Yesterday, Slate posted a piece by William Saletan about the implication of Jewish genes and what the recognition of a Jewish race means to Jewish culture. Saletan begins thusly:

Are Jews a race? Is Jewish intelligence genetic?

If these notions make you cringe, you're not alone. Many non-Jews find them offensive. Actually, scratch that. I have no idea whether non-Jews find them offensive. But I imagine that they do, which is why Jews like me wince at any suggestion of Jewish genetic superiority. We don't even want to talk about it.

The mind boggles at the cowardice. What inquisitive thinker doesn’t “even want to talk about” a profound question of science and culture for fear that someone somewhere may take offense? It’s Saletan’s silliness that should “make you cringe.”

The article’s lead reminds me of something I witnessed as a graduate student. I attended a research presentation given by a Ph.D. candidate on the topic of African American standardized test scores. On average African Americans score lower on such tests than Asian or White Americans. The student opened his presentation by offering three possible reasons for this. The first: the idea that such tests were constructed with a built in cultural bias. One famous fill-in-the-blank example goes something like “Race is to car, as regatta is to _______.” The presenter noted that such biases had been exhaustively corrected in recent years, so that was an unlikely cause for lower test scores. The second possible explanation: stereotypes of Black students were somehow activated in the exam room setting and this propelled a chain reaction resulting in sort-of group-fulfilled prophecy. This was the candidate’s thesis. The third: Black people are genetically less intelligent than other groups. To which the budding scholar said, “We won’t even get into that.” If learning institutions don’t get into it, bigots and fascists of all stripes certainly will.

Back to Saletan. The piece was about a presentation given by John Entine, author of the book Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People, Charles Murray who’s authored some controversial work on Jewish intelligence, and Laurie Zoloth, a bioethicist. Here’s the crux:

The average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is 107 to 115, well above the human average of 100. This gap and the genetic theories surrounding it stirred discomfort in the room. Zoloth, speaking for many liberals, recalled a family member's revulsion at the idea of a Jewish race. Judaism is about faith and values, she argued. To reduce it to biology is to make it exclusive, denying its openness to all. Worse, to suggest that Jews are genetically smart is to imply that non-Jews are inherently inferior, in violation of Jewish commitments to equality and compassion.

I love this line: “To reduce it to biology is to make it exclusive, denying its openness to all.” Imagine the sorrow of the dejected hordes who’ll have to make do with the country club, the DAR, and the millennial legacy of world domination. That’s funny. What’s not funny is that Zoloth, a respected academician, is proposing a fictional dilemma. The discovery of markers for Jewish DNA hasn’t a thing to do with the accessibility of the Jewish faith. When rabbis start asking for blood tests, we can revisit the question.

Saletan goes on:

But what if Judaism as a genetic inheritance is compatible with Judaism as a cultural inheritance? And what if the genes that make Jews smart also make them sick? If one kind of superiority comes at the price of another kind of inferiority, and if the transmission of Jewish values drives the transmission of Jewish genes, does that make the genetics and the superiority easier to swallow?”

[…]

The theory still sounds arrogant, until you hear the IQ machine's possible costs. Some scholars now hypothesize that the genes that make Jews smart also give some of them nasty diseases such as Tay-Sachs. Entine finds this plausible. He pointed out that some genes associated with brain growth are also associated with breast cancer, including in his own family. During the question-and-answer session, someone brought up another tradeoff: Supposedly, Jews are deficient in vision-spatial skills, possibly because their brains allot extra space for verbal intelligence. That might explain the average Ashkenazi Jewish score of 122 on verbal IQ tests.

Pondering these nuances and tradeoffs, Zoloth reconsidered her aversion to the idea of Jewish genes and Jewish intelligence.

Here we’ve gone from cowardice to full-on masochism. Saletan and Zoloth can accept the scientific claim of Jewish genes as long as such genes condemn Jews to early death. Jewish history is a cascade of horror. Why do we have to hunt out the deadly in order to enjoy one cosmic nanosecond of good news? Trust me: we’re Jews – the other shoe will drop without our asking.

The historian Paul Johnson, his faults aside, opens his book Modern Times with a convincing argument that Einstein, Freud, and Marx were the most crucial architects of Twentieth Century thought. The three men were undeniably Jews and undeniably geniuses. But what's been forgotten is their bravery. My question is where has that little twist of protein disappeared to in the succeeding generations of Abraham’s children?

I don’t think it’s a strictly Jewish issue, though. It’s part of a larger paradigm of apology that’s bloomed in the West over the past fifty years. The difference is that the world needs the West. If Jews apologize themselves out of existence no one will blink.

I have to mention my own initiation into the exclusive genetic club that Laurie Zoloth finds so unsettling. Because as a child I was fair-haired, slightly freckled, and in possession of a smallish nose I understood myself to look “non-Jewish.” This assessment seemed some cause for amusement if not, shamefully, minor celebration all around. A few years ago I was paying for a small coffee in a Korean deli that I had frequented on a more-or-less daily basis. This one afternoon I was counting out, in the palm of my hand, the seventy-five cents I owed the ever-friendly cashier. What happened next was not only an epiphany but also a kind of fantastic New York moment. “Are you Jewish?” she said. At once it struck me that in hovering over my change the Shylock gene had burst into full expression. “Yes,” I said, “Why?” “I thought so,” she said, “Jews don’t look like American people.”

But let’s not talk about it, shall we.

I always knew there were two Norman Finkelsteins.

But I was not quite positive about which was which until last week, when this Norman Finkelstein came to Purdue University to give a talk and to read some of his poetry. Yes, I said poetry. This Norman Finkelstein is a poet--and a good one, at that.Norman Finkelstein: ProvocateurNorman Finkelstein: Poet

After the lecture, I was fortunate enough to join the poet Finkelstein and another professor for coffee and a lively discussion. Somehow, I also managed to score a free copy of Finkelstein's newest book of poetry, Passing Over, which is a gem.

Below are a couple of exquisite excerpts from two of the poems.

From "inscription of the body on the text":

Something I know of bodies and something of texts, / how lines are inscribed and how they curve, / how they mingle freely and how they are forbidden, / how they articulate their wonted and unwonted fires.

And, from "Elegy":

Let the Angel of Death stay in his dressing room / forever redoing his makeup, / and let our hopes flourish falsely into flowers / for our lovers, who will laugh and throw them away.

Let the old world remake itself / into a sequence of lights. / There will be crowns in the sky and we will look up amused, / for we were told that the past / could be cleansed of all its imperfections. / Yes, we will laugh and turn the switch; / the lights will be extinguished and we will embrace in the dark, / thinking, before we give up on thinking, this is how it was meant to be.

The other Norman Finkelstein, the political theorist of the recent DePaul tenure scandal (and the subject of recent Jewcy discussions), does not write poetry. Both Finkelsteins, however, do publish books and articles on Jewish-American culture--though one is more politically-inclined, while the other relegates his critiques to the world of the literary, metaphorical, and poetic.

It is funny, though, no?

I wonder if, somewhere, there is also another Alan Dershowitz.

What Jeffrey Hart hath wrought:

Having long since shed his conservatism, now Mr. Gessen and his colleagues at n 1 have decided to create a liberal version of Mr. Hart's pamphlet, in order to offer college freshmen some guidance about what to read and how to approach their education. The theme of the pamphlet, which consists of transcripts of two roundtable discussions held in n 1's office this past summer, is regret: what they wish they'd read; what they wish they'd known. There is a list at the end of the pamphlet of all the works cited — including those that the participants mocked or that were mentioned because someone regretted having read them. Each of the participants has also contributed a list of around 10 "Books That Changed My Life."

This sounds like a Wes Anderson loop de loop of Allan Bloom's disciples reciting Plato to beat back the bandolier-clad black militants at Cornell in 1969.

I matriculated to Dartmouth College in 1998, the year that marked the beginning of the administration of Dr. James Wright. I won't soon forget my favorite classics professor's description of the incoming president as a "gray ponderous mass" and a mere "steward" of everything that had been accomplished already, to mixed fanfare and disdain, by his predecessor James O. Freedman. I should say the late James O. Freedman, as he died last year of cancer, Dartmouth's first Jewish president and a man who made it his mission to restore the love of learning and individuality to the beer-drenched quadrangles. Freedman caused a lot of giggles when he envisioned the ideal Dartmouth student as someone who'd read Catullus under a tree. (Try Derrida under the influence.)

And whenever I think of that pretentious and overcooked image, I'm reminded of Auden's "Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times." Adam Kirsch, himself a Harvard man, has a characteristically fine essay on the wry subversiveness of the poem, delivered as the 1946 Phi Beta Kappa oration:

The comedy of the poem, and its prescience, lies in Auden’s description of Apollo, the presiding spirit of what he calls “the fattening forties.” The danger to postwar America, the poet suggests, lies in the soft tyranny of institutions, authorities, and experts—of people who know what’s best for you and don’t hesitate to make sure you know it, too. Auden gives a wonderful catalog of the things these Apollonians want to impose: colleges where “Truth is replaced by Useful Knowledge,” with courses on “Public Relations, Hygiene, Sport”; poems that “Extol the doughnut and commend/The Common Man” (did Byron Price flinch at those lines?); even processed foods: “a glass of prune juice or a nice/Marsh-mallow salad.” In short, Auden is already predicting the dullest, most conformist aspects of American life in the Cold War years, the kind of prosperous mediocrity that gave the 1950s a bad name.

So here we're confronted with the wonderful set piece of an openly gay ex-Communist poet from Greenwich Village telling young Ivy Leaguers in perfect meter and rhyme, at the nascent Central Intelligence Agency's recruitment center, to damn consensus.

Dartmouth recently decided to eliminate one of its better traditions of allowing half of the Board of Trustees to be elected by the alumni while the other half is appointed by the administration. Now it's to be a 1/3 - 2/3 split in favor of direct appointments. Such are these reactionary times. A college doesn't want to be told what to do by the students it graduated. There's an Auden stave to describe this phenomenon as well:

And always the loud angry crowd,
Very angry and very loud,
Law is We,
And always the soft idiot softly Me.

PZ Myers, blogger and science writer for Seed, is being sued 15 million dollars by Dr. Stuart Pivar for panning Pivar's book (okay, twice). The Panda's Thumb reports:

The plaintiff of the case is none else than Dr. Stuart Pivar, NYC businessman and art collector, who burst on the evolution/creationism scene a couple years back claiming that, based on conversations he had with the late Stephen J Gould, he could assert for a fact that Gould really opposed the basic tenets of modern evolutionary theory, and the role of natural selection in particular. According to Pivar, Gould only endorsed evolutionary theory (in dozens of books and hundreds of articles, not to mention sworn court testimony!) under some sort of duress from the iron fist of the enforcers of “Darwinian orthodoxy”.

The obvious nonsense was discussed in various articles here at PT and elsewhere, but of course the absurdity of that canard was not enough to deter the usual peanut gallery of gullible Creationists, Denyse O’Leary foremost among them, from getting all excited about the matter.

Anyway, besides liberally reinterpreting Gould’s entire scientific opus, Pivar’s other personal involvement with evolutionary matters at the time was that he had published a well-illustrated tome called Lifecode, in which he apparently proposed some sort of structuralist/developmental interpretation of evolution. In a rather incautious move, Pivar decided to send his book to a real developmental biologist for review: PZ Myers. PZ read it, soundly criticized it at Pharyngula, and apparently never thought of it again until earlier this year, when Pivar sent out some grandiose-sounding press release together with an updated version of the book, both of which PZ once again trashed.

Thus did Pivar proceed to sue Myers for the “emotional and mental distress”, among other things, caused him by Myers’ reviews. From the complaint:

16. On July 12, 2007, Defendant Myers maliciously, and without cause, defamed Plaintiff by referring to him as "a classic crackpot."

17. Upon information and belief, Defendant Myers' references to Plaintiff as "a classic crackpot" were necessarily intended to disparage Plaintiff's abilities as a scientific enquirer and were intended to hold Plaintiff up to ridicule and embarrassment in this specific area of Plaintiff's professional endeavors.

Nietzsche said that translation is a form of conquest.

This line comes up in a section of The Gay Science where Nietzsche says that “the degree of the historical sense of any age may be inferred from the manner in which this age makes translations.” He felt we could learn a lot from both the unwitting and purposeful omissions, and insertions, made by the translators of books.

The Muslim world is 1.2 billion people. Only about 10 - 20% of those speak all the various dialects of Arabic. Only a small percentage of those know fus-ha, the standard-modern style of Arabic in which the Quran is written (Arabs who speak local dialects don't understand fus-ha). This means that the great majority of Muslims get access to the Quran via translations. Nowhere is Nietzsche’s point about translations more important than inside of Islam.

Yet, over the 20th century, how the Quran was translated was an issue completely overlooked and uncared about by most Muslims.

No surprise then, that in that period those who succeeded in the “conquest” of Islam were those who appropriated the power of translation for themselves.

In an article that I wrote for a Muslim magazine which I entitled The Quran I Hate, I pointed my finger at these conquerors.

No longer in this newly rewritten Quran is a believer left to reflect upon his [being in] relation to the unknown, his entry into the mysteries of existence, but [he is] to hate the Jew [and] hate the Christian. How could the Lord of all the Worlds accept such rancor toward His creation? Don't ask God; ask the government of Saudi Arabia which peddles this "noble" anti-Quran; ask the "Islamic" University of Medina; ask Shaykh Bin Baz, Saudi Grand Mufti [of the Kingdom] until 1999 who certified these insertions; and the King Fahd Center For Printing of the Holy Quran.

The Quran scholar Michael Sells did a masterful study called War as Worship/Worship as War, which brought much of this hate-mongering-via-translation to light. (By the way, this is the same Sells whose books right-wingers tried to block at UNC).

Take just one example Sells pulled from the Al-Hilali/Khan translation. The example is from the last verse of the first chapter of the Quran, called The Opening. Pay attention to the parentheticals.

Guide us to the Straight Way. The Way of those on whom You have bestowed Your Grace, not (the way) of those who earned Your Anger (such as the Jews), nor of those who went astray (such as the Christians).

Now, the Arabic word for Jews is “Yahud.” I’m reading verse 1:7 of the Quran in the original Arabic as I write. I have been able to read Arabic as long as I have been able to speak. I can’t for the life of me find the word “Yahud” in that verse. It is not there. Yet it exists in the parentheticals of the most widely distributed Quran out there.

Here is how Leopold Weiss, an Austrian Jew, later Muhammad Asad, a convert to Islam, and ironically enough a best friend of the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, rendered the same verse:

Guide us the straight way – the way of those upon whom Thou hast bestowed Thy blessings,* not of those who have been condemned [by Thee], nor of those who go astray!

No mention of Jews or Christians. In fact, Jews and Christians don’t even get a mention in his paragraph long commentary on the verse.

Sigh? You want to sigh?

No, don’t sigh yet.

Not until you realize that you can still get the Al-Hilali/Khan translation of the Quran from Saudi embassies and consulates around the world. Embassies and consulates that we protect.

Gawker's Emily went to the N+1 party celebrating their new pamphlet about how books do furnish a room but not a dorm. She came away with this (what I'd call an apercu if I weren't afraid the Talking Points Memo people were still lurking around here):

These people's other regrets include having read Paul de Man before Wordsworth and Deleuze before Proust and having read Frederic Jameson instead of Perry Anderson. The pamphlet is 126 pages long. However, it only takes 5 minutes and 52 seconds to listen to the song "Common People" by Pulp in its entirety.

Read more.

Dateline, Limmud UK: All the way here, I saw signs for Stratford-Upon-Avon. Banking on my last post, about the merits of visiting the graves of tzaddikim, I am trying to convince people here to come with me to hang out with me at Shakespeare's final resting place. (If ''hang out with me'' means ''give me a ride,'' that is.)

Meanwhile, I have a new favorite writer: Bernard Kops. An 81-year-old British dude whose play about Anne Frank is going up in LA next week and soon in NYC, he did some amazing poetry -- just sat down and started reading, his voice against the loud air conditioner. He has a singuar talent for the one-line zinger:

People always tell you

everything will be

alright.

 

You thank them

and shut the door

and lie awake all night.

About this, he said: ''I've suffered more from reassurance than I have from criticism.'' He also told us that, if politics changed anything, it would have been abolished years ago.

Josh’s post about the Hitchens / D’Souza debate reminded me of Tobias Wolff on his wicked stepfather: “[A]n atheist of the Popular Science orthodoxy. (Jesus hadn’t really died, he had taken a drug that made him look dead so he could fake a resurrection later. The parting of the Red Sea was caused by a comet passing overhead. Manna was just the ancient word for potato.)” I’m in sympathy with Josh, but his neuroscience is of a piece with this triumphalist literal-mindedness:

Descartes believed that somewhere in the brain there was a driver’s seat for the soul—the site where “you” make the decision to act, whether morally or immorally. But the “I” that so many take for granted is known to be nothing more than the brain’s interpretation of its own complex functioning. Multiple things occur in the brain that the “I” isn’t aware of and couldn’t control no matter how hard it tried. . . . Whence did the soul of the “I” come into being in terms of human evolution? And how can something be transcendent if it can be surgically removed?

That last question certainly begs the question: In order to take Josh’s point, one has to take it on faith that the soul or the moral will can be surgically removed. This is hardly so apparent as he makes it seem. Evelyn Waugh, asked how someone as horrible as himself could claim to be a Christian, supposedly retorted, “Were it not for my religion, I would scarcely be a human being.” In God Is Not Great, Hitchens takes this idea and runs in the wrong direction with it. Some interviewer has just wondered how an atheist can possibly lead a moral life. Hitchens notes rather astutely that what the interviewer is really wondering is how he himself would lead a moral life without religion.

I no longer have my copy of the book—I liked it so much that I gave it to a family member. As I recall, and readers should correct me if I’m wrong, Hitchens regards this slip merely as proof of the interviewer’s moral turpitude. Don’t ask me why: I was fascinated by it, as I’ve always been by the story about Waugh, because it reminds me that people often force themselves to behave contrary to their nature, whether by reason or unreason. It’s nothing short of miraculous that one can use his brain against itself. My own neurological configuration, for instance, gives me the desire to smash the headlights of the guy who steals my parking space, but it also taketh it away. I see this as evidence that my brain is in working order.

But suppose I do smash those headlights. Suppose the gentleman in turn beats me into baby food—thus putting the moral reasoning center of my brain out of commission. Does this mean my soul has been “surgically removed”? A carpenter doesn’t cease to be a carpenter because he can’t use broken tools. Perhaps the soul is the carpenter, not the tool—the one who exercises the will, not the will itself. (I promise that this isn’t a coded Jesus reference, just the first analogy that came to mind.) This is by no means my own view of the conundrum, but the ease with which it presents itself suggests that the matter isn’t closed just because our understanding of the brain has deepened.

I can’t hope to address the question of the soul in the space of a blog post. What I hope to address is the lack of curiosity on both sides of this debate. Now, as Josh rightfully points out, D’Souza is by far the guiltier party. I first suspected that D’Souza was a lazy, thoughtless fraud when I read this post by James Wolcott about an advance copy of The Enemy at Home:

D’Souza makes a tired Buchananite reference to Piss Christ, so tired that its creator is misnamed as Jose Serrano. It’s Andres Serrano, of course, which any philistine should know. Perhaps the name will be corrected when the book is published, but there is no way to correct falsehoods such as labeling “Jose Serrano” a “liberal hero,” because these are fancies lodged in the penny arcade of D’Souza’s dim imagination.

Serrano’s work, despite its artistic deficiencies, wasn’t meant to be anti-Christian, but this fact does nothing to advance D’Souza’s paranoid views and must be ignored. No surprise there. D’Souza’s mind is so childish that when criticized by Scott Johnson in The New Criterion, he resorted to schoolyard taunts. Josh zeroes in on D’Souza’s accidental auto-refutation, to hilarious effect:

D’Souza actually made this point himself accidentally when he reminded us that in absence of evidence of unicorns he feels no need to speak out for their non-existence but simply lives as if there are none. I’d have liked to have heard Hitchens remind him that a) the belief in absurdity is offensive on its own b) that if part of the unicorn myth involved the sanctioning of murder in the name of one’s unicorn tribe, it would become necessary to fervently attack the belief in unicorns and that c) if Dinesh understands this principle with regard to unicorns, his willingness to suspend it for the Christian God proves his hypocritical selectivity . . .

This “hypocritical selectivity” and lack of curiosity reminded me of a letter sent to The New Criterion by a prominent and, for my money, breathtakingly brilliant Eastern Orthodox theologian, in response to my Hitchens review: “[I]n agreeing with Hitchens that the ‘argument from primary cause’ is infinitely regressive . . . he commits a very basic logical error. The one thing the idea of a primary cause cannot be is regressive.” Well, he’s right. He’s also pretending not to grasp my very basic objection, which is that believers choose the “vanishing point” of this regression to suit themselves. In Catholic high school it was presented to us very simply: “What caused the Big Bang, then? It must be God.” But the Big Bang could just as easily be the “uncaused cause,” as any schoolboy can see, and Young Hitchens would surely have demanded to know what brought about God.

Even the smartest guys in this knock-down, drag-out fight cling to their irrational prejudices and untested hypotheses. We can be thankful for that: It forces us to see that none of us really has it figured out. And we can take comfort in the fact that no matter what their faults, at least they’re not Dinesh D’Souza.

Although Philip Roth struck out miserably in his latest novel, Exit Ghost, literary Jewry may yet have some reason for celebration. America’s least Jewish novelist, (with some very fierce competition from John Updike) Cormac McCarthy, has brought a little bit of Yiddish with him into the post-apocalyptic universe.

In McCarthy’s most recent, and miraculously stunning, novel The Road, the reader is made witness to the blackened sphere that is the Earth after Armageddon. A father and son trod west across America, trying to outrun the onslaught of a deadly winter. And the onslaught of a deadly everything else too. The book is so absolute in its bleak evocation of hell on earth that it very nearly defies description. As the old expression goes: it’s like describing the color blue to the blind. There’s no humor in the conventional sense. There’s no black humor or sick humor either.

There’s wall-to-wall violence and abomination of religious proportions. There are nightmares made daymares made flesh. However, amid the death with a side of death and a glass of death to wash it down there is a heightened sense of the tender, the precious, and the fragile. And this is about the only reason I can imagine for McCarthy’s inclusion of the otherwise laughably out of place sweet Yiddish word tuckus in the text.

Continue reading...

My new book of essays, (Not That You Asked), covers a lot of ground: literature, politics, pop culture, sexual shame. It also includes a piece called “Ham for Chanukah” about my unique brand of pork-intensive Judaism.

As might be expected, several concerned readers have emailed – including but not limited to my mother – wanting to know how a Jewish writer could sink so low. Recently, I sat down with myself to discuss the matter:

Facial hair, self-deprecation, neuroses: Aren't all writers a little bit Jewish?So Steve, for the record, are you a Jewish writer or not?

Well, Steve, I'm glad you asked. Lots of authors dance around questions like this, but I’m a wretched dancer.

The answer is yes.

You don’t find that description reductionistic?

Of course it’s reductionistic. But it also happens to be factually accurate. I’m Jewish. I’m a writer. Ergo, I’m a Jewish writer. I’d prefer that critics focus on my work rather than me – every honest writer would – but I gave up on that dream long ago. And frankly, I find the other labels I get slapped with much more offensive.

Such as?

“Literary pornographer.” “Left-wing blowhard.” That kind of thing. Every time I put I book out, it’s the same mishagoss. The critical culture of this country has become infected with a disease I’ll call PeopleMagazinitis. Rather than writing about the quality of the prose and ideas and emotions within a book, they write about the author. Reviewing has become a form of gossip mongering, rather than aesthetic assessment. And I’m not just talking about the trashy outlets, either. The almighty New York Times Book Review pulls the same crap.

Okay, so we’ll stick to the text. In your essay “Ham for Chanukah” you confess to being an atheist. Would it then be fair to call you an atheist writer?

If you must label, I’d prefer Jewish atheist writer.

You don’t see any contradiction there?

Only if you define Judaism as a religious identity. Or even more narrowly, as a theological identity. But Judaism – especially in this era, especially in the United States – is a cultural and ethnic signifier more than anything. It means you come from a particular set of bloodlines, a particular set of intellectual traditions. In my case, two of my great-grandfathers were rabbis. But they were also cranky, difficult patriarchs. And so their children turned away from the formal practice of Judaism. But they remained culturally identified as Jews.

That doesn’t really explain the “Ham” part of “Ham for Chanukah.”

Ah yes, the ham. That comes from my maternal grandmother, Dorethea. She was a German Jew who immigrated to America a few years before World War II. Her reaction to the devastation of the Holocaust was to deny her Jewish identity. I can’t explain precisely why, but I suspect that, like a lot of Jews, she felt guilty for having survived the Holocaust and blamed herself, and maybe her Judaism, for all the tumult. Whatever the psychological particulars, she became a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church. And she insisted on celebrating Christmas.

At which she served ham?

Well, not every year. Mostly, it was turkey. But we still did the whole holiday schmeer: the tree, the tinsel, the cookies.

Treyf on a tray: How can you say no to this much ham-juice?As a culturally identified Jew, wasn’t that odd?

It was totally fucking nuts. But when you’re a kid, you’re really more focused on gifts than identity. And it wasn’t like my parents hid the fact that we were Jews. We did celebrate Chanukah and Passover, and we had informal bar mitzvahs at home. Still, our brand of Judaism was pretty watered-down by assimilation. So I never made my Jewish identity a central part of my writing. It would have felt phony to do so, to claim that kind of ownership. Especially compared to writers like Nathan Englander and Shalom Auslander, guys who grew up with Judaism as a central and radical aspect of their lives. Before them, you had guys like Isaac Bashevis Singer and Shalom Aleichem, who were writing from within the shetl experience.

So now it sounds like you’re saying you should be considered an “assimilated Jewish atheist writer.”

There’s really no winning with you, is there? What I’m trying to suggest is that this extratextual labeling is a sucker’s game. All the guys I mentioned above do write about the Jewish world. But their work inevitably grapples with themes and feelings that are universal. That’s how art works. You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy (or even understand) their work. Just like you don’t have to be a member of the British landed gentry to enjoy Jane Austen.

Okay, fine. No more labels. But I do think it’s fair to ask how Judaism has influenced your writing.

Oh, absolutely. I’m not going to sit here and pretend I’m a man without a religion. From the outside, it might sometimes seem like that, because there’s nothing in my work (or even in my name or my physical appearance) that screams Jewish! In my case, the links to Judaism are subtler. For instance, in one of the first stories I published, “My Life in Heavy Metal,” I used the word “kvell.” Now, there aren’t a lot of non-Jews who use that word. But my mom used it all the time (because her parents spoke Yiddish), so it was something I heard growing up. And it was the exact right word for the sentence in question.

But even more than trafficking in Yiddish words, I think of my work as having a Jewish attitude.

Meaning what?

Meaning neurotic, self-deprecating, smart-alecky, moralizing. Oh, and guilt-ridden (though I suppose that falls under the broader category of “neurotic.”)

I think you just dug yourself a bit of hole.

Why? Did I miss an adjective?

No, but I don’t think your fellow Jews are going to appreciate being reduced to a series of adjectives.

Actually, you’re right. I forgot an adjective: contentious.

If these descriptors cause offense, I hereby apologize. But I don’t take them back. These are the attitudes I associate with the Jews I know, and I do so lovingly. I like that we’re big mouths and that we know how to crack jokes at our expense and that we’re honest about our doubts and in our concern for the world. And I do believe that the most important part of being raised Jewish – the one part that seems to have stuck for me – has to do with a determination to find, or create, meaning through words. Isn’t that what the Bible amounts to? It’s a bunch of Jews telling stories in an effort to make sense of their world and their role within it. This is what all the great Jewish intellectuals have been up to, from Maimonides to Marx and Freud. And I’ll add Saul Bellow and Phillip Roth to that list. We’re preoccupied by the life of the mind, by consciousness itself.

Young Judaica: Should you introduce your kids to religion at an early age? Now you’re sounding like a booster for the whole “Chosen People” line.

Oh, nonsense. I’m not suggesting that Jews have the monopoly on intellectual achievement or self-reflection. But you’d have to be an idiot not to recognize the emphasis that gets placed on ideas and learning in a Jewish home – even in secularized one like mine. There’s an ambition there, a stubborn vitality.

You can hear this even in the Jewish liturgy. As you might guess, I’m not a regular at Synagogue. But I’ve heard the Yom Kippur services a few times, and what always strikes me about them is the emphasis not on acts of atonement, but simple attention. The whole idea is to recognize the splendor of the universe, and to give thanks. God becomes a form of gratitude. Writers have the same agenda. We’re in the business of pricking readers’ consciousness, enticing them to slow down and experience the richness of the world inside and around them.

This, by the way, is why my wife and I hope to raise our daughter Jewish.

Yeah, I was going to ask about that. Given the declared atheist thing, it seems odd to impose a religion on her.

Maybe. But I think you can raise a child to have religious identity without pushing them into a specific belief. My wife Erin wanted to convert to Judaism because she respects the values of the religion – that emphasis on ideas and learning. As for me, I want Josephine to know who and where she comes from, that she owes her existence to a particular history of sacrifice. I want her to know that her great-great grandfathers, cranky or not, were passionate thinkers. I want her to celebrate Passover in a manner that compels her to recognize that her ancestors, people of her own blood, endured hardship so that, thousands of years later, she could sit around stuffing herself with roast chicken and matzo balls. And I want that moral knowledge to inform how she views her own world, the social conscience we hope she’ll develop.

But that doesn’t amount to a kind of “buffet Judaism”? Just picking and choosing what you like, with no deeper commitment?

Yeah, it does. And so what? I’m not interested in forcing my daughter to commit to the parts of Jewish tradition that oppress women, or denigrate other cultures, or presuppose a God that endorses bloody wars. That stuff is medieval. We’ve got enough medieval notions coming from the right wing of this country at the moment.

What I want is for Josie to feel a sense of wonder and humility as she moves through the world. I want her to remain curious. More than anything, both Erin and I want her to be a reader. And I think being raised Jewish, or semi-Jewish, can only help.

It was on a trip a few years ago to that mecca of petit bourgeois decadence, Las Vegas, that I devoured Alan Wald's The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left.  This book is now widely considered the definitive text on the various trotskisant movements (or "groupuscules") that peppered the Gotham cityscape in the twenties and thirties. Mostly Jewish, with as much a tropism for literature as for politics, these sons and daughters of immigrants started out as revolutionaries and wound up anti-Communists, either of a liberal or conservative stripe. (Wald deftly showed that the was as nerve-racking as it was satisfying, especially for latterday patrons of the establishment who traffick in selective memories about the old days and bygone struggles, who took what position when, who did what to whom.) 

A number of these complicated and dynamic figures are now forgotten: If Herbert Solow can't earn a place at the table for being the leading American Trotskyist before World War II, then he at least deserves recognition as the man who helped nurture the critical talents of one Lionel Trilling. Others are famous for their continuing influence (Norman Podhoretz is an advisor to Rudy Giuliani) and their semi-permanent positions on the mastheads of great, or once-great, journals of opinion like Partisan Review, Encounter, Commentary and Dissent. On the whole, they're all defined more according to their ex-identities, those idealistic and embarrassing vestiges of a radical past which they've spent the second and third acts of their distinctively American lives repudiating. As Irving Kristol once put it, "As long as I can remember, I've been a 'neo' something. I was a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neocon. Eventually I'll just be a 'neo.'"

Wald has since altered his focus to account for some of the lesser -- or at least less acknowledged -- revolutionaries of yesterday who left us enduring ruins and monuments of their time. Most of these were Stalinists, strict CP men who wrote forgettably because in the eyes of the Party, they were themselves forgettable: mere individuals being ground through the cogs of history.

Installment one began in 2002 with Exiles From a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. Now Wald has published the follow-up volume, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade, which is well-reviewed by J. Hoberman in The Nation:

Exiles's major tour de force is the chapter "Inventing Mike Gold," a startling rehabilitation of the Communist Party's leading literary hack (and hatchet man), remembered today largely for his contribution to the mythology of the Lower East Side, Jews Without Money (1930), one of the few proletarian novels to earn a spot in the academic canon. Wald downplays Gold's greatest hit to present him as a lapsed romantic Modernist, linking him to Walt Whitman and even the Beats. (One of the book's more fascinating secondary narratives recounts the way Whitman, the American poet most admired by leftists, was transformed into a Popular Front icon. In Gold's 1935 "Ode to Walt Whitman," Wald notes, the poet "is likened to a reborn Christ, to the spirit of communism, to nature, and to Bolshevism...serv[ing] as the multipurpose icon of Gold's multiethnic cultural mosaic.")

Wald by no means ignores Gold's work. Still, cognizant of (if not necessarily endorsing) Kempton's contempt for talent sacrificed on the altar of social revolution, he is almost always more interested in the drama of lives than those of literature, mapping a "humanscape" populated by writers committed to political commitment. Thus, Exiles's cover features Gold in action, addressing a 1930 May Day rally. The denizens of Waldsville are often quite colorful. Exiles featured such rare birds as the forgotten Woody Guthrie analogue Donald Lee West, as well as Communist poet Joy Davidman, who was married to "radical folksinger" William Lindsay Gresham before she decamped to England to change the life of C.S. Lewis. Trinity, which is more concerned with prose than poetry, devotes half a chapter to Lauren Gilfillan, whose precocious (and once-celebrated) nonfiction novel--a firsthand account of the Great Coal Strike of 1931 called I Went to Pit College--although more straightforward (and ironic), prefigures by several years the art reportage of the James Agee-Walker Evans classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

It might interest you to know that Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, wrote her graduate thesis on Gold, further fueling speculation about her intellectual kinship with Paul Wolfowitz and the left-to-right school of U.S. foreign policy.

It might also interest you to know that Gold actually was not so cut-and-dry an apparatchik as he's made out to be here.

After a notorious Leavisite dust-up with Thornton Wilder -- whose ecclesiastic death-wish unsettled plenty of non-Reds, too -- about the shaky relationship between art and ideology, Gold wrote a vigorous defense in The New Republic of Jews Without Money, which, admittedly, was a journeyman's attempt at what James T. Farrell would later accomplish with his brilliant Studs Lonigan trilogy, the Irish-American working class epic of the forties. Gold’s book, in an interesting turn of events, had been attacked from the left by Melvin Levy, in full prolier-than-thou mode for what Levy saw as too minimalist a depiction of alienated factory life in New York. 

Gold responded, “It is difficult to write proletarian literature in this country because all the critics are bourgeois. If a Thornton Wilder writes books in praise of the Catholic theology, or if a Robinson Jeffers preaches universal pessimism and mass-suicide, that is art. But if a revolutionary writer, even by implication, shows the social ideas that are stirring in the heart of the working class, he is called a propagandist. [Let] us not fear to be crude or propagandistic. We are going somewhere. The rest of literature is sinking into the arms of Catholicism, and death.”

George Orwell, surveying the wreckage of T.S. Eliot's talent twenty or so years after the publication of "The Waste Land," noted that “It would be putting it too crudely to say that every poet in our time must either die young, enter the Catholic Church, or join the Communist Party, but in fact the escape from the consciousness of futility is along those general lines.”

And no less of a critic than Edmund Wilson commented on the Gold-Levy affair that "it has now become plain that the economic crisis is to be accompanied by a literary one.” What Wilson saw in proletarian literature -- John Dos Passos representing the highwater mark -- was that it was the only of several utopias hitched to the stream train of the future rather than to the wagons of the past:

Most Americans of the type of Dos Passos and Eliot—that is, sensitive and widely read literary people—have some such agreeable fantasy in which they can allow their minds to take refuge from the perplexities and oppressions about them. In the case of H.L. Mencken, it is a sort of German university town, where people drink a great deal of beer and devour a great many books, and where they respect the local nobility—if only the Germany of the Empire had not been destroyed by war! In the case of certain American writers from the top layer of the old South, it is the old-fashioned Southern plantation, where men are high-spirited and punctilious and women gracious and lovely, where affectionate and loyal Negroes are happy to keep in their place—if only the feudal South had not perished in 1865! With Ezra Pound, it is a medieval Provence, where poor but accomplished troubadours enjoy the favors of noble ladies—if only the troubadours were not deader than Provencal! With Dos Passos, it is an army of workers, disinterested, industrious and sturdy, but full of the good-fellowship and gaiety in which the Webster Hall balls nowadays are usually so dismally lacking—if only the American workers were not preoccupied with buying Ford cars and radios, instead of organizing themselves to overthrow the civilization of the bourgeoisie! And in T.S. Eliot’s case, it is a world of seventeenth-century churchmen, who combine the most scrupulous conscience with the ability to write good prose—if it were only not so difficult nowadays for men who are capable of becoming good writers to accept the Apostolic Succession!

From funny writer Jason Roeder comes his debut book, Oh the Humanity: A Gentle Guide to Social Interaction for the Feeble Young Introvert. Roeder is a humor writer, which means he is unemployed. He writes a column for Writer's Digest called "Roeder Report" and has been published in such so-so publications as Salon, The New Yorker, and McSweeney's.

Here's a preview of what you'll encounter in Oh the Humanity.

One valuable section, "Obliterating Yourself With Alcohol-Responsibly," lends advice on how to use the "confidence tonic" to improve upon your usual stammering and awkward self. Another, "Humor: Harnessing Your Inner Wayans Brother," teaches you how to make jokes that don't suck. And, in "Can I Be Too Curious?" Roeder offers such sage advice as: "1. Avoid asking strangers where they like to be nibbled. 2. Avoid asking them to confirm their gender. 3. Avoid asking them to confirm your gender."

Jewcy: Humor writing is vacuous. Do you think so?

Jason Roeder: Spoken like someone who's never read a single word of a "You Might Be a Redneck" desk calendar.

Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of publishers who will take a chance on a humor book that doesn't seem to have loud novelty value. The humor sections of most bookstores are clogged with books that are really more like extended greeting cards. If you've ever opened a Shoebox Greeting and thought, "Man, I wish that dismal punch line pertaining to how decrepit I am at age 40 could go on for a hundred more pages," I have some fantastic news for you, my friend.

Don't get me wrong. I haven't exactly written Crime and Punishment myself, but I don't think a humor book has to be literary fake vomit, either.

J: What's the funniest thing you've ever written?

JR: Honestly, I'd say my master's project from journalism school. It was slapdash and superficial and awful. It might have been 20 pages. My advisor said that it wasn't even journalism. I said, "Thank God."

My favorite intentionally funny piece is probably my first: "I Enjoy Taunting Insomniacs." Insomnia used to be a problem for me, a huge one. A few years ago, I was into my third day without sleep. I had either begun to hallucinate, or Technicolor amoebas had moved into my apartment. I sat down and typed out 500 words of verbal abuse from the perspective of someone who just enjoyed a full eight hours and decided to brag about it. It's the only piece I've ever written that provoked more than one email with "You Dick" typed into the subject field.

J: As your book tells us, it turns out that empathy helps in making friends. Here's what you have to say about it: "Sometimes we can draw on our life experiences to empathize with someone. For example, a friend of mine recently described how frustrating it was trying to get through to his uncle with Alzheimer's. Although no one in my family has that terrible disease, I remember an unproductive conversation I had with an L.L. Bean customer-service representative who insisted there were no hunter-green chamois pajamas in stock. On another occasion, I was unable to get a waitress's attention immediately. So, although I couldn't relate to the specifics of my friend's situation, I knew his emotional struggle all too well."

JR: We all have more in common with each other than we think, shared emotional, if not factual, histories. When a homeless person raises his Styrofoam cup, I know the only change he really wants is my two cents' worth! So, I tell him how down-and-out I was when my DSL wasn't operational for seven straight hours before it suddenly just started working again for some reason. The way he hurls garbage at me says, "I'm not so alone, after all."

J: The New Yorker published your writing in a Shouts & Murmurs column last fall. That must've been a shitty day in the life of Jason Roeder.

JR: Oh, certainly. You get the acceptance email, and you spend the rest of the day with a trembling shotgun against your chin, wondering if you're man enough to do what has to be done. Actually, a clip in The New Yorker is a good thing, though any time I hear someone say that the stuff in Shouts just isn't that funny or should be funnier, I realize that I'm now probably part of the complaint. And when critics point out how infrequently women appear in Shouts & Murmurs, I recognize that I contribute to the imbalance. The reason I say that is because I have a penis.

J: You recently moved from Boston to New York. Which is better?

JR: First of all, I have no allegiance to the Yankees or Red Sox. I think I'll side with whichever team switches to football first.

It's hard to choose a favorite because I've only been in New York a couple of months. I'm still contending with the transition and feel like a tourist in many ways. I was on a date a couple of weeks ago, and the woman chided me for not detesting "sanitized" Times Square quite as much as I'm apparently supposed to. I guess I see her point. It took me more than an hour to get a hand job at M&M's World.

J: In regards to gay marriage you write, "What could be more transgressive than wanting to participate, as billions of others have, in one of civilization's most ancient institutions?"

JR: Well, I hope in my lifetime that gay marriage will cease to be a social issue, and I think the longer it exists, the tougher it will be to argue that the institution of marriage is being contaminated by it. Then again, the most recent census reported that 74.3 percent of Americans are credulous dildos, so who can say?

I remember how there'd be some important gay-marriage-related vote at the statehouse in Boston, and you'd see a photo of a righteous busybody evidently not needed in the workforce holding up a sign that read something like, "God Made Adam And Eve, Not Adam And Steve." I would've loved to have held up my own sign that said, "God Didn't Make Adam And Eve, Either, Bitch." Why not bring up evolution while you've got a fundamentalist's attention?

J: What's up next after "Oh the Humanity" tops the Times' Bestseller list?

JR: The second stage of the Apocalypse, I would imagine. And possibly a novel.

J: Besides world peace, what's your hope for the future?

JR: I'm not ready for world peace, not until Cyprus apologizes to me. You know what you did, Cyprus.

It was announced
earlier today that the very deserving Doris Lessing has won the 2007
Nobel Prize for Literature. Much mazel to Ms. Lessing, but
seriously, folks: what the hell does Philip Roth have to do??

Dr Michèle Mendelssohn, a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, is coming out with a new book that suggests Oscar Wilde plagiarized all his best epigrams and insights and was absolutely obsessed with the critical mind of Henry James:

One of the fascinating revelations of her book is quite how successful Wilde was at identifying himself with the Aesthetic movement. Her first illustration is of an American advert from 1882 which reads: "To be truly esthetic [sic] buy your ice cream and confections at JN Piercy's." Alongside this unlikely slogan is an image of Wilde, complete with floppy hair, cravat and velvet knee-length breeches. She points out that similar images of the author, who at the time had little literary output to his name, were used to sell hosiery, corsets, stoves and washing machines. Wilde had never endorsed such products and made no money from the adverts but, in an age long before today's celebrity-fuelled culture, he profited by association just as much as a Big Brother contestant will milk a career by hopping from one tabloid to the next. He had not invented Aestheticism, but he seemed to embody it, so much so that the illustrations that accompanied James's novel Washington Squa