Jewcer Roi Ben-Yehuda wrote up his recent trip to Barcelona for Haaretz. If youEuropean Antisemitism: Straight up, no chaser want to see antisemitism done right --- or if you want to restore your confidence in the importance of Zionism --- go to Europe and then wait around a while:

If the presence of swastikas were not enough, Barcelona also has the dubious honor of being home to Europe's most infamous neo-Nazi bookstore, brazenly titled "Europa Bookstore: Persecuted Books - The Truth Will Set You Free."...

The books in the store were a literary mix covering revisionism, fascism, Israel-bashing, Hitler-praising, anti-immigration and homophobia. To this was added DVDs and CDs of Hitler's "greatest hits."

In my best Spanglish, I told a young woman who asked if I needed help that I would like to take some pictures and talk to her. She hesitated and then declined, but told me that I could "come back tomorrow and speak to the leader."...

[A]s I walked around I had a "for the six million!" moment. One of those moments that lead Jews to do something about injustice. So I took out my camera and started taking pictures...

"Give me your camera," she had raised her voice. "I want to see the pictures. I want to eliminate the pictures!"

"Leader"; "eliminate." The great thing about European fascists and racists is that they traditionally haven't put up much of a pretense of not being fascists and racists. Sadly, though, the new crop of the European far-right seems to be taking trans-Atlantic PR cues. Even the most deranged neo-Nazis on these shores feel compelled to wrap their hatred up in some public interest cause --- like saving the wombs of white women from the Pornocaust. So it's comforting, in its way, to learn that there's a little corner of Catalonia where the good stuff, the real unadulterated neo-Nazism is served straight up, no chaser.

Poland: Still a bit pissed about the war Saturday saw the kick-off of the European Football Championships in Basel. The tournament for Europe’s top 16 football (you call it 'soccer') nations is being co-hosted this year by Switzerland and Austria, neither of which is a noted hotbed of footballing passion, but feelings have nonetheless been running high for the past few days. That has little to do with the placid Alpine fans, and more to do with Sunday’s match between old rivals Germany and Poland.

In the run-up to the game, the Polish tabloid Super Express devoted its back page to a gruesome depiction of the Polish coach holding the severed heads of Joachim Löw and Michael Ballack, the German trainer and captain respectively, beside the headline “Leo, give us their heads!” A minor diplomatic incident ensued, with the situation defused only by an in-person apology from the Polish coach to the two decapitated Germans. “This is shit,” exclaimed Leo Beenhakker angrily. “Here one sees what sick people there are in this world.” Though the match itself was unremarkable, rival fans clashed afterwards, with some 150 detained; it is reported today that some of the German fans were heard singing Nazi and anti-Semitic chants.

Polish antagonism towards their neighbors has shown little sign of abating with the passage of time; last year, the then Prime Minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, caused outrage when he suggested that Poland’s voting rights in European Union institutions, weighted according to population, be rebalanced to take account of the millions killed by the Germans during the war. But in a continent which has largely banished conflict as a means of settling grievances, football is often the continuation of war by other means. Local rivalries exist in all sports everywhere, but Europeans are particularly good at using them as an excuse to dredge up old grudges.

Holland Brought It: to germany in 1988 Perhaps the most famous of these is the rivalry between Holland and, yes, Germany. When the Germans hosted these championships 20 years ago, the Dutch convoys came across the border singing "In 1940 they came, in 1988 we came" (it's catchier in Dutch, apparently). Two years ago, the fans traveled back across to Germany for the World Cup clad in WWII-style orange plastic helmets. The atmosphere is reasonably light-hearted these days, but there is no mistaking the undercurrents running beneath the surface.

Other match-ups are more hostile. Games between Greece and Turkey, or Serbia and Croatia, have in recent years seen major clashes between supporters. Armenia and Azerbaijan took it one stage further; their two qualifying matches for this competition were simply canceled amidst childish wrangling over venues. As for Israel, they clock up the air miles competing in the European football set-up, rather than against their Arab neighbors.

But, just as football fans can use the sport to express hostility, it can also serve as a vehicle for more positive nationalist sentiments. In the Gorbachev era, for example, with Soviet republics beginning to scent independence, fans used local club sides as proxies for the national teams that were still some years off. And so supporters of Ararat Yerevan, say, would look forward to games against "Georgia" or "Lithuania," not Dinamo Tbilisi or Žalgiris Vilnius, and chant the name of their opponents’ home republic in solidarity.

In some parts of Europe, club teams remain a focus for regional or national pride. Barcelona is still sentimentally seen as a substitute for a Catalan national side (despite being stuffed with foreign players), AEK Athens historically draw their support from the descendants of the displaced Greeks of Asia Minor, Glasgow Celtic "represent" Scotland’s Irish Catholic community. As for my own country, it has been seriously argued that devolution of government from Westminster to Edinburgh was delayed by two decades due to the timing of a referendum on the issue just months after Scotland's shattering failure at the 1978 World Cup.

Arc de Triomphe: after france's world cup win in 1998 But we who follow the sport with maniacal devotion (I'm typing this with one eye on the France-Romania match in the corner of my screen) do have a tendency to exaggerate its powers. The most remarked example of football as vehicle for social cohesion from recent years is probably France’s World Cup-winning team of 1998, whose members comprised a veritable rainbow of races and immigrant backgrounds; Armenian, Basque, Senegalese and Caribbean. The crowds celebrated in the Champs-Élysées under a giant picture of the great Zinedine Zidane, the son of Algerian immigrants, illuminated in red, white and blue under the slogan "Zidane Président." The chattering classes in France loved it.

Only Jean Marie Le Pen and his National Front chose to strike a sour note: "France cannot recognize itself in the national side," he griped. "Maybe the coach exaggerated the proportion of players of color, and should have been a bit more careful." Le Pen's casual racism seemed out of step with the time, but four years later he was in a runoff for the Presidency against Jacque Chirac, and few would say that Zidane's iconic image has done much for relations between "native" French and the country's large Muslim population. Perhaps sport serves as a focus for national pride when other outlets aren't available; maybe it's a safety valve that allows us to mock our enemies without (usually, at least) fighting them in the streets; maybe it can hold up a mirror to our society and help up see ourselves as others see us. Maybe it can even change that society for the better. But hang on; in the corner of my screen, it looks as if the French team of 2008 may finally be stuttering into life, so let's wrap this up.

The actual football game between Germany and Poland? It passed off without incident. The Germans won, as the Germans usually do. Appropriately, both goals were scored by striker Lukas Podolski, who was born in Poland and left when he was a child. He did not celebrate.

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These babies have more than just good looksThe Smart Car hits the street of America this winter. World travelers out there will probably recognize the mini-vehicle from the streets of Europe, where they can be found navigating narrow alleyways and parking in small spaces. Minuscule cars are all well and good over there, but will they hold up in America against an onslaught of SUVs? Watch as Americans interact with the car in this short video from the New York Times.

It's OK. There are Europeans who think America is the world.

   This is a post about English soccer – but before all you Americans scroll down to something else, let may say it is also about identity and globalisation, capitalism and the decline of the nation-state.    

OK, still here? Right, England has entered one of its periodic crises after the national soccer team failed to qualify for next summer’s European Championships. The qualification process ensures that the top 16 nations in Europe gather together in Switzerland and Austria next year for a big tournament which is second only to the World Cup in terms of interest and status. England, who invented ‘Association Football’ aren’t among those 16 after finishing behind Croatia and Russia and on the same points as that powerhouse of European soccer –Israel. (I don’t need to explain to you why Israel have  play in Europe rather than in competition with the other Middle Easter countries which they would almost certainly win).    

 It is 41 years since the England team last won a prize – the 1966 World Cup - which was the only time the tournament was held in England. Unlike most major powers in the game, Brazil, Argentina, Germany, Italy etc, England have never actually won away from home turf. But, we invented the game, we have the ‘greatest league in the world’ and most English people really believe they, their clubs, their players and their fans, represent the genuine, authentic heart and soul of the game. 

There is no way of comparing this trauma to anything in US sports – if I must try and tempt you with an analogy – imagine that baseball really went global, there was a World Series befitting of the title and the US didn’t even make the play-offs, finishing behind Honduras and South Korea after losing to Venezuela.       

No country in Europe likes their soccer team to not qualify for the Euro finals but in England, the failure provokes deep reactions which tell us a great deal about the tortured sense of identity in the country.      

 First of there is the sense of entitlement that is lost by actual competition – the English assume their place is at the top table for reasons of tradition and history. But unlike bodies such as the United Nations and The Commonwealth, European soccer is based purely on merit and not on heritage. No-one is silly enough to suggest England should qualify automatically (as they do for the UN Security Council) so the response is a vicious search for blame. As usual, and as in most sports, the coach is the first scapegoat. Steve McLaren was sacked before his bosses had even digested their bacon sandwiches the morning after the defeat to Croatia. Then there are the search for the ‘deeper causes’ of the defeat and here the deep pains of English identity start to emerge.    

One of the most popular ‘root causes’ identified this time around has been foreign players in English football. The Premier League (EPL to those Americans who take an interest) is packed with players from all over the globe and none of the elite teams are coached by Englishmen. Liverpool is owned by Americans and coached by a Spaniard. Chelsea is owned by a Russian and coached by an Israeli. The argument goes that because there are so many foreign players in England – English boys don’t get a chance. The argument is utter nonsense for several reasons - primarily because England had similar disappointments in the seventies and eighties when there were hardly any non-British players in the top league.   

Nonetheless, the argument is based on an essential truth – the ability of England’s Premier League to market itself globally, in a similar fashion to the NBA , has generated a huge amount of income which the clubs have invested in buying up foreign players. The result is a championship which is based on the core values of modern globalized capitalism – it is deregulated, internationalised and the team with the most money available usually wins. Imagine an NFL where a previously unheard of Russian billionaire could buy up, say, the Cleveland Browns, purchase Tom Brady and half the current New England Patriots team along with the best players from all the other teams and win the Superbowl easily every, single, year. You can’t do that in American sports because of the regulations – the draft, the salary cap, the rules on ownership etc  – it is a curious state of affairs but compared to the laissez-faire capitalism of English soccer, American sports are almost socialistic.

The English are pretty happy with this state of affairs for their league – they are sports fans, they support their teams in a tribalistic fashion and so no-one amongst Chelsea’s supporters ever complains about a loss of identity given their club is in Russian hands and they only have a couple of English players in their starting line-up – if the Blues win, the Blues fans are happy. The  problem comes when you get to international competition between nation states where the rules are very different. You can’t trade your citizenship, the coach of the national team can’t buy anyone and it doesn’t matter how much money your organization has – selection is restricted to people who are citizens of the country. National team soccer is the last survivor of the old amateur values – you play for honour and pride – not money. You represent your country and not your employers. You are expecting to give your all for glory and not for the next big contract deal.    

And this is where the global success of the English soccer brand falls down – the results show that the players aren’t really good enough or they haven’t been coached well enough and the normal rules of the market – buy some better players – don’t apply.    

So the England players are blamed for not caring enough and the system is criticised for being out-dated – and there are some valid arguments that I shan’t trouble you with here about what precisely, technically is the problem with homegrown English footballers.     

But the big picture is that soccer, like other sports, is transforming itself and globalizing itself in a way which leaves the old nation state framework looking increasingly like a sideshow. On a week to week basis fans, owners and coaches don’t care about nationality – they want results and entertainment. Most of the time, the English enjoy the chance to watch top international performers either in the Premier League or the Europe-wide Champions League. The pangs of pain only come when cash no longer can talk – when soccer enters a timewarp and we go back to an era when the rules are different. The pain is enhanced because the English like to think they represent the old values of the game when in fact they epitomize the modern transformation of the sport into a global entertainment and marketing industry.   

There are no signs that the trends will change – if anything they are likely to intensify -  and so the English will slowly have to get used to the fact their national team is mediocre but they have the most marketable professional league in the world. And in this respect England will become more American.    

There are no nation-state battles in American football or pro baseball and the Olympic competition in basketball and hockey is a sideshow for anyone who seriously follows the NBA or NHL. Americans are lucky in that so few countries play baseball or football – they can simply enjoy the NFL and MLB without worrying about what the rest of the world is doing. The English are going to have to learn to do that -  not to care about nation-state competition – and that won’t be easy for a people who remain attached to tradition while being at the vanguard of tradition-smashing global, capitalized sport.

Several days ago I came across this post on the Economist’s “Certain ideas of Europe” blog: “Bye, bye, Europe?” The title and topic called to mind “It’s the demography, stupid,” a New Criterion article by Mark Steyn (later expanded into a bestseller called America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It) which, when I was an editor at the magazine, generated so much traffic in one afternoon that it put the website out of commission for a week. Where The New Criterion’s readership seemed anxious—sometimes almost to the point of a fatalistic impatience—for forecasts about the shrinking of the European birthrate and consequent aging of Europe’s population, Economist subscribers are curiously blasé, if not outright pleased. Here’s a sampling of reactions to the news that “there are now more elderly Europeans than European children”: 

• Why the glum tone? Shrinking populations are good news for environments. Ultimately every environmental problem stems from an excess of people. Unfortunately, growing populations elsewhere in the world will probably obliterate all of the quixotic measures Europeans are making now to cut global greenhouse-gas emissions. But regionally, a long-term fall in population will help overcrowded European countries reclaim space for wilderness and wildlife in lands that have been chopped, ploughed, and engineered into oblivion over the past several centuries.

• [T]he link between population and economic strength can perhaps be overstated. Sweden is doing very well with only 9 million people, and tiny Iceland (pop. 300,000) is one of the world’s richest countries per capita.

• Clearly, the values one attaches to traditional economic growth, nature and environment and power on the international scene determine one’s valuation of the maturing of populations. Since I value the environment and a comfortable way of life, my choice would be to work a bit longer, invest in my education and hope for a gradually shrinking population. Say, a fertility rate of 2 or just below.

• The Russians will be growing people in laboratories by the middle of the century. It’s really not as hard as it sounds. It will be one of those technologies only the Russians could pioneer—like laser eye surgery. I really don’t think I’m a lunatic for making this claim.

Though that last bit does have some intriguing Invasion of the Body Snatchers elements to it—not to mention some intimations of a Philip K. Dick-style derangement—the responses generally show a surprising lack of imagination. The environment? The economy? Is that really all there is to worry us about a people and, more to the point, a culture in decline? Unfortunately not, as the latest from the Netherlands reminds us. Both Christopher Hitchens and Anne Applebaum report that the Dutch have revoked Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s security funding—as in security from murderous Islamists offended by her criticisms. (For more on Hirsi Ali, this interview is recommended.) Applebaum writes:

[I]n 2006, the Dutch government tried to revoke Hirsi Ali’s citizenship over an old immigration controversy, and why her neighbors went to court that year to have her evicted from her home (they claimed the security threat posed by her presence impinged upon their human rights). But although she did finally move to the United States, the argument continued in her absence. Last week, the Dutch government abruptly cut off her security funding, forcing her to return briefly to Holland.

The reasons given were financial, but there was clearly more to it. To put it bluntly, many in Holland find her too loud, too public in her condemnation of radical Islam. She doesn’t sound conciliatory, in the modern continental fashion. Compare her description of Islam as “brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women” with the German judge who, citing the Koran, in January told a Muslim woman trying to obtain a divorce from her violent husband that she should have “expected” her husband to deploy the corporal punishment his religion approves. Hirsi Ali herself says she is often told, in so many words, that she’s “brought her problems on herself.” Now the Dutch prime minister openly says he wants her to deal with them alone.

It’s difficult to discuss European demography and immigration without inviting accusations of racism, but this situation makes it clear that the issue isn’t where you’re from but what you believe. If more newcomers to Europe were like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, full of genuinely courageous enthusiasm for thought and change, we wouldn’t need books like Mark Steyn’s. But, as it stands, she’s a rarity, and one we’ll have to protect at any cost if we’re to have any hope of showing her enemies that we’re serious about defeating them. 

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner is getting lots of attention for his statement on French radio that the world should be prepared for the worst, that is, for war with Iran, if the latter was to acquire nuclear weapons. Two preliminary remarks must be made, amidst usual French internal accusations of “Atlantism” at best and allegiance to Judaism rather than to France at its unfortunately usual worst (look respectively at the post and comments here):

1) Kouchner’s position is not new: ten days ago, he was saying exactly the same thing to the media: “There are a lot of solutions (other than war) to envisage, other paths to explore, peace negotiations to conduct. There must be dogged diplomatic efforts. Let’s listen, negotiate, negotiate again and prepare ourselves for the worst.” [By the way, in this same article he restates his relation to Judaism, which makes him a very Jewcy Jew]

2) Kouchner’s position is not simply his own: it’s France’s in general (supported by both the President and the Prime Minister).

But what exactly is proposed? The clearest statement is perhaps here (in French). The immediate problem is that of sanctions on Iran. France proposes unilateral European sanctions, without waiting for the UN to move –the Netherlands disagree, but Germany is in favour (actually they originated the idea). A secondary problem is what to do if those sanctions fail. But this isn’t really the question. Rather, it seems that this situation is an almost direct parallel to the 2003 debate about Iraq. Kouchner’s position then (‘Neither War Nor Saddam’, an interesting elucidation of which can be found here) was that France was making an enormous mistake by opposing its veto to the ‘disarmament ultimatum’ resolution put forward by the US and the UK. The sight of a disaggregated coalition was a comforting sight for Saddam and would imply that there would be no military coalition of 1991 magnitude against him. Diminishing thus the threat of intervention meant, simply, that diplomacy would have no bargaining tool (maybe a primitive argument, but Saddam was hardly a rational leader). A united diplomatic front now absent, there was no other option for the committed U.S. but to go it alone. In other words, the mistake according to Kouchner has always been to show a disunited diplomatic front, in particular insofar as sanctions, from economic to military, are concerned. Diplomacy against rogue regimes has no way to proceed forward unless they understand that we mean business.

Kouchner’s call not to absolutely remove the military option from the table then and now is thus first and foremost a way to guarantee that negotiations actually do move forward. He is no lover of war, and his actions are solely aimed at avoiding this extremity if at all possible; however to do so, the threat of war may have to be used. As chess player Aron Nimzovich once stated: ‘The threat is stronger than the execution.’

Yesterday I got an e-mail from my cousin Matt saying, "a hundred years ago today Isak Altbaum left Europe...thank God we got out of Poland!"

Attached to Matt's e-mail was a manifest of all the greasy "steerage aliens" (a term worth reviving, if ever one was) packed into the bottom of the ship Amerika as it set sail from Hamburg to New York on June 5, 1907. Isak Altbaum's name is there, and he's listed as a 33 year-old tailor from Russia, of the "Hebrew" race, travelling alone.

Isak was my great-grandfather, the first of my family to make it to America, Steerage Aliens Aboard Amerika, one hundred years ago yesterday: Great-grandpa Isak Altbaum is number 13 (clickable)and I'd always known that he arrived in New York sometime after the abortive 1905 Russian "dress rehearsal for revolution." The story of his flight to America seemed more mythical than historical, and this unexpected hard evidence--the name, the actual date, the papers that accompanied him to America--felt almost indecent, like a challenge to the 20th century Exodus narrative that my family has woven for itself over the decades. This wasn't just one man's trip across an ocean, after all, but my family's own piece of the Great Wave creation event upon which all Jewish-American family folkore is built.

And now old stories would have to be reevaluated in light of historical fact. Even worse, the centennial was being rudely thrust upon me--it was a hundred years to the day since my family left Europe for America. I felt as though I should be taking stock. What would Isak think of the lives of his American descendants, at T+100 years? Is this what he came for? Would he have been horrified by us? He left everything he knew, and everyone he loved, to cross an ocean in the bottom of a ship for the dream and privilege of starting over, alone, impoverished, in a profoundly foreign country. Is the life I'm leading worthy of the Odyssey that made it possible?

These are irritating questions to have thrust upon you in the middle of a work day. So instead, I began to think about the far more frightening questions with which this voyage ultimately confronted Isak himself.

Amerika sailed from Hamburg, an alien metropolis to which Isak would have travelled in order to catch a ship to the bigger, more alien metropolis across the ocean. He made his way to Hamburg from Frampol, the east Poland shtetl that was his home for the previous 33 years. (Frampol, some of you will know, is also the name of the fictional shtetl in which Isaac Bashevis Singer set many of his stories, but yes, there was also a real shtetl called Frampol, near Lublin, and it's where my family was from.) As a kid I often heard the story of what Isak and those who followed him to America were told when they left Frampol to head to America: "Don't ever forget where you come from," said the family they left behind.

That line was always presented to me as if it were thick with poignance and pathos, but in less reverent moments I wondered whether, with all the accumulated Talmudic wisdom that was surely bouncing around Frampol, they mightn't have sent Isak on his way with something a bit less obvious, a bit more zing.

In any case, in the family lore that came down to me, the story of the people of Frampol ends as we, the America-bound young and foolish, head toward the sea to catch our ride to the Promised Land, and the people we left behind send us off with their little nugget of saccharine Old Country wisdom, each of them looking just like Tevye or his Marxist son-in-law Pertchik (the women the same, but in dresses). And that's how Isak's parents and siblings and cousins in Frampol have remained frozen in the narrative of our Jewish-American family for the past 100 years.

But of course life didn't stop in Frampol in 1907. Did Isak use telegrams or mail to remain in touch, to learn how the people he'd loved for all the first half of his life were faring? How did Frampol, and my great great-grandparents, great uncles, etc., make out during World War I, the Russian Revolution, or later? Suddenly yesterday I wanted to know, and Isak must have been desperate to know the same.

But if he did learn anything about the lives of our family who remained in Frampol, find out, it wasn't passed along to the next generations. Just "Don't ever forget where you came from," and then the heavy suggestion that, sometime later, the cataclysm. Surely they were all killed by the Nazis? Is it possible that their story somehow had a happier outcome?

In 2007, a question like this need not remain a mystery: yesterday, after getting my cousin's e-mail, I googled around a bit. This is what I found, excerpted from an out-of-print book titled Eyes on the Sky, by one Wolfgang Schreyer:

13 September 1939, the town of Frampol, with a population of 3000, and without military or industrial targets, nor any Polish Army defenders, was practically annihilated by Luftwaffe bombing practice. In the opinion of Luftwaffe analyst Harry Hohnewald: "Frampol was chosen as an experimental object, because test bombers, flying at low speed, weren't endangered by AA fire. Also, the centrally placed town hall was an ideal orientation point for the crews."

Given the alternatives, I suppose this amounted to quite an outstanding stroke of luck for the Altbaums and other inhabitants of my ancestral shtetl. They never lived to suffer ghettoes, deportations, camps, were never separated from their children or spouses. Instead, they were wiped out on a single fall day because they made for particularly fine target practice for the young heroes of the Luftwaffe.

And yet however much DNA I may share with the people who died on 13 September 1939, and even though some of them loved a person (Isak) who loved a person (my grandfather, Sam, Isak's son) who I loved, I can't, even if I try, feel very much more intimacy with their tragedy than I do with any other catastrophe affecting no one I know. Their parting request to us, the new Americans branch of the family, was that we not forget them. And we do remember them. But as I read about their demise yesterday, I felt no more horrified, infuriated, or depressed than I would reading about any other atrocity. Mostly, I just felt the amoral fascination of a history buff to learn that the Jews of my ancestral shtetl were massacred in so eccentric a fashion.

I do, though, wonder about Isak, who in photographs always seemed to look dour and a bit irked, as though he was peering out at the 21st century ass-clown American luftmenschen he'd spawned, and wasn't pleased, wasn't pleased at all. I can't be sure why his own story of Frampol concluded the day he left in 1907. Was this a conscious decision of his? Is it possible he genuinely never knew any of what unfolded in Frampol's 32 remaining years.

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This is Ashkenazi? According to Google it is!After discussing the dilemma of the words we don't really know the meaning of and the resulting need to go back and re-learn some things, I woke up this morning with the realization that there's a Jewishy word I use without any real background: Ashkenazi.

In my lame-ass understanding of the term, an Ashkenazi Jew is someone whose family:

1. at some point spoke Yiddish

2. lived in Poland or thereabouts

3. looked Hassidic

That's about it for my sense of what that word means. Though if I wrote my own Jewish dictionary, it might say simply Ashkenazic- NOT Sephardic. (another only vaguely understood term... but we'll get to it later)

But then I got to thinking that I have no idea why a bunch of Polish motherfuckers speak German, and I have no idea when they got to where they got, or how long they stayed. Turns out...

... they arrived in northern France (we assume from the middle east) and the Rhineland sometime around 800-1000 CE, the Ashkenazi Jews brought with them both Rabbinic Judaism and the Babylonian Talmudic culture that underlies it. European Jews became called "Ashkenaz" because the main centers of Jewish learning were located in Germany. "Ashkenaz" is a Medieval Hebrew name for Germany.

But they didn't stay forever. It follows that...

With the onset of the Crusades, and the expulsions from England (1290), France (1394), and parts of Germany (1400s), Jewish migration pushed eastward into Poland, Lithuania, and Russia.

So some of these families were in Germany for as long as 700 years, and some as few as 200 years. In most cases, much longer than they were in Poland or wherever, and a helluva lot longer than we've been in the United States so far.

The other question I have about this relates to a rough sense that Sephardic Jews were classier and smarter and better off than Ashkenzic Jews for a long time... but at some point lost their clout. I've heard such rumors, and would like to look into the matter, but this post is already too long.... so maybe after I've had my coffee.

Nordreich, a Neo-Nazi group that is gaining ground in Europe, employed Norway's national anthem, "Ja Vi Elsker" as background music to accompany their 2-minute clip (on Youtube) which features a montage of Europe's major cities with superimposed Nazi symbols.

Said Foreign Ministry Information Adviser Odd Naustdal said of the incident:

We will contact YouTube and ask them to remove the video.

C'est tout? Once again, Nordic people prove that they are indeed the superior race with no balls.

Not That Fun For Anyone, ReallyNew Year’s Eve blew even more tourist butt than usual this year. There was the requisite good-time-pressure implosion and resultant tears, of course. And the face-sucking of acquaintances, natch. Deflated expectations, girl-fighting, and the oldest anti-climax in the book, check.

It got worse, however.

We got invited to tag along to a party, the theme of which was, I shit you not at all, Paris in the ‘30s. (Note: not to be confused with dressing up like a projected Paris In Her Thirties.) At first glance, that might not seem so strange. Paris = debauchery and style and fun! Josephine Baker! The Lost Generation! Avant-Garde! Anais Nin! Henry Miller! Anal sex! Absinthe! Whatever! Wheeee!

But, uh, all that revelry turned out to be something of a harbinger for -- how you say -- not the best of times for a… lot of people.

From Jay Freedman’s review of The Twilight Years, William Wiser’s seminal account of the period:

“Tragically, while Dali and Picasso painted, while existentialists debated in Left Bank cafes, while proponents of haute couture thrived, the social and political rot gnawing at the innards of the Third Republic accelerated.”

Long story short, Paris in the thirties was “…a city whose brightest lights seemed oblivious to impending doom.” A regular "ship of fools". A terrible choice for a party ushering in 2007, one would hope like hell.

Why not just go all the freaking way and make it Berlin in the thirties? It was a fucked up time everywhere. There was the Depression, the rise of Fascism, the Nuremberg Laws. Oh, and don’t forget Stalin's first round of purges! Chug-a-lug!

Izzy felt that, since we were both wearing our pants tucked into our boots (neither Paris in the ‘30s nor Paris In Her Thirties), we should storm the party like resistance fighters. The jazz trio and champagne tower had too hypnotic an effect, however, and we found ourselves stuck in stunned, ambivalent silence. (Kind of like the French as the thirties drew to a close.)

Admittedly, it’d be hard to find a historical party theme that doesn’t carry with it a bitter, bitter historical aftertaste for someone, somewhere. And our hosts seemed like fine, fine folk. Next time, though, maybe a good old fashioned Come-As-You-Are?

Obviously I should’ve addressed all of this on the first of the year. But I was way, way too hung-over, self-indulgent, depressed, and apathetic to bother with much grappling.

Kind of like France as the thirties drew to a close.

Whatevs. Peel me a grape.

“Lebanon faces prospect of seeing repeat of violent history,” says the International Herald Tribune, as sectarian tension sizzles in the aftermath of the Gemayel assassination.

Lebanon's seeming slide toward civil conflict is not just a symbol of unfortunate historic symmetry. This country is a barometer for the region, a canary in the Middle Eastern mineshaft, serving as a measure of tensions and rivalries.

Jewcy user SimpleLiquid agrees, but not in the way that the IHT might expect. He says,

Lebanon is a failed nation state plagued by sectarian violence since it was drawn onto the map by France as part of French imperial designs. Lebanon's people have no cohesive history or independent identity and since its creation have not been able to form one. Hence, the nation is doomed to failure and continuing civil strife. Lebanon should be removed from the map and either incorporated into Syria or divided up into sectarian states.

In other words, Lebanon is a “canary in the mineshaft” in that Middle Eastern bloodshed, from Lebanon to Iraq, has the same source: the awkward and ahistoric national borders that Europe imposed during its 500- year campaign to carve the world into pliant and lucrative colonial fiefdoms.

Oceans of blood were spilt on European soil as its nations worked out their borders and demography. And Europe made the same violence—or worse—inevitable in the Middle East, Africa, and other colonial lands by forcing hopelessly unnatural borders upon them.

If such reasoning is correct (and it is), then the die was cast for Lebanon a long time ago. Cataclysmic sectarian violence will threaten unless somehow, some way, the map is redrawn so that it no longer reflects the brutal carelessness of colonial Europe. Until then, all we can do is damage control.

It's all so very sucky.