Why are there anti-Israel Jews

A recent article in the Jerusalem Post looked at the critical attitude towards Israel of some prominent Jews, in particular, Noam Chomsky, Bernie Saunders and George Soros. The article considered the question of hatred and love, but did not touch of the unease many felt in the face of Zionism. If you saw yourself as an emancipated member of a secular, liberal society, Jewish nationalism was anathema. You were an America or Hungarian, or for that matter international stateless intellectual and your Jewishness was merely incidental to who you were. For those of us who experienced the vast disillusionment with the secular, liberal society that we were part of, those of us who felt betrayed by friends, neighbours and compatriots, our Zionist creed was non-negotiable. We were identified with Judaism, we were Jewish and this is how the rest of the world saw us. Facing antisemitism was the natural fate of Jews and confronting this hatred was incumbent on all Jews. Israel and Zionism will be there when the world turns on the comfortable broad minded liberals like Chomsky, Saunders and Soros who will be perceived as the enemies of the societies they live in, the eternal other who can be blamed for the ills of facing their world. As a Zionist I have to accept that there will be Jewish ganevim, there will be Jews whom I don't like, and Israeli politicians whose policies I don't agree with. I don't have to place Israel on a pedestal as a country superior to others, I don't have to attribute to my fellow Jews qualities superior to all other people. If Israel is to be a state like all other states in the community of nations we have to apply the same yardstick as we do to all others. We must not presume that just because Jews hold a special religious role among the myriad of beliefs  that they are in any way on a higher plain. The fact that the Zionist adventure turned into such a successful state, with all its shortcomings and limitations, is akin to a miracle and beyond all expectations of the original founders and dreamers. That like Jews today, the original founders and dreamers could not agree among themselves is part of this amazing story.

What do we commemorate

Over the last few weeks Donald Maurice and Inbal Megiddo of the New Zealand School of Music put together an interesting and challenging programme for this year's Kristallnacht Commemoration Concert. This concert has little to do with Kristallnacht, just as Yom HaShoah has little to do with the anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising or the UN Holocaust Memorial Day with the liberation of Auschwitz. These all commemorate something much more than the dates of these significant events. Yom HaShoah is part of the Israeli Zionist narrative of 'never again', Jews will never again go to their deaths as sheep to the slaughter. The UN Holocaust Memorial Day is a recognition of the great tragedy that was brought about by the denial of universal human rights.
So what is the Kristallnacht Commemoration concert about. First of all, it is about human experience told in music; not speeches, not ceremonial gestures, candle lighting, just music. Only two of the items to be performed have a direct link to Kristallnacht, Richard Fuchs's setting of Eliot's Song of Simeon and Dachaulied composed by two prisoners as they marched to Dachau. 
Richard Fuchs was a successful, prosperous architect living in Karlsruhe, Germany, but in 1938, like many German Jews, he realized that he had to emigrate. On Kristallnacht he was arrested and imprisoned in Dachau. and was only released when he secured a visa to come to New Zealand. Until 1938 all his songs were set to texts by German authors. As he was planning to move to an English speaking country he clearly thought it appropriate to write music to a setting of a poem by possibly the greatest contemporary English poet, T. S Eliot. The fact that A Song of Simeon was about a New Testament personality and had a clear religious overtone was perhaps less significant than that Fuchs identifies with some of the lines of the poem:

Grant us thy peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
Have given and taken honour and ease.
There went never any rejected from my door.
Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children’s children
When the time of sorrow is come?

The other works in the programme are either by composers who were murdered during the Holocaust, works by two composers who were imprisoned in Theresienstadt and later killed in Auschwitz, The Finale of the opera The Emperor of Atlantis by Victor Ullman and Gideon Klein's String Trio. Mieczyslaw Weinberg survived the Holocaust because he fled from Poland to the Soviet Union, but most of his family were murdered. He continually referred in his music to his early life in Warsaw, his Cello Sonata will have echoes of that lost world. Then there will be works by contemporary composers who a generation, perhaps two generations later explore the tragedy of the Holocaust through their music, Lori Laitman's Five Vedem Songs for voice, setting of poems by boys who were murdered,  Strings of Love by Boris Pigovat whose grandparents were among the 31,000 killed at Babi Yar, outside Kiev. Laurence Sherr's Cello Sonata, which uses themes of Jewish resistance. Thus each of these works reflect a different aspect of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was not one event but a whole cluster of events and individual tragedies, so it is appropriate that its commemoration should embrace the many aspects of these tragedies.
 

To fast or not to fast

My father was a simple man, not a learned scholar like Elyse Goldstein of Toronto. Elyse Goldstein wrote a blog published in the Times of Israel in which she explained why she stopped fasting on Tisha B'Av. She doesn't mourn for the destruction of the Temple. Knocking those old and corrupt priest off their perch was a good thing. All the argument about women praying at the wall only leads to trouble. She has no regrets about the destruction of the Temple. Perhaps she has nothing in her life to make her confront the big issues of her existence though fasting and commemoration. My father on the other hand did fast. He would have described himself as an agnostic. He was brought up in a traditional Jewish home, but the question of the existence of God didn't bother him. It was how to live his life and the purpose of living that mattered to him. When faced with a miracle he recognized it. He was fated to survive, to live and to live for a purpose. Early in November 1944 as a slave labourer, he was marched from Budapest, Hungary, towards the Austrian border to dig trenches to stop the invading Soviet tanks.  He then went on to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. When the camp was full to overflowing with prisoners who arrived from Hungary, a subcamp was set up in Gunskirchen 37 km from the main camp. In April 1945, a few weeks before the end of the war, my father, with 17,000 others was transferred from the main camp to Gunskirchen, Only some 5000 of these men were still alive when the camp was liberated on May 4, 19 The forced march there took as long as three days because it was a march of dying people obliged to carry their dead companions along with them. While the column of men was trudging along in the snow through the narrow alpine pass, one of the soldiers, perhaps only a teenager, a bewildered member of the Hitler Jugend who escorted the group, took pot shot at the men just for the thrill of it.  In the instant when the shot was fired my father stumbled and was left behind for dead on the ground. When the column passed and was out of sight my father got up, and having no alternative, joined the next column of Jewish walking skeletons. My father survived through a miracle, the amazing miracle that the shot missed him. He commemorated this personal miracle for the rest of his life by fasting on the anniversary of that day. He came face to face with the personal miracle of survival. Those of us, who have not had such a personal encounter can only experience the tragedies of the lives of others through fasting and appreciating that we survived while Jews like us were massacred over the generations. It behoves us to remember and through fasting experience the destruction of the Temple, the annihilation of Jerusalem and the murder of Jews in ancient Palestine, and then in various parts of Europe from the early Medieval persecution by the Visigoths, to the Crusades, the expulsion from Spain and Portugal, the destruction of the Jewry of Ukraine by the Cossacks, the pogroms in Russia, the slaughter of Jews on an industrial scale during the Holocaust. When my father fasted on the anniversary of his miraculous survival he knew that fasting has nothing to do with priests of old, or the equality of women; it is about acknowledging the miracle.

A golden age

I watched last night, on my brother's recommendation, Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. It is a weird film. OK, learned critics loved it, it has nice if nostalgic and selected shots of Paris with everything modern and ugly excised, and charming actors impersonating famous people from the past, but the satire and the nostalgia for a golden age didn't work for me.  Hemingway, Faulkner, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stern were in Paris in the 1920s because it was a cheap place to live in and you could get booze legally. Some of them were talented people, others fed of the talents of others. There was a temporary flowering of the arts, as there was in Vienna in the years immediately before the First World War, in Berlin during the Weimar Era, the Belle Epoque from 1871 in Paris, in New York in the 1960s, but I don't buy into such nostalgia. The period was overcast by the shadow of the war and the unsettled sense of injustice, resentment and disillusionment. The Belle Epoque followed the defeat of France in its war against Germany, and was marred by the ugly divisions that were manifested in the Dreyfus case. Golden ages are periods of history without major wars such as the present. There are and were bloody regional wars, Vietnam, the Balkans, Chechnya Iraq and Afghanistan, and numerous conflicts in Africa between countries and tribes many of us had never heard of and certainly had never given much thought to, but the conflicts on the scale of the two World Wars had been avoided. Compared with the history of past centuries, we live in a period of peace. Woody Allen can poke fun at Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso and the rest of the notable characters of that period, and in particular, poke fun at the pompous academic know all, but spare me the nostalgia.

The transformation of America 

A few days ago I watched a documentary about Noam Chomsky, the possibly misguided guru of linguistic theory, but certainly a prominent spokesman for intellectuals who don't like what's going on in the America around them. There was little in what he said that I didn't know, but he had a way of putting things together, organizing his argument to make his points clear. He talked about 10 points that contributed to the transformation of America that essentially made the rich richer and the gap between rich and poor greater. America was a fairer society in the 1960s. Richard Nixon was the last President who believed in the ideals of the New Deal, a fair go for the common man. After Nixon, the rich elite took steps to enhance their power and wealth at the expense of the rest of the Americans. In the 1960s America was a manufacturing country. People made things, cars for example. Gradually with the transformation of economic theories, libertarianism, free market principles, manufacturing was transferred to lower wage economies, China, Mexico, India, wherever it was cheapest to make things. Those employed in America in making things were displaced by people in places where they were prepared to accept lower wages. In exchange for exporting manufactured good, America imported poverty. In the course of achieving such an outcome, America destroyed its infrastructure by underinvesting, destroyed its educational system by defunding, altered the political landscape by removing limits to politcal contribution and thus ppolitical influence, created a philosophical context in which such changes became not only acceptable, but desirable. The creation of wealth through manufacture was replaced by financial manipulation. Financial controls were removed, with the result that financial collapses occurred, something that never happened during times of stringent financial regulations. Financial collapse led to the impoverishment of the already poor and the middle class, while the wealth of the rich were protected through the principle of 'too large to fail' and large financial institutions were rescued by the state. Socialism for the rich, the poor subsidised the losses of the rich. Financial manipulation also enabled the creation of vast monopolies, which stifled innovation. The response of monopolies threatened by innovative start-ups is to buy them and stifle them. Monopolies are of their nature averse to risks. Trump and his large number of followers are the product of the sense of alienation and disengagement that is the result of this transformation of American economy. Chomsky may not always be entirely right, but he is worth listening to.

Too much music

Yesterday I went to a piano duet recital, by two talented Wellington musicians, Fiona McCabe and Catherine Norton. For me, the highlight was Schubert's Grand rondeau, D951. I don't recall ever having heard this piece before. Schubert wrote it five weeks before he died. It is a rondo using a gentle, song like theme. The music just sprouted from the 29 year old Schubert. In the last year of his life he wrote his greatest instrumental works, the piano trios, his three great last sonatas, his cello quintet, and the song cycle Winterreisse, one of the most moving song cycles ever written. The slow movement of the A Major sonata and the slow movement of the Cello Quintet are some of the most melancholy pieces I can think of. Although suggesting that Schubert had his own forthcoming death in mind is romanticising these works, they have a gentle, sad, acceptance of fate  that can only be captured in music, or perhaps more accurately, only the young Schubert, on the brink of his own death could capture. Much of the rest of the music of his last years is sunny, cheerful, but there is always a tinge of sadness that creeps though. Music just poured out of him, even though he felt ill for much of the time. He gorged himself on music and wanted more. He wanted to learn counterpoint. He didn't think he was good enough. What a wonderfully humble little man he was. Since yesterday my mind is full of Schubert's late works. I have listened to the A Major Sonata, the Cello Quintet, the F minor Fantasie for Piano Duet. If there would be music at a Jewish funeral I would select my music from among these pieces, though would not want to rush their perforamnce. 

Israel and music

Inbal Megiddo, the wonderful cellist who teaches at the New Zealand School of Music, gave an interesting and thought provoking talk last night on the role of music in Judaism and Israel. She talked about music in ancient times in the Temple, but it is music in the emerging Israel and the role of music in nation building that was of special interest. The early generation of Jewish composers, the generation of Ernst Bloch drew inspiration from traditional Jewish liturgical and popular klezmer music. The following generation gathered the music of the various ethnic groups in Israel, as Bartok and Vaughan Williams did in their time in their lands. The younger generation are no longer self-conscious about writing Jewish music. They are just contemporary composers. If they draw on the wealth of different musical traditions around them these are building blocks of the language of their music. As important, however, as the works of Israeli composers, performers have a significant role to play in bringing the various people of the land of Israel together. Inbal, a former member of the Western- Eastern Divan Orchestra talked about the orchestra that brings together young musicians from the countries of the Middle East, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, to make music together, and incidentally, establish friendships. She talked about the Arab Orchestra of Nazareth that employs Russian Jewish musicians to supplement the Arab musicians playing traditional Arab musical instruments. The orchestra brings together Muslims, Christians and Jews. She mentioned the Polyphony Conservatory, based in Nazareth, with a branch in Jaffa. Most of its 130 students are Palestinian Israelis, but among the students there are  Israeli kibbutzniks who are brought together by their love of music. Perhaps it is in music that we can see the future of a peaceful Middle East. There may come a time when Arabs get sick of murdering Arabs, Palestinians stop murdering Israelis and Israelis murdering Palestinians. and the region will live in harmony and cooperation as they do when making music in their orchestras.