Corey Robin's Blog, page 53

Economics is how we moderns do politics

Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France:

 Society…is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primæval contract of eternal society…

Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money:

Money in its significant attributes is, above all, a subtle device for linking the present to the future.

 

K Street in Nazi Germany

Building on these old posts about the relationship between capitalism and Nazism, here’s another nugget from Martin Kitchen’s biography of Speer:

Speer’s plan for Berlin underlined the fact that the headquarters of the Armed Forces and of Germany’s leading companies did not merely share the same address, but lived together in harmony….Ernst Petersen’s project for the washing powder manufacturer Henkel was next door to Herbert Rimpl’s building for the Hermann Göring Works. IG Farben was placed opposite Hitler’s palace. AEG was across the street from the Ministry of Propaganda. This sense of togetherness and of monumentality was strengthened by bunching these huge buildings together along the north-south axis.

Hitler’s Furniture

Tipped off by Adam Tooze’s review in the Wall Street Journal, which I highly recommend, I ordered Martin Kitchen’s new biography of Albert Speer. A few nuggets so far.

On Hitler, Speer, and furniture:

The style of furniture that was extolled in the professional journals of the day as ‘furniture for the German people’ that reflected ‘the honesty, solidity and directness of a natural lifestyle’ was not to be found in the new chancellery [designed by Speer to Hitler’s specifications]. Aping the style of bygone ages, particularly if foreign and essentially aristocratic, was roundly condemned. Such gaudy luxury and ostentatious grandeur had no place in the new Germany….Speer’s approach was radically different. His was the exact reverse of the Werkbund’s. He had no taste for furniture that was designed somehow to reflect German’s racial characteristics….

Ideologically sound National Socialist furniture makers, true to the ‘Blood and Soil’ ideology, insisted that Germans should have furniture made of German woods such as pine, beech or elm. For special occasions walnut, ash or larch might be considered. Hitler and Speer wanted nothing to do with such nonsense. Only mahogany, ebony, rosewood and other tropical woods, for which scarce foreign exchange was needed, were good enough for them. This at a time when the average German had increasingly to make do with plywood, laminates and hardboard as the Four-Year Plan extended its control over civilian production….Even in furniture there was a marked contrast between that of the leadership and the masses that revealed the true nature of National Socialism and exposed the concept of the ‘racial community’ as an empty sham.

On art in the chancellery:

No one seemed to have the noticed the irony of Tintoretto’s painting of the discovery of Moses among the bulrushes hanging in the cabinet room.

And the AC in the Chancellery seldom worked.

This Muslim American Life: An Interview with Moustafa Bayoumi

Moustafa Bayoumi is a professor of English at Brooklyn College, where I teach political science. His book, “This Muslim American Life,” came out in September. It’s a fascinating collection of pieces—sometimes hilarious, often unsettling, always probing and provocative—about, well, Muslim life in America, past and present.

There’s a mini-memoir about the time Moustafa worked as a Middle Eastern extra on “Sex and the City 2″; a Philip-Roth-like story about his discovery of a terrorist named Mustafa Bayoumi in a detective novel (that really did happen); a loving deconstruction of the Islamic undertones and overtones of John Coltrane’s music (“A Love Supreme” becomes “Allah Supreme”); a harrowing essay on how the American military uses music to terrorize and torture its victims (the phrase “Disco Inferno” takes on a whole new meaning); a long and learned history of the relationship between Muslim Americans and African Americans.

The book ranges widely, but it’s held together by a single premonition: that the wrenching changes of the War on Terror have been not only legal and political but also cultural. They are not confined to foreign policy or domestic policing; they extend to the most intimate and personal spaces of social life. They have created among all of us—Muslim and non-Muslim alike—a new set of experiences and sensibilities, a new sense of community and collectivity. At the same time, Moustafa’s book is a long, sustained insistence that we understand all the ways in which people—particularly Muslim people—live their lives outside the War on Terror. “This Muslim American Life” documents the oozing influence of the state, but with its sense of humor and history, shows just how much of the Muslim American experience lies beyond that influence.

A literary critic and gifted essayist, Moustafa brings his formidable skills as a reader of texts to his analysis of contemporary political culture. He’s got that eye—and ear—for the way our most incidental phrases, those stray bits of language, betray our deepest feelings. Where other books on the War on Terror focus on high acts of state, Moustafa finds his materials in the most unexpected places: yes, in the fine print of a legal statute, but also in standup comedy, in the parables of Kafka, in the penultimate paragraph of newspaper article. His archive is everywhere.

Moustafa and I have been friends for years, and we’ve often talked over drinks or dinner, on campus and in cafés, about the topics he addresses in his book. But it wasn’t till I sat down with “This Muslim American Life” that I truly saw the unity of his vision. So I decided to do what we always do when either of us has a book or an idea we’re excited about: sit down with him and talk about it.

Salon ran the interview this morning.

 

Democracy’s Descent

I’ve noticed an interesting line of democratic descent in the last two decades. It used to be that you weren’t allowed to criticize your nation’s leaders during wartime. Then it became, after the Nader fiasco of 2000, that you weren’t allowed to criticize the Democratic Party nominee during a general election. Now it’s become, with the rise of Hillary Clinton and the prospect of candidate Trump, that you aren’t allowed to criticize the likely party nominee during a primary campaign, lest you so tarnish the likely nominee that she becomes, in your eyes, illegitimate. Given the rightward drift of the GOP, which shows no signs of abating, I assume the next step will be that you aren’t allowed to criticize whoever the media anoints as the party front-runner a full four years before the campaign has even begun. Which leads to the question: amid this steady winnowing of democracy’s time and space, where and when is actual debate about the country’s direction and its leadership supposed to happen?

Fiddler on the Roof: Our Sabbath Prayer

Every week in synagogue, as we return the Torah to the ark, we sing a prayer that concludes, “Chadesh Yameynu K’Kedem.” The line has been variously translated, but my favorite is this one: “Make our days seem new, as they once were.” It comes from Lamentations, songs of sorrow composed after the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and killed or banished many of its inhabitants. But today the invocation speaks less to a geographic sense of loss and longing than to a psychic sense of ritual that’s become rote, feeling that’s gone cold, a desire for a more vital apprehension of liturgy and law, an experience of prayer akin to what our ancestors once felt.

Or so we assume they once felt. As Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole explain in Sacred Trash, their book on the Cairo Geniza, the staleness of religious experience isn’t exactly a new phenomenon for Jews, something we only began to suffer in the suburbs of New Jersey. As long ago as late antiquity, Jewish liturgical poets were tasked—or tasked themselves—with the responsibility of making all their days seem new. Particularly in synagogue. According to Hoffman and Cole:

It was incumbent upon the poet to make use of all the literary devices at his disposal in order to revive the experience of worship and wonder for his synagogue listeners….All these devices were used to intensify the liturgical moment, to suck marrow from the seemingly dry bones of routinized prayer and to make it matter afresh, as the Mishna demanded: “Whoever makes his prayer a fixed task,” it cautions, “his prayer is not a true supplication.” Other sources echo that call: “One’s prayer should be made new each day,” the Palestinian Talmud tells us, and “As new water flows from the well each hour, so Israel renews its song.”

Our challenge today, in other words, may not be so different from their challenge yesterday.

Nor, as it happens, is it so different from the theater’s challenge everyday. Each night on stage, actors must make lines or songs they’ve rehearsed and performed a thousand times sound fresh, as if they were being spoken or sung for the first time. Theater companies putting on Hamlet or Macbeth face a larger version of the same challenge: how to take a play that everyone knows and make it seem new.

Which brings us to Fiddler on the Roof, which opens tonight on Broadway, the fifth revival in the show’s history.

In her cultural history of the musical, Wonder of Wonders, Alisa Solomon tells us that every year some two hundred schools put on the show. There are “probably more local productions than the licensing agency can count—and more than it even knows about.” Everyone knows, or thinks he knows, the musical. Even Pinochet: a “Marxist inspired” work, he said, upon banning it in 1974, with “disruptive elements harmful to the nation.”

Which makes for an interesting irony. The most Jewish element of the Fiddler may not be its latent content: that is, the struggle between tradition and modernity, announced with such fanfare in the show’s opening number “Tradition.” As Solomon explains, “Tradition” was a late addition to the musical, wrought from the presiding genius and ambivalent identity (Jewish, gay) of director Jerome Robbins.

In meeting after meeting at his home, Robbins kept asking the authors a question that struck them as unnecessary for having such an obvious answer: “What is this show about?” He’d lean back in his chair and await their answer, but the authors were dumbfounded. Robbins knew full well that the show traced the trials of Tevye, a simple Jew trying to scratch out a living in the Russian Pale of Settlement at the turn of the century. They had nothing new to tell him. Still, Robbins kept hammering the questions like a district attorney and, every time, one of the creators gave the same answer: “The show is about a dairyman and his marriageable daughters.”

One late autumn day, Robbins snapped, “No, no, no, that’s no good.” He let out a gust of exasperation. “That’s not it. That’s not enough. That’s ‘The Previous Adventures of the Goldbergs.’”

…

No one remembers who uttered the words that finally provided the answer to Robbins’s persistent question, but they seemed to rearrange the molecules in the room. “It’s about the dissolution of a way of life.” Robbins leaned forward. “That’s it! That’s it!” he said. He wasn’t the sort to cry out or slap the table—more a “quiet, growling presence,” as Hal Prince describes him—but his enthusiasm was unmistakable. “It’s tradition,” he asserted. “Yes, that’s it. We have to establish the traditions at the beginning and then the audience will see how they’re breaking down. That’s the show.”

…

Right away, an image took shape in his mind. Robbins saw exactly how to open and close the show. “I’ll begin it with one of the oldest folk forms: the circle,” he told the authors. “I’ll bring the cast out and make a folk circle. And at the end, we’ll bring the cast out and the circle will disintegrate.”

Months later, Robbins was worrying over the same terrain.

“The drama of the play,” he scribbled down on the first day of the new year, “is to watch a man carefully treading his way between his accepting of his sustaining belief (that way of life that is centuries old, practiced as if it were still in the middle ages, which protects & defends him & makes his life tolerable)—& his wry questioning of it within the confinements of the belief. He always asks why. He ducks & weaves with the events around him still managing to straddle both sides—his traditions & the questioning of it.” The tests of Tevye’s ability to stay astride the widening gulf become more difficult and finally, when Chava [Tevye’s third daughter] chooses Fyedka [a gentile], “he is forced either to move forward into being a new Jew or embrace the strict traditions of his life.”…

…As he describes Tevye’s torment, Robbins seems to merge emotionally with the character. He slips into Yinglish syntax in his notes: “Underlying all his actions is the frightening question ‘Why?’—Why? Why Chava? Why on me is this visiting?” And he could well have been describing his own decades-long anguish…

Tevye’s struggle—as Robbins and Fiddler conceived it—presumes that the tradition is still vital and vibrant; the pull of the past, still strong. At least as strong as the lure of the new sexual mores, women’s autonomy, revolution, and interfaith marriage that we see tugging at Tevye’s daughters. The problem in Fiddler is not the deadness or staleness of tradition; it is its residual power. When Robbins finally staged “Tradition,” he stressed to the actors, “You’re proud. You’re very proud of your tradition.” The song’s choreography—the villagers walk out on stage with their arms held up at 90-degree angles, forging a finger-bound circle of ancient lineage and unbroken time—reinforced the message.

A message that Robbins thought of as less Jewish than universal. In Solomon’s words:

The director saw the potential wide appeal of the Tevye musical in its “vital and universal” story about “the changing with the times we all have to make, and the conflicts and tensions made by these changes.” And he understood that the universalism would emerge most potently from Tevye’s anguish. Unless the play traced his “attempts to keep his tradition and still follow his heart,” Robbins enjoined, “we are back with a better ‘Rise of the Goldbergs.’” Plus, he added in an especially telling complaint, the script was “still terribly anti-Gentile and Jewish self-loving.”

When the musical was made into a film in 1971, its overseas publicist was of a similar mind: “It is essential that we establish the universality of the film, and avoid stressing its Jewishness.”

In other words, the conflict between tradition and change, which has come to seem the very essence of being Jewish in modern America, seemed, to Fiddler’s creators and promoters, a way of making the story less Jewish. And that is how audiences throughout the world have seen the musical. From Ocean Brownsville, which staged a controversial black and brown version of the musical during the even more controversial teachers’ strike of 1968, to Japan, where a producer wondered, the librettist Joe Stein told Solomon, “how Americans could relate to a show that was ‘so Japanese.’”

It may be, then, that the Jewish element of the musical lies less in the overt story that its makers so emphasized than in the serendipity of a reception they never could have anticipated. Relentlessly rehearsed and recited throughout the Jewish community for more than a half-century—from summer camps to weddings and bat mitzvahs—Fiddler on the Roof has become a part of our liturgy. When Samantha Massell, who plays Tevye’s daughter Hodel in the current revival, made her pilgrimage to Israel as a 19-year-old, she stuck a piece of paper with lyrics from “Sabbath Prayer” into the cracks of the Western Wall; “as sacred text as any,” observes Solomon.

As I sat in the audience of the Broadway Theater this past Wednesday, I knew what she meant. There I was, surrounded by Jews of all ages—including my seven-year-old daughter—singing the words to “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” and “If I Were a Rich Man.” Sometimes clearly and crisply, sometimes mumbling and uncertain. It felt like I was in shul.

If that’s true—and I think it is—Fiddler faces a challenge that all Jewish prayer has confronted since, well, there was Jewish prayer: How to make a devotional text seem new. And in confronting that challenge, this revival of Fiddler seems like the most Jewish production of all.

I grew up a Reform Jew. I can still remember my feeling of bewilderment, even estrangement, the first time I entered a more observant shul. Unlike the choreographed performances I was used to from my youth—complete with organ, choir, and rabbi serving as master of ceremonies—this service seemed as inscrutable as a family chaos. There was the prayer book, mostly in Hebrew; there was the bima; and there were the leaders of the service, rotating in and out of the congregation to assume their temporary positions of authority. Everyone was praying or davening—a mix of word and movement—ever so quietly. You could barely catch what was being said. I felt as if I were in someone else’s living room, where everyone knows each other so well they needn’t speak in order to be heard.

Parts of this Fiddler revival that I saw on Wednesday felt like that: Lines that you knew the actors knew you knew, were let slip in the offhand way so many Jews pray in shul. The effect in the Broadway Theater, at first so alienating, was, by the end, transporting. The performer and producers of the show had turned its greatest liability—its familiarity—into its strength. Theater suddenly felt like an ancient rite, a community of ritual and prayer.

Likewise, Danny Burstein, who plays Tevye, turned all of the milkman’s signature gestures, made famous by Zero Mostel—arms and shoulders shimmying up to the air, wrists and elbows snaking into the sky—into ironic, knowing references, post-modern commentaries on the set pieces they’ve become. The dancers periodically mimicked Tevye/Mostel’s moves. The actors seemed to be shrugging their shoulders, offloading the weight of the past—not of a thousands-year-old religion but of a fifty-year-old musical—with a genial “What are you going to do?”

In perhaps the most daring move of all, the opening scene has Burstein come on stage, dressed in a red parka and contemporary clothes, reading from what seems to be a guide book, peering up at a sign that spells out, in Cyrillic letters, “Anatevka,” the shtetl where the musical takes place. We think we’re seeing an American tourist exploring his roots in Eastern Europe—shades of so much Jewish-American literature since the fall of the Berlin Wall. As he recites the show’s opening lines, Burstein transforms into Tevye and we’re transported back to 1905. At the end of the musical, Burstein reverts to the tourist in the red parka. Only this time, the rest of the company is on stage, frozen in their tracks, midflight from Anatekva, banished by the violence of anti-Semitism and Cossack reaction.

According to the New York Times, this new staging is meant to be a nod to the contemporary refugee crisis. But I read the scene differently: it suggested something more like a museum exhibit, perhaps a tableau from Ellis Island. The question being raised was not about politics present but about rituals past: How do we take this set piece of the Jewish imagination out of the museum and make it come alive?

This production finds an answer in the most unlikely of places: in dance.

From the very beginning, it was dance that captured Robbins’s imagination, and it was in dance that he saw the deepest, most vital expressions of Jewish longing and desire. Solomon describes in loving and exquisite detail Robbins’s nightly pilgrimages to far-off Brooklyn, where he did research for Fiddler at Hasidic weddings and holiday celebrations, and saw men, Jewish men, dancing in ways he never thought possible.

Dozens of men were crammed into the tiny shtiebl [prayer house], singing, clapping, knocking back schnapps after schnapps. Their dancing came as a revelation: the secular showmen expected gentle folk forms of all hold hands and mosey one way round a circle and then the other; instead, they felt the room shake from floor stomping, body twisting, athletic flinging, and writhing.

…

Every time, it was the men’s dancing that amazed Robbins. “My great wonder, watching the dangers, was how people weren’t hurt & bruised as bodies were flung centrifugally from out-of-control circles,” Robbins later marveled in handwritten notes for a letter. “Hats flew off, chairs overturned—but the rough dominant force that was released by all this kinetic energy was overpowering—for in spite of each man improvising as he felt—in spite of primitive variations of the basic rhythm—two things held them together. Their constant hand grip—when if broken by the external momentum of the dance, or by another body flinging itself into the dancer, was always regained, reunited. And secondly, the deep & powerful assertion—a strength I never knew—a dedication to a rite, claiming survival & joy, procreation & celebration. An explosive foot thrust to the floor that shook the room that said Yes I am here, & I celebrate the continuity of my existence.”

It was as if the shame Robbins had long felt about “weak” Jewish (and gay) masculinity was pulverized by the whirling frenzy of these homosocial dances, then kicked up and blown away like old, dry dust. This dancing provided the proof positive, and further inspiration, for his demand that that the show express Jewish robustness and resilience—the strength that not only he “never knew” but that had been obscured in popular representations for decades.

It was these passages from Solomon’s book—itself a wonder of wonders, a sumptuous catalog of theater criticism, cultural history, and gorgeous prose—that led me to the Broadway Theater on Wednesday afternoon. I had seen the film and lesser productions of Fiddler over the years, but I had never seen what Solomon describes here. Till one night in November when I happened upon this trailer from the revival.

In the newly choreographed “Tradition,” men and women hurl themselves across the stage, their bodies unlocked from Robbins’s 90-degree cage. Their arms sweep across the floor and swoop through the air, Martha Graham-style, undulating to the rhythms of an unseen force. Their hands twist and turn like Flamenco dancers’, as they erupt from the earth and lunge for each other. You feel as if you’re watching the infamous 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring.

Except this is no pagan celebration. It is controlled and disciplined by a less natural, more transcendent deity, the absent presence that is the Jewish God. In an email, Solomon wrote me that, from the preview she saw in the theater, “it seemed to me their [the dancers’] shoulders were rounded inward and their heads tucked. If there’s technical language for that, I don’t know it.” And it dawned on me what that technical language is: these are men and women davening in shul, praying to God.

The wondrousness of Solomon’s book is that it wrenches the achievement of Robbins and his co-creators from the clutches of kitsch and places it where it belongs: among the highest forms of American art. The wondrousness of the Israeli-born Hofesh Schechter’s choreography is that it takes this piece of American art and recasts it as what it is: a deeply Jewish mode of prayer.

Another Victory for BDS: Doug Henwood Refuses To Sell Translation Rights

My friend Doug Henwood has refused to sell the translation rights of his book on Hillary Clinton, My Turn, to an Israeli publisher. Because of BDS. Good for him. I believe Doug’s going to be writing something more about this decision in the coming days, so let me focus instead on this comment from the Israeli publisher:

Boycotts, silencing people, or refusing to acknowledge different opinions go against the very nature of the publishing world. Freedom of expression trumps everything….In the publishing field, the freedom of speech is the most appreciated value. In this boycott, the author is acting with an hypocritical attitude. He himself is expressing views in the free world, but preventing others from sharing them.

Note the irony.

Had Doug turned down the publisher’s offer simply because he didn’t like the financial terms—royalties too low, etc.—that would have been fine. But turning down the offer in order to make a political statement is an abridgment of free speech.

Meanwhile, as I was reading Lamentations 5 tonight—

Remember, O Lord, what has befallen us;

Behold, and see our disgrace!

Our heritage has passed to aliens,

Our homes to strangers,

…

We must pay to drink our own water.

—I recalled this:

But the Palestinians say they are prevented from using their own water resources by a belligerent military power, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to buy water from their occupiers at inflated prices.

In other news, Adam Sandler has come out against BDS. Somehow, we soldier on without him.

Another Question Raised by Benedict Anderson: What Makes an Idea Exciting for You?

What makes Benedict Anderson a scholar of such surpassing stature is that he transcends the challenges to his ideas. His ideas are so much a part of the mental furniture of the age—like “banality of evil,” “imagined communities” is now part of a larger lingua franca—that they lie beyond right and wrong. Confronted with his work, we move into a different sphere of engagement with him. Where the question is less whether his ideas are correct than whether and how they grab you. For many people, it’s clear that Anderson’s ideas have and continue to have a hold on them. I’ve never felt that way. On a Facebook thread related to my earlier post, I commented that it was the work of Benedict Anderson’s brother Perry Anderson that had a gravitational pull on me. The question for me that’s raised by someone like Benedict Anderson is: Why does an idea stick to you, why does it grab you? When I read Imagined Communities, I thought: I get it, makes sense, I see its innovations in context. But that was about it for me; the insight felt somehow small. It didn’t and doesn’t excite me in the same way as other ideas do. I realize how odd this is: entire generations of scholars have had the opposite reaction. Obviously some part—perhaps a good part—of this is personal and biographical. There are a lot of people who read my endless series of posts on Hannah Arendt and think, God, what is he on about? (I know, they’ve told me.) But when you’re dealing with such a mass phenomenon as Imagined Communities, the question of its devotees and—well, not exactly its detractors; more like its non-enthusiasts, and not because we think it’s wrong, but because it doesn’t move us—ceases to be merely biographical or personal. It raises fascinating issues (to me, at least) of how ideas seize people’s minds, capture their attention, and never let go. Or don’t. And, again, not because of their rightness or wrongness, but because of…what?

Benedict Anderson, 1936-2015

Benedict Anderson has died. In the coming days, I’m hoping someone at Crooked Timber like Henry Farrell or Chris Bertram writes something more substantive about his contributions. While I read Imagined Communities, it never touched me in the way it has so many other scholars and students. Reading people’s comments on Facebook and Twitter, I’m struck by how intellectually diverse his audience was, how ride-ranging his reach. All morning, people from so many different fields and persuasions have been testifying to Anderson’s impact upon them and their work. Which leads to a thought: I’d put Anderson up there with Clifford Geertz and, increasingly, Jim Scott as among the most influential scholars of the last half-century. All of them scholars of Southeast Asia. I’m sure other people have noticed this and/or perhaps written about this, so forgive my saying the obvious, but what is it about that region that has made it such a site of transformative scholarship and fertile reflection?

What if Donald Trump is the Lesser Evil?

Lesser evilism is always a trope in an election campaign. In part because it reflects a very real reality: there are candidates who are worse against whom we must mobilize, even to the point of casting a ballot in favor of an only slightly less odious candidate. But here’s the problem with that argument: human nature being what it is, that argument can also be used on behalf of the truly odious. As our friend Victor Klemperer discovered in Nazi Germany. Writing in his diary in April 1935:

Frau Wilbrandt told us: in Munich people complain out loud when Hitler or Goebbels appear on film. But even she—economist! close to the Social Democrats!—says: “Will there not be something even worse, if Hitler is overthrown, an even worse Bolshevism?” (That keeps him where he is again and again.)

Even his Jewish friends, Klemperer noted in December 1934, were saying, “Rather Hitler than someone worse!”