Corey Robin's Blog, page 65

“It breaks my heart to say this, but today I don’t feel I can call myself a Zionist any longer.”

I first got to know the philosopher Sam Fleischacker​ through his excellent work on theories of distributive justice and on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (his discussion of Smith on value is among the best I’ve seen). I’ve since come to known him on Facebook and via email as a very principled and thoughtful liberal Zionist, with whom I’ve had some respectful disagreements about Israel, the two-state solution, and BDS. Earlier today he posted on Facebook this response to the election results in Israel. With his permission I reprint it here; it’s definitely worth your while:

At a discussion I ran at UIC [University of Illinois at Chicago] about 10 days ago, I asked the liberal Zionist participants what might be the point at which they would give up on the possibility of a Jewish and democratic state in Israel. For me, we have just passed that point. I have friends I respect deeply who think differently, but to me it is as clear as it is ever likely to be that the election on Tuesday marks the end of liberal Zionism. Consider: Netanyahu calls out just before the election that he will make sure there is no Palestinian state and the response – far from the utter rejection of this suggestion for which I and many others had hoped – was an overwhelming endorsement of him by the Jewish voters of Israel: and certainly by its Zionist voters. Set aside the Joint List, for which very few Jews (and virtually no Zionist Jews), voted. Of the remaining 106 Knesset seats, 67 went to parties that either actively agree with Netanyahu or are indifferent enough to his views on this issue that they are willing to sit in coalition with him. Which is to say: about TWO-THIRDS of the Jewish vote essentially said, “We are happy to end the peace process and instead rule over millions of Palestinians indefinitely; we are happy to have them have no vote, ever, either in their own state or in ours.” Which is to say, in what turned out to be as close to a referendum on the peace process and the two-state solution as we are ever likely to get, two-thirds of Israel’s Jews have just voted for the undemocratic version of the one-state solution: Israel has become, this week, the Herrenvolk ethnocracy its detractors have accused it of long being. We have long faced the possibility that we will have to choose between a Jewish but undemocratic Israel and a democratic Israel that is no longer a Jewish state. The choice is here now and I favor democracy. The thing to work for now is one person, one vote, from the river to the sea: voting rights for all Palestinians under Israeli rule. And if BDS will help bring that about – not sure that it is, but that’s a strategic matter, not a moral one – then BDS is a good thing. It breaks my heart to say this, but today I don’t feel I can call myself a Zionist any longer.

Readings for Passover: Rousseau on Moses and the Jews

As we head into the Passover season, I’m on the lookout for readings. This past weekend in shul, I was struck by the following passage from Jeremiah 22 (I tend to read around the prayerbooks):

Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness, and his chambers by wrong; that useth his neighbour’s service without wages; and giveth him not for his work.

I was struck not only by the passage’s sense that injustice, in the form of uncompensated labor, is a wrong for which one will be punished but that one will be punished because it is a wrong sown into the building, the very foundation, of one’s construction. It’s that sense of the inseparability, the inseverability and indivisibility, of an edifice and the labor that goes into its creation that seems so archaic. We live in a world, pace Arendt, where the labor that goes into the construction of our material objects is nearly invisible; we have hardly any tangible sense that one can build our chambers by wrong because we have so little sense of how our chambers are built, that they are built at all.

On the flip side, there’s a whole literature, in Nietszche among others, denying that this moral proposition of Jeremiah can even meet the condition of possibility; slavery and domination are intrinsic not only to the construction of material things but to life and culture as such: “Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, imposition of one’s own form, incorporation and at least, at it mildest, exploitation,” as Nietzsche writes in Beyond Good and Evil.

What if we were to read the entire Haggadah from the perspective of the slaveholder? Might be an interesting exercise.

But then, in working on this piece on Arendt and Eichmann in Jerusalem, which should be out in May, I was pointed by Bonnie Honig to this passage about Moses in Rousseau’s Government of Poland, which I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never read. (Note to self: sponsor a discussion among political theorists about which of the canonical texts we’ve never read. And why.) The passage also seems apt for the holiday, albeit for very different reasons from the ones discussed above:

I look at modern nations: I see many lawmakers among them but not a single lawgiver. Among the ancients I see three principal ones who deserve particular attention: Moses, Lycurgus, and Numa. All three devoted their principal cares to objects which our learned men would consider laughable. All three achieved successes which would be thought impossible if they were not so well attested.

The first formed and executed the astonishing enterprise of instituting as a national body a swarm of wretched fugitives who had no arts, no weapons, no talents, no virtues, no courage, and who, since they had not an inch of territory of their own, were a troop of strangers upon the face of the earth. Moses dared to make out of this wandering and servile troop a body politic, a free people, and while it wandered in the wilderness without so much as a stone on which to rest its head, he gave it the lasting institution, proof against time, fortune and conquerors which five thousand years have not been able to destroy or even to weaken, and which still subsists today in all its force even though the body of the nation no longer does.

To keep his people from being absorbed by foreign peoples, he gave it morals and practices which could not be blended with those of the other nations; he weighed it down with distinctive rites and ceremonies; he constrained it in a thousand ways in order to keep it constantly alert and to make it forever a stranger among other men, and all the bonds of fraternity he introduced among members of his republic were as many barriers which kept it separated from its neighbors and prevented it from mingling with them. This is how this singular nation, so often subjugated, so often scattered and apparently destroyed, yet ever idolizing its rule, has nevertheless maintained itself down to our days, scattered among the other nations without ever merging with them, and how its morals, its laws, its rites subsist and will endure as long as the world itself does, in spite of the hatred and persecution by the rest of mankind.

Some interesting things to note about this passage.

First, and most obviously, Rousseau’s insistence that Moses gave the Jews a sense of peoplehood without a territory, and that even without a territory, that sense of peoplehood endures over the millennia. Not only without a territory but scattered across many territories.

Second, the poignancy that Rousseau notes of the tension between the Jews’ constant subjugation, the denial of their sovereignty, and their “ever idolizing [their] rule.”

Last, the seemingly bizarre idea of creating a nation out of fugitives and strangers on the earth. There are many ways to conceive of a nation, and often they reside in a glorious past or the recovery of that past. (Consider Machiavelli’s connection between the recovery of ancient glory, particularly of Rome, and the creation of an Italian nation.) Likewise, do they draw on a sense of being at home, rooted somewhere. Yet Rousseau claims that the key to the sense of peoplehood among the Jews is precisely the opposite of both notions: no glorious past, no rootedness anywhere.

For more on Rousseau and the Jews, check out this interesting article by Jonathan Marks.

What Every Reporter Should Be Asking John Kerry Between Now and April 18

US Secretary of State John Kerry, April 18, 2013:

I believe the window for a two-state solution is shutting. I think we have some period of time – a year to year-and-a-half to two years, or it’s over. (h/t Yousef Munayyer)

Between now and April 18, every single reporter should be asking Kerry how much closer Israel and Palestine are to reaching a two-state solution, and what the US will do differently if, as seems likely, it reaches the date when by his own word the window for achieving such a solution has permanently closed.

British Government Tries to Dershowitz Southampton University

Members of the British government are trying to dershowitz* Southampton University:

Eric Pickles has warned Southampton University against “allowing a one-sided diatribe” as the become [sic] the most senior politician yet to intervene in the growing row over a major conference into the legitimacy of Israel.

The Communities Secretary’s comments come as a senior Jewish leader called for the event, hosted by the institution’s law school, to be reconstructed or cancelled.

…

“Given the taxpayer-funded University has a legal duty to uphold freedom of speech, I would hope that they are taking steps to give a platform to all sides of the debate, rather than allowing a one-sided diatribe.”

Board of Deputies vice-president Jonathan Arkush will head a delegation to meet the university’s vice-chancellor Don Nutbeam next week.

“The Board’s central insistence will be that if this conference cannot be re-structured to revise its tendentious subject title and focus on delegitimising The State of Israel, and to feature a balanced line up of academic contributors, it cannot be treated as a serious and genuine academic study and should be cancelled,” he said.

“Thus far, all it is achieving is the inflicting of serious damage to the reputation of the University of Southampton as a British university of repute.”

Pro-Israel speakers including Professor Alan Johnson have been added to the conference’s schedule but research by the Fair Play Campaign Group classified 80 percent of the 56 speakers as “anti-Israel activists”.

*dersh·o·witz

 verb

demand that a speaker(s) with one view of the State of Israel share the platform with a speaker(s) of the opposing view, unless the first speaker supports the State of Israel.
demand that a speaker(s) with one view of the State of Israel share the platform with a speaker(s) of the opposing view, unless the first speaker is Alan Dershowitz.

Without Getting Into History

From a recent press conference:

State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki: “As a matter of long-standing policy, the United States does not support political transitions by nonconstitutional means….”

AP journalist Matt Lee: “Sorry. The U.S. has—whoa, whoa, whoa—the U.S. has a long-standing practice of not promoting—what did you say?…”

Psaki: “Well, my point here, Matt, without getting into history—”

Yes, let’s not get into history, shall we?

h/t Junyoung Verónica Kim

The Lives They Touched

The year after I graduated college, I lived out in the East Bay area. I was interning at a magazine, for free, and temping (among various other jobs) to support myself.

At one of my temping gigs I befriended a woman from Carbondale, Pennsylvania. Her name was Gloria. She had long black hair, wore lots of leather and makeup, and listened to hard rock and heavy metal. I think she had a son, though I can’t remember for sure. A working-class Italian-American from back East, we didn’t have much in common except a shared love for complaining about our job and trash-talking our boss. Even so, she wound up telling me a lot about her personal life (I have vague memories of  a problematic boyfriend on the scene). She also lent me a cookbook of Italian recipes that I never returned to her.

One day, Gloria furtively pulled out a folder of clippings and told me they were about her Aunt Viola. Viola had been a mother of five in Michigan who went south in the 1960s to march for voting rights for black Americans. Gloria told me she was shot and killed. Gloria was clearly proud of her aunt, but she also said that not everyone in her family felt the same way. I had never heard of her aunt or this story.

I forgot about both, until years later, when I learned the story of Viola Liuzzo. I put two and two together and realized that Gloria was Viola’s niece. For many years, Liuzzo was one of the forgotten heroes of the Civil Rights Movement. But apparently she now has received her due in the film Selma, which I haven’t seen yet.

 

Mary Stanton wrote a lovely piece on Liuzzo back in 1999, which was revived and posted this month, but before I provide some excerpts here, I want to come back to Gloria. As far I could tell, Gloria was not a political person. She was mostly a survivor—of bad jobs, bad relationships, bad luck. Even so, she had strong feelings about racism and racial equality, rooted in a sense of obligation to her murdered aunt. Just a small reminder of how many lives a radical movement of social change like the Civil Rights Movement can touch.

From Stanton’s piece:

A red and white Impala full of angry Klansmen prowled the streets of Selma, Alabama, on the evening of March 25, 1965. The Voting Rights March had ended that afternoon, and federal troops were everywhere. Frustrated by the tight security, the Klansmen decided to return to Montgomery. Maybe they could provoke some trouble there.

Turning onto Water Avenue, they spotted a white woman in a car with a black man stopped at a traffic light. Viola Liuzzo and Leroy Moton were also heading back to Montgomery, to pick up a group of marchers who were waiting to return to Selma.

“Will you look at that,” one of the Klansmen said. “They’re going to park someplace together. I’ll be a son of a bitch. Let’s take ‘em.”

Weeks later, one of the Klansmen — Tommy Rowe — would tell a grand jury that they followed Mrs Luizzo’s car along Highway 80 for the next 20 miles. When she realized she was being tailed, she accelerated to almost 90 miles an hour. They tried to pull alongside her green Oldsmobile four times, but each time they were forced to drop back — first by a jeep load of National Guardsmen, next by a highway patrol unit, then by a crowd of black marchers trying to cross the highway, and finally by a truck in the oncoming lane.

“That lady just hauled ass,” Rowe testified. “I mean she put the gas to it. As we went across a bridge and some curves, I remember seeing a Jet Drive-In Restaurant on my right hand side. I seen the brakes just flash one time and I though she was going to stop there. She didn’t … she was just erratic … Then we got pretty much even with the car and the lady just turned her head solid all the way around and looked at us. I will never forget it in my lifetime, and her mouth flew open like she — in my heart I’ve always said she was saying, “Oh God,” or something like that … You could tell she was startled. At that point Wilkins fired a shot.”

Viola Liuzzo, a housewife and mother of five from Detroit, Michigan, was killed instantly. Leroy Moton, covered with her blood, escaped by pretending to be dead when the murderers came back.

…

Because the Impala filled with Klansmen (including Tommy Rowe, who was on the FBI informer payroll) spotted Liuzzo leaving Selma with a black man sitting in the front seat of her car, she lost her life. And because the Birmingham FBI tried to cover up their carelessness in permitting Rowe — a known violent racist — to work undercover and unsupervised during the march, she also lost her reputation.

FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover himself crafted a malicious public relations campaign to blacken Liuzzo’s name in an effort to deflect attention from his Bureau. He successfully shifted the country’s concern from a brutal murder to a question of Liuzzo’s morals.

Hoover was desperate, and for good reason. He had to bury the fact that Rowe had telephoned the FBI on the day of the Liuzzo murder to report that he was going to Montgomery with other Klansmen, and that violence was planned. While Rowe claimed not to have known exactly what the plans were, he said Grand Dragon Robert Creel told him personally, “Tommy, this here is probably going to be one of the greatest days of Klan history.” That remark later led to speculation (never substantiated) that the Klansmen were scouting for an opportunity to kill a much more prominent figure — possibly Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hoover eagerly accepted Klan assistance in generating ugly rumors about Viola Liuzzo, and seduced the American press with a series of carefully engineered “leaks.” His caricature of Liuzzo as a spoiled, neurotic woman who had abandoned her family to run off on a freedom march took hold. Years of unrelenting accusations of her alleged emotional instability, drug abuse, adultery, and child abandonment nearly destroyed her husband and five children.

…

Despised as an “outside agitator,” Viola Gregg Liuzzo was in fact raised in rural Georgia and Tennessee. She grew up during the Depression in a Jim Crow culture of segregated schools, movie theaters, department store dressing rooms, water fountains, and churches. Her family moved to Ypsilanti, Michigan, in 1941 in search of war work at Ford’s Willow Run bomber plant. In 1942, 18-year-old “Vi” Gregg moved on to Detroit by herself, where she met Sarah Evans, who would be her closest friend for 20 years.

Sarah Evans, a black woman from Mississippi, encouraged Vi to join the NAACP, begged her not to go to Selma, and ultimately raised Vi’s youngest daughter Sally, who was only six when her mother was murdered.

Until 1963, Vi Liuzzo lived a somewhat ordinary life. She kept house for her husband, Jim, a business agent for the Teamsters, and helped her five children with their homework, planned birthday parties, took the girls antiquing and the boys camping, and went back to work as a hospital lab technician when Sally started school. Realizing that more education would allow her to advance, Vi — a high school dropout — took and passed the admission test to Wayne State University.

At Wayne State, a wider world opened to her. She read Plato, who defined courage as knowledge that involves a willingness to act, and Thoreau, who believed that a creative minority could start a moral revolution.

Even though she was Roman Catholic, Vi began attending services at the First Unitarian Universalist Church just two blocks from the Wayne Campus. It was a congregation committed to social justice; many were former Freedom Riders. She also attended weekly open houses hosted by chaplain Malcolm Boyd, who defined himself as a “Christian existentialist:” “We are what we do,” Rev. Boyd told his students, “not what we think or say.”

In this morally-charged atmosphere, Vi Liuzzo made her decision to respond to Dr. King’s national call for help. She volunteered for the transportation service with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. On her first day in Selma, she met fellow volunteer Leroy Moton, 19. She would later be accused of having an affair with this young man, who was the same age as Sarah Evan’s grandson, Tyrone.

 

…

Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney, the young men murdered during the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, were already civil rights heroes by the time of Viola Liuzzo’s murder. They were all young men of promise. A white activist college student, a selfless white social worker, a black community worker determined to fight for the freedom of his people — these were positive images.

Viola Liuzzo, however, was too old, too pushy, too independent, and she trampled on too many social norms to be a hero. She’d ventured beyond the role of wife and mother to demonstrate on behalf of a social movement that a majority of white Americans felt was already moving “too fast.” Viola Liuzzo’s activism couldn’t be chalked up to youthful idealism. Hers threatened the family, the protected status of women, and the precarious balance of race relations.

Ironically, she’d been murdered precisely because she afforded such a clear symbol to the segregationists — a white female outside agitator driving after dark with a local black activist. This all resonated for them. In choosing her, the Klansmen sent a clear message that Northern whites and Southern blacks would understand.

In the cases of Goodman, Schwemer, and Chaney, the families worked hard to ensure that their sons would not be forgotten. All three families had been supportive of their sons’ involvement in the movement, while Jim Liuzzo had been more ambivalent.

After Vi’s murder, Jim found himself continually defending her reputation, refuting the vicious rumors, and trying to protect his children. He told a reporter for the Free Press,”My wife was a good woman. She’s never done anything to be ashamed of.” Two days after her funeral, a cross was burned on his lawn in Detroit.

…

Viola Liuzzo’s children were taunted by their classmates, shunned by their neighbors, and shamed by the cloud of suspicion that hung over their mother’s activism. She became the single most controversial of the civil rights martyrs.

I never forgot about her, about how angry people were at her. And I never forgot how they seemed to lose track of just who the victim was.

And gradually, I understood that Viola Liuzzo’s story is of an ordinary woman whose simple desire to be useful collided with America’s belief that change was happening too fast — and lost her life and her reputation for her trouble.

In this sense, we can see clearly in her life what author Melissa Fay Green once observed: “After the fact, historians may look back upon a season when a thousand lives, a hundred thousand lives, moved in unison; but in the beginning there are really only individuals, acting in isolation and uncertainty, out of necessity or idealism, unaware that they are living through an epoch.”

 

Irony Watch

We have Human Rights Watch. Why not Irony Watch?

To wit:

U.S. President Barack Obama issued an executive order on Monday declaring Venezuela a national security threat…

…

“We’ve seen many times that the Venezuelan government tries to distract from its own actions by blaming the United States or other members of the international community for events inside Venezuela,” [White House spokesman Josh] Earnest said in the statement.”

 

My new column at Salon: on racism, privilege talk, and schools

I’m happy to announce that today I begin a new gig as a columnist at Salon. I’ll be writing a bimonthly (or is it biweekly: I can never get that one straight) column on the kinds of things I write about here. Here’s my first column, on racism, privilege talk, and schools.

Facebook can be a weird place on Martin Luther King Day. Some of my friends post famous passages from MLK’s speeches. Others post statistics on racial inequality. Still others, mostly white parents, post photographs of their children assembled in auditoriums and schoolyards. These are always hopeful images, the next generation stirring toward interracial harmony. Except for one thing: nearly everyone in the photos is … white.

In her public school this year, my first-grade daughter learned that Daisy Bates helped integrate the Little Rock schools. She knows that Ella Baker, someone I’d never heard of till I went to college, was part of the civil rights movement. Meanwhile, her school has a combined black and Latino population of 15 percent, down from nearly 30 percent just seven years ago.

In school, white children are taught to be conscious of race and racism in a way I never was when I was as a kid in the 1970s. Yet they go to schools that are in some respects more segregated now than they were in the 1970s.

Read on here.

And if you have ideas for columns—stories that aren’t being reported, authors who are not being interviewed or reviewed, topics that need to be addressed—please don’t hesitate to email me at corey.robin@gmail.com. I’m always looking for material.

Thomas Hobbes on Daylight Saving

Hobbes, Leviathan:

NATURE (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life?

Don’t forget to set your clocks forward tonight.

 

Awakening to Cultural Studies

Leonard Nimoy’s death reminded me of a moment in college. I don’t remember what year it was, but I was talking with a student who was writing a paper—or was it a senior thesis?—on Star Trek. The thesis was about how the show’s representations of race filtered and processed various anxieties and aspirations of the Cold War, particularly ideas about civil rights in the US and decolonization abroad.

Remembering this conversation reminded me of one of the critical aspects of my college education: realizing that mass culture was a thing, something to be studied, analyzed, approached with the same critical eye that you would bring to a literary text or historical event.

I’m curious if other people had a similar moment in college or grad school or high school. I remember the first time this awareness hit me: I was a freshman in a class on Shakespeare. The preceptor (Princeton’s fancy word for TA), a grad student in the English department, went on a long tangent about Madonna, about her artistry, what she was doing vis-a-vis our ideas about gender and sexuality. Coming from high school, I had thought of Madonna as a pop star, someone you liked or didn’t like. It never occurred to me that there was any more meaning to her than that. But listening to my preceptor, I realized there was more to her, that “pop star” was a category to be mined, not dismissed.

The other time this awareness hit me, I was a sophomore. Michael Berkowitz, a senior who would go onto become a friend in later life, wrote an article in a progressive newspaper with which I was affiliated on the changing style and substance of black sitcoms, from Good Times and Sanford and Son to The Cosby Show. Again, the piece came to me as a revelation: the idea that pop culture had a history, and that in that history lay a whole story about how America was dealing with race and racism.

There are many intellectual awakenings that mark the transition from high school to college. Critical thinking, historical consciousness, political and ideological critique: all of these I brought with me to college, none was new. But one of the ideas I did not bring with me, one of the moves I really did learn in college, was to look at popular culture, this thing I had grown up with, this thing that was as familiar to me as my own family, as something strange, something to be studied and attended to, with the same rigor and intensity that one would devote to philosophy or history or literature.