“Justice is the end of government,” James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51. But what is the meaning of justice?
Justice has been variously defined as the quality of being impartial and fair, the equal treatment of equals, and living in accordance with the natural law and the divine plan. It implies integrity in dealing with others and conforming our lives to facts and to truth.
09.06.2011 - 6:55 PM
Julian Barnes, shortlisted for the fourth time in his three-decade literary career, was among the six finalists for the 2011 Man Booker for Fiction, the prize committee announced earlier today. The Sense of an Ending, his 11th novel, is about four old school friends entering middle age. Barnes’s novel-writing colleague Anita Brookner reviewed it in the Telegraph here. Since he is one of Britain’s most celebrated novelists, Barnes has to be considered the favorite for the prize, even though The Sense of an Ending is a 150-page novella, rather slim for the best novel of the year, even in slim-book-loving England.
My money is on 35-year-old Stephen Kelman, whose Pigeon English is about an immigrant boy from Ghana who finds himself caught up in gang violence in London. Kelman skillfully weaves in sharp-tongued Ghanian slang in a novel that is as much about mastering the English language, and fashioning a distinctive narrative voice, as it is about the marginalization of African immigrants in British culture and society. Kelman revives a style and subject explored to great effect by Colin MacInnes half a century ago.
Two-years-older A. D. Miller was also shortlisted for a first novel. Snowdrops is a crime novel, and when it was nominated for the prize, controversy and celebration broke out in equal measures. Although “genre-bending” is all the rage, the Man Booker follows the parade rather than leading it. Miller is unlikely the win the prize.
Two Canadians, Patrick deWitt for The Sisters Brothers and Esi Edugyan for Half Blood Blues, were both shortlisted for the Booker and longlisted earlier today for the Giller Prize, one of Canada’s top two literary prizes. Veteran 11-book novelist Carol Birch fills out the Booker half-dozen, but another historical novel has to be listed as a long shot only two years after Hilary Mantel won the prize for Wolf Hall.
09.06.2011 - 6:40 PM
Mother Jones published its “Secret Koch Brothers Retreat Tape!” this morning, as part of its important investigative series into the Koch Brothers summer fundraising event. So far, the biggest scandal is that Charles Koch may have referred to Obama as “Saddam Hussein”:
“We have Saddam Hussein,” declared billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, apparently referring to President Barack Obama as he welcomed hundreds of wealthy guests to the latest of the secret fundraising and strategy seminars he and his brother host twice a year. The 2012 elections, he warned, will be “the Mother of All Wars.”
If you want to know why Jake Tapper is an exceptional (and exceptionally independent-minded) White House reporter, watch him press White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on whether President Obama is willing to rebuke the use of inflammatory and wholly inappropriate rhetoric by Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa. (The president will not.)
It’s another embarrassing moment for Carney (there are a fair number of those these days) and highlights how meaningless and deeply cynical the Obama administration’s calls to civility really are. The president has tremendous influence with his allies; if he genuinely cared about the quality of public discourse in America, why wouldn’t he rebuke Hoffa? It would be the right thing to do and lend greater credibility to his civility sermons — including when he calls out conservatives and Republicans for their inappropriate rhetoric (which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do from time to time). But in this case, doing the right thing would probably offend the labor movement — and Obama, it seems, is unwilling to do that at any cost. Even at the cost of upholding the civility he claims to care so much about.
09.06.2011 - 6:03 PM
As both Omri and Seth have already pointed out, the page one story in today’s New York Times about the wiretapping of the Israeli embassy in Washington raises a host of questions. In addition to the interesting points the two have made, the story also raises the issue of how and why friendly nations engage in this sort of espionage. Even if we take it for granted, as we must, that all governments and even the closest of friends will spy on each other, many Americans will probably be surprised by the zeal with which the FBI has sought to keep tabs on a cherished ally. But any discussion must inevitably turn to the case of Jonathan Pollard, the Navy analyst who was convicted of spying for Israel.
Pollard sympathizers will note, not without some justice, the bugging of the Israeli embassy is a sign of hypocrisy on the part of a U.S. intelligence establishment that continues to block Pollard’s release even though he has already served more than 25 years in prison. But if we want to know why so many in the security apparatus still cling to the notion Israel and its supporters in this country are worthy of suspicion, we must come to grips with the terrible damage Pollard and his Israeli handlers did to both American Jews working in Washington as well as to the alliance between the two nations.
09.06.2011 - 3:17 PM
The 2009 Recovery Act was such a flop, apparently even the term “stimulus” has become politically toxic. That would typically signal it’s time to look at alternative ideas for restarting the economy. But not for Nancy Pelosi, who thinks the stimulus just needs a name change:
Democrats are now being careful to frame their job-creation agenda in language excluding references to any stimulus, even though their favored policies for ending the deepest recession since the Great Depression are largely the same. …
09.06.2011 - 3:14 PM
Fifty years ago this week Edward Lewis Wallant’s novel The Pawnbroker was published. While it is customarily described as one of the first American novels to examine the moral and spiritual consequences of the Holocaust, the truth is that Wallant’s novel has been superseded by later fictional accounts that perform the examination with a keener insight derived from deeper historical knowledge. The Pawnbroker is not really a Holocaust novel at all. It is something different. And at least when it comes to the American novel, something better. The Pawnbroker is one of the last examples of a genre that has largely disappeared from American shores — the meaning-making novel, the novel with something to say, the novel with an overt and unembarrassed message.
In a short review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review — the only notice the paper took of the novel — staff writer Morris Gilbert praised Wallant for his “great insight into the wretched world he describes.” But there are really two worlds in The Pawnbroker, and both of them are wretched. Sol Nazerman manages a pawnshop in Harlem, practicing “the ancient, despised profession” of Jewish moneylender. At the age of forty-five, he has neither friends nor heart (“Haven’t you got a heart?” a customer whines, bargaining for more money. “No,” Sol answers. “No heart”). But he is also a scholar and an intellectual, a former professor at the University of Cracow, whose family was murdered by the German Nazis before his eyes. Imprisoned at an unnamed death camp, he was impressed into the Sonderkommandos, although Wallant does not appear to know the term, and is tormented by what becomes of him in the constant presence of death:
The smell of burning flesh entered him, and it was as though he ate the most forbidden food. A great and eternal sickness began in him. The smoke of their bodies was blowing north when this hideous hunger hit him. He lusted for rich meats and heavy pastries, had an insane yearning for wine and coffee. He dug his clawlike fingernails into his thighs to punish himself for not praying to that fleeting, greasy smoke. But all he felt was this great desire for food. And then his lust turned to a hunger of the loins, and he wondered at the monster he was.
Unlike William Styron, who boasted in Sophie’s Choice that he had thoroughly studied the “historical account,” reading books by Elie Wiesel, Tadeusz Borowski, Olga Lengyel, Eugen Kogon, and Bruno Bettelheim before starting his own, Wallant relies only upon his own imagination, aided by conversations with a Holocaust survivor whom he knew personally, to recreate the experiences of a Polish Jew in the camps. Although historical ignorance (or half-learning, in the case of Styron) is a defect in most novelists, it is unexpectedly an advantage for Wallant. He is not trying to fill in the emotional blanks of the historical record. He is trying, quite explicitly, to write a symbolic account.
Nobody could get away with it today. Wallant was writing at a time, though, when historical ignorance of the Holocaust was widespread and unavoidable, except among a few scholars. Gerald Reitlinger’s Final Solution (1953), the only English-language history to date, had been issued by a small publishing house in a small print run (the New York Times did not get around to reviewing it). Raul Hilberg’s comprehensive 700-page Destruction of the European Jews was not published until two months after Wallant’s novel appeared.
Wallant also wrote long before the psychologists’ term of art post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was coined. Nor was the Holocaust, for him, an “incurable wound,” as Edmund Wilson spoke of it in The Wound and the Bow (1941) — a special variety of “morbid psychology,” with the literary treatment, as in Sophocles, “clinical” and “up-to-date in the physical science of his time.” For Wallant, the Holocaust was a mythic, nearly religious event, a sort of reverse Sinai. The Jews at Sinai were terrified by the thunder and lightning, the blare of the horn and the mountain smoking; they begged Moses to mediate between God and them, lest they die. The title character of Wallant’s novel has passed through a similar experience: “His memory was screened off, his hopes had long ago been amputated.” Because he had approached too closely to the infinite evil that is the reverse image of God, he had been
cauterized of all abstract things. Reality consisted of the world within one’s sight and smell and hearing. He commemorated nothing; it was the secret of his survival.
His very name is symbolic. Sol Nazerman is a nazir man, a post-Holocaust Nazirite who avoids the intoxicants of modern life, not because he is consecrated to God, but because his experience at the limits of experience has separated him from the mass of men. His pawnshop is a front for a gangster’s money-laundering operation, but Nazerman does not care where his own money comes from. He lives in a large house in Mount Vernon with his sister’s family, who depend upon him for financial support. He is contemptuous of them, and barely less so toward his mistress and her father, who also survived the Holocaust. “How did he get like that?” asks a doctor who comes to treat him. “Some bad accident or what?” “A very bad accident,” Nazerman replies. “Of birth. He was in the camps.”
Nazerman feels neither grief for his wife and children who died in the camps nor pity for the blacks of Harlem who frequent his store, asking for small loans on badly used objects. He is, by his own admission, barely human. He is “like a creature embedded in a plastic block.” Although he is not suicidal, he is not eager to prolong life either: “enough of this,” he says, “too much of this.”
The novel moves relentlessly toward the event that finally shatters Nazerman’s block of plastic. Jesus Ortiz, his black Puerto Rican clerk, who planned to rob him, is shot dead while trying to shield Nazerman from another robber’s bullet:
All his anesthetic numbness left him. He became terrified of the touch of air on the raw wounds. What was this great, agonizing sensitivity and what was it for? Good God, what was all this? Love? Could this be love? . . . Oh no, not love! For whom? All these dark, dirty creatures? They turn my stomach, they sicken me. Oh, this din, this pain and thrashing.
To put it as bluntly as possible, Nazerman is saved by Jesus and is reborn — into conscience, human feeling, responsibility. He phones his nephew Morton, an aimless art student whom Nazerman had scorned, to come take Jesus’s place and learn “the ancient, despised profession.”
The ending is far too neatly symbolic, especially to fifty-years-wiser ears. But that is also part of The Pawnbroker’s distinction and charm. Compared to the ease of flow in many recent novels, whose writers studied in creative writing workshops to polish a verbal surface to a high gloss, Wallant’s novel is stiff and awkward and amateurishly bold. In the second decade of the 21st century, no American novelist would give his characters names like Nazerman and Jesus. A minor character would never look upon the hero and say, “That man suffer!” Religious symbolism is now taboo, direct statement shameful. But as a consequence, you will never again have the experience of reading a novel that is heavily laden with significance, not unless you are willing to read a novel that is at least fifty years old.
For many months it was said by the president’s political team and his supporters that while his ratings were problematic, they drew comfort from the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, both of whom also faced low ratings in their first terms. In response, many of us patiently pointed out the difference was those low ratings occurred early in the first terms of Reagan and Clinton; that the economy was getting stronger, not weaker, by the summer of their third year; and that the economy (and Obama’s fortunes) were going in exactly the opposite direction from Reagan and Clinton.
Now comes this story in the Washington Post, which reports on a new poll (which Alana wrote about), showing Obama at a record low for his presidency (43 percent of Americans approved of Obama’s job performance in that poll while 53 percent said they disapprove of Obama, with a staggeringly high 77 percent of Americans saying they believe the country is on the wrong track, the highest percents since Obama took office). And according to Jon Cohen and Dan Balz, “By this time in their presidencies, approval ratings for both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton— who also suffered serious midterm setbacks during their first term — had settled safely above the 50 percent mark. Both then stayed in positive territory throughout their reelection campaigns.”
09.06.2011 - 2:40 PM
Robert Gates’ tenure as Secretary of Defense will be remembered chiefly for his successful supervision of the surge in Iraq. Yet, as Max Boot pointed out in his valuable article in the September issue of COMMENTARY, some of his farewell comments about our allies and the future of defense policy contained more hyperbole than wisdom. Jeffrey Goldberg added to our understanding of Gates’ flaws in a column in Bloomberg yesterday in which he blasted Israel as an “ungrateful ally.”
Goldberg leads his piece by describing the anger Gates and other administration officials felt when Netanyahu lectured Obama in the Oval Office about the existential challenges facing his country. But what the author leaves out is this act of impudence took place just days after the president chose to ambush the Israeli by timing a speech aimed at tilting the diplomatic playing field against the Jewish state on the eve of Netanyahu’s visit to the United States. Far from being the patient, faithful ally who had gone the extra mile for Israel, the Obama administration had once again picked an unnecessary fight. Gates’ resentment of Israel says far more about the self-defeating attitude of this administration that has actually harmed the cause of peace rather than helping it.
09.06.2011 - 2:20 PM
Tom Gross, perhaps the sharpest commentator on Israel, anti-Semitism, and Jewish heritage, had a wonderful piece in, of all places, London’s The Guardian last Friday. Reporting from Lviv, in the Ukraine, he described how Ukrainian authorities are destroying parts of the Golden Rose synagogue complex, one of the last remnants of the city’s Jewish community. Ukraine, after all, needs parking facilities and hotels ahead of its hosting the European football championships.
Ukraine’s own laws are designed to preserve such historic sites. The Ukrainian authorities are not the only ones at fault. Where is the UN cultural organization, UNESCO? The synagogue ruins were designated part of a UNESCO world heritage site in 1998. And where is the European football body, UEFA? The Ukrainians are planning to build a hotel on the site to host next year’s European football championships, the world’s third most-watched sporting event, which they are co-hosting with Poland. So much for UEFA’s much-hyped campaign to “kick racism out of football.”
09.06.2011 - 2:00 PM
The New York Times delves into the details of the recent case of an Israeli-American of dual citizenship, Shamai Leibowitz, who was hired by the FBI to listen in on the Israeli embassy. Leibowitz, once a controversial pro-Palestinian lawyer in Israel before moving to the U.S., then leaked secret information on Israel to a vicious left-wing critic of the Jewish state. While there is nothing particularly surprising about the agent’s assignment–as Omri wrote this morning, the U.S. routinely monitors the communications of foreign embassies–the report leaves me with several questions, such as: Why on earth was a lawyer who represented Marwan Barghouti and compared him to Moses hired by the FBI to monitor Israeli communication?
“According to some lawyers, he should be called a terrorist, but according to Exodus, he is a freedom fighter,” Leibowitz said during Barghouti’s trial in 2002. Barghouti had been charged–and he would be convicted–of murdering two dozen Israelis in a terrorist attack. Barghouti has always been a hero to Palestinians and to far-left activists like Leibowitz and the blogger he leaked to, Richard Silverstein. Obviously, the U.S. has no desire to see the information they glean from monitoring embassy activities leaked to journalists (hence why Leibowitz is being put behind bars). But that makes the decision to hire Leibowitz in the first place quite puzzling, and raises other questions.
09.06.2011 - 1:40 PM
Since July, Obama has been berating Congress to pass a group of free trade deals, insisting this is one piece of job-promoting legislation that can be initiated “right now.”
But despite Obama’s supposed urgency, the White House still hasn’t sent the agreements to the Hill for a vote. Now that Congress is back in session, Sen. Mitch McConnell wonders why Obama’s continuing to hold up the deals:
09.06.2011 - 1:20 PM
The deteriorating Egyptian-Israeli relationship has produced an interesting side effect: For the first time in 30 years, Israelis are seriously questioning the
wisdom of “land for peace.” Even veteran land-for-peace advocates like former Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief David Makovsky now acknowledge war with Egypt is no longer unthinkable. Recognition is growing that Egypt’s nonstop demands to boost its forces in Sinai threaten the Israeli-Egyptian treaty’s main achievement: the demilitarization of Sinai, which ensured Egypt could never attack Israel by surprise.
Hence Elliot Jager, another erstwhile land-for-peace advocate (and former senior Jerusalem Post editor), warned in Jewish Ideas Daily today that “If the treaty with Egypt must be gutted in order to save it, something may be terribly wrong with the underlying land-for-peace approach.” Guy Bechor, a regular columnist for the mass-circulation daily Yedioth Ahronoth, bluntly declared the land-for-peace formula “dead” last week. Even Akiva Eldar of Haaretz, a diehard leftist who still wants an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines, admitted despairingly after last month’s cross-border terror attacks from Sinai that “When the border between Israel and Egypt is open to murderers, it’s harder to condemn Israel’s leaders for refusing to utter the words ‘negotiation on the basis of the ’67 borders.’”
09.06.2011 - 12:58 PM
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s radical and thuggish prime minister, is again showing his true colors: While sycophantic American diplomats still talk about Turkey as a responsible regional state and even talk of a Turkish model for Arab states which have shaken off their dictators, Erdoğan is quietly encouraging Egypt to violate its peace agreement with Israel.
Erdoğan is soon to travel to Egypt to reprise his imagined role as the neo-Ottoman sultan. After years of bashing Israel and embracing not only the Palestinian cause, but that of Hamas as well, he wants to visit the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
09.06.2011 - 12:30 PM
In the wake of the leak of the United Nations report which largely exculpated Israel for the Mavi Marmara incident and confirmed the legality of the blockade against Hamas-controlled territory, the Turkish government has become increasingly bellicose. The Turkish press is reporting the Turkish Navy (largely supplied by the United States) will increase its presence in the Eastern Mediterranean. “A more aggressive strategy will be pursued. Israel will no longer be able to exercise its bullying practices freely,” one Turkish diplomat explained. Namik Tan, Turkey’s ambassador to the United States who once quipped about “the final solution,” joined the chorus, posting a fairly threatening tweet as well.
It’s no secret Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s political party was behind the ill-fated flotilla, but recent statements suggest the prime minister may now be considering escorting a new flotilla to block the Gaza blockade. The irony that Gazans have greater health and welfare than Turks is an irony that escapes Erdoğan. Turkish bluster is not limited to anti-Israel sentiment. Turkey’s ruling party recognizes that bluster translates into popularity among the fiercely nationalistic Turks. Discussing a dispute with Cyprus over oil drilling, Egemen Bağis, Turkey’s minister for European Union accession (who I last wrote about here), threatened to use the Turkish Navy against Greek Cypriots. “That’s what a navy is for,” he told a Turkish Islamist newspaper last Friday. No wonder Turkey has been so ham-handed in its drive for European Union membership.
09.06.2011 - 12:10 PM
Three new polls are out today, but for President Obama they all say pretty much the same thing: he’s hit a low in his presidency during the same week that he’s set to address the nation’s jobs problem in a speech to a joint session of Congress.
All three polls showed a sharp drop in his job approval ratings. Washington Post-ABC News has Obama at 43 percent, Politico at 45 percent and the Wall Street Journal-NBC at 44 percent.
09.06.2011 - 11:50 AM
In her five years in Congress, Michele Bachmann has earned a reputation for high staff turnover. That this pattern is repeating itself in her presidential campaign can’t be considered unexpected, but the loss of two senior aides during the weekend was bad timing to say the least. Coming as it does in the wake of a decline in her standing in the polls that knocked her out of the first tier of GOP candidates, the defection of campaign manager Ed Rollins and his deputy is yet another blow to an already faltering candidacy overshadowed by Rick Perry’s entry in the race.
Given Rollins’ own well-earned reputation as a loose cannon whose propensity for loose lips was often more of a political liability than anything his candidates said, the blame for this resignation probably should not be placed on Bachmann. Having jumped onto Bachmann’s bandwagon just as she was gaining momentum back in the spring, he’s jumping off after her first real setback. This leaves Bachmann scrambling for organizational coherence just at the moment when she seems to be slipping out of contention.
09.06.2011 - 11:30 AM
Two Wikileaks cables from 2010 confirm with stunning accuracy the critique of Israel’s foreign-funded NGO movement that many have been making for years — and they do so from the mouths of the NGO leaders themselves. The cables summarize meetings between U.S. officials and leaders of the New Israel Fund, B’Tselem, and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, called ACRI, a flagship NIF project.
In one cable, we learn that leaders of these groups have been telling U.S. officials the Israeli legal system is incapable of investigating claims against the Israeli government and military. In fact, Israel’s judiciary, both civil and military, is among the world’s most independent, and the former president of Israel’s High Court was cited by President Obama’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, as a significant role model. Yet advancing claims of judicial indifference to war crimes has become a central ambition of the NGOs, because establishing Israel’s supposed inability to investigate itself would open the door to international prosecutions where verdicts against Israel are foreordained. The credible prospect of such prosecutions would paralyze the IDF — which is exactly the point:
At a Labor Day rally yesterday, speaking before President Obama, Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa repeatedly invoked the metaphor of war, saying the Republicans and the Tea Party has declared war on workers and “there’s only going to be one winner…We’re going to win that war.” And speaking about the Tea Party, Hoffa said, “President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let’s take these sons of bitches out.”
In response, the president delivered powerful and moving remarks, saying, “Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let’s use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together.” The president, in a show of impressive political courage, rebuked his ally in the labor movement, saying, “Only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation.” The president then added this: “We can question each other’s ideas without questioning each other’s love of country, and … our task, working together, is to constantly widen the circle of our concern so that we bequeath the American dream to future generations.”
09.06.2011 - 10:45 AM
Last night, the New York Times posted an article purporting to detail how the FBI spies on Israeli officials and on American supporters of the U.S.-Israeli alliance. The piece is important, though not for anything having to do with the actual story. The revelation the U.S. government has the Israeli embassy wired isn’t exactly news. Ha’aretz had a better sourced piece with more specifics on the topic last year, and here are a couple of videos of former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds talking about spying on AIPAC. At the end of the article, even author Scott Shane described the practice as “taken for granted.”
What’s significant about the article isn’t the scoop, such as it was. What’s striking is that, at least on Israel-related issues, there no longer seem to be any standards as to who counts as a legitimate source for the Paper of Record.
