Picture This

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The Power of Pictures:
Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film
The Jewish Museum, New York
September 25, 2015–February 7, 2016

National Tour: Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, TN; and Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Review by Roslyn Bernstein

As critics of contemporary fiction, drama, and the arts know full well, finding the narrative in a work can often be an elusive search. Characters appear and disappear, images surface and dissolve, and the story lurches forwards and backwards, pushing and pulling the reader, the viewer, and the audience in disparate directions.

2015

State Terrorism in the West

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The United States and Terrorism: An Ironic Perspective

Ron Hirschbein
Rowman and Littlefield, 2015

This is a deeply insightful analysis of how self-destructive and dangerous to all humanity U.S. responses to and engagements with terrorism have been. For many decades, Ron Hirschbein has been an intellectual architect of Concerned Philosophers for Peace. He asserts that the U.S. campaign against terrorism has helped produce the very violent world it was supposed to prevent. Terrorism is most widely understood as the intended infliction of violence upon noncombatants or civilians, so it is ironic that most of the Western media fail to notice that the United States and its allies have been engaged in terrorism since World War II, despite sanctimoniously condemning the terrorist actions of others. Hirschbein gives us an alternative history of the past seventy years.

Culture

A Time for Literary Diplomacy

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Now that recent Senate votes have guaranteed that the agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear program will go into effect, what more can America do, beyond the strictest vigilance, to build on this historic breakthrough for peace? Perhaps it is time for the citizens of the United States to experience a breakthrough of their own, to go beyond past prejudices against their enemy and use the occasion to gently plunge into the deepest wells of Persian identity that originate in a civilization preceding ours by many centuries. We can do so by connecting with Rumi, a Sufi master born in 1207, whose luminous, salacious, mystical verses written in Farsi are carried by all Iranians in their hearts, as we do the words of Shakespeare. To read even a small selection of Rumi’s witty poems to his beloved can help shatter the blinding stereotypes that separate us from ordinary men and women in Tehran today, the very clichés of mistrust that the negotiators in Geneva had to overcome in order to reach a solution to what seemed an intractable problem. Indeed, those negotiators may have been listening to Rumi when their positions seemed most conflicting and conflictive.

Culture

The Rich Take Over “Burning Man”

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Why the Rich Love Burning Man
 

Burning Man became a festival that rich libertarians love because it never had a radical critique at its core.  

by Keith A. Spencer

Trey Ratcliff / Flickr

 

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In principle the annual Burning Man festival sounds a bit like a socialist utopia: bring thousands of people to an empty desert to create an alternative society. Ban money and advertisements and make it a gift economy. Encourage members to bring the necessary ingredients of this new world with them, according to their ability. Introduce “radical inclusion,” “radical self-expression,” and “decommodification” as tenets, and designate the alternative society as a free space, where sex and gender boundaries are fluid and meant to be transgressed.

Culture

The Short Crappy Life of Walter J. Palmer, or, The Oddities of American Wealth

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Anyone who has followed the demise of Cecil, the African lion, and Walter J. Palmer, his American slayer, can’t help but be struck by the parallels with Hemingway’s classic story, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” where a wealthy but timid American bumbles around the African savannah under the protection of a guide, procures a few hides, and ultimately meets his demise.

Culture

Time Between Trains

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Now in a gusty April…she sat in the place where roads cross, the lonely four corners where, with nothing stopping it, the wind sweeps along without regard for anything.

Culture

Why I’m Not Going to Burning Man This Year by Daniel Pinchbeck

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WHY I’M NOT GOING TO BURNING MAN THIS YEAR
by Daniel Pinchbeck (from Reality Sandwich)

I have gone to Burning Man 15 years in a row. When I went the first time, back in 2000, I was a journalist on assignment for Rolling Stone. That was an amazing introduction to the event, as I was able to go “back stage” and meet the organizers, artists, and geniuses behind the sculptures, lasers, and camps. I was immediately hooked. I couldn’t believe such a place existed – that tens of thousands of people shared the same ideals, and worked together to realize their visions.

2015

Do You See Me

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Between earth and Heaven? I’ve never been anything but alone. But your face warms my world. Everything that blooms, blooms from you. When you look at me,
My heart sweetens.

2015

Babel

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They used to conspire in a brother tongue
no one else could parse. They were its sole native speakers,
these sons of mine
who grew up talking their way to the table. They come back as men to the keep
of my kitchen, the habit of food and talk,
leaving their rented rooms
half a life away. Who are these children-in-disguise
with their beards and glasses,
smoking and joking, each in his own tongue,
about who knows what? Don’t get twin beds, I begged my mother, afraid
of the slightest space
between him and her—a nightstand
with its drawers and knobs,
foursquare and stolid as a gravestone,
the two of them
buried on either side.

2015

The Poetry of a Jewish Humanist

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Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems 1980-2015
by Chana Bloch
Autumn House Press, 2015

A child of immigrant parents who was raised in an observant Jewish household, poet Chana Bloch has absorbed the details of her ethnic and linguistic heritage; this includes what she has called “the habit of questioning,” which is “not only sanctioned by Jewish tradition, it’s an honored part of it.” As a poet, biblical scholar, and translator of ancient and modern Hebrew poetry, she has followed her teacher Robert Lowell’s advice to “learn to write from [her] own translations.”

Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems demonstrates that Bloch has converted that important lesson into a unique poetic voice that modulates from the homespun to the literary and shifts from wit and humor to a pull-no-punches toughness. Spare and musical, intimate while open to history, intelligent and emotionally rich in the details of divisions and connections, Bloch’s poetry negotiates the complexities of her identity as a first-generation Jew, a woman, a child, a parent, a wife, a lover, and a citizen. A self-proclaimed “Jewish humanist,” Bloch quarrels with tradition by asking why God has to make divisions. Some of the divisions she writes about include those between husband and wife, parents and children, illness and health, historical memory and momentary joy, and the contradictions within Judaism itself. Bloch critiques these divisions and, when she finds them, offers alternatives that are more inclusive and more humanistic.

2015

Jacob Chose Hospice: A Critique of Invasive End-of-Life Care

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Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
by Atul Gawande
Metropolitan Books, 2014

What does the Torah have to say about end-of-life care? Its most striking story on this topic appears in the last four chapters of Genesis, which describe the hospice death of the Jewish patriarch Jacob. After Jacob became ill, he summoned his children and grandchildren, and requested burial in the Caves of Machpeleh, alongside his parents (Isaac and Rebecca) and his grandparents (Abraham and Sarah). He gave blessings to his sons, and “when Jacob finished instructing his sons, he drew his feet onto the bed; he expired and was gathered to his people” (Gen. 49:33). He suffered no invasive medical interventions, he was surrounded by his family and was able to bless them, and he died a peaceful death.

2015

What Can Replace Prison?

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Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison
by Nell Bernstein
The New Press, 2014

Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better
by Maya Schenwar
Berrett-Koehler, 2014

If you have the capacity to read one book on prisons this month, which should you choose? For many people I would say without hesitation: Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2012). It is a stunning book. Or it was for me. Call me naïve, but it had never occurred to me that the cancerous growth of the prison system since the 1970s might have been a response to the success of the Civil Rights movement in the ’60s.