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meyerlansky · 7 years ago

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In BWE, how many languages does Meyer speak? We see him speaking English, Italian, and Hebrew/Yiddish (IDK which) on screen, so he's at least trilingual. One could also assume he learned whatever language was native to Odessa when he lived there as a child (Polish? Russian?), and by the way he interacted with the blonde woman in Havana in S5, I got the feeling he speaks at least passable Spanish. I might be thinking too much into this, but I'd like your thoughts, if you've got the time. Thanks!

OKAY I WANT YOU TO KNOW I’M REALLY SORRY ABOUT THE LENGTH OF THIS POST BUT IT’S A REALLY GOOD QUESTION SO TL;DR ANSWER: depending on how we define “speaking a language,” and depending on certain historical circumstances that i don’t know enough about to speak on with definite certainty but am DAMN SURE GOING TO SPECULATE ON, the possible set of “languages meyer might be able to speak” ranges from four to eleven languages. english, yiddish, hebrew, italian/sicilian [which can count as one or two languages, depending on Many Things], and spanish make up the core possibilities, with the latter three[/four] being phrase-based as opposed to comprehensive fluency.

like you said, on screen we see him speak three languages; in terms of fluency, he’s obviously fluent in english as well as yiddish, though he doesn’t actually use a significant amount of yiddish in boardwalk; the stuff he says during the beatdown in all in is hebrew, not yiddish, and they use the same script but are different languages. based on what i’ve read meyer’s much more likely to understand german thanks to knowing yiddish than hebrew. as for the yiddish he actually does use, “mishegoss” and “emis” are pretty much it, iirc? ...you can maybe include “hocking” in 5x01 because i don’t think that one had entered the yinglish lexicon juuust yet? but anyway, he uses it on a phrase/word basis, mostly because americanization respectability not-wanting-AR-to-be-a-dick-about-it etc etc, but it would have been his first language and he continued to speak it at home to his parents historically, so presumably he did in bwe as well. so, so far, fluent in english and yiddish, at least passably fluent in hebrew to construct sentences on the fly while murdering a dude, and depending on how impressive we want to make Meyer The Polyglot out to be, yiddish’s mutual intelligibilty with german could count for a fourth.

as far as italian goes, apparently the phrase he says in ourselves alone is... extremely formal and stilted, as well as being italian, not sicilian. there’s a whole ongoing debate in linguistics circles wrt whether sicilian is a dialect or a language, but suffice it to say mutual intelligibility between the two is not very high, for non-native speakers at least; i’ve looked up the italian subtitles for charlie and masseria’s scenes and more often than not, what’s written in italian does not match up with what’s being said in sicilian in the slightest. it’s sort of baffling, considering the writers apparently did so well with the sicilian in the rest of the show, and charlie and masseria have a whole conversation in what i’ve read is fairly accurate sicilian a few episodes later, but at this point i just headcanon it away that meyer taught himself mainland italian from library books while charlie was away in hampton farms and tried to surprise charlie with his ~italian skillz~ when he got out and charlie was just like “WHY ARE YOU TALKING LIKE A SIXTEENTH CENTURY SCHOOLMARM sit down i have to fix this” and taught him enough sicilian to get by when surrounded by mafia guys, but the stupidly formal italian is an inside joke past 1920. again, depending on whether we’re counting italian and sicilian as different languages, and whether charlie actually taught him any sicilian phrases offscreen [which i cannot believe he wouldn’t have, not if charlie’s going around picking up yiddish himself], we can add either one or two languages to the total, but he’s probably not as fluent in either sicilian or italian as he is in yiddish, english, or even hebrew.

you’re probably right about spanish too, but my guess is if he does know it his knowledge is probably pretty phrase-based more than a comprehensive fluency. he can probably get by in cuba if he has to, though, which is more than i can say, so that’s another, though spanish is probably closer to his fluency level with italian/sicilian than yiddish or english.

then the question of “russian or polish” is... a complicated one. he was from grodno, not odessa; odessa is in present-day ukraine, whereas grodno is in present-day belarus, but lies extremely close to both poland and lithuania [”close” as in walking distance, less than 20 miles from either border] and was part of the russian empire when meyer was born, but was considered to be part of poland within the empire, kind of? russian imperial history is a whole nightmare of “officially, according to the russians, countries other than russia that were subsumed by the empire did not exist and retroactively never existed after they were subsumed, except for how non-russian peoples resisted russification where they could,” which means that there are potentially FOUR options for the vernacular language of the city: belarusian, polish, and lithuanian, with russian being the “official” language of the imperial government—and therefore what forms would have been written in and the language spoken by government officials and in schools, but not necessarily spoken by anyone in grodno.

while my guess for the spoken language meyer might’ve picked up is belarusian or maybe polish, i genuinely do not know enough about eastern european history to say what would have been spoken in the gentile parts of grodno when meyer was growing up there. but that in and of itself kind of presents another problem; i also don’t know how independently the jewish population of grodno operated from the gentile population in the early 1900s. the impression i get is “significantly independently,” because afaik the russian empire [ON THE WHOLE some of the czars were better than others but GENERALLY NONE OF THEM WERE GREAT ON THIS FRONT] didn’t admit jewish kids to the russian school system, so meyer may not have even learned russian because shuls wouldn’t necessarily teach it. by the same token, the population of grodno was more than half jewish in 1907, and considering he was A LITERAL FIVE YEAR OLD he may not have interacted with any gentiles in a significant enough context to learn anything other than yiddish as a kid ANYWAY. so the answer for “what non-yiddish language[s] might meyer have picked up while living in grodno” can be anywhere between 0-4, with either “none of them” or “written russian and spoken belarusian/polish” being the most likely answers imo, depending on how much interaction there was between the jewish and gentile communities in grodno before 1909.

for me, my headcanon regarding any knowledge meyer may have had of any of the slavic languages mentioned is, he may have known polish/belarusian/russian as a kid, but in contrast to yiddish—which he presumably continued to speak offscreen with his parents and anna if we’re transposing historical facts onto bwe canon—and both spanish and italian/sicilian—which he would have had to put in at least SOME concentrated effort to learn after emigrating from grodno—meyer would have had no interest retaining polish/belarusian/russian, because it is in no way useful to him as a teen/adult, and the only thing the people who spoke those languages did was force his family to emigrate out of fear.

so like i said in the tl;dr, it sort of depends if you consider certain things languages or dialects, if you factor in mutual intelligibility, the historical context of both non-russian languages during the russian empire’s death throes, AND the historical context of jewish-goy interaction IN the late russian empire, but the potential options for languages he can speak in bwe are:

english [confirmed, obviously]

yiddish [confirmed historically and on a word basis in bwe]

hebrew [confirmed in bwe but not to what degree]

italian [confirmed in bwe but outdated/overly formal]

sicilian [not confirmed on screen but i refuse to believe charlie picked phrases in meyer’s mother tongue up easier than meyer picked up phrases in charlie’s]

spanish [not confirmed on screen but pretty likely on a phrase basis]

russian [not confirmed on screen and dependent on historical context, also likely primarily written russian]

belarusian[not confirmed on screen and dependent on historical context, and probably an either/or situation with polish/lithuanian]

polish[not confirmed on screen and dependent on historical context, and probably an either/or situation with belarusian/lithuanian]

lithuanian[not confirmed on screen and dependent on historical context, and probably an either/or situation with belarusian/polish, also the least likely of the slavic languages]

german [not confirmed and mostly due to mutual fluency with yiddish, not any concerted effort or interest in the language]

#LONG POST #I'M SO SORRY #boardwalk empire #meyer lansky #everybody's got larceny in 'em #because i can't not address the history. god this is #a nightmare of a post #i'm so sorry #Anonymous #asks

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comrade-jiang · 7 years ago

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hi sorry to bother you but i was wondering what are some reasons you hate stalin and the ussr so much? this might be a stupid question but im still new to socialism and my sources of information seem to be quite sympathetic to the way of the tank sometimes

Just getting around to this ask, sorry.

One of the most prime reasons is the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact, known formally as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. As the description implies, the MRP was a peace treaty signed between the Soviets and Nazis about a week before the invasion of Poland.

The Nazis commenced their invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, and the Soviet Union theirs on 17 September of the same year (1 day before my birthday, but beside the point). The two nations divided up Poland, and despite having the manpower, Stalin and his officials maintained the secret pact and did not stand up to Germany until Hitler broke the pact with Operation Barabrossa on 22 June 1941.

Stalin himself used antisemitic buzzwords in his dissertations against Trotsky, who was Jewish, or at least of Jewish ancestry. The Soviet state-run press spoke of Jews as "groveling before the West," helping "American imperialism," "slavish imitation of bourgeois culture" and "bourgeois aestheticism."

There was also the suggested “Jewish Autonomous Oblast”, which would’ve sequestered the Jewish population of the Soviet union in the far east, bordering the bitterly-cold Heilongjiang province in China. From Wikipedia, Stalin and Antisemitism:

To offset the growing Jewish national and religious aspirations of Zionism and to successfully categorize Soviet Jews under Stalin's nationality policy an alternative to the Land of Israel was established with the help of Komzet and OZET in 1928. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast with the center in Birobidzhan in the Russian Far East was to become a "Soviet Zion". Yiddish, rather than "reactionary" Hebrew, would be the national language, and proletarian socialist literature and arts would replace Judaism as the quintessence of culture. Despite a massive domestic and international state propaganda campaign, the Jewish population there never reached 30% (as of 2003 it was only about 1.2%). The experiment ground to a halt in the mid-1930s, during Stalin's first campaign of purges, as local leaders were not spared during the purges.

I’m not Jewish, but their poor treatment in the Soviet Union is a major reason why I don’t stand behind it. The aesthetics might be nice, and we can respect legendary Nazi-killers like Vasiliy Zatzyev and Lyudmila Pavlichenko without looking up to statism or Stalinism.

The origins of the Soviet Union are even stranger. Lenin supported a system of state capitalism, which is what the Soviet Union started as, and what it remained as until its death in 1991. From Lenin, The Tax in Kind:

State capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state of affairs in our Soviet Republic. If in approximately six months’ time state capitalism became established in our Republic, this would be a great success and a sure guarantee that within a year socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold and will have become invincible in this country.

From Lenin, To the Russian Colony in North America:

The state capitalism, which is one of the principal aspects of the New Economic Policy, is, under Soviet power, a form of capitalism that is deliberately permitted and restricted by the working class. Our state capitalism differs essentially from the state capitalism in countries that have bourgeois governments in that the state with us is represented not by the bourgeoisie, but by the proletariat, who has succeeded in winning the full confidence of the peasantry.Unfortunately, the introduction of state capitalism with us is not proceeding as quickly as we would like it. For example, so far we have not had a single important concession, and without foreign capital to help develop our economy, the latter’s quick rehabilitation is inconceivable.

Additionally, the Soviets crushed anarchist movements in the Union. There was no room for error if you were in the Soviet Union- once the anarchists had served their purpose, they were often executed or “disappeared” to gulags.

The major example of this is the Kronstadt Rebellion. This originated when Soviet production plummeted and the anarchist sections of the Soviet Baltic Fleet deserted. They formed a new constitution of sorts in Petrograd:

Immediate new elections to the Soviets; the present Soviets no longer express the wishes of the workers and peasants. The new elections should be held by secret ballot, and should be preceded by free electoral propaganda for all workers and peasants before the elections.

Freedom of speech and of the press for workers and peasants, for the Anarchists, and for the Left Socialist parties.

The right of assembly, and freedom for trade union and peasant associations.

The organisation, at the latest on 10 March 1921, of a Conference of non-Party workers, soldiers and sailors of Petrograd, Kronstadt and the Petrograd District.

The liberation of all political prisoners of the Socialist parties, and of all imprisoned workers and peasants, soldiers and sailors belonging to working class and peasant organisations.

The election of a commission to look into the dossiers of all those detained in prisons and concentration camps.

The abolition of all political sections in the armed forces; no political party should have privileges for the propagation of its ideas, or receive State subsidies to this end. In place of the political section, various cultural groups should be set up, deriving resources from the State.

The immediate abolition of the militia detachments set up between towns and countryside.

The equalisation of rations for all workers, except those engaged in dangerous or unhealthy jobs.

The abolition of Party combat detachments in all military groups; the abolition of Party guards in factories and enterprises. If guards are required, they should be nominated, taking into account the views of the workers.

The granting to the peasants of freedom of action on their own soil, and of the right to own cattle, provided they look after them themselves and do not employ hired labour.

We request that all military units and officer trainee groups associate themselves with this resolution.

We demand that the Press give proper publicity to this resolution.

We demand the institution of mobile workers' control groups.

We demand that handicraft production be authorised, provided it does not utilise wage labour.[7]

The Soviets responded to this by labeling them as members of the Black Hundreds, who... didn’t actually exist anymore. They then forcibly retook the city from the socialists who had drafted a constitution and set out their goals in a fair manner, and executed upwards of 2000 people.

This is a long ask, and I can go into more detail if you need, but these transgressions are more than enough for most leftists to discard Soviet worship as a whole.

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spainwealth89-blog · 5 years ago

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California Fool’s Gold — Exploring Wilshire Vista

INTRODUCTION

I finally visited and explored Wilshire Vista. I say “finally” because, at the time of writing, it’s the most voted-for neighborhood ever and has been for a little while now (to vote for other Los Angeles neighborhoods to be the subject of an edition of California Fool’s Gold episode click here). OK, it’s only received nineteen votes — but even with about 800 total votes cast, there are so many Southern California communities that nineteen for a single one is the current record. I have no way of knowing why people cast the votes for the communities which they do — but each computer/IP address is only allowed to register one vote so I’m led to believe that either nineteen people have rallied for the neighborhood — or alternately that Russian bots have somehow managed to infiltrate Surveymonkey. Whatever the case may be, here follows my exploration of Wilshire Vista.

Pendersleigh & Sons Cartography’s map of Wilshire Vista

The first people to arrive in what’s now Wilshire Vista were almost certainly the Paleoamerican ancestors of the Chumash, who arrived from the north at least 13,000 years ago. The Chumash were alone in Southern California for thousands of years, until Uto-Aztecan language-speaking people began to arrive from the east, including the Tongva, about 3,500 years ago. By then, Chumash villages were limited to the coastal areas along the mainland’s Pacific coast and the Channel Islands, offshore.

Spanish explorers arrived in 1542 and claimed the region for their empire but their conquest didn’t begin, in earnest, until 1769, when the first of 21 missions was established. In 1810, Mexico declared independence from Spain, and in 1823, Governor Luis Antonio Argüello granted Francisco Ávila the 17.96 km2 Rancho Las Cienegas, through which flowed the Los Angeles River until 1825, when it drastically altered course, moving its mouth from the Santa Monica Bay to the San Pedro Bay.

In 1848, as a result of the Mexican-American War, the United States took conquered much of Mexico, including all of California. California was made the 31st state in 1850. A claim for Rancho Las Cienegas was filed with the Public Land Commission in 1853. In 1870, what’s now Wilshire Vista was purchased by French rancher and former sailor, Joseph Masselin, who’d come to California during the Gold Rush and, having failed to find any precious metal, bought 120 acres (48.5 hectares) of land and turned his attention to dairy cows and beans. In 1921, John A. Vaughan and Walter G. McCarty bought some land west of Los Angeles from Masselin’s heirs and named it “Wilshire Vista,” a reference to a boulevard donated to the city by Henry Gaylord Wilshire in 1895.

Although the name suggests a view of the boulevard sometimes referred to as Los Angles’s “main street” or “spine,” it’s pretty much impossible to see Wilshire from any corner of the neighborhood today — although since its construction from 1968-1971, the Gin Wong-designed 39-story 5900 Wilshire has loomed like a beacon of that boulevard in the background. Looking south, one can make out the Baldwin Hills, and if I’d been consulted on the naming of the neighborhood I might’ve suggested “Baldwin Hills Vista.”

Gin Wong’s 5900 Wilshire Boulevard, looming as always, in the background

Wilshire Vista was annexed by the city of Los Angeles in February 1922 as part of the La Brea Annexation. In late October of that year, lots of Vaughan and McCarty’s tract went on sale. Most of the development’s selling points, as touted in initial advertisements, hinged not on neighborhood amenities, of which there were relatively few — but rather to its proximity to other places. It was variously promoted as being “20 minutes from Broadway” and “an eight minute walk to Los Angeles High School. Mention was made of its sewer network and concrete sidewalks. The promoters also mentioned its proximity to the Page Military Academy and “convenience to the city and beaches via the boulevards.” Mention was invariably made of “the promising of a car line,” which (since there was already a Pacific Electric (PE) line in existence) must’ve been a reference to Los Angeles Railway’s (LARy), streetcar network.

Although they’re more often romanticized today, PE’s trains were never as popular as LARy’s streetcars with the Angelenos who actually rode them. PE’s interurban red cars were somewhat more akin to commuter rail, connecting as they did far-flung towns and toonervilles (suburbs) using private right-of-ways, such as San Vicente Boulevard, which form’s Wilshire Vista’s northern border. LARY’s yellow streetcars, on the other hand, operated along streets within Los Angeles, charged lower fares, and enjoyed a much higher ridership.

As someone who walks a lot, I always keep an eye on the sidewalk for love initials, classic rock logos, contractor stamps, &c. I spied a few stamps from E. Riveroll & Company, which was sufficient to lead me down a bit of a rabbit hole. E. Riveroll was Elfego Riveroll, the son of Manuel Riveroll — a friend of Maximilian I of Mexico during the Second Mexican Empire. His stamps can be seen from Beverly Hills to Manhattan Beach and his family home still stands in the charming Alvarado Terrace section of Pico-Union. In 1905, Elfego was still a citizen of Mexico living in the US, and he patented a new iron smelting process. In 1910, he married Georgia Rachel Youngblood. In 1924, his company built the Grand Olympic Auditorium. He died in 1956 and was interred at the Chapel of the Pines Crematory.

Pastel homes

Spanish Colonial and Tudor revival homes, with drought tolerant, and thirsty lawns (respectively)

A typical, shady street (palms are thankfully rare in the neighborhood)

Today Wilshire Vista remains overwhelmingly residential. There are no bars, karaoke boxes, billiard halls, post offices, bowling alleys, libraries, nightclubs, art galleries, or performance venues in the neighborhood. Most of the neighborhood consists of detached homes and low-rise apartments situated on quiet residential streets. Most of the homes were designed in either the Spanish Colonial or Tudor revival styles and were built from the mid-1920s through the mid-1930s by either the by either the Commercial Construction Company or the John A. Evans Corporation. Pico Boulevard, which forms the southern border, hosts nearly all of the neighborhood’s businesses, most of them housed in commercial buildings constructed in the 1940s or “mall era” shopping centers.

A commercial building on Pico

Pico Spaulding Shopping Center, 1987

San Vicente Gardens, 1958

Most of the neighborhood’s modest apartments were built in the 1950s, although it’s usually safe to assume that Norman Revival apartments, or those painted chalky pink, were built in the preceding decade.

Norman Revival apartment buildings

The neighborhood’s other borders are formed by Hauser Boulevard to the east, which hosts no businesses (although when I passed through, there was a fruit vendor on Packard Street offering his produce to the motorists crawling along the surprisingly traffic-choked route. Fairfax Boulevard forms the western border of the neighborhood but since the early 1990s, the overwhelmingly Ethiopian and Eritrean-operated businesses there have effectively seceded and thus, as Little Ethiopia, achieved a sort of de facto neighborhood independence.

Pendersleigh & Sons Cartography‘s map of Midtown Los Angeles

Wilshire Vista’s other neighbors include Carthay Square, Faircrest Heights, the Miracle Mile District, Picfair Village, Pico Park, and the similarly (but somewhat confusingly) named Wilshire Vista Highlands. References to the multi-neighborhood region of Midtown date back at least to 1935 — and yet more than once I’ve heard Angelenos (invariably ones who don’t live there) claim that no one refers to the region thus. Since the early 1970s, “Mid-City” began to overtake Midtown in regional usage, even if it’s not exactly synonymous (no one, for example, refers to Koreatown — undeniably located in Midtown — as being part of Mid-City). There are indications in business names (e.g. Hollywood Cigar and Miracle Mile Medical Center) as well as gang placas claiming “WS” that no one is in absolute agreement about the neighborhood’s geography and the only signs I saw proclaiming Wilshire Vista” were identical in design and include the cryptic tagline “a community of respect since 1921.”

A “community of respect since 1921” …as long as you’re not a truck weighing over 6,000 pounds.

What it was not, since 1921, was a neighborhood of racial diversity. Before World War II, the area — with the exception of servants — was exclusively white, thanks to the racially restrictive housing covenants which determined where Angelenos could live, based on their ethnicity. It was home, however, to a substantial foreign-born population of immigrants from Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Russia. The most common languages spoken were English, German, Russian, and Yiddish. Most native-born residents were transplants from the Midwest and East, rather than from California natives.

Wilshire Vista is now a rather diverse neighborhood. According to the website, City-Data — which I rightly or wrongly assume rightly acquires its data from a recent census — Wilshire Vista is home to 3,233 residents, .3% of whom were Native American, .9% identified as “other race,” 3% were mixed race, 6% were Asian-Pacific Islander, 13.9% were Latino, 35.3% were non-Latino white, and 40.1% were black.

The “car line” originally promised to the Wilshire Vista’s first, potential homebuyers never did arrive. I don’t know whether or not Vaughan and McCarty made the promise in good faith; unscrupulous developers certainly weren’t above placing “sold” signs on un-sold houses and promising public transit in order to spur purchases. Whatever the case, LARy’s Pico and First Street Line (and later P Line) never extended west of Rimpau Boulevard, where it terminated two kilometers east of the neighborhood’s easternmost edge. It was a popular line, however, and was sometimes blamed for siphoning transit users from PE’s Santa Monica via Sawtelle Line, which ceased operation in 1951. Today bus transit is provided in Wilshire Vista by Metro’s 30, 330, 28, Rapid 728, and Rapid 780 lines; and Big Blue Bus’s 7 and R7 lines.

A long alley behind San Vicente Boulevard

Another alley, this time behind Pico

Oddly-placed stairs in an alley

55 years later there are still no trains serving the neighborhood. Nor is there — the car-free explorer can’t help but notice — even a single section of bicycle lane on any of the neighborhood’s fifteen streets or lengthy, unnamed alleys. Nowhere is this car-centricity on more annoying display than on San Vicente Boulevard, a road created for a train and, at 38 meters wide, big enough to accommodate not only protected bicycle lanes but light rail lines, dedicated bus lanes, and fairly wide bioswales, all while retaining the landscaped median. Were it not for the cars, the road itself could be quite appealing, it’s wide median landscaped with a variety of trees and plants just begging for the sort of walking/jogging path it would accommodate if this were a street in Mexico City.

A fleeting moment of relative calm on San Vicente Boulevard

A vacant property on Pico

The ruins of an abandoned Walgreen’s

Pico, on the other hand, is the neighborhood’s only street that could be described as vibrant, even though many of the storefronts are currently vacant — including a fairly large, former Walgreen’s, built in 2008, but vacant since last year. I didn’t see a lot of people walking — but then, most of the businesses are the sort that attract motorists on a specific mission, not rambling pedestrians. There are places selling upholstery, drapery, insurance, flooring, lighting fixtures, and offering printing, or computer repair. About a dozen of the street’s shops could broadly be described as providing maintenance, with about half offering car repair and the other half offering haircuts, styling, and massage.

La Pico Plaza, 1966

Tires used to advertise tires…

…and tires used to grow geraniums

Most of the auto shops, I must point out, are not the sort of charming Streamline Moderne ones that some Angelenos value more than housing, rather they’re almost all the sort of cinderblock constructed Smog Check Revival style buildings that some Angelenos value more than housing. Although Pico is not as wide as San Vicente, it does accommodate a median, and has room for dedicated bicycle lanes, if only there was the political will necessary to overcome inertia (the neighborhood, part of the Los Angeles’s 10th Council District, is currently represented by Los Angeles City Council president, Herb J. Wesson Jr.). There are also two neighborhood bicycle shops — Mike’s Bike Shop and SoundCycles.

Eagle-eyes are required to read “Sound Cycles” on this signage

Hand-painted signage… soon to be repainted, according to a barber

Entrance to LADWP Distributing Station No. 43

The homes in Wilshire Vista almost all possess undeniable architectural charms but one of the most appealing buildings in the neighborhood is the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s (LADWP) Distributing Station No. 43, which like so many LADWP buildings conveys a sense of being imposing, impregnable, and very mysterious. Although heavy metal doors had a peephole, I assumed that there was no on the other side. The building is engraved “A.D. 1927,” which is the date it was built for the LA Gas and Electric Co. That company and its properties were purchased by the Los Angeles Bureau of Power and Light in 1937, shortly before merging with the Bureau of Water Works and Supply and to create the LADWP. See also “Early Power Distribution Stations,” which includes photos of distributing station interiors that would look right at home in a photographic exhibition on “die Neue Sachlichkeit.”

Pico/Genesee Drilling Island

Even more intriguing than the distribution station is the Pico/Genesee Drilling Island, an oil well encased in what appears, at first glance, the architecture of a mid-rise office building. The Packard Well Site is one of four drilling islands still extracting oil from the Beverly Hills Oil Field so that we can keep the fossil fuel fire burning and drink beverages with plastic straws. The mostly windowless building constructed in 1968, when apparently people thought nothing about living next to a beautiful and terrible petrochemical extraction facility and the public could enter through the front door and watch the machinery at work.

Don’t trespass, smoke, get cancer, or breathe

Today the oil well is operated by Houston-based, Freeport-McMoRan, who no longer allow the public to access the lobby. Warnings to trespassers (and would be smokers) are posted on all sides — as are warnings about the cancer-causing chemicals present at the site.

A welcoming, if apparently purely decorative, footpath and bridge

As with the distribution station, it appeared to be unstaffed. On the eastern side, there was a guard-post which, upon approaching turned out to be vacant. On the western edge, a winding path and footbridge appeared to have seen little if any use. Cocking my ear I could hear nothing but a quiet, industrial hum providing the mellifluous counterpoint to the soft rustle of sweet gum and magnolia leaves.

The locked, barred, and chained entrance to the educational display

In front, a window looked to have been knocked out with a rock but it was through the tinted windows that I could make out something of the interior, lit through the roofless building by the sun above. Although I wouldn’t want to live anywhere near an active oil well, no matter what its aesthetic appeal, the lover of supervillain lairs in me inevitably imagined decorating the place with some Danish furniture purchased from a shop around the corner called West Coast Modern L.A.

West Coast Modern L.A.

Just north of West Coast Modern LA and the Walgreen’s haikyo is the Korean Western Presbyterian Church. In the case of this building, it’s not just the aesthetics of its architecture that drew me to it but the demographic story it told. Hebrew dedications, a stained-glass Magan David, and other symbols revealed, quite clearly, that its life as a Korean church it was a Jewish synagogue.

Research revealed that the synagogue was constructed in 1950 as the Congregation Rodef Sholom-Etz Chayim Synagogue and that it had come into being when the Rodef Sholom Congregation, previously of South Los Angeles’s Westside, merged with the Etz Chayim Congregation, previously of South Los Angles’s Eastside, and both had decided to leave make the exodus to Midtown, a region where racially restrictive housing covenants prohibiting Jews, blacks, and all other non-WASPs from buying homes in most neighborhoods was overturned by the United States Supreme Court in the case of Shelley v. Kraemer.

By 1959, the synagogue was known as Temple Judea but many Jews didn’t permanently settle in Midtown and eventually reached the promised land of the Westside. In 1975, the congregation moved to its home at the B’nai David-Judea Congregation in the Westside neighborhood of Pico-Robertson. Koreans, in many cases compelled to leave their homeland by American-backed dictator Park Chung Hee’s “Heavy-Chemical Industry Drive” where among the next wave of Midtown settlers and in 1982, the old synagogue became a Korean Presbyterian Church.

I was exploring midday on a Tuesday, so it’s likely that most who live in the neighborhood were at work, which probably, combined with its suburban oasis calm, gave me the impression of a very quiet neighborhood, aside from the commercial streets located along its edges. From what I saw, I can’t imagine that there’s much more civic life at night, though. Although located in the middle of a vibrant metropolis, Wilshire Vista does feel like a suburb — and the archetypical suburbanite prefers the private to the public, yards to parks, home theaters to cinemas, and wet bars to dives.

There is a live theater space, though, VS. Theatre Company, which was founded in Wilshire Vista in 2004 and produces, in its space, original works. Although I haven’t yet attended a performance there if you’ve never experienced (and supported) live theater I absolutely encourage you to do so. I’ll keep my eye for upcoming performances.

Plastic bollards and purple curb extensions awaiting planters on Pico

In the past, there have been occasional community events. In 2014, there was the Wilshire Vista Neighborhood Mixer, organized by the Wilshire Vista Neighborhood Association. In 2017, there was the Wilshire Vista Block Party, organized by the P.I.C.O. Neighborhood Council. The best bet, however, seems to be 3rd Thursdays on Pico, which takes place on the third Thursday of the month (naturally), from 15:00-21:00, between Fairfax and Cochran Place. I’ve not been yet but according to the Great Streets website, it features “local businesses as they showcase live music, food, art, and more,” which sounds a bit like a night market and thus totally up my alley.

Speaking of alleys — I actually began my exploration behind by walking down an unnamed alley behind Little Ethiopia. On my left were residential garages and on my right, Ethiopian restaurants and markets, which to my surprise (because Los Angeles alleys are usually sadly underutilized spaces) there were back entrances to most of the Ethiopian businesses. In any neighborhood exploration, I like to eat in that neighborhood and Ethiopian cuisine is one of my absolute favorites. What’s more, I’d skipped breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses, and brunch and the aromas of berbere, coffee, and niter kibbeh seemed to be tugging at my stomach like sirens. However, even though Little Ethiopia technically straddles Carthay Square and Wilshire Vista and thus, I could argue, can be regarded as part of Wilshire Vista — it’s really its own entity and so I summoned up all of my strength and decided to eat somewhere in Wilshire Vista proper.

Powerplant Cafe and, if you look closely, that scourge of urban life — a humble Bird scooter

My lunch alarm went off at 14:00 at which time I found myself in front of Powerplant Superfood Cafe, a gluten-free, mostly vegan restaurant. As a vegetarian (albeit a gluten-loving one), this sounded promising and so I popped it. It was very clean and the servers were pleasingly friendly. The food was pretty good, although personally, I wouldn’t have minded if my BBQ “meatloaf” (quinoa) sandwich had been a bit juicier and barbecue-y — maybe that’s just the Missourian in me. As unlikely as salads are to inspire praise, I found mine to be delicious. The iced coffee, too, was tasty and restorative. The coconut-based mocha ice cream was almost impossibly rich. Other restaurants in the neighborhood include CJ’s Cafe, Charlie’s Fish & Chip, Ho Ho Kitchen, My Two Cents, ROUNDK, and Stevie’s Creole Cafe. The only “market” in the neighborhood appears to be Sunshine Liquor and, for your hot sauce needs, there’s the Fuego Hot Sauce Store.

Hand-painted, incandescent, and neon signage at Stevie’s Creole Café

When researching this piece, I looked at Airbnb listings to see how neighborhood residents are now promoting the neighborhood, since the LARy streetcar is never coming, and a journey to the Broadway Theater District (which is, for better or for worse, not what it was in the silent film era) by bus will more likely take 45 minutes and involve a transfer. Most often mentioned in these posts is the ample parking — which seems completely unworthy of mention since no one in their right mind would rent a car when visiting Los Angeles and if one did, you certainly wouldn’t want them staying in your home.

As in 1922, I think it’s Wilshire Wilshire’s proximity to attractions outside the neighborhood that might be more worth mention. The Purple Line Extension is scheduled to open nearby in 2023, a year after the neighborhood turns 100 years old. Metro is also currently considering several routes for extending the Crenshaw line north to the Purple and Red lines. All but one involve routing the train from Crenshaw up San Vicente and from there branching north up La Brea Avenue, Fairfax Avenue, or La Cienega Boulevard to Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood.

But even now, a walk of ten minutes or less can take one to Museum Row (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Craft and Folk Art Museum, the Petersen Automotive Museum, and the George C. Page Museum), Little Ethiopia, the Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles, the El Rey Theater, the Zimmer Children’s Museum, Tom Bergin’s (assuming someone re-opens it), Ballona Creek, The Mint, and an India Sweets and Spices. The Beverly Center, the Museum of Tolerance, and the Expo Line‘sLa Cienega/Jefferson Station are no further away than a transfer-less, fifteen-minute bus ride. For the Wilshire Vistan still clamoring for a streetcar, in 2013 developer Rick Caruso floated the idea of extending an actual streetcar down Fairfax from his mall, the Grove, to the nearby Wilshire/Fairfax Station.

A cherub — a being created by God to protect the Garden of Eden

As seen in an alley

Sign with photography from Senegalese-Angeleno Djibril Drame

FURTHER READING

Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, by David L. Ulin (2015), a writer who lives and walks in Wilshire Vista. The book’s cover is based upon two of my Pendersleigh & Sons Cartography maps.

Eric Brightwell is an adventurer, writer, rambler, explorer, cartographer, and guerrilla gardener who is always seeking paid writing, speaking, traveling, and art opportunities. He is not interested in generating advertorials, cranking out clickbait, or laboring away in a listicle mill “for exposure.”

Brightwell has written for Angels Walk LA, Amoeblog, Boom: A Journal of California, diaCRITICS, Hidden Los Angeles, and KCET Departures. His art has been featured by the American Institute of Architects, the Architecture & Design Museum, the Craft & Folk Art Museum, Form Follows Function, Los Angeles County Store, the book Sidewalking, Skid Row Housing Trust, and 1650 Gallery. Brightwell has been featured as subject in The Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Magazine, LAist, CurbedLA, Eastsider LA, Boing Boing, Los Angeles, I’m Yours, and on Notebook on Cities and Culture. He has been a guest speaker on KCRW‘s Which Way, LA? and at Emerson College. Art prints of Brightwell’s maps are available from 1650 Gallery. He is currently writing a book about Los Angeles and you can follow him on Ameba, Facebook, Goodreads, Instagram, Mubi, Twitter, and Weibo.

Click here to offer financial support and thank you!

Source: https://ericbrightwell.com/2018/09/07/california-fools-gold-exploring-wilshire-vista/

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neras-kirneh-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Israel and Zionism, pt. 2

@angrybell Okay, I’m continuing the discussion here.

It’s a label that applies to a region. It does not denote a nationality. It does not denote an ethnicity. It does not denote a race. Its simply a label applied to a region of land by some people.

Doesn’t excuse the Nakba.

I. The term “Palestine” has never applied to any independent state, kingdom, or other national entity in the region.

Doesn’t excuse the Nakba. Palestine would have become a state after the end of the British Mandate if not for the Zionists - just like Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon all became states right after the British and the French left.

As far as what it was called by the various factions which have controlled the territory in question, that’s pretty well established. The place called Palestine is Israel.

No, it was always called Palestine prior to the Nakba.

II. There Is No Historic Boundaries For An Entity Known as “Palestine”.

Yes, there are: Mandatory Palestine; borders were the Mediterranean to the west and the Jordan River to the east, and the Galilee in the north and Eilat in the south. Those are the borders.

Funny how none of these maps match what the PLO/Fatah, Hamas, or any of the other groups seeking to destroy Israel and establish a “Palestine” claim.

Because none of them are relevant today. The only map that has been relevant since 1948 is that of Mandatory Palestine, because that is the area that has been hit by Zionist settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing of its indigenous population for nearly 70 years.

In fact, 75% of the area painted green in the map was actually public land, unowned by any individual.

That does not change the fact that prior to 1948, Palestinians still lived on that land. That area had a majority-Palestinian population back then; but now the area has been ethnically cleansed of most of them by Israel. Because they are not Jewish. It is not possible to have a “Jewish state” in a place where most people are not Jewish, after all. All of the prominent Zionists, including Theodor Herzl, understood this very well.

III. The Only Historic Palestinians In What Is Now Israel Have Been Jews and Not Arabs.

Wrong: they have been Jews and Muslims and Christians - but they were nearly all Arabs; specifically, Palestinians. (There was, however, also a minority of Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazi Hasidic Jews prior to the onset of Zionism, of course.)

“Arab” denotes the language you speak, “Jew” denotes the religion you practice. That these two identities are somehow mutually exclusive is a ridiculous Zionist fabrication, nothing more. I have already explained that Jews who historically lived in Arab countries and spoke Arabic were objectively Arabs themselves.

The people who claim to be “Palestinians” claim that they have an ancient claim to the land. In some cases, they claim to trace their ancestry back to the Canaanites. The reality is much different.

For example, Saeb Erekat has claimed that he is descended of Canaanites. However, his family is from the Howeitat region (an area shared by Jordan and Saudi Arabia). His family on emigrated, at the earliest, in the 7th Century CE when the Arabs overran the Byzantine controlled region.

Wow! The 7th century, you say? So they have at least 1,200-1,300 years on most of the Israelis, in other words...

Also, it doesn’t excuse the Nakba.

However, who was there before? That would be the Jews and other non Muslim, non Arab communities that survived in the region.

All of whom were also Palestinians. Their descendants today are mostly Palestinians.

Arabs in the region, prior to the 1960s, typically identified themselves as Syrians. It was only when the PLO and other terrorist groups began creating the idea of an Arab “Palestinian” as part of their effort to destroy Israel.

The difference is that Arabs living in what we know today as Syria had not been ethnically cleansed by the Zionists, but Arabs living in what we know today as Israel had.

Starting in 1948, there has been a determined effort erase the existence of Jews in the land in favor of a myth of an Arab-only land of “Palestine”.

That has never been the goal of the Palestinian resistance. They have made it very clear, abundantly clear, that their struggle is only against the State of Israel and its political ideology of Zionism - not against Jewish people, and certainly not against the Jewish religion. Period.

Starting in 1948, the Jordanians especially began destroying ancient Jewish synagogues. Graveyards, most significantly the Jewish graveyard at the Mount of Olives, were destroyed and Jewish headstones were used for building projects. Much of the cemetery on the Mount of Olives was cleared to build a new hotel by the Jordanians. Jews were forcibly expelled by the Arab Legion from their homes and businesses in Jerusalem.

Glass houses, angrybell:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arab_towns_and_villages_depopulated_during_the_1948_Palestinian_exodus

It was not only the Jews who suffered under Arab rule in the post-1948 era. Determined to completely Islamicize Judea and Samaria, Jordan placed restrictions on land ownership and enforced school curriculum that would indoctrinate minorities into the Islamic faith.

And now, Israel is repressing the religious freedoms of Muslim and Christian Palestinians, both in the West Bank and inside the Green Line. They even banned the Muslim call to prayer from three Jerusalem mosques recently!

Between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese there are no differences.

Yes, there are.

There is no other answer I can possibly give to a statement that rhetorical and devoid of anything backing it up. But, hey! Kudos to you for writing “Palestinians” without quotation marks for once! :)

An Arab “Palestinian” people furthermore lack any of the attributes usually ascribed to a national group. They have no distinct culture from other Arab groups other than their resistance to Israel.

Linguistically, they were and are Syrian in their dialect of Arabic.

There are no spiritual ties to the land, other than those which were fabricated once Jews in the region began to prosper. There is no distinct, common ancestry with the region.

Wrong, wrong and wrong again. They do have distinct customs, a distinct accent of Arabic, a distinct history, etc. Susan Abulhawa talked about this in her debate with Alan Dershowitz seven years back.

Conversely, the Jews do meet the criteria as “Palestinian” if they chose to use that title.

No, they do not. Most of them had no presence on that land prior to the 1940s. No familial history, no provable ancestral history, nothing. They came there through immigration, period.

They have a spiritual connection to the land as evidenced by the Torah and independently confirmed by contemporary third party sources.

Muslims and Christians also have a spiritual connection to the land. Not that it matters, because God is not a real estate agent. (You still haven’t responded to me pointing out the fact that Theodor Herzl, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, David Ben-Gurion etc. all were atheists, by the way.)

They occupied and continued to occupy the land in the face of ethnic cleansing, repression, and conquest.

No, now you are describing the Palestinians, not the Israelis.

The Jews had and have a distinct culture and language, different from the general Arab culture.

Okay, now this is just straight-up fucking bullshit. A distinct culture and language? Not even in Israel do all Jews have the exact same culture and language!

Jews originate from many countries, including but not limited to: Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Germany, Lithuania, Iraq, Morocco, Algeria, Yemen, Syria, Palestine, Iran and Ethiopia; and they historically spoke many different languages, including but not limited to: Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Tat, Bukhori, Russian, Polish, German, French, Spanish, Farsi and Amharic.

Not only that, but they wildly vary in terms of race, physical appearance, clothing style, culture, cuisine, values, etc. Jews are not a cohesive ethnic or national group, like Zionism likes to pretend they are.

You called me a racist.

Because that’s what you are.

Now, you make the claim that Arabs are simply a conglomeration of people who were previously conquered by the Arabs.

Not exclusively, perhaps; but yeah, pretty much.

Now, I am not going to deny that intermarriage or conversions happened.

Good! Then you are one step closer to realizing how things actually are.

However, your statement is false because the Arabs made sure that those other groups, like the Jews, were governed by a separate set of law that rendered them inferior in the eyes of the Muslim state.

And?! That doesn’t change anything about what they were! Why do you keep on fucking insisting that Jews should define themselves based on how antisemites view them?!

Zionists have a lot more in common with antisemites than you’d like to admit...

As I noted above, it ignores that most clans which make up the “Palestinians” do not originate from the region. Many originate from Arabia. Simply because they intermarried does not mean that everyone becomes an Arab.

No, they do originate from the region, and yes, people who the Arabs conquered and intermarried with did become Arabs. Again: being an Arab only means that you are someone who speaks Arabic, and the language you speak does not determine your ethnic background or ancestral origin. Do you get me now?

You can be Muslim, Christian or Jewish and still be an Arab, and not every Arab originates exclusively from the Arabian Peninsula.

Your attempt to make a false equivalence using American Indians as an example fails. Native Americans have a their own language which they use for their purposes, but they also speak the lingua fraca which in this case means English. This does not mean that they lose their ethnic identity.

Right - and the fact that Palestinians speak Arabic doesn’t mean that they lose their ethnic identity!

And white people have made a concerted effort to kill Native American languages, so many of them now do speak English as their first language.

Just like the fact that the Jews spoke Arabic, among other languages, does not mean that they lost their Jewishness either in their own eyes or in the eyes of the Muslim overlords.

Someone who speaks Arabic is an Arab.

Consider this, and I know you wont because it contradicts your secular religious beliefs, Gaza could be a prosperous region today.

What are “secular religious beliefs”?

And no, Gaza could never be a prosperous region. Israel wants it to be an impoverished ghetto, and so it is.

Hamas decided it would prioritize the destruction of Israel over the building of a prosperous state. Why? Because if people are prosperous, they don’t like to die in war. They have too much to live for.

Hamas decided that it would fight for the rights of the Palestinian people. Most Palestinians in Gaza are not from Gaza; they are refugees from the southern parts of Israel. Israel is one giant refugee camp, as well as the world’s biggest open-air prison. How could such a place ever hope to be “prosperous”?

There is no other logical conclusion for Hamas’ decision to initiate hostilities against Israel.

Really? Literally no other logical conclusion?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_exodus

It must be nice to live in a world where everything is the Jews’ fault.

Where did I say that? Quote, please.

Also: stop equating Israel with Jews and Zionism with Judaism. Most religious Jews in the early days of Zionism hated Zionism. As did most other Jews. To this day there are still Jews who despise Zionism. Most Jews still do not live in Israel.

I do think that everything when it comes to Palestine is Israel’s fault. I do not think that everything in the world is ”the Jews’“ fault.

You seem to ignore that your argument that everything is the Jews/Israelis fault (depending on the time period) is predicated on one thing: the existence of Jews in their ancestral home.

The ancestral home of Russian Jews is Russia, the ancestral home of Polish Jews is Poland, the ancestral home of Moroccan Jews is Morocco, and the ancestral home of Yemeni Jews is Yemen. Prior to Zionism, all of those Jews would have resented anyone saying that Palestine was their “ancestral home”.

Anyway, here’s etrogim to explain why that is not the problem:

http://etrogim.tumblr.com/post/153839028927/why-do-you-think-jews-arent-indigenous-to-israel

When did the Jews begin to arm themselves? After the Arabs started massacring Jewish settlements.

Zionists massacred far more Palestinian Arab villages and towns in 1948.

Why were the Arabs killing the Jews? Because they bought land to farm.

No, because they knew they intended to colonize their land. Reminder: the violence didn’t start until after the Balfour declaration.

As happened in Hebron.

Ah, yes... Let’s talk about Hebron!

This is the account of Rabbi and eminent Jewish scholar Baruk Kaplan present at the yeshiva during the 1929 Hebron massacre. Rabbi Kaplan eventually became the principal of Beis Yaakov, one of the finest Jewish girl's religious schools in New York and is regarded within the Jewish community as an academic authority beyond reproach or accusations of misrepresentation. The following is a translation of his recorded interview made in Yiddish in 1980:

I would like to describe the error that is spread in Jewish communities. A horrible error that accuses the Arabs in Hebron of being killers who attacked the Jews simply because the Arabs were bad people. In order to correct the record this error must be corrected. The Arabs were very friendly people and the Jews in Hebron lived very well with them and had very friendly relations with them. To take just one example I used to have the habit of walking a mile or two out of town all by myself to visit a tree which is believed to be the tree where our patriarch Abraham met the three angels as described in Genesis. I especially enjoyed visiting the tree in the summer time. Along the way I would talk to the Arabs using mostly my hands because I spoke no Arabic. Interestingly enough no one in the yeshiva every told me it was dangerous to go by myself among the Arabs. We just lived with them and got along very fine.

I have also seen a letter by the Grand Rabbi of the Ghera Hasidim at that time Rabbi Abram Martray elder who has memory of Poland regarding his trip to the Holy Land during the days when people were talking about emigrating to Palestine. He wanted to find out what kind of people the Palestinians were in order to be able to advise people whether to move there or not. He wrote in his letter that the Arabs were a very fine and friendly people. Therefore it is necessary to set the record straight about the accusation that the Palestinians were terrible people who liked attacking Jews. This was never the situation at all. Today’s wicked Zionists are just like their predecessors who are responsible for causing terrible suffering in Palestine with their wars against the Arabs. May G-d have mercy.

At the time in 1929 the Zionists had a slogan arguing that the western wall was a Jewish national symbol. Of course the Arabs disagreed with this idea considering that they had enjoyed control over the location for over one thousand one hundred years. However the Zionist mobs were yelling 'the wall is ours'. It's hard to understand why they felt that way considering to have no connection to the Jewish holy places whatsoever. An argument errupted in the Jewish newspapers about establishing a permanent prayer area for Jews at the wall.

This provoked the Arabs and the Rabbi of Jerusalem at the time Chaim Josef Sonnenfeld begged them to stop and be appreciative to the Arabs for allowing Jews to pray at the wall for so many centuries undisturbed however the Zionists wanted a permanent set up under their control. This began the conflict at the time between the Zionists and the Arabs.

After we were studying at the yeshiva in Hebron and saw a bunch of boys in short pants carrying weapons on bicycles and motorcycles running around the streets of Hebron. We were very worried about this. What were they up to? In brief our Rabbi the supervisor of our religious academy Moshe Hetreps called them for a meeting but they refused. He was forced to go over to them and ask them what they were up to. He accused them of wanting to provoke the Arabs. They responded that they were coming to protect us. We cried out ‘woe are us, G-d have mercy.’ They didn’t want to leave town until it was too late. These arrogant cowards only ran away when the local Arab leaders called for a mass meeting of the people from the surrounding Arab villages but it was too late. The Arabs got organised and the Mufti called upon his people to be ready Friday night when the yeshiva would be attending prayers.

At this point the Yeshiva was alone against the Zionists but the Arabs didn’t know to distinguish between us and the Zionists. Sadly they attacked and killed some of our people including the great scholar Joshua Rosenhaus. The next morning we heard the excitement in town and even worse we heard the crying and shouting. I and a friend lived in an apartment that was a part of a three storey building leased by a Jew from an Arab. We could hear all the noise from our apartment on the third floor. We were terrified to let the Arabs in because we knew how angry they had become but a while later things calmed down. In total some sixty five people were killed.

On the other side of town however the Jews were spared. Why am I telling you about this story? It’s because I want to expose how the wicked Zionists both today and in those days were the cause of our suffering. They cooperated with the Nazis, Our religion teaches us that a person who causes someone to sin is worse than the sinner who kills.

A state (of affairs) that killed the Judaism of the Yemenite and Moroccan Jews of many other Sephardic Jews. This is the work of these thugs and gangsters. Everyone must know that the anger of the Arabs against us is only caused by the Zionists. The Arabs were a friendly people to us and I am a witness to it. We lived very well with them in Hebron and I will attest to this as well. It is the accursed Zionists who caused them to hate us. The Zionists dared to use their power to expel the Arabs and even today in the Lebanon they kill and butcher Arabs. They wipe out whole villages with their aeroplanes, Everyone should know who the murderers are. The Zionists are the biggest murderers in the world who refuse to let the Jews live in peace either spiritually or physically.

So, yeah...seems pretty clear-cut to me whose fault that particular tragedy was...

Apparently, you’ve never been through US naturalization. You are required to swear an oath of allegiance. If Lieberman wants to make “Palestinian” Arabs sign it, it would be no different because they are not citizens like Arab Israelis are.

People who are not white and Christian don’t have to swear an oath of allegiance that say the US is a white Christian country and that they don’t have as much value as white Christians.

Also, “naturalization”? The Palestinians have lived there for generations! Centuries! Millennia! Lieberman has lived there since 1978! He wasn’t even born there!

You use it because its an easy way to slander Jews.

Nope, I use it because that’s what it is, and stop equating the State of Israel with “Jews”.

Now you claim I use the fact that the “Palestinians” are an invented nationality/ethnic group to justify ethnic cleansing. I never made that claim. Arabs were displaced as a result of military operations, both those conducted by the Arabs and Israel. However, ethnic cleansing did not occur.

Yeah, it did. It did occur. Demonstrably so. That’s what Plan Dalet was: a plan to cleanse the land of all its Jews in order to create an artificial Jewish majority.

No citation is needed for my statement about the use of Jewish status to confer immunity from charges of antisemitism. These quisilings, or commonly referred to as “asajews” have been the bane of our communal existence for centuries. It was they that would provide the testimony needed by the Christians and Muslims to convict the Jewish people of blood libels by stating that we use Christian blood in our ceremonies. (And because I have to with you, I categorically state that we have never used blood sacrifice in our religion).

It seems to me like you are the one here who’s anti-Jewish. You are literally saying that any Jew who does not support the racist settler state of Israel is not a real Jew. Few statements could be as antisemitic as that one.

Anti-Zionist Jews are not any less nor any more Jewish than Zionist ones, and that is a fact.

I’ve provided you with a link to one of those anti-Zionist Jewish Tumblr users. You can go check out any of the others at any point. Why don’t you at least try to talk to them? (Maybe don’t tell them that you think they should be executed by firing squad, though.)

And no, you do not fucking have to tell me that you have used blood sacrifice in your religion. I’m an anti-Zionist, not an anti-Semite. I hate oppression and racism, I do not hate Jews.

You can actually just go to any of your quisling friends and look at how they treat their advocacy for the terrorist entities of Gaza and the PA and how they treat their Jewish heritage.

I already have. Now you.

You also suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding of Zionism. It is about Jews taking control of their own safety and stopping being victims.

https://neras-kirneh.tumblr.com/post/162091864390/anarchamarxistdrowfeminism-ruthyless

Now we want to make sure that no one does it to us again.

Well, you don’t get to brutalize an entire other people in order to do that, sorry.

We have learned that the world categorically would rather see a dead Jew than a successful, proud one.

Yes, and that is bullshit - but it doesn’t justify the Nakba.

At the core of Judaism has always been a belief that we are meant to live in the land chosen for us by G-d. That land is Eretz Israel.

I have heard many Jews claim otherwise. Jews lived in other parts of the world for thousands of years before the Zionist movement started. Only a small percentage of the world’s Jews ever permanently lived in Palestine, and even today, Israeli Jews are a minority among the world’s Jews.

Seems to me like if that was at the core of Judaism, these things would not be the case.

On our holiest day, we say “L’Shana Haba'ah B'Yerushalayim”. It translates to: Next year in Jerusalem. At our most important holiday, Passover, we say the same phrase. We have said those phrases for more than 2000 years.

And yet the Zionist colonization of Palestine has only gone on for about 120 years.

Yes, Spiritual Zionism has existed ever since the Jews got banished by God. It is a spiritual journey - not a physical one - in which adherents strive to regain the grace and favour of God and be recalled to Zion - not to travel there and conquer it. This concept is known as divine redemption and political Zionism is repugnant to it.

It is heresey by way of defying God's banishement and seeking to regain a land by force which is strictly prohibited by the faith of the Torah. Zionism is indeed a European cult and was condemned by Jews worldwide and most especially by the Palestinian Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews of the “Old Yishuv”, who despised Zionists. In response, they were murdered and silenced by the Zionists.

Zionism is not a local liberation movement lead by Palestinian Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews. It was a regime forced on them (and on their Muslim and Christian countrymen) violently when they opposed it peacefully almost to a man.

Also, God is - once again - not a real estate agent. You don’t get to use (or in this case, misuse) your religious faith in order to justify ethnic cleansing, apartheid, war crimes and genocide.

To be a part of the Jewish community, as opposed to someone who has been cursed with the wrong lineage, means a belief that the Jewish people will have a home of their own in Eretz Israel.

Seems to me like most Jews are happy to have “a home of their own” in the US, France, Canada, the UK, Argentina, Russia, Germany, Belgium, Australia and the rest of the world...

So its read that while he is urging a stern line be taken, its not because he wants to destroy all the Arabs. Its because compromising at that the time of the state (1923), it would hurt the Jews. He was hopeful that an agreement could worked out, but believed it would only come in the future.

What conditions did he think were necessary for that to happen? The Arabs would have to abandon their dream of expelling all the Jews from the region.

Jabotinsky was a fascist who was praised by Mussolini. He was also a racist, so I can see why you would like him.

Look at that, your supposed bogey man actually had a plan that would have achieved what Israel eventually chose to do: have a state where Jews and Arabs had equal rights. Which is what Israel has done, contrary to your unfounded claims.

No, it is not. Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are not treated equally under Israeli law.

Everything in the original Zionist plan was built around doing things by purchasing private property. They would encourage Arabs to leave, but they would not force them to do so. If someone refused to sell, they would just bypass them and leave them to their own life, unmolested.

If by “bypass them and leave them to their own life unmolested” you mean “brutally ethnically cleanse them according to Plan Dalet”, then yes, you’d be correct.

Anyway...looking forward to your next piece of apologia for ethnic cleansing and settler-colonialism...

#jews #israel

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checkmarch79-blog · 6 years ago

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California Fool’s Gold — Exploring Wilshire Vista

INTRODUCTION

Pendersleigh & Sons Cartography’s map of Wilshire Vista

Gin Wong’s 5900 Wilshire Boulevard, looming as always, in the background

Pastel homes

Spanish Colonial and Tudor revival homes, with drought tolerant, and thirsty lawns (respectively)

A typical, shady street (palms are thankfully rare in the neighborhood)

A commercial building on Pico

Pico Spaulding Shopping Center, 1987

San Vicente Gardens, 1958

Norman Revival apartment buildings

Pendersleigh & Sons Cartography‘s map of Midtown Los Angeles

A “community of respect since 1921” …as long as you’re not a truck weighing over 6,000 pounds.

A long alley behind San Vicente Boulevard

Another alley, this time behind Pico

Oddly-placed stairs in an alley

A fleeting moment of relative calm on San Vicente Boulevard

A vacant property on Pico

The ruins of an abandoned Walgreen’s

La Pico Plaza, 1966

Tires used to advertise tires…

…and tires used to grow geraniums

Eagle-eyes are required to read “Sound Cycles” on this signage

Hand-painted signage… soon to be repainted, according to a barber

Entrance to LADWP Distributing Station No. 43

Pico/Genesee Drilling Island

Don’t trespass, smoke, get cancer, or breathe

A welcoming, if apparently purely decorative, footpath and bridge

The locked, barred, and chained entrance to the educational display

West Coast Modern L.A.

Plastic bollards and purple curb extensions awaiting planters on Pico

Powerplant Cafe and, if you look closely, that scourge of urban life — a humble Bird scooter

Hand-painted, incandescent, and neon signage at Stevie’s Creole Café

A cherub — a being created by God to protect the Garden of Eden

As seen in an alley

Sign with photography from Senegalese-Angeleno Djibril Drame

FURTHER READING

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fabulesque · 7 years ago

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Hi, I'm writing a story where one of the main characters is Jewish and I was wondering, if someone is ethnically Jewish, are they considered white? I'm sorry if this is a dumb question !! I really want to write her accurately :) Have a nice day, thank you

No it’s good that you’re asking! Please don’t ever feel bad for asking questions about things you legitimately don’t know. This is a debate within the Jewish community (though then again, we’re a group that debates whether to eat latkes with applesauce or sour cream, so we’ll pretty much debate anything. Side note: applesauce is better). Also, thank you for taking steps to educate yourself on the nuances of Jewish identity! Too many authors and creators just default to antisemitic stereotypes or beliefs about Jewish people, so it’s awesome that you want to make sure you’re writing an accurate portrayal of a Jewish person.

This is gonna be long, so I’ll put the rest under a read more. Also, I’m probably giving you more discourse than you asked for, because I love writing unnecessarily long answers (it’s a Jewish thing). If, after reading this, you still have questions, please feel free to message me some more; I’d be happy to talk about Jewish identity, both related to myself and in general.

Also, anyone can reblog this.

First, let’s recognize that Judaism is an ethnoreligion (that is, both a religion and an ethnic group). People can be Jews without being ethnically Jewish, and not all ethnically Jewish people are religious, but the Jewish community encompasses both these groups and many more besides. I’m not religious, but I am ethnically Jewish, and I know there are several converts on this site who are not ethnically Jewish, and many of them are probably better versed in Jewish theology and culture than I am (case in point: @brehaaorgana).

Applying contemporary concepts of race to Jewish ethnicity is tough. Let’s take me for example. I am ethnically Jewish. My parents are Jewish, their parents are Jewish, going all the way back to a rabbi in Eastern Europe (I think present-day Poland) in the 1600s. There may be bits and pieces of other groups in me, but my primary ethnicity is Jewish, and I think of myself as Jewish.

Now, if you’ve seen my selfies (which you should because I’m hella cute), it’s obvious I have white skin. While I have Jewish features (prominent nose, dark hair, etc), my skin is white, and this means that in a lot of social situations I am perceived as white. As such, I’m in a weird in-between spot where I reap the benefits of interpersonal white privilege without necessarily accessing the systemic aspects of it. My skin color and physical features are not treated as indicators of my abilities in the way that people of color are, but I also have to deal with what I and many Jews call “goyische bullshit” (goyische is a Yiddish word and it’s an intracommunity term, but basically it means non-Jews. Not just Christians, but all non-Jews). Western society is pretty Christian-normative, and that can cause problems for non-christians, even if we’re perceived as white. Just think of all the white politicians who openly invoke Jesus in their speeches. Am I really the same race as them? I’m not inclined to think so.

So I’m in a strange in-between place. I’m not a person of color, but western definitions of whiteness almost universally have the subtext that whiteness requires christianity, or at least cultural christianity (other side note: lots of us get pissed at atheists for criticizing “abrahamic religions” when really they’re culturally christian and are projecting all the negative aspects of christianity onto Judaism and Islam). In essence, trying to categorize Jews as white or non-white is attempting to fit an old group of people into a new box. Usually I think of race as phenotypic presentation, and so I am white in that respect, but so much of western whiteness excludes me and others like me that it’s an ill-fitting label, which is why I view ethnicity as more important. I would find more community with a room full of Jewish people of color than a room of white goyim.

This does not mean that I don’t still access parts of white privilege. I am not likely to face increased rates of police violence, I do not have to worry that my name or my hair will be considered unprofessional, and I see people who generally look like me in media (though a frustratingly large number of Jewish characters or Jewish-coded characters are villains, so take from that what you will). But I don’t fully access white privilege as a result of christian hegemony.

The western world has a long history of antisemitism (for example, the SAT being created as a way to reduce the number of Jewish students getting into top universities). Neo-Nazi movements are making a resurgence, and the majority of religious-based hate crimes in the US target Jews. Furthermore, antisemitism exists on both sides of the political spectrum. For every right-winger who calls us greedy shylocks, there’s a leftist calling us Zionist colonizer scum.

But I’ve gotten off track; going back to your original question, there is one place where I do need to correct you. Not all ethnic Jews are white-presenting. Jews are a varied ethnic group, with different subcategories of us everywhere in the Diaspora. I, for example, am Ashkenazi, which means I derive my heritage from Eastern Europe. There are also Sephardic Jews, who are of North African extraction, Mizrahi Jews, who are Middle Eastern, and many other groups. The first Jewish synagogue in the Western Hemisphere was in Recife, Brazil, and as more of us emigrated to avoid the pogroms in Europe, a larger Latino-Jewish population developed. And of course, I can’t leave out Kaifeng Jews, who are Chinese. Basically, the community is diverse, but not many people outside of it are aware of this diversity.

tl;dr, ethnic Jews might present as white, but no, you shouldn’t consider us white (we don’t all have white skin, and even those of us who do don’t fully fit into the social category of whiteness and have complete unconditional access to white privilege).

@tikkunolamorgtfo might have more to say on this, but here’s my take on this question.

#jumblr #judaism #long post #original #my commentary #ethnicity #white privilege #anon #ask

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how2to18 · 6 years ago

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ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER — the famed Yiddish writer who in 1935 moved from Warsaw to New York and in 1978 received the Nobel Prize for Literature as an American-Jewish author — made his first trip to Israel in the fall of 1955, arriving just after Yom Kippur and leaving about two months later. His relationship to Israel was complicated to say the least. He had been born into a strictly religious family of rabbis and rebetzins in Poland, for whom the land of Israel was the holiest of religious symbols. But he also lived a secular life in 1920s Warsaw, witnessing Zionism overtake Jewish Enlightenment and Bundism as a viable 20th-century political force. In more personal terms, Israel was also the place to which his son, Israel Zamir, had been brought by his mother, Runya Pontsch, in 1938, growing up in part on Kibbutz Beit Alpha and later fighting in the War of Independence. Yet Singer had always avoided every kind of -ism — from Zionism to communism — and so his perspective on the young state of Israel was largely free of the ideology and dogmatism that was prevalent during the country’s early days.

During his trip, Singer published several articles per week in the Yiddish daily Forverts, recording his visit. While these articles sometimes read like touristic travelogues, they reflect Singer’s complex relation to the land of Israel, as both an idea and a place. Israel had been in Singer’s consciousness since his youngest days as a boy growing up in religious surroundings, and it made its way into his work, including some of his earliest fiction, which was published in Hebrew. When he was still living in Warsaw, Singer wrote a novella titled The Way Back (1928) about a young man full of the Zionist dream who travels to the Land of Israel and returns five years later after suffering hunger, malaria, and poverty. In 1948, just a week before the state of Israel was declared, he ended The Family Moskat with several characters leaving Warsaw and moving to pursue the Zionist dream. In 1955, just weeks before his trip, he published an episode of In My Father’s Court (1956) titled “To the Land of Israel,” about a local tinsmith who moves his family to the Holy Land, then returns disappointed to Warsaw, but then, despite everything, goes back. In his memoirs, Singer writes that he considered moving to British Mandate Palestine in the mid-1920s, and in The Certificate (1967), he fictionalizes this in a tale that ends with the protagonist instead going back to his shtetl. As late as 1938, in a letter to Runya sent from New York, he was still fantasizing about the idea: “My plan is this: as soon as I have least resources, and I hope they come together quickly, I will travel to Palestine.” But by mid-1939, these dreams seem to pass into a different view on reality: “For me, in the meantime, getting a visa to Palestine is impossible.” For Singer, it seems, Israel remained, in both the symbolic and literal sense, the road not taken.

And yet, in late 1955, Singer made his first trip to Israel, accompanied by his wife Alma, on a ship called Artsa traveling from Marseille via Naples to the port of Haifa — not as a religious child or an idealistic young man but as a middle-aged Yiddish writer who was beginning to make his name on the American literary landscape. And his journalistic assignment was to capture the trip in short articles that would give Yiddish readers across the United States a sense of what the young state of Israel was like. His son, Zamir, was in New York working as a Shomer Ha’Tsair representative, and both letters and memoirs suggest there was no question of his meeting Runya. Singer was left to his own devices — traveling throughout Israel with Alma, but writing about it as if he were there all by himself.

Singer’s peculiar perspective — with such complex personal history behind it, and such pragmatic goals before it — gives his writing from Israel its unique tone. It is always concerned with the big picture yet remains focused on the small picture. This is evident from the first moments of his trip, even while he was still on the ship. “I think about Rabbi Yehuda Halevi and the sacrifices he made to set his eyes on the Holy Land,” he writes while the ship sails from France to Italy. “I think about the first pioneers, the first builders of the New Yishuv […] How is it that there’s no trace of any of this on this ship? Are Jews no longer devoted with heart and soul to the idea of the Land of Israel?” Singer is looking for proof of the spiritual greatness that the Land of Israel represents, and he wants to see it in the people on board with him — but he soon comes to understand that Israel is not a place of imagination, it’s a place that actually exists. “No, things are not all that bad,” he writes. “The fire is there, but is hidden […] The Land of Israel has become a reality, part of everyday life.”

He begins a keen description of reality still on board the ship. Observing the younger passengers, he describes a now familiar picture: “The young men and women who sit under my window on folding lounge chairs have possibly fought in the war against the Arabs. Tomorrow they may be sent to Gaza or another strategically significant location. But at the moment they want what any other modern young people want: to have a good time.” He identifies, before even arriving on shore, the constant negotiation in Israeli society between war and freedom.

On the ship, he also identifies cultural tensions between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, religious and secular:

There’s a tiny shul here with a holy ark and a few prayer books lying around. But the only people praying there are Sephardic Jews who are traveling in third class or in the dormitories […] It will soon be Yom Kippur, but the ship’s “Chaplain” […] told me there are only three Ashkenazim who want to pray in a quorum.

Singer becomes attached to this group of Sephardi Jews from Tunisia, following them with his eyes and ears:

On Friday evening I wanted to attend prayers. It was still daytime. I went into the little shul and there I saw a kiddush cup with a little wine left inside, and a few pieces of challah laying nearby. It seemed that they had already brought in the Sabbath. The Tunisian Jews have to eat at 6 o’clock and need to pray first.

Later, he goes again, and sees a man praying in a way that moves him. “There, in that little shul, I first came upon the spirituality for which I searched. There, among those Jews, it felt like shivat tsion — the Return to Zion.” He later watches the young Tunisian Jewish women with their head coverings down on the lower deck.

I look for the commonalities between me and them. It seems to me that they, too, look at me to see what connects us. From the standpoint of our bodies, we are built as differently as two people can be […] But as far as one may be from the other, the roots are the same […] There, in Tunisia, they looked Jewish, and for this they were persecuted.

What binds Jews from different corners of the world together, it seems, is their separate but shared experience of difference, even in their native countries.

Singer reports that the mood changes in Naples, where several hundred more passengers board the ship. Now there’s also singing and yelling — the fire he was looking for. But during this part of the trip he also meets a German-Jewish couple who complain bitterly about their life in the Yishuv.

The husband said that letting the Oriental Jews in without any selection, without any inspection, had completely thrown off the moral balance of the country […] The wife went even further than the husband. She said that, no matter how much she wished, she could not stand the company of Polish and Russian Jews. She was accustomed to European (German) culture […] she could not stand the Eastern European Jews.

Singer pushes back against her snobbery. “‘You know,’ I asked her, ‘that your so-called European culture slaughtered 6 million Jews?’” And she responds: “I know everything. But…”

Before he even sets foot in Israel, Singer identifies some of the social difficulties that its citizens face. “It’s hard, very hard, to bring together and bind together a people who are as far from each other as east from west […] Holding the Modern Jew together means holding together powers that can at each moment come apart. Herein lies the problem of the Yishuv.” This observation is less a criticism than a diagnosis. No matter how much binds Jews in Israel — the roots we all share — we have to, at the same time, navigate our differences. In this, Singer acknowledges one of the greatest challenges of a Jewish state.

What seems to really strike Singer when he finally arrives in Israel is the reality that, while built on modern organizational foundations established since the mid-19th century, the country appears as if it had been constructed out of nothing. His access to this reality is, funnily enough, street signs:

Israel is a new country, there’s a mixed population, for the most part newcomers, and they need information at every step. Signs in Hebrew — and often also in English — show you everything you need to know. […] The signs don’t just offer information, they’re also full of associations. . . Every street is named for someone who played a role in Jewish history or culture. Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, Ibn Gvirol, J. L. Gordon, Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, Peretz, Bialik, Pinsker, Herzl, Frishman, Zeitlin are all part of this place’s geography. Words from the Pentateuch, from the Mishnah, from the commentaries, from the Gemara, from the Zohar, from books of the Jewish Enlightenment – are used for all kinds of commercial, industrial, and political slogans.

What Singer seems to like about this is that it makes even less sympathetic Jews have to face their connection to Jewish history and culture. “The German Jew who lives here might be, in his heart, a bit of a snob […] but his address is: Sholem Aleichem Street. And he must — ten times or a hundred times a day — repeat this very same name.” In these signs, Singer sees something that goes much deeper into the reality and paradox of Jewish identity: its apparent inescapability.

Singer quickly connects these prosaic thoughts with the very core of Jewish faith: “As it once did at Mount Sinai, Jewish culture — in the best sense of the word — has brought itself down upon the Jews of Israel and called to them: you must take me on, you can no longer ignore me, you can no longer hide me along with yourself.” In Israel, spirit and religion are not ephemeral feelings; they are viscerally present.

On his way from the port in Haifa to Tel Aviv, Singer stops at a Ma’abara, or transit camp, set up to house hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants and refugees, mainly recent arrivals from Arabic-speaking countries across North Africa and the Middle East. “It’s true that the little houses are far from comfortable,” he writes.

This is a camp of poor people, those who have not yet integrated into the Yishuv. But the place is ruled by a spirit of freedom and Jewish hopefulness. Sephardic Jews with long sidelocks walk around in turbans, linen robes, sandals, ritual fringes. There’s a little market where they sell tomatoes, pomegranates, grapes, bread, buns, cheese […] It’s true that there are no baths here or other such comforts. But the writer of these lines and our readers were also not all raised in houses with baths.

The poverty in these camps does not alienate someone like Singer, who himself grew up in poverty.

Singer recognizes both the desperation and the potential in these refugee camps:

The Jews here look both hopeful and angry. They have plenty of complaints for the leaders of Israel. But they’re busy with their own lives. Someone is thinking about them in the Jewish ministries. Their children study in Jewish schools. They are already part of the people. They will themselves soon sit in offices, speak in the Knesset.

It is as if Singer could see the long and difficult road ahead of someone like Yossi Yona — the academic scholar and Labor Party politician who was born in the Ma’abara of Kiryat Ata and now sits in the Knesset.

At every step, Singer reflects on his relationship to the reality of being in the modern Jewish state: “Moses, our great teacher, did not merit coming here. Herzl did not have the luck to see his dream realized. But I, who laid not a single finger toward building this state, walk around like I own the place.” His focus, at this early point of the trip, is mainly on the unbelievability of Jewish sovereignty. The question of its sustainability — the role of Palestinian Arabs within this project and the constant threat of war — is still to come. In the meantime, Singer basks in what he sees as the Jewishness around him: the history and culture with which he grew up, persecuted for hundreds of years in Eastern Europe, had finally risen and come to reign over an entire land and people. This unimaginable reality leads him to focus not on Israel’s relations with other people or states — its Arab population, the Palestinian refugees, the enemy nations across its borders — but rather on Israel’s national relationship to itself.

“There cannot be a Kibbutz Galuyot — an ingathering of the exiles — without the highest tolerance,” he warns.

Everyone in this place has to be accepted: the most orthodox Jews and the greatest apostates; the blonde and the dark-haired, the ingenue and the pioneeress, the Russian baryshnya, the American miss, and the French mademoiselle, the rabbinical Jewish daughters, and the wives that wear wigs with silk bands, and even the German Jewish fraulein who complains that Jews stink and that she misses the mortal danger of German culture.

This sentence is perhaps difficult to swallow today, and yet the divisions in Israeli society have only grown since Singer wrote this over 60 years ago. He could not have known the place that the Ultra-Orthodox would occupy in today’s Israel, or the great split in public opinion that would develop over territories occupied in the Six-Day War, or the strong shift to the right that the Israeli population has exhibited since the late 1970s. What he saw before him were Jews from different backgrounds, in different attire, with different beliefs and convictions, all living together in a single country. He immediately realized that, without tolerance for one another, the project would be doomed from the beginning.

It is worth scrutinizing this thought. Israeli society must deal fairly with others, but Israelis must also find a way of dealing fairly with each other. Respect for the unfamiliar begins with respect for the familiar — with the ability to see oneself in other people, and others in oneself. Where anger, destruction, and violence rule, they do so both inwardly and outwardly. If Jews cannot be good to Jews, this seems to suggest, how could they ever be good to anyone else?

In his writing on Israel, Singer also constantly contemplates religious history and personal experience. In this spirit, he writes: “Ahavat Israel, loving fellow Jews […] has a mystical significance.” Singer cannot avoid associating the place with his own religious education as a child — being a Jew in Israel also means, for him, being constantly in touch with the myriad of Jewish texts he has internalized.

Standing at the foot of Mount Gilboa, he writes:

This was where Saul fell, this was where the last act of a divine drama was played out. Not far from here the Witch of Endor, the spiritist of the past, bewitched Samuel the Prophet. I look at this very same rocky hump which was seen by the first Jewish king, who had made the first big Jewish mistake: underestimating the powers and evil of Amalek.

Looking out from the balcony of a hotel in Safed a few days later, likely at Mount Meron, he writes: “This is not a mountain for tourists, or runaway fugitives, but for Kabbalists, who made their accounting with our little world. There, through those mountains, one can cross from this world into the world to come.” He continues:

At this very mountain gazed the holy Ari [Rabbi Isaac Luria], Rabbi Chaim Vital, the Baal-Ha’Kharedim [Rabbi Elazar ben Moshe Azikri], and the author of Lekha Dodi [Rabbi Shlomo Halevi Alkabetz]. Here, in this place, an angel showed itself each night to Rabbi Joseph Karo [author of the Shulkhan Arukh] and conducted nightly conversations with him. The greatest redemption-seekers looked out from this place for the Messiah. Here, in a tent or a sukkah, deeply gentle souls dreamed about a world of peace and a humanity with one purpose: to worship God, to become absorbed in the divine spirit, in a spirit of holiness, of beauty. This is where the Ari [Rabbi Isaac Luria] composed his Sabbath poetry, which was full of divine eroticism, and which had a depth with no equal in the poetry of the world.

In visiting Mount Zion, he similarly finds himself transported to a mystical past:

I look into a cave where you can supposedly find King David’s grave. I walk on small stone steps that lead to a room where, according to Christian legend, Jesus ate his last meal. […] This is another sort of antiquity than in other places. The antiquity here smells — it seems to me — of the Temple Mount, of Torah, of scrolls, of prophecy.

And elsewhere: “On this very hill there started a spiritual experiment that continues to this very day. In this place, a people tried to lead a divine life on earth. From here there will one day shine a light to the people of the world and to our own people.” And it seems that his sense of moral choice, raised by the danger of Jordanian soldiers looking down on him from the wall above, also finds expression: “What is today a desert could tomorrow become a town, and what today is a town could tomorrow become a desert. It all depends on our actions, not on bricks, stones, or strategies.” Walking through the Valley of Hinom, the historical site of Gehenna which he finds covered in greenery, he even jokes: “If the real Gehenna looked anything like this, sinning wouldn’t be such a terrible thing.” The images and symbolism of the Bible are truly present at every step.

The land as a whole has a strong effect on Singer, but his trip to Safed, as someone raised on the Kabbalah, made an especially strong impression. “I can say that here, for the first time, I gave myself over to the sense that I was in the Land of Israel.” These are moments when Singer’s sense of criticism, doubt, heresy, intellectuality, and all the other complex impulses that find their way into his fiction, takes second place to a deep sense of piety and faith. This is no less powerful in his work, where his characters achieve it rarely or partially, and, even when they do, with great difficulty.

Singer doesn’t come to this spiritual journal easily either. In Safed, he also encounters the reality of the new state. There he meets a Jew who speaks Galician Yiddish, but who is part of generations of Safed residents. “The Arabs of the past were good to Jews,” Singer quotes the man.

They let the Jewish merchants earn a living. When you bought grapes from them, they would add an extra bunch. Another man said: everything was good until the English came. They incited the Arabs against the Jews. Another man said: Well, may there soon be peace. This is atkhalta d’geula — the beginning of the redemption.

Among the mysticism and magic of the place are politics, colonialism, and history.

Later, in Tel Aviv, Singer visits a courthouse. In the first courtroom, Singer sees “a young man from Iraq who had allegedly falsified his documents in order not to have to go to the army.” In the next courtroom, a Greek Orthodox priest is taking the stand, speaking Arabic, which is being interpreted into Hebrew:

On the bench sit several Arabs […] They are suing to get back their houses, which the state of Israel took over after the Jewish-Arab War […] Jews have taken over their homes. But now the Arabs have decided to sue for their property back. They no longer have any documents, but they are bringing witnesses to testify that the houses that they own belong to them. The old Greek priest is one of these witnesses.

In a third courtroom, Singer observes a Yemenite Jewish thief who is accused of assaulting the police, but who claims the police actually assaulted him. The young thief ends up being acquitted. Ashkenazi Jews are conspicuously absent from this entire visit to the courthouse.

Singer soon observes other forms of suffering and injustice. On the southern side of the city, it is even more evident:

Here in Jaffa you can see that there was a war in this country. Tens and possibly hundreds of houses are shot up, ruined […] The majority of Arabs fled Jaffa, and in the Arab apartments live Jews from Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia. They live in single rooms almost without furniture. They cook on portable burners. […] The situation in Israel is generally difficult, but in Jaffa everything is laid bare — all the poverty, all the difficulty.

Singer is, as that passage and most of his writing suggests, almost singularly focused on the new Jewish population of the state. The former Arab tenants of these apartment buildings remain invisible to him.

Singer is so utterly focused on the creation of the new state and the new Jewish settlers, that even when faced with the Arabic population, he barely acknowledges them. He writes, “In Beer Sheva, more than in other cities, you feel that you’re among Arabs. […] Arabs are not black but also not white. […] What sticks out to the eye most is the great amount of clothing that Arabs wear on the hottest of days. […] Rarely do you see Arab women on the street.” What is striking is the degree to which Singer sees Israel’s Arab population as an impenetrable other. He seeks no interaction with them, no attempt to understand them. He puts it plainly in another text: he just wants them to let Jews live their lives. Later, when he visits Jaffa, he writes: “As long as the Arabs leave well alone, there will be building-fever here like in Tel Aviv and in the rest of the country.” This is a difficult opinion to hear, but it has actually come to bear. Jaffa, more than 60 years later, is now going through a major revolution of gentrifying Jewish construction.

There is no doubt that Singer’s story of Israel is a Jewish story. His writing can deepen our understanding of different kinds of Jewish realities, even if, when it comes to Palestinians, his opinions are thoroughly unexamined and unconsidered. Singer can contribute, however, an interesting perspective on the need for tolerance among different kinds of Jews: Sephardic, Ashkenazi, old world and new. This is especially the case when it comes to modern Jews understanding the mindset of the old world. And it sets out a path for tolerance that can then be extended beyond Israel’s Jewish population.

“I myself want people to speak to me in Hebrew,” Singer writes in one of his earlier articles.

But as soon as anyone hears that my Hebrew sounds foreign, they start speaking to me in Yiddish, and so the result is that I mostly speak Yiddish. People here speak Yiddish at every step. […] Even Sephardim learn some Yiddish in the army. It’s also in fashion for Hebraists to throw in Yiddish words to be cute.

Over and over, Singer’s wishes and imaginings of this place bump up against the reality. Everyday life — the texture of daily reality — pushes back against the big questions that seem to always be at hand. “A good cup of coffee is rare,” Singer writes. “You can get a good black coffee, but if you like a cup of coffee with cream like in New York, you will mostly be disappointed.” He also points out that “yogurt is very popular, as is a sort of sour cream called lebenya.” And another thing: “You see balconies everywhere. People sit on their balconies, eat on their balconies, entertain guests.” He points out that there are many elegant people on the streets but that well-dressed people are a rare sight. He even spends a paragraph on trisim, the heavy shades that are meant to keep out the Mediterranean sun. No matter the history, there is always real life to negotiate.

A major part of this real life, as Singer points out, is the constant threat of war. “The enemy can attack from all sides: from north, from south, from east,” Singer writes, reflecting on his trip up to Kibbutz Beit Alpha. “But the visitor in Israel is infected with a mysterious bravery that belongs to all Jews in Israel. A kind of courage that’s difficult to explain.” On Tel Aviv, he writes: “The enemy is not far. If you in New York were as close to the enemy as we are here, you’d shiver and shake and try to run away. But in the streets where I find myself there reigns a strange quiet, a serenity having something to do with the physical and spiritual atmosphere.” In Jerusalem, he again has the same thought: “It’s hard to believe that you’re close, extremely close, to the enemy.” And on the way up to Mount Zion, he again points to the mysterious courage: “I’m no hero, but I have no fear. I’d would say that Israel is infected with bravery. In any other country, this kind of walk, next to the very border of the enemy, would arouse fear in me.” Violence is a reality that Israelis face at all times — and there is no doubt that over the decades it has affected and perhaps also infected our society, both how Israelis treat non-Jews and how we treat each other. But the fact remains that, to live here, we all need an inherent kind of bravery, toward outside threats no less than our own neighbors.

In one of his articles, in which Singer considers all the people he met during his trip, he tells the story of Benjamin Warszawiak, an old friend from Bilgoraj who moved to Israel. Benjamin found life difficult, moved for a time to South America, but eventually came back to live out his life working on a kibbutz. His story is sad, and yet Singer sees a redemptive aspect to this man’s life — that there is nowhere else but the Jewish state for him to live. “You don’t have to necessarily be an extraordinary person to have deep spiritual needs,” he reflects. “Simple people often sacrifice their personal happiness to improve their spiritual atmosphere. Israel is full of such people, and you find them especially in the kibbutzim. I can say that almost all of the kibbutzniks are in their own way idealists.”

Ultimately, Singer suggests, the paradox of Jewish life in Israel lies in the heart of the Jews who continue to make Israel their home. “Faith in this place, like the Sabbath, is somewhat automatic and instinctual too,” he writes. “The mouth denies, but the heart believes. How could people live here otherwise?”

David Stromberg is a writer, translator, and literary scholar based in Jerusalem.

The post Faith in Place: Isaac Bashevis Singer in Israel appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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