RUTHFULLY YOURS

In Jules Dassin’s 1960 comedy Never on Sunday Melina Mercouri’s Piraeus demimondaine weeps at the awful denouement of “Medea,” but cheers up when the actors take their curtain call. They didn’t die after all, Mercouri exclaims, adding, “And they all went to the seashore.” Former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has written a report, Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom, on the tragic failure of democratic movements in the Middle East, Russia, and elsewhere, but with the sad bits left out. So convinced is she of democracy’s inevitable triumph that every story has a happy ending.

Iran’s regime “may for a time prevent the Iranian people from rising against their government, but it almost ensures that when they do, the landing will not be a soft one for the regime or the country.” Rice reports her “shock” when Hamas terrorists won the 2006 Palestinian elections urged by the State Department (so shocked, she says, that she called the State Department watch officer from her elliptical workout to confirm the news). She learned, she tells us, that “armed groups should not participate in the electoral process.” The remedy lies in “nurturing a diverse set of institutions…empowering entrepreneurs and businessmen, educating and empowering women, and encouraging social entrepreneurs and local civic organizations.” She praises former Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who told her that the P.A.’s security services were “a bunch of gangsters,” but does not bother to mention that Fayyad was fired in 2013 after he failed to make a dent in the P.A.’s kleptocracy.

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Of Hosni Mubarak’s fall and the Egyptian military’s return to power she declares that “the Egyptian people were calling for [Mubarak’s] immediate ouster” in February 2011. By the people, she means the fraction of Egypt’s population that fit into Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Then the Muslim Brotherhood “won an impressive victory in peaceful elections.” Unfortunately, the Brotherhood’s president, Mohamed Morsi, had an “Islamic and autocratic tilt” and “was blamed, whether fairly or not, for attacks on religious minorities.” In July 2013 the military overthrew him, after “violent protests swept the country, with millions of Morsi supporters and millions of his critics facing off.”

This involves an improper use of the plural. The Cairo-based International Development Center’s report on the demonstrations counted fewer than one million pro-Morsi and 30 million anti-Morsi demonstrators in July 2013—a majority of Egypt’s total adult population. Never before or after did the “Egyptian people” proclaim their views with such unanimity. To Rice, the “Egyptian people” were present to topple Mubarak but not to expel Morsi. It happens that Egypt had less than a month’s supply of wheat on hand when General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi took the country back from the Muslim Brotherhood with the manifest support of a supermajority of Egyptians. Mass popular support for a return to military rule does not fit Rice’s narrative, so she simply leaves out the unpleasant facts.

In time for Thanksgiving 2018, Michelle Obama’s memoir is due for release. The book, which should be entitled Enjoying a Bigger Piece of Your Pie, will instead be titled Becoming.

According to the former FLOTUS, the “highly anticipated” tome details what Michelle O calls a “deeply personal experience.” And well it should, because she and her world-renowned author husband reached a hefty $65-million two-book deal with Penguin Random House – a formidable amount of wealth that neither Shelly nor Barry is likely to be spreading around anytime soon.

Due to be published in 24 languages, rumor has it that Michelle’s book will have global appeal, which most certainly puts Becoming in the literature category of contenders for the next Nobel Peace Prize.

Speaking of Nobel Peace Prizes, husband Barack, whose half of the book deal is due out in 2019, will take Becoming on an international book tour, where he’ll use his wife’s book as an excuse to promote himself as the ultimate source of all wisdom and truth.

Just for the record, this is not Mrs. Obama’s first crack at authorship. When the former first lady took up organic gardening on 1,500 square feet of White House lawn, that agricultural exploit resulted in a book titled American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen and Gardens Across America.

In a statement from the CEO of Penguin Random House, Markus Dohle, this new book “will stretch the confines of a traditional former first-lady memoir the same way Obama’s official portrait for the Smithsonian did.” About the anticipated bestseller, Dohle elaborated, “‘Becoming’ is an unusually intimate reckoning from a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations – and whose story inspires us to do the same.”

Recently, it was Mrs. Obama who observed that in the movie Black Panther, “young people … finally [got to] see superheroes that look like them on the big screen.” Therefore, if all goes according to plan, the cover jacket portrait of Becoming will accomplish a similar end.

A review of his searching new collection of essays, Leading a Worthy Life

Our present age has been marked by various forms of collectivism. People follow trends. They rarely think or ask questions. The idea of examining one’s life has become foreign, even old-fashioned, and yet the question of what it means to live a worthy and virtuous life persists, despite social pressures to live this or that “lifestyle,” as opposed to an authentic life. That question, seemingly simple, is what drives Leon Kass in his new book, Leading a Worthy Life: Finding Meaning in Modern Times.

Kass, a philosopher and bioethicist, has devoted his life to asking what it means to be human. In this collection of essays, he explores that question in detail. Most of the essays in the book were previously published in a similar form in various magazines, although they have been updated here.

These are not just simple musings by a philosopher. Kass lives what he philosophizes. I saw that when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago and attended a seminar that he taught on the Book of Exodus. U of C, as we call it, is all about the “life of the mind.” The approach to learning and arguing there is incredibly rigorous. It was there that I learned how to think critically, how to construct an argument, and especially how to take responsibility for that argument.

That was certainly true of Kass’s seminar. But it wasn’t just that. He is a superb teacher who treats every one of his students with the utmost dignity and respect. He challenged us and yet also encouraged us to be independent thinkers, skeptical of superficial and final pronouncements, and, more than anything else, to free ourselves from the shackles of ideology. In the chapter titled “The Aims of Liberal Education,” he writes that “thinking — all thinking — seeks to liberate us from slavish adherence to an unexamined opinion and an unreasonable trust in our own perceptions and experiences.”

Being the true philosopher and teacher that he is, Kass offers no final answers, which are impossible anyway. To be sure, he makes value judgments, and he challenges groupthink. But the book reveals a man with an open mind that lives in concert with an open heart, always learning, seeking wisdom, and striving to be a good human being in every sphere of his life. What binds the essays together is the author’s rightful insistence to remind us of the dignity inherent in every human being. Knowing and recognizing that dignity — in other words, refusing to engage in the dehumanization of another — should always be a starting point for both contemplation and action.

The dictator was not ‘demonic’, as biographer Stephen Kotin would have it, but pathological, psychopathic, paranoid, criminal and perverse. That is one of a few small quibbles with an author whose magisterial, three-volume work will deservedly be recognised as the gold standard.

Putting Simon Sebag Montefiore’s popular work on Stalin into the shade, Stephen Kotkin’s projected three-volume biography will run to well over 3000 pages, all rooted in primary Russian archival sources and a vast array of Russian-language research publications. Birkelund Professor in History at Princeton University, Kotkin is also the author of the highly influential Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. You read that correctly. The just-published second volume of his Stalin biography is 1154 pages long and covers the period from 1929 to 1941 (collectivisation of agriculture, the Terror, the Nazi–Soviet Pact). The dominant point of view, given largely but not solely via documents flowing in and out of Stalin’s office (the “Little Corner” in the Kremlin), is from his desk: his appointment books, the notes and transcripts of meetings and conversations in there, his speeches, writings, annotations, just about everything that was his or was close to him. This is an interiorised biography, with the ideological motivations and personal complexities seen from inside-out. If being inside Stalin, day in, day out, puts you off, avoid this work.

With so many pages at his disposal, Kotkin can cover the entirety of Stalin’s private and public world, including his powerful influence on art, literature, music and cinema—some of the most interesting sections in this volume are on these subjects. Rather than attempt a comprehensive distillation of the book, which for most of its length is familiarly and compellingly dark, it’s more interesting to focus on surprising and out-of-the-way revelations, and to consider some questions Kotkin leaves up in the air, particularly in relation the Great Terror of 1937-38.

This mammoth work in many ways complicates our view of Stalin, which is good, because human nature is complex, and he was not demonic. Nothing diminishes the murderous nature of his regime, with which we’re adequately familiar. Stalin admired everything about Ivan the Terrible (in many ways his preferred historical model), vastly outdoing him in terror and death-dealing. Whether a Trotsky, a post-dated Lenin, a Bukharin or a Voroshilov could have held the country together through the Great Patriotic War, overseeing the creation of armies and marshals to crush the myriad divisions of Grossdeutschland and its capital into dust … Conceivably not.

In 1932 Stalin adopted “socialist realism” as the plastic-arts and literary aesthetic of the USSR, an ideological widening, and Kotkin reveals the process. As a prelude, Stalin disbanded the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. This was around the time Maxim Gorky returned permanently from his preferred residence in Fascist Italy. The self-styled “proletarians” were mutually hostile zealots fixated on “the correct line”, excoriating one another for the slightest imagined deviation, and mostly under-achievers (Demyan Bedny was typical). In contrast, many non-party writers, like Mikhail Bulgakov, were publishing brilliant work. So Stalin set up a new Union of Soviet Writers, open to non-party as well as party members, and the other arts were supposed to be organised similarly. Stalin wanted Gorky, denounced by the “proletarians” as “a man without class consciousness”, to head the new union.

No man did more to shape the judicial landscape of America than John Marshall, who led the Supreme Court for more than three decades and hand-crafted scores of decisions that affect us still today. When he was appointed chief justice in 1801, the court was an orphan branch of government with little authority, holding its sessions in spare committee rooms and boarding houses. Marshall’s tenure would transform it.

In “Without Precedent,” Joel Richard Paul, a professor at the University of California’s Hastings Law School in San Francisco, has crafted a scholarly but highly readable and often entertaining chronicle that embeds Marshall among the leading lights of the nation’s founding generation, humanizing him along the way.

Marshall’s modest origins hardly hinted at the illustrious career that was in store. Born in 1755, the future chief justice grew up on what was then the Virginia frontier, the eldest of 15 children who lived packed into a two-room log cabin. His father worked as a farmer and surveyor. In contrast to the tutored sons of Virginia’s elite, young John was largely self-taught. He received only a single year of formal education and later six weeks of training in the law under the eminent legal teacher George Wythe.

As a rifleman during the Revolutionary War, Marshall endured the horrific winter at Valley Forge, where he came to know George Washington. Washington sensed Marshall’s natural intellect and appointed him a military judge advocate. After the war, Marshall established a law practice in Richmond and was elected to the Virginia legislature, where he soon became the star of its Federalist minority.

Wallis Simpson is buried on the grounds of Windsor Castle in England, next to Edward VIII, the king who abdicated the throne to be with her.

But their seemingly towering romance—he threw it all away for her!—crumbles in the hands of biographer Andrew Morton. “She lies next to a man she came to despise,” he writes, “buried in a land owned by a family she hated and in a country she loathed.”
‘Wallis in Love’ is scheduled for release on Tuesday.

Mr. Morton’s book out on Tuesday, “Wallis in Love: The Untold Life of the Duchess of Windsor, the Woman Who Changed the Monarchy,” upends accepted wisdom about this couple, describing a relationship based on mutual exploitation. Mrs. Simpson pursues Edward in hopes of becoming queen, not realizing the havoc her two divorces will wreak on her quest. Edward dreads becoming king and finds a solution in his adoration of this American woman, whose past disqualifies him from the royal job.

Two days before their wedding in 1937, Mr. Morton writes, Mrs. Simpson met with the man she really loved, Herman Livingston Rogers. Mr. Morton describes her seemingly offer to have Rogers’s baby and pass it off as Edward’s. His evidence for this claim is based on brief notes about the matter by Mrs. Simpson’s onetime ghostwriter, Cleveland Amory.

“It was a story of bitterness, disappointment and ultimately failure,” Mr. Morton said during an interview from Pasadena, Calif., where he lives when he isn’t in London.

Mr. Morton argues that the king’s 1936 abdication was, in the end, a one-sided decision. Edward’s marriage to Mrs. Simpson was forbidden due to her two divorces and living ex-husbands, but his abandonment of the throne to be with her was far from a given.

“The man who ostensibly loved her was making decisions about her future without any kind of sensible conversation,” Mr. Morton said in the interview. Not long after the abdication, Edward is described singing in a bathtub. Mrs. Simpson, however, is portrayed getting snubbed by British and American elites and exiled to a semi-royal life.

For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been’.by John Greenleaf Whittier .

Many years ago, I was at a gun show in Connecticut with my husband who collected modern handguns. I was bored and hot and annoyed when my husband spotted a hand stitched pillow in one of the booths which read “Jew Learn to Shoot!” Impelled by the famous quote of my idol Zeev Jabotinsky, I went to speak to the owner. He explained that his father, a passionate Zionist taught him to shoot as a young boy, something that he used to good advantage as a sharp-shooter in the United States Army during world war 2. We engaged in a long discussion about the trapped Jews of Europe who could not defend themselves The subject still haunts me especially as I read:

Racing Against History: The 1940 Campaign for a Jewish Army to Fight Hitler by Rick Richman

The following are reviews of this wonderful book by David Isaac and Richard Baehr, and a column on “Ritchie’s Boys “and the book by Matti Friedman. Please read them and by all means read the book.

David Isaac

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/racing-against-history-the-1940-campaign-for-a-jewish-army-to-fight-hitler-by-rick-richman-reviewed-by-david-isaac.html

Why wasn’t there a Jewish army in World War II to fight the Nazis? No group had more motivation to do so. Well, it’s not that they didn’t want one. Rick Richman’s Racing Against History skillfully recounts the efforts by three major Zionist leaders to raise a Jewish army in America to fight Hitler. Chaim Weizmann, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and David Ben-Gurion, representing the center, right, and left of the political spectrum, came to the United States on separate missions with the same goal in 1940.

Ritchie’s Boys and the Men from Zion By Matti Friedman

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2018/02/01/ritchies-boys-and-the-men-from-zion-by-matti-friedman/

https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/

A second new book, Rick Richman’s Racing Against History, examines a more radical option—Zionism—by describing three visits by Zionist leaders to the United States in the desperate year of 1940. Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, and Vladimir Jabotinsky stepped off ocean liners in New York that year, hoping to sound an alarm about the fate of Jews in Europe and to encourage the creation of a Jewish force to fight in the war. This was tricky, because the United States was still neutral, and American Jews weren’t sure how much they could help without endangering their own fragile position at home. Arriving separately and often at odds with each other, the three Zionist politicians addressed rallies, met important people, gave interviews, and wrote down their impressions, leaving material that Richman ably mines for this concise and illuminating account.

The Ritchie Boys practice their German-language prisoner interrogation skills on mock prisoners at Camp Ritchie. (Courtesy of NARA.)

Of the three leaders in Racing Against History, Weizmann was the most careful in his public utterances. He grasped the danger of the perception that world war was being waged for Jewish interests and preferred the quiet maneuver. He privately lobbied Chamberlain, the British prime minister, to accept “Jewish manpower, technical ability, resources” and was politely turned down. He privately lobbied for 20,000 permits to Palestine for Jewish children from Poland and was politely turned down. In America, he wrote, even mentioning what was happening to Jews in Europe might be “associated with warmongering.” American attitudes, he found, had “no relation to the grim realities which today face humanity at large and the Jews in particular.”

American Jewish thinkers of the time, Richman reminds us, included rabbis such as David Philipson of Cincinnati, who regarded the Jews as a universal people and the Land of Israel as “an outgrown phase of Jewish historical experience.” In an autobiography, the rabbi wrote: “Every land is the homeland for its Jews—the United States for me, as England for my English Jewish brother, France for my French Jewish brother, and so in every country.” Those lines, Richman notes, were published in 1941, with Europe under Nazi occupation.

In this volume, the sharpest contrast to Weizmann’s style is offered by Jabotinsky, who was outspoken about his impatience:

The old fallacy, the curse of our past, has been revived: that there is no Jewish problem; that all our troubles can be cured en passant by general measures of progress, and there is no need to worry about any special remedies. The allied victory will ensure democracy and equality . . . and that will be enough for the Jews.

Jabotinsky wanted a Jewish army raised immediately and said so, even though the mainstream American Jewish leadership called him a “militarist” and published a pamphlet warning against his views. In the pages of the Forward, editor Abraham Cahan mocked him as a “naïve person and a great fantasizer.” There was no need for Jabotinsky’s Jewish army, Cahan thought, and the Jewish problem would be solved not by a Jewish state but by an allied victory and democracy: If “true democracy exists, there is no place for anti-Semitism.” In other words, the way forward was to be American citizens and soldiers, like the Ritchie Boys.

Recent events in Europe and America would seem to suggest that anti-Semitism does, in fact, have a place in democracy; the English-language descendant of Cahan’s own Forward, for example, recently printed a bizarre op-ed by a Jewish supporter of an anti-Jewish boycott expressing sympathy for some of the views of an American neo-Nazi. The old idea of “Jewish warmongering,” about which Weizmann was so careful in 1940, is still current, as evidenced by the flap in September over a tweet by Valerie Plame, the former CIA agent, suggesting just that. And though the Zionist plan succeeded and there is a Jewish army, the normalization of the Jews has failed to materialize and their existential fears continue. Both the Ritchie Boys and the three Zionist leaders profiled in these books might be surprised how much the questions of their times remain unresolved 70 years later.

1940: American Inaction and the Tragedy of European Jewry By Richard Baehr

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/01/1940_american_inaction_and_the_tragedy_of_european_jewry.html

1940: American Inaction and the Tragedy of European Jewry By Richard Baehr

During 1940, three of the most significant Zionist leaders in the world – Chaim Weizmann, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and David Ben Gurion , all visited the United States , hoping to gain a measure of American Jewish support or US government support for the creation of a Jewish army to help fight the Nazis. Rick Richman’s new book, Racing Against History, provides an interesting and very carefully researched history of these visits, the leaders’ goals, what they accomplished, and what prevented greater success. Richman’s book is a fascinating look at a moment in time, different seemingly from our own, but with some of the same issues.

Many fewer people are aware today of Jabotinsky than of Weizmann or Ben Gurion. Richman provides an illuminating portrait of this exceptional Jewish leader and his work, which will serve as an introduction for many. Nearly 40 years after Jabotinsky’s death, Menachem Begin became the first Israeli Prime Minister whose politics were rooted in his vision.

In World War 1, the British had allowed the creation of a Jewish legion, 15,000 strong, that had fought on their side in various places, with Jabotinsky having a leadership military role. Weizmann, a highly respected British chemist with many British government contacts, parlayed the Jewish help for Britain in the war to gain support for creation of a Jewish homeland in historic Palestine, laid out in the Balfour Declaration, and eventually leading to the British mandate for Palestine between the wars.