RUTHFULLY YOURS

When young John Freely asked his mother if they belonged to the working class, she answered, “We would indeed be of the working class if your father could find steady work.” Mr. Freely was born in 1926, the son of two Irish immigrants struggling to gain a toehold in Brooklyn. By the onset of the Great Depression, his father had failed as a trolley-driver and longshoreman. His mother kept the family from starvation with overnight work as a Rockefeller Center cleaning woman, but endured many humiliating evictions until his father finally caught steady work as a gravedigger in Brooklyn’s Evergreen Cemetery.

On two separate occasions in the early 1930s, Mr. Freely’s mother took him and his younger sister back to Ireland to live with her people on the Dingle Peninsula. The young boy imbibed the Celtic lore of his grandfather in the primitive and poverty-stricken landscape that gained wide fame in the Great Blasket memoirs of Maurice O’Sullivan, Peig Sayers and Tómas O’Crohan. “The House of Memory,” the nonagenarian author’s account of the first quarter of his life, might be considered his contribution to the canon of the impoverished Irish, though life would soon carry him far from his upbringing.

When young John Freely asked his mother if they belonged to the working class, she answered, “We would indeed be of the working class if your father could find steady work.” Mr. Freely was born in 1926, the son of two Irish immigrants struggling to gain a toehold in Brooklyn. By the onset of the Great Depression, his father had failed as a trolley-driver and longshoreman. His mother kept the family from starvation with overnight work as a Rockefeller Center cleaning woman, but endured many humiliating evictions until his father finally caught steady work as a gravedigger in Brooklyn’s Evergreen Cemetery.

On two separate occasions in the early 1930s, Mr. Freely’s mother took him and his younger sister back to Ireland to live with her people on the Dingle Peninsula. The young boy imbibed the Celtic lore of his grandfather in the primitive and poverty-stricken landscape that gained wide fame in the Great Blasket memoirs of Maurice O’Sullivan, Peig Sayers and Tómas O’Crohan. “The House of Memory,” the nonagenarian author’s account of the first quarter of his life, might be considered his contribution to the canon of the impoverished Irish, though life would soon carry him far from his upbringing.

A polymath educated on the G.I Bill, Mr. Freely would earn a Ph. D. in physics and spend his academic career teaching at Istanbul’s Bosphorus University, somehow finding the time to write more than 60 books on topics that include Turkey, Greece and the history of science. He first acquired the rudiments of an education at Fourteen Holy Martyrs School and Brooklyn Tech, but it was outside of class that he developed his especial fondness for Homer; young Mr. Freely dreamed of sailing the world in the wake of Odysseus. Soon he would: The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor pushed the United States into the war, though not until the middle of 1944 was Mr. Freely old enough to join the Navy. Mr. Freely volunteered and was placed in “Amphibious Roger Three,” a Navy unit (considered one of the precursors of the Navy’s modern SEAL teams) that was being sent to China to train elite forces in the armies of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

“Muslims have helped us to be more American, to be better Americans,” writes Loyola Marymount University theology professor Amir Hussain in his new book Muslims and the Making of America. Yet his volume offers little support for this multicultural, politically correct thesis.

“There has never been an America without Muslims,” Hussain states while noting Muslims among America’s African slaves both before and after the United States’ founding. Historians estimate their numbers at between ten and 20 percent of all slaves brought in bondage to America. He analyzes the subsequent “impact of Islamic practices on African American worship and music,” although, as other studies have noted, slave-master repression ultimately extinguished Islamic belief among American slaves.

Similarly examining the American founding, Hussain also concludes that Founding Father Thomas Jefferson’s “owning a copy of the Qur’an and reading it is crucial to my argument that Islam is part of the history of America.” He “began learning Arabic in the 1770s, after he purchased a translation of the Qur’an in 1765,” namely the 1734 English translation of the Quranic Arabic by English Orientalist George Sale. “It was this Qur’an that Keith Ellison used when he was sworn in as the first Muslim member of Congress in 2007,” Hussain enthuses.

“To be clear, Jefferson was no fan of Islam,” Hussain writes, and Sale’s Quran offers reasons why. Sale’s introductory essay describes Islam as “so manifest a forgery” that has motivated “calamities brought on so many nations by the conquests of the Arabians.” Hussain also notes President Jefferson’s campaigns against North Africa’s Muslim Barbary pirates; thus the “founding of the modern American Navy is connected to the Muslim world.”

The worlds of entertainment and sports loom large in Hussain’s assessment of Islam in America. Therefore he dedicates his book to Ahmet Ertegun “and to Muhammad Ali, perhaps the two American Muslims with the greatest global influence.” While Ali dominated the boxing ring, Ertegun was “president and cofounder of Atlantic Records and the chairman of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a man who shaped the music of the twentieth century.”

A strange Muslim role model, Ertegun’s biographies say almost nothing about piety, but note his elite background as a diplomat’s son who came to America when his father was Turkey’s ambassador. Using a truly broad definition of “Muslim,” Hussain concedes that Ertegun “wasn’t a ‘good’ Muslim. He lived the high life, was a bon vivant, drank, partied to excess, and had numerous affairs.” Ertegun himself noted in a 2005 interview that he “used to drink a bottle of vodka a day, every day, for about 40 years.”

“I am Daniel Deronda.” https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2017/03/for-george-eliot-to-appreciate-the-jews-was-to-save-england/

With these words, Colonel Albert Edward Goldsmid, formerly of the Royal Munster Fusiliers, presented himself to Theodor Herzl in 1895 when the latter, who was soon to found the World Zionist Organization, made his first trip to England in search of supporters. There was some truth to what Goldsmid said. Like the eponymous hero of George Eliot’s 1876 novel, Goldsmid grew up as an Englishman, unaware of his Jewish origins, but ultimately returned to his people and became an early lover of Zion.

Goldsmid’s story, however, was much simpler than Deronda’s. The son of baptized Jews, he was a young officer serving in India when he first learned the truth about his background and reverted to Judaism—much as, in recent years, some Portuguese descendants of conversos have rejoined the Jewish people after uncovering their family history. By contrast, the coincidence-strewn path that leads Daniel Deronda, the ward of an English aristocrat, to the happy discovery that he is a Jew unwinds over hundreds of pages.

It all begins with Deronda’s rescue of a young waif named Mirah Cohen, who is about to drown herself. His efforts to assist Mirah in locating her long-lost mother and brother lead him to London’s Jewish East End, where he makes the acquaintance of a certain Mordecai, who is actually, as Deronda eventually learns, none other than Mirah’s brother, Ezra Mordecai Cohen.

And who or what is Mordecai to Deronda? Consumptive, not far from death, he is a Jew who clings to a vision of his people’s restoration to the Holy Land. This vision he struggles to transmit to Deronda, of whose own Jewishness Mordecai is almost completely convinced despite the latter’s honest but ignorant demurrals. Still, before he has any inkling of his own true identity, Daniel does figure out the two siblings’ relationship and succeeds in reuniting them. In the course of doing so, he falls in love with Mirah.

Not long afterward, the unrelated intervention of a friend of Daniel’s grandfather induces the Jewish mother whom Daniel has never met to summon him to Genoa, where she explains the lengths to which she has gone to spare him the burden of Jewishness. To her dismay, but not to the reader’s surprise, Daniel proclaims himself glad and proud to learn that he was born a Jew.

Upon returning to England, Daniel shares the good news with his new Jewish friends. Mordecai dies shortly afterward, content that he has breathed his soul into Daniel, and the novel ends with the newlywed Daniel and Mirah heading east together to fulfill Mordecai’s Zionist dreams. As the novel is set during the time in which Eliot was writing it, Daniel and Mirah would have moved to the land of Israel roughly two decades before Herzl would come to write The Jewish State.

So this,in a nutshell, is the story of Daniel Deronda. But it is by no means all there is to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, an 800-page novel of which the tale of Daniel’s Jewish and Zionist initiation constitutes but a part. Indeed, in the eyes of one prominent 20th-century literary critic, the Jewish component of the book was wholly dispensable. The illustrious Cambridge professor F.R. Leavis dreamed of “freeing by simple surgery the living part of [this] immense Victorian novel from the dead weight of utterly different [that is, Jewish] matter that George Eliot thought fit to make it carry.”

And what was that “living part”? Specifically, Leavis proposed to sever, from the story I’ve just summarized, the “compellingly imagined human truth of Gwendolen Harleth’s case-history” and make it into the core of a presumably renamed novel. But who or what is Gwendolen Harleth to Daniel Deronda? A vivacious, alluring young woman suddenly reduced from a coddled existence to one of “poverty and humiliating dependence,” Gwendolen has been maneuvering to claw her way out through a marriage of convenience to a wealthy aristocrat she knows is unworthy of her. Her life intersects with that of Deronda already in the novel’s first pages, but they do not converse with each other until halfway through. As Gwendolen’s wretched marriage becomes more and more excruciating, Deronda becomes at first her moral adviser and then the object of her strongest affections. But not even the fortuitous death of her husband can bring him within her reach.

Apparently unimpressed by Gwendolen’s sad story, the book’s first Hebrew translator, David Frischman, made it his business, as Gertrude Himmelfarb has observed, to perform Leavis’s surgery “in reverse” by publishing a Hebrew edition “without the Gwendolen distraction.” Indeed, many appreciative readers of Daniel Deronda, even if they have never entertained the thought of operating on it, have found themselves wondering about the relationship between its two rather disparate parts.

Imagine if a business did not have to worry about convincing paying customers to choose its product and could stick non-customers with the bill. Bureaucracies like the Postal Service, Amtrak and the Department of Veteran Affairs have that luxury. But imagine further that the enterprise could force its services on users whether they like it or not. Law enforcement is one of the few American entities that enjoys this privilege. The U.S. now has twice as many prosecutors as it did in the 1970s—and each one now sends more than twice as many people to prison as he or she did in that period.

In the extremely important book, “Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform,” John F. Pfaff analyzes why America incarcerates more people than ever even as crime rates continue to fall. State and federal prisons jailed 200,000 Americans in the early 1970s; today they hold more than 1.5 million people. Another 700,000 are locked up in local jails. The U.S. now has higher incarceration rates than Russia or Cuba.

Product Details

Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration—and How to Achieve Real Reform
Feb 7, 2017
by John Pfaff

Mr. Pfaff, a Fordham law professor and economist, argues that the American criminal justice system defines too many offenses as deserving of jail time and that prisons often act as a revolving door. He likens incarceration to radiation treatment: Yes, it targets the disease, but it also causes a tremendous amount of collateral damage.

A 2012 Pew Survey found that 69% of Americans oppose the fact that our government jails nearly 1 out of every 100 citizens—and to read “Locked In” it’s no wonder that number is so high. For starters, although there have long been claims that higher incarceration rates are tied to the decrease in crime, Mr. Pfaff cites multiple studies showing that, at best, the effect is minuscule. Criminals who commit crimes of passion do not really weigh the prospect of having to serve time. Most criminals tend to get less violent with age, so overlong prison sentences have little effect on safety.

Incarceration for what most people consider non-crimes can have unintended consequences. When the U.S. Justice Department investigated the police in Ferguson, Mo., following the shooting death of Michael Brown by an officer in August 2014, they discovered that the city’s cops routinely threatened to jail citizens for charges as insubstantial as having an overgrown lawn. Law enforcement was used as a means of increasing revenue for city coffers through ticketing and forfeitures. The result was a severely strained relationship between the public and the police that was primed to explode. CONTINUE AT SITE

I am currently reading Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World by Katherine Zoepf. One chapter discusses the use of the veil or the hijab and it is a most telling revelation about the astonishing differences of thinking in the traditional Islamic society as contrasted with Western thought. Zoepf recounts this encounter with a Muslim woman who proudly explains why she wears the hijab.

What if a man sees you girls walking in the street with your hair uncovered and becomes so aroused that he goes and abuses a child?

Wouldn’t you feel that it was your fault that this child was raped? I know that I could never live with myself if something like that happened. That is why I wear the hijab.

Although only two or three years younger than Zoepf, this Muslim woman named Asma is light years removed from the idea that “blaming an unveiled woman for the actions of a child molester [is] outrageous [and] to argue otherwise [is] to suggest that men [aren’t] responsible for themselves.”

Zoepf quotes Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist who has explained that the traditional Islamic society “hardly acknowledge[s] the individual, whom it abhor[s] as a disturber of the collective harmony.” Consequently, traditional society “produce[s] Muslims who [are] literally ‘submissive’ to the will of the group.”

If seen in a positive light, this group cohesion creates a strong community bond where all Muslims are guardians of the others in the group. Thus, “if someone slipped, then the guilt would be shared.” Consequently, less important are the rights of the individual compared with the “rights of the community.” This sense of group identity is certainly a common thread among tightly knit communities of many different religious organizations.

On the other hand, this misogyny “disproportionately” burdens female members. Thus, females who grow up under this constant scrutiny “face a particularly difficult path, since the mere fact of their being in the public eye is often enough to raise suspicions about their modesty.”

Herein lies a fundamental and clear-cut difference between a society based on individual responsibility for one’s actions and one based on group conformity wrapped around a guilt-induced rationale. At no time does a man’s accountability for assault enter this mindset. According to this point of view, the woman deliberately put herself in a position to be victimized and the community did nothing to stop the woman’s actions. This, is why Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, Australia’s most senior Muslim cleric can assert, without irony, that an unveiled woman is asking to be raped since she is “like uncovered meat who attract sexual predators.” Moreover, al Hilali “suggested that a group of Muslim men recently jailed for many years for gang rapes were not entirely to blame” since there were women who “sway suggestively” and “wore make-up and immodest dress.” He went on to say that if the woman “was in her room, in her home, in her hijab (veil), no problem would have occurred.” Thus, the problem of rape lies entirely with the women victims.