Baby

I got this screenshot after the tweet itself had been deleted, for obvious reasons: the doctor hadn't really meant to argue that fabricating quotations is OK as long as one's intentions are genuine. So I don't actually know what it's referring back to. But I think it's such a precise representation of the intellectual spirit of the Trumpery, in which Anthony Scaramucci can tell us that Trump deserves special regard because he's not an ordinary liar but lies "intentionally", to troll the left. 

It was the Hebrew Immigrants Aid Society, I realize, that met up with Aleksey Yastreblyansky, may his memory be a blessing, in Galveston early in the 20th century, a couple of years after he survived the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, and suggested that he might want to call himself Alec Bloom instead, to make himself a little more digestible for American society. In family mythology in the second and third generations, we just called them "German Jews", that is representatives of an earlier wave of immigration, with a slightly resentful sense of how they didn't trust their eastern European brethren to be wholly civilized ("My zeydi spoke more languages than your zeydi!"), but it was definitely HIAS, and I'm making peace with them, with effect from right now. They were right about Yastreblyansky, how would anybody even have spelled it? And they were right 20 or 30 years ago when they began broadening the scope of their work to include distressed and abandoned and persecuted people from everywhere, of every religion, putting the Passover commandments into the most powerful possible effect. They are the best.

Sunday morning

Tree of Life Holocaust memorial at the Great Synagogue in Budapest, via.

Donald just found out about Dinesh D'Souza and his theory that Donald is basically the same as Abraham Lincoln, and he's intrigued:

Very interesting! https://t.co/ZmSA4v5fKi

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 28, 2018

Interesting! He's got that way of watching his own TV show from the real outside. He's a student of himself, but he always retains the ability to be surprised by the remarkable things he does, when an eminent critic points it out.

Dinesh is kind of like the Frederick Douglass of our time, in the sense that he's doing an amazing job and getting recognized more and more, and has understood that Lincoln is just like Trump because he owned the libs and drove them nuts.

— YasGHOUL's Farm (@Yastreblyansky) October 28, 2018

It Was Good For the Hebrew Children

Hebrew Children in the Fiery Furnace, from Robin's Great Coloring Pages.

I've been neglecting David Brooks since he came back from his recent book-generating aestivation (an aestivation or estivation is like a hibernation only in summer), for reasons akin to those cited by blogfriend Andrew Johnston; he's really not giving me enough material that I haven't already dealt with (Drew shows convincingly that you could write a really thorough review of the new book before it's even published, so that it's impossible to see why you'd want to even look at it, let alone slaving over an analysis of the text).

There's a moderately funny bit in today's column, though, a pre-election whine about Democrats failing to make a serious attempt to get his vote by offering a spiritual program ("The Materialist Party"), instead of talking about health care, health care, health care, or

“The top three issues this year are health care, health care and health care,” J.B. Poersch, of the Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC, told CNN....

Choose

Synagogue models in the collection of the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C., photo by Jared Soares/New York Times (very cool article by Noah Welland about what's really happening in American Judaism). 

Speaking of Monsignor Ross, his Sunday column ("The Jewish Crossroads") was somehow about criticizing Judaism, or Jews, which seemed like a remarkable development even though it was hedged round with the Douthatian hedge—he wasn't actually doing it, just talking about how it might be done—and something that ought to be worth my complaining about, but I couldn't understand what he was up to. Now I think I've got an idea.

Plus an opportunity to tell one of my favorite jokes, about the Jewish Robinson Crusoe. The guy is marooned on a tropical island for 30 years before he's finally rescued, and when the sailors show up he naturally shows them around the environment he's built himself, almost a little town, with a deli where he likes to have breakfast, a grocery store, a bar that serves home-brewed coconut vodka, a park, a public library, and two synagogues.

Your debutante just knows what you need

Shanghai speciality, Four Happiness braised pork, one of those idiotically simple and unbearably delicious Chinese ways of slow-cooking pork, via The Spruce.

David Brooks starts off aspirationally ("When Life Asks for Everything"):

I’d like to offer you two models of human development.

Heh. He'd like to, but unfortunately he didn't bring any with him. He's only got these Great Chain of Being hierarchies of—well, of two different things, one of which is sometimes applied to development:

The first is what you might call The Four Kinds of Happiness. The lowest kind of happiness is material pleasure, having nice food and clothing and a nice house. Then there is achievement, the pleasure we get from earned and recognized success. Third, there is generativity, the pleasure we get from giving back to others. Finally, the highest kind of happiness is moral joy, the glowing satisfaction we get when we have surrendered ourselves to some noble cause or unconditional love.

The second model is Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs. In this conception, we start out trying to satisfy our physical needs, like hunger or thirst. Once those are satisfied we move up to safety needs, economic and physical security. Once those are satisfied we can move up to belonging and love. Then when those are satisfied we can move up to self-esteem. And when that is satisfied we can move up to the pinnacle of development, self-actualization, which is experiencing autonomy and living in a way that expresses our authentic self.

The first of these is is a philosophical paradigm, fundamentally the four different kinds of satisfaction different humans aim at, as defined by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics—material gratification, money making, political action, and contemplation—with the theotropic interpretation, God-haunting at the fourth level, projected on it by centuries of Roman Catholic doctrinal development, dimmed in the fog of Brooks's suburbanity, which can imagine only kinds of happiness available to guys at a certain income level living in Montgomery or Westchester County. The second is Abraham Maslow's psychological paradigm aiming at characterizing the different kinds of need that are common to all people. It's not about how "we start out" but how the world starts out with us. A primary way in which they are completely unrelated is right there: Aristotle and successors are addressing you on what you can do for yourself ("What kinds of things can I want?") and Maslow, the therapist, is telling people how to help set goals for others ("What kinds of emotions does my child or patient need?").

Brooks thinks both hierarchies are moral scales, arranged from the lowest to the highest good, but this is completely wrong.

Cantor on the roof

The Third Temple for All Mankind, a hyper-ecumenical proposal by architect Moses V. Komsky.

All week I've been walking past a headline in the Jewish Daily Forward:

Jews Cast Wary Eye on Evangelicals

I finally took the time to look it up online, and found it's reporting a poll from the Public Religion Research Institute that

asked Jewish respondents to rate the favorability of several religious groups. Mormons received a 47% favorability rating, Muslims 41.4%; the group [jump]

Slim pickings

The Jewish Daily Forward reports a new poll finding 62% of US Jews supporting Obama, the same percentage as this time in 2008 (Obama ended up with 78% of the Jewish vote):

The reason for Democrats’ strong showing in the poll, which was released April 3, lies in deeply rooted views of American Jews on social issues, including traditional liberal stances on improving the economy and reducing the gap between rich and poor.

“Whoever wants to appeal to Jewish voters has to go through social values,” said Robert Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, the not-for-profit, nonpartisan organization that conducted the survey. “Our poll shows that you cannot appeal to these voters through the single issue of Israel.”

Also from the Forward, 81% of American Jews favor same-sex marriage (up from 76% a year ago). As I've been saying, it's just not Jewish to be conservative; it's really part of the religion.

Research suggests almost three-quarters of Jewish contributions go to non-religious causes. Jews disproportionately give to meet basic human needs like food and shelter. (Jewish World News)

As violence in Syria spills helplessly over the Turkish border, I can't help thinking about Tanzania's invasion of Idi Amin's Uganda and Vietnam's invasion of "Democratic Kampuchea", both in 1978. Do you suppose that's how this dreadful story ends as well, with the Turkish army mopping up the Assad regime? And a quieter and comfier, Sunni, dictatorship for a couple of decades? Would that be a good thing? (I know it would be better than a US invasion, but that's not saying a lot...)

No, not even slightly like this. (From Edmund Spencer's Turkey, Russia, the Black Sea, and Circassia, 1855. Wikimedia Commons.)

Wisconsin repealed their equal pay law last week, on the grounds that there's no need for it;

Repealing the law was a no-brainer for state Sen. Glenn Grothman (R), who led the effort because of his belief that pay discrimination is a myth driven by liberal women’s groups....

When [Daily Beast reporter Michelle Goldberg] ran the numbers by him, he replied, “The American Association of University Women is a pretty liberal group.” Nor, he argued, does its conclusion take into account other factors, like “goals in life. You could argue that money is more important for men.” 

A shande far de goyim (continued)

I ran across something kind of beautiful that gave me an idea how to conclude this post on my Likud Derangement Syndrome and the general Israel dilemma of the leftish JOJIA (Jew Or Jewish-Identified American). It's from a commentary on Exodus 21:1 to 24:14 as a weekly Torah portion by David Marcus of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and it goes like this: [jump]

Holy heretics

A shande far de goyim

Updated 4/8/2012

The four sons: "the wise, the wicked, the simple, and the one who doesn't know how to ask... the question" From Point of No Return.

When a Jewish or Jewish-identifying American says something harsh about the Likud party and its coalition, as happens fairly often to me,* she or he runs a risk of being attacked as anti-Semitic or a self-hating Jew, as if Binyamin Netanyahu somehow represented all of suffering Jewry and to criticize him were equivalent to accepting the Blood Libel.

To the contrary, the reason so many leftish JOJIAs get so upset about Bad Israelis like Netanyahu that they appear instead to be identifying with Palestinians is that Bad Israelis misrepresent Jewry in a way that brings shame on the race; they are a shande far de goyim, a scandal seen by the gentiles.** I think of Netanyahu as a gangster cousin whose parents should have [jump]

*I'm only patrilineally Jewish--Jewish enough, as you might say, for Hitler, not for Chabad.
 **That's far corresponding to German vor meaning "in front of", not fur corresponding to für.