Daily Archives: August 14, 2021

How does one even begin to express ones love for a homeland that is everything? Alpha and omega. Home, journey and destination. A sandbox where you make all mistakes and in a heartbeat, everything is forgiven and forgotten. Motherland and fatherland. And must one express this love? Or is it communicated and understood without saying anything like a sons is towards a parent. But then again this is the age of expression and children today remind you of their infinite love every five minutes. This is where the poverty of ones abilities holds ones tongue. I, for one, am no Tagore whose alchemy of words would create pure gold, or who had the company and help of titans like Yeats. I can only try to talk of the visceral nature of affection that powers my heart and preoccupies every waking hour of my modest existence.

Perhaps Tagores these words would come close to what I want to say: I am here to sing thee songs. In this hall of thine I have a corner seat. In thy world I have no work to do; my useless life can only break out in tunes without a purpose. When the hour strikes for thy silent worship at the dark temple of midnight, command me, my master, to stand before thee to sing. When in the morning air the golden harp is tuned, honour me, commanding my presence.

74 is an interesting number. Just one year shy of platinum jubilee. An age quite mature in human years but rather young in the comity of nations. One number further than 73, that Dr Sheldon Cooper of Big Bang Theory fame calls the best number. Why? 73 is the 21st prime number. Its mirror, 37, is the 12th and its mirror, 21, is the product of multiplying 7 and 3.... In binary 73 is a palindrome, 1001001, which backwards is 1001001. But it is neither 73, not 75. Almost there but not quite. Stuck between being and becoming. But let us not forget that it is the mirror of 47, the year of the countrys birth.

When you look at the nature of the 74 years of our collective cognitive experience, the first word that comes to mind is survivalism. Seriously. I have not seen another country that burns so much midnight oil mulling over existential threats, both real and imagined. This could be because of the spontaneous nature of Pakistans birth, the trauma left behind by the violence that accompanied freedom, Indias constant predictions about its failure, the fall of East Pakistan or a million more trials that it has gone through. While others sing of their countrys greatness, we pray for its long life. Humility is good, and prayers useful. But when you have lived long enough you do not need to revisit and re-litigate the causational factors of your countrys birth. It is there, we inherited it and it is the only place we have ever called home. Instead of justifying it every 10 minutes, we need to concern ourselves with the task of making it better. Dreams and visions matter here. Todays aspirations for tomorrow. And actions affirming those visions.

Reflecting on the independence day and journey so far proves to be a bittersweet experience for my generation. Sweet because it is the independence day. Bitter not because of the day or the country, but for who we (my generation) are. I call us the lost generation. Not the one that was led astray, but the kind that falls through the cracks when you are not looking. Heavy traffic on streets forces cars to switch to the slower lanes, where once boxed in, it may take hours to cover a journey of minutes. This is the story of my generations life. As Faiz put it, Kahaan se aaii nigaar-e-sabaa, kidhar ko gaii, abhii charaagh-e-sar-e-rah ko kuchh khabar hii nahin, (Whence came that darling of a morning breeze, whither has it gone? The lamp beside the road has still come no lessening.)

For a lifetime how many crises have we seen? The worst earthquake of the countrys history (2005), the worst floods (2010), the worst existential challenge since 1971 (the war on terror which left around eighty thousand dead including women and innocent children), perhaps the worst climate change challenge, economic hard times, belligerent neighbours and constant erosion of opportunities. The first Afghan war, refugee crisis, Afghan civil war, Taliban, the second Afghan war, now Taliban again. Modi, Doval and their defensive offence. Only God knows how many more upheavals we have to see before we meet our maker. And what leadership did we provide? All our national leaders are in their advanced sixties. My generation has never led the country. Perhaps the next generation will. We, my dear sirs, are truly a lost generation.

Then there is the matter of memory and introduction. The countrys memory is not what it once was. In the American romantic comedy 50 first dates, when Adam Sandler learns after falling for Drew Barrymore that she suffers from anterograde amnesia and he will have to re-introduce himself to her every single day, he does not baulk. But thats why stories are just stories. It is one tough job. And it must be a South Asian thing because recently an Indian poetess Rehna Sultana wrote: Ma, ami tumar kachchey aamar porisoi diti diti biakul oya dzai (Mother, Im so tired, tired of introducing myself to you.) I know it was said in a different context. But it fits this context too. Like a glove. Doesnt it?

So, you get it. Bittersweet. But here is the thing. This countrys most emancipating gift and one can die because of the intensity of love due to this, is that it is almost a blank slate. Too much can be written. And perhaps the best that has ever been written, anywhere. A paradise on earth, a city of love, a dreamers best dream come true. We owe it to our next generation to leave a better Pakistan than the one we inherited. No political pipe dreams or delusions of grandeur. Just a beautiful, peaceful, pluralistic place one feels proud to call home. From our eastern neighbour, we are getting too much hate these days. We have seen enough hate to last a lifetime. We will only deal in love and humanity now. As the prime minister so aptly put it, we will be partners in peace, not in war.

Great nations are built on the backs of many generations that die unrecognised. It seems my country needs only one. Perhaps, that is the only way for my lost generation to be found.

Happy 74th Independence Day everyone.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 14th, 2021.

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Seventy-four - The Express Tribune

This weeks Altercation is (mainly) authored by the extremely prolific Shaul Magid, professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College, Kogod senior research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, and rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue in Seaview, New York. It draws on the research and arguments of his new book, Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical, though its contents are original to Altercation.

When people today hear the name Meir Kahane, most think about the militant and racist rabbi turned Israeli politician who founded a political party in Israel, was elected to the Knesset in 1984, and was removed in 1987 under the Racism Law legislated just for him, which made his party illegal. Many may be familiar with his policy to transfer Arabs out of Israel, his belief that Israel cant be both Jewish and democratic, and his critique of left-wing secular Israelis, calling them Hebrew speaking goyim.

Those more familiar with Israel may be aware of the ubiquitous Kahane was Right graffiti that dotted the landscape, especially after the second intifada in 2000, the emergence of a series of Israeli politicians who still view Kahane as a mentor, and the rise of small but vocal neo-Kahanist vigilante groups that terrorize Arab civilians in the name of Kahanes vision of what a Jewish state means. There are very few in Israel who are not familiar with the term Kahane or Kahanism and what that implies. His funeral in Israel in 1990 was one of the largest in the history of the country.

In contemporary America, however, things are very different. Kahane is almost a persona non grata in the American Jewish conversation, and when his name is mentioned, it is usually in regard to something in Israel. Ironically, Kahanes career began in America with the founding the Jewish Defense League in May 1968, and by early 1970 he had all but hijacked the Soviet Jewry movement through his call for civil disobedience and even violence to persuade Russia to free its Jewish dissidents. He testified before Congress about Soviet Jewry in June 1968. In March 1971, he organized a rally in D.C. for Soviet Jewry that was the largest rally ever held at the White House. He was the subject of long articles in Esquire and The New York Times Magazine, and was a feature interview in Playboy in 1972. JDL chapters sprang forth in many cities across the country, and his Soviet Jewry activism was the subject of a White House discussion between President Nixon and the Soviet ambassador. In 1971, a Look magazine poll showed that about 25 percent of American Jews had a positive view of the JDL. Kahane was not a marginal figure but a national one. It is likely that between 1968 and 1973 he was mentioned in The New York Times more often than any other rabbi in America.

So why do we know so little about Kahane in America? Jonathan Sarnas comprehensive book American Judaism does not mention him or the JDL at all. This is no oversight. There has been a marked attempt among scholars and institutional Judaism more generally to erase Kahane from American Jewish history.

Perhaps thats because Kahanes American record includes leading an organization that committed several murders. In 1985, regional offices of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee were bombed; the bombing in Santa Ana, California, killed ADC official Alex Odeh. Irv Rubin, the head of the Los Angeles branch of the JDL, publicly celebrated the killing, and eventually several JDL members were convicted of murders of other Arab Americans, while JDL members whom the FBI posted rewards for in Odehs killing remain free in Israel. Rubin died in prison awaiting trial for other violent acts. The JDL credo that set it apart from other far-right American Jewish organizations was its embrace of deadly violence.

Despite that, the ultranationalism of Kahanes worldview has seeped deep into the collective subconscious of American Jewry. We simply cannot tell the story of postwar American Jewry without Meir Kahane.

To get at what I am arguing, we must distinguish between two things: Kahanes tactics and Kahanes worldview. Kahanes tactics were very much a product of his time; the culture and race wars of the late 1960s, the radicalism of the New Left that led many young first-generation Jews to radicalize and adopt radical politics for Jewish causes after the New Left became anti-Israel after 1967. Kahanes militarism was a reflection of those years, even if his American followers proved to be a good deal more deadly than any wing of the New Left.

His worldview, however, was something different. It was an amalgam of Cold War anti-communism, an attack on American liberalism, and a systemic critique of the moderate nature of a mainstream Jewish establishment that was wary of making trouble. He challenged the regnant belief that liberalism and moderation would save the American Jewish dream. Interestingly, Kahanes early program was a diasporist one and not focused on Israel at all. An early JDL manifesto claimed the organization sought to save the American dream for Jews by instilling in its youth an assertive and activist program to fight assimilation, anti-Semitism, and intermarriage.

If we remove Kahanes militant tactics, his general worldview is alive and well.

His belief in the ubiquity of anti-Semitism in America was strongly resisted by the American Jewish establishment, and most American Jews. His belief that liberalism had no answer to intermarriage was similarly contested. He wrote a book on intermarriage in 1974, Why Be Jewish?, when few Jews were writing about intermarriage. Based on the 1972 sitcom Bridget Loves Bernie, he called American Judaism Bernism. He lamented the American bar mitzvah (all bar, no mitzvah) and offered a Judaism of the street before there was a social justice movement. When American Jews were still worried mostly about anti-Semitism on the right, he claimed anti-Semitism on the left was more threatening, and in the 1970s he argued that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism were identical at a time when few made that connection. Kahane argued against Black nationalism the way some Jews today argue against critical race theory. In the late 1960s, he argued Jews were not responsible for whatever had happened to American Blacks, at a time when many liberal Jews favored reparations. Today, Kahanes view on reparations can be heard in many quarters of the moderate Jewish world.

On these and other issues, what Kahane was saying about American Jewry in the late 1960s and 1970s is what many mainstream Jews are saying in 2020. If we remove Kahanes militant tactics, his general worldview is alive and well. He founded Camp Jedel where Jews could learn to shoot guns as Jews. Today, some American Jews proudly send their children to the IDF military Gadna program, where American Jews learn to shoot guns as Jews. In some way, what Kahane wanted was to transfer Israeli survivalism to American shores. In the 1980s, Kahane argued that a Jewish and democratic state was schizophrenic. Today, faced with a half-century occupation, some Jews are questioning whether democracy should be sacrosanct if it challenges a Jewish state.

In short, if we separate tactics from worldview, Kahane has seeped into the collective subconscious of American Jewry more than we are willing to admit. In Israel, facing up to Kahanism is easier as it is more open and thus more a part of the conversation. The attempt to erase Kahanes legacy in America makes it much more difficult to recognize and confront. Many want to see him as a persona non grata. And therein lies the danger. The neoconservatism that emerged after Kahane was gone has been partly responsible for the rightward shift in some of American Jewry. But Kahanism lurks just beneath the surface. Someone once said that even though Kahane left America, America never left Kahane. I would add that in the collective mind of much of American Jewry, Kahane lives on in many of the moderate and genteel discussions about Jewish survival today.

I see that that Rabbi/Professor Magid is also a clawhammer banjo player and a student of Ken Perlman, one of the great living banjo virtuosos and musicologists of old-time banjo as well as the musical partner of Al Jabour who was, until his death a few years ago, the curator of American folk music at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. There are a few people in this world who have too much talent to be accorded to a single person. Its just not fair. I had this thought twice in the past week, once when I was reading about Jhumpa Lahiri and again when I was reading about Viet Thanh Nguyen. Both are significant scholars as well as brilliant authors of fiction. (Of course, they are also terrific, albeit unnecessary, arguments for the value of an open immigration policy.) Ive not read Lahiris new novel, Whereabouts, originally written, infuriatingly to mere mortals, in Italian, a language she recently decided to learn, but I did read Nguyens magnificent two novels and can recommend them unreservedly. Start with The Sympathizer before moving on to The Committed.

We cant solve many of the worlds problems all by ourselves here at Altercation, but one I think we can dispose of is the sad fact that many people think Tom Jones is lame. Well, think again after you have watched Tom sing Long Time Gone with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; Raise Your Hand with Janis Joplin; Burning Down the House with the Cardigans; and, more recently, Leonard Cohens Tower of Song all by himself.

Finally, what the world needs now, no less than love sweet love, are conservatives who have a sense of honor and devote themselves to tell the truth, regardless of where it may lead. There are just a few of these left and we lost one with the passing of Yale historian (and Brooklyn College alumnus) Donald Kagan, whose four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War is one of the great scholarly achievements of the past half-century.

Excerpt from:

Altercation: The Ghost That Stalks the American Jewish Establishment - The American Prospect