Harold Pinter (October 10, 1930)

Pinter, an English playwright and Nobel laureate, had Jewish parents, but like many English Jews, did not retain a public Jewish identity. According to Jewish Virtual Library, Joshua Cohen of Forward said, “Pinter is too much of a Modern to define himself as a Jew,” and that he “has downplayed his Judaism many times in conversation, and has consciously ignored it in his characterizations.” In what I see as an excess of pride, some Jewish critics have tried to assign Jewish sensibilities or motives to Pinter's writings. I am not convinced.

Pinter, sad to say, was not the only successful English Jewish intellectual to attack Israel and to assume as his own the left-wing attacks on Zionism and the defense of all Palestinians no matter what they did. I can only think about the caricature of this type of person in Howard Jacobson's book The Finkler Question.

Howard Jacobson (August 25, 1942)

Howard Jacobson won the 2010 Booker Prize for The Finkler Question. I thought it was a very enjoyable and powerful book, exploring the way that English Jews (and by extension others) create self-hatred. The most extreme of these do so by joining the haters of Israel. The novel is a satire, and one of the most satirically enlightening characters is a non-Jew who wants to be a Jew, not for the religion but for the most superficial cultural aspects.

Various Jewish points of view are illustrated -- with several degrees of irony -- by various characters. However, the characters are fully realized, not just tokens of each intellectual or personality type. I especially remember one question, asked by an elderly character who had a firm secular Jewish identity and did not hate himself. He asked whether the anti-Israel Jew thought that the deaths of his family in the Holocaust were justified retroactively by the acts of Israelis that the self-hater was deploring.

I haven't read any of Jacobson's other books, but they are on my list.

Sailing to Gaza

Howard Jacobson has written a really penetrating explanation about what's wrong with the Gaza Flotilla -- even though the participants claim "good intentions." On CNN: "Why Alice Walker Shouldn't Sail to Gaza."

Best quote:

"Even before the deed, Alice Walker has her language of outraged moral purity prepared -- 'but if they insist on attacking us, wounding us, even murdering us...' The Israeli response is thus already an act of unprovoked murder, no matter that the flotilla is by its very essence a provocation. Whatever its cargo, by luring the Israeli military into action which can be represented as brutal, the flotilla is engaged in an entirely political act. To call it by any other name is the grossest hypocrisy.

"Alice Walker might be feeling good about herself, but by giving the Palestinians the same old false comfort we've been doling out for more than half a century, and by allowing the Israelis to dismiss it as yet another act of misguided and uncomprehending adventurism -- further evidence that its fears go unheeded - her political gesture only worsens the situation. The parties to this conflict need to be brought together not divided: but those who speak disingenuously of love will engender only further hatred."

Jason Isaacs (June 6, 1963)

You may know the actor Jason Isaacs only through his most famous role: Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter films. How interesting that a Jewish actor should play the one character with what I would call serious meaning for secular Jews. Malfoy of course is a wizard aristocrat who – along with arch-villain Lord Voldemort – is obsessed with “pure blood.”

If there is any political allegory in the Harry Potter books, it lies in the way author J.K.Rowling (as well as the writers of the film scripts) dealt with the snobbery and fixations of wizards like Malfoy and how their obsession lures them into the worst evil and power madness. The entire treatment points to the way that English aristocratic obsessions have affected English Jews, as well as darker hints about a comparison to the Nazis. Isaacs' creation of the Malfoy role has seemingly underscored this comparison. I can't help comparing the Malfoy theme with themes of English-Jewish life, as presented by authors like Linda Grant and Howard Jacobson.

Isaacs has had many other roles as well as Malfoy. For example, he played Maurice in the film "Good." In the film, according to an article in the Forward, Maurice is a secular Jewish psychiatrist in pre-war Nazi Germany. "He’s the film’s moral center, despite the fact that — or perhaps because — Maurice is a secular Jew (who doesn’t like Jews) who is also an unapologetic bon vivant. As a self-proclaimed 'Jewish man who does almost nothing Jewish in his life,' Issacs said he could relate."

Hanukkah Again

In today's New York Times, another way to look at Hanukkah from the author of The Finkler Question:

Hanukkah, Rekindled by Howard Jacobson

Why it’s so hard to get excited about a holiday with the Hasmoneans.

Jacobson looks at things a little differently than I do (see my post from a few days ago, Happy Hanukkah!), but he's also wondering how the Maccabees can be heroes to Jews today.

Bernard-Henri Lévy: November 5, 1948

Bernard-Henri Lévy was born on November 5, 1948. A French Public Intellectual he appears on ultra-intellectual French TV shows and is so well known he’s just called BHL. He doesn't seem to make it into internationally compiled lists of everyone's favorite public intellectual -- at best this is because he is a kind of a buffoon.

French worship of their BHL hasn’t affected American indifference to him. From Publisher’s Weekly review of his book (now out of print) Who Killed Daniel Pearl?

“The author's moments of gonzo journalism are thrilling, as when he penetrates a forbidden madrasa (seminary) by posing as ‘a special representative of the French president.’ The earlier passages of the book, which take some literary license in describing what Pearl must have felt, is alone worth the price of admission. This book is a controversial bestseller in France, where Levy has long been a leading philosopher and writer. Here, interest in Pearl and the larger issues makes this both fascinating and essential, even if you don't quite buy it all, and a credit to the investigative reporter whose work it seeks to honor.”

So I'd say that most Americans who have heard of him at all don't have much respect for his French pretensions.

I chose to celebrate Lévy's birthday because I was reminded of him when I recently read two Jewish-themed novels about public intellectuals: one British and one American. First is the character Finkler in Harold Jacobson’s The Finkler Question. Finkler has a lot in common with Lévy. Finkler's public reputation was built on a large collection of successful, and pretentious, self-help/philosophy books beginning with The Existentialist in the Kitchen and The Little Book of Household Stoicism. His work-in-progress was The Glass Half Empty: Schopenhauer for Teen Binge Drinkers. BHL's books seem as ridiculous as these made-up titles. Many social phenomena, especially Jewish ones, were parodied in Finkler. The contradictions of Finkler's status as a public intellectual who leads Jewish anti-Zionists and self haters plays a big role in the book.

The second fictional public intellectual who ponders his Judaism is the character Cass Seltzer in Rebecca Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. Seltzer is a more sympathetic character, but in his role as a public intellectual he also finds quite a bit of contradiction with his personal wish to be taken seriously as a philosopher and philosophy professor. The issues I have with the hollowness of Lévy and his lack of any academic stature whatsoever are more thoughtfully explored in Goldstein's book.

Lévy in sum isn't anywhere near as interesting than these fictitious public intellectuals. For example, Lévy's book American Vertigo described a trip he made to the United States with a translator to interpret our difficult and to-him-unknown language and a chauffer because he can't drive a car. Total immersion, no? I can't tell you how banal and without insight I found this work. (I read the pre-book -publication version in the Atlantic which was one of the reasons I didn't resubscribe to it.) His reputation is described thus:

"A philosopher who’s never taught the subject in any university, a journalist who creates a cocktail mingling the true, the possible, and the totally false, a patch-work filmmaker, a writer without a real literary oeuvre, he is the icon of a media-driven society in which simple appearance weighs more than the substance of things. BHL is thus first and foremost a great communicator, the PR man of the only product he really knows how to sell: himself." From In These Times "The Lies of BHL."