Having grown up in Princeton, New Jersey, the Ivy League culture and the rules and pleasures of intellectual debate (no matter how pretentious) are like second nature to me. I’m guilty of enjoying the whole sad spectacle, but I also have a kind of Holden Caufield irreverence about the thing. I think it’s fun to debate, but I also think the intellectual scene, as it exists at the highest levels, is as phony as a three-dollar bill, and ultimately unimportant for determining how things move and shake in the more important world of power.
That’s why I can only laugh at Paul Rosenberg and people who people who write long essays to say nothing more than “that guy’s quote-of-the-day was anti-semitic.’ Yeah, maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t, but you bored me to death and no one cares.
Lol, Andrew antisemitic? Please. Did you actually read the essay?
That wasn’t aimed at you with the “actually.” I meant, “Lol, did you really read it?”
You were bored? I wasn’t. I can’t think of anybody who comes close to Leon Wieseltier in the art of rhetoric. Maybe it strikes people as pretension. It always struck me as brilliance. I’m not sure that it’s possible for Wieseltier to bore me.
Rhetoric in the service of what, though? Don’t you see the mismatch between topic and effort?
Open Left is an interesting place. I like Bowers and usually read his posts, even though he’s been wrong/counterproductive so often. Lux is good for the inside scoop and his historical passion can be moving. And Adam Bink did some compelling work during the Maine marriage fight. On the other hand Sirota is one of the worst left-leaning commentators out there. And Rosenberg – well, what other writer on a well-trafficked blog do more people scroll past more quickly?
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Not hiding the hawk inside, perhaps he considers AS as a traitor of the Neocon-Israel cause. As far as the content of his writings, Leon Wieseltier is a fool professing the extreme Likud/Netanyahu policy of illegal occupation. He ignores the inhumane treatment of the Palestinian population under pretense of the Bush/Cheney terror regime after 9/11. Literary brilliance? Not in this essay. His view going forward leads to a Jewish state with an apartheid regime, as backed by Likud and the religious right. His essay is not about anti-semitism, but very similar to the intent of Dershowitz: absolving the Jewish State of war crimes.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."I’m always amused at the anachronistic political correctness that gets trotted out as moral arguments these days. Taboo words change and the emotional effect of them change.
That’s the offending quote by W.H. Auden, and quoted by Andrew Sullivan as a random quote of the day.
And one can only assume that it is anti-semitic if you stereotype readers of The New Republic as mostly made up of Jews. Which Paul Rosenberg apparently does.
It shows the idiocy of having a Google Alert on the name of your publication.
What if the proverbial man from Mars read it and thought instead that the readership of The New Republic was mostly atheist?
The really funny part about Rosenberg’s article is that Rosenberg’s long excursion into the mind of W.H. Auden/Andrew Sullivan seems to prove the truth about the statement. Without granting the purported anti-semitic reference. At least for one writer for The New Republic.
A massive waste of brain cells, bandwidth, and if in the printed edition, trees and ink.
Missed the author’s name; Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic.
To the extent that Rosenberg echoes the author’s thoughts, the above comment can be about Rosenberg.
wow that was some seriously boring shit.
I all boils down to a single theme: criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. And if you have not been called anti-Semitic, you are not sufficiently critical of Israel. And that criticism may be nothing so innocent as to publish news that expose events taking place on the ground about the continuing military occupation of the Palestinians, and the colonization of remaining Palestine.
In short, if you can’t keep silent, you’re a damned anti-Semite.
I had no idea that hermetic academic dithering like this still went on. And still in NR. The kind of caste-defining stuff that made me feel so special in my days of callow youth, and so embarrassed now.