Jews as the World's Conscience and Eye for Beauty

[Jonathan Borofsky’s Dancers, 2003, in Denver, CO]

In the middle of the night, I woke up to find this comment from Ernie Brill:

unsubsribe me,dude. I have folowed your sensational fiction qnd poetry for yeqrs,but your sense of the Jewish people is inaccurate and horrendous, an ongoing biggoted diatribe. We Jews have immensly improved the world with such folks as Jesus, and Einstein and Freud and such writers as I J Singer of the novels The Brother Ashkenazi and The Family Carnovsky, the poetry of Bialik, Rukeyeser,Levertov, Retznikoff,Naomi Replansky, Alice Ostriker, Marge Piercy,Adrienne Rich, Phil Scultz, Phil Levine, Robert Pinsky, David Meltzer, Alan Ginsberg, Leslie Simon, NellySachs, and the fiction of Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, myself, Thane Rosenbaum,Edith Perlman, Lucia Berlin, and others—the great Elsa Morante of Italy (HISTORY), Vassily Grossman of Russia(Life and Fate,Stalingrad, The Road, The people immortta

Notice how this nobody who can’t even spell has included himself among notable Jewish writers. Naomi Replansky is dreadful, however, and Leslie Simon is a joke. She’s praised by Jack Hirschman, former Poet Laureate of San Francisco, “Leslie Simon’s poetry is made of the perpetual motion of rachmones (Yiddish for ‘compassion’) as it is nourished by the African-American dimension in working-class life.”

The one time I met Hirschman (in North Beach, San Francisco), he couldn’t stop gushing about Joseph Stalin. Hirschman’s self-love was so complete, he showed no interest in anyone around him. Going on about Stalin or himself, Hirschman’s eyes gleamed and his face glowed.

Brill cites Simon because he’s been praised by her, so, again, we have one Jew lauding another. This encapsulates much of the American cultural scene. Google “Jonathan Borofsky” to see how this Jewish disaster has blighted so many public spaces with his “sculptures.” He’s even more obnoxious than Richard Serra, another Jew.

Serra, “If you make some contribution at all, it’s very very hard to predict, in terms of perpetuity, what’s going to last and what’s not. Let’s just say that this kind of work means that there’s a chance.” He’s talking about his 82-ton masterpiece, Four Rounds: Equal Weigh, Unequal Measure. Its installation was lovingly filmed by another Jew, Ava Wiland. The money required to remove such a grandiose fuck you would fund how many insect meals for the unhoused of color?

Simon’s novel The Divine Comic is spun from Dante, with Beatrice a progressive Jew. Simon, “Sometimes holocaust survivors referred to themselves as ‘saved remnants’ and refused revenge. Beatrice believes she stands for the kind of integrity of a person or a people who refuse to let injustice prevail. Jews should be—she agrees with [Grace] Paley—a kind of conscience of the world.”

Beatrice is contrasted with her sister, Leah, “As she spirals into despair over the agonies of the second world war’s attempted genocide of her people, she turns toward other slaughters, a turn which, ironically, brings her closer to understanding Beatrice’s compassion for the Palestinian people, though it doesn’t change Leah’s devotion to Zionism and what she perceives as safety for her own people.”

Whether consumed by the “anti-oppression politics of the sixties,” like Beatrice, or devoted to the “safety of her own people,” like Leah, Jews are essentially good, you see.

At dawn, the latest Report on Beth Israel Vigil arrived. Henry Herskovitz, “How to single-handedly end an ‘anti-war’ protest? Just show up with a sign containing the word ‘Jew.’”

Beth Israel Vigil’s latest signs in Ann Arbor, “Jews out of Palestine,” “Jews Bomb Schools,” “Jews Bomb Innocent Civilians,” “No Jewish State,” “No more wars for Jewish interests.”

Such blunt signs appalled members of Witness for Peace, so nearly all fled. Trump’s and JD Vance’s blood would also boil at any accusation against Jews. As for Vance’s sugar daddy and puppet master, Peter Thiel, there are still billions to be made from war and the surveillance state, so Jew driven genocides must continue, even without Israel.

Most Americans only became aware of Thiel in 2016, when he declared at the Republican National Convention, “I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all I am proud to be an American.”

On his humble beginning, “Back when my parents came to America looking for that dream, they found it right here in Cleveland. They brought me here as a one-year-old and this is where I became an American. Opportunity was everywhere. My dad studied engineering at Case Western Reserve University, just down the road from where we are now.”

Actually, Thiel’s daddy had “helped apartheid South Africa build a clandestine nuclear weapons program. When the mine opened and the African labourers whom Thiel père oversaw (and who had not been told they were building a uranium mine) started dying of radiation poisoning, Klaus was on the move yet again […]” That’s James Corbett, but who the hell is he?! Let’s not stray into conspiracy theories.

It’s sweetly retarded Brill’s failure to mention Kafka and Elias Canetti. Clearly geniuses, they’re superior to all those he listed. As for Ginsberg, he certainly looked like a poet and prophet. Mimicking Ginsberg, I’ve let my hair grow wild, but unjustly, my nose refuses to rise, despite my plucking it morning and night. No nose equity, no peace! At least for me.

A Canetti teaser, “I am here deliberately opposing all the usual concepts of tribe, sib, clan, with a different kind of unit, the unit of the pack. Those well-known sociological concepts, important as they are, all stand for something static. The pack, in contrast, is a unit of action, and its manifestations are concrete. To explore the origins of the behaviour of crowds we have to start from the pack.”

Most basic is the hunting pack. Tribes hunt and are hunted. Those who fail to understand this are already dead meat.

[Richard Serra’s Sylvester, 2001, in Potomac, MD] 

[Barnett Newman’s First Station of the Cross, 1958. The Fourteenth Station is a blank canvas.]

[Julian Schnabel’s Anh in a Spanish Landscape, 1988]

[Henry Herskovitz’ fireplace in Ann Arbor on 8/4/16]