May 16, 1948 - Jews of Arab lands endangered

I've published an article on my Israel blog, "The Land and the People," giving the text of a New York Times article published on May 16, 1948, detailing the danger that Jews of Muslim and Arab lands were in with the establishment of the state of Israel. See Jews in Grave Danger in All Moslem Lands for the complete text.

Why not say 'sci fi'?

I used to be part of science fiction fandom, in my teens and twenties, and one of the things that drove us crazy was when people referred to sci fi (pronounced sci fye) instead of SF. I think it was mostly a matter of defining boundaries - we the real science fiction fans knew the correct word to use, while the mundanes (our name for non-SF fans) didn't know what real science fiction was and called it sci fi. Calling it sci fi was a way to belittle the literature (and by extension, us).

Normblog provides a more elegant and literary reason:

Readers, I'm here to tell you that I've now thought of an argument in favour of my prejudice preference. 'Sci fi' is supposed to abbreviate 'science fiction', but it is spoken as if it rhymes with 'hi fi'. What kind of sense does that make? If I say 'in the circs', I wouldn't pronounce 'circs' to rhyme with, say, 'larks', so that it came out 'sarks'. If I say 'peeps', I don't rhyme it with 'hopes' and call them 'popes'. And so on, you get the picture. Accordingly, 'sci fi' ought to be said as if the second syllable was the beginning of the word 'fiction'. But no one says it like that. It would sound silly, as if it had been interrupted by a sponge suddenly being thrust into the mouth of the speaker. From now on I'll be urging this silly pronunciation upon all who say 'sci fye', in the hope of shaming them towards the more elegant 'SF'.

The semester is OVER!!

I finally handed in my grades tonight - at 10:00 p.m., the deadline. What a relief! Next Wednesday I'm driving to Cambridge to see my family for a few days, and then on January 8 I'm flying to Israel for my sabbatical - I'll be there until the end of July.

Ron Paul, Anti-Semite

Eric Dondero, a former staffer for Ron Paul, has just published a statement on a right wing site - Right Wing News - trying to exonerate Paul of racism and homophobia, but concentrating on Paul's foreign policy isolationism, his opposition to the existence of Israel, and his callousness about the lives of Jews in Europe during the Holocaust. He does a really lousy job of exonerating Paul of racism and homophobia (in part by retailing a couple of stories about how Paul recoiled from physical contact - like shaking hands - with his gay male campaign supporters).

Paul's views on Israel and Jews

Israel

Is Ron Paul an Anti-Semite? Absolutely No. As a Jew, (half on my mother’s side), I can categorically say that I never heard anything out of his mouth, in hundreds of speeches I listened too over the years, or in my personal presence that could be called, “Anti-Semite.” No slurs. No derogatory remarks.

He is however, most certainly Anti-Israel, and Anti-Israeli in general. He wishes the Israeli state did not exist at all. He expressed this to me numerous times in our private conversations. His view is that Israel is more trouble than it is worth, specifically to the America taxpayer. He sides with the Palestinians, and supports their calls for the abolishment of the Jewish state, and the return of Israel, all of it, to the Arabs.

Again, American Jews, Ron Paul has no problem with. In fact, there were a few Jews in our congressional district, and Ron befriended them with the specific intent of winning their support for our campaign. (One synagogue in Victoria, and tiny one in Wharton headed by a well-known Jewish lawyer).

On the incident that’s being talked about in some blog media about the campaign manager directing me to a press conference of our opponent Lefty Morris in Victoria to push back on Anti-Jewish charges from the Morris campaign, yes, that did happen. The Victoria Advocate described the press conference very accurately. Yes, I was asked (not forced), to attend the conference dressed in a Jewish yarlmuke [sic], and other Jewish adornments.

There was another incident when Ron finally agreed to a meeting with Houston Jewish Young Republicans at the Freeport office. He berated them, and even shouted at one point, over their un-flinching support for Israel. So, much so, that the 6 of them walked out of the office. I was left chasing them down the hallway apologizing for my boss.

On Paul's isolationism and Jews during WWII

On one other matter, I’d like to express in the strongest terms possible, that the liberal media are focusing in on entirely the wrong aspects regarding controversies on Ron Paul.

It’s his foreign policy that’s the problem; not so much some stupid and whacky things on race and gays he may have said or written in the past.

Ron Paul is most assuredly an isolationist. He denies this charge vociferously. But I can tell you straight out, I had countless arguments/discussions with him over his personal views. For example, he strenuously does not believe the United States had any business getting involved in fighting Hitler in WWII. He expressed to me countless times, that “saving the Jews,” was absolutely none of our business. When pressed, he often times brings up conspiracy theories like FDR knew about the attacks of Pearl Harbor weeks before hand, or that WWII was just “blowback,” for Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy errors, and such.

I would challenge him, like for example, what about the instances of German U-boats attacking U.S. ships, or even landing on the coast of North Carolina or Long Island, NY. He’d finally concede that that and only that was reason enough to counter-attack against the Nazis, not any humanitarian causes like preventing the Holocaust.

The conclusion I draw from these remarks is that Ron Paul represents a revival of the staunchly isolationist, anti-semitic conservative movement that existed in this country before the Second World War. He would be in good company with Charles Lindburgh and the America First Committee. No matter the number of black or Hispanic staffers he's hired, he still hold old-fashioned racist views, and he fully shares in the homophobia of the American religious right. I wonder what Andrew Sullivan, anti-Israel gay conservative, will make of these words from Dondero. I wonder what the evangelical Christian base of the Republican Party will make of Dondero's exposure of Paul's anti-Israelism and anti-semitism. This statement by Dondero deserves the widest possible publicity.

Update (December 27, 2011): See Jeffrey Shapiro on the Big Government site today reaffirming Paul's remark that he would not have entered WWII "to save the Jews." While this is an unpleasant thing for him to say, it seems to me that at the time a lot of people were saying this (and others were thinking it). And of course the US did not enter the war to end the Holocaust - if we had, we should have declared war against Germany in the summer of 1941 (after the German invasion of the Soviet Union) rather than after we were attacked by Japan in December. And of course, once we entered the war, it took rather a long time to persuade Roosevelt to do anything special to save European Jews (other than trying to win the war), with the establishment of the War Refugee Board in 1944. Roosevelt could have authorized US action long before then to vigorously try to save Jews in Nazi Europe, not through military action (which would have been quite difficult before D-Day), but by doing the things the WRB did - send agents to Europe to negotiate with Nazi satellite regimes, to threaten them, and to pay them off. But that is another subject.

Is this apartheid?

Separation Wall at Abu Dis, Jerusalem

Israel gearing for effective separation of East Jerusalem Palestinians (Haaretz).

Last week, a new border crossing was opened in East Jerusalem's Shoafat neighborhood, to little fanfare. Two days later, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat asserted that Israel should relinquish Palestinian neighborhoods of the capital that are beyond the separation barrier, despite the fact that their residents carry Israeli identity cards.

Some people view these events as two pieces of the same puzzle. A third piece is the resumption of work on separate roads for Israelis and Palestinians between Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim.

Separation Wall at Abu Dis

(Also published on my new Israel blog - The land and the people, which I'm setting up to write for when I'm going to be in Israel for my sabbatical - January-July 2012).

Photos of the Separation Wall at Abu Dis were taken when I went on a tour of East Jerusalem sponsored by Ir Amim, in the summer of 2010.

Christopher Hitchens and the Iraq War

I've been reading all of the obituaries and encomia of Christopher Hitchens, and realizing when I started paying attention to him - after the September 11 attacks. Terry Glavin writes -

“OK, that’s a confrontation between everything I like and everything I don’t like,” he remembered saying to himself. Writing in the Boston Globe a year later, he put it this way: “On one side, the ethics of the multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan ... on the other, the arid monochrome of dull and vicious theocratic fascism.”

But Hitchens quickly noticed that something else had happened that day, and he’d resolved that he wasn’t going to shut up about it. The bloody spectacle had opened up a deep rot down in the structural foundations of the political culture that had nurtured him, first as a young Luxemburgist pamphleteer at Oxford, then as an acid-witted chronicler for obscure Trotskyist journals, and later, as something extraordinary in American culture: a popular, prize-winning, hard-left public intellectual.

By the morning of Sept. 11, Hitchens had established himself as an essayist, literary critic and a formidable Washington correspondent for such venerable liberal American journals as the Nation, Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly and Vanity Fair. What he saw in the meaning of Sept. 11 was not just this: “You couldn’t really have wanted a better and more dynamic and radical confrontation.” It was this: “And the American left decides: ‘Let’s sit this one out.’ That’s historical condemnation. To be neutral or indifferent about that, it’s just giving up.”

This is as close as you can get to any paradigmatic truth about any of the important political debates and controversies that were to rage and churn through the first few years of the 21st century, a decade of vile hatreds and hysterics that consumed the Left and rendered much of the liberal American mainstream an ugly caricature of itself.

I agree with Hitchens that the "American left decides to sit this one out," something that I experienced in futile arguments here in Ithaca, New York, a bastion of reflexively left-wing thinking (Ithaca is home to Cornell University and Ithaca College, where I work). I remember in the summer of 2002, being told by a local left-wing political activist that a local candidate for the New York Assembly should be voted for because she had opposed the NATO intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo (as if this had anything to do with whether she would be a good member of the Assembly!). He said this as if it was universally accepted that this was the only proper way to think - to leave the people of Kosovo to the tender mercies of the Serbian nationalists. I was in Israel during this time (spring of 1999), following the news, and came to the conclusion then that it was better for NATO to intervene than to stand idly by. I couldn't imagine why someone who purported to be on the left and on the side of oppressed people would oppose the NATO bombing. I realized slowly that this was part of the idiotic "anti-imperialism" of fools that had overtaken the left - the assumption being that everything that the US does outside of its borders is wrong, to be condemned, and is part of American imperialism, leading to the truly disgraceful sight of people on the left consorting with vile dictators. But that was okay, since they were opposing American imperialism!

Today is also the day when the last American troops leave Iraq. I was a supporter of the Iraq War at the beginning - I believed the claim that Iraq had WMDs and was prepared to use them (being persuaded by among other things Colin Powell's presentation at the UN). Once it became clear that Iraq in fact did not have WMDs I began to have my doubts - and then more so when it also became clear that the US had no plan for what to do once we succeeded in conquering Iraq - remember the unrestrained looting and destruction after the invasion? Remember Rumsfield saying, "Stuff happens," and doing nothing? And then there came the horrible scandal of Abu Ghraib and the other prisons in Iraq where American soldiers tortured and humiliated Iraqi prisoners, and the feeble defenses of torture by the Bush administration. I am glad that we have finally withdrawn all of our soldiers. We have left behind us a devastated nation - although we are certainly not responsible for all of that devastation, since Saddam Hussein did his level best before the US invasion to destroy his own country, first by invading Iran and fighting with it for eight years, and then invading Kuwait and being defeated by the allied coalition in 1991. But even then we had a role in helping him to kill his own people - the first president Bush, after encouraging the people of Iraq to rebel against Saddam, stood idly by as Saddam's troops brutally killed thousands of Shi'ites and Kurds who began to do what he had urged them to do.

So should I have opposed the Iraq War at the beginning? In hindsight, yes, although if we had not invaded Iraq in 2003, would we still be imposing sanctions on the country which were strangling it economically and further impoverishing its people? I remember the bitter protests against the sanctions by people on the left-wing before the invasion. The sanctions were denounced as evil, as child-killing, and there were people who went to Iraq then, while Saddam was still ruling the country, to stand in solidarity with the people of Iraq. I was also dumbfounded by this response - how could western leftists act in such a way as to put themselves on the same side as Saddam Hussein, who by this point had probably killed about 300,000 of his own people (remember the hundreds or thousands of mass graves discovered after the conquest of Iraq?). It could be argued that they went in to support the people, not Saddam - but do you think that if they had openly opposed him, they would have been allowed into Iraq? No, of course not.

The situation of Iraq long before the war in 2003 was a real challenge to the leftist assumption that everything the US did was wrong and that any foreign ruler who opposed the US was an anti-imperialist. Saddam Hussein *was* an imperialist - he invaded two of the countries neighboring Iraq in order to gain benefits for Iraq.

One of the strengths of Christopher Hitchens is that he did in fact stand with the people of Iraq against Saddam - he was a long time supporter of the Kurds. Surprisingly, when I tried to argue that the invasion of Iraq did in fact help the Kurds, this did not move the people I knew who opposed the war - they could not admit that perhaps the war, for all of its cruelty and stupidity, had actually benefited some of the people of Iraq, who had been the victims of attempted genocide.

I don't know how to end this essay. My thoughts and feelings about Iraq are still very mixed - I can't come to a single, unambivalent statement about the war and what we should have done. Certainly what we did do was horrible, cruel, and bloody - but on the other side, Iraq is no longer ruled by Saddam Hussein.

Christopher Hitchens is dead

I've just read the announcement in Vanity Fair that Christopher Hitchens has just died of cancer. I have nothing particularly profound to say about him, except that I found his writing about his struggle with cancer to be immensely moving and also terrifying in his open confrontation with death. In his last column for Vanity Fair, he wrote:

I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

These are progressive weaknesses that in a more “normal” life might have taken decades to catch up with me. But, as with the normal life, one finds that every passing day represents more and more relentlessly subtracted from less and less. In other words, the process both etiolates you and moves you nearer toward death. How could it be otherwise? Just as I was beginning to reflect along these lines, I came across an article on the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. We now know, from dearly bought experience, much more about this malady than we used to. Apparently, one of the symptoms by which it is made known is that a tough veteran will say, seeking to make light of his experience, that “what didn’t kill me made me stronger.” This is one of the manifestations that “denial” takes.

I am attracted to the German etymology of the word “stark,” and its relative used by Nietzsche, stärker, which means “stronger.” In Yiddish, to call someone a shtarker is to credit him with being a militant, a tough guy, a hard worker. So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion. It is our common fate. In either case, though, one can dispense with facile maxims that don’t live up to their apparent billing.

May he rest in peace.

Political attack on study abroad in Israel

California State University is considering reestablishing its study abroad program in Israel, while a group of Cal State faculty and administrators has written an Open Letter to the administration calling for this attempt to be stopped, on the grounds of danger, possible discrimination against some CSU students, and of course the apartheid charge. They also think that it would be one-sided to establish a study abroad program in conjunction with Israeli universities without also establishing a similar program with Palestinian universities. It might be a good idea to establish a similar program with Palestinian universities (Bard College has established a joint program with Al-Quds University in Jerusalem), but the absence of such a program should not prevent the reestablishment of the Israel study abroad program.

The University of California restarted its formal study abroad program in partnership with the Hebrew University in 2009.

I certainly hope this attempt to cut off student opportunities to study in Israel is ignored. David Klein, who teaches at CSU Northridge, and was the main author of the letter, argues that "cutting off engagement with Israeli universities is an exercise of academic freedom, not an abridgement of it: 'We’re choosing not to have relationships with institutions that participate in apartheid, in the same way that in the lead-up to World War II, universities broke off relations with universities in Nazi Germany.'"

Notice the rhetorical slip here - from the evil of apartheid to the evil of Nazi Germany. Does Klein think that Israel is trying to exterminate the Palestinians?

Zeev Maoz, a UC Davis professor who has taught a summer study abroad course in Israel, "offered a different interpretation. 'They’re raising the notion of academic freedom, and what they’re advocating is putting limits on academic freedom,' he said. 'To me, this is the epitome of hypocrisy.'"

I agree with Maoz. Klein and his supporters are using their own academic freedom in order to prevent others to exercise their own academic freedom to study and teach in Israel. That is the epitome of the BDS campaign.

Another discussion of JANT

I just discovered another discussion of JANT, by Walter Russell Mead - Faith Matters Sunday: The Jewish Discovery of Jesus. He doesn't, however, review it, because he hasn't gotten it yet from Amazon. I'll be curious to hear what he thinks of it once he has a chance to read the commentaries and essays.

And here's some more:

From the JPS Blog - Rachel Broder discusses the book.

Joe Winkler on Jewcy again mentions the book, but hasn't read it yet.

A discussion on Project Quinn by Jessica Youseffi.

A very nice review of the book at Ancient Hebrew Poetry (John Hobbins).

More reviews of JANT

Messianic Jewish Musings has just published a review of JANT - Jewish Annotated New Testament.

An anti-semitic review of the book at Maurice Pinay Blog: Anti-Christ "New Testament" published. His perspective seems to be extreme traditionalist Catholicism (which rejects the Second Vatican Council); he also advertises books by Michael Hoffman, a notorious Holocaust denier.

Discussion forum at the Center for Inquiry presents a range of interesting perspectives - Here comes the Jewish Jesus.

Jim West of Zwinglius Redivivus mentions the book favorably, but doesn't have a full review.

New York Times article on the Jewish Annotated New Testament

Good New York Times article on A Jewish Edition of the New Testament.

Some highlights:

The book she [A.J. Levine] has just edited with a Brandeis University professor, Marc Zvi Brettler, “The Jewish Annotated New Testament” (Oxford University Press), is an unusual scholarly experiment: an edition of the Christian holy book edited entirely by Jews. The volume includes notes and explanatory essays by 50 leading Jewish scholars, including Susannah Heschel, a historian and the daughter of the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel; the Talmudist Daniel Boyarin; and Shaye J. D. Cohen, who teaches ancient Judaism at Harvard....

And yours truly, who wrote the article on Divine Beings.

So what does this New Testament include that a Christian volume might not? Consider Matthew 2, when the wise men, or magi, herald Jesus’s birth. In this edition, Aaron M. Gale, who has edited the Book of Matthew, writes in a footnote that “early Jewish readers may have regarded these Persian astrologers not as wise but as foolish or evil.” He is relying on the first-century Jewish philosopher Philo, who at one point calls Balaam, who in the Book of Numbers talks with a donkey, a “magos.”

Because the rationalist Philo uses the Greek word “magos” derisively — less a wise man than a donkey-whisperer — we might infer that at least some educated Jewish readers, like Philo, took a dim view of magi. This context helps explain some Jewish skepticism toward the Gospel of Matthew, but it could also attest to how charismatic Jesus must have been, to overcome such skepticism.

My response to panel on Religious and Mystical Experience at SBL

I participated in a panel jointly sponsored by the Religious Experience and Esotericism and Mysticism sections of the SBL, giving a response to three papers - by Frances Flannery, Istvan Czachesz, and Jim Davila.

If you would like to read my paper, it's after the jump.



I would like to begin by offering my thanks to all three authors for their thought-provoking articles. My discussion will consider each paper in turn, while also making comments drawing the papers together. I am starting with Jim’s paper, “Ritual Praxis in Ancient Jewish and Christian Mysticism.”

Jim’s paper is a lucid discussion of the issues involved in discovering the relationships between ancient instructions for ritual practice and mystical experiences. His survey of the sources for these rituals surveys texts that provide explicit directions, first-hand accounts of mystical experiences, fictional accounts, and architecture and artifacts. His discussion of how to glean rituals from first-hand or fictional accounts is very useful. I would emphasize that the Hekhalot literature, as discussed later in the paper, also contains many ritual instructions intended to bring angels down from heaven (for example, the Sar ha-Panim or Prince of the divine Countenance) and instructions for travel to the heavenly throne room. The instructions for invoking angels, in particular, include many details of ritual practice that are similar to some of those in Sefer ha-Razim. As for the Babylonian incantation bowls, I question whether in most cases we can regard the rituals accompanying their use as mystical in nature. As Jim points out, most of them are protective and exorcistic, intended to protect those named on them from demonic attacks. It is also difficult to discern exactly what rituals would have accompanied the use of these bowls, because we do not possess any kind of accompanying ritual handbook which explains how they were used once they were written. In terms of methodology, Jim’s work and the work of others has demonstrated amply how useful cross-cultural comparisons are, either within the closer culture area of Greco-Roman and Ancient Near Eastern societies or farther afield, for example his own comparison with the Hekhalot rituals and shamanistic traditions from Siberia, North and South America, and Japan. Jim’s most intriguing suggestion for comparison is his last, with modern ceremonial magic. I think this suggestion is well worth following up, and there are anthropologists who have already written ethnographies of a number of groups using the various techniques of ceremonial magic, whether or not derived from the Golden Dawn – for example T. M. Luhrmann’s study, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England, and Felicitas Goodman’s Where the Spirits Ride the Wind: Trance Journeys and Other Ecstatic Experiences. Other comparative possibilities also suggest themselves – to the meditative and ritual techniques of medieval and early modern Jewish mystics, among them Abraham Abulafia and Isaac Luria (via Luria’s disciple, Hayyim Vital). J. H. Chajes’ study Between Worlds is a useful entry into the world of Safedian Kabbalah, where these techniques were developed and elaborated. The proposals that Jim makes in his paper have the potential to be very useful in helping us to understand the experiences of ancient Jewish and Christian mystics.

I now turn to Istvan’s and Frances’ papers. My expertise is in the study of mysticism in late antiquity, not in cognitive neuroscience. My comments here will center what I think is useful in Istvan’s and Frances’ papers for the study of mysticism, and on questions I have about whether, and how, the insights of neuroscience can be applied to the study of mysticism in late antiquity.

Let us begin first with basic definitional questions raised by both Istvan’s and Frances’ papers – how can we define both religion and mysticism? Is mystical experience necessarily religious? Frances’ definition assumes this, when she says that mysticism is a “sub-category of religious experiences that entails experiences rooted in personal bodily expressions of an epistemological revelation.” Questions of definition have bedeviled the study of religion for many decades, and there is no unified definition that all or even most scholars would agree upon. The same is true for the study of mysticism, perhaps even more acutely. Earlier definitions of mysticism saw mystical experience as “union with the divine,” but this definition excludes religious communities whose practitioners deny the possibility of such unions, non-theistic religions, nature mysticism, mystical experiences by people who do not belong to a particular religious community, and probably others that I am not thinking of. One of the great virtues of William James’ discussion of mysticism in his Varieties of Religious Experience is that he attempted to collect a very wide range of testimonies of mystical experience and then present them on a spectrum of experiences. He does come up with a well-known synthetic definition but does not deny the mystical aspects of experiences that do not fit the full definition. Istvan’s paper would appear to agree with this approach (when it says that “mystical experience should include sensations of being near to superhuman, absolute, ultimately significant, hidden, or overwhelming things and beings,” p. 3) but to take it back when it says “Mystics maintain elaborated philosophical and exegetical traditions and emphasize the importance of a sustained, long-term engagement with them” (p. 11). This is certainly not true of all mystics. I think that there needs to be much more careful attention paid to exactly what mystical experiences are being studied through neurological testing, in order to end up with results that will be meaningful for understanding mystical experiences. And if we want the results to be relevant to mysticism in late antiquity, following a definition such as that offered by April DeConick in Paradise Now would be helpful, as Frances says. DeConick’s definition “identifies a tradition within early Judaism and Christianity centered on the belief that a person directly, immediately, and before death can experience the divine, either as a rapture experience or as one solicited by a particular praxis.”

Istvan’s paper surveys a range of neurological studies that attempt to determine the parts of the brain activated by a variety of activities that the researchers consider religious or potentially religious – meditation by Tibetan Buddhists or Franciscan nuns, glossolalia, Bible reading, and rhythmic dance and music engaged in by Pentecostal Christians. He says, however, that “It is important to note that simply observing that a certain brain area plays some role in a certain kind of experience is not yet a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon,” because “one has to keep in mind that any real-life cognitive and behavioral phenomena depends on the cooperation of a network of brain areas.” Therefore discovering what part of the brain is active when a certain activity is done is an interesting fact, but does not necessarily explain the phenomenon. One question I would have about these findings is whether they tell us anything about how the practitioners themselves would explain their own experiences? One advantage that researchers of contemporary religious activity have over studies of ancient religion is that they can observe and even take part in religious performances, as well as ask people directly what their experiences are. Has this been done? I think it would be interesting to see if the neurological findings align with the practitioners’ reports of their own experiences.

Finally, I would like to ask how these studies of contemporary practitioners of various religions can apply to the study of ancient religious texts? As Jim has pointed out, the way we learn about ancient mystical experiences is by interpreting texts that may be first-person accounts, or fictional accounts, or ones that correlate certain ritual activities with experiences such as visionary dreams – but we cannot ask ancient people what their experiences were. Nor do we know how close the written accounts are to what people actually experienced. It is much easier for us to figure out what ritual activities people engaged in. Perhaps by making a catalog of ritual activities that the ancient texts refer to, and then testing people today who engage in those ritual activities, we might be able to learn something about the areas of the brain that would have been activated in ancient people who did those same rituals. Frances’ paper, it seems to me, is making the first steps towards trying to do something like this in her examination of the Testament of Abraham.

Istvan’s discussion, however, leaves out a crucial element in the study of experience, whether ancient or contemporary, whether religious, mystical, or another kind of experience – the role of culture and language in determining experience – both the experience itself and how it is later interpreted. Steven Katz has famously stated that, “There are no pure experiences … it is not just a question of studying the reports of the mystic after the experiential event but of acknowledging that the experience itself as well as the form in which it is reported is shaped by concepts which the mystic brings to, and which shape, his experience.” The virtue of Katz’s position is that it strives to deal with the differences in mystical experiences across cultures and religions, rather than eliding them. Frances modifies Katz somewhat, saying that “the brain simultaneously processes religious or mystical experience as stimuli of various neurological regions of the brain along with cultural matrices of interpretation, and that these are inseparable even on a neurological level of processing.” Frances’ account of mystical experience is sensitive to the particular cultural matrix of a particular account of mystical experience, even if she would not go as far as Katz does.

Despite my hesitation to identify all mystical experiences as religious, there are several aspects of Frances’ definition of mystical experience in antiquity that I think are quite interesting and useful, especially her insistence on paying attention to the body. Ancient accounts of mystical experience do often include bodily descriptions – for example, a passage in the Hekhalot literature refers to the experience of standing in limitless space with one’s feet cut off [need to find exact reference]; in the Apocalypse of Abraham, Abraham finds himself prostrate, clutching at the rolling floor of heaven; and Paul is taken up to the third heaven “whether in the body or out of the body.” And various ritual practices involving the body are often a requirement to achieve specific mystical experiences – for example, again in the Hekhalot literature, in order to encounter an angel and speak with him, the practitioner typically has to fast for a certain number of days, eating only bread he has baked and water he has drawn, isolating himself from all other people in a room, and reciting prayers and adjurations – all physical, bodily activities.
The question I asked earlier – about how the neurological studies can be useful for the study of mystical experience in antiquity – is answered in an interesting way by Frances, when she says that “when we marginalize the body in our discussions of mysticism in antiquity, we miss the one sure bridge we have to antiquity…. it is our embodiment that is the one sure window into those persons who composed, heard, and/or circulated the mystical texts.” She then focuses on details that Jim also addresses in his paper from the point of view of ritual studies – the bodily expressions in mystical texts. The texts describe body postures, the senses, affective changes in the body, etc. These insights are easy to apply to Frances’ discussion of the Testament of Abraham, which includes many physical actions that correlate with affective experiences – for example, when Abraham washes the stranger’s feet, his “heart was moved and he wept over the stranger.” Her discussion of the Testament of Abraham also accords well with the cross-cultural approach that she and Jim both advocate, when she compares the activities in the Testament with those typically engaged in by someone who engaged in dream incubation at a temple of Asclepius. It will be interesting to see Frances’ full exploration of the Testament of Abraham in the light of cross-cultural studies of mystical experience and ritual and the findings of cognitive neuroscience.

Jewish Voice for Peace at AAR/SBL

I spent the morning going through the book exhibit, and came upon a booth for Jewish Voice for Peace, where I argued with them for a long time. Not much enlightenment on either side - we were really talking past each other (not that I expected anything else). They are here trying to get people to support their divestment from TIAA-CREF campaign. I argued that punitive measures like this are guaranteed to alienate most Jews both in the U.S. and in Israel, but they kept saying that divestment had an effect on getting rid of apartheid in South Africa. I objected to the comparison of Israel with apartheid South Africa, and we disputed over the issue of Israeli Arab representation in the Knesset. They issued a rejoinder that even in the Iranian parliament has one token Jewish representative. I didn't bother arguing that Israel is nothing like Iran. I agreed with them on some of their diagnoses of the problems (settlement building, Bibi's intransigence, the perverse map of the separation wall which shuts whole Palestinian towns off by surrounding them with a wall - Kalkiliya and Walaje spring to mind) - but not on the solution. It was frustrating, and I felt angry that they were even here at AAR/SBL. I've been going to annual meetings since 1985, and I don't remember ever seeing a both on political issues - even in the heyday of anti-apartheid campaigns or protests against the Iraq War.

Jon Haber of Divest This! has many times described the disruptive effect of groups like JVP, which try to bring Middle Eastern politics into organizations that basically have nothing to do with them, in order to push their own agenda. They drag their own agenda into unrelated groups, and cause nothing but discord and bad feelings. This is in sharp contrast to groups like J Street or the American Task Force for Palestine, which work openly to persuade people of their political views in the political arena. They lobby Congress or the President, they hold conferences of various kinds, they organize local chapters that engage in letter-writing or citizen lobbying. They do not try to take over groups that have nothing to do with the Middle East to further their own ends.

"Reconstructing Practice from Texts" - Esotericism and Mysticism session at SBL

Yesterday morning I went to the fabulous first panel sponsored by the Esotericism and Mysticism in Antiquity section of the SBL (we used to be called the Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism section), where the presentations were fascinating and very wide-ranging. The two I found the most interesting were April DeConick's, “'The road for souls is through the planets': The Mysteries of the Ophites Diagrammed" and Cordula Bandt's "The Tract 'On the Mystery of Letters' in Context of Late Antique Jewish, Gnostic and Christian Letter Mysticism."

Here are the abstracts:

April's paper

This paper will reexamine the Ophite Diagram presented by Origen in his treatise against Celsus (6.21-40). I will make a detailed reading of the text and argue that the Diagram is exactly what Celsus and Origen claimed it was, a map of the soul’s journey through the planets. Furthermore, I will demonstrate that the prayers correlate to a Neopythagorean ascent pattern. I will conclude with the argument that Origen has preserved for us a piece of an Ophite initiatory handbook, that is the map, prayers and seals used in the intermediate initiatory rite when the soul practiced the death journey through the heavenly realms.

 Cordula's paper

Speculations on letters play an important role within Late Antique mystical and magical tradition. Letters are regarded as smallest units of speech, but on a more esoteric level they are also understood as tools to gain spiritual progress or even influence reality. Names of angels and heavenly powers which are nonsense clusters of letters, composed by combining them according to certain rules, occur as prominent means of protection and power in early and later Jewish mysticism as well as in Gnostic texts, which are preserved in original or as quotations in polemical writings by the Church fathers. However, in orthodox Christian tradition references and responses on the symbolism of letters are rather rare, despite Christ's famous saying in the Book of Revelation "I am the Alpha and the Omega" (Rev. 1:8, 21:6, 22:13). Nevertheless, exactly this cryptic dictum inspires the remarkable tract "On the mystery of Letters" which was composed probably by a Christian monk in mid-6th century Palestine. This tract is thoroughly rooted in orthodoxy, but presents an astonishing variety of interpretations of the Greek alphabet, revealing hidden secrets by close examination of certain features of the letters like name, shape, numerical value, position in alphabet, pronunciation etc. In 2007, I published the editio princeps of this unique work, accompanied by a German translation and analysis of its content. In order to give a wider public access to this still quite little known text, I am currently preparing an English version of my book. My paper at the SBL Annual Meeting 2011 will focus on similarities between Jewish and Gnostic letter mysticism in the first centuries of the Christian era and the tract "On the mystery of letters". I will show how the author transforms rather heterodox ideas into a truly orthodox approach towards the alphabet. I will also discuss why mainstream Christianity at this time seems to be reluctant to involve into mystical letter speculations.

Bandt has also published her dissertation "On the Mystery of Letters" and the Bryn Mawr Classical Review has a very laudatory review of the book. (The title is Der Traktat "Vom Mysterium der Buchstaben," Kritischer Text mit Einführung, Übersetzung und Ammerkungen. Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur, 162. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2007).

I'll post more about them later. In a few minutes I'm heading over for our second session, which we are doing together with the Religious Experience in Early Judaism and Early Christianity section.

I'm in San Francisco for the SBL

I arrived in San Francisco earlier this evening for the AAR/SBL conference. I just noticed that both April DeConick of Forbidden Gospels and Jim Davila of Paleojudaica had blogged on their attendance at the conference. We are part of the Esotericism and Mysticism in Antiquity section, which has two meetings at the SBL this year, one at 9:00 tomorrow morning, the second on Sunday at 1:00. Tomorrow's session is on the theme of Reconstructing Practice from Texts (in Convention Center 2011). Sunday's session is on Praxis and Experience in Ancient Jewish and Christian Mysticism (in Convention Center 2018). I'll be responding to the papers on Sunday. Jim just wrote that he's going to be participating in another panel tomorrow, S19-212b - Engaging the "Wired-In Generation": Knowledge and Learning in the Digital Age. It's from 1:00-2:30 in Convention Center 3002.

This is the first time in several years that the AAR and the SBL are meeting together - I'm looking forward to going to some AAR sessions as well as SBL sessions, especially those sponsored by the Study of Judaism section of AAR.

Strange places in China

Noah Schachtman of Wired's Danger Room has called attention to a bunch of strange structures out in the Chinese desert. After the jump, there are some pictures of them.





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Größere Kartenansicht


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Stephen Sizer's debate with Calvin Smith

Joseph W reports on Rev. Stephen Sizer's debate with Dr. Calvin Smith last night, in particular focusing on Sizer's closeness to the Iranian regime: Stephen Sizer on his links with Iran’s Khomeinists: “I’ll go anywhere to share the gospel”.

Dr. Smith has just written to let me know that the recorded debate has now been uploaded to Vimeo - here is the link.


Has the Church Replaced Israel? (TV debate) from Calvin Smith on Vimeo.

A rather opinionated assessment of the debate by Moriel Archive.

Gev of the Rosh Pina Project has some harsh words for Rev. Sizer's performance at the debate -

Stephen Sizer is a master at speaking a different way with a different message to different audiences. A prime example is last night’s debate he had on Revelation TV with Calvin Smith, Principal of King’s Evangelical Divinity School, UK. Sizer conceded most of the theological ground to Smith and sought to seem as reasonable and as nice as possible. I just felt like he was grooming his audience for some nefarious purpose.

Last night he concluded that he wanted to “learn from his Messianic brothers” however to an audience of largely non-Christian Palestine Solidarity Campaign supporters he called Israeli Messianic Jews, who support their country, an abomination! He later issued an “apology” when he was caught out, but blamed the naughty Zionists who filmed him for putting him under-pressure and hence he came out with that howler....

Sizer couldn’t keep to the theological topic that was billed in the debate and launched a tirade against Israel’s injustices but ignores, and sometime worse, he rationalises the violence and minimises the murderers of Jews by calling them political prisoners,  as we reported here.

Sizer’s elastic-sided ethics stretch so far as to allow him to promote a new blog site as if he had nothing to do with it, when it fact he started it. We reported this here.

In conceding to Calvin Smith that the Jews were still God’s chosen people and God has not finished with them, Sizer sang a different tune to the one he sang in Malaysia for a Viva Palestina meeting he addressed. He said in an interview to Shahanaaz Habib of the Star Newspaper that the idea that the Jews were God’s Chosen people was “absolute rubbish”. We reported this here.

Who tarnished Penn State's reputation?

I wondered whether there might be student response at Penn State last night to Paterno's firing. Well, there was, and it turned into a riot. Penn State Students in Clashes After Joe Paterno Announcement.

The New York Times reports -

After top Penn State officials announced they had fired Joe Paterno on Wednesday night, thousands of students stormed the downtown area to display their anger and frustration, chanting the former coach’s name, tearing down light poles and overturning a television news van parked along College Avenue.

One student said:

“We got rowdy and we got maced,” Jeff Heim, 19, said rubbing his red, teary eyes. “But make no mistake, the board started this riot by firing our coach. They tarnished a legend.”

The Board "started this"? They "tarnished a legend"? How about - Joe Paterno's turning a blind eye to hideous crimes started this? How about Joe Paterno tarnished his own "legend."

I look forward to the day when colleges and universities, along with the NFL, decide that it has to run its own farm system, rather than relying on American colleges and universities. Somehow baseball has managed to succeed without this kind of massive subsidy from our supposed higher education system.

TV Debate between Calvin Smith and Stephen Sizer

Dr. Calvin Smith has a brief report on his debate last night with Rev. Stephen Sizer on his blog - Calvin L. Smith: That TV Debate. He will be uploading video of the debate eventually to his website. If anyone would like to comment on the debate, I'd be interested to hear it. (I did not hear it, since I'm in the US and was at work when it occurred).

Violence and sex, money, and war

Some random thoughts, in no particular order -

The scandal at Penn State is really unbelievable. When I read the story yesterday about how graduate assistant coach Mike McQueary had caught assistant coach Jerry Sandusky in the act of anally raping a 10 year old boy in the locker room, I was appalled - and then even more appalled to learn that McQueary did nothing to stop the rape, left, called his father, then reported it to Joe Paterno, the head coach, who sent the report up the line, with no one calling the police, or apparently even learning the name of the young victim. Today, the university's president, Graham Spanier, stepped down from his job, and Joe Paterno was fired by the Board of Trustees of the university.

Students at the university have been holding large rallies at Paterno's home, in support of him. Why? Apparently, football, the American religion, can't be questioned, even if the sainted head coach covers up the grotesque crime of child rape.

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Is the world economy about to go into freefall again? Now it's Italy's turn to totter at the abyss. And maybe France's.... When will the EU leaders get their act together?

Italy, a central member of the euro zone and its third-largest economy, struggled to find a new government as anxious investors drove Italian bond rates well above 7 percent and the markets tumbled worldwide. And although critics have warned of just such an escalation for months, European leaders again were caught without a convincing response....

And of course the fear in Paris is that France will be next. Mr. Sarkozy’s government just announced another set of budget cuts and tax increases in the face of lower growth, to keep to its promises to cut its own budget deficit. But on Wednesday, the spread of 10-year French government bonds over their German equivalent rose to a euro area high of around 140 basis points. “Contagion” is not just a movie.

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Iran apparently is much closer to getting a nuclear weapon. Should we do anything about it? Should Israel do something about it? An Israeli attack on Iran would very probably lead to a regional war, with thousands of missiles being launched from Lebanon and Gaza at Israel. I hope there's not a war - I'm going to Israel in January for seven months (I'm on sabbatical), and I'd rather not spend the time in a bomb shelter!

Another Gaza flotilla

This morning I received an email from my favorite correspondents, US Boat to Gaza, informing the world that boats are now sailing to Gaza. From the press release:

At this moment, two boats are in international waters in the Mediterranean heading to Gaza.  One boat, the Saoirse from Ireland, includes parliamentarians among its passengers.  The other, the Tahrir, carries representatives from Canada, the U.S., Australia, and Palestine.  The U.S. Representative on the Tahrir, Kit Kittredge, was a passenger on the U.S. Boat to Gaza, The Audacity of Hope mission in Athens in July.  A journalist from Democracy Now is on the Tahrir also. Civil society organizations in Gaza await their arrival, and look forward to the delivery of letters collected from thousands of U.S. supporters in the To Gaza With Love campaign.  

It appears to me that this time around, they kept the sailing completely quiet before the boats reached international waters, in order to prevent what happened this summer from happening again, when the boats were basically stuck in Greek ports, under heavy pressure from Israel and the US. (I hope Israeli intelligence knew they were sailing!) Also, the boats sailed from Turkey, which supports the attempt to break the Israeli embargo on Gaza. (See article from Haaretz, which confirms that they kept the plan quiet so they wouldn't be stopped; apparently the Turkish authorities insisted that they send fewer people on the boats than they had originally planned).

Reuters reports:

The Israeli navy will prevent two yachts carrying pro-Palestinian activists which left Turkey on Wednesday from breaching an Israeli blockade and reaching the Gaza Strip, an Israeli military official said. Lieutenant-Colonel Avital Leibovich, speaking to reporters by telephone, would not say how the boats might be stopped, saying only "we will have to assess and see if we are facing violent passengers."

Israel was aware two yachts had set sail carrying Irish, Canadian and U.S. activists, Leibovich said. Describing their journey as a "provocation," she said they were still far from the Israeli and Gazan coast. Israel would offer to unload any aid supplies on board and deliver them to Gaza, Leibovich said. Israel blockades the Gaza coast to prevent the smuggling of weapons to Palestinian gunmen in the territory, she added.

There is, apparently, an unidentified boat following the Canadian one, about which @PalWaves says, "The #Tahrir captain is 99% sure it's Turkish Coast Guard following them, still trailing." I hope not - the worst thing would be a confrontation between the IDF and any part of the Turkish military.

UPDATE: apparently it was *not* the Turkish Coast Guard, and the Israeli Navy intercepted them yesterday (Nov. 4) and led them to Ashdod port. 

Goldstone debunks the "Israeli apartheid" slander

I don't have the time to say much about this right now, but Richard Goldstone (of Goldstone Report fame or infamy) has just written an op-ed piece for the New York Times, entitled Israel and the Apartheid Slander, which demolishes the accusation that Israel is an apartheid state.

One particularly pernicious and enduring canard that is surfacing again is that Israel pursues “apartheid” policies. In Cape Town starting on Saturday, a London-based nongovernmental organization called the Russell Tribunal on Palestine will hold a “hearing” on whether Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid. It is not a “tribunal.” The “evidence” is going to be one-sided and the members of the “jury” are critics whose harsh views of Israel are well known.

Jews and Halloween

Inspired by Jared's post on zombie Halloween, I decided to do some investigation about Jews and Halloween. I grew up, like most American children, celebrating Halloween by going out in a costume and trick-or-treating. This was in the 1960s, before parents got involved in taking their children, and I remember on at least one occasion being chased by some older kids - we were also warned not to take apples, lest they have razor blades in them. I also remember how much fun it was, how much candy I collected (and then ate), and the one year that a neighbor created a haunted house, including the darkened room with spaghetti in a tray that we were told was intestines. I was never told anything about a Jewish attitude towards Halloween (but then, I didn't grow up in a very religiously Jewish home).

So what do religious Jews have to say about Halloween? Should Jewish children "trick-or-treat"? Should Jewish houses welcome children in to give them candy? I now live in a neighborhood in Ithaca that is very child-friendly, and lots of people trick-or-treat - parents even driving in with their children  from neighboring towns to go from house to house. If you don't want to take part, you have to make sure that there are no lights on at any doors, or just leave for the evening.

An article in My Jewish Learning, by Rabbi Michael Broyde (who is Orthodox), argues that Jewish children should not go out and collect candy on Halloween. He writes, quoting a newspaper article:

"According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Halloween originated with the pagan Celtic festival of Samhain, a day on which the devil was invoked for the various divinations. 'The souls of the dead were supposed to revisit their homes on this day', Britannica says, 'and the autumnal festival acquired sinister significance, with ghosts, witches, hobgoblins ... and demons of all kinds said to be roaming about.' In the early Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church instituted All Hallow's Eve on October 31 and All Saints Day on November 1 to counteract the occult festival. It did not work. All Hollow's Eve was simply co-opted into the pagan celebration of Samhain."

Since Halloween is rooted in a pagan holiday, he argues that Jews should not celebrate it. He concedes that the vast majority of Americans who celebrate it do not know of its pagan origins and do not celebrate it in order to observe Samhain, yet he still thinks it should not be celebrated by Jews. This is because of the injunction not to imitate the customs of the Gentiles (Leviticus 18:3: “You shall not copy the practices of the land of Egypt where you dwelt, or of the land of Canaan to which I am taking you; nor shall you follow their laws” ). Rabbi Broyde writes:

Tosafot [a medieval Talmud commentary] understands that two distinctly different types of customs are forbidden by the prohibition of imitating Gentile customs found in Leviticus 18:3. The first is idolatrous customs and the second is foolish customs found in the Gentile community, even if their origins are not idolatrous. Rabbenu Nissim (Ran) and Maharik disagree and rule that only customs that have a basis in idolatrous practices are prohibited. Apparently foolish--but secular--customs are permissible so long as they have a reasonable explanation (and are not immodest). Normative halakhah follows the ruling of the Ran and Maharik. As noted by Rama [Rabbi Moshe Isserles, c. 1525-1572]:

"Those practices done as a [Gentile] custom or law with no reason one suspects that it is an idolatrous practice or that there is a taint of idolatrous origins; however, those customs which are practiced for a reason, such as the physician who wears a special garment to identify him as a doctor, can be done; the same is true for any custom done out of honor or any other reason is permissible."

Rabbi Isserless is thus clearly prohibiting observing customs that have pagan origins, or even which might have pagan origins. His opinion, the most lenient found in normative halakhah, is the one we follow.

Rabbi Broyde believes, therefore, that Jewish children should not go out and collect candy on Halloween. What about giving out candy?

The question of whether one can give out candy to people who come to the door is a different one, as there are significant reasons based on darkhei shalom (the ways of peace), eva (the creation of unneeded hatred towards the Jewish people), and other secondary rationales that allow one to distribute candy to people who will be insulted or angry if no candy is given. This is even more so true when the community--Jewish and Gentile--are unaware of the halakhic problems associated with the conduct, and the common practice even within many Jewish communities is to "celebrate" the holiday. Thus, one may give candy to children who come to one's house to "trick or treat" if one feels that this is necessary.

Magical images from Sefer Raziel

For a more journalistic, and non-halakhic discussion of Jews and Halloween, see the article in the Baltimore Jewish Times - Jews and the Halloween Dilemma.

For an article on Jews and magic/the occult, see this article in Tablet Magazine from two years ago: Under a Spell.

An interesting article by a Reform rabbi on Halloween - the comments are also interesting - Is Halloween Good for the Jews?

Ancient Zombies for Halloween

A great post by Jared of Antiquitopia on Ancient Zombies (his Halloween post):

As everyone begins preparations for the most important religious holiday of the year--Halloween (what else would it be? Yom Kippur? Easter? Diwali? Ramadan?)--I thought I would provide some seasonal cheer for your undead pleasure.

While the jury is still out on whether or not Jesus was a zombie, who did come from the dead and encourage us to drink blood and eat flesh (although drinking blood lends itself to a more vampiric reading), zombies appear to be as old as civilization itself. The earliest reference I know of occurs in Mesopotamian stories of the Descent of Ishtar and, perhaps a bit more well-known, the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Jewish Annotated New Testament just published

I just received an email from Marc Brettler, the editor, that the Jewish Annotated New Testament has just been published. I contributed the article on "Divine Beings." There are going to be two sessions at the SBL about it - one a panel discussion, one a reception (see below).

Some blog commentary on it:
Annotated Jewish New Testament, first impressions, on the BLT blog.
The Jewish Annotated New Testament – First Impressions on the Baker Book House Church Connection.

----------------------------------------------------

M20-300
Publication of Jewish Annotated New Testament and Jewish/Christian Relations
11/20/2011
4:00 PM to 5:00 PM
Room: 3009 - Convention Center

Theme: Sponsored by the Oxford University Press
The Jewish Annotated New Testament is a complete edition of the New Testament in the New Revised Standard Version, with scholarly comment and contextualizing essays by Jewish New Testament scholars, Greco-Roman historians, and theologians. It aims to open up new perspectives on this text for Jewish and Christian readers, and for all who are interested in expanding their reading of the New Testament.

Amy-Jill Levine, Vanderbilt University, Panelist
; Marc Zvi Brettler, Brandeis University, Panelist
; Adele Reinhartz, University of Ottawa, Panelist

M20-315
The Jewish Annotated New Testament Reception
11/20/2011
6:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Room: Atrium Lobby - Marriott Marquis

The release of Gilad Shalit and the 405 bus attack in July, 1989

I was visiting Israel in the summer of 2006 when Gilad Shalit was kidnapped, and I remember the two-week mini-war that his kidnapping caused (and which has since been forgotten, since that was also the summer of the Second Lebanon War). I wrote a blog post then, but haven't written anything else about Shalit since then.

In my subsequent visits, I was puzzled by the emotion that my Israeli friends felt about Shalit, and about the many signs posted everywhere calling for his return home. As Ethan Bronner in the New York Times has noted, most Israelis see Shalit as being almost a member of their families - a son or brother who is missing in an unknown location, held by ruthless killers. I still don't quite get the emotion, since I'm not Israeli and don't have the same visceral connection to him. The only thing I can really compare it to in the United States is the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979-1980 - I remember watching "Nightline" with Ted Koppel, with the banner on the screen, "America Held Hostage." Even then, it was nowhere near as personal.

I do, on the other hand, feel more personally about some of the terrorists who are being released in return for Shalit, one in particular - Abd al-Hadi Rafa Ghanim, who attacked the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv bus 405 on July 6, 1989.

I was living in Jerusalem at the time. The bus was on its way to Jerusalem, and had just passed Abu Ghosh. The terrorist grabbed the steering wheel and drove the bus into the abyss. The road is very steep at that point in the climb up to Jerusalem, and there is a deep fall into the valley at that point. The bus tumbled into the ravine and sixteen people were killed, some of them being burned alive.

The attack was a horrible shock to everyone. Anyone living in Jerusalem had taken the 405 to and from Tel Aviv. It was so easy to imagine being on that bus as the terrorist wrestled the steering wheel out of the driver's grip. I remember taking the bus after that and peering out, trying to discover where the attack had occurred.

The Jerusalem Post article published the next day on the attack (retrieved via LexisNexis) is available after the jump:

A bearded Palestinian man shouting "Allahu Akbar" seized the steering wheel of a No. 405 Jerusalem-bound Egged Newsbus from Tel Aviv yesterday and sent it crashing over a steep precipice, killing 14 passengers and injuring at least 27, seven of them seriously.

Among the dead were several who were trapped inside the bus and burned alive when it exploded in flames at the bottom of the ravine. Forensic experts at Abu Kabir were last night still trying to identify some of the dead who had been burned beyond recognition. Names of the dead were not released by press time.

Senior police officers said the attack had been planned, and that this would make it the most deadly terrorist incident in Israel since the Coastal Road massacre in 1978, when 37 people were killed and 76 were wounded.

Police Inspector-General David Kraus said last night that the police had been placed on high alert, especially in the Jerusalem area, to prevent reprisal attacks against Arabs. The alert was announced after the Kach movement distributed leaflets calling for attacks on Arabs.

Kraus's assessment that the attack had been planned was apparently based on the preliminary interrogation of the suspect's father, who was reportedly among the passengers on the bus and was arrested yesterday afternoon. Police and General Security Service officers were interrogating the suspect, under guard at Hadassah Hospital in Ein Kerem, where he is being treated for "moderate injuries." Police reported that the suspect had begun speaking to his interrogators after hours of not cooperating. They said his identity was known. Kraus said that the suspect's father, who had also been on the bus, was also under arrest.

The terror suspect, 28, was a worker in Tel Aviv's Carmel market, and had not been in Gaza in weeks. Arab sources say that the man was a member of the Islamic Jihad. Israel Radio reported at midnight that the suspect told interrogators that he acted out of revenge, saying his family members were beaten by the IDF.

Investigators moved from bed to bed in the two Jerusalem Hadassah hospitals and Shaare Zedek, as well as Sheba Hospital, Tel Hashomer, taking statements from the injured as they recovered sufficiently to speak. Many of them had been asleep at the time of the attack, or had not seen what occurred at the front of the bus.

Medical staff at Hadassah Ein Kerem, where 14 of the wounded were taken, worked feverishly in the emergency ward for hours after the crash. The most serious cases were rushed into surgery shortly after their arrival, while others, bandaged but still covered with drying blood, were tended to in the emergency ward. Among the three most seriously wounded, two men were apparently unconscious. A hospital spokesman said that two of the seriously wounded were being operated on last night - one for multiple fractures, the other for head injuries.

A U.S. Consulate spokesman in Jerusalem said seven American nationals were among the wounded.

The incident occurred when the bus began picking up speed on the long straight stretch after the Abu Ghosh junction.

Driver Moshe Elul, who sustained minor head injuries, seemed dazed as he recounted from his bed at Shaare Zedek the events that led to the tragedy. "A young man approached me suddenly. I thought he wanted to ask a question. (But) he grabbed the wheel, shouted 'Allahu Akbar' (God is the greatest, in Arabic) and pulled the wheel with all of his strength rightward. "I struggled with him and tried to pull the wheel back to the left. But he planted his legs on the dashboard of the bus to gain more strength, and that's how he made us topple over the precipice."

Elul was apparently later flung out of a window. He said he could not recall clearly what happened after his initial struggle with the passenger.

Most of the passengers were thrown from the bus, which disintegrated as it tumbled dozens of metres down a 45-degree slope.

First to provide assistance to the wounded were drivers who stopped by the roadside and yeshiva students from nearby Telshe-Stone. When Air Force helicopters arrived, they found it difficult to land in the wadi and turned the highway into a makeshift landing strip. Scores of volunteers joined Magen David Adom and IDF rescuers in the difficult evacuation operation.... Victims were lifted out of the wadi by rope. Ambulances took 22 of the wounded to hospitals in Jerusalem, while five were evacuated by helicopter to Sheba Hospital.

Dr. Ya'acov Adler, director of Shaare Zedek's emergency ward, where four of the wounded were taken, happened to be driving by the scene when the crash occurred. He rushed to administer emergency treatment.

Police were searching last night for two missing passengers, believed to have made their way home after being slightly injured.

Teams from the Hevra Kadisha burial society worked until nightfall to help evacuate the dead, gather scattered limbs, and search for signs of any other bodies. The burial team consisted of 25-30 ultra-Orthodox men, some of whom crawled under the bus to evacuate casualties. Rabbi Elazar Gelbstein, head of the burial society, said: "After six hours of work, I broke down and cried. I hope that God stops the suffering inflicted on the Jewish people."

Most of the wounded were in shock; those who could talk, did so in a whisper.

A team of doctors and nurses treated the suspect in hospital, while a group of Shin Bet interrogators stood by, waiting for a chance to talk to him. One armed soldier stood guard by the bedside, while other security men with walkie-talkies milled around the crowded ward.

Among the wounded at Hadassah Ein Kerem was Eliezra Ben-Yehuda Cassuto, 53, granddaughter of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the father of modern Hebrew. Cassuto, who lives in New York, was on her way to see her daughter Sigal represent the U.S. in the Maccabiah gymnastics event yesterday afternoon in Jerusalem. Cassuto, with a cast on her leg and speaking through an oxygen mask, said that just before the bus swerved she heard passengers sitting in front of her say that "something is not right. Then we were on our side, it happened so quickly. I woke up outside when there was an explosion and the fire started. I was lying on dry grass and there was fire all around. I wanted to get away but I couldn't move. I heard a woman scream that she couldn't find her son and that he was trapped inside the bus. But people told her not to go near, it was too dangerous."

Another of the wounded was Victor Assal, a 23-year-old American-born soldier from Jerusalem, who had been given a few days' leave and was on his way to see his mother who is here on a visit. Assal, who had been sitting on the left side of the bus near the back, has a broken leg and cuts and bruises on his back and head. Doctors removed large chunks of glass from his back. "I hadn't slept last night and I conked out on the ride up," Assal said from his bed in the emergency ward. "I woke up when the bus veered sharply to the right. I saw people thrown to the side and heard people screaming up front. I grabbed for my gun and then blacked out. I woke up in a sitting position above the bus. I don't know how I got out of the bus, whether I was thrown or whether someone pulled me out. My whole body hurt. I tried climbing up the slope and someone came and helped me."

Netanel Zuberri, 29, of Tel Aviv was lying on his back yesterday evening in the orthopedic ward of Sheba Hospital, counting his blessings. He was lightly wounded. His parents Naomi and Shalom were at his bedside, his mother trying to feed him vegetable soup while his father, pale and tearful, sat slumped in a nearby chair.

"At about 11.45 I was half asleep. I sat near the back door. I opened my eyes and thought I was dreaming. The bus was going straight through the safety barrier into the ravine. It happened so fast, that as soon as I understood what was happening there was an enormous crash as the bus smashed into a boulder on the floor of the wadi and overturned. The funny thing was that on the way down I flew in the air with my eyes open and I saw other people flying. It all happened in a fraction of a second. After the bus overturned I must have blacked out. I woke up and saw I was on my back and smoke was all around me. I crawled through a broken window, and got to three metres away from the bus. The whole time I could hear people screaming and crying. I gathered my strength and crawled 50 metres away where I lay down and saw how the bus was burning. You look and you can't believe it's happening."

"I lay there about 30 minutes, and only then did I realize I was injured. I felt pain in my back and I had a deep and long wound on my knee through which I could see the bone. I was very thirsty and I tried to clean the hole in my knee of all kinds of thorns and dirt. The first people to come to me were a soldier and another fellow who gave me a drink of water from a jerrycan. I tried to talk but I didn't succeed. Afterwards they pulled me up the side of the ravine with ropes and put me on the helicopter. Throughout the flight I prayed: 'God, just make it so I won't be paralyzed,' and I patted my legs the whole time to make sure I could feel them."

An American woman, Pella Fingersh, was dozing next to her 25-year-old son when she was wakened by a scream. "It sounded like some catastrophe had happened. The bus began somersaulting through the air. I felt like a ball in a bingo basket going round and round, being thrown against the ceiling and everywhere. We went around three or four times before I was thrown clear." She could not remember if she was thrown through an open window. "I found myself lying on a rock. The bus was still rolling down the hill. It hit bottom and began to burn. There was a young soldier lying next to me. He didn't move. I hope he wasn't dead. There was also a young girl covered with blood. She said 'Help me. I can't feel anything.'"

Finding herself able to move, Fingersh got up and looked around her. "It was a scene from hell. People lying about, people wandering around, covered in blood. I wanted to look for my son. I began walking. I had lost my shoes. The ground was covered with thorns." She did not find her son and was finally persuaded to leave the scene in an ambulance. She was taken to Hadassah Hospital, Mount Scopus, where she was treated for bruises. Hospital officials informed her that her son had been taken to Hadassah Hospital, Ein Kerem. "They say he has only light injuries, but I haven't spoken to him yet."

A Hadassah spokesperson last night released the following details on the wounded: Haviv Amar and Pella Fingersh, both lightly wounded, were released from hospital. Haya Cohen, aged 12, and Rami Ben-Ami remained at Hadassah Mt. Scopus.

At Hadassah Ein Karem, Rita Levin, Arye Yardeni and Shimon Fahima were all reported in serious condition. Suffering from medium wounds were Iris Peretz, Spanish tourist Sylvia Martinez, Eliezra Cassuto, and Shlomo Dgani. Dov Itkin, Naomi Yardeni, Victor Assal, Eitan Zilberman, Amit Limor and Paul Fingersh were said to have been lightly wounded.

The Egged management asked all their bus drivers and the rest of the drivers on the nation's roads to drive with car lights on today to honour the victims of the attack.

The Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway was reopened to traffic at approximatley 10 p.m. after having been closed since the accident.

Ruth Connell Robertson adds:

Maestro Zubin Mehta and the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra matched the national mood of mourning at their concert in Jerusalem last night by asking the audience to stand in silence for two minutes, and then to refrain from applause during the performance.

Wikipedia supplies the names of the dead:

Shimon Dahan, 27, of Herzeliya
Kinneret Cohen, 14, of Jerusalem
Rita Susan Levin, 39, of Philadelphia
Cpl Tova Maimon, 19, of Or Yehuda
Cpl Shaul Chai Tzur, 21, of Netanya
Nahum Mizrahi, 63, of Tel Aviv
Shlomo Atzmon, 60, of Lod
Miriam Tzerafi, 41, of Jerusalem
Isaac Na'im, 47, of Holon
Esther Na'im, 45, of Holon
Mordechai Rosenberg, 50, of Sha'arei Tikva
Matityahu Gershon Resnik, 25, of Givat Haim (Ihud)
Ya'akov Shapira, 73, of Jerusalem
Emil Gorbman, 54, of Jerusalem
Dr. Shelley Volokov Halpenny, 32, of Vancouver
Fern Rykiss, 17, of Winnipeg, Canada

It is of Abd al-Hadi Rafa Ghanim that I think when I hear of Gilad Shalit's release, and of the sixteen people he killed and the many others he injured and traumatized, one attack of so many during the wars between Israel and its neighbors.

For a disturbing and uncanny perspective on Ghanim and his attack, see an article written by John Hockenberry (NPR reporter in Israel during the first intifada) in Tikkun. Hockenberry had met Ghanim before the attack. When Hockenberry was visiting a young Palestinian friend of his named Radwan in Mokassed Hospital in Jerusalem, Ghanim was also visiting him.

Why did Yasser Arafat deny the existence of the Temple in Jerusalem?

Interesting article on Palestinian Jewish Temple denial and where it comes from, by Yitzhak Reiter in the American Interest. He explains why Yasser Arafat asserted in the 2000 Camp David peace negotiations that "the Temple never existed in Jerusalem, but rather in Nablus." Longstanding Muslim tradition never denied the existence of Solomon's and Herod's Temples in Jerusalem, but instead assumed them. It's only since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war that denial of the existence of those temples had spread among Palestinians and in the wider Arab world.

Steve Jobs is dead

I just saw on TPM that Steve Jobs has just died. I find myself quite sad, which surprises me, because the death of public figures usually doesn't touch me. But I feel a quite personal attachment to Apple Computers, as many people do, I suppose, because I've owned an Apple since 1985, when I started graduate school at Harvard. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on a typewriter (which meant that I had to retype it several times....), and vowed that for graduate school I would get a computer.

I remember reading a little booklet on how to choose a personal computer, and the Macintosh seemed much better than the clunky PCs with DOS machines - I liked the more intuitive interface, with icons, and WISYWIG, and different fonts. (I spent several years as a typesetter and was definitely into fonts). I've had one ever since, going from the Macintosh 128K, then to an upgrade to a 512K. I then went to Israel for two years and first used my roommate's DOS machine (I still have 5 1/2 inch floppy around somewhere) and then the next year rented something in a heavy metal box that ran Wordstar. When I returned to the US I bought another Macintosh (bequeathing the 512K machine to an old roommate) - I don't remember which one now. The next time I went to Israel I brought a rather heavy laptop - 5300 something. I wrote my doctoral thesis on this one, and ended up printing out the whole 450 page behemoth on an Apple Stylewriter (which I had bought in Israel the previous year).

Eventually I got an iMac, then a better laptop, and now my MacBook. I still feel the same fondness for Apple Computers, and I hope that the company continues to prosper and build more fantastic computers and other devices.

R.I.P., Steve Jobs.

Hussein Ibish on Atzmon and Mearsheimer

Excellent discussion by Hussein Ibish on Gilad Atzmon and John Mearsheimer: self-criticism, self-hate and hate.

Why Mearsheimer found Atzmon compelling in spite of these attitudes, even if they are largely concealed, implicit or downplayed in his book, is a very disturbing question. Ever since he and Walt began criticizing the role of the pro-Israel lobby (Jewish power in Israel and the United States being a subject that deserves serious interrogation of the kind being done by Peter Beinart, among others), Mearsheimer (far more than Walt) has been developing an outright vendetta with the Jewish mainstream that, I fear, has become deeply personal and therefore distorted.

Last year he gave a dreadful speech at the Palestine Center in Washington in which he abandoned his long-standing good advice to Arab and Muslim Americans to develop an alliance for a two-state solution with peace-minded Jewish Americans. Instead, he counseled Palestinians and their allies that Israel would never agree to the creation of a Palestinian state and that because of demographics and other factors, Palestinians would ultimately prevail, and that in effect they need do nothing to achieve that victory (save, he noted, engaging in the kind of violence that might rationalize another round of Israeli ethnic cleansing). In response to that worst of all possible advice, I dubbed him the “Kevorkian of Palestine,” because I believe he was preaching a form of assisted suicide. He was repeating the siren song Palestinians and other Arabs have been telling themselves about Israel and Zionism since the 1920s: that demographics are destiny and steadfastness alone would secure a victory over the Israeli national project. To say that history has proven this logic incorrect, and led from defeat to defeat, would be a gross understatement.