Bill and Sister There seems to be a temptation among some who are just or beautiful enough to empathize with Israel and the Jewish People on the one hand, but are averse to ostracism by their crowds on the other, to repeat in their own way a version of Bill Clinton's notorious 'Sister Souljah Moment' perpetrated when he was first running for President. Clinton at the time looked well positioned at long last to break the McGovern/Carter/Dukakis curse of the Dem Party and win t

Netanyahus, Nyerere, Idi Amin Prologue: It's said that 'the L'rd works in mysterious ways.' If true, it's probably seldom been truer than this summer. Consider the following sequence of cross-causal historical confluences now reaching some sort of 'Divine Closure' ... (And perhaps buckle-up first, as the SHEER VOLUME of JAW-DROPPING 'coincidences' here would make NOT seeing some strange Kabbalistic 'Divine Hand' at work all but impossible - WITHOUT benefit of Rachel Maddow, G

Fyodor Of Campism, Non-Binaryness, and Enemies' Enemies as Fwiends I don't think I experienced mass campism till 2022, and I am fairly sure I never looked up the word till last year. In any event, it strikes me as a strange phenom - especially in an age where being 'non-binary' is 'a thing' among mu fellow self-styled lefties - and even a widely defended such thing. What saliently happened in 2022 was of course Russia's invasion of Ukraine... I have long been a defender of

Faust II, Act 5 Let's start with something about polities that I'll draw out by analogy to the enterprise forms - or 'firms' - about which I teach. Something I think helps explain a new Western psychosis about Israel and its broader community - the Jewish community. It won't be as boring as that might at first sound. How could it be, with Israel and Goethe's Faust both poised to get in on the act? One way to think about all enterprise forms is as co-ops. Every

I don't believe we can break current Middle East impasses or the public fever around them without first developing a comprehensive long-term plan that we can push both relentlessly and positively in response to every expression of pure negativity. In this spirit and as a first pass, here is what I tend to think will have to be the full three-part 'full court press' of the coming months. Crucially, I think that ALL THREE PLANKS must be pursued both (a) SIMULTANEOUSLY and (b) R

There was a time when it was said 'all politics is local' - a line often attributed to Tip O'Neil (AI'd in image here). Now it all seems to be MORE local than 'local' - it's all in one place, all in some strange abstraction called 'gah-tha.' At least if you're DSA pseudo-'progressive.' Just a few years ago my progressive comrades and I in both DSA and Justice Dems were all about greenification, industrial revitalization, economic democracy, public banking and M4A. Now, again,

Georgie Before 10/7 of 2023, I probably would never have thought widespread ATTACKS upon someone or something might be the precipitant of my coming to LOVE the relevant someone or something. I would have thought that at most such hysteria would elicit my instinctive protectiveness or sympathy, maybe accompanied by some disgust or outrage, along with some puzzlement as to how literally scores of millions of people all could go suddenly stark raving mad while being identically

As more data emerges on the 23 June elections in New York, Hakeem Jeffries' observation that districts where jihadi DSA candidates won are the most gentrified in New York proves to be ever more salient. (I say 'jihadi' both because of DSA funding sources now, as distinguished from when I was a member, and because these candidates' answers to virtually all questions in the pre-primary debates were the locally irrelevant and hate-criminally Blood-Libelous words 'gatha,' 'Zionis

Hair Shirt, Bed of Nails, Projective 'Culprit' - i.e., Scapegoat The new, partly outside-financed oikophobia of the contemporary Occident, combined with the longstanding human tendency nevertheless to want to blame anyone but oneself for one's wrongs even while posturing as a contrite moralist ('virtue-signaling'), seems to be driving yet another episode of otherization and blame of a discrete and particular ('insular'), while likewise (just barely) scapegoat here in the West

Capitalism is well known to erode, then to obliterate, all familial, cultural, and other affective-communal structures, followed by what we can call the self-structures that those structures undergird too. First the larger structures are atomized into 'individuals,' then the individuals are atomized into 'attention-bytes.' Such is the psycho-'productive' 'attention economy' that sucks out our surplus attention-labour, through use of our surplus 'digital creator' labor, atop t

As I have witnessed the recent degeneration of discourse about 'the Middle East' among some of my erstwhile comrades on the putative 'left,' as well as among those from whom I have never expected much better on the putative right, I have been struck by how now even old tendencies appear in a new light. The new Zionophobia and its correlate, 'Palestinianism,' I think, highlights a sense in which we in the Occident are prone to fetishizing not only 'the exotic Other,' but also

I hesitate to write this, because I don't believe that as much hinges on terminology right now as some seem to think. It might nonetheless be of some value to share a brief word about why I think 'Zionophobia' a more helpful word than 'Anti-Zionism' at our present historical juncture. For my reasons are rooted in what is at bottom a NON-terminological distinction that I think is CRUCIAL - a distinction that the term 'Anti-Zionism' elides. This while, ironically, 'Anti-Zionism

I'm not usually given to quoting Sartre, but these lines, much admired by Adorno, are too penetrating not to share ... First this one: 'One cannot be anti-semitic alone.' Then this one: '[The sentence] "I hate the Jews" is a sentence which is said in chorus; saying it one connects oneself with a tradition and a community.' Finally, and relatedly, this one: '[Anti-semitic emotions are] not provoked by experience.' Sound like anyone you've encountered?

Here are three gems from the anti-semitism chapter of Horkheimer's and Adorno's 'Dialectic of Enlightenment, and one from the Frankfurt School's 'Authoritatian Personality,' that I find particularly arresting. All four quotes seem to me to bear striking applicability to contemporary mass-psychoses. The profundity of insight here (not to mention the contemporary relevance) I suspect stems BOTH from the authors' personal experience as Jewish refugees from a then Nazifying Europ

Am finally reading the nearly 1000-page 'Authoritarian Personality,' a project of 'the Frankfurt School' broadly construed. My G-d, what a tour de force... If you think you know 'critical theory' or 'cultural Marxism' (the latter term a reactionary misnomer) and are not familiar with this work, please consider a 'reset' by first (a) provisionally suspending all presuppositions, then (b) reading IN or ALL OF this work (even Adorno's and Peter Gordon's introductory reflections

Mark David Chapman, Arafat The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the American Psychiatric Association's (APA's) definitive catalogue of mental disorders and illnesses. It is TGE go-to for mental health professionals seeming to spot, diagnose, and treat psychoses of all kinds. As a catalogue, it is of course no more static or incontestable than are psychiatry and mental health practice themselves. Hence it evolves, gradually but steadily, over tim

Harold Bloom, Arafat Having written elsewhere about identity-theft and its mass-marketing by those Einat Wilf has dubbed 'palestinianists,' I think it worth meditating a bit more on what prompts this ideational pathology and its ugly praxis. It seems to me there are at least two helpful frames in which to consider the phenomenon. One is what I dub DSM-diagnosable 'Narcissistic Identity-Appropriation Disorder,' which I'll say more about in a subsequent post. The other is what

Marcel Duchamp, 'Fountain,' Arafat Early last century, Duchamp notoriously spoofed modern art with a new form that he named the 'readymade.' A found object - an objet trouvé - became 'art' at his hands simply through the act of christening. The artifice of the artist was shown to be, given the right cultural-institutional conditions, almost alchemical. Warhol then took things a step further - in effect showing, without apology to Walter Benjamin, that even mass-production and

What distinguishes actual devotees of Marx, including Labour Zionists, from mere ‘leftists,’ ‘democratic socialists,’ and even some (not all) ‘Western,’ or ‘Cultural’ Marxists themselves is our focus on what and how we produce - how we collaboratively construct our material lives, in ways that could, but still don’t, give expression to our real inner genius and creative autonomy. There is of course no real tension between such a focus, on the one hand, and devotion to carefu

A beautiful tenet of Marx and his circle - a truth they not only propounded, but lived and lived FOR - was that class could in large part determine, but would not in the future define us. Hence to be on the right side of class struggle was to fight in effect for the end of class structures themselves. Each could in due course be everything. Thus we would 'win' when we no longer are tokens of pre-given types, but become types of our own - when we collapse the type-token disti