Review
The Past Is Not Past
December 25, 2018The Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude interrogates his country’s antisemitic history and its echoes in the present.
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Review
What Marx Got Wrong
September 20, 2018A new biography of the philosopher misses the shortcomings of the Marxist tradition.
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Review
Fauda and the Act of Israeli Ventriloquism
June 27, 2018The new season of the hit Israeli show Fauda continues in its portrayal of brutish Israelis and cowardly Palestinians.
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Review
Indonesia's Unmourned Communists
May 23, 2018A new work addresses the long-neglected mass politicide of communists in Indonesia.
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Review
The Kremlin Ball
April 24, 2018Ex-fascist diplomat Curzio Malaparte's masterpiece blends the real, the improbable, and the impossible in Soviet Russia.
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Jewish Films at the Doc NYC Festival and Beyond
November 7, 2017by Mitchell Abidor FERENC Török’s 1945, currently showing at Film Forum, takes place over the course of a few hours in a small Hungarian town in August 1945, a time of transition. The war in Europe is over, the war in the Pacific is about to end, and Hungary, though Red Army troops occupy it, is not yet the socialist state it will soon be. Throughout the film we hear radio broadcasts about upcoming elections. Everything is unsettled, and into this charged atmosphere two Jews descend from the mo...
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The Uncivil Servant: Murdering Freud
October 18, 2017by Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: Freud: The Making of an Illusion, by Frederick Crews. Metropolitan Books, 2017, 744 pages. FREDERICK CREWS, a retired professor at Berkeley, has spent decades taking a pickaxe to the work and legacy of Sigmund Freud. His near monomania on the topic (equaled only by his interest in Winnie-the-Pooh, about which (whom?) he has written two books), has rested on relatively solid ground as Freud’s reputation has sunk. No longer a dominant figure in t...
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The Uncivil Servant: Beauty, Despair, and Globalization
August 8, 2017by Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: Machines, by Rahul Jain, a film opening at Film Forum in New York, August 9. RAHUL JAIN'S documentary Machines, shot in a fabric factory in the southern India state of Gujarat, is a film of beauty and great despair, a portrait of globalism and the grinding brutality of the overseas factories that provide the clothing we wear, the goods we use. Shot largely inside the factory, we, like the workers there, are assaulted throughout the film by the cease...
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The Uncivil Servant: On "Killing" Trump
June 16, 2017by Mitchell Abidor IN THE AFTERMATH of the shooting in Alexandria on June 14, the New York Times published an article describing it as a “test” of the movement Bernie Sanders founded. The journalist, Yamiche Alcindor, described this as “a moment for liberals to figure out how to balance anger at Mr. Trump with inciting violence.” She cites examples of Sanders’ allegedly overheated rhetoric, with Bernie calling Trump “dangerous” and "a demagogue.” Alcindor and the Times are not alone: we’ve ...
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The Uncivil Servant: Ten Million Books
June 8, 2017by Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: The Book Thieves by Anders Rydell. Viking, 2017, 352 pages. THE NAZI WAR on knowledge and ideas is well-known and documented, and its image has been eternally fixed: the burning of books on May 10, 1933, a scene that opens Anders Rydell’s informative and well-written The Book Thieves. Less known is the complement to book burning: their confiscation, a policy that began almost simultaneously with the burnings. The sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and his ...
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The Uncivil Servant: Meanwhile, in France . . .
April 28, 2017by Mitchell Abidor AFTER THE FIRST round of the French elections, in which the centrist banker, Emmanuel Macron, leading his party of one, emerged in first place, followed closely by the anti-immigrant Marine Le Pen of the Front National (FN), and as the battle continues in preparation for the second round on May 7, a few observations: • The FN in truth laid something of an egg. They got more votes than ever, but with just over 20 percent of the vote, their chances of winning are nil, and give...
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The Uncivil Servant: The Hour of the Hypocrites
October 17, 2016by Mitchell Abidor THE TIME has perhaps come for a hypocrisy check. As the number of women accusing Trump of unwanted sexual advances mounts, we all sit in shock and horror, wondering how anyone can continue to support him, and how anyone can think, as Trump claims, that this is all a politically manipulated campaign against the nominee. All these women are lying? Aren't their accusations consistent with what we’ve seen of Trump’s conduct over the years? Despite the obvious truth of the accusat...
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The Uncivil Servant: Birobidzhan Follies
September 9, 2016by Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: Where the Jews Aren’t by Masha Gessen. Nextbooks/Schocken, 2016, 170 pages. WHERE THE JEWS Aren’t, Russia-born Masha Gessen’s recounting of “the sad and absurd story of Birobidzhan, the Soviet Union’s "Jewish Autonomous Region,” is the latest addition to the Jewish Encounters series produced jointly by Schocken and Nextbook. The series has been uneven, producing small gems like Adina Hoffman and Peter Coles’ Sacred Trash, a thoroughly researched and ...
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“We Are All Mahmoud”
August 28, 2016OR WE SHOULD ALL PRETEND TO BE by Mitchell Abidor From the Summer 2016 issue of Jewish Currents 1. A PLAINT THESE LAST FEW YEARS have been terrible for us Muslims. The promise of the Arab Spring has ended in chaos and dictatorship in the best of cases, with our fellow Muslims feeling the weight of the death and violence. Yes, ISIS gets press for its killings in the West (where its victims almost always include Muslims), but the overwhelming mass of those they kill, or whose lives they make a l...
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The Uncivil Servant: Myths of the Paris Commune
August 2, 2016by Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: The Last Communard, by Gavin Bowd. Verso Press, 2016, 182 pages. BECAUSE OF ITS PURITY, because it lived so briefly and gloriously and died so bravely and brutally, the Paris Commune has been enveloped in a nimbus of admiration and myth. It was the first time the working class seized power anywhere, and was also, according to Engels, the dictatorship of the proletariat made flesh. Yet Marxists must overlook the fact that Marxists and Marxism were non...
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The Uncivil Servant: Tim Who? Tim Why?
July 23, 2016by Mitchell Abidor LIKE SOME HERO out of Greek tragedy, Hillary Clinton seems to be dogged by an evil fate of her own making. Her lack of principle has long been reproached her, her overweening arrogance as well. She and her husband’s sentiment that everything revolves around the Clintons, and that all is permitted them led to the email fiasco, which has helped make what should be a cakewalk into a possible defeat All of this leads naturally to her choice of Tim Kaine for vice president. Tim w...
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The Uncivil Servant (servus incivilitis): discipula latinae
July 14, 2016by Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: Living with a Dead Language, by Ann Patty. Viking, 2016, 244 pages. ANN PATTY had a powerful job in the world of publishing, then she lost it. She left Manhattan, moved to upstate Rhinebeck, and, after a period when she was at sixes and sevens, she decided, as a lover of words, that she was going to learn Latin. “How much better would I understand words, grammar and syntax if I went back to the mother of Western tongues? I could, at long last, comple...
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The Uncivil Servant: Abraham Tuschinski and His Theater
May 31, 2016by Mitchell Abidor THE STREETS in Amsterdam linking the Rembrandtplein and the Jewish quarter were once lined with theaters owned by Jews, one of which, the Theater Tuschinski, is both still standing and stands out nearly a hundred years after it was opened. Tourists who pass it by on Reguliersbreestrat, or who stop to photograph its flamboyant exterior, are doubtless unaware that it is in a way a monument to the murdered Jewish community of the city, the 102,000 Jews (73 percent of pre-war Jew...
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The Uncivil Servant: The Battle Is Over, Bernie. The Long March Has Begun.
May 18, 2016by Mitchell Abidor HILLARY CLINTON has modeled herself after George Washington in this year’s election. No, I’m not saying she has probity of the Father of our Country. Rather, like the Washington who commanded the revolutionary armies, she has lost her way to victory. Like Washington, she loses battle after battle, but still has taken away just enough to carry the day in the end. And that she has carried the day is, however sad, undeniable. Unlike Washington, Clinton went into a game rigged i...
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The Uncivil Servant: Hannah Arendt and Chantal Akerman
March 26, 2016Two Film Events in New York by Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt, a documentary by Ada Ushpiz. Zeitgeist Films, 2015, 125 minutes; Chantal Ackerman: Images Between the Images, A Retrospective. Brooklyn Academy of Music, April 1 - May 1, 2016. [caption id="attachment_41113" align="alignleft" width="300"] Scene from Chantal Ackerman's "Jeanne Dielman"[/caption] HANNAH ARENDT was a prolific writer, an important thinker in the fields of moral and po...
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The Uncivil Servant: Deflated France
March 12, 2016by Mitchell Abidor AFTER TWO WEEKS traversing France working on a book on the events of May 1968, speaking to leftists both Jewish and non-, I took a while find the right word to describe the state of the country, but I think I’ve hit on it: deflated. The economic situation, the political situation, the ethnic situation (for want of a better word) are all pretty despairing. Although daily life goes on as normal, as soon as you start talking about bigger issues, a dark cloud settles overhead. T...
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The Uncivil Servant (in France): "We Are All German Jews"
March 6, 2016by Mitchell Abidor I DIDN'T TRAVEL to France to escape the shame and horror of the current American presidential campaign, but I’ve been able to do that while here, to some extent. French politics being in almost the same state as ours, with the National Front posing a serious threat, the people I spend my time with know they have nothing to be smug about when they compare France to the U.S.: the French left is dead, the government’s attitude toward the refugees camped in “The Jungle” in Calais...
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The Uncivil Servant: Michael Moore's Invasions
February 16, 2016by Mitchell Abidor MICHAEL MOORE'S latest film, Where to Invade Next, is amazingly timely. Moore travels the world, a one-man invasion team searching for social programs other countries have that we don’t, so he can bring them back to the U.S. The film is, for most of its length, a virtual Bernie Sanders campaign ad, demonstrating the benefits of the European social-democratic state Sanders speaks of, even when the state is run by conservatives. After a brilliant montage showing the all-too da...
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The Uncivil Servant: America, Seen from the Antipodes
February 13, 2016by Mitchell Abidor [caption id="attachment_40734" align="alignright" width="295"] Andy Blunden (left) burning his draft card.[/caption] Andy Blunden is an independent scholar in Melbourne, Australia. A Hegelian who frequently lectures on the German thinker and has published many books on philosophy, he is also an administrator of the Marxists Internet Archive. Andy is a longtime political activist who left Australia for England in 1966 after burning his draft card in protest against the Vietna...
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The Uncivil Servant: Hillary Clinton's Scolds
February 8, 2016by Mitchell Abidor IF HILLARY Clinton’s supporters wanted to confirm their image as irrelevant relics they couldn’t have done better than they have over the past few days. Madeleine Albright’s "There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other," and Gloria Steinem’s "When you’re young you’re thinking, where are the boys, and the boys are with Bernie" were of a piece with the generally tone-deaf nature of Clinton’s campaign. Condescension, snark, resentment: Nothing is more ce...
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The Uncivil Servant: Bernie, Pigs, and Corn
February 2, 2016by Mitchell Abidor THE CORN-GROWERS of Iowa have finally spoken. Hillary Clinton, who learned nothing from her humiliation in the primaries of eight years ago, when she mocked Barack Obama’s magnificent promise, talking about how under Obama "the skies will open, the light will come down, [and] celestial choirs will be singing," repeated her performance this go-round. Her sneering at Bernie Sanders’ flights of fancy about single-payer healthcare and a more just America has left her with egg on ...
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The Farewell Letters of the Manouchian Group
January 9, 2016Jews of the French Resistance in Their Final Hours Translated by Mitchell Abidor From the Autumn 2015 special issue of Jewish Currents on the theme, "Honoring the Jewish Resistance." THE MEMBERS of the Manouchian Group, twenty-three mostly foreign-born men and women fighting in the Communist Resistance in France, were captured in the fall of 1943. Tortured and interrogated, they were sentenced to death after a brief show trial. (See my article in the Spring 2015 edition of Jewish Currents.) Be...
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The Uncivil Servant: Karl Kraus vs. the Criminal Human Race
December 20, 2015by Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus. Yale University Press, 2015, 645 pages. THE VAGARIES OF TRANSLATION have resulted in huge gaps in our knowledge of world literature, leaving English-language readers ignorant of essential writers and books. The result is regular bouts of head-scratching when the Nobel Prize for Literature is awarded to a writer unknown to us because no publisher has taken the risk to translate them. A case in point was the 2014...
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The Uncivil Servant: The Candidate We Deserve
December 3, 2015by Mitchell Abidor We were discussing politics, my wife and I, and I said, "Who knows, maybe it’ll be Trump against Bernie in the general election, and we’ll see which way America chooses to go when presented with the clear choice between decency and vileness." Joan said she wouldn’t want to see that choice presented, so I told her that she clearly supports Clinton, since a Bernie supporter would say: We want Bernie to be the candidate, which means we want him to face whoever the Republicans ...
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The Uncivil Servant: That's Not Who We Are?
November 29, 2015by Mitchell Abidor SO EVEN THOUGH the U.S. has only accepted 1,200 refugees — most of them women and children — from war-torn Syria and Iraq, and the process to enter this country is so onerous that it takes a year and a half to two years, plenty of time for them to freeze to death or die of disease in a camp, the House of Representatives has decided that we’re too liberal and we should block this immigration entirely. Those on the side of the angels have said this is wrong, and almost all of ...
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The Uncivil Servant: France's Other Wave of Terror
November 18, 2015by Mitchell Abidor AS PARIS RECOVERS from the latest terrorist attacks, and as France bombs ISIS-held cities and its president and legislature threaten its democracy, it is perhaps a good time to remember that Paris and France were once before the targets of a wave of terrorism — one that lasted several years, counted innocent bystanders as its victims, and to which the government’s reaction was the curbing of democracy. This was the wave of attacks by the anarchist "propagandists of the deed" ...
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The Uncivil Servant: BDS and Free Speech in France
November 11, 2015by Mitchell Abidor IN LATE OCTOBER, France’s highest appeals court issued a decision with such alarming implications that it deserved far greater notice outside that country than it has received. The court determined that the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement is in violation of French law prohibiting discrimination based on national origin. The court has, in essence, determined that simply protesting against Israel's policies is an anti-Semitic act. The dreams of Netanyahu have been f...
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The Uncivil Servant: Justice Ginsburg, aka the Notorious Smallie Bigs
November 9, 2015by Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: Notorious RBG, by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik. Dey Street Books, 2015, 240 pages. I SAT DOWN to read Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik’s book on Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Notorious RBG, with some trepidation. Though I had seen the authors speak and was impressed by their sincerity, intelligence, and articulateness, I still harbored fears about the book. The cover, showing Ginsburg in her robes, her lace jabot, and a crown like that worn in a famous image ...
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The Uncivil Servant: Sattouf's Childhood in the Middle East
October 22, 2015by Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East (1978-84), by Riad Sattouf, 2015, Metropolitan Books. WHEN RIAD SATTOUF'S graphic novel, The Arab of the Future, was published in France in 2014, it met with almost unprecedented success for a graphic novel, indeed, for almost any kind of novel. It sold an unimaginable 200,000 copies and met with strong reactions, both positive and negative. It was praised for its honesty, and was condemned as sp...
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The Uncivil Servant: Visiting the Central Cemetery in Vienna
October 15, 2015by Mitchell Abidor CEMETERIES HAVE LONG been my favorite places to visit on my travels, not least because almost all of the people who matter to me can be found in them. No place in the world equals Paris’ Montparnasse cemetery, where within a hundred yards of each other the great writers Samuel Beckett, Julio Cortázar, and E.M. Cioran can be found, the three of them not all that far from Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Susan Sontag. No gathering of the living can equal this. Friends wonder wha...
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The Uncivil Servant: Bambi in Vienna
September 30, 2015by Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: Bambi’s Jewish Roots and Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture, by Paul Reitter. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, 296 pages. PAUL REITTER'S Bambi’s Jewish Roots, a collection of the author’s reviews and essays, provides the reader with cause for reflection not only in every selection, but virtually on every page. In examining German-language Jewish writers from the fin de siècle to the inter-war period, Reitter eschews academic jargon (though he is himself...
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The Uncivil Servant: Hofstadter's Prescient Insight
September 24, 2015Understanding the Tea Party Half a Century Before It Was Launched by Mitchell Abidor IN HER COMMENT on the conversation Nick Jahr and I had at this website on Bernie Sanders, Anna Wrobel cited Richard Hofstadter’s analysis of populism. Not only do I agree with the paraphrased opinion of the great historian, but I have become increasingly convinced that Hofstadter (1916-1970) is perhaps the greatest guide there is to American political life and history, and that his books are a necessary part...
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The Uncivil Servant: Corbyn and Sanders as Fruits of Our Defeat
September 9, 2015by Mitchell Abidor THE SMASHING VICTORY of Jeremy Corbyn in the contest for leadership of the Labour Party has been compared to the Bernie Sanders moment here in the U.S. These men of clear leftwing principles, who stand up for those principles without any concern for polls, do indeed have much in common, though of course the immediate difference is apparent: Corbyn is now the head of the leading opposition party in Parliament, while we can only hope we’ll live so long as to see Sanders as the ...
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The Uncivil Servant: The Black Panthers, Heroes and Maniacs
September 6, 2015by Mitchell Abidor ON A PURELY PERSONAL LEVEL, Stanley Nelson’s engrossing film The Black Panthers, Vanguard of the Revolution has led me to revise what I’ve been saying for decades about my youthful love for that organization. I’ve maintained that I was right to support them, but it was for all the wrong reasons. In cynical hindsight, they seem to me to have been all about posturing and insanely violent rhetoric that led to their demise and led the white New Left — which had, indeed, treated t...
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The Uncivil Servant: A Failed Paean to a Kosher Communist
September 1, 2015by Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: The House of Twenty Thousand Books, by Sasha Abramsky. New York Review Books, 2015 (published in Great Britain in 2014), 336 pages, $27.95 CHIMEN ABRAMSKY was the scion of a long line of important East European rabbis. After following his rabbi father into exile from Soviet Russia and spending time in Palestine, he landed in England where, instead of following in his ancestors’ footsteps, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and, fro...
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The Uncivil Servant: Bernie and the Black Lives Matter Movement
August 13, 2015by Mitchell Abidor FOR THE SECOND and almost certainly not the last time, Bernie Sanders has been blocked from speaking by people from the Black Lives Matter movement. Though in Phoenix he was able to get in a few words at the Netroots Conference, in Seattle he was unable to speak at all. Yet again, the suicidal instincts of the American left have kicked in. Yet again the American left is proving itself to be foolish, cowardly, and self-destructive. It regularly provides the answer to the quest...
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The Uncivil Servant: New York and the Folk Revival
August 9, 2015An Exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York by Mitchell Abidor FIFTY YEARS AGO, on July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan appeared at the Newport Folk Festival backed by an electric band and set off a storm that’s hard to imagine today. Try to imagine (or remember) people booing, shouting, and writing screeds about and against a musician changing styles. The events surrounding Dylan’s apostasy are covered thoroughly, thoughtfully, and entertainingly in Elijah Wald’s new book, Dylan Goes Electric, whic...
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The Uncivil Servant: For Bernie
July 31, 2015by Mitchell Abidor IT IS ONLY NOW, when I’m old enough to receive a pension and Social Security, that I will be actively supporting a Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders. I must have supported Eugene McCarthy for ten minutes in 1968, because among my political memorabilia from the Sixties, in a box with my countless Black Panther buttons (“Free the Panther 21,” “Free Huey,” “The Spirit of Fred [Hampton] Lives: I am a Revolutionary”) is a McCarthy pin. I was quickly cured of any of my illusions...
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Honest Abe and the Children of Abraham
July 27, 2015Much Ado About the Inconsequential by Mitchell Abidor From the Summer 2015 issue of Jewish Currents Reviewed in this essay: Lincoln and the Jews, by Jonathan Sarna and Benjamin Shappel. Thomas Dunne Books, 2015, 288 pages. THERE HAVE BEEN some sixteen thousand books written about Abraham Lincoln, few of them, I’d wager, dedicating many pages to his chiropodist (as podiatrists were then called). Issachar Zacharie was a man who made magnificent claims about his education, which was in reality a...
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The Uncivil Servant: The Dark Side of Gay Marriage
July 6, 2015by Mitchell Abidor BUT THERE IS A DARK SIDE to gay marriage. Our friend Dan was visiting from St. Louis, a city in a state where he thought he’d never live to see the possibility that he could wed. And now it’s law. A law that brought two sad truths home to him. He wondered: “So am I a spinster now?” And he lamented: “Well, now I guess marriage is just one more thing I’ve failed at.” Mitchell Abidor, our contributing writer, is the recipient of a Hemingway Grant from the French Ministry ...
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The Uncivil Servant: History and Civics Lessons
June 28, 2015by Mitchell Abidor [caption id="attachment_37583" align="alignleft" width="233"] John Calhoun, by Matthew Brady[/caption] THIS HAS BEEN a week for exposing the public's general ignorance about American history and our entire political system. My 7th-grade social studies teacher, Miss Kelly, told us that if we remembered everything we learned through the 6th grade, we’d seem like geniuses all our lives. Back then that was true: Who remembers the patroon system anymore, or learns about it? Expla...
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The Uncivil Servant: Richard Pryor's Daughter Onstage
June 7, 2015"Fried Chicken and Latkes" by Mitchell Abidor RICHARD PRYOR was a unique figure in American comedy, his comedy developing from light and silly early routines to the pointed and profane humor of his later years, when he became a comedic god. He had, we learn in "Fried Chicken and Latkes," “either six or maybe seven children,” one of whom, Rain, has a one-woman show of that title running at The National Black Theatre, located in the heart of Harlem, until June 28. Rain, as we can infer from the ...
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The Uncivil Servant: A Zetz! "Yiddish Fighting Words" at YIVO
May 11, 2015by Mitchell Abidor I WAS NOT a red diaper baby. In fact, when I was a kid, ideas in general were as rare as bacon on Yom Kippur in my house. After supper, my father would go into the living room, lie down on the couch, and snore the evening away. He wasn’t alone in this: All of my friends’ exhausted fathers did the same, though some fell asleep in a chair rather than on the couch. No issues of the day, no great historical questions agitated my father, nor did they matter to Irving Glasser, Nat ...
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The Uncivil Servant: The Thugs Are Loose
May 4, 2015by Mitchell Abidor THE THUGS ARE LOOSE on the streets of Baltimore and New York, and the papers and the TV news are full of scenes of violence. Unlike the rioters and demonstrators frauds like Geraldo Rivera call “thugs,” these thugs wear uniforms, and they kill. And when they kill, until now they have almost always walked. The killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore has vastly complicated the explanation for the police killings over the past year. The protests and outrage in 2014 and 2015 have r...
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Le Groupe Manouchian
May 2, 2015Betrayed Heroes of the French Resistance? by Mitchell Abidor From the Spring, 2015 issue of Jewish Currents IT WAS LATE FEBRUARY, 1944 when the German Occupation authorities in France decided that the time had come to stage the trial of a group of Resistance fighters they’d captured the previous autumn. Under ordinary circumstances, trials of partisans weren’t held, and if they were, they were never public; fighters were captured, tortured, and sent before the firing squad. But this group was ...
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