Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: The One About the English Antisemites

The One About the English Antisemites

Ever wondered where the Guardian draws its hatred of the Jews from? Well, there was Shakespeare, of course, and Dickens, and Marlow, and Defoe, and HG Wells, and Chesteron.... and lots more were that came from. Take a course in English Literature 101, and you'll have the list.

This, and much more, in a book that probably needs to be read: Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England. Assuming you wish to spend a chunk of time being educated about Jews haters, that is. If you don't, I suppose you can be forgiven.

h/t Contentions

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: The One About the English Antisemites

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: The Lost Jews of the West

The Lost Jews of the West

Just completed the reading of a small book with a large thesis. It's the joint project of two local scholars, Arye Edrei (Law, Tel Aviv University) and Doron Mendels (History, Hebrew University). Because of the vagaries of academe, they both live in Hebrew, their research is based on sources in Hebrew Aramaic Greek and Latin, they published their findings in two articles in English, but the book which contains the fullest presentation of their findings exists only in German, Zweierlei Diaspora, Zur Spaltung der antiken juedischen Volk. The two earlier articles appeared in the Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, 2007 and 2008.

The reason I'm getting into all the bibliographic stuff is because of my frustration that such a ground-breaking and fascinating study is hidden in such remote nooks and crannies as to ensure that no-one ever finds them, except for some dusty old eggheads.

The thesis: About 2,200 years ago the Jews split into two language groups. The Western half forgot Hebrew, and in spite of its size was eventually lost to Jewish history.

The Jewish world from the 3rd century BCE onwards was split between the western communities which spoke Greek, and the eastern ones which spoke Aramaic. The Aramaic-speaking ones knew Hebrew, read the Bible in it, created the Mishna in it, and then developed the Talmud and its auxiliary creations in Aramaic interspersed with Hebrew. In the west, meanwhile, the Bible was translated into Greek (the Septuagint), so the Greek-speakers no longer needed Hebrew and forgot it.

In the Land of Israel itself there were Jews of both camps. Moreover, until the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70CE the division was not necessarily troubling because everyone accepted the utter centrality of Jerusalem, and Jewish practice focused on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The destruction of the Temple and of Jerusalem removed the center of Judaism. The pharisees, who had already begun developing an oral law, managed to forge a new form of Judaism, rabbinic Judaism; the Jews of the west, not having any of the languages, were simply not part of it. They did not contribute to it, and there are only rare indications that they even knew it existed. Nor, as time went on, is it clear that the Jews of the east remembered that the Jews of the west were still there.

There was also the matter of Christianity: the Septuagint enabled anyone to read the Bible, and now ever growing numbers of non-Jews were claiming themselves to be Israel; this caused the rabbis to insist that their Talmudic tradition never be written: an oral tradition of immense complexity in languages most Christians didn't know would be impossible to translate and expropriate. In practice this meant dropping the Jews who couldn't participate.

Prior to the late 18th century rabbinic Judaism was the only sort there was (though within its limits it was of course extraordinarily rich and variegated). The Jews of Asia Minor, North Africa and Europe simply didn't know about it.

So how did they live? As what? Initially, they lived according to the Biblical precepts, meaning the basic laws of Kashrut and the Sabbath and holidays. Yet Edrei and Mendels speculate that many of them may have joined the early Christians, who were not obviously all that different from them initially. By and by they stopped sending money to the center, because it wasn't there anymore, and thus they lost another form of connection. And then?

In the 9th or 10th century rabbinic Judaism appears in Europe; by the 11th it is stronger there than in the east. How did this happen? The book offers no clear answer, and when I pressed Arye Edrei he said he doesn't know, because the sources are too weak. He seems to incline to the explanation that rabbinic Jews traveled to the west and settled there. Did they find remnants of the local Jews and teach them the rabbinic tradition? Was there anyone left to teach?

Which leads to the obvious question: in the long run (centuries), can Jews exist as Jews without Hebrew?

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: The Lost Jews of the West

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Tony Judt's "Postwar"

Tony Judt's "Postwar"

Trying to clear my desk this afternoon before going off to other climes, I recognize I'll never find the time to write the review of Postwar it so richly deserves. That would be Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.

I've said this before but Ill say it again. This is one of the best history books published in recent years, certainly one of the best I've read in years. First, there's the language. Often reviewers praise the language of a book when they've not got much better to say. In this case, I'm praising the language because it's clear, understated, but always a pleasure to read. Judt has the ability to wander over his terrain, looking at things from a changing perspective and through diverse lens, all without our being aware of his mechanics. It's like listening to a particularly compelling teacher roam over terrain he knows better than the back of his hand.

There's the breadth of knowledge. It is, quite simply, inspiring. Wow.

There's the author's perspective, and his professionalism. True, he really doesn't like Margaret Thatcher, and doesn't manage to hide it. Yet he's also a man with strong political convictions and a well-known writer on contemporary political issues. This never stops him from pointing out the weaknesses, cynicism or other foibles of the actors he's describing, even if you suspect he mostly agreed with some of them - yet he does this all in a calm, British understatement tone.

It must be said that the historical depth shallows out as he goes, but that's the way it has to be. We have far more perspective on the late 1940s and even the 1970s than on the 1990s. Eventually, his final chapters are not much more than exceptionally good Economist reports - but The Economist is, after all, the best news magazine out there, so that's not so bad. And all the previous chapters were much better.

The content: he says at the beginning that he doesn't have a grand thesis. His story, however, is the story of how present-day Europe came to be: and it's a very different place than it was. His first section, titled Post-War, deals with 1945-1953, and it starts with a litany of how awful things were in the various corners of Europe in 1945, and how they different countries went about their first attempts of climbing out of the mess. So it's a story of many strands. Then there's a section on Prosperity and Its Discontents: 1953-1971, then Recessional: 1971-1989. Without trumpeting the fact, his narrative begins losing strands, and begins to coalesce: South joins West, West is different than East in uniform ways. The poignant part here is how West Europeans essentially wrote off the East, while the East pined after the West. (A friend who read the book before me summed up it's 900-some pages in one sentence: It was because of the different quality of the refrigerators produced in East and West Germany).

The final chronological section is called After the Fall: 1989-2005. By now Judt is describing the world we're in, there;s only one major stand, yet he has shown that it wasn't planned, wasn't even contemplated in its present form, rather it grew out of a long serious of events and decisions and compromises. A sobering thought for those who see the European Model as humanity's future (Judt may; many of us don't).

He then finishes with thought on the role of memory and history.

It's a long book, but also a long pleasure to read.

Of course, Judt isn't just anyone. From the perspective of this blog and its themes, he's part of the problem: a Jew with a weighty voice who takes anti-Israeli positions and is widely recognized for them. How does this fit with the magnificent historian, I hear you wondering?

My answer is that I don't know. People are complex, and the author of this intelligent a book can also be the writer of profoundly wrong and wrong-headed columns about the Jews, their identity, and their place in the world. Fact.

Yet as is publicly known, he is suffering from a horrible and incurable sickness. That's not a justification for anything, but I choose to regard it as cause for reconciliation. I have no will to criticize him anymore. On the contrary: I hope, for him, that in the future he will be remembered as a fine and important historian, and his other writings will fade into oblivion.

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Tony Judt's "Postwar"

A Complicated Jew on Complicated Jews

A Complicated Jew on Complicated Jews

Imagine a Catholic orphaned from murdered Jewish parents who thought they were Catholic, who narrowly survives and becomes a priest, spends a long career on the fault-line where Christians and Jews gingerly investigate the historical basis of their differences of opinions, then becomes a Jew and writes about it all in a calm, intelligent and balanced manner. Ah, and his subject matter is the single most important archeological finding of the 20th century, which itself shed some light, but not enough, on one of the strangest groups of Jews ever, if Jews they were; perhaps they were proto-Christians, or outcasts who served as an inspiration for someone, or perhaps they weren't at all. You might be likely to read his book, wouldn't you?

Geza Vermes, The Story of the Scrolls. The Miraculous Discovery and True Significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Not on sale in America, it seems, but you can buy it on Amazon.uk. If you need more prodding, here's a review that should do the job.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

A Lethal Obsession

A Lethal Obsession

Robert Wistrich is the archetype of the scholar. He speaks English with an Oxford accent, Hebrew like a Sabra, German like a yekke, and his French and Russian sound to me fully convincing. He probably speaks some additional languages, too. He has read any book or article relevant to his field, and the field is rather broad. He has written something like 20 books.

His newest book,A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad just came out last month. It's more than a thousand pages long. The other day I saw a copy, and you wouldn't wish it to fall on your toe.

In spite of the title, it apparently focuses not on the longevity of Jew hatred, but on its post-Holocaust vitality. Anyone who wishes to speak with authority on this topic, must read the book, even though it will take a bit of effort. That's how one acquires authority: by working at it.

If you'd like to know about the thesis without the major effort, here's a fine review by Jeffrey Herf. (h/t Silke)

When Hitler made his famous threat to exterminate Europe’s Jews in 1939, many Western political observers did not believe he meant what he said. It was too incredible and without precedent. No political leader before had so bluntly and publicly announced his intention to engage in mass murder. And so the disgust that greeted Hitler was mixed with disbelief. But the leaders of our own time do not have the excuse of incredulity. As much as any historian can, Robert Wistrich has documented the fact that radical anti-Semitism is in earnest, that its geographic and cultural center of gravity has shifted, and that it has again become a factor in world politics. The advocates of this disgusting doctrine have the power from which to make good on their threats.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

The Gathering

The Gathering

Over the weekend I read Anne Enright's 2007 Booker Prize-winning The Gathering.

If you like very well written novels in which deeply troubled narrators slowly uncover the decision made 80 years ago which led to an ugly act 35 years ago which will negatively impact a dysfunctional family well into the second half of the 21st century, you'll enjoy this book greatly. It is very well written, and does do a fine job of unraveling the mystery while creating complex figures in a compelling story.

Me, I suppose I'm too philistine to be swept away by this sort of thing. This is either cause or effect of my not reading enough contemporary literature.

On the other hand, a few days ago I completed Tony Judt's magnificent Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Judt is a strident enemy of Israel, but he has written a truly top-notch history of Europe, and I need to find the time to write my impressions; I even ought to do so soon, while they're still fresh. Alas (or not at all alas) I'm very pressed for time these days. Anyway, if anyone offers you to choose between these two books, now you know my recommendation.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

A Small and Weak Country

A Small and Weak Country

What happens to a small and weak country, when it tries to move in a direction the neighbors don't like, and it must rely on its powerful friends to protect it?

It's not a nice place to be. Ask Georgia.

Better to be not weak, and not dependent on friends, no matter how nice they are. Ask Israel.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Diaspora

Diaspora

"Diaspora is a Greek word for a Jewish condition". Thus begins Dan Diner's foreword (alas, in German) to Doron Mendeles and Arye Edrei's very important new book Zweierlie Diaspora: Zur Spaltung der antiken juedischen Welt. I'll talk about the book someday, but that first sentence is arresting on its own. Back in the Helenic world, people lived where they were supposed to live; a nation living in dispersal while remaining a nation was odd enough to require a word be invented to contain the thought.

Later the word took on many additional meanings, of course, but that initial condition is of great significance. More than 2,000 years ago the Jews were already doing things differently from everybody else.

Old habits die hard. Ancient ones, it seems, don't die at all.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Czechoslovakia and Hungary

Czechoslovakia and Hungary

The Economist has two interesting book reviews, which are worth glancing at even if you won't buy the books.

The first review is of Mary Heimann's Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed. Accroding to the review, Heimann has documented that just about all the nice things we sort of generally "know" about Czechoslovakia and what a positive place it was, were wrong. It wasn't. Having read the review it occured to me that many of the specific points I'd heard of over the years, but never in a coherent way that might change the overall impression of what the country was about.

Well, maybe that's because Heimann's case is overstated, or so her reviewer thinks. But it still sounds very interesting.

Then there's the story of communist Hungary. It was ghastly - according to Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America, by Kati Marton. Even at the time there was no lack of misguided people in the West who refused to accept that for all its blemishes, it was simply superior in almost all things to the communist part of the world; the passage of time isn't making the incredulity any softer. Read the Guardian and you'll see. Anyway, the need to believe the worst about the democratic world as it faces far worse societies which are whitewashed is still one of the main political themes of our day.

This book sounds like a useful reminder that there can be truly evil regimes; if you don't have time for the book at least read the review.

Originally postd byYaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Lozowick on Cesarani on Eichmann

Lozowick on Cesarani on Eichmann

A reader has left a comment on my recent "Evil isn't Banal" post:

There is a book by David Cesarani,
"Becoming Eichmann, Reviewing the life,
crimes and trial of a desk murderer" which
seems to be very critical of Arendt's approach (I haven't read it yet...it on
my waiting list).

The book is here: Becoming Eichmann

This set off a bell, and I went to the back room, bent down to rummage around at the back of the lowest shelf of the cupboard behind the old piano, and lo and behold: behind a pile of old shoes (most of them left shoes, for some reason) and dusty Lego castles, I found... a review I once wrote about Ceserani's book. Apparently it was published in some German journal, but I did the writing of it in English. So on the spot I decided to redeem it from the lost past, and here it is!

David and I used to be friends; in recent years we've drifted apart what with my moving to a new career. Now that I see the review, however, I wonder if there wasn't more substance to our lost of mutual interest. Sad.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Poland's Solidarity

Poland's Solidarity

I know the 1980s were a long time ago, but the story of Solidarity makes for a fine read, and I needed to know more about it for a lecture I'm scheduled to give later this month in Warsaw, so I did what used to be the obvious thing (at least before Wikipedia): I ordered and read a book about it. The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (Third Edition), by Timothy Garton Ash.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Evil Isn't Banal

Evil Isn't Banal

Ron Rosenbaum (author of, among others, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil), has read some interesting research efforts about Hannah Arendt and her relationship to Heidegger, on the one hand, and the Jews, on the other. Rosenbaum is always worth your time, and this review isn't even particularly long, so I recommend it in its' entirety. My paraphrasing: Arendt preferred Heidigger the Nazi over her fellow Jews, and this warped her understanding of the world. Since she's one of the most influential intellectual figures of the 20th century, and remains important to this very day, this is no small problem.

Wasserstein believes she internalized anti-Semitic literature; I would perhaps modify this to say she internalized the purported universalism of Germanic high culture with its disdain for parochialism. A parochialism she identified with, in her own case, her Jewishness, something she felt ashamed of on intellectual grounds, so primitive, this tribal allegiance in the presence of intellects who supposedly transcended tribalism (or at least all tribes except the Teutonic). One can still hear this Arendtian shame about ethnicity these days. So parochial! One can hear the echo of Arendt's fear of being judged as "merely Jewish" in some, not all, of those Jews so eager to dissociate themselves from the parochial concerns of other Jews for Israel. The desire for universalist approval makes them so disdainful of any "ethnic" fellow feeling. After all, to such unfettered spirits, it's so banal.

Apropos her Banality of Evil thesis, allow me a wee bit of preening. Back in the mid-1980s, after I had read her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Classics) three or four times and was utterly convinced of its profound truth, I set out to bolster her arguments with a close look at all the documentation Eichmann and his colleagues left. To my great surprise, it turned out the documents resoundingly disproved her thesis, and this eventually formed the conceptual framework for my first book, Hitler's Bureaucrats: The Nazi Security Police And The Banality Of Evil (Continuum Guide in the Third Reich). I have no idea if Rosenbaum ever read my book or not, but he summarizes the matter well:

To my mind, the use of the phrase banality of evil is an almost infallible sign of shallow thinkers attempting to seem intellectually sophisticated. Come on, people: It's a bankrupt phrase, a subprime phrase, a Dr. Phil-level phrase masquerading as a profound contrarianism. Oooh, so daring! Evil comes not only in the form of mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash types, but in the form of paper pushers who followed evil orders. And when applied—as she originally did to Adolf Eichmann, Hitler's eager executioner, responsible for the logistics of the Final Solution—the phrase was utterly fraudulent.

Adolf Eichmann was, of course, in no way a banal bureaucrat: He just portrayed himself as one while on trial for his life. Eichmann was a vicious and loathsome Jew-hater and -hunter who, among other things, personally intervened after the war was effectively lost, to insist on and ensure the mass murder of the last intact Jewish group in Europe, those of Hungary. So the phrase was wrong in its origin, as applied to Eichmann, and wrong in almost all subsequent cases when applied generally. Wrong and self-contradictory, linguistically, philosophically, and metaphorically. Either one knows what one is doing is evil or one does not. If one knows and does it anyway, one is evil, not some special subcategory of evil. If one doesn't know, one is ignorant, and not evil. But genuine ignorance is rare when evil is going on.

Indeed.

(h/t Goldblog)

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Book Recommendations

Book Recommendations

One can't read only the Goldstone Report from cover to cover without respite; there have to be other readings to balance it. So here are three quick recommendations about books I've been reading.

The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, by Amity Shlaes. This is a rather revisionist look at the New Deal of the 1930s, so it's relevant reading as we watch President Obama revamp the American economy, or not. Shlaes starts with the non-controversial, indeed straightforward fact that for all the fine things Roosevelt's New Deal accomplished, it didn't pull the American economy out of the recession. World War II did that. Her thesis is that it didn't, because it did the wrong things, encouraging various statist experiments while interfering with the power of the free market and especially innovators and industrialists to do it on their own.

It's a provocative thesis, and yes, it's oh-so-very-relevant. Alas, however, she doesn't do much to prove it. She's a fine storyteller, she consistently keeps us engaged in her flowing descriptions. She's convincing that Roosevelt was a master politician, but we already knew that, just as we knew the New Deal wasn't a careful application of a fully consistent economic world view. She likes Wendell Willkie, the head of an electric company who eventually ran against Roosevelt as a Republican in 1944, and she positions him as a counter-Roosevelt figure. (Interestingly, Willkie was almost the last Republican presidential candidate ever to be endorsed by the New York Times, but that's a different story).

The problem is that for her thesis to carry weight, not merely to intrigue, it would have had to offer a lot more economics than it does. The book probably would then have been a much slower read, and less fun, but it would have been more convincing, or at least more challenging. As it is, it's more a book of jounalism than economic history. I do recommend it though, for its interesting perspective and cast of fascinating characters and events.

In a dramatic leap we turn to David A. Kessler's The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite. Kessler is a physician, lawyer, and top FDA bureaucrat who in spite of being as well informed as anyone, didn't manage not to be fat. So eventually he went looking for the science behind this, which he presents in this book. It's almost 300 pages long, and he could have written it in 30 - but again, as with Shlaes, those 30 would have been intense and demanding (and wouldn't have counted as a book). This way, it's a readable book that can be skimmed with no major intellectual challenge.

Kessler's thesis, in one sentence, is that sugar fat and salt make us want to eat more sugar salt and fat. Whether they understand the science or not, the food industry has cracked this truth and does its best to offer what Kessler calls hyper-palatable food, which means irresistible.

I came away from the book with the conviction that the only food one should eat is unprocessed food. As an acquaintance of mine (who hasn't read the book but gets the message) has been saying all along: I never eat anything that was created in a factory.

Near the end of the book Kessler tries to offer ways to free oneself from the tyranny of industrial sugar-salt-fat. He recommends formulating and applying counter-commands, that will block the imperatives of the enticing food we see all around us. It occurs to me that this really may work. I eat only kosher food, so all those yummy-looking extravagances I see all around me when I'm in America: I've never had them, I have no chemically inbuilt memories of how much I crave them, and were I to reach for one of them, my own repulsion would be stronger. I'll bet they taste heavenly, but I have no urge to eat them. On the contrary.

Finally, let's go to Kazau Ishiguro's Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, which just came out a few months ago. It's not his magnificent The Remains of the Day, one of the better books I've read, but it is a very good book. Five short stories, very lightly interwoven, about itinerant musicians (and one itinerant English teacher) and their world.

I liked the way Ishiguro used American English when his narrators are American (or East European), but English English when they're Brits - but maybe that's banal when dealing with a master wordsmith. His depiction of the itinerant's world was new to me: folks who spend their career on the edge of the normative family-work-walking-the-dog-saving-for-retirement world, indeed, they live off that world and encounter it every day, without any apparent feeling of regret for not being in it. Artists who make a living from their art, without high-flying aspirations nor the despondency of not achieving them.

Not that they all live lives of serene contentment: if so, what would the author write about? Most face a flaw in their lives, or several of them; and the stories are not about how they get resolved, either. It being reality Ishiguro would like to comment on, none of the flaws actually go away. At best, they evolve, moving from one state to another. As Jane says in Mr. and Mrs. Smith - hardly a profound cultural creation, that - happy ending are merely stories that haven't ended yet. Ishiguro, however, can be profound, and this is a wistful book, beautifully written, that may well cause you to notice the band in a cafe alongside a piazza in a new way.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Navel Gazing and Revolutionary Mass Murder

Navel Gazing and Revolutionary Mass Murder

I'm reading Amity Shlaes' excellent The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. Perhaps I'll review it here, by and by. In the meantime, a small anecdote that illustrates how some things never really change. In chapter two she's following a group of American progessive thinkers who in 1927 went on a fact-finding mission (that's what it would be called today) to the Soviet Union. Although this was before the worst excesses of communism, the communist revolution had already killed hundreds of thosands of people, and you needed to be a bit myopic or obtuse not to have noticed. Some were:

A number of the [...] travelers had also involved themselves with the Sacco and Vanzetti cause - Douglas, for example, had sent money for the defense. But the pleas failed, and the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti was expected to happen while the travelers were in Europe. This act seemed to confirm American barbarism. Roger Baldwin, especially, wondered whether Soviet Russia might have found a higher sort of freedom. (p. 59).

Baldwin was the founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU. To be fair, in the 1930s he recognized that Stalin was a monster. But that was later.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Six Thinking Hats

Six Thinking Hats

Edward de Bono is a Thinking Guru, I suppose you could say. An intelligent fellow who has done lots of thinking about the practice of Thinking. His fundamental insight is that if people think in thoughtful ways rather than merely jumping all over, they'll get better results. He has developed various techniques to help them do so.

I recently read his Six Thinking Hats. It's a short book, a couple-hour read. He tells us there are six types of thinking, each of which he has tagged by color.

White hat thinking is about facts. It's neutral, often numbers: sales are up by 12.3%, unemployment is down to 2.4%, investments in the stock of XXX have had returns of 14.6% annually for the past 18 quarters. (Remember those days?) White hat thinking does not allow for opinions ("I expect the economy to boom forever"), but reporting the fact of other people's opinions are allowed ("Senator Such-and-Such says the economy will boom so long as he doesn't get unseated").

Red hat thinking is purely about emotion. "I think that idea you just carefully presented is pure bunk. My proposal is superior in all ways." De Bono's point is that if a group sets aside a specific segment of time for articulating emotions (red hat), it will be legitimate to put on the table all the ulterior messages that inevitably cloud any discussion.

Black hat thinking is by far the most pervasive. It is giving all the reasons why something won't work (with the exception of the emotional reasons, which were given legitimacy under the red hat). Your idea may be worthy, but it will be too complicated, too expensive, no-one will buy it, the Bad Guys will ride it's coat-tails and screw us, the boss will never let us get away with such a scheme, the voters won't either, the voters will love it but we're a company not a democracy..... and so on. We all excel at this type of thinking.

Yellow hat thinking is the section of the discussion where all participants must think sunny positive thoughts. (If not they'll be shot, I expect). So while you detest the promulgator of the idea (red hat), and you're convinced it will swallow all available resources for a decade with no possible return on investment (black hat), and you recognize there are dry facts in favor of it (white hat), yellow hat is the part of the discussion where everyone offers happy thoughts about all the good things that could happen if only...

I imagine some people might not easily participate in the yellow hat part of the discussions, but maybe that's just me.

Green hat thinking is the part where folks have to be original and innovative. Where they offer new ways of looking at things, new possible solutions, new ways out of a bad situation. (Names of potential new bosses to replace the bastard we have - ah, sorry about that). Actually, Jews tend to do this very well, after a couple thousand years of living by their wits in less-than-optimal conditions, but I'm here to report that the ability to come up with new ideas of value is not easy. Some folks know how to do it, others don't, and I'm not certain how you train people. To give him credit, de Bono has some concrete suggestions.

Blue hat thinking is what the project manager does. He (or she) runs the process, tells everyone else when it's time to switch color and ensures compliance; the blue-hatter also thinks about matters such as meeting deadlines, running logistics, ensuring quality and all those edifying things.

It's an interesting way of looking at the world and how we get things done in it. It's also quite irrelevant to many parts of the human endeavor. Listening to music, for example. Interpretating history. Writing a novel. Falling out of love (well, there's red hat thinking there).

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

io9 - Guillermo Del Toro's The Strain Is An Antidote To Fey Vampires - Books

Guillermo Del Toro's The Strain Is An Antidote To Fey Vampires

Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo Del Toro and novelist Chuck Hogan have written The Strain, the first book in a vampire trilogy. And the good news is, their spin on vampires comes with a noticeable creep factor, despite silliness. Spoilers below.

This book began life as a TV series pitch to FOX, a few years back. Del Toro scoffs at the romanticized image of the vampire that infests modern media, and wants a return to the dark folkloric roots of the creatures. He isn't alone: many of us are sick of these pale and pretty poseurs, brooding about their cursed immortality and chatting up jailbait by the Orange Julius. Oh sure, they can go all scary cat-face, just before they fight cheerleaders, but usually they look like they're trying to get a record deal. Honestly, what happened to the Horror? Someone who considers you a source of protein is not a good role model.

It's common to lay the blame for all this at the feet of Anne Rice, but it goes back further than that. Bela Lugosi's dapper aristocrat, dressed for a night at the opera, lunges to mind. The original Dracula is responsible for much of the bodice-ripping and doomed-love themes that still flit around the genre. The appearance and mannerisms of Count Dracula were inspired more by Bram Stoker's relationship with the stately and imposing actor Henry Irving than any actual Eastern European folklore.

Read All at :

io9 - Guillermo Del Toro's The Strain Is An Antidote To Fey Vampires - Books

Book review: Animal Farm by George Orwell | English classic | Culturazzi

Animal Farm - George Orwell

Posted by Andrew Cotlov On May - 25 - 2009

In 1943 when George Orwell wrote Animal Farm, his caustic critique of Stalin’s Russia, the Soviet Union was so popular in the United States and Great Britain that he couldn’t find a publisher for his novel. In fact, the Russians were so strongly associated with the fight against the Nazis that it wasn’t until 1945, when the Second World War was over, that Animal Farm was finally published. After reading the manuscript Orwell sent him, TS Eliot wrote a letter of rejection actually explaining that an anti-Russian novel would not fare well in the political atmosphere of the moment. He also said that the novel’s allegory was “unconvincing” and suggested that if Orwell’s goal was to make a case for Trotskyism he should’ve created “more public spirited pigs”.

Indeed, while he was a socialist, Orwell was more enchanted by Trotsky than his counter-part Stalin because he knew about Stalin’s unchecked political power, and the length he was willing to go to maintain it, first-hand. “We were very lucky to get out of Spain alive,” Orwell once wrote, and he wasn’t talking about the skirmishes he was involved in against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, rather; he was talking about the politically charged violence the Stalinists brought with them from Russia when sent to support the Spanish democracy. In Spain, Orwell was in a Trotskyite band of soldiers and later wrote

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Book review: Animal Farm by George Orwell English classic Culturazzi

The Associate by John Grisham | Best Book

The Associate by John Grisham

If you like Grisham’s earliest works (the Firm, the Pelican Brief, etc.) you’ll almost certainly like this one too. Similarities between John Grisham’s latest book, The Associate, and his previous best seller, The Firm, are unavoidable.
With 20 novels and one work of non-fiction, Grisham has returned to trademark territory with his newest book.
Dipping us into the pitiless world of corporate law and the underhand dealings of the people working within it, Grisham has created a story that is just begging to be brought to life on the big screen.
As I was reading The Associate, the irritating image of Tom Cruise (Grisham’s hero from The Firm) popped into my head. In fact, Grisham’s descriptions of McAvoy and most other characters never really gelled with me, hence I found it difficult to build a mental picture of the main players.

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The Associate by John Grisham Best Book

QUALITY OR PR ?

Quality or PR?

Back when I was a wee lad, quite some years ago, I was staunchly convinced quality beat public relations; I truly expected that if anyone was really good he (or she) would rise to the top based merely on the quality of their abilities. Since in the days of my wee-dom advertising executives enjoyed the status that Wall Street humbugs enjoyed in 2007, you can see that I was a contrarian even then.

Then life taught me otherwise. Quality is a fine thing, surely, but PR is better, and sharp elbows are bestest, especially when used to create fine PR to cover one's pushiness.

I have just finished reading the second book in a row that claims that quality is a necessary condition for success. The first, which I mentioned a while ago, was Guy Kawasaki's The Art of Start. The second is even more troubling, as it focuses entirely on how to get word out to the masses: Emanual Rosen's The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited; Real-life Lessons in Word-of-Mouth Marketing.

I must say this insistence on an idea I gave up on many years ago is disconcerting.

taken from : Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)

WHY ISRAEL ?

Why Israel?

Yesterday evening I went to a book launch of Daniel Gordis' new book, Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End.The book is brand new, and as regular readers will know, I'm a wee bit behind on my reading, so I haven't read it yet. Danny's lecture, however, was interesting. He started by saying we should talk about why Israel needs to be here and what the Jews are supposed to do with it; then he said that most of the things we need to achieve don't need to wait for peace, so we really should stop waiting and do them. Apparently the book is his list of goals.

Had he intended this to be an internal Israeli discussion, he'd have written the book in Hebrew, and I'll bet he'd have written a different book. In writing in English, it seems to me, his real discussion is what Israel can and should be for the Jewish people. Though he didn't come out and say this last night, I got the impression he's addressing what he percieves as a widening gap between Israelis - who have zillions of fervently-held opinions about those questions - and American Jews, who are feeling estranged by us rambunctious cousins.

Which might mean the book isn't really about Israel at all, but rather about the Jews outside and how they look in, or don't look in, or should be looking in. Unless the book is very different from how its author presented it - the only way to know is to read it.

taken from;Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)