On Being a Jew

Brandon Wade/Associated Press

Jeff––Saturday

 

On Thursday, I read an article in The New York Times by Ruth Graham, its religion, faith and values national correspondent, addressing antisemitic episodes having reached new highs in the U.S.  It came as no more a surprise to me than did an opinion piece appearing soon after International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27, 2023) in Greece’s paper of record, Ekathimerini, authored by Tom Ellis, Editor-in-Chief of its English language version, and captioned "Antisemitism in Greece."

 

Taken together they present a distinctly unsettling present, but in their expression offer hope that history shall not repeat itself.

 

I’ve reproduced the two articles below—with a limited edit in length to Ms. Graham’s article, available here in its entirety.  

 

From The New York Times:

 

Ruth Graham

The number of antisemitic incidents in the United States last year was the highest since the Anti-Defamation League began keeping track in 1979, the Jewish advocacy group announced on Thursday.

 

In a new report, the A.D.L. counted 3,697 incidents throughout the United States in 2022, a 36 percent rise from the year before. A majority were characterized as harassment, including online, but the tally also included 111 assaults and more than 1,200 occasions of vandalism.

 

The report is the latest indication that antisemitism in the United States is on the rise, a trend that has been reflected in American culture and politics, sending fresh waves of alarm through Jewish communities. It also mirrors data gathered by the federal government, as well as a separate academic study tracking incidents of bias against many religious groups.

 

Anti-Jewish enmity has been expressed in openly antisemitic leaflets and graffiti, or brazen physical attacks, especially on visibly Orthodox Jews. But it is also palpable in harder-to-track discourse online and in troubling public rhetoric from celebrities like Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, who tweeted last fall that he would “go death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” And right-wing politicians and commentators have stoked fears of “replacement theory,” the conspiracist idea that elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to “replace” white Americans. The cumulative effect is an atmosphere in which threats, slurs and conspiracy theories brew online but are increasingly visible offline, too.

“We’ve seen antisemitism normalized in ways that would have been unimaginable a few years ago,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive and national director of the A.D.L. “If people see conspiracies behind every misfortune, it doesn’t take long for them to look at the Jews and say they’re the problem.” … 

This is the third time in the past five years that the A.D.L. has declared its count a record high. Five states — New York, California, New Jersey, Florida and Texas — account for more than half of the total incidents. 

“We’re in a new era for antisemitism,” said Brian Levin, the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, which monitors hate crimes in American cities. “We’re now seeing Jews becoming a default.” …. 

From Ekathimerini:

Tom Ellis

 

Along with the rest of the world, Greece last week paid tribute to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust. Events were held, documentaries screened, interviews published and lectures given, many of which were emotionally laden with memories of the terrible ordeals of World War II that led to the eradication of almost 90% of the country’s Jews. 

The heroism and determination of many Greeks who resisted bravely and helped Jews survive was also highlighted, with the example of Archbishop Damaskinos standing out, along with those of the Metropolitan Bishop of Zakynthos Chrysostomos and the Ionian island’s mayor, whose actions are taught in schools in Israel and should serve as the bar against which we judge Hellenism’s relationship with the Jewish community.

In that vein, the percentage of the vote secured by Golden Dawn in the 2015 elections that got it into Parliament is a dark chapter in Greece’s modern political history that must be prevented from being reopened.

The neo-Nazi party’s popularity was obviously the result, to a significant degree, of the financial crisis, anger with the system and with endemic corruption and the injustices and inequalities that emerge in day-to-day life. But this reaction cannot be expressed by voting for a party that espouses the Nazi ideology and symbols; certainly not in Greece, given its experience in WWII, the destruction and pain rained on the country during the German occupation, and the brave battles that were fought against Hitler.

Holocaust Remembrance Day came as an opportunity to think long and hard about such things. It is not just the extreme version of antisemitism expressed by Golden Dawn and its offshoots that should be of concern, but also the habit – which has, admittedly, been stronger in the past – of judging the Jewish people by the actions of the politicians of the state of Israel. Someone can disagree with Israeli government policy without becoming an antisemite. The Israeli people themselves are harsh judges of their governments through their many and diverse political parties.

That said, at a time when antisemitism appears to be on the rise in many parts of the world, younger Greeks appear to shun two basic elements of “Greek antisemitism:” The first is the conspiracy theory that Greeks are a nation that has been wronged by various malevolent forces, and the Jews bear in some conspicuous way some responsibility for this, and the second is a tendency to mix the justifiable reaction to specific policies by the Israeli political leadership, with – and this is definitely not justified – lashing out against Jews simply because they are Jews.

At the same time, the deepening cooperation between Greece and Israel – bilaterally and also trilaterally with Cyprus – is not just geopolitically desirable. It also brings the two peoples closer and in doing so deals another blow against antisemitism.

Holocaust Memorial - Alexandros Avramidis/In Time News

––Jeff

Call a spade a racist shovel

 Michael - Thursday

Just to put this in context, I’m a supporter of The New York Times and a subscriber to their digital edition. The Washington Post is my other international subscription. (I have no difficulty with Jeff Bizos owning it; he seems to let the editors and the journalists get on with their job. The Pulitzer Prize for public service that they received this week would seem to support that.)

Keeping with context, I’m not a starry eyed admirer of Elon Musk. He is certainly a brilliant innovator with the ability to convert way out ideas into actual products against all odds. He follows in the footsteps of Steve Jobs. He's a Fellow of the Royal Society, which is an honor reserved for people who have made a major contribution to science and technology, and not awarded lightly. However, the best I can say about his behavior is that it’s often, shall we say, strange. The current furor about him is motivated by his purchase / potential purchase of Twitter, and particularly his recent tweet that banning Trump was inappropriate and would be reversed if he did buy the company.

The New York Times apparently decided that it would be a neat idea to comb his past and take him down a peg or two, so a couple of their journalists dug around in his background in South Africa. Fair enough. Celebrities have to expect that everything they do and have done will be open to public scrutiny.

Here is a bare-bones summary of the facts of his background in South Africa.

Musk grew up in Pretoria. His father was a South African and his mother was Canadian. His father seems to have been successful in a variety of commercial ventures. He was also elected to the Pretoria city council as a Progressive Party member—the only (white) political party at that time that actively opposed apartheid under the leadership of the redoubtable Helen Suzman. He must have had a tough time on the council of a city whose white electorate was largely Afrikaans and supportive of apartheid. According to The New York Times article, the sons shared their father’s dislike of the system. Musk attended Pretoria Boys High School, a school with liberal values by the standards of the day, but nevertheless exclusively for white boys and generally privileged ones at that. Yet, other white males who graduated from the school include Edwin Cameron, gay rights activist and constitutional court judge, Booker prize-winner Damon Galgut, and Peter Hain, anti-apartheid activist and subsequent member of the UK parliament. Musk briefly attended the University of Pretoria to avoid joining the South African Army, which had compulsory military training for all young white males. At the age of 18 he left South Africa permanently and went to live with relatives in Canada.

Pretoria Boys High School
Now SA's most expensive private school

None of this reflects on Musk particularly well, but neither does it reflect on him badly. Certainly, as a young man he could have actively opposed apartheid, but the large majority of young white men didn't, whether or not they were against it in principle. It’s hardly likely that the family home was racist given his father’s politics and his mother’s background, and Musk had black friends – not usual in that segregated era. But somehow, during their five-day time-slot, The New York Times journalists had to find a story about this white South African. The premise they came up with was exactly that – he was a white South African. In fact, there's nothing really negative reported in their article. You can read the full piece here: “In Musk’s past, a South Africa rife with misinformation and white privilege”.

So what was the point of the exercise? How many company CEOs have grown up in overseas countries with authoritarian governments and censorship? For that matter, how many grew up in the south of the US? Yet it seems that just being a white South African is enough to throw doubt on Musk's suitability to own a communications company. That’s the tone of the piece. That doesn’t seem the sort of standpoint one expects from a world-class, liberal newspaper.

Of course, since I’m also a white South African, my comments could be brushed aside as just one supporting another. So I’ll leave the last words to Palesa Morudu, a South African writer based in Washington, DC. Her full piece, “TheNew York Times declares Elon Musk Guilty of being a white South African”, appeared in the Daily Maverick. 

Here's an extract:

“There may be a lot that is unlikable about this particular billionaire, but being a white South African is surely not a credible starting point for a takedown.

The central problem with the Musk piece is that The New York Times has imposed its latter-day American racialist lens on what is a supposedly South African story. This approach, which infects more and more of the paper’s reporting and commentary, is effectively a new form of tribalism – the opposite of the nonracial worldview championed by Mandela.

What, for example, are we to make of the authors’ contorted implication that Musk’s views on free speech and his pending purchase of Twitter should be suspect purely on the basis that he was born white in a country that denied free speech to its citizens who were black? ‘It is unclear what role his childhood – coming up in a time and place in which there was hardly a free exchange of ideas and where government misinformation was used to demonise black South Africans – may have played in that decision,’ the writers postulate. Should this logic extend to all white South Africans or is this only reserved for Musk?

Some of the other assertions look like special pleading, or are downright risible. ‘Elon’s electric car company, Tesla, has faced serious accusations of racism.’ Oh, really? Have Ford and General Motors never faced such accusations? Is Tesla therefore ‘more racist’ because it’s owned by someone born in South Africa, which held its first democratic elections 28 years ago?

In the Times’s blinkered world view, skin colour is destiny, and the reader is left poorer for it.”

Yes. That sums it up!

_____________________________________________________

Upcoming events:

Join Stan this week at Crimefest in Bristol:

THURSDAY, 12 MAY, 15.50 – 16.40
A CHANGE IS AS GOOD AS A REST: WRITING MORE THAN ONE SERIES
* M.J. Lee
* Douglas Lindsay
* Michael Stanley
* T E Kinsey 
Participating Moderator: Michael Ridpath

 

FRIDAY, 13 MAY, 12:30 - 13:20
DIVIDED SOCIETY: HATE CRIMES AND SOCIAL FACTORS
* Kia Abdullah
* Antony Dunford
* Sarah Sultoon
* Holly Watt

Participating Moderator: Michael Stanley

FRIDAY, 13 MAY, 16:00 – 16:50
ITW: THRILLING FOR A LIVING
* Alison Bruce 
* Dugald Bruce-Lockhart
* Alex Shaw
* Michael Stanley

Participating Moderator: Zoë Sharp

Obscene Gestures of the Ancient Greek

I saw something this week in The New York Times that made me think.  As opposed to cry, gnash my teeth, or curse the night.  

It was about hand gestures of the Italians.  There are hundreds they say, many coming via ancient Greeks who’d settled in southern Italy—which should come as no surprise to fans of such historic classics as the Aeneid and My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

Having been raised in an Italian neighborhood in Pittsburgh and now living in Greece, I clicked on the newspaper’s accompanying video, looking forward to a meaningful trip down memory lane.  Nice piece for the uninitiated, but virtually useless for anyone trying to follow the actual guts of a colorful, down home conversation among the locals.  It’s like wearing a pin-stripe suit to a (non-Yankee) baseball game and expecting to fit in with the fans in the bleachers.

Even if you don’t understand the language, knowing a few of the more, shall we say, earthy hand gestures will enrich your understanding of the people and possibly alert you to some situations (and people) you should avoid.

For example, if you happen to see two Greek men waving at each other, hands extended straight out from their shoulders, it’s not a “Howdy, my friend, how you doing?” moment.  Nor do I suggest adopting the gesture as a quaint way of saying “hello” to Greeks. 

So, as a public service for those seeking a less Politically Correct report than the Times’ coverage on local gestures, here are my top five or so obscene Greek gestures…as illustrated by my capable ancient Greek assistant, an A(n)donis in his own right. 

Let’s start with the “waving hand” gesture I just mentioned. It even has a name, the moutza. You’ll quite often see it serve as the precursor to a road rage incident when flashed by the victim of one of Greece’s finer driver’s incomprehensible decisions, such as passing a car in the face of on-coming traffic only to cut back in line barely inches from the soon to be moutza flashing other driver’s front bumper, running a stop sign, turning without warning, or otherwise demonstrating that the common sense rules of the road don’t apply to that driver. 

The moutza is the classic, non-verbal Greek method of expressing that you are the dumbest S.O.B. to walk the earth…or have done an award winning stupid act.

And for the really stupid  (acts and people), there’s the double moutza, though that’s rarely expressed in a driving situation except by a driver deserving of the double moutza himself… or herself.  For, yes, even women are known to flash the moutza on occasion.

Another gesture, one rarely expressed by a woman, is the one-handed chop in the direction of your own genital area or, if really incensed, a two-handed chop.  I say rarely by a woman because the dialog accompanying the act generally includes a reference “to my balls,” and is meant to convey, “I don’t give a damn about your opinion. Don’t waste my time with nonsense.”

There is a unisex version available for those so inclined.  It’s a one- or two-handed chop in the direction of the bottom of your shoes accompanied by a phrase roughly meaning “I write your words on the bottom of my old shoes because they’re so meaningless.”

Hmmm, bet you’re still wondering why the “All the news that’s fit to print” folks didn’t take their story in this direction.

To continue.  You’ll often see in modern Greece the “up yours” sign of one hand clasping the inside of the bent other arm at the elbow, or the middle finger salute, but purest Greeks regard them as coarser gestures corruptive of the classic Greek. “Up yours is Italian,” said my expert, and “this” flashing me the finger “is now part of America’s political culture” despite its Greco-Roman origins.

For the really hard-core classic Greek gesture equivalent to our revered middle finger, my friend demonstrated the time honored…drum roll…open handed, bent middle finger. 

Jim Croce (1943-1973)

A CLOSING WORD OF CAUTION.  Though many of these gestures are exchanged among friends in a teasing, playful way, the indiscriminate use of them can be hazardous to one’s health.  To paraphrase Jim Croce’s great lyric, “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, and you don’t flash the finger at the old Lone Ranger unless you want to end up skinned.”

Jeff—Saturday

The Dark Side and the Gray Lady

I love bookshops.

Most readers do.

But authors, particularly mystery authors, have a special place in their hearts for independent mystery bookshops. The folks who work in those places have steered me to some of the best reads in my life, and helped me, time and again, to win converts to my work.

Last year, when Jim Huang was forced to close his beloved bookshop, The Mystery Company, in Carmel, IN, it put me in a bad mood that lasted a week. I’m not kidding. A week.

The people of the Indianapolis area had a treasure in Jim’s shop. It was more than a store. It was a service to the community, run by a guy who loves books. He didn’t deserve to fail.

Other great shops, like Murder by the Book, in Houston, The Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, AZ, The Mystery Bookstore in Los Angeles, Kingdom Books in Waterford, VT and M is for Murder in San Mateo, CA, have been places where I’ve been received with warmth and enthusiasm, where I’ve had the opportunity to meet my fans, and where I’ve experienced some of the major milestones of my career. I love them all!

I never leave an independent bookshop without buying a book.

Never.

It’s the least I can do in the way of payback to people who’ve given me so much.

When I travel, I invariably return to Brazil with bags heavy with books.

I’d order books, by mail, from my friends at U.S. independent bookshops if I could.

But I can’t, because, more often than not, books so ordered don’t arrive, being subject to theft on the way.

Moreover, I’m a voracious reader.

And I always consume more books than I can carry.

Okay, enough of a preamble. I admit it. I have a confession to make.

I’ve gone over to the dark side – and bought myself an e-reader.

It’s a Kindle.

And, I have to tell you, the printed word aside, it is an amazing device.

Particularly for an author who travels a lot, gets asked by other authors to contribute blurbs and reviews, and has a penchant, in addition to mysteries and thrillers, for reading more esoteric stuff in the English language. (And which, until Google Books launched their immense collection of offerings, was pretty hard to find in Brazil.)

And now there’s also Calibre.

You can download it here.

http://calibre-ebook.com/

Don’t try to watch the demo video on the website. It’s too slow. But there are other demos on YouTube that will clearly explain to you how Calibre works and what it can do.

One of Calibre’s niftiest features is that it converts virtually any e-publishing format into any other - and automatically sends it to your Kindle.

So if the material is not “protected”, you can take (for example) an e-pub file and turn it into a Kindle file at the push of a button.

I never resisted mobile (cell) phones, computers or GPS receivers.

So why did I, for so long, resist buying an e-reader?

I think it was a deep-seated fear of what the devices might do to my first love – printed books.

But I have now come to believe that it need not be “either/or”.

And I am convinced that printed books are going to be able to live in peace and harmony with my Kindle.

So if you, too, Dear Reader, have been one of the holdouts, and you travel a lot, may I suggest that it’s time for you to re-evaluate?

And, if you, like me, are an author, guess what?

You actually need it.

People send you books to blurb, and send you books with a request to review, right?

And isn’t it true that more and more of those books are arriving in electronic form?

I have four books in my home, at this moment, that I’ve been asked to critique.

And only one of them is printed on paper.

Something else: you’ve got to be able to check the quality of your own e-books.

If you’re not putting those books up on Kindle outside your home country, you’re missing something.

Amazon offers the opportunity to pick and choose your countries. Each book, in each country, gets its own, exclusive URL. The page looks the same as all the others, but the internet address is different.

As of the day-before-yesterday, my second book, Buried Strangers, joined Blood of the Wicked, on Kindle in the UK, and in Brazil, and in Australia, and in New Zealand and throughout Western Europe, and in about a hundred other places where the books weren’t available before. And at prices that are cheaper than they are in the United States.

But my North American publisher, Soho Crime, did me one better.

To celebrate the launch of the fourth book in the series, Every Bitter Thing, they put the Kindle version of the first one, Blood of the Wicked up for free.

If you live in the United States, you can get it simply by going here:

http://www.amazon.com/Blood-of-the-Wicked-ebook/dp/B001E0KW62/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&qid=1188838521&sr=8-1

But you can’t get it elsewhere. If you’re our reader in Vanuatu, for example, (yeah, we really do have a reader in Vanuatu) you’re not allowed to download it.

And I don’t think that’s fair.

So, for the next month or so, here’s what I’m going to do:

If you live outside of the U.S. or Canada, and you’d like a free e-book of Blood of the Wicked, you need only drop me a line through my web site.

And I will respond by sending you the book by email. Please specify if you’d like me to attach a Kindle or an Epub version. And remember that you can convert to other formats by using Calibre.

And remember, if you don’t yet own an e-reader, you can read it on your computer screen by downloading one of the free apps from Amazon. It’s not the best way, but, heck, it’s free.

Now about The Gray Lady.

Most folks in America know that’s the affectionate nickname given to The New York Times.

Respected by most, hated by some, the Times is, more than any other, America’s newspaper of record.

And, for us who read and write books, a publication of supreme importance, because it is one of the few major dailies in America that continues to publish book reviews and support the people who write them.

The New York Times Sunday Book Review Section appears in two versions, one with a cover price sold via subscription, and in bookstores and newsstands; the other with no cover price, which is included as an insert in each Sunday’s edition of the Times. The versions are otherwise identical. And there are, each week, well over a million copies printed.

The NYTBR receives between 750 to 1000 submissions each week.

A mere 20 to 30 are chosen for review.

Of those, only four or five are mysteries.

Yesterday, December 12^th, 2010, my latest book, Every Bitter Thing, was so honored.

You can read the complete review here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/books/review/Crime-t.html?emc=eta1

And, if you’d like to hear a live interview with the author, you can drop in to C.J. West’s internet radio show this coming Wednesday:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/author-cj-west

If you take the time to register with Blog Talk Radio ahead of time, you can use the chat feature to chime in with questions. You can even, if you like, call in.

This is a launch week. I hope you’ll all pardon me for being in promotional mode.

It only happens once a year.

Next week, I promise, it's back to business as usual.

Leighton - Monday