Book 5 of 2022: How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

 

Bari Weiss wrote this book soon after the slaughter of Jews at prayer at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. Weiss grew up in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood. She and her family were members of Tree of Life.  

The book was published in 2019 before COVID-19 and before Weiss resigned from the New York Times in 2020. An article in Politico talked about the reason for her resignation:

Weiss described the Times as an institution where "intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability" and where the opinions of Twitter users have become the paper's "ultimate editor." She complained that she felt bullied by colleagues who "called me a Nazi and a racist" and who posted an ax emoji next to her name. 

“Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery,” Weiss wrote.   

I listened to the almost every episode of the "Honestly by Bari Weiss" podcast before I read the book.  So I knew her positions on the anti-Semitism of both the Left and the Right before I started reading.  

In the first chapter she takes on the long history of Christian anti-Semitism, "the mere fact that Jews continue to exist in the world was an affront to the most foundational Christian idea, that the Messiah had indeed come. 

She says her intent is not to blame Christian doctrine, "It is simply to point out the historical and intellectual depth of the anti-Jewish conspiracy."

She then talks about the Unite The Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.  She says, "That event was a shattering awakening for those of us who believed that the poisonous ideology of white supremacy was mostly confined to the lunatic online fringe."  

On Friday evening, August 11, 2017, I watched news footage of men with torches marching across the University of Virginia campus chanting "Jews will not replace us" and "Blood and soil."  Between then and now Great Replacement Theory has become the truth for Fox News viewers.  The most popular Fox shows promote Great Replacement Theory.    

My response to Charlottesville was to join a synagogue. In a country with a President who says there are "fine people on both sides" I knew I had to take sides.  

The next two chapters in the book explain the anti-Semitism of the woke left and radical Islam. The last chapter is titled "How to Fight."  Weiss says, "ethnic nationalism always puts us in grave danger."

The last chapter has a different category of advice every page or two. Under the heading: Trust your discomfort. she says, "If a politician you thought represented your values claims that Israel is among the worst abusers of human rights in the world, you know the truth about that politician."

Next she advises Call it out. Especially when it's hard.  She says it is easy to call out white racists, but when a Democrat is anti-Semitic, we have to call it out: "Ilhan Omar can espouse bigoted ideas [about Jews]. And Ilhan Omar can herself be the hate object of bigots, including the (45th) president of the United States." 

Weiss says we should maintain liberalism. Worship of the state, Christian nationalism expressed in America First, is bad for democracy. Since the writing of the book three years ago, the right in America has become openly hostile to democracy and praising Putin, Orban of Turkey and other right-wing dictators.  

We should also support Israel: ready to criticize its flaws, but in support of a political and historical miracle.  She later quotes Walker Percy on the extent of that miracle:

Why does no one find it remarkable that in most world cities today there are Jews but not one single Hittite, even though Hittites had a flourishing civilization while the Jews nearby were a weak and obscure people. When one meets a Jew in New York or New Orleans or Paris or Melbourne, it is remarkable that no one considers the event remarkable. What are they doing here? But it is even more remarkable to wonder, if there are Jews here, why are there not Hittites? Where are the Hittites? Show me one Hittites in New York City.

Percy is right. I have never met a Hittite, but Jews are everywhere I go. The book inspired me to do what I can to keep it that way.  

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First four books of 2022:

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Book 4 of 2022: Biography of Fritz Haber, a French Graphic Novel

Fritz Haber 1. The Spirit of the Times.

I just finished the first of three volumes of a graphic novel biography of the German Jewish chemist Fritz Haber.  He is a Nobel laureate and a German patriot who died in exile just after Hitler took power.  

He invented the process for taking nitrogen from the air and making fertilizer. We would not have a world population of seven billion now without Haber.  Not a quarter of that.  But that invention also meant Germany could fight for four years in World War I instead of running out of gunpowder in the first six months.

Billions fed, millions dead.

This first volume traces Haber's life until the first decade of the 20th Century. The great and the terrible years are in the next two volumes.  

A short biography of Haber is below in an article I wrote for Chemical Engineering Progress  magazine in 2004.

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First three books of 2022:

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

A Healthy Culture Includes All of its History

The French flag waving in the Arc d'Triomphe de l'Etoile on November 11

Few great cultures have been more self critical than French culture.  When revolution swept France in 1789, they even threw out the seven-day per week calendar. They invented the guillotine in 1791 and used it on their king two years later.  The French people analyze and criticize all of their long history and celebrate the best of French history.

Last year, I was in Paris on November 11. I walked around as close as I could to the Arc d'Triomphe de l'Etoile. I saw French people from kids to people in their 80s watching the celebration of the victory of the France and their allies in World War I.  Napoleon commissioned the Arc in 1806. The design was completed the same year, but it would be three decades later in 1836 before it was completed.  

France has a long a long history of fighting wars at great cost in men and money.  The French celebrate their two millennia of history. The celebrate the great triumphs in World War I and many of Napoleons battles and other wars going back to the Roman Empire.  

The French, much better than America, accept all of their history. I worked for a French petrochemical company in the 1990s.  They thought American anguish over President Bill Clinton was amusing. No one in France is surprised when someone with the ego to stand in front of 300 million people and say "Elect me!" turns out to have some flaws.  

I am currently reading a biography of Thomas Jefferson along with the Federalist Papers.  I plan to read biographies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton later in the year.  The men who founded America were not perfect, but they were great, mostly very young men, who began a nation with liberty for some in the hope of liberty for all some day.  

Jefferson wrote that the American colonies should end of slavery in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. In 1787, Hamilton wrote the Federalist Papers to persuade New York and New England to unite with the South, knowing it would mean a slavery compromise. They did the best they could in founding a new nation. 

We should honor our founders knowing they were not perfect, but strove to bring real equality and freedom into a world of monarchy and despotism.  

What they did began a new nation that would lead the free world for much of the 20th Century. Their ideas held until January 6, 2021, when a petulant monster attempted to steal the election and ended the 240-year tradition of a peaceful transfer of power.

I was in London just before November 11. I got a poppy in London and a blue cornflower in Paris. I wore both on November 11. These little commemorative flowers grew in the devastated landscape where the war was fought. 

France and the United States 200 Years Ago

France in the person of Marquis de Lafayette and the troops he brought to Yorktown are the reason there is an America.  Without the French, America would have been defeated in Virginia and lost the war.  Coming to the aid of America added to the crushing debt France already had. That debt and its effects was one of the major causes of the French Revolution less than a decade later. 

Alexis de Tocqueville came to America and wrote a thousand pages about what he saw, praising self-government and the American spirit while unsparing in his criticism of slavery and the way we treated Native Americans.  His book was a call for change in France as well as the single greatest book written about America.  

My Daughter's Book Featured in Lancaster Newspapers

 

My daughter Lauren's book "Amelia's Journey to Find Family" was featured in a review in the Lancaster Newspapers today.  

She published the book this summer after caring for a 14-year-old rescue Labrador Retriever named Amelia for the last year of her life.  I wrote about Lauren's book and her love for dogs in a post in June last year.

If you want a copy of the book, you can order it here. 

It's wonderful to see Lauren share her love of dogs in this way.  

Her Dad is very proud!

Book 3 of 2022: The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future

The next American Civil War won't be like the last one--there will not be battle lines and armies.  The next civil war will be a slide into permanent conflict possibly followed by a regional break into two or more countries.  

That's the future of America according to the Canadian author Stephen Marche.  By some definitions, the level of violence and political dysfunction in America is already at a point we are close to a civil war.  

In the book Stephen Marche uses information he learned from military and political experts to make scenarios of how America could fall into civil war.   

The first scenario he calls "The Bridge." Federal inspectors close a bridge between two rural counties.  Protestors occupy the bridge, tear down the roadblocks, and defy the federal government to close the bridge. A sheriff in one of the counties becomes the spokesperson for the protesters.  Soon he is on Fox News every day giving updates from the frontlines. 

Eventually the Army moves in.  After months of delay, the military attacks the bridge. The sheriff is arrested and charged with treason and becomes a hero to Fox News.  

In the aftermath of the fight, the President comes to town for a "listening tour." An unemployed white kid living in mom's attic and dreaming of being a hero shoots the President when she makes a surprise visit to a Jamba Juice. He becomes a bigger hero than Kyle Rittenhouse.  

From there the local terrorist war becomes national. Attacks, counter attacks become daily life in America.  

Marche then speculates on how the US will break into pieces since we are ungovernable.  One part will be Texas, by itself. Another part will be the Pacific Coast.  Then the northeast and midwest will be the land still called the USA. The South and the West will form a nation with the most land area, no abortions at all anywhere, unlimited gun rights, and an economy that will crater immediately without all the tax money they get from the rich states.  South Carolina, for example, gets $7.50 from the federal government for every dollar it pays in taxes.  

Marche says he has some hope at the end, but he sounds like a manager who who talks for about 20 minutes about her worst employee then says, "I know she's a good person inside."  The message of the rest of the book: move to a blue state or live in Gilead.

Book 2 of 2022: Marie Curie--a graphic novel biography in middle-school-level French

(In past years I have written an essay about the books I read in the previous year.  As my list of books gets longer and my memory shorter, I decided to write about the books as I read them rather than 2000+ words at the end of the year.)

 

In November I visited the Institute Curie near the Sorbonne in Paris.  This book was on the shelf in the tiny bookstore inside the small museum.  I read kids books in French to keep some level of reading comprehension.  This graphic novel gave me a chance to practice French and to remember what I learned about the life of this remarkable scientist.  

I learned a lot about Marie Sklodowska-Curie's life because more than half the book is about her childhood in Poland and struggles to get to France to study physics.  When I read about her previously, it was about her research and life-saving work in World War One.  

After I finished the book, I looked up how many people have won Nobel Prizes:  962 laureates earning a total of 603 prizes (as of 2020).  Just 59 laureates are women and Marie Curie is the first.  

Just four laureates have received two Nobel Prizes:  

Linus Pauling won a chemistry prize and a peace prize.

John Bardeen won the Nobel twice in physics.

Frederick Sanger won two chemistry prizes.

Marie Sklodowska-Curie won the Nobel Prize in physics and in chemistry: the only person to be awarded to Nobel Prizes in two different fields.  She is extraordinary, even among the short list of multiple Nobel laureates.  

If you read French at all, the book is fun to read and not difficult.  

The summary on Goodreads:

Cette biographie de Marie Curie (1867-1934) retrace les principales étapes de son existence : son enfance en Pologne, sa scolarité studieuse et ses études supérieures, son arrivée à Paris, sa rencontre avec Pierre Curie, ses recherches sur le radium et ses découvertes sur les rayons X, l'obtention de ses prix Nobel en 1903 et 1911 et son engagement pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale.

Love Makes Sense: The Four Loves by CS Lewis

 

On Friday, I hope to join the monthly discussion of the New York CS Lewis Society.  The topic is The Four Loves.  I love this book and am hoping to participate, but even retirees have schedule conflicts and I will be on the way to Minneapolis to see two of my six kids.  

I have read and re-read this book since the mid-1980s.  From then to now, the four loves are and have been the frame through which I see relationships, my own and those around me.  To begin where Lewis did, there are four words for love in Greek. Most languages have just one. In French and Hebrew and many other languages, like and love are the same word.  In popular usage, like and love are hard to tell apart in English.  

In Greek: 

Storge στοργη, means affection, the love in families.

Philia φιλια, is friendship, not just acquaintance.

Eros εροϲ is romantic love.

Agape aγαπη is charity.

I used the grid (above) in a talk I gave in a Russian literature class about how the characters in a novel related to each other--both good and bad. 

From my first reading of The Four Loves, I was interested in the relationship of the loves to each other. If you look across the grid, the top row are the "natural" loves, those shared with animals. The bottom row are "spiritual" loves, shared with spirits (for those who believe in a spiritual world) and people who are spiritual.  

The natural loves are always best when embodied.  We can maintain a family relationship at a distance, but a happy family wants to be together.  There are too many jokes for me to repeat about the difference between romance in person and on line.  

In the columns, the loves are merited, and unmerited.  Storge and Agape are alike in that they do not (or should not) depend on how good or bad the loved person is.  Parents love children whether they are beautiful, or not.  When Mother Teresa went to Calcutta, she helped those considered the worst: those of the lowest caste with leprosy.  

But we choose our friends and lovers based on merit.  The lover is dazzled by the beloved. The friend finds another who shares the same deep interest and says, "What! You too?" Romance and friendship can continue through hardship and grief, but they begin with merit. 

Friendship and romance, while similar in being based on merit, have opposite expression because one is spiritual and the other natural.  The posture of friendship is side by side sharing an activity or idea.  Lovers are face to face. They want each other. English idiom says this best.  If two friends become lovers, we say the friendship "turned into" love. 

The book is full of example, detail and clear explanation of the best and the worst of each kind of love.  I could (and have) recommend this book to anyone except a cave dwelling hermit--and maybe seeing what she is missing this book would lure her out of the cave.  

In a world so suffused with hate and manipulation it can be difficult to believe love is at the center of life, the universe and everything.  But reading this book, seeing how love is part of everything that is good in our lives, The Four Loves might be the most hopeful book I ever read.  

By the way, a decade ago, I wrote about a fellow soldier choosing between Eros and Philia.

First Book of 2022: Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

My first book of 2022 was in the category graphic novel. But the book in question is not a novel. It is a philosophy book that is written with words and drawings.  

But graphic novel is the category according to Wikipedia, so I will go with it:

A graphic novel is a book made up of comics content. Although the word "novel" normally refers to long fictional works, the term "graphic novel" is applied broadly and includes fiction, non-fiction, and anthologized work. It is, at least in the United States, typically distinct from the term "comic book", which is generally used for comics periodicals and trade paperbacks.

Before I read Unflattening, I heard Nick Sousanis talk about how his book came to be and what he was trying to do with his use of graphics.  I loved hearing him talk about how our eyes follow images and graphical cues and how he used that knowledge to create the book.

I liked this review by comicsgrid.com

Over eight chapters, Unflattening follows an anonymous, sleepwalking figure as they step out of a regimented life and take flight to explore new worlds. Sousanis draws the imagery of these worlds from TV, movies, the classical canon of art, and scientific diagrams. Unflattening embraces visual references from Paleolithic cave prints to James Bond films, and verbal ones from Bruno Latour to Wallace Stevens. The protagonist bears at one time Hermes’ sandals and at others wings of its own; it is incarnated as a Pinocchio-like puppet confounded by a centipede’s existential challenge, ‘Who are you?’, before finally being reborn as a child reminiscent of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The comic’s final image is of that newborn’s eye opening to see the world as if for the first time.

In the course of this journey, Sousanis dethrones the primacy of the word in a kind of Copernican revolution. He argues that image is not mere illustration, subordinate to words, but an equal partner and component in thinking. He explores stereoscopic vision and the principles of astronomical observation as metaphors in order to define ‘unflattening’ as ‘a simultaneous engagement of multiple vantage points from which to engender new ways of seeing.’ (Sousanis 2015: 32).

An extended sequence takes us through the world of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, in which two-dimensional ‘A. Square’ encounters a three-dimensional sphere who exposes him to previously unimagined perspectives. We need each other’s points of view, Sousanis tells us, to avoid become constrained in set modes of thinking and blinkered perspectives, just as A. Square must be enlightened by his encounter with the sphere. Words and images together free us from the limitations presented by either the purely visual or purely verbal. 

And here are a few pages.  

I hesitated to read the book for a long time, but now I am reading two other graphic novels (both biographies of scientists).  Unflattening will take your mind places it has never been before.

Enjoy!

My books of 2021:

Fiction

Non fiction 

Favorite

Books of 2022

January 6, 2021, the End of Democracy in America

 

Trump horde ending democracy in America

From the beginning of my military service nearly 50 years ago, until the last my last day in the Army in May 2016, I attended dozens of change of command ceremonies. After the flag is passed the new and out-going commanders often make a speech.  Probably one in three of those speeches made a sincere nod to the American tradition of the peaceful transfer of power.  

For the mostly conservative officers taking or relinquishing authority, they linked themselves to a 200-plus year American tradition--a hallmark of American exceptionalism.  

But that ended one year ago today when the 45th President sent a mob to overturn the election he just lost.  The coup d'etat was mere minutes from success.  Hundreds of Trump supporters were screaming to kill Mike Pence.  If they had managed to stop the vote, the election could have been thrown into the House of Representatives. That is the last possible place in which a disputed election can be decided according to the Constitution.  

With one vote per state, Trump would have taken the election.  

All of my adult life I had an implicit belief in progress in America: more rights for more people.  The racist rednecks would recede, I believed.  

With Trump's nomination and election, my belief cracked.  After Charlottesville it was shattered. With January 6, it was gone. The end of democracy was only a matter of when.  

America no longer has a tradition of the peaceful transfer of power.  I voted for Joe Biden and hoped normal order could be restored in America.  One year later, the democratic party is fighting about infrastructure and social programs and has done nothing to fix the electoral count act or secure voting.  The Republicans are running MAGA candidates all over the country to get control of election counting.  How much does voting really matter if the Republicans are in charge of counting.  

In 2016, 63 million Americans voted for a failed casino owner who played a business man on a game show.  In 2020, 74 million Americans watched a lying buffoon for four years and said they would like four more.  The people who claim most publicly to be followers of Jesus (Love your neighbor; Love your enemies; turn the other cheek) worship Trump much more fervently than they follow anything Christ ever said or did. I have read and re-read the New Testament. Few people who have ever lived are less like Jesus than Donald Trump.

January 6, 2021, was a dress rehearsal.  The command performance is three years away. In 2025, there will be no need for a mob to attack.  The criminals will be in the building. They will use the power entrusted to them by the Constitution to end democracy. 

The Roman poet Horace fought to preserve the Republic during the Civil War after Julius Caesar took power and was murdered.  The Republicans lost. Horace was wounded and lost everything.  When he recovered, he knew the Republic was gone, so he made peace with his circumstances and became a poet, living the best life he could. 

I hope to be like Horace, to do my best to preserve the Republic, and when that fails, to protect my family and live as well as possible.