The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy Book 42 of 2022

 

When I began my Jewish journey after torch-carrying Nazis marched in Charlottesville. In my search after that horrible night, Bernard-Henri Levy in his book The Genius of Judaism was one of the first writers to show me I really am a Jew.  

Jews themselves fight over who is a Jew. My family and Jews I knew growing up said I was not a Jew.  I do not have a Jewish mother. When I joined a Synagogue, it had to be a Reform Synagogue. To be Conservative, especially to be Orthodox, I would have to convert.  

For non-Jews, my Jewish Dad means I am a Jew, the same way that having an Italian Dad would make me Italian.  Of course, every white supremacist and Nazi in America hates me even if my mother is not Jewish.  

Levy went showed me what an amazing tribe I am a part of.  To be a Jew is to have a unique place in the world in so many ways. Who loses their country and gets it back after two millennia? And keeps its culture together during that entire two thousand years.

I wrote this about my first reading of the book in 2018:  

The book explicitly on faith that moved me the most was The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy. This book looks at the history of the Jewish people and Israel through the lens of the Book of Jonah.  Levy shows us Judaism and his view of the Jewish world by his interactions with “Nineveh” in the form of modern-day enemies of Jews and Israel.  One modern Nineveh he visits is Lviv, Ukraine.   

I knew my trip last summer was to visit Holocaust sites would center on Auschwitz, But this book led me to pair Lviv with Auschwitz as two sad extremes of the Holocaust.  Auschwitz is the most industrial site of slaughter, Lviv is the most personal.  At Auschwitz, the Nazis built a place of extermination. In Lviv they simply allowed the local population to act out their own anti-Semitism.   

Lviv was the most personal of the sites of Holocaust slaughter.  Neighbors killed neighbors and dumped their bodies in ditches.  Levy went to Lviv to make peace with this site of unbridled hate.  He seems to have succeeded.  I did not.  Ukraine tried to kill my grandparents. Ukraine remains a cauldron of anti-Semitism. 

Which brings up another aspect of Judaism which Levy makes so simple and beautiful. We Jews, at our best, are committed to Justice, to repairing the world.

Until this year, I was ambivalent about Ukraine as was Levy.  From the beginning of the war, I have volunteered for Ukraine, sometimes three or four days a week making combat medical kits.  Levy made a documentary backing the fight to keep Ukraine free.   

When the Russians invaded, Ukraine needed all free people to rally to her defense.  Whatever problems I had with Ukraine before February 24 are insignificant compared to the unjust attack on an innocent country.

Glory to Ukraine.

The book is a celebration of Jewish history and life and is beautifully written.

First 41 Books of 2022:

C.S.Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis

Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

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

C.S.Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como, Book 41 of 2022

Sometimes I have a book for a few years, suddenly remember I have it, and read it in a couple of days. That just happened with C.S. Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by Jim Como. I have had the copy since it was first published in 2019. I bought it and had it signed by the author at the 50th Anniversary of the New York C.S. Lewis Society. 

Jim is one of the founding members. I joined a decade after the founding of the group in 1979 just after I left active duty in the Army in Germany.  Jim and I have known each other for four decades. I attended meetings of the NY CSL Society about once a year for the past four decades. Like most NYCSL members, Jim lives and works in the New York City region.

I read the book now because I just finished reading CSL's longest book:  English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama. Lewis referred to it by the series name abbreviation OHEL: Oxford History of English Literature. 

I read Jim's book to as a review of all that Lewis wrote before and after the OHEL.

The short introduction includes a brief biography, brief summaries and evaluations of all of Lewis's books and many essays. He even includes a list of the more prominent critics of Lewis and some of the controversies that cropped up during and after Lewis's life.  

After being so far into the weeds of the 16th Century, it was fun to come back to all the ways Lewis wrote and lived.  I have read all of the 40 books published in during the life of Lewis and most of the collections published after he died--a dozen more.  

Lewis is now known most of all for the seven books of the Chronicles of Narnia. All of them made into movies I will never see (I don't watch movies of novels I love.)

But Lewis is also a novelist. His Till We Have Faces is, I think, his best book and among the better novels of the 20th Century.  Jim's description of the book and it's place in 20th Century literature is excellent. 

Lewis is also a Christian apologist, a lecturer, a BBC radio personality during WWII, essayist, book reviewer, and a science fiction writer: Perelandra is a brilliant novel, and a literary critic of considerable reputation. Jim's most recent book is about Perelandra. 

Jim's Very Short Introduction convey's all of this in 128 pages.  If you have read only some of Lewis, this book will tell you what to read next. 

And I will also suggest what to read next:  If you haven't read The Four Loves or the essay "The Inner Ring," they should be your next read.

First 40 books of 2022:

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis

Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

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

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis, Book 40 of 2022

 

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis

The longest book of the more than forty books written by C.S. Lewis in his lifetime, took more than forty years for me to finish reading.  

I first read a few pages from English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama in my semester as a full-time student in 1980. In my Western Traditions II class, taught by Theodora Graham, we read the Norton Critical Edition of Utopia  by Sir Thomas More.  

Among the dozen critical essays in the back was an excerpt from Lewis's history. Amid essays claiming More was a communist, a socialist, an authoritarian and number of other political positions that mostly did not exist in the 16th Century, Lewis said the key to understanding the book was the magic map. He said the book was written for friends who shared More's taste for creating worlds--with magic maps. 

It was a refreshing and fun essay in the midst of others with very long faces. 

Twenty years later I read the long first chapter of the book, which is a wonderful summary of the century and its politics and religion.  But I put the book down and did not read it except as a reference until this year. Then I decided to finish it.  

Lewis read everything and everyone who published prose and poetry in the 16th Century in English.  More than one reviewer said Lewis found the only good lines of poetry ever written by some very bad poets.  

Lewis wrote about More and Tyndale as prose writers, and as martyrs. Tyndale, the Protestant, translated the Bible into English. His translation makes up a lot of what would become known as The King James Bible published in the early 17th Century. 

More, a Catholic, wrote in defense of his Church. Both men faced death by torture and burning at the stake worried whether they would break under torment. But neither thought the concept of punishing heresy by death was inherently wrong, even when they were waiting in cells for execution.  When we read old books, we are reading a whole world of different assumptions about life and the universe.

The final 200 pages of the book, 'Golden,' is divided into three sections:  Seventy pages on Philip Sydney and Edmund Spenser, seventy pages on Prose in the 'Golden' Period, and sixty pages on Verse in the 'Golden' Period. 

At several points, Lewis analyzes a sonnet cycle and says where the poet missed the mark in form or content.  Sometimes in relation to the standard of that era, the sonnets of Francesco Petrarch. Then on page 502, after several pages on Shakespeare's longer verse, the first paragraph begins:

Shakespeare would be a considerable non-dramatic poet if he had only written Lucrece: but it sinks almost to nothing in comparison with his sonnets. The sonnets are the very heart of the Golden Age, the highest and purest achievement of the golden way of writing. 

Lewis continues for another seven pages explaining why Shakespeare's sonnets are "the very heart of the Golden Age."

At this point I stopped reading this book, got a copy of Sonnets and started reading them aloud.  It has been years since I read them. They are beautiful. 

As with any book this comprehensive, we can read pieces of the book we care about and omit the rest. Anyone interested in the history of literature or in late Medieval Europe can enjoy the introduction "New Learning and New Ignorance." This 66 page essay could be a short history book all by itself.

Since I have read and loved so many Medieval works, Book I. Late Medieval, was interesting for me just as history of how literature was changed by the break up of the Church and subsequent religious wars and controversies. 

Book II. 'Drab' is repellent just by the title. But it is in this section we learn about Tyndale and More. Reading Lewis on bad poets is interesting just to see how he handles the material.

Book III. 'Golden' is why we read history.  Lewis pulls together all the threads of culture, society, religion, and literature and weaves a narrative to show us in detail how English Literature dragged along for a half century and suddenly flowered in a way no one could have anticipated.

Enjoy! 

First 39 books of 2022:

Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

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

La veritable histoire des trois petits cochons by Erik Blegrad, Book 39 of 2022

 

La veritable histoire des trois petits cochons

The tale of the three little pigs is the 1843 original version, en francais.  The French is simple and the illustrations are lovely.  

In this rather bloodthirsty telling of the tale, the wolf (le loup--he is not called the "Big Bad Wolf" or le grand mechant loup) eats the first two pigs.  The second is shown in a pan with an apple in his mouth fresh from the oven.  

The tale has the third little pig outsmarting the wolf several times before finally getting the wolf so angry he jumps down the chimney into a pot of boiling water. The last illustration is the third little pig eating the wolf doe his supper--at the table with a napkin, silverware and a candle.

The most lovely line in the book is the wolf's repeated threat to the little pigs:

Eh bien! Je soufflerai, et je gronderai, et j'ecraserai ta maison.

Well! I'll blow and I'll roar and I'll crush your house.  

It worked two out of three--then the wolf was dinner......

First 38 books of 2022:

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

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

The Iliad or The Poem of Force by Simone Weil, Book 38 of 2022

This brief book was written shortly after France was defeated by the Nazis in 1940. Within three years, the author, Simone Weil, would be dead. She would die in the effort to free her country from the Nazis.

The Iliad or the Poem of Force begins: 

The true hero, the true subject at the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away.

She goes on to show how every character in the Iliad is crushed by force.  Every character eventually is afraid and dies by irresistible force. Throughout Weil makes her case that force is the hero at the center of the drama of the fall of Troy.  

The essay is more sad and beautiful than I can easily convey. If you have read Homer, read this essay and weep again with the heroes before the walls of Troy.

First 37 books of 2022:

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

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

Game of Thrones, Book 5, A Dance with Dragons, Book 37 of 2022

 

I just finished book 5 of the Game of Thrones:  A Dance with Dragons. Before I started reading the series at the beginning of the pandemic, I watched the entire HBO series.  Although the series runs eight seasons and 73 episodes, the more I read, the more the video series seemed schematic.  So many details that did not or could not make it into the vast video production.  

Of course, a video adaptation is simply a different artistic work than a book.  The trajectory of the difference is predictable. If the novel and the video series were main branches of a tree, the longer they grow, the farther apart they get. That was how it felt to read the books after seeing the video series.  

Season 1 and Book 1 are very similar.  Book 2 and Season 2 started to diverge. By then of Book 5, I felt I was in a different story, or a version of a different story. At the end of Book 5, every major character was dead, near death, threatened with death, or just miserable.  

Nothing that happened in the last two seasons of HBO series seemed to be the likely path of the characters at the end of Book 5.  

George R.R. Martin said Book six will be published in November of 2023.  I am so looking forward to it. I want to see what the story is like after 11 years of hiatus. Martin has to be influenced by what the HBO crew finally produced, so we will never know what Book 6 would have been without the HBO series.  

I loved the books. The further I went through the books, the more I loved them. 

First 36 books of 2022:

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

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