John Brown, a Jew after my own heart. L’Chayim. The “Real State” of the Jewish, when Israel is realized, will look like a Bronx Cooperative Movement. With my radical views, Jews often say to me, “You don’t believe in the Jewish state?” I sometimes retort quickly, “No, I believe in a Jewish world.” Of course based on Jewish values of justice “tzedek, tzedek, tirdof”, community, and of course that every man is created in the divine image. Not the fascistic and racist policies of the current Jewish state.

i’ll take the Herzl photo. don’t worry, i’ll give it back to you when you’re ready. i’m serious.
nice post. very rich.

eli, when were you in berlin? i lived there all of last year 2003-2004.

Yeah, my grandfather read the Forwards and is buried in the section sponsored by his “Fahrbandt”.
Nostalgia…
These dreams have failed everywhere they have been tried – including Israel.
And specifically, as a substitute for Judaism – like other assimilationist attempts to distill Judaism into big universal ideas – these dreams also failed. Many of these people’s grandchildren – including the children of Israel’s founders – cannot justify the very existence of the Jewish people.
Now the “progressives” are antiques, free-market democracy has proven much more effective than socialism at growing working classes out of poverty and giving them representation.
And the ideological genies the Jewish lefties uncorked have now come around and bit them in the behind. This entire blog is testimony to the inability of these Jews to handle unabashed Jewish nationalism – and of the dilemma they find themselves in as “supporting every underdog” increasingly means siding with the murderers of innocent Jews.
This is is the bitter end of the cosmopolitan dream – Jews who don’t know why they’re Jewish getting slapped back and savaged by the movement of one-world fraternity… still no room in that dream for the Jews!
Nostalgia…
Sure looks rosy from a distance, though…

That should have read “my uncle’s brother”. Either way, this is my family’s history. I just called my father and he told me my aunt checked out the exhibit and that there are pictures of our family in it. I’ll definitely be checking this out.

Ben-David, regarding “free-market democracy has proven much more effective than socialism at growing working classes out of poverty and giving them representation”
Amen. The single greatest issue I have with Jewish History in the last century or so is the substantial embrace of socialism/communism. I can understand Russians who saw it as preferable to Czarist rule, but in other contexts, it baffles me. When the state forces us to “give,” it ruins our ability to freely engage in acts of tzedakah. Consequently, on the Maimonidean ladder of tzedakah, we are reduced to its lowest rung, if forced “giving” even counts at all. Of course, I am entirely ignoring all the pork (how appropriate that this type of spending is treif) and bureaucratic costs involved in government. Adding those costs in, the power of socialism to destroy the mitzvot of helping others is shocking.
Of course the prohibitions on theft, the emphasis on human liberty, property rights, and the principles of self ownership in the Torah are even greater reasons to oppose socialism. I’ve never really understood the Jewish argument for socialism, aside from Perchik’s ridiculous interpretation of Jacob’s relationship with Laban from Fiddler on the Roof. Can someone “enlighten” me?

J –
Did you ever wonder why political scientists have three different words for socialism, communism and stalinism ? Do you think it’s like eskimos with their supposed many words for snow?
Or do you recognize that there is a difference between them?
Or do you really want us to believe that jewish seamstresses who fought for better wages, fair housing, and a 10 hour workday really secretly wanted mass murder, gulags and the KGB having files on every citizen, etc ?

sorry – private conversation continued.
eli – i was kind of doing the same thing – i.e., studying at the FU, living in Prenzlauer Berg and doing a lot of stuff with the Juedische Gemeinde.

Brown..
why not ready for a Theo poster?
moogie • 02/09/05 09:10pm

moogie: isn’t it obvious? I have problems with his ideas

Wow, Yisrael we finally agree on something, concerning communism, There is hope for us all after all… hehehe

J.B: Liked the photo of the children’s protest, Bronx Workmen’s Circle shul #2, 1934. Note that protests by Workmen’s Circle kids are still going on in the 21st century – in the Boston area, Workmen’s Circle http://www.circle.org , the Jewish Labor Committee http://www.jewishlabor.org and others have held anti-sweatshop demos http://babel.massart.edu/~fredless/stop-sweatshops for the last few years. For details, contact me [email protected] .
You mentioned that your family is from the Seward Park Houses in Manhattan, which was financed and built by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America also had developed some low-cost housing on the Lower East Side of Manhattan as well, just across the park from the Jewish Daily Forward building, if I’m not mistaken. Yes, rich history indeed.
Over the years, the historically Jewish garment unions have undergone mergers. http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/library/kheel/collections/bibliographies/uniteAndPredecessorUnions/about.html The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America [the sponsors of the Amalgamated Houses] merged with the Textile Workers Union of America in 1976 and formed the ACTWU. That union merged with the ILGWU in 1995 to form UNITE, and in 2003, UNITE merged with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees [HERE] into UNITE HERE http://www.unitehere.org . You can see some of the history online. http://www.unitehere.org/about/history.asp
The Jewish labor movement as a whole has a diverse and rich history, from the alphabet soup of unions and allied Jewish labor organizations, and range from a [the Jewish anarchists] to f [Yiddishist social-democratic Farband and the Yiddishist labor Zionist Farband] through z [the labor Zionists and socialist Zionists] I’ve included on the JLC website – http://www.jewishlabor.org – a basic reading list on the American JLM http://www.ericlee.me.uk/jlcarchives/000036.html that might be of interest to some folks “here.” Take a look.
That your grandmother used to play mah jong with Ethel Rosenberg and your my grandparents were boxing up world-war II rifles the many Jewish war veterans had brought home from the war as part of an effort to smuggle arms for the Jewish fighters in Palestine … well, that just shows how intertwined and fluid some of the personal and political boundaries were in those years.
Daniel’s comments that “the `Real State’ of the Jewish, when Israel is realized, will look like a Bronx Cooperative Movement,” is a tad self-serving, what with his radical views and all.
His retort to the question Jews often ask him — “You don’t believe in the Jewish state?” – that is, “No, I believe in a Jewish world,” is also self-serving. A Jewish world would be a good, fair and decent world? Hey, anyone involved in social change movements, as Rosen apparently is, a’la his web link, wants a world based on “Jewish values of justice” – but the expression “tzedek, tzedek, tirdof” – “justice, justice, shall you pursue – which is from the last book of the Torah [Deut. 16:20]is connected with the relationship between the importance of the pursuit of justice, that it is necessary for living, and that not just so one may live, but “inherit the land which the LORD your God gives you.”
Rather than fulminate about “the fascistic and racist policies of the current Jewish state,” [hey, it’s called Israel], I’d recommend finding individuals, parties, and organizations within Israel and here in the U.S. who are working for a more peaceful Israel – not only in relation to Israel and the Palestinians and its other neighboring peoples/states, but also within Israeli society. For instance Shalom Achshav http://www.peacenow.org.il/site/en/homepage.asp and Meretz USA http://www.meretzusa.org , to pick two quickly. Or to support the work of the New Israel Fund http://www.nif.org and its colleague groups within Israel working for social change. Here’s a links page page of links to a range of Israeli and American groups, courtesy Meretz USA http://www.meretzusa.org/linkspage.shtml
Eli is interested in the “rebuilding of yiddishe culture in new york.” Well, reach out to the Workmen’s Circle – 212-889-6800, ask for the New York Regional Office, and also to the Congress for Jewish Culture – 212-505-8040 – and Yugntruf – Youth for Yiddish http://www.yugntruf.org – 212- 787-6675. They all operate Yiddish language and culture activities in New York and other communities.
Ben-David’s grandfather read the Forwards. It is still coming out, weekly in print and online, in English http://www.forward.com and Yiddish http://yiddish.forward.com
As to Holy Terror’s “claim that American Jews sat on their ass throughout the holocaust,” let me be both informative and a bit self-serving and direct people to an online exhibit on the Holocaust era history of the Jewish Labor Committee http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/collections/exhibits/tam/JLC/opener.html [I work at the JLC.]
>> Arieh Lebowitz

im tirtzu ein zo agadah, eh? or is that only for dreams we like?

Yisrael, I disagree. The structure of the modern corporation is as hierarchical as anything the medieval, feudal period had to offer. The hierarchy is almost perfectly pyramidal and there is little accountability at the top, even if the company is publicly traded. In any event, ten percent of the population owns over 90 percent of the stock, so we shouldn’t exaggerate the influence of that. The corporation is basically a feudal lord that puts a gun to your head and controls you for eight hours a day. I don’t think that’s an imaginary hierarchy at all.
To say nothing of the countless people in our society who have the most mind-numbing, drudgery-involving jobs and yet get paid the least, i.e. janitors, sanitation workers, etc. If our economy made any sense no one would have to do a job like that for their whole lives, and everyone would have some opportunity to develop some specific skill or talent as an individual.
By the by, African countries embroiled in civil or guerrilla wars are not examples of anarchism in action. They’re just failed states. Try the Spanish collectives of the mid-30’s or the early Russian Soviets (before Lenin crushed them in the name of, uh, Soviets) for better examples.

Little accountability? To whom? Shareholders? Do top executives work 80-hour weeks just for the hell of it? Lack of accountability to the government? Ever try wading through securities statutes or practicing corporate law?
In the early days of this here republic, corporations had to be chartered by the states. To make sure they performed useful functions, and didn’t harm the commonweal. After Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, in which the precedent was set that corporations are people, it all started to plunge even further downhill.
What if someone’s talents or skills, even when developed, only qualified them for a drudgery-involving job? But I’d be willing to experiment with job rotation. Why don’t we start by having the janitors and sanitation workers serve as surgeons for anarchist patients?
Sure, it makes tons of sense that at 18 years old, we give people this choice: either you can spend some more years at school, benefiting from further education, or you can go straight into the workforce and become a janitor! After nine years, the student will be a doctor, and you can still be a janitor! Therefore, the person who spent your nine drudgerous years as a janitor should be paid much more than you! Because, you know, of all their sacrifices.

They still are, as anyone who has formed a corporation recently knows.
Right, but when was the last time a corporation had its charter revoked for being irresponsible?
I really have no idea what your’e getting at here. Do you believe that everyone has the same or similar levels of intelligence, talents and ambitions? Do you think medical school, or law school, or medical or law practice is a picnic? Do you think that of the janitors out there who have the talent to become professionals, all would choose to be professionals, with the greater stress levels that entails? Are you trying to say that there’s not enough opportunity in America? Even to the extent that’s true, wouldn’t relatively minor reforms (more rigorous grade schools and high schools) be preferable to dumping the entire system?
I do think that everyone has relatively the same level of intelligence, though not necessarily either talents or ambitions. But I don’t think the system as it is structured now offers enough opportunity for each person to develop their potential, and I’m not sure that it could even with better education due to the fact of economic inequality transmitted from generation to generation. Also, I think I agree with Michael Albert that it makes more sense, morally, to remunerate for effort instead of output. Law school might not be a picnic, but ask a law student whether they’d rather be in law school or clean a sewer and see what they tell you. I certainly don’t think that people who clean sewers are all ambitionless, talentless people who deserve to be doing those jobs their whole lives.

A flight of fancy: while reading through Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought , the arguments among sixteenth-century northern humanists about the aristocracy and the plebes reminded me of this argument. Maybe conservatives throughout history and in completely different contexts are really similar in at least this way: they tend to think that people in the current society are for the most part where they deserve to be. And usually, this is because they have some kind of lofty position themselves, though in some cases it is because they hold the hope of attaining such a position. In the sixteenth century, the argument was that although virtue, and not blood and heredity, constituted the only true title to rule, it was nonetheless the case that noblemen had more virtue than “the rascal rabble,” and that the aristocracy could “accomplish more copiously and plentifully than the dregs and dross of men.”
Cut forwards a few hundred years, and we have “science,” which is certainly not at all ever tinged by “ideology,” telling us that hey, some people just accomplish more than others because they’re born that way.
By the by, I don’t see how you read “remuneration for effort” as the same thing as “remuneration for need.” One is effort, the other is need. Those are two completely different metrics! Our society’s metric is output, which I think is immoral for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the opportunity we offer to each individual and the fact that if indeed we accept the more obvious of science’s genetic divisions (i.e. a tall, strong guy can pick more grain than a short, skinny guy) then we’re simply rewarding another facet of luck, the genetic lottery. Since most moral philosophers agree that luck is morally irrelevant, we should find other ways of distributing remuneration.
Oh, and in the hypothetical system I am referring to, which is not by any means the only proposal for an anarchistic system (and in fact, many anarchists contest its anarchistic nature), effort is evaluated by one’s co-workers in a regular fashion. Assuming everyone comes in and works the same hours at the same pace or level of effort, remuneration would turn out relatively “equal.” If someone noticeably slacked or noticeably put in more effort, they would get more. If you want you can read about some of these ideas here: http://www.zmag.org/parecon/indexnew.htm
And if we did remunerate according to effort, I’d love to see you in the sewers. You’ve answered the usual “why your system would never work” question, which is “who would clean the sewers?” The answer, it seems, is that stressed-out lawyers looking for jobs that were less mentally taxing would do it. We could leave the lawyering to people who were actually into the job.

G Green – I should really ask my grandmother more and tape record her answers or something