When it comes to the condition of Jews in Christian Europe, France was long known as the haven and heartland of integration and of toleration. And yet when things seemed to be going well for Jews in Western Europe and North America generally and France especially, the infamous fin de siècle Dreyfus affair brought to the surface some of the worst kinds of bigotry and animus--like contemporaneous Russian pogroms a premonition of the deadly looming revival of ethnic or religious divisions that had seemed a thing of the past.

Our guest today, historian Maurice Samuels, author of many fine books on French history (Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (2010), and The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (2016))and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism has written a crackerjack new book. Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair, (Yale 2024) has written a wonderful account of Dreyfus himself and how should we understand what that turmoil has ot tell us how Jews then (and perhaps today) coexisted with a mainstream secular Christian society either by way of assimilation or (not quite the same thing) by peaceful integration that preserved cultural distinctions.

The discussion ranges widely, setting the scene in the prior centuries when Jews settled all over France, and then were accorded unusual rights by the universalist vision of the French Revolution. Maurie also explains why succeeding generations in France included the ascension not only of Leon Blum the Jewish socialist (and inventor of the weekend!) who improbably led anti-fascist France during in the 1930's--but also the other Jews who followed him as political leaders in France, right up to the present-day.

From Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) forward, Maurie shows, intellectuals have missed the significance of the way Dreyfus and his family integrated without assimilating. The conversation culminating in Maurie introducing John to the fascinating "Franco-French War" about what that coexistence should look like: assimilation which presumes the disappearance of a distinctive Jewish cultural identity, or integration which posits the peaceful coexistence of French citizens of various religions and cultures.

Mentioned in the episode

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As Oscar Season rolls around, Recall This Book looks back to John's 2019 discussion with Columbia University professor Sharon Marcus about The Drama of Celebrity, her tour-de-force account of how stars are born, publicized, and in time devoutly scrapbooked by adoring fans.

They tackle a question at least as old as Sarah Bernhardt: who or what makes a star? Rather than crediting star making to the culture industry, to fans, or to star themselves, Sharon makes the case that all three forces together constitute a celebrity creation machine.

After discussing her archival work on theatrical scrapbooking in Indiana, Sharon pulls from the vaults a marvelous Hollywood memoir, Brooke Haywood’s Haywired. That triggers discussion of the studio system and how its models of celebrity are and are not with us today.

Sharon’s two Recallable Books also capitalize on mid-century notions of celebrity: Mommie Dearest by Christina Crawford and Edie: American Girl by Jean Stein and George Plimpton. John’s choice, The Entertainer by Margaret Talbot, another biographical account written by a star’s daughter, gives a slightly rosier perspective on the family memoir.

Discussed in this episode:

Read the episode here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For our Pandemic-era Books in Dark Times series, RTB spoke in 2020 with Carlo Rotella of Boston College. Rotella is the author of such gems as Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt and most recently has come out with What Can I Get out of This? along with some sparkling related pieces about AI in the classroom.

Carlo is always worth listening to, in dark days... and darker ones, too. He starts by praising sagas, makes a case for stories of disagreeableness and plugs a remarkable book about preaching, deception, and the urge to belong.

Read transcript here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One Battle After Another, the spirited and controversial Oscar contender from Paul Thomas Anderson, premiered in September. That opening weekend featured a "Behind the Screen" premiere at the storied West Newton cinema.

Why "behind"? Because Marisa Pagano and J.B. Sloan of the West Newton Cinema Foundation) invited RTB to oversee a fascinating post-mortem between authors of recent books about Paul Thomas Anderson and about Thomas Pynchon, whose scintillating 1990 novel Vineland inspired the film. If inspired does not seem the right word, the exact relationship between the two was one of many things that Ethan Warren (The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha, Columbia University Press, 2023)and Pete Coviello (Vineland Reread) pored over in some detail in this live-before-a-studio-audience Recall This Book conversation.

Pete situates the inspirational novel as a pivot-point ("funniest novel you've ever read") for Thomas Pynchon, who traces what happens to counter-insurgency from the post-1960's when it meets the complacency of the Reagan era. Ethan, who defends practically every PTA movie but Hard Eight (despite John's affection for it) points out the significance of centering non-white characters, and applauds his "alarming" decision to confront white supremacy in its clarity and also the cartoon supervillainy of the Christmas Adventurer's Club.

Pete, who wishes that the film could be as funny as the novel, emphasizes that earlier Pynchon novels were founded on conspiratorial pushback against Manichean structures. By 1990, though, he no longer rejects the solidarity that the left might bring to bear against the fascist power of the Right. God bless the unrepudiated armed insurgents, says Pete. Camaraderie and solidarity define the essence of both book and film. Ethan, more skeptical of the politics of the novel, reminds us that they all lose; at the end of the day, Ethan sees the film's overt message as less appealing than its visual energy.

Audience questions, topping off the event, delve into the past and the world of Pynchon's commitments, in often surprising ways. The conversation wraps by celebrating a more than cameo by Tisha Sloan, who happens to be West Newton organizer J.B.'s sister!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John's “Arendt's Refugee Politics” came out in Public Books in early November. He made the case that his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt is an opponent both of identity politics and also of a cosmpolitan universalism that is blind to all the differences (of race, gender, belief) that make us who though not what we are. Going back to one of the first pieces she published in English, a 1943 essay from Menorah called "We Refugees", he reflected on how amazingly Arendt was able to air her unease about militant Zionism at the same time she warned fellow arrivals in America from rushing to disguise their origins.

Recall this Book 153 is simply John reading the article aloud. It is an experiment (akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side) in soliloquy. You can consult footnotes and a read a transcript by heading back to the article in its original form here.

Reach out and let us know if you think it should be the first of many, or simply a one-off!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Belfast, good fences can make for bad neighbors. David Cunningham ( Wash U. sociologist, author of There’s Something Happening Here and Klansville, U.S.A and frequent RTB visitor) joins John to speak about the Troubles and their aftermath with the brilliant Northern Irish novelist/essayist/memoirist Glenn Patterson. His fiction includes The International (1999) and Where Are We Now? but the conversation’s main focus is his two collections of short non-fiction, Lapsed Protestant (2006) and Here’s Me Here (2016).

Glenn has lifetime of insights about the boundary markers and easy to miss shibboleths that define life in divided places--and in divided times. In Belfast, everyone learns to use words without being marked out: how do you avoid uttering "the one word that gets you killed"?

But Troubles that go cold also have a way of heating up again, if we forget, as Glenn puts it, that you can choose who you are. China Mieville's brilliant novel The City and the City is, says Glenn, an allegory for places like Belfast itself, where you have to learn to “unsee” residents of "the other city" even in shared areas. That kind of unseeing, in fiction and in real life, leads to distorted mental maps.

Glenn sees the so-called “softening” of the peace walls as among the most pernicious occurrences of the last 40 years, since softening coupled with notion that you simply belong to one of two "communities" is what makes real traffic, real conversation, harder to achieve. He and David agree that all over the world, in ways the echo Belfast although it is rarely spelled out, all sorts of invisible architectural extensions of the security and segregation apparatus hover unobtrusively. Glenn also riffs on the names people dream up for what might lie beyond a Belfast wall's other side, spinning off writer Colin Carberry's proposal: Narnia.

Mentioned in the Episode

Recallable Books

Read the episode here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ben Fountain is far more than just the author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which won RTB hearts and minds (and the National Book Award) long before it became a weird Ang Lee movie.

Back in 2020's lockdown, RTB asked Fountain what was consoling and engaging him. American novels, especially those about Americans abroad (Joan Didion. say) have always done something special for him. Marilynne Robinson’s and James Baldwin’s work make us confront the reality that’s happening around us all the time, “a freaking massacre.” He carried the the (fictional but genuine) facts of Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk in his head for forty years.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When does comedy become more than a laugh? Ben Mangrum of MIT joins RtB to discuss The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence, which in some ways is organized around “the intriguing idea that human knowledge work is our definitive feature and yet the machines we are ourselves made are going to replace us at it.” Comedyhas provided a toolbox (Charles Tilly calls them “collective repertoires”) for responding to the looming obsolescence of knowledge workers.

John’s interest in Menippean satire within science fiction leads him to ask about about the sliding meanings of comedy and its pachinko machine capacity; he loves the way Ben uses the word and concept of doubling; Ben explains how the computer may either queer (in an antisocial way) or get assimilated into romantic heteronormative pairings. John asks about Donna Haraway’s 1985 A Cyborg Manifesto and the way it denaturalizes gender roles and the way new technological affordances (from the Acheulean axe that Malafouris discusses to the Apple watch) redefine human roles. Ben delves into the minstrelsy pre-history of the photo-robots going as far back as the late 19th century. They unpack the distinctively American Leo Marxian optimism of The Machine in the Garden (1964) that spreads back as far as proto-robots like The Steam Man of the Prairies(1868) and good old Tik-Tok in the Wizard of Oz novels.

John asks about double-edged nature of Ben’s claim that comic “genericity provides forms for making a computationally mediated social world seem more habitable, even as it also provides Is for criticizing and objecting to that world.” First you get description says Ben–and then sometimes critique. John asks about the iterability of the new: how much of what seems new is actually New New (in the sense of that great 1999 Michael Lewis book, The New New Thing)?

Mentioned in the episode:

Listen and Read here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

RtB loves the present-day shadows cast by neglected books, which can suddenly loom up out of the backlit past. So, you won’t be shocked to know that John has also been editing a Public Books column called B-Side Books. In it, around 50 writers (Ursula Le Guin was one) have made the case for un-forgetting a beloved book. Now, there is a book that collects 40 of these columns. Find it as your local bookstore, or Columbia University Press, or Bookshop, (or even Amazon).

Like our podcast, B-Side Books focuses on those moments when books topple off their shelves, open up, and start bellowing at you. The one that enthralled Merve Emre (Wesleyan professor and author ofsuch terrific works as The Personality Brokers) was a novella by the luminous midcentury Italian pessimist, Natalia Ginzburg. And if you think you know precisely why a mid-century Italian writer would have a dark and bitter view of the world (already thinking of the Nazi shadows in work by Italo Calvino, Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani) Ginzburg’s The Dry Heart will have you thinking again.

Merve Emre, Ginzburg fan and B-Side author

Merve started her piece, and we started this 2023 conversation, by asking that age-old question: “When should a woman kill her husband?”

Mentioned in This Episode

Read transcript here

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An Arendt expert has arrived at Arendt-obsessed Recall This Book. Lyndsey Stonebridge discusses her widely praised 2024 We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Lyndsey sees both radical evil and the banality of evil at work in Nazi Germany and in the causes of suffering and death in Gaza today. She compares the moral idiocy of authoritarians (like the murderous Nazis and those who are starving Gaza) to that of philosophers who cannot hear the echoes of what they are doing.

Lyndsey and John discuss Arendt’s belief in the fragile ethics of the Founding Fathers, with its checks and balances and its politics based not on emotion but cool deliberation. Arendt could say that “The fundamental contradiction of [America] is political freedom coupled with social slavery,”” but why was she too easy on the legacy of imperial racism in America, missing its settler-colonial logic? Arendt read W. E. B. DuBois (who saw and said this) but perhaps, says Lyndsey, not attentively enough.

Lyndsey is not a fan of Jonathan Glazer's Zone of Interest, because it makes the evil banality of extermination monstrous all over again (cf. her"Mythic Banality: Jonathan Glazer and Hannah Arendt.") Responsibility is crucial: She praises Arendt for distinguishing between temptation and coercion.

Mentioned in the episode:

Various books by Hannah Arendt come up:

Recallable Books

Read transcript here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices