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Hannah Arendt was one of the great intellectuals of the twentieth century.  She was a German Jew.   Some of her books were targeted to academics and other intellectuals but her book on Eichmann in Jerusalem was published in the New Yorker and achieved wide readership.   It also plunged her into deep controversy, if that is even an adequate word for the vilification she experienced.  Anyway, here are some thoughts on this amazing woman.  

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September II.  Part two.  September 13. 

This is podcast two on the topic of September 11.  The first podcast focused on the day itself. This one focuses upon what happened next.  I spoke to a campus gathering.  I spoke to the Archdiocese of Detroit.  And I spoke to many people whose stories and experiences are reported here. 

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September 11.  Recollections and Reflections from 2001  

Back in 2001 I was keeping a journal.  These are some things I recorded on one of the worst days in American history.  

Two days later, on September 13, the Chancellor held a commemoration event on campus and I was asked to speak.  That will be a separate podcast. 

Oops.  A glitch.  I said the 1973 bombing of the World Trade Center.  I meant the 1993 bombing.  

Some films

Fahrenheit 9/11

Flight 93

World Trade Center

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Abram Leon, The Jewish Question. 

Abram Leon was a Jewish intellectual and activist.  He was a Marxist of the Trotskyite tendency.  He was also a Zionist.  He lived in Palestine for a time as a child but his family returned to Europe and he moved from Poland, where he had been born, to Belgium.  The Nazi movement plunged him into reflections on why there had been such tension around and hostility to Jews throughout European history.  He was not convinced that this was simply a matter of religious prejudice.  He saw it as more complex than that.  His analysis, called in English The Jewish Question, was written in 1944. It used Marxian logic, focusing upon "materialist" conditions.  He said the Jews survived, not “in spite of history” but “because of history.” They performed functions that society needed.  As the industrial revolution spread to Eastern Europe, displacing whole classes of people, the Jews became a surplus people (as did others).  

We Americans are well aware of the waves of East European immigrants who began to pour into this country in the late 19th century: Jews, Poles, Ukrainians,  Romanians, Lithuanians, and others.    

Leon felt that Jews constituted a “people-class.”  The meaning of that concept will be discussed in the podcast, but it refers to a group of people disproportionately concentrated in and associated with certain economic functions.  It is similar to the concept of an “ethno-class,” a term used in contemporary social science.  

I suggest that if we turned the analysis to ethnic groups in general (which we Americans have studied for 400 years) it makes real sense.  

This is a unique and provocative analysis. 

The book was published in 1946 in French, in 1950 in English (in a very limited edition in Mexico), and then in America in 1970. An introduction to the book explains how the publishers searched for the source material that Leon used.  He was dodging Nazis at the time and did not have access to libraries. All the footnotes and tables were added later. 

This was a classroom lecture delivered by Zoom during the Pandemic.  

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The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy 

Back in 2007 two of America's great strategic thinkers wrote a book entitled The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy.  They were John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard.   This book, which was extremely readable,  became a sensation, as you might guess.   It even became a best seller, which is amazing for a book that is 484 pages long, including 106 pages of footnotes.  And it came under the predictable assault from pro-Israeli activists who made all the not-surprising accusations.  

A student group in Ann Arbor invited Mearsheimer and Walt to come to the University of Michigan to speak.  They invited me to introduce them. I am not sure how they decided that I was the best person, but I am glad they did. 

The rather large room was packed, and were very attentive to my every word. 

The student who headed the organization made a nice introduction when telling the audience who I was but he called me John Stockton.  He was a bit embarrassed and quickly apologized.  I told him that I had no problem when people confused me with one of the great point guards in NBA history.  

This is my introduction to these two great scholars and their book, and the issues surrounding it.    Remember this was when the Obama-Clinton struggle for the Democratic nomination was going on. 

Note that at several points in the podcast, I pause to explain to the audience the context for a certain comment or to explain some term that may not be familiar today.   

Remember, there is an earlier podcast called Paradigm Lost, which discusses another book and its analysis of why internal dynamics in Israel pulled Israel away from a political settlement based on two states.  And ways in which the pro-Israel lobby influenced U. S. policy, not for the good.  

Truth in Podcasting:  Mearsheimer and Walt cited one of my articles.  It was in one of those hundreds of footnotes, but anyway, thanks guys.  

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This podcast is just for fun.  It is about a vacation we took in England, in the Lake District.  We went with our dear German friend, Sibylle Laurischk.  It was a special vacation.  We met the Queen.  (Well, sort of.  She came while we were there and we were able to see her and Princess Anne).  We also climbed the mighty Helvelyn and avenged an earlier defeat when we had tried to climb it,  and failed.  We also learned the story of the Faithful Dog, who, as it turns out, was not all that faithful in the end. 

Well, off we go. 

Note:  Within a day or two I will put a text version of this, with photos, on Deep Blue.  See the short podcast on Deep Blue if you need information on how to access that.  The photos are great. 

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Afghanistan:  A Background Briefing 

This is the first podcast Briefing, focusing upon something in the headlines.  I would often do briefings such as this in a class, when some major event occurred.  Some of those classroom briefings were fairly short, maybe 15 minutes.  Others would last over an hour.   Students liked these.  The briefings linked analysis with the headlines. 

The goal of this podcast is to give you some context for what is happening in Afghanistan.  My version of context starts in the 1840s and extends up to the afternoon of August 26, 2021 when I recorded these thoughts.  As I recorded this, I had been listening to reports of the bombings in the Kabul airport where American soldiers were conducting evacuations. Someone else might have started context with Alexander the Great. 

I think simple explanations often go wrong.  History and politics and world struggle are too complex to be understood by a single explanation.  It’s the oil.  It’s the Zionists.  It’s racism.  It’s the military-industrial complex. 

Please.  Spare me.  If everything can be explained by one thing then you are listening to ideology, not insight or analysis. 

I remember hearing someone say, “The Arab world makes a serious mistake when they try to understand what the Americans are doing.  They assume we are smarter than we are.”  Afghanistan is not a part of the Arab world, but the point is still valid.  Sometimes our leaders are just not very bright.   Sometimes they get fixated on some way of thinking and just don’t let their minds open up to alternate possibilities.  Sometimes they get locked into a policy and can’t figure out a way to escape from it.  Sometimes they get charmed by an advisor and pay too much attention to that person’s explanations and suggestions.  Sometimes they are just afraid of the voters.  

I hope you will come out of this podcast with more questions than answers.  Even as I am posting it, I am second guessing myself. 

Have fun, and thanks for listening. 

Update on September1.  All of our troops are out and nearly 122,000 people were evacuated. The war is over.  

 Bravo! 

Some terms and names used, in case you don’t recognize them. 

Mujahideen, Taliban, Madrasa, The Scramble for Africa, geopolitics, Jihad, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Malindi, Stinger missiles, Al Qaeda, ISIS, reconstruction, nation building, Doha Agreement of 2020, Pushtun, apartheid, 

Shia, Hazara, Ashura, Ali, Hassan, Hussein, 

Osama bin Laden,  William Casey, Rudyard Kipling,   Gorbachev, Brezhnev, Tony Blair, Abdul Ghani Baradar,  Secretary of State Pompeo, Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana,  Jomo Kenyatta, Nelson Mandela,  Najibullah. 

Film Osama

Book: Ahmed Rashid, Taliban 

Book: Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower 

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Marx on Religion  

In my class on Religion and Politics, I had three lectures on the Marxian model.  One was on Marx’s view of religion; one was how Marx analyzed the situation of the Jews in Europe; and one was on a fascinating person named Abram Leon.  He was a Zionist and a Trotskyite.  In 1944 he wrote a book trying to make sense of what was happening to the Jews in Europe.  

If you are seriously interested in this analysis, then these three talks are made for you.  I think they are fascinating but that is for you to decide. 

This talk focuses upon Marx and his view of religion.  Warning:  It is NOT what you think.  His thinking was nuanced and analytical and even humanistic.  This talk is an hour and fifteen minutes long.  It covers a lot of ground but I will take you by the hand and try to lead you through the wilderness. 

Our warped view of Marx came out of the Cold War, that everything having to do with Marx was really, really bad.  He was an evil, scary person who hated God and believed in oppression of religion. I have even read kooky articles suggesting that he was the inspiration for the Holocaust.  Bizarre! 

I think back in those days people with an agenda sometimes intentionally took every brutal thing that Joseph Stalin ever did and attributed it to Marx.  This talk is not on Marx’s political views but I think he would have been a vigorous opponent of Stalin with his ruthless brutality.  Plus Stalin was Russian; Marx was West German and an activist in the pro-democracy movement of 1848. The Communist Manifesto (not addressed in this talk) was written more than 70 years before Stalin was in power.  It was a political platform warning people not to be misled by false information being spread about what was then called the Workers Party.  

This talk was delivered to a class in early 2020 when the pandemic was just starting.  There is reference to study sheets and readings.  At one point I ask students to draw a chart.  These parts might be distracting, but they are short so perhaps you can get through them. 

I mention a few names you may not know: Engels (colleague of Marx), Tomas Munzer (a populist revolutionary during the peasant wars), and Martin Luther. 

Words used are hierarchy, guild, Thesis/anti-thesis/synthesis. 

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Reflections on Obama’s Election.  The Day After

For someone of my generation, it was hard to believe that we would ever have a Black President.  And then we had one.  I realized that this was a historic event and decided I should put my thoughts down in writing.  These are reflections written the day after that amazing election.  They are very personal, especially about my engagement with race and racism, and how that evolved over time.  But these thoughts are also analytical.  I try to do my political science thing as best I can.  This discussion reports  on how the aging Civil rights leaders reacted to Obama, how white voters reacted to Obama, and how my students reacted to Obama. 

I shared these with the university community and got very good feedback.  I also shared them with my students.  I always urge students (and others) to write something about historic events:  September 11,  the invasion of Iraq, the election of Donald Trump, the pandemic.  We are small bits of debris caught up in tornados but our modest reflections may be of interest to future generations. 

I hope my reactions to the Obama election keep your attention.  

Note:  In case you were not aware, I also have a podcast on Obama’s memoir.  

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Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie is one of the great English language literary figures.  He has won the Brooker Prize for the best Novel in English and was a finalist twice. 

The focus of this talk is on the Rushdie novel, the Islamic traditions around the most controversial passages, comparisons with Christian traditions, and the reaction of Ayatollah Khomeini. 

But a core focus is upon how we interpret texts, especially religious texts.  Consider an incident in the gospels.  It is called The Woman at the Well.  Jesus is thirsty and asks a woman drawing water if he can have a drink.  She says yes and gives him a drink.  It turns out she is a “loose” woman, maybe even a prostitute.  But that aside there is a problem in translation.  In at least one African culture, when a woman gives a man food or drink from her hand, it is a prelude to sex.  In that particular translation of the Bible, there is a footnote explaining that Jesus is not hitting on this woman. Lesson 1:  Fidelity to the words as written can often be wrong rather than right.  Lesson 2: Our understanding can also be wrong, even if we have a clear understanding of the words. 

There is also a tension between the overarching goal of revelation (for those who are believers) and specific texts.  If the divine goal of revelation is to empower humans to achieve their full potential, then a focus upon a specific text intended to put a check on sin can be in contradiction with the higher goal if it is emphasized in a way that constrains human empowerment by overlooking  the higher divine purpose.   

All believers want to know God’s Will but God is often opaque in terms of our understanding.  (Go back to the podcast on Feuerbach is you missed that one).  I am reminded of what the great Catholic theologian Hans Kung said when he came to Dearborn in the 1980s and was challenged from the floor about how he had interpreted a specific passage. The person challenging him had absolute certainty about the meaning of a specific text regarding the future: Kung  said, “God does not act to satisfy human curiosity.”  Ouch!  

Some of you will find this lecture provocative.  Good! I hope it is provocative in a way that makes you think.  

This was a class lecture.  There is some interaction with students and some  references to readings.  Sorry about that.  I thought the lecture came out well and did not want to re-record it. 

Books by Salman Rushdie are Satanic Verses and  Joseph Anton.  

Some terms and names
Qureish, Hagar/Hajar, Ishmael, Abraham/Ibrahim,  Mecca, Medina, Gabriel/Jibril, circumambulate, Mahound, Salman the Scribe; Pantheon (a building in pre-Islamic Mecca where there were 360 gods); Taif; demiurge;  intersession; garaniq. 

Three female goddesses from Taif: Al-lat, al-Uzza, Manat.  
Ayatollah Khomeini, fatwa.  Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988.  
Early biographers: Ibn Ishak, Tabari, Ibn Saad; 
Apostasy, blasphemy, heresy. 

One glitch:  A favorite translation of the Bible is The Jerusalem Bible, not The Jefferson Bible.  (There is a Jefferson Bible, consisting entirely of the words and teachings of Jesus, but it is not the one I mentioned). 

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