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Pete Seeger was one of the great social justice protest singers.  His songs ("If I had a hammer" for example) were legendary.  Pete believed that music could change societies.  He never gave up, even during the long period of time when he was blacklisted.  Then in 1968 he appeared on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and introduced a new anti-Vietnam war song.  It was "Knee deep in the Big Muddy."  This is the story of Pete's life, and of what happened when he sang that song on the Number One television program of the age.  

You are welcome to join Stocktonafterclass Podcast Discussion group on facebook.  Thoughtful comments welcome. 

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The Book of Daniel was written about the same time as Maccabees II.  It would be best to listen to the Maccabees podcast before this one.  Remember that Maccabees II was a response to the Maccabees uprising, described in Maccabees I.  Daniel was placed in a much earlier time to conceal its contents as not being contemporary, even though it was.  This was a time when the literary style of the day was filled with poetry and metaphors and mystical symbolism.  For example, a domestic animal such as a sheep, represented a friendly country.  A wild animal such as a lion represented a hostile country.  Back in those days, everyone would have understood these stories to be symbolic, not literal.  If you were brought up in a tradition that treated these stories as if they were literal (as I was) then this will be a new approach for you, and a new way of looking at a biblical text. 

Have fun. 

ps.  This was a class lecture.  There  was some interaction with the class (which was off in zoom land) about readings and assignments.  In case I didn't delete that, sorry for the distraction.  

pps.  There is a Stocktonafterclass podcast discussion group on Facebook.  Thoughtful comments welcome.  

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The Maccabees Uprising . 167-160 B. C. 

In my class on Religion and Politics I had students study two uprisings rooted in religious communities.  One was the Maccabeean uprising against the Seleucid Empire and the other was Osama bin Laden.  This podcast is on the Maccabees.  There will soon be a podcast on Osama bin Laden. Thinking of these two uprisings in comparative and analytical terms, leaving aside your preferences, yields valuable insights. 

A word about these texts.  The word “canon” means the official books of the Bible.  The canon was closed about 300 years before the birth of Christ.  Jonah was the last-added book.  To Christians, the canon was re-opened with the gospels.  To Jews, it is still closed.  

But between the closing of the canon and the birth of Christ, there was a lot of history and a lot of teaching, and a lot of writing.  The books that emerged during that time are called The Apocrypha, a word that means both hidden and unfolding.  They are in the Catholic Bible but not in the Protestant or Jewish canons.  The Jewish leaders of that time were worried about revolutionaries who claimed to be prophets and would produce revealed books to prove it.  They had a rule that if you are a prophet you must perform a miracle in the presence of a minyan (10 righteous people).  Otherwise, there were severe penalties. (Those familiar with the Gospels will recall times when "the Jews," i.e., a minyan, would ask Jesus to perform a miracle). 

To avoid these problems, books would be written in mystical styles with spirits and creatures and miracles.  They would also be placed well into the past, as if they had been “rediscovered.”  The book of Daniel was of that style, being placed hundreds of years in the past.  There is a word pseudepigrapha that means falsely attributed.  It does not mean false.  It is as if you wanted to write a book on politics today and presented it in the form of a secret diary of George Washington.  After about ten pages any reader would realize this is not George Washington at all but a commentary on today’s political situation.  A couple of thousand years later, people might not get that point.  When you read Daniel and his troubles with an oppressive ruler who is abusing believers, you need to realize that this is really about a contemporary leader.  Except the author does not want to be arrested.  

Also during that time the writings would use metaphors and codes.  Everyone at the time knew what those things meant, but today we often read them as if they are somehow factual, or even as predictions of future events.  That was how I was brought up.  

In the discussion of Maccabees II we will discuss some examples of this style and what it means.  Remember, the authors knew what they meant, and so did everyone at the time who read those texts. 

I thought about breaking this into two podcasts, Maccabees I and Maccabees II, but left it in one.  It's a bit long, but it covers all the bases. 

Suggestion:  You might download the books of Maccabees I and Maccabees II so you can follow along with the discussion.  You might even read them in advance if you wish. Or just lean back and enjoy yourself. 

People:  Tobias, Mattathias, Antiochus Epiphanies, Ptolemy, Seleucid, Onias, Heliodorus, Judah Maccabees. 

Terms and places:   Galilee, Samaria, Judea, Syria, pseudepigrapha, canon, Cohen, zealot, gymnasium, Shema, phalanx, Hasid, Hellenism, Hanukkah, Apocrypha, Torah, Modein. 

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Somehow I went from being an 18-year-old writing instructor’s nightmare to a being a good writer.  There were a lot of steps along the way to that achievement, not all of them easy.   In this podcast, I am going to share some of my struggles, and my secrets, with you.  I always told my students that writing was a skill that one could learn.   I have seen students go from C to B in a few months after they adopted some of these ideas, so I know what I am saying.  

When I was teaching in Kenya, the British teachers taught me something they did in their schools.  It was called a precis, using a French term.  I came to love this exercise.  We would give students a 300 word passage and tell them to rewrite it in 100 words.  And don’t leave anything out.  This forced students to concentrate upon what was essential in a passage, and what could be dropped.  My colleague Elaine Clark said she would have students write a two-page essay rather than a five-page essay.  She said two pages required more discipline than five pages.  Plus professors could mark them quicker so it was possible to give more assignments.  I am not sure the students liked that last part.  

I do have a suggestion that might be hard to implement.  When I was 9 years old I had a heart problem -- rheumatic fever -- that caused me to spend a lot of time sitting on the sofa in the winter or on the porch swing in the summer.  (I totally recovered).  To pass the time, I began to read.  The town next to us had a nice library so every two weeks my mom would take my sister and me to that place and I would check out five books.  That was the number you could check out and I always took the maximum.  We had to return them in two weeks so I would start reading.  I seldom got through more than two, but the idea of having five books was exciting.  In my younger years, I would read boy books about dogs and horses.  But I also read adventure stories and  biographies about heroic leaders.  As I got older, I migrated towards history and biography.  I also had a secret weapon in the Chicago Tribune.  Every Sunday we would buy the VERY fat Sunday paper.  I think we got it for the comics but it had a very nice magazine of books.  Today the New York Times is the only newspaper that has a book magazine.  But every Sunday I would read those book reviews.   I learned how writers analyze and how they write.  

When I was a sophomore in college our English professor had us write an essay on a book.  She gave me a bad grade and wrote on the paper, “sounds very bookish,” as if I had stolen it from somewhere.  I was very upset at this.  Not only did she think that I had plagiarized the essay, but she assumed that someone from a small town in Southern Illinois could not possibly have written a cohesive essay.  I told her about the Chicago Tribune and she realized she had made a mistake.  I was happy that she did so. 

I realize that none of you can return to when you were 9 and start reading but do remember that reading  will improve your writing skills. Somehow it gets into your head. 

And some of the tips in this podcast can work wonders. 

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In September, 1982, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon,  the Israeli army took control  of West Beirut and the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatillah.  Bashir Gemayel, the leader of the Phalangist movement (Kataeb in Arabic), had just been assassinated.  He had supported the Israelis in their invasion, hoping to free his land of the PLO and of Syrian domination.  The individual convicted of the assassination was a Christian.  He claimed he had acted because of Gemayel’s support of Israel.  Many people think Syria was behind the attack. 

Gemayel’s followers were bent on revenge.  The visible target was the Palestinian refugee camps.  The PLO forces had been evacuated to Tunis by an American-brokered agreement.  Part of that agreement was that the U. S. agreed to protect the Palestinian civilians who would be left without security.  President Reagan’s personal representative, Ambassador Phillip Habib, had negotiated the withdrawal of Palestinian forces and had guaranteed the security of the civilian refugees left behind in the camps.  

But there was extremely bad blood between the Phalangists and the PLO and this was an opportunity to get revenge for past offenses.  The Israelis controlled access to those camps and allowed military units to enter.  The killing went on for three days.   There was a story in the Jerusalem Post as the massacres were going on.  The sun was setting and a  military rabbi was leading an outdoor religious service.  There were sounds of shooting and screams in the distance.  The Jerusalem Post said this will go down in history as the “Rosh Hashana of Shame.” 

Under domestic and international (i.e., U.S.) pressure, the Israelis set up a three-person commission headed by a very respected member of their high court, Justice Kahan.  This is the story of that report. 

There are two award-winning films that might be of interest.  One is an Israeli film called Waltz With Bashir, a graphic-novel type film.  An officer is having nightmares of wild dogs.  He starts talking to others in his unit.  They are also having nightmares.  It turns out they were all present during the massacres but they have suppressed what happened on their watch.  The other film is The Insult, a Lebanese film.  It starts with a simple confrontation between two men in which one calls the other a name. This happens many times every day without consequence so why does this incident escalate?  It turns out the two parties are connected personally to these massacres. Even though this is decades later, the wounds are still there.  

People:  Bashir Gemayel, Amin Gemayel, Raphael Eitan, Shimon Peres, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, Shimon Peres, Elie Hobeika, Yaron, Major Saad Haddad,  

Terms: pogrom, blood libel, Phalange, Lebanese Forces, Damour Vengeance Brigade, “The Comprehensive Solution,” i.e., the Reagan Plan, Eretz Israel, Appendix B, Blood Libel, Knesset, Tunis. 

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Abraham Lincoln delivered two speeches that are considered among the greatest ever delivered.  One was the Gettysburg Address and one was the Second Inaugural.  Most Americans consider the Gettysburg Address to be his greatest, but Lincoln believed his Second Inaugural was his best. I agree.  It changed the way Americans thought about their country.  

This is a talk I delivered to a class in the fall of 2020.  They had in front of them the speech itself.  You should print out the speech before you listen to this so you can follow along.  

Lincoln had read and admired Feuerbach on how we humans generate our religious thinking.  If you have not listened to the talk on Feuerbach, and are interested, you might do that.  

The last minute of the talk gets cut off. Sorry about that.  I was talking about Barack Obama’s minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  Reverend Wright was an amazing minister.  His congregation, which is situated in south Chicago, a very poor neighborhood, had wonderful programs.  He had educational tutoring, scholarships, jobs programs, food programs, health programs.  You name it, they did it.  I admire him in many ways.  But he had a style of preaching that was common in the Black community but not well understood outside of that tradition.  I grew up with that style.  The preacher will renounce the congregation for their sins. In my case I remember the minister saying, “You are damned and doomed to a devil’s hell.”  But the renunciation was really a reassurance that you can overcome your sin and be a better person.  In one sermon Reverend Wright spoke of the tendency of people to say “God Bless America.”  The Reverend thought they were claiming a status in the eyes of God that they did not deserve.  He said, “NO!  Not God Bless America.  God Damn America!”  It may be hard to believe but that was actually an expression of patriotism, an affirmation that America could be what God meant it to be.  God is in the whirlwind and we can emerge a better nation, a nation truly under God.  But this emerged during a presidential campaign and one of the candidates was a Black man who had attended that church.  This phrase was distorted and misrepresented until candidate Obama had to renounce it.  

 Lincoln would have agreed with Reverend Wright.   Lincoln DID agree with Reverend Wright, as you can tell.  God is giving us a terrible punishment that we could never have imagined.  “I tremble for my country when I consider that God is just,” as Jefferson said.  Lincoln was even more graphic:  a Black drop of blood will be repaid by a dead white person.  We have to wonder how an American president would fare today if he delivered such a speech.  

It was American Exceptionalism, Lincoln style. 

Two last points.  Reporters were keeping close track of cheering.  Most of the enthusiasm during the talk came from the Black members of the audience.  Many white people were silent.  The white members of the audience were Lincoln’s base, his strongest supporters.  And every single one of them had lost someone they knew and loved in that war.  

Finally, the comment by Frederick Douglass demands an acknowledgement.  Lincoln and Douglass had become personal friends.  This  unlikely friendship is  analyzed in the wonderful book Giants by John Stauffer. Douglass came by the White House that evening.  The place was packed but Lincoln singled out Douglass and asked what he thought.  Douglass demurred but Lincoln insisted.  “Mr. Lincoln.  That was a sacred effort.”  

And so it was.  

For those overseas, be aware that I am taking you deep into an American way of thinking.  

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In 1986 General Westmoreland visited the University of Michigan-Dearborn.  He had three events during the day.  One was a meeting with faculty and guests, which I chaired.  Another was a panel discussion and a third was a meeting with the public.  

These are my observations and comments, written up just after the day's events.  

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There are extremist group in Israel, even in the Knesset,  that trace their origins to Rabbi Meir Kahane.  Kahane was born in Brooklyn but moved to Israel and was elected to the Knesset.  He was later assassinated.  At the time, his views were considered shockingly extreme.  He was widely renounced by American Jews and by Israelis.  

I heard Kahane speak twice in the Detroit area in the early 1980s.  I also read two of his books, Time to Go Home and They Must Go!  They were chilling  I also read quite a few essays by him.    As far as I can tell, those who embrace his name and his ideas are not fundamentally different from what I heard in the 1980s.   

Kahane believed that anything is justified to bring the new age and to save the Jews.  I thought of the accusations by radical Iraqi Jews that the 1952 bombings of synagogues were done by Zionist commandos in an effort to panic them into fleeing to Israel.  I have no way to know if those accusations are correct but such a thing would surely be justified by Kahane.  He was filled with hatred of Arabs, Americans and secular Jews.  He believed in his cause and would do anything to achieve it.  He had a definite support base in the American Jewish community, although certainly not nearly as the vast proportion who were hostile to him.  I don’t want to be inflammatory but I wrote in my notes back in the 1980s that I felt I was in a Munich beer hall in 1924 listening to Hitler polish up a speech.  I have never heard anyone quite like him. 

Note that in the Knesset, there are religious parties connected to the rabbis.  Two are United Torah Judaism (Ashkenazi) and Shas (Sephardic).  There are NOT Kahanist. 

If you are interested in how  a similar logic works out in American culture you might listen to my podcast on the Replacement Wars. 

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Al Aqsa Intifada.  The Logic of Violence, the Impact of Violence. 

 There were two Intifadas. The first began in December, 1987. The second is called the Al Aqsa Intifada and began in September, 2000.  The first involved non-lethal violence on the part of the Palestinians, throwing stones, burning tires. The second was extremely violent.  In both cases, from a Palestinian point of view, the protection of Islam and Islamic Holy Sites was a major motivating force.  

The Here are some names and terms you might not know: 

Names:  Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat, Dennis Ross, Aaron David Miller, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu, Anwar Sadat, Colonel Luft, Professor Papp, Marwan Barghouti, Shimon Peres, Sheikh Yassin, Dr. Rantisi. Yitzhak Shamir. . 

Other terms:  Oslo Accords of 1993, Camp David (Carter and Clinton efforts), IDF (Israeli military)

There is an excellent film called Paradise Now. It focuses on the logic of suicide bombing. 

Menachem Begin wrote a memoir, The Revolt.  It addresses what is terrorism and what is not.  When US forces went into Afghanistan after 9/11 and entered the Al Qaeda camps they were stunned to discover Begin’s  materials on Al Qaeda computers.  I was not surprised.  Begin’s  organization was Irgun. 

Fatah is Yassir Arafat’s party; Al Aqsa Brigade is a Fatah  military unit. 

Kill ratio is a term from the Vietnam War.  It means the ratio of our dead to their dead. 

The kill ratio in first Intifada was 23:1.  23 Palestinians died for every Israeli who died.  Why did I say 23:3?  That makes no sense.  But that kind of glitch happens in the middle of a talk. 

Note:  I originally delivered two talks on this topic.  This merges the two. 

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The word Intifada (sometimes Intifadah) means uprising.  More specifically it means “shaking off,” but uprising is close enough.  There were two Intifadas, one in 1987-1993, just called the Intifada.  The other is called the Al Aqsa Intifada from 2000 to 2005.  These were very different from each other. 

I have two podcasts on these.  One on the Intifada, one on the Al Aqsa Intifada. 

I wrote two articles on Intifada Death Patterns.  One of those, analyzing the first two years of fatalities, is available in Deep Blue.  I also wrote a shorter newspaper analysis of deaths during the first Intifada.  This was accepted for publication by a Jerusalem newspaper (Al Fajr) but was censored. Israel has two censors, a military censor and a political censor.  My article was cleared for publication by the military censors but rejected by the political censors.  This is odd because the information I used (individual data about age, gender, day of death, possible cause of death, location of death) was publicly available.  I guess having that analysis available in a Palestinian newspaper was seen as too dangerous  (although similar analysis was covered in the Israeli press on a regular basis, and Defense Minister Rabin issued similar analyses on a regular basis).  

As far as I know, I am the only University of Michigan-Dearborn professor  who ever had his research officially censored.   (I have the draft newspaper article with the censor’s mark on it.  It is framed and on my wall). 

There are quite a few terms, places, names, etc. that you might not recognize.  Here are some of them (in no particular order).  You might read those before you listen. 

 Places: Ecce Homo; Dome of the Rock; Al Quds;  Four Quarters; Via Dolorosa; Stations of the Cross; Jabalya, Gaza; Balata camp; Negev Desert; Hebron, Nablus, Jenin; Birzeit University; 

People:  Um Kulthum (famous Egyptian singer); Yitzhak Shamir; Ariel Sharon; Yitzhak Rabin; Yasser Arafat. 

Other: Lechi/Stern Gang; extra-territorial entity;   Status Quo Agreement; kill ratio;, Iron Fist; Hezbollah;  Uprising of the Stones; Breaking Bones Policy; Biladi (my land, a song). 

Note:  The kill ratio in the Intifada was 23:1.  Sometimes in a lecture someone’s brain goes off track and comes up with bizarre numbers. 

Also Note:  Al Aqsa refers to the mosque compound, Al Quds refers to Jerusalem.  I might have got that backwards at one point.