Monthly Archive for June, 2011

From guardian.co.uk

It is 60 years since Africa began to emerge from the shadow of colonialism. For much of the intervening time, this paper has charted the continent’s battles with poverty, famine, pestilence, corruption, drought, Aids and war. It was only right that the developed world focused on some of its poorest inhabitants. And it was right that richer countries came to the aid of those less fortunate. But the story of Africa’s despond took root and crowded out other news. At times, and over the years, it seemed as though there was no other news from Africa.

We framed post-colonial Africa with the same narrative for decades – this was a continent that was, to European eyes, gamely but mostly failing to come to terms with its new-found independence.

We watched, appalled, as unimaginable horrors unfolded in Biafra, Uganda and Angola. Later still, genocide in Rwanda and Congo seemed to eclipse all that had gone before. All the while, a long list of corrupt and venal despots turned their rule into virtual kleptocracies and stole their children’s futures.

The TV coverage of the Ethiopian famine and the subsequent Live Aid concerts of the 1980s drew attention to the corrosive and deadly poverty visited on post-colonial Africa. The response from the west was impressive – massive injections of aid and an explosion in the number of non-government organisations dedicated to improving the lives of millions of Africans. In this story, Africans were the victims and we were on hand to help.

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From Paula Marantz Cohen, The Smart Set

If you study the greeting cards in the Father’s Day section of your drugstore, you’ll see that they tend to exhibit a consistent iconography. There are the references to beer and golf, those conventional displacements for the marauding, nomadic male. There are the drab browns, greens, and ochres meant to contrast the prettiness of Mother’s Day pink. But the predominant images on these cards are of domestic pastimes: dads reading bedtime stories and playing catch with the kids; dads wearing aprons and funny hats at family barbecues; dads sprawled, exhausted, on the couch watching TV. Father’s Day celebrates the domesticated male, and what the cards don’t show, under any circumstances, are babes. This is why, I surmise, the French came to Father’s Day later than we did. The Fête des Pères is celebrated in France, but it is one of those cases of French imitation of an American model.

Which may help clarify the arrest and indictment of IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn on American soil for his alleged sexual assault on a New York chambermaid. Similar antics performed in Strauss-Kahn’s Parisian hometown did not result in even a slap on the wrist.

At the heart of the matter is the question of what it means to be a man in the two cultures. Dominique Strauss-Kahn was a strong and effective leader of the IMF, a post that has always been occupied by a European male of a similar stripe. This means: successful and sexually commanding. Sexual aggression in France is a kind of accessory to success. Like a pair of supple Armani shoes, it completes the outfit. “I’m even proud of [his sexual escapades],” his wife is quoted to have said once. “It’s important to seduce for a politician.” The droit du seigneur (or right of the lord of an estate to have his way with any peasant on it) is a French phrase, not by accident.

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Original photo Peter Asquith/Flickr

From Adam Kirsch, Tablet

Well, yes and no. As every contributor to Philosemitism in History acknowledges, Jews have never been entirely happy about the idea of philo-Semitism. The volume’s introduction, by editors Adam Sutcliffe and Jonathan Karp, begins with a Jewish joke: “Q: Which is preferable—the antisemite or the philosemite? A: The antisemite—at least he isn’t lying.” This may be too cynical; closer to the bone is the saying that “a philo-Semite is an anti-Semite who loves Jews.” That formulation helps to capture the sense that philo- and anti- share an unhealthy interest in Jews and an unreal notion of who and what Jews are. Both deal not with Jewishness but with “Semitism,” as if being a Jew were the same as embracing a political ideology such as communism or conservatism—rather than what it really is, a religious and historical identity that cuts across political and economic lines.

If only as a change of pace, then, a book called Philosemitism in History (Cambridge University Press) should be cause for celebration. Never mind that it is a mere 350 pages, and not a continuous history but a collection of academic papers on fairly narrow subjects, from the Christian Hebraists of the 17th century to documentaries on West German TV. At least it promises a chance to hear about Gentiles who admired and praised Jews, instead of hating and killing them. There must have been some, right?

Books about anti-Semitism are depressingly numerous. New studies of the subject appear in a constant stream, focusing on anti-Semitism in this or that country, in literature or politics, in the past, the present, or the future. In 2010 alone, readers were presented with Robert Wistrich’s A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism From Antiquity to the Global Jihad and Anthony Julius’ Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, which between them offer 2,100 pages of evidence of how much people used to and still do hate Jews.

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