Chabon concluded

I put on the t-shirt at the top of the pile in the drawer this morning. It was a t-shirt with Hebrew type for the "University of Alaska" that I got as a gift about a decade ago. That reminded me that I didn't return to the subject of Michael Chabon. I finished the novel over the weekend and can now definitely say that I am in the camp of those reviewers who liked it.

The main thing is that Chabon imagines an entire world out of an alternate reality scenario. For the most part it works.

Three comments for the naysayers:

(1) There are a couple of things I would have imagined differently, but hey, when I write about what I imagine the Jewish autonomous region of Alaska would be like, I get to change things to my liking. And when you imagine your own "cloud cuckoo land" you can do it your way.

(2) Imagining a scenario in which Israel was destroyed in 1948 is not the same as wishing that it had happened. I don't really know what Chabon's politics are but it's hard to read this novel as anti-Zionist. Warning, spoiler ahead: you might read it as anti-"Temple Mount Faithful" but that's a far cry from seeing this as Chabon's manifesto against Israel.

(3) You might not like mixing "[noir] genre" and "literary" in novels. But it's not like Chabon woke up one morning and said let's throw them together ("you've got your peanut butter in my chocolate") and see what happens. He seems pretty committed to a project of breaking down--or at least playing with--such boundaries/labels.

My Day in the South Hills

UPDATE, 5/25/07: Back in Dormont this morning. I did notice a "welcome to Dormont" sign heading south on West Liberty Ave. And I had some good coffee at Fredo's on Potomac Ave in Dormont.

UPDATE, 5/24/07: A friend who lives in Mt. Lebanon tells me that she prefers the coffee and pastries at Uptown Coffee.

Or, Being a Tourist in the Suburbs.

Twice a year I take the car for service at a dealership on West Liberty Avenue in the South Hills section of Pittsburgh. West Liberty Avenue is the main drag that divides two Pittsburgh neighborhoods, Beechview to the west and Brookline to the east. Not much happens along West Liberty Avenue except for car selling and car repair so my usual practice is to leave the car and walk about a mile up the road to the suburban borough of Dormont. Dormont is a typical inner-ring streetcar suburb. Not the most exciting place in the world, but, as I've said before, Dormont has a nice little business district along Potomac Avenue and West Liberty Avenue with a newly re-opened movie theater, a couple of restaurants and delis, and a used bookstore. So my usual practice is to take a walk, buy a couple of cheap mystery novels, and sit down for a late breakfast at the Dor-Stop diner. The car place calls, tells me about some mysterious problem that will cost me a couple of hundred dollars more than I thought I would spend that day, I approve it, finish my breakfast, and take a walk back down hill to get the car. A pleasant way to waste half a day. (I used to leave the car, take the bus downtown, transfer to a bus to Oakland, go to my office at the university, work for a few minutes, and then reverse the process to try to pick up the car before rush hour. An unpleasant way to waste half a day.)
Yesterday, however, one thing led to another and I didn't get the car up there until 10 am and they were backed up so they said the car wouldn't ready be before 3.

What to do?

I decided to keep walking up West Liberty Avenue until I got to the fabled borough of Mount Lebanon and its famous Washington Road business district. Mount Lebanon has the reputation for having one of the best school districts in the area, a nice shopping district, and the second-largest Jewish community in the area (after Squirrel Hill). I stopped in at Aldo Coffee, which some people say is the best in town, for a double espresso and a pastry, and enjoyed an hour or so there reading the book I had along with me. (By the way, I thought the espresso was good but nothing special which means that a) those who says it's the best are wrong; b) my tastebuds aren't sophisticated enough to appreciate the best coffee in town; or c) the barista had an off day. The pastry was ok.) Then I hung out in the Mt. Lebanon Public Library where I caught up on the last six months of the New York Review of Books. After this, I browsed for a few minutes in Rolliers, a good hardware and houseware store whose Shadyside branch (actually the original) is missed.

Then I headed back down the hill to Dormont, bought my used books and had lunch at the Dor-Stop, got my phone call from the car place and headed back down the hill all the way back to the car dealer. (After I picked up the car, I took another detour to the South Side on my way back to Squirrel Hill. But that wasn't on purpose. I forgot to get in the left lane before the Liberty Tubes and had to exit to the South Side when I came out of the tunnel.)

A couple of observations:

1) Washington Road has some fancy shops, but (unless I missed them) no bookstore (there must be one in a mall nearby) or movie theatre (ditto) in the center of Mount Lebanon's business district. So score one for Dormont (and two for Squirrel Hill) over Mount Lebanon. On the other hand, Mount Lebanon (like Squirrel Hill) has multiple nice places to sit for a long time over a cup of coffee (see above), and Dormont could use a nice coffeehouse. And the presence of a place in the central shopping district where one can buy a hammer, a spatula, a lightbulb, and a hanging plant at the same time (e.g.) is much appreciated (see above), so score another one for Mount Lebanon.

2) The legend has circulated among my crowd of young parents in the city of Pittsburgh--did you hear that in Mount Lebanon they still have half-day kindergarten? Although I have had confirmation of this from a colleague who lives in Mt. Lebo, I can now say that I have seen evidence of this with my own eyes: as I walked up to the public library a little after eleven, there were the moms and dads (only a couple of dads) waiting for their kindergartners to emerge from Washington Elementary school. Someone is going to write in and tell me how great half-day kindergarten is and how kids that little are too small to be in school all day, etc. I'm not judging, you understand--I'm just surprised that a "good" school district in 2007 doesn't have full-day kindergarten.

3) The Mount Lebanon municipal building is nice. I like the art deco design. I hope that they find a good use for it when the messiah comes and municipal functions are transferred to the new metropolitan Allegheny County government.

4) I saw no signs welcoming pedestrians and motorists to Dormont or Mount Lebanon, so I wasn't quite sure where Dormont ended and Mount Lebanon began. Also not sure where West Liberty Ave turned into Washington Rd. There was a sign at one point indicating the change in street name, but then there was a church on what was supposed to be Washington Road with a West Liberty Ave address on the sign in front. (The only "Welcome to" sign was welcoming me to Pittsburgh when I was walking north on West Liberty Avenue back to the car dealer. ) And the "South Hills" post office with a "Pittsburgh, PA" address on the front seemed to be in Dormont while the Duquesne Light "Dormont" substation was in Pittsburgh. And there were hardly any signs on West Liberty Avenue pointing pedestrians and motorists to the T (light rail) stops which, in both Mount Lebanon and Dormont, were off the main drag a block or more.
In other words, if you don't know where you are, you shouldn't be here? (I will blog another time about what I find to be the strange practice here of using a "Pittsburgh, PA" mailing address outside the city.)

5) A Boston analogy just occurred to me and might make sense to about six people: Dormont is Arlington--with businesses and commercial activity spread out all along West Liberty Avenue/Massachusetts Avenue. Mount Lebanon is Lexington with a much more clearly defined center that stretches for only a few blocks along the main drag (Washington Road/Massachusetts Avenue).

Attention Marketing People Using Google

The phenomenon of "Blogola" has recently come to my attention (thanks to this morning's Wall Street Journal). If you are involved in marketing for publishers or booksellers, I would be happy to accept old books, or new books related to old books, regarding the subjects listed at the top of this page. A trip to a venue such as the Frankfurter Buchmesse (e.g.) also accepted.
If you represent the tea or lemon industries, we can discuss other possibilities. In return, I will consider mentioning your product to my readers, who currently number in the seven figures (assuming the first six figures are 0). Thank you.

Some (old) book notes

I learn from Chicago Public Radio, via Rare Books News, that the Newberry Library and the Spertus Institute have jointly acquired a copy of the 1481 edition of Nicholas of Lyra's Postilla Litteralis super totam Bibliam . More information here. According to the press release, there are only 3 known copies in the U.S. In Pittsburgh, the earliest editions of Nicholas' Postilla can be found in this 1508 Basel printing at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and a 1588 Venice printing at Duquesne's Hailperin collection.

Meanwhile, I learn from this article in Haaretz that Hebrew and Arabic books from the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem will be included in Worldcat.

Reviews of Chabon

I don't think I've ever seen a more negative review in a newspaper than this review of the new Chabon novel by Kris Collins in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times reviewer, was much more positive. (Warning: spoilers in both reviews. Hey reviewers: it's fine to think the ending is contrived, but it's not cricket--or kosher--to reveal key aspects of the solution to what is, after all, a mystery novel.). I'm only half-way through the book so I'll reserve full judgment, but so far I'm agreeing with Kakutani in the Times. Collins seems to have missed the point. More when I finish.

Do people change political affiliation when they move?

This article by Michael Barone in yesterday's Wall Street Journal is interesting. Barone suggests, as have others, that population increases in Republican-leaning areas will increase Republican political strength. E.g.: "...within California, House seats will shift from the Democratic coast to the Republican Inland Empire and Central Valley."

But if the increase in population in these areas come from immigrants (who lean Democratic, as Barone acknowledges) and from domestic migration from what he calls the "Coastal Megalopolises" and the Rust Belt, it seems that the only way Republicans gain strength is if the domestic migrants are Republicans or if they are Democrats who change their political affiliation when they move to Sacramento or Dallas.

So, is there any evidence that Republicans move from the big cities on the East and West Coast and the Rust Belt cities in greater numbers than Democrats? Are more Republicans than Democrats moving from Pittsburgh and Boston to Charlotte?

If this is not the case, is there any evidence that Democrats turn into Republicans when they move from San Francisco or Detroit to Las Vegas?

A sidenote: Barone notes what Chris Briem has been trying to get people to notice--that the rate of domestic migration from cities like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit is quite similar to that of metro areas like Washington, DC. And the Rust Belt, on average, is doing better than New York and San Francisco in terms of keeping the US-born in town. As everyone has noted, it's the lack of immigration that poses demographic problems for Pittsburgh et al.

The Difficulty of Religious Studies

When I attended my new faculty orientation, one of my lunch table-mates, a scientist, asked me whether my department trained people for ministerial careers. Yesterday on the bus I got to talking to the lady next to me who--when she found out that what department I'm in--asked me about how we taught religion in a public university. When people find out I teach about Judaism in a department of "Religious Studies," they often ask if I'm a rabbi. Almost anyone who works in my field can tell similar stories. Generally, when people ask what I do, I say I'm a historian. This is true on a number of levels--my Ph.D is in History and methodologically, what I do is exactly what my colleagues in the History department do. But I really say it to try to forestall questions like these.

People are confused about what "Religious Studies" is and I can see why.

"Religious Studies" is one of the common names for departments and programs in North American academic institutions that study religion. The people in those departments break down into a few broad types. Some are religious people and study their own religious tradition and often "represent" that tradition in some ways (as theologians, as church historians). That is to say this group often speaks as "insiders" (in Religious Studies parlance). Members of a second group may study their own tradition or not or not (or may or may not be religious), but have some sensibility that "religion" represents some kind of "real" thing out there in the world. They don't necessarily believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, but they often speak of the field of Religious Studies in terms of studying the "really real" or the "numinous." Russell McCutcheon calls this second way of speaking the "sui generis" discourse on religion, i.e. the notion that the way one studies religion should be different somehow than the way one studies other cultural and social phenomena. (I should also say that sometimes it's hard to distinguish between the first type and the second type. The first type tend to be clergy and the second type tend not to be, for one thing; the first type is more often at church-related or other sectarian institutions and the second type more likely at non-sectarian private or public universities. But these generalizations don't always hold.)

McCutcheon is one of the main proponents of a third type of Religious Studies, one that I would identify myself with. We see "religion" as a human cultural and social product that should be studied using the same tools that historians or social scientists use to study other aspects of the human experience. Folks in this group often get called nasty things like "reductionist" or "naturalist" but in our (or at least my) view this approach is what separates "Religious Studies" from Theology or religious practice (in the sense of study as ritual in the rabbinic Jewish tradition).

Institutionally, this is all very confusing because departments and programs that study religion come under lots of different names in the English-speaking world: "Religious Studies," "Religion," "Study of Religion," "Divinity," "Theology," "Comparative Religion," etc. And people who practice all three types of scholarship can be found in all of the variously named entities.

Perhaps the fact that most English universities include the study of religion primarily in faculties of "Divinity" is is part of what confused Mary Beard when she went off to a graduate student conference in Religious Studies and discovered that not all the PhD students were religious or stodgy.

Meanwhile, I've just read an article in The American Scholar by Robert Orsi (who I would place in the second group above) arguing a position with which I simply can't agree, and which I am loathe to call a historical argument:

"It is customary in the study of religion when we encounter people who have had experiences like this to say that these people believe what happened to them to be real and their belief in its realness is all that interests us. But belief has nothing to do with it, and in any case I want to move across this border in order to think about how the really real becomes so. The challenge is to go beyond saying “this was real in her experience” to describe how the real—whether it’s the Holy Spirit at a Pentecostal meeting or the Virgin Mary on a hillside or a vision of paradise so compelling that people will kill for it—finds presence, existence, and power in space and time, how it becomes as real as guns and stones and bread, and then how the real in turn acts as an agent for itself in history."

Why does "belief" by the human actor have nothing to do with it? (Also, what is "it"?) When John Doe acts after having experienced the Holy Spirit at a Pentecostal meeting, does Orsi really mean to say that God acted? If not and he simply wants to emphasize that John Doe acts because of an experience that feels quite real to him, the point is banal. But if John Doe's "beliefs" are said not to matter, then just what does Orsi mean by saying that the "real in turn acts as an agent for itself in history"?

A non-banal interpretation of Orsi gets us awfully close to providential history. Now, I don't begrudge anyone who wishes to argue a theological point or any journal that wishes to publish it. But when one of the leading journals in American intellectual life publishes this sort of thing from a "professor of the history of religion at Harvard" it tends to reinforce the notion that the first and second groups speak for all historians of religion. And it makes it much harder for those of us in the third group to explain ourselves to faculty colleagues and to the wider public (that perhaps wishes to know why a public university has a department of "Religious Studies").

(A response by Russell McCutcheon to Robert Orsi on related matters can be found here, by the way.)

UPDATE (May 11): While googling something else, I ran across this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education from January whose author offers a similar tripartite division of Religious Studies scholars. His criteria has a little less to do with the the working definition of religion that scholars employ and a little more to do with the institutional issues that I touch on above.

Sorry!!!

Three exclamation points in the previous two posts. What's wrong with me?!

Back from Chicago

I spent three days in Chicago last week at the wonderful Newberry Library, looking at tracts from the Council of Trent printed by a Jewish physician and other old books, mainly from 16th-century Italy. I also participated in a workshop on the Italian book trade led by Angela Nuovo.

And I drank good coffee and ate nice pastries at "Bombon Americano," a little cafe behind the Newberry. I also ate excellent Indian food at the curiously named "Gaylord's Indian Restaurant," on Clark Street about 7-8 blocks south of the Newberry. I bought a sweater on Michigan Mile (at Filenes' Basement, you understand), and I had a view of the world's largest McDonalds from my hotel. All in all a good trip.

There was so much new construction--mainly high-rise condo buildings--in the Newberry's neighborhood ("Near North" I think they call it) that one might have thought the Chicago fire was in 1996!

Finally, I was one of at least three people on my flight from Chicago to Pittsburgh reading Michael Chabon's new novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union. I felt so trendy!

Get me to the airport on time!

"In my vast experience with relationships, it is not money, nor sex, nor raising children that causes the bitterest disputes between couples, but how early you really need to get to the airport."

Have truer words then these ever been found in the pages of The New York Times?

Yale Alumni Trustee ballot

I got my electronic ballot for the alumni trustee to the Yale Corporation today.

Here is my rough breakdown of the corporation membership

8 business/finance types
1 academic
1 techie entrepreneur
1 scientist
1 artist
2 jurists
2 journalists.

On the ballot:

1 art historian/museum director
1 business/finance type

I'm voting for the art historian.

Boston and Pittsburgh: banking edition

Here are some more ways that Boston and Pittsburgh are alike.

See this earlier post for the beginning of this thought.

Fact in Fiction

I'm sure literary critics have written a lot about the status of inaccurate but purportedly factual information in fictional works. It seems like a simple question with a simple answer in many ways, right? Fiction is fiction hence Dorothy Sayers' "Author's Note" prefacing Gaudy Night:

"It would be idle to deny that the City and University of Oxford (in aeternum floreant) do actually exist, and contain a number of colleges and other buildings, some of which are mentioned by name in this book.... Persons curious in chronology may, if they like, work out from what they already know of the Wimsey family that the action of the book takes place in 1935, but if they do, they must not be querulously indignant because the King's Jubilee is not mentioned, or because I have arranged the weather and the moon's changes to suit my own fancy. For, however realistic the background, the novelist's only native country is Cloud-Cuckooland, where they do but jest, poison in jest: no offence in the world."

Of course the question is a bit more complicated and can seem relevant in terms of poetry as well as prose, as this exchange among fictional characters in David Lodge's novel Nice Work suggests:

"Marion began reading her paper in a low monotone. All went well until she observed that the line from 'Locksley Hall,' 'Let the great world spin for ever, down the ringing grooves of change,' reflected the confidence of the Victorian Railway Age. Vic raised his hand.
"'Yes, Mr. Wilcox?' Robyn's tone and regard were as discouraging as she could make them.
"'He must have been thinking of trams, not trains,' said Vic. 'Train wheels don't run in grooves.'
"Simon Bradford gave an abrupt, high-pitched laugh; then, on meeting Robyn's eye, looked as if he wished he hadn't.
"'D'you find that suggestion amusing, Simon?' she said.
"'Well,' he said, 'trams. They're not very poetic, are they?'
"'It said the Railway Age in this book I read,' said Marion.
"'What book, Marion?' said Robyn.
"'Some critical book. I can't remember which one, now,' said Marion, riffing randomly through a sheaf of notes.
"'Always acknowledge secondary sources,'* said Robyn. 'Actually, it's quite an interesting, if trivial, point. When he wrote the poem, Tennyson was under the impression that railway trains ran in grooves.' She read out the footnote from her Longman's Annotated edition...."
(Penguin paperback edition, 1990, pp.242-243).

So what would the annotated edition to Carole Nelson Douglas' Sherlockian/semi-Sherlockian novel Castle Rouge say about this passage in which the possibility that a Jew was Jack the Ripper is discussed?

"Irene [Adler] supported Bram [Stoker] as well. 'That is one fact [apparently ritualized arrangement of the victims' bodies] that made the Jews suspect of the crime: they perform ritual sacrifice of animals, and so were favored suspects because the women were killed as if in a ritual." (Forge Books, mass market edition, 2003, p.281)

In my imaginary landscape of the Sherlock Holmes world, Irene Adler is Jewish** but that may not be how Carole Douglas conceives the character. But earlier in the novel an indisputably Jewish character says:

"He shrugged. 'Who am I to judge ways of worship? At Passover we celebrate with the sacrifice of the lamb. Christians do not understand that, yet they worship a sacrificed man." (Ibid., p.73)

The convoluted plot of this "novel of suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes" is not too important here. I won't reveal the plot but suffice it to say that it turns out that Jack the Ripper is not Jewish.

I can think of a few scenarios here, all of which are perplexing and a bit weird:

1) Carole Nelson Douglas, an actual person living in the 21st century, thinks that Jews in the 19th century engaged in animal sacrifice.

2) Carole Nelson Douglas knows full well that actual (real) Jews in the 19th century did not engage in animal sacrifice but has invented a Cloud-Cuckooland of 19th-century Europe that maps onto historical 19th-century Europe in some respects and not others. In this fictional version of 19th-century Europe, Jews engaged in animal sacrifice.

3) Carole Nelson Douglas knows full well that actual Jews in the 19th century did not engage in animal sacrifice. But she has invented fictional characters who know that Jews did not engage in animal sacrifice but who, for whatever obscure fictional motives, wish to suggest to their fictional interlocutors that Jews in the 19th century do engage in animal sacrifice. [This one seems highly implausible as the plot is not furthered by any such devious scheme.]

Given that the Jewish Jack the Ripper theory is introduced in this mystery mainly as a red herring, #1 seems most likely. One could argue that the Jewish Jack the Ripper theory functions as more than a red herring since Irene Adler is initially set on the case by the Baron de Rothschild who is concerned about antisemitism. Thus anything that makes the possibility of a Jewish Jack the Ripper more plausible does serve the plot and thus #2 may be the answer. Arguably, however, this rather subtle plot point would be established more effectively (and way less subtly) by putting these notions only into the mouths of non-Jews.

Perhaps Robyn Penrose would tell me that it's a "trivial" point, but nonetheless, I would like to know whether a popular American mystery writer does or does not think Jews in the 19th century engaged in animal sacrifice.


*Good advice.
**I have no good Sherlockian evidence for this, either from within the canon or from pastiches, but it just seems like she ought to be Jewish.

Non-Jews at Jewish Schools

It's old news but someone forwarded this interesting article from The Independent (UK) to me. And just a few weeks someone asked me why non-Jews cannot attend Jewish day schools in the US. It's a good question, actually.

How the future looked in 1982

I accidentally stumbled across this, an essay that Jim Morris of CMU wrote in 1982 about what a campus computing system should look like. Fascinating. Everyone knows that we have lived through an unbelievable amount of technological change in the last 25 years, but reading this brings it home, and like some kind of bloggy madeline makes me think about what I was doing with computing technology in 1982:

By 1982, I had been exposed to the personal computer: we had some Tandy computers (TRS 80's) at school and I spent the summer of 1982 at a day camp where we swam in the morning and in the afternoon, we learned to program the computer to do such important tasks as drawing cubes and writing "My name is..." in an infinite loop. Our middle school math skills were limited and one couldn't do that much with BASIC (or at least we couldn't), so the head counselor (who was a math and English teacher at my middle school) spent most of the time teaching us algebra and reading us O.Henry stories.

1982 was also the year that my family entered the home computer era when my parents opened up a big box on the first night of Hanukkah and took out a Commodore Vic-20. We hooked it up to the TV and away we went. I recall that we had a Centipede game and a word processor called "Quick Brown Fox." Data storage was a tape recorder.

Meanwhile up in Pittsburgh, Jim Morris was wondering whether or not the campus computers could be hooked up to something called "ARPANet."

Friday Musings: Special Spring Break Edition

Normally, I'd be teaching this morning, but since it's spring break:

This morning's Post-Gazette has an interesting article about arts funding in various cities, including Pittsburgh. Once again, I wonder if some of the statistics cited--for example regarding educational levels--don't tell the full picture because they don't account for the demographic history of the region. Chris Briem has blogged about this question at Nullspace.

I just read the Sunday section from the Post-Gazette ("On the Arts") over breakfast (I parcel out the Sunday paper--actual paper--for the rest of the week's breakfasts) and found this article about Bessie Bramble interesting. The PittGirl of her day? (Yes, I know the "blogger" label applied to pre-Internet writers is getting tiresome.) And yes, I have read one of the Carole Nelson Douglas novels that mention Bessie Bramble, although the reference passed right by me at the time.

Via the Hirhurim blog, I got to this interview with four scholars of early Christianity and ancient Judaism in the Biblical Archaeology Review. This is an issue that comes up frequently for my students in Religious Studies classes, particularly introductory ones and ones that deal with antiquity. Less of an issue when I teach on the medieval and modern periods. For discussion (from the perspective of Orthodox Judaism), see Hirhurim, Dov Baer , and Wolfish Musings. I assume some Christian bloggers are discussing this, but I haven't checked.

Regarding "old books": a review in Haaretz alerted me to a new book on Jewish booksellers and the booktrade in 19th-century Eastern Europe by Hagit Cohen.

In this week's Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, two stories about important resources for researching Pittsburgh Jewish history (and American Jewish history writ larger as well): a cemetery database and digitization of the Pittsburgh-based Jewish Criterion.

And in the category of totally pointless trivia: I have often assumed that the Springfield in "The Simpsons" must be Springfield, Mass. This article from the Boston Globe cites some of the reasons, but it leaves out what I consider the clincher: Mr. Burns takes the train to the Harvard-Yale game. (This is in the episode where Rodney Dangerfield guest start). I suppose one could take the train to New Haven from Springfield, VA; Springfield, NJ; or Springfield, PA (suburban Philadelphia?). But Springfield, Mass. to New Haven is perfect train distance. And the other northeastern Springfields are all suburbs of big cities and not central cities. It's clear that the Springfield in "The Simpsons" is the central city of a small metro area.

Boston and Pittsburgh

I used to live in Boston and now I live in Pittsburgh. Overall, I prefer Pittsburgh, but I'm often struck by how similar the two cities are. In many ways, Pittsburgh is a smaller version of Boston. (I can elaborate at length if you would like me to.)

A few weeks ago, we heard about Bostonians in the robotics industry upset that "Roboburgh" is stealing their thunder. Now a report that Boston should not be complacent about its leadership in health-care and biomedical research. Pittsburgh is listed as one of the smaller cities nipping at Boston's heels. But some of the same issues that have Boston worried--healthcare as an outsized percentage of the local economy and a decline in NIH funding--should have Pittsburgh worried as well.

Where is the 4200 block of Murray Ave?

According to the Post-Gazette today, there were 3 hold-ups "in Squirrel Hill" yesterday morning in the 4200 block of Murray Ave after which the robber "ran toward Greenfield." This caught my eye and not only because I live a few blocks from that stretch of Murray Ave.

Mainly, I was interested in the neighborhood label: I had always thought of the 4200 block of Murray Ave as lying in Greenfield. Everyone I know calls the Giant Eagle on that part of Murray the "Greenfield Giant Eagle." Indeed, I had thought of all of Murray Ave from the bridge over Beechwood Blvd to Hazelwood Ave as part of Greenfield. I had thought of the border between Squirrel Hill and Greenfield as the section of Beechwood Blvd running from Hazelwood Ave and Brown's Hill Rd north to the parkway entrance and beyond to the Greenfield Bridge over the parkway--Squirrel Hill east of Beechwood and Greenfield west of Beechwood.

On the other hand, I checked the zip code directory and 4200 Murray is indeed in the 15217 zip code. 15217 is normally associated with Squirrel Hill and the post office goes so far as to list "Squirrel Hill, PA" as an acceptable alternative to "Pittsburgh, PA" for mail addressed to the 15217 zip code. And the shopping center at the intersection of Murray Ave and Hazelwood Ave is called "Squirrel Hill Plaza."

But check the Pittsburgh city official neighborhood maps and one finds that "Greenfield" extends east as far as Saline St and makes a weird jog around the triangle park at Hazelwood Ave, Saline St, and Beechwood Blvd such that the triangle is part of "Squirrel Hill South." This is consistent with the signage put up by the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy ("Welcome to Squirrel Hill") on that triangle. But it puts "Squirrel Hill Plaza" as well as the
victimized businesses in the 4200-block of Murray squarely in Greenfield.

Let Them Go to Kansas City

Update: I guess we have Scenario 3 and I can live with it. It looks like no local tax revenue (city, country or RAD) will go to this. And if we are to have casinos in Pennsylvania, I suppose diverting some of the profits to this is ok. According to Gov. Rendell, some of the casino funds were already dedicated to economic development and the state money for the arena will come from that. Most interesting is the plan for economic development rights around the arena: the Penguins get them parceled out year by year and then lose them each year if they do nothing. But I can still fantasize about Pennsylvania politicians singing Rodgers and Hammerstein can't I?

Let me get this straight:

Scenario 1:
The Penguins can pay no rent to Kansas City and the citizens of Kansas City and Missouri can shell out the money to run the arena there and we can ask Mr. Barden to spend $7.5 million a year on community development instead of a hockey arena. Maybe he can even renovate Mellon Arena and turn it into something like a big concert hall with a retractable roof.

Unhappy people: Penguins fans in Pittsburgh.
Happy people: Taxpayers in Pennsylvania and Penguins owners.
Stupid people: Taxpayers and officials in Kansas City and Missouri who are giving away millions to a for-profit business.

OR

Scenario 2:
The citizens of Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, and Pennsylvania shell out lots of money
for a new arena and/or forego the use of tax revenue and casino profits for other purposes. The Penguins spend money that they wouldn't have to spend in Kansas City. Kansas City continues to look for someone to occupy their new arena for nothing.

Unhappy people: Penguins owners; taxpayers in Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania; Kansas City officials and residents.
Happy people: Penguins fans in Pittsburgh.
Stupid people: The people in Kansas City and Missouri now joined by the people of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania.

I might see this differently if I were at all interested in hockey, but it looks like a no-brainer to me. If I were Ed Rendell, I would call Mario Lemieux and Ron Burkle and start singing a certain Rodgers and Hammerstein favorite through the phone.

Miscellany

I've been having trouble logging into blogger and google recently so I haven't been posting. But here's a sampling of some of my musings over the last few weeks:

Some of you may have noticed this New York Times article about the Texas lawmaker who got some flack for characterizing modern science, including the Big Bang and evolution, as kabbalistic and rabbinic. But he was simply offering the non-philo-semitic version of what has long been a trope among kabbalistically inclined Orthodox Jewish scientists. If one googles "Kabbalah and Science," the first result is for something called "torahscience.org" and which includes this short story on its website. An interesting case of Jewish apologetics (our holy rabbis discovered the Big Bang before modern physics)? Of course if one thinks modern physics is a great threat to one's own religion (fundamentalist Protestant Christianity), one might accept this claim and see it as further evidence of Jewish (or "Pharisaic") perfidy. The best line in the NYT article refers to a characterization (by the website that served as source material for the Texas representative) of Albert Einstein as a "Kabbalist physicist."

One of my actual physicist friends got a kick out of that when I mentioned it to him yesterday at a Purim carnival. He's been reading Richard Dawkins's book The God Delusion--dare I say spreading the good news about this book? In the meantime (via Leiter Reports), I just read this interesting article in the Guardian about a kind of anti-Dawkins backlash in England. And the letters in response are equally interesting. The impression one forms from the reviews of Dawkins is that he is quite aggressive about countering rather simplistic belief in a supernatural God whose followers often take violent actions against those who do not share the same belief. Presumably Dawkins would say that the fact that this critique does not take into account sophisticated liberal theologies, naturalistic as well as supernaturalistic, is beside the point since the "liberals" (broadly speaking) in whichever religious tradition one focuses on are not the ones doing violent things to other people in the name of "God." But I will say no more until I have read his book.

Meanwhile, I have been thinking some about religious violence in my own religious-ethnic tradition of late, given that Purim was yesterday and my friend Elliott Horowitz (author of Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence) spoke last Monday at Pitt. I could not help pay attention to the stories about Ariel Toaff's now-pulled Pasque di Sangue over the last two weeks. Without reading the book (and it looks like that will not be a possibility for the foreseeable future unless anyone in Italy has a bootleg copy they would like to send me), I won't offer any historical judgement on Toaff's claims since I'm not really sure what those claims are (were?). However, one issue strikes me as interesting and worthy of comment: historians of pre-modern Europe have routinely relied on Inquisition documents and other archival records of trials as primary sources for years. Given the use of torture in medieval and early modern judicial systems, how one uses these sources is a tricky methodological problem. The best approaches, it seems to me, are those that regard archival sources (all of them) as texts to be interpreted--in which authorship, intended audience, genre, political considerations in the production and conservation of the material, language (both langue and parole for you structuralists), and a host of other factors have to be considered in order to make sense of what these pieces of past writing can actually tell us. In terms of methodology, this seems to be the central question in evaluating Toaff's work. Yet many (lay) commentators have suggested that using the trial records at all was wrong. So far, I have only seen two discussions of the work that emphasize the manner in which Toaff reads (wrongly as far as these reviewers are concerned) his texts: Kenneth Stow, writing for History News Network, and Roni Weinstein, writing in Haaretz. (If you can read the Hebrew, I recommend that version of Weinstein's article.) Weinstein notes that Toaff turns to Carlo Ginzburg's groundbreaking historical work for inspiration. So Ginzburg's comments in Corriere della Serra are worth noting (found via the blog, My Obiter Dicta).

Ok. That's enough about books I haven't read.

Blog Birthday and Books

Yesterday was the second anniversary of this blog. Let's drink some tea and lemon in celebration.

And yesterday I read this somewhat odd column by Bob Hoover, book editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (whose work I usually like, I should say) where he laments the influence of the New York Times Book Review. For most of the column, he writes as thought he has forgotten about the Internet and of sites like this that link to a number of on-line avatars of newspaper book sections, highbrow and middlebrow magazines and even publications that call themselves "book reviews" or "reviews of books" or such similar things. Circa 1995, one might read a review of a particular book in the book review sections of the New York Times and of one's local Sunday paper (which unless one lives in Washington is likely to be a pretty small section). Now, someone who cares about books can spend all of Sunday reading book reviews, including multiple reviews of the same book. At the very end of the column, he does note that "unlike the 1960's world... the Internet offers unlimited possibilities." Right. But doesn't that makes the whole premise of the column false?

Also it seems a bit strange for a book editor to lament the out-sized influence of the New York Times while reviewing more or less the same roster of books in one's own book section week after week with a smattering of Pittsburgh or Pittsburgh-connected authors thrown in.

However, his opening comments about antiwar readers abandoning Max Ascoli's The Reporter in the late 1960s over Ascoli's support for Johnson's Vietnam policies appear to be quite timely given the current state of Leftist opinion about that venerable icon of liberal politics, The New Republic. See here for an entry point into the whole set of questions--follow the links and sample the comments at both places (but promise me you won't spend too much time with the comments or you may go as crazy as some of the commentators).

(I tried to stop reading The New Republic a couple of years ago after letting my subscription lapse. Partly I was annoyed that they hadn't fully made amends for spending a couple of years pretending that George Bush was the second coming of Woodrow Wilson [although they did come out strongly--with one exception--for John Kerry in 2004]. Partly I just wanted to save money. But I missed the book reviews and the arts coverage, so I subscribed again a few months ago.)

I got to that business about The New Republic via Bitch, PhD who has just posted a talk she gave at the Modern Language Association conference about the blogosphere and the eighteenth-century public sphere. Worth a look if one has an interest in the history of communication.

I Love Miss Manners (Still)

Today's gem:

Dear Miss Manners:

How do I reply to people who ask me to guess how old they are?

"Four."

Rick Santorum's next career(s)

So--I learn from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette--Rick Santorum is off to the Ethics and Public Policy Center. That he would head a program called "America's Enemies" is perhaps not a surprise, but the conventional wisdom had the defeated Santorum headed to a K street lobbying firm not to a think tank (however right wing). And Reg Henry, one of America's Greatest Columnists, wishes him well:

But I am just so glad he has a suitable job. We were all worried for him. After all, he couldn't very well be a lobbyist because he is friendly with so many that just choosing one firm would have given offense to the crowd. Now he can sit in the thoughtarium marinating in right-wing opinions until the tide again turns.

But it turns out the conventional wisdom wasn't so far off, after all. Check out this profile of the former senator from Penn Hills in The National Review Online. Actually I'll save you the trouble and just quote the crucial penultimate paragraph:

The former senator also plans to join a law firm in D.C. "I’m talking to a few firms right now, but working on the America’s Enemies program is my first priority."

A new example of anticlimax

You've heard the one about the example of an anticlimax in use at Harvard? "For God, for Country, and for Yale."

This was mine on the bus this morning: Isaiah Berlin, Virgil, Martin Peretz.

I haven't made up my mind about whether I would like Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic nominee for President in 2008 or whether I would like her to be President. One reason I might not like to see her as President: 4 years of Martin Peretz using the Diarist page of The New Republic to rant about the Clintons might drive me nuts--especially when the "back of the book" in the January 15 issue was so interesting. After Isaiah Berlin on Jewish identity and essays on Robert Fagles' translation of the Aenied and Melvin Ely's book on free blacks in an antebellum Virginia community, comes another argument for the moral and political superiority of Al and Tipper over Bill and Hillary.

Some miscellaneous thoughts about Pittsburgh in January 2007

Can Pittsburgh still be considered a major metropolitan area without public transportation to the airport?

In my view, the North Side location for the casino is the second best. The best would be anywhere outside the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

If the Mellon Arena is the oldest venue in the NHL and has some kind of quirky charm, why not renovate it and turn it into the Fenway Park of hockey? If the eggs are broken, make an omelette (or whatever that expression is).

Will Ferrell in a Fog

Am I the only Unamuno fan out there who notes some similarities between the plot of the new Will Ferell-Emma Thompson movie "Stranger than Fiction" and the early twentieth-century novel, Niebla, by Miguel de Unamuno?

(Apparently the answer is no: I googled "Stranger than Fiction" and "Unamuno" and found one comment at this site by a Mr. or Ms. Bongalongadingdong who also noted the parallel.)

"They can talk even without a cell phone."

Our daughter, who is in kindergarten, told us tonight at the dinner table about a boy who was being disruptive in gym class. The gym teacher called the homeroom teacher to come get the disruptive boy. Our daughter wanted us to understand that "they can talk even without a cell phone" using special "boxes in the wall that have buttons." When we explained that these were called "intercoms" she took it in stride (parents know a lot of things) but we surprised her when we explained that intercoms have been around for a long time and that cell phones only were invented recently (since Mommy and Daddy were adults). She thought her elementary school had some kind of really cutting-edge technology with these boxes in the walls.

Miss Manners Thursday

The first letter in yesterday's Miss Manners begins this way:

Dear Miss Manners:

A few nights ago my husband and I went out to try a new Italian restaurant. When our food arrived, Waiter 1 set down my plate, then set down my husband's. Not five seconds later, Waiter 2 arrived, asking, "Would either of you care for some fresh ground pepper?"

This prompts me to share with the world the two things I dislike most in restaurants:

1) Being asked if I want fresh ground pepper. Either the chef seasoned the dish properly or he didn't. If I want to prepare my own food, I'll eat at home.

2) Being asked if I'm "still working on a dish." The chef worked on the dish in the kitchen; I'm eating it and, it is to be hoped, enjoying it. What's wrong with "Are you finished, sir?"

Before anyone responds:
1) I never share these thoughts with the waiters asking these annoying questions at the time. I respond quite politely, "no, thank you" to the first and "yes" or "no, you may take it" or "no; would you please wrap it up"--as appropriate--to the second.
2) I always tip 20%.

What I did on summer vacation

See if you can guess where I was last week...

Sunday: lazy day at in-law's house;
Monday: morning in town A with coffee and a book I'm reviewing; lazy afternoon; James Taylor concert in the evening, sitting on lawn of beautiful estate turned music festival with 18,000 other people (James: lovely performance except for your bizarre cover of "Oh What a Beautiful Morning");
Tuesday: busy day: 2 art museums--one mainly modern art, the other contemporary art and "anti-art strategies" (really), mini golf, Mark Morris Group performance in evening at a farm turned dance festival (the man himself did not perform--the group was in residence at this place all week, but he only performed for the big-money crowd Saturday night);
Wednesday: morning walk through grounds of beautiful estate turned music festival; afternoon in town A with coffee and book review; dinner on the porch of a nice restaurant in town A; Yo Yo Ma and Emmanuel Ax all-Beethoven recital in the evening (well, the program said Yo Yo Ma was playing but we were so far back on the lawn that I barely detected a cello especially for the first two pieces that were played on period instuments);
Thursday: hang out in town B; picnic at playground; ice cream in town A (because the ice cream place in town B was booby-trapped with candy at every turn and we generally only allow candy on weekends); rented video in evening ("Matchpoint" by Woody Allen; review: oddly un-funny for a Woody Allen movie; barely a drop of comic relief mixed in with the philosophizing);
Friday: reception at Daughter's week-long art day camp in morning; lunch at home; early afternoon visit to opera singer classmate from college now living in lovely vacation area to see her new baby; late afternoon: book sale at Town A library; evening: dinner at organic restaurant a little north of Town A, follwed by orchestra concert at beautiful estate turned music festival: Bernstein's Candide overture; Beethoven Piano Concerto #1; and one of my favorites, rarely heard in its entirety, de Falla's Three-Cornered Hat (we did hear one of the best orchestras in the country but I would love to hear the de Falla and the Beethoven played by an orchestra that emphasizes a richer tone from the strings, like the Philadelphia Orchestra or the Pittsburgh Symphony);
Saturday: morning walk around beautiful estate turned music festival, listening to orchestra rehearse; afternoon: Rubberband Dance performance at farm turned dance festival (newish group from Montreal that combines break-dancing, martial arts moves, and ballet; hmm...).

Rested and ready for the semester and feeling lucky that my wife's parents live in a part of the country with beautiful scenery and fantastic summer cultural events.

Categorization is a tricky thing

I was in my local public library this afternoon for a few minutes and passed by the shelves for the booksale run by the "friends of the library" group.
The Living Talmud: The Wisdom of the Fathers, ed. Judah Goldin, was shelved with the mystery novels.

To the bicyclist on Fifth Avenue Monday afternoon:

I am sorry that I honked at you. But before you leave Pittsburgh and spend the rest of your life telling people that you had to move to Seattle or Austin or wherever because of those terrible old-fashioned, planet-destroying Pittsburgh drivers who would honk at you and who just couldn't understand how wonderfully progressive biking is and how it would save the earth if we all did it, I just want to tell you the following:

Tailgating a bus in the opposite-flow bus-only lane and following said bus through a yellow light is not cool. Nor is it progressive or avant garde. It's quite stupid. It's especially not cool because the person waiting to turn left from the middle of the intersection and waiting until the bus clears the intersection to do so (that's me) can't see you and certainly does not expect to find a bicyclist breathing the bus's exhaust. Lucky for you, I'm the responsible sort who checks for oncoming traffic and pedestrians before turning left. Next time, you might consider a) being in the proper travel lane; b) maintaining a safe following distance behind buses and trucks so that drivers can see you.

I tried to tell you all this with my honk. I hope your hostile glare was simply trying to tell me that it would be much better not to honk and to put this all on my blog. If so, I apologize for honking.

Otherwise, enjoy Portland or San Diego.

All the best,

Adam

What does Sephardic mean?

This article from the Forward, about Spain and its Jewish heritage, is interesting, but it left me with some questions and comments.

Certainly all of the 40,000 Jews now living in Spain are "Sephardim" in a certain sense--that is, they all live in "Sepharad" (the Hebrew term for Spain since the Middle Ages). How many, however, are Sephardim in the sense of being immigrants or children of immigrants from Sephardic diaspora communities in North Africa, Turkey, or elsewhere? And how many are Ashkenazim? I would guess that a good number of contemporary Spanish Jews come from Morocco, as does the current president of Federation of Jewish communities, quoted in the article, and are "Sephardim". I would guess that a certain percentage come from elsewhere in the European Union and some of these are Ashkenazim. I would also guess that there are a certain number from Latin America, the overwhelming number of whom are children or grandchildren of Ashkenazic immigrants from Eastern Europe to Mexico or Argentina or elsewhere in the New World. But the article does not say, and I would expect the reporter to have paid some attention to this question.*

Secondly, the article suggests that most of the "renaissance" in interest in Spain's Jewish heritage is driven not by the presence of a Jewish community in Spain but by the tourist industry. Thus, the lead-in emphasizing the Jewish community seems a bit misplaced.

Finally, what is the time-frame here? Like nearly all newspaper travel features, things are a bit vague.** Since the death of Franco in 1975? "especially over the past decade", i.e. since 1996? Certainly, it's been a gradual process. But why isn't 1992 mentioned? Either this was the watershed year that sparked things (that perhaps only got underway after 1995), or--contrary to expectations--the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of Jews from Spain was not such a big deal in the on-going resurgence of interest in things Jewish in Spain. Either way, strange that it wasn't mentioned.

*I spend a lot of time when I teach medieval and modern Jewish history explaining to my students the changing meaning of the terms "Sephardic" and "Ashkenazic" over time.
(Brief version: Jews from Yemen are not "Sephardim" despite what some Israeli tour guide may have told you once.)

**What I mean by this is best seen by the New York Times which discovers that Philadelphia and Boston are undergoing cultural renaissances approximately every two years (on an odd-even cycle: e.g. Philadelphia in 97, 99, 01, 03, 05 and Boston in 98, 00, 02, 04, 06.) High turn-over among the travel-writing freelancers? Ingrained literary trope in travel feature-writing?

Miss Manners Wednesday

1) Of course Miss Manners gives exactly the right advice on etiquette to this woman whose ex-boyfriend has "dumped" their friendship at the behest of his fiancee. There seems to be something in the zeitgeist of advice columns these days (see this "Cat's Call"--scroll down--from Sunday's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) about women who can't stand for their future husbands to maintain a friendship with former girlfriends.

I suppose every relationship is different and the ways of the human heart are strange, but are there really still people who believe in the dictum of the "Harry" character from "When Harry Met Sally"?

2) I've missed a few Wednesdays, but going back over the recent columns, I noticed this from Wednesday the 2nd:

Dear Miss Manners:

I recently visited a remote tropical island where, upon my departure, the local inhabitants insisted on killing and eating a giant sea turtle in my honor. I do eat meat, but not turtle. Though I thanked them and ate it with a smile, was that the wrong thing to do?


I should never suspect Miss Manners of making up letters, but I do harbor a slight suspicion that someone out there is pulling her leg.

And now back to naarishkeit

A few quick things on the lighter side:

Yesterday's Miss Manners: important information about cleavage, ball caps, pregnancy, and a nice made-up story about a medieval abbess.

The philosophers over at Leiter Reports are gearing up for another round of discussion about why historians do better than philosophers at getting fellowships.

Some folks are confusing history and homiletics, as I point out in a fairly sharp comment at Hirhurim.

Our family entered a new era yesterday as the five-year-old daughter is now the proud owner of her first bike-- purple, with tassels hanging down from the handlebars. It's a 20" bike, which means she has to stretch those five-year-old arms to reach the handlebars, but she has long legs, so the 20" was the way to go, according to the folks at the bike shop. We decided to spend a little more and patronize one of our two local bike shops in Squirrel Hill (in the end, we went with the less expensive one) since some consumer websites convinced us that you want your kids bike assembled and adjusted by bike professionals and not someone in a big-box store. (I'm sure the websites were all shills for the all-powerful independent bike dealers industry but that's ok. We feel better.)

Finally, I just got an e-mail from the minyan coordinator at one of the two synagogues my family attends announcing that the new assistant rabbi (who I like quite a lot despite what I'm about to say) will be introducing some Shlomo Carlebach tunes at the morning service (Shaharit) this Shabbat. So I wrote back--only half-joking: "nothing says 'come late to shul' to me like 'Carlebach tunes at shaharit.' See you at musaf [the additional service, the second service of the morning]." Ha mayvin yavin.

Dilemmas of Just War in our Age

I haven't put anything on the blog yet about Lebanon, and when people have asked me what I think, I have generally demurred. The reason is that I am trying to grapple with the troubling issue: how can a state defend itself against attacks from an armed group that does not play by the rules of war? Specifically, how can a state (which has a duty to protects its citizens) respond to an enemy that--on purpose--intermingles with civilians? A reader at Talking Points Memo poses the problem and laments the lack of discussion on this issue. In yesterday's mail, I received this week's New Republic where Michael Walzer judiciously lays out the issues and some tentative conclusions. As Jonathan Chait points out in the on-line version of that journal, we may not have answers to these questions for some time. Thus, I think (contra Juan Cole)that assertions that the Israeli army has committed war crimes are pre-mature. I'm not ready to give Israel a free pass, but there is a big step from harming civilians (bad) or civilian infrastructure (bad but perhaps necessary) to war crimes (bad and criminal). On the other hand, it seems quite obivous that Hezbollah's mixing itself with a civilian population in Lebanon, using civilian residential buildings to store weapons, and indiscriminately targeting civilians in Israel are war crimes (Hezbollah does not even pretend to be going after military targets in Haifa or Nahariya.) For another judicious consideration with which I generally agree, see this discussion by Norman Geras at his Normblog.
There is also some interesting discussion in--of all places--these comments to a posting at History News Network.

I don't expect that this posting will be of any interest or use to people who:
a) believe that Israel can do no wrong and that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic or, if it comes from a Jew, treachery.
or b) believe that Israel's status as a sovereign state is illegitimate, and that Israeli civilians are fair game.
Comments that state these views or obviously proceed from these premises will be deleted.

Comments that offer serious reflection on the difficult issues involved are welcomed.

Do researchers for the Federal Reserve live on this planet?

Update: Friday's Post-Gazette had a report of another study on credit cards, one that seems more in line with real life.

According to today's Post-Gazette, the Federal Reserve has absolved credit card companies of responsibility for increasing personal bankruptcies. (See the article here.) But the report apparently contains this stunning sentence:

"Credit card issuers do not solicit customers or extend credit to them indiscriminately."

Huh? My five-year-old daughter and two-year-old son regularly receive unsolicited credit card offers. While I imagine that honest answers to the questions on the solicitations would lead to credit not being extended to them were they to reply, does anyone truly believe that credit card companies are not soliciting customers "indiscriminately"?

Conservative Judaism and Hebrew School

This week in the library, I came across the Summer/Fall 2005 issue of the periodical, Judaism, which contained a forum on "Conservative Judaism Today: Judaism and the Future of Religion in America." Other than noting the rather pompous title, I was particularly struck by the failure of any of the contributors (all youngish Conservative rabbis) to include the synagogue supplemental school in their conceptions of the future of the Conservative movement. When education came up in the contributions, day schools were praised and supplemental schools ignored, dismissed, or implicitly or explicitly denigrated. For a number of reasons, this makes me unhappy.

What is the history of statements about the history of nonsense?

Last night, I was reading Brian Leiter's introduction to his edited volume, The Future for Philosophy (Oxford, 2004). In his description of "Wittgensteinian quietism," he says that philosophers in this vein have turned to the "history of philosophy, which shows us how we came to think there were such things as philosophical problems and philosophical methods in the first place." (p.2) In the footnote to this statement, Leiter writes: "An influential, but little-published, Harvard philosopher, the late Burton Dreben, purportedly gave hyperbolic expression to this Wittgensteinian view in an oft-repeated line: 'Philosophy is garbage. But the history of garbage is scholarship.'" (n.7).

I stopped reading and wondered whether Professor Leiter had ever heard the story about Gershom Scholem lecturing in New York. The story goes that Saul Lieberman, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary and one of the leading Talmud scholars of the day, introduced Scholem's lecture by saying: "Nonsense is nonesense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship." I also wondered whether Burton Dreben had ever heard this story.

A quick Google search for "Dreben Scholem" led me here and an answer to my first question. One of the commentators to this post about Dreben on Leiter's blog (written after he had published this introduction) points out that Dreben had been married to the daughter of another professor at JTS, Shalom Spiegel.

This also probably answers my second question. It seems probable that Dreben heard the story and the pithy formulation from his father-in-law, admired the turn of phrase, and recycled it in relation to his own subject. It should also be noted that in his 1941 Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Scholem thanks Shalom Spiegel, then of the Jewish Institute of Religion, "for his unfailing friendship and readiness to give of his time and help."

Strauss's Acquittal on Appeal

See here for an interesting exchange about a letter Leo Strauss wrote in 1933 in which he seems to endorse fascism, or maybe where he (sort-of) expresses some sympathy for fascism because he thinks liberal democracy fails to live up to its human rights rhetoric, or maybe where he criticizes the Nazis for failing to live up to fascist ideals, or something, or maybe where he reveals his utterly reactionary politics.

Many of the learned commentators at that site quickly veer off topic into criticizing today's "Straussians" (which I'm all for but which seems rather pointless at this point). But if one reads carefully, there are some rewarding comments about Strauss and early 20th-century German (and German-Jewish) intellectual history.

Judezmo on the Brain?

I'm listening to the Orioles-Athletics game via the Internet and the announcer on WBAL just announced an upcoming "Latino Night" at Camden Yards. But I heard "Ladino night" at first and it took me a minute to realize that the Orioles are not in fact honoring the Judeo-Spanish vernacular of Ottoman Jewry.

Rodkinson and the Talmud

A few weeks ago I posted a bit on a Talmud passage, using Rodkinson's translation of the Talmud (the only available on-line). I checked the translation against the Talmud text for the passage I was interested in and it seemed ok (not great, but ok.) There was another passage a few days ago that I was having trouble with so I decided to look at the on-line translation to see if that would help. And I couldn't find it at all. I figured it was my mistake in guessing where the folio number from the standard edition matched up with the page numbers to Rodkinson's edition and went back to my Jastrow and puzzled it out for myself.

Now Manuscript Boy gives a bit of background on Rodkinson and Dan Rabinowitz points out in the comments at Hagahot that it's an abridged translation. Ah hah!

Do the Post-Gazette editors read this blog?

Last week, I called attention to the fact that Governor Rendell's comments at the Gay Pride parade were basically an endorsement of same-sex marriage. I also pointed out that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette might have treated this as the significant (and salutary) statement that it was.

This past Sunday, the editors finally took note of Rendell's comments in an editorial.

Which leads me to wonder: do the Post-Gazette editors read this blog? Or are they even more behind in reading the paper than I am?

Leo Strauss Acquitted

The first time I ever heard of Leo Strauss was in the early 90s in a Yale undergraduate seminar called "Political-Theological Writings." Our professor, a political theorist, was working on Spinoza and was rumored to be something called a "Straussian."

As the 90s went on and I turned to the study of medieval Jewish philosophy, I read a good bit of Strauss and some scholarship on Strauss's take on Jewish thought.

As the 2000s began, I started hearing about "Straussians" again. But these "Straussians"--neoconservative Bush administration officials and hangers-on--didn't sound much like the Leo Strauss I had read or like my Yale professor talking about Spinoza.

Two years ago, Anne Norton published Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire to try to explain (and to explain away) the connection between Strauss and the neo-con "Straussians." Now comes my old professor, Steven Smith, in Reading Leo Strauss, also arguing against drawing a connection between Strauss's work as a political theorist and intellectual historian and some of his students' (or rather, "grandstudents"?) politics. Robert Alter has a nice summary in last weekend's New York Times Book Review.

One more thing: I am not a Straussian although a Straussian might think I was one if he or she were to note the title of this blog and this line from Smith's introduction: "When asked what he taught, it is said, Strauss often replied 'old books.'" Hmm...

Learning from the past?

Pedestrian-only streets and rerouting buses? The Post-Gazette reports that these ideas are now under consideration for the Market Square area in downtown Pittsburgh. Although there are some differences, this all sounds like something Pittsburgh has tried before--and it didn't work. See this Post-Gazette story on the failed redevelopment plan for East Liberty.

Downtown

I've been chatting with some folks over at Antirust about downtown development.
Turns out I just want to be like the cool kids even if I have to spend money I don't have to keep up with them.

Noted in the papers (miscellany)

Just got to the Sunday papers last night and over lunch today and noted the following:

--This interesting article on the front-page of Sunday's Post-Gazette about how airlines are experimenting with boarding procedures. This has long been one of the things about which I say while participating, "there must be a better way."

--Also on the Post-Gazette front-page, what they call a "dog bites man" story: turns out that lots of over-priced and badly maintained apartments are being rented by college students in the neighborhood adjoining Pitt and CMU. I'm shocked, shocked!

--Interestingly, the headlines of the previous two articles in the print version are much better than the headlines in the on-line version:
Which do you like better:
"Airlines fuss over best way to seat travelers" or There's more than one way to fill a plane"?
"An Old problem getting no better" or "Oakland living can be under par"?
Methinks someone thought the "fuss over" in the first story implied that the airline folk were improvising rather than using scientific modeling. Uh-huh. And perhaps someone noticed that the print headline for the apartment story kind of admitted that this wasn't exactly breaking news.

--Three cheers for Ed Rendell who not only came to the Pittsburgh Pride March, but also basically endorsed same-sex marriage: "Some day I hope that shirt says 'Just married in Pennsylvania,' " he said, to a roar of approval from the crowd. See the story in the Post-Gazette here.

--A question for the Sunday P-G editors: when the sitting governor of a swing state where the state legislature is considering a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage says that he hopes that gay marriage will someday be legal in his state, don't you think that should go on the front page of the paper? (You could have bumped the story of the college students with the broken walls to the front page of the local section.)

--Finally, this is really minor but I had no idea that the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York was not one of the original hotels built by the Astor brothers.

Small Pennsylvania

Apparently Pennsylvania is the best state to study really small things as I learn from this Pitt news release. Penn was ranked #1 and Pitt was ranked #2 in nanotechnology research.

European Higher Education

Another event that looks interesting and that I won't be able to get to (even though it's in my backyard, as it were):

The Bologna Process: Transatlantic Perspectives
June 23-24, 2006, University of Pittsburgh
The European Union Center of Excellence

Jerusalem Book Evening

One thing I always enjoyed about living in Jerusalem were the evening discussions at the Van Leer Institute when a significant new academic book in Jewish studies is published: three or four eminent scholars discuss the book, then the author responds. I wish I could be in Jerusalem next Sunday when Nehemia Allony's long-awaited book on the booklists of the Cairo Geniza is the subject.

I received this invitation by e-mail today:

מכון בן-צבי לחקר קהילות ישראל במזרח
של יד יצחק בן-צבי והאוניברסיטה העברית בירושלים


מתכבד להזמינך לערב עיון לרגל הופעת הספר

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יום ראשון, כ"ט בסיוון תשס"ו (25 ביוני 2006) בשעה 18:00
ביד יצחק בן-צבי, רחוב אברבנאל 12, ירושלים


יו"ר: אהרן ממן, ראש מכון בן-צבי

דוברים:
ח"כ מנחם בן-ששון
יוסף יהלום, האוניברסיטה העברית בירושלים
חגי בן-שמאי, האוניברסיטה העברית בירושלים
מרים פרנקל, סגנית ראש מכון בן-צבי

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Hagahot explains the significance of the book.

Commentary on Miss Manners

A new Wednesday feature? Commentary on Miss Manners:

Today's column:
"To Madam, With Sincerely"

Miss Manners is exceedingly patient in explaining to a patent attorney that "Madam" is the female equivalent of "Sir" in formal correspondence, and that he need not worry that about the marital status of the unknown patent examiner. I am concerned that an attorney needs to write to the Washington Post etiquette columnist in order to learn how to address a government official.

The reply to the next letter strikes close to home:

"What you are doing is sending out a mass newsletter to people who have not shown interest in entering into a regular exchange.

They seem pleased enough to receive it, and Miss Manners does not mean to discourage you from continuing. But its being a hobby of yours does not require them to make it a hobby of theirs."

She is referring to the practice of sending out a group e-mail to friends and to the questioner's sadness that his friends do not reply. But I should keep her answer in mind when I lament the relative paucity of comments on the blog.

The final pericope? Just brilliant:

"Dear Miss Manners:

I have a friend who constantly refers to herself in the third person, i.e., "Jenny never eats red meat," or "Jenny loves to go to the movies!" What is the best way to deal with this wholly annoying habit?


How would Miss Manners know?"

How is the substitute high priest like a vice president?

Today's "Daf Yomi" folio is folio 12 from the Babylonian Talmud tractate Yoma which deals with Yom Kippur. The discussion here takes up one of the issues from the first mishnah of the chapter, the appointment of a substitute high priest in case the high priest becomes impure and is unable to perform the Yom Kippur sacrifices.

So what happens if the substitute takes over from the high priest on the Day of Atonement?

"The rabbis taught: When the high-priest happened to become unfit for service, and his substitute performed it, then after the Day of Atonement the high-priest resumes his service, and all the laws regarding the high-priesthood apply to the substitute (he can no longer be like a common priest). Such is the decree of R. Meir. R. Jose, however, says: The high-priest resumes his service, the substitute does not become like a high-priest, nor continues to be as a common priest. And R. Jose added: It happened to Joseph b. Alem of Ziporeth, that he was a substitute for the high-priest, who performed the service instead of the high-priest, to whom an accident had happened. Later the sages said, the high-priest should resume his service, and that Joseph b. Alem is fit no longer to be either a high-priest or a common priest. A high-priest, to prevent enmity; and a common priest, because there is a rule, in holiness one may increase but not decrease. Said Rabba bar bar Hana in the name of R. Johanan: The Halakha prevails according to R. Jose. R. Jose grants, that if the substitute has performed service in the Temple, this service is valid.

R. Jehudah said in the name of Rabh also: The Halakha prevails according to R. Jose, and R. Jose grants that when it happens the high-priest dies, he may become high-priest. This is self-evident? One might say, since he was his rival in life, he might not become a high-priest after his death. He comes to teach us it is not so."
(BT Yoma 12b-13a; translation by Radkinson from Internet Sacred Text Archive; I've never heard of this translation but it seems ok and the Soncino translation of Yoma is not available on-line--and needless to say, I'm too lazy to type out my own translation).

Here is how the Daf Yomi page summarizes R. Jose ("Yossi")'s view:
"1. He cannot be a co-Kohen Gadol for fear of enmity.
2. He cannot be a regular Kohen out of respect for his elevated status."

A dubious honor, then, to be chosen as the substitute high priest for Yom Kippur. You can't keep the top job and you can't go back to your old job because you've become over-qualified (at least in terms of holiness).

A busy summer weekend

The kids have already been asleep for 45 minutes. Perhaps we tired them out today. First to Mellon Park for Bach, Beethoven, and Brunch with the Edgewood Symphony. Good program of favorites from Beethoven's Fifth to Copeland, Bernstein, and Sousa. Had a picnic with the blanket in the shade but the kids were actually on the blanket, in the shade, for a total of about 10 minutes in 2 hours. Then friends remarked that they were going to Schenley Plaza to watch the Zany Umbrella Circus, so we went along too. Free rides on the new carousel today so we did that a few times as well. Then home and rest.

A nice father's day. Only complaint: who decided to put the carousel next to the dumpsters as Schenley Plaza? A bit of an unpleasant smell on a hot summer's day.

Yesterday: shul at the big conservative synagogue in the neighborhood. Then home for lunch and rest and a bit of play in the backyard. My wife and I went out last night for the rare date, having secured the services of a babysitter who used to teach at the preschool and is much beloved by both children. (Daughter woke up this morning calling out her name.) We tried Sweet Basil/La Filipiniana. We decided to mainly eat off the Philippine side of the menu since we have our choice of umpteen Thai restaurants. The veggie Siapao was excellent--more like a sweet bun than a dumpling. We both liked the Fish Sinigang. My wife thought the Jackfruit was ok but I didn't like it.

Then we went to see "Keeping up with the Steins" which we both enjoyed. We wondered how well it was doing in the rest of the country, but it was a packed theatre in Squirrel Hill.

We had lots of time before the movie so we had a cafe cortado and an iced pomegranate at Tango Cafe.

Courtesy in Boston

Those who know me know that Boston is not one of my favorite cities nor is the T one of my favorite public transit systems. One of my complaints about the Hub of the universe and its transit-riding citizens is the exceptional level of rudeness I observed during my two years living there.

It sounds like Brian McGrory, a Boston Globe columnist, and now the T administrators themselves are on the case.

Thy Temple Amid Thy Hair is Like a Slice of Pomegranate

Happy Bloomsday!

Some allusions to this blog in Ulysses:

[TEA, LEMON]
--...O jay, there’s no milk.
Stephen fetched the loaf and the pot of honey and the buttercooler from the locker. Buck Milligan sat down in the a sudden pet.
--What sort of a kip is this? he said. I told her to come after eight.
--We can drink it black, Stephen said thirstily. There’s a lemon in the locker.
--O, damn you and your Paris fads! Buck Mulligan said. I want Sandycove milk. (episode 1; p.10)

[OLD BOOKS]
What final visual impression was communicated to him by the mirror?

The optical reflection of several inverted volumes improperly arranged and not in the order of their common letters with scintillating titles on the two book shelves opposite. (episode 17; p.581)

[OLD JEWISH BOOKS]
...An ancient haggadah book in which a pair of hornrimmed convex spectacles inserted marked the passage of thanksgiving in the ritual prayers for Pessach (Passover)... (episode 17; p.594)

[JEWISH INTELLECTUAL HISTORY]
Accepting the analogy implied in his guest’s parable which examples of post-exilic eminence did he adduce?

Three seekers of the pure truth, Moses of Egypt, Moses Maimonides, author of More Nebukim (Guide of the Perplexed) and Moses Mendelssohn of such eminence that from Moses (of Egypt) to Moses (Mendelssohn) there arose none like Moses (Maimonides).

What statement was made, under correction by Bloom concerning a fourth seeker of pure truth, by name Aristotle, mentioned, with permission, by Stephen?

That the seeker mentioned had been a pupil of a rabbinical philosopher, name uncertain. (episode 17; p.563)

[PITTSBURGH]
--Rather bleak in wintertime, I should say. Martello you call it?
--Billy Pitt had them built, Buck Mulligan said, when the French were on the sea. But ours is the omphalos. (episode 1; p.15)

(page references to the Gabler edition.)

More on Libby Rowe and LBJ in Bed

Just now, after posting my father's story about Libby Rowe, I decided to google her, and found this oral history interview.
See pp. 4-5 where she described being called in to the President's bedroom in the White House where he was lying sick.

Could my father have been telling a garbled and embellished version of this story?

Hmm....

Breakfast in Bed and the Metro

A few posts back, I indicated that I was planning to read Zach Schrag's The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro. I have two personal connections to this book, beyond having ridden the Metro. First, Zach and I went to high school together. Second, my father was general counsel and secretary to the National Capital Planning Commission from 1959 to 1984, during the period in which Metrorail was planned, built, and first opened. Well, I have now read the book and can report that I found it fascinating.

One of Zach's major arguments--clearly indicated by the title--is that Metro has to be seen against the broader backdrop of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations' domestic policy. One point that he emphasizes is that there was a decisive change in regional planning from the Eisenhower to the Kennedy administrations. NCPC, in the late 50s, prepared a regional plan generally called the "Year 2000 plan" It was released in 1960, the last year of the Eisenhower administration. (Remember how the year 2000 was once "The Future"?) The hallmark of this plan was the idea of corridors and wedges--corridors of development leading from the central city into the suburbs with wedges of open space in between. (Somewhat naive for the post-WW2 era, I think, but that's another story.) The plan called for rapid transit in the corridors but also endorsed controversial Robert Moses-style freeway plans for DC itself.

When the Kennedy administration took over, a number of things changed: the Kennedy administration hired a point man for DC affairs in the White House and appointed a new chair of NCPC who in turn, installed a new director. That new chair was Libby Rowe. Under her, NCPC reversed course on freeways in DC and put its weight fully behind rail rapid transit. (It's important to remember that in those pre-home rule days NCPC was not only the federal agency with veto power over local projects, it was also the local planning office within the District.)

Zach tells this story well and I urge you to read the book if you are interested in DC history, or urban history more generally.

Now the personal part: Although my father had been part of the old regime at NCPC (remember he was hired in 1959), as a civil servant (and not really a policy-maker) he had stayed on with the change of administration. My father always spoke of Libby Rowe with great personal fondness and professional admiration. Now, Libby Rowe was appointed by Kennedy but she and her husband were close friends of Lyndon Johnson. Here's one story from my father that illustrates both the importance of precision in language and how NCPC (literally) had the ear of the presidency during the Great Society years: every week during her tenure as chair of the commission, Rowe would meet with the director and my father to go over the commission's upcoming agenda. One week, she announced at the beginning of the meeting that the previous weekend, she had had "breakfast with the President in bed." "Breakfast in bed with the president?" replied the others in astonishment. "No," she responded, "that's not what I said." And she explained that she and her husband had been guests at LBJ's ranch the previous weekend and on her way down to breakfast one morning, a maid had intercepted her and said that the President would like to see her to discuss something. She was led to the President's bedroom where he was sitting up in bed, eating his breakfast off a tray. She was led to a chair next to the bed and invited to sit down, whereupon she was handed a breakfast tray. For the next half hour or so, they discussed whatever issue it was. And thus, she repeated again, she had had "breakfast with the President in bed."

Miss Manners or Judith M?

As I have said before, I am a big fan of Miss Manners. But I'm a little disappointed in her column yesterday in that she doesn't open up a larger discussion of the issue of whether professors ought to call students by their first names. Instead, she focuses on the question of how a student should respond to a professor who signs an e-mail with his first name.

Margaret Soltan (Sra. Prof. Dr. Frau Mrs. UD Soltan?) does open up the discussion a bit, along with her commentators, over at University Diaries.

It seems to me that the crucial issue is an imbalance of power that may lead to rudeness. It seems generally accepted that college students call their professors
Doctor or Professor or Mister or Ms. so-and-so, depending on the culture of the institution, while professors call students by their first names.

A couple of years ago, I suggested to my wife that I wanted to start calling my students Mr. and Ms. While she agreed that this might be proper, she advised against it on the grounds that perhaps a theoretical and abstract rudeness was better than a concrete example of weirdness. (That is not to say that all professors who call students Mr. or Ms. so-and-so would be seen as weird, but presumably 30-somethings with a mid-Atlantic accent and casual khakis would be.) I have followed her advice and continued to call students by their first names and have not objected when they call me Professor. But I continue to think about it and am a little troubled by it.

It may be that I think about this because the rather progressive DC private school I attended as a child has a prevailing custom that teachers (from elementary school on) are called by their first names. However, any teacher that wished to be called by their last name could be. In the entire history of the school (since 1945), so far as I know, only two teachers have been called Mrs. X and only one was called Mr. X. One was my kindergarten teacher, the beloved Jessie Klein, who went by "Mrs. K" which she told us stood for both "Klein" and "kindergarten." When her husband retired from his airline job and came to teach with her, he naturally became "Mr. K." The third teacher who used her last name was a legendary fifth-grade teacher who retired before my time. Interestingly, she had a daughter who attended the school and who later became a noted etiquette columnist for the Washington Post.

A blog stock market?

Every once in a while I google myself (who doesn't?). Yesterday, I decided to google "Tea Lemon Old Books" for the first time... and found this.

Can anyone explain this to me?

Time to advertise again?

Remember the Hebrew National "we answer to a higher authority ads"? Apparently some California grocery workers and customers don't. This is an amusing story from the Forward: "Market Flunks Kosher 101."