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.