Knowledge and the Public Good–Some Suggested Reading

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Haim Watzman

The dissemination of knowledge-high-quality knowledge-is essential to a democratic society. So I’d like to point out an interesting juxtaposition of articles from my Shabbat reading that, taken together, have something important to say about the importance of getting good knowledge to the public.

Danielle Allen’s review of Josiah Ober’s book Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens in The New Republic concludes:

Josiah Ober shows us that Athens knew what the Athenians knew, because the city as a whole had devised institutions that made sure the useful knowledge of the widest possible range of individuals flowed to where it was needed. Have we fully tapped into the resources of participatory democracy to supplement our own representative structures with a citizenry within which all the sluices of knowledge are open and have been set a-flowing? Does America know what Americans know?

In the March 5 issue of Nature, Harry Collins, a social scientist who studies science, concludes an essay entitled “We Cannot Live By Skepticism Alone” with these words:

Science, then, can provide us with a set of values-not findings-for how to run our lives, and that includes our social and political lives. But it can do this only if we accept that assessing scientific findings is a far more difficult task than was once believed, and that those findings do not lead straight to political conclusions. Scientists can guide us only by admitting their weaknesses, and, concomitantly, when we outsiders judge scientists, we must do it not to the standard of truth, but to the much softer standard of expertise.

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We Couldn’t Make Any of This Up

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Gershom Gorenberg

Since Purim is past, I can put up a brief compendium of news stories that should be satires. Well, actually, if we made this stuff up, you would accuse us of third-degree cynicism. But we’re innocent. This stuff really happened.

  • In Maryland, the Washington Post reports, a Muslim woman was told to leave a line in a bank and be served in a back room because she was wearing a scarf over her hair. The bank said it had a “no hats, hoods or sunglasses” policy, intended to prevent robberies and identity theft (you might want to visit us for more information about how to actually prevent this kind of crimes). Giving the bank the benefit of the doubt, the clerks did not believe that she was hiding an assault rifle under her scarf. So apparently, they found it absolutely impossible to verify a person’s identity when her hair was covered. Perhaps this is part of an “all those people look the same” policy, which may apply equally to Muslim women and Orthodox Jewish women who cover their hair.

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His Uniform, My Responsibility

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Gershom Gorenberg

In the informal division of labor in this blog, Haim normally handles the issues of army service. He’s the one who wrote Company C, after all. However, in the week when my son became a soldier, it was hard for me to write my column for the American Prospect about anything else.

A friend has volunteered to drive. He’ll drop us off in a suburb outside Tel Aviv, near the entrance of the Israel Defense Forces induction center. My son and I will talk, with our eyes on our watches, and I’ll hug him, and he will swing his duffel bag over his shoulder and walk in. I’m writing beforehand. You are reading this after the event.

For my son, as he has described his feelings, that gate marks the precise physical location of the end of childhood. For me, it marks the end of the countdown that began with his birth. It is the line between one type of anxiety and another, shaded in a deeper gray.

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The Haman Gene

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Haim Watzman

According to disturbing report in the latest issue of the British scientific journal Nature, a team of geneticists based at pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. has discovered that a strange set of markers shared by 90 percent of all Jews indicates widespread intermarriage with the Amalekite nation in the Middle Bronze Age.

The comparative study became possible when a team of Israeli archaeologists uncovered an ancient Amalekite cemetery in a lightning excavation carried out in the Gaza Strip under air cover during Israel’s recent Operation Cast Lead. The cemetery contained human bones along with pottery depicting heroic attacks on the women and children of a contingent of dessert nomads, almost incontrovertible proof that the site belongs to the ancient Amalekite civilization. DNA extracted from the bones was used for a comparative study with the DNA of modern Jews.

“Given the Bible’s severe condemnation of the Amalekite people, and its command that the Israelites destroy them utterly, it’s nothing short of surprising to find that the two nations intermarried,” admitted the noted scholar of Jewish civilization and leading intellectual and adviser to Israeli leaders Yoram Hazony. “It will require a major reconceptualization of who and what the Jewish people are.”

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What AIPAC Doesn’t Want Discussed in Court

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Gershom Gorenberg

Doug Bloomfield is a bowtie-wearing lobbyist, and he used to lobby for AIPAC. A friend of mine pointed me to a column Bloomfield wrote about the long-delayed trial of two former AIPAC staffers accused of passing classified info to the media and the Israeli government.

Bloomfield’s column is a treasure, hidden in the website of the New Jersey Jewish News – as if dumped on the Jersey shore by a pirate crew on the run. It explains how the trial — if it ever happens — could hurt the hawkish Israel lobby, even more than it could embarrass the prosecution. (The defendants? They may have the least to worry about.) This will look like one of those divorce trials in which all the family secrets are finally spoken aloud. Says Bloomfield:

One of the topics AIPAC won’t want discussed, say these sources, is how closely it coordinated with Benjamin Netanyahu in the 1990s, when he led the Israeli Likud opposition and later when he was prime minister, to impede the Oslo peace process being pressed by President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.

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An End to Umbrella Politics

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Gershom Gorenberg

My latest column for Moment is now on line:

There’s an old story from the cold war era, the kind of unsourced anecdote that probably never happened but nonetheless contains a truth about history. A Soviet diplomatic delegation once visited the West — so goes the story — and a Jewish member of the team spoke to journalists.

Asked about the Middle East, he parroted the party line and attacked “Zionist imperialism.” Afterward, a reporter cornered him and said, “You’re Jewish. You must have your own opinion about this.”

“Yes,” said the Jew from Moscow, “but I don’t agree with it.”

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In Praise of Hegemony: Mizrahi Culture in Israel

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Haim Watzman

Is the cultural freedom of marginal and minority groups violated by the promotion of a standard central culture by a state or society? In contemporary sociology and cultural theory, “central” and “standard”—more often called “hegemonic”—are dirty words. Such scholarship, veering from the descriptive into the prescriptive, seeks to rescue the lost and oppressed voices of marginal groups and to defend them against the dictatorship of the official, mainstream culture.

Erez Biton and the Andalusian Orchestra
Erez Biton and the Andalusian Orchestra
I encounter this view frequently in scholarly works that I translate. Right now I’m pondering it as I work on the introduction to a book on the poetry of Israel’s Mizrahim—that is, of Israeli Jews whose origins lie in the Arab world—by Yochai Oppenheimer, a poet and writer about poetry.

Indisputably, when Mizrahi Jews arrived in Israel in the great wave of immigration in the 1950s, they encountered a central Zionist culture that believed itself to represent the only viable future for the Jewish people. That culture rejected Jewish religious tradition, and drew considerable inspiration from modern Europe. It viewed the Orient, and its Jews in particular, as a backward and primitive place. Therefore, its leaders and doers were not, for the most part, interested in fostering or respecting the native culture of the new immigrants. Instead, it sought to assimilate the Arab Jews and make them into Hebrew-speaking moderns.

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‘A Deeply Cynical Argument,’ Yes

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Gershom Gorenberg

Several friends who watched my bloggingheads conversation with David Frum last week wrote to me about one particular segment, where Frum insisted that settlements were no obstacle to a peace agreement because…

If people move one way, they can move another way. I just – the idea that these are kind of geologic facts – we’re talking about loading up a moving van. Had there been, had there been a deal, there’s nothing easier. I mean you’ve seen these settlements, they’re ramshackle things, they’re trailer parks…

Even if they’ve built the Emerald City of Oz in one particular place, again, people move, people are incredibly mobile…

When I heard this, I was amused by how strong Frum’s assertions were and how weak his knowledge was of the subject. I was also struck by the act of projection: He imagined settlers as being  suburbanites ready to move at a moment’s notice, for a good job offer, perhaps.

But as Matt Duss wrote to me, Frum isn’t alone in arguing that settlements are essentially conditional statements, retracted more easily than a candidate’s gaffe. Says Matt:

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My Day in Loyalty Court–“Necessary Stories” column, Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman “What number you got?” asked the puffy-eyed guy sitting in the metal chair next to me. He hadn’t shaved in two days, from the looks of it; his clothes were stained and his breath bad. Blue and white stripes flashed across the LCD screen hanging on the far wall of the Ministry of … Read more

My Year of Blogging

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Haim Watzman

It’s exactly a year since we launched the South Jerusalem blog. And it’s been a great year-one in which we’ve gained hundreds of readers, some of whom think we’re left-wing fanatics, some who think we’re hopeless jingoists, and at least one who thinks we should relocate to Las Vegas.

I started blogging about four years after I was first told “You should start a blog.” I didn’t want to start one for a number of very good reasons, all of which this last year’s experience have proven well-founded. A friend of mine told me about her WordPress account after I asked what is wordpress? When I started, I had very little clue about cpanel hosting and all of the other things it takes to start a blog. I thought that I would be spending a lot of money creating my blog, but it was just getting a domain and finding a web hosting service to get the blog to go live. Plus knowing that you can use something similar to these working HostGator India Coupons to help save you some money and that’s one less aspect to think about when it comes to blogging.

As I feared, I have spent far more time than I can afford writing blog posts for which I get paid nothing, and because I’m not getting paid I can’t take the time to do the research and legwork that would be necessary to make the blog a really valuable source of news and analysis. Maybe I should consider using hostiserver.com so I have more time to write, not fiddling with the tech side of things. But with newspapers hitting the boards right and left, and with the surviving ones slashing their budgets for freelance stories, it’s hard to get paid enough to do serious reporting in the traditional media anyway.

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The Phosphorus Question, Revisited

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Gershom Gorenberg

I’m glad that Haim brought up the ethics of the Gaza war. Because the news cycle has a ferociously short-term memory, the elections pushed the war and its unanswered questions out of the headlines. But we shouldn’t wait 25 years for an animated documentary to get us to have a conversation that should be going on now.

One very specific issue that lingers in my mind is the use of white phosphorus in Gaza, especially the question of whether the IDF fired that fearsome substance at civilians.

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