October 19, 2022
Igor Levit, a gifted pianist of Russian Jewish descent who lives, works and engages politically in Germany made me half laugh half cry with his recent sketch:
Project Proposal:
One million Variations with infinite Fugue about (German) fascism
Variability: endless
Duration: open
Reception: mostly empty phrases
Effect: renewed frustration, every single time.
Warnings and criticism falling on deaf ears, or being waved off with a shoulder shrug. Echoed by official reporting in yesterday’s NYT that “Voters See Democracy in Peril, but Saving It Isn’t a Priority.” Some weeks ago NY Magazine had an in depth article on how the GOP surrendered to Antisemites. That was before a former president openly called for American Jews ” to get their act together” (and support him) “before it is too late.” Jewish voices in both Israel and the United States denounced “a former US president using threatening language about American Jews at a time when antisemitism is on a global rise.” Notably, Biden said nothing. The administration has been slow to condemn the remarks of Trump, waiting 24 hours after Trump’s online warning to “US Jews” before saying anything. And this was only in answer to a question asked of White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in the routine daily press briefing Monday. There was no public statement.
On the other hand, we had a tempest in a teapot about two Just Stop Oil activists throwing tomato soup at the glass of a van Gogh painting to protest the other existential danger to human kind – climate change. The Washington Post mused on climate protests tactics getting weirder, or stranger, or any number of words that minimized the urgency of the affair. You might argue that attention seeking of this kind (for a valuable goal, you readily admit, of course) gets you nothing. If anything it puts people off, right? Support their cause, but not their methods?
May I remind you, gently:
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
By the way – the video of the activists got over 50 million views by now, the one introducing their concern substantively almost 4 million, as one of the women explains here.) Something to think through, on this Wednesday morning. While you do you can listen to Levit’s playing, it will recharge you.
Here is a concert a Royal Albert All last year.
And here in a more informal setting at the NPR’s tiny desk concerts.
A new documentary about him can be currently watched in cinemas by my German readers.
Photomontages today from my series On Transience shown at the Oregon Jewish Museum years ago, considering issues connected to Jewish immigration. (Description of the project here.)
(The staircase in this montage is a photograph of the emergency exit in the Jewish Museum Berlin. There might be a “too late” after all, never forget.)
Leanne Grabel
Thank you, again!
Julie
This is so very powerful … and heartbreaking … and true …
Your art is exquisite!
Sara Lee Silberman
“Exquisite” montages indeed! And Martin Luther King’s words, from “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” never cease (at least for me) to haunt, appropriately rebuke, and sadden. And then this morning’s incomprehensible (again, at least for me) polling news that while a majority of Americans are concerned about the survival of democracy in the U.S., some significant percentage of those concerned say they will vote for Republicans in the upcoming elections. Go figure! I can’t.
Roger Porter
I too have been thinking about an article in yesterday’s NYT that reports that while 70% or more are worried about the decline of democracy (but don’t be deceived, Republicans also see a threat to democracy–though from vote-by-mail, drop boxes, and corrupt Democratic election officials), a lot of those people (including some Democrats) don’t seem to care enough about the threatened decline to vote against Republicans. What I’ve been brooding about is why that disconnect? Why fear a threat to democracy but take no active role (at east electorally) in preventing its demise? Why has the Jan. 6 Committee apparently changed few if any minds? My thought goes this way: Unlike in Europe, America has never suffered before from authoritarian dictators; we have never had a truly fascist government with camps, political prisoners en masse, and the worst consequences of Nazi Germany, Mussolini Italy, and behind-the-Iron-curtain Eastern European communism. So there is a naive refusal to believe it could happen here, even though we’ve already had hints galore from Trump and Trumpism, and what that movement promises will come. Somehow because we haven’t experienced the full blown collapse of democracy we are too prone to take its perpetuation for granted, so we do little or noting to prevent its genuine erosion. We are so seduced by the endless mantras of American exceptionalism and the continuous propaganda (from grade school on) that we are the greatest country on earth, the freest country in the history of the world, that warnings of the decline if not the end of democracy are not really, deeply, believed, nor cause fears or serious enough concerns.
Carl Wolfsohn
Get out and vote! And watch the new documentary by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein: The U.S. and the Holocaust. The same dynamics are alive in today’s Republican Party, and, yes, too many Americans won’t act against it.
Louise A Palermo
Your words are powerful. Your images are blockbuster! The amount of lethargy we have toward saving ourselves and our world is equal only to our nonchalance at keeping up our comforts at the expense of the world.