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.)