Anti-Judaism frequently reflected not the presence and activities of real, living Jews, but the importance of “Judaism” as a concept in a broader structure of ideas. Using Marx’s pivotal essay, “On the Jewish Question,” as a framing device, Nirenberg argues that Christian, Muslim and secular Western societies produce the idea of “Judaism,” in Marx’s phrase, “out of their own entrails” — that is, to express the unpleasant corollaries of their cultural ideals, satisfy the needs of conceptual systems and think through important abstract binaries.

For the rest, read on.

Second, in the back of my mind, ever since writing a long piece about Modern Orthodox parody of Lady Gaga, I’ve been wondering what to do with this video, in which a Haredi wedding band introduces newlyweds at their party to the tune of various Lady Gaga songs, then transitioning into standard Hasidic “simcha” (celebration) music. It’s significantly less semantically dense than the parody I wrote about above, but I found it oddly draws me, and I’ve never understood why.

Here’s a quick thought. I think part of the video’s draw, especially compared to the layered ironies of the Modern Orthodox parody video (many of which play on the power and gender hierarchies of both the Orthodox and secular worlds), is that of Haredi naivete. We commonly assume that Haredi naivete is valuable largely insofar as it allows Haredim to appreciate their Jewish rituals, text, and traditions more simply, directly, etc. (I’ll bracket for the moment all the manifold ways it’s harmful.)  But here, what’s poignant about Haredi naivete is that it allows them to experience our music simply and directly. These men are dancing to Lady Gaga without a second thought about what they’re hearing. That is, they’re actually participating in a cultural ideal surrounding American popular music (an ideal which we could call, borrowing a title from one of the Lady Gaga songs they’re quoting, “Just Dance”). Further, it’s an naivete inaccessible many of us who are supposedly closer to the secular lifeworld that produces Lady Gaga, because of our heightened attention to the various messages, problematics, etc. of popular music.

I’m not sure if others found that video as entrancing as I did. But I suspect I did because, hidden between the charm of Haredi innocence and cluelessness is the irony that they seem to have found a shortcut into mass American culture, a culture which, because of my Jewishness or intellectualism, I find elusive.

Would you confuse Moses Mendelssohn and the Vilna Gaon, sometimes called the fathers, respectively, of Reform and Orthodox Judaism? Certainly not if you had seen their pictures. It’s hard to mistake Mendelssohn, with his clean-shaven cheeks and curly, uncovered hair, for the Gaon, usually depicted with flowing beard, enormous black kippah and prayer shawl. And it wasn’t just their getups. Mendelssohn, an 18th-century German Jewish philosopher who mingled with famous playwrights and bested Kant in an essay competition, is known for bucking rabbinic authority and beginning the Jewish Enlightenment. The Gaon, on the other hand, though Mendelssohn’s contemporary, spent most of his life secluded in study, writing recondite commentaries on the classics of rabbinic literature and ignoring the non-Jewish Lithuanians around him. The division between the two men — and by extension, between modernity and tradition — seems pretty clear.

Yet, in his new book, “The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism,” Yale University religious studies professor Eliyahu Stern suggests that the Gaon was as fully modern as Mendelssohn.

To find out how, read on.

This may come as a surprise, but the Israeli government doesn’t consult me about public relations. Which is a shame, because I have an idea for some truly inspired Hasbara: let the twenty Eritreans who have been stuck for six days on the Israel-Egypt border—in the desert, mostly without food—enter Israel.

Great photo-op, of course: Israeli soldiers helping beleaguered African women, to the theme-song from “Exodus.” And we’d avoid embarrassing questions, like why a nation founded by refugees forces pregnant women to languish on its borders (and reportedly to miscarry). But those are incidental benefits. More importantly, welcoming Eritreans would powerfully bolster the case for a Jewish state.

What do we talk about when we talk about Jewish self-hatred? That’s the question Paul Reitter tackles in his new book, “On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred.” After tracing the first appearances of the term “Jewish self-hatred” in interwar Germany, and filtering out contemporary polemics, he looks for what remains. The precipitate, achieved through a painstaking literary decanting of both primary texts and secondary scholarship, is odd as well as remarkable.

“Jewish self-hatred,” according to Reitter, originally meant something positive. It was not simply internalized prejudice, nor was it a club with which to beat your political opponents. Rather, it was a distinctive, ironic and redemptive way of being: “the capacity through which the Jews could teach the world how to heal itself.”

If this seems counter-intuitive or bizarre, just read on.

1. The citation of Quixote as an example of “Honor, heroism, decency, justice and ‘Ah, love, let us be true to one another’ writing.” But Cervantes, after all, was joking. The “burdens of civilization” in Don Quixote are carried by irony, by the light-hearted but epochal imagined dissolution of feudal heroism into—gasp, invention—that “loose, baggy monster,” the new form of the novel. If you don’t appreciate self-consciousness, irony, cynicism, or invention, then why are you praising Quixote?

2. Arguing that “the great writers use anticipation instead of surprise” in an essay that begins by extolling the virtues of Daniel Deronda. I will pass over the fact that Rosenblatt takes Deronda’s sappy, idealized heroism to be the part of Geroge Eliot’s novel worth praising. I have better things to do than to argue the merits of a character as faultless as to seem preemptively sanitized, as if later canonical commentators had already rubbed away all the interesting bits. The real point is that the unfathomably great accomplishment of Daniel Deronda has always been its surprise-ending.

The novel plots, from its first paragraph, towards Deronda’s marriage to Gwendolen, and then, somehow, confusingly, Deronda marries a bit-character, a gypsy-Jew singer of ethereal and questionable graces. From that surprise springs—for good and for ill—a great conservative revolt against the mixings of modernity: an argument for separation, for difference, for classes, for a sense of place. (Of course, the novel has its counter-strains and contradictions. I don’t want to offer a definitive reading, just to say the surprise is not just a visceral shock. It encodes meaning.) In short, there is no greater monument to surprise—not anticipation—than Daniel Deronda. (And don’t get me started on Dickens and surprise.)

3. Rosenblatt’s confusion of Tennyson’s Odysseus and Homer’s. The former is “wild”; the latter is not. It’s important not to confuse “polymetis”—”many-skilled,” the key epithet for Odysseus—with “Polyphemus,” the hero’s one-eyed, barbaric antagonist in Book 9 of the Odyssey. What makes Odysseus distinct is his cleverness, his eloquence, sophistication, and his trickiness—i.e., all the things Rosenblatt insists are secondary in great literature. What gives?

Frye’s self-declared goal is to arrive at a “synoptic” view of literature, that is, an overall structure of criticism which traces the central recurrent literary phenomena. The book consists, in essence, of a number of categorizations. Genres, for instance, are fourfold: comedy, tragedy, irony and romance. Or there are five “phases,” which describe the relation of the protagonist to the audience, ranging from mythic, in which the protagonists are gods; through romance—confusingly used to mean something related to but different from the above—which features superheros or demigods; high mimetic, featuring aristocrats; low mimetic, featuring commoners; and ironic, featuring anti-heros and the like.

There are several more systems like this: each is developed cleverly, and a dizzying selection of literary works—both high art and low—is employed in tracing the many archetypes. So, for instance, Freud’s master narrative is a comedy (!), just like those of Aristophanes and Shakespeare—and indeed, like Hollywood movies—and more interestingly, when Frye does the work of making smaller, more controversial divisions and evaluations, the groups and narrative affinities he described do not strictly correspond to historical periods: You may find that His Girl Friday has more in common with, say, A Midsummer’s Night Dream, than do The Merry Wives of Windsor and Dr. Strangelove (in fact, you would—the first two comedies are closer to romance, the latter two to irony).

So here’s the question. If I don’t think literature has a synoptic structure, what use is Anatomy of Criticism? I’ve been struggling to articulate where this skepticism comes from. Yesterday, it was clarified by a professor I met to talk about graduate school.

She said, more or less in passing, that although English departments talk about being interdisciplinary, transnational, and the rest of it, basically they were interested in provable historical adjacencies. To show that Blake’s idea of revolution anticipated post-colonial conversations (or is a meaningful part of them), you should find articles about the Haitian revolution in the papers he was reading. Further, English professors, these days, are frankly more interested in, say, how Ghanain independence relates to Portnoy’s complaint (both end of the fifties), than in how Roth’s vision of masculinity in the novel relates to, say, Henry James’s. The latter is basically the subject of a book, because you’ll need 200 pages to move a half century or century (or more likely, the book’ll just be four unconnected essays, and the “relates to” will be an illusion anyway).

I think this sensibility is a more precise version of my skepticism. The issue isn’t just the “single literary canon,” it’s the whole idea that one can move easily between historical periods, that, whether because of the conscious design of the writer or, as Frye thinks, the shared literary structures within which they end up working necessarily, the most interesting things to say about them would be based on structural affinities, rather than historical adjacencies. (Needless to say, physical books themselves are the historical adjacencies between the “deep past” and the present: Homer’s Iliad is historically adjacent to me because of the Fagels translation sitting on my shelf which I read in college.)

Now, while I am interested in theoretical answers to my skepticism (i.e., I’m not sure we’ve taken the right tack in discounting literary arguments that aren’t historically local, and I think Fagels and Lattimore are quite important), I also want to put forward an argument for how literary structure can help us construct arguments that are ultimately historically local. So that’s the plan for the next post.