Raphael Magarik

Ever wonder why so many cars blow up in American novels and movies? I did:

Among the American contributions to world literature, perhaps least appreciated is the genre of automotive horror. To be sure, we are acknowledged to have invented the road trip, which was prophesied by Huck Finn and Lewis and Clark (whose rivers yearn to be highways) and shifted into full gear in the work of Jack Kerouac and Bob Dylan. Miles of paper have been spent analyzing our carefree, gas-guzzling quests and their values: freedom, wilderness, the ecstatic individual who sings America. We tend to pass over the ghosts that haunt this national romance, even though our nightmares are littered with murderous cars (Stephen King novels alone account for several), crazed motel managers, and buses which explode if they go below 50 miles per hour. Exactly what do these vehicular demons say about American freedom?

Go read the answer.

I dissect the politics surrounding the proposed Jewish State Law:

Since I read Anatomy of Criticism, I have been wondering how I could use Frye’s myth criticism, especially given that I’m skeptical of the idea of unified, transhistorical literary structure—whether of characters, genres, or stories. This is not a question, sadly, on which I make daily progress. But I do have two little thoughts, as a result of reading Surprised by Sin, about Frye’s approach.

1. Frye’s approach is, in effect, an invention of the Renaissance, and its technical name is “monomyth.” People like Milton used monomyth (or something very much like it—the word seems to have been coined later) to assimilate Greek myth and literature into the Christian scheme. If you love and respect Ovid, but you believe in Christian history and theology, it helps to identify the correspondences between the two and to identify the incarnated divine visits to Baucis and Philemon with, say, the annunciation scene. Obviously, at its core monomyth reflects some of the archetypal patterning of the Christian Bible, and its correspondences to the Hebrew Bible (which were used to retroactively read the Hebrew Bible christologically). But monomyth—the idea that all stories are at their heart one story, or parts of one—seems to have been spurred by the pressure to include extra-canonical voices (I don’t know if there’s work on whether the Age of Exploration played a role or not, but I would not be surprised).

In ways, these Early Modern assimilative desires also play themselves out in Frye’s work and context. Frye himself was ordained as a minister, and reading his books, you notice first of all the vast range of his references (all periods of literature, high and low, prose and poetry). Further, if Frank McConnell is to be believed, Frye appealed to students in the sixties in large part because, in opposition to the New Critical purism then “regnant,” Frye offered an inclusive, eclectic criticism. As scholars were just starting to tug at the seams of the canon, they needed an even vaster, more expansive monomyth.

2. I have no idea if these mythic threads are real, but they are ubiquitous. So, for instance, this morning, on my daily run, I was listening to Phil Ochs’s version of “The Ballad of The Carpenter,” Ewan MacColl’s politically radical retelling of Jesus’ life and death.

As you can tell from the title, the song foregrounds Jesus’ having been a worker, and he recounts the Passion as the story of a revolutionary (“he noticed how wealth and poverty / Live always side by side“) undermined by and betrayed to the “rich men.” I’ve always loved this song. But only this morning did I realize how deep its retelling goes.Continue reading “An Early Modern Phil Ochs”

Over at the Talmud blog, I review Elizabeth Shanks Alexander’s new book on women and timebound, positive commandments. For the last few decades, this obscure- and technical sounding category has been central to fights over feminism and Jewish law, because rabbinic texts seem to exempt women from those commands, excluding them from some of the central responsibilities of a Jewish adult. Alexander argues the term is not just technical in sound; its originators never intended it as anything other than a technical, structural device to help encode information better.

Implicit in the title of Elizabeth Shanks Alexander’s new book, Gender and Timebound Commandments in Judaism, is the question: What does gender have to do with “time-bound, positive commandments”? What motivates rabbinic texts to rule that women are exempt from those mitzvot? And as the phrase “in Judaism” implies, this question arrives entangled in important arguments over how Jewish women ought to practice today. Yet, while Alexander conceived the idea for the book, as she explains in the introduction, “in the shadow of a contemporary cultural debate,” she writes as a Talmudist. Thus, she restricts herself historically to pre-Medieval sources and methodologically to descriptive history. Further, within those frameworks, Alexander does not so much answer as destroy the original question. She argues that in classical Rabbinic literature, the rule does not express a substantive intuition about (or, in her term, “construct”) gender. The rule and its history tell us not about rabbinic attitudes towards gender, but about the transmission of rabbinic texts.

 

Read the rest!

The title of this post comes from Oberlin professor W. Arthur Turner’s otherwise unremarkable 1969 review of Stanley Fish’s critical masterpiece, Surprised by Sin. It is not hard to see why Turner thought what he did, since the thrust of Fish’s book was to defend Paradise Lost’s coherence and clarity as an Orthodox Christian text against the claims of those (most famously and remarkably, William Blake and William Empson) who had insisted that the text actually revealed God as a manipulative, illogical monster.

Fish’s book, which more or less inaugurated reader-response criticism, took the then-novel line of attributing many of the text’s apparently difficult moments (in which Satan seems appealing, or God mistaken, or the action absurd) to Milton’s pedagogical inclinations. The poem constantly tempts its readers to read it wrong, and then it pulls them up short. By doing so, it confronts us repeatedly with our own fallen state, and it helps us to reject our fallen intuitions.

But, of course, Mr. Fish was not, and is not, theologically orthodox or Christian (“traditional” is a trickier word). By all appearances, he is a lackadaisical Jew (a term I mean just descriptively). To the reader who knows that, the book’s persistent, closely argued explication of the orthodox Milton is a source of wonder, just as it was a source of error to Professor Turner.Continue reading ““Mr. Fish himself is surely an orthodox traditional Christian.””

After Netanyahu demanded the United States release Jonathan Pollard, I argue that Bibi’s appeasing his right-wing base and ask:

Why is there a Pollard card? Why does a convicted spy so inspire the right’s imagination? Why were there “We Want Pollard Home” signs all over Jerusalem for Obama’s visit? The answer, I think, is that many Israeli Zionists—especially religious ones, and especially American immigrants—who have a hard time facing the reality of a comfortable, assimilated American Jewry, prefer the cultural icon of a persecuted, ethnically loyal Pollard.

Here‘s the fuller story.

Why have people hated the Jews? David Nirenberg takes a crack at this one in his impressive, immense history of Anti-Judaism—which I reviewed for the Forward—arguing,

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.

My review of Eliyahu Stern’s The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism is up at The Forward:

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.

My latest at Open Zion: