Dec. 10: We Don't Like the Verdict, Therefore There is No Justice
Luigi Mangione sets untenable example; ADL says Jews are locked out of secretarial jobs; Pope Francis puts Jesus in a keffiyeh
The Big Story
Last Friday, the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg appeared to be playing a dirty trick to avoid a mistrial in the Daniel Penny case. Penny is, of course, the former Marine who put Jordan Neely, a crazed homeless man who was threatening violence on a subway car, into a headlock; Neely died, evidently from being subdued. The jury claimed it was deadlocked over the most serious charge, second-degree manslaughter, and the prosecution moved to drop that charge to allow the jurors to consider a lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide. By averting a mistrial, it seemed, the prosecution was hoping to nail Penny on the secondary charge, which could only be dealt with following a verdict on the manslaughter charge. It was widely expected that the jurors would reach a compromise among themselves—deadlocked on the top charge and guilty on the lesser charge.
But the jury came back Monday and acquitted Penny entirely, finding him not culpable in the death of Neely. Some courtroom observers wonder if the jury, annoyed by protesters outside baying for a guilty verdict, returned a not-guilty verdict out of spite. Certainly, passions were running high. The case reminded observers of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in which the teenage Rittenhouse shot three rioters who were directly threatening him, killing two. He, too, was accused of vigilantism. Others with longer memories recalled the 1984 case of Bernhard Goetz, the spectacled white subway rider who was accosted by a gang of Black muggers and shot all of them. He, too, was acquitted by a Manhattan jury all too familiar with the parlous state of mass transit at the time.
Leftists went predictably ballistic, at least rhetorically, following the verdict. The New York Working Families Party called it “a modern-day lynching,” as did socialist Queens council member Tiffany Cabán—a former public defender who came extremely close to being elected Queens district attorney in 2019. The NAACP posted, “The acquittal of Daniel Penny in the death of Jordan Neely has effectively given license for vigilante justice to be waged on the Black community without consequence.” Hawk Newsome, a Bronx rabble-rouser who fashions himself the leader of the local Black Lives Matter movement, shouted threats at Penny after his acquittal and called openly for “Black vigilantes” to answer the “white supremacist” jury that freed him.
Other less fiery but no less meretricious officials mouthed sad words about how the system “failed” Neely. Public Advocate Jumaane Williams—who unaccountably lives on an Army base in Brooklyn—wrote, “Jordan Neely needed aid—and intervention would have meant food, or shelter, or mental health support. … Instead he was met with violence. Jordan Neely is dead, and Daniel Penny is being celebrated, and that is neither safety nor justice.” City Comptroller Brad Lander, a candidate for mayor, called the death of Neely “an indictment of our system.” Neely was, according to Lander, “crying out for mental health care.” New York City, said Lander, “cannot be a city where there is no consequence for killing someone.”
But of course, there was both “justice” and “consequence” for Penny after his actions resulted in the death of Neely. He was put on trial for manslaughter and could have faced decades in prison. If he had not been arrested, one could argue that he would have faced no consequences or justice, but what Williams and Lander mean is that they don’t like the verdict. This is common among those who see the justice system as a quantum-level phenomenon: We only know if the trial was fair when the jury returns the correct verdict.
Moreover, the idea that Neely was denied “intervention” in the form of mental health treatment, housing, or food is nonsense. New York spends billions of dollars on social services—including many hundreds of millions of dollars spread across multiple city and state agencies addressing housing, mental health and food assistance—and it is a certainty that Neely had hundreds of interactions with its vast human-services network: He was arrested dozens of times and frequently “diverted” into treatment. According to The New York Times, Neely was on the “Top 50” list of “the homeless people living on the street whom officials consider most urgently in need of assistance and treatment.” In 2021, Neely was arrested for beating up an old woman and breaking her nose; he was ordered to reside at a treatment center, which he abandoned after two weeks, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Social workers approached Penny in a subway car a few weeks before his death, and he attempted to pee on them. “An outreach worker noted that he was aggressive and incoherent. ‘He could be a harm to others or himself if left untreated,’ the worker wrote,” reports the Times.
Far from “being denied access to stable housing and health care, and then dehumanized for it,” in the words of Cabán, Neely received extensive care from the human-services network, which poured untold hours and dollars trying to help him. New York State has one of the most robust laws in the country for mandating treatment for the seriously mentally ill who pose a threat to themselves or others, but Kendra’s Law is woefully underutilized because it is essentially coercive and ultimately has carceral implications. It’s true that the system failed Neely, but not in the sense meant by anti-law-enforcement politicians, whose answer to the problem is always to add funding to the human-services complex, preferably at the expense of policing. The system that failed him is precisely the system they designed, which includes the convenient excuse that its gravest malfunctions are always the fault of a heartless, racist society that has starved it of adequate funding.
IN THE BACK PAGES: Daniel Salomon on André Spire, France’s prophet of Jewish dis-assimilation
The Rest
→The arrest at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s of Luigi Mangione, the suspected and likely murdered of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, ended the manhunt for the notorious assassin, who briefly became the darling of the “dirtbag left” for brazenly shooting an unsuspecting executive in the back on Sixth Avenue. Mangione, it emerges, is the scion of a Maryland property dynasty, an Ivy League graduate and, until recently, a counselor for rising freshmen at Stanford University. Murdering a health insurance executive has been cited as a cause for “joy,” in the words of journalist and long COVID awareness advocate Taylor Lorenz, who used just that word to describe her feelings to Piers Morgan. She and many others insist that Thompson, whose company routinely limits medical coverage in the course of business, has “murdered” tens of thousands of suffering people in the pursuit of profits. Mangione, evidently a Unabomber enthusiast, reportedly underwent complicated back surgery in the past year, which had driven him around the bend and sparked an unhealthy obsession with the health-care industry and its supposed inhumanity.
Lorenz and other spokespeople for terrorist violence are hopeful that the killing of Thompson will provoke conversation about the United States’ need to institute a form of single-payer health care, such as Canadians enjoy. The profit motive, they say, has no place in the calculus of the need for medical treatment. But they overlook the cold fact that every health-care system in the world has restrictions, either in the form of money or overt rationing. The idea that doctors should determine the scope and extent of necessary procedures sounds appealing at first, but unrealistic. Imagine if society had a single-payer car insurance system, and auto-body repairmen were in charge of deciding how extensively cars should be fixed following collisions. With no limiting principle as to cost, every car would be chromed out and rehabilitated beyond factory-line specifications. The point is that if you are going to justify murdering health-care executives because they limit care, you will have to justify the slaughter of Health Canada actuaries, too.
→Everyone has heard of the studies that applied to jobs using identical résumés under different names—one with no perceptive ethnic association other than white Protestant, the other characteristically African American—and saw different response rates, which prove that employers are biased against minority applicants. Now, having conducted a similar study using Jewish-sounding names or affiliations, the Anti-Defamation League has discovered some “troubling” results. The New York Post reports:
Job applicants with Jewish names or Jewish-linked prior employers were less likely to get responses for administrative assistant gigs, a troubling new study by the Anti-Defamation League Wednesday claims.
The ADL conducted a field experiment that sent out 3,000 applications for administrative assistant job postings via Craigslist.org between May and October of this year in 23 cities across the country.
The positive response rate was 3.4% lower for Jewish Americans and 4.9% lower for Israeli-Americans compared to other backgrounds such as those with Italian or Irish heritage, according to the report.
Jews getting 3.4% fewer responses for receptionist jobs may not be Nuremberg Laws-level injustice, but it could indicate discrimination in the job market, especially if it turns out that Jews are underrepresented among administrative assistants nationwide. Perhaps the ADL ought to run this experiment along other occupational lines, including HVAC technicians, home health-care aides, NFL cornerbacks, and farriers. These professions are notable for having low Jewish penetration, and antisemitism among hiring agents could be the problem.
→The collapse of the Syrian regime will have untold ramifications, and it may be unrealistic to put excessive hope into the promises of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham to respect the rights of minority populations, seek coexistence with Israel, and generally undo decades of repression by the Assad regime. But only the hardest of hearts could gainsay the relief and joy of Syrian exiles, dissidents, and average people alike who are exhilarated by the sudden collapse of the regime and the flight of Bashar al-Assad to Russia. Millions of Syrian refugees abroad now face a major question of whether to return to a country that underwent a catastrophic war. Turkey, which has at least 3 million Syrian refugees, appears ready for them to leave; Austria, which has 100,000, is making arrangements to begin deporting them. The United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Greece, and Germany have halted asylum applications. At a time when Europe has grown weary of answering the world’s refugee problems, the fall of Assad should provide a test case for reversing the flow of the human tide north.
→The Pope attended the opening of a Nativity scene in the Vatican last week that contained a controversial symbol: The infant Jesus lay swaddled in a keffiyeh, the Palestinian scarf that has become the blazon and standard of the international antizionist left. Inserting the keffiyeh into the crèche is especially inflammatory at this moment because of the annoying and anachronistic claim by activists that Jesus was a “Palestinian refugee.” The antizionist movement is addicted to falsifications of myth and history, as when it points to the use of the word Palestine on coins and maps made prior to 1948 as proof that Palestine, in the contemporary, post-1967 sense, existed as an independent political entity. This crude Orwellian reconstruction of the past is transparently false but serves to fool historically illiterate college students and other useless idiots of the pro-Palestine movement into believing that Israel planted itself atop an already-existing country. Bergoglio surely knows better than to allow the Vatican to embrace this vulgar historiography, which has fashioned continuous human presence in the Levant over the millennia as a direct line of Palestinian blood-and-soil indigeneity. But his Jesuitical liberationist prejudices are clearly overriding decades of progress that the Church has made in overcoming centuries of antisemitic dogma.
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By moving federal agencies out of D.C., Donald Trump can put the government back in touch with the people it serves while spreading federal dollars more equally, to places that need them
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André Spire, France’s Prophet of Dis-Assimilation
In the wake of October 7th, American Jews are learning some of the same lessons
By Daniel Solomon
André Spire (1868-1966) lived multiple rich lives across two centuries, which was long enough to see himself vindicated. Poet, activist, civil servant, negotiator, he became the enfant terrible of French Jewry upon the publication of his Poèmes Juifs in 1908. Proclaiming a renaissance of Jewish art and literature in France, his poetry collection was a succès à scandale that mocked the bourgeois quest for social acceptance and economic gain, repudiating the dominant ethos of assimilation and embracing the Jewish nationalist cause. Life imitated art: He soon emerged as France’s foremost Zionist, speaking at the Paris Peace Conference and securing his country’s endorsement of the Balfour Declaration. Not the sort to push himself to the front of the parade, he assumed secondary titles in the organizations he had himself founded. This aversion to self-promotion has sometimes occluded his central role in these events.
Ever since emancipation, Jewish existence has oscillated between the poles of assimilation and return. Like the French Jews of the belle époque, American Jews have seen their certainties melt into air since the Hamas pogrom. Trusted institutions—chief among them the universities—seethe with crude anti-Jewish resentment and prejudice only lightly disguised as a hatred for "genocidal Zionism." The dream of an insouciant, seamless integration in which Jewish particularity can be easily celebrated and easily evaded has been shattered. And in that nightmare has begun a responsibility to reassess our relationship to the majority society and how it wishes to define us. Spire’s poetry and prose—in addition to his exceptional life—ought to serve as a guide in that process.
***
Born to a family of Franco Jewish industrialists in the eastern city of Nancy, Spire had an enchanted upbringing—excursions into the woods, instruction in sports, immersion in literature, music, and the humanities. Judaism, in the attenuated form generated by a century of assimilation, was a garment worn lightly—ever present but hardly exigent. French Jews expressed a serene confidence in these middle decades of the 19th century—the new republican regime born from the defeat from the Franco-Prussian War seemed to have cleared away the rubble of la France ancienne of throne and altar. The French Revolution’s implicit accord with the Jews—acculturation in exchange for admission—appeared to have succeeded. No Jewish community in the world could rival the French Jews in terms of political rights and social mobility.
The French Jewish fusion reached its apogee in the penultimate decade of the 19th century—on the centenary of the Revolution, rabbis delivered sermons hailing the event as “a great social Passover” and saluting France as the heir of the ancient Hebrew commonwealth. But the antisemitic tempest’s nimbus had already appeared at France’s eastern horizon. In 1888, Maurice Barrès, the city’s literary icon and exponent of romantic nationalism, smeared Spire’s father, Édouard, as a representative of "Jewish Capital." At a real estate auction, one of Barrès’ henchmen tried to outbid Édouard for a house, declaring “this French home will not be owned by that dirty Jew.” André, then performing his compulsory military service in a mounted division, challenged the offender to a duel. He moved to Paris and earned a spot through competitive examination on the Conseil d’Etat, the prestigious legal body that ensures legislation respects the constitution.
Spire soon attracted the notice of the antisemites at La Libre Parole, Édouard Drumont’s notorious penny press, who slimed him and other Jews as having cheated to secure their position on the Conseil d’État. He met insolence with intransigence, demanding that the author face him in a duel; Spire, as he would later recall, received “three centimeters of iron in the forearm” for his moxie.
The fin-de-siècle in Paris had raised conviviality to an art form—the café-concert on the square, the refined conversation in the salon, the costume ball at the dance hall. French Jews were no strangers to these rococo delights—Jacques Offenbach practically created the comic opera; Paris’ greatest salonnières, Geneviève Straus (Georges Bizet’s wife) and Léontine Lippmann (muse to Anatole France), were Jews. But André was a Spire, not a Swann (though he did count Proust as an acquaintance!). He detested the drawing rooms and table settings of the bourgeois; he preferred the factory floor and scanty cupboards of the proletariat.
Spire’s philanthropic instinct arose from his outrage at the inequalities of industrial society, to which he had been exposed at an early age through his father’s business. Édouard Spire paid for workers’ compensation and maternity leave long before the law mandated it. But these were modest salves for the ravages of "the satanic mills." André observed in his memoirs that in the factory “the ruddy, gay boys from school turn[ed] pale and jaundiced, flowers wilting straightaway; the girls becoming premature shriveled, embittered crones.”
Encountering the destitute of the capital, he and several colleagues decided to form a charitable organization, La Société des Visiteurs, which in today’s parlance would be termed a social services agency. The initiative, which helped tens of thousands of people over its 20-year run, tried to help its beneficiaries turn their lives around. The visitors consulted with the needy and determined what had caused their descent into poverty, e.g., an accident, an ailment, etc., and then provided funds and services to remedy for this. The organization arranged for doctors’ visits, personal hygiene and grooming, and children’s activities. Spire added on to this a popular education initiative, L’Enseignement mutuel, in order that bourgeois and proletarian might learn from each other—the former about the conditions of the lower classes, and the latter about the high culture of the age.
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The Dreyfus affair, in which bourgeois liberals and socialist workers saved the French Republic from its monarchist, ultra-Montanist enemies, lent energy and urgency to Spire’s endeavors. Spire belonged to a generation of privileged men who discarded the economic liberalism of their fathers to clamor for labor rights and far-reaching social reform. Even as he still backed private charity, he increasingly believed that the state had to be the prime agent of economic uplift. He oriented his own career around that aim, transferring from the Conseil d’État to the Labor Ministry, where he conducted research into new regimes of factory inspection and labor arbitration.
Spire’s brief brought him to the East End of London. Westminster had adopted reforms to curb abuses against laborers who turned out piecework at home—many of these laborers happened to be Jewish women. Eastern European Jews had streamed in by the tens of thousands to the United Kingdom from the Russian Empire. Spire encountered a community whose Jewishness encompassed its national identity, language, culture, religion, and politics. He reveled in the East Enders’ vitality and unabashed expression of a distinct cultural identity.
French Jews, he now saw, had paid too high a price for their economic and social integration—having been accepted on sufferance after divesting themselves of pride of culture and origins. The French Revolution’s creation of a civic nation in which adherence to the rights of man mattered more than descent or religion could not be gainsaid. Spire never renounced the heritage of the 18th century, and framed his battle against antisemitism in terms of a wider war on racism and inequality. But the men of ’89 had conflated universalism and uniformity, equality and sameness. French Jews’ distinct past, he now saw, ought not be viewed as an impediment to a common present and future.
Spire’s desire to revise the brutal bargain of emancipation presaged his adoption of Zionism. Eastern European Jewish newcomers—whether to France or Britain—began to change the century-old conversation in both countries about emancipation and assimilation. The Zionist movement was making inroads among the nascent, burgeoning immigrant communities of Paris; the death in 1904 of its tragic hero, Theodor Herzl, intensified the discussion.
Spire declared himself a Zionist for the first time in a letter to his mother, dated Oct. 12, 1904. “I believe that the doctrine of assimilation is a false promise, and I have too much admiration for the Jewish race to desire its absorption. But a nation in perpetual exile cannot be happy. It needs a territory. Thus, I feel that I am a Zionist,” he reasoned. He continued: “I do not feel much enthusiasm to live with Poles [Polish Jews], but it would be much better to live with them than with many Christians … So, ‘next year in Jerusalem.’”
He elaborated further on his evolution in a second missive dispatched to his mother on Oct. 26, 1904: “Living in a new state would be very seductive to me … and above all working for the improvement of the Jews of the East and Russia. They cannot live in their country and when they emigrate, you curse them,” he admonished. “When a flood of Poles arrives in Nancy, I see all of you blanch. Because they disturb you in your blissful assimilation,” he added. He concluded that even French Jews content in their assimilation ought to embrace Zionism out of self-interest—a Jewish state would receive those Eastern European Jews who incensed antisemites upon their arrival in the West.
***
The next month, November 1904, marked a pivotal event: the appearance of the French translation of Israel Zangwill’s short story "Chad Gadya" in the Cahiers de la Quinzaine. Zangwill, a British Jewish dramatist and advocate of territorialism (i.e., the founding of a Jewish state in a land that was not necessarily Palestine), captured the anguish of many in the tale of an assimilated Jew returning home to Venice for a Passover Seder. The ceremonial meal, and one of its last songs, “Chad Gadya,” remind him of all that he lost in the brutal bargain of assimilation. Estranged from his native milieu and barred from full integration into broader European society, he drowns himself in a Venice canal.
Spire recounted a half-century later the tremendous effect the story had on him, recalling: “‘Chad Gadya’ revealed a profusion of images, captivated me with its multiple associations. It had the same effect on me as a crystal in an oversaturated liquid. This was no less than a return, a conversion … I became a Jew with a capital ´J.’ And in addition to a French poet, a Jewish poet, too.”
The appearance of Poèmes Juifs (1908) announced Spire’s debut as an unbending opponent of assimilation and indefatigable proponent of Zionism. The poet did not mince words, prefacing the collection with this verse: “You ask me why I love these pariahs / the sole proletariat for which I still can hope.”
Spire’s poems savaged the Franco Jewish consensus and the figure of the assimilated Jew. In “Assimilation,” he mocks a Jewish bourgeois who seeks to blend into the crowd. The poem’s unnamed protagonist scrutinizes himself for the slightest deviation from the norm—in deportment, speech, hand gestures, nose shape, hair texture—and reassures himself that he can fit in. The poet breaks in in the last stanzas to upbraid this French Jewish bourgeois:
You are so pleased with yourself! Your nose is almost symmetrical, goodness me! And then again, many Christians have a nose somewhat askew. You are so pleased with yourself! Your hair barely curls anymore, goodness me! And then again not all Christians have straight hair. You are so pleased with yourself! You are almost no longer dolichocephalic! And then again not all Christians have a rounded cranium! You are so pleased with yourself! Your facial expression is almost completely a cipher! And then again many Christians move their face muscles! You are so pleased with yourself! Your shoulders and arms hardly gesticulate! And then again Christians sometimes speak with their hands! You are so pleased with yourself! The Christians invite you to all their parties! And you carry yourself almost as badly as they do! In a button-down, polo, smoking jacket, or blazer, You have learned to crow: “Delicious, Admirable!” With the same aplomb as the rest of them! You are so pleased with yourself! They are taking you along with them to finish out the night, There where all their amusements will end! Hands full, mouths full, They are having a grand time! What are you doing in your corner, awkward and sad? So pitiful, so contemptible Jew, you lack nerve! So many contortions, constraints, So much avoidance to remain there. Carry yourself correctly, do like the others Or they will laugh at your nose. And chase away your old noble soul, Which even here seeks you out.
Spire’s dandy goes so far as to deny the realities of his own body in a bid for social admission. He amputates parts of his essential being—even according to Spire, his soul. And the operation does not succeed; a gaffe could result in him being noticed as a Jew and ridiculed for his appearance. Such a figure rates as affected and contemptible—he has relinquished his dignity and self-respect and failed to gain much in return.
The alternative to the lily-livered Israélite in Spire’s new mythos comes in the form of a new Jewish man ready to avenge the indignities of millennia. In “Écoute, Israel,” Spire advances an argument common to the Zionists of the age: The Jewish people must not patiently wait for their salvation in God’s good time. Rather, in a form of secular messianism, they must abandon the quiescence of the prophets and embrace the agency of the moderns. He concludes the poem—which in an Orthodox setting might be considered a blasphemy against Judaism’s holiest prayer—in this spirit:
Hear O Israel: The torrents still disgorge round stones, For the slings of future Davids, The quarries are full of grindstones, To sharpen the tips of your old swords, You will find forges, hammers, anvils, To repair the plowshares of your old carts, And curved Brownings that roar at each shot. Hear O Israel: To arms!
In this poetry collection—the content of which proved so explosive that Spire had to find a second publisher—the artist strove to redefine French Jews’ relationship to France. Spire could not renounce the French canon on which he had been reared. He had no desire to cast aside the land and language of his birth—and as a poet, how could he do so. But he was also conscious that France, once the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church, had a history of denigrating the figure of the Jew. He exhorted his fellow French Jews to resist forms of assimilation that entailed the community’s wholesale disappearance.
The next month, November 1904, marked a pivotal event: the appearance of the French translation of Israel Zangwill’s short story "Chad Gadya" in the Cahiers de la Quinzaine. Zangwill, a British Jewish dramatist and advocate of territorialism (i.e., the founding of a Jewish state in a land that was not necessarily Palestine), captured the anguish of many in the tale of an assimilated Jew returning home to Venice for a Passover Seder. The ceremonial meal, and one of its last songs, “Chad Gadya,” remind him of all that he lost in the brutal bargain of assimilation. Estranged from his native milieu and barred from full integration into broader European society, he drowns himself in a Venice canal.
Spire recounted a half-century later the tremendous effect the story had on him, recalling: “‘Chad Gadya’ revealed a profusion of images, captivated me with its multiple associations. It had the same effect on me as a crystal in an oversaturated liquid. This was no less than a return, a conversion … I became a Jew with a capital ´J.’ And in addition to a French poet, a Jewish poet, too.”
The appearance of Poèmes Juifs (1908) announced Spire’s debut as an unbending opponent of assimilation and indefatigable proponent of Zionism. The poet did not mince words, prefacing the collection with this verse: “You ask me why I love these pariahs / the sole proletariat for which I still can hope.”
Spire’s poems savaged the Franco Jewish consensus and the figure of the assimilated Jew. In “Assimilation,” he mocks a Jewish bourgeois who seeks to blend into the crowd. The poem’s unnamed protagonist scrutinizes himself for the slightest deviation from the norm—in deportment, speech, hand gestures, nose shape, hair texture—and reassures himself that he can fit in. The poet breaks in in the last stanzas to upbraid this French Jewish bourgeois:
You are so pleased with yourself! Your nose is almost symmetrical, goodness me! And then again, many Christians have a nose somewhat askew. You are so pleased with yourself! Your hair barely curls anymore, goodness me! And then again not all Christians have straight hair. You are so pleased with yourself! You are almost no longer dolichocephalic! And then again not all Christians have a rounded cranium! You are so pleased with yourself! Your facial expression is almost completely a cipher! And then again many Christians move their face muscles! You are so pleased with yourself! Your shoulders and arms hardly gesticulate! And then again Christians sometimes speak with their hands! You are so pleased with yourself! The Christians invite you to all their parties! And you carry yourself almost as badly as they do! In a button-down, polo, smoking jacket, or blazer, You have learned to crow: “Delicious, Admirable!” With the same aplomb as the rest of them! You are so pleased with yourself! They are taking you along with them to finish out the night, There where all their amusements will end! Hands full, mouths full, They are having a grand time! What are you doing in your corner, awkward and sad? So pitiful, so contemptible Jew, you lack nerve! So many contortions, constraints, So much avoidance to remain there. Carry yourself correctly, do like the others Or they will laugh at your nose. And chase away your old noble soul, Which even here seeks you out.
Spire’s dandy goes so far as to deny the realities of his own body in a bid for social admission. He amputates parts of his essential being—even according to Spire, his soul. And the operation does not succeed; a gaffe could result in him being noticed as a Jew and ridiculed for his appearance. Such a figure rates as affected and contemptible—he has relinquished his dignity and self-respect and failed to gain much in return.
The alternative to the lily-livered Israélite in Spire’s new mythos comes in the form of a new Jewish man ready to avenge the indignities of millennia. In “Écoute, Israel,” Spire advances an argument common to the Zionists of the age: The Jewish people must not patiently wait for their salvation in God’s good time. Rather, in a form of secular messianism, they must abandon the quiescence of the prophets and embrace the agency of the moderns. He concludes the poem—which in an Orthodox setting might be considered a blasphemy against Judaism’s holiest prayer—in this spirit:
Hear O Israel: The torrents still disgorge round stones, For the slings of future Davids, The quarries are full of grindstones, To sharpen the tips of your old swords, You will find forges, hammers, anvils, To repair the plowshares of your old carts, And curved Brownings that roar at each shot. Hear O Israel: To arms!
In this poetry collection—the content of which proved so explosive that Spire had to find a second publisher—the artist strove to redefine French Jews’ relationship to France. Spire could not renounce the French canon on which he had been reared. He had no desire to cast aside the land and language of his birth—and as a poet, how could he do so. But he was also conscious that France, once the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church, had a history of denigrating the figure of the Jew. He exhorted his fellow French Jews to resist forms of assimilation that entailed the community’s wholesale disappearance.
Spire, in assuming the post of secretary general for La Ligue des Amis du Sionisme, was sought out by elements in the government favorable to the movement. André Tardieu, Georges Clemenceau’s aide-de-camp at Versailles, chose the poet and civil servant as a conduit between Zionist leaders and the French government. French Jewry’s top honchos inveighed against the nationalists. In order to placate them, both French Jewish Zionists and anti-Zionists were invited to present their case at the peace conference. Spire spoke for the former, while Sylvain Lévi, a scholar of Sanskrit, professor at the College de France, and future president of the Alliance Israelite Universelle represented official Franco Judaism. Lévi warned that a Jewish national home could become a hothouse of “Bolshevism” and raised the specter of “dual nationality” endangering Western Jews. Chaim Weizmann, who was in the audience, refused to shake hands with Lévi, calling him a traitor.
Spire concurred, and painted a devastating portrait of the Franco Jewish grandee in a recollection penned soon after the event. Lévi had become a “poor servant of his country” and “an enemy of his race.” As the beneficiary of “a privileged situation” who belonged to “those small clans spending their lives between the Jardin des Plantes and the Boulevard Saint-Michel [the toniest sections of Paris]” he could not comprehend the plight of Eastern European Jewry, let alone the modern world. Lévi had indeed visited the Holy Land, but as a habitue of “the frosted panes of the College de France” had been “blinded by the sunlight of the Orient.” He had returned to France to regurgitate his own preconceptions. Spire encouraged Lévi to return to his bubble: “The peace is here. We are demobilizing. Everyone must go back to his place. The horse to the racetrack, the professor to his obscurity.”
Spire closed his essay by citing a Talmudic legend in which an ascetic leaves his cave and hectors the am haaretz (salt of the earth) for being covered in sweat and caked in dirt. In the tale, God reproaches the sage for his severity: “Would you prefer, my friend, that they had white hands and a white soul like you and the whole world went hungry tonight?”
Here, Spire reprised against the French Jewish bourgeoisie the attacks he had leveled at the broader French bourgeoisie. The Jewish nationalist cause was framed in terms of class. Franco Jewish institutions represented the interests of comfortable, native-born notables desperate to protect their own position at any cost. Thrown to the wolves were the Jewish common man and woman.
At other times, Spire indicated that even the Franco Jewish elite might be redeemable. Writing in the Pages Libres in 1904, in the earliest of his essays on Zionism, he implied the movement could exercise a salutary effect on diaspora Jewry, too. Addressing "those who would hesitate to exile themselves from countries in which some have tried to make us believe we have a homeland,” he posed this question: “But what stops those Jews whose soul is more European than Jewish from spending most of their time in a European country, much like the men of all nations, who when residing in a foreign land feel stronger when their homeland is stronger?” He argued, “We will feel more protected than we do now in our current homelands, because we will no longer be wretches to whom one deigned to grant rights, but nationals of a great power capable of enforcing these rights, even by force.”
***
André Spire had the good fortune to see the mirage of his 30s become the reality of his 80s. The new Jewish state elevated his brother-in-arms, Chaim Weizmann, to the office of the presidency. Franco Judaism’s chieftains—a few of whom carried the assimilationist faith to the gas chamber—had to concede that he had been right. Spire himself was a marked man after the fall of France. He and his wife, Therese, secured an exit visa from the Vichy regime authorities in the spring of 1941, finding a wartime refuge in New York City. Spire’s editors had once lampooned him for his Zionism, affixing the title “Shall We Go to Jerusalem?” to an article of his. In the last decades of his long life, he could respond in the affirmative.
No time is the same, and the antisemitism of 19th-century France bears only a vague resemblance to the animus American Jews now encounter. André Spire cannot serve as a mold for the contemporary Jew—no one can, insofar as each man in each generation must resolve for himself the dialectic of assimilation and return.
But he can impart a set of lessons to contemporary American Jews. Never accept others’ distorted image of the Jew. Do not cede to the false promise of assimilation. Never simper after fair-weather friends. Transform sources of shame into points of pride. Give no quarter to antisemites. André Spire belongs to the useful and beloved past we must recover in order to make a Jewish future that may be as sustaining as the one that he helped to bring into being in the face of the most destructive hatred that the Jewish people had ever known.
"It’s true that the system failed Neely, but not in the sense meant by anti-law-enforcement politicians, whose answer to the problem is always to add funding to the human-services complex, preferably at the expense of policing. The system that failed him is precisely the system they designed, which includes the convenient excuse that its gravest malfunctions are always the fault of a heartless, racist society that has starved it of adequate funding." That is the key to a massive demise of Neely and others like him. Thankfully, Penny is exonerated, but I find it abominable that Neely's family is now suing Penny. Where have they been before??
Don’t be shocked by the current stances of the Vatican This is what liberation theology looks like