What Happened Today: September 19, 2023
Netanyahu and Musk talk tech; New COVID boosters; City-owned grocery stores in Chicago
The Big Story
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged Tesla CEO Elon Musk to thwart antisemitism on his social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, during a live-streamed in-person discussion in Fremont, California, on Monday. “I encourage you and urge you to find the balance. It’s a tough one,” Netanyahu said. Facing accusations in recent months of tolerating hate speech on X, Musk argued that with upwards of 200 million posts on X per day, “some of those are gonna be bad.” Under new platform guidelines, objectionable posts won’t be removed but rather buried by the algorithm, upholding what Musk describes as “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach.”
Turning to the topic of AI, Netanyahu framed humanity’s choice in Jewish terms: “3,500 years ago, when Moses steered the children of Israel to the Promised Land, he said, ‘You’re going into the Promised Land, and you’re going to find a choice between two things: a blessing and a curse.’ And he said, ‘You’d better choose the blessing.’” Netanyahu went on to say that he feels the choice is similar for humanity going forward, adding, “The blessings of AI are amazing. We see them already … We see the addition of decades of life to the human lifespan, precision medicine dedicated to every person’s genetic composition, robots who care for the elderly,” and more.
Discussing the potential downfalls of AI, Musk, who has been one of the loudest voices warning of the technology’s existential risks, noted that the chances of “rogue actors” using AI for ill remain fairly low due to the immense resources required to set up a computing center capable of producing a superintelligence.
At a nearby Tesla factory, demonstrators gathered to protest Netanyahu’s ongoing overhaul of Israel’s judiciary, a subject raised by Musk in the freewheeling discussion. Netanyahu replied that his original package of judicial reforms was a “mistake” but that he still intends to pass reforms related to judicial selection—a “minor correction,” he said.
You can watch the full sit-down here: https://twitter.com/netanyahu/status/1704181356991774933
In The Back Pages: Norman Manea’s Exiled Shadow
The Rest
→ Despite claims that the Biden administration’s new immigration policy was reducing the flow of migrants crossing the U.S. southern border, the numbers are rapidly ticking back up, especially in the past three weeks, according to the Department of Homeland Security. On Sunday alone, Border Patrol took more than 7,500 migrants into custody, up from the daily July average of 4,300. And the detainees aren’t just single adult men. In the Rio Grande Valley area of Texas, Border Patrol reports that last week it saw an average of 150 unaccompanied children each day, up from an average of 94 in June.
→ Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ignited an international firestorm on Monday when he implicated the government of India in the murder of a Canadian citizen. Trudeau made the accusation in an address to Canada’s parliament, saying that Canadian law enforcement was “pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the Government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar.” Nijjar was a Canadian of Indian origin and the president of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara temple in Surrey, British Columbia, where he was gunned down June 18. Nijjar was also a Sikh separatist, wanted in India for terrorism charges. After the announcement, Canada expelled an Indian diplomat, and on Tuesday, India expelled a Canadian diplomat in turn, saying in a statement, “Allegations of the Government of India’s involvement in any act of violence in Canada are absurd.”
→ Republican presidential candidate Sen. Tim Scott took a hard line on the United Auto Workers strike against the big three automakers at a Monday campaign event, echoing President Ronald Reagan’s decision to fire striking federal employees in the 1980s. When asked how he would handle the auto worker walkout, Scott invoked the Gipper: “He said, you strike, you’re fired. Simple concept to me. To the extent that we can use that once again, absolutely.” Scott has been vocal in his opposition to unions in general, and he drew a distinction between himself and the incumbent, President Joe Biden. “I mean this to be sincere—I’m not sure if the words are bought and paid for, but certainly he has been leased by the unions.”
→ Number of the Day: 24%
That’s the estimated number of Americans who are likely to receive another COVID-19 booster this fall, according to Pfizer CFO David Denton. The FDA has emergency use authorized a new booster from both Pfizer and Moderna for use in the coming months, though Tablet contributor Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the new boosters have “no human-outcomes data,” and he warned that pushing the shots without such data “makes a mockery of the scientific method and our regulatory process.” Nonetheless, a recent Politico poll shows that 57% of Americans will “probably” or “definitely” get the booster, including 79% of Democrats and 39% of Republicans. Tablet contributor and Stanford professor Dr. Vinay Prasad weighed in on X with his own estimate, writing, “Probably 7-10% will take it. No one wants unproven medicines.”
→ Last Friday, emergency workers arrived at a day care in the Bronx run by 36-year-old Grei Mendez to find multiple toddlers unconscious, with symptoms of opioid exposure. Two of the three toddlers survived with hospital treatment, but 1-year-old Nicholas Feliz Dominici was pronounced dead at Montefiore Medical Center. Detectives found further evidence of opioid exposure in the form of multiple “kilo press[es]” in the home as well as a kilo of fentanyl in a closet outside the room of Mendez’s tenant, Carlisto Acevedo Brito. Police arrested both Mendez and Brito on Saturday evening on murder charges. Andres Aranda, Mendez’s lawyer, claims she is innocent. “Why would someone who knows they have fentanyl in their apartment call the police?” Aranda said.
→ Crypto jester Sam Bankman-Fried’s parents may also have been involved in his web of crime. The legal team responsible for returning stolen FTX and Alameda funds to investors filed a new lawsuit on Monday against Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried for using “their access and influence within the FTX enterprise to enrich themselves … and knowingly at the expense of debtors.” The lawsuit also alleges that Joseph Bankman used “his command of tax law and unique understanding of the FTX Group’s muddled corporate structure” to arrange a $10 million payment to himself and Fried that has been used to fund their son’s legal fees, and that they also received a Bahamian estate that cost $18,914,327 from FTX funds belonging to investors.
→ Arab Member of Knesset Ahmad Tibi has sent a letter to the Euroleague asking it to investigate Israeli basketball club Maccabi Tel Aviv because of a new “cooperation agreement” that the heavy-hitting ball club signed last week with the much smaller Elitzur Shomron, based in the West Bank. Tibi wrote, “As is known, international law treats settlements as occupied territory, including Samaria, as illegal. These settlements are an obstacle to the peace process, and they are ostracized by the international community. By entering into such an agreement, Maccabi Tel Aviv is supporting an entity that operates in violation of international law.” The Jerusalem Post, however, points out that, “Elitzur Shomron in fact hosts its games in Ganei Tikva, which is not located in Samaria.”
→ After losing four Chicago-area Walmarts earlier this year and one nearby Whole Foods last year, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, in collaboration with nonprofit advocacy group Economic Security Project, is proposing the creation of city-owned grocery stores in areas designated as “food deserts.” Steve Boulton, chairman of the Chicago Republican Party, told the New York Post that while “food deserts do exist in Chicago neighborhoods … the answer is promoting capitalist prosperity and stopping crime, not injecting more socialist dependency.” When the Whole Foods in the city’s Englewood neighborhood closed last year, local resident Linda Johnson told Block Club Chicago, “I don’t want this space to be vacant. We have enough vacancies in our community. This is a big footprint to fill.”
TODAY IN TABLET:
Kiddushin 37 by Take One
Our bodies, ourselves
The Survivors’ Temple by Carol Unger
On Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the 1960s, my parents didn’t belong to a synagogue, but they found an ad hoc congregation in an unlikely place for the High Holidays
Norman Manea’s Exiled Shadow
Freed from the dreary, nauseating oppression of Ceausescu’s communist surveillance state, the great Romanian author is thrown back on himself, books, and the Jews
By David Mikics
On Sept. 11, 2001, Norman Manea was teaching a class at Bard College on Nabokov’s Pnin. Manea cut his class short, noting the mismatch between the unfolding terrorist atrocity and Nabokov’s delightful novel about a hapless émigré professor. History had arrived with a vengeance, but hardly for the first time in Manea’s life. Born in Bukovina (like Paul Celan, another Romanian Jew), Manea was sent at the age of 5 to a concentration camp in Transnistria, where he remained until the end of the war. As a teenager he was briefly a passionate communist, but he soon turned away from Romania’s Draconian regime, which at one point tossed his father in prison for loaning someone a bicycle. During Ceausescu’s long tyranny Manea became a distinguished Romanian author, continually harassed by the state and refusing to court the dictator’s favor. Manea turned down several chances to emigrate to Israel, but finally left Romania in 1986, going first to Berlin and then to America.
At the age of 87, Manea retells his story in his new autobiographical novel, Exiled Shadow—subtitled “a novel in collage,” since it contains lengthy excerpts from authors ranging from Thomas Mann to Junichiro Tanizaki. These quoted passages encircle the meandering, curious tale of an aged Romanian Jewish professor in love with his half-sister, who has several names (Tamar, Tamara, Agatha). She is mirrored by other tantalizing women—an English teacher, a professor, a rabbi. The hero exchanges letters about the communist past with his friend Günther, a German who hosts him during his stay in Berlin. Eventually, he arrives in America, and teaches at a college that resembles Bard.
The spur for Exiled Shadow was Peter Schlemihl, a slight yet haunting novella from 1814 by Adelbert von Chamisso. In Chamisso’s story, Peter Schlemihl sells his shadow to a man in a gray suit in exchange for an inexhaustible bag of money. But Peter soon discovers that he cannot go out in daylight without being ridiculed. Everywhere he goes, people can see he lacks a shadow. He can never become ordinary; his presence is shocking. Women spurn him, reacting with pity and horror. Peter refuses to sell his soul to the man in gray in order to get his shadow back. Instead, he throws away his bag of gold and magically acquires seven-league boots, which enable him to travel to the farthest reaches of the globe and devote himself to the solitary study of natural science.
Chamisso was not a Jew, but his Peter Schlemihl has many Jewish overtones. The word schlemihl, derived from Shelumiel, a biblical name identified by the Talmud (Sanhedrin 82b) with the sex-addled Zimri of Numbers 25:14, still means a luckless loser—“Jewish texts say these lost ones are loved by God,” Manea notes. Exiled from the ranks of the normal, Peter resembles a Jew who has achieved wealth but lacks a shadow, i.e., the bourgeois solidity of the surrounding gentiles. Chamisso dedicated his eccentric tale to his friend Julius Eduard Hitzig, a Jewish convert to Christianity. (Since he was French by birth, Chamisso, like the German Jews, was never considered a real German.) Late in the story, Peter is mistaken for a Jew because of his long beard. His trajectory in the novella’s final episodes resembles that of the Wandering Jew, doomed to travel the earth alone—though Peter, unlike the Wandering Jew, is happy in his solitude.
Manea’s most permanent book is October, Eight O’Clock, his collection of short stories about his childhood in the camp in Transnistria. The book is a miraculous compound of intrigue and pain, where Manea agilely inhabits a small boy’s point of view. Manea’s essays on politics and art in the Eastern bloc, collected in The Fifth Impossibility and On Clowns, rank with those by Havel and Milosz. Manea’s short story “The Interrogation,” from another collection, Compulsory Happiness, inspects the relation between a torturer and his victim with Dostoyevskian pointedness. Exiled Shadow, a rambling and tangent-obsessed book, cannot match these earlier works. Much of Manea’s life story is taken from his autobiography, The Hooligan’s Return, which is the book to read before this one.
But Exiled Shadow, loosely sketched as it is, has moments of great tenderness, like this dream of incest:
Tamar would curl up in her brother’s seashell, or eggshell, as they called it, or spoon, or lair, and they would fold themselves into each other, naked, skin on skin, two felines folded up, inseparable, one, as they wished, let the years, assaults, ages, and torrents pass over them. Nothing would touch them, untangle them.
Manea treasures this infantile symbiosis between the half-siblings, which recalls the brother-sister bond in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. Ever the bibliophile, he cites a short story by Patricia Highsmith in which she describes the intimate courtship of snails.
Manea is melancholic by nature, a sad fool rather than an antic one. His fancies, which seem so tenuous, have a slightly desperate appeal. “I no longer trust reality. I’ve replaced it with books,” he writes, and Exiled Shadow is a bookish fantasy, resembling some of Cynthia Ozick’s fictions in its metascholarly quest. Just as Peter Schlemihl remains outside of society in spite of his riches, so Manea’s novel recedes from the reader’s grasp. Exiled Shadow feels unanchored, a product of Western freedom rather than communism’s dark collective shadow.
Manea wrote in The Fifth Impossibility that “the one-party system provided its subjects with a shared obsession with survival—sought through opportunism—and the avoidance of confrontation.” Under communism, guilt was widely distributed and eagerly denied. When Manea left Romania and went into exile, he encountered a new world where people could take risks and be responsible for themselves, actions forbidden under communism. The amorphous West with its confusing possibilities clearly posed a quandary for Manea, whose writing had been so firmly located against the background of Romanian communism and fascism. Manea has for decades now lacked his essential subject, the grim reality of totalitarianism. His unexpected freedom may be less compelling a subject than his earlier bondage, but it is nonetheless something to celebrate.
Manea avoids naming Ceausescu in his novels and essays. Instead he calls him the chief buffoon or the white clown. Totalitarianism in Romania was a tragedy, but also a “grotesque comedy,” Manea notes. Like Idi Amin, Ceausescu was a gruesome cartoon of a dictator. Manea describes the ruler’s hunting parties, where tranquilized bears were starved for days before the hunt, and “our tiny national clown” took aim at them from his helicopter. Ceausescu was just “a little white mouse, a carrier of the plague: a death’s-head of nothingness,” Manea declares.
Romania became a surveillance state par excellence, so that no citizen could ever “divulge some secret of the state: the name of his factory, the measurement of pickle jars, the formula for the atomic bomb, the number of public urinals per city district, the clown’s nickname ...” Contact with foreigners was prohibited. Women were subjected to periodic gynecological examinations to make sure that they were not using birth control to cheat the nation of its future citizens. Authors, who needed a special permit to own a typewriter, had to submit to an annual interrogation.
In 1952, Manea the 15-year-old communist was secretary of the Union of Working Youth. “Lost in the glamour of the show’s magic, that solemn, glacial farce,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I was busily trying to cover up my doubts and embarrassment by stammering the routine inquisitorial slogans ... I had taken part in meetings, expulsions, informing, and assorted rituals, which, I must admit, had an enormous effect on the ego.” Unlike so many in postwar Eastern Europe, Manea suddenly renounced his beliefs, nauseated by the ceremony of persecution that was communism.
Manea sometimes cites Mihail Sebastian, whose novel For Two Thousand Years presents an uncanny vision of a Jew surrounded by antisemites in 1930s Bucharest. Sebastian’s adored mentor was the political economist Nae Ionescu—no relation to the playwright Eugen Ionescu (later Eugène Ionesco), that strident opponent of totalitarianism. Nae Ionescu, a magnetic lecturer, taught at the University of Bucharest, where Sebastian experienced constant antisemitic harassment. In 1934, Ionescu wrote a notorious preface to Sebastian’s novel, calling Sebastian by his given name, Iosif Hechter: “Judah suffers because it is Judah ... Iosif Hechter, you are sick ... The Messiah has come, Iosif Hechter, and you have had no knowledge of him ... Iosif Hechter, do you not feel that cold and darkness are enfolding you?” Sebastian was attacked for allowing the preface to appear, as if he were authorizing Ionescu’s antisemitic tirade. But Sebastian was really putting Ionescu’s barbarism on display for all to see.
Sebastian with his preternatural acuity spoke about the “open wound” of Judaism. He credited Jews with “a tumultuous sensitivity and a ruthlessly critical sense,” “intelligence in its coldest forms and passion in its most untrammeled forms.” Manea quotes Sebastian’s remarks, but his own idea of Judaism is much more elusive. For Manea the Jew is footloose, shadowless, the perpetual outsider whose essence can never be properly defined. “The relation between self and Jew had become a complicated knot, one that could not fail to interest Dr. Freud,” Manea remarks in The Hooligan’s Return.
Sebastian was a friend of Mircea Eliade, the polymathic scholar of religion who taught after the war at the University of Chicago, and he knew that Eliade was a fervent supporter of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, later known as the Iron Guard. Eliade looked forward to a Romania that would be “frenzied and chauvinistic, armed and vigorous, ruthless and vengeful,” he wrote in 1936.
In 1937 Eliade lamented that Romania was “ravaged by poverty and syphilis, overrun by Jews and torn apart by foreigners.” And in 1939, during the German invasion of Poland, Eliade remarked to Sebastian, “Only yids are capable of blackmail by putting women and children in the front line, so as to take advantage of German scruples.” He added, “Rather than have a Romania again invaded by kikes, it would be better to have a German protectorate.”
In January 1941 came the Iron Guard’s uprising. Jews were hung from meat hooks in a slaughterhouse, under placards reading “kosher.” The guard was soon suppressed by Romania’s fascist dictator Ion Antonescu, but his regime was just as antisemitic, killing hundreds of thousands of Jews by the end of the war.
During “the obscene decade between 1935 and 1945,” as Manea called it, many of Romania’s greatest thinkers were seized by “nationalist delirium,” including the aphorist E.M. Cioran (who wrote in 1936, “the Jew is not our fellow man”). Eliade never renounced his support for the Iron Guard. After the war he presented himself as a gentle spiritual seeker and sage. In Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein he is the courtly scholar Radu Grielescu, who kisses the hand of ladies like the narrator’s wife, Vela (based on Bellow’s fourth wife, Romanian mathematician Alexandra Tulcea). When Bellow’s narrator is impressed by Grielescu’s refined manners, Ravelstein tells him, “Just give a thought now and then to those people on the meat-hooks.”
Manea became notorious in Romania when he published an article in The New Republic in 1991 detailing Eliade’s support for the Iron Guard and its antisemitic violence. For Romanians, Eliade had become a saintlike figure—even under communism, in spite of his right-wing associations and his devotion to religion.
After he attacked Eliade, “that old, boring, everlasting anti-semitism” struck again, Manea wrote in The Hooligan’s Return. Time-honored epithets were hurled at him—“traitor,” “the dwarf from Jerusalem,” “American agent.” Manea received in the mail an anonymous postcard—a Chagall painting of a Jesus-like Jew tied to a stake, his hands and feet bound by tefillin. At Bard, he was put under FBI protection. Another academic, the brilliant scholar of religion Ioan Culiano, had been assassinated in a toilet stall at the University of Chicago, perhaps because he too had drawn attention to Eliade’s fascist leanings.
Manea quotes a 1938 article by Eliade: “The Legion member is a new man, who has discovered his own will, his own destiny. Discipline and obedience have given him a new dignity ...” Nothing could be further from Manea’s skeptical trust in his sad, hopeful fantasies. For him, nationalist myths are alien and unrecognizable. “After all, what other possessions do we have, apart from exile?” Manea wrote in The Hooligan’s Return. “Dispossession should not be deplored, it is preparation for the final dispossession.”
Exiled Shadow harbors death at its margins. Manea ends with as remarkable a paragraph as he has ever written, a sublime reflection on Jewishness, imagination, and the thought of death:
He was no longer listening, the Professor was no longer listening. He had tired of these self-flagellatory meetings in the tradition of his ancestors and of the long-ago prophets and those of more recent times. The poor man had fallen asleep with his balding head resting on the cold desktop. He was happy, had reached the age of sleep and of senility. He enjoyed sleeping deeply, for many hours, as many hours as possible, and feeling rich in dreams and nightmares and sensual snores. The true gift of the dark, of the tired. The true salvation.
He mumbled. Hineni, here I am, I am here. I am ready.
With Exiled Shadow, Manea yet again makes himself present. Like his ancestors, he has the right to say hineni.
Two questions:
1. When will people stop writing ‘formally known as Twitter’? I’m so tired of seeing that.
2. How will robots care for the elderly? Are the CNAs underpaid to do that now not callous/uncaring enough?
I posted a few of the comments by Mircea Eliade on my library's book search app under one of his books. It makes me sick that people who say things like that can prosper so abundantly.