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A Black writer explores how Germany remembers its ‘unthinkable’ past
(JTA) — For his 2021 book “How the Word Is Passed,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, poet and journalist Clint Smith explored the landscape of American memory — specifically how the history of slavery is explained, commemorated, distorted and desecrated in sites across the United States.
While on tour promoting the book, he explained in an interview Tuesday, he’d often be asked if any country had gotten it right when it came to memorializing its own dark past. “I kept invoking the memorials in Germany, but I had never been to the memorials in Germany,” Smith said. “As a scholar, as a journalist, I felt like I had to do my due diligence and excavate the complexity and the nuance, and the emotional and human texture, that undergirds so many of these places and spaces.”
The result is December’s cover story in the Atlantic, “Monuments to the Unthinkable.” Smith traveled to Germany twice over the past two years, visiting Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, its Topography of Terror Museum, the museum in Wannsee where the Nazis plotted the Final Solution, and the concentration camp at Dachau, talking to historians and curators along the way. As a Black man wrestling with how America accounts for the crimes of its past, he went to learn from the experience of the Germans, who “are still trying to figure out how to tell the story of what their country did, and simultaneously trying to figure out who should tell it.”
In an interview, Smith talked about the inevitable differences between the Holocaust and the Atlantic slave trade, the similarities in how two countries — and communities — experience their histories, and how his article could serve as a bridge between African-Americans and Jews in a time of increasing tension between them.
Smith spoke to JTA from his parents’ home in his native New Orleans.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Your book is about the ways America succeeds and fails to come to terms with slavery, and your article is about the ways Germany is, in your phrase, “constructing public memory.” I was struck by someone who warned you, “Don’t go to Auschwitz.” What were they saying?
Clint Smith: It was Frederick Brenner, a Jewish man and a remarkable photographer who has photographed the Jewish Diaspora across the world for the past several decades, who said that, because people are standing [at Dachau] and they’re taking selfies, and it’s like “me in front of the crematorium” and “me in front of the barracks.” That was deeply unsettling to him, especially as someone whose family was largely killed in the Holocaust.
I don’t want to be reductive about it and say that you don’t want people to go to these spaces and take pictures. I think it’s all about the sort of disposition and sensibilities one brings to a space. If someone went to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, I don’t necessarily want them doing puckered-lip selfies in front of a slave cabin. I can understand why people wouldn’t want those places engaged with in that way, but you do want tourists to come, right? I mean, before the pandemic, 900,000 people visited Dachau every year, and part of what brings people to Dachau is seeing and taking a picture of the crematorium, taking a picture of themselves on this land in that space where history happened, and posting it online. And maybe that serves as a catalyst for somebody else to make that journey for themselves.
You did go to Dachau, which you call a “memorial to the evil that once transpired there.”
I am a huge believer in putting your body in the place where history happened. I stood in many places that carry the history of violence: plantations, execution chambers, death row. But I’ve never experienced the feeling in my body that I felt when I stood in the gas chamber at Dachau. And you just see the way that this space was constructed, with the sort of intentional, mechanized slaughter that it was meant to enact on people. The industrialized nature of it was something unlike anything I’d ever experienced before and it made me feel so much more proximate to that history in ways that I don’t think I would have ever experienced otherwise.
Physically standing in a concentration camp and physically standing and putting my body in the gas chamber fundamentally changed my understanding of the emotional texture and the human and psychological implications of it. Because when you’re in those spaces you’re able to more fully imagine what it might have been like to be in that space. And then you can imagine these people, these families, these women, these children who were marched into camps throughout Europe. You can never fully imagine the fear, that sense of desperation that one would have felt, but in some ways, it’s the closest we can get to it if you are someone who did not have family who lived through or survived the Holocaust. It provided me with a radical sense of empathy. And that’s why I took the trip in the first place.
A tourist takes a selfie inside the Memorial to the Murdered Jews Of Europe in Berlin, Sept. 25, 2019. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
By contrast, there are the memorials that are not historical sites, but either sculptural or architectural, like Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, nearly five acres of concrete slabs. What do you think makes an effective memorial that isn’t necessarily the historical place itself, but a specifically memorial project?
Well, for example, the big one in Berlin. It’s just so enormous. The scale and scope of it was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I tried to imagine what an American analog would be like. What if in the middle of downtown Manhattan there was a 200,000-square-foot memorial, with thousands of stone columns, dedicated to commemorating the lives of indigenous people who were killed in the early Americas? Or a 200,000-square-foot memorial in the middle of downtown D.C., not far from the White House, to the lives of enslaved people?
With that said, what I found really valuable were the people I spoke to, who had very different relationships to that space. Some thought of that memorial as something that was so meaningful because of its size and because of its scope, and because it was a massive state-sanctioned project. And then there were others who thought that it was too abstract, that it was too passive, even in its name, right, the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” which sounds as if something happened to people without naming the people who enacted the harm and who committed the crime. Those are the sort of nuances and complexities that I wanted to spend more time with, and found really valuable because, in the same way, descendants of enslaved people here in the United States have many different conceptions of what the iconography of slavery should look like or what repair and reparations to slavery should be made.
You write about the “stumbling stones” or “Stolpersteine”: Those are the small brass plaques placed in the streets, inscribed with the names of Holocaust victims and placed in front of their last known residence. The stones are exactly the opposite scale of the Berlin memorial.
Right. I think that is the memorial that I was most struck by: the largest decentralized memorial in the world, with 90,000 stones across 30 different European countries. I remember the moment I was walking down the street looking for landmarks and saw my first Stolpersteine, and I only saw it because at that moment the clouds moved and the sun shone off the brass stone. You see the name, the birth date, the deportation date, the death date, the place where the person was killed. You walk past another home, you see seven; you walk past another home, you see 12. You begin to imagine entire lives based on the names and information that exist on these stones. It creates this profound sense of intimacy, this profound sense of closeness to the history and it’s so human, because it’s individual people and individual names.
One of the most valuable things about the stumbling stone project, I think, is all the work that precedes it. It’s the school students who are doing research to find out about the lives of the people who were taken from the home across the street from their school. It’s the people in the apartment complex, who come together and decide that they’re going to figure out who were the Jewish families who lived in that apartment complex before them. And sometimes it’s really remarkable, granular details about people’s lives: what their favorite food was, what their favorite flavor of ice cream was, what the child liked.
Artist Gunter Demnig lays “stumbling stones” that memorialize persecuted or murdered Jews on the streets of Frankfurt. (Boris Roessler/picture alliance via Getty Images)
As Gunter Demnig, the originator of the project, says, 6 million people is a huge abstraction, and now it becomes about one man, one woman, one child, and [people] realize that it truly was not that long ago. There are so many survivors of the Holocaust who are still with us. Gunter Demnig, his father fought for the German army. He represents this generation of people who are engaging in a sort of contrition for the acts of their parents and their grandparents.
You ask in the piece what it would look like for a similar project to be created in the United States as a memorial to enslaved people.
I’m from New Orleans, and the descendant of enslaved people in New Orleans, which was at one point the busiest slave market in the country. And as Barbara Steiner, a Jewish historian, said to me in Germany, entire streets [of New Orleans] would be covered in brass stones! That was such a striking moment for me. That helped me more fully realize the profound lack of markers and iconography and documentation that we have to enslaved people in our landscape here in the United States relative to that of Germany.
Why are physical monuments important? I have sometimes wondered why we spend so much money on the infrastructure of memory — statues, museums, memorials — and if that money could be better used for living memorials, like scholarships for the descendants of victims, say, or programs that study or archive evidence of genocide. Why is it important to see a statue or a museum or even a plaque?
First off, museums and statues and memorials and monuments are by no means a panacea. It is not the case that you put up some memorials or you lay down some Stolpersteine and suddenly antisemitism is gone. Obviously, Germany is a case study and is experiencing its own rise in antisemitism. And that’s something that’s deeply unsettling, and is not going to singularly be solved by memorials and monuments.
With that said, I think there is something to be said to regularly encounter physical markers and manifestations of the violence that has been enacted and crimes that have been done in your name, or to the people that you are the descendant of. I try to imagine Germany without any of these memorials and I think it would just be so much easier for antisemitism to become far more pervasive. Because when your landscape is ornamented by things that are outlining the history that happened there, it is much more difficult to deny its significance, it is much more difficult to deny that it happened, it is much more difficult not to have it shape the way you think about public policy. I do believe that if we had these sorts of markers in the United States, it wouldn’t solve the racial wealth gap, it wouldn’t solve racism, it wouldn’t solve discrimination. It wouldn’t eradicate white nationalism or white supremacy. But I do think it would play some role in recalibrating and reshaping our collective public consciousness, our collective sense of history in ways that would not be insignificant.
And to your point, my hope is that those things are never mutually exclusive. It’s a conversation that’s happening here in the United States with regard to how different institutions are accounting for their relationship to slavery. Universities are coming up with reports, presentations, panels and conferences that outline their relationship to the history of slavery, especially since the murder of George Floyd [in 2020]. Activists and descendants have pushed them to not just put out a report, or put up a plaque or make a monument. It’s also about, well, what are you going to do for the descendants of those people? Harvard, where I went to grad school, put $100 million aside specifically for those sorts of interventions. Places like Georgetown have made it so that people who were the descendants of those who are enslaved have specific opportunities to come to the school without paying. And people of good faith can disagree over whether those initiatives are commensurate with or enough to atone for that past, and I think the answer is almost inevitably no.
Certainly people on what we like to think of as the wrong side of history understood the importance of physical monuments in creating memory.
The origin story of my own book was that I watched the monuments come down in 2017, in my hometown in New Orleans, of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee. I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority Black city, and there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people. What does it mean that to get to school I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard? That to get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway? That my middle school was named after a leader of the Confederacy? And that my parents still live on a street today named after someone who owned 115 enslaved people? The names and iconography are reflective of the stories that people tell and those stories shaped the narratives that communities carry. And those narratives shape public policy and public policy is what shapes the material conditions of people’s lives.
One thing about Germany is that its national project of memory and repentance has been accompanied by a vast reparations program — for Israel, Jewish survivors, their families and programs to propagate Jewish culture. I wonder if you think Germany could have moved ahead without reparations? And can America ever fully grapple with the legacy of slavery without its own reparations?
The short answer is no. America cannot fully move forward from its past without reparations. The important thing is not to be limited and reductive in the way that we conceive of what reparations are or should look like. In some ways, I’m as interested if not more interested in what specific cities and states are doing in order to account for those histories and those crimes. For example, in Evanston, Illinois, they created a specific program to give reparations to Black families who experienced housing segregation, in a certain period of time, given how prevalent redlining was in and around Chicago in the mid-20th century. I know in Asheville, North Carolina, there’s a similar program that’s thinking about how to meaningfully engage in repair to the descendants of communities that were harmed from some of the policies that existed there. This is not to say that those programs themselves are perfect. But I think we sometimes talk about it so much on a federal level, that we forget the local opportunities that exist.
West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signs the reparations agreement between his country and Israel, Sept. 10, 1952. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Benjamin Ferencz, from “Reckonings”)
Many people who were redlined or experienced housing covenants — all the sort of insidious manifestations of wealth extraction that were part of Jim Crow — are still alive today. So sometimes it’s not even a question of what you have to give the descendants. Sometimes it’s like, what do you give the actual people who are still here?
That’s an important distinction you make in your article, about the difference between grappling with the past in Germany and the United States. In Germany, there are so few Jews, while in the U.S. we see the living evidence of slavery, not the evidence of absence.
That’s perhaps the greatest difference that allows for both a landscape of memory to be created in Germany, and also allows for Germany to pay reparations in ways that the United States is reluctant to do: Jewish people in Germany represent less than one quarter of one percent of the population of Germany. One of the folks I spoke to told me that Jewish people in Germany are a historical abstraction. Because there’s so few Jewish people left, because of the slaughter of the Holocaust. I think about the reparations that were given to Japanese Americans who were held in incarceration camps during World War II. They got $20,000 checks, which is not commensurate with what it means to be held in a prison camp for multiple years, and cannot totally atone for that. But part of the reason that can be enacted is that there’s a limited amount of people. There are 40 million black people in this country. So the economic implications of reparations are something fundamentally different here in the United States.
So let me ask you if there’s anything else you wanted to mention that we haven’t talked about.
I want to name specifically for your readers that I’m not and would never intend to conflate slavery and the Holocaust. They are qualitatively different historical phenomena that have their own specific complexities and should be understood on their own terms. With that said, I do think it can be helpful to put the two in conversation with one another, specifically in the profound ways that these two monumental periods of world history have shaped the modern world and how they are remembered in fundamentally different ways.
And there are similarities as well, which you write about.
I did find so many parallels. The Jewish people I spent time with in Germany explained that some of the manifestations of racism and anti-Blackness in the United States are not so different from the sort of manifestations of antisemitism that exist in Germany, especially as it relates to public memory. When I was at the museum devoted to the Wannsee conference, the executive director, Deborah Hartmann, told me that she and Deidre Berger [the chair of the executive board of the Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project Foundation] were talking about how Jewish people did not always have a seat at the table when these monuments and memorials were being built. Jewish people were not allowed to participate beyond a certain extent, because many Germans felt that Jewish people were not objective. Jewish historians couldn’t be taken seriously because they were too close to the history.
That just echoes so much of what Black scholars and historians have been told about their ability, or the lack thereof, to study the history of Black life. The godfather of African-American scholarship, W.E.B. Du Bois, was told by white scholars that he couldn’t be taken seriously because he was too close to the history of slavery.
Meanwhile, Deborah Hartmann talked about how so many of the historians and scholars who played a role in shaping the landscape of memory in Germany were themselves “close to the history,” including former members of the Hitler Youth.
Somebody sent me a message that really meant a lot to me this past week, basically saying that my essay is an exercise in “solidarity via remembrance” — in a moment where, unfortunately, there have been a lot of public manifestations of ideas and antisemitic remarks that might threaten to rupture a relationship between Black and Jewish people. Obviously, we didn’t time it this way: I worked on this piece for a year. But it’s my hope that as someone who is a Black American, who is the descendant of enslaved people, who is not himself Jewish — that my respectful, empathic, curious, journey reflects the long history of solidarity that has existed across Black and Jewish communities and that that I hope we never lose sight of.
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Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up to ‘The Social Network’ has a pretty good Yiddish joke — too bad about the rest of the movie
In The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s misbegotten follow-up to the generational classic The Social Network, there is, amid a cascade of exposition on algorithms, a decent Yiddish joke.
“Jeff, you would know this, settle a bet,” a coworker asks Jeremy Allen White’s Jeff Horwitz, a real journalist known for his 2021 Wall Street Journal series “The Facebook Files.” “Is spatula a Yiddish word?”
The question, a variation of which is found in Portnoy’s Complaint, is a nod, surely, to the protagonist’s heritage, one thing Aaron Sorkin has in common with his latest stand-in. The other features, which may well be true but I suspect are authorial projection: a love of old-school musical theater, a confounding Luddite disposition for a technology reporter and, in a kind of pre-Meta metafiction, a past career covering politics in D.C. (Sorkin admits to only joining Facebook to write his two films — when a source asks Horwitz “aren’t you a tech reporter?” he replies, “ish.”)
The actual Horwitz, a 2026 Pulitzer recipient, is an investigative reporter who also covered finance (no sports as far as I can tell) before arriving at the tech desk of the Wall Street Journal. His habit of appearing with a headband on Meet the Press goes unanswered for, but suggests a missed opportunity in casting (Matt Johnson, anyone?).
Sorkin, it seems, can’t help but write some version of himself: either the boy scout neoliberal or the edgier man of his youth, who was too busy writing in a coke frenzy to be told “no.”
That brings us to Zuckerberg, here an antagonist played by Jeremy Strong, who is at a considerable handicap for a couple of reasons. Jesse Eisenberg was such a perfect union of character and actor as to make an indelible performance he’s still trying to break away from (hence his refusal of a big payday to reprise the role here). The other factor is Zuckerberg the real man, who since The Social Network, has cut a public persona at odds with the first film’s characterization of him as a bitter loner with incel potential. Rather, he’s a dorky guy who wore a Benson Boone jumpsuit and cut a cover of “Get Low” for his wife. He slathers on too much sunscreen and Sweet Baby Ray’s. He’s a meme, if a wealthy one with a crazy amount of power.
Throughout this film, there are glimmers of a plausible engine that drives him beyond profit and his calling as a “free speech absolutist.” Facebook juices positive comments on videos featuring him and buries anything negative. His insecurity, which in the first film left off on him refreshing a friend request to his ex, lingers. At one point, he says of upcoming testimony before Congress, that it’s his opportunity to be liked.
But it is within that context, squaring off against AOC, that the real man revealed himself as a mumbling mess unequal to Sorkin’s dialogue. What remains of the figure in The Social Network? Take away the iconic score, the original actors and the conventions that made that film so effective and all that’s left is a quippy, moralizing husk. Without another director to take the helm (David Fincher’s taking on a Tarantino script), Sorkin’s tics have nowhere to hide.
“Something happened,” Horwitz says when he takes the job covering Facebook — after failing to find the Journal’s office on his car’s GPS.
We learn what that something is, as Mikey Madison’s Frances Haugen, an employee for Facebook’s civic integrity team slowly works her way up to blowing the whistle. The social network fed us outrage for clicks, funelled users toward extremist groups and ravaged the self-esteem of middle school girls on Instagram. Naturally, in the film, the platform’s penchant for sending amygdalae into overdrive and peddling disinformation culminates in Jan. 6.
Haugen insists, at one point, that she is not a Frank Capra character. It’s true — she’s a Sorkin invention, but unlike Mr. Smith, she is based on a real person. Her conviction is that Facebook could be a source for good. Sorkin may not believe this, though he was right to think there was a good movie in the revelations surrounding it since the first film. This just isn’t it.
“Spatula,” by the way, is not a Yiddish word (it’s Latin), though Meta, the new name Facebook took on shortly after Haugen’s damaging testimony, is both a Hebrew and a Greek one. In the language of the Bible, it is the feminine form of “is dead.”
Sorkin may have done well to take this as an omen: When it comes to a film property that needed no resurrection, it’s best to let the dead bury the dead — with or without a spatula.
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Anne Carson — a poet of spirituality and ‘small things’ — has won the Nobel Prize
Anne Carson, today awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, can be a difficult poet. Much of her work is erudite, complex and genre-defying; it is poetry and prose and criticism and translation and, occasionally, a kind of theology. But Carson’s work is also profoundly spiritual and richly rewarding, especially for those of us prone to introspection, intellection, melancholy, and, as Carson once described the task of a writer, “noticing small things.”
There are many facets of Carson’s work, and many lenses through which one might relate to it. Born in 1950, Carson was trained as a classicist, and spent much of her career teaching Ancient Greek; in addition to her translations of Sophocles, Sappho, and others, her own poems are often saturated with classical references. Her essays on a wide variety of subjects are similarly erudite and rich. Many have written on these aspects of her work.
Personally, though, as a contemplatively-inclined Jewish reader, I have found her to be a literary as well as spiritual role model. I use the word ‘spiritual’ with hesitation. I doubt Carson would like it much, and what I mean by it is not the cultivation of certain warm feelings but the choice to pay attention, in a certain way, to both the surfaces and the depths of things; to refuse the pat dichotomy between the head and the heart; to dwell in the interiority of experience that, paradoxically, arises from “noticing small things.”
When Carson does turn explicitly to religious and spiritual subjects (she was raised Catholic), she excels, perhaps more than any other writer I have read, in avoiding the clichés that make writing about ‘spirituality’ so challenging. Her long poem from 1992, “The Truth About God” begins:
My religion makes no sense
and does not help me
therefore I pursue it.When we see
how simple it would have been
we will thrash ourselves
Carson isn’t speaking conventionally here, I don’t think — this isn’t quite the Israelites saying, in Sinai, Na’aseh v’Nishmah, we will do and [then] we will understand. But it is a contemplative version of it; a devotional attitude toward the particular. In another section of the poem, entitled “God’s Justice,” she writes:
In the beginning there were days set aside for various tasks.
On the day He was to create justice
God got involved in making a dragonflyand lost track of time.
It was about two inches long
with turquoise dots all down its back like Lauren Bacall.
So this is why there is no justice in the world, or why we must always pursue it anyway: because God was so busy with beauty. The poet, too, gets distracted; the rest of the poem is about the dragonfly. (Like Mary Oliver, Carson is a sublime poet of nature.) As indeed is true in our world — alongside all the evils and injustices of the last few years, the shimmering of tree branches in the breeze, the light refracting into my study, remain as resonant as ever.
When I heard the news about Carson’s Nobel, I came across a post by Florida State University Professor Martin Kavka, whom I’ve known for many years and who, it turns out, is also a Carson fan. Like me, Kavka was elated to hear the news, and we chatted for a while. “Sometimes we think of poetry as something that expresses the way the world is, that pierces the mystery of the world and gives us True Knowledge,” Kavka told me. “But for me, Carson’s poetry, in its odd recombination of words, expresses how we so often feel askew when relating to the world, as if it will always be mysterious, as if its mystery were just there to taunt us.”
“We all know that when we feel askew,” Kavka continued, “authority figures make us feel that it’s our fault. This is true of religious authority figures — and Jewish texts, given that Deuteronomy suggests that we are at fault when we are not thriving — but also of political and educational authorities. Carson gives us all armor for those moments… And for so many of us who are (over)educated, we value assembly too much and beauty not enough. I feel recalibrated whenever I read her, as if I’ve just visited some sort of emotional chiropractor. “
I love that insight. Carson is definitely, in some ways, a nerdy writer. Her work is intellectual, dense, and sometimes opaque. (I find myself reaching again for the word ‘erudite.’) But that is not at the expense of emotional depth. A recent essay, for example, describes Carson’s heartbreaking loss, due to Parkinson’s Disease, of her ability to write legibly — but along the way discusses the Roman poet Catullus, the painter Cy Twombly, composer David Lang, psychiatrist Norman Doidge, as well as Roland Barthes, John Keats, John Cage, Gertrude Stein, and attending a boxing class for people with Parkinson’s. In it, she writes:
Let’s start with life, your life. There it is before you — possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map — let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor, a pirate, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up and you’re seventy. Looking ahead you see a black doorway. You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you look at it or not. Most moments contain it, most moments have a sort of sediment of black doorway at the bottom of the glass. You wonder if other people are seeing it too. You ask them. They say no. You ask why. No one can tell you.
A minute ago you were 25. Then you went ahead getting the life you want. One day you glanced over from 25 to now and there it is, the doorway, black, waiting.
Similarly, Kavka’s favorite Carson poem, “Merry Christmas from Hegel,” begins with the poet “wretchedly lonely with all my family dead”:
It was the year my brother died, I lived up north and had few friends or they all went away. Christmas Day I was sitting in my armchair, reading something about Hegel.
Yet she doesn’t stay in the armchair. She is “overjoyed” at Hegel’s language, at “this notion of a philosophic space where words drift in gentle mutual redefinition of one another,” and she goes outside to stand in the snow:
I went to the middle of a woods. Fir trees, the teachers of this, all around. Minus twenty degrees in the wind but inside the trees is no wind. The world subtracts itself in layers. Outer sounds like traffic and shoveling vanish. Inner sounds become audible, cracks, sighs, caresses, twigs, bird breath, toenails of squirrel. The fir trees move hugely. The white is perfectly curved, stunned with itself. Puffs of ice fog and some gold things float up. Shadows rake their motionlessness across the snow with a vibration of other shadows moving crosswise on them, shadow on shadow, in precise velocities. It is very cold; then that, too, begins to subtract itself, the body chills on its surface but the core is hot and it is possible to disconnect the surface, to withdraw to the core, where a ravishing peace flows in, so ravishing that I am unembarrassed to use the word *ravishing*, and it is not a peace of separation from the senses, but the washing-through peace of looking, listening, feeling, at the very core of snow, at the very core of the care of snow.
This is the consolation of the intellectual life, in the best sense: the abstruse philosophical language of Hegel liberates the poet from her melancholy, sends her out into the woods where she has an encounter with the numinous, rendered in perfect, concrete prose without a single platitude of religious or spiritual writing.
Said Kavka of this work, “I learned how to be a widower — how to relate to the world so that death does not govern my existence — from her.”
I am delighted that Carson has won the Nobel, not only for the recognition (and money!) that she deserves, but because it might win her some new readers, including those of us in the Jewish spirituality world for whom Carson’s “noticing” is at the center of our religious lives. I’ll give her the last words, once again taken from the poem “The Truth About God”:
God’s Work
Moonlight in the kitchen is a sign of God.
The kind of sadness that is a black suction pipe extracting you
from your own navel and which the Buddhists call“no mindcover” is a sign of God.
The blind alleys that run alongside human conversation
like lashes are a sign of God.God’s own calmness is a sign of God.
The surprisingly cold smell of potatoes or money.
Solid pieces of silence.From these diverse signs you can see
how much work remains to do.
Put away your sadness, it is a mantle of work.
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Ford was the most pro-Israel president in US history, and we need his playbook now
If you ask historians to name the most pro-Israel president in U.S. history, you’ll generally hear variations of the same responses. Harry Truman recognized the Jewish state; Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden defended Zionism; George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump have all, at various points, been dubbed “the first Jewish president.”
Gerald Ford almost never makes the list. He is usually lumped in with Dwight D. Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush as a president who was hostile to Israel. I would argue, contrary to the popular perception, he belongs at the very top. In Israel’s hour of need, Ford provided what only a true friend can offer: tough love.
After the 1973 Yom Kippur War shattered Israel’s self-confidence, Ford perceived what many in Israel could not: Militarism as a substitute for diplomacy is self-destructive.
Much like today, the wars of 1967 and 1973 involved remarkable technical feats on the part of Israel; they also nearly triggered global nuclear conflict. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara described the U.S. and Soviet Union as being a “hair’s breadth” away from war in 1967. In 1973, with Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev drinking heavily, the CIA reported that the Soviets had moved nuclear weapons to Alexandria, Egypt; the U.S. subsequently went to DEFCON III. What made 1973 so deeply troubling was that Egypt’s Anwar Sadat had secretly attempted to avert war and pursue peace. Still more troubling is the fact that King Hussein of Jordan had personally flown to Israel to warn of the imminence of an Arab attack.
Even after Ford took office, Israel’s government did not take Sadat seriously. But Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, a Holocaust refugee and a friend of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, did. If Nixon and Kissinger brought out the worst in each other — from supporting the coup in Chile to prolonging the Vietnam war — Ford and Kissinger brought out the best in each other, at least when it came to Middle East diplomacy.
In March 1975, after Israel continued to resist compromises with Egypt, Kissinger advised Ford to take a tougher line with Rabin. On March 21, Ford wrote one of the harshest letters in the history of the U.S.-Israel relationship, indicating that he had ordered “an immediate reassessment of U.S. policy in the area, including our relations with Israel.” Ford subsequently suspended or deferred new arms deliveries, including F-15 fighter jets. These were extremely risky political moves with very little domestic upside. But Ford was not simply another politician looking to the next election; he was a statesman looking to the next generation.
More importantly, Ford was acting as a true ally. Friends do not let friends squander a fleeting chance for peace with a mortal enemy. The Sinai II agreement was signed in 1975, committing Israel and Egypt to resolve their differences through diplomacy rather than warfare, laying the groundwork for the 1979 Camp David Accords. Jimmy Carter rightly gets credit for finishing the job with the former Irgun leader Menachem Begin as Israeli prime minister; but it was Ford who enabled the breakthrough. Six years after Sinai II, Sadat became a martyr for peace; two decades after the agreement (and two years after the first Oslo Accord), Rabin met the same fate.
For nearly half a century, that peace has served as the cornerstone of American and Israeli security in the region. It has survived wars, revolution, and terrorism. Peace with Egypt broke the taboo on Arab-Israeli pacts, demonstrating that coexistence was indeed possible; it paved the way for a treaty with Jordan and, ultimately, the Abraham Accords. To this day, Egypt remains one of Israel’s most vital intelligence partners.
What Ford can teach today’s leaders
Israel’s current leaders appear oblivious to this history. Highly credible reports have indicated that Israel was warned of war by Egyptian and other officials prior to the Oct. 7 attacks, which were themselves strikingly reminiscent of 1973. Remarkably, Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel is even said to have flown to Israel days before the slaughter to warn Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s claim that he only learned of these warnings from the media raises profound questions.
Oct. 7 and what followed have demonstrated the absolute bankruptcy of the “escalate to deescalate” doctrine and also the centrality of the Middle East conflict to regional and global security. So, in this world-historic moment, what can we learn from Gerald Ford?
First, like Ford, we must be realistic about the severity and trajectory of the crisis. It is clear that one or more players are inching closer toward the deployment of an unconventional weapon, ground forces, and/or a major conventional attack that would destroy critical infrastructure. Any such action would certainly be reciprocated, taking the global economy off a cliff.
Second, we must insist on known solutions. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert confirmed to me that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas never said no to the map he proposed in 2008. This is because the two men were essentially in agreement. Instead of sending Israel 40,000 one-ton bombs, Trump should do what Ford did. Freeze weapons shipments until Netanyahu negotiates with Abbas in good faith to conclude an agreement along the lines of the Olmert parameters. As its name suggests, the “Axis of Resistance” would be severely undermined by peace with the Palestinians.
Third, we are faced with a simple truth: military escalation in the Persian Gulf cannot achieve what global diplomacy can. We must ask ourselves why China and Russia both supported the first Iran deal. While both countries would love to see the U.S. weakened in the region, does anyone really believe either power desires Iranian nuclear weapons in the Strait of Hormuz any more than the U.S. would desire them in Venezuela’s oil fields or the Panama Canal? History and economics suggest otherwise: Russia, once dubbed the “lesser Satan” by Iran, attempted to dismember the country after World War II, and China currently purchases roughly 90% of Iran’s exported oil. Ford, who used diplomacy with Egypt to weaken the USSR in the Middle East, would recognize these underlying frictions and use them to turn China and Russia against Iran. Today, we have accomplished the exact opposite.
Ford paid a profound political price for his courage, but he did the right thing anyway. When he took the oath of office, his hand rested on the wisdom of Solomon: “Lean not unto thine own understanding.” Many of our leaders today lean on little else.
The most pro-Israel thing an American president can do today is exactly what Ford did: Get some good advice and then administer tough love.
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