US Election

Romney Victory:
Romney has reached an unassailable position. He is supported by those who are convinced that he believes what he is saying(Tea Party,conservatives) as well as by those who are convinced he does not believe what he is saying(rest of Republicans )

aging

I stood on Bay and Queen waiting for the Bay Street Bus to take me to U.of T. I waited and waited. No bus came. I cursed Toronto's transportation system. No bus came-none was in sight.I notice that no buses came in other direction. Expanded my curse noting that TTC didn't leave any signs informing the public of its suspension of the route. I ask a streetcar driver on the Queen street route whether he knows why Bay Street bus has been suspended. He shrugs. I finally leave. As I depart I discover I haven't been standing on Bay street. I've been standing on Yonge Street which I know has no buses.

Phillip Roth

Coetzee's review of Phillip Roth's "Nemesis" ,in the latest New York Review of Books,is a tour de force in the craft of reviewing. But it is also puzzling. The brief opening paragraphs set the stage with an arresting account of the paradoxical mechanics of a disease ,central to the plot,that became lethal only after health authorities learned to manage it and continues with an equally arresting account of the disastrous social consequences of its spread .(He notes later in the review that Roth is especially good at description and perhaps wants to take up the challenge of matching him) He then gives an admirable account the plot so vivid and detailed that (with apologies) he reveals one of its secret twists. Finally,showing that the work belongs in the big leagues of literature he discusses it in the context of two very great works of literature very convincing comparison with Camus' "The Plague" and "Oedipus Rex. Breathtaking.
He ends ,however with the judgment that this is a minor novel in Roth's ouevre.
I want to look up one of his reviews of what he takes to be a major novel.
I wouldn't mind someone comparing one of my essays on Russell with one by Montaigne and then declaring it one of minor works

Torah study

This morning we studied "Lech Lecha" (Genesis 12)Abraham's Call,or rather, the first few verses, because by the end of an hour and a half we had managed to comment on only three of them.
Speed readers would be horrified.But do they have much to brag about.
I've had two experiences with speed reading. About thirty years ago I was consumed by a conviction that I was undereducated .(I have not abandoned that conviction))The advertisements for speed reading courses promised that the student would learn the techniques for whizzing through books such as all the volumes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall in an evening and that their comprehension would be better than those who slogged through them in six months.Incredible,I thought. The next night I could gulp down Shakespeare's plays. Marvelous. I went to three classes and learned the technique of following my fingers as they maneuvered over the page. In the third class the instructor announced that on that night he would read a work he had never read before " Darwin's Origin of Species" and report on the content the next day Alas,his account was confused and inaccurate The only redeeming feature was the possibility that he might get a position as the Darwin expert in some Bible College, I was reminded of Woody Allen's account of his speed reading class. "We read War and Peace in fifteen minutes. It's about Russia."
The next encounter was with a very bright student who boasted he would read an encyclopedia over the weekend. I never saw him again. I have visions of him wandering in the desert raving wildly with springs and wires dangling from his head .
I now read slowly. This is very pleasurable except that I never get anything finished.It took me a whole summer to read Julian Young's biography of Nietzsche.I love detective stories (in film) but I never read them because it takes me so long My slow reading Torah study class consists mainly of enthusiastic converts. One was a WICA priestess. Their responses are enthusiastic,very imaginative and often as wild as those of orthodox rabbis.
Two passages interested me .God tells Abraham leave his father's house and go to a land that He ,the Lord, will show him. He doesn't say where,so it is into the unknown Rashi underplays the sense of a radical break with the past. He is too Rabbinic for such cataclysms. When the Lord promises him he will still be a somebody. Rashi comments implausibly that these are precautions of any traveler. WEll the Rabbis don't seem to like too much excitement. It was they who announced the end of Prophecy and the end of Miracles.
The second is a passage that notes without comment that the Canaanites already live there. Rashi must have worried about this because he offers a long explanation of their origins. Noah originally gave the land to the forefather of the Hebrews and over the decades the Canaanites sort of sneaked in.. No Comment.

Israeli democracy

An important article in Tablet that spells out the obvious. I have a hard time explaining the difference between liberal and democratic in the phrase "liberal democratic" to my students.Bertrand Russell was a liberal democrat" ,a liberal by conviction and a democrat by necessity. His friend Gilbert Murray was a liberal but not a democrat, that is, he believed in "freedom of the press" but not in giving the vote to the uneducated.
In the United States democracy is a sacred term uttered with a reverential hush, but liberal is a dirty word to be used only as an epithet.
That liberal democracy can be an oxymoron is evident in the Middle East where the majorities are Islamist and refuse to endorse vital parts of liberalism, such as equality for women. This article suggests that Israel, because of its immigration policy is moving towards the same culture .The article ignores the strength of Israel's liberal institutions.Still new peoples,from the Middle East and now from Russia, that have had no experience of liberal institutions, have become a large majority and often despise the liberal institutions that Israel does support.
Ironically, the politician from Likud who built his party on an anti liberal majority Menahem Begin,always insisted he was a liberal,as did his mentor Jabotinsky.

Education

I began reading Martha Nussbaum's "Not For Profit" today and after some hesitation, will continue. My hesitation came when I saw that " Socratic Pedagogy" was one of its principal themes. Didn't we have enough of this in the sixties? Disillusionment with the Socratic Method was one of the sources of our current enthusiasm for rote learning. This, of course is a misinterpretation of Plato's Meno where Socrates ,questioning an uneducated slave ,shows that he has innate ideas of equality such as it is understood by geometry
But in those days the intellectual content of Socrates questioning was ignored and "Socratic "teaching" meant pulling the "real me" understood as a feeling. out of the the false socialization that has been imposed from authorities from the outside.
Though she sometimes writes this way this way this isn't Nussbaum's point.She is much closer to the real Socrates, whose method was focused on education as an ability to construct arguments. More to come

the "unique" and liberal democracy

A recent column by Stanley Fish may help us think about the public use of the holocaust-it's meaning in to day's political world, its uses and abuses etc.
We often insist(rightly I would say),that the holocaust is unique and not to be compared to other atrocities in history. My friend Fackenheim argued strenuously that it should not be compared to the atrocities of racism, and rejects the pairing of the Holocaust and Hiroshima. This tradition of interpreting uniqueness of the Holocaust is so fixed on the incomparable that it seems to have lost its historicity ,as a catastrophe that blighted the earth we stand on.
But many who argue this way, including sometimes Fackenheim himself contradict themselves are ready to compare Arafat with Hitler and call many of Israel's adversaries Nazis
Moreover the success of our Holocaust institutions , the public commemorations of the Holocaust lie in the fact that it is seen as a paradigm of the evils of racismlinked to the experience of other peoples'
The dillemma is "if we insist on its uniqueness too stridently we say that the holocaust took place on another planet.
Fish's article is about a case where a religious group sought priveleges in enforcing its beliefs. Fish replied tat all religious groups