On Jewish values: 'Alfred Kazin's Journals'

Today's email from the New York Review of Books shares an old article, "The Hidden Life of Alfred Kazin," by Edward Mendelson (Aug 18, 2011). The email teases it:

“‘Values are our only home in the universe,’ Kazin wrote in 1962 at the height of his public success, and the more intensely he thought about values, the more intensely he thought about himself as a Jew. ‘For what is it I draw my basic values from if not from the Jews!’ His journals explore a radical, idiosyncratic Judaism informed by the same nonconformist moral passion that drove William Blake’s radical, idiosyncratic Christianity.”

The Book

Alfred Kazin's Journals: Edited by Richard M. Cook. Yale University Press, 2011.

Publisher's description:

At the time of his death in 1998, Alfred Kazin was considered one of the most influential intellectuals of postwar America. What is less well known is that Kazin had been contributing almost daily to an extensive private journal, which arguably contains some of his best writing. These journals collectively tell the story of his journey from Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood to his position as a dominant figure in twentieth-century cultural life.

To Kazin, the daily entry was a psychological and spiritual act. To read through these entries is to reexperience history as a series of daily discoveries by an alert, adventurous, if often mercurial intelligence. It is also to encounter an array of interesting and notable personalities. Sketches of friends, mistresses, family figures, and other intellectuals are woven in with commentary on Kazin's childhood, early religious interests, problems with parents, bouts of loneliness, dealings with publishers, and thoughts on the Holocaust. The journals also highlight his engagement with the political and cultural debates of the decades through which he lived. He wrestles with communism, cultural nationalism, liberalism, existentialism, Israel, modernism, and much more.

Judiciously selected and edited by acclaimed Kazin biographer Richard Cook, this collection provides the public with access to these previously unavailable writings and, in doing so, offers a fascinating social, historical, literary, and cultural record.

Spotted Kazin here too:

"White nationalists have long identified with Israel: an ethnonational state that violates international legal, diplomatic and ethical protocols with its language of ethnic homogeneity, unwavering policy of territorial expansion, extrajudicial killings and demolitions. Today, an extreme manifestation of what Alfred Kazin, writing in his private journal in 1988, called ‘militant, daredevil, fuck-you-all Israel’ also serves as a palliative to many existential anxieties within the Anglo-American ruling classes."

— Memory Failure Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books, Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

Another reflection on Jewish values

Isaac Deutscher identified with the oppressed. Supporting people who are oppressed is what he saw as the important meaning of being Jewish.

"Polish Jewish intellectual Isaac Deutscher (1907–1967) insisted," as Rebecca Ruth Gould explains, "that his identity obliged him to adhere to a certain kind of partiality. In Deutscher’s own words: “I am … a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated.” Deutscher’s partiality was against racism, and ultimately against Zionism."

As I see it, "solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated" doesn't mean agreeing with anything and everything that person says about any topic whatsoever; it means having solidarity vis-a-vis their oppression and their right to exist and to get free from their oppression. The meaning of solidarity that is "unconditional" is, I think, that we don't impose additional conditions on our solidarity. They do not have to sing and dance for us to earn our solidarity for getting free. They do not have to bribe us. They do not have to work for us. The fact that they are oppressed is in itself a reason — the only reason — for us to have solidarity with them in their fight against oppression.

This is aligned with "what [Indian philosopher Akeel] Bilgrami calls ‘wilful imbalance’," meaning that you intentionally take sides. Your view is not from nowhere. You have a standpoint, and you choose the side you want to take.

Gould concludes her essay: "Justifications of free speech that rely on the liberal emphasis on balance obscure what it really means to silence another person’s voice. To silence is to deny, through the language of moderation and balance, their very right to exist. To respect free speech is to respect life itself."

As I understand it: If there's a debate over maybe these people should be allowed to exist and be free, or maybe they shouldn't? that debate doesn't embody freedom for the people who's lives are at stake, because one of the options being considered is that they shouldn't be free (or that they shouldn't exist at all, which is tightly linked to the idea that they shouldn't be free — those are overlapping concepts). This raises the question of, when we say "free speech," for whom is the speech free? For the person who's running their mouth, perhaps freedom means their right to speak any words it occurs to them to say or that pass through their lips with varying degrees of intentionality. But whether the speech promotes freedom is another question entirely, and it matters for the person who's being talked about. Free speech that undermines the conditions of freedom is a kind of paradox. Should the person being talked about cease to be free, or even cease to exist, in what sense will the speaker continue to have "freedom of speech" to talk about them?

"Against Balance: Why Free Speech Cannot and Should not be Neutral," Rebecca Ruth Gould, Dialogue & Discourse (Medium), Feb 25, 2024

Citing The Non-Jewish Jew: And Other Essaysby Isaac Deutscher (Verso, 2017).

On the portal: Midlife transition

A reference to "the portal" drew my attention. Yes, the midlife transition is like a portal. I read:

"Are You In the Portal?" It's a crisis, but it's an awakening. Anne Helen Petersen. Culture Study (Substack). Oct 22, 2023.

Petersen's mother said to her one day:

"'What are you now, 42?...I think that’s exactly when I started writing textbooks. I just had this huge creative surge.'

What an amazing way to reframe the energy I’ve been channeling this last year: energy to write another book, energy to figure out a Culture Study-related podcast, energy to dahlia farm. What if it wasn’t ambition pushing me forward….but a swell of creativity? And what if that swell of creativity was possible because I’ve become a whole lot less concerned with bullshit?"

Petersen read how Anja Tyson referred to "the weird spiritual / emotional / professional / transitional portal that women ages 37 to 45 are in." Then, Petersen says: "I became obsessed with this idea of a portal, and when I brought it up — on IG, but also in casual conversation — it seemed to resonate. Something was happening. Maiden-becomes-crone, sure. Destabilizing, yes. But it was also an experience of transformation, of refinement."

She spoke to Satya Byock, "a Jungian psychotherapist who specializes in younger patients going through transitions" and author of the book Quarterlife, who sees that, "within a Jungian framework, there’s a midlife passage," and "the experience is more intense if you’ve been heads-down — absorbed by parenting, by your career, by an illness, by something — for some time."

She also spoke to Claire Zulkey, author of the Evil Witches newsletter. "'Part of me thinks that I’ve gone through the portal,' she told me, 'but the part of me that’s paranoid and wise thinks: oh bitch you haven’t even begun to portal.'" If you're privileged to do so, you can redesign your life so you have more time for parenting, yet still, "it’s half boredom, half gratitude."

(I have felt that way about redesigning my life for an office career.)

Career coach Keren Eldad had her own experience at 36. It's just that something "sets you off the edge," as Eldad puts it. "It can be stagnation around your career, it can be kids going to elementary school or even college. It can be around physical changes..." Once you're set off, you're in an ongoing process of letting go of the past. What you feel about yourself and your life might be separate from what you feel about the new work you're doing. Eldad says: "Like, I am personally done, but this is not done. And that, you feel invigorated by. If you’re grieving what you’ve left behind, let yourself feel it. What you’re doing is gathering your strength, and there will be a point when the grieving ends."

Petersen concludes:

"There’s nothing magical about the portal. It can be painful and discombobulating and, as Claire Zulkey points out, sweaty. There’s certainly no guaranteed joy on the other end. I don’t think there’s a right or a wrong way to experience it or to understand its shape in your life. I don’t even think it’s gendered...It’s just a period of transition. You can lean into it, you can ignore it, you can understand it as a crisis or a transformation."

You should read her essay "Are You In the Portal?" for more of this.

'Your story is not just about you'

"...every story, including memoir as well as fiction, has a dual narrative responsibility. Your story is not just about you. It can’t be. And if you’re not yet sure what else it’s about, then you have work to do. ...every personal conflict echoes larger struggles. That’s what we mean when we talk about linking the personal to the universal."
— Aimee Liu, "Afong Moy’s ‘Astonishing Little Feet’," Medium, June 25, 2024

On community

"...without the support, direction, and accountability of our communities and cultural identities, we have no center, we have no soul. That fire that burns in the center of collective identity and lineage and culture is the mythic hearth, and those who protect, embody, and maintain that center for the community are our hearth-keepers.

* * *

But who maintains the norms, rules, and ways of that group? Who remembers the songs, the order of things, the rituals? Who passes that culture along, and to whom is it passed? How is the soul of our family/tribe/community protected and maintained and enacted and embodied by us who are the members? It is the warriors who defend this, but it is the hearth-keepers who preserve, hold, nurture, and teach. And that work is hard and constant work, and is worthy of respect too. Warriors will help us tear broken systems down and will protect us from those who would destroy our homes and lives and ways of being in the world; it is the hearth-keepers that are responsible for maintaining and creating the societies and homes and communities we actually want to live in, who will set and maintain and enforce and teach those ways of being. Hearth-keeping is revolutionary: it is how we will rebuild the world."

— Riverdevora. The revolutionary art of hearth-keeping. August 21, 2017.

Questions to guide a planned transition

Osi I. wrote:

"Here are a few points I reflected upon as I prepared to take my leaps. They might be helpful as you consider yours:

1. How important is it to take such a step? Will it change my life for the better?
2. What are the barriers, if any, to taking the leap? How can they be addressed, mitigated, overcome?
3. Can I just step out on faith to do what I know my spirit is calling me to do?
4. Will taking this leap add value/joy/peace/fulfillment to my life?
5. Will this leap help me and mine grow in unimaginable ways?
6. Will this leap save my life?
7. If I don’t take this leap, what will it cost me?"

— "I Left My 6 figure Job to Save My Life," Feb 25, 2024

I wrote of my midlife transition

Bad Fire: A Memoir of Disruption.

Three waves of opposition to transgender bodies

G. Samantha Rosenthal is a scholar of transgender history.

Here's a recent article:

Pseudoscience Has Long Been Used to Oppress Transgender People: Three major waves of opposition to transgender health care in the past century have cited faulty science to justify hostility. G. Samantha Rosenthal & The Conversation US. Scientific American. February 12, 2024.

Rosenthal argues that there have been "three waves of opposition to transgender health care". I organized this blog post based on them.

Eddie Clark phrased this simply (Bluesky):

"...one of the UK's most widespread colonial exports was its 19th century, homophobic criminal code, which continued to corrupt its colonies long after the UK's exit from them.
Now doing the same with transphobic laws. As in so many contexts, transphobia is plagiarised homophobia."

Wave 1: Nazi Germany

Rosenthal writes: "In 1933, when the Nazis rose to power, they cracked down on transgender medical research and clinical practice in Europe."

One important beginning in modern trans history: "In 1919, the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, which became the world’s leading center for queer and transgender research and clinical practice" just as "the new science of hormones was just reaching maturation and entering mainstream consciousness." Following an "Enlightenment-era effort to classify and categorize the world’s life forms," some scientists "developed a hierarchy of human types based on race, gender and sexuality. They were inspired by social Darwinism, a set of pseudoscientific beliefs applying the theory of survival of the fittest to human differences." Everyone was classifying queer/trans people, but some wanted to do so for political liberation and others for genocide.

Gender-affirming care has existed in the United States since the 1940s. Rosenthal says: "Puberty blockers, hormone therapies and anatomical surgeries are neither experimental nor untested and have been safely administered to cisgender, transgender and intersex adults and children for decades," and opposition to this "has historically been rooted in pseudoscience."

Learn more

This history is known. Historians can ask questions:

“So who are the Bad Gays of Weimar Berlin? Were they the ambisexual performance freaks whose audacious and aggressive sexuality and playful confusion of gender norms triggered an entire society into fascism, as though the Nazis were an allergic reaction? Or were they people like Ernst Röhm, whose worship of masculine vitality… and who followed that impulse towards lifting fascists to power? Were they people like Friedrich Radszuweit, cautious and apolitical men who decided to stand back and stand by while fascism gained steam? Were they people like Hirschfeld, complicated and ambivalent men with deep reservoirs of idealism, knowledge, and compassion who were limited by their blind spots, shaped by and shaping racist and eugenic discourses, and often willing to accept rights for some at the expense of others?”

— Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller. Bad Gays: A Homosexual History. London: Verso, 2022.

In late 2022, for the first time, "a court acknowledged the possibility that trans people were persecuted in Nazi Germany." — New Research Reveals How the Nazis Targeted Transgender People, Laurie Marhoefer, The Conversation, September 21, 2023.

This result followed 20 years of activism. In January 2023, the German parliament "dedicated the [annual Holocaust] remembrance to those killed by Nazis because of their gender identity and sexual orientation. The body also acknowledged decades of post-World War II persecution against LGBTQ+ people in Germany." — The Advocate

For more information about the colonial-era and industrial-era construction of "homosexuality," please read "There Were Gay Nazis". It's a 7-minute read on Medium.

See also this 2008 report from Human Rights Watch, "This Alien Legacy: The Origins of "Sodomy" Laws in British Colonialism."

Gay Neo-Nazis in the United States: Victimhood, Masculinity, and the Public/Private Spheres
Blu Buchanan
GLQ (2022) 28 (4): 489–513.
October 1, 2022
https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-9991299
The author said on Twitter: "This was YEARS in the making, and I hope it’s a valuable launching point for future scholar-organizers."
It's rentable from Duke University Press for $15 for 48 hours.

On evolving biological knowledge ("A Doctor’s Case Against Assigning Sex at Birth," Assigned Media, April 8, 2024), Emry Cohen, MD writes:

"It was not until 1923 that Theophilus Painter discovered the X and Y sex chromosomes, which was later confirmed by Tijo and Levan in 1956 where they were able to definitively describe human chromosomes. For those keeping track at home, this means that our knowledge of chromosomes and any of the resultant deeper understanding of sex occurred three years after Christine Jorgensen trail-blazed her way to international fame by transitioning to become a woman in the early 1950s."

Wave 2: 1970s

Rosenthal writes: "In 1979, a research report critical of transgender medicine led to the closure of the most well-respected clinics in the United States."

"In the 1950s and 1960s, transgender medicine bounced back in the U.S. Scientists and clinicians at several universities began experimenting with new hormonal and surgical interventions. In 1966, Johns Hopkins became the first university hospital in the world to offer trans health care.

By the 1970s, trans medicine went mainstream. Nearly two dozen university hospitals were operating gender identity clinics and treating thousands of transgender Americans. Several trans women and men wrote popular autobiographical accounts of their transitions. Trans people were even on television, talking about their bodies and fighting for their rights."

Rosenthal continues: A 1979 study by Meyer and Reter was "homophobic and classist in design" insofar as it defined the success of gender transitions by whether the people had "straight marriages and...gender-appropriate jobs." So: "The study exemplified the pseudoscientific beliefs at the heart of transgender medicine in the 1960s through the 1980s, that patients had to conform to societal norms – including heterosexuality, gender conformity, domesticity and marriage – in order to receive care. This was not an ideology rooted in science but in bigotry."

Willow Maclay and Caden Gardner, Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema (Repeater, 2024):

“The end of the 1970s, with the publishing of and support for The Transsexual Empire, the Johns Hopkins University halting trans surgeries and the closure of many other gender clinics, in addition to the HIV/AIDS crisis, heralded a dreadful new decade for many trans people. Indeed, transness was further pathologized by the medical community. After years of research, the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-III (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) was finally published in 1980 and employed the term ‘gender identity disorder’ (GID) to label those who were transsexual.

This would immediately have an impact, largely negative, and meet resistance. Much like homosexuals and their fight to have homosexuality removed from the DSM — a fight they ultimately won in 1973 — many trans people resented the pathologizing, medicalizing, and labeling entailed in having to be diagnosed with GID. The Standards of Care tied to being diagnosed with GID meant a long process full of contingencies and evaluation, often lasting years.”

Wave 3: Post-Covid

Chase Strangio: "Though contemporary political assaults on trans lives began in 2016, it was only in 2019 that the right found a fruitful opening for attack: Since 2020, 24 states have passed bills barring trans kids from participating in sports aligned with their gender identities." ("Trans Visibility Is Nice. Safety Is Even Better," New York Times, Feb. 15, 2024)

Hil Malatino (Trans Care, 2020) refers to "the present moment, when trans lives are recurrently and brutally utilized as a political wedge issue in order to consolidate horrifyingly ascendant forms of ethnonationalism and the ongoing violence of neoliberal austerity. This produces forms of hypervisibility that wear us out, that cultivate hyperalertness and anxiety that, for so many of us, make getting out of bed and getting through the day difficult."

Malatino goes on to mention the 2018 New York Times headline "‘Transgender’ Could be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration"; it was predictable, yet still felt shocking. Malatino explains:

"The strategy being deployed by the Department of Human Services under Trump — interpreting gender as reducible to biological sex, where biological sex is wrongly understood to be radically dimorphic and grounded, fundamentally and irrevocably, in the aesthetic appearance of the genitals at birth — is old hat. I lived and taught in the southern United States for years; I've listened to conservative politicians repeat this idiocy over and over again in order to attempt to push through transphobic legislation."

Rosenthal writes: "And since 2021, when Arkansas became the first U.S. state among now at least 21 other states banning gender-affirming care for minors, we have been living in a third wave."

See my article: 2024 anti-transgender initiatives in the US

As the anti-trans people would have it, as explicated by Charlie Jane Anders,

"The story goes something like this: Once upon a time, there were only a small number of trans people. And they were Good Trans People, who lived with dysphoria for years before going through the system and proving themselves, and at last having surgeries. They accepted that they weren't really ever going to be their real gender — they were going to be flawed facsimiles of men and women, and they knew that they were allowed to exist thanks to the charity of everybody else. These Good Trans People did everything in their meager power to walk unnoticed among the normal people, hoping for a modicum of tolerance and understanding. They were grateful for whatever crumbs the world tossed their way.

But then along came these Trans Activists, who are Bad Trans People. They imposed a heinous "gender ideology," which insisted that trans men are men and trans women are women, and non-binary people are valid. This is outrageous, and flies in the face of everything that good, decent people believe. But there are still Good Trans People out there, who do not subscribe to this harmful ideology — who know their place."

— Charlie Jane Anders, I'm Proud To Be a Bad Trans Person, September 8, 2021

On systems thinking

Systems thinking is non-hierarchical and undermines supremacist thinking.

On 'systems thinking'

A few days ago on Bluesky, Dr. Elizabeth Sawin says it's "revolutionary/radical thinking" (Bluesky)

there aren't lines in the world, just in our minds"
good: "curiosity about borders and boundaries"
dangerous: "treating made-up boundaries as real" (Bluesky)

"events unfold in multistep (sometimes circular, sometimes branching) chains of causation" (Bluesky)

She recommends this book: Thinking In Systems by Donella Meadows

Right vs. wrong

People like to perceive a Team A vs. Team B conflict and propose which side they'd be on or (as a spectator) hope will win. However, such an imagined "conflict" may not the best way of understanding what's going on. Maybe there's a place for A and B to both exist in the world and to exist in some kind of creative tension or mutual support. Jumping to right vs. wrong eliminates possibilities.

Tessa Koumoundouros shares an example of a failure of systems thinking: Instead of acknowledging "complex ecosystem interactions," we reduce it to a problem of "horses vs wildlife that can be fenced (it can't) to argue for an emotionaly charged 'ethical decision', at expense of the entire system" (Bluesky) The context is this article: "Rethinking the mantra of biodiversity: Why the past should not determine the future." Pablo Castelló and Francisco Santiago-Ávila. ABC Australia. Feb 8, 2024.

Ecological crisis

The tendency toward atomistic thinking, where you can focus on a discrete person or thing as well as on some direct cause-and-effect chain centering on that same originally perceived person or thing (whose identity is not transformed by the process), and individualistic thinking (selfishness), is a reason why people don't productively discuss or sustainably enact our relationships to natural systems.

"As Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe wrote in their book “Rewilding: The Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery,” rewilding pays attention “to the emergent properties of interactions between ‘things’ in ecosystems … a move from linear to systems thinking.”" (quoted here)

Gender

"Gender" means "category." To understand someone's gender, we can look at them not only as individuals, and not only as how they individually fit (or don't fit) into the category, but at their relationships with others and how everyone's characteristics and category membership are always in flux. That would be systems thinking.

Another suggestion

See also: Systems 1: An Introduction to Systems Thinking by Draper Kauffman and Morgan Kauffman