Month: April 2020

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Republic Day

I took my sophomores to the Valley of the Fallen this winter following a visit to El Escorial. The purpose of the day was to talk about how imperial ambitions are constructed through art and architecture across time, and the pairing of those two monuments is a great illustration of the phenomenon. Franco was consciously mirroring the location, style, materials, and design of King Philip II’s palace when he commissioned his mausoleum-monument that would ultimately be built by prisoners of war. 

Our visit was less than two months after the disinterment of Francisco Franco, and so I also wanted to show the students the ways that the conversation about historical memory is slowly starting to shift.  Photography isn’t permitted inside the monument and there were three guards assigned to our group (because we were being led by Francisco Ferrándiz, an anthropologist whose progressive views and activism are unpalatable to the staff there) so I couldn’t take even a surreptitious photo of the shiny, new, blank marble slab with nothing below it. (The surveillance aspect of the visit was striking, both to me and to the students in the group, who were very cognizant of being closely observed.) 

People still venerate the grave of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Spanish Falange, whose body will eventually be moved into an anonymous grave on the site along with other people who were killed in the Civil War. I don’t need to digress into a tangent about my willingness or not to sidestep certain rules, but what I don’t feel bound to observe, for sure, are rules designed to preserve nostalgia for fascism; and the one surreptitious photo I did manage to take was of Primo de Rivera’s tomb — in low light and shot quite literally from the hip while trying to keep 28 19-year-olds from wandering off  — specifically so I could query one particular detail at a later date: The ribbon around one bunch of roses left by a mourner is in the colors of the flag of the republic: red, yellow, and purple. I still don’t know the answer to the question why, but I like to think that some contrarian florist knew the destination of the bouquet and adorned it with the flag of Spain’s second republic, the democratic government that fell at the end of the Spanish Civil War, and of the republican government in exile.   

It’s hard not to wonder and worry about the state of democracy right now with lots of proposals being floated for managing the coronavirus that seem likely to put privacy, civil rights, and even the upcoming elections at risk. So it’s worth taking a step back to celebrate the survival of even fragile, new republics, and the contrarian florist-citizens who insist upon their survival. 

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Paper Ephemera

Just something simple but pretty to look at in bad times. Dust jacket of a 1951 translation of a talk given by Bialik in 1913, when he was still based in Odessa. It’s pink Italian paper laid out on a screen mold; “PMF Italia” is watermarked on the opposite corner. 

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Pozo Amargo, 2020

I used to have this friend. For a lot of reasons we grew apart. Ultimately, it was one of those grad school friendships that didn’t survive one and then both of us no longer being in graduate school. I might have tried to hang on longer if I hadn’t felt like I had taken on the role of being the friendly local Jewess whose very being could debunk the kinds of myths believed by people who grow up in parts of the world and the country where they might not have ever met any Jews, and if I hadn’t felt like I was failing at it. She’s the sort of person who thinks she can identify Jews — strangers, classmates, faculty —  by the size of our noses or who will start out an anecdote by mentioning that one of the people involved “is Jewish — no offense” as if it were an insult. 

There are other reasons for it, too, but we’re not in touch anymore; and that’s entirely on me. I don’t wish her ill. I hope she’s doing well, whatever well means to her; and I do occasionally look at her social media to see if that’s the case. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, a Jewish journalist posting a photo of a line of men in coats and streimels and black hats waiting to buy suits for Passover; the journalist commented that he found this phenomenon infuriating.

My former friend replied to him:

(Guys, look, I know this is searchable, but I’ve anonymized it because as much as this hurt is personal, this is a much wider problem. Don’t go be an arse to someone I used to care about on social media, please.)

I’m teaching an introductory lecture course on medieval Spain this semester as part of NYU’s core curriculum, and we are nearing the lecture in which I will discuss the fourteenth-century legends and the rhetoric that grew up around Jews as unique and malicious vectors of the plague, legends and rhetoric that have persisted until today. It’s less flashy than the neo-Nazis who march with tiki torches, afraid that Jews will “replace” them, but it’s still an anti-Jewish myth that has persisted — in forms that change over time, of course — since the Middle Ages.

Let’s start with some statistics. The measles outbreak in Marin County, CA, was the result of a huge percentage of parents refusing to vaccinate their children for non-religious philosophical reasons. The United States was within days of no longer being considered a country where measles is eradicated; we’re not a big enough or spread out enough part of the population at large for that to have happened if measles were a Jewish problem. The bottom line is that yes, there are people in Jewish communities who are wrong on public health issues in ways that perpetuate harm. But there are also people in non-Jewish communities who are wrong on public health issues in ways that perpetuate harm. Thinking that you know better than physicians and epidemiologists or that you don’t have to pay attention to the wider world, whatever the foundation of those beliefs, is not an inherently Jewish trait. People are people in both the wonderful and the deeply stupid ways they engage with the world; but people tend to highlight it and act on it when it’s Jews in the wrong.

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