American Pogroms

 

I was always aware that the Chinese were appallingly mistreated in America, particularly in nineteenth and early twentieth-century California.  But nothing prepared me for Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans by Jean Pfaelzer.

What Pfaelzer catalogs is nothing short of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and pogroms, all under the banner of an ugly and uncompromising white supremacy.  

If you know a person who still thinks America gives all a fair shot regardless of ethnicity, religion, or class, disabuse them by giving them this book.

Are the Inverted Nuns Quotes?

 

I’m not sure how many secrets are revealed in Scribal Secrets: Extraordinary Texts in the Torah and Their Implications by James S. Diamond (of blessed memory). 

Indeed, the Torah has some textual abnormalities that are hard to explain, almost all dots above certain words.  Diamond gives various explanations for them: the scribes are noting these words because they are in the wrong place, but they don’t want to remove them.  Or we should pay close attention to this word because it has some importance.

Then there are large and small letters.  In the Shema, it appears, this was done to highlight letters that could be easily confused and render the meaning heretical.  Other small or large letters have no obvious meaning.

What fascinates me most are the inverted nuns in Numbers 10: 35-36.  The author thinks that the nuns may indicate that this is an insertion from another source outside the Torah, the so-called Song of the Ark.  We know that the Torah is a book built from various sources, but they were incorporated into the text without drawing attention to that fact.

If the inverted nuns truly act as quotes here, and they were once used more frequently in the Torah text for such interpolations, this is truly an amazing bit of Torah-lore. 

The Civil War Counter-Offensive

 

Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy, by David Zucchino, chronicles what became a template for the violent overthrow of Republication governments and the popular vote in the years after the Civil War. The White Supremacist Democrats in Wilmington, North Carolina first used fear and violence against black voters and their white allies.  They stuffed ballot boxes and kept black voters away from the polls through violence and intimidate.

After they “won” the election they banished white Republican men from the town for life, and the black middle class. They then enacted laws that would enable to keep their power in future elections.  As the author explains, this coup, and others like it in other southern towns and cities, led to the formalization of Jim Crow laws in the south, and peeled back any gains made during and after Reconstruction.

We fought a Civil War, and then lost it in the decades after the war’s end, through what can only be called in insurgency.  Zucchino’s book makes this all too clear: this was not only a southern event, but an American event.  The compliancy of the North and the Federal government allowed this to go unchecked, and will still live with its consequences.   

Getting to that Place

 

Emily St. John Mandel novel Sea of Tranquility is certainly an accomplished work.  Obviously people are buying and enjoying this book (15K review on Amazon as of this writing). This is an unfair thing to write, as I should judge the work by the work, or by similar works, but this novel does not live up to such hype.  Certainly, it is a good novel, but like nearly of Emily St. John Mandel’s work (with the possible exception of Station Eleven) there is the sense that she is holding back.  Her writing could be deeper and more emotionally resonant, but something prevents her from getting to that place.

Waiting for Their Torah

 

I stopped reading books like Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood, by Leah Vincent, not because I think this type of book is in anyway a worthless endeavor, but because it pains me that the most of the extreme versions of Judaism bear little resemblance to the religion that shapes my entire life.  A religion that is the way for me, is a prison for others.  

I read this book because the author, now known as Jericho Z Vincent, advances some stunning ideas in articles and videos, and I look forward to a book of their Torah.  I wanted to get the requisite background of their world, their story, so I am prepared to read their Torah.