responses to participants

A number of people have responded to my "Putin Is Right" posting and several others.On Putin, there was one comment pointing out that the Russian President himself is an imperial bully, harrasing Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, etc., so who is he to lecture the U.S. on bossing around the rest of the world? I agree that Putin is a bully, a murderer of crusading journalists and an uzerpater, but for now at least he is a regional bully, whereas the U.S. claims its right to unilaterally lord it over the rest of the world. It is for that reason that Putin's speech in Munich resonated far beyond revanchist Russians of the red-brown variety, but caused amens in Europe, the Muslim world and many places south of the Rio Grande.

Interestingly, a number of other people, all Russian-American Jews, responded to my argument--both on and off the forum, in surprisingly favorable tones in reference to Putin, even in tones of pride in the rennaissance of Russian power he has overseen. I have long been fascinated how certain Russian Jews who tend to be Republicans in the U.S. political context and Likudniks in the Israeli political context, also evince, almost in spite of themselves, a fondness for Putin and pride in Russian power. I guess American observers like me see that as more of a contradiction than many of my Russian-Jewish friends do, and perhaps they have a point. After all, what Putin, Bush and Bibi have in common is a fondness for the application of power without niceties of compassion and humanism that liberals insist upon. Silnaya ruka y fsyo. To me, all three of the above mentioned guys are nasty sons of bitches, and Putin even more so than the other two--but again, more of the world feels oppressed by America these days than they do by Russia, which is the point I tried to make in 'Putin Is Right'.

Tom Friedman also had an excellent op-ed piece on this theme in the NYT a couple of weeks ago (sorry I forgot to make a link here), pointing out that when the U.S. insisted during Clinton's time in expanding NATO into Poland, Slovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Lativa, and Lithuania, etc, what we accomplished was to discredit Russian liberalism and to help pave the way for Putinism. And what benefit did we get out it, Friedman asked tongue in cheek, the addition of the Czech Navy to NATO?

My friend Locke is for McCain. I'm not. McCain is an utter hypocrite, now endorsing the Christian right, calling for the outlawing of abortion and all the rest of the crap those people push. He obviously doesnt believe it, but in his desperate desire to get elected, he is ready to kiss the popa of the American far right. Let him enjoy the company of the Falwells and Robertsons, people he once rightly called fanatics. As for Locke's other point, that my giving my rhetorical blessing to Jews with the decency and guts to go to the West Bank to help replant Palestinian olive trees that other Jews (settlers) viciously uprooted, feels good in the way that wetting my pants feels good, he is right that I ought to be out there with them rather than sitting in the safety of New Jersey and blessing their actions. But, Locke, I have met many imams for peace; I attended a conference in Seville, Spain last March with more than 100 of such imams from around the world (International Conference of Imams and Rabbis), including a number from Gaza. In recent weeks, I have visited two mosques in New York and dialogued with Muslims who want an end to killing on both sides and explictely condemn 9-11 and other acts of terror by Islamic extremists.

The idea that there are no Muslims who want peace and are willing to speak out against extremism is one that Jews enjoy repeating to each other on the apparent theory that endlessly repeating a falsehood and shutting ones eyes and ears to all evidence to the contrary, must make what you are saying to be true. Locke, believe me, reaching out to the other side and learning to understand and trust each other is a lot harder--but also a lot more rewarding--than wetting one's pants. If you would like, I can arrange to take you to the next such dialogue I'll be going to in New York, scheduled for the end of March.

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Living La Vida Loca

Postcard from Cabo San Lucas

I apologize to readers that I haven’t filed in so long—I am just completing a week’s vacation in Cabo San Lucas, at the tip of Baja California, together with Tanya, her daughter Hannah, my brother Dan from Oakland, California and his daughter Twyla, a student at Barnard. We had a wonderful time amidst the cactus, beautiful beaches and superb Mexican restaurants, and lots of drinking of various strange concoctions, but also had a stressful adventure I wanted to share briefly. Rubyjewsday, readers, beware, if you travel to Mexico and decide to rent a car, ALWAYS pay for full coverage insurance and not just Liability. I did the latter, thinking I am a good driver and why pay the extra $15 a day, but in the middle of our trip, on a lonely road in the middle of the desert, our car was hit hard from behind by a local driver and sustained somewhere from $6000-$8000 in damages. Even though the accident was clearly not our fault, it turned out that the insurance of the other driver, who was a very nice guy, had expired, and the company said we were 100 percent liable for the damages. We decided to fight, and got some local lawyers, who were wonderful people and hardly wanted to take any money (I ended up paying them $300 for half a days work and taking them to dinner and they told it was way to much money). They took us to a Mexican consumer protection bureau called Profeco, which filed papers on our behalf and said they couldn’t force us to pay before leaving the country, but could only file charges against us and I warned the company that I am a journalist who would write nasty things about them, etc, etc. We called our credit card company and instructed them not to pay any large sums to a rent a car company, which was fortunate, because almost immediately thereafter they tried to collect and found the account closed. I also called the U.S. Consulate, and the official there reported that the company was considering calling the police (los federales) to prevent from leaving the country without paying. Our lawyers said, “Don’t worry, they can’t do that,” but I was VERY worried and considering caving in, but then, three days after the accident, the company called and said that the other driver had agreed to pay and we only owed for the week rental we had originally agreed too.

It was all very stressful, but also fascinating; a chance to get into the workings of Mexican society, instead of the usual lying on the beach and sipping pina colados. Overall, I was enchanted with the Mexicans, a warm, cultured, artistic and very intelligent, people, which is relevant to Russian Jewish community, because several weeks ago I was at a debate of the Russian leadership group of the American Jewish Committee, where there was a liberal-conservative debate on immigration (among other issues) and the conservative side was arguing that even though they themselves only arrived 10-15 years ago as refugees (and a few as illegal immigrants), the U.S. should now build a wall and keep out the swarthy Mexicans, who immediately go on welfare( as though untold thousands of Russian new arrivals had not done exactly the same) and thereby preserve America’s ‘European’ character. I had better not go into my feelings about the hypocrisy of this line of thinking here as I may write about the immigration debate in the Russian community for the Jewish Week, but I wish some of the people making those arguments had a chance to meet and experience the Mexico and Mexicans Tanya and I got to know in this wonderful restful and zestful week. They were nothing short of an inspiration and no less fully, resplendently human and equal to any Russian Jew I ever met.

As has happened many times before, I felt proud and happy to be a Jew who is part and parcel of the larger human family and mi hermanos and hermanas (brother and sisters) come in all colors and ethnicities (Mexicans, Africans, Chinese and Palestinians, as well as Europeans and Americans; Jews, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and Hindus. Only together, as one collective humanity, can we build a more peaceful and ecologically sustainable world. The alternative is collective destruction.

I will write on my return tonight responses to some of the posts I received concerning my “Putin is Right” piece.

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Putin Is Right

Let me say from the top that I yield to no one in my detestation of Vladimir Putin and all that he has wrought. Here is a ex-KGB thug who has turned Russia into a thuggish kleptocracy fueled by oil wealth and totally dominated by the new version of the KGB known as FSB. Putin runs an autocratic regime based on the mailed fist (silnaya ruka) that casually murders its opponents, whether in Moscow or in London. Internationally, Putin’s Russia bullies weaker, resource-poor neighbors like Georgia and Ukraine, irresponsibly shares nuclear technology with Iran and uses Europe’s addiction on its natural gas to keep the EU from challenging its behavior.

Yet despite all of that, Putin was right on target when he gave a speech at a security conference in Munich featuring the participation of DefSec Robert Gates, Sen John McCain, Joe Lieberman and others in which he accused the U.S. of forcing its will on the rest of the world.
Putin accused the United States of making the world a more dangerous place by pursuing policies aimed at making it "one single master." Attacking the concept of a "unipolar" world in which the United States was the sole superpower, he said: "What is a unipolar world? No matter how we beautify this term it means one single center of power, one single center of force, and one single master. "It has nothing in common with democracy because that is the opinion of the majority taking into account the minority opinion," he told the gathering of top security and defense officials. Putin archly added that “People are always teaching us democracy, but the people who teach us democracy don't want to learn it themselves," he said.

Incredibly, in all of the U.S. press coverage I’ve seen of the speech, in the NYT, Washington Post, and elsewhere, the focus has been almost exclusively on asking whether oil-rich Putin was trying to start a new Cold War, without focusing on the obvious; that most of the world emphatically agrees with Putin’s position that the unipolar American hegemony that has ruled the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union, has been bad for the world. Despite the collapse of its only rival, the U.S., even under the relatively pacific Clinton regime, kept on building arms—including nuclear arms—as though there was some rational reason to do so, and poisoned westernization trends in Russia during the 90’s by expanding NATO to include all the former Soviet satellites and the Baltic states. Bush started off in 2001 by tearing up the 30-year-old anti-ballistic missile treaty (it now plans to place ABM’s in Poland and the Czech Republic, and of course, going hog wild after 9-11; sending U.S. forces to Central Asia and then invading Iraq despite the overwhelming opposition of the international community to that invasion. Bush and company refused to abide by any international agreements and tore up the Kyoto Protocol, postponing for a decade the efforts of the world community to try to deal with global warming.

Putin said the United States had repeatedly overstepped its national borders on questions of international security, a policy he said had made the world less, not more, safe.
"Unilateral actions have not resolved conflicts but have made them worse," Putin said, adding that force should only be used when the option is backed by the United Nations Security Council. "This is very dangerous. Nobody feels secure any more because nobody can hide behind international law," he said. Putin also said the increased use of force was "causing an arms race with the desire of countries to get nuclear weapons." All of the above is very true and right on target.

Are we so blind in this country that we can’t see how much the world; not only Russia, but China, Latin America, the Muslim world and Europe as well, resents the U.S. dictat, and it is that sense of being pushed around and disregarded, as much as the presence of the obnoxious George Bush in the presidency, that is making this country hated more and more around the world. In the wake of the bloody debacle of Iraq, which was caused by the hubris and arrogance of the neo-cons, we can only hope that the next administration will ‘get it’ that the age of absolute U.S. domination of the world is over. The U.S. may still have the military razzle-dazzle to sweep into a third world nation and overthrow its government in the face of world opinion, but Iraq has shown that we can’t do the follow through and force our will and version of reality on a (dissolving) Middle Eastern society with very different priorities.

So far, Bush, with his arrogant self-righteousness and unilateralism, has played completely into the hands of bin-Laden and his ilk, immeasurably strengthening Islamic extremism by invading the heart of the Arab/Muslim world and trying to create some new version of Texas there. The U.S. is not in a position to ‘do’ Iraq or Agfghanistan on its own; it needs the help of the world and that help will come at a price; no more unilateral decision making out of Washington, whether by reactionary Bushies or a restored (Hillary) Clinton regime. Putin, nasty and thuggish though he is, deserves credit for saying out loud what most of the rest of the world has been feeling for quite a long time.

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Sophia Romma's Absolute Clarity

The other night, Tanya and I went to a theater on MacDougal Street in the Village to see an off-Broadway play called Absolute Clarity and had a brief, but rewarding encounter with the playwright, Sophia Romma (ne Murashovsky), a wildly talented exemplar of the new generation of Russian-American Jewish writers alongside Gary Shteyngart and Lara Vapnyar. Romma, now in her early 30’s came here from the Soviet Union at the age of six and has somehow found time and energy to get both a BFA and MFA at NYU and a PhD in 19th Century Russian literature at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. She teaches American Literature at Touro College, runs a screenwriting workshop at the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center and sometimes teaches screewritin g at Mc Gill University in Montreal. She is clearly an intensely mezhdunarodnya soul, a creation of a particularist ‘Russian Jewish intelligentsia in America’ sensibility, which is by its very nature extremely cosmopolitan.

A writer of poetry and prose, Romma has written three plays which were produced at the famous La MaMa Theater; Love In the Eyes of Hope Dies Last, a journey through Russian-Jewish immigration in a series of eight playlets; Coyote, Take Me There, a surrealistic work on the ordeals of immigration and the corruption of the American Dream as experienced by Russian Jews and Mexican immigrants; and Defenses of Prague, a story of revenge set among gypsies in 1968 Prague. She is author of the film Poor Liza, a love story set in 19th Century Russia which was directed by Slava Tsukerman, another Russian-Jewish expatriate who made the memorably psychedelic and brainy film Liquid Sky back in the 1980’s.

Romma’s last play before Absolute Clarity was called Shoot Me In the Cornfields, a time travel extravaganza involving characters finding love during the siege of Stalingrad and during the Moscow coup of 1991, which, I myself had the privilege of witnessing. Actually, I had thought that was the play we would be seeing, but instead found that Absolute Clarity was a ‘transplanted to New York’ version of a play by the famous Russian playwright Edvard Radzinski, who collaborated with her on the project. I was a bit disappointed because I had expected to see a play focused on the Russian Jewish experience, but Absolute Clarity turned out to be an enjoyable absurdist romp through the modern downtown New York cultural and artistic scene, involving vivid characters who revolve around Claire, clearly Romma’s alter ego, a prematurely hip teenage gamin who speaks in rhyme. Claire struggles to actualize herself as an artist, is terribly cruel to her mother, a lounge singer who was once a stripper, torments and seduces a middle aged artist, and hangs out with an outlaw jazz/hip-hop group, whose members rap, sing and make music in black, Jewish, Latin and Russian/Georgian rhythms. The play’s director, by the way, is another transplanted Russian Jew, Yuri Joffe.

There are some other memorable characters, including a hilarious black chanteuse, a slimy, joyously corrupt Italian-American judge, with perfect Curtis Sliwa diction, a bitchy, seductive Frenchwoman. It is obvious that Romma has a wonderful ear for language, accent, and expression of cultural distinctiveness. And she wrote all of the jazzy, hip hop music in the play, which is itself a tour de force

Before the play. I spoke briefly to Romma, a slight curly-haired figure with a warmth and easy informality that contrasts with the creative forces—some of them evidently dark—churning inside her. As she talks about her life and her art, it is obvious that she is fully at home and artistically engaged in both New York and Moscow and interacts effortlessly with the finest artistic and literary minds in both capitals. Let me say for the record that I am more than a little jealous that I don’t get to have her life, but, nu, shto deliyat? Anyway, its fun to be in the presence of youthful genius. Romma said that Absolute Clarity which is about “striving for happiness amidst betrayal” is her attempt to write a play along the lines of one of her artistic inspirations--Tennessee Williams—“to have a go at writing something more meaty than I usually do.”

Romma spends a lot of time in Moscow and loves living there, “because it remains a place where you don’t need a calling card like you do here. You can just drop in on people spontaneously, although it’s a good idea to bring a honey cake with you.” But hasn’t Moscow gone all glitzy and wildly materialistic? “Yes, that is happening of course, and I dislike glitziness whether in Moscow or New York. But I still find plenty of people there who believe in love, beauty, poetry and humanism.”

Anyway, rubyjewsday readers, I recommend you go and see Absolute Clarity, which is to run at the Players Theater from January 31 to February 25. Yes, it’s an America-focused play, but it comes with plenty of Russkaya dusha.

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hope and inspiration

As long as there remain Jews and Palestinians like these to counter the haters and bigots on both sides, there is still hope

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limited, modified mea culpa

Nemo and others have complained that I should have read the Jimmy Carter book before commenting on the controversy surrounding it. Having now read it, I concede I found it more unbalanced in favor of the Palestinians than I had expected. I stand by the main point I made in my previous postings on this question; that it was outrageous for Alan Dershowitz to shout before Jewish gatherings that Carter has "blood on his hands" for his insistence that the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians is profoundly wrong, or for other critics to label as an "anti-Semite" the former president who worked his ass off to help Israel to get its first peace treaty with an Arab nation. However, it was a mistake on my part to plunge headlong into the controversy without, as Nemo says, having done my homework, and I hereby acknowledge my mistake. So what, you may ask, was it about the Carter book that turned me off? I agree fully with his premise that the Israeli occupation and oppression of the Palestinians over the past 40 years is morally wrong and has contributed mightily to the perpetuation and intensification of the conflict. But Carter sees the occupation as the central cause, the causus belli, for the endless, every worsening Israeli-Palestinian conflict; riting that Palestinian suicide bombing and other violence, while wrong, is simply a "reaction" to Israeli occupation and would stop if Israel carried out a withdrawal to the lines which may or may not have been agreed to by Israeli and Palestinian neogitators at Taba in December 2000, with Israel leaving all but about 2-3 percent of the WB and the Arab populated parts of East Jerusalem in exchange for full peace and recognition (Dennis Ross says both sides signed off on this, Carter says Israel never really did).


Whatever. The problem with that analysis is, of course, that there is a very sizable chunk of the Palestinians, today represented by Hamas, which won the last Palestinian elections which do not accept Israel within ANY borders, and see such a peace treaty as only a way station to their long term goal of making Israel disappear. Also, obviously that the Palestinians, as then represented by the PLO, did not accept Israel's existence before 1967, and only did so at the 1992 Oslo Agreement, while never giving up on the right of return that if fully implemented would destroy Israel as a Jewish state.


I certainly agree with Carter's point that hard-line Israeli policies and never-ending settlement building have pushed more and more Palestinians into the extremist camp and undermined the moderates, most damagingly in the post-Oslo period when for a fleeting time there was a 70 percent majority of Palestinians in favor of permanent peace with Israel. But the same thing can be said in reverse; that continuation of Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians after Oslo destroyed the Israeli majority in favor of the agreements. The main point is that Carter declines to grapple seriously with Palestinian rejectionism, except to blame it on Israeli policies. That is much too facile. Palestinian rejectionism of the Jewish state project began at least 50 years BEFORE the 1967 war. Also, while the former president rightly expresses great moral indignation at Israeli policies which oppress and torment the Palestinians, one does not feel a similar sympathy from him for an Israeli population which has suffered grievous losses and trauam due to ongoing Palestinian terrorism. The problem with that kind of selective moral outrage is that it just contributes to further polarization and closoing of minds. Yes, 3-4 times of Palestinians have died in Israeli-Palestinian violence since the explosion of the second intifada in 2000, but that still leaves something like 1000 Israelis who were killed by Palestinians during the same period. They and those who loved them deserve every bit as much compassion as Palestinian victims do.


The reality is that only a moral witness that gets that BOTH sides are suffering horribly in the present situation and deserve equal love and compassion has a chance to elicit healing and reconciliation rather than the opposite impact. Many people in the pro-Israel camp cannot find it in themselves to feel human compassion for Palestinians and plenty of people in the pro-Palestine camp cannot find any compassion for Israelis. I had expected more from Carter, a deeply religious Christian who has done much wonderful work around the world for peace and democracy since leaving the presidency. His book left me feeling sad. To the extent that he confronts Jews and says insistently 'look at the hideousness and moral squalor of the occupation straight in the face' he is doing us a moral service. But to the extent that he seems hard-hearted and unable to feel Israeli and Jewish pain, as he does in this book, he undercuts the usefulness of the whbole project and and a potential opportunity for honesty, truth and healing slips away.

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