By Irit Dekel, April 11th, 2012 
Upon boarding the flight back last Wednesday night from NY to Berlin I picked up the Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), finding on its first page a picture of Guenter Grass, holding a pipe. The headline read “Ein Aufschrei” (An outcry): Guenter Grass warns of a war against Iran: “the literature Nobel Prize Laureate’s claims that Germany should not provide Israel with Submarines.”
I did not read the poem, “What Must Be Said” on the flight (being busy with two young children and recurring attempts to sleep), but thought that, from that headline, I would support an outcry against attacking Iran. I like poetry making the first pages of centrist (left-leaning) newspapers, and as for the pipe and the submarines, they are signs of older times, part of performing memory in Germany around Grass who is identified with the pipe, the 68’ers and Germany’s underwater adventures, and its declared commitment to Israel’s security. So be it. But now I have my concerns about the not very good poem and about the controversies surrounding it.
In the taxi ride back home, we heard discussions in all news channels (as the driver browsed from one to the next) about Grass’s anti-Semitism, which perplexed me. We read the poem at home and were underwhelmed. Thomas Steinfeld noted in the SZ on Wednesday night, it is not Grass’s first poem. Actually, the first published one made him join group 47 in 1955, and his poetry has always been full of exaggerations. Exaggerations are part of the poetic form, we are reminded, and Grass went wrong here, as he erred about, for instance, “trying to save the collapsing GDR from the German Federal Republic.”
I would like to focus a bit on the language of the lyrical prose, preserving and highlighting parts of it that have been overlooked, like the discussion of comparable moral standing and silence, and the performance of national memory narrative.
In the German (and Israeli) discussion following Grass’s poem, the focus has been on the attack on Israeli atomic policy, on Israel’s moral superiority in the Middle East and on . . .
Read more: What Can be Said about Guenter Grass’s “What Must be Said”?
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 9th, 2012 
This in-depth post is the first in a series on the question: Why Poland? To skip this introduction, click here.
A few years ago, I was invited to give a series of lectures in Lublin, Poland. I was promised that the lectures would be translated and published as a book. It was a promise, never fulfilled. But preparing and giving the lectures was a very interesting exercise, nonetheless. It gave me an opportunity to start reflecting on how my research and public activities in Poland before the fall of communism could inform public life there “after the fall.”
I prepared and presented three extended lectures. The first was on media and the politics of small things, a topic that I have focused on in recent years. The other two lectures were on topics I haven’t explored further, but I think may be of interest to readers of Deliberately Considered. I will reproduce the lectures in the coming weeks. Today’s in-depth post: the first of three posts addressing a simple question I have often been asked, “Why Poland?” Later, my second lecture, another frequently asked question: “Why Theater?”
Why Poland? It was a question first posed to me by my mother. She wanted to understand why it was that I had chosen to do research in the country from where her parents fled. It was a question motivated by the troubled relationship between Poles and Jews. It is a topic that I have not spent much time addressing professionally, though I have had to deal with it personally. The lecture I gave in Poland was one of the rare times that I publicly addressed the topic, making the personal professional.
The lecture made three distinct moves, responding to the issue of the relationship between Jews and Poles from three different vantage points: the first, today’s post, was the most personal, built upon reflections on my personal experiences as a researcher in Poland in 1973-4. The second . . .
Read more: Why Poland?: Poles and Jews Before the Fall of Communism
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 9th, 2012 My mother was not pleased when I told her that I would be going to Poland to do my dissertation research, thirty-five years ago. “Why Poland?” This was not a simple or innocent question, motivating it were the horrors of the twentieth century, and the pain and suffering of her family. For, I am the grandson of Victor and Brana Frimet who came from the small town of Bulschwietz near the city of Lemberg (Lwow to the Poles, Lviv, to the Ukrainians). The Frimet’s memories of their times in that place, then Poland, were not sweet. This was a town, a city, a nation and a region where multiculturalism has not been a very happy matter, as it was not for much of twentieth century Europe, especially for my people. My grandparents left in 1920, and they never looked back, never regretted leaving “the land of their fathers.” Our relatives who remained perished in the Holocaust. Why, then, was I going back?
My answer to my mother’s question was filled with the naiveté and the self-centeredness of youth. I was looking for adventure. I wanted to visit Europe after I had completed my studies. I had a good dissertation proposal to study theater in Poland, and a major foundation was willing to pay for a year’s preparation and language study and a year or more of research and living expenses in Europe. This was a great opportunity, both personal and professional. For me, the pain of my people and my family were things of the past, to be remembered and understood, but not something that should restrict my ambitions and plans. In retrospect, mine was “the wisdom of youth.”
Because I was not restricted by the very recent past, which seemed not so recent to me, I could attempt to develop the capacity to remember and to understand, as would never have been the case had I been constrained by my mother’s memories of her parents. But the insight of my mother’s question persists. It sheds light on many of the problems I have faced in the course of my research and experiences in East and Central Europe, and it may help us understand the problems of clashing collective memories . . .
Read more: Why Poland?: Poles and Jews Before the Fall of Communism
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 6th, 2012 
Cynicism is a key cultural characteristic of the political right today. It’s aggressive, different from cynicisms past, much more than the enervating political orientation and questionable political tactic that I studied in the Reagan era. It is central to the “conservative” brand, first clearly presented at “fair and balanced” Fox News. It was shockingly revealed in the speech Mitt Romney gave to the Associated Press editors on Wednesday. I fear that this cynicism has also invaded the Supreme Court and think it is quite apparent in the response to the Trayvon Martin case in Florida.
Romney’s speech pivoted around the open mic exchange between Presidents Obama and Medevev of Russia. Romney sees in this the key that can unlock the mystery that is the Obama presidency:
“Barack Obama’s exchange with the Russian President raises all kinds of serious questions: What exactly does President Obama intend to do differently once he is no longer accountable to the voters? Why does “flexibility” with foreign leaders require less accountability to the American people? And, on what other issues will he state his true position only after the election is over? …
He wants us to re-elect him so we can find out what he will actually do…
With all the challenges the nation faces, this is not the time for President Obama’s hide and seek campaign…
Unlike President Obama, you don’t have to wait until after the election to find out what I believe in – or what my plans are. I have a pro-growth agenda that will get our economy back on track – and get Americans back to work.”
Given the unsteadiness of Romney’s political commitments, this is an odd attack, as was noted by the talking heads on cable after the speech, but I think much more troubling is the way that Romney used a relativity trivial informal exchange between two presidents to provide a cynical account of Obama’s “hide and seek” politics.” This explains the basic pattern of criticism of Obama that Romney, his Republican rivals . . .
Read more: The Aggressive Cynicism of Mitt Romney and His Party: A Cynical Society Update Part 2
By Michael Corey, April 4th, 2012 
BBC America recently broadcast Jamie’s American Road Trip. Jamie Oliver is not an academic, nor is he an ethnographer. Yet, he is an educator. His stature as a British celebrity chef, television personality, and food activist has given him a platform to explore important issues. Through his active engagement and his charitable foundation, he has helped find ways to give needed skills and jobs to unemployed young people, improve food services in schools in England, and help turn attention to the problems of obesity. He has tried to do similar things in the United States with less success. But his American road trip, nonetheless, presents a vivid portrait of American society through the special perspective of what and how we eat and prepare to eat.
Jamie’s American Road Trip began production in America shortly after Barack Obama became President in 2009. Through food and culture related to it, Oliver traveled as a stranger, and an outsider. He observed and asked this question in a companion cookbook, “We’ve all heard about the American dream … but what is the American dream?” Oliver locates this question within what he describes as a “kick-ass” recession and the election of America’s first black president. Oliver’s road trip to the United States is a backstage look at cultural issues in transition: the tough areas of East Los Angeles; a working cattle ranch and rodeo in Wyoming/Montana; the underground and immigrant areas of New York City; hard hit areas of New Orleans and rural Louisiana; a diagonal slice of the deep South in Georgia ranging from trailer park life to a lady’s tea social; and a small community on a Navajo reservation where a local chapter president is trying to preserve and revive tribal food and culture. Oliver helps us use small things to help us reflect on larger issues.
During six episodes, viewers encounter issues relating to: immigrant communities, gang violence, drugs, the hardships of rural life, homelessness, racism, economic hardships, the underground economy, problems with the health care system in . . .
Read more: A Portrait of America: Jamie’s (Food) Road Trip
By Gary Alan Fine, April 2nd, 2012 
During two weeks under Morocco’s sheltering skies, one loses a granulated sense of current American civil discourse. Sipping mint tea in the souks of Marrakesh, the world filtered through the International Herald Tribune, it appeared that Iranian nuclear policy, gas prices, and the health care challenge were sucking up American discursive oxygen. I was vaguely aware that a teenager had been shot in a small town in Florida, but across the ocean that seemed like a routine tragedy in a nation awash in firearms. Teens are often shot and often shooters.
Within hours of touching down at JFK, I learned that the killing (or, some insist, the murder) of Trayvon Martin in Deland, Florida, constituted that now-common spark that creates a blaze in the public sphere. As is so common when the insistent force of the image outruns mundane evidence, people were making forceful pronouncements, selectively parsing the facts of the incident. Trayvon was transformed from a Skittles-eating kid to a talking point. Anytime an adolescent dies, we should weep, but should we pounce?
As many have noted, from Attorney General Eric Holder on down, Americans have great difficulty – perhaps cowardice – in discussing the pathologies and the possibilities of racial contact. Even our president is palpably anxious behind his bully pulpit. So rather than discussing the broad structural challenges of race relations we often rely on idiosyncratic moments, often tragic ones: Bernard Goetz, the subway vigilante; the dragging death of James Byrd; the wilding attack on the Central Park jogger; and, of course, OJ. Now we discuss the shooting death of young African-American Trayvon Martin in a suburban gated community. Each of these instances is a rare and atypical moment, but they are magnified to reveal pervasive racial animosities and resentments. And frequently what we believe is at some remove from how the events evolved.
The jury is still out on Trayvon’s shooting, or perhaps with more accuracy the jury hasn’t yet been called in. But on that evening of February 26th, 17-year-old Trayvon, wearing a hoodie, was returning to his father’s home in a gated . . .
Read more: Hoodie Nights: Trayvon Martin and the Racial Politics of Small Things
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