Life Imitates Life, Art, And Life Again

 La Horde Outside The Helping Hand

I had a post on an arson in an Arab-Jewish bilingual school in Israel last year.
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2014/12/fire-at-hand-in-hand.html

The prime minister’s reaction — or lack thereof — to the arson attack against Jerusalem’s bilingual school reflects what can only be understood as contempt for Palestinian-Israeli partnership.

The arsonists who set fire to the Arab-Jewish bilingual school in Jerusalem Saturday night decided to pile up the first graders’ books and burn them in the middle of the classroom. Jews burned books. Belonging to six years olds. In Israel’s capital...

I called it Brennungsnacht 2014 creating an echo to the past night of broken glass...

But now the name of the school, Hand In Hand, sounds ominously like the name of the help center in the French series Les Revenants. That center was La Main Ouverte (the open hand)  or The Helping Hand as it was translated.

Nothing in particular, but an edge between life and death, flipping from one side to the other, and everything looks slightly different each time we flip over. In each environment, the reality of Israel and the story of a town in France, the Helpful Hand becomes a focus of unknown powers of hidden malignity or beneficence... leaving us in the dark... in the night; a night of arson like Azimov's Nightfall where deliberately set fires give light and hope/despair.


Es errinert mich an Siegfried Kracauer...

Von Les Revenants in die Zukunft,  eine psychologische Geschichte des  Films

 (From "Les Revenants" to the Future, a Psychological History of the Films)

There are too many threads of possibilities here!

--

The Crackpot Jew Norman Finkelstein 2

Professor Dershowitz is trying to throw a "Night of the Long Knives" party for that crackpot Jew, Norman Finkelstein.

You may read about the details in http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070521/wiener from which we excerpt:
 
"Of course Finkelstein's work--like that of all of us--is 'flawed,'" Novick wrote. The question, he said, is "whether, on balance, the positive contribution of the totality of his scholarly work outweighs its faults." His own published criticisms of Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry "reflect my values, my sensibility, who I am...but I don't confuse those criticisms with holy writ." Novick then appealed for "pluralism" in the academy: "There are those who relish the adversarial role, who delight in combat, whose greatest joy is in advancing a cause... such people are often inclined to stretch evidence to the breaking point, and occasionally beyond.... Professor Finkelstein seems to be of that number, as does Professor Dershowitz." That was not his own style, Novick said. While it would be "disastrous," he wrote, "to have a university composed exclusively of people like Finkelstein and Dershowitz," it would be "equally undesirable to have a university composed exclusively of people like me."

At this juncture, you may wonder what this all means. Well, in case you haven't noticed, there is a great debate about the Holocaust. This debate is overt and covert, explicit and implicit. I wrote about it once in my posting http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2006/12/speechless-in-gaza.html

In Ha'aretz we read that the name of Daniel Pearl has been added to a wall whereon are engraved the names of those killed in the Holocaust. There is a bit of controversy. In short, there is a tendency away from the strict theological interpretation of the Holocaust as an event divine and wordly, to a more worldy view, with the divine extended back to the past and forward to the future, but in exactly the same way the divine does for all things. You might think this is not too very interesting, but I believe it to be emblematic of a number of trends within the world. I believe it to be one of the first skirmishes of the great battles of the 21st century. Before we can get into this, I have some things to attend to, one of which is to actually write first drafts of these posts and redact in an effort to be a bit clearer. This topic will be called Future Ideologies, even though they exist right now. They are in chrysalis, as it were, and not yet fully formed. In our hearts we feel their lineaments and shudder.