American Marxist Subversion of Israel

One could not find a more phony occupation for this old Jew than writing an essay on the American Marxist poet Margaret Randall. My daughter had to write on an American contemporary feminist poet and having profiled her professors, we selected Margaret Randall, an American communist poet who lived eight years in Cuba during Fidel Castro and the Che revolution, and then moved to Nicaragua to take part in the Sandinista chaos. Since I was working in Nicaragua then and am well acquainted with Latin American things of those times, I thought I could help my daughter to understand the background. I was on the site when the Sandinista bandits were invited to enter Managua and take over Nicaragua, as Somoza Jr. did following Jimmy Carter's orders. 

Margaret Randall has authored dozens of Marxist/feminist books and maintained extensive correspondence with Latin American intellectuals. She is the only American poet forbidden by Senator McCarthy to return to the United States. I do not know if she is also a lesbian, she looks like one and partners with a woman painter, although she was married (to a man; in our days, one has to specify) and is mother of four children.

Anyway, the proposal to write the essay on her was successful and now we are engaged in ordering books and looking for bibliography. "We" because I am my daughter's research assistant. It is difficult, because her professors and teachers are of the highest quality, all them Ph.D.s in English Literature from Harvard and Oxford, talented Jewish women who married to Israelis and live here. They have absorbed politically correctness from the very source, and indoctrinate their students in spirit of the most extremist Berkeley feminists. The College also has an American Fullbrighter with a Hispanic name, he corrects "our" essays and I have to admit he is very professional and all his comments/criticisms are right. What is he doing teaching English literature in Israel? (The question does not imply any negative sentiments, I am happy to be corrected by him because he is an excellent editor).

But, objectively, he is a cultural missionary converting us to left wing American culture. (I had thought that feminism conquered Israel by imitation, but no, Americans are actively subverting Israeli culture. Meaning political culture, see how our poor President Katzav was defenestrated and jailed for trying to seduce his whore secretary.)

Some of the Fullbrighters are financed by the CIA, at least those in Argentina in my times, were. No doubt we are being actively influenced and subverted by crazy American left wing culture, but I think we - I mean my daughter and I - are in little danger of catching the lunacy. And it seems worth to run the risk of damaging our mental health in order to learn world class English literature. 

Career Advice

Here is an anecdote that any ambitious young professional should read and meditate on for an hour. 

First, how was Navarro recruited? During the campaign Trump told Jared Kushner to find some research supporting his protectionist trade views. Kushner responded by going on Amazon, where he found a book titled “Death by China.” So he cold-called Navarro, the book’s author, who became the campaign’s first economic adviser. Source.

Navarro has been promoted by Trump to the position of Trade Czar, in charge of America's trade relations with the world. But his high position and power did not fill him with hubris and blinded him with pride. Like the Pope who signs as "the servant of the servants of Christ", Navarro sees himself as the first and humblest servant of his boss. 

“My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.” 

Here you have a good model, a man with a good attitude. I know nothing about foreign trade and am not sure if reviving the nineteen thirties's "Yellow Peril" phantom is reasonable, but I admire him.

New Semester

I got a lot of teaching hours this semester. Yesterday was a full day and am tired like ... I was about to say like a dog, only that dogs live a most pampered life. The campus is built on two levels and I had to walk up and down in the stairs several times. I am well impressed by the quality of the new class, they look serious and purposeful. I saw only one female in my classes, but the campus is full of religious girls that study psychology and other social work courses. There has been much building in the campus and the infrastructure is better than last year.

My little daughter is the national co-ordinator of some program of the Ministry of Education for exceptional students or whatever. She is in a meeting today. Yesterday was worried about meeting the representatives of Arab and of Haredi and of the settlements colleges. There was a problem how and in what language to write the invitations. I advised Hebrew and Arabic, both languages are official. Will the settlement colleges object? The multicultural age is arrived in Israel with its supersensitivity to pretended "offenses". In the end the only safe subject to write about will be food and pets.

A Horse Walks Into a Bar

Thursday night we went to the Kameri theater in Tel Aviv to David Grossman's "A Horse Walks Into a Bar" - a kind of stand-up black comedy. I could review the opus but someone did it better for me. The Washington Post.  Surprisingly, the WP reviewer Ken Kalfus noticed the same things I did and his review succeeded in sharpening some of my observations. The black, tragic joke of Dobaleh, from a family of dwarves that "passed through" Auschwitz death camp, that "we could say that Mengele is our family doctor" is notable. Kalfus writes that Dobaleh is dying, but that was left out of the act or I missed it (Kalfus is reviewing the book, which I did not read). I may have missed some details and I don't know if the people that stood up and left in the middle was real paying public or actors playing the part of the public leaving Dobaleh's failed standup routine.

All in all, good.

Remember Amalek

Today we read the chapter Remember (parashat yizkor) that starts with "Remember Amalek what he did to you in the desert when you were escaping from Egypt and you were weak and exhausted. He followed you and destroyed those straying behind and the sick and the weak..."

Paradoxically, the chapter also instructs us to erase and to delete the memory of Amalek under the heaven.

The result is that there are no Amalekites and no one remembers them. Only we are mentioning them all the time.

Since every generation we are attacked when we are weakest, it is fitting to imagine that it is always Amalek that is torturing us in the desert. Amalek, always the same Amalek, attacked us when the remnants of the death camps in Europe were trying to re-form in Israel. Three thousand years from now we shall still remember this Amalek, although no else will.

Early morning dread

Well, they came back. The reason is simple: the taxmen is again sending me frightening letters. I pay a tremendous amount of money but that only whets their appetite. How do I survive? I leave the bed a 0400 AM and drink coffee and do some works. The coffee makes me sleep and I return to bed for one hour. Then ready to work for the day. If the anxiety bothers me, I take 5 mg diazepam. Once a week, 60 - 100 cc  and cheap alcohol to erase myself for a while.  and start the week with a tabula rasa mind. I asked my doctor if there was any danger of addiction. He said that at my age there is none. Israeli doctors have a peculiar opinion about old age. They think one should spend his last days in comfort and contentment, and drink is an important part of happiness. I think this comes to us from Russia. As Solzhenitsyn says, we exchanged some habits after two hundred years living with Russians. Jewish abstinence did not stick to them, but we did learn to enjoy vodka with salted fish. 

Israeli Gas Royalties Fund

The Treasury is seeking candidates for the position of manager of the newly established Fund of Gas Royalties. That means that there are gas royalties and more are expected. The model seems to be Norway, that has one trillion dollars fund from oil royalties. They are not injecting that income in the national economy, so to avoid the Dutch disease or the fatal Venezuela disease. Anyway, they are so rich that living income is assured for all citizens, and working is more or less an option. They could learn environmental or gender studies in the universities, all of them.

The prosperity in Israel is starting to be such that my competitors are rejecting projects for lack of manpower. I am paying 50% tax, and wondering if continuing working is worth my stress.