[Cz-L] Diasporism

Diasporism, let's start with R.B. Kitaj, one of the greatest painters of
our time

First Diasporist Manifesto
http://www.jbooks.com/firstchapters/index/FC_Kitaj_Manifesto.htm

Quote:
> Because neither Diaspora nor Israel can live really happily ever after
> anyway (or so it increasingly seems) and a normative coexistence
> replaces the "normalcy" once wished upon the state, many of us who
> make our lives in dispersion follow its peculiar, various, often very
> homelike (America), very complex destinies where, as someone put it,
> Jews have achieved emancipation without auto-emancipation. The
> compelling destiny of dispersion is one's own and describes my
> Diasporism, which describes and explains my parable-pictures, their
> dissolutions, repressions, associations, referrals and sometime
> difficulty, their text-obsessions, their play of differences, their
> autobiographical heresies, their skeptical dispositions, their
> assimilationist modernisms, fragmentation and confusions, their
> secular blasphemies, their longing allegiance to the exact art past
> which corresponds to the historical moments when Jews became free to
> pursue a life in art

Phillip Roth - the dean of American Jewish writers, in Operation Shylock,

> At the beginning of Philip Roth's raucous 1993 novel Operation
> Shylock, the narrator--a novelist named Philip Roth--receives a call
> from a friend in Israel, the novelist and Holocaust survivor Aharon
> Appelfeld. A man who calls himself "Philip Roth" and describes himself
> as "an ardent Diasporist," Appelfeld tells him, has just met with Lech
> Walesa in Gdansk, urging Ashkenazi Jews in Israel to return to their
> European countries of origin, including (a Jewish joke if ever there
> was one) Poland. Translating from an article in an Israeli newspaper,
> Appelfeld quotes "Roth" as saying:
> The so-called normalization of the Jew was a tragic illusion from the
> start. But when this normalization is expected to flourish in the very
> heart of Islam, it is worse than tragic-it is suicidal. Horrendous as
> Hitler was for us, he lasted a mere twelve years, and what is twelve
> years to the Jew? The time has come to return to Europe that was for
> centuries, and remains to this day, the most authentic Jewish homeland
> there has ever been, the birthplace of rabbinic Judaism, Hasidic
> Judaism, Jewish secularism, socialism-and on and on. The birthplace,
> of course, of Zionism too. But Zionism has outlived its historical
> function. The time has come to renew in the European diaspora our
> preeminent spiritual and cultural role.
> "What swell ideas I have," Roth the novelist says to Appelfeld. "Going
> to make lots of new pals for me in the Zionist homeland." " 'Anyone
> who reads this in the Zionist homeland,' said Aharon, 'will only
> think, "Another crazy Jew."'"

This is an article from Oxford Journals 2009
http://mj.oxfordjournals.org/content/29/3/326.extract
Avraham Burg, former chairman of the Jewish Agency, former Speaker of
the Knesset, and a onetime candidate for leadership of the Labor Party,
says:

> I maintain that just as there was something astonishing about German
> Jewry, in America too they also created the potential for something
> astonishing. They created a situation in which the goy can be my
> father and my mother and my son and my partner. The goy there is not
> hostile but embracing. And as a result, what emerges is a Jewish
> experience of integration, not separation. Not segregation. I find
> those things lacking here. Here the goy is what he was in the ghetto:
> confrontational and hostile.

I feel in this group the nostalgia for Czernowitz, how non-Jewish
volunteers clean the Jewish heritage, I realize why Daghani was rejected
almost anywhere he went. He was a Diasporist, a very Jewish artist, and
the etiquette of Zionism did not fit him well. This is not disrespect
fot Israel, just his formative artistic matter was Diasporic bohemian,
Jewish.

If Diasporism would not exist, [Cz-L] would not exist. Rabbi Nachman
will not exist. Paul Celan will not exists. All the Bukowina CBE and
OBE's will not exist.

If I hate the Holocaust, is that its brutality replaced the way we
define as Jews. Liel Leibowitz write in Table mag

>
> It would take a doctoral dissertation to elaborate on just how much is
> wrong with Steven Spielberg’s astoundingly stupid Holocaust melodrama,
> and, certainly, many dissertations have been written on the director’s
> films. Still, a highlight reel is in order: the baffling scene with
> the showers that turn out to be nothing more than showers; the soppy
> final scene in which actors and real-life survivors march together;
> the excessive use of Christian iconography; and the fact that the
> movie, really, is about a Christ-like gentile who saves a horde of
> hapless Jews who have no agency or resolve of their own. This makes
> Schindler’s List not just one of the most ham-handed Holocaust films
> ever made but also, peculiarly, one of the least Jewish in sensibility

http://www.tabletmag.com/100-films/84314/no-100-schindler%E2%80%99s-list

Cheers,

Miha

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Received on 2012-06-27 09:23:11