How Human Rights Were Defanged from Any Truly Emancipatory Potential

By Neve Gordon JANUARY 24, 2020

The Morals of the Market

Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism 

By Jessica Whyte

Published 11.05.2019

Verso

278 Pages    

IN THE MID-1980s, Rony Brauman, who, at the time, was the president of the leading humanitarian organization Médecins sans Frontières, established a new human rights group called Liberté sans Frontières. For the inaugural colloquium, Brauman invited a number of speakers, among them Peter Bauer, a recently retired professor from the London School of Economics. Bauer was an odd choice given that he was a staunch defender of European colonialism; he had once responded to a student pamphlet that accused the British of taking “the rubber from Malaya, the tea from India, [and] raw materials from all over the world,” by arguing that actually “the British took the rubber to Malaya and the tea to India.” Far from the West causing Third World poverty, Bauer maintained that “contacts with the West” had been the primary agents of the colonies’ material progress.

Bauer hammered on this point at the colloquium, claiming that indigenous Amazonians were among the poorest people in the world precisely because they enjoyed the fewest “external contacts.” Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore, he continued, showed proof of the economic benefits such contacts brought. “Whatever one thinks of colonialism it can’t be held responsible for Third World poverty,” he argued.

In her illuminating new book, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism, Jessica Whyte recounts this story only to ask why Brauman, a leading humanitarian activist, invited Bauer — whom the Economist had described as being as hostile to foreign aid as Friedrich Hayek had been to socialism — to deliver a talk during the opening event for a new human rights organization. Her response is multifaceted, but, as she traces the parallel histories of neoliberalism and human rights, it becomes clear that the two projects are not necessarily antithetical, and actually have more in common than one might think.

Indeed, Liberté sans Frontières went on to play a central role in delegitimizing Third World accounts of economic exploitation. The organization incessantly challenged the accusations that Europe’s opulence was based on colonial plunder and that the world economic system made the rich richer and the poor poorer. And while it may have been more outspoken in its critique of Third Worldism than more prominent rights groups, it was in no way an outlier. Whyte reveals that in the eyes of organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, for instance, the major culprit for the woes of postcolonial states was neither Europe nor the international economic order but rather corrupt and ruthless Third World dictators who violated the rights of their populations as they undermined the development of a free economy. This approach coincides neatly with neoliberal thought.

Whyte contends that we cannot understand why human rights and neoliberalism flourished together if we view neoliberalism as an exclusively economic doctrine that favors privatization, deregulation, and unfettered free markets over public institutions and government. Although she strives to distinguish herself from thinkers like Wendy Brown and Michel Foucault, she ends up following their footsteps by emphasizing the moral dimension of neoliberal thought: the idea that a competitive market was not “simply a more efficient means of distributing resources; it was the basic institution of a moral and ‘civilised’ society, and a necessary support for individual rights.”

She exposes how neoliberal ideas informed the intense struggle over the meaning of “human rights,” and chronicles how Western rights groups and neoliberals ultimately adopted a similar interpretation, one that emphasizes individual freedoms at the expense of collective and economic rights. This interpretation was, moreover, in direct opposition to many newly independent postcolonial leaders.

Whyte describes, for instance, how just prior to the adoption of the two 1966 human rights covenants — the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights — Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana, coined the term “neo-colonialism” to refer to a series of mechanisms that perpetuate colonial patterns of exploitation in the wake of formal independence. Nkrumah “argued that the achievement of formal sovereignty had neither freed former colonies from the unequal economic relations of the colonial period nor given them political control over their own territories,” thus preventing these states from securing the basic rights of their inhabitants. A “state in the grip of neo-colonialism,” he wrote, “is not master of its own destiny.”

Nkrumah thought that only when postcolonial states fully controlled their natural resources would they be able to invest in the population’s well-being. In the meantime, neo-colonial economic arrangements were denying African states the ability to provide adequate education and health care as well as other economic and social rights to their populations, thus revealing how these economic arrangements were welded in a Gordian knot with international politics. Any attempt to understand one without the other provided a distorted picture of reality.

Such combining of the economy with the political, however, was anathema to neoliberal thought. In 1927, exactly three decades before Ghana’s new leader led his country to independence, Hayek’s mentor, economist Ludwig von Mises, had already argued that colonialism took advantage of the superior weaponry of the “white race” to subjugate, rob, and enslave weaker peoples. But Mises was careful to distinguish colonial oppression from the economic goals of a competitive market, noting that Britain was different since its form of colonialism pursued “grand commercial objectives.” Similarly, the British economist Lionel Robbins separated the benign economic sphere from the merciless political one, writing in the 1930s that “[n]ot capitalism, but the anarchic political organization of the world is the root disease of our civilization.”

These thinkers set the tone for many neoliberal economists who have since defined colonial imperialism as a phenomenon of politics, not capitalism, while casting the market as a realm of mutually beneficial, free, peaceful exchange. In this view, it is the political realm that engenders violence and coercion, not the economic sphere. Yet, during the period of decolonization neoliberals also understood that they needed to introduce moral justifications for the ongoing economic exploitation of former colonies. Realizing that human rights were rapidly becoming the new lingua franca of global moral speak, Whyte suggests that they, like Nkrumah, began mobilizing rights talk — except that neoliberals deployed it as a weapon against states who tried to gain control over their country’s natural resources as well as a shield from any kind of criticism directed toward their vision of a capitalist market.

Their relation to the state was complicated, but was not really different from the one espoused by their liberal predecessors. Neoliberal thinkers understood that states are necessary to enforce labor discipline and to protect corporate interests, embracing states that served as handmaidens to competitive markets. If, however, a state undermined the separation of political sovereignty from economic ownership or became attuned to the demands of its people to nationalize resources, that state would inevitably be perceived as a foe. The solution was to set limits on the state’s exercise of sovereignty. As Friedrich Hayek, the author of The Road to Serfdom, put it, the “taming of the savage” must be followed by the “taming of the state.”

Shaping the state so that it advances a neoliberal economic model can, however, be a brutal undertaking, and the consequences are likely to generate considerable suffering for large segments of the population. Freed from any commitment to popular sovereignty and economic self-determination, the language of liberal human rights offered neoliberals a means to legitimize transformative interventions that would subject states to the dictates of international markets. This is why a conception of human rights, one very different from the notion of rights advanced by Nkrumah, was needed.

In Whyte’s historical analysis the free-market ideologues accordingly adopted a lexicon of rights that buttressed the neoliberal state, while simultaneously pathologizing mass politics as a threat to individual freedoms. In a nutshell, neoliberal economists realized that human rights could play a vital role in the dissemination of their ideology, providing, in Whyte’s words, “competitive markets with a moral and legal foundation.”

At about the same time that neoliberalism became hegemonic, human rights organizations began sprouting in the international arena. By the early 1970s, Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists were already active in numerous countries around the globe, and Americas Watch (a precursor to Human Rights Watch) had just been established. According to Samuel Moyn, a professor of history at Yale and author of the best seller The Last Utopia, it was precisely during this period that human rights first achieved global prominence. That Western human rights organizations gained influence during the period of neoliberal entrenchment is, Whyte argues, not coincidental.

Although Whyte emphasizes the writings of leading neoliberal thinkers, a slightly more nuanced approach would have framed these developments as the reflection of a conjunctural moment, whereby the rise of neoliberalism and of human rights NGOs was itself part of numerous economic, social, and cultural shifts. Chile serves as a good example of this conjuncture, revealing how a combination of historical circumstances led neoliberal economics and a certain conception of human rights to merge.

Notwithstanding the bloody takeover, the extrajudicial executions, the disappearances and wholesale torture of thousands of dissidents, Hayek’s response to Pinochet’s 1973 coup was that “the world shall come to regard the recovery of Chile as one of the great economic miracles of our time.” Milton Friedman, a key figure in the Chicago School, later echoed this assessment, describing Chile as an economic and political “miracle.” The two Nobel Prize winners were not detached observers, having provided advice to Pinochet on how to privatize state services such as education, health care, and social security, and it was Friedman’s former students, the “Chicago Boys,” who occupied central positions within the authoritarian regime, ensuring that these ideas became policy.

What is arguably even more surprising is the reaction of human rights organizations to the bloody coup in Chile. Whyte acknowledges that Naomi Klein covered much of this ground in The Shock Doctrine, where she details how Amnesty International obscured the relationship between neoliberal “shock therapy” and political violence. Characterizing the Southern Cone as a “laboratory” for both neoliberalism and grassroots human rights activism, Klein argued that, in its commitment to impartiality, Amnesty occluded the reasons for the torture and killing, and thereby “helped the Chicago School ideology to escape from its first bloody laboratory virtually unscathed.” While Whyte concurs with Klein’s assessment, she has a slightly different point to make.

To do so, she shows how Samuel Moyn contested Klein’s claim that the human rights movement was complicit in the rise of neoliberalism; he argued that the “chronological coincidence of human rights and neoliberalism” is “unsubstantiated” and that the so-called “Chilean miracle” is just as much due to the country’s “left’s own failures.” Moyn’s comment, Whyte cogently observes, “raises the question of why, in the period of neoliberal ascendancy, international human rights organisations flourished, largely escaping the repression that was pursued so furiously against leftists, trade unionists, rural organizers and indigenous people in countries such as Chile.”

She points out that the CIA-trained National Intelligence Directorate had instructions to carry out the “total extermination of Marxism,” but in an effort to present Chile as a modern civilized nation, the junta did not disavow the language of human rights, and at the height of the repression allowed overseas human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists to enter the country, giving them extensive freedom of movement.

Whyte explains that in focusing their attention on state violence while upholding the market as a realm of freedom and voluntary cooperation, human rights NGOs strengthened the great neoliberal dichotomy between coercive politics and free and peaceful markets. Allende’s government had challenged the myth of the market as a realm of voluntary, non-coercive, and mutually beneficial relations, and the Chilean leader paid for it with his life. By contrast, the junta with the Chicago Boys’ aid sought to uphold this myth, while using the state both to enhance a neoliberal economic order and to decimate collective political resistance. Whyte acknowledges that in challenging the junta’s torturous means, human rights NGOs arguably helped restrain the worst of its violence, but they did so at the cost of abandoning the economy as a site of political contestation.

Whyte’s claim is not simply that the human rights NGOs dealt with political violence in isolation from the country’s economic transformations, as Klein had argued. Rather, she shows that the gap between Amnesty’s version of human rights and the version espoused by postcolonial leaders, like Nkrumah, was wide. Indeed, Amnesty International invoked human rights in a way that had little in common with Nkrumah’s program of economic self-determination, and the organization was even hostile to the violent anti-colonial struggles promoted by UN diplomats from postcolonial societies during the same period. The story of human rights and neoliberalism in Chile is not, as Whyte convincingly shows, simply a story of the massive human rights violations carried out in order to allow for market reforms, or of the new human rights NGOs that contested the junta’s violence. It is also the story of the institutionalization of a conservative and market-driven vision of neoliberal human rights, one that highlights individual rights while preserving the inequalities of capitalism by protecting the market from the intrusions of “the masses.”

Expanding Whyte’s analysis to the present moment (the book focuses on the years between 1947 and 1987) while thinking of the relation between neoliberalism and human rights as part of a historical conjuncture, it becomes manifest that many if not most human rights NGOs operating today have been shaped by this legacy. One of its expressions is that rights groups rarely represent “the masses” in any formal or informal capacity. Consider Human Rights Watch, whose longstanding executive director Kenneth Roth oversees an annual budget of over $75 million and a staff of roughly 400 people. In four years’ time, Roth will outstrip Robert Mugabe’s 30-year tenure in office; while Roth has dedicated most of his adult life struggling against social wrongs, he has never had to compete in elections to secure his post. Indeed, due to the corporate structure of his organization the only constituency to which he is accountable are Human Rights Watch’s board members and donors — those who benefit from neoliberal economic arrangements — rather than the people whose rights the NGO defends or, needless to say, the “masses.” Moreover, Human Rights Watch is not exceptional within the rights-world, and even though rights organizations across the globe say they are interested in what the “people want,” sovereignty of the people in any meaningful sense, wherein the people can control the decisions that affect their lives most, is not really on the agenda.

Undoubtedly, Human Rights Watch has shed light on some of the most horrendous state crimes carried out across the globe over the past several decades. Exposing egregious violations is not an easy task and is a particularly important endeavor in our post-truth era. However, truth-telling, in and of itself, is not a political strategy. Even if exposing violations is conceived of as a component of a broader political mobilization, the truths that NGOs like Human Rights Watch have been revealing are blinkered. Given that they interpret human rights in an extremely narrow way, one that aligns quite neatly with neoliberal thought, their strategy therefore fails to provide tools for those invested in introducing profound and truly transformative social change.

From the get-go, most Western human rights NGOs had been attuned to Cold War politics and refrained from advocating for economic and social rights for decades, inventing numerous reasons to justify this stance: from the claim that the right to education and health care were not basic human rights like freedom of speech and freedom from torture, to the assertion that economic and social rights lacked a precise definition, thus rendering them difficult to campaign for. It took close to a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ongoing campaigning of Third World activists for the leading human rights organizations to acknowledge that economic and social rights, such as the right to health care, education, and social security, were indeed human rights, rights that they should dedicate at least some of its resources to fight for. But even today, almost 20 years after their integration within Human Rights Watch’s agenda, the resources allocated to the protection of these rights is relatively small, and the way that the organization strives to secure them is deeply skewed by the neoliberal view that politics and markets are separate realms and that human rights work should avoid interference with the capitalist structure of competitive markets. Wittingly or not, organizations like Human Rights Watch have not only bolstered the neoliberal imagination, but have produced a specific arsenal of human rights that shapes social struggles in a way that weakens those who aim to advance a more egalitarian political horizon.

Several years ago, Roth tried to justify Human Rights Watch’s approach, claiming that the issues it deals with are determined by its “methodology,” and that the “essence of that methodology […] is not the ability to mobilize people in the streets, to engage in litigation, to press for broad national plans, or to provide technical assistance. Rather, the core of our methodology is our ability to investigate, expose, and shame.” The hallmark of human rights work, in his view, is uncovering discrimination, while the unequal arrangement of the local and international economy leading to discrimination are beyond the organization’s purview. Not unlike the neoliberal thinkers discussed in Whyte’s book, Human Rights Watch limits its activism to formal equality, adopting a form of inquiry that ignores and ultimately disavows the structural context, which effectively undercuts forms of collective struggle.

Returning to Rony Brauman and the creation of Liberté sans Frontières, toward the end of the book Whyte recounts how in a 2015 interview he understood things differently than he had in the mid-1980s. “I see myself and the small group that I brought together as a kind of symptom of the rise of neoliberalism […] We had the conviction that we were a kind of intellectual vanguard, but no,” he laughed, “we were just following the rising tendency.”

Whyte suggests that this assessment is, if anything, too modest: rather than being a symptom, the humanitarians who founded Liberté sans Frontières explicitly mobilized the language of human rights in order to contest the vision of substantive equality that defined the Third Worldist project. Brauman and his organization benefited from the neo-colonial economic arrangements and, she notes,

were not powerless companions of the rising neoliberals, but active, enthusiastic and influential fellow travellers. Their distinctive contribution was to pioneer a distinctly neoliberal human rights discourse, for which a competitive market order accompanied by a liberal institutional structure was truly the last utopia.

The destructive legacy that Whyte so eloquently describes suggests that the convergence between neoliberals and rights practitioners has defanged human rights from any truly emancipatory potential. Formal rights without the redistribution of wealth and the democratization of economic power, as we have learned not only from the ongoing struggles of postcolonial states but also from the growing inequality in the Global North, simply do not lead to justice. So if the objectives of a utopian imagination include equitable distribution of resources and actual sovereignty of the people, we urgently need a new vocabulary of resistance and novel methods of struggle.

¤

Neve Gordon is a professor of human rights and international humanitarian law at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Israel’s Occupation(University of California Press, 2008), co-author of The Human Right to Dominate (Oxford University Press, 2015) and of Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire (University of California Press, forthcoming August 2020). His Twitter account is @nevegordon.

SEE http://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2005/01/war-whats-it-good-for-profit.html

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=KOSOVO

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My Taco Laughs at You: On Death Threats Aimed at Women of Color Who Don’t Fellate White Supremacy

By Myriam Gurba

JANUARY 23, 2020

IF YOU REALLY WANT to piss off a white man, ignore him. I did this online a few weeks ago when one tried arguing with me about a piece of racialized literary criticism I wrote. The dude desperately wanted to tell me his definition of Latina because he thought my definition was wrong. I told the fucker to shut up, I’m not interested in having myself explained to myself, and soon after, Alex, my publisher, emailed me.

Hi Myriam, 

Your piece has blown up (not surprisingly!).  The response has been really wide and deep, and thank you for sharing it with us.  I wanted to flag this comment; we’re obviously not going to approve it in moderation, but thought you should know about it because it is personally threatening.  I imagine this kind of horrible racist venom is not something new in response to your work.  We get people like this periodically, unfortunately, but it’s always really unsettling.

I’m not just a writer. I also work as a high school teacher and since I’m not the kind of dick who throws kids’ work in the trash when they turn it in without a name, I’ve developed skills. I can examine anonymous work and tell who wrote it. Aside from handwriting, syntax provides great clues and as I read the flagged comment, it seemed pretty likely that the dull mansplainer from the internet had written it. The threat stank of his desperation and uninventiveness, and it reminded me why I keep my thesaurus away from children. Note the awful alliteration and flagrant abuse of adjectives.

Why won’t you just admit that *anything* written by a white person would have earned your clumsy, overcompensating, ostentatiously ethnic ire? Your entire career is predicated upon the laughable notion that your skin color and genitalia give you some authority to tell others what they may not experience or, dare I say it, enjoy, even if they aren’t from your zealously guarded, ethnocentric tribe of literary poseurs.

Please keep being angry. Please protest vociferously. Please confront the police in person. If we’re all lucky, maybe one of them will relive [sic] you of the burden of a life spent in feckless fury. Alternatively, make me a taco.

I wanted to reply, “I don’t cook, bro!” but the message, signed by E. V. L. Whiteman, was sent through an encrypted service.

Two things came to mind as I pondered what to do next. First, I thought of Maren Sanchez, a 16-year-old Latina who attended Jonathan Law High School in Milford, Connecticut. In 2014, one of Sanchez’s classmates, Christopher Plaskon, a 16-year-old white boy, invited her to the junior prom. Sanchez told him no; she wanted to go with someone else. Plaskon retaliated by stabbing her to death at school. Sanchez’s family buried her in her prom dress.

My next thought was of an ex-boyfriend. This guy had been super charming when we began seeing each other but over time, he showed me who he was. He was the kind of guy who hits his bitch in the face before she heads out to work.

“What happened to your cheek, Miss Gurba?” a kid once asked me.

“A cabinet door banged it.”

I called the police after my batterer told me he was thinking about driving me to a desolate California location, fucking me, and then soaking the countryside in my blood. After I shared these details with a domestic violence detective, he lectured me about male fantasies. The detective urged me to have compassion, stressing that what I had described is common and that I shouldn’t be frightened of the violence in men’s imaginations. When has a woman ever been harmed by a fantasy?

I pushed back against the detective’s bullshit, arguing that my boyfriend’s imagination should be taken very seriously. As proof of how much imagination matters, I explained that my boyfriend had discussed beating and raping me before beating and raping me. The detective then wanted to know what I was wearing when I got raped.

During questioning, the detective’s voice swelled with vicarious pleasure, making me feel freshly assaulted. Not wanting to endure a similar humiliation, I decided to refrain from reporting E. V. L. Whiteman to law enforcement. I didn’t need another lecture on male fantasy. I’m intimate with it. My back is scarred by it. My front tooth has been broken by it.

E. V. L. Whiteman’s threat offers a porthole into his imagination, one where “skin color” and “genitalia” confer authority on those possessing the right kind. And, while E. V. L. Whiteman obliquely mentions my dark pussy, my little brown backpack, the word around which his death threat revolves is “enjoy.” Let’s get back to what he wanted to argue about to begin with, a novel. I, a Latina, dared to criticize a book overflowing with sloppy Mexican stereotypes meant to stir pleasure through pity. That someone would make E. V. L. Whiteman feel bad for taking pleasure in racism, and racial stupidity, shook him to his vanilla core. The jolt registered as an existential threat. Not only did he want me silenced for my offense, he wanted me dead.

Talk about having a case of “the feels.”

Albert Memmi wrote that “[r]acism is a pleasure within everyone’s reach,” and this thesis is golden. We can also exchange the word racism for gender or sexuality and still have the statement ring true. I, however, would prefer for us to layer these nouns on top of each other and then mash them up because I’m a queer as fuck Chicana with European, Indigenous, and Black ancestry. My body is a product of Spanish colonialism and as such, it resides at a dangerous crossroads, one which often exposes me to a very specific type of racist misogyny.

My great-grandmother, Felipa, faced similar dangers, and that is why, upon entering puberty, she began carrying a loaded pistol in her purse. You never know when you’ll run into a Christopher Plaskon.

James Baldwin understood the sensual nature of the pleasures that titillate E. V. L. Whiteman. “How can one be prepared,” asked Baldwin,

for the spittle in the face, all the tireless ingenuity which goes into the spite and fear of small, unutterably miserable people, whose greatest terror is the singular identity, whose joy, whose safety, is entirely dependent on the humiliation and anguish of others?

What prepared Felipa was the death of her father, Magdaleno. He took up arms against the Mexican government because he was done living a miserable life: he wanted better than the shit he was expected to eat. Federal troops captured him, tied him up, took him to Colima, and ordered him to face the wall. As his nose touched it, an executioner raised his rifle and shot him.

With her gun in her purse, Felipa visited this wall. She ran her fingers along its holes, wondering which was made by the bullet that ended her father’s life.

What prepared me for how whack shit can get was middle school. When I was in seventh grade, I took US history with a white lady. She loved John O’Sullivan’s declaration of Manifest Destiny and she made us write an essay about it for homework. Reading O’Sullivan’s description of México pissed me off. He wrote that México suffered “impotence,” characterizing it as an “imbecile” incapable of exercising “any real governmental authority.” He argued that gringos ought to “overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of [their] yearly multiplying millions.”

Dafuq?

At our kitchen table, I chewed a Hot Pocket as I dragged pen across paper. I scribbled that when a country with a bigger military beats up a country with a weaker military for the sake of snatching their dirt, that’s robbery. Also, why did these people feel the need to spread out all over the place? What’s wrong with … Europe? Seems pretty big.

My teacher didn’t give me an A. Instead she gave me a shitty grade and called me rude. Across my essay, in big ass letters, she scrawled, “WHAT’S WRONG WITH WANTING LAND?”

My parents took pride in my level of academic achievement, it was usually high, so I felt a little nervous about how they would respond to my D. When I showed the essay to him, Dad read it and guffawed. He said, “There’s nothing wrong with your paper. You should’ve gotten an A. And your teacher is an asshole. Just like the one you had last year.”

I smiled and laughed with Dad. I’m glad he gave me a profane lens through which to regard my teachers and in doing so, Dad taught me a lesson best articulated by Hannah Arendt: “The greatest enemy of authority […] is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.”

E. V. L. Whiteman ended his threat with profanity: “Alternatively, make me a taco.” According to Urban Dictionary, taco “can mean anything from food to a pussy to slang for a spanish person.” Given these three definitions, it seems E. V. L. Whiteman was attempting a triple entendre, which he didn’t nail very well. My taco — dark brown, succulent, savory, and bearing a full set of teeth — cackles at his failure! Its lips flap and my cunt’s fangs shine, my taco blowing an endless raspberry at all the E. V. L. Whitemen who want to taste my Mexican food.

¤

Myriam Gurba is a writer, podcaster and artist who lives in Long Beach, California. Her most recent book, the true crime memoir Mean, was a New York Times editors’ choice. Publishers Weekly describes her as a “literary voice like none other.” Gurba co-hosts the AskBiGrlz advice podcast with cartoonist, and fellow biracialist, MariNaomi. Her collage and digital artwork has been shown in museums, galleries, and community centers. Follow her on Twitter.

“Lights, Camera-maids, Action!”: Women Behind the Lens in Early Cinema

By Marsha Gordon, Charles “Buckey” Grimm

¤

BY THE 1920s, the United States had transformed into a nation of enthusiastic moviegoers. Hollywood was fast becoming the film industry’s capital as studios were built, stars born, and successful careers made in every aspect of filmmaking from lighting and writing to stuntwork and publicity. Long before film schools, the industry was populated by ambitious self-starters of all sorts, including plenty of women.

Anyone familiar with film history knows that women behind the camera are not a modern phenomenon. Recent documentaries, such as Be Natural (2018) about director Alice Guy-Blaché, who began her career in the 1890s; websites like the ongoing Women Film Pioneers Project, which collects scholarship about women working in all aspects of the early film industry; and DVDs like Kino Lorber’s Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers (2018), a collection of women-directed films gathered from archives around the world, many of which have never been released for home viewing before — document significant contributions by women in the early film industry.

But so much of film history — the films themselves, as well as information about the people who made them — is still unknown. As we become more aware of how hard women have had to fight to make movies, with the hurdles of outright discrimination and sexual harassment often creating impossibly high barriers, it is worth recalling a time when women first had careers in one of the most technical positions in the industry.

When was that time? Roughly one hundred years ago

Ten seconds into this mysterious film fragment, an unidentified woman camera operator makes an appearan

Maxine Dicks
“The Mansfield News Journal,” Feb 6, 1922

¤

Back in 1920, Ida May Park, a prominent director at Universal Film Manufacturing Company, touted the challenges and rewards of the filmmaking profession in deliberately gender-inclusive terms: “[T]here is no one, man or woman,” she wrote in a book called Careers for Women, “who might not take up the profession with a certain degree of confidence in his or her ultimate success.”

This was uncharted professional territory, after all, though Park’s optimism for women in the field would prove false. The division between men’s and women’s work in the movies was already in the process of forming as the studios became big business. Park observed that the industry was too young to have an established path to the director’s chair, nor barriers to keep anyone, including women, out of it. However, she cautioned, “Knowledge of camera operation, of lighting effects, and of all the hundred and one less important mechanical details must be gained through work in the studio itself. The difficulty of obtaining a position as apprentice or assistant is unfortunately very great.” [i]

Park was correct: camera operation was the most important skill of all.

In filmmaking’s earliest days, the camera operator was, in fact, the director. There was no division of labor when filmmaking was, essentially, a one-man or one-woman show. According to director Alice Guy-Blaché, women weren’t just capable of being filmmakers, they were better positioned to succeed at it than their male counterparts. In 1914, Guy-Blaché proclaimed that “[o]f all the arts there is probably none in which [women] can make such a splendid use of talents so much more natural to a woman that to a man and so necessary to its perfection.” [ii]

Both Park and Guy-Blaché’s confidence about what women might do behind the camera was off the mark, at least in the immediate years after they expressed it. This is evident by looking at the case of the camera operator in the decades to come, when women were marginalized from directing and most other technical roles. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, there were only two female feature film directors working in Hollywood — Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino. To our knowledge, there was not a single female camera operator working for the studios in this same window.

READ MORE HERE 

The following essay appears as the preface to How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish, edited by the authors and published today by Restless Books.

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We have to believe in free will. We have no choice.— Isaac Bashevis Singer

¤

CELEBRATED AND MARGINALIZED, lionized and trivialized, Yiddish is so deeply woven into the fabric of the United States that it can sometimes be difficult to recognize how much it has transformed the world we live in today. It’s a language and culture that’s as American as bagels and Rice Krispies, Hollywood and Broadway, Colin Powell and James Cagney (and connected to all of these, in one way or another). Yet many Americans think of Yiddish, when they think of it at all, as a collection of funny-sounding words. Oy gvald, indeed!

The aim of this book is to present a very different picture of Yiddish, true to its history, as a language and culture that is — like the Americans who spoke, read, and created in it — radical, dangerous, and sexy, if also sweet, generous, and full of life. Its inception is embedded in a radical shift. Some see Yiddish not only as a language but as a metaphor. They note that unlike most other tongues, it doesn’t have an actual address — a homeland, so to speak — or claim, as Isaac Bashevis Singer did when accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature, that it doesn’t have words for weapons. And because of its history, it awakens strong feelings of nostalgia. But others see this as an ongoing problem. In particular, it irritates Yiddishists that the language is fetishized, especially by people who don’t speak it.

Since the Second World War, many valuable anthologies have helped American audiences understand the gamut of Yiddish possibilities. Arguably the most influential has been A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (1954), edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg. It concentrated on the Yiddish literary outpouring from figures like the three so-called classic Yiddish writers, Mendele Moykher Sforim, I. L. Peretz, and Sholem Aleichem, and served as a conduit to connect an American Jewish audience to the pre-Holocaust civilization. Its publication was certainly a watershed: the volume was the manifestation of a collective longing. That anthology looked at the shtetlekh, or small towns, in which Ashkenazi Jews lived for centuries through an American lens, as noble, even idyllic, and with a sense of homesickness, but also as a site of contradictions, violence, and unfaithfulness. Readers simultaneously idealized what Israel Joshua Singer called “a world that is no more” and sought to understand themselves as a continuation, as well as a departure, from it.

Other anthologies of Yiddish literature in translation followed suit. Each concentrated on either a region (the USSR, for instance) or a particular literary genre (such as poetry). These volumes include Ashes Out of Hope: Fiction by Soviet-Yiddish Writers (1977), also edited by Howe and Greenberg; The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (1987), edited by Howe, Ruth Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk; Benjamin and Barbara Harshav’s American Yiddish Poetry (1986); and Yiddish South of the Border: An Anthology of Latin American Yiddish Writing (2003), edited by Alan Astro. To various degrees, the objectives of these anthologies remained the same.

But in the last few decades, the position of Yiddish in the zeitgeist has dramatically changed. The study of Yiddish thrives in America, among teenagers and senior citizens, the religious and the secular, and everyone in between. Technology has made the language and culture available in wider ways. Young people are studying it. Scholarship related to it is prolific. Its musical rhythms and motifs have been borrowed by other traditions. It is part of movies, television, and radio. And the internet serves up lexicons, memes, recipes, and all sorts of surprising artifacts. Assimilation in the United States has indeed presented Yiddish with challenges, and it has responded impressively, dynamically, demonstrating its flexibility, complexity, and strength.

So what is Yiddish, exactly? First and foremost, it’s a language, a Jewish one. Throughout the thousands of years of their history, Jewish people have spoken many languages, their own and the languages of the majority cultures in which they’ve lived. Hebrew, the language of the Torah (what Christians call the Old Testament) and an official language of the contemporary State of Israel, is one such Jewish language, and many others have arisen in other places and times as means of communications for Jewish communities. For example, Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, has been spoken by the descendants of the expulsion from Spain in 1492, and Judeo-Arabic has been spoken by Jews throughout the Arabic-speaking world. Yiddish, meanwhile, was the primary Jewish language of Ashkenaz, which is what Jews called northern Europe.

During much of its existence, Yiddish was dismissed as a zhargon, not quite a language at all; this was the common fate of many vernaculars, which were seen as less prestigious than scholarly languages like Latin, and the major European languages like French, English, and German, which had state power behind them. But Yiddish was absolutely a language, one that originated somewhere in central Europe about a thousand years ago, with the oldest extant example of a printed Yiddish sentence dating all the way back to 1272. Written in the Hebrew alphabet, and drawing for its grammar and vocabulary on Germanic, Slavic, Romance, and Semitic languages, Yiddish soon became the vernacular spoken by the majority of the world’s Jews for more than seven centuries, and over those centuries, a language of increasingly popular books and prayers.

In the 19th century, around the same time that languages like Italian and Norwegian evolved into their modern forms, Yiddish hit its stride, flowering into a language not just of commerce and community but of modern theater, journalism, literature, and even national aspiration. At that time, speakers of the dialects of Yiddish — sometimes referred to as Lithuanian, Polish, and Ukrainian Yiddish — constituted large minorities or even majorities in many European cities and in hundreds of European small towns and villages, while many more Yiddish speakers had relocated from Europe to other parts of the globe. The world’s total Yiddish-speaking population just before the Second World War is estimated by scholars to have been about 13 million people.

The language’s fate would be entangled with one of the world’s most brutal tragedies — millions of those Yiddish speakers were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators in the Holocaust during the Second World War — but it also flowered almost everywhere that Jews settled, before and after the war: Yiddish newspapers and books were published in Montreal and Montevideo, Cairo and Melbourne, Paris and Cape Town (not to mention Warsaw and New York). While mostly the language has had to survive, unlike most major languages, without a government’s backing, Yiddish was briefly an official language of the Soviet Union and today it is one in Sweden. It is currently spoken, at home and in the street, by more than 400,000 people around the world.

We might never know when the very first Yiddish speaker arrived on American shores, but it’s clear that a substantial number of speakers had already arrived by the middle of the 19th century, and that they quickly found their way to almost every corner of the developing nation. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an enormous wave of European immigration brought hundreds of thousands and then millions of Yiddish speakers. Free from some of the strictures imposed by European governments, American Yiddish speakers created newspapers and theaters, and before long they had built one of the most vibrant centers for Yiddish culture in the world.

At the height of the language’s American popularity in the 1920s, a handful of different Yiddish newspapers circulated hundreds of thousands of copies every day, and Yiddish theaters on Second Avenue, in Manhattan, seated thousands of spectators every night. Also, as the primary language of a vast immigrant community of poor laborers and their upwardly mobile children, Yiddish became a crucial part of American politics — at a moment when socialism, anarchism, and communism competed for Americans’ votes with more familiar political orientations — and of American business, entertainment, cuisine, and speech.

In short, America, famously a nation of immigrants, was the site of many of Yiddish’s greatest triumphs — a Nobel Prize, best sellers, and theatrical smashes, as well as political movements that changed the way people everywhere work. As specific as its history might be, like any language, Yiddish is, for all intents and purposes, infinitely capacious: you can say anything in Yiddish that you want. And of course, in America, all kinds of people have done so: factory owners and communists, Hasidic Jews and Christian missionaries, anarchists and political fixers, scientists and quacks. To dive into the diversity and complexity of American Yiddish culture, as this book invites you to do, is one wonderful way to appreciate the wild possibilities of life in the United States.

This anthology showcases the rich diversity of Yiddish voices in America, and of the American culture influenced and inspired by Yiddish. It is made of poems, stories, memoirs, essays, plays, letters, conversations, and oral history. Many of the authors represented here were immigrants themselves who remained loyal to Yiddish in the new land. Others are their offspring, the so-called kinder for whom the language was a link to ancestors and a source of inspiration and provocation, or people from a variety of backgrounds, Jewish and not, who learned the language and made it their own.

Much of the material included here comes from the publications or collections of the Yiddish Book Center, a nonprofit organization working to recover, celebrate, and regenerate Yiddish and modern Jewish literature and culture, which was founded in 1980 by Aaron Lansky, then a 24-year-old graduate student of Yiddish literature (and now the Center’s president). In the course of his studies, Lansky realized that untold numbers of irreplaceable Yiddish books — the primary, tangible legacy of a thousand years of Jewish life in Eastern Europe — were being discarded by American-born Jews unable to read the language of their Yiddish-speaking parents and grandparents. So he organized a nationwide network of zamlers (volunteer book collectors) and launched a concerted campaign to save the world’s remaining Yiddish books before it was too late. Since its founding, the Center has recovered more than a million books, and published Pakn Treger (The Book Peddler), the Yiddish Book Center’s English-language magazine that features articles, works in translation, profiles, and portfolios about Yiddish culture. Not exactly “the best of Pakn Treger,” but drawing on its rich archive and the Center’s other collections, this anthology offers landmarks and sidelights of American Yiddish culture to give readers a spirited introduction to what Yiddish America has been and can be.

The book does not attempt to present this material in chronological order or to make a single argument. Like many anthologies, this one wants to be a smorgasbord. We offer the nexus between American and Yiddish culture, in English translation — with full knowledge of how complex, and also generative, translation can be. This anthology’s animating hope is that its readers will make connections between its heterogeneous content, browsing and skipping and finding surprises everywhere.

To that end, the 63 entries have been organized into six distinct parts. The first, “Politics and Possibility,” explores immigrants’ initial encounters with America. It features scenes of ritual and tradition in the Jewish ghetto of the Lower East Side and explores the ways children of immigrants ventured out into Harlem, the Bronx, and well beyond. The selections reflect how, around the turn of the 20th century, Yiddish culture in New York emanated from a community whose first concern was survival, and who had to decide what that struggle for survival implied about politics, ethics, and culture. For example, a watershed moment in the history of Yiddish in the United States took place in 1923 when Sholem Asch’s play God of Vengeance (written in Yiddish in 1906) opened, in English, on Broadway. The play represents a setting that was as shocking to audience members then as it would be today: a brothel operated by a Jewish pimp and offering the services of Jewish prostitutes.

The realities of Jewish participation in sex work in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are complex and tragic, and what Asch’s play captures, with stark symbolism, is the tension between the noble aspirations of Jews of that time to holiness and purity, and the degradations imposed on them by the struggle to earn a living under discriminatory regimes. The play included much that shocked its audiences, including a scene in which a young, supposedly innocent girl is seduced by an older, female prostitute — posing the question of what would happen and what would change when the old authority structures, derived from the rabbis and from Christianity, crumbled away. The second act of God of Vengeance appears in this part. So does a letter written in 1936 about a female athlete who successfully transitioned to male, written to the editor of Forverts, arguably the most important immigrant publication in the United States, in which readers looked for answers to daily questions about becoming American: In what way is this nation also mine? How much tradition am I ready to sacrifice on the road to gaining new rights?

A central question for Yiddish speakers in America, as for most immigrants, was precisely a question about language. Each one had to answer for herself how much she should depend upon and defend the language of her childhood and tradition, and how much she should embrace a new language — English — with its strange possibilities. Such questions had especially large stakes for writers, artists, and politicians. “The Mother Tongue Remixed,” the second part of this anthology, concentrates on the vicissitudes of the Yiddish language as it adapted to the new territory. It features reflections on what happens in the classroom to make Yiddish survive, and the role dictionaries and other authoritative entities play in the continuation of life for the language.

Part two also includes appreciations of figures like Leo Rosten, a humorist who became famous for his efforts to codify “Yinglish” — the blend of Yiddish and English that became common in midcentury America — and some concrete examples of the playfulness with which Yiddish can be deployed, as in the case of Stanley Siegelman’s poem “The Artificial Elephant.” People often get defensive — or prescriptive — about the right ways and wrong ways to speak a language (and of course that kind of attitude has its value), but very often the story of Yiddish in America, even linguistically, has been a story of playfulness and irreverence.

The third part of this volume, “Eat, Enjoy, and Forget,” focuses on one of the avenues through which the culture of Yiddish-speaking Jews has had the broadest impact in America: food. In an immigrant culture, assimilation in the culinary dimension is about experimenting with flavors and ingredients in order to satisfy evolving palates. Those experiments quickly moved from Jewish homes out into restaurants. In the 20th century, delicatessens became staples of every major American city, and bagels triumphed across the country. American companies like Maxwell House and Crisco understood that they could profit by serving a hungry Jewish market. More recently, as nostalgia for Jewish cooking has found its way into haute cuisine, dishes such as latkes have fused with other ethnic favors (say, chocolate-based Mexican mole) to create new tastes that reflect the complex families and histories of Jews in America. Over the decades, classic Ashkenazi dishes have undergone changes in the way they are cooked, in how they are presented, and in what they are accompanied with during a meal. In a 1988, 14-minute short film by Karen Silverstein called Gefilte Fish, three Jewish women of the same family, an immigrant grandmother and her American daughter and granddaughter, explain how each prepares the dish. The first describes the labor-intensive process of cooking it, which she learned from her own mother, starting with the purchase of a living fish — “to make sure it is fresh.” The last just acquires a bottle of the Manischewitz brand before serving it on the table.

The fourth part, “American Commemoration,” focuses on the wide array of Yiddish literary voices in America. It includes translations from the Yiddish of a short story and a lecture by the American Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, still the only Yiddish writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature — and examples of poetry, fiction, and literary essays by many equally talented but less widely celebrated Yiddish writers, including Chaim Grade, Jacob Glatstein, Anna Margolin, Blume Lempel, Peretz Fishbein, and Celia Dropkin. Almost all American Yiddish writers of that generation were born in Europe, and they naturally drew upon European models as well as Anglo-American ones in developing their verse and prose. It’s not surprising that their narratives frequently take up the experience of dislocation, whether by explicitly telling stories about being an émigré in a land with little patience for the past, or more implicitly by exploring the complications faced by Jews and others in the 20th century.

The fifth part of this anthology, “Oy, the Children!,” considers the descendants of Yiddish speakers, who went on to roles of increasing prominence in American culture. Inheritors of the immigrants’ pathos, their offspring built upon that legacy to make their own marks. In many cases, like Cynthia Ozick’s story “Envy: or, Yiddish in America” (1968) or Joan Micklin Silver’s film Hester Street, they did so by depicting the experiences of Yiddish speakers; artists who did so include novelist Michael Chabon and playwright Paula Vogel, both of them winners of the Pulitzer Prize. In other cases — for example, Hollywood actors Leonard Nimoy and Fyvush Finkel — they distilled the humor or charm of their Yiddish-speaking families and milieus and transformed them in one way or another for wider consumption. Among many other celebrated artists of recent decades, this section also includes graphic artists and storytellers whose drawings depict an older, Yiddish-speaking generation in unexpected and moving ways.

Finally, the sixth and last section of the anthology, “The Other Americas,” explores Yiddish as it flourished not just in the United States but through the American continent, from Canada to Argentina. (The word “America” comes from Amerigo — in Latin, Americus — Vespucci, the Italian cartographer, navigator, financier, and explorer who in 1501–’02 sailed to Brazil and the West Indies.) The language thrived in these regions, too, and continued to link Jews who had come from the same communities in Europe but found themselves in very different situations after immigration. These selections help to suggest some of the ways in which the story of Yiddish in the United States wasn’t unique but rather part of a larger set of phenomena that involved the establishment of Jewish communities throughout the Diaspora.

Each of the entries is introduced with a brief contextual headnote, and a timeline presents some fascinating and representative historical events — but, again, this isn’t a history. It’s most of all meant to be a grab bag, an opportunity for readers to get a little lost and to discover something that they weren’t expecting. It showcases the rich diversity of Yiddish voices in America and of the American culture influenced and inspired by, and created as a result of, Yiddish and its speakers and their descendants. They pushed Yiddish — its sound, its sensibility — to utterly unexpected regions in the continuation of its epic story. By doing so, they have changed America.

¤

Ilan Stavans is a Mexican-American author and translator, the publisher of Restless Books, and Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College.

Josh Lambert is the academic director of the Yiddish Book Center and visiting assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He’s the author of American Jewish Fiction: A JPS Guide (2009) and Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (2014).

‘A Frankenstein creation’: Saudi prince says US peace plan takes away Palestine’s heart and soul

PUBLISHED TUE, FEB 11 2020 Sam Meredith@SMEREDITH19

KEY POINTS

The U.S. unveiled its long-awaited peace initiative for an Israeli-Palestinian deal with great fanfare late last month.

The proposal, which Trump delivered standing alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would give Israel most of what it has sought during decades of conflict.

“What I have seen so far of that deal is that it is trying to make of Palestine what I can call a Frankenstein creation,” Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki Al Faisal told CNBC’s Hadley Gamble on Tuesday.


Saudi politician: Trump’s Middle East deal a ‘monstrous conception’ of Palestine

President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan is a “monstrous conception” of a Palestinian state that is not going to progress any further, according to a former chief of Saudi intelligence.

The U.S. unveiled its long-awaited peace initiative for an Israeli-Palestinian deal with great fanfare late last month.

The proposal, which Trump delivered standing alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would give Israel most of what it has sought during decades of conflict. This includes the disputed city of Jerusalem and recognition of Israeli sovereignty over settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Palestine has rejected the U.S. proposal outright, while Israel strongly supports it.

“What I have seen so far of that deal is that it is trying to make of Palestine what I can call a Frankenstein creation,” Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki Al Faisal told CNBC’s Hadley Gamble at the Milken Institute MENA Summit in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday.

It is “generally just a monstrous conception of a Palestinian state. It’s rightful capital Jerusalem is stripped from it, so that takes away its heart, and its borders are undefined and that takes away its soul.”

“So, it is not going to go very far — not only in our part of the world — but the whole world has rejected it,” Al Faisal said.

The White House was not immediately available to comment when contacted by CNBC on Tuesday.

A ‘step back’ on Palestine

His comments come one week after the European Union rejected parts of Trump’s peace plan for the Middle East.

The bloc, which took time to respond in order to allow for unanimity from all of its members, said on Feb. 4 that the plan departed from “internationally agreed parameters,” Reuters reported.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry has since described the EU’s position as “regrettable and, to say the least, odd.”



When asked about the perception of the Trump administration in the region, Al Faisal replied: “On Palestine, definitely it is a step back, as I told you. They have abandoned all of the legitimate history and weight of the United Nations Security Council resolutions and adopted a course that is very much one-sided.”

“As far as Iran is concerned, he’s definitely, in my view, taken the right course. Because the nuclear deal allowed Iran, instead of becoming a constructive partner in the Middle East, to be a destructive player in the Middle East.”

“So, reconvening that negotiation and that deal is what he’s offering. The Iranians have not accepted renegotiating the deal and I think they should,” Al Faisal said.