Penn Museum

 

 

 

Penn Museum Gets Floored

The Lod Mosaic at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 3260 South Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104. www.penn.museum. February 10-May 12

 

By Jackie S. Akins

[Writers Clearinghouse News Service]

In the year 300 A.D. in the Roman Empire colony of Diospolis in Palestine area of Judea, fifteen miles southeast of Tel Aviv, business was thriving. The colony stood on the former Jewish municipality of Lod and while the Roman citizens were primarily Christians, it being a day’s walk to Judea, the city after the fall of Jerusalem became famous as a seat of Jewish scholarship.

Old Wars Provide Lessons...

... In Stopping Our Current Ones 

Drunk on Wars: the Long Hangover.

Rabbi Arthur Waskow

50 Years of Staggering down the Wrong Road

By Arthur Waskow
[Special to Writers Clearinghouse News Service]

Between 1961 and 1971, the United States undertook three different wars. All of them were abysmal disasters.

One was the war against Vietnam, begun in 1961 by President John F Kennedy and expanded after his death by President Lyndon Johnson. The second was “the war on poverty,” initiated by President Johnson in 1964. The third was the “war on drugs,” initiated by President Richard M Nixon in 1971.

The first war resulted in the deaths of about 50,000 Americans and more than 1 million Vietnamese, and ended in 1975 with military and political defeat for this attempt to extend the American Empire and with the hasty withdrawal of American troops.

One might say “ignominious withdrawal” except that the true ignominy was that of the US government under three presidents, who had for no decent purpose wasted these lives and enormous resources that could have been meeting human needs, in America and the world. Indeed, the Pentagon Papers, published forty years ago, show that the Pentagon soon knew the war could not be “won.” From then on, its purpose was to terrorize nationalist movements in countries other than Vietnam by showing how bloody would be the cost of any uprisings against Western control.

The second “war” was – laudably -- not a war at all. Utterly unlike a war, which tries to impose order by violence from the top down that disempowers most of the country and people under attack, this policy tried to abolish poverty by empowering the poor. Indeed, one of the key elements in its efforts was “maximum feasible participation of the poor” in shaping the change in their own lives.

It was abandoned within two years because there was no money to put into serious change in ending and preventing poverty in America. The reason there was no money? The enormous costs of the real war against Vietnam.

In other words, 'guns over butter.' Choosing between a top-down war that killed more than a million people and a bottom-up effort to abolish poverty, the US political system chose war.

Then in 1971, the Nixon Administration announced an all-out “war” on drugs. This looked a lot more like war -- top-down violence, massive numbers of prisoners, increasing deaths. But the war was fought mainly against the nonviolent users of drugs, not against the sometimes violent purveyors.

And after forty years -– by far the longest “war” in US history -– the results are: more than a million nonviolent “criminals” in US prisons; the supply of tens of thousands of guns by US sellers across the Mexican border to drug cartels which use them against Mexican and US police and against civilians; spiraling deaths in cities like Juarez -– and no diminution in the use of drugs!

When the US government chose to fight wars in Vietnam and on the street corners where drugs are sold, it did not bother to look either at why Vietnamese were prepared to die in order to choose their own government, or why Americans were taking drugs.

If the US had looked carefully at Vietnam, it might have actually encouraged the impulse to end colonialism and foreign domination.

If the US had looked carefully at the urban street corners and the small towns where jobs had disappeared and at the GI hangouts of trauma and despair in Vietnam that themselves became hotbeds of the “drug epidemic,” they might have realized what the unmet needs were that led to the drug use. They might have realized that a “war on drugs” was precisely the wrong answer.

What were those unmet needs? Three: worthy jobs, a meaningful place in society, and non-drug moments of spiritual exaltation.

Paul Goodman’s book Growing Up Absurd addressed the first two, and became the sacred literature of many in the social-change movements of the Sixties because it named what young people knew was missing from their lives. (Goodman addressed only the plight of young men, but women soon realized they were suffering the same lacks.)

The absence of worthy jobs and a meaningful social place in some chunks of American society was a result of the failure of the misnamed “war on poverty.” If the effort to assist a grass-roots self-organizing movement of the poor had continued, instead of being snuffed out by Vietnam, and if military “service” in Vietnam had not itself poisoned a generation of many young men with despair that only drugs could nullify, then absurdity would not have been the fate of many young Americans. Drugs would not have been their need and their escape.

As for exaltation: In 1971, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was writing, "I interpret the young people's escape to drugs as coming from their driving desire to experience moments of exaltation.... The classical form of exaltation is worship.... But exaltation is gone from the synagogue [and] from the church....

“Our life thus devours the wisdom of religious tradition without deriving from it sources of renewal and uplift.... The new witnesses for a revival of the spirit in America may well turn out to be those poor miserable men and women who are victims of the narcotics epidemic. If we will but . . . try to understand their misguided search for exaltation, we can begin the task of turning curse into blessing." ("In Search of Exaltation," pp. 227-229, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, Susannah Heschel, ed. (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996.)

Just as the ”war on drugs” was beginning under President Nixon, Rabbi Heschel was more truly naming the response we needed. And still need:

Worthy jobs paying enough to make an honorable life possible, and time for celebration that can exalt the place of a citizen in the eco-system of human society interwoven with the eco-system of all life-forms.

A living wage, and livable hours. “Six days shalt thou labor and do all your work, and on the seventh you shall pause to celebrate, give thanks, experience exaltation, reflect, share, love.” Given the technology we now have, the ratio should probably be “Four days shalt thou labor,” but the rhythm is crucial.

Why then did the US government and even such institutions as churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, not follow the path that Goodman and Heschel were blazing?

Because if you are powerful and reluctant to share your power by empowering the powerless, it is far more attractive to make war from the top-down than it is to encourage self-organizing at the grass roots or the cement pavements.

Because if you are afraid of uppity young black men but can no longer humiliate and disempower them into subservience with pleasant “White-only” soda fountains, grungy “Black-only” bathrooms, and lousy black-only schools, then you can write laws that define black ways of consuming cocaine as worthy of five times the prison time as white-suburbanite ways of consuming cocaine, and throw millions of blacks into prison. While they are there, they are not counted among the “unemployed,” and when they get out, they cannot get jobs anyway.

And so America got drunk on war, and the hangover has lasted fifty bleary years. Those who controlled our government, our lives, first found themselves lying filthy in a ditch of their own disenchantment, being challenged by the myriad movements for self-empowerment that grew out of the war-spree of the Sixties. But soon the powerful recovered from a brief period of alcoholics’ remorse.

Confronted with the murderous attacks of 9/11, they chose to use the drunkards’ response to being an alcoholic: They chose to “drink the hair of the dog that bit them” –- the hair of war and violence. They chose to repeat the blindness of the war on Vietnam and the war on drugs. Instead of asking what had led a tiny band of terrorists to do these murderous deeds, and then seeking to do at home and abroad the grass-roots empowerment that the misnamed “war on poverty” had promised and abandoned, they went to war.

They smashed Iraq, they are still smashing Afghanistan, they have started smashing Pakistan and Yemen, they have allied themselves with a right-wing Israeli government’s effort to smash any vestige of Palestine.

And even when the most respected scientists throughout the world shout warnings that they are smashing the planet itself, even when climate-driven droughts and floods destroy crops, when food prices jump and people starve and movements of the hungry shake the Arab world, they multiply their own wealth and power and pretend that global scorching is not happening.

But once again, the disempowered are stirring. Tens of thousands of teachers, firefighters, social workers in Madison Wisconsin, and thousands of supporters around the country. Conservative elders in upstate New York. Tens of thousands of people at thousands of locations around the world, speaking out against the Drug Lords of Big Oil Big Coal, demaning action to restore the bearable ceiling of 350 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere.

And finally, even the US military budget is no longer a sacred cow. Finally, a bipartisan vote fell only 11 votes short (204-215) in the House of Representatives of requiring the US to begin detailed planning now to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and prepare for the transition to Afghan civilian and military control.

The need to meet civilian needs in the US is finally beginning to match the hangover of war-drunk top-down power. But the shift needs our energy!

Giving our energy, against the entrenched power of those drunk on war and violence, will not be easy. Here we must listen to Rabbi Heschel. “Exaltation” is what we will need, as the exalted prayerful joy of black folk singing prayer in the streets is what we needed fifty years ago.

(Arthur Waskow is a rabbi who heads the Shalom Center in Philadelphia).

Philly Philanthropists Reach Out to Israel

'New' Israel Museum is Beneficiary

By Richard Carreño

[WritersClearinghouse News Service]

The Art of the Steal, a 2009 'mockmentary' by local director Don Argott, putatively uncovered how the Barnes Foundation was 'stolen' by Philadelphia's Establishment power brokers who, working as a secretive cabal of evil, decreed that the museum move from his established home in suburban Philadelphia to a new venue on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. All that was missing was, cackle, cackle, a witches' brew.

Amid a din-din-din Jaws-like musical leitmotif, the film was more creepy conspiracy than well-crafted agit-prop, a la Michael Moore. Moreover, Steal's theme, how the will and wishes of the foundation's eponymous founder Dr. Albert G. Barnes, were being thwarted by Gov. Edward Rendell, the Pew Charitable Trusts, tourism interests, and other Satanic forces has been oft-repeated, and, by now, a tiresome conceit. Boring.

Anyway, the 'new' Barnes, home to world's greatest collection of French Impressionism, is scheduled to debut next year on Museum Mile. This, despite witchcraft, or -- as more likely the case -- good stewardship by the city's arts community.

The film survives as a curiosity. As well as proof that Dr. Barnes' well-known delusional penchant to view life as a vast conspiracy is still alive in well in Philadelphia.

Otherwise, The Art of the Steal is mostly forgettable.

But not easily forgiven.

Regardless of its risible single-minded silliness, the film is also remarkably slimy.

This is no better highlighted than how the picture mocks Gerry Lenfest and Ray Perelman, then key board members of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and prominent PMA benefactors, as 'spokes' in Philadelphia's Axis of Evil.

Lenfest is slimed with 'a powerful conflict of interest.' Perelman gets slimed as 'a nasty old man.'

***
A recent visit to Jerusalem, where the Israel Museum is located, was perfectly timed. Not by me. Just good fortune. The museum, an encyclopedic repository of Jewish history and art and a clear contender for membership among the world's great museums, had just reopened weeks before after a three-year renovation.

Among other reasons for my visit to Israel, I was eager to see works by Marc Chagall at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and, most important, encounter the so-called Chagall Windows at the Synagogue of the Haddassah-Hebrew University Medical Center, also in Jerusalem.

Again, my timing was fortuitous. The synagogue had also just reopened, after a year's closing forced upon it by structural work that was being undertaken at the hospital.

I was particularly struck by the Israel Museum -- and by the unexpected. Its New York-born director, James S. Snyder, whose mandate was to modernize and reorganize, has in fact recreated the just-45-year-old institution. (In 1965, the embryonic museum was the vision of Jerusalem's legendary mayor, Tedi Kolek).

'Its status and reputation is linked with what has always been a decent display of ancient and contemporary art,' Time Out Israel reported last month. 'But its old structure and outdated layout was cramped and inconvenient -- hence the decision to revamp it almost in its entirety,'

Enter Synder, 58, who joined the museum in 1996.

'...[M]any people do not know what to make of him,' The New York Times recently reported. 'He has never acquired Israeli citizenship or learned more than basic Hebrew. In a country where dressing up often means donning a clean T-shirt, he has kept the look of an Ivy League professor of a generation ago....'

Despite a traditional appearance, Synder introduced one skill to the museum that's thoroughly modern -- fundraising on a worldwide scale. The renovation budget was $100-million.

***

I looked up to a plaque of about about 50 names as I entered the museum. These were major contributors from around the world, and those also willing to donate $100,000 annually to the museum.

Not surprisingly, several of names were those of well-known New Yorkers.

Only one city, Philadelphia, other than New York, had more than one benefactor.

One was Gerry Lenfest. The other, Ray Perelman.

An Open Letter

To a Master of his Craft

Mr A. Ady Gelber,

President and CEO

ISRAMWORLD

233 Park Avenue South

New York, NY 10003-1606

Dear Mr Gelber,

I never complain. I have rare chances to praise. But I'm compelled to express my gratitude to your fine company – and, most especially, to Mr Shmulik Hader – for our recent introduction to Israel.

From the first, when we met Mr Hader on Saturday, 21 August, in Tel Aviv, to our departure visit in Old City on Saturday, 28 August, in Jerusalem, we knew we were in good, expert hands.

Ours was no once-over-lightly tour. Our group, seven in all, was challenged, entertained, and educated by a master of his craft, at the top of his game. In all ways, Mr Hader was professional, charming, and thoughtful. There were few tidbits or insights that he did not immediately have at his grasp and – as important – he wasn't eager to seek out if he didn't readily know.

Mr Hader was not simply a 'tour' guide – he was our medium to discovering Israel's heart and soul. I felt I was transported to my university days as Mr Hader immersed us in a nuanced and balanced understanding of great cultures, religions, and civilisations.

It is customary for a teacher to give a student a grade. If I might, let me give 'Professor' Hader one of my own: A+++.

Yours truly,

Richard CARRENO.

Joan T. KANE.

In a Divided City...

... A Divided Marc Chagall
By Richard Carreño
[Writers Clearinghouse News Service]

Jerusalem.
After touring Israel's chief museums and art repositories, it'd be easy to think that Marc Chagall (1887-1985) is this country's 'national' artist. Dozens of the artist's masterful oils, from early to later pieces, are prominently displayed at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and, here in Jerusalem, at the recently reopened Israel Museum, an encylopedic institution that stands among the world's great museums. (This in a country that's about the size of New Jersey).

Even in small ways, it's not hard to be reminded to Chagall's presence here. Over a drink at the American Colony Hotel recently, I looked up to see a plaque listing many of the prominent personages who have stayed at the hotel. Hardby Peter Ustinov's name was that of Chagall's.

Nowhere is Chagall's presence felt as dominantly -- and soulfully -- as in the Synagogue of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center, atop Mt. Scopus along Jerusalem's western edge. And nowhere is the counterpoint of the art, culture, and history of this capital, divided by Muslim and Jew, so markedly pointed as in this house of worship, home to the Chagall Windows, what well may be the multi-facited artist's best work in stained glass.

The 12 windows, installed in 1962, dipict the Twelve Lost Tribes of Israel, frame the synagogue's four walls, and are illuminated by natural light streaming from above.

Fortunately, the windows are again on display. For more than a year the Haddassah synagogue was closed, just reopening this month. (Underground, bomb-proofed operating theatres were being constructed nearby, requiring that the windows be encased to protect them from shattering).

As art, infused with Chagall's well-known 'dancing' figures and bold colours, the windows are breathtaking.

For Jews, in particular, in this place, in this time, the windows also evoke the thousands-of-years struggle for their recognition in this Holy Land. Art, yes. But also a defining sense of majestic being as the Sons of Jacob.

Tinting windows was not a new medium for Chagall. But the Chagall Windows, celebrating the Jewish peoples of this new homeland, significantly differ from much of the artist's most dominant thematic memes, often the Ashkenazi shetel life of Russia and Eastern Europe.

This social-realist, even secular artist, as opposed to the Biblical artist of the Hadassah synagogue, is one best known in Europe and in North America. (And not unknown, of course, in Israel itself. The Israel Museum mounted a retrospective in the 80s).

Not surprisingly, the European Chagall will also be on offer when the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents next year its own version of the non-Biblical artist in an exhibition of mostly secular works. (Titled 'Paris Through the Window: Marc Chagall and His Circle,' the show will run from March to July in the Perelman Building).

Despite Israeli admiration, both personal and professional, Chagall never really returned the favour. He didn't identify himself as a Zionist, nor did he seek Israeli citizenship (his, as a Jew, for the asking), nor did he contemplate making aliyah, an official, ritualistic form of repatriation by a Jew in diaspora.

Almost since the founding of this Jewish homeland in 1948, Israel has tried to claim Chagall as one of their own. The artist was named an honorary citizen of Jerusalem, and, in 1950's, the late prime minister, Golda Meir, offered the artist a subsidy if he would spend in winters working in the northern Mediterrean port city of Haifa. He declined. Instead, he took a winter home in St.-Paul-de-Vence, in the south of France.

In fact, Chagall felt so fiercely about the creative forces eminating from his own adopted homeland of France (he was a naturalised citizen), he declared that only in France could he manifest his artistry. (The windows were created in France, shipped to Jerusalem).

Even in dedicating the windows, Chagall sounded less the Zionist than simply a committed Jew.

'My modest gift to the Jewish people, who have always dreamt of Biblical love, of friendship, and peace among all people; to that people which lived here, thousands of years ago, among other Semitic peoples,' he said. 'My hope is that I hereby extend my hand to seekers of culture, to poets, and to artists among the neighbouring peoples.'

Chagall died at 97 in St.-Paul-de-Vence, and was laid to rest in a local Christian cemetery.

Israel Homage

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