Naturally you didn't speak to any of the points I made except to assure me that you have a pretty good radar for antisemitism because of your background. Sometimes radar systems fail.You say that you have a different opinion of antisemitism than I do -that puzzles me . What's your opinion of antisemitism ? -that it's not polite to bring the subject up ? Especially in the case of a famous person whose association with you- is beneficial to your personal strategic/careerist goals -or someone with whom you share other social goals. Because of your family history ,from my point of view, what seems to me like your minimization and excuses for Baraka's antisemitism is all the more lamentable . Did you ever confront Baraka on the issue ? Somehow. I doubt it . But I hope I'm wrong about that . Maybe you dressed him down in a way that made him re-think & retract his views.
I remember seeing a Poet in San Francisco who got up on stage ,and read a poem about his mother's escape from the Nazis-and other family members who didn't escape -and the ongoing torment it caused him growing up in that atmosphere. I thought that there was something horribly exploitive about it. In that performance he reduced The Holocaust to cheap identity politics . It was almost like a version of the book Black Like Me where a white journalist goes on a bus through the Jim Crow South to see what it feels like - but here the Poet was saying I can use MY background and be just like the cool angry Black Poets that everyone is paying so much attention to. Not that that Poet was insincere, or that in his life he didn't walk the walk about
being true to Fackenheim's 614th mitzvah(which I hope you're aware of)-just that I thought there was something very unseemly about using the Holocaust to establish or buttress a reputation in coffeehouse milieu.
Dear Dave Rubin, It’s difficult to have a discussion or debate with someone who seems unwilling to read what I’m saying, and who makes assumptions about me without taking the time to look at my work (and instead cites a different author who wrote about the Holocaust), despite my having mentioned a place that you could start. Since I don’t know anything about you, and you have a common name that makes it difficult to be able to google, I hadn’t said that you and I had different opinions about anti-Semitism, but that we had different opinions about the question of Amiri Baraka and anti-Semitism, a statement which was clear from your initial comments about Amiri. I also wasn’t sure why you kept bringing up Ezra Pound, who I hadn’t (ever) defended or praised. And I’ve tried my best, and will continue here, to be diplomatic and to avoid saying anything personally negative toward you, despite the fact that you’ve been sending personal insults my way, like accusing me, a happily little-known poet and activist, of doing things for careerist reasons. When I sent in my initial piece about Amiri (who was one of many known and mostly unknown writers and activists that I’ve met in my almost 50 years now as a poet and activist) to Simon Warner, I hadn’t even realized that it was possible on his Substack for people to make comments underneath, so that I totally didn’t realize that I could soon get caught up in a debate, which I really don’t have the health for these days. And I’ve already sent an email apology to Simon Warner for this too-long comments-section discussion which has moved away from his Substack topic of Rock & the Beat Generation. So I will try my best to make this my last comment on this thread, unless anyone else has a new question, and then you can have the last word. Just let me ask you one personal question. It looks from your post signature that you’re a harmonica player--are you also the same Dave Rubin who I see on amazon has written a book called Don’t Burn This Book (riffing off Abbie Hoffman’s classic title, Steal This Book) or is that a different Dave Rubin?
Ezra Pound endorsed the Jewish objectivist poets (Reznikoff, Zukofsky et al) and through his influence gave them their first opportunities for publication . Does that mean he wasn't -as was Jones/Baraka - a despicable antisemite?-(despite what Ginsberg claims that Pound privately told him )-
As far as I know, Ezra Pound never wrote a public apology in The Village Voice for having written a few anti-Semitic poems in his earlier life. I'm guessing that you didn't know Amiri. While Pound seems to have lived his later years largely in social isolation, only occasionally welcoming visitors, Amiri lived his last forty-plus years as a very sociable, very friendly, and very public, multicultural poet and activist. If you had known Amiri, I think, or at least hope, you might have had a different opinion.
You’re really missing the point . On Pound- try reading the The Genealogy of Demons Anti-Semitism ,Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound by Robert Casilllo; That should change your sense of the intensity, and the scope of his antisemitism… You seem to me to be laboring under the illusion as the cherished old cliché has it “the personal is the political”-at worst that’s a version of Trump’s -"Well Putin’s very nice to me ,Orban’s very nice to me -I have a great relationship with them -so what's the problem”…but normally it's just allowing the subjective to totally overwhelm the realistic, and involves one in all sorts of untenable defenses and rationalizations-the great buzz of knowing famous people ,and vicariously experiencing the adulation of their admirers explains a lot.
The fact that antisemitism
never emerged with you , doesn’t mean it wasn’t there- If you ever published any of his work in LONG SHOT that would have given him a reason to conceal his bias-but a high minded person would never allow such a venal thought to creep into consciousness
Comparing Pound & Baraka’s later life activities is meaningless .Many public figures like to be surrounded by the sort of people who would never challenge them,(groupies) others don’t want to be bothered.
Just because I have a different opinion about Amiri Baraka and the question of anti-Semitism doesn’t mean that I missed your point. We don’t know each other, but I do know that you have the right to your personal perspective. And I can only offer mine. As I wrote, Amiri was a very public poet and activist. In the decades after I became a poet and political activist in my late teens in the mid-1970s (including, through the years, helping to create peace groups, and housing and food programs for Central New Jersey homeless families that remain ongoing), I saw Amiri give many readings and political talks where he wouldn’t have known I was in the audience until after the event, and also before he would have known who I was. And although I’m not a religious person, I have a pretty good radar for anti-Semitism as the son of a Hungarian-born, Holocaust-survivor mother, who survived three Nazi concentration camps, including six months in Auschwitz, and who lost both her parents and five of seven siblings in the Auschwitz gas chambers. After talking with my mother about those years, I wrote and published a long Holocaust-related poem in the mid to late 1990s, “Liberation Recalled,” exploring historical and intergenerational legacies of my mom’s Holocaust-survivor experiences, which you could take a look at online or in one of my books if you’d like to see more about my democratic-left worldview. So my thoughts about Amiri are based on observations—including his criticisms of the Nazis, of American-based neo-Nazis, and of anti-Jewish violence, in a number of Amiri’s poems and talks—and not just on our having been New Jersey poet and activist friends.
Eliot: I'm not the guy who wrote the book on Amazon that you refer to ...
I have no wish to continue this discussion either.
I have no sub stack -that's an error due to my technological incompetence . I hope you change that Simon.Thank You .
Naturally you didn't speak to any of the points I made except to assure me that you have a pretty good radar for antisemitism because of your background. Sometimes radar systems fail.You say that you have a different opinion of antisemitism than I do -that puzzles me . What's your opinion of antisemitism ? -that it's not polite to bring the subject up ? Especially in the case of a famous person whose association with you- is beneficial to your personal strategic/careerist goals -or someone with whom you share other social goals. Because of your family history ,from my point of view, what seems to me like your minimization and excuses for Baraka's antisemitism is all the more lamentable . Did you ever confront Baraka on the issue ? Somehow. I doubt it . But I hope I'm wrong about that . Maybe you dressed him down in a way that made him re-think & retract his views.
I remember seeing a Poet in San Francisco who got up on stage ,and read a poem about his mother's escape from the Nazis-and other family members who didn't escape -and the ongoing torment it caused him growing up in that atmosphere. I thought that there was something horribly exploitive about it. In that performance he reduced The Holocaust to cheap identity politics . It was almost like a version of the book Black Like Me where a white journalist goes on a bus through the Jim Crow South to see what it feels like - but here the Poet was saying I can use MY background and be just like the cool angry Black Poets that everyone is paying so much attention to. Not that that Poet was insincere, or that in his life he didn't walk the walk about
being true to Fackenheim's 614th mitzvah(which I hope you're aware of)-just that I thought there was something very unseemly about using the Holocaust to establish or buttress a reputation in coffeehouse milieu.
Eliot, the more we argue-the more I like you.
All the Best
Dear Dave Rubin, It’s difficult to have a discussion or debate with someone who seems unwilling to read what I’m saying, and who makes assumptions about me without taking the time to look at my work (and instead cites a different author who wrote about the Holocaust), despite my having mentioned a place that you could start. Since I don’t know anything about you, and you have a common name that makes it difficult to be able to google, I hadn’t said that you and I had different opinions about anti-Semitism, but that we had different opinions about the question of Amiri Baraka and anti-Semitism, a statement which was clear from your initial comments about Amiri. I also wasn’t sure why you kept bringing up Ezra Pound, who I hadn’t (ever) defended or praised. And I’ve tried my best, and will continue here, to be diplomatic and to avoid saying anything personally negative toward you, despite the fact that you’ve been sending personal insults my way, like accusing me, a happily little-known poet and activist, of doing things for careerist reasons. When I sent in my initial piece about Amiri (who was one of many known and mostly unknown writers and activists that I’ve met in my almost 50 years now as a poet and activist) to Simon Warner, I hadn’t even realized that it was possible on his Substack for people to make comments underneath, so that I totally didn’t realize that I could soon get caught up in a debate, which I really don’t have the health for these days. And I’ve already sent an email apology to Simon Warner for this too-long comments-section discussion which has moved away from his Substack topic of Rock & the Beat Generation. So I will try my best to make this my last comment on this thread, unless anyone else has a new question, and then you can have the last word. Just let me ask you one personal question. It looks from your post signature that you’re a harmonica player--are you also the same Dave Rubin who I see on amazon has written a book called Don’t Burn This Book (riffing off Abbie Hoffman’s classic title, Steal This Book) or is that a different Dave Rubin?
Ezra Pound endorsed the Jewish objectivist poets (Reznikoff, Zukofsky et al) and through his influence gave them their first opportunities for publication . Does that mean he wasn't -as was Jones/Baraka - a despicable antisemite?-(despite what Ginsberg claims that Pound privately told him )-
As far as I know, Ezra Pound never wrote a public apology in The Village Voice for having written a few anti-Semitic poems in his earlier life. I'm guessing that you didn't know Amiri. While Pound seems to have lived his later years largely in social isolation, only occasionally welcoming visitors, Amiri lived his last forty-plus years as a very sociable, very friendly, and very public, multicultural poet and activist. If you had known Amiri, I think, or at least hope, you might have had a different opinion.
You’re really missing the point . On Pound- try reading the The Genealogy of Demons Anti-Semitism ,Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound by Robert Casilllo; That should change your sense of the intensity, and the scope of his antisemitism… You seem to me to be laboring under the illusion as the cherished old cliché has it “the personal is the political”-at worst that’s a version of Trump’s -"Well Putin’s very nice to me ,Orban’s very nice to me -I have a great relationship with them -so what's the problem”…but normally it's just allowing the subjective to totally overwhelm the realistic, and involves one in all sorts of untenable defenses and rationalizations-the great buzz of knowing famous people ,and vicariously experiencing the adulation of their admirers explains a lot.
The fact that antisemitism
never emerged with you , doesn’t mean it wasn’t there- If you ever published any of his work in LONG SHOT that would have given him a reason to conceal his bias-but a high minded person would never allow such a venal thought to creep into consciousness
Comparing Pound & Baraka’s later life activities is meaningless .Many public figures like to be surrounded by the sort of people who would never challenge them,(groupies) others don’t want to be bothered.
Just because I have a different opinion about Amiri Baraka and the question of anti-Semitism doesn’t mean that I missed your point. We don’t know each other, but I do know that you have the right to your personal perspective. And I can only offer mine. As I wrote, Amiri was a very public poet and activist. In the decades after I became a poet and political activist in my late teens in the mid-1970s (including, through the years, helping to create peace groups, and housing and food programs for Central New Jersey homeless families that remain ongoing), I saw Amiri give many readings and political talks where he wouldn’t have known I was in the audience until after the event, and also before he would have known who I was. And although I’m not a religious person, I have a pretty good radar for anti-Semitism as the son of a Hungarian-born, Holocaust-survivor mother, who survived three Nazi concentration camps, including six months in Auschwitz, and who lost both her parents and five of seven siblings in the Auschwitz gas chambers. After talking with my mother about those years, I wrote and published a long Holocaust-related poem in the mid to late 1990s, “Liberation Recalled,” exploring historical and intergenerational legacies of my mom’s Holocaust-survivor experiences, which you could take a look at online or in one of my books if you’d like to see more about my democratic-left worldview. So my thoughts about Amiri are based on observations—including his criticisms of the Nazis, of American-based neo-Nazis, and of anti-Jewish violence, in a number of Amiri’s poems and talks—and not just on our having been New Jersey poet and activist friends.