The Secret Jewish History of Tupac Shakur

Was Bad Boy Rapper Just a Nice Jewish Son?

Challah Out: The late Tupac Shakur was gunned down in 1996.

By Seth Rogovoy

Tupac Shakur, the notorious rapper whose career was cut short when he died in a hail of bullets at the age of 25 in 1996, may seem an unlikely candidate for memorialization in the form of a Broadway musical. Yet sure enough, “Holler if Ya Hear Me,” an $8 million production “inspired by” the work of the gangsta rapper which includes 21 of his songs, is currently playing the Palace Theatre in New York.

This is not some off-the-wall, crass attempt to cash in on the controversial legend of Shakur. Among the musical’s producers is Afeni Shakur, Tupac Shakur’s mother, a former member of the Black Panthers. Afeni Shakur is nothing if not protective of her son’s creative legacy; his brief but astounding career on the rap charts made him one of the best-selling recording artists of his time. In other words, she’s not doing it for the money.

There’s something else going on here, and it just may be that finally the stars have aligned to present Tupac Shakur — the man whose music former Vice President Dan Quayle said “has no place in our society”; a convicted felon who in a few years was in and out of prison and court for a variety of violent crimes; a man accused of being the perpetrator of several shootings who was himself gunned down in an infamous drive-by that has never been solved — as what he may really have been: a nice Jewish boy who loved his mother.

Tupac Amaru Shakur was born in East Harlem on June 16, 1971, to parents who preached a violent form of black nationalism. Despite chronic poverty, Shakur’s mother made sure he always had access to a well-rounded education, especially in the performing arts.

From a young age, Shakur was drawn to the stage: He performed in a production of “A Raisin in the Sun” by Harlem’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble at the Apollo Theater at age 12. At age 15, his family moved to Baltimore, where he attended the Baltimore School for the Arts, studying acting, poetry, jazz and violin, performing in productions of Shakespeare, and playing the role of the Mouse King in the ballet “The Nutcracker.”

In other words, Quayle’s public enemy number one — the gangster-in-chief who threatened the very foundations of American civilization — got his show business start as a violin-toting, Shakespeare-quoting ballerina.

At age 17, Shakur and his family moved to the Bay Area. Here, Shakur, already an aspiring rapper, met the woman who would prove integral to his career and artistic development. Leila Steinberg was the daughter of a Mexican-Turkish activist mother and a Polish-Jewish criminal defense attorney who ran a spoken-word poetry workshop called the Microphone Sessions in Oakland, California. Steinberg was raised, as she put it, “surrounded by the workings of the justice system and took a front row seat at the personal tragedies and socio-economic pressures that turn so many at-risk youths into hardened felons.” In Shakur, she clearly saw the very embodiment of her life’s work: a real-world blend of urban street life, political activism, cultural literacy, and natural talent, with the charisma of a born star. The two hit it off, and Shakur moved in with Steinberg’s husband and two children, with Steinberg serving as a mentor and manager until the point where his career required more professional oversight. The two remained close friends until the end of Shakur’s short life.

Shakur released his debut album, “2Pacalypse Now,” in late 1991. It remained his most political and socially conscious album — the work of a nascent, would-be prophet — with songs mostly about and addressed to black America, unflinching portrayals of racism, police brutality, poverty and teen pregnancy (as in the infamous “Brenda’s Got a Baby”), but songs that didn’t let his listeners off the hook for their complicity in the dire situations he depicts. The album undoubtedly received its biggest boost when rock-critic-in-chief Quayle condemned it saying, “There’s no reason for a record like this to be released.”

Shakur only recorded four more albums over the next five years, but they were all multi-million sellers that made him the biggest name in hip-hop. He wore the cloak of a gangster or thug, but was really more a pavement prophet, rapping about the prison of ghetto life in “Trapped” and likening that life to one of slow genocide in “Words of Wisdom,” in which he calls on his people to “break the chains” that enslave them. One of his most brutal portrayals of poverty and the cycle of violence it breeds, “Troublesome 96,” even samples the melody of “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem, perhaps a subtle call for a kind of urban Zionism to solve the social and political ills of black life in America.

But perhaps the most endearing and enduring moments of Shakur’s career occurred in 1994 when he recorded “Dear Mama,” a soft, sweet soul ballad, over which he intoned a tribute to his mother, Afeni Shakur. The narrator is reflective, looking back on a hardscrabble youth from a position of newfound comfort, and paying tribute to the maternal devotion that got him through the most difficult of times:

“Pour out some liquor and I reminisce, cause through the drama/ I can always depend on my mama… When I was sick as a little kid/ To keep me happy there’s no limit to the things you did/ And all my childhood memories/ Are full of all the sweet things you did for me… You are appreciated/ Dontcha know we love ya?”

The emotion and imagery Shakur uses in “Dear Mama” are resonant of a well-known early 20th-century song in which someone who grew up in poverty and scratched out a life of success looks back over a lifetime and pays tribute to the woman who made it all possible. I speak, of course, of “My Yiddishe Momme”:

“Of things I should be thankful for, I’ve had a goodly share/ And as I sit here in the comfort of a cozy chair/ My fancy takes me to a humble East Side tenement/ Three flights up in the rear,/ To where my childhood days were spent… / It wasn’t much like paradise but amid the dirt and all/ There sat the sweetest angel/ One that I fondly call/ A Yiddishe Momme.”

Widely considered Shakur’s greatest single hit (the song sold seven million copies at the time of release) and one of the greatest hip-hop songs ever, “Dear Mama” was one of 25 songs that in 2010 were added to the National Recording Registry — a list of sound recordings that “are culturally, historically, or aesthetically important, and/or inform or reflect life in the United States.” That same year saw the very first Yiddish recording ever inducted into the registry, “Fon der Choope (From the Wedding)” by Abe Elenkrig’s Yidishe Orchestra. Somewhere, Shakur was smiling.

Seth Rogovoy has explored the hidden Jewish stories of the Rolling Stones, the Super Bowl halftime show, Cher, Paul McCartney and David Bowie in the pages of the Forward.

<The Forward>

Time for Jewish Evangelizing

We Should Make the Case for Judaism in a Public Space

By Nigel Savage

If we’re serious about renewing Jewish life in the future, we must confront the challenge of evangelizing for Jewish tradition in public space. One of the reasons that the tension between the tribal and the universal in Jewish life isn’t addressed directly is because most Jews lack confidence in their knowledge of Jewish tradition to talk about it in the public square. But the faith communities that have grown the most rapidly in this country in recent years are those that have the self-confidence to go into public space and proclaim: You should be a Mormon! You should be a Christian! If we learn anything from living in a free-enterprise society, it is that if you have a good product the key to growth is strong marketing.

The word “evangelism” sits uneasily with Jewish people. We have been at the wrong end of it for too many centuries. Too many of our people have died at the hands of those who believed that their god and their religion was the only true way. But we entered the world as a proselytizing religion. Maimonides includes converting people to Judaism as one of the 613 mitzvot. I think that it is time for the Jewish community to start inviting people, publicly, to become Jewish.

This need not mean — and should not mean — evangelizing in inappropriate ways. It doesn’t mean saying, “if you don’t become Jewish, you’re condemned to hell and damnation.” But we should say something like the following: “If you are happy in the religion that you grew up with, we hope that you will grow and flourish in it and be a good Christian, a good Moslem, a good citizen. But if you find that it doesn’t speak to you; if you have always had Jewish friends, or you’ve been interested in Jewish tradition, or if you would simply like to learn more about what it means to be Jewish, then we warmly invite you to start to learn with us. And here’s a website in which you can find rabbis of every Jewish denomination who would be willing to welcome you, learn with and perhaps help you on the first steps of your Jewish journey…”

Doing something like this shouldn’t be owned by a single stream of Jewish life. To be most effective, it needs to be trans-denominational. And there will be one significant side-effect of such a process: In making the case for Jewish tradition in public space — focused on non-Jews — we will also explicate Jewish tradition to the most universal of our own young people, those who are more comfortable in the public spaces of American life than the Jewish spaces . At the root of this drive lies a core tension: Either we believe in Jewish tradition or we do not. For me Jewish tradition is wise, humane, ancient, contemporary, vibrant, ethical, challenging and exciting. The Torah really is a commentary on the world — and the world is a commentary on the Torah. I reject the false distinction between the universal and the particular. I believe that this country would be a better country and the world a better world, if there were more Jews in it.

Standing up for Jewish tradition in public space — actively inviting people to consider becoming Jewish — would be a blessing to the many non-Jews who are interested in becoming Jewish. It would also be the clearest possible signal to our own young people that we are proud of being Jewish. May our ancient tree of life grow and flourish for generations to come.

Nigel Savage is the president of Hazon.

<The Forward>

Shmuley Boteach: Women's Sensuality Guru

By Frimet Goldberger

Women, have your husbands snuffed out your libidos? Do you feel like you no longer need to pursue beauty, wit, insight, creativity and personal sensuality because your lazy-ass husband flips through the TV stations and stumbles into bed after his nightly dose of porn and afternoon office sex with his mistress? Do you feel that the vows you made with HIM to lust for each other in sickness and in health are violated now that you’ve left your parents’ loving home and your beauty isn’t overwhelming anyone?

If you or someone you know is experiencing similar sexual famine, look no further than the self-proclaimed guru of women’s sensuality, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, or as I like to call him, Shmuley Botox. Rabbi Botox is the world-acclaimed author of the New York Times Bestseller “Kosher Sex: A Recipe for Passion and Intimacy” and has now penned a profound and potentially earth-shattering essay on Huff and Post titled “What Women Really Want: A Rabbinical Guide to What a Woman Needs and Desires.”

“Women are not looking just for love in a marriage,” Botox wrote. “They are primarily looking for lust… This is what a woman thirsts to hear more than anything: ‘I desire you. I want to be physical with you. Your beauty is overwhelming to me. I cannot control myself around you. I find myself thinking about you constantly and I have to have you — I don’t care what the consequences are. I don’t care if we don’t go to sleep tonight and we have to get the kids to school in the morning; there are no physical considerations that can suppress my desire for you.’ That’s what women want and need to hear; that’s what will melt a woman, because it taps into her core desire. A husband who approaches a woman without wooing her is not likely to get much of a response, because he hasn’t addressed her core need.”

Spot on, Rabbi! Women get married because they want their husbands to lose control. Married women desire only men who know how to tap their cores and melt them. Women get married because they hate to sleep and want to be ravaged at every hour, as if by Christian Grey in “Fifty Shades of Baloney.”

American wives, Rabbi Botox Guru continues, are “relegated to the roles of caretaker, wage earner, housekeeper, and waitress… Many husbands subconsciously snuff out their wives’ libidos. They sexually extinguish their women, all but guaranteeing that the men themselves will have to turn to porn, affairs, or fantasy for their own erotic thrills. A man complains that his wife is no longer interested in sex, all the while transforming her from a woman into a maid and from a mistress and lover into the mother of his children.”

A woman’s sexuality doesn’t exist apart for her husband doing his part to awaken it. The proof is in the marital pudding: the day-to-day monotony of caretaking, housekeeping, parenting and wage-earning forces husbands to seek out other erotic thrills to quench their uncontrollable animalistic urges. Let’s be honest: wives who busy themselves with domestic nonsense like cooking and cleaning and tending to their children are less desirable to men, just like men who busy themselves with women’s work are less desirable to women. Which is why so many husbands married to such boring and domesticated wives turn to the computer and Google “MILF,” and why sensually famished wives look in the mirror and repeat – over and over – “where have my single years and sexual libido gone?”

It is heartening to see a rabbi speak for the ladies and dictate what they desire — or should desire.

Women around the world read your viral (not to be confused with vital) piece and exhaled a collective sigh of relief. They dropped their functional and domestic work, quit their jobs, stashed all the children into boxes labeled “functional” and took off to tap into their lost sensuality. One woman even bothered to annotate your essay, Rabbi Botox, before she joined the others in marital fairyland.

From the bottom of our hearts, we thank you for ending the sexual famine which threatened to kill us all and leave our sorry husbands flipping through the channels and stumbling into bed with the perfectly-nonfunctional Venus.

<Forward>

What Jews Can Learn From Rwandans

A woman consoles a fellow Rwandan at a genocide commemoration ceremony / Getty Images

By Randy Kafka

I am no Shmuley Boteach, God knows. But I have recently learned from the Forward that Boteach and I have one thing in common – we are both rabbis who have visited Rwanda.

This February, on the eve of Rwanda’s commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the Tutsi genocide, I joined a 10-day “witnessing” tour hosted by the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding. We heard stories of horror, and stories of heroism, rescue, reconciliation and – unimaginably, miraculously – stories of forgiveness.

While I am delighted to hear that the governments and entrepreneurs of Rwanda and Israel are now interested in one another, I find myself dreaming of a different sort of connection: What if the people of Israel and Palestine could learn from the Rwandan people how to do the difficult and necessary work of trauma healing and reconciliation?

The blossoming of Rwanda today defies facile explanation, just as it defies facile criticism. I went on this journey with the intention of not-knowing, of bearing witness without judgment. Throughout the ten days, Abraham Joshua Heschel’s expression “radical amazement” kept coming to mind – a theologian’s way of saying “mind-blowing.” How to process, for example, the experience of meeting 60+ convicted genocide perpetrators in matching blue outfits, dancing and singing joyfully to welcome you as they take a break from their community service work building homes for survivors?

A few weeks after returning home, an image came to me in a dream of healing a house on the inside and on the outside. This dream image captures the multi-level processes happening in Rwanda. You might say that the all-out, rapid government push to modernize – the spanking clean and high-tech image of the capital city Kigali, for example, with foreign business people staying at posh hotels – is the healing of the house on the outside. But the stories we heard – those are the stories of healing on the inside.

Trauma healing seems to be at the heart of the transformation happening in Rwanda, and it is relatively recent. Our hosts in one village spoke of the dawning realization that is beginning to bring peace to their hearts: that they have all been traumatized, that they have all been suffering. Utilizing decades of research and intervention by American psychologist Ervin Staub and others, the Rwandan people are learning concrete steps to heal their broken hearts and to accept the Other as human. It is a radical notion, and it is spreading.

Of course, reconciliation without justice would be a travesty. Rwanda’s community-based, all-volunteer judicial system, gacaca, did an astounding job of dealing justly with millions of genocidal perpetrators. Yet with a task so daunting, satisfactory closure remains an ongoing challenge.

I recall us sitting on a long wooden bench in a village clearing, listening (with the help of a translator) to six people sitting on the bench across from us. Two are Tutsi survivors, one is a Hutu perpetrator who served time in prison, one is a former member of a Hutu militia group, and two are young people representing the next generation. They are at the heart of a widening circle of “clubs” of reconciliation in their region, trained in trauma counseling and non-violent communication. They say that they now enjoy one another so much, they can’t wait for the weekly gatherings in which they together assist whoever needs help in the village.

One by one the six people on the bench tell us their stories, and then it happens: a gesture so subtle we almost miss it. The older woman survivor leans in to whisper something to the tall male perpetrator sitting next to her, and she drapes her arm over his shoulders. It is a moment of casual affection that speaks louder than all their prepared stories. We are awestruck.

The late philanthropist Anne Heyman successfully exported the “youth village” concept from post-Holocaust Israel to post-genocide Rwanda. Today, the Rwandan people have much to export to Israel/Palestine, and to the world – and I’m not talking about coffee and bananas. On the level of our shared humanity, we have much to learn from the ordinary people of Rwanda. If they can live literally next-door to former enemies, learning to co-exist and cooperate as neighbors – and in some cases even grow to love one another – then other people in less horrific conflict situations ought to be able to do at least as much. If the people of Rwanda can heal their broken hearts and accept the Other as human, so can we.

Randy Kafka serves as rabbi of Temple Kol Tikvah in Sharon, MA.

<Forward>

What Gabriel Garcia Marquez Taught Me

Budding Jewish Novelist Learned of Romance and Term Papers

GETTY IMAGES

The Master: Gabriel Garcia Marquez died at the age of 87.

By Boris Fishman

It is a well-known fact that young men under 18 embrace literature primarily to impress the girls they are trying to seduce. You had to congratulate my ambition: A Soviet-Jewish immigrant kid with funny hair and funnier clothes after an American-born, Catholic, Colombian beauty whom I’ll call C. But I had a secret weapon: the work of her countryman Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who died yesterday (on this earth, at least) at 87. That I would try to seduce this ethereal creature was as fantastical a proposition as any of the things that went on in the novels of the great Gabo, where blood ran from a battlefield to the doorstep of the home of the slain, women ate dirt in despair, and lovers reunited after 50 years of forced separation. But a Russian Jew, even at 15, knows how to hustle. A Russian Jew brings friends to a fight.

Gabo — and C — were everything that my life in northern New Jersey was not. I had emigrated at nine from a country of voluble, undiplomatic, and boundary-invading kitchen talk (so unlike the grayness usually associated with the USSR) to a country of greater civility but less self-revelation and candor. My family still talked loudly and over-intimately in America, only now this was severely out of place and looked at askance. But that disposition was native once again between the covers of a Marquez novel. There — and in C’s family kitchen — the blood ran quick in the way that I remembered from home, and as a promise that such a life could be found again. Add to this that, in emigrating, I had suddenly passed from a sheltered childhood to a radically unfamiliar place where I was made responsible for the well-being of adults twice and three times my age because I had learned English the fastest. You could not have met a more stressed, terrified, humorless teenager. You can imagine why I lost hours with Marquez’s books.

Northern New Jersey may have been the least romantic place in the world, but Gabo made it bloom for me and C. We read his books one after the other, each of us underlining what moved us, making comments to each other in the margins. Because of our different religions, our families did not like us together, and because we were kids, that was all the reason we needed to think we should be together forever. Gabo quickened our sense of ourselves as doomed lovers. Let this be the first and last place where I reveal that my ultimate seduction was inspired by a scene in “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” (It involved fluttering rose petals and four adults waiting out the night in the parking lot of a Shop Rite. But that’s for another essay.) Also that I wrote C’s senior-year term paper, also about “Solitude.” It was called “Love Among the Ruins.”

There’s a singular bittersweetness to the moment when a hero returns to the role of, simply, someone you read once. For the first time in nearly twenty years, I opened Solitude last year to discover I could not get very far. Enough things had happened in my life – really real things, things that could not be mitigated even by that novel’s magical happenings – that I found its fabulism ungrounded and irritating. As an adult, I wanted something that engaged with the stubbornly real, melancholy timbre of the world I was actually living in. My adoration had passed on to William Styron, Bernard Malamud, J. M. Coetzee.

But even erstwhile heroes leave a lasting mark. In my debut novel, out this June, about a failed young journalist who starts forging Holocaust-restitution claims for old Russian Jews in Brooklyn, the conversation is between the grandchildren and grandparents, the parents hardly making an appearance. After finishing the novel, I realized that it was Marquez, who had been raised by his grandparents and their tall tales, who had led me to this emotional matrix. I had been raised by my parents, but it was the stories of my grandparents, who had lived in a time when life seemed to work entirely differently, that had really impacted me. This is to say nothing of the novel’s obsession with fabulism and invention, relocated to the far less surreal precincts of the American Northeast. At one point, Slava Gelman, the protagonist says, “If you say there are elephants flying outside your window, no one will believe you. But if you say there are six elephants flying outside your window, it’s a different story.” That is taken directly from a Marquez interview with The Paris Review. And while I have never quite found that new home where life answers to the heart instead of other gods like the market, there is only one reason why the personal essay is my favorite form. For me, Gabo lives.

As for C and I, we were together for three years. (If I ever run for office, she can destroy me by publishing some of the Marquez-inspired poetry I wrote her during that time. “The moonlight on your hair…”) Some days, it seemed like Gabo was all that we shared. I wonder if the intensity of our affection and gratitude for his work helped conceal all the ways in which we weren’t happy with each other, made the relationship go on longer than it should have. Perhaps. But I know that the old man would have relished that he had been used to kindle this first love, a love between a Jew and a Catholic from opposite ends of the world meeting in a third place, free but sedate, that they both craved to escape for the unreasonable world of his pages. Was that any less fantastical than what he wrote about? Would that he were still around to take on the idea.

Boris Fishman’s debut novel ‘A Replacement Life’ will be published on June 3 by HarperCollins.

<Forward>

Funcionários do Ministério das Relações Exteriores declaram greve geral, paralisando sistema diplomático de Israel

Greve é o culminar de sanções renovadas, protestando falha do Ministério das Finanças para resolver queixas dos diplomatas

Funcionários do Ministério das Relações Exteriores declararam uma greve geral neste domingo, após duas semanas de paralisações parciais. A greve está prevendo o fechamento das missões estrangeiras do país e a paralisação total do sistema diplomático israelense.

Pela primeira vez desde a criação do Estado de Israel, 103 missões israelenses no Exterior serão fechadas, assim como a sede do Ministério das Relações Exteriores em Jerusalém. Ambas serão completamente fechadas, e por um período indefinido de tempo, para protestar contra as condições de trabalho dos diplomatas israelenses e a decisão do Ministério das Finanças de cortar seus salários durante as paralisações.

O Sindicato dos Trabalhadores do Ministério das Relações Exteriores informou a todos os empregados em Israel e no Exterior, por e-mail e mensagens, de que a greve geral começaria às 03:00 h deste domingo e instruiu-os a deixar seus locais de trabalho imediatamente.

"A Sede do Ministério das Relações Exteriores será fechada para todas as atividades. Todos os trabalhadores, em todas as posições, são ordenados a ficar longe do escritório", disse o comitê num comunicado a todos os trabalhadores. "Missões israelenses no Exterior serão fechadas, a partir de segunda-feira 24 de março. Todos os trabalhadores, em todas as posições, estão ordenados a ficar longe das missões".

Fontes do Ministério das Relações Exteriores disseram que o encerramento das missões no Exterior seria total e que os agentes de segurança haviam sido instruídos a impedir a entrada a todos, incluindo funcionários do Ministério da Defesa, o IDF, Mossad, Shin Bet - Serviço de Segurança e outros ministérios do governo.

A sede em Jerusalém será bloqueada ao longo da greve e a entrada será negada ao ministro das Relações Exteriores Avigdor Lieberman, ao vice-chanceler Ze'ev Elkin e ao Diretor-Geral Nissim Ben-Sheetrit.

O comitê da greve vai lidar com os pedidos de cidadãos israelenses, ou empresas privadas, durante o período da greve, mas apenas nos casos em que haja perigo de vida. O comitê pode ser contatado em unionmfa@israel.org

O primeiro-ministro Benjamin Netanyahu foi forçado, na semana passada, a cancelar 

uma visita "histórica" (?) para a América Latina prevista para abril, depois que seu bureau encontrou muitas dificuldades em fazer os arranjos necessários devido às sanções dos diplomatas, que incluem uma recusa global de ajudar a organizar viagens ao Exterior para qualquer ministro.

Os diplomatas também se recusaram a lidar com a visita do primeiro-ministro britânico David Cameron, na semana passada (embora ele veio de qualquer maneira), e agora estão se recusando a cooperar sobre os preparativos para a visita do Papa a Israel, em maio. Uma delegação do Vaticano, que deveria ter visitado Israel para trabalhar nos arranjos, cancelou sua viagem, e agora é incerto se a visita do Papa acontecerá.

<Rua Judaica>

DISCURSO DE ENGELS DIANTE DO TÚMULO DE MARX

No dia 14 de março, três horas e quarenta e cinco minutos da tarde, o maior pensador de nossos dias, parou de pensar. Nós o deixamos apenas por dois minutos a sós e quando voltamos o encontramos dormindo suavemente na sua poltrona, mas para sempre.

É praticamente impossível calcular o que o proletariado militante da Europa e da América e a ciência histórica perderam com a morte este homem. Imediatamente se perceberá o buraco que foi aberto com a morte desta personalidade gigantesca.

Assim como Darwin descobriu a lei do desenvolvimento da natureza orgânica, Marx descobriu a lei do desenvolvimento da história humana: um fato tão simples, mas escondido debaixo do lixo ideológico, de que o homem necessita, em primeiro lugar, comer, beber, ter um teto e vestir-se antes de poder fazer política, ciência, arte, religião, etc.; que, então, a produção dos meios imediatos de vida, materiais e, por conseguinte, a correspondente fase de desenvolvimento econômico de um povo ou de uma época é a base a partir da qual tem se desenvolvido as instituições políticas, as concepções jurídicas, as ideias artísticas e, até mesmo as ideias religiosas dos homens e de acordo com a qual, então, devem ser explicadas, e não ao contrário, como até então se vinha fazendo. Mas, não é só isto. Marx descobriu também a lei específica que move o atual modo de produção capitalista e a sociedade burguesa criada por ele. A descoberta da mais-valia, imediatamente, clareou estes problemas, enquanto todas as investigações prévias, tanto dos economistas burgueses quanto dos socialistas críticos, haviam vagado na escuridão.

Duas descobertas como estas deveriam ser bastante para uma vida. Quem tem a sorte de fazer apenas uma destas descobertas, já pode se considerar feliz. Porém, não houve um só campo que Marx não investigasse - e estes campos foram muitos e, em nenhum deles, se limitou a fazer apenas superficialmente - inclusive na matemática, na qual não fizesse descobertas originais. Tal era o homem de ciência. Porém, isto não era, nem com muito, a metade do homem. Para Marx, a ciência era uma força histórica motriz, uma força revolucionária. Por pura que fosse a alegria provocada por uma nova descoberta que realizasse em qualquer ciência teórica e cuja aplicação prática talvez não pudesse ser prevista de modo algum, era muito outro o prazer que experimentava quando se tratava de uma descoberta que exercia imediatamente uma influência revolucionária na indústria e no desenvolvimento histórico em geral. Por isso, seguia, detalhadamente, a marcha das descobertas realizadas no campo da eletricidade, até os de Marcel Deprez nos últimos tempos.

Porque Marx era, acima de tudo, um revolucionário. Cooperar, deste ou do outro modo, para a derrubada da sociedade capitalista e das instituições políticas criadas por ela, contribuir para a emancipação do proletariado moderno, a quem ele tinha infundido pela primeira vez a consciência da própria situação e das suas necessidades, a consciência das suas condições de emancipação: tal era a verdadeira missão da sua vida. A luta era seu elemento. E lutou com uma paixão, uma tenacidade e um sucesso como poucos. Primeira Gazeta do Reno, 1842; Vorwärts1 de Paris, 1844; Gazeta alemã de Bruxelas, 1847; Gazeta nova do Reno, 1848-1849;

Tribuna de Nova Iorque, 1852 a 1861, para tudo aquilo que é necessário somar um montão de folhetos de luta e trabalho nas organizações de Paris, Bruxelas e Londres, até que, ultimamente, nasceu como remate de tudo, a grande Associação Internacional de Trabalhadores que era, na verdade, um trabalho do qual o seu autor poderia se orgulhar, ainda que não tivesse criado nenhuma outra coisa.

Por isso, Marx era o homem mais odiado e mais caluniado de seu tempo. Os governos, a mesma coisa os absolutistas e os republicanos, o expulsavam. Os burgueses, a mesma coisa que os conservadores e os ultrademocratas, competiam para lançar calúnias contra ele. Marx separava tudo isso de um lado como se fossem teias de aranha, não prestava atenção a elas; só respondia quando a necessidade imperiosa exigia isto. E morreu venerado, querido, chorado por milhões de trabalhadores da causa revolucionária, como ele, espalhados por toda a Europa e América, desde as minas da Sibéria até a Califórnia. E eu posso ousar dizer que se teve muitos opositores, não teve um único inimigo pessoal. Seu nome viverá através dos séculos e, com ele, sua obra.

Discurso realizado em inglês, por F. Engels, no cemitério de Highgate, em 17 de março de 1883. Publicado em alemão no Sozialdemokrat em 22 de março de 1883. 

<Esquerda Marxista>

95 anos do discurso de Lênin na abertura do congresso de fundação da Internacional Comunista

Por solicitação do Comitê Central do Partido Comunista russo, inauguro o primeiro Congresso Internacional.  Antes de mais nada, pelo que honrem a memória dos melhores representantes da III Internacional, Karl Liebknecht e Rosa Luxemburgo.

Camaradas, nosso Congresso reveste-se de uma grande importância na história mundial.  Ele demonstra o fim de todas as ilusões da democracia burguesa.  A guerra civil se transformou num fato, não só na Rússia, mas nos países capitalistas mais desenvolvidos, por exemplo a Alemanha.

O povo percebeu a grandeza e a importância desta luta.  Tratava-se de encontrar a forma prática quer permitisse ao proletariado exercer sua dominação.  Esta forma é o regime dos Sovietes com a ditadura do proletariado.  A ditadura do proletariado; essas palavras eram “latim” para as massas até nossos dias.  Agora, graças ao sistema dos Sovietes, esse latim se traduziu para todas as línguas modernas; a forma prática da ditadura foi encontrada pelas massas populares.  Ela se tornou inteligível para a grande massa de operários graças ao poder dos Sovietes na Rússia, aos espartaquistas da Alemanha, às organizações análogas nos outros países, como Shop Stewards Committes na Inglaterra.  Tudo isso prova que a forma revolucionária da ditadura do proletariado foi encontrada e que o proletariado está em ação para exercer de fato sua dominação.

Camaradas!  Penso que depois do que aconteceu na Rússia, depois dos combates de janeiro na Alemanha, importa sobretudo observar que a nova forma do movimento do proletariado se manifesta e se amplia também nos outros países.  Hoje, li num jornal inglês antissocialista um telegrama anunciando que o governo inglês recebeu o soviete de delegados operários de Birmingham e prometeu-lhe reconhecer os Sovietes como organizações econômicas.  O sistema soviético conseguiu a vitória não apenas na Rússia atrasada, mas também no país mais civilizado da Europa: a Alemanha, e no mais antigo país capitalista:  a Inglaterra.

A burguesia pode maltratar; pode também assassinar milhares de operários – mas a vitória é nossa, a vitória da revolução comunista mundial está assegurada.

Camaradas,

Em nome do Comitê Central desejo cordialmente que sejam bem-vindos.

<Esquerda Marxista>

Bayer: “Não criamos medicamentos para os indianos, mas para ocidentais que podem pagar”

Uma lição explicita de capitalismo

A declaração acima foi dita pelo diretor executivo da empresa farmacêutica Bayer, Marijn Dekkers, publicadas pela revista, Bloomberg Business Week. A companhia é uma das maiores do mundo, no setor medicamento e só produz, “para quem pode pagar”.

Dekkers fez estas declarações em referência às novas licenças sobre a propriedade das patentes farmacêuticas, aplicada pelo governo da Índia, uma iniciativa que repercutirá favorável aos fabricantes locais para que produzam medicamentos genéricos a preços mais baratos e acessíveis para toda a população.

A medida está pensada para os tratamentos contra o câncer, o HIV e diabetes, segundo a revista, mas o governo indiano pretende ampliar para mais 20 medicamentos. As novas licenças permitirão a qualquer empresa do país asiático produzir essas mesmas fórmulas sem consentimento do titular da patente e sem receber o correspondente pago pelo seu uso. A medida tem como objetivo exercer pressão sobre os fabricantes para que estes baixem os preços e sejam competitivos com os genéricos, além de satisfazer as necessidades de seus cidadãos mais pobres.

Com essas licenças uma empresa local já tem elaborado o genérico de um anticancerígeno de Bayer, que custa 97% menos que o original. Mas esta iniciativa provocou a ira farmacêutica alemã, que decidiu recorrer à justiça da Índia argumentando que estas licenças constituem um roubo. No entanto, os doutores da organização ‘Médicos sem Fronteiras’ citados pelo jornal creem que este caso, “reflete a maneira perversa na que se desenvolvem hoje em dia os medicamentos. As farmacêuticas estão claramente concentradas em multiplicar os lucros, pressionando de uma maneira agressiva as patentes para elevar os preços”.

“Lamento que o que foi uma resposta rápida no marco de uma discussão tenha saído à luz de uma maneira que eu não pretendia. Não pode ser mais contrário ao que eu quero e ao que fazemos em Bayer”, disse depois Dekkers ao desculpar-se por suas declarações.

<Esquerda Marxista>

The World's Oldest Holocaust Survivor, Alice Herz-Sommer, Dies at 110

Prague-Born Pianist Is Subject of New Documentary

POLLY HANCOCK

Alice Herz-Sommer, pictured here on her 107th birthday, is the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary.

Ofer Aderet

(Haaretz) — The world’s oldest Holocaust survivor, Alice Herz-Sommer, died Sunday at the age 110 in London. Herz-Sommer, a pianist, born in Prague, was the subject of a documentary “The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life”, Academy Award (Oscar) winner.

“Young people take everything for granted, whereas we, the elderly, understand nature, “ Herz-Sommer told Haaretz in an interview at age 106. “What I have learned, at my advanced age, is to be grateful that we have a nice life. There is electricity, cars, telegraph, telephone, Internet. We also have hot water all day long. We live like kings. I even got used to the bad weather in London,” she said.

Besides her twin sister, Mariana, she had another sister and two brothers. She discovered a love for music at the age of 3, and it has remained with her to this day. Her family home in Prague was also a cultural salon where writers, scientists, musicians and actors congregated, among them Franz Kafka, who she remembers well. He was the best friend of the journalist, author and philosopher Felix Weltsch, who married her sister Irma.

“Kafka was a slightly strange man,” Sommer recalled. “He used to come to our house, sit and talk with my mother, mainly about his writing. He did not talk a lot, but rather loved quiet and nature. We frequently went on trips together. I remember that Kafka took us to a very nice place outside Prague. We sat on a bench and he told us stories. I remember the atmosphere and his unusual stories. He was an excellent writer, with a lovely style, the kind that you read effortlessly,” she says, and then grows silent. “And now, hundreds of people all over the world research and write doctorates about him.”

When World War I broke out, she was 11. Five years later she enrolled in the German music academy in Prague, where she was the youngest pupil. Within a short time she became one of the city’s most famous pianists, and in the early 1930s was also known throughout Europe. Max Brod, the man who published Kafka’s works, recognized Sommer’s talent and reviewed several of her performances for a newspaper.

In 1931 she married Leopold Sommer, also a musician. Six years later their only son, Rafael, was born. In 1939 the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia.

This was a very difficult time for Sommer, who had stayed behind. The Nazis forbade Jews to perform in public, and so she stopped holding concerts and participating in music competitions. At first she was still able to make a living by giving piano lessons, but when the Nazis forbade Jews to teach non-Jews, she lost most of her pupils.

“Everything was forbidden. We couldn’t buy groceries, take the tram, or go to the park,” she said.

But the hardest times of all still lay ahead. In 1942 the Germans arrested her sick mother, Sophie, who was 72 at the time, and subsequently murdered her.

“That was a catastrophe,” Sommer said. The bond between a mother and her child is something special. I loved her so much. But an inner voice told me, ‘From now on you alone can help yourself. Not your husband, not the doctor, not the child.’

And at that moment I knew I had to play Frederic Chopin’s 24 etudes, which are the greatest challenge for any pianist. Like Goethe’s ‘Faust’ or Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet.’ I ran home and from that moment on I practiced for hours and hours. Until they forced us out.”

In 1943, Sommer was sent to the Terezin-Theresienstadt concentration camp, along with her husband and their son, who was then 6 years old. The Nazis allowed the Jews to maintain a cultural life there, in order to present the false impression to the world that the inmates were receiving proper treatment. Sommer thus performed there together with other musicians.

“We had to play because the Red Cross came three times a year,” she recounts. “The Germans wanted to show its representatives that the situation of the Jews in Theresienstadt was good. Whenever I knew that I had a concert, I was happy. Music is magic. We performed in the council hall before an audience of 150 old, hopeless, sick and hungry people. They lived for the music. It was like food to them. If they hadn’t come [to hear us], they would have died long before. As we would have.”

In September 1944, her husband Leopold was sent to Auschwitz. He survived his imprisonment there, but died of illness at Dachau shortly before the war ended. His departing words to her at Theresienstadt saved her life, says Sommer: “One evening he came and told me that 1,000 men would be sent on a transport the following day - himself included. He made me swear not to volunteer to follow him afterward. And a day after his transport there was another one, which people were told was a transport of ‘wives following in their husbands’ footsteps.’ Many wives volunteered to go, but they never met up with their husbands: They were murdered. If my husband hadn’t warned me, I would have gone at once.”

In May 1945, the Soviet army liberated Theresienstadt. Two years later Sommer and her son immigrated to Palestine, where they were reunited with her family: her twin Mariana, who had meanwhile married Prof. Emil Adler, one of the founders of Hadassah Medical Center (their son, Prof. Chaim Adler, is an Israel Prize laureate for education), and with Irma and her husband Felix (their grandson is actor Eli Gorenstein).

I don’t hate the Germans,” Sommer declared. “[What they did] was a terrible thing, but was Alexander the Great any better? Evil has always existed and always will. It is part of our life.”

In 1962, she added, she attended the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem: “I have to say that I had pity for him. I have pity for the entire German people. They are wonderful people, no worse than others.”

For almost 40 years Sommer lived in Israel, making a living by teaching music at a conservatory in Jerusalem. “That was the best period in my life,” she recalls. “I was happy.”

In 1986, Sommer followed her son, a cellist, and his family to London. She continued playing and teaching; to this day she devotes three hours a day to practicing. She speaks lovingly of her two grandchildren, whose father, Rafael, died of a heart attack in Israel in 2001, at the end of a concert tour. He was 64.

His birth was the happiest day of my life, and his death was the worst thing that happened to me,” she notes, but manages to find a bright spot even here. “I am grateful at least that he did not suffer when he died. And I still watch my son play, on television. He lives on. Sometimes I think it will be possible someday to postpone death through technology.”

When asked in 2006 what the secret of her longevity was, she answered: In a word: optimism. I look at the good. When you are relaxed, your body is always relaxed. When you are pessimistic, your body behaves in an unnatural way. It is up to us whether we look at the good or the bad. When you are nice to others, they are nice to you. When you give, you receive.” “My recommendation is not to eat a lot, but also not to go hungry. Fish or chicken and plenty of vegetables.”

When asked whether she was afraid of dying, she replied: “Not at all. No. I was a good person, I helped people, I was loved, I have a good feeling.”

<The Forward>

The Secret Jewish History of Don Quixote

Was Cervantes's Hero the Mensch of La Mancha?

GETTY IMAGES

Impossible Dreamers: The adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza seem to have been influenced by stories in the Zohar.

Benjamin Ivry

Was Don Quixote’s impossible dream a Yiddisher one? The French author Dominique Aubier, whose study “Don Quixote: Prophet of Israel” has just been reprinted, apparently thinks so.

Aubier’s book, which originally appeared in 1966, is based on the thesis now generally accepted by literary historians that the author of “Don Quixote,” Miguel de Cervantes, likely hailed from a family of conversos, or converts, Spanish Jews who in 1492 were faced with the choice of leaving their homeland or staying on as Christians. Extrapolating from this likelihood, Aubier advanced controversial theories, for example that “Don Quixote” contains numerous references to the Kabbalah and other Jewish themes. The protagonist’s very name, according to Aubier, is derived from the Aramaic word qeshot, meaning truth or certainty, often used in the Zohar, a key text in Kabbalah.

Critics of Aubier’s ideas are plentiful among Spanish literature experts (the Cervantes scholar Daniel Eisenberg has termed her book “highly misleading”), who point out that it is near impossible that Cervantes could have had access to Jewish mystical literature in Spain. When “Don Quixote” was originally published, from 1605 to 1610, observant Jews had long since been expelled from the country. Among Aubier’s other suggestions is one concerning Dulcinea del Toboso, Don Quixote’s ideal woman who was in reality a peasant-like “brawny girl,” as Quixote’s servant Sancho Panza described her. Aubier states that Dulcinea symbolizes the Shekhinah, which in talmudic tradition has been described as representing feminine attributes of God’s presence. “Don Quixote: Prophet of Israel” also offers an etymology for Dulcinea’s town El Toboso as deriving from the Hebrew words tov and sod, or good and hidden meaning.

Aubier reads “Don Quixote” as an intentional gloss on the Zohar, claiming that if readers accept that Cervantes “proceeds from a dynamic engagement with the concepts of the Zohar, themselves resulting from a dialectic dependence on Talmudic concepts, which in turn sprang from an active engagement with the text of Moses’ book, it is then on the totality of Hebrew thought — in all its uniqueness, its unity of spirit, its inner faithfulness to principles clarified by slow and prodigious exegesis — that the attentive reader of ‘Don Quixote’ must rely in order at last to be free to release Cervantes’ meaning from the profound symbols with which it is encoded.”

Aubier’s fervent, elevated tone is also present on more recent Kabbalah-inspired video analyses posted on YouTube. In one of these, Aubier, a sturdy elderly Frenchwoman who speaks in a pronounced Provençal accent, describes what the numbers on the New York street address of the then-accused felon Dominique Strauss-Kahn signify in Kabbalah lore. Aubier was born Marie-Louise Labiste in 1922 and adopted her present name after joining the French Resistance in Grenoble. (In 1945, Aubier published a collection of stories based on her Resistance experiences that would probably also make intriguing reading today.) Aubier admits to being neither a Hebraist nor a professional scholar of Kabbalah. Yet some Cervantes specialists are taking her arguments about “Don Quixote” increasingly seriously.

“Don Quixote and Sancho Panza Were Walking on the Way,” a 2009 article by Nathan Wolski in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, denies that Cervantes had intended to hide kabbalistic references in “Quixote.” Wolski concedes that both “Quixote,” about a wandering knight, and the 13th century Sefer ha-Zohar (Book of Splendor), published in Spain by Moses de León, are picaresque in that they consist of discussions sparked by events encountered on journeys. Wolski notes: “In the Zohar itself, the Kabbalists are often portrayed as knights of Torah and knights of the Shekhinah, and the Zohar frequently employs medieval military imagery to depict its wandering heroes… The Torah is compared to a beautiful maiden or princess hidden deep within her palace, while the Kabbalist is described as her lover passing by her gate constantly.”

Most of the stories in the Zohar begin by stating that two rabbis were “walking on the way.” Wolski describes the Zohar as a “proto-mystical novel recounting the adventures and expositions of Rabbi Shimon and his disciples, the Companions… For both the Zohar and Don Quixote then, walking and speaking are concurrent and constitutive activities of the journey… [T]hese correspondences derive from a shared Spanish-Jewish-converso literary legacy spanning more than three centuries.”

“Is There a Hidden Jewish Meaning in Don Quixote?” in Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America also explored the works’ shared thematics as pioneered by Aubier. The article, written by Michael McGaha, argues that Cervantes intended to depict Don Quixote as a converso, although Aubier did not establish how Cervantes might have acquired any knowledge of the Zohar. Aubier’s theses have received scant wholehearted support in academia, one exception being Ruth Reichelberg, a professor at Bar Ilan University and author of “Don Quixote, or the Novel About a Concealed Jew.”

Still, Jewish readers need no convincing of Don Quixote’s inherent Yiddishkeit, especially with regard to the modern Hebrew translation by the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873-1934). Working from an abridged Russian translation of Cervantes’ masterpiece — Bialik could not read Spanish — he cut the novel by over one-half. In a letter to a friend, Bialik stated: “I read [“Don Quixote”] in Russian when I first came to Odessa as a teenage yeshiva boy, trying to become a poet. I was living in poverty in Odessa, and the book had enthralled me… Dostoyevsky made me weep and Cervantes made me laugh. I alternated between laughing and crying.”

The novelist Vladimir Nabokov termed “Don Quixote” a “cruel and crude old book,” an observation justified by a readily available online summary of the novel’s action: “Don Quixote promises to make a balsam to cure Sancho… Don Quixote mixes ingredients and drinks the potion. He vomits immediately and passes out… Sancho also takes the potion, and although it makes him tremendously ill, he does not vomit… Don Quixote rushes into the battle and kills seven sheep before two shepherds throw stones at him and knock out several of his teeth… Don Quixote takes more of the balsam, and as Sancho comes close to see how badly his master’s teeth have been injured, Don Quixote vomits on him. Nauseous, Sancho then vomits on Don Quixote.”

Yet in appetizing English-language versions by the acclaimed Jewish translators J. M. Cohen, Burton Raffel and Edith Grossman, “Don Quixote” is no stomach turner. The literature-obsessed knight of doleful countenance was a man of the book, simultaneously a schlemiel and schlemazel, who seems destined to remain irresistible to Jewish readers. Even Nabokov, in his “Lectures on Don Quixote,” admitted that by the novel’s end, “we do not laugh at [Don Quixote] any longer. His blazon is pity, his banner is beauty. He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish and gallant.”

Benjamin Ivry is a frequent contributor to the Forward.

<The Forward>