The Newsletter of Fig Tree Books

January 2024: Issue #50 --- Fredric D. Price, Founder & Publisher

From an Unpublished Novel:

Our Time is Up, by Roberta Satow

The weather in our house was stormy with the promise of thunder and lightning. I walked on the balls of my feet, as if to prepare for the thunderclaps that would slam me across the room. Before I started elementary school, I was alone with my mother when my father left for work at the Hunter Coal Company on Flatbush Avenue. As usual on Wednesdays, she put on her shmata, a sleeveless cotton housedress that tied across the front. The pink and green flowers on the dress accentuated the scowl on her face. She hated cleaning. But it was her life sentence. She filled a brown plastic bucket with hot water and added Ivory soap flakes and Jane Parker ammonia. Putting on her yellow plastic gloves to protect her nail polish, she dropped the wooden brush with stiff bristles into the bucket. Then she turned to me and said, "Go out on the porch so I can wash the floor."

Roberta Satow, Ph.D. is a practicing psychoanalyst and Professor Emerita of Sociology at Brooklyn College. In addition to her non-fiction books Gender and Social Life (Allyn & Bacon, 2000) and Doing the Right Thing: Taking Care of Your Elderly Parents Even if They Didn’t Take Care of You (Tarcher/Penguin 2006), she has written a novel Two Sisters of Coyoacan (2017) and numerous articles on sociological and psychoanalytic subjects that have appeared in journals and magazines such as the Psychoanalytic Review and Partisan Review. Dr. Satow also writes a blog for Psychology Today (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/life-after-50).

BOOK REVIEW: The Boatmaker, by John Benditt

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award

John Benditt had a career as a science journalist before turning to writing fiction fulltime. He was a senior editor at Scientific American and at Science before serving as Editor in Chief of Technology Review: MIT's Magazine of Innovation. The Boatmaker is the first book in a trilogy that takes its protagonist from childhood to the threshold of the next life.

GUEST COLUMNIST - EVE BARLOW, Creator of Blacklisted

They Joined A Cult

Battle lines were drawn after October 7. Personal stakes were considered. And people chose. If you lost your friends, it’s because they chose the cult. That’s what happens when people join cults. They sacrifice themselves for the cult. And cults do not like critical thinking and will do anything and everything to shut it down, including proliferating sexy slogans. Heil Hitler. And they become robots with not much feeling or care. Tragic. Because losing compassion for loved ones is alarming and should freak everyone out. These types of bonds, rooted in trust, now shattered and lost and replaced by coerced belonging, actually help us live longer and more meaningful lives. But in a cult, the people who don’t belong are suddenly ousted and theories are invented around them about “who they really are”. And those who might question it are denied their free will or pressurized and coerced until there is no choice left. And while the cult profess to care and agonize deeply about the issues it stands for, nothing about these emotions are truly authentic. All that is genuine is the need to be in the cult, and not alone without it.

...

At the end of her column, Eve Barlow suggests watching the Bill Maher video on New Rules from December 15, 2023 (see below for the link).

Eve Barlow

@Eve_Barlow

"The interrupter" Journalist. Zionist. Feminist. Scottish.

evebarlow.substack.com/subscribe

66.1K Followers

JEWS OF DIFFERENT HUES:

My Black Jewish Family's Values Were 150 Years in the Making

In the 1880s, a Black Baptist and a Reform Jewish family lived in the town of Tyler, Texas. In the 1870s, Tyler was an ill-fated town with a train that ran right through it. When an unlikely stop was created on the line in the 1880s, Tyler emerged as a commercial center of West Texas.

The Jewish family’s patriarch, Maurice Faber, came from an unbroken line of Orthodox rabbis. He believed his religion was ready to be more progressive, however, and in the 1880s he moved his family from Hungary to the U.S., eventually becoming a Reform rabbi in the Texas town. The train line had tripled the town’s population within the decade, and opportunities for businesses continued to grow.

Meanwhile, in 1897, Thomas Butler was born to a land-owning Black Baptist family in Tyler. He became a foreman on the railroad and a father to 13 children, all of whom attended an all-Black school in the segregated town. In the 1910s, Butler left Tyler in the middle of the night, after his white supervisor made advances on his wife.

GUEST EDITORIAL: When that other ball drops,

by Thane Rosenbaum

It was in 1908 when New York City began the annual tradition of ushering in the New Year with the celebratory dropping of the ball in Times Square. It is estimated that over one billion people from around the world count down along with the hundreds of thousands standing below the ball — braving all that cold and claustrophobia.

This year another element was added: The possibility of a terrorist attack kicking off 2024 in grand Islamist style.

Not a fanciful fear, at all. In 2023, a Muslim brandishing a machete and screaming “jihad!” attacked three police officers: And that was without a war in Gaza that has sparked 1,000 protests in New York City since the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel. 



Indeed, from the earliest days after such brazen barbarism, New Yorkers witnessed protests that were far from peaceful — and rooting for the terrorists! There were arrests at various iconic New York landmarks: The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade; the lighting of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center; the disruption of pre-Christmas shopping in Midtown; and obstructing the busiest days of travel at Kennedy International Airport and Grand Central Terminal.

Fig Tree Lit welcomes responses to this guest editorial; decisions to publish are exclusively within the domain of Fig Tree Lit. To respond, send an email to Info@FigTreeBooks.net.

BOOK CHAPTER: Confronting Antisemitism on Campus,

by Chaim Siedler-Feller

Friday nights at UCLA H i l l e l have developed a reputation for being joyous, celebratory spiritual and social occasions and are usually attended by 125-250 students representing all denominations, as well as the faithless. There are even some non-Jewish students who regularly join in the warm and inviting dinner environment.

But one particular Shabbat in November 2018 was different. Coming as i t did on the heels of the broadly politicized national conference of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) that was held at UCLA, i t was an unusually poignant evening. The conference had garnered inordinate attention due to the scheduled appearance of some especially offensive speakers known for their inflammatory anti-Israel/Zionist/Jewish rhetoric, to SJP?s role as the main sponsor and promulgator of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign on campus, and to the protestations of a variety ofJewish groups demanding that the proceedings be canceled. Even though the SJP gathering passed without incident, campus tensions had mounted and many Jewishly involved students felt battered. There was a palpable desire and need for a comforting Shabbat experience.

COMMENTS: On Harvard's ex-president, Claudine Gay

Editor's note: We received many emails from readers asking us to give some "context" to the situation vis-a-vis Claudine Gay's resignation as the president of Harvard, in which she railed against racism but declined to mention either of the issues that brought her down: her failure - during a Congressional hearing - to acknowledge that calling for the genocide of Jews was against the code of conduct at Harvard; and, the fact that she plagiarized many passages in her writings, including her doctoral dissertation.

We have excerpted (with full disclosure of sources) sections from articles that have been published in print and online forums. We welcome readers' comments on this issue by sending them to Info@FigTreeBooks.net.

How to Fix Harvard

It’s time we restore veritas to my alma mater. 

By Bill Ackman, January 3, 2024

In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about. I first became concerned about Harvard when 34 student organizations, early on the morning of October 8—before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza—came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel “solely responsible” for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts.

How could this be? I wondered.

Bill Ackman is the CEO of Pershing Square, and holds bachelor’s and MBA degrees from Harvard. This piece originally appeared as a post on Ackman’s X account. Follow him @BillAckman.

Claudine Gay and the Limits of Social Engineering at Harvard

By Bret Stephens, January 2, 2024

I had written and filed a column about Harvard and its president, Claudine Gay, when news of her resignation broke on Tuesday afternoon after fresh allegations of plagiarism in her published work. I’d like to record what I wrote: “Cancel culture is always ugly and usually a mistake. If Gay is to go, let it be after more deliberation, with more decorum, and when pundits like me aren’t writing about her.” Oh, well.

The point may now be moot, but the important question for Harvard was never whether Gay should step down. It was why she was brought on in the first place, after one of the shortest presidential searches in Harvard’s recent history. How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?

Nellie Bowles, The Free Press Dec 29, 2023

I still think Claudine Gay is too big to fail. She is a symbol. And the perfect one for a once-great American institution running on prestige fumes and foreign dollars. Of course her papers are flawed and plagiarized. Of course she isn’t up for the actual task of the job. It’s part of the point of Claudine Gay being president of Harvard. It’s part of the statement. And I don’t mean the crude take that she got the job simply based on her identity, since Claudine herself has played a major role in smearing several truly great black academics throughout her career. No, the statement Claudine Gay as president of Harvard makes is that politics matter more than anything else. It’s actually better for the movement that her work is fake. Because it makes the message even clearer: mediocrity, so long as it’s wedded to ideology, is enough. We’ll even call mediocrity genius and give it the most prestigious academic job in the land, so long as you say just the right things about this list of issues. In conclusion, Claudine Gay is the perfect president of Harvard. 

Carol Swain, PhD

X (Twitter) Jan 2, 2024

I must confess the entire Claudine Gay affair, and Harvard's incompetent handling of it has created enormous stress for me. I never expected HarvardU and many scholars I once respected to attempt to redefine plagiarism because the ends justify the means in their sight. It is a sad day in America when Harvard can get faculty to compromise high academic standards so easily. This is being done to advance social engineering, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) goals. 

Born into abject poverty in rural southwest Virginia, Dr. Carol Swain, a highschool dropout, went on to earn five

degrees. Holding a Ph.D. from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.S.L. from Yale, she also earned early tenure at Princeton and full professorship at Vanderbilt where she was professor of political science and a

professor of law.

Congressional testimony Dec 5, 2023

Stefanik: And Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no.

Gay: It can be depending on the context.

Stefanik: What’s the context?

Gay: Targeted at an individual.

Stefanik: It’s targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals. Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them? Do you understand that dehumanization is part of antisemitism? I will ask you one more time, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?

Gay: Antisemitic rhetoric…

Stefanik: And is it antisemitic rhetoric…

Gay: …when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation, that is actionable conduct and we do take action.

Stefanik: So the answer is yes, that calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard code of conduct, correct?

Gay: Again, it depends on the context.

Stefanik: It does not depend on the context, the answer is yes and this is why you should resign, these are unacceptable answers across the board.

Short Story: The Visit by Maurice Labi

Not until after the third round of pounding did Leonard Rubin push himself out of his chair. With his impaired hearing, he could have mistaken the initial racket for the neighbors’ kid jumping on the floor above him. The second set of banging could have been the Korean restaurant’s driver delivering a take-out dinner to Mr. Choi in 308, but when the raucous knocking resumed for the third time, Leonard tucked his toes in his house slippers and unlocked the door to his apartment.

Standing in the doorway stood a woman of about thirty. “Your doorbell’s dead,” she said, and extended her reddened knuckles toward him as proof of her multiple attempts.

Maurice Labs was born in London, educated in Tel-Aviv, and in Los Angeles. He holds a master’s degree in English. His blog https://notesfromgalilee.wordpress.com tells of his return to Israel. He is the son of a holocaust survivor, a young boy who had been transported from Benghazi, Libya, to Italy, to Bergen-Belsen camp. My short stories were shortlisted with New Letters, won first prize at University of Haifa. Married with children, he splits his time between the US and Galilee, Israel. My prior story, a memoir, A BOY ADRIFT, tells of my Israeli immigrant clash with 1960s America.

BOOK REVIEW: The Politzer Saga by Linda Broenniman

“When I was 27, I accidentally discovered that my father was Jewish. And that much of what I knew about him and his family was a lie.”

Linda Ambrus Broenniman was born to Hungarian physicians who survived World War II and started their new life in the US in 1949. Linda graduated from Swarthmore College with a BA in psychology. Several years after getting her MBA from Carnegie Mellon, she left mainstream corporate America to follow her path as an entrepreneur, building companies in technology and biotech. She let her passion for uncovering hidden potential in unexpected places guide her. And she allowed this passion to fuel her search for her hidden family.