2/19/2023 0 Comments Soulless golem![]() It described Spencer as a movement intellectual and credited him with inventing the very term “alt-right.” The general tone of the piece was that the alt-right consists of a bunch of merry pranksters who read Spengler think brave, heretical thoughts about racial differences and should be taken seriously even if they do sometimes make Holocaust jokes. Of course, the reason Richard Spencer’s smug ravings before a crowd of 150 sieg-heiling guys are newsworthy is that he is a leader of the “alt-right,” and Steve Bannon, President-elect Trump’s chief strategist, famously told a journalist at the Republican National Convention that his website Breitbart News Network was “the platform of the alt-right.” It would be comforting to think that Bannon didn’t really mean people like Spencer, but just a few months earlier Breitbart had published a long primer on the movement by its star provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari. Why did Spencer pick a Jewish folk tale as his punchline in a racist, pseudo-Nietzschean rant (“To be white is to be a striver, a crusader, an explorer, and a conqueror.”)? And what is the identity of this dark power that animates and controls the press golem? Which kabbalist rabbi-or is it a globalist cabal?-inscribes the Hebrew word emet, truth, on the forehead of the soulless clay man and sends him out on the Sunday morning talk shows to rampage against the Gentiles? When CNN made the mistake of saying that Spencer had called Jews golems, the Daily Caller jumped: “SURPRISE! CNN Makes A False Claim And Press Picks It Up.” The story that followed seemed to absolve Spencer of anything save contempt for the mainstream media-but not so fast. But, if you listen closely, Spencer was describing the media-for which he also gleefully used the old Nazi term Lügenpresse (lying press)-not the Jews, as a golem. Then I saw The Atlantic’s now-infamous video clip of white nationalist leader Richard Spencer “hailing Trump,” in which he says, “One wonders if these people are people at all, or instead soulless golem animated by some dark power to repeat” set talking points, and for a second I thought this was the kind of thing Weingrad was talking about. I guess I just don’t get out enough, so I hadn’t heard any anti-Semitic golem stories. (See “Brave New Golems” in this issue.) It didn’t tally with what I knew of golems from Gershom Scholem, Moshe Idel, and, of course, the Maharal of Prague tales, as filtered through the modest imagination of Yudl Rosenberg. When, in his brilliant essay, Michael Weingrad argued that golems are “a classically negative Christian imagining of Judaism itself: unlovely, slightly threatening, and hopelessly literal and earthbound,” I wasn’t quite convinced.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |