The Magnes Zionist: Kristol and the Shikse

In this article Hebrew University professor Jeremiah Haber discusses the attraction the Sarah Palin exerts over Neocon leader William Kristol in terms of a sort of lust for the quintessential shikse in combination with a sort of Jewish conservative narodnik epiphany.

Haber is hypothesizing a sort of male Jewish desire that might be called shiksephilia or perhaps even shiksemania on the model of nymphomania. (See the note below for a discussion of shiksemania from the standpoint of ethnic Ashkenazi Bolshevism.)

While I have written about Palin and Neoconservatives in rather similar terms in Shabbesshikse Lies About Sudan Record and discussed the effort of Israel advocates to transform American patriotism into shabbesgoyism, Professor Haber identifies shiksephilia as an aspect of a sort of ethnic Ashkenazi psychological flaw that brought many Jews of Czarist Russia into the revolutionary terrorist movement Narodnaya Volya.

Harvard Professor Ruth Wisse used a similar accusation of shiksephilia to knock the eminent Yiddish scholar Khone Shmeruk for abandoning Israel to return to his native Poland.

Jerry Haber may be overpsychologizing. Kristol probably saw Sarah Palin as another Dan Quayle, whom Kristol served as chief of staff during the first Bush administration.

Maybe Sarah Palin is Dan Quayle 2.1 because she is far more charismatic as well as ignorantly manipulable.

Finding such ignorant, charismatic and manipulable non-Jews to front for Jewish special interests seems to be an old cultural habit that probably has served historically as one of the most effective ways for Jews to enrage non-Jews in Central and Eastern Europe.

In his book Militant Zionism in America: The Rise and Impact of the Jabotinsky Movement in the United States, 1926-1948, Rafael Medoff discusses the effort of Jabotinsky and his followers to link up with white racist Christian Evangelicals and use them as an ally or front for Zionists as early as the 1920s.

Note on Shiksemania

On pp. 199-203 of The Jewish Century, Slezkine writes:

No icon better expresses the essence of that age (Kultura 1 [or the Heroic Age of the Russian Revolution], in Vladimir Paperny's terminology ) than El Lissitzky's Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. The "three-edged frankness of the bayonet" and the "sharp-angled face" of Feliks Dzerzhinsky were aimed at the "crusty gut of the earth's routine" and indeed everything dull, round, or predictably rectangular. According to one of the prophets of the revolutionary avant-garde, Vassily Kandinsky, the triangle was more "sharp-witted" than the square and less philis­tine than the circle. It was also much more Mercurian than Apol­lonian, and therefore-stylistically-much more Jewish than Russian. Jewishness was not the only way of representing the trian­gle' but it was one of the more familiar and aesthetically convinc­ing. Levinson's "red wedge of a beard," Mindlov's angular move­ments, Rozov's knifelike figure were all references to the traditional and pervasive iconography of Mercurianism. According to one of Ilya Ehrenburg's characters (a Chekist), Lenin might be a sphere; Bukharin was a straight line; but Trotsky, "the chess player and the chief of the steppe hordes, disciplined and lined up under the ban­ner of the twenty-one theses of some resolution-that one is a trian­gle." And according to Arosev's Terenty the Forgotten, "if I were a futurist artist, I would represent Trotsky as two downward -point­ing triangles: a small triangle-the face-on top of a large trian­gle-the body."¹⁵³

One obvious reading of the wedge-over-circle imagery is violence ("beat the whites"); the other is sex (love). Eduard Bagritsky por­trayed both. His poem "February," written in 1933-34 and pub­lished posthumously, is about "a little Hebrew boy" who loves books about birds (the same birds, presumably, that adorned Galina Apollonovna's robe and inhabited Efim Nikitich Smolich's realm of "nature"):

Birds that appeared like weird letters,
Sabers and trumpets, spheres and diamonds.

The Archer must have been detained
Above the darkness of our dwelling,
Above the proverbial Jewish odor

Of goosefat, above the continuous droning
Of tedious prayers, above the beards

In family albums ...

As a young man, he falls in love with a girl with golden hair, a green dress, and "a nightingale quiver" in her eyes, "all of her as if flung wide open to the coolness of the sea, the sun, and the birds." Every day, as she walks home from school, he follows her "like a murderer, stumbling over benches and bumping into people and trees," thinking of her "as a fabulous bird who had fluttered off the pages of a picture book" and wondering how he, "born of a Hebrew and circumcised on the seventh [sic] day," has become a bird catcher. Finally, he gathers up his courage and runs toward her.

All those books I'd read in the evenings­
Hungry and sick, my shirt unbuttoned­
About birds from exotic places,

About people from distant planets,
About worlds where rich men play tennis,
Drink lemonade, and kiss languid women,­
All those things were moving before me,
Wearing a dress and swinging a satchel. ..

He runs beside her "like a beggar, bowing deferentially" and "mumbling some nonsense." She stops and tells him to leave her alone, pointing toward the intersection. And there,

Fat-bellied and greasy with perspiration,
Stands the policeman,

Squeezed into high boots,

Pumped up with vodka and stuffed full of bacon ....

Then comes the February Revolution, and he becomes a deputy commissar, a catcher of horse thieves and burglars, "an angel of death with a flashlight and a revolver, surrounded by four sailors from a battleship."

My Hebrew pride sang out as clearly,

As a tight string stretched out to its limit.
I would have given much for my forefather
In his long caftan, his hat with a fox tail
From under which, like a silvery spiral,
His earlock crawled out, and a thick cloud of dandruff

Floated over the square of his beard,
­For him to be able to spot his descendant

In this strapping fellow who loomed like a tower
Over the bristling guns and the headJights,
Over the truck.that had shattered midnight ....

One night, he is sent to arrest some gangsters, and there, in a suffocating brothel reeking of face powder, semen, and sweet li­queur, he finds her-"the one who had tormented me with her nightingale gaze." She is bare-shouldered and bare-legged, half asleep and smoking a cigarette. He asks her if she recognizes him, and offers her money.

Without opening her mouth, she whispered softly, "
Please have some pity! I don't need the money!"

Throwing her the money,

I barged into-

Without pulling off my high boots, or my holster,
Without taking off my regulation trench coat­
The abysmal softness of the blanket

Under which so many men had sighed,

Flung about, and throbbed, into the darkness
Of the swirling stream of fuzzy visions,

Sudden screams and unencumbered movements,
Blackness, and ferocious, blinding light ...

I am taking you because so timid

Have I always been, and to take vengeance
For the shame of my exiled forefathers
And the twitter of an unknown fledgling!

I am taking you to wreak my vengeance
On the world I could not get away from!

Welcome me into your barren vastness,
In which grass cannot take root and sprout,
And perhaps my night seed may succeed in
Fertilizing your forbidding desert.

There'll be rainfalls, southern winds will bluster,
Swans will make their calls of tender passion.¹⁵⁴"

According to Stanislav Kuniaev, this is the rape of Russia cele­brated by "the poet of the openly Romantic ideal Zionism who does not distinguish between messianic ideas and pragmatic cruelty." [my emphasis] According to Maxim D. Shrayer, this is "a dream of creating har­mony between the Russian and Jewish currents in Jewish history, ... a dream, if you wish, of a harmonious synthesis, which would lead to the blurring of all boundaries, i.e., to the formation of a Russian-Jewish identity .... Sexual intercourse with his former Russian beloved is the modicum of the protagonist's revenge upon and liberation from the prerevolutionary world of legal Jewish in­equality and popular anti-Semitic prejudice." And according to the protagonist himself, this is 'his revenge on the world he "could not get away from"-the world of "goosefat," "tedious prayers," and "cloud[s] of dandruff." The Jewish Revolution within the Russian Revolution was waged against "the shame of exiled forefathers" and for the "Hebrew pride" singing like a string; against the Russia of fat cheeks and for the Russia of Galina Apollonovna. It was a violent attempt to conceive a world of Mercuri an Apollonians, a Russia that would encompass the world.¹⁵⁵

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