A Serious Man

Though I can imagine other interpretations, I have always believed that the Coen Brothers great movie A Serious Man was metaphoric for the moral failure of Zionism.

[Warning: plot revealed]

Facing multiple terrible issues, the protagonist is being pressured to accept a bribe (from an failing student's father) to give his son a passing grade in physics.  He's offered a lot of money.  He tries to say no but just kicks the can down the road.

I this as the rabbis in a Talmudic academy who knew very well that establishing a Jewish State in the holy land was forbidden by G-D.  But Zionism is first trying to bribe it's way past established religious doctrine.

Later on, his administration comes around to remind him of his forthcoming review, and he is likely do do well because there have been no complaints from parents.  It seems like he's being pressured to accept the bribe, by the administration.

This is like the government of the UK deciding that Zionism would work well for their global empire, and writing the Balfour Declaration, just as planting Jews in Jerusalem had previously been part of the Persian plan of global domination.  And later, the US has had the same goals of denying local regional integration and sovereignty--a threat to western imperialism--by having a settler colonial presence.  Those not on the program must be Communist.

Then his brother (who is lost in meaninglessly trying to correlate everything in the world with everything else--a metaphor for Jewish mysticism) has a nervous breakdown and he needs more cash.  The protagonist is kicked out of his home by his adulterous wife (whose obviously really lost touch with her Judaism).  She's being courted by some rich Jew downtown (likewise).  As hard as he's trying, nobody else is following the rules.

The bribe money is delivered.  He struggles to find a way to return it.  He could bring it right in to the administration.  But with everything else happening, he decides he'll just have to keep it, maybe just temporarily.  He's busted otherwise.

This is like, bending the rules just for this (immediate post Holocaust) moment, then we can fix that later.

A huge tornado closes in on his sons primary school.  As he's trying to gather up his son for the shelter, the tornado is closing in.

That's the ethical failure and its consequences.  There might not be any "later" to fix things.  One step down the road may well make the rest inevitable.

Being ethical is tough when life is tough.  That's probably how Zionism took over most of Judaism.

****

Yesterday I watched a recent video with Noam Chomsky in which he memorably and accurately said about Israeli Society what I'd been trying to say with more words: "When you have your boot on someone's neck, you try to find ways to justify it."

In the same clip, he re-iterated a line I've de-emphasized perhaps too much.  That Israel took a fork towards endless conflict in 1967 when it refused to let go of newly conquered territories: East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and Gaza.  That's when Israel became a darling of the US security state.

I've long believed Chomsky is both accurate and too kind here.  There definitely was a sea change for the worse in 1967.  I remember it very well.  At the time I was 11 years old, and all my friends in LA were Jewish.  Nobody had ever talked about Israel before.  Jews seemed kind of quaint.  They were successful but only because few took education and work seriously.  Culturally the Jewish community seemed very much like as portrayed in A Serious Man. 

Then it all changed.  All the top celebrities, lawyers, doctors, and everyone became Jewish.   Soon it was about entitlement.  And so we went from Justice Brandeis and Jonas Salk to Bari Weiss.

And the hinge point was 1967, and a first order interpretation, including mine until just before I wrote this essay, was that THAT was what the movie A Serious Man was all about.  (Others might point to the movie as a metaphor about 'others ganging up against Israel' which again turned out to be a myth.  1967 is best understood as planned territorial expansion through aggression by Israel.  Would the Coen Bros be sucked into the myth?  Perhaps.)

But let me say that my view is that while their was a hinge point in 1967, I think the genocide in Zionism was baked in from the beginning, in the very elaboration by Herzl and others, the fantasies about lands without people and what they might have to do.  And then in the 1890's the imperialist friends of Zionists started leaning on the Ottoman government to force Palestinian local government authorities to sell land to Zionists.  Any sale that is forced is not a sale it is a theft.  And that's when the theory and practice of modern Zionism respectively started.  And then there were many individual violent acts, piling up.  And then there was another big hinge point towards greater crimes against humanity in 1948 with the Nabka.  And there were lots of little individual actions before 1967, but truely 1967 is when it all took a turn about as cataclysmic as the ending of A Serious Man.  But perhaps also as shown by the film, there had been lots of bad things before and they were starting to pile up.

Now we have in 2023 a second Nabka that looks worse than the first one.

But also while I believe the British were more cognizant of the utility of Zionist Settler Colonialism to their imperial maintenance, US security experts were no doubt on that from the beginning, though to a lesser degree.

And of course the whole area that Chomsky dismisses, that the assassination of JFK had anything to do with the deep state getting rid of a President who was drifting too far in the direction of dovishness.

But it does seem AFAIK that JFK was fighting the Israeli government's acquisition of the bomb, and Johnson turned that around right away, and notably turned a blind eye to Israeli misdeeds a bunch of times, including acquiring bomb materials, and the attack on a US monitoring ship.

So perhaps we should understand there was yet another hinge point, in 1963.

FWIW, Johnson did in fact have a famous Jewish Zionist girlfriend, who replaced his previous top girlfriend who dumped him in 1964 because of the Vietnam War.

My twitter is exploding with people blaming the assassination entirely on Israel, Mossad, etc.  I'm not saying that.  I haven't heard a clear story of that, though certainly some Zionist Jews like Meyer Lansky and Jack Ruby were involved.  I don't think the Israel-bomb thing is 100% of the assassination, perhaps only 5-15%, depending on whether it the best scoring shooters were CIA or Mob, and how much Lansky and Ruby were motivated by that and not their more personal grievances with regards to Cuba and other Mob related matters.  Probably they had more important concerns themselves and would have given little thought to Israel's bomb.  But they no doubt had Mossad friends.  Likewise probably Johnson felt some Zionist pressure.  But he also had many other concerns, including his own.

And what if it had been the other way around.  What if it was that JFK had been the pushover for Israel, and Johnson started turning that around from the first moment?

Surely Mossad figured it out, just as the Russians did, and Mossad would have had the connections to undo the Johnson administration from the start.

When the needle only moves in one direction, that makes one suspicious of hidden hands.