Over the weekend, many Democrats had hushed conversations about the possibility of the Obama campaign going further and responding to any negative attack by the McCain campaign by bringing up McCain's central role in the Keating Five. Tonight, Mike Allen is reporting that the Obama campaign has decided to hit McCain for being one of the Keating Five and causing the Savings and Loan Scandal.

On this morning's Meet The Press, Democratic strategist Paul Begala stated that if the McCain campaign raised William Ayers, Obama should respond by highlighting McCain's association with John Singlaub, a controversial figure in the Iran contra scandal and who sat with McCain on the board of a group that was called anti-Semitic by the Anti-Defamation League.

There are also reports that Senator McCain might use Tuesday night's debate to directly attack Senator Obama. Were McCain to do that, he would have an audience of several million viewers and while Obama would probably have a response in his back pocket, it would elevate the negative campaigning to new levels that have not been seen in years.

Gerusalemme, 3 ott - La crisi dei mutui si accompagna a un'impennata di prese di posizione antisemite nei siti internet degli Usa e di altri paesi anglosassoni. La denuncia arriva dall'Anti-Defamation League (Adl) nelle parole del responsabile della sezione israeliana Aryeh O'Sullivan. Negli ultimi giorni, ha spiegato O'Sullivan in un'intervista alla radio militare israeliana, è stato notato un improvviso moltiplicarsi in numerosi siti internet di espressioni di carattere antisemita che imputano agli ebrei la responsabilità della crisi.

I responsabili di siti come Yahoo e YouTube cancellano questi messaggi. "Spesso - ha detto O'Sullivan - ciò avviene però solo dopo che tali messaggi sono stati visionati da numerose persone e quando il danno è ormai stato fatto". Secondo O'Sullivan "l'antisemitismo è sempre latente e riemerge nelle crisi: ad esempio dopo l'attacco di al-Qaida alle Torri Gemelle e oggi con il crollo di Wall street".

Syjonistyczna 'Liga Przeciwko Zniesławieniu' (Anti-Defamation League - ADL) wydała oświadczenie wskazujące na "dramatyczny wzrost ilości antysemickich wypowiedzi na dyskusyjnych forach internetowych, specjalizujących się w finansach i ekonomii", w związku z kryzysem finansowym.

"Wypowiedzi skierowane są przeciwko Żydom generalnie" - pisze ADL - "lecz niektóre z nich stwierdzają, że Żydzi kontrolują rząd i finanse w ramach 'żydowskiego porządku światowego' ("Jew world order"), i w związku z tym są odpowiedzialni za ekonomiczne zawirowania."

Jak przyznaje ADL: "Antyżydowskie inwektywy pojawiły się również na różnych blogach i 'konspiracyjnych' stronach internetowych, monitorowanych przez Centrum Ekstremizmu (Center of Extremism) [to taki rodzaj policji - albo lepiej: internetowego ZOMO] ".

"Wiemy ze współczesnej historii" - mówi dyrektor ADL, Abraham H. Foxman - "że kiedy mamy ekonomiczny dołek, zwiększa się poziom antysemityzmu i bigoterii, i to właśnie zauważamy teraz. Stara śpiewka o tym, że Żydzi powiązani są z pieniędzmi*, zawsze znajduje się [gotowa] pod powierzchnią. Tak samo jak byliśmy świadkami po wydarzeniach 9-11, wtedy kiedy mamy do czynienia z kłopotami i niepewnością w ekonomii i wydarzeniach światowych, Żydzi stają się kozłami ofiarnymi i okropne antysemicki plotki pojawiają się na nowo."

ADL podaje przykłady "niektórych bardziej zjadliwych antysemickich wypowiedzi umieszczonych na stronach poświęconych finansom:

• 'Żydzi zinfiltrowali Wall Street i rząd i zrujnowali nasz kraj.' [...]
• 'Oni (Żydzi) kochają nic innego tylko pieniądze, żadna [inna] wiara i religia nie jest tak bardzo bezduszna wobec ofiar'
• 'Oto jak to wszystko działa: sprzedają akcje short [na krótko - stwianie na zniżkę akcji], zarabiają biliony a potem [...] podatnicy przychodzą z pomocą; jest prawdą, że wszystkie te instytucje są prowadzone przez Żydów'.

"Jakkolwiek operatorzy najbardziej popularnych forum internetowych na stronach finansowych, w tym prowadzonych przez Yahoo! Finance, szybko reagują usuwając obrażające komentarze [czy ktoś mówił, że cenzura w wolnym, demokratycznym kraju istnieje?], ilość nowych postów uniemożliwia ich usunięcie zanim nie będą przeczytane przez dużą rzeszę czytelników. [...] Dobrą wiadomością jest to, że dostawcy Internetu [sic!] i moderatorzy forum a nawet indywidualni użytkownicy szybko reagują gdy pojawia się w dyskusji antysemityzm. Operatorzy internetowi reagują szybko i w większości przypadków obrażające wypowiedzi są szybko usuwane."

* Ang. "The age-old canards about Jews and money"

[Przypisy w nawiasach pochodzą od redakcji BIBUŁY - przepraszamy, nie mogliśmy się powstrzymać]

KOMENTARZ BIBUŁY: Wypowiedź pana Abe to chyba najlepszy humor żydowski ostatnich lat: Żyd obraża się gdy inni wskazują, że Żydzi powiązani są z pieniędzmi. Cymes!

No i to określenie "kozły ofiarne". Fuj, jak brzydko. Oczywiście powinno być: "niewinne baranki"

LOS ANGELES (AP) - When Randy Brown visited Hispanic Pentecostal congregations in Southern California, he was stunned by displays of Star-of-David flags, fervent prayers for peace in Israel and Hebrew words in their church names.

Brown, an executive with the American Jewish Committee, saw an opportunity to build Jewish-Latino relations and combat anti-Semitism among the immigrants, who generally have little exposure to Jews in their predominantly Roman Catholic native countries.

"I was amazed at the affinity these congregations have for Israel," recalled Brown, director of interreligious affairs for the Los Angeles chapter of the Jewish advocacy group. "I wanted to take this to the next level." (The next level, of course, is to deny the need to evangelize Jews. The level after that will be dual covenant theology. The level after that will be to deny Jesus Christ Himself.)

The Los Angeles office has since worked to forge new bonds: They recently took a group of Pentecostal Hispanic pastors to Israel, offered a course called "The Essence of Judaism" at a Southern California Pentecostal seminary, and invited Hispanic pastors and their families to Passover seders and Sukkot harvest celebrations. (A real course on "The Essence of Judaism" would teach how the current Judaism bears no resemblance to the Sinai religion of the Bible that pointed to Jesus Christ and was fulfilled in Jesus Christ, and it would also deal with the fact that Jews have resisted the gospel from the time that Jesus Christ began His ministry until today, and that this will continue until the day of the Lord.)

"We have many things in common," said pastor Ramiro Lopez of the Iglesia Vida Abundante in San Bernardino. (No we don't. You have no more in common with a Jew than you do a Jehovah's Witness or a Mormon.) "Now I can understand Israel from more than a biblical perspective and I have more of a commitment to Israel." (If you actually had a biblical perspective, you would know that Judaism is a false religion and to treat it as such.)

While Latino immigrants in the U.S. are mostly Catholic, evangelicals comprise a notable 15 percent of the population, according to a recent study by the Pew Hispanic Project and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Many are Pentecostal, one of the fastest-growing streams of world Christianity, known for spirit-filled worship and speaking in tongues.

A 2007 survey by the Anti-Defamation League found a higher-rate of anti-Semitic views among foreign-born Latinos than among U.S.-born Hispanics. Twenty-nine percent of Latinos born elsewhere harbor anti-Jewish views, while the rate for Hispanics born in the country — and for the U.S. population in general — was 15 percent, the study found.

The 2007 numbers are slightly lower than those in a 2005 survey, but Jewish leaders are worried all the same, especially as Latin Americans are expected to become 29 percent of the national population by 2050.

"Clearly, it was disturbing," said Michael Salberg, director of international affairs for the New York-based Jewish civil rights group.

Latin American countries are overwhelmingly Roman Catholic and are steeped in a five-century-old tradition of a church that wields much influence. With the exception of Argentina, Jewish communities in Latin America are tiny and tend to keep a low profile.

By contrast, U.S. Jewish and Catholic leaders have held high-level interfaith talks for years. Several Catholic colleges in the country have centers for Jewish-Catholic understanding, and U.S. bishops heavily emphasize the Second Vatican Council teaching that Jews are not collectively responsible for the Crucifixion. That outlook influences not just Catholics, but also other Christians in the U.S. (What a lie. The Bible itself teaches that Jews are not collectively responsible for the crucifixion. It was Roman Catholic tradition that taught that lie, and the only ones who believed it were Roman Catholics who reject the Bible for the lies of the papacy. It is amazing how these ecumenical "Christian" newspapers are so willing to repeat the lies of Rome.)

Pastor Tony Solorzano, who heads the Iglesia Llamada Final, a 5,000-member congregation in Downey and Inglewood, said some Latinos simply need more education about Judaism to dispel stereotypes. Some consider Jews "Christ-killers." (So you guys are going to replace one lie with another? Like that will help the Jews, or yourselves for that matter.)

"Not many think that way, but some have heard this," Lopez said. "We tell them there's a plan according to God's will. We have to be grateful to the Jewish people because Jesus was Jewish." (Jesus Christ wanted the Jews to accept them, and rejected and pronounced woe upon those who would not. Do you tell them that? Of course you don't. If you will tell a Muslim or Hindu that he will go to the lake of fire without Jesus Christ but won't tell a Jew the same, then the love of God is not in you because you disobey God's commandments.)

Pentecostals, who interpret the Bible literally (literally but out of context), believe God promised the Jewish people the historic land of Israel. Many consider the modern state of Israel a fulfillment of biblical prophecy — and a precondition of the second coming of Jesus Christ. (If by setting the stage for the great tribulation, then yes.)

They often cite (out of context!) a passage from Genesis where God makes a covenant with Abraham that those who bless Abraham's people will be blessed, those who curse his people will be cursed.

"I really believe that promise," Lopez said. (If you understood what you believed, you would know that this promise was fulfilled already by the coming with the new covenant. The new covenant blesses you with salvation, forgiveness of sin, a clean conscience, and eternal life. But you want health, wealth, prosperity, fame, etc. under the old covenant. I bet that the book that Word of Faith prosperity Pentecostals hate the most is the Book of Hebrews.) "Every day we pray for Jerusalem with our hands to the east." (Why not pray for Mecca and Medina in the same fashion? Seriously, what is the difference? Or why not try to convert the Muslims? Or for that matter the Jews?)

Jewish leaders are building on Pentecostal pro-Israel sentiment to dispel stereotypes between both groups. Many Jewish groups in recent years have accepted such support without questioning the theology behind it, which says that all people, including Jews, will ultimately accept Christ. (They didn't challenge Christian teaching with the mainline denominationals either, at least not at first. It is only after the social, religious, and political relationships are felt that the attacks on Christianity start, and usually beginning with speaking of how wise the Jewish teachers were and their similarity in matters of ethics and values to Christianity.)

"It's a new and emerging connection that didn't exist with the Catholic Church," said Salberg of the Anti-Defamation League.

Pentecostal congregations, often housed in storefronts filled with rows of folding chairs, have become fixtures in Latino neighborhoods across the United States, as well as Latin America. Pastors tend to be influential opinion-makers in their congregations and some, like Lopez, have radio programs or stations, expanding their reach.

At the Latin University of Theology in Torrance, which trains Pentecostal pastors, many of the students in Brown's Spanish-language "Essence of Judaism" course hail from Latin American countries. He hopes they'll return home with new knowledge about Jews and Judaism to change negative images and misperceptions. (Of course, the truth, that Judaism is a false religion just like Islam or Hinduism and that Jews are actively working to get Christians to deny the deity and Messiahship of Jesus Christ and the exclusivity of the gospel is almost certainly not taught there.)

Nationally, the American Jewish Committee has formed a Latino and Latin American Institute, and in 2001 convened the first Latino-Jewish Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C., to discuss common policy concerns such as immigration. Along with the Los Angeles office, several local chapters of the nonprofit are reaching out to Latinos, according to Ken Bandler, the group's national spokesman. (An article in the Jerusalem Post not long ago promoted the notion that the black - Jewish alliance is past its time, is now against the interests of both communities, and that Jews should seek to work with Hispanics instead.)

Pastor Richard Escobedo holds two sessions weekly to pray for Israel at his 500-member Centro Palabra de Fe church in Compton, where he has an Israeli flag on display, has held Passover seders and preaches that "love thy neighbor" includes Jews and others. Many Pentecostals wear Star of David pendants and other paraphernalia, he said. (The star of David is not a legitimate Jewish religious symbol, but a mystic symbol that may have origins in freemasonry and the Kabbalah that Jewish socialist and mostly atheist Zionists adopted for their POLITICAL movement in the 1800s ... when it was adopted as the Jewish political symbol most Jews initially were opposed, but eventually acquiesced to it over time. That "One Night With The King", that TBN oneness pentecostal movie, depicted the star of David as a Jewish symbol in Old Testament times was one of the biggest lies in a movie obviously designed to promote Zionism and not Jesus Christ, as a person coming from that movie would learn nothing about Jesus Christ but fully convinced that we should use nuclear weapons to wipe Iran off the map.)

Engaging with Jews, he said, "is opening our eyes to how Jesus himself was taught."

Copyright 2008 Associated Press.

In an opinion piece published in The Morning Call today, Richard Kohn considers the difficulties many Jewish voters have with the candidacy of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as the Republican vice presidential running mate of Senator John McCain.

There has been much said about both candidates courting the Jewish vote. The truth is, the Republicans are just talk in this area. If John McCain had any respect for the Jews in America, he wouldn't have chosen Sarah Palin as a running mate.

The executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, Ira Forman, cited a ''cultural distance'' between Palin and almost all American Jews. ''She's totally out of step with the American Jewish community,'' he said.

Palin's social conservatism, her paper-thin record on Israel, and -- perhaps most importantly -- her cultural roots in evangelical Christianity may be a major turnoff to Jewish voters. Just a few weeks ago, Palin's church, the Wasilla Bible Church, gave its pulpit over to David Brickner, the executive director of Jews for Jesus, a ministry that has drawn wide criticism from the organized Jewish community and the Anti-Defamation League.

As Gov. Palin sat unprotesting in her church, Brickner described terrorist attacks on Israelis as God's ''judgment of unbelief'' on Jews who haven't embraced Christianity.

Florida Rep. Robert Wexler has attacked Palin for appearing at a 1999 event with Pat Buchanan -- who has attacked the influence of ''the Israeli lobby'' in America.

Barack Obama's choice for VP may be Catholic, but Joe Biden is a long-time friend of Israel. Neither he nor Sen. Obama have any intention of pushing their religious views on others.

Jewish Voters Find it Hard to Vote for Palin

The Eruv Rav

The headline of this column refers to Marc Schneier, the high-profile rabbi leading the campaign for an eruv, or ritual Sabbath enclosure, in his tony Westhampton Beach community.

It’s also an allusion to the Hebrew phrase in the Torah translated as “mixed multitudes,” or rabble rousers — in this case increasingly vocal and angry local residents, Jews and non-Jews, opposed to the town granting approval to the rabbinic loophole allowing observant Jews to carry on the Sabbath.

Whether the heart of the issue is religious rights, community relations, personality clashes, misunderstandings or thinly veiled anti-Semitism (or at least anti-Orthodoxy), the battle is escalating. The rabbi, who takes pride in his reputation for bringing people of faith together in dialogue, is digging in his heels against those in opposition to him and his synagogue, and each side is casting the other as the root cause of the ugly dispute.

A large community forum held at the synagogue several weeks ago to answer questions and allay fears about the eruv turned into a nasty shouting match. Since then, an invitation by the local St. Mark’s Church for Rabbi Schneier to speak at services this Sunday, as part of his informational effort to explain the eruv, appears to have been rescinded. And a group calling itself “Jewish People Opposed to the Eruv” has now been formed; organizers have scheduled a meeting for Sunday and expect a large turnout.

How did this situation get so out of hand?

Conflicts over an Orthodox community’s requests from local civil authorities for permission to construct a symbolic eruv enclosure — often making use of existing telephone pole wires, and essentially invisible — have been common in recent years, usually pitting Jew vs. Jew.

Orthodox proponents argue that the eruv, which permits carrying objects like keys, prayer shawls, and books, etc. within its confines, allows them to also bring babies in strollers or ill or elderly family members in wheelchairs to synagogue, or to visit friends and relatives on the Sabbath, and that it causes no hardship to anyone.

Critics tend to express concerns about changing the nature of their community, often interpreted as a fear of creating an Orthodox enclave, having a negative impact on property values and public school enrollment. Local shopkeepers worry that they might be asked to close their stores on Shabbat. In virtually every case that has resulted in legal action, the courts have ruled in favor of the eruv as a right provided by freedom of religion.

‘Ugly Confrontation’

Rabbi Schneier insists that this case is different, that the Jewish community of Westhampton is not divided but strongly united in favor of the eruv. He describes his Orthodox congregation as uniquely open in that its membership is made up of Jews from all denominations. Indeed, few seem to be clamoring for an eruv as there are many strollers outside the synagogue on Shabbat mornings, and the parking places are filled for blocks around.

Some say the rabbi long ago confided that he would not seek either an eruv or mikveh in the community in an effort to preserve the eclectic mix among his congregants. It is also alleged that the request for an eruv came from a handful of Orthodox members so that they could bring young children to shul on Shabbat.
Rabbi Schneier denies these reports, insisting that the impetus for an eruv is the result of the large growth of the congregation, now in its 18th year, including an influx of young families in a community of 2,000 year-round residents that swells to about 20,000 in the summer. He added in an interview that dozens of communities around the country have installed an eruv in recent years and that it is the right and obligation of an Orthodox congregation to have one.

He said he is saddened by the situation, and notes the irony that “a rabbi who brings people together” — he heads the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, promoting Jewish dialogue with blacks, Christians and Muslims — is at the center of “a very ugly confrontation.” He blamed it on “the moral laryngitis that permeates the community,” saying local leaders have been too reticent to acknowledge the anti-Semitic overtones of the anti-eruv campaign.

Rabbi Schneier cited as proof the full-page ad in The South Hampton Press two months ago that brought the simmering conflict into the open. The ad asked residents, “Do you want Westhampton Beach to be proclaimed an Orthodox Jewish community?” and called for citizens not to vote for candidates in a local election who favored the eruv. “Don’t let it happen,” said the ad, signed by “the Westhampton Beach Alliance for the Separation of Church and State.”

The rabbi said such opposition has only “galvanized” his congregation and strengthened his resolve to ensure the creation of the eruv. A devotee of Martin Luther King Jr., he framed the issue as a matter of civil rights, adding: “We’re not seeking the community’s approval, we’re seeking their understanding.”

This approach has inflamed some critics, and upset even several of the rabbi’s most influential supporters within his congregation, who have tried to convince him to “back off for now and let the controversy die down,” according to one synagogue leader, believing the rabbi has mishandled the situation.

“It’s clear the law is on his side,” the leader said, “but at this rate he’s going to win the battle and lose the war” of community relation.

Bungled Outreach

The Anti-Defamation League is ready to step in and help mediate, hoping to tamp down the tempers on both sides, officials of the group say. But its offer has been rebuffed by the rabbi, who maintains that after the eruv is approved, “people will get used to it” and soon forget the controversy.

Judging from the results of the Aug. 13 attempt by the rabbi and synagogue leaders to respond to community concerns, though, that won’t happen anytime soon. An estimated 500 people packed the synagogue that evening, but a number of them left in anger early on, complaining that a synagogue attorney spoke down to the crowd.

In the end, the effort to calm the situation misfired and the usually upbeat Rabbi Schneier acknowledged in an interview that “regrettably,” his informational outreach effort “is not working.”

He mused that he has had more success dealing with other faiths, noting “sometimes it’s easier to fight battles for others than your own — maybe that’s the lesson I’ve learned.”

But while he said he plans to see what the town officials will do next, he added that ultimately he will prevail and that the eruv will be constructed.

Not if Arnold Sheiffer can help it, though. A businessman who has lived in town for 16 years, Sheiffer has organized “Jewish People Opposed to the Eruv,” frustrated that even Jewish critics of the eruv are labeled anti-Semites. He maintains that Jewish traditions of “honoring and respecting people of all traditions” trumps the mandate for an eruv, and acknowledges that his complaint is less with the specific ritual and more with Rabbi Schneier, who he and others accuse of arrogance and a tendency toward self-promotion.

“I know they shouldn’t be intertwined” — the issues of the rabbi and the eruv — “but they are,” he said.
Sheiffer said that the eruv would “set apart one religion from the others in town” by focusing on one mile of the two-mile village. When asked if the problem of separation could be solved by enclosing the whole village, he responded: “Don’t go there.”

A newspaper ad for the new group says citizens have “the inalienable right to oppose an eruv” and Sheiffer says he expects up to 200 people at the meeting on Sunday.

What Next?

Calmer voices are calling for Rabbi Schneier to put off his eruv request for now, using the quieter fall and winter months to rebuild some bridges of communication. “Education is the key and it has to begin within the Jewish community, and then expand to interfaith and civic leaders,” said Joel Levy, ADL’s New York regional director. “People need to understand that the eruv is important only for Orthodox Jews and has no impact on others. But it has to be done in a low-key way.”

Samuel Freedman, a journalist and author of the award-winning book, “Jew vs. Jew,” which included a portrait of an eruv battle in the suburbs of Cleveland, says he has never found a compelling argument against a community eruv.

“It’s really the practical equivalent of a restrictive covenant” in real estate, prohibiting Jews from certain neighborhoods, an action Jews strongly opposed in the first half of the 20th century.

“In effect, the opponents are saying we don’t want certain people living here,” noted Freedman, who said that opposition to the eruv is rooted, partly, in misperceptions.

“People tend to feel some form of coercion, that they will now have to live in some particular way and will be unable to opt out. On a deeper level, it’s about who sets the tone in the community.”

For now, Rabbi Schneier says he will wait to see what action the town takes and will continue his informational efforts to allay concerns, while critics say they will step up their efforts to preserve the town’s ethnic balance.
Among the lessons to be learned from the Westhampton brouhaha are that forcing an issue on a community, even when the law is on your side, can result in a pyrrhic victory, and that anti-Orthodox sentiments, and worse, can lie just beneath the surface, even in the most sophisticated communities in 21st century America.
It’s a cautionary tale that should give pause to both sides about their motives and tactics before the situation deteriorates even further.

Journalist Richard Silverstein, whose blog Tikun Olam is dedicated to the resolution of the Israeli-Arb Conflict, wrote a recent article for the Guardian.co.uk on the selection of Governor Sarah Palin as Senator John McCain's vice presidential running mate. 

Praise the Lord and pass the ballot box.

Things are different in Alaska, perhaps because politically there is less at stake. But now that Sarah Palin moves onto a national stage as John McCain's running mate, it might be useful to examine some of her faith-based values in greater detail.

She emphasised these views in a talk she gave in June at her hometown church in Wasilla, Alaska. In his introduction, controversial evangelical Pastor Ed Kalnins noted that when he first met Palin, she was the mayor of the town:

When I got the chance to meet our mayor, I said: "This person loves Jesus. That's the bottom line. She loves Jesus with everything she has. She's a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ before she's a mayor."

After boasting that her 19-year-old son Track had enlisted in the military and was about to be deployed to Iraq, Palin said:

Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [US soldiers] out on a task that is from God. ... That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan.

Subsequently, she spoke about a $30bn natural gas pipeline that she's seeking to build from Alaska through Canada to the lower 48 states:

I can work really, really hard to get a natural gas pipeline, a $30bn project that's going to create a lot of new jobs for Alaskans and will have a lot of energy flowing through here. And pray about that also. I think God's will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that.

Then, after listing the tasks she can do as governor to make the state a decent place to live, she added:

None of that is gonna do any good if the people's heart isn't right with God. We can work together to make sure that God's will be done here in Alaska.

After watching this video, I can perfectly understand why evangelicals are overjoyed with her nomination. But I can't understand why McCain was as well. Did he not think that statements like this might disturb non-evangelicals, not to mention non-Christians, of which, believe it or not, there are a few in this country?

Religiously, Sarah Palin is George Bush unbuttoned. The latter manages much of the time to disguise the evangelical passion of his political mission. Palin possesses the same zeal, but lays it on the line for all to see. There is no artifice, no subtlety. It's all right there. If this woman is right for the vice-presidency, then evangelical Christianity is even more pervasive and powerful than I feared.

Frankly, candidates like Palin are the Jews' worst nightmare. The sentiments she expresses are part of a vestigial memory we internalise about what intolerance and bigotry sounds like. This certainly doesn't rise to the level of flat-out anti-Semitism. But we know when we're not wanted, and as non-believers we're not wanted in the evangelical Christian worldview, except as enablers of Jesus' final coming.

The Politico's Ben Smith reports that only two weeks ago, Palin attended her local church to hear Jews for Jesus executive director David Brickner excoriate Jews for not accepting Him as their Lord and saviour:

Brickner's mission has drawn wide criticism from the organised Jewish community, and the Anti-Defamation League accused them in a report of "targeting Jews for conversion with subterfuge and deception".

Brickner ... described terrorist attacks on Israelis as God's "judgment of unbelief" of Jews who haven't embraced Christianity.

"Judgment is very real and we see it played out on the pages of the newspapers and on the television. It's very real. When [Brickner's son] was in Jerusalem he was there to witness some of that judgment, some of that conflict, when a Palestinian from East Jerusalem took a bulldozer and went plowing through a score of cars, killing numbers of people. Judgment - you can't miss it."

I'm not going to make the same mistake anti-Obamaites made in attributing the Rev Jeremiah Wright's views to Obama by attributing Brickner's views to Palin. But I think it's entirely legitimate to ask what she was doing there while a speaker Jews view as anathema was expressing such ideas. And it's appropriate to insist that she not participate in such forums in the future and that she dissociate herself from the views she heard that day.

We are a minority who, in a way, lives on the kindness of strangers, to quote Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. In the evangelical world that Palin embraces there is little kindness for Jews.

Until now, McCain enjoyed the highest poll ratings of a Republican presidential candidate in a long time (around 32%). No longer. With Palin on his ticket he can kiss a good deal of that Jewish vote goodbye. Sure, he'll still retain 20-25% of the hardcore true believers. But forget the rest. Smith also writes about an email he received from the Republican Jewish Coalition touting Palin as a friend of Israel because her office has an Israeli flag on the wall:

The fact that this tiny image [of the Israeli flag] is the best the official voice of Republican Jewry has to defend Palin is a mark that McCain may have just helped solve Obama's Jewish problem.

On Tuesday, MSNBC reported that Palin, chaperoned by Joe Lieberman, had her first pro forma meeting with Aipac's national board of directors at her Minneapolis hotel, where the campaign has sequestered her:

A campaign official ... said [the meeting] was geared towards putting the American Jewish community at ease over her understanding of US-Middle East relations.

"That's obviously going to be an issue," the aide said. "It's not like being the senator from New York, obviously. But these aren't issues that are off her radar."

Palin ... expressed her "heartfelt support for Israel" and spoke of the threats it faces from Iran and others, the campaign official said.

"We had a good productive discussion on the importance of the US-Israel relationship, and we were pleased that governor Palin expressed her deep, personal, and lifelong commitment to the safety and well-being of Israel," Aipac spokesman Josh Block said. "Like senator McCain, the vice-presidential nominee understands and believes in the special friendship between the two democracies and would work to expand and deepen the strategic partnership in a McCain/Palin administration."

This is clearly boilerplate stuff. And you'll notice that the story was fed to the press by spokespeople instead of the candidate herself. This is a further indication of nervousness on the campaign's part in having Palin present her own views on the issue.

Clearly, McCain's people worry that Palin has as little understanding of Israel as she has of other major foreign policy issues. It would be legitimate to question whether, at this point, she gets many issues of concern to the Jewish community. Her evangelical background isn't going to help persuade Jews otherwise.

This is through no fault of her own. But the fault lies with McCain, who chose Palin without thinking through the impact this would have on his campaign in the Jewish community.

Kissing the Jewish Vote Goodbye

The details:  Just two weeks ago, Palin’s church, the Wasilla Bible Church, gave its pulpit over to David Brickner, the founder of Jews for Jesus.   Palin’s pastor, Larry Kroon, introduced Brickner on Aug. 17, according to a transcript of the sermon on the church’s website .   “He’s a leader of Jews for Jesus, a ministry that is out on the leading edge in a pressing, demanding area of witnessing and evangelism,” Kroon said.The Anti-Defamation League has issued a report saying that Jews for Jesus has a history of “targeting Jews for conversion with subterfuge and deception.”

During the sermon at Palin's church Brickner also described terrorist attacks on Israelis as God's "judgment of unbelief" of Jews who haven't embraced Christianity.   As Andrew Sullivan says:

Yes, Sarah Palin sat in a church where this message was given. Two weeks ago. The karma in all this is just amazing:

Brickner also described terrorist attacks on Israelis as God's "judgment of unbelief" of Jews who haven't embraced Christianity.

"Judgment is very real and we see it played out on the pages of the newspapers and on the television. It's very real. When [Brickner's son] was in Jerusalem he was there to witness some of that judgment, some of that conflict, when a Palestinian from East Jerusalem took a bulldozer and went plowing through a score of cars, killing numbers of people. Judgment — you can't miss it."

Palin was in church that day, Kroon said, though he cautioned against attributing Brickner’s views to her.

How does Hannity deal with this? After what he said about Jeremiah Wright?

Originally published August 25, 2008.

The buzz has been endless. People seem to be leaning out of doors and shouting the news to one another: Urban Outfitters has arrived in Champaign!

The store, located in one of the monstrous Green Street high-rises, has already been a topic of joyous discussion between members of the campus community returning for the new academic year. If you've got the money (and the patience) to live on Green Street, chances are good that Urban Outfitters' prices are equally unobjectionable.

I don't doubt that the store will see a large amount of business in the coming months. But many customers will shop unaware of the controversies in which the retail chain has been involved.

Let's start with the top and work our way down. Richard Hayne, the president of Urban Outfitters, Inc., founded his business on much different principles than the ones he stands by today, at least according to a June 11, 2003 article in the Philadelphia Weekly online archives. Hayne contributed over $13,000 to ex-Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, who remains famous for his statements equating homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia, and for declaring his belief that constitutional privacy rights do not cover sex acts between consenting adults.

By working our way down, I mean the bottom of the production chain. The same article asserting Hayne's financial contributions to Santorum also details a conversation with the Urban Outfitters prez about the manner of clothing production for his business - presumably, sweatshops. Hayne confirmed that almost all of the clothing sold in his stores is made in Third World countries, "just like nearly all of the clothing sold in this country."

He claims that if his merchandise were produced using domestic unionized labor, the prices he would have to charge to turn a profit would be unaffordable.

Isn't $68 for a tank top already unreasonable, especially when the person making it probably doesn't make a living wage?

Somewhere in the middle reside all of the clothier's poor product choices. Questionable items have included T-shirts reading "Voting is for old people" in 2004 and Christmas ornaments in the shape of glittery handguns sold in 2006. While these may sound relatively tame to some consumers, both products were discontinued.

More prominently featured on Urban Outfitters' list of product flubs are 2003's "Everyone loves a Jewish girl" tees and 2007's "anti-war" scarves.

The "Everyone loves a Jewish girl" shirts featured said slogan prominently in the middle of the chest, surrounded by stylized dollar signs and shopping bags.

The Anti-Defamation League commended the store's eventual decision to discontinue the item but has also condemned more recent products, including T-shirts reading, "New Mexico, Cleaner than Regular Mexico" and "Erin Go F*** Yourself" (a spin on "Erin Go Bragh", a traditional Irish expression).

In 2007, "anti-war" scarves were sold by the retailer but pulled because of their strong similarity to the kaffiyeh, so recognizably worn by Yasir Arafat and often considered a symbol of Palestinian solidarity. The New York Times attributed the swift discontinuation to a post on the blog "Jewschool" which strongly voiced its disapproval the same day.

I already anticipate the reader responses stating that these so-called controversies have been taken far too seriously. Richard Hayne has the right to a political opinion, many retailers employ sweatshop labor overseas, stereotypes are only meant as a joke, and people shouldn't read so much into colorful neckwear.

To them, I say that everyone has a right to enjoy non-procreative sex with a consensual, fully-comprehending adult partner; ending sweatshop labor requires the awareness and effort of people who will never have to work in one; stereotypes are never funny, and there is a sincere difference between political correctness and genuine respect; and American consumers need to understand that international politics are not fashion fodder - ignorance of cultural symbolism is based on our own narcissism.

I think it's safe to assume that I will not shop at Urban Outfitters anytime soon. I hope this column provides sufficient encouragement to do the same - and to always do your homework before making a big purchase, like an obnoxiously overpriced shirt.

Chelsea is a senior in English and music and is excited for classes to start. Seriously though, she loves class. A lot.

White supremacists are arguing that if Obama gets elected in November,  it may be a plus for their movement.

For instance, one higher-up in the Ku Klux Klan recently asserted - that if elected -  Barack Obama would trigger a backlash. At that juncture, whites would be inspired to rise up and revolt in the streets.

Another Civil War in America?

After all, in his estimation, whites have lost control of America.

Bottom line, a win for Barack Obama would jar the Caucasian race into action, stir 'em up off their fannies and out of their sleepy complacency.

Richard Barrett - a sixty-five year lawyer who has been traveling the country supporting white-related issues - is convinced that Barack will win in November. And, that there will be an upheaval, on the heels of his election victory.

In particular, Barrett notes that Civil Rights issues will be of concern.

"Instead of a so-called civil-rights bill, for example, that says you have to give preference to minorities, I think American people are going - once they see the "Obamanization" - they're going to demand a tweaking of that and say, "You have to put the majority in office."

Talk about twisted logic.

Fortunately, the majority of Americans are not racist.

In fact, about 200,000 Americans involved with the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center - who monitor white supremacist organizations - assert that a white "revolution" is pure fantasy. 

In my own estimation, the wild scenario the White Supremacists envision will never see the light of day.

God Bless America!

A Review

Conquest Of A Continent

by

Madison Grant

Review by R.E. Prindle

Texts:

Grant, Madison, Conquest Of A Continent, Liberty Bell Publications, 2004. Reprint of 1933 Edition

Fischer, David Hackett, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways In America, Oxford, 1991

Higham, John, Strangers In The Land: Patterns Of American Nativism 1860-1925 Rutgers U. Press 1955

Myers, Gustavus, History Of Bigotry In The United States, Random House, 1943

Wittke, Carl, We Who Built America: The Saga Of The Immigrant, Case Western Reserve, 1939

     In the immediacy of the moment one frequently overlooks or forgets the history leading up to the moment.  One might think for instance that the current flap over Diversity and Multi-Culturalism is a recent occurrence.  While the two terms are of recent provenance the argument under different names goes back much farther while the protagonists are essentially the same.

     The story of immigration into America is almost always told from the point of view of the immigrant.  Few books tell the tale from the Nativist point of view and they are universally and viciously derided as a tale told by bigoted idiots.  While charity is demanded from the Nativists none is to be expected from the immigrationists.

     Thus we get volumes like Strangers In The Land by John Higham and Carl Wittke's We Who Built America that distort the issue in favor of immigrants while deprecating the Natives.

     Qustavus Myers' History Of Bigotry In The United States on the other hand appears to be a willful misunderstanding of the nature of the relative status between immigrant and native resulting in a slanderous approach like that of the contemporary Greil Marcus.

     Conquest Of A Continent has been placed on the Jewish Index Of Anti-Semitic Books.  Based on that I expected a detailed derogatory examination of the Jews from their entry into America perhaps being the conquerors referred to.  The President of the American Jewish Committee sent a letter to every Jewish publisher in the United States demanding that they refrain from either reviewing the book  or noticing it at all.  Dynamic silence was to prevail.

     After reading Conquest I can only conclude that the AJC was hyper sensitive to a degree.  Since his 1916 Passing Of The Great Race Mr. Grant had learned that 'You Don't Mess With Rohan' to quote Adam Sandler.  Grant all but ignores the Jews in his volume.  No, his offense, according to the AJC was even more egregious, he uses the world Nordic and dares to imply that they are 'the Great Race' rather than the AJC's own Semites.

     The other volumes mentioned and, indeed, all writing in this genre which is pretty extensive, defers to the Jews as 'the Great Race' probably genetically superior to all others.

     So Madison Grant is interested in telling the story of how the Nordic race conquered the continent.  This approach can only be considered as a sin by non-Nordics.  Grant then tells the story of how the US and Canada were occupied by peoples other than the native Indians.

     He begins early referring to twelfth century attempts to settle by Scandinavians.  In the 1100s the firece native Indians were able to exterminate the invaders and may well have been able to exterminate the Puritan settlers but for the fact that a small pox epidemic shortly before the Puritan arrival had reduced the native population by as much as half while weakening them concomitantly.  Such is the luck of the draw.

     Grant thus traces immingration back to its origins colony by colony and then State by State as the Nordics moved Westward.

     David Fischer in his excellent Albion's Seed retraces the same ground fifty years after Grant with much addional detail concerning the places of origin and their activities once in the US.

     Grant's approach is in some ways superior to that of Fischer since as an unabashed Nordic advocate he is interested in detailing the exact racial content of the occupation of the various states and provinces.  If you aren't aware of the progress of settlement and by whom there are numerous surprises.  My own notions were certainly vaguer before I read Grant.

     I was surprised at the seeming numerical superiority of Southern migrants in the Westward movement.  It seems that Whites did not like to live in the South where they were compelled to compete with slave labor while being despised by both the plantation owners and their slaves.  Thus there was a constant stream of the best and brightest  of the South moving into the North and West.  As Grant notes, Virginia was the mother of States.

     Then too some of Grant's population statistics are of interest also.  At the 1790 census before the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 there were less than a million Africans in the United States.  Seventy years later as the Civil War began the number had increased to four and a half million. Thus natural increase was out of the question.  It follows then that between 1800 and 1860 more Africans were brought to the US than there were before 1800.  As a result the slave trade fluorished more than ever.

     Prior to 1800 Alabama and Mississippi had no settlers so that in 1860 these two States were still rough frontier States still in a state of organization.

      There is much good background here as to how the US came under settlement.  The continent was accupied in its entirely when the truly major immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe began to accelerate in the 1870s and 1880s changing the basic Nordic institutions  of the country.  The change in Grant's eyes was much for the worse.

     Carl Wittke's We Who Built America published in 1939 was undoubtedly in response to Grant's Conquest Of A Continet.  Wittke, was published by Case Western Reserve University.  Grant explains the meaning of The Western Reserve which has always puzzled me.  The Western Reserve was three million acres set aside as a concession to the State of Connecticut for giving up other territorial rights.

     Wittke made a great impression with his his volume, his opinions being taken as overriding fact.  I remember my sixth grade teacher in Michigan lauding the book to the skies.  I finally read it a couple years ago.  Not so much.

     As is usual with books and writers of this type Wittke overstates his case and underproves his facts.  A contribution to the dialogue at best.

     Grant's book should prove useful to any unbiased reader.  If his attitude of Nordic superiority offends you, ignore it.  His history as history is sound.  For those of you reared on Myer's History of Bigory attitude you will probably be surprised to find that there is another point of view.  Bigotry is not a matter solely of American destestation of immigrants as the program of Diversity and Multi-Culturalism indicates, bigotry is a red herring and not the issue.  The issue is who will be Top Race.  The contestants for the Top Spot have turned out to be the Africans, Semites (both Jews and Arab Moslems) Hispanics, Chinese and Euro-Americans. (Grant's Nordics)  As you can see race has replaced nationalism.

     The contest is real and ongoing.  Peace is merely another form of war.  The prize will go to who wants it the most.  If you don't see the contest in these terms I suggest you remove your rose colored glasses.

Exhuming Bob IX, Pensees 7:

Into The Lost Land

by

R.E. Prindle

Texts:

Dylan, Bob, Chronicles Vol. I, Simon And Schuster, 2004

Prindle, R.E.   Exhuming Bob, VIII The Walls Of Red Wing, idynamo,wordpress.com 2008

Thompson, Toby, Positively Main Street, U. Minnesota, 2008, reprint from 1971

http://www.hibbing.org/dylan1/story.html  Life In Hibbing: Hibbing Chamber Of Commerce

http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/85-dec.htm  Bob Dylan Is Not Like A Rolling Stone Interview, Spin Magazine, Volume One, Number Eight, December 1985

http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/play78.htm  Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan 1978

http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/66-jan.htm  Playboy Interview:  Bob Dylan  February 1966

                                                                               1940

     In attempting to put together a reasonable facsimile of Bob's life in Hibbing and Minneapolis, Minnesota and New York City as he mythologized it in his chapter of Chronicles, The Lost Land, I have come to the following tentative conclusions.

     Bob was born in Duluth, Minnesota on 5/24/41.  In 1943 he was taken to Hibbing where he lived from then until graduation from high school in the Spring of 1959.

     Within the concept of normal Bob had a fairly advantaged childhood.  His parents were indulgent buying him anything he wanted while providing adequate pocket cash.  Bob's family was one of the more important in town both within the Jewish community and the town at large.  In what appears to have been a tight small town social scene Bob either excluded himself or was excluded from the dominant social groups within which he had a right to be included.

     Perhaps Bob's conception of the Hibbing period could be best interpreted from his favorite movie, Rebel Without A Cause, starring James Dean.  Bob is said to have seen the movie several times.  This was unusual as few people ever saw a movie more than once. He would have been a very impressionable fifteen at the time.   Most of us didn't have the money while quite frankly few movies, if any, were worth watching twice including Rebel Without A Cause.  I was seventeen when I saw it and while I was in awe I wasn't submerged.  Of course Bob's relatives owned the theatres so he got in for free.

     As he set up a Dean shrine in his basement which greatly offended Father Abe we may be justified in assuming that Dean was a controlling influence in his life from the time he saw the movie.  It is of interest that Abe was to remove the Dean shrine from the basement after Bob left replacing it with a shrine to his own son Bob Dylan ne Zimmerman.

     Abe Zimmerman (1911-1968)   worked for Standard Oil in Duluth when Bob was born.  According to the C of C he lost his job in 1943 moving to Hibbing where his wife's family, the Stones, could help the young couple.  Why Standard Oil should lay Abe off in the middle of the war during a manpower shortage seems to pose a question.  As can be seen from the photograph of Abe and Beattie above borrowed from the Flickr photostream of <drineevar> he was a well set up handsome man.  He appears to be exceptionally self-possessed, sound in the eyes.  Beattie appears to be a haughty high fashion queen which would accord with later facts.

      Abram Zimmerman, for such was his name.  Usually called Abraham, the name on his tombstone is Abram, and his two brothers Maurice and Paul bought the Micka Electric Company in 1943 changing the name to Zimmerman Appliance.  In 1968 Paul Zimmerman told Thompson that they had been in business for twenty-five years which would mean 1943 although the date seems odd.

     According to the C of C Abe came down with polio in 1946 requiring a lengthy convalescence.  The C of C says that the Zimmermans bought Micka's after his convalescence but if Paul Zimmerman is accurate it would have to have been 1943.  There would be no record of what Abe did for a living then from 1943 to 1946.  As Bob says both his uncles served in the Army it would seem that they bought Micka's going into the Army shortly thereafter leaving Abe to tend the business.

     Maurice and Paul became President and Vice-President of the corporation while Abe siginficantly assumed the controlling post of Secretary-Treasurer.  Managed the money, paid the bills.

     During the fifties at least Abe spent a fair amount of money on both Bob and Beattie.  Angel Marolt whose family bought the Zimmerman residence after Abe's death was trying to tell him of Beattie's several fur coats, diamonds and Cadillac but Thompson says he wasn't paying attention.

     Thompson quotes Echo Helstrom as saying that the Zimmermans had stores in both Hibbing and Duluth.  Having a customer base of approx. 250,000 makes more sense when one considers the amounts of Abe's expenditures and the fact that the profits had to be split three ways.

     The C of C describes Abe as a 'big man' in town partial to those big thick long cigars.

    The couple had enough money on arrival to buy the large nine room house that Bob grew up in so Abe must have been well paid at Standard Oil before he was laid off.  Both he and Beattie are well dressed in the picture while Beattie is actually overdressed.

     Bob was entrolled at Alice School for his kindergarten year in 1946 at five years of age.  The status of Alice School is unclear.  Perhaps it was closed the following year or consolidated with the Hibbing High complex as Bob was transferred.  Hibbing High housed kindergarten through twelve as well as the Jr. College.  Thompson describes it as a huge and rambling building.

     So from first grade to graduation Bob was with the same group of students.  I sure wouldn't have wanted to move into town in tenth grade and try to break into that one.  While he wouldn't have known them all well he must have known the entire student population on sight.  This presents the problem then of why Bob, who was the son of the Big Man in town, wasn't included in the top social cliques.  Those cliques undoubtedly formed early persisting through graduation.  If Bob was in one he was either forced out early or found it uncongenial to remain for whatever reason.  Perhaps he thought his Jewishness excluded him.  So if something happened we don't know what it was and won't; unless Bob tells it's going to be difficult to trace.

     Growing up in a small town anyone with any ambition looks around and sees very limited opportunities.  Working for his father wasn't a viable option.  Not everyone wants to be a doctor or lawyer either.  Nuclear Science is OK but a lot of those guys are out of a job now too.  My next door neighbor when I was a kid for one.

     Bob's mind turned early to music and then to Rock and Roll.  While Rn'R went on to conquer the world and become as respectable as such a spectacle could it was definitely considered discreditible and low class almost volunteer outlawry in the fifties.  At the very least it was 'pimple' music.  It took a certain amount of courage to say you liked Elvis Presley.  Pat Boone was set up as his rival and you had better say you liked ol' White Bucks.  If you don't think Elvis was considered a social criminal check out a couple of his movie roles like King Creole or Jailhouse Rock.  What was the Colonel thinking?  Clown roles, that's all Elvis ever got.

      And then Bob chose as his hero and model Little Richard.  People looked at you funny if you said you

liked Little Richard!  I mean, Bill Doggett was a respectable Negro with music you could understand, Fats Domino was as lovable as a chubby ten year old but Little Richard!  They hadn't even created the ghetto he could come out of.  His band might have passed but then he opened his mouth.  If there was ever a direct challenge to middle class sensibilities Tutti-Frutti was it.  Not only was the song incomprehensible it was about queers.  Nobody ever quoted the lyrics correctly, while I'm walking around saying 'Tutti Frutti, I want Rudy?'  What does that mean?  I hope no one overheard me.  So when Bob gets up, ignoring Pat Boone entirely,  and launches into some screaming vision like Rip It Up or She's Got It or God only knows what, was the crowd taken aback?  Chuckle, chuckle.

     So Bob having opted for the lifestyle was forced to associate with the hoody crowd or have become a loner.  Besides Colin Wilson's book The Outsider  had appeared in 1956 that began a cult of The Loner that peopled the early sixties.  These guys, who were by no means rebels but deep thoughtful guys who had a line on the truth denied anyone else and that  penetrated sham and hypocrisy sat alone ever ready to resolve a situation setting things right were highly romanticized fellows.  There were as many Loners in those days as there were Hawkeyes a couple generations later.  So Bob wouldn't necessarily have been thought of as weird, strange but a Loner.  A Loner was next door to weird and strange.  Thin line if you get my meaning.

     On the other hand the C of C describes the L&B Cafe as a regular jumping Bop Street right there in the heart of Hibbing, Minnesota.  Bands set up and played continuously.  They knew how to party in Hibbing.  The C of C even says there was a radio station in town playing Bob's kind of music thereby contradicting every other source even Bob.  He says he had to go to Shreveport on the radio waves  to get his kind of music.  In this case I'm betting on Bob.

     The C of C  tells of Bob's musical debut like this putting the best possible face on it:

Described by fellow students as polite, easy to talk with, and somewhat introspective, it was a total shock when he pushed back the piano bench and stood up to pound the first notes of a song into the auditorium, electrifying the student body.  Kids jumped up, stared at each other open mouthed not knowing what the reaction would be.

     Well, yes, they were electried but did they like it?

     According to the C of C, looking back fondly, Bob went over real well with his fellow students.  If you like this version don't check the other sources as this is at variance with every other known account but then this is the Chamber Of Commerce  speaking.  Up to this point in the C of C account there is no reason for Bob to be as bitter as he is about Hibbing at all.

     A note of interest is the reoccurence of Fourth Street in Hibbing, Minneapolis and New York City.  Quite a coincidence, I knew there had to be some association with Fourth St. in Hibbing.  So far we learn that Bob attended Jewish shule there.  Whether the synagogue was also located there isn't clear.  The synagogue Bob attended is no longer anywhere at any rate.  Tore it down.  It was in the way.  Had to go.  Even though Bob's father was the most prominent Jew in town, the President of B'nai B'rith and ADL as well as his business interests, and even though Bob had a mega Bar Mitzvah with four hundred people in attendance some say at the most prominent spot in town, the Androy Hotel, some say at the synagogue, he wished to conceal he was Jewish.  This attitude may have contributed to his renouncing the Jewish fraternity house to which he pledged at UM while also hiding his religion in New York.  The attitude was strange since he seemed to prefer Jewish musicians around him to  the exclusion of goys.

     Bob's father Abe, was quite frankly a marvelous provider, spending very large sums of money on son Bob, wife Beattie and his second son, David.  When he died in 1968 the house on 7th Ave., now Bob Dylan Ave. was sold.  The owners at the time of Thompson's visit were the Marolts.  Angel Marolt who was at home when Thompson called offered to show him around.  One thing he learned was that Bob had a clause in the sale's contract that allowed him to stay in his old room in the Marolt's house whenever he was in town.  Too weird.

     What quirk in Bob's mind compelled him to live in other people's houses?  Perhaps Rebbe Maier back in 1954 impressed on Bob that Biblical scripture presribes that Jews would live in houses they never built.  As an article of religion that injuction is a mind boggler.  One can't predict how anyone's mind will interpret instruction.  Bob who functions out of his subconscious very heavily must have accepted such teachings in literal ways.  Rebbe Maier was a definite turning point in Bob's life.  Imagine getting out of school, going upstairs at a Rn'R cafe to sit before the only bearded man you may ever have seen, dressed completely in black with a black yarmulke perched on the back of his crown intoning things like:  The Jews shall live in houses they never built and then go downstairs to boogie.  Pretty spooky, don't you think?  And then as Bob says, he disappeared like a ghost.  Let that roll around your brain for little while and see what you come up with.

     Mrs. Marolt was trying to tell Thompson something about Mrs. Zimmerman's multiple furs, heaps of diamonds, I'm sure all the latest fashions and her own Cadillac.

     Bob was indulged to the extent of apparently more than one motorcycle, a car, lots of amplifiers and electronic gear for his bands, whatever he wanted plus free movie admissions and plenty of pocket cash.  He must have had a large record collection for a kid as he spent his spare time at Crippas record store ordering the odd title.  You can bet Crippas didn't discount either, charging full bore.  At the time (after 1958)   stereo was 5.98 and mono was 4.98.

     As the profits from a sole Hibbing store divided three ways could not have supported this sort of expenditure, having a store in Duluth could account for it.  It is significant also tha Abram died in June 1968 and the store closed a few months later.  Was the store a losing proposition for the last few years?  Did Bob provide the difference so Abe wouldn't be embarrassed by going banko?  Then with his father gone there was no reason to support Uncles Maurice and Paul?

     There really is something happening here, isn't there?

     Also as a petty expenditure for Bob (it would have been huge in my life) according to the C of C:

Almost every day Bob came in after school for his regular snack: cherry pie a la mode and coffee (or Coke.)

     And then to dinner?  No wonder the young Bob had all that baby fat. 

     If Echo bought those hot dogs for Bob and bought his story that his dad didn't give him an allowance she was had in more ways than one.

     So, Abe was nothing if not a generous father and husband.  Beattie as President of Hadassah as well as a Stone must have made the Zimmermans the most powerful Jews in the syngogue while actually giving she and her husband the means to be petty dictators of the town,  I saw something like this in Eugene, Oregon in the sixties and seventies, or, as the C of C says a Big Man and big people.

     Bob must have a quirk in his mind to misrepresent his childhood so.  He was the Fortunate Son John Fogerty only sings about.

     In Thompson's interview with Beattie he quotes her:

How can you know you have a genius in your house, when all my time is spent trying to feed him and keeping his clothes pressed.

     In Bob's story, The Lost Land, Chloe Kiel is shown ironing Bob's shirts and at the end of the chapter she 'slaps' a plate of steak and fried onions in front of him just before he darts out the door to begin the next chapter, A New Morning, just as in the old days when he returned home from school for lunch and was fed by his mother he darted back to school.

     Ironing his shirts and providing free steaks was a signal service for bare acquaintances like Ray and Chloe.

     Chloe comes across as cold and indifferent and indeed there is a tinge of resentment and anger beneath Beattie's statement.  Motherly, of course, but there.  Still, she doesn't impress me as any Yiddishe Mama of the Mrs. Goldberg variety.  Whether Bob was a good boy or not he does have an ambivalent attitude toward his parents.  But then he claims that he was really raised by his grandmother, whether Stone or Zimmerman isn't clear.

     I believe the big change came over Bob with his Bar Mitzvah and I'm not talking puberty alone.  According to the C of C Bob attended Jewish shule during his young years.  This was done after public school hours.  Then in 1953-54 when his Bar Mitzvah was approaching Father Abe sent to Brooklyn, New York to have an ultra-orthodox, almost certainly a Lubavitcher Rebbe, sent to Hibbing to indoctrinate Bob in untra-orthodox teachings.  It can't be any surprise that when Bob exhibited his Jewish reverence after his Jesus indoctrination with the Vineyard Fellowship he chose to show himslef as a Lubavitcher.  Welcome home, Bob.  The C of C tells it this way:

According to a 1985 Spin Magazine interview by Dave Engel, Bob said it was above the (L&B) Cafe that Rabbi Reuben Maier stayed while giving Bob Hebrew lessons in preparation for his Bar Mitzvah.  The Rabbi and his wife showed up one day and stayed for a year while Bob got ready for his big event .  The article quotes Bob as saying he would learn Hebrew after school or in the evening for an hour, then go downstairs and boogie at the L&B.  After completing his Bar Mitzvah the Rabbi just disappeared.

     In the interview Bob tells it this way:

There weren't many Jews in Hibbing, Minnesota.  Most of them I was related to.  The town didn't have a rabbi, and it was time for me to be bar mitzvahed.  Suddenly a rabbi showed up under strange circumstances for only a year.  He and his wife got off the bus in the middle of the winter.  He showed up just in time for me to learn this stuff.  He was an old man from Brooklyn who had a white beard and wore a black hat and black clothes.  They put him upstairs in the cafe, which was the local hangout.  It was a rock n' roll cafe where I used to hang out, too.  I used to go there everyday to learn this stuff either after school or after dinner.  After studying with him an hour, or so, I'd come down and boogie.  The rabbi taught me what I had to learn, and after conducting the bar mitzvah, he just disappeared.  The people didn't want him.  He didn't look like anybody's idea of a rabbi.  He was an embarrassment.  All the Jews there shaved their heads and, I think, worked on Saturdays.  And I never saw him again.  It's like he came and went like a ghost.  Later I found out he was Orthodox.  Jews separate themselves like that.  Christians, too.  Baptists, Assembly of God, Methodists, Calvinists.  God has no respect for a person's title.  He don't care what you call yourself.

     The C of C knows the Rebbe's name was Reuben Maier and Bob Dylan doesn't?  There were enough people in Hibbing to have a temple and shule but they didn't have a Rabbi?  The Rebbe Maier showed up in time for Bobby Zimmerman's Bar Mitzvah but what? it was the first Bar Mitzvah in Hibbing's Rabbiless history?  No wonder four hundred people showed up.  The Jews in Hibbing shaved their heads and worked on Saturday's?  I presume Bob means they didn't wear beards but shaved their faces unlike the Lubavitcher in white beard and one of those funny round hats.  I serously doubt there were three hundred or more Jews walking around Hibbing with shaved heads in 1954.

     They took one look at Rebbe Reuben's weird beard and outre attire and told him to get out of town?  Now that I can believe.  Beards in '54 were a sign of great eccentricity or a psychotic desire to draw attention to oneself.  But why in '85 the mysterioso act?  He just showed up to teach Bobby Zimmerman, a complete unknown with no direction home Lubavitcher tales like this:  (actually this is pretty standard esoteric doctrine adapted for Jewish needs)

The messianic thing has to do with the world of mankind, like it is.  This world is scheduled to go for 7,000 years.  Six thousand years of this where man has his way and 1,000 years when God has his way.  Just like the week.  Six days work, one day rest.  The last thousand years is called the Messianic Age, Messiah will rule.

     Essentially what we have here is a variant of Madame Blavatsky's Theosophy along with a little Hebrew Theology.  If one looks real closely one can see the outline of Sigmund Freud's notion of the unconscious.

     According to Beattie Bob knew, oh, two hundred words of Hebrew.  So much for several years of shule and a year of intensive training by Rebbe Reuben.

     Whether Bob knows or admits it, it must be true that Father Abram sent for Reuben to instruct Bob in mysteries that Abe thought were essential to his vision of Jewish religion while they were not part of the services of the Hibbing congregation.

     It is possible that Abram brought the Rebbe in on the approval of the congregation who rejected him.  The comment by Bob of working Saturdays may be signficant here.  The Jewish sabbath begins on Friday sundown and continues to Saturday sundown.

     As a Lubavitcher, Rebbe Reuben could not have tolerated working during the sabbath while the congregation found it essential amidst a gentile population.  Likewise beards are an integral part of the orthodox religion so that the congregation  also refused to stop shaving.  The only thing mysterious is why it took Reuben so long to catch on.  Or maybe he had a contract for one year and the year was up.  Of course Bob did need help on those two hundred words.

     So Bob's upstairs memorizing his two hundred words while the throbbing beat pounds insistently through the floor.  The super patient Reuben and his wife never object.  Bob shortly joins the revelers with his two hundred Hebrew words rattling round his skull, steps up to the mike and begins screaming: I've got a girl and her name is Echo.  Hmmm.  Quite an image out there in the Lost Land of Bob.

     Now indoctrinated in quaint antiquarian rites Bob is bundled off to Webster, Wisconsin and Camp Herzl to steep himself in Israeli style Jewish living.  Camp Herzl was conducted as Israel in America so those two hundred Hebrew words came in handy in that surrogate for summer in a kibbutz in the Holy Land.

     The summer sojourns must have set Abram back a handsome fee for the times.  Six to eight weeks of essentially summer boarding school does have expenses.  Abe apparently was deeply religious: in Protestant circles he would have been known as a Fundamentalist nut.  He and Mike Huckabee would have gotten along fine.  One wonders if younger son David was given the same treatment.

     So Bob from 1954 on is definitely the product of two nations.  The world of the Three Hanks as the C of C puts it and this world of Adam, Moses and the Messiah.  Bob was named after Sabbatai Zevi the last acknowledged Jewish messiah in the seventeenth century, his Jewish name is Sabtai.

     As kids we all have a lot to reconcile, begin working out at graduation.  Bob had a double load; he had two Bobs to reconcile.  Personalities wander and widen in those years, Bob made a clean split.  On the one hand he was the twerp Bobby Zimmerman of whom it may be said:  There's no success like failure while on the other he was struggling to be the super successful Bob Dylan in which he failed to assume the mantle so that failure is no success at all.  At least he made this split off persona's name mean something.  As a note, it was not generally known Dylan was Jewish until after Blonde On Blonde.

     Thus in his movie Renaldo and Clara he is not Bob Dylan.  Anybody can be Bob Dylan he says, you can be Bob Dylan.  Toby Thompson thought he could be and did a pretty good job of it walking a mile or so in Bob's shoes.  Sounded just like him.

     As remarkable as it is that Bob realized his fantasy beyond anything he could have dreamed and became the hugely successful Bob Dylan he created an entire new set of problems whose solution eluded him.  Well, you know, there's something lost and something gained while it's hard to know whether the gain was worth the loss.  However the money has disappeared from the table.

     The result then is Bob looking backward from 2004 to create a fantasy of how it was in Ray and Chloe's place on Vestry Street in NYC.  The chapter is approriately titled The Lost Land or possibly Never-Never Land might have been better.  The chapter isn't a complete fabrication but it is fiction.  Something like the various incidents might have happened but not exactly the way Bob tells it.  The framing story of Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel is pure fiction however.  They could not possibly have existed.

     Bob tells the whole story of the Lost Land within the reference of Ray and Chloe and their fabulous apartment near Vestry below Canal near the Hudson across the street fromt he Cathedral with its bell tower.  Thompson got it right.

     A troubling aspect of Bob for me is his insistance on bumming other people's apartments.  This seems to be compulsive behavior.

     Bob was actually voluntarily homeless from January of '61 to October  or November of the same year when he and 'roommate' Suze Rotolo took up digs on Fourth St.  I suspect that Father Abe would have been only too happy to supply Bob with funds to live on Vestry Street if he had asked.  Bob is simply untrustworthy in any of his stories.  As he said of what he learned from folk music:  If you told the truth, well and good; if you told the untruth, well and good also, so in Bob's mind there are no lies, there is only the truth or untruth both having the same value and whichever is more serviceable at the moment.  You can't believe him.

     A troubling aspect of Bob's behavior is his habit of bumming couches in other people's nests; gaining meaning, as it were, from other people's lives.  Perhaps that was the way he felt of his life in his mother and father's house.  Or perhaps as a Jewish outsider in a goyish land it was his attempt to insinuate himself in the main stream much as he appropriated Woody Guthrie's persona.  Of the houses I have traced they have all been those of goys; he didn't choose to insinuate himself into the houses of his fellow Jews.  His imaginary hosts Gooch and Kiel are obviously goys.

     The Lost Land then is a mythologized version of his childhood and first few months in New York City.  To my mind Ray Gooch is a combination of Dave Van Ronk, Paul Clayton, Matt Helstrom and his father.  Chloe seems simply to be an idealized notion of his mother.  (Study her picture for a few moments again.)

     As the Gooch frame brackets the period from Bob's encounter with Gorgeous George to the apartment with Suze Rotolo it must represent a time frame from sometime in '58 to October '61.  In October Bob Dylan ceased sponging off others to take up his own apartment.

      The only one in this time frame he knew who had a large gun collection was Matt Helstrom.  The Helmstroms also had a large record collection that Bob listened to.  The couch and apartment undoubtedly belonged to Van Ronk while certain exoticisms of Gooch are characteristic of Clayton.  The library of Gooch may simply be the New York City Library of which the long narrow room would merely describe the stacks.

     The Southern character of Gooch must represent a time after Bob studied the South in the library since there are several references to his Civil War studies.  Gooch himself is a Southerner from Virginia gone North which is a symbol in itself.  This can be symbolically described as Father Abe being a Jew in Gentile America.

     Here then Bob creates or accentuates the more pleasant aspects of his memories in contrast to the very bitter unpleasant memories of the songs.  He tells us a great deal about his dream life but little of its realities.  At this point I am of the opinion that the party of Camilla ( who Bob says he gets to know quite intimately) is another fabrication of the based on a true story variety.

     As Bob would say, folk music taught him that if what you said was true,well and good; if what you said was untrue well and good also.  We may probably construe the Lost Land as both true and untrue while a good folk tale.  Even the title has a fictive quality a la Edgar Rice Burroughs.

     To round off the period back in the C of C milieu of Hibbing:  Bob spent his last summer at Camp Herzl in 1957.  In the summer of '58 he was running back and forth between Hibbing and Minneapolis.  At that time he would have become familiar with Highway 61.

     In his Junior year of '57-'58 he took up his relationship with Echo Helstrom.  They were going steady hence were not supposed to be dating others.  As he was in Minneapolis most of the summer he left Echo sitting home alone.  She resented this.  As the Senior year began she told Thompson, she took a revenge on Bobby returning his token in public in the hall at school.  Boy, that hurts.

     The feelings must have been much harder than either Bob or Echo portray them.  A key problem area is did Bob spend time in Red Wing Reformatory on Highway 61 below Minneapolis and if he did what did he do to receive his sentence:  I examine this more fully in Exhuming Bob VIII:  The Walls Of Redwing.

     He says in Chronicles that he was absent from school from some time at the beginning of April of '59.  He was back at least by the June 5th graduation.  His birthday is May 24th.  After that date he would have been eighteen and subject to adult sentencing.  For what It's worth he says in his song that no inmate was over seventeen.  I'm suggesting that he spent a month of two at Red Wing returning in time for graduation.  Certainly a Big Man in town like Abe could have arranged the graduation if he couldn't get Bob off that time.

     The question is what did Bob do?  By the middle of this Senior year it appears that he had been in enough scrapes to be known as a troublesome boy; perhaps living out a Rebel Without A Cause persona.  Father Abe used his influence up to that time to avoid unpleasant consequences for the lad.

     I believe Bob's song The Chimes Of Freedom tells the story of his crime.  Quite simply Echo set him up.  She obviously was not quite as complacent as she tells it.  See Exhuming Bob VIII:  Walls Of Red Wing.

     Returning home from Red Wing his parents threw a graduation party for him.  Bob was reluctant to attend the party, perhaps with good reason but was persuaded to do so.

     This then leaves a very sketchy account of the three or four months of the summer of '59 for which Bob provides little information.  In Walls Of Red Wing I place his stint at Red Wing in August but that is probably wrong.  In any event the period from April of '59 to September of '59 needs to be explained more fully.

     Bob gives some brief details of his stay at Dinkytown but not much.   A little bit of the John Pankake episode while avoiding the important details of his theft of Pankake's records.

     Thompson has some good information from Ellen Baker whose father's folk song collection Bob used extensively.

     Then to NYC and his account of The Lost Land segues into his New Morning.

Exhuming Bob X:

Lubavitcher Bob

by

R.E. Prindle

There's something happening here

But you don't know what it is,

Do you, Mr. Jones?

-Bob Dylan

     In 1979 Bob publicly embraced Jesus as his personal savior.  This was widely seen as a conversion to Christianity because Bob went to the Vineyard Fellowship of Tarzana for indoctrination into the Christian mysteries.  He could hardly have learned Christianity from Jewish circles although the Jewish group of Jews For Jesus was already active.  Pharasaic Jews have always despised Jews For Jesus so that may not have been a viable option for Bob.

     While non-Jews may be scandalized by the concept of Jews embracing Jesus there is no reason for them to be astounded.  After all Jesus was a Jew, preaching to Jews in the Jewish tradition.  The early Christian movement was entirely Jewish.  They were Jews of the Jews who had accepted Jesus as the Jewish Messiah.  Christianity became a universal religion only after Paul reconstructed it shedding the practices most repellent to gentiles while the Hellennic  or Greek religion and philosophy was grafted onto the religion which gave it substance and intellectual vigor displacing Semitic stultification.

     There should be little wonder then that Jewish Christianity should resurface  two thousand years later with Bob as its Messiah.

     Bob was uniquely trained for the role.  He grew up in a Christian community dominated by the Hillbilly music on the radio with a large and active Jewish congregation.  His father thought of himself as a Jewish scholar while heading the local chapter of B'nai B'rith and ADL.  His father was covertly ultra-orthodox.

     In 1990 Bob wrote a letter to the editor of a publication called Sister2Sister. (Bob's Unshakeable Monotheism, Part IV, Scott Marshall http://www.jewsweek.com/ ) in which he said:

...until the entire world believes and obeys the same God, there can be no truth or justice or peace for anyone.

     What that means in the age old Jewish notion that as God's chosen people they are destined to bring their vision of God to all the peoples of the Earth at which time they will become a nation of priests, the rulers and overseers of all others.  The Supreme People placed between God and humanity as demi-gods.

     The notion did not necessarily occur to Bob in 1990 but was placed in his mind at a much earlier date.  It would always have been present in the synagogue.  Anyone who has ever attended Jewish services will be be struck by the insistence that Jews are to rule the world and all the peoples.  It is the duty of every Jew to further that work.

     Whether Bob had the Messianic impulse before his Bar Mitzvah is the question.  It may have been there in embryo.  In 1954 as Bob was about to turn thirteen his father, Abraham, who obviously believed the proper religious education was lacking in Hibbing sent for a Lubavitcher Rebbe from Brooklyn to come to Hibbing specifically to indoctrinate Bob in the more recondite lore of the ultra-orthodox.  The intensity of the instruction would be virtual hypnosis.  It was at this point, I believe, that the Messianic impulse was fixed in Bob's mind.

     The indoctrination had devastating results for the young boy's character and personality.  He went off the rails becoming wild and dissolute.  In searching for a means to spread the message he had received he hit on music and from there it led into folk music.  Folk music had a special appeal because it was a pure expression of the dominant culture.  If one subverted folk music one subverted the culture.

     Thus after being  initiated into folk at Dinkytown near the University of Minnesota Bob left for the Big Apple, New York City.  The Folk scene of Greenwhich Village in New York was a virtual Jewish enclave or colony.  A great many Jews were already doing what Bob set out to do.  Disoriented by his conflicts between his Jewish and Christian education Bob nevertheless set about changing Folk music, discarding the content for Jewish themes while retaining the outer forms.  The Jewish world organization realizing they had something in Bob gave him maximum publicity actually turning him into a messianic figure through television and magazines.

     The stresses of intense fame to his personality and character were terrific almost destroying him.  Bob retreated at the height of his fame in 1966 after having established himself with three terrifically influential record albums.  His mind was now focused and somewhat cleared.  Placing a large Bible in the middle of his living room for easy reference Bob and his band worked and experimented with the Folk and old timey oeuvre of the White Christian hill people.  Once again retaining the forms while stripping the material of the content, he infused Jewish Biblical content which was familiar to the Christian culture into the material.  The immediate result was John Wesley Harding which is a Jewish religious album in tradtional White Christian dress. 

     The result is quite remarkable and on that basis is an astounding work of Jewish genius.  Unaware of what was being done to them White Americans could offer no defense except rejection.  There were quite a few of us who walked away from Bob at that point.  I can't say that I understood what Bob had done but I felt the insult to my sensibilities.

     Thus, in retrospect, Bob's so-called Christian period became inevitable as his strategy slowly unfolded in his mind.  There is no conflict with Bob's intense Jewishness in his combined religious entities, or reclaiming the Jewish Jesus for Judaism.  Nothing could be more natural.

     The preemption of the goi culture for Judaism is the astonishing achievement of little Bobby Zimmerman.  Long after the fact there are still few who get it.

A Review

Slum Goddess From The Lower East Side

Some Thoughts On The Autobiography Of Suze Rotolo:

A Freewheelin' Time

by

R.E. Prindle

1.

Sandoz The Great

     In 1938 Albert Hoffman, a Swiss chemist working for Sandoz isolated LSD-25.  In 1938 young Tim Leary was 18 years old.  It was in 1943 that Albert Hoffman discovered the effects of LSD.  Seventeen years after that LSD burt onto the world through the agency of the now, Dr., Timothy Leary, a psychologist with Harvard University.

     LSD was adopted by the Bohemian society and all its offshoots as the appearance of the new chemical Messiah:  Better living through chemistry as the slogan was.  Its use quickly spread through the folk music community of Greenwich Village in New York City.

     In 1923 a fellow by the name of Tuli Kupferberg was born and his partner Ed Sanders came along in 1939 a year after I did.  Kupferberg and Sanders were poets who became influenced by the folk scene forming a band sometime in 1964 originally called the Village Fugs, later the Village was dropped and they became simply the Fugs.  In 1965 they released their first LP on Folkways.  Now, cut one, side one was little number entitled Slum Goddess From The Lower East Side.  Sort of OK as a song, funny, as were a lot of Fugs songs.  Like Dylan they searched for social significance rather than write trite love songs.  Unlike Dylan you could easily understand the meaning of the lyrics.  Slum Goddess was one and then there was a song that many of us thought significant in the social sense back in those days entitled:  Boobs A Lot.  'Do you like boobs a lot?  Gotta like boobs a lot.'  As I said deep and intense meaning.  This was followed by a song eulogizing jock straps.  'Do you wear your jock strap?  Gotta wear your jock strap.'  So the Fugs were with it.

     At some point after 1965 the Village Voice decided to run a feature depicting some East Village lovely as the Slum Goddess From The Lower East Side.  Suze Rotolo had the dubious honor of being selected as the very first Slum Goddess.

     To what did she owe this honor?  Well, she was famous on the Lower East Side for being featured on the album cover of Bob Dylan's second LP, The Free Wheelin' Bob Dylan.  She was at that time, 1962, I believe, Bob's girl friend or, at least, one of them, perhaps the principle one but one can't be sure as Bob had others as 'part time' girl friends.

     Thus one has to go back to the summer of 1961 to discover how Suze Rotolo began her odyssey to become the very first Slum Goddess.  Suze tells her story in her autobiography issued in May of 2008 called A Freewheelin' Time.  It is a bitter sweet story not lacking in charm.  Bob was born in 1941 while Suze was born three years later.  All the disparate elements in our story born at separate times were slowly moving to a central focal point in New York City from 1961 to 1965 or so.

     Suze and Bob were of that age when freewheelin' seemed possible while the psychological social moment was about to congeal and then vanish before it could be realized as psychological moments do.  Some catch the golden ring as it come around, some don't.  Bob did, Suze didn't.

     Suze was born in Queens, over there on Long Island, as a red diaper baby.  In other words in the romanticized Communist parlance her parents were Communists when she was born.  She was brought up in the faith.

     Bob described her as a libertine dream or some such epithet.  I'm not sure Suze saw herself in the same way.  I think she expected a little more of Bob than to be his sex toy.  As a Communist she should have had a more freewheelin' attitude.

     Suze seems to have been brought up completely within the Red religion much as a Christian might be a Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran or as Jew in whatever stripe of Judaism it might be.

     She edged into race agitation at a young age.  She met Bob when she was seventeen while she had been working for CORE  (Congress Of Racial Equality) for  a couple years before that.  She would have been fifteen or sixteen.  Whether she had sexual experiences with the Africans she doesn't tell us.  In her search for a raison d' etre for her life she found herself in Greenwich Village in the Summer of '61 where she met the twenty year old Bob Dylan just in from the Iron Range of Minnesota.  They were mutually attracted, quickly forming a sexual relationship.

     Bob as everyone knows was and is Jewish.  He came not only from a Jewish background but from an orthodox background.  Hibbing, Minnesota, his hometown, had a Jewish population of about three hundred families with their own Jewish establishment and synagogue.

     According to Beattie Zimmerman, Bob's mother, Bob was a good boy who attended services regularly while investigating the nature of the various Christian churches.  As a mother Beattie's version of things must be interpreted through the eyes of mother love.

     Father Abe was not only a practising Jew but the President of the Hibbing chapter of B'nai B'rith and its terrorist arm the Anti-Defamation League.  In addition Beattie, Bob's mother, was the President of the Women's auxiliary, Hadassah.  So Bob isn't just Jewish but comes from a very committed Jewish background.

     As the President of the Hibbing chapter, Father Abe would have attended statewide gatherings in Minneapolis, regional meetings wherever they were held and possibly if not probably national meetings in NYC and elsewhere.  Now, within the international Jewish organizations heavy hitters attend various levels of meetings where they meet and learn something of the various local and regional people.  Thus, it may be assumed that Abe Zimmerman as a name at least was known on the national Jewish level.  Kind of the Jewish Who's Who, you know.  Bob says that he had contacts to help him when he got to New York.  Those contacts would have come through Father Abe while being part of B'nai B'rith and ADL.  Bob wasn't entirely alone out there.

     Bob's Jewish name is Sabtai after the last acknowledged Jewish Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi.  There have been many that filled a Messianic role since Zevi not least of which was Sigmund Freud and possibly Albert Einstein.  Bob may have been encouraged to take the role for himself.

     At any rate when Bob approached thirteen and Bar Mitzvah time Abe brought in a special Rabbi from Brooklyn to instruct Bob.  Now this is really signficant.  He was probably a Lubavitcher or ultra-orthodox Jew.  When Bob publicly expressed his Judaism after his Christian stint he chose to do so as a Lubavitcher.  Very likely that was no coincidence.  Having received his crash course in orthodoz Judaism Father Abe next sent his son to a Zionist summer camp for 'several ' weeks for each of four successive summers ending at the age of seventeen.  This would have the effect of introducing him to young Jews not only of the region but from around the world while at the same time estranging him from his fellow Hibbingites giving him his strange cast of character.

     Camp Herzl was named after the originator of Zionism, Theodore Herzl.  the camp with a spacious hundred and twenty acres is located on a lake near Webster, Wisconsin.  Herzl is not your basic summer church camp but a national and international gathering place where young Jews from around the US and the world can meet and get known to each other somewhat.

     The camp is conducted exclusively for Jews along Jewish lines eliminating as many goyish influences as is possible.  At least when he was seventeen Bob was playing the Wild One showing up in a mini biker cavalcade.  One may assume that many national and international Jewish figures made appearances over the four years to both instruct, encourage and look over the upcoming generation.

     The post-war years were very traumatic for the Jewish people.  The death camps of the Nazis dominated their minds.  They were psychologically devastated and unbalanced looking for Nazis under their beds before they went to sleep at night.  One may safely assume that Bob and his fellow campers had to watch extermination movies over and over lest they forget.

     The State of Israel was founded in 1948 while the first of Israel's successful wars occurred in 1956.  The '56 war was a seminal event bolstering the spirits of the Jews turning them aggressive as they now believed they could fight.  After '56 they began to come out of themselves.

     For whatever reasons as Bob entered high school his personality began to disintegrate.  Perhaps he had to cease being Bobby Zimmerman to become what his people expected of him which was a probable religious leader who then became Bob Dylan.  As always Bob would combine two cultures, Jewish and Goyish.

     After an extremely rocky year in Minneapolis where Bob shed the remnants of his goody goody image of Hibbing he became the dirty unkempt Bob Dylan of his rush to fame of the Folk years.

     Thus as Bob and Suze met in the Summer of '61 they were both searching for something to be.

Part 2.

Why Do Fools Fall In Love?

     The question now that Suze and Bob have gotten together is to sort out the various accounts of what happened.  Bob says everyone has gotten it wrong.  However his own account in Chronicles I is no more factual than the accounts of his biographers and commentators.  Suze doesn't provide us with much more clarity.  While Bob tells it like he wanted it to have been Suze on the the one hand protects her memory of what she wants to keep as a beautiful memory while glossing over her own actions at the time to keep it so.

     Bob goes through the romantic notion of constructing their bed with saw, hammer and nails.  This is a charming story and I'm embarrassed to say I took him at his word.  You simply can't.  Chronicles came out four years ago so Suze has had plenty of time to read it and mull over Bob's ruminations.  Thus she must be aware of Bob's story of the bed.  She says it was an old bed the landlord left from another tenant.  Another beautiful tale of Bob's down the tubes.

     Suze rather unflatteringly depicts Bob as a rouster and fairly heavy drinker.  She was offended that Bob, who was posing as Bob Dylan, not yet having officially changed his name, didn't level with her and confide that Dylan was a pseudonym that looked better on a marquee while his real name was Zimmerman and that he came from Minnesota rather than being an orphan from New Mexico.  Coming home one night, as Suze tells it, Bob, stumblingly drunk, dropped his ID and she discovered the truth as she picked it up.  Even then she had to drag the truth out of Bob.

     These problems mounted up.  There was immediate hostility between Bob, Suze's mother and her sister Carla.  The mother seems to have instinctively seen through Bob, while I'm sure Carla soon learned that Bob was doing her sister wrong.

      As we know from Chronicles Bob had other 'part-time' girl friends, pick ups and whatever.  As the folk crowd was a fairly tight knit group even if Suze didn't want to hear the obvious Carla who was employed by the Folklorist, Alan Lomax, could hardly have been unaware that Bob had a laissez faire attitude toward romancing the girls.

     Indeed, Bob's understanding of Suze was that she was his Libertine belle.  As a libertine therefore he could hardly have believed fidelity was a necessary condition.  I don't know if Suze considered herself a Libertine but as a Communist both fidelity and jealousy were forbidden by the dogma so speaking consistently with the belief system neither mother, Suze nor Carla had grounds for complaint.   Nevertheless both mother and Carla wished to separate Bob and Suze.

     Bob records his side of the conflict in his song Ballad in Plain D.  In his usual high flown language Bob says in his song:

"The tragic figure!" her sister did shout,

"Leave her