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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 8h

He's never especially had my politics, but I still think Koppel S. Pinson did worthwhile work, incidentally, one small example being already, during the Nazi regime, exposing disingenuous tendencies of some in the US Right to pretend to believe that the Nazis were leftists or even 'socialists'.

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 8h

Many of the same disingenuous techniques of discursive policing persist or are being brought back now, as US fascism tries to influence or outright control the content of whatever will pass for education.

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 8h

Anyway, you look at mid-20th century US academic discussion of American white supremacy and you aren't going to have to look far before finding some work of semiotic interest certainly, but not much else...

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 8h

According to the Sister, this is evident in "his dismissal of the moral aspects with such a statement as "Morally Jim Crow hasn't a leg to stand upon and I refuse to even discuss it morally".

I'm less sure that this is Conrad rejecting any kind of moral position, instead of demonstrating one...

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 8h

Sister Maria is vague about the problem with Conrad's proposals, except that he is somehow insufficiently focussed on 'morality' (though Conrad refers to the "economic-political-moral" issues of white supremacy and civil rights).

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 8h

Sister Maria seems upset that Conrad is so supportive of "left-wing elements, particularly in the labor area", as part of his support for the concrete "political and economic measures" Conrad argues could help the US undermine and overcome white supremacy.

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 8h

"...grow through a restrictive legislation in all social fields, and, through the deliberate misuse of a false ethnology to create a subordinate place for the Negro, insure the economic advancement of the white supremacist group".

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 8h

Conrad was a journalist at the Chicago Defender, and Sister Maria complains that he unfortunately makes statements "without documentation" - though the statements she is referring to are to the effect that "the roots of the tree of Jim Crow begin with the slave trade..."

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 8h

But to really get a sense of the culture of this academic journal, one need only add the example in the same issue of Sister Loretta Maria's reaction to Earl Conrad's book, Jim Crow America.

HIS apparent lack of objectivity about white supremacy is maybe even worse...

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 8h

This is 1947.

Europe had only just seen the overthrow of more than one clerical fascist regime founded upon pronounced tendencies of Catholic anti-Semitism, emerging from institutions which saw many priests preaching anti-Semitism and which actively organised genocide.

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 9h

The core example of the "series of statements" that "result" from this unfortunate resentful distortion and lack of objectivity is Jacob Marcus writing that:

"The responsibility of Christian religious teachings for the present unchristian attitude toward the Jews must not be underrated".

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 9h

And this distortion, this "resentment" means that Pinson's edited collection on anti-Semitism suffers from insufficient examination of the fact that "side by side with anti-semitism is the antigentile spirit of some Jews".

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 9h

Pinson's edited collection has some problems apparently, and in particular it seems that some of these, you know, they don't say it directly but obviously, Jewish writers, saw this subject - anti-Semitism - through "the tinted light of resentment rather than in the clear light of detachment".

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 9h

Looking at some mid-20th century discussions of anti-Semitism, I recently came across some comments on the volume edited by Koppel S. Pinson, Essays on Antisemitism, in the October 1947 issue of The American Catholic Sociological Review.

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 9h

(A more directly relevant philosophical interrogation of related concepts would actually be Derrida's Limited Inc, which does involve not merely the question of mention but of quotation, and as categories in speech act theory - always implied in the implicit theories of the censorious.)

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 9h

The Russell of 1903 was accused of having argued himself into a position which not only couldn't distinguish sign from referent, but also couldn't recognise the distinction between use and mention. But I think he could have seen the slippery slope of interpretation involved here.

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 1d

Jett, obviously the greatest dog to ever live.

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 2d

Be very careful what you say about the white supremacist.

There's very little room for even the slightest disrespect about the guy who argued that 'god's perfect law' required that gay people be put to death. Who wanted many more state executions and said they should be televised.

So, caution.

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 2d

Because if so, it's a well-sculpted tentacle. I like the tentacle. I don't actually have the expertise to judge what's well-sculpted, but I like the piece.

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 2d

One of your works?

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 2d

(Actually, that's what Wikipedia says about that book, but my copy, an unproofed printing, doesn't have the years at the end of the title and says the book is being published in 1964, so...)

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 2d

Well, you can't always see where things are heading and what will emerge.

Though I note that the Oxford University professor-of-history-to-be had become internationally renowned because of his 1966 book, The Emergence of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria 1867–1914.

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 2d

In 1982, Peter Pulzer argued in The English Historical Review that, what with all of five major works appearing over the last five years, there was a "serious risk" that the "fascinating, if marginal" British Far Right was receiving "over-attention" in academia.

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 2d

This is I guess a CONCEPTUALLY graphic image.

It's not actually disturbingly visceral - it's not showing the awful things people impose on the bodies of other people in the way so many images from the Israeli genocide in Gaza do - but it was instantly labelled as 'graphic' by BlueSky moderation.

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 2d

"He did politics the right way..."

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