Joel thanks for responding.
Well, I was afraid you wouldn't want to go into personal details. I did go back and read your Tikkun blogs from November and December. However, it would be good to hear the more abstract or philosophical or theoretical version without the references. I sense an intellectual dispute, and it would be interesting and informative to understand what that was---not for its gossip value, but whatever light it might shed on larger issues of politics and culture.
In any event, I've looked up Tikkan on various occasions over the last three years, but more for historical background rather than current events. Although I have to admit, I usually lost myself in interest in the current essays on culture and books. The intention to those readings were to gain some perspective on Strauss and Weimar and whatever I could find on the kind of political arena that shaped Zionism and Israel long before its emergence as a country. I think there are profound lessons to be found in that history, especially looking backward from this demented era.
``Not as interested in religion theologically as I am politically.''
Niether am I of course. I would have never opened a bible if it hadn't been for the righwing take over in the US. But I have come to think that obscure theological themes and their debates are a form of political thinking that link up theology, philosophy and politics, and the main trace or thread that connects them all is their ethical world view, made politically manifest in law and social policy. These connections between theology or religion and politics are obviously not limited to Judaism and Israel, since the whole thrust of the US domestic policy agenda under the current rightwing follows a theological-political thread from various interpretations of Christianity where fundamentalists, Catholics, and less strident Protestant denominations clammer away in the political arena, not unlike the various Calvinist factions did in Spinoza's Amsterdam.
(It's a nice irony that the Right has fallen from public grace on all these religious and ethical fabrications of their own making.)
Although I am completely ignorant of the Moslem world and Islam outside of the US news media, it is apparent that a similar intellectual trace with its own historical nodes drives events and people from North Africa to Pakistan and beyond. I even tried reading the Koran after getting disgusted with the Old Testament and found it even more impossible to read. But I thought of all the religious texts I've tried to fathom it was probably the most command driven, political and legalistic of all. That is to say, the most easily adapted to the formation of an authoritarian state. I am afraid I complete disagree with Yoshie on whatever positive or progressive themes she finds in the Iran regime. Although I must say it was pure geopolitical (read anti-American) brilliance on Chavez's part to link up with Iran while he simultaneous decounted home heating oil in the US northeast. There's some triangulation.
In any event, I would certainly prefer to think about cultural developments, but the dominance of a theological interpenetrated political milieu and the devastation it has wrecked on everything that used to constitute a US secular civil society, especially this insane war has simply erased any other interest---well, most of the time.
Good luck with your book.
CG