Kerim's Triptych for Sunday, September 1st, 2024

Welcome 👋 to Kerim's Triptych, a free newsletter that delivers three fabulous links to your inbox, two or three times a month. (If you didn't intend to subscribe, or you don't want to receive these anymore, there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom.)

1️⃣ Two Paths for Jewish Politics

In this masterful New Yorker essay, the political scientist Corey Robin traces different paths by which Jews have negotiated their status within secular democracies, comparing American and Europe.

In Europe, emancipation was often conditioned on cleaving the citizen from the Jew. “The Jews should be refused everything as a nation,” one delegate to the French National Assembly declared, “but granted everything as individuals.” Many American Jews sought to avoid that separation. Instead of abandoning Judaism or relegating it to the private sphere, they designed their institutions in the image of the democracy they were helping to build. As the historian Hasia Diner has shown, synagogues wrote their own constitutions, with democratic procedures, a bill of rights, and provisions for amendment. Government officials were invited to address congregations rather than negotiate with individual élites. Where Jews in modern Europe worked with states to anoint one body to represent them all, continuing the medieval tradition of a single interceding voice between sovereign and Jewry, Jews in America created a multiplicity of organizations, some more democratic than others, none with the power or authority to speak for the whole.

The climax of this distinctively modern approach to Jewish politics came not in defense of the Jews but in support of the New Deal and the Black Freedom struggle. This may seem paradoxical, instances of Jewish do-gooders acting on behalf of others. The protagonists saw things differently. As the Jewish Community Relations Council of Cincinnati declared in 1963, “The society in which Jews are most secure, is itself secure, only to the extent that citizens of all races and creeds enjoy full equality.” This was the opposite of the lesson that Jews had learned across the European millennia.

I found the sections on the US Civil War especially interesting. He discusses how "General Ulysses S. Grant ordered the expulsion of all Jews living in his zone of command" (I have to admit that I did not know about this!) and why Jews later supported his presidency despite that.

2️⃣ Xiansheng

Even if you don't speak Japanese, almost everyone knows the word sensei—used to address a teacher or master. What I never realized, however, was that it is written with the same characters used for the Chinese word xiansheng 先生. That is surprising because xiansheng is usually translated as "mister" (Mr.). This essay by Pan Ruotian in Sixth Tone offers an engaging deep dive into the divergent and contested meanings of the word Xiansheng in China, and how the older sense (still used in Japan) has never completely gone away.

The answer lies in the introduction of the English term “Mister” to China by 19th-century traders and missionaries. A general honorific used only for men, early translators struggled with the term, first relying on transliterations like misi. But these failed to catch on, in part because they had little grounding in Chinese culture.

Eventually, English-to-Chinese translators set their sights on xiansheng. Unlike xiaojie, or “Miss,” it was not a particularly good match, but it nevertheless caught on by the 1860s, with many Chinese dictionaries and textbooks adopting xiansheng as the default translation of “Mister.”

Even then, the gendered use of xiansheng was not a given. Soon after the 1911 Xinhai Revolution toppled the Qing, the Chinese revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen called for the replacement of the Qing-era titles daren (“Excellency”) and laoye (“Master”) with new titles for a new China: xiansheng and jun (“Gentleborn”). Although Sun was more concerned with civic responsibility than women’s rights, his proclamation had an interesting side effect: Calling women xiansheng became a way to signal support for gender equality. By 1918, the intellectual and literary editor Liu Zhelu observed that, “The addressing of women as xiansheng has entered common usage with the establishment of the Republic of China.”

3️⃣ Beyond The Pleasure Principle

This short story by Hari Kunzru, set in Vienna, reminds me of Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, one of my favorite authors.

The second and more startling difference lies in the composition of the icing sugar which dusts the outside. It coats the fingers of the eater and presents the palate with an unusual bittersweet taste, for in the Cafe Czerny, unlike the Buchteln served elsewhere in Vienna, this sugar is mixed with an extremely high percentage of pharmaceutical cocaine.

So far, in our travels around Vienna this summer, we have not found any pastries dusted in cocaine ... but the sugar is more than enough for us!

Endnote

Apologies. This was supposed to be my second post for August, but it is already September 1st! I will do my best to get back on schedule…

❤️ Enjoying Triptych? Let your friends know! Encourage them to sign up via the Triptych website.

💬 Or maybe you'd consider writing a short endorsement for the "kudos" page? You can just email it to me, or fill out this Google form.

💰 Last, but not least, you can also show your appreciation by becoming a sponsor. A big shout-out to my current paid subscribers, whose contributions keep this place running — and help keep me motivated.

Thank you!