New English Review

To My Dearest Readers:

Although Giving Tuesday has passed, someone younger and far cannier than I am suggested to me that I might--nay, that I must--invite my readers to become paid subscribers. But know that I will never make my Substack unavailable to anyone because they simply cannot afford to subscribe to yet another site. I currently have about 3,500 subscribers, of which 61 (or almost 2%) are paid. I would so love to increase this percentage a bit.

I myself have long ago maxed out on the costs of every media site that I feel obliged to read. Some friends stepped in and began subscribing for me to sites such as The London Review of Books, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times (the digital version only), The Atlantic, etc., plus a lot more.

Do you know that I once marched for Angela Davis when she was imprisoned in the Woman’s House of Detention in 1971 in New York City? Along with others of my generation, I, too, was foolishly besotted with glamorized killers such as Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Assata Shakur. I actually thought they were brave revolutionaries, resisting fascism and racism. (Sound familiar again?)

I was wrong, wrong, wrong. Angela was guilty of having provided a gun to Jonathan Jackson, whose brother, George, was one of the jailed Soledad Brothers. The details are a bit hazy now, but George and two other prisoners were trying to break out of San Quentin, and in the melee, three guards and two inmates were killed, and Jonathan was killed in the courtroom as he attempted to break his brother out. Someone shot the judge. At the time, left-wingers and feminists viewed Angela as falsely imprisoned just because she was a black woman, a Marxist (which she definitely was), something of a feminist (which, as it turns out, was not exactly true), sported a trendy Afro, and did not really “know” that Jonathan would shoot up the courtroom with her gun. A jury found her innocent.

Since then, Davis has become a prominent player in the anti-Israel BDS movement and has been lionized many times over for this and other political postures.

As I’ve written, I was wrong, wrong, wrong--and yet, please understand that the struggle for black/African-American rights was, once again, in full and righteous and non-violent swing; the FBI had just shot a very young Fred Hampton in his bed, because he was seen as a dangerous revolutionary, a socialist and a Black Nationalist. After all, we had just experienced the decade in which Malcolm X, JFK, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. (No, we did not know that Malcolm had been killed by members of the Nation of Islam for his increasingly “progressive” views, and we did not connect it with Robert Kennedy’s assassination by a Christian “Palestinian,” Sirhan Sirhan, because of Kennedy’s pro-Israel views and actions.)

America’s history of slavery was and is abominable. The eras of Reconstruction and Jim Crow continued on--a terrible legacy as well. The matter of the extermination of Native American Indians remains unresolved even though it is increasingly memorialized.

There’s little point in my pointing out that 90% of our ancestors, certainly mine, were not here back in the day. Christian immigrants came from all over Europe for better lives. My own ancestors were scrambling for their lives in Europe (Italy, Ireland, England, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Austria, and in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Ukraine), in hellholes from which Jews had been forced to flee for their lives. America’s immigrants also came from the Jewish Arab world and Jewish Central Asia. But the take-away point is that very few of America’s 18th, 19th, and 20th century immigrants were Muslims. Most were Christians and Jewish. Make of this what you will.

And yet, and yet, feminists who’d been on the left and involved in the 1960’s civil rights struggle on behalf of African Americans/against racism found that the “movement” treated them all as “white girls,” mainly good for typing, getting coffee, and for bedding. We adopted the title of Robert Grave’s 1929 autobiography, some perhaps stole it, as our own. We said: Goodbye to All That.... The earlier Black Panther version of Black Lives Matter (BLM) also had criminals, psychopaths, killers, scoundrels, and misogynists, but it was not the same as today’s versions of BLM. Or was it?

This lived history all came flooding back to me last night as I watched the musically rather wonderful biopic about Aretha Franklin. Franklin’s soul music provided the soundtrack to my generation’s version of “revolutionary” idealism. Jennifer Hudson is terrific as Aretha (known to her family as Ri or Ri-Ri). Oh, do see it, mainly for the music but also for the great acting by Forrest Whitaker (as her Reverend father), Audra MacDonald (as her mother) and Marc Maron as Jerry Wexler, one of the many Jewish producers who supported black singers and musicians.

Moving along: I am very far behind in reading and reviewing very important books. Please allow me to recommend some titles anyway: Dr. Kenneth Levin’s The Canary on the Couch, Ben Kerstein’s Self Defense: A Jewish Manifesto, Dr. Rafael Medoff’s The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews, Jonathan Leaf’s The Primate Myth: Why the Latest Science Leads Us to a New Theory of Human Nature, and a book from long ago, whose wonderfully politically incorrect work I failed to review--Bruce Gilley’s The Case For Colonialism. Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me does not require my review, and it is one sensational piece of writing about a powerful and powerfully abusive mother and about Roy’s own escape from and wrenching memorialization of that very mother.

Please help support my work by becoming a paid subscriber at Substack. Or donating to my not-for-profit organization through my website. Or, as my colleague and friend Elder of Zion used to say, “Buy Elder a glass of tea.” Thank you, but I’ll have an iced cappuccino with two shots of espresso.