Soraya Boyd: courageous, fearless and creative
Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 7:25AM
''Embarked upon an earnest journey of self enquiry. Gilad's need to strike into the very heart of ethics lead him to venture forth in the manner of an artist: courageously, fearlessly, and creatively. With all the lucid acuity of a forensic but compassionate mind, Gilad scrutinises the landscape of the sum total of his life's experience dissecting his knowledge and understanding with great precision. He does not mistake the map for the land. Gilad's achingly rigorous examination of Jewish identity and the perennial conflictual narrative of its religio-body-politic is searingly honest. There is no attempt to get away from anything however uncomfortable, rather to embrace it openly. A remarkable and thought-provoking work replete with profound insights, which will no doubt cause a great deal of discomfort among particular quarters and rightly so. Ought to be mandatory reading." Soraya Boyd, CEO, Facilitate Global
You can now order Gilad Atzmon's New Book on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
Reader Comments (3)
Peace, Gilad. Your music blows me away every time. Your music makes me feel like Trane made me feel when I first heard him, and Bird, The Modern Jazz Quartet, Cannonball Adderly, and a very few others. And I agree with you about the way Bird fought the strings on that orchestral album, but made the tension between the strings and the Ax work its way. Damn, memories--and your great sound brings a lot of it back.
Kind of scary for me, because I was a kid musician hanging out at the afterhours places, it was before the Civil Rights movement, and the afterhour joints were the only integrated room in the country. But the pain was there, and therefore a lot of drugs. For many years I heard the drugs in the music, and laid off jazz completely. But your sound is a lot like that, but you're happening in a different way, and so I've part-way come back to jazz. That's something. Thanks, man.
I think you're trying to fight something off, trying to dissociate from something, the way I did with jazz for about four or five decades. I hear it in the music--yes, even in your music. And I think you're getting somewhere, exactly where I don't know. But I can hear it, and I know you have to do it.
But I have to pull your jacket a little bit on the Jewish thing. I just don't think that all the progressive Jews are all obeying the same impulses, the same dreams and fears. There's a big difference between many of them. In A Jewish Voice for Peace, for example, there are many different people, there are non-Jewish members of the organization, and there are many different attitudes and approaches. So I don't see them as being in the same groove. Yes, they're all reacting to the same nightmare, but aren't we all? We're all headed for the big sleep, and besides I think a lot of us are haunted by the possibility that there may be a religious war. That would give anybody nightmares.
But the differences between the Jews that I know are huge. You can't completely generalize. It would make the thing easier if that was true, but it's not all that true.
And even if Jews are incredibly tribal, who made them that way? Here's where I have to really share something with you, something I feel big-time. It was Christians that made them that way, if that's really the way they are. It was Christianity that chased them down and disrespected them for sixteen centuries. And you know what? That makes Christianity a failed religion, in my book. And I can say that, because I'm a Christian myself.
I still pray, and I love Jesus, but I don't have to think he's God to know he said some good things. And I don't mind disagreeing with him now and then, either. He's my brother and my teacher, but I don't have to believe he's God to know I follow him. And I know damn well that somewhere along the line the Christians went off the line. They jumped on the Empire bandwagon, and it was racism, torture, imperialism and war from then on.
So what I'm saying is this: everything has a cause. If Jews developed some bad habits, isn't it possible that they got them from the people that persecuted them? That's not an excuse, that's an explanation. Think on it, man. And we're still all trying to get over the Holocaust. I've lived in Germany, and I can tell you that the grandchildren of Nazis struggle with the same shit as all of us, the same ghosts that you talk about.
Let's do everything that we can to help the Palestinians survive. Just don't let the Christians off the hook completely. Let's just do everything we can to keep the Palestinians from becoming the next people to perish or be driven crazy by the brutality that comes from not being able to talk to our own goddamn ghosts!
Peace, man. Keep blowin' that horn.
Interesting, thanks so much for your kind words..
I am opposing Jewish power, Jewish identity politics, and Jewish lobbying, however, I do not have any doubt that many of the Jews who support Pls are actually incredible people... and as you may know, many of my supporters are actually Jewish ..
Peace to you..
You know, its probably a bit heretical to say, but I dont wonder if a lot of those pogrom stories were just made up or at least embellished. The nurturing of a "victim" identity is most probably nothing new. It is the victim identity that causes some Jewish people to side with minority groups, they have been reared on stories of their persecution and thus do anything to subvert the majority culture which they feel is against them. Ironically, by doing so, they cause the very anti semitism they fear. You can't say G-d doesn't have a sense of humour.
Its as though Jewish people have to pretend that they are some kind of misunderstood puritan usurers, pious worshipers driven from country to country by cruel Christians and others. Lets face it, the Jewish people are a carnival people! When they roll into your country, they bring a wild mix of music, politics, philosophy, food, perverse sexuality and our old friend usury. Usury is all about money, and with money you have gambling, whores, liquor, debt, entertainment, cabaret, and of course people to enforce the debt. This is no doubt the business end, the wild mafia like decadence that drove cuba into the ground, the weimar into the ground and in fact any culture where the love of pleasure overcomes the need to restrict human sexuality.
May as well be honest about your own culture. Because if we are not, our culture turns into a weapon that we use against others.