‘Wandering Who?’ Reading Group
Sunday, February 12, 2012 at 9:54PM Gilad Atzmon by Francis Clark-Lowes
On 7th February 2012 Ben Mullins, Brenda Brown, Francis Clark-Lowes, Penny and Jim Porter and Valerie Phillips (Phil) gathered in Brighton, UK, to discuss the Foreword and Chapter 1 of The Wandering Who? (Winchester and Washington DC, Zero Books, 2011).
According to your point of view, this work is either ‘a fascinating and provocative book on Jewish identity in the modern world’ (John J. Meersheimer, review quoted at the beginning of the book) or ‘On Jewish identity Atzmon has nothing new to say’ (Tony Greenstein)
Before we started to look at the book, we had a discussion about how our meetings would be organised and what our purpose would be. There was some difference between those who simply wanted to study the text and those who believed our aim should be to draw conclusions about campaigning. We resolved this by agreeing that everyone should take what they wanted from the meetings, but that our focus should initially be on the ideas expressed in the book.
We will be meeting monthly for a year, looking at a couple of sections of the text each time, facilitated in rotation by one of the group. Participants are asked to read the relevant chapters for the next meeting in advance, so that we can concentrate on a couple of key elements at the meetings without them being taken out of context.
This time we started on the phrase: ‘… tribalism can never live in peace with humanism and universalism’ (p. 1). There was some discomfort with this polarity, dualism, dichotomy or whatever else you might call it. Are universalism and humanism as identities entirely credible, and is tribalism necessarily a bad thing? Phil had spent some time in Namibia where she had seen the beneficial side of tribalism. Indeed we wondered if Jewish tribalism was necessarily a problem? We would be returning to this subject as it was clearly central to Atzmon’s view of the world.
