Eastern University Books

I have yet to come across a more thoroughgoing, reasonable, fair, and profound treatment of Strauss' intention as a thinker and founder of a school of thought. Whether treating of his relation to the neo-cons (or implicitly tackling Drury), or of the scope, manner, and mode of his philosophizing, Meier elucidates Strauss' political philosophy in such a manner that the individuality and "originality" of Strauss can be seen as nothing more than a wonderfuly lucky gift to those who can benefit from his work for the sake of going beyond both their historical horizons and that which is merely "Straussian."

Best of all, though, are the previously unpublished lectures given by Strauss at the end of Meier's book. Reason and Revelation, at least for me, is enormously helpful for working out the conflict between the two insofar as Strauss therein silently provides exceedingly useful escape routes. [close]

A volume such as this is long overdue and welcome to those of us who feel near to Buber and Levinas. In the introduction, the editors announce the intent of the volume as "not to assimilate their respective views to each other, but to point out their differences - differences that both Levinas and Buber agreed were required to begin." (2) While the question of rapprochement is always in the not too distant background, this work eminently achieves its intentions, even in those essays that modestly gesture toward rapprochement.

As I read, I was struck by the pathos, the energy produced in drawing Levinas and Buber into proximity. In each essay, one feels the preference of each contributor, a nearness beyond intellectual specificity, a proximity that resembles filial obligation. Levinas and Buber inspire commitment in us. The import of their excurses reach through yet beyond formal questions to the vitality of flesh and breath. In reading I found myself drawn into this drama. Thus, my own filiality might be manifest in this review.

The book is organized into four parts. Part one, "Dialogue," presents a short essay by Buber entitled, "Samuel and Agag," and an essay by Levinas, "On Buber," responding to it. These selections are well made in that the "little disagreement" they illustrate is enceinte, in all the multivalence of the term, signaling the divergent trajectories each take in their respective accounts of inter-subjectivity.
Part two, "Ethics," queries the differences and similarities in Levinas's and Buber's ethical thinking. Stephan Strasser's "Buber and Levinas: Philosophical Reflections on an Opposition" delicately traces the philosophical tensions that emerge in their proximity. As he critically presents both thinkers, he allows the oppositions to meet without, admirably, seeking to resolve them. Robert Bernasconi, in "`Failure of Communication' as Surplus: Dialogue and Lack of Dialogue between Buber and Levinas," brings Levinas and Buber into a contact that allows their respective insights to operate without utterly assimilating one to the other. I recognized, however, that this contact has a quintessentially Levinasian flavor. In my view, Bernasconi models the most viable strategy for a rapprochement between them. Andrew Tallon's essay, "Affection and the Transcendental Dialogical Personalism of Buber and Levinas," seeks to invite Levinas into Tallon's own Buberesque project. This essay is especially intriguing to those of us interested in pre-deconstructive phenomenological analysis and the situatedness of these thinkers with respect to tradition. Neve Gordon in "Ethics and the Place of the Other," and Maurice Friedman in "Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas: An Ethical Query," are refreshing in their forthright criticisms of Levinas. Gordon convincingly suggests that Levinas's ethical inter-subjectivity cannot be teased out of, or integrated within, the I-Thou without damaging Buber's central theses.
Part three, "Religion," discusses Buber's and Levinas's embeddness in the Jewish tradition and their different locations within this locale. These essays are especially interesting. The authors seem more comfortable with the tensions produced in the dialogue. They imply, it seems to me, that the tautness between communion and concern for justice, evolution and tradition, consolation and responsibility, reciprocity and height, may be necessary for religion to authentically operate. The tension is none other than that space familiar to us, that space where the pastoral and prophetic meet (or perhaps we might say the dialogical and the ethical). Ephraim Meir, in "Buber's and Levinas's Attitudes toward Judaism" masterfully presents these differences, such that I was touched by the vitality. He is valiantly even-handed though he hints at a Levinasian leaning. Michael Fagenblat and Nathan Wolski, in "Revelation Here and Beyond: Buber and Levinas on the Bible," tackle the problematic of revelation in Levinas and Buber. Robert Gibbs's "Reading Torah: The Discontinuity of Tradition," presents Buber's and Levinas's respective approaches to the reading of the Torah with special attention to the (non) mediation of tradition. Tamra Wright, in "Beyond The `Eclipse of God': The Shoah in the Jewish though of Buber and Levinas," compares their different trajectories in the wake of the Holocaust. The one exception to the aforementioned comfort is Andrew Kelley's essay, "Reciprocity and the Height of God: A Defense of Buber against Levinas." Kelly's "defense" is unconvincing as I will show below.
In Part four, "Heidegger, Humanism, and the Other Animal," the culminating essays draw Levinas and Buber into current debates on these issues. Richard Cohen's important essay, "Buber and Levinas - and Heidegger," traces Buber's and Levinas's respective relation to Heideggerian ontology. Cohen successfully discloses how this relation structures their own meeting. Matthew Calarco, in "The Retrieval of Humanism in Buber and Levinas," convincingly argues that Levinas, passing through yet beyond Buber, provides a pregnant site from which to address the contemporary problematic of humanism. Peter Atterton's essay, "Face-to-Face with the Other Animal," is an interesting attempt to extend Levinas's thought beyond its explicit specifications, integrating Buber's concern for a non-human I-Thou relation. Passionately argued in the best sense, Atterton highlights an ambiguity in the application of Levinas's thought. Though he raises some complex questions, unfortunately, he may only be convincing to those who share his sentiments. Atterton confronts Levinas's (alleged) anthropocentrism with his own, implicit, anthropocentrism (or more precisely, anthropomorphisms).

The Promethean thread strung throughout this volume suggests that the questions of reciprocity and formalism posed to Buber by Levinas are the decisive points of contention. The essays that most decidedly side with Buber suggest that these criticisms are not well founded when giving Buber a close reading. Gordon, Friedman, and Kelley aim at answering Levinas's challenge on these grounds while critiquing his positions. Gordon (elsewhere) writes, "I believe that it is more becoming to begin reading Buber's ideas without assimilating him to Levinas" (119). While this may be so, it may be equally "becoming" to read Levinas in the same vein. For example, Friedman writes: "Levinas's...most insistent critiques of Buber's philosophy are tied up with his own assertion that the relation to the Other must be asymmetrical, and correspondingly, I must place the Other at a height above me..." (119). Kelley makes similar moves when he writes: "For Levinas, there is something about the other - the person opposite - that I cannot grasp" (227). These simple statements, meant to convey Levinas's position in relation to Buber, betray an ignorance of Levinas's point and the implications of his challenge. While it is true that the question of asymmetry and alterity are decisive, Friedman and Kelley seem to miss why they are decisive. In other words, the other is not placed at a height by the I, but is always already a height, and as such, the other person is never initially "the person opposite." I want to dwell on the why of these criticisms because I do not believe the above are mere `slips of the pen,' but expressions of a deep fissure irrupting between Buber and Levinas.
Cohen's essay explicitly draws out the why behind Levinas's criticisms of Buber, a why not adequately addressed by Gordon, Friedman or Kelley: what has priority, ontology or ethics? Cohen writes, "Buber's critique of Heidegger is not based on a critique of ontology as such, but rather on a different version of ontology" (241). This is Levinas's qualm with Buber and the reason he raises questions of reciprocity and height. As such, no amount of amendments or qualifications to Buber's ideas can ameliorate the tension; it resembles analytic opposition. The question is not: can ontology (in this case Buber's) have an ethics? The Levinasian question is more basic: is Being adequate to Goodness? For Levinas, the answer is no and if one answers in the affirmative one must philosophically and ethically account for the horrors of human history, one must become an apologist for Being. As our contemporary milieu demonstrates, nihilism and fanaticism seem preferable to such an apology, or perhaps, proceed from it.

Numerous statements throughout specific essays, as the examples above hint, miss this basic point. Tallon's essay attempts to extend Buber's insights while "...comparing and contrasting...by circling several times..." the challenge of Levinas (49). Tallon constructs epistemological categories in seeking to make Buber's ontology more rigorous. While he is successful at integrating some of Levinas's broad concerns in his dialogical perspective, his recourse to "co-constitution," "broadened intentionality," "intimate co-presence," and the construction of a "dialogical transcendental," would draw ethics back into ontology, rendering it derivative. Kelley writes elucidating the I-Thou: "I allow the other person to be who he or she is. It is in this way that speaking...does not destroy the height of the other" (230). And: "The word `Thou' merely indicates the initiative on the part of an I of turning toward and addressing that which confronts the I" (232). It is hard to see how the relation is not determined by the I's own comportment, that is, the I determines the relation in "allowing," in its "turning toward," the other to "be who he or she is." Being is still the underlining term. It seems to require sheer heroism to keep the "-" from subsuming the "I" and "Thou." The issue is not that we should not efface the other's height, but that we absolutely and utterly can not. The height of the other is inviolable, and this is precisely what traces the rupture of Being by ethics. Kelley, and Friedman quoted above, already presuppose reciprocity. Such a position already reduces the "ungraspable alterity" to a derivative status, (i.e. the other is different from me) setting the relation into an economy, the play of polarities, and so on. For Levinas, the other's height marks a (pre) originary alterity, an alterity before all presence and reciprocity. Before any question of economy or reciprocity can be raised, the command-the height of the other-elects the subject to an infinite responsibility. In ethics, the I is elected to an orientation before any choice of how and whether I comport myself in such and such a manner.
I do not wish to be uncharitable in these criticisms. Yet in order "not to assimilate their respective views to each other, but to point out their differences - differences that both Levinas and Buber agreed were required to begin," (2) the question of the priority of ethics to being must be addressed. If it were a question of assimilation, it seems to me that Levinas would fare far worse in that he essentially evaporates in Buber, as ethics always does when subordinate to an ontological relation. Buber fares better than Levinas, in that Levinas ruptures the process of assimilation as such. Buber's deep insights can operate in Levinas's orbit without being obliterated. It would be interesting and important to elaborate what Buberian intimacy would look like while taking Levinas's criticisms seriously, that is, while maintaining the primacy of ethics over ontology. For instance, what would "communion" mean when it no longer means diffusement in a totality? I'm not sure that Levinas's descriptions in his phenomenology of eros are exhaustive, or even, perhaps, adequate. For instance, what happens in an intimate and personal friendship taking the priority of ethics seriously?

As I intimated earlier, Gordon convincingly suggests that Levinas's ethical inter-subjectivity can not be teased out of, or integrated within, the I-Thou without damaging Buber's central theses. In that these theses assume an ontological basis he is absolutely correct. It must be stressed that the issue is not Buber's "nominal" use of the language of Being, but rather, that the very structure of inter-subjectivity he elaborates requires Being, and in such a way that can allow the I its hegemony. Bernasconi successfully argues that it is not the case that Levinas "fails" to give Buber a close reading. Given the basic opposition in their founding orientation, Levinas is as charitable as he can be in his evaluation of Buber. At the close of his fine essay, Bernasconi writes: "For our model of dialogue should also recognize the alterity of the other which shows itself in `the restlessness of the same disturbed by the other'...and in the failure to communicate" (97). To modify my opening comments, this exhilarating volume repeats previous communicative failures, in that the dialogue is yet to adequately address the question of priority between ethics and ontology. As things stand, the dialogue can not help but fail, unless Buber's concerns are elaborated on an ethical rather than ontological basis. So the failure of this book is precisely its success, in that the challenge is now more explicitly and directly presented. With Bernasconi and Cohen, we must admit Buber's ontological rather than ethical bias, that is, the very structure of Buber's intersubjectivity is at issue and no amount of qualifications really address Levinas's basic challenge. The task, it seems, is to set ourselves to articulate what the intimacy of the I-Thou would look like on an ethical rather than ontological basis.

A quick note on form: though the cover art leaves something to be desired, the publisher is to be commended for the attractive and reader friendly layout and font selection. The substantive index will be welcome to students and researchers. Taking into account the few critical exceptions noted, this volume is, I think, an eminent success. As I intimated earlier, reading Levinas and Buber in close proximity generates pathos. The essays in this book are sure to inform and inspire, even those that offer perspectives one rejects. This volume will no doubt set off some intense dialogue as we continue to engage these questions.

John Israel has done an incredible job in collecting materials about this university. It's especially impressive because the university was formed during the Anti-Japanese war, a lot of original materials were destroyed. He gives a detailed, analytical description of the National Southwest Associated University which is unique in human history. He also introduces the reader to the best professors available in China during this time and the patriotism of the students. As a professional historian, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Chinese higher-education.

NEVER AGAIN! I haven't been so moved about fascism and Nazism since visiting the national holocaust museum in Washington DC several years ago. This little book tells the story of one town in Poland and how it was impacted by World War 2. One of the things that makes this book so compelling is that it is about the town that Fresno's very own Ellie Bluestein's family came from.

We learn about life before and after the Nazis invade Strzegowo by hearing from the survivors. Their stories give a glimpse into what life was like and how the Jewish community reacted as life was forever changed for everyone in that town. Today, there are no Jews in Strzegowo. All but a handful were killed by Hitler's "final solution" and those who survived did not return. It is hard to imagine the atrocities committed by the German fascists but this book takes you one step at a time through that period of history.

All of the Jews were sens to the death camps were not sent at once. There was a long process that included making them virtual slaves for the ethnic German population in Strzegowo, establishing ghettos where they were forced to live, and executions for offences like possessing a loaf of bread. The brutalization continued for years until most of the population was shipped by train to Auschwitz. There, one of the young men was forced to work piling bodies into the ovens. The experience was worse than death itself and he decided to voluntarily join the line to the gas chambers. These images are hard to imagine but impossible to forget.

Gene Bluestein has produced a testimonial that I will always remember.

Review by:

Mike Rhodes Editor Labor/Community Alliance Newsletter P.O. Box 5077 Fresno Ca 93755...

There has been a glut of books on Rumi in the past few years, many of them of dubious authenticity or quality; this assessment applies especially to the "free" translations of his poetry which have been such a big hit in the West! I think those poetical translations are not doing justice to the message of Rumi since they are so far removed from many of the original Persian poems.

This book then is a welcome change. It is quite an old book but its republishing is an important event in the world of Rumi studies, in my opinion.

For a start this book, though perfectly accessible to the lay person, is primarily a scholarly endeavour and as such much more concerned about relaying the events of Rumi's life and his message as accurately as possible than in selling copies!

It is unique of all the books I have read on Rumi to date in that it tries to look, in depth, at his early life and how that affected him later when he met Shams Tabrizi and was moved by Divine Love to compose ecstatic poetry.

Thus we have a detailed chapter on the political conditions of the area (Afghanistan) in which he lived; then we have an exposition about his father (who himself was a very famous Muslim scholar and jurisprudent as well as a Sufi) who, as this book shows, had a major influence on Rumi's development and later ideas. We also then are introduced to the other people who influenced Rumi in one way or another, his teachers and his family and friends.

The sections on Rumi's life are detailed too: his life is divided into three sections: his birth, childhood, migration to Konya and early training as an Islamic scholar under his father and other famous teachers; his period following his father's demise as a prominent scholar, and Sufi teacher himself (he was an heir to his father's position); and then the period of his meeting with Shams and afterwards for the remainder of his life. This latter period is also further sub-divided based on his various works and mystical states as evidenced by his poetical output. Most other works on Rumi tend just to concentrate on this last period of his life.

After this the major poetical works of Rumi are discussed in, more or less, chronological order of writing. Thus the Divan-e-Shams-e-Tabrizi, his great collection of ecstatic lyrical poems in praise of Shams is dealt with first followed then by an explanation of his magnus opus, the Masnavi. Then the author discusses Rumi's overall message. The final section looks at sections of the Masnavi which RE Nicholson, in his great translation of the Masnavi, decided to translate into Latin as he believed them (erronously) to be of a pornographic nature. In fact, when one reads the English translations here, one sees that Rumi simply uses examples of human sexual behaviour to underline an important teaching point of Sufism.

For those who are interested in Rumi's message and life in earnest, and not in the suspicious "New-Age" fad which the spurious translations of his works seem to have started (and which he, being a pious Muslim, would no doubt be horrified by!), this book is a must.

Dr. Iqbal needs to be congratulated for trying to bring Rumi's message across as it is!

This is a beautiful if somewhat idealized portrait of Jewish shtetl life. An anthropological study it reads as a series of informal and informative essays that comprise together a collective picture of Eastern European Jewish life before the Shoah. This is a picture of a religious world in which there is great mutual caring, and a sanctification of everyday life. The picture perhaps underplays the conflict and misery of this world, but it does give a strong sense of what a remarkable and holy world the shtetl Jews lived in before this world was destroyed.

Living in Storms: Contemporary Poetry and the Moods of Manic-Depression is an anthology of free-verse poetry collected from eighty contemporary poets who have been affected in some way by manic-depression, also known as bipolar disorder, a devastating condition known for its swings between extreme emotional highs and lows. An acutely vivid and unforgettable glimpse into the difficult world all too often experienced by creative figures. "Portrait Sketch": Women who had never enough / never for long enough- / tenterhooks then happiness / shrilled to hysteria, / lament, dullness- // watches from a distance / rain-bleached sky, lawns' / deepening with gloss- // a surface that returns incidents, / magnetic attractions, characterizations, / desires, her last heart / a midsummer pond / narrowed, glinting within leaves.

An eye opening book. Details how the British ruled the colonial Sudan by helping create and educated, at the Gordon Memorial College (present day University of Khartoum), a technocratic class of lower level clerks and minor civil servants. This literate class collaborated with the Empire in ways that allowed a handful of British bureaucrats to rule the vast area of Sudan. But in many ways there was ambivalence and suspicion of each others motives, and feelings of frustrated ambition on the side of the Sudanese. The British used their own racial and imperial prejudices in selecting Arabic speaking groups and families to draw into this class and excluded Southerners and others they termed "detribalized blacks". In doing so they influencing the class's ideas of itself and their environment, and shaped their very narrow vision of the future post colonial nation. A national vision that proved to be as elitist, statist and unable to incorporate the reality of a diverse and complex Sudan. It is this central lack of vision that lies at the heart of the Sudan's failure to build an inclusive nation. It is a sad commentary that the same elite still sees itself as a conduit for propagating western civilization, in the form of such alien ideologies as "secularism", to an essentially savage nation.

As a product of this class I am amazed to realize just how narrow this class has remained. Again and again I recognized the actors in this book as being the grandparents of my colleges and friends. In the mid-eighties my educated parents convinced me to withdraw from an English university and return to matriculate at The University of Khartoum. It has been one of the most profound decisions I have ever made.

This book attempts to analyze the structure and function of local government at the 'zhou' and 'xian' levels during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). These lowest levels of administration dealt directly with the everyday activities of the people. However, Chu never clearly identifies them beyond referring to them as "department" (zhou) and "district" (xian). 'Zhou' in its modern usage commonly refers to a state or prefecture, however in former times I assume it referred to a sub-prefecture administration (possibly a region consisting of many towns and villiages within a prefecture). 'Xian' can be considered a county (the same as in the modern usage).

To accomplish the goal of the study, Chu poses the following questions:
-What were the actual functions of the local government?
-How were they carried out and by whom?
-Who were the decision-makers?

After beginning with an outline and brief description of local government, the study looks at both the formal (the magistrate, clerks, runners, servants and secretaries) and informal (the gentry)positions within the government (each of these will be discussed below). It then moves on to the different functions of local administration such as justice, taxation, population registration, public works, public welfare, and education.

Chu uses a myrid of resources, such as laws, statutes, administrative codes, correspondence and memoirs written by local officials, biographies, local gazetters, and essays to construct this picture of local government during the Qing. The work is copiously documented with a total of 142 pages of notes and a glossary that contains the Chinese terms used throughout the work.

In discussing the 'zhou' and 'xian' magistrates, Chu points out that these officials, while low in the hierarchy of local officials, played an extremely important role in local administration. Appointed to a region outside their native province (the rule of advoidence), it was the magistrate's responsibiltiy to take care of the day to day administration of the department or district he oversaw. Magistrates consisted of both civil service graduates and/or those that purchased an official title. The latter became more common during and after the rule of the Xianfeng emperor (r. 1851-61).

Chu describes the clerks(shuli) and runners(ya yi) serving under the magistrates as corrupt officials. "All clerks were recruited within the province where they would serve; their situation thus contrasted with that of the magistrate who, as a stranger, was not familiar with the local situation and problems and might not even understand the local dialect. This explains why a magistrate could easily be deceived by the clerks (p.36). Also the clerk's personal contacts within their native province, such as friends and family members, and their access to government files made it all the more easier for them to manipulate and monopolize information. By the time the magistrate discovered these abuses his term was usually coming to an end. The main duties of the clerks involved the preperation and processing of draft documents, routine reports, memorandums, warrents and tax records. Clerks also were responsible for filing these documents. Therefore, clerks were a vital part of the local administration despite the corruption they participated in.

Government runners, those that served the government as messengers, guards, policemen, and other "menial capacities", were just as corrupt as the clerks. Part of the reason Chu asserts is because they also served in their native province or region and were payed very little. However, because the runners constituted an organized force upon which a magistrate could rely on to enforce law and order, they were indispensible in collecting land tax and tribute grain. (for a more positive description of clerks and runners see: Bradly W. Reed's "Talon's and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing dynasty [Law, Society, and Culture in China]", 2000.)

Personal servants, hand picked by the magistrate, acted as a check on the clerk's and runner's inclination toward corruption. Many were former servants of the magistrate or his family. It was believed that since these servants were not natives of the locality in which the magistrate served, they would not easily fall into corrupt practices like the clerks and runners. However, many became just as corrupt.

Private secretaries on the other hand served as a bridge between scholar and official, meaning that they had either failed the civil service exam (which was usually the case) or passed at least the lowest level of the exam and had yet to find or qualify for official employment. They were personally hired and payed by the magistrate to handle administrative matters. Chu refers to them as the "nerve center of the yamen"(p.195). While not government officials, they were considered the equals of the officials (for a brief autobiography of a personal secretary during the Qing dynasty see; "Shen Fu: Six Records of a Floating Life" [1809] trans. 1983).

In his discussion of the gentry, Chu gives a very adequate and lucid description of this informal power group. Acting as social leaders of the community and consisting of both the "official gentry"(those that had passed the civil examination and obtained official employment) and "scholar gentry"(those that had passed the civil examination and had not yet obtained official employment), "they settled disputes, conducted fund-raising campaigns, commanded local defense, and provided other kinds of leadership. The people also expected the gentry to protect them against injustice, to give them relief in time of calamity, and to take an active part in promoting local welfare"(p.175). As Chu states in his concluding remarks, the gentry had no legal or political obligation to protect the people. These acts were primarily based on moral standards and were voluntary.

Chu's study of this lowest level of government in imperial China has long been the starting point for other studies on the subject and is still considered the best introductory work.

LODOZ GHETTO: A HISTORY represents the first English translation of Isiah Trunk's study, originally published in Yiddish in 1962 which describes and explains the first major ghetto imposed by the Germans after they invaded Poland during the war. Lodoz once housed a quarter-million Jews: when the Soviets arrived they found 877 living Jews left. Trunk's purpose was to describe the course of events in the Ghetto: his blend of statistics and historical review is essential for any college-level collection strong in Holocaust studies.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch