The entrance hall to The Guardian building in Kings Place, York Way, London, is housing an exhibition until Feb. 23 on Masada and the birth of a nation. It's curated by Robin Christian, and a link to the exhibition can be found here. It's actually a 50th anniversary of a report and exhibition The Observer held in 1963.
Having had a brief look, on my way to a concert next door, it looks absolutely straight reporting on the Yigal Yadin excavations from 1962 onwards. Mind you, the accompanying descriptive sheet is written by Martin Bright, former political editor of the Jewish Chronicle, so perhaps this is less surprising that my usual cynicism towards the Guardian might normally expect.
Then again, this is all about Masada and not modern Israel, so perhaps a straightforward account can be given (my cynicism is creeping back in). In this latter context, Bright's last paragraph is instructive: "For Josephus [the main source for our modern knowledge of the siege of Masada], the Secarii were the ultimate political extremists, who did the cause of the Jewish people nothing but harm. But the historian is not a dispassionate observer. He himself had been a rebel leader who was captured and 'turned' by the Romans. He became their greatest propagandist. For him, the Jewish War proved that God was on Rome's side and he rewarded for his loyalty with wealth and property."
Note the words "not a dispassionate observer": could we apply this self-same phrase to so many The Guardian's writers and reporters? Especially when Bright goes on the conclude "Josephus puts into the mouth of Josephus the bleakest of conclusions: 'From the very first, when we were bent on claiming our freedom but suffered such constant misery at each other's hands and worse at the enemy', we ought perhaps to have read the mind of God and realised that His once beloved Jewish race had been sentenced to extinction.'"
My cynicism is back in full force: this could almost be the watchword for the BDS campaign, couldn't it?
Update: a call from the Guardian says that it might run until the end of February, which means it will just about overlap with Jewish Book Week, being held next door, in the Kings Place chamber music centre. So, anyone in or close to London, get along and see what you think.
By Brian Goldfarb.
1 hour ago
10 comments:
You bird lovers. Pshaw. The rest of us find it hard to get off on bird pictures.
I still prefer the simple statement of the photograph of Israeli F-15s in formation over the death camp. One picture=one thousand words. Or more.
Plays it straight? Naw.
I agree, there is an art to getting off on bird pics ;-)
Yes, that was one of a kind.
For a very short stretch.
I dont think I want to know...
Well, at least they didn't go off on Yadin.
Thank you Snoopy, that was a great, moving article that reminds us of all the usually unknown so-called little or normal people, like the engineers, that were involved in making Auschwitz and the other death camps, the all too effective mass murdering death factories that they were.
Dedication
"We never knew how just was our cause until we entered the rotten interior of Germany and beheld for the first time the unbelievable results of Nazi greed and cruelty - the shallow, quick like graves - the feeble thanks and tears of joy of the emaciated walking dead - the slave laborers, who were former free men in Europe - miserable wretches who plight might well have been the lot of our own loved ones had we not succeeded.
May this history, then, be dedicated to those who died inconspicuously, but not in vain, that freedom might
live."
-- From the combat history of the 137 US Infantry Regiment, Kansas National Guard, 35th US Infantry Division.
That's actually by Brian, but you are welcome, David.
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