My Amazon Review of Joshua Cohen's "The Netanyahus:....................."

 

A Snarky and Humorous Look at the Netanyahus

 

Joshua Cohen has written a snarky and humorous book of speculative fiction about Benzion Netanyahu’s job interview at the fictional Corbin College in western New York during the winter of 1959-60. One of the buildings at the college is called Fredonia Hall. True there a town in New York called Fredonia, but I believe the real reference to Fredonia, the mythical country in the 1933 Marx Brothers movie “Duck Soup.” The book is patterned after his real-life visit to Cornell where he was hosted by Harold Bloom. Netanyahu brings his whole family with him including is wife and three kids, one of whom is his son Binyamin.

 

Much of the book has to do with his host, economic historian Ruben Blum, his family, and his identity as the only Jewish faculty member. Because he is Jewish, he is chosen to host Netanyahu who is an expert on inquisition Spain, a subject Blum knows little. Blum comes from the family of an East European garment cutter, while his wife Edith comes from a German-Jewish family of a small factory owner. The conflicts are obvious and their teen aged daughter pines for a nose job. Here we have all kinds of identity issues rapped up into one family.

 

The Netanyahus overwhelm the Blums wreaking havoc with their home and breaking their color TV, an anachronism here because in 1960 there were very few assistant professors who owned a color TV. Color television did not become a mass consumer product until 1964. In another anachronism he has Blum’s former employer CUNY, which was not formed until 1961. Further, Ruben condescends to call the Netanyahu family the “Yahus.”

 

The book is serious when it discusses Netanyahu’s thesis that antisemitism in inquisition Spain was racialized. It did not matter whether or not a Jew converted to Catholicism, it was their blood that kept them from being true Christians. Hitler would adopt a similar view 450 years later and to me that was reinforced when I visited an exhibition on converso Spain at the New Mexico Museum. Thus, if Judaism was racialized the only solution for Jews was to have a state of their own.

 

I sense that Cohen really does not understand the Revisionist Zionist philosophy of Benzion Netanyahu. I did learn that Netanyahu was Jabotinsky’s, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, man in the United States until he died in 1940. Several years ago, I reviewed Hillel Halkin’s biography of Jabotinsky. ( See:  Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Hillel Halkin's "Jabotinsky (Jewish Lives)   There I learned that Jabotinsky and Netanyahu by implication understood that 1) there would be an inherent conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, 2) Nazism was going to destroy European Jewry and 3) the Labor-Zionist socialist model was not going to work in Israel. Simply put Jabotinsky and Netanyahu were clear-eyed realists. I wish Cohen grasped that fact.

 

Nevertheless, when you get beyond the issues I have raised, I believe the reader will learn much from the issues concerning the role of Jews in America, especially in a very non-Jewish community and will enjoy the comedic touches throughout the book.

For the Amazon URL see: A snarky and Humorous Look at the Netanyahus (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of David Pietrusza's "1920: The Year of Six Presidents"

 

A Rocky Road to Normalcy

 

1920 was quite a year. The 18^th Amendment (prohibition) was enforced, the 19^th Amendment was ratified (Women’s Suffrage), the Palmer raids against radicals continued, the Ku Klux Klan was revived, Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested for murder, and the North discovered there was a large African American population living in its major cities as a result of the wartime demand for labor. Into this hothouse comes the 1920 presidential election.

 

Author David Pietrusza highlights the role of six presidents who played key roles in that year’s election. First there is Theodore Roosevelt who in late 1918 after Republican congressional victories became the odds-on favorite for the nomination. Unfortunately, he dies in early 1919 and his chosen successor General Leonard Wood fails to win the Republican nomination. Then there is President Woodrow Wilson who was ready to run for an unprecedented third term but was incapacitated by a stroke that enabled his wife Edith to become the de facto president. We see young and charismatic Franklin Roosevelt advancing to become the Democratic nominee for Vice President. Before that he was talked about running for Vice President under Herbert Hoover on the Democratic ticket.

 

Of course, Hoover would ultimately acknowledge that he was a Republican. Hoover was extraordinarily popular in his role to feed famine struck Europe and even Keynes noted that Hoover was one of the few people who came out of the Versailles Conference with an enhanced reputation.

 

On the Republican side we see the very amiable and very flawed Warren Harding win the nomination under the aegis of his corrupt campaign manager Harry Dougherty. Harding’s affairs and illegitimate children would have made Bill Clinton blush. In a multi-ballot affair, the Republican leadership settles on Harding in the famous Room 404 of the Blackstone Hotel which forever after would be called the smoke-filled room. When a delegate from Oregon nominates Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge for Vice President a genuine stampede on the floor of the convention leads to his nomination. Coolidge is known for breaking the Boston police strike in 1919.

 

The Democratic Convention is also a multi-ballot affair that leads to the nomination of Ohio governor James Cox, a favorite of the big city bosses. Unlike the Republican Convention the Democratic bosses left no tracks. Ironically both Harding and Cox are newspaper publishers from the same state. Nevertheless, the decision of the voter in November was clear. Both Harding and the Republicans in congress won a blowout victory. One of Harding’s first acts is to pardon Socialist candidate Eugene Debs who was serving in prison, an act that Wilson refused to do.

 

Where Pietrusza is acute is his character sketches of the book’s major protagonists. Wilson is a stubborn old man, Harding is in way over his head, Hoover, though brilliant is cold and austere and Coolidge, though quiet is a dedicated public servant. This book is a great read for political junkies. I learned that the Republicans put a mild anti-lynching plank written by the NAACP and that the seeds for Roosevelt’s 1932 run were planted in 1920 where he collected the names of leading Democrats throughout the country during his vice-presidential campaign.

For the full Amazon URL see: A Rocky Road to Normalcy (amazon.com)

Too Complacent about Inflation

Over the past two months both the stock and bond markets have become far too complacent about the prospects for inflation. Indeed, after the Fed announced that it was talking about tapering, bond prices rallied sending the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield below 1.5%, well off from its 1.74% high. After the break in lumber, iron ore and copper prices the market has bought in hook-line and sinker to the Fed’s view that the recent uptick in inflation is transitory.

 

In my view the markets are way too complacent. Why? There are two long term and very sticky factors that will keep inflation well above 3% over the next few years. The first factor is that the reported owners’ equivalent rent component of the consumer price index increased at a very modest 2.1% from May 2020 to May 2021. However, in the real world according to CoreLogic single family home rents increased by 5.3% over the same time period. Thus, the official CPI has lots of catching up to do.

 

Second, although average hourly earnings for nonsupervisory workers increased at a modest 3.4% annual rate from December 2020 to May 2021, if you look under the hood wage gains are far from modest. For example, over the same time period the annual rate increase for manufacturing wages was 11.5%, leisure and hospitality 13.2%, construction 5.2%, professional services 6.4% and the much-maligned retail sector 4.8%. The low topline increase in wages is a result of mix change as lower wage workers reenter the workforce.

 

The market seems to be ignoring these data at its peril. Part of the reason, I believe, is institutional inertia; money managers are reluctant to make an out of consensus bet on inflation, because if they are wrong, it would become a career ending event. As a result, by this Fall much of the transitory factors may well have run their course, but the longer-term inflationary forces will come to the fore to the chagrin of most market participants.

My Amazon Review of Matti Friedman's "Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel"

On the Job Tradecraft

 

Journalist Matti Friedman has written an important book on the adventures of four Israeli spies in the service of pre-state and post-state Israel from early 1948 to mid-1949. At the start Gamliel, Isaac, Havakuk and Yakuba were operating under the orders of the Arab Section of the Palmach, Israel’s special ops force. They were all Mizrahi Jews from the Levant and were fluent in Arabic which enabled them to pass in the Arab section of Haifa and in Beirut. What we witness is a very real example of on-the-job training in spy craft.

 

They were recruited by the Palmach to engage in sabotage, and to gather information on arms movements, Arab militias, and public opinion. They never knew they would be able to return safely and were under the constant threat of exposure. Remember at the outset there was no country to go home to and when the Israeli state was proclaimed it was not clear it would survive the onslaught of the Arab armies.

 

One highlight for me was an attack on Hitler’s yacht which was owned by a Lebanese businessman. It was being refitted as a warship in Beirut harbor. The Beirut team assisted an Israeli frogman whose mission was to blow up the ship in the harbor. Although the yacht did not sink, it was sufficiently damaged to prevent it from becoming a warship.

 

Friedman highlights the Ashkenazi prejudice against Misrahi Jews, a prejudice though less than before, exists to this day. He also highlights the fact the spies realized early on the Palestinian problem was not going to go away.

 

Along the way we get a sense of the boredom and loneliness the spies felt every day which was punctuated by short bursts of intense fear. He also notes that they developed relationships with Arab women. After all they were all in their early 20’s. Friedman has brought his keen journalistic eye into the very early days of Israel’s spy agency, the Mossad. It is well worth the read.

 For the full Amazon URL see: On the Job Tradecraft (amazon.com)

My Appearance on UCLA Panel on the Office Market

 Below is a YouTube of a panel discussion where I was a member on the outlook for the office market presented on the June 2nd UCLA Anderson Forecast.

UCLA Forecast: June 2021 Economic Outlook - YouTube

My Amazon Review of Sean McKeekin's "Stalin's War: A New History of World War II"

 

Stalin Wins

 

Bard College history professor Sean McKeekin has written an interesting revisionist history of World War II. In his view the real winner of the Second World War was Stalin’s Russia even after the horrendous losses it suffered. All of Stalin’s pre-war aims as outlined in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 were achieved and then some. In Europe Stalin ends up with redefining the Finnish, Polish and Romanian borders along with his capture of the three Baltic states. In the East he ends up controlling Manchuria and North Korea. Not bad for a leader who looked at the jaws of defeat in December 1941 with the German army at the gates of Moscow.

 

How did Stalin do it. McKeekin gives great credit to the Soviet-Japan nonaggression pact of May 1940 which avoided a two-front war. It came about, in part, because Hitler never informed Japan of his plan to invade Russia. Had he done so, McKeekin argues that Japan may have moved north into Russia instead of south into the Dutch Indies. I would respectfully disagree because after Russia bloodied Japan’s nose in Manchuria in 1939 and the collapse of Holland and France in 1940, the way was open for Japan to attack the French, British and Dutch possessions in southeast Asia.

 

That said, through the efforts of Soviet spy Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department the Japan-U.S. antagonism was intensified. White was behind the oil sanctions against Japan and the author of the Hull note which signaled which called for a pullout of Japanese forces in Indochina and parts of China. Remember it was Moscow’s goal to have Japan tied down with a war with the United States. Russia got its wish.

 

McKeekin criticizes Britain for not bombing Russia’s Baku oilfields which were supplying 40% of Germany’s oil and the failure of Britain for not coming to the aid of Finland after Russia’s invasion in early 1940. He wanted to see an all-out fight against totalitarianism. But what was Britain, standing alone to do. It could not fight both Hitler and Stalin.

 

McKeekin writes at length about the lend lease aid given to Russia after Hitler’s invasion. He is way too detailed here, but the fact remains Russia received billions of dollars in aid without conditions. To McKeekin lend lease Administrator Harry Hopkins was “objectively” (my word) a Soviet asset. And it was the lend lease aid that came just in time to save Moscow in 1941 and Stalingrad in 1942. Further by 1943, Roosevelt with Hopkins present at the Teheran Conference all but concedes Eastern Europe to Stalin.

 

At the end of the war, we see White influencing the Morgenthau Plan to deindustrialize Germany. That plan gives backbone to the German Army to undertake the Battle of the Bulge. Just after that at the Yalta Conference we see Roosevelt ratifying the Soviet facts on the ground in Eastern Europe.

 

I don’t buy into all of McKeekin’s assertions, but it does make for an interesting book, save for the over-detailing of U.S. lend lease aid to Russia which should have been left for an appendix.

For the full amazon URL see: Stalin Wins (amazon.com)

Its not Easy Being Green

Ten years ago the great Kermit the Frog introduced his classic, "Its not Easy Being Green." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRZ-IxZ46ng) Today's climate warriors face a similar dilemma.  An example of this can be found in today's Wall Street Journal (https://www.wsj.com/articles/solar-powers-land-grab-hits-a-snag-environmentalists-11622816381) where we have a story about Mojave Desert residents opposing an industrial scale solar farm for Facebook on narrow environmental grounds. Hello! If climate change is such an existential threat to the planet why say no to solar power?

This story will be played over and over as so-called environmentalists oppose high voltage transmission lines that will bring electricity from solar and wind farms to the great urban centers, offshore wind farms, the mining of copper, lithium, cobalt and rare earths that are so necessary for electrifying the economy, and the construction of carbon-free compact nuclear power plants. Something has to give and in paving the road to a carbon neutral economy environmentalists are going to have to give up on many of their long held shibboleths. And the Biden Administration is going to have to find a way to fast track their climate projects.