My Amazon Review of Shlomo Avineri's "Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution"

A False Prophet

Hebrew University political scientist Shlomo Avineri has written a sympathetic biography of Karl Marx under the auspices of the Yale University Press’ Jewish Lives series. Although Marx came from a family of Rabbi’s, he was not Jewish. His father converted to enjoy the benefits of post-Napoleonic Prussia.

Instead of portraying Marx like his all too many dogmatic disciples, Avineri’s Marx is not of the one size fits all school. Hence in witnessing the advances in democracy in England and later on the continent his Marx become more open to realizing his working class dreams through the ballot box rather than revolution. Hence he learned from the failures of the 1848 revolutions and contrary to Engels’ later writings, he was critical of the Paris Commune. Further he was very ambivalent about the prospects for revolution in Russia, Indeed aside from 1848-49 Marx never directly participated in revolutionary activity; his role was to be theorist studying the inner workings of the capitalist system.

He rarely discussed Jews and Judaism. Early on in 1844 he associated Judaism with the worship of money in a typical anti-Semitic trope. Nevertheless in 1854 in his dispatches on the Crimean War to the New York Tribune he noted that Jerusalem was majority Jewish. This was 40 years before the establishment of Zionism as a political force.

For someone so focused on the working class Marx never lived among, worked with or studied directly real factory workers. He got his insights from the works of Engels and book learning. In a very real sense he was someone who loved humanity, but didn’t really like individual people; not too different from many liberals today.

What Avineri doesn’t touch on is that fact that in order to equalize society, the state doesn’t wither away, but rather it requires brute dictatorial force to keep people equal. Nevertheless for those readers interested in a short biography of Marx Avineri has offered up a very readable book.    

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/REBLW2QXDDEDG/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of David Thompson's " Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio"

From Youngstown, Ohio to Hollywood

David Thompson knows how to write. He has written a very entertaining book about four Jewish immigrant brothers from Youngstown, Ohio who make it in Hollywood and America. The book is a fitting edition to Yale’s Jewish Lives series, despite it being a biography of a movie studio rather than an individual.

As with most of the early movie studios Warner Brothers evolves from operating theaters to running a major studio in Hollywood. Along the way we witness the sibling rivalry among the bothers mostly pitting the oldest, Harry against the youngest, Jack. Harry stays true to his religion and his wife, not so much for Jack. Ultimately Jack wins and sells the company out from the other brothers in the 1950s and then buys it back to become its sole owner.  Harry dies of a stroke shortly thereafter.

The real guts of the book is how Warner’s evolved from making Rin Tin Tin movies in the early 1920s, to pioneering sound with Al Jolson’s “Jazz Singer.” From there we go on to the realistic gangster movies that brought us such stars as Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney. Warner’s also brings us the great Busby Berkeley song and dance spectaculars. In “Gold Diggers of 1933” Joan Blondell sings one of the two great anthems of the 1930’s, “My Forgotten Man.” The other anthem was “Brother Can You Spare a Dime.”   So if you add to the gangster movies, “Gold Diggers”, “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang,” and “Petrified Forest” you get a real flavor of America in the 1930s. Because this is in the Jewish Lives series Thompson highlights the rolls of such Jewish actors as Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni, Peter Lorre and Lauren Bacall.

Of course no book on Warner Brothers would be complete without a full discussion of “Casablanca,” the best movie ever made that starred Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and was directed by the Hungarian Jew Michael Curtiz. In a few short pages he takes us into the inside of making that movie.

There is much more in book with vignettes on Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Howard
Hawkes and Joan Crawford. My one minor quibble with the book is that Thompson throws in a few gratuitous comments about Donald Trump. Nevertheless it is a very enjoyable read. 

The full Amazon URL appears at:  https://www.amazon.com/review/R1N1JF0CJ3Z8TX/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv