surrealism-art-by-Rene-Magritte
Prof. Sam Lehman-Wilzig Surreal: Israel, the Jews, and the World at Large
The Surrealist movement in art is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. Unfortunately, the rest of the world itself seems to be moving ever more in a surrealist direction – with Israel and world Jewry suffering the brunt.
For starters, a few words about Surrealism. It was initiated by the poet and critic André Breton, who published The Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. Briefly, Surrealism strived to (re)unite conscious and unconscious ways of experiencing the world, by joining dreamlike fantasy with the objective, rational world – offering “an absolute reality, a surreality.” Not a completely novel idea; Freud was already plumbing the mind’s subconscious, a century after Romanticism had become the zeitgeist of 19th-century Europe.
Little did Breton and other surrealists (e.g., Salvatore Dali) know that soon enough Europe and the globe would be engulfed by political “surrealists” – Hitler, Stalin, Mao et al – whose irrational madness would bring calamity upon their nations and the rest of the world. The following few decades towards the end of the 20th century brought some respite from such insanities – but not for long.
One could circle the globe today and find national surrealism on the upswing on almost every continent: North Korean totalitarianism, Russian historical revisionism, American Trumpian… (choose your own adjective), and so on. Let’s focus, though, on what is happening to (and within) Israel and world Jewry.
On Oct. 7, Israel was savagely attacked by true barbarism (we’ll spare the very gory details here, known to anyone reading this). Almost immediately, Israel was accused of being “at fault” for the attack, a completely topsy-turvy way of perceiving the matter. As to the sexual violence perpetrated by the Hamas attackers, news reports kept on using the word “alleged” despite mounting factual evidence of such heinous crimes against humanity. Of course, when Hamas issued the numbers of Gazans “killed,” no such “alleged” terminology was used. The numbers bandied about by the world’s media (including such venerable” ones as The New York Times), were not caveated with the fact that the fatality count included Hamas terrorists (accounting for at least a third, and possibly half, of all such “Gazan deaths”)!
Then the International Court of Justice began to investigate whether Israel was committing genocide – this is when the Hamas Charter explicitly states that genocide of the Jews is its main goal (driving Jews into the sea). All the while, a real genocide was taking place in the Sudan, ironically with an Arab army decimating non-Arab villages – without much (if any) news coverage. And then this week, the International Criminal Court conflated Israel’s leaders with those of Hamas – surrealism at its “apex.”
What’s going on? Anti-Semitism has lots to do with the general surrealistic atmosphere surrounding the Israel-Hamas War, but this is occurring within a much larger surrealistic environment in the world at large. To put it bluntly: a growing number of people are consciously disconnecting themselves from reality. Here are but a few general examples:
Reality TV: Is there a greater oxymoron than “reality television” that is designed to entertain the masses in unreal situations (Big Brother; Survivor)?
Conspiracy Theories: Oswald didn’t assassinate JFK; a “deep state” has been manipulating the American people for decades; Trump won the 2020 election; and so on.
UFOs: Purportedly, aliens landed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1948, but the “Establishment” has been keeping this secret – including numerous other “sightings.”
Fake News: Distorting propaganda has been with us for a very long time (see: Goebbels and company), but with artificial intelligence able to fake pictures, sounds, and even video with uncanny exactitude, it is now becoming increasingly hard for even the non-surrealistic among us to differentiate the real from the fake. Major politicians jumping on this bandwagon (Trump’s “Stop the Steal!”) have only added fuel to this surreal fire.
Virtual Reality: We ain’t seen nothing yet, compared to what’s coming up the pike. With virtual reality technology, people will be able to escape the physical world into a fantasy life that feels “real” for as long as they wish.
I could go on (and on: marrying avatars! virtually cloning dead loved ones!!), but the picture is clear: the surreal is overwhelming the real. The main remaining question is why.
There are no clear answers. Permit me, though, to offer three related ones.
First, from time immemorial humans have indulged in what can best be described as “virtuality” – creation of the non-real (my book, Virtuality & Humanity, analyzes the phenomenon at length: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-16-6526-4). Much virtuality has (and is) positive, other elements neutral, and some negative – all in the eye of the beholder. A few examples: art is a “distorted” (offbeat) rendition of reality; drugs & alcohol that we have been ingesting for thousands of years in order to alter our state of consciousness; religion (when was the last time you actually saw God or heard the Almighty speak?); even money and economics in general (when did you last sell your goat for a pair of sandals? Or seen that legal entity called a ”corporation” walking around? Indeed, people are increasingly not even using hard cash for economic transactions).
Second, our technological abilities in the past were severely limited. However, as just noted above, the contemporary world offers numerous tools for creating or consuming “false worlds” – whether for our entertainment or for more serious endeavors (e.g., politics).
Third, what’s leveraging these two elements is the accelerating pace of change in the 21st century. The contemporary world is quite different from the one today’s adults grew up in a mere decade or two ago – not merely technologically (AI, robotics), but also socially (e.g., transexuals, polyamory, etc.), economically (e.g., cyber currency), nationally (mass immigration), medically (pandemic), and environmentally (global heating, extreme weather). All this is deeply disconcerting, indeed psychologically threatening to many many people. That’s not surprising given that most human beings are constitutionally conservative at their core. Surrealism (or virtuality, if you will) is a way of escaping all this turmoil.
But why pick on Israel and Jews specifically? Because if one is escaping reality, an (e)scapegoat is needed – and Jews have been the traditional “blameworthy” factor for whatever social ill the Gentile world is worried (and confused) about. Indeed, Jews have always been viewed surreally: too much capitalism in the world? Blame the Rothschilds. Too much socialism? Blame Karl Marx, the Jew. Too much residual “colonialism”? Blame the State of Israel as the embodiment of foreign imperialism.
Reality check? Unfortunately, at present it’s more like reality checkmate….
