Eli Zaretsky

To understand Walter Benjamin’s life, it is best to begin with his death. Attempting to flee Nazi-occupied France, he died by suicide on 26 September 1940, in the village of Portbou, Catalonia. Born into a wealthy Berlin family in 1892, he had been a prodigious intellectual force as a student, anti-war activist and journalist. After Hitler came to power in 1933, however, he became an impoverished and isolated exile in Paris, writing and researching at the Bibliothèque Nationale.

Many Jews today feel torn. On the one hand, they feel loyalty to Israel, the land of their fellow Jews, many of whom were driven to that country by persecution. On the other hand, they recognise that Israel has been committing crimes against humanity, which are essentially racially driven. They want to oppose Israel’s wars, but they want to do it as Jews. Is there a specifically Jewish way to address this conflict? I believe there is.

The question of what computers can’t do was posed in 1972 by the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus. Dreyfus’s answer – think creatively – was soon considered an error, but the problem remained. It is difficult to distinguish human from machine intelligence because we use the same underlying philosophical and psychological understandings of the mind to discuss both. We think of human beings as essentially rational, problem-solving, goal-oriented animals – an idea that long antedates neoliberalism. At the same time, we think of the computer as a problem-solving calculator, though one with access to far more data than an individual person. The main alternative to this paradigm – psychoanalysis – has long been discredited. Nonetheless, I want to propose a psychoanalytic answer to the problem Dreyfus posed. What computers can’t do is free associate.

Growing numbers of Democrats have called for Biden to step aside, but for the moment this does not seem likely. Meanwhile, it is worth pausing to ask how it came about that Biden is able to hold the party hostage, especially in the face of what it repeatedly defines as a quasi-fascist threat.

Not for the first time, there is a crisis in Jewish identity. Many Jews, including myself, abhor Israel’s current policies, the occupation, the dispossession and many other aspects of the Zionist project. And yet, they want also to affirm their identity as Jews. This suggests there is a conflict at the centre of Jewishness itself.