Spirituality and Partisan Fervor Intersects in Washington D.C.
By Nathan Guttman for the Jewish Daily Forward
WASHINGTON
— An anecdote described in the opening of the new book that has been
rattling the nation’s capital tells the story of NBC correspondent
Andrea Mitchell and former Reagan chief of staff Ken Duberstein, who are
described as “Jews by religion and local royalty by acclamation.”Invited to a dinner party at the mansion of the Saudi Arabian ambassador on the eve of Yom Kippur, both felt “pangs of Jewish guilt,” according to Mark Leibovich, the author of “This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral — Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking! — in America’s Gilded Capital.” But it ended up to be, the author wrote, “such a coveted social function” that the pair “could not say no to this most holy of obligations.”
“Spirituality in Washington can be more of a — I don’t want to say it — but, a networking opportunity,” Leibovich said in an August 5 interview with the Forward. “Religion is often used opportunistically in the political conversation."
A month after the launch of his book, and after reaching the top of The New York Times Best Sellers list, Leibovich was vacationing in Cape Cod, trying to get away from the buzz that his book has created in his hometown of Washington. It is a brutally sober look at the back stage of the real Washington, where politicians, consultants and journalists make up a class of their own, an unelected elite for whom personal gain trumps ideology.
Some of Leibovich’s heroes are household names, at least for those following politics. But many are known only inside the close-knit Washington circle: press secretaries to congressmen, lobbyists working behind the scenes and local socialites who show up at every event. The book, Leibovich told the Forward, has become “a marker for disgust” felt by Americans across the nation toward their political system.
Continue reading.
At
a recent rally for the Voting Rights Act in Alabama, Minister Louis Farrakhan of
the Nation of Islam spoke of the Jews. Surrounded by a cadre of tall, glowering
men with snappy suits, sunglasses, and folded arms, Farrakhan addressed an
enthusiastic crowd in terms that would be unsurprisng to anyone familiar with
his unique way of stirring up an audience. After asserting, with a benevolent
smile, that he is not an anti-Semite, Farrakhan dove into his feelings about
Jews: “I just don’t like the way they misuse their power,” he said. “And I have
a right to say that, without being labeled anti-Semitic, when I have done
nothing to stop a Jewish person from getting an education, setting up a
business, or doing whatever a Jewish person desires to do.” The remarks were
evocative of the sentiments he has shared widely throughout his decades-long
career as a public figure—namely, that blacks should not trust Jews. 
“Writing a biography means living through an intimate
and sometimes intimidating adventure,” writes Benoît Peeters in his newly
translated biography of Jacques Derrida, who would have turned 83 today. But
what is the difference between the biography of a living man and a dead man? In
the Introduction to Derrida, published in France in 2010 and now beautifully
translated into English by Andrew Brown, French artist, critic, and author
Peeters writes, “Whatever happens, Jacques Derrida will not be part of his own
life, like a sort of posthumous friend. A strange one-way friendship that he
would not have failed to question.” The author continues in the book’s
introduction: “I am convinced of one thing: there are biographies only of the
dead. So every biography is lacking its supreme reader: the one who is no longer
there. If there is an ethics of biographers, it can perhaps be located here:
would they dare to stand, book in hand, in front of their subject?”