Reviews and Comments

Each chapter is a paper by a different historian, so there's a lot of variation in the quality of the writing. The book is divided by geographic area, which makes sense: the conditions and forms of Jewish resistance did vary by area quite a lot, it turns out. The subject matter of Jewish life during national socialism is pretty grim, so it was a tough read at times, still the fact that the book is about resistance gives it a relatively optimistic focus. I especially liked the chapters that were about individual figures or groups. The chapters that focused more on the broader history were a little boring to me. The contextualization of the book in the discourse among historians (first two chapters) was very interesting. The art history and literary studies chapters in the last part were boring to me personally. The collection of yiddish resistance songs at the end, on the other hand, was a great, non-dry way to close the book.

I learned a lot from this book. It is an academic work that is exactly about what the title says - very straightforward. I knew what I was getting into, and got what I expected.

Good: the structure (a life in five ideas) makes sense and is easy to follow. Bad: the biographer makes himself way too visible. I do not care about his judgments on the practicability of Weil's ideas, even less about his strange downplaying of French and British colonialism, and less still about his bizarre asides about Donald Trump or smartphones. Those are the worst! Did his editor tell him he can only write about Weil if he ties her to contemporary issues somehow? It's so bad.

Simone Weil is a great figure to write a biography about. I think less of her now, than I did before reading this. My commie brain is telling me that she was just a bourgeois reactionary who only got more openly right-wing with age. In a way, she was the traditional stereotype of what commies imagine all anarchists are like. Fortunately I don't just think with my commie brain and am able to see her as a complex and nuanced figure. I do feel like many intellectuals are probably sympathetic to Weil out of class solidarity. They regard her as a uniquely strong willed and uncompromising figure because she was also a bourgeois intellectual, and disregard all the other militants who have done far better work than her while leading lives just as raw and uncompromising - if not more so, since she could, and did, always go back to her rich parents after any of her failed life experiments (e.g. trying to work in a factory or to fight in the Spanish civil war). But I've been following this train of thought while reading and have decided to not come down too harshly on Weil for being, well, privileged. That would be a simplistic lens to view her life through.

This book made me want to learn more about other militant figures of Weil's time.

Had a hard time for the first few chapters because I was on my guard on whether or not I was reading Mao apologia - but the more I got into the book, the more I understood the author's points and was able to follow his way of thinking. From then on, this felt like a necessary corrective approach to the field of sinology. The book is written for academics and that's fine. It's still fairly engaging, with exceptions. The last chapter is exceptionally hard to understand, it's too heavy with Marxist theory for my tiny brain. The chapter about the death count of the Great Leap Forward started off like something I would hate (it just feels like the "holocaust denier" kind of argument about numbers not adding up), but somehow managed to make an excellent point about the disregard for Chinese lives that Sinologists show in handling the history of the GLF. This book confronted me with my own unconscious racisms and essentialisms. It made me aware of some rotten things in sinology. I hope to reread the last chapter once I have a more solid grasp on Marxist concepts. I guess maybe I should read Said's Orientalism too, since it is the framework that this book is based on. Maybe someday. I also think it's interesting that the author isn't a Sinologist but actually considers his external perspective to be an epistemological strength. After all the book is mostly about epistemology (it does have "knowledge production" in the subtitle) and I find that very interesting.

For the shortness of this text, it gave me so much to think about. It is a very dense text in this way. Roughly, the first half of the book is about antisemites and the second half about Jews. Just from the implications of the fact that it was written, this text gives us a glimpse into the discourse around Jews in 1946 France. It is hard to believe how normalized open antisemitism still was in post WW2 France. Seeing that Sartre feels the need to argue for the basic rights and existence of Jewish people is honestly kind of horrifying. The Overton window must have been really bad back then. About the analysis itself: the description of "the antisemite" seems extremely specific, maybe too specific. Maybe Sartre is describing a type of guy that only existed in his specific time and place. Or maybe he is mixing personal distaste (understandable!) into his analysis and thereby missing the core of antisemitism: he isn't describing an ideology, but a character flaw. But maybe that is his point. Some of his analysis of antisemitism seems applicable to all prejudices against minorities, like the disgust, fear, sexualization, etc. Other parts seem specific to antisemitism, like the conflation of Jewishness with the abstract and universal, and identification of the antisemite with a mystical heritage from which property derives. One interesting feature of the text is that it barely mentions Jewish culture at all. One of his main points is that Jewishness is produced by the antisemite. Jewishness is only defined negatively. I guess the reason why this stands out to me now, is that between Sartre and me lie decades of identity politics. I guess one thought differently about identity, group identity, minority identity in the 1940s. This was a really interesting insight for me, however trivial it may be for others. This in turn makes me think of second wave feminism and how the second wave understanding of the social construction of woman follows the exact same model. It makes sense considering de Beauvoir's influence. Fascinating stuff.

I have strayed from the topic of this review, but this just goes to show how many new thoughts and connections this text gave me. I would really like to know, though, whether back when it came out there was any criticism from the Jewish community about his downplaying of Jewish culture and the existence of positive Jewish community. I imagine there must have been?

The structure is a little lacking. The chapters are thematically consistent internally, but why any chapter was put where it was is unclear. There is no explicit overarching argument. The addressed audience is anticolonial revolutionaries and a big portion of the book is advice on the way from revolutionary struggle to nation-building. I found these parts boring and hard to get through, they don't really seem relevant anymore. The chapter On national culture is an exception, it is quite thought provoking and I will revisit it. The chapter about mental illness under colonialism is another exception. It is way more concrete and grounded than the other chapters. The case studies of patients are quite heavy to read and definitely left an impression on me.

I'm glad I read this book because it's a classic, but for the most part I'm also glad I'm done with it. Peau noire masques blancs was the better Fanon, unexpectedly.

I really like travel literature so that helped. I really enjoyed this little book. What I liked best was the description of how different regions in Germany feel different to wander through. What I liked least was the aside about PoC and LGBT people being "privileged minorities" or whatever. The selling point of the book is a little absurd on the face of it: "Only 6 % of Germany is covered with asphalt or concrete, yet we only hear the perspectives of the people from there. I went outside the beaten path to hear from the rest". Like obviously 94 % of the surface doesn't mean 94 % of the population. Almost 80 % of Germany's population live in cities. The people the author met on his journey are absolutely not representative of a silent majority or anything like that. Of course, that doesn't mean their stories aren't worth hearing (which is why the book is still very enjoyable); it does mean though, that you'll have a hard time extracting some larger political point from a few conversations you had (which is why every attempt at that throughout the book is annoying and betrays the author's biases). The book is good as a travelogue though. The prose is above decent, the politics are cringe, the structure and length are just right. Very enjoyable.

Fanon takes a lot from psychoanalysis in his description of the psychological effects of colonialism. He describes the subjectivity of the oppressed who are led to identify with their oppressor and are alienated from themselves. He replies to a lot of other texts, quotes a lot of black poets. He replies to Sartre, it made me want to read Sartre's "question juive". He also replies to some authors that are irrelevant nowadays, these parts are a little boring because he kinda assumes that the reader has read them. The parts about white women wanting to be raped, or about white racists being repressed homosexuals, sound pretty bad nowadays. All in all, he is at his most astute when describing the condition of the colonized (which, luckily, is most of the book). He gets a little weird and bad when psychoanalyzing the colonizers. Some passages are really well written and highly quotable.

This is a book based on an article, or rather it is an article inflated to the size of a book. I was able to tell after 30 pages, and got confirmed afterwards. This seems like a common practice in the US publishing world: an article-sized essay gets inflated through the addition of an introduction where terms are defined, and the insertion of examples. The argumentative structure stays the same, only now instead of occasionally nodding towards an example to support an argument, every argument gets one to several examples that are stretched to wikipedia length. This practice isn't necessarily a bad thing. In the case of this book, some of the examples given are things I didn't know anything about (the decolonial struggles of Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde), so this is a nice opportunity to learn something new. But all in all, this practice makes good essays longer and worse. If it is often hard to tell what point Táíwò is trying to make when he goes into biographical details of some historic figure, that might be because these details aren't conducive to the point at all - they are just upping the word count. After finishing the book just now, I read the article that originated it (in the Boston Review, no paywall). The article makes several points that confused me in the book way clearer. In particular, the article cites Frazier's "Black Bourgeoisie" to generalize the point it makes about, well, elite capture. The book, on the other hand, gives us Frazier's backstory, the story of his parents, his intellectual legacy, etc. All this achieves (besides being interesting in the way a wikipedia article is) is to obscure the argument that Táíwò actually wants to make. So this is my conclusion: read the article. The book contains the same points, made with more words and less clarity. The points themselves are very good! The concept of elite capture is useful for critiquing nonconstructive uses of identity politics. It's a shame that the publishing industry doesn't incentivize conciseness.