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(Volume 43, Number 6)

Judeophobia, Art, and the Holocaust Imagination Kenneth Mischel hough few noticed it and even fewer pondered its significance, a remarkable event occurred recently in Hungary. On Christma~ Eve 2003, the drunken host of a radio talk show, a former punk rocker and a non-Jew, expressed the wish to see Christians exterminated Several days later, a lmge crowd assembled oulside the station to protest, unsatisfied with the host's forthright apology and dismissal. A group of women wearing yellow crosses stood among the gatherers. These yellow crosses, intended to be reminiscent of the yellow stars that the Nazis had once forced the Jews to wear, expressed the women's belief that Hungary's Christian community had been marked for extermination, as Europe's Jews had been marked sixty years earlier. Others in the crowd identified who they believed to be the Christians" pursuers, chanting '~dirly Jews" as various leading Hungarian literary lights denounced a "moral holocausf' being perpetrated on the country by a "small minority," Some burned Israeli flags. From a historical perspective, such an outpouring of hatred, mixed with fear, hardly merits mention. Hatred mixed with fear--Judeophobia--has nipped at the Jews' heels at least since the days of the GrecoRoman wortd, wherever Jewish communities have been ~ocated. Remarkable about this instance, rather, is that Judeophobia chose to cloak itself in Holocaust commemorators' clothing. Jew-hatred now uses the Holocaust. How is this possible? The incident is extreme, but not isolated. Throughout Europe, one can glimpse Jews living in Israel being cast in the role of their grandparents' pursuers. "Wall: Fragments of History," an artwork recently exhibited

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in Oslo, prominently features the date on which the United Nation's General Assembly approved the coming into existence of the State of Israel, November 29, 1947. Next to this date appears the word "holocaust," with Stars of David filling in the spaces between the letters. The Spanish cily of Oleiros sponsored an electronic billboard flashing the message that Israelis are the "new Nazis." When Jews are not directly likened to their grandparents' pursuers, those among them who show too strong an affiliation with Israel are sometimes cast outside the society of acceptable commemorators. At Auschwitz, for example, three French visitors shouted anti-Semitic slurs at and grabbed a group of Jewish student~, 5ome of whom were wearing or holding Israeli flags. They demanded that the students leave the gruunds, telling them that they should be ashamed to be seen in such a place with the Israeli flag. The French visilors justified their behavior on the grounds (as witnesses paraphrased it) that "the Holocaust doesn't only belong to the Jews." In a sense quite unintended by them, the French visitors have a point, The maintenance of public memory invariably involves negotiation and conflict, While great literature, with its attention to open possibility and prosaic detail, may well be an extension of hfe (as Lionel Trilling once contended), public memory cannot be. Novels complicate, memory simplifies. A Jane Austin novel, with its quirks and complexities, would make an unassimilable public memory. Putting the past into publicly assimilable form is like identifying a regular geometric shape within the perimeter of a slightly irregular object: it requires emphasizing,

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even amplifying, certain features while omitting others. Because various patterns of emphasis and omission promote various current interests, few remind others of the past disinterestedly. Still, that Judeophobia should find public memory of the Holocaust a resource rather than an impediment seems odd, even paradoxical, given the high esteem we have for Santaya~a's dictum ~1~atthose wh~ cannot remember the past are bound to repeat it. Firm in the conviction that exposure to pernicious patterns of thought is inactive, because past form spurs us to prepare effective responses against these patterns, we seek to prevent outbreaks of Judeophobia such as occurred in Hungary by building Holocaust museums and otherwise impressing civilization's obscenities on the public mind. But here is Judeophobia seizing the momentum from the museum builders. s it possible that current trends in intellectual life inadvertently contribute to this turnabout? This essay explores the consequences of two connected and common practices in contemporary arts and letters: using the destruction of European Jewry as a perpetual source for metaphors; and inviting the reader or viewer to become what Alain Finkelkraut once termed an "imaginary Jew" playing at being persecuted by a Nazi-like regime in his current circumstance while otherwise lacking a substantive connection to ongoing Jewish life. How, briefly, do these practices invite Judeopbobia to embrace the m e m o r y of Holocaust? The abuse of language, here metaphorical language, impairs thought. Chronically overused Holocaust metaphors may eventually cease being perceived as metaphors. Before this happens, the properties, perpetrators, and victims of "the Holocaust"--the cattle cars, the concentration camps, the gas chambers, the Nazis, the Jews--detach themselves in the public mind from the grounding specificities of time and place. The detachment presents Judeophobia with a unique opportunity: Minds readied to spot Nazis anytime, anywhere, and at the slightest intimation, are minds easily nudged, perhaps receptively manipulated, into spotting Nazis in present-day Israel. A recent University of Bielefeld poll revealed that 51 percent of Germans surveyed believe that there is little difference between the way Israel treats Palestinian Arabs and the way the Nazis once treated the Jews. The second tendency, the invitation to become an "imaginary Jew," diverts attention away from the

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enduring towards the ephemeral. Ephemeral are the barracks, cattle cars, and gas chambers, the hallmarks of a massively bureaucratically organized system that came and went in the mid-twentieth century. Enduring is the attitude that morally equates Jewish self-assertion with physical assaults on Jews, taking as self-evident that the "settler" living beyond the Green Line is the equivalent of a suicide bomber, the latter's comradein-arms. Enduring, as well, is the conviction that major societal problems are really Jewish problems at their root, as a British sociology professor explained on CNN in December 2004, noting that the political alienation of Muslim prison inmates in France must be traced to ongoing events in "Palestine and Iraq." (Not a few public intellectuals place the blame for Iraq's present turmoil on a "cabal" of neo-conservative Jews.) Such attitudes and convictions, which had already reached a high pitch before the full flowerings of Christian civilization, may well enable future violence against the Jews, as they so often have enabled violence against the Jews in the past. Do we remember this past, the past of Apion, Cicero, Seneca and Tacitus, and its echoes, which continue to sound in our ears today? We may be too busy at the moment, fixated on Hitler. have in mind a short story, Thane Rosenbaum's Cattle Car Complex," which appears in a recent Holocaust writing anthology, Nothing Makes You Free: Writings by the Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors (2002), and a pair of artworks, Tom Sach's "Prada Death Camp" and "Giftgas G/riser." Though hardly unique in their casual use of holocaust metaphors and promptings to the receiver to play the role of an "imaginary Jew," these works exemplify the two tendencies in a clear way. I turn first to Rosenbaum's story. In addition to being a writer, often publishing on Holocaust topics, Rosenbaum teaches law at Fordham University, which he joined after being a corporate lawyer at a major Wall Street firm. He has abiding concerns about the moz'aIity of the legal system, many of which he expresses in his book, The Myth of Moral Justice. "Cattle Car Complex" expresses some of the same concerns in short story form. The story relates the breakdown of Adam Posner, a junior corporate lawyer and the child of Holocaust survivors. Late one evening, after an overly long stint at the office, Posner finds himself stranded in a disabled elevator. As he waits, the protagonist hallucinates about

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being trapped in a cattle car with others, destined for a concentration camp. Is Posner's anguish backward-looking, occasioned by the erosive forces of stress and exhaustion on defenses erected around a tragic family past? The narrative descriptions in "Cattle Car Complex" indicate that Posner's anguish stems at least as much from staring too lucidIy into {~e present. The story's oraniscien~ ~5~rdperson narrator describes Posner's apartment building as a beehive, his apartment as a honeycomb. What, then, can be said about the elevator in this building? If Posner perceives the elevator in his office building as a cattle car, the narrator perceives the elevator in Posner's home as a transport for bees. The two elevators thus share the same dehumanizing function. "This is not life--trapped in a box made for animals! Is there no dignity for man?" Posner asks. The question is Posner's, but, toned down a bit, it could be the narrator's. The narrator further pushes the comparison between corporate lawyers and Holocaust survivors by describing Posner and his colleagues as "walking zombies with glazed eyes and mumbling mouths." Phrases like this are commonplace in concentration camp liberators' accounts of what they found, and in autobiographical accounts of concentration camp survivors. The narrator even hints that Posner and his colleagues might metaphorically find themselves meeting the same fate as many camp inmates once met, being disposed of after work quotas have been fulfiEed: "His [Posner'sJ Hermes tie, with the new fleur-de-lis pattern, was hanging from his neck in the shape of a noose." Because the narrator identifies his own perceptions so closely with Posner's, he confers on Posner the mantle of a prophet. By the end of "Cattle Car Complex," the reader learns about what Posner sees, but little about Posner. The protagonist experienced childhood terror at hearing his parents' Holocaust nightmares. So did numerous children of Holocaust survivors_ He made his career choice on the basis of the needs to be safe and belong. So did many actual children of survivors. What elements of the story individuate Posner from these countless others? The answer is that little individuates Posner, because Posner is not meant to be individuated. Rather than aiming for the shaded complexities of a memorable character, Rosenbaum opts for a transparent vessel through which the reader can glimpse the sony state of the present world. He uses Holocaust metaphors to help the reader summon up outrage.

I turn next to Tom Sachs' pieces, which also rely heavily on Holocaust metaphors and invite their beholders to become "imaginary Jews," but which rent the Holocaust for an entirely different reason than does Rosenbaum's story. "Prada Death Camp" recreates a miniature concentration camp out of flattened Prada packaging. "Giftgas Giftset" features three facsimile Zyk~on B gas canisters, color-coordinated and monogrammed with the Tiffany, Chanel, and Hermes' labels. The inclusion of these works in the Jewish Museum's 2002 exhibition "Mirroring Evil" occasioned howls of protest, especially from Holocaust survivors. Sachs responded to the criticism by denying that the pieces are about the Holocaust at all. Their subject, rather, is contemporary consumer culture. As Sachs put it in a widely cited interview with the New York Times Sunday Magazine, "I'm using the iconography of the Holocaust to bring attention to fashion. Fashion, like fascism, is about loss of identity." In a subsequent interview with Deutsche Bank's Art Magazine, Sachs presented himself as an artist deeply concerned with "systems." The social engagement, if it can be called that, is shallow. In addition to "Prada Death Camp," Sachs has exhibited "Prada Toilet," a recreation of a toilet also made entirely from Prada packaging. What do the two pieces, laken together, imply about the relationship between toilets and death camps, about the relationship between toilets and Nazis? The point, never clearly elucidated, seems to be that the fashion industry is omnipresent in contemporary life, as the Nazis were once omnipresent in Europe, behind all "systems," malicious and mundane. If this is indeed the point, little of substance has been conveyed_ Artists and critics have long quibbled over whether the various arts should find their "rational justifications" in social engagement or in the development of the forms made possible by these arts' specific media, A century ago, Oscar Wilde, pointing to the deceil and selfdeception so frequently accompanying liigh-minded endeavors, suggested that art for its own sake is the only serious thing in the world. Sometimes Sachs seems to follow Wilde in taking art to be its own engine. As Sachs puts it: "I only engage in social issues to do the technical stuff." At other times, as when he talks about connections between fascism and fashion, Sachs seems to present himself as the socially engaged artist par excellence. The attempt to have it both ways suggests either fundamental problems in the works' conception,

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or an example of the deceit and self-deception against mean 'blotting paper.'" By this assert{on, the poet which Wilde railed. The common denominator shared pointed to his ability to evoke striking images through by death camps and toilets is that making scale models unusual pairings. What would happen, Barzun wonof each allows for the manipulation of Prada packaging. ders, after a million such pairings, each one lending The Holocaust metaphors lend an illusory gravity to some property of blotting paper to an archipelago? the endeavor. Again, the Holocaust is rented. The answer is that the million-and-first pairing would Rosenbaum's and Sachs' pieces may exemplify arts evoke nothing at all. and letters' penchant for Holocaust metaphors, but they On their way to debasing language, the poet and hardly encompass it. As Melvin Jules Bukiet repeatedly his followers would also debase thought. We often emphasizes in the introductory essay to the anthology imagine people as first formulating thoughts, and in which "Cattle Car Complex" appears, contempothen choosing the appropriate words to express them. rary artists are invariably drawn to the Holocaust as a While there is some truth to this, it oversimplifies the "touchstone" on which to mark their skills. What can relationship of mutual influence that exists between be said about the impact of this ceaseless metaphorthought and language. What is regularly said influences making on the public mind? what is regularly thought, almost as much as the other Sometimes metaphors evoke images by violating way around. As Lev Vygotsky once wrote, "The relanorms. This is because norms provide part of the mental tion of thought to word is not a thing but a process, a background against which we process continual movement back and forth such images. Violation produces confrom thought to word and from word trast, hence vivacity. Consider, for We often imagine to thought." example, the following passage early people as first Consider, for example, the efon in W. G. Sebald's novel, Austerlitz, formulating thoughts, fect that repeated lending through which explores the long shadow that and then choosing the m e t a p h o r has on perceptions of the Holocaust continues to cast over appropriate words to the property being lent. Read this Europe. We don't normally think of sentence: "Italy's Gross Domestic express them. raccoons as being creatures capable of Product grew by 4% last year." Is it experiencing obsessive guilt, particumetaphorical? The answer is that it larly when that guilt concerns their parents' behavior is. Growth was originally understood to be a property rather than their own. Hence, it is through raccoons that inherent to living things, the word "growth" coming we are made to vividly see post-Holocaust Europeans' from the word "green." By lending this property to impossible position: "It sat beside a little stream with Italy's economy, the sentence likens this economy a selious expression on its face, washing the same bit to a living thing. Yet few of us read the sentence as of apple over and over again, as if it hoped that all metaphorical, because we have become as accustomed this washing, which went far beyond any reasonable to associating growth with economies as we are to thoroughness, would help it escape the unreal world associating it with living things. Growth now floats in which it had arrived, so to speak, through no fault freely in our minds. of its own." Had Sebald assigned the obsessive guilt Concentration camps, cattle cars, Nazis, and Jews to the human heart, as we normally do, the assessment are also beginning to float freely, too, in no small part of contemporary Europe's predicament would not have the result of a similar pattern of renting. Here is Joan been so striking. Rosenbaum, director of the Jewish Museum, attesting But--and this is the crux of the matter--this kind of to her Museum's willingness to rent the Holocaust: creativity is perpetually in danger of folding in on itself. "We are committed to showing works of contempoIt depends upon a stable background for contrast, yet rary artists who have used images of the Nazi era to repeated violations of the norms wear this background make a powerful and timely investigation of the nature away. Eventually, the wearing away saps such metaof evil. These artists ask each viewer to consider his phors of their means for evoking vivid images. or her responsibility toward civil society and to be The historian Jacques Barzun writes of an encounter vigilant about the bigotry and dehumanization that with an acclaimed French poet. "You see," the poet continues in the world more than 50 years after the informed him, "if I want to, I can make 'archipelago' Holocaust." Each such piece, along with its kindred 90

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spirits appearing in museums and libraries, subtly pries the parties to, and properties of, Nazi Europe away from the grounding specifics of time and place. Collectively, these pieces have succeeded in partially detaching them. The impressions of New York Times columnist Edward Rothstein, after a recent trip to the Anne Frank House, confirm the extent of the detachment: "The almost overwhelming effect of seeing the rooms as she described them is muted by attempts to treat Anne's fate as a single instance of worldwide violence and injustice. The Holocaust is not minimized, but its Judaic aspect is." The tenor of mind that equates "vigilance" with the predisposition to spot metaphoric Nazis and Jews everywhere grants Judeophobia a golden opportunity. If the Judeophobe directly compares today's Jews to yesterday's Nazis--these are like t h o s e - - h e takes upon himself the burden of providing evidence for his claim. He can greatly reduce this burden by wrapping the comparison in metaphor. The reduced standard owes itself to two widely held convictions. The first is the "cult of art," an abiding faith in the importance and redemptive potential of art. (What high-minded government or citizen is willing to publicly question the state's duty to support the arts? His ancestors were once unwilling to publicly question the state's duty to support the Church.) The second conviction is the egalitarian one that everyone has the artist in him, if only deep down. Taken together, the two convictions predispose us credulously to receive metaphorical assertions that today's Jews are yesterday's Nazis as long as these assertions come wrapped in the finery of art. Had the artist who created "Wall: Fragments of History" stood on an Oslo thoroughfare shouting "Israel is like Nazi Germany," he might have been expected to furnish proof. His words would not have met the same ready acceptance as did his artwork, though the words and the work share a common message. If "fashion, like fascism, is about the loss of identity," can any but the confirmed nudist count himself spared by the assault of today's fascists? If corporate law turns its lawyers into mumbling zombies, which practicing corporate lawyer cannot number himself among its "survivors? .... Imaginary Jewishness" might seem to be the symptom of an intense engagement with the past. It is better understood as a rejection. Like the literary critic, who interprets texts for others, the person who reminds others of the past should aim to strike a balance between self-restraint and imagi-

nation. Too single-minded a reliance on self-restraint (to borrow a phrase from Russian literary critic Mikhail M. Bakhtin) "encloses the past in its epoch," producing interpretations (of texts, of events) that never go beyond the immediate experience of authors and firsthand participants. Such enclosure tends to obscure semantic depth, layers of potential meaning, inherent in text or event, if originally unintended and unrecognized. If the rabbis, for example, had lacked sufficient imagination and had thereby enclosed Judaism within its past, we would lack a Jewish law capable of delineating permissible and impermissible uses of electricity on the Sabbath and a Jewish textual tradition uninformed by the insights of Midrash. If historiography demanded that histories of Renaissance thought enclose that thought in its epoch, we would lack a volume such as J.G.A Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment, which traces (among other things) the ways in which potential inherent in Italian republicanism came to expression on the shores of America several centuries later. Too single-minded a reliance on the imagination, on the other hand, "modernizes and distorts" the text or past, overwriting it with the present's interests and values. The unrestrained imagination vanquishes its subject, twisting and clawing at it until it becomes a signatm'e of itself (as Irving Howe once famously complained about Philip Roth's fiction.) "Imaginary Jewishness" is a case in point. Consider, for example, the remarks of a catalogue-essayist for "Mirroring Evil," reacting to the exhibit's pieces: Through our spectatorial power (to look) and our powerless (in being unable to resist their seduction) we become momentarily doubles for both the perpetrator of evil and its victims .... Arriving in the art museum...in a state of willful disbelief appropriate to the realm of the aesthetic, we are kidnapped. Simultaneously, conspiring with the perpetrators (real and imaginary), we evade the burden of our guilt, taste the juices of our own cruelty, and feast in the fancy of our belief mastery over what in real life would repel and/or destroy us. In simple words: We look at Nazis, we see ourselves. We look at Jews and see ourselves. The Holocaust as such doesn't exist. The Holocaust is you. Where might such unrestrained imagination eventually lead? The outcome of a related misadventure is illuminating. Many twentieth-century literary critics came to conceive of themselves first as the novelist's partner in creation and later as the novelist's artistic equal.

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When they promoted themselves a second time, thereby promoting interpreting novels to a status equal to writing them, these literary critics became wholly fixated on criticism and lost interest in literature. Here is Jacques Barzun on a scholar's praise for an academic volume, Swift's Landscape, which the scholar trumpets as forcing a reassessment of the field: "Reassess what? Some previous theory known to a handful of academics? And what does the theory deal with in this case--literature? No; the conception of landscape in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory." By the early 1980s, English and Comparative Literature departments reached the dead end that they are still trying to back away from today: a working adherence by many to a "reader receivership" theory in which texts are taken to be inherently devoid of meaning, the meanings these texts acquire coming instead from the efforts of their de jour community of interpreters. It's as if, having used Gulliver's Travels to gain his podium, the literary critic decided he no longer had use for the novel. With what then, does the university-based literary critic occupy his time? If culture's high is no more inherently meaningful than its low, why not devote one's best efforts to the exploits of a Latino Elvis impersonator or a Russian "faux Lesbian" rock band, as presenters at the 2004 annual meeting of the Modem Language Association did? The choice of topics is not unrepresentative; many English and Comparative Literature professors currently embrace attending to and producing ephemera. If Holocaust-related arts and letters continue to push towards a parallel dead e n d - - a working adherence to a "commemorator receivership" theory in which the past gains meaning solely by the efforts of those interpreting it--it, too, will resign itself to trafficking in ephemera. Where, after all, are the enduring elements of Nazi Europe to be found? Not in the situations and events; these evaporated long ago. If a residue remains, it is to be found in a number of moral and intellectual attitudes that exist today and that have their origins in the moral and intellectual attitudes of Nazi Europe. Demonstrating the kinship would require the careful scrutiny of numerous contemporary and Nazi-era texts. It would also require a kind of reverence for these Nazi-era texts, which should not be confused with approval of them. Why reverence? Each scrap of text from the Nazi era is like a small treasure in that it provides a w a y - - m a y b e the only w a y - - t o peer into a world which is not and cannot be our own. Without these scraps, we have no means of seriously contemplating the continuities and

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discontinuities between that past and our present. This truth holds for the historical artist, novelist, and playwright no less than it holds for the historian. The imagination that knows no self-restraint knows no reverence. The "Imaginary Jew" thus finds himself cut off from the means of locating the persistent in the present. How, for example, can the "imaginary Jew" gauge the menace behind Dave Brown's cartoon, which appeared in the British tabloid, The Independent, on January 27, 2003, depicting the Prime Minister of Israel biting off the head of a Palestinian Arab baby, and which received the British Political Cartoon Society's top prize for 2003? What implications can he or she draw from the New Statesman's January 14, 2002 investigation of the Jewish lobby in England--a "Kosher Conspiracy," the magazine's cover depicting a Star of David piercing the Union Jack? Judeophobia neither started nor ended with the Nazis. To gauge the current climate of "moral antagonism" against the Jewish people, we would do well to compare and contrast this climate with earlier climates of moral antagonism. Consider, for example, these words of Saul Ascher, a German Jew, written in the year 1794: "There is evolving before our eyes a quite new species of opponents armed with more dreadful weapons than their predecessors .... If the Jewish nation had until now political and religious opponents, it is now moral antagonists who are ranged against them." How is the "moral" antagonism ranged against the Jewish nation today related to the antagonism of which Ascher wrote? Gauging the current menace will require scrutinizing--and reveri n g - t e x t s . To the extent that arts and letters foster a public mind fixated on ephemera, they disqualify the mind from its task. The path from event to memory is frequently unreliable, even when it takes the most direct of routes. Leo Tolstoy, whose job in the Russian army required him to interview participants after a battle, described these soldiers' initial impressions as "sublime, complex, infinitely varied and grim...from no o n e - - l e a s t of all the commander in chief--will you learn what the whole affair was like." Over the ensuing weeks, people not present at the battle began to compile an official military narrative of what took place. A wholly different kind of memory, "clear and always flattering," emerged. Eventually firsthand participants came to recollect their own experiences largely in conformity with public memory's narrative.

How much more troubled the path becomes when the passing of time irrevocably separates those who experienced from those who remember. For those who experienced an event may not know what did happen, but they do know what didn't. Certain public recollections are likely to strike them as patently false, and they will reject them, viscerally. Truth is deeper than social construction. Bereft of this group's presence, the custodians o f m e m o r y - - h i s torians, artists, and novelists, United Nations ambass a d o r s - c a n n o t so readily count on their own or their audiences' visceral responses to keep memory close to the track. The imagination, out of necessity, looms increasingly large. When the imagination is malnourished by a diet of mendacious metaphors, it gradually loses its ability to distinguish between apt and inappropriate comparisons. When the imagination is consistently beckoned to trample all boundaries between the outside world and itself, it learns to see this world through the eyes of a solipsist, or perhaps even an infant. In such an impaired, infantilized state, the imagination proves no match for history's demons. Rather, it willingly shares the public square with them. It looks on, wordlessly, wearing a gold cross, as the demons burn the Star of David.

FURTHER READINGS Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Translated by Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barzun, Jacques. 1989. The Culture We Deserve. Edited by Arthur Kl~stal. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Bukiet, Melvin Jules, ed. 2002. Nothing Makes You Free: Writings by the Descendants of Holocaust Survivors. New York: W.W. Norton. Finkelkraut, Alain. 1994. The Imaginary Jew. Translated by David Suchoff and Kevin O'Neill. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Morson, Gary Saul. 1994. Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. Rose, Paul Lawrence. 1990. Revolutionary Anti-Semitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rotbstein, Edward. 2002. "Connections: Artists Seeking Their Inner Nazi." New York Times (February 2), B9. Sebald, W. G. 2001. Austerlitz. New York: Random House. Vygotsky, Lev. 1986. Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kenneth Mischel is an associate professor offinance at the Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, CUNg. Among his most recent publications' are "On Metaphors and CurrentAffairs," which appeared in the Israeli journal Nativ in January 2006.

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Nicholas Eberstadt Through painstaking collection and analysis of hard-to-uncover data, Eberstadt provides a quantitative tableau of North Korea's terrible failure in its economic race against South Korea. In this meticulously researched volume, Eberstadt shows there is a grim coherence and a ruthless logic to North Korea's political economy--one that unreservedly subordinates economic welfare to augmentation of political power and with little interest in resolving the current nuclear impasse. Author of numerous works on Korean affairs, Nicholas Eberstadt holds the HenryWendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. ISBN: 0-7658-0360-7 (cloth) 2006 340 pp. $39.95

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