On my most recent visit to Jerusalem this past June, I spent a few hours in heaven: touring the collections of the National Library of Israel and previewing plans for its new state-of-the-art building to be built on a beautiful site near the Knesset, the Supreme Court and the Israel Museum.

Reimagining the library for the 21st Century and beyond — the new building should be completed by 2019 and in full use by 2020 — has been a herculean task, involving decades of committees, legal restructuring, legislation, and a unique partnership of public and private funds. With roots that go back to the 19th century, the library has set great goals for itself, aspiring to be, as its website declares “the prime institution of national memory — not only of the Israeli nation, but also of the Jewish people throughout the world.”

To give some idea of the importance of the collection, I was shown a narrow volume with two columns of Hebrew on each page that is the oldest and sole extant copy of a printed Haggadah from 1480, Guadalajara, Spain (the library has earlier handwritten Haggadot). No illustrations, no songs (and no Maxwell House coffee ad), but the Ma Nishtana is there plain to see. Only some 30 years after Gutenberg began printing, and some 12 years before the expulsion from Spain, the experts at the National Library believe that originally 100-140 copies of this Haggadah were printed. Today there is just one.

If that were not mind-blowing enough, I was also shown a blue workbook, in appearance like college final exam blue books. However, this notebook was the one in which Franz Kafka practiced his Hebrew lessons. That is amazing enough, but all the more so if you are familiar with Kafka’s life, his complicated relationship to Judaism, Pre-Israel Palestine, and the crush he had on his Hebrew teacher (a young woman from Palestine). The philologists at the National Library determined that based on the Hebrew words and phrases that Kafka used in the notebook, his knowledge of Hebrew was sophisticated.

These are but two of the treasures of the collection of the National Library which includes more than 5 million items, among them the archives of leading Jewish and Israeli figures including S.Y. Agnon, Martin Buber and Gershon Scholem, 35,000 rare books, 10,000 Hebrew manuscripts and 74,000 rolls of microfilmed manuscripts (comprising 90 percent of all known Hebrew manuscripts including 200,000 segments from the Cairo Genizah and the Ginsberg collection from the Lenin Library among others); the Islam and Middle East collection which includes 2400 manuscripts in Arabic script and more than 100 manuscripts of the Koran dating back to the 9th Century; a collection of rare and ancient maps dating back to the 15th Century; and 30,000 hours of recorded song related to Jewish traditions in communities all over the world and in the land of Israel.

The new National Library will be housed in a gleaming state of the art building designed by Swiss architectural firm Herzog de Meuron. The design, simulations of which can be seen on the National Library website (web.nli.org.il), is a modernist wedge atop a glass core, in which the library’s vast holdings can be seen. It also features indoor and outdoor community spaces for cultural events — in fact, the entire end of the wedge is a giant screen that can be used for public screenings and performances held on the lawn outside.

There will be a central reading room with a giant oval skylight, which speaks to both the serious scholarship and openness the library hopes to foster. For the library’s invaluable collections, there will be a secure, climate-controlled underground storehouse.

Finally, for those who can’t visit the library in person, there will be multi-language access to the library’s digitized collections as well as related collections held in institutions all over the world.

The Library dates back to 1892, when The B’nai Brith Lodge in Jerusalem established the Midrash Abarbanel Library as the first free public library to serve the Jewish community in Pre-Israel Palestine. The seventh Zionist Congress in Basel in 1905, decided to create a National Library of the Jewish people with the Midrash Abarbanel Library as its foundation which, in turn became the basis, when the Hebrew University was founded in 1925, for its National and University Library, under the direction of Shmuel Hugo Berman, and with Gerson Scholem, as librarian and later head of the department of Hebrew and Judaica. In 1948, during the War of Independence, the library was moved from Mt. Scopus, taking up residence in several West Jerusalem locations before settling at the Hebrew University’s Givat Ram campus where it has remained until today.

Between 1994 and 2010, there were a number of critical developments in the library’s growth and development: an international panel of experts from the Weizmann Institute, The German National Library, the Oxford Bodleian Libraries and the U.S. Library of Congress, concluded that “the library must be reborn” (1994-1996). In order the untangle the various stakeholders in the library (The Hebrew University, the Zionist Federation, the State of Israel) and create an independent entity which could raise the funds and manage the process of the Library’s reinvention and renewal an Israeli group recommended changing the status of the library (2002-2004), established a public committee (2005), proposed “The National Library Law” which was passed (2007), entered into an agreement with the Hebrew University (2008), and formulated a master plan for Library renewal (2008-2010). The Hebrew University loaned its collections and the Israel government granted the land near the Knesset and the Supreme Court, for the site of the new Library.

Finally, in 2010, Yad Hanadiv, the Rothschild family foundation operating in Israel, committed to providing the main funding for construction of the new building as well for the library’s technology. In Yad Hanadiv, the project found its ideal partner. Yad Hanadiv, which built both the Knesset building as well as the Supreme Court building, has a proven track record and immense credibility as one of the oldest and largest private charities in Israel.

It is worth stating that the National Library is a fitting complement to the Knesset and Supreme Court, for how else best to represent what Israel means –what is Israel is – than as a democracy (The Knesset), a nation who observes the rule of law (The Supreme Court), and home to the people of the book (The National Library).

Further, Yad Hanadiv Chairman Lord Jacob Rothschild is not known as someone who simply writes a check – he gets actively involved and sees a project to completion. Lord Rothschild has his own enviable track record as regards restoration and renewal of architectural properties, including the restoration of Someset House and Spencer House in London, as well as Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, England. Not only has each been exquisitely restored but they have also become highly popular visitor destinations.

Finally, Ariel Weiss, Yad Hanadiv’s executive director, who I had the opportunity to meet with in Jerusalem, is particularly well-suited to the task of working with the various stakeholders and interests to achieve consensus, as well as to shepherd the complex tasks of determining the appropriate technology and how to deploy it to achieve the greatest possible access in the most appropriate manner. Many years ago, in another lifetime, when he was known as Ari Weiss and worked as the senior staff member and right hand man to Tip O’Neill, the former Speaker of the House and legendary Democratic politician, the New York Times called Weiss, “one of the most influential, albeit unknown, men on Capitol Hill.”

O’Neill famously said, “All Politics is local” but discussing the National Library project with Weiss, I got the feeling that one might say that “all successful projects involve politics.” Weiss’ deep respect for and engagement with process, his experience in crafting strategy, marshalling support and seeing legislation to adoption, his willingness to wade in to complex and complicated processes, are all much-valued talents at play in successfully steering the National Library project to its 2017 completion. Weiss remains humble and modest, but his importance to the project’s success should not be underestimated. Which is what makes Yad Hanadiv such a formidable and credible lead partner for building The National Library.

The National Library’s projected opening in 2019 is a milestone but is in no way the end of the endeavor. To meet its ambitious goals of being both a center for scholarship and a cultural hub and making the treasures of the collection better known and more accessible, The National Library will need to increase its supporters, and engage all possible stakeholders to create a sustainable enterprise.

The notion of a National Library of the Jewish People is an idea that only a century ago seemed quixotic. Yet over the last century, The National Library has become the central repository of Jewish Culture and Civilization, the land of Israel and the State of Israel, in all its richness, diversity and complexity. That the National Library, re-imagined and reconceived to share the treasures of our global cultural heritage for generations to come, will be housed in a building befitting its new purpose, at a site commensurate with its stature, only affirms what Theodore Herzl once said about the future Jewish State, “It is no dream.”

Everything about visiting The Broad, the new museum on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles that Eli and Edythe Broad built to house their contemporary art collection, is better than expected, better than a drive-by of the exterior leads you to believe, better than photos would have you think. Yes, there are plenty of reasons to criticize The Broad, which opened Sept. 20 across the street from the Museum of Contemporary Art, but those pale before the very enjoyable visitor experience.
Joanne Heyler, the museum’s director and chief curator, who has run the Broad Art Foundation for more than two decades, called The Broad “Eli and Edye’s gift to L.A.” The Broad’s chief ambition is to “connect art with the public,” Heyler said, and to that end, the foundation has made 8,000 loans of artworks to more than 500 institutions worldwide since its founding. The new museum will be open six days a week, closed only on Mondays, and admission will be free, with online advance-ticket booking and only a limited number of daily walk-in tickets. Some special exhibitions may require admission fees.
At the museum’s press preview, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti called The Broad “the boldest new articulation of who we are,” saying that its opening makes L.A. “the cultural heart” and “the creative crossroads” of the United States.

Eli Broad, speaking at the same preview, told the international gathering, “Contemporary art is the art of our time,” and also stressed how much he wants to share his collection with L.A. residents as well as with visitors to a city that, according to Broad, now has more space devoted to showing contemporary art than any other city in the world.

L.A. philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad. Photo by Elizabeth Daniels, courtesy of The Broad
Hype aside, The Broad succeeds in delivering a highly personal survey of contemporary art of the last 50 years, with notable works by brand-name artists from Pop Art icons Andy Warhol and the more recent Japanese Haruki Murakami, mixed in with works that are political, that question what art is. But none of it strays too far from the accepted and the pleasing.

The visitor experience begins from the street. The 120,000-square-foot museum, designed by the New York architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and built at an estimated cost of $140 million, is encased in a white honeycomb carapace, dubbed “The Veil,” which is elegant and beautiful up close, and which plays well in response to the gleaming metal exterior of its neighbor, Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. The Veil is something of a construction marvel, made mostly of concrete panels that allow diffused light into the building and support the open, column-less galleries inside.

Although the museum’s exterior appears somewhat brittle, cold and formal at first glance, the inside brings the visitor immediately into a dark, inviting space shaped by gray free-form walls that are as futuristic as Gehry’s Disney Hall, but far more womb-like. A narrow escalator whisks the visitor directly to the third-floor galleries, a bright 23,000 square feet of exhibition space. The artworks currently on view on the third floor are organized as a chronological survey of collection highlights from the last 50 years. From there, one descends to the second floor, which offers views into the center of the building, “The Vault,” a vast storage facility containing the remainder of The Broad’s 2,000-work collection that is not on view or on loan, as well as conference and event rooms, and the building’s administrative offices. And finally, the visitor returns to the first floor, where several installations are on view and where the work generally will be more current than the art-historical sweep shown on the third floor.

Let’s talk about the art: There are early Warhols, including two “Campbell’s Soup Can” paintings from 1962. There’s a Jasper Johns “Flag” depicting the American flag, and a very early Robert Rauschenberg “Combine,” from 1954, that features an abstract collage of oil, charcoal, newspaper and fabric on a nailed wood structure raised above two light-bulb-like glass radiometers. There also is a roomful of Roy Lichtenstein paintings, whose Pop Art dots echoing the comics that inspired them interact nicely with the Veil, which is visible in the gallery ceiling and through a window. Works by Jeff Koons abound, including an early Neo-Geo work of basketballs floating in an aquarium (Broad has been the largest private collector of Koons’ work). Signature works are included by painters Barbara Kruger, Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha, and by Kara Walker, the Stockton, Calif.-born artist whose cut paper decoupage covers whole walls with silhouetted images that are a commentary on representations of African-Americans as much as a corrective to conventional American history. The Broad also features works by sculptors Mike Kelley and Charles Ray. The staged self-portrait photographer Cindy Sherman is represented, as are the now-iconic German artists Anselm Kiefer, Joseph Beuys and Thomas Struth. Robert Longo’s early work from the 1980s is shown here, along with recent work about the riots in Ferguson, Mo. The museum’s ground floor currently shows two installations: “The Visitors” by Ragnar Kjartansson, which includes nine screens, each showing a musician in a different room, all playing a song together that is strangely moving; and Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrored Room,” an immersive experience that hopes to blow your mind.

So, why does The Broad get mixed reviews? As much as the Diller Scofidio + Renfro building may be a reflection of Broad himself (a hard exterior reveals substantial treasures inside), and as much as the museum’s holdings are a showcase for the Broads’ taste as collectors of contemporary art, they also reflect facets of the man who named his autobiography “The Art of Being Unreasonable” (an attempt to make a virtue of his reputation for being controlling and meddlesome). Although represented as “a gift” to L.A., The Broad remains part of a private foundation controlled by Broad, with all the tax advantages available to a nonprofit that purchases and loans its art; The Broad building and its collection remain very much a successful businessman’s collection, featuring mostly blue-chip brand-name art and lacking the singular vision that distinguishes truly remarkable individual collections such as Philadelphia’s The Barnes Foundation, or even the collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation here in Holmby Hills.

As only 15 percent of The Broad collection is on display — the rest is in the Vault -— The Broad Museum is, in the end, more storage facility than public collection. If the point was to show off more of the collection, why not a larger building, with three or more exhibition floors, in order to exhibit 30 percent, or 40 percent or even more of the collection? While Heyler insists the Broad Art Foundation’s collection will always remain a part of the museum, Eli and Edythe Broad still retain the power to grow, sell or move it if they so choose. Finally, there remains an inherent conflict of interest in shaping a museum around a private collection: Doing so validates the work and also affirms its cultural value, and thereby increases its worth, influencing the art market in ways that favor the works’ owners.

Yet, as important as it is to recognize these objections, one can’t help but celebrate what Broad has accomplished in opening a new museum in downtown L.A. on Grand Avenue: a new attraction for tourists, both domestic and international. But it is the great art itself that stands out among the myriad pleasures The Broad affords.

If, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time,” then The Broad is a first-rate addition to Los Angeles with some issues.
For more information, visit www.thebroad.org.

A portrait of Picasso. Photos by Ervin Marton Courtesy Stephen Cohen Gallery

“It is not enough to have talent,” photographer Robert Capa once said, turning an old saying on its head. “You also have to be Hungarian.” By which he meant Hungarian-Jewish. This point is reinforced in an exhibition of post-World War II Paris photographs by Ervin Marton at the Stephen Cohen Gallery on Beverly Boulevard.

The contributions of Hungarian Jews to photography is mind-boggling: Legendary war photographer Robert Capa (born Endre Friedmann) co-founded Magnum; younger brother Cornell Capa, in addition to shooting for Life magazine, became a photo curator and founded New York’s International Center for Photography (ICP). Martin Munkacsi (born Martin Mermelstein) pioneered fashion photography (including taking the first fashion photograph for Harper’s Bazaar in 1933), and the elegant abstract compositions of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (born Weiss) established photography as an art form. The list also includes icons Andre Kertesz (born Andor Kohn) and Brassai (Gyula Halasz).

Marton, who is less known, was well regarded in his time by Brassai and Kertesz, older artists whom he befriended. The show provides a sampling of Marton’s versatility. “We wanted to show the different traditions that surface in Ervin Marton’s work,” Gallery associate Ian McPherson explained. Marton “was a very skilled portraitist, a skilled street photographer, and he was drawn to experimental techniques.” The images include portraits of Pablo Picasso, as well as French writers Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet and Jacques Prévert. Marton’s portrait of Picasso in profile has been used by the Picasso Museum in Paris as well as for other Picasso exhibitions, Cohen said.

Ervin Marton’s “Pont des Arts,” circa 1945, is part of a show of Marton’s post-World War II Paris photos, at the Stephen Cohen Gallery.

Marton was born in Budapest in 1912. His cousin, painter Lajos Tihanyi, was among a group of Hungarian-Jewish artists who moved to Paris in 1924 that included Brassai and Kertesz (Kertesz went on to New York but often returned to visit Paris). In 1937, as Hungarian fascists began to promulgate anti-Semitic laws, Marton also moved to Paris, where he would live for the rest of his life.

Through his cousin, he became friendly with a group of older artists in Paris, whose circle included Picasso. When the Nazis overran France, Marton joined the French resistance and worked with other Hungarians and foreigners, making false identity cards for people wanted by the Nazis, as well as producing and distributing numerous underground fliers. For these efforts, Marton was later awarded France’s Medaille de la Liberation.

After the war, Marton received commissions from the French government, including from Culture Minister Andre Malraux, to take portraits of France’s greatest artists, including Renoir, Chagall, Brassai and even Pierre Cardin (several of these images are at the Cohen Gallery exhibition).

The exhibition also includes several of Marton’s photographs of Paris street life, including strolling lovers, playing children and a fire-breathing performer. “I always think of Brassai and Marton as two sides of a coin: darkness and light. Brassai worked mostly at night; Marton’s pictures are sweeter,” Cohen said. Marton died in 1968; the Stephen Cohen Gallery has represented the estate since the 1990s.

As to why Jews from such a small country have had such a large impact on photography, there are several theories: It turns out that in the 1920s and 1930s in Budapest, a camera was a popular bar mitzvah gift. Plus, if you have to move to another country, photography requires no translation. Perhaps being a small but irrepressible minority in an isolated country gave these artists the best possible perspective to use behind the lens. Whatever the reason, the nimbleness of mind and explosion of talent of Hungarian Jews of that generation was best expressed by physicist Enrico Fermi in his much-quoted answer about the existence of extraterrestrials: “Of course, they are already here among us; they just call themselves Hungarians.”

“Ervin Marton: Paris, the Post-War Years” is on view through July 3 at the Stephen Cohen Gallery, 7354 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles. For more information visit http://www.stephencohengallery.com

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Published in The Los Angeles Review of Books:
The following essay/book review was just published in The Los Angeles Review of Books:
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/liar-four-personas-adolf-eichmann

The Liar: The Four Personas of Adolf Eichmann

April 19, 2015

By Tom Teicholz

Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer By Bettina Stangneth (Knopf).

LIKE A FOSSIL preserved in amber, Adolf Eichmann has become fixed in popular memory as “The Man in the Glass Booth,” the Nazi kidnapped in Argentina to stand trial in Jerusalem. Although it was the Israeli District Court judges in the case, Moshe Landau, Benjamin Halevi, and Yitzhak Raveh who would pass judgment and sentence Eichmann to death, Hannah Arendt delivered the phrase that would entomb Eichmann, as the personification of “the Banality of Evil.”

This phrase, divorced from the totality of Arendt’s reporting, has come to signify Eichmann as a bureaucrat in the Nazi machinery of extermination — a paper-pusher who tried to avoid responsibility by claiming he was only following orders, and whose focus on the efficiency of mass murder placed him at a remove from the individual crimes or as German philosopher Bettina Stangneth put it: “an ordinary man who was turned into a thoughtless murderer by a totalitarian regime.”

Since Eichmann’s capture in 1961, several shelves worth of books about Eichmann have appeared, including tomes by Isser Harel, the then Israeli Mossad Intelligence chief; Zvi Aharoni and Peter Malkin, members of the Israeli abduction team; Gideon Hausner and Gabriel Bach, the Israeli prosecutors; as well as by Nazi hunters Simon Wiesenthal and Tuviah Friedman. Eichmann figures in books, documentaries, and films about the Wannsee Conference; the deportation of Hungarian Jewry to Auschwitz; about his dealings in Budapest with Jewish leaders Joel Brand and Rudolf Kasztner, as well as with Swedish diplomat and rescuer Raoul Wallenberg; and about his apprehension in Argentina and trial in Jerusalem. Yet Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann has most permeated popular opinion even among those who never read her book.

In Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer Bettina Stangneth quotes Jean-Jacques Rousseau to effect that “in every assumption that leads to injustice, two parties are always involved: the person making the claim, and all others who believe him.” A philosopher based in Hamburg, Stangneth challenges Arendt’s view of Eichmann arguing that we should not just take Eichmann at his word, we should examine his words to understand his lies.

In the course of her persuasive work, Stangneth reviews Eichmann’s writings going back to 1937, publications about Eichmann by his contemporaries, and a number of other sources, some just recently available: the extensive trove of “Argentina Papers” which include Eichmann’s own attempts at autobiography; the Sassen interviews, some 1,300 pages transcribing more than 60 tapes Dutch Nazi collaborator Willem Sassen made with Eichmann in Argentina, some annotated by Sassen and some in Eichmann’s own hand; the transcripts of Eichmann’s interrogations while in captivity in Buenos Aires; his interrogations in Jerusalem and his writings during the trial and after, including another attempt at autobiography (which was published in Israel in 2000), and his last letters to his family.
As Stangneth points out, although some of this material has been hidden or not fully accessible to the public until recently and was dispersed across several archives, none of it is new. Until Stangneth’s work, though, the entire corpus of Eichmann’s dissembling had not been reviewed and subjected to any systematic study. Stangneth doesn’t just share her findings; she takes on the role of dogged and opinionated investigator telling us the story of every archival revelation.

Stangneth’s book is not a chronological account of Eichmann’s life and crimes but rather something more radical — an account of how Eichmann tailored what he said based on his audience and what others said about him, a man caught between self-aggrandizement and calculated evasions, using lies for both, all in the service of being Adolf Eichmann. What emerges corrects Arendt and others’ reading of Eichmann, letting us see Eichmann’s active participation in the mass deportations and murder of Jewish men, women, and children, his personal responsibility for the murders, and his fanatical anti-Semitism.
From this compendium of Eichmann information, one can delineate four distinct chapters to Eichmann’s life. In the first, Eichmann is eager to be noticed, as a member of the Gestapo, of the SD (the Security Division) in Vienna in charge of Jewish emigration from Austria. In becoming a self-professed expert on Jewish affairs, Eichmann allowed others to believe that he was born in Sarona, a German colony in Palestine (rather than in Germany), that he spoke and could read Hebrew and Yiddish (he memorized a few expressions), that he was knowledgeable about Jewish law and ritual, and was familiar with Jewish leaders (he would drop the names of Jabotinsky or Weizmann for effect). Eichmann made much of a 1937 trip to Palestine (where in fact he was only allowed to spend 48 hours in Haifa before being expelled by the British), and traveled to Cairo, where he intended to meet with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (he didn’t then, but he would meet him briefly at a reception in Berlin during the war). The plan to transfer Jews to Madagascar is often attributed to Eichmann, but that too is a lie he encouraged.

Eichmann quickly realized that Jewish affairs were dear to the Nazi leadership and by promoting himself as an expert in dealing with Jewish communities he brought himself into the Nazi elite and into contact with Himmler, Göring, and Goebbels. Eichmann oversaw the forced emigration of Jews from Prague, from Romania, as well as the expulsion of Jews from Szczecin, Posen, and Berlin. Eichmann became known as a creative problem solver — if by “problem” one meant “Jews.” So much so that when at the Wannsee Conference Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich was tasked with planning a final solution to the Jewish question, Eichmann was a natural to implement it. He traveled to Chelmno to see the mobile gassing vans and to Auschwitz to see the murders of Jews there. Years later in Argentina, Eichmann would actually claim to Sassen that he coined the term “Final Solution.” Yet at his trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann would claim that he was merely the secretary appointed to take notes at the meeting.

In Budapest Eichmann’s second chapter began. In a period of some four months in 1944, Eichmann presided over the deportation of more than 420,000 Jewish men, women, and children to Auschwitz-Birkenau to be murdered. Years later, in Argentina, Eichmann gloated that it “was actually an achievement that was never matched before or since.”

Budapest was Eichmann at his most powerful and most deluded. At his trial, Eichmann claimed his negotiations with Budapest’s Jewish leaders such as Rudolf Kasztner and Joel Brand showed that he was working to save Hungarian Jewry, and this has led others to castigate Kasztner and Brand for failing so spectacularly. However, in Argentina Eichmann spoke freely of how he toyed with Kasztner and Brand, his hatred for “that Jewish dog Wallenberg,” and how he never had any intention other than to distract Hungarian Jewry from their imminent demise.

At the Nuremberg trials, Nazi associates such as Dieter Wisliceny and Kurt Becher, in trying to exonerate themselves, indicted Eichmann as being “out of control,” habitually boasting of his personal ties to Himmler, and fanatically pursuing deportations of ever more Jews (even after Himmler ordered him to stop), as well as being drunk much of the time. Eichmann had a different explanation: “As my chief [Gestapo Commander] Mueller expressed it, they were sending in [to Hungary] the master himself, so I wanted to behave like a master.” Mueller would comment: “If we had 50 Eichmanns, we would have won the war.” Wisliceny would testify at the Nuremberg trial that Eichmann’s conscience was clear and that Eichmann told him “he would follow his Führer anywhere, even into death […] he would leap laughing into the pit, because millions of [murdered] Jews would be lying there.”

Eichmann even turns out to be source for estimating the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis as six million. Nazi Wilhelm Höttl testified at the Nuremberg trial that Eichmann had estimated that four million Jews were murdered in the camps, and two million were murdered by the German Einsatzgruppen. This was repeated in Kasztner’s affidavit, and the media seized upon this number and the phrase, “The Murder of Six Million Jews.”

Eichmann’s third chapter begins at war’s end. As Stangneth documents in great and convincing detail, Eichmann had planned his escape well in advance, preparing false identities. So if he indeed told Wisliceny he was ready to follow the Führer “even into death,” he was lying. He spent the first few months after the war as Otto Eckmann, in an American POW camp. From there, he escaped and assumed another identity as Otto Heninger, establishing himself in Northern Germany where he lived peaceably for the next five years. Eichmann had even created a false trail that led many to believe he had fled the country to the Middle East, taking up residence in either Cairo or Damascus, under the protection of the Grand Mufti.

In 1947, Eichmann’s wife, Vera, applied to have her husband declared dead. When Simon Wiesenthal got wind of this, he raised such a protest that what had been an attempt to further Eichmann’s deception only ignited worldwide interest in finding him. As Stangneth notes, the problem Eichmann faced in Germany was twofold: he could not get the recognition he sought for being Eichmann, even as being Eichmann proved to be an increasing danger.

In 1950, Eichmann followed a pre-established escape route for Nazi criminals, making his way to Genoa where, as Ricardo Klement, he received a visa and boarded a boat for Buenos Aires, Argentina. Stangneth tells us: “A chain of German helpers, Argentine public officials, Austrian border guards, Italian records offices, the Red Cross, men from Vatican circles, and influential shipping magnates allowed people to escape.” Eichmann’s short-term visa for Argentina came from Horst Carlos Fuldner, a people smuggler who had Argentine leader Perón’s blessing. In 1948 in the same South Tyrol city, identity papers were issued to Eichmann, Josef Mengele (Auschwitz’s sadistic “Angel of Death”), and Ludolf von Alvensleben (Himmler’s adjutant). In 1962, Eichmann would express gratitude to “the organization” for providing safe haven for him and his family in Argentina.

Years after his arrival, Eichmann explained the appeal of Argentina: “I knew that in this ‘promised land’ of South America I had a few good friends, to whom I could say openly, freely and proudly that I am Adolf Eichmann, former Obersturmbannfürhrer” — a rank equivalent to lieutenant colonel. Years later he would recall his feeling upon arrival in Argentina. “My heart was filled with joy. The fear that someone could denounce me had vanished. I was there, and in safety.”

Argentina and Buenos Aires proved quite hospitable to former Nazis. Eichmann was reunited with, among others, Hans Fischböck (the Nazi’s finance minister in Austria), von Alvensleben, Eduard Roschmann (who commanded Riga’s ghetto), Nazi officials Berthold Heilig, Herbert Hagel, Erich Rajakowitsch (in charge of the deportations of Jews in the Netherlands under Eichmann’s command), Josef Schwammberger (commander of camps in the Krakow district), and the infamous Mengele.

In 1952, Vera Eichmann applied for a passport and travel visa for her and her three sons to Argentina. For this reason alone, the German government should have known that Eichmann was in Argentina (and perhaps did). Stangneth demonstrates the ways in which German authorities and even Israeli investigators should have known where Eichmann was, and their possible agendas in not wanting him found (such as potential embarrassment to Germany, or a reminder of the Nazi past). However, Eichmann’s carefully constructed false trails to the Middle East, and rumors of his death or suicide, also kept authorities at bay.

Stangneth demolishes the notion perpetuated in Eichmann films and accounts of his apprehension that Eichmann lived as some sort of impoverished recluse in Argentina. Not only was Eichmann reunited with his wife and three children, they had another son born in Argentina, an event Eichmann saw as a victory against his enemies. He was not exactly incognito: in Buenos Aires, Eichmann would recall, he “made the acquaintance of President Perón, who always had time for us Germans.” Throughout his time in Argentina, Eichmann was consistently given work by German companies. At the time of his capture, Eichmann was working for a Mercedes Benz company and had built a home for his family on a plot of land he had purchased in a suburb of Buenos Aires.

In Argentina, Eichmann was unafraid of speaking out. As Stangneth notes, “Eichmann’s urge to speak had always been greater than his sense of caution.” He spoke to his fellow workers out in Tucumán, at gatherings of Nazi sympathizers in Buenos Aires, in taped conversations with Sassen, and in voluminous manuscripts he produced.

In Eichmann’s writings and taped monologues in Argentina, he speaks with a greater passion and greater confidence than the whiny voice he would adopt in Jerusalem. Eichmann believed deeply in the Nazi ideology of blood and race. He saw himself as sort of a new man, unsentimental, not tied to religion, conventional morality (feeling guilt, he said, was childish), uninterested in the trappings of personal wealth (although he enjoyed them during his Nazi service). The German race, or as he called it, “my blood,” was the cause he served.

Eichmann claimed that it was Chaim Weizmann, the leader of the Jews who had forced Germany to invade Poland by Weizmann’s “interference,” and that this necessitated the Final solution. The Nazis were fighting a “total war” against the enemy (i.e., the Jews) that demanded victory by any means necessary — the Jews would do anything, so the Nazis could do anything. It was a blood war, Eichmann said, in which there was no “double standard.” Eichmann and his fellow Nazis did no wrong and could not be guilty because, Eichmann said, both sides committed atrocities. Eichmann’s “inner morality” was not troubled by his actions because he was being loyal to his blood and to the Reich.

As late as 1956, Eichmann considered surrendering to Germany through an open letter to Konrad Adenauer, in order to speak the truth of the Nazi era, assuming that he would only receive a four- to six-year sentence such as other prominent Nazis had received.

Eichmann devoured books about the Holocaust, and kept himself apprized of the Kasztner case, reading Joel Brand’s book as well as the Kasztner report. Stangneth argues that Eichmann’s goal was not greater understanding but rather to find weaknesses he could exploit when constructing his own narrative (and later, his defense).

Eichmann was constantly writing. Early in his Nazi service, Eichmann claimed to have written a book on implementing The Final Solution, which he said had to be destroyed before war’s end. He also claimed to have begun writing a memoir immediately after the war, in Northern Germany, which he professed to have burned before leaving. In Argentina, he wrote a 260-page manuscript to explain himself to his family, which remains in their possession, as well as a 107-page draft autobiography called The Others Spoke, Now I Want to Speak.

Stangneth makes much of the importance that Nazism placed on words and on books. Hitler, famously, launched Nazism with Mein Kampf. Stangneth writes:

National Socialism had a great — perhaps too great — respect for the power of the written word. People burn books only when they attribute power to them; in other words, because they fear them…. The National Socialists didn’t just rewrite history through their actions. From the outset theirs was also a cultural and literary project: they vilified the culture industry as “Jewish” and discredited whole branches of academia as “too much under foreign influence.” […] Sorting and burning books — as the Nazis went on to do with humans — was just the first step. The second was to care for the German race, and to found a Nazi culture and academic tradition…. This new culture was promoted by the self-proclaimed ideological elite, in particular the SD [to which Eichmann belonged]. The SD strove to be “creative” […] Eichmann’s work was shaped from the beginning by the production of texts.

In 1950s Argentina, Germans and Nazi sympathizers imagined the press was exaggerating when they wrote that six million Jews had been murdered in the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Cocktail parties were held where Eichmann held forth in answer to their questions (and which were recorded). Sassen also interviewed Eichmann at length at his home, for a proposed book, even though Eichmann often appeared with his own manuscript.

In Argentina, Eichmann was uninhibited about the murders and his role in them. He told one assembly:
As a conclusion […] I must first tell you: I have no regrets! […] I balk inwardly at saying that we did anything wrong. No, I have to tell you quite honestly that if […] we had killed 10.3 million [Europe’s estimated total Jewish population], I would be satisfied, and would say, good, we have destroyed an enemy […] We would have fulfilled our duty.

Faced with the truth of the Holocaust, the Germans in Argentina eventually abandoned any hope of a resurgent National Socialist Party. The Peronists lost power in 1955, and Konrad Adenauer was reelected by a strong majority in Germany. In the latter half of the 1950s, the search for Nazi war criminals became more active. Germany issued arrest warrants. Even in Argentina where Eichmann had done little to conceal his identity, there was a change in attitude. Mengele, paranoid by nature, saw the writing on the wall and began to avoid Eichmann and moved on to greater anonymity in Paraguay and Brazil.

Eichmann stayed in Argentina, unwilling to stop receiving recognition for being Eichmann; which led inexorably to his apprehension. From the moment of his capture on the street before his house on May 11, 1960, Eichmann began to craft his defense. This is the fourth chapter in Eichmann’s life, the final persona he created, which Arendt would dismiss so definitively.

By the time Eichmann, who was himself well versed in interrogation techniques, found himself in the glass booth in Jerusalem, he had had many, many years of preparing answers and monologues. He had read much of the extant literature and knew which facts were most malleable and where doubt might best be practiced. In Israel, Eichmann put the past behind him, assured that his Argentine papers would not haunt him, and secure that those who might challenge his versions were for the great part either dead or never going to set foot in a court in Israel.

Eichmann wrote constantly in Israel, constructing a new narrative for himself, claiming that his whole life had been guided by the principles of philosopher Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative — so while Nazism may have been morally repugnant to him, he was following a greater law, which was obeisance to the Reich. Eichmann argued that no one could judge him guilty by applying a system of morality that is different than the one he was operating under during the war. Arendt was not impressed.

When Stangneth’s book was first published in Germany in 2011, much of the attention in the German press was directed at Stangneth’s claims that Germany knew, or should have known, about Eichmann’s whereabouts as early as 1952. Eichmann was not apprehended until the Israelis did so in 1960 because, as a January 2011 article in Der Spiegel put it, “Germany was unready and unwilling to put him on trial.”

Here, in the United States, since the book’s September 2014 publication, most of the discussion has not been about Eichmann but rather about Arendt, and whether “Eichmann in Jerusalem” was “right” or “wrong.” So much so, that a New York Times blog post by Seyla Benhabib of Yale University asked: “Who’s on trial, Eichmann or Arendt?”

Arendt’s chronicle of the Eichmann trial as first published in The New Yorkeroffended many because she departed from coverage of the trial itself to judge harshly the behavior of Jewish leaders in the ghettos and the camps which, to her many critics over the years, seemed at best misguided and not relevant to Eichmann’s guilt, and at worst a misplaced transference of Jewish self-loathing complicated by her relationship with Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger and the horror of what those Jews who remained in Europe during the Holocaust did to survive.

As for Eichmann himself, Arendt adjudged him not special in any way: not particularly smart or educated; he had no substantial accomplishments prior to his Nazi service; was physically slight of build with a whiny voice and spoke in tortured circumlocutions of circular logic. Eichmann, Arendt wrote, had a weak understanding of philosophy and the obedience issue. Arendt concluded that “the banality” of Eichmann’s anti-Semitism and the “thoughtlessness” of his allegiance to Hitler and the Nazi regime’s victory allowed him to perpetrate genocide.

According to Stangneth, what Arendt failed to grasp was that Eichmann wanted his “audience” to believe that poorly or not, he was a person of conscience who was obeying orders out of a misplaced loyalty. Stangneth points out that each of Eichmann’s captors and interrogators would later report that they believed that they were important figures to Eichmann. Eichmann had flattered them into believing so. “Again and again,” Stangneth writes, “Eichmann and his texts led people to false conclusions.”
As Arendt did not have access, as Stangneth has, to the full texts of Eichmann’s Argentine papers, interviews, and his jailhouse writings, she could not know that Eichmann derided conscience during war as a lie, and any expression of remorse, “cheap hokum,” or that Eichmann was an ideologue whose credo placed him beyond philosophy in “total war.”

Arendt’s defenders such as Benhabib in The Times, Roger Berkowitz in TheNew York Review of Books, and Kazue Koishikawa on Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center blog explain that Arendt’s use of “thoughtlessness” in no way minimized Eichmann’s guilt, and that, in fact, Arendt had acknowledged Eichmann’s personal responsibility for the murders. Instead, they argue, Arendt meant to explain Eichmann’s lack of conscience for his acts — that what allowed Eichmann to commit mass murder was his lack of a conscience, which was itself a failure of thoughtfulness, of Eichmann’s insufficient ability to think.

Arendt wasn’t wrong about any of this; but the persona Eichmann presented in Jerusalem and in his writings was purposely dissembling. What Stangneth demonstrates is that what matters most is not what Arendt or anyone else thought about Eichmann in Jerusalem, but rather what Eichmann thought of Eichmann. The truth of Eichmann is to be found in the totality of his words, in the various truths he proffered and, most tellingly, in his lies.

Eichmann left about 8,000 pages from his time in Jerusalem. His last words to his wife on his way to the gallows were: “I have peace in my heart and this is proof to me that my belief is correct.” Eichmann’s final words, delivered in German were:

After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. I have lived believing in God and I die believing in God. Long live Germany. Long live Argentina. Long live Austria. These are the countries with which I have been most closely associated and shall not forget them. I had to obey the rules of war and my flag. I am ready.

Eichmann would have had us believe he was nothing more than a patriot and an officer who served country and cause in wartime. Eichmann may have not been exceptional, but his fanatical anti-Semitism was criminal and his enthusiastic participation in the murder of so many millions of innocent Jewish men, women, and children, placed him outside the circle of normative human behavior. Eichmann died a criminal’s death and the stain of his being was erased from the Earth: he was cremated and his ashes dumped into the Mediterranean. Thanks to Stangneth, we now know better the full extent of his evil. For as Stangneth put it: “A man who wears so many masks is always tempted to reveal who he is.”
¤

“Once upon a time” is a phrase we use for fairy tales and fables. Yet most Jews carry with them another time, another land, another city. It could be the Pale of Settlement or Vilnius, Krakow or Lvov or, in more recent times, the Lower East Side, the Bronx, Tehran, Moscow, Buenos Aires or even the Tel Aviv that once was. Perhaps in the future we will say the same for Paris, Manchester or Copenhagen. Quien Sabe?

That feeling of being in two places, two time periods, at once, is part of the experience of “Letters to Afar,” a remarkable exhibit on view through May 24 at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco (CJM), a video and sound installation by Hungarian artist Péter Forgács that combines Polish=Jewish “found footage” (home movies, travelogues) made between 1918 and 1939 with music by the Klezmatics.

“Letters to Afar” is installed in the upper-floor galleries of the CJM’s Daniel Libeskind-designed building. Films, for the most part taken by American Jews on return visits to Poland, each from different Polish cities, including Warsaw, Krakow, Grodek, Lodz and Vilna, are projected onto the walls of the darkened galleries, or onto multiple scrims, which endow the imagery with a ghostly presence, sometimes doubling the films horizontally, so that the same film is shown twice but not always showing the same images at the same time, or in different magnifications; or three films stacked vertically — forcing us to compare, contrast and take in the complex multiple details of each lost world.

The installation is austere, the effect contemplative, reverential — the effect is not “we are there” so much as to create the feeling that we, in the here and now, are drifting through some limbo of past Jewish experience. There are benches and pinpoints of light where one can stand and listen — at times to klezmer strains, at others to atonal, ambient, classical or dissonant sounds. Occasionally, we hear narration of the travelogues on view. Some of the films include identifying text, most do not.

The exhibition has no set unfolding. Rather, visitors are meant to wander about freely and see what they can (to see all the film being projected would take an estimated six hours). The entire installation is one artwork, “a composition … one total installation where all elements of different films are in interaction with each other,” Forgács said. “We wanted to create this immense richness of life that was crushed.”

We look at the faces, some of which look contemporary, others from the past, and still others appear as if unchanged from shtetl life centuries ago. We don’t know these people, and yet we feel we do. For example, I experienced a “Back to the Future” time-travel shock in seeing on film Max Weinreich, the YIVO’s founder in 1935 at its headquarters in Vilna — a person and a place I had read about but never in my wildest dreams imagined being able to see. It was surreal.

As Forgács explained in an interview, “The hidden history is on the films.” As these are home movies or educational or travel films, the images are pedestrian, of everyday life. “There are no home movies about divorce or heart attacks,” he said. His work is not meant as “an informative documentary.” Instead, Forgács is trying to create an encounter with “the gestures, the winking, the smile, the movements … the silent emotions that we read and [that make us] aware of these beautiful things.” In his work, Forgács creates the context and the drama. “I like operas, not documentaries,” he said, describing his films as attempts to “slow down time.”

“My work,” Forgács said, “is much more than my words.”

Forgács was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1950. Since 1978 he has made more than 30 films and is best known for his series “Private Hungary,” which recontextualized Hungarian home movies from the 1930s and ’60s — showing private lives that we know will be subsumed by the tsunami of European history, one that occurs, as Forgács put it, “off screen.”

In 1983, Forgács established the Private Photo & Film Archives (PPFA), a collection of amateur film footage from the 1920s. Angelenos may recall the artist from his 2002 multimedia installation at the Getty Research Institute, “The Danube Exodus: Rippling Currents of the River.” That project, made in collaboration with Marcia Kinder and the Labyrinth Project at USC, contrasted film of Slovakian Jews aboard a ship trying to escape to Palestine with a later ship of Bessarabian Germans trying to flee the Soviets.

“Letters to Afar” came about, Forgács recounted, by a confluence of fortunate circumstances. He received a phone call from Frank London of the Klezmatics suggesting they collaborate on a project involving a collection of films at YIVO, the aforementioned Jewish cultural preservation society now housed in New York (and where London’s fellow Klezmatic Lorin Sklamberg has worked since 1987). Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation funded the collection’s digitization. The next stroke of luck was when the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews agreed to commission the work, focusing on Polish Jews during Poland’s Second Republic from 1918 to 1938, the period during which a Polish democratic state was created, and Jews, who were granted civil rights, flourished until the Nazi invasion on Sept. 1, 1939.

The Galicia Museum is responsible for a related exhibit presently on view at the CJM, “Poland and Palestine: Two Lands and Two Skies,” a collection of 50 images from a discovered trove of 15,000 images made in the 1930s by Ze’ev Aleksandrowicz, which is displayed just outside the entrance to “Letters to Afar.” Its presence adds to the feeling of being in two places (or more) at once.

In “Letters to Afar,” Forgács has created a memory play. The past, ours and that of the Jews in “Afar,” are but threads in the tapestries of our collective consciousness reminding us that, as the Jewish partisans used to say, “Amchu.” The Jewish people are one and will always be, although not always in the places we used to be.

“Letters to Afar” continues at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco through May 24. For more information, contact THECJM.orgor 415.655-7800.

Let me indulge in some hyperbole: When Moses spoke after he came down from the mountain, when Jesus delivered his Sermon on the Mount, I don’t believe their audience could have been any more stunned than I or the other 3000 attendees were at Friday night’s Grammy week MusiCares charity event when Bob Dylan, this year’s person-of-the-year honoree, took to the podium and spoke for some 35 minutes, cogently, lyrically and, at moments, comically and poignantly. During Dylan’s speech the room of world-class schmoozers went dead silent; and afterwards you could almost hear them picking up their jaws from the floor. And like some latter-day Josephus, I can say: I was there, I saw it and heard it. And it was awesome. It actually blew my mind.

By now, you’ve probably heard about the speech, probably even read a transcript of it, as published in The LA Times, or Rolling Stone. That won’t stop me from telling you about it – it’s just one of those experiences that demands recounting.

Dylan’s speech was candid, heartfelt and deeply personal. He acknowledged those who supported and stood by him as a songwriter when it was not commercial to do so, such as John Hammond of Columbia Records, Lou Levy of Leeds Music and Artie Mogull of Witmark Music; and those who first popularized his songs, such as Peter, Paul and Mary, and Joan Baez, as well as the Turtles, The Byrds and Sonny Bono, who Dylan said made Pop versions of his songs that were like commercials for his music, and others like the Staples Singers, Nina Simone and Jimi Hendrix who gave his songs greater recognition.

Dylan placed his songs in the context of the folk tradition in which he had immersed himself and where he learned his craft; and in the context of the producers, songwriters and performers whose admiration he cherished such as Doc Pomus, Sam Phillips and Johnny Cash and whose talent he distinguished from those who didn’t understand Dylan’s such as Leiber & Stoller, Ahmet Ertegun and Tom T. Hall ; Dylan responded to critics’ attacks on his voice and his performances over the years; and, finally, he spoke about the good work of MusiCares, talking of the care they offered rockabilly musician Billy Lee Riley when he got sick.

The speech turned out to be most memorable and surprising event of what will now be remembered as a legendary evening. Don Was, the evening’s musical director, played both electric and standup bass as part of a great backing band that included Buddy Miller on guitar and Greg Leisz on steel guitar, Benmott Tench on keyboards and drummer Kenny Aronoff, as well as some terriffic back-up singers.

Although, as is customary at MusicCares, the honoree Dylan did not perform, he was very involved in the selection of artists and song choice. Here’s who performed, what, when they originally performed it, and how they did:

• Beck opened with a decent pumped-up art rock version of “Leopard-skin pillbox hat” which he originally performed on the 2009 War Child charity album;
• Aaron Neville did a gorgeous version of “Shooting Star.”
• Alanis Morissette performed “Subterrannean Homesick Blues” much as she did at a 2005 UK Music Hall of Fame event, which to these ears was the night’s weakest performance.
• In one of the evening’s liveliest performance Los Lobos gave a rousing version of “A Night Like This” which they originally covered for Dylan’s film “Masked and Anonymous.”
• Willie Nelson, who could bring emotion and world-weary truth to a reading of the phonebook (if anyone read phonebooks anymore), gave a powerful reading of Senor (Tales of Power), despite some teleprompter snafus.
• Jackson Browne did a solid “Blind Willie McTell.”
• John Mellencamp did a Tom Waits-like version of Highway 61, much as it appeared on his “Trouble No More Live at Town Hall.”
• Jack White did a thunderous version of “One More Cup of Coffee” (which appears on the 1999 White Stripes first studio album) laying down a curtain of heavy funk;
• Tom Jones did a wonderfully soulful version of “What Good Am I” which also appears on his album “Praise and Blame.”
• Norah Jones performed “I’ll be Your Baby Tonight” on piano, a track that appeared as the B side from her debut album;
• Susan Tedeschi, Derek Trucks and the Tedeschi-Trucks band, blasted through “Million Miles Away.”
• One of the evening’s surprise standouts was John Doe’s take-us-to-church version of “Pressing On: which appears on “I’m Not There.”
• Crosby Stills & Nash performed “Girl from the North Country,” which they’ve been doing on their most recent tours.
• In what I and many others feel was the night’s best performance, Bonnie Raitt performed, “Standing in the Doorway” which appeared on her album “Slipstream.”
• Sheryl Crow did a good-not-great “Boots of Spanish Leather” (I rather wish she had performed Missisippi).
• Springsteen and Tom Morello did “Kocking Heaven’s Door” allowing Morello some soaring guitar solos.
• After Dylan spoke, Neil Young closed out the show with a solo acoustic “Blowing in the Wind” which he’s been performing on his 2014 tour.

So you can see my point: Had it only been the music, that would have been enough (Dayenu!). But then President Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States, took the stage, a little smaller, a little hunched, but making a strong showing for any 90 year old.

President Carter gave a positive plug for “Shadows in the Dark” Dylan’s latest album of Sinatra-recorded standards and then explained that he had met Dylan when Carter was governor of Georgia. Dylan was then exploring Christianity, and Carter recounted that they stayed up late talking religion, politics and how advances in human rights are achieved.

“There’s no doubt,” President Carter said of Dylan, “that his words of peace and human rights are much more incisive and much more powerful and much more permanent than any president of the United States.” Great praise indeed. And if that’s all there was, that too would have been enough (again: Dayenu).

But then Bob Dylan took the stage, and he held a sheaf of papers in his hands and no one really knew what was coming: Based on a lifetime of cryptic public pronouncements and very limited on-stage chatter, no one would have been surprised if Dylan had accepted the award, then mumbled a few words, or even sung a few bars and made a hasty retreat. He might have even performed a few numbers with some of the stars. Instead he started in slow, saying,

“There are a few people we need to thank tonight for bringing about this grand event. Neil Portnow, Dana Tamarkin, Rob Light, Brian Greenbaum, Don Was. And I also want to thank President Carter for coming. It’s been a long night, and I don’t want to talk too much, but I’ll say a few things.”

And he did, for more than 35 minutes. If in his autobiographical book “Chronicles,” Dylan delivered some insight into his creative process and those who inspired or taught him in his journey to become an artist, then this MusiCares speech was a sequel of sorts, about becoming a songwriter, about acknowledging those who supported him and those who made it possible for his songs to be played.

For more than 50 years Dylan has jousted with journalists about his songs playfully, angrily, cynically, dismissively, and mysteriously. In his speech, Dylan placed his work in the context of a tradition that reaches back to Shakespeare’s times and spoke of his devotion to traditional music, traditional folk music, traditional rock & roll and traditional big bang swing music.

Dylan spoke of the years he immersed himself in folk music and how those songs were the bedrock on which he built his own songs, tracing connections between “John Henry” and “Blowing in the Wind”; Big Bill Broonzy’s “Keys to the Highway” and his own “Highway 61”; “Roll the cotton down” and “Maggie’s Farm”; Robert Johnson’s “Better Come in My Kitchen” and “Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall”; “Come Ye Gather” songs and “The Times They are a Changin”; and “Deep Elum Blues” and “Desolation Row.” In Sum, Dylan said, “All these songs are connected…. I was just extending the line.” There was a humility in saying this, and at the same a willing demystification of Dylan’s art, — one that acknowledged the source as important even if Dylan’s classics transcended their roots to become iconic songs in their own right.

However, in aligning himself with a deep tradition which he embellished and transcended to create his own timeless canon for which he was being honored, Dylan was not without ego. He went off on a list of people who didn’t like what he did, and those who did. Reading it, Dylan comes off as a tad petty, harboring grudges in the face of all the recognition his work has received, but in person it was funny, smart-alecky and revealing.

Who’s in and who’s out? OUT: Leiber & Stoller (Yakety Yak and Hound Dog), Ahmet Ertegun, Merle Haggard and Tom T. Hall – all critical of Dylan; IN: Doc Pomus(This Magic Moment” and “lonely Place”), Sam Phillips of Sun Records (Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash), Buck Owens (“Together Again”) and Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash.

“Why me, Lord?” Dylan said (three times) about how critics have found fault with his singing all throughout his career. Critics, Dylan, had opined that: “I can’t sing. I croak. Sound like a frog….can’t carry a tune and I talk my way through a song… No Vocal range… slur my words, no diction.. mangle my melodies, render my songs unrecognizable…” It’s true that if you’ve seen Dylan in concert in the last decade, you might have heard this said too, or even thought it. But Dylan matched each of these accusations with a performer in whom critics found this fault to be a strength, be it Tom Waits, Lou Reed, Dr. John, Leonard Cohen or Muddy Waters.

In one of his funnier lines, Dylan started to talk about “a popular soul-singing sister” who sang the national anthem and “sang every note that existed and some that don’t exist.” Yet he was the one being criticized for mangling a song. At this point, I wondered if the speech was about to go off the rails. Also, although Dylan delivered the speech leaning on one arm, his feet seemed to splay out behind him, almost like a ballet dancer at the barre and I feared that his feet were going to slide out from under him. But, as usua,l to doubt Dylan is a fool’s errand.

Here’s what Dylan said next: “Sam Cooke said this when told he had a beautiful voice: He said, “Well that’s very kind of you, but voices ought not to be measured by how pretty they are. Instead they matter only if they convince you that they are telling the truth.” Think about that the next time you are listening to a singer.”

In Dylan’s reckoning, songwriters like Tom T. Hall fake trying to connect with the average man, while Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash told it true. Similarly Dylan set his just released album of Sinatra standards apart from those by Michael Buble, Harry Connick, Jr, Rod Stewart, Linda Rondstadt, and Paul McCartney, who did so with a full orchestra in imitation of what was, rather than performing the songs in a true manner. Dylan also explained how Rock N’ Roll is part blues, which is itself derived from “Arabian violins and Strauss waltzes,” and hillbilly music that needs to be played with “the right kind of rhythm.” Dylan said: “You can fake it, but you can’’t make it.”

Dylan shared that he was considering making a gospel album with the Blackwood Brothers, which he said might surprise some people but that it shouldn’t. ”I don’t think it would be anything out of the ordinary for me. Not a bit. “ Dylan was making the point that in all the various albums he made whether folk, rock, Texas swing, Christmas Songs, Sinatra covers, his ambition was always the same, to perform them in a way that is true.

Dylan then spoke with great affection for the late Billy Lee Riley (most well-known for “Red Hot”), a rockabilly pioneer eclipsed by Jerry Lee Lewis, whose conversation and performances Dylan enjoyed and who MusiCares aided when Riley became sick. MusiCares, Dylan payed Riley’s mortgage and health bills for six years and were able to make “his life comfortable, tolerable to the end.”

“That is something that can’t be repaid.” Dylan said, “Any organization that would do that would have to have my blessing.” And then Dylan said, “I’m going to get out of here now. I’m going to put an egg in my shoe and beat it. I probably left out a lot of people and said too much about some. But that’s OK. Like the spiritual song, ‘I’m still just crossing over Jordan too.’ Let’s hope we meet again. Sometime. And we will, if, like Hank Williams says, “the good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.” And just like that, he was gone.

The room collectively pulled its jaw up off the floor, stood and applauded, and then spent the little of the night that was left, dazed. MusiCares raised $7 Million from that night alone.

HBO is planning on airing the concert as a special (no date has been announced). I hope they don’t cut Dylan’s speech. However, even if they do show the speech in its entirety, what I hope comes through is what we, lucky enough to be in the room, experienced: A sermon about tradition, about a gift not ignored, about being grateful to those who believed in you, and gave support and succor along the way, about making art that is not fake, and that remains true even as it is ever changing and that, in its own way, tells a truth – and about standing up for those organizations that care for others in a meaningful way.

Although Dylan was honoree, the evening provided no way beyond the performances to thank Dylan himself. What comes to mind, now almost a week later are lines Aaron Neville had sung earlier in the evening:

“Seen a shooting star tonight slip away
Tomorrow will be another day
Guess it’s too late to say the things to you
That you needed to hear me say
Seen a shooting star tonight
Slip away.”

Anastasia writes:

I was a college student at the time working part-time at Fromin’s deli, the first time he came in. There was something powerful and domineering about him.

“I need things,” he said to me, his voice a rough mix of Brooklyn and post-nasal drip that sent an electric current though my whole body.

“What sort of things?” I said in all innocence.

“Things. Bagels, cream cheese, lox. I need them. I want them.” No one had ever talked to me like this. I didn’t know if it repelled me or attracted me.

“Anastasia?”

“How do you know my name?”

“It’s…” Had he seen me before? Was this fate?

“It’s on your nametag. Mind if I call you Ana?’

I nodded. I was already submitting to his will.

“Ana, can you get my order? I think it’s sitting up there on the counter.”

He took his order and left, leaving me confused and thinking I was somehow not up to his standards.

The next day, he called and ordered me to come to his house.

“I’ve got very specific tastes,” he said. A shiver ran through me. What kinky world was he into?

I held my breath as he ordered me bring a selection of smoked fish, some whitefish salad and a kippered herring. He gave me his address. And then he said his last name was Brooks. I assumed that was a cover name. He didn’t sound like a “Brooks.”

“I don’t even know your first name.”

He laughed that crazy laugh. “Guess”

“Christian?”

“No. Jewish.”

His home was on a beautiful street lined with old trees, and looked like a chateau or palace. I had heard he was wealthy but I had no idea.

I rang the doorbell, my heart racing equal parts afraid and excited. I expected a liveried servant to open the door, but it was him. He was wearing a polo short, and his chest hairs peeked through its V. Is the trying to torture me?

“Right this way.” He led me into a room filled with gleaming knives and hanging iron and copper devices. “Put that down on the counter.”

Was my initiation about to begin. I wasn’t sure I liked being ordered around by him. I did but I wasn’t sure I could do his bidding.

He pulled out a pen. “I’ll sign this.”

It was the contract that binds us. I watched him sign. He handed me the long scoll. I looked it over. It listed all his orders. But there was no place for me to sign. Apparently, he thinks I am already his slave.

“Follow me, I’ll show you my playroom.” He leads me back out towards the entry and then to a side room, where he flings open the doors. I walk in and it’s as if I’ve been transported back to the Catskills in the 1950s. There are posters everywhere, each one more frightening than the next: There is one with a Nazis dancing; another with an African-American Cowboy rearing his horse in a menacing manner; an inhuman creature; and a some Furries piloting in space. Throughout the room were displayed a bizarre collection of little gold statuettes of naked men he called “Oscar”; others that held coins with two-faced clowns that he had named “Tony”. There were golden victorolas and statues of winged women. It was unnerving.

Dominating the room was a gleaming black instrument that he took control of, placing his soft large hands on its ivory protrusions. He pressed down on them, and they made an unholy sound. Then he looked me in the eye and began an incantation:

“Here I am… I’m Melvin Brooks, I’ve come to stop the show/ Just a ham who’s minus looks but in your hearts I’ll grow…”

“I just can’t do this,” I murmured and fled the room and house.

But I knew I’d be back.

How do we understand the impact of climate change and natural disasters on people and architecture, and how does humanity learn from our mistakes and try to prepare for potential future cataclysms? That is ostensibly the agenda of “Sink or Swim: Designing for a Sea Change,” an exhibition opening Dec. 13 at the Annenberg Space for Photography, curated by Frances Anderton, an architecture writer perhaps best-known as the host and executive producer of KCRW’s DnA Design and Architecture radio program.

What Anderton has done is bring together images by six photographers whose works reveal the cruel beauty of people in extremis, as well as the very human impulse to build again and prepare for the next storm.

Among the photographers included in the show is Iwan Baan, a Dutch architectural photographer who won acclaim for depicting the human interaction with architecture and who was awarded the inaugural Julius Shulman Institute award in 2010. Baan has photographed several African communities in Nigeria and Benin that live on the water; for this project, the Annenberg sent him to document some of the flood defenses in the Hague as well as post-tsunami homes in Japan. Stephen Wilkes is known for his monumental time-lapse images, as well as his photographs of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and for his photos of Staten Island after Hurricane Sandy. Jonas Bendiksen, a Magnum photographer, has devoted years to documenting the Bangladeshi delta communities. Monica Louwens, a California-based, Dutch-born photographer, makes images of wetlands restoration, which she contrasts with evidence of human negligence despite warning signs. Mark Holtzman’s medium is aerial photography, including work about the nature and infrastructure of the Los Angeles River, Malibu and Oakland, and Kip Evans focuses on the wetlands of Elkhorn Slough in Monterey County.

Finally, there is the work of Paula Bronstein, a photojournalist who has been based in Bangkok since 1998 and who has made a career of being present whenever there is a disaster, political turmoil or war. Currently, she is in Myanmar (formerly Burma); before that, she spent a month in Hong Kong covering the street protests. She also traveled to Japan to cover the tsunami, and to the Philippines, in 2013, when Typhoon Hiyan hit.

For the Annenberg, Bronstein returned to Japan to photograph the state of recovery and preparation for the future after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

“… These works tell such powerful stories about resiliency, climate change and architecture, as well as engage with viewers on a humanistic level,” Wallis Annenberg, for whom the center is named, said in the event’s press release.

Among the show’s photographers, each worthy in his or her own way, Bronstein stands out. For decades, she has put herself in harm’s way to share with us stories to which we might not otherwise have access. She reports on events for news outlets, but she brings an artist’s eye to her compositions, offering beauty and, at times, hope where none should exist.

Bronstein grew up in Newton, Mass., in what she calls “a typical dysfunctional Jewish family. Very ‘Seinfeld.’ ” After majoring in photography at the University of Colorado and photojournalism at the Rochester Institute of Technology, she eventually joined the staff of the Hartford Courant in Connecticut. In 1984, when the Bhopal gas disaster occurred at the Union Carbide plant in India, because Union Carbide was headquartered in nearby Danbury, the Courant sent Bronstein to cover what would be revealed to be one of the world’s worst industrial disasters (more than 500,000 people were exposed to toxic gas).

She went on to work briefly at the Chicago Tribune and Oregon’s Register-Guard newspaper, then moved to Bangkok, realizing that in that region, “assignments were plentiful.”

She proved correct. After 9/11, she traveled to Afghanistan and embedded with troops to cover the war, and she has consistently focused as well on the plight of Afghan women and children (Bronstein is currently assembling a book of her photographs from Afghanistan). Since then, she has traveled to cover major news stories throughout the region, including in Nepal, Pakistan, Gaza, South Sudan and Vietnam, in addition to those named above. “When a big story happens in the region, I’ll jump in,” she said.

Bronstein admits she has felt in danger “many times,” but said she does not plunge into assignments in a foolhardy way. For example, Bronstein said she would not go to cover the civil war in Syria (except maybe the most Northern part). She said that throughout all her travels over the years, no one has ever raised an issue about her last name or her religion (it just doesn’t come up), nor has her gender been an obstacle — even in countries where women’s rights are little respected. “It’s only been a problem,” Bronstein said, “that I’m American.” She said there is a gang mentality — shared by the Taliban and ISIS, as well as their sympathizers, that “if they hate Clinton, or they hate Obama, they hate you.” Or, put simply: “[They] hate all Westerners.”

However, that doesn’t stop Bronstein: “I’m always feeling that our work keeps on changing, and we have to be aware of those changes and be aware of where we are going, and assess the threat level, if there is some.”

For the Annenberg exhibition, Bronstein photographed the new sea walls being built off the coast of
Japan that was so badly damaged by the tsunami. In a Bronstein image being used to promote the show, a small girl is shown, arms open wide for balance, walking along a gleaming sea wall that looks like an airplane wing tilted toward the sky. Just beyond, a large wavelike expanse of sand appears as if it, too, is trying to climb over the structure — a vivid depiction of nature versus the elements, man versus nature, and a child who must navigate this contested future. As much metaphor as journalism, the image tells a story that is both immediate and timeless — the very essence of Bronstein’s life work.

Bronstein said she feels fortunate to have been able to follow her passion literally around the world. As her images at the Annenberg demonstrate, her mission is simple:
“I’ve always been a news photographer, so, for me, covering big news stories is important — to document it in a way that brings attention to the subject, that brings the story to the world.”

“Sink or Swim: Designing for a Sea Change” is at the Annenberg Space for Photography from Dec. 13 through May 3. For more information, visit annenbergspaceforphotography.org.

The mere release of “Popular Problems,” two days after Leonard Cohen’s 80th birthday last month, is remarkable in and of itself. (How many 80-year-old sex symbols and style icons are there?) But it also caps a decade in which Cohen conquered troubling neuroses and fears to mount worldwide tours that were invocations, convocations and spiritual gatherings, not to mention money-makers, that returned Cohen, who’d been swindled out of his lifesavings, to financial security. His is one of the more amazing runs in music history.

Nomen est omen. The name determines the life. In Cohen’s case, he has become the priest, and not just for a cadre of followers around the world; he is also a seeker, a pilgrim ever struggling to find satori — in wine, drugs, women, in isolation and among the world, in words and in song.

“Popular Problems” finds Cohen’s baritone deepened, his voice more raspy, but each word distinct, each phrase launched like an arrow at a target. The accompaniments, produced by Patrick Leonard, are spare — piano, violin, a chorus of back-up singers, digitalized beats that are melodic in contrast to Cohen’s own probing lyrics.

This may be my favorite collection since 1988’s “I’m Your Man.” It is about optimism in the face of age, war, terrorism and the ongoing challenges of love. Cohen opens with “Slow,” a sly declaration of style over age, singing “It’s not because I’m old / It’s not the life I led / I always like it slow / That’s what my momma said.”

“Slow,” however, is no oldster’s apologia, but rather a credo akin to slow cooking, or slow networking, an acknowledgement that slow and mindful is how to savor life — a feat Cohen has spent a lifetime pursuing.

A decade ago, Cohen was ready to retire. He had become overwhelmed by a fear of disappointing his live audiences that he could not go on stage. Then, after becoming a victim of embezzlement forced him back to work, Cohen took up a tour so arduous — filled with three-hour shows each night — a tour so powerful, so joyous, so satisfying, that in just three years, Cohen earned his way back to financial stability. “Popular Problems” is a capstone to the artist’s triumph over his own demons. In “A Street,” he sings, “The party’s over / But I’ve landed on my feet / I’ll be standing on this corner / where there used to be a street.”

The nine songs on “Popular Problems” present meditations on Jewish heritage replete with biblical imagery (“Born in Chains”), and applies that imagery to Hurricane Katrina (“Samson in New Orleans”), love and love lost (“My Oh My,” “Did I Ever Love You”) and war (“Almost Like the Blues”) and songs that combine them all (“Nevermind”), tackled with both seriousness and self-deprecating humor. As he sings in “Almost Like the Blues,” “There’s torture and there’s killing / There’s all my bad reviews / The war, the children missing / It’s almost like the blues.”

One cannot read the lyrics on “Popular Problems” without appreciation for the zen of Cohen: His words are heavy with meaning, with counterpoints of humor, irony or cynicism; there’s meter to his lines and, occasionally, a clever rhyme. His lyrics present a man at home with his past and with his cultural tradition. He sings, “My father says I’m chosen / My mother says I’m not / I listened to their story / Of the Gypsies and the Jews / It was good, it wasn’t boring / It was almost like the blues.” He even ends his album on a declaration of optimism as plain as it is direct, “You Got Me Singing.”

“You got me singing / Even tho’ the news is bad / You got me singing/ The only song I ever had … You got me thinking / I’d like to carry on.”

Rave on, Leonard Cohen. Happy birthday, and many more. Eighty is but a stepping stone in your Tower of Song.