Last year at anniversary time, I complained about the way politics banged up rudely here at the blog. It came as something of a surprise, but given the war in Gaza, there was no way around it. “Thanks to the war,” the blog at the start of 2015 had “enjoyed” an exceptionally good year in terms of traffic. This year, JPP has settled into its own little groove. It’s boutique thing with a modest amount of visitors, but gets not a bad bit of visibility. Some of that visibility has been good for business. I posted a lot, probably too much about Israel, and also Islam and refugees and ancient Near Eastern visual material. For the next month or so it’s going to be bodies, and then what?
In the final year of the Obama Age, JPP is world-weary waiting for the next shoe to drop, the next war, the next little atrocity, this and then that, and the quick conclusions. When I post about contemporary politics, there’s a definite spike in visits. I guess that’s what people care about. But politics and political people are exhausting (my friends excepted, of course). There’s just no pleasure in it. Maybe next year I only post about ontology, or re-post images copied from the Twitter feed of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Thank you all for your kind patience, thoughtful comments, sage suggestions, and critical pushback.
Happy birthday
I started following Jewish Philosophy Place because I am Jewish, teach philosophy, and even do some Jewish philosophy. Unfortunately, it has largely turned out to be yet another political echo-chamber about Israel. taking pot shots at the usual suspects. To be perfectly honest: I can’t remember ever learning anything new about Israel on the blog.
Fair enough. I regret too the amount i post about Israel. But alas, it’s my own sense that philosophy has to take into account a raft of human and ethical questions in relation to the political. My own philosophical interests re: religion and culture are steeped in “aesthetics,” not so much as a discourse about the beautiful and the ugly as about figures and composition. the organization of perception. That would explain, for instance, my postshot last week about the old and new kova tembel, the image of the new Jew and the new Israeli. To not address the world, in this case the Jewish world, would be a worse alternative than to addressing it. As a Zionist, I don’t see how Israel is not a central axis in that Jewish world.