Franz Rosenzweig suffered from the muscular degenerative disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease) and towards the end of his life had to write with the help of his wife Edith, who would recite letters of the alphabet until he indicated for her to stop, continuing until she could guess the word or phrase he intended (or, at other times, Rosenzweig would point to the letter on the plate of his typewriter). They also developed a system based on him blinking his eyes.

Rosenzweig's final attempt to communicate his thought, via the laborious typewriter-alphabet method, consisted in the partial sentence: "And now it comes, the point of all points, which the Lord has truly revealed to me in my sleep, the point of all points for which there—". The writing was interrupted by his doctor, with whom he had a short discussion using the same method. When the doctor left, Rosenzweig did not wish to continue with the writing, and he died in the night of December 10, 1929, in Frankfurt, the sentence left unfinished.

For the last eight years, this was the governor of my state. What does this mean?

the other side of something, articulately bombs through roads, twisting its nonsense beak, against the noon rise

Tonight I listened to a recording of a Malek class circa 2008. The best part might have been the 5-minute pizza break:

Nathan Schradle: Maybe a cow died in a way that was inhumane to make this pizza, but it's delicious pizza.

Alex Wolf: It's very tasty Bestand.

The example is first of all for others, and beyond the self. Sometimes, perhaps always, whoever gives the example is not equal to the example he gives, even if he does everything to follow it in advance, "to learn how to live," as we were saying, imperfect example of the example he gives--which he gives by giving then what he has not and even what he is not. For this reason, the example thus disjoined separates enough from itself or from whoever gives it so as to be no longer or not yet example for itself. We do not have to solicit the agreement of Marx--who died to this even before being dead--in order to inherit it: to inherit this or that, this rather than that which comes to us nevertheless by him, through him if not from him. And we do not have to suppose that Marx was in agreement with himself. ("What is certain is that I am not a Marxist," he is supposed to have confided to Engels. Must we still cite Marx as an authority to say likewise?) For Blanchot does not hesitate to suggest that Marx had difficulty living with this disjunction of the injunctions within him and with the fact that they were untranslatable into each other. How is one to receive, how is one to understand a speech, how is one to inherit it when it does not let itself be translated from itself to itself? This may appear impossible. And, we have to acknowledge, it is probably impossible. But since this sums up perhaps the strange subject of this lecture devoted to the specters of Marx, as well as to the avowed distortion of its axiom, permit me then to turn the objection around. Guaranteed translatability, given homogeneity, systematic coherence in their absolute forms, this is surely (certainly, a priori and not probably) what renders the injunction, the inheritance, and the future--in a word, the other--impossible. There must be disjunction, interruption, the heterogeneous if at least there must be, if there must be a chance given to any "there must be" whatsoever, be it beyond duty.

- Derrida, Specters of Marx

Edward Said mentions at least 'three remarkable witnesses of Gaza':

Amira Hass, Sara Roy, and Gloria Emerson.

Play that funky music, Jewish boy

Leonard Cohen sings, or rather recites, his sexual past as if he were an art historian talking about his favorite painters of the baroque. Cohen does not sing, or he sings in a near-monotone, a murmur so slow that it is profane, as if to actively communicate the fact that he is a novelist and a poet, a failed novelist turned musician. He deflates a traditional mode of the love song with a kind of dismissive spiritual detachedness, the detachedness of a Buddhist, a Jewish Buddhist, or, as my aunt says, a 'Jew-Bu' (he is one of the few musicians to devote his life entirely to Buddhism at one point).

Whereas the white Africanist male singer would croon for the woman, his words the evidence of the irrational sacrifices he makes for the object of his desires, the Jewish balladeer, epitomized by Cohen and Bob Dylan, approaches the situation differently. Jews are still not white, try as we might, or, as Hannah Arendt put it, 'there is no escaping Jewishness' (and Jewishness is not, Judith Butler points out, the same as Judaism). Both Cohen and Dylan have not tried to escape their Jewishness, and this has been part of the key to their enormous success. There is a poetic moment to their sonic fictions, a theoretical aspect to their sonorous mobility, which can be traced back to the exegetical and the Talmud.

This is not to say that a Jew, someone like Neil Diamond, perhaps, is incapable of writing, and presenting him or herself, in a thoroughly non-Jewish mode, or that a non-Jew is incapable of displaying an intense Jewish influence. The description of an aesthetic, or, as Susan Sontag would say, of a sensibility, must allow for an articulation of the ways in which the sensibility, the movement, has moved, itself, through cultures, rubbing against others.