The Exodus in Biblical Memory. By Ronald Hendel.

The Exodus in Biblical Memory. By Ronald Hendel. Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 120, No. 4 (Winter 2001). Also here.

Exodus: A Book of Memories. By Ronald S. Hendel. Bible Review, Vol. 18, No. 4 (August 2002). Also here.

Hendel:

The Exodus from Egypt is a focal point of ancient Israelite religion. Virtually every kind of religious literature in the Hebrew Bible-prose narrative, liturgical poetry, didactic prose and prophecy—celebrates the Exodus as a foundational event. Israelite ritual, law and ethics are often grounded in the precedent and memory of the Exodus. In the Ten Commandments, Yahweh identifies himself as the one “who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Exodus 20:2 = Deuteronomy 5:6). The deliverance from Egypt is the main historical warrant for the covenanted religious bond between Yahweh and his people Israel. In some texts (and featured prominently in the Haggadah, the traditional retelling of the Exodus story at the Passover Seder), the historically distant event is drawn into the present by the elastic quality of genealogical time: “You shall tell your son on that day, ‘It is because of what Yahweh did for me when he brought me out of Egypt’” (Exodus 13:8; see also Deuteronomy 6:20–25). In its existential actuality, the Exodus, more than any other event of the Hebrew Bible, embodies William Faulkner’s adage: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

 

But is it true? Well, yes and no.

 

Does the story contain real history? Very probably yes, although it’s not easy to pinpoint.

 

The biblical account is a conflation of history and memory—a mixture of historical truth and fiction, composed of “authentic” historical details, folklore motifs, ethnic self-fashioning, ideological claims and narrative imagination. It was communicated orally and then in written texts and circulated in a wide discursive network. We may plausibly assume that the Bible (including its constituent documentary sources) depends in various ways on earlier discourses, both oral and written. The collective memory of the Exodus is, in this sense, situated in a history of discourses. It is the remembered past that we have in our Bibles. The past and the present are interrelated in collective memory.


The Exodus from Egypt: Myth or Reality? By Baruch Halpern. The Rise of Ancient Israel. By Hershel Shanks, William G. Dever, Baruch Halpern, and P. Kyle McCarter, Jr. Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1992.

Halpern:

Under what circumstances did Romulus and Remus found Rome? What was the role of Hercules, or Jason and the Argonauts, in creating a unified Mycenaean consciousness? If you can answer those questions, you are ready to tackle the issue of the Exodus. For our accounts of the Exodus reflect the prehistory of the Israelite nation, or, perhaps, of some part of it.

 

The closest parallel to the Book of Exodus in the ancient West is Homer’s Odyssey. Both are stories of migration—of identity suspended until the protagonist—Odysseus or Israel—reaches a home. Neither account records events of the sort that are likely to have left marks in the archaeological record, or even in contemporaneous monuments. At both ends of the journey, though, in Egypt and Israel or at Troy and Ithaca, the narrative can be said to reflect local conditions. In both cases, our sources reflect long-term oral transmission, followed by authoritative codification in writing. In both cases, there is evidence of that peculiar process of oral transmission in which the story is renegotiated with each separate audience each time it is told. Each story reflects a healthy admixture of fancy with whatever is being recalled.

 

The Odyssey is the story of an individual at odds with sorceresses, one-eyed cannibals and sirens—very much like a metaphor for the journey of a social welfare bill through the legislature. The implausibility of the story occasions no great difficulty: Augustine tells us that the Odyssey was taught as gospel in the Greek world of his day; it is basically a piece of children’s literature. So, in its way, is the story of the Exodus.

 

But the Exodus is not the story of an individual; it is the story of a nation. It is the historical myth of an entire people, a focal point for national identity. The Exodus story was to the ancient Israelite what the stories of the Pilgrims and the Revolutionary War are to Americans. At a deep level, in fact, our American fathers modeled their notions of identity and history on the Exodus.

 

The Exodus coded certain common values into the culture. All Israel shared the background of the ancestors—all Israel had been slaves in Egypt. Whatever one’s biological ancestry, to be an Israelite meant that one’s ancestors—spiritual or emotive or collective ancestors—had risen from Egypt to conquer Canaan. YHWH liberated the Israelites from Egypt and executed a covenant with them. The covenant stipulated that, in return for their emancipation and for the gift of the land of Canaan, Israel would worship YHWH and obey his law. In Near Eastern culture, a sovereign who saved his subjects from ruin and gave them land merited loyalty. This nexus furnished the myth of the Passover, celebrated every spring as the green wheat broke ground. This was the story of how Israel came to be, and how it came into possession of Canaan. For without the conquest of Canaan, the Exodus would have been without a point.

 

The earliest Israelite Passover ritual already incorporated the pretense that the participants were in transition from Egypt to Israel, from bondage to freedom: The unleavened bread they ate was (and is) the “bread of affliction,” the unleavened bread that their ancestors ate on leaving Egypt. And the roasted lamb they ate was the stuff of rugged campfires; it reflected the absence of basic amenities—since in civilized settings, meat was always boiled. The ritual of the Passover, in sum, always presupposed the threshold location of the celebrant, between bondage and freedom, between Egypt and Canaan, in the realm of the uncivilized.

 

The difference between the early Israelite celebration and the Jewish festival is this: The Jewish celebrant in the Diaspora expresses hopes for national reintegration; the ancient Israelites knew, from the bleatings of the flocks and from the greening of the landscape all around them, that the festival would leave them in possession of the land of Canaan.

 

Yet modern scholarship divorces the Exodus from its completion in the conquest. For the relation of the Exodus to Israel’s settlement of Canaan is no longer as clear as it was to the Israelites of the Iron Age. Neither the date of the Exodus nor the duration of Israel’s sojourn in Egypt can now be ascertained with any confidence. Consequently, we cannot accurately gauge the interval between the Exodus and the emergence of Israel in Canaan. More the pity: to the Israelite of the Iron Age, the events were all but simultaneous; this is the reason that the Book of Joshua locates Israel’s entry into Canaan at the time of the Passover (Joshua 4:19, 5:10–11).

 

The historical uncertainty arises from the nature of our sources, and of the events reported. Endless generations of oral recital have made themselves felt in shaping the literature. The accounts—of J, E, P, D, and other sources—differ in detail. And the story of the Exodus is so central to Israelite identity that changes in that identity almost unconsciously registered in the evolution of the story. Nevertheless, behind the Exodus story events can be discerned that, unlike those of the patriarchal narratives, can be termed historical in scale.


How to Tell a Canaanite from an Israelite. By William G. Dever. The Rise of Ancient Israel. By Hershel Shanks, William G. Dever, Baruch Halpern, and P. Kyle McCarter, Jr. Washington: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1992.

Ceramics, Ethnicity, and the Question of Israel’s Origins. By William G. Dever. The Biblical Archaeologist, Vol. 58, No. 4 (December 1995).

Dever:

The thirteenth/twelfth century BCE “Proto-Israelite” entity or polity that I have tried here to characterize archaeologically as an ethnic group was not, of course, homogenous in the beginning, because its members were of diverse origins. We must probably think of most of the highland colonists as “displaced Canaanites” (both geographically and ideologically), including an assortment of urban refugees, social dropouts and malcontents, migrant farmers, resedentarized pastoralists, perhaps some Shasu-like bedouin and other immigrants from Transjordan, and even some newcomers from Syria and Anatolia. All these peoples were among those displaced by the radical socio-economic and cultural upheavals at the end of the Bronze Age toward the late thirteenth century BCE. But the new alignments that followed soon produced, among the other coalitions, our “Proto-Israelites,” emerging as an agrarian socio-economic movement on the highland frontier, and thus with sufficient solidarity to constitute an “ethnic group.” This group certainly possessed an ideology as part of its self-awareness (although this is difficult to discern archaeologically) and perhaps pronounced "reformed" tendencies, as such dissident groups have often had.

 

The foregoing seems to me to be the most likely scenario at the moment for the origins and early development of ancient Israel. Yet it must be confessed that it is in sharp contrast to the biblical tradition of the Exodus and Conquest—a theological dilemma that few archaeologists, those who precipitated the current crises about “Israelite origins”—are willing to face. I can only suggest that we must presuppose a complex, multi-faceted process for the formation of the later literary tradition of the “origin stories.” Thus we are dealing here with literature, which does not reflect “real” life directly or even necessarily accurately—especially ancient literature, which never claims to be historical in the modern sense. Literature reflects life imaginatively. The biblical writers and editors are therefore interpreting events; seeing the past through “the eyes of faith”; looking at monarchical Israel after its history is finished, trying to make sense of it all. When the authors of the Bible do look back, the fact that a small and obscure people from the fringes of the desert became, even briefly, a great nation; that despite their fecklessness, Yahweh revealed himself to them through prophets and priests; and that even a remnant survived the Assyrian and Babylonian onslaught and kept their faith intact-all this seemed miraculous. It must have been God’s doing all along! Such a conclusion may be somewhat skewed historically; it may seem to us naive theologically; and it certainly cannot be confirmed archaeologically. But the Bible’s “explanation” of Israel’s birth may be in some ways as good as our own, for much about ancient Israel still remains a mystery, if not a miracle.

 

The “Exodus-Conquest” story is perhaps really about only a small group, the central unrepresentative group, the southern tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, who were sometimes called the “House of Joseph,” because of the obvious Egyptian connection in one strand of the early tradition. If we ask then how the story of the “House of Joseph” became in time the story of “all Israel,” the answer may be deceptively simple. It was they who in the end told the story; and quite naturally, they included all those who later reckoned themselves part of biblical Israel. In time most people no doubt believed that they had been in Egypt.

 

A simple analogy may help us to understand this phenomenon. In mainstream American tradition, we all celebrate Thanksgiving as though we ourselves had come to these shores on the Mayflower. That is the myth; yet in fact, most of us got here some other way. My ancestors came from County Donegal in the potato famine 150 years ago. Yours may have come as slaves from Africa or from the ghettos of Europe, or as farm workers from Mexico. But spiritually (yes!), we are all Pilgrims: that is what makes us “Americans.” So are the myths of Israel’s origins, or ours, true? Of course they are—in the deepest sense. That we can put off our religious or cultural hat, and temporarily don the hat of the modern skeptical historian or archaeologist, does not necessarily alter or diminish the value of the tradition. We are what we believe we are, just as ancient Israel was.


How Did Israel Become a People? The Genesis of Israelite Identity. By Avraham Faust. Biblical Archaeology Review, Vol. 35, No. 6 (November/December 2009).

Migrations, Ethnogenesis, and Settlement Dynamics: Israelites in Iron Age Canaan and Shuwa-Arabs in the Chad Basin. By Thomas E. Levy and Augustin F. C. Holl. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Vol. 21, No. 1, (March 2002).

Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity: An Archaeological Study of Egyptians, Canaanites, Philistines, and Early Israel, 1300-1100 B.C.E. By Ann E. Killebrew. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005.

Exploring Exodus: The Oppression. By Nahum M. Sarna. The Biblical Archaeologist, Vol. 49 No. 2 (June 1986).

The Exodus and the Settlement in Canaan. By H. H. Rowley. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 85 (February 1942).

The Egyptian Empire in Palestine: A Reassessment. By James M. Weinstein. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 241 (Winter 1981).

Were the Jews Slaves in Egypt? By S. David Sperling. NJBR, June 20, 2013. With related articles.

Was King Saul Impaled on the Wall of Beth Shean? By Amihai Mazar. NJBR, June 8, 2013. With related articles.

The Exodus and Cultural Memory. By Ronald Hendel. Video. Biblical Archaeology Society. (BAS Membership required.)

Ancient Israel’s Exodus from Egypt, rather than being a single, momentous event that can be confirmed through archaeology, should be viewed as a deep-seated cultural memory that allowed disparate groups of highland villagers and escaped Canaanite slaves to coalesce into a single people. How this story arose and why the early Israelites adopted this memory are key questions, which find coherent answers in the relationship between Canaan and the Egyptian empire of the Late Bronze Age. By fusing historical and fictional memories, the story created the necessary social context for the birth of Israel as a people.


Out of Egypt: Israel’s Exodus Between Text and Memory, History and Imagination. By Noah Wiener. Bible History Daily, February 6, 2014. With links to videos from the Qualcomm Institute conference to be added.

Exodus: Out of Egypt: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Archaeology, Text and Memory. Qualcomm Institute. Calit2. University of California at San Diego.

Website introduction by Thomas E. Levy:

This website does not advocate any solutions to the story of ancient Israel’s Exodus from Egypt, known from the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. Rather, it highlights new transdisciplinary perspectives on this ancient puzzle based on an international conference held May 31 to June 3, 2013 in Calit2’s Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego. The conference – Out of Egypt: Israel’s Exodus Between Text and Memory, History and Imagination – brought together more than 40 of the world’s leading archaeologists, Biblical scholars, Egyptologists, historians and geo-scientists. In tandem, the Qualcomm Institute staged an exhibition, EX3: Exodus, Cyber-Archaeology and the Future, through June 9, as an experiment in trans-disciplinary research, team science, and scholarly communication using technologies developed for the museum of the future. Archaeologists and Biblical scholars teamed with computer scientists, engineers, geo-scientists and sonic artists to show how 21st century collaboration in these fields can provide new ways of looking at ancient historical problems. Nearly four dozen scientists contributed their unique expertise and worked “out of the (disciplinary) box” in search of potential answers to historical questions. They explored cyber-archaeology data collection, analyses and dissemination, and the exhibition featured new 3D and large-scale visualization platforms developed by the Qualcomm Institute as prototype display systems for the museum of the future. At right is a collection of images from the conference and exhibition. Below, this portal features streaming video, including an overview of the exhibition, as well as on-demand video of all conference proceedings. At bottom, click on the links to view panels from the exhibition on the significance of the Exodus from an ecumenical perspective in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.

 

Thomas E. Levy, Distinguished Professor, Conference Host, Qualcomm Institute - UC San Diego.


Keynote Lecture: The Exodus as Cultural Memory: Poetics, Politics, and the Past. By Ronald Hendel. UCSD Exodus Conference, May 31-June 1, 2013. Video. Calit2ube, June 11, 2013. YouTube.




The Exodus and the Bible: What Was Known, What Was Remembered, What Was Forgotten. By William Dever. UCSD Exodus Conference. Video. Calit2ube, June 11, 2013. YouTube.




The Emergence of Iron Age Israel: The Question of “Origins.” By Avraham Faust. UCSD Exodus Conference. Video. Calit2ube, June 7, 2013. YouTube.

Ben-Gurion Didn’t Recognize Israel as the Nation State of the Entire Jewish People. By Chemi Shalev.

Ben-Gurion didn’t recognize Israel as the nation state of the entire Jewish people. By Chemi Shalev. Haaretz, January 8, 2014.

Shalev:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is demanding that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a “Jewish State” or, in a different formulation, as the “nation state of the Jewish people.” He says that this recognition is “the real key for peace," a “minimal requirement” and an “essential condition” without which there can be no agreement.

 

Love it or loathe it, one cannot understate the public relations genius behind this stipulation. It has captured the imaginations of Israelis, Jews and many other Israel-supporting people around the world. Secretary of State John Kerry is said to be pressing Arab states to accept it. A decade ago it didn’t exist and, presto, out of the blue, it is the now the lynchpin of the process, it's sine qua non, the make or break issue.

 

I would be more than happy if Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas somehow succeeded in overcoming Palestinian objections and acceded to Netanyahu’s demand. Palestinian recognition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people would remove a serious obstacle to peace talks and may convince Israelis that Palestinian rejectionism has turned a historic corner. Such a move would also put immense pressure on Israel to be far more forthcoming in the concessions that it needs to make to reach a deal.

 

But here’s the thing: I don’t know what Netanyahu’s demand is doing for Abbas, but it is making me increasingly uneasy. The more I think of the demand to recognize Israel as the “nation state of the Jewish people," whatever that is, the less I like it. In my eyes, Muslims and Christians who were born in Israel and live there are Israelis; Jews who live in Tulsa or Tashkent are not. Jews around the world may worship Israel but that does not make it theirs.

 

My position is this: “The name Israel differentiates between the sovereign Jewish people in its homeland, called by the name of Israel, and the Jewish people in the world, in all the generations and in all the land, who are called the “Jewish people” or the “people of Israel." That’s what David Ben-Gurion wrote to Brandeis historian and philosopher Simon Rawidowicz in 1954.

 

Rawidowicz – a towering Jewish intellectual whose memory has faded to the extent that he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry in English to his name – was a champion of the “equal status” of Israel and Diaspora Jewry, which he described as “Jerusalem and Babylon”. He objected to the name Israel that Ben-Gurion had chosen for the state because it excluded Diaspora Jews, and, in essence, relegated them to a second-tier status.

 

While denying charges of “negation of the Diaspora," as it was known then, Ben-Gurion, in effect, agreed with Rawidowicz: Diaspora Jews can worship Israel and can very well call themselves “the people of Israel” if they wish, but they are not Israelis, and Israel is not their country unless and until they choose to live there.

 

Likud leaders from Menachem Begin to Netanyahu have been systematically erasing Ben-Gurion’s fine line. As columnist Doron Rosenblum meticulously recorded over the years in Haaretz, the Likud and the religious right have steadily downgraded secular “Israeliness” as inherently alien and leftist and fostered traditional “Jewishness” for ideological, political and cultural reasons in its stead. When the Likud first came to power in 1977, most Jewish Israelis defined themselves as being Israelis before being Jews, but a majority now claims the opposite.

 

And if Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people as a whole, then the prime minister, ipso facto, is the prime minister of Jews wherever they may be. That’s why Netanyahu can tell the U.S. Congress “I speak on behalf of the Jewish people,” That’s how he can openly call on U.S. Jews to “stand up and be counted” in his campaign against U.S. policies on Iran. That’s why he made no effort to correct David Gregory who anointed him “Leader of the Jewish people” on Meet the Press last year.

 

The right wing, in fact, would like to adopt the Jewish people wholesale, wherever they are, and to thus prop up the Jewish majority in the “Greater Land of Israel” by remote control or even, potentially, by giving Diaspora Jews the vote. And by demanding that hundreds of thousands of Israeli Arabs be “transferred” to another sovereignty and another citizenship, Netanyahu’s deputy and Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is only confirming the claims of many Palestinians: that by recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, Abbas would be giving his blessing to those, like Lieberman, who view the citizenship of Israeli Arabs as second rate and expendable.

 

Don’t get me wrong: As long as there is a Jewish majority in Israel, I have no problem with its Jewish character or with its decision to grant automatic citizenship to any Jew who wishes to make it their home. Ancient ties, millennia of devotion and 20th century horrors justify such a position.

 

If Netanyahu had demanded that Abbas recognize the historic links between Israel and the Jewish people or its centrality in Israeli life, I would be backing him all the way. But Netanyahu has not only injected Abbas into the whole “Who is a Jew” conundrum, he wants him to accept that a Jew who lives in Buenos Aires has a weightier connection to Israel than the Palestinian family that has lived in Shfaram or in Tirah or in Taybe for hundreds of years.

 

That may be a reasonable position for Jewish uber-patriots, but it’s a bridge too far for me.

 

I have never accepted the contention that in order to be a Zionist one has to live in Israel. One can be a Zionist and support Israel even if one lives in Timbuktu. But one cannot live in Timbuktu and claim Israel as one’s own. Abbas may choose to accept Netanyahu’s demand, but as far as I am concerned, Israel is an Israeli state, and it is the nation state of Jews who choose to live in it. Period.

Fighting Back Against the New Anti-Semitism. By Charles Krauthammer.

Fighting Back Against the New Anti-Semitism. By Charles Krauthammer. National Review Online, January 10, 2014. Also at the Washington Post.

Ari Lesser: Boycott Israel. A Rap Reply to the Boycotters. Video. Ari Lesser, October 6, 2013. YouTube.

Krauthammer:

For decades, the American Studies Association has labored in well-deserved obscurity. No longer. It’s now made a name for itself by voting to boycott Israeli universities, accusing them of denying academic and human rights to Palestinians.

 

Given that Israel has a profoundly democratic political system, the freest press in the Middle East, a fiercely independent judiciary, and astonishing religious and racial diversity within its universities, including affirmative action for Arab students, the charge is rather strange.

 

Made more so when you consider the state of human rights in Israel’s neighborhood. As we speak, Syria’s government is dropping “barrel bombs” filled with nails, shrapnel, and other instruments of terror on its own cities. Where is the ASA boycott of Syria?

 

And of Iran, which hangs political, religious, and even sexual dissidents and has no academic freedom at all? Or Egypt, where Christians are being openly persecuted? Or Turkey, Saudi Arabia, or, for that matter, massively repressive China and Russia?

 

Which makes it obvious that the ASA boycott has nothing to do with human rights. It’s an exercise in radical chic, giving marginalized academics a frisson of pretend anti-colonialism, seasoned with a dose of edgy anti-Semitism.

 

And don’t tell me this is merely about Zionism. The ruse is transparent. Israel is the world’s only Jewish state. To apply to the state of the Jews a double standard that you apply to none other, to judge one people in a way you judge no other, to single out that one people for condemnation and isolation — is to engage in a gross act of discrimination.

 

And discrimination against Jews has a name. It’s called anti-Semitism.

 

Former Harvard president Larry Summers called the ASA actions “anti-Semitic in their effect if not necessarily in their intent.” I choose to be less polite. The intent is clear: to incite hatred for the largest — and only sovereign — Jewish community on earth.

 

What to do? Facing a similar (British) academic boycott of Israelis seven years ago, Alan Dershowitz and Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg wrote an open letter declaring that, for the purposes of any anti-Israel boycott, they are to be considered Israelis.

 

Meaning: You discriminate against Israelis? Fine. Include us out. We will have nothing to do with you.

 

Thousands of other academics added their signatures to the Dershowitz/Weinberg letter. It was the perfect in-kind response. Boycott the boycotters, with contempt.

 

But academia isn’t the only home for such prejudice. Throughout the cultural world, the Israel boycott movement is growing. It’s become fashionable for musicians, actors, writers, and performers of all kinds to ostentatiously cleanse themselves of Israel and Israelis.

 

The example of the tuxedoed set has spread to the more coarse and unkempt anti-Semites, such as the thugs who a few years ago disrupted London performances of the Jerusalem Quartet and the Israeli Philharmonic.

 

In this sea of easy and open bigotry, an unusual man has made an unusual statement. Russian by birth, European by residence, Evgeny Kissin is arguably the world’s greatest piano virtuoso. He is also a Jew of conviction. Deeply distressed by Israel’s treatment in the cultural world around him, Kissin went beyond the Dershowitz/Weinberg stance of asking to be considered an Israeli. On December 7, he became one, defiantly.

 

Upon taking the oath of Israeli citizenship in Jerusalem, he declared: “I am a Jew, Israel is a Jewish state. . . .  Israel’s case is my case, Israel’s enemies are my enemies, and I do not want to be spared the troubles which Israeli musicians encounter when they represent the Jewish state beyond its borders.”

 

Full disclosure: I have a personal connection with Kissin. For the last two years I’ve worked to bring him to Washington to perform for Pro Musica Hebraica, a nonprofit organization (founded by my wife and me) dedicated to reviving lost and forgotten Jewish classical music. We succeeded. On February 24, Kissin will be performing at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall masterpieces of Eastern European Jewish music, his first U.S. appearance as an Israeli.

 

The persistence of anti-Semitism, that most ancient of poisons, is one of history’s great mysteries. Even the shame of the Holocaust proved no antidote. It provided but a temporary respite. Anti-Semitism is back. Alas, a new generation must learn to confront it.

 

How? How to answer the thugs, physical and intellectual, who single out Jews for attack? The best way, the most dignified way, is to do like Dershowitz, Weinberg, or Kissin.

 

Express your solidarity. Sign the open letter or write your own. Don the yellow star and wear it proudly.

Point of No Return in Egypt. By Khaled Dawoud.

Point of no return. By Khaled Dawoud. The Arabist, January 8, 2014. Originally published in Arabic in El Tahrir, December 28, 2013.

Amanda Knox: I’ll Be A Fugitive If They Convict Me. By Barbie Latza Nadeau.

Amanda Knox: I’ll Be A Fugitive If They Convict Me. By Barbie Latza Nadeau. The Daily Beast, January 9, 2014.

An Italian newspaper says the babyfaced Seattle native vowed to go on the lam if an appellate court upholds her conviction in the trial of the murder of Meredith Kercher.


Amanda Knox: I’ll Be a Fugitive If Found Guilty Again of Murder. By Tom Kington. The Huffington Post, January 9, 2014.

A New Hampshire Rebellion for Aaron Swartz. By Lawrence Lessig.

A New Hampshire Rebellion for Aaron Swartz. By Lawrence Lessig. The Daily Beast, January 10, 2014.

What the Internet Did to Aaron Swartz. By Noam Scheiber. NJBR, March 12, 2013. With related articles.

Aaron Swartz, Internet Pioneer, Found Dead Amid Prosecutor “Bullying” In Unconventional Case. By Zach Carter. NJBR, January 13, 2013. With related articles.

The Smartest Book About Our Digital Age Was Published in 1929. By Ted Gioia.

The Smartest Book About Our Digital Age Was Published in 1929. By Ted Gioia. The Daily Beast, January 5, 2014.

Gioia:

How José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses helps us understand everything from YouTube to Duck Dynasty.


I first read José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt ofthe Masses more than thirty years ago. I still remember how disappointed I was by this cantankerous book. I’d read other works by Ortega (1883-1955), and been impressed by the Spanish philosopher’s intelligence and insight. But this 1929 study of the modern world, his most famous book, struck me as hopelessly nostalgic and elitist.

 

Yet I recently read The Revolt of the Masses again, and with a completely different response. The same ideas I dismissed as old-fashioned and out-of-date back in the 20th century now reveal an uncanny ability to explain the most peculiar happenings of the digital age.

 

Are you, like me, puzzled to learn that Popular Science magazine recently shut down comments on its website, declaring that they were bad for science? Are you amazed, like me, that Duck Dynasty is the most-watched nonfiction cable show in TV history? Are you dismayed, like me, that crappy Hollywood films about comic book heroes and defunct TV shows have taken over every movie theater? Are you depressed, like me, that symphony orchestras are declaring bankruptcy, but Justin Bieber earned $58 million last year?

 

If so, you need to read The Revolt of the Masses. You’ve got questions. Ortega’s got answers.

 

First, let me tell you what you won’t find in this book. Despite a title that promises political analysis, The Revolt of the Masses has almost nothing to say about conventional party ideologies and alignments. Ortega shows little interest in fascism or capitalism or Marxism, and this troubled me when I first read the book. (Although, in retrospect, the philosopher’s passing comments on these matters proved remarkably prescient—for example his smug dismissal of Russian communism as destined to failure in the West, and his prediction of the rise of a European union.) Above all, he hardly acknowledges the existence of “left” and “right” in political debates.

 

Ortega’s brilliant insight came in understanding that the battle between “up” and “down” could be as important in spurring social and cultural change as the conflict between “left” and “right.” This is not an economic distinction in Ortega’s mind. The new conflict, he insists, is not between “hierarchically superior and inferior classes. . . . upper classes or lower classes.” A millionaire could be a member of the masses, according to Ortega’s surprising schema. And a pauper might represent the elite.

 

The key driver of change, as Ortega sees it, comes from a shocking attitude characteristic of the modern age—or, at least, Ortega was shocked. Put simply, the masses hate experts. If forced to choose between the advice of the learned and the vague impressions of other people just like themselves, the masses invariably turn to the latter. The upper elite still try to pronounce judgments and lead, but fewer and fewer of those down below pay attention.

 

Above all, the favorite source of wisdom for the masses, in Ortega’s schema, is their own strident opinions. “Why should he listen, when he has all the answers, everything he needs to know?” Ortega writes. “It is no longer the season to listen, but on the contrary, a time to pass judgment, to pronounce sentence, to issue proclamations.”

 

Ortega couldn’t have foreseen digital age culture, but he is describing it with precision. He would recognize the angry, assertive tone of comments on web articles as the exact same tendency he identified in 1929. He would understand why Yelp reviews have more influence than the considered judgments of restaurant reviewers. He would know why Amazon customer comments have more clout than critics in The New Yorker. He would attend an angry town hall meeting or listen to talk radio, and recognize the same tendencies he described in his book.

 

Recently I had dinner with a friend who is affluent, educated, and a noted wine connoisseur. We were talking about wine critic Robert Parker and other experts, and my friend asserted that he now relies more on wine advice from websites where anyone can post their evaluations of different vintages. And if the mass mentality has taken over wine-tasting, what can we expect from film reviews or rock criticism?

 

Of course, this rise of mass opinion comes at a cost. For example, music criticism is turning into lifestyle reporting. Even specialist magazines avoid dealing with any technical descriptions of what a performer is doing, and I have a hunch that the less critics know about the structure of music, the more likely they are to succeed today. This same tendency, outlined with precision by Ortega back in 1929, can be seen in numerous other fields where experts once reigned, but have now been replaced by the opinions of the masses.

 

Strange to say, not all kinds of expertise are ignored nowadays. The same people who denounce expert opinion about movies or music will praise a skilled plumber or car mechanic. The value of blue-collar expertise is accepted without question. The same people who get angry when I make judgments about the skill level of a pianist, would never question my decision to pay more to hire a superior piano tuner. This is a peculiar state of affairs, but very much aligned with the “revolt of the masses.”

 

Ortega also predicted the close connection between advancing technologies and these new rude attitudes. He devotes an entire chapter to the co-existence of “primitivism and technology.” He understands that the rise of new technological tools gives a global scope to the unformed opinions of people who, in a previous era, would have only focused on what was nearby and familiar. Above all, he marvels at the fact that the “disdain for science as such is displayed with greatest impunity by the technicians themselves.” Or put differently, skill in manipulating a technology (say, Instagram or the iPhone, in our day) has nothing in common with a zeal for facts and empirical evidence. That shocked Ortega, but we encounter it daily on in the web.

 

I wish Ortega were around nowadays to comment on digital age culture. At one point in The Revolt of the Masses, he complains about a woman who told him “I can’t stand a dance to which less than 800 people have been invited.” So how would the Spanish philosopher respond to the crowd mentality that seeks out viral videos with a hundred million views? How would he evaluate TV reality shows in which the best singers or dancers are determined by the verdict of the masses? What would he think of political judgments shared by the millions in the form of 140-or-fewer-characters tweets?

 

I can’t do justice to all of this book’s riches in a short article. On almost every page, Ortega addresses some issue that still resonates today—for example, the rise of consumerism; or the possibility for barbarism to flourish in tandem with technology; or the unbalanced specialization which favors science over the humanities; or (in his words) “the loss of prestige of legislative assemblies.” You recognize all of those hot topics, don’t you?

 

Okay, we encounter these dysfunctional tendencies every day, but Ortega forces us to see them with a different perspective—from the standpoint of “up” versus “down.” Indeed, his book is more valuable for the speculations it will spur in a current-day reader than in the specific situations Ortega addresses. But isn’t that always the measure of a timeless thinker?

Egypt’s Arab Spring Gives Way to Spring of the Patriarch. By Christopher Dickey.

Egypt’s Arab Spring Gives Way to Spring of the Patriarch. By Christopher Dickey. The Daily Beast, January 10, 2014.

Does Prince Charming Really Need to Be Reinvented. By Akash Niklolas.

Does Prince Charming Really Need to Be Reinvented. By Akash Nikolas. The Atlantic, January 8, 2014.

A Tiny Glimmer of Hope Amid the Ruins of Syria. By Gordon Brown.

A tiny glimmer of hope amid the ruins of Syria. By Gordon Brown. Washington Post, January 10, 2014. Also here.

Israel Boycott Strikes at Academic Freedom. By Pierre Atlas.

Israeli Boycott Strikes at Academic Freedom. By Pierre Atlas. Real Clear World, January 9, 2014. Also at the Indianapolis Star.

Florida-Georgia Line: Get Your Shine On.

Florida-Georgia Line: Get Your Shine On. Video. FlaGeorgiaLineVEVO, February 25, 2013. YouTube.

Pharaoh and the Palestinians. By Stewart Weiss.

Pharaoh and the Palestinians. By Stewart Weiss. Jerusalem Post, January 9, 2014.

Weiss:

There are two axioms that I believe help to guide Jewish history along its twisting and tumultuous path. The first is that the more things change, the more they remain the same. The second is that nothing significant ever occurs in our national life that cannot be found in the Torah portion we read that week.

 

We are now smack-dab in the middle of the story of the Jewish experience in Egypt, which culminates in the Exodus (read about it this Shabbat in Parshat Beshalah) and the giving of the Ten Commandments (read it next Shabbat in Parshat Yitro). These events, recorded for posterity so long ago, remain to this day a road map for our struggle to overcome our adversaries and become a nation.

 

Pharaoh is the archetypal anti-Semite, the dictatorial and despicable poster boy for all the Jew-haters of future generations.

 

Ignoring the fact that Joseph brought immense wealth and prestige to Egypt, he rewrites history and accuses the Hebrews of being an alien, divisive “fifth column” that must be dealt with mercilessly. To divert attention from the real problems of his society, and to unite the populace by appealing to its basest instincts, he tells his people that the “Nation of Israel” (ironically Pharaoh is the first person ever to use that phrase) is “great and mighty from us!” In other words, the Jews are parasites; they take the land that is rightfully ours, and they suck the very life-blood out of it.

 

This approach to demonizing the Jews is exactly the course that the Palestinians and their many sympathizers have taken. They begin by denying any historical legitimacy to the Jewish residents of the land, maintaining that we have no ongoing connection whatsoever to Israel. There never was a Temple in Jerusalem; kings David and Solomon, the Prophets and the Maccabees never inhabited this part of the world; the Twelve Tribes – if they existed at all – lived somewhere in Europe.

 

And as for what to do with the mountain of archeological evidence, the accounts of the Bible, and the overwhelming opinion of historians that this truly is our ancestral land? That is cavalierly dismissed as “Jewish propaganda” and disregarded by the Pharaohs “who knew not Joseph.”

 

Their national mantra, one of which their pharaonic predecessor would surely be proud, is repeated so long and so intensely that even normally level-headed people begin to believe it: “The Jews stole the land and usurped its rightful owners.” From this canard flows all the evil that our neighbors perversely perpetrate upon us, what I call the “10 Plagues of the Palestinians”: the boycotts, the car thefts, the home invasions, the deadly rock-throwing at our vehicles, the suicide bombings, the drive-by shootings, the firing of rockets on civilians, the glorification of child-killers, the education to terror, the turning of so many beautiful Israeli families into blood.

 

All of these atrocities and more are blithely justified among the Palestinians as the rightful reward for those who took what was theirs.

 

OF COURSE, the greatest victims of all in this drama are the Palestinians themselves.

 

Their lives could be infinitely more rewarding and more productive if only they chose compromise over conflict.

 

They know that they – like their Israeli Arab brothers – would enjoy an immensely higher standard of living and quality of life if they ceased their extremism and met us halfway. But like Pharaoh, who remained impervious to the pleas of his own people to release the Israelites – “Do you not know that Egypt is lost?” the Egyptians said to him after the eighth plague – the Palestinian leadership is supremely steadfast in its stubbornness.

 

The secret to success in international relations – no less than in personal ones – is knowing when to let go and when to hang on. Just as Pharaoh could, theoretically, have saved himself and his nation from untold amounts of suffering if only he had acquiesced to Moses’s initial demand – “Let us depart for three days into the wilderness to serve our God” – so the Arab world, by consistently squandering its manifold opportunities for a peaceful settlement, has “upped the ante” and brought disaster upon itself. From their rejection of the 1947 partition plan to their “Three Noes of Khartoum” (“no peace, no recognition, no negotiation” with Israel) following the Six Day War, to the present- day refusal to accept Israel as a Jewish state, the Palestinians have always taken – to their detriment – the most hard-line positions, and this, above all, has created the self-inflicted “Nakba” that they so often moan about.

 

ONE OF the more celebrated aspects of the Exodus story is God’s “hardening of Pharaoh’s heart.” While this clearly creates certain theological difficulties – the denial of free choice being primary among them – it also serves to highlight the Almighty’s active part in the equation, and His determination to see His people achieve their goal of becoming one nation, under God, in their own land. At some point, God “allows” Pharaoh to fall victim to his own obstinacy, resulting in his demise and our redemption.

 

In like fashion, the Palestinians, too, suffer from a case of “hardening of the heart.” Just when reconciliation appears to be possible, they make sure to thwart it by coming up with some new demand that they know we can never meet. It might be a return to 1949 “Auschwitz borders,” or an insistence on reclaiming the Kinneret, or a demand for the “right of return” or the redivision of Jerusalem.

 

Whatever it is, it brings us back to our senses as we realize just how far this Arab entity actually is from desiring a true and lasting peace with its neighbors.

 

As Jordan learned when it stubbornly refused Israel’s peace overtures in 1967 and belatedly entered the war, resulting in the Jordanians’ loss – and our gain – of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria; and as Pharaoh learned when he reneged on his freeing of the Israelites and attacked us at the Reed Sea, resulting in the destruction of his army and the end of Egypt forever as a world power, there is a high price to be paid for making the wrong choices and for trying to block Jewish destiny.

 

Despite Israel’s readiness to bend – indeed, often to a fault – we will never abdicate our God-given right to recreate our eternal homeland. And it is this steely resolve that will win out in the final analysis. The end result of the Passover story, quite remarkably, is that “the man Moses was great in the land of Egypt, and great in the eyes of every Egyptian” (Exodus 11:3). Those who remain humble yet steadfast in their mission and who believe in the justice of their cause will not only see their efforts prevail; they will gain the grudging respect of even their bitterest enemies.

Israeli Official Points to “Incitement” by Palestinians. By Jodi Rudoren.

Israeli Official Points to “Incitement” by Palestinians. By Jodi Rudoren. New York Times, January 6, 2014.

Israelis Document Incitement by the Palestinian Authority. New York Times, January 6, 2014. Also here.

NYT casts Israelis as victims of Palestinians who complain bitterly about oppression. By Philip Weiss and Donald Johnson. Mondoweiss, January 7, 2014.

Palestinian Children: When we die as martyrs. Video. noterrorhere, June 15, 2010. YouTube.

What If Israel Were a Jewish State? By Daniel Gordis.

What If Israel Were a Jewish State? By Daniel Gordis. Jerusalem Post, January 9, 2014. Also at DanielGordis.org.

Movement on the Right. By David Brooks.

Movement on the Right. By David Brooks. New York Times, January 9, 2014.

A Kind of Racism We’re Not Used To. By Masha Gessen.

A Kind of Racism We’re Not Used To. By Masha Gessen. New York Times, January 9, 2014.

Israel in the Eye of the Hurricane. By Ofir Haivry.

Israel in the Eye of the Hurricane. By Ofir Haivry. Mosaic, January 2014.

The Middle East is imploding. America is pulling back. Time for a new regional strategy.


Map of Middle East Ethnic Groups. By Michael Izady. The Gulf/2000 Project.

The Culture of Rebellion in Syria. By Faysal Itani.

The Culture of Rebellion in Syria. By Faysal Itani. Atlantic Council, January 7, 2014.

The Women of Pussy Riot Fight On. By Masha Gessen.

Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (R) and Mariya Alekhina in a cafe in downtown Moscow, January 3, 2014.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova: “I Was My Own Person Again.” By Masha Gessen. Slate, January 9, 2014.

Pussy Riot’s Next Act: Exclusive Photos of Life After Prison. By Simon Shuster and Yuri Kozyrev. Time, January 9, 2014.

Russia’s Riot Girls, All Grown Up. By Cathy Young. Real Clear Politics, January 13, 2014.


Gessen:

The women of Pussy Riot made meaning out of a horrific experience in prison. Now, they’re launching another protest movement in Russia.


But prison is an object of almost universal fear and interest in Russia. The country has one of the world’s highest percentages of its population behind bars—not as high as the United States, but a key difference is that in Russia the risk of landing in prison cuts across class lines. No one knows the exact figures, but human rights advocates estimate that more than 15,000 and possibly more than 100,000 of Russia’s roughly 700,000 inmates are entrepreneurs sent to jail by competitors or extortionists. And then there are the political prisoners, a population that is growing despite recent high-profile pardons. Opposition activists are arrested seemingly at random; many of them are not leaders but ordinary grassroots activists or even one-time participants in a demonstration.

 

The goal of this tried-and-true Soviet tactic is to frighten people away from any and all opposition activity. It’s effective, but its flip side is that when Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova speak about the abuse of prisoners, they grab the attention of millions of Russians who fear winding up behind bars themselves. Since leaving prison, they have appeared in public wearing borrowed or donated clothes, all of them unfailingly trendy because the donors are their fans in the media and fashion industries. This sends a stark message: When two young, well-turned-out women talk about being subjected to what amounts to torture, they really call attention to the fact that it can happen to anyone.

 

Their high profile afforded some protection in prison—Alyokhina was not forced to work the extremely long hours of other inmates—but it also drew much unwanted attention. Prison authorities tried to ensure they were both isolated and scared; they threatened other inmates with retribution for associating with the women, whom they perceived as potential troublemakers, and rewarded them for harassing the Pussy Riot convicts. Alyokhina was threatened with bodily harm within days of landing in her dorm at a penal colony in the Urals in December 2012; she asked to be placed in protective solitary confinement.

 

Protective solitary differs from punitive solitary in name only—it is the same place, so cold that no amount of warm clothing can remove the chill. The fight for warmth is one of many battles for a semblance of physical comfort and human dignity that inmates face on a daily basis. Tolokonnikova and her lawyers battled the authorities for several long winter months before she was allowed to wear a warm kerchief instead of a chintz one; she fought a similar battle to wear warm boots in winter and light shoes in summer instead of the prison-issue shapeless plastic footwear, in which feet either freeze or swelter. The privilege of wearing what are known as “civilian” shoes was regularly revoked as punishment, not only for Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova themselves but for other inmates, with the clear purpose of pitting the larger prison population against the activists.

 

Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova try to talk about other inmates more than they do about themselves, in part because they are now free, and in part because they feel they were ultimately in a privileged position in prison. What they have disclosed of their experience opens the window on the hell that is the life of a Russian inmate. Prison stories are stories of humiliation, dehumanization, and constant physical hardship. While in solitary, for example, Alyokhina was subjected to gynecological searches whenever she left her cell to meet with her lawyer and again when she returned. She filed a series of complaints and eventually declared victory in a letter to a friend: “This went on for a month, and now I have finally managed to get this canceled. It was painful and disgusting, and anyway, no one can stand being subjected to ‘the chair’ 4 times a week.”

 

But Alyokhina’s first major battle behind bars concerned the most basic, most pervasive, and perhaps most pernicious practice of Russian prisons: the systematic denial of the right to wash. While the members of Pussy Riot were in pretrial detention in Moscow in the spring and summer of 2012, supporters paid the facility to allow the women to take more than one shower weekly. Once Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova arrived at the penal colonies, though, that option was no longer available. Like the other inmates, they were reduced to risking lice and other afflictions of dirt, and to feeling like the filth in which they were forced to live.

 

An official letter from the regional prison authority, stating that female inmates could wash their hair more than once a week, was the first of Alyokhina’s many wins on the personal hygiene front. Another was increasing the number of toilets and sinks in the dorms from two to eight, for a unit of 50 to 100 people—and, as important, getting the facility to put up partitions between toilets. Once Alyokhina, who was a journalism student at the time of her arrest, had fought and won her first battles, she became a full-fledged—and hyperactive—jailhouse lawyer. She challenged procedural violations in reviewing inmate infractions, helped inmates write numerous complaints, and collected bulging folders of information on working conditions in the colony.

 

* * *

For her part, Tolokonnikova had no intention of taking up prisoners’ rights. A philosophy student at Moscow State University at the time of her arrest, she thought of herself as a philosopher and an artist more than an activist, and in jail she planned to keep a low profile. “For a long time, I wanted to try to blend in, to be like everyone else,” she says. This was both a survival strategy and an existential approach: “I wanted to live a universal experience. I wanted this to have been not just Nadya Tolokonnikova's experience of prison but a human being’s experience of prison.” She was dispatched to work on the grounds, which can take many forms—often puzzling in their futility but effective as tools of intimidation and control. Mostly, inmates lug stuff around: anything from flour to dug-up dirt to rocks packed into giant black bags. As what seems to be a matter of policy, penal colonies do not have wheelbarrows or trolleys.

 

Tolokonnikova, too, came up against the facility’s hygiene rules. Once a week at Correctional Colony No. 14 (IK-14) in Mordovia, inmates were marched to a small common washroom, where about 100 naked women would use their elbows and fists to gain access to faucets from which water may or may not flow on any given day. Tolokonnikova sneaked about, secreting a towel and a plastic ladle beneath her uniform jacket and going to a washroom on a different floor, where the duty watchwoman was somewhat more relaxed. On “bath days,” Tolokonnikova hid from the guard who escorted the inmates to the common washroom. The young inmate tried to make herself invisible to spare herself the humiliation of fighting and failing to keep herself clean.

 

Yet Tolokonnikova, unlike Alyokhina, did not want to enter into constant confrontation with the prison authorities. Even the potential to leave the colony for occasional court hearings did not appeal to her. “I just want the time to pass quickly,” she said when I visited her in prison in June last year. “Anything that breaks up the monotony slows time down.”

 

Alyokhina would have had no way of knowing her friend felt this way at the time—inmates are not allowed to correspond with one another—but this attitude is exactly what she wants to take on as a prisoners' rights activist. “Many inmates say, ‘I just want my 14-hour workday and to be allowed to sleep the rest of the time so the days pass faster,’” she says. “This is the most terrible thing that happens to a person in prison: She refuses to live, she refuses to see that she is more than a body that is shuttled between the dorm and the factory. And it turns out not to be so difficult to give up thinking for yourself—suddenly it seems like not such a big sacrifice to make. The denial of freedom as a legal concept becomes a metaphysical denial of freedom.”

 

Tolokonnikova, the student of metaphysics, discovered this empirically: Her strategy of trying to live the life of a regular inmate forced her into a corner. Last summer conditions at IK-14 began deteriorating rapidly as the administration took on more and more orders for sewing police uniforms. Work hours expanded, as did the output requirements, and the hours allotted for sleep shrank. Inmates who failed to meet their production goals were beaten and denied access to food sent by friends and family—the only way to stay nourished in a Russian prison. When Tolokonnikova so much as tried to raise the issue with the warden, she was penalized too. For days she was locked out of her dormitory after work: She would have to remain outside, in a small fenced-in area, until lights out. This punishment was supplemented by so-called work in the woodshop; though the shop was equipped with a gas rotary saw, Tolokonnikova would be given a manual saw and required to stay in the shop until she had cut a thick log.

 

But the worst of the pressure was exerted through other inmates: as soon as Tolokonnikova so much as raised her voice in protest, others’ work hours would grow longer, too, and their access to food would be curtailed. It wasn’t just the responsibility for making fellow inmates' lives hell that weighed on Tolokonnikova—it was the knowledge that eventually they would not only blame her but kill her. The deputy warden told Tolokonnikova as much when she got up the nerve to ask him to cut work hours back to the legal maximum. “He said he would make sure I’d be all right for eternity, ‘because in the afterlife, everyone is all right.’” This was a death threat, hardly veiled. It was this that finally got Tolokonnikova to act—this and the inspiration she drew from a friend, a doll-maker jailed on drug charges.

 

“Every once in a while, the administration would do a sweep of my friends,” Tolokonnikova says. “People who had been seen talking to me would be told there would be trouble if they kept on, and they’d suddenly distance themselves.” At some points Tolokonnikova could not even ask a work-related question at the factory; other inmates would hiss at her to step away from their stations. But not the doll-maker—she was defiant in every way. For one thing, she continued to practice her art, carving her dolls even while standing in formation in the quad, or getting up in the middle of the night to paint; for another, she never abandoned her friend. Nor did she seem deterred by the physical hardships of colony life—not even on the regular occasions that the plumbing backed up, sending fecal matter flying into the living quarters, when she would be the one trying to unclog the pipes using a stick.

 

“For months I struggled with the idea of how to resist in these conditions, where anything I did would have negative consequences for other inmates,” Tolokonnikova says. “Finally I figured out that I needed to engineer my total isolation from other inmates.” A hunger strike would be her ticket, because an inmate who refuses food is automatically transferred to solitary. Tolokonnikova set about composing an open letter, though getting it out to the public would be extremely difficult. She passed paragraphs scribbled on scraps of paper surreptitiously to her husband and fellow activist, Petr (Petya) Verzilov, during his visits, and dictated other parts to him while prison staff were out of earshot.

 

The resulting letter was probably the most detailed and searing expose of Russian prison conditions since Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Verzilov released it to the public on Sept. 23, the day Tolokonnikova declared her hunger strike.

 

Solitary confinement followed. In the cold, without food, and following a summer of sleep deprivation and poor nutrition, Tolokonnikova became very weak very fast. She was taken to a hospital that served several Mordovian penal colonies at once, which marked a final turning point in her evolution as an activist. At the hospital she met women from a women’s facility for repeat offenders, Correctional Colony No. 2 (IK-2). The stories they told—and the condition many of them were in—made the abuses Tolokonnikova had witnessed at IK-14 seem almost harmless in comparison. One woman from IK-2 said that for writing a complaint to a human rights commission, she had been punished by a year in punitive solitary, where the door to the street had been propped open in the dead of winter while the woman wore only “an orange dress and a pair of panties.” After she was seen talking to Tolokonnikova, this inmate was transferred out of the hospital back to IK-2.

 

Tolokonnikova made up her mind to use her skills and her access to the media to speak up for these women. She and Alyokhina began communicating secretly—passing messages through the lawyers they shared—to hatch a plan for a prisoners' rights NGO that they would launch as soon as they were released.

 

Before Tolokonnikova was released, though, she was transferred back to IK-14. Her friend the doll-maker was now in solitary for having spoken to a human rights inspector, who had come to the prison because of Tolokonnikova’s hunger strike. Tolokonnikova now had even more reason to fear for her own safety, but she was no longer allowed to see her lawyer or have any telephone contact with the outside world. She declared another hunger strike, demanding a transfer. She was finally transferred to a penal colony in Siberia, in a grueling three-week-long transport in an unheated train car with painted-over windows and only a hard bench to sleep on. Inmates dread these transports, during which they are cut off from contact with lawyers, friends, and family and consequently, from any source of food other than the prisoner's scant ration. Another hardship specific to the transport is the number of bathroom breaks—no more than three and often two a day, at a time chosen by the convoy. “I took a plastic bucket with me,” says Tolokonnikova, by that time a seasoned inmate. “I made sure not to drink much water. And it was fine.”

 

Tolokonnikova had made a breakthrough: Not only had she escaped IK-14, but she had also found her mission, making the entire prison experience meaningful. “I felt euphoric. During the transport, I was held over at some of the harshest pretrial detention centers in the country, and yet I felt I had been halfway released. I was my own person again.”