Month: May 2026

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Why is Spinoza so ignored?

On August 20, 1672, a mob led by royalist thugs grabbed the deWitt brothers and beat them with sledgehammers, stabbed them with knives and swords, and repeatedly shot them at close range. They were stripped naked and hung by their feet. Body parts and internal organs were removed. An eye was eaten by someone, others ate raw flesh, and the liver was roasted on a fire and eaten by many. Fingers, ears and body parts began trading for cash. A finger went for 20 cents. The Hague Historical Museum has a tongue and finger on display.

Baruch Spinoza had been 23 when he was excommunicated by the Jewish community in Amsterdam decades earlier. When the Inquisition expelled Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal, many fled to the Netherlands because of its religious tolerance.

After the deWitt’s organized a successful and completely bloodless revolution in the Netherlands that toppled the ruling royal family (103 years before the American revolution), surrounding nations began mobilizing with the intent of invading and restoring the Dutch monarchy. Spinoza, like the deWitt’s, belonged to a successful merchant family. However, their ships had been destroyed in the first Anglo-Dutch War. Spinoza went to the city council to release himself from his father’s debts, a violation of Jewish law that infuriated the Jewish council. All Jews were commanded to cut off communication with Spinoza, including his own family. He had been living in isolation for decades when the deWitts were murdered.

Most likely, Spinoza’s views on the Torah were involved. He had recently anonymously published Theological-Political Treatise (1670), which claimed nations needed to secularize and reign in religions, and freedom of thought and speech were essential to spreading democracy. Spinoza knew Moses could not have written the Torah because the Torah contains a description of the death and burial of Moses. It was not the divine word of god, but assembled by men over many generations.

Although known for his stoic behavior, the 39-year-old Spinoza lost it when he heard the news about the deWitts, and immediately painted a sign with words “Ultimi barbarorum” and wanted to bring it to the site while the mob was still assembled, but was prevented by his landlord. Had he done so, Spinoza would also have been hung by his feet and eaten.

Spinoza’s views on democracy changed that day and he no longer trusted the masses. In fact, the murders had been carefully orchestrated by the deposed royals who were pumping out leaflets blaming the massing French army on the border as being the fault of the deWitts. Remove them, and the invasion threat would go away.

Spinoza continued to write extensively but nothing much was published until after his death at age 44, five years after the murder of the deWitts.

Ethics (Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata) argues that God and nature are the same substance and everything in the universe is a part of God. Freedom and happiness do not come from free will, which is an illusion, but from deploying reason to understand emotions and laws of nature. He is recognized as the earliest fundamental figure in the European Enlightenment, preceded by Descartes and followed by Locke, Newton and Voltaire.

A film director in Israel recently wanted to make a documentary on Spinoza with the help of Yitzhak Melamed in Amsterdam. Far from reconsidering the cherem, or ex-communication, that the rabbinical authorities in Amsterdam pronounced against Spinoza in 1656, when he was just 23, rabbis in the Netherlands extended that cherem to Melamed and to the filmmakers.

Hollywood has never gotten anyone near this amazing story. Wonder why.

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Hip Hop History 101

Three of the biggest controversies involving Hip Hop history solved.

1) Is graffiti writing part of hip hop?

Cornbread claims he was the first but he took more from NYC graffiti than he gave.

Not initially. The first writer may have been Cornbread, who wrote “Cornbread loves Cynthia” in Philadelphia. At first he claimed this was 1967, then later backdated it to 1965 (likely after he discovered Julio 204 had started in 67). By his own account, he had just been released from juvenile detention and was either 12- or 14-years-old depending on which date you accept.

Julio 204’s birthdate has never been released and he stopped tagging in 1970 after being arrested. Julio inspired Greg 69, and Phil T. Greek, who inspired his childhood friend Demetrius to start writing Taki 182 in 1969, when they were both 16-years-old.

But graffiti blasted into the white hot core of hip hop in 1972, when Phase 2 started a chapter of the Ex Vandals at Stevenson High in the South Bronx. A student at Alfred E. Smith Technical also began tagging. He named himself Kook Herc. Both Phase and Herc were 17-years-old.

Phase 2 brought graffiti into the white hot center of hip hop when he started a chapter of the Ex Vandals at Stevenson High along with Stay High 149 and Super Kool 223.

In 1971, Super Kool 223 had discovered he could replace the nozzle on a spray can with the nozzle from a shaving cream can. This allowed him to create the first masterpiece. Many writers balked because it “took damn near an entire can of paint,” according to Phase. Very quickly, however, the best writers began crafting masterpieces. Phase turned Super Kool’s stick letters into bubbles in 1972, and that led into Wild Style.

The original writers in Washington Heights did not aspire to create masterpieces, replace nozzles, or enter into the art world. There is a profound difference between them and artists like Phase, who easily entered the art world, even though they were marginalized until Keith Haring came along and opened a door for commercializing graffiti.

2) Who was the first rapper?

Coke La Rock, the first hip hop emcee.

Coke La Rock began rapping in 1973 at Cindy’s birthday party in the West Bronx when he was 18 years-old. Hollywood began deejaying earlier in 1972, but Hollywood did not rap until two years later, when he was 20-years-old.

3) Who invented breakdancing?

Before it was called “breaking” it was called “going off” and it erupted spontaneously so no one person gets credit. However, Kool Herc immediately recognized having the best dancers was essential to having the best parties, and he cultivated the Twins, Clark Kent, Sasa, Trixie, Eldorado Mike, James Bond, while Coke La Rock made sure to call them out whenever they went off, which made them stars in the emerging culture before the rap crews appeared and took center stage. Herc would reward these displays by extending the break, which was the part reserved for their best moves.

In 1975, in a moment of spontaneous improvisation, Cholly Rock extended the floor spin and finished with a freeze. Sasa had a famous drop, and the Twins did splits like James Brown, and both Kent and the Twins had a spin move, but Cholly laid a foundation for transforming breaking into something entirely new. He was 15 years-old.

Cholly Rock was a huge influence on the crews that emerged after his generation aged out, which included the Crazy Commandos, Bronx Crew, Mexican Crew, and the Rockwell Association, who were inspired by the Zulu floor spin, something Spy and Willie Will expanded that to include the head spin. Phase 2 and Sisco Kid played a role in the evolution of spinning. The crews most people know from the movies (Rocksteady, NYC Breakers) came later.

Cholly was recruited into the emerging Zulu Kings. After Kool Herc was stabbed and lost his club, Bambaataa captured the center of gravity on hip hop culture, which flourished at Bronx River Projects in the East Bronx. In 1979, the best battles were between the Funky 4 against the Furious Four. In 1983 the best battles were between the Furious Five and the Cold Crush Brothers.

Grandmaster Caz could out-rap and out-deejay most everybody in the Bronx. He had started as a breakdancer, became a deejay named Casanova Fly, and then changed to Grandmaster Caz shortly before joining the Cold Crush Brothers (founded by Tony Tone and Charlie Chase), which happened in 1979, when Caz was 19-years-old.

Hip hop began with blacks in the Bronx, but they were often going off to Puerto-Rican-influenced beats. Many hip hop classics were influenced by those beats, especially “Just Begun” by Jimmy Castor, and “Apache” by the Incredible Bongo Band, which became the ultimate b-boy battle anthem early on when street gang culture was fading and hip hop emerging. Latin teens soon flooded in and re-energized the dance style kicked off by Cholly and the Zulus.

Breakdancing was the portal most teens used to enter the culture. First known as a breakdancer turned deejay/rapper named Casanova Fly, Grandmaster Caz joined the Cold Crush Brothers started by Tony Tone and they soon challenged the Furious Five for supremacy.

The Beastie Boys switched from hard core to hip hop in 1983, the same year Run/DMC came out of Hollis Queens with a style that brought back an uncompromising style of rap that had been pioneered by Caz and Melle Mel.

Although Cindy’s birthday party marks the official start of hip hop culture, the essential b-boys arrived a bit earlier (although they wouldn’t get named yet). Disco started in NYC at the Loft in downtown Manhattan in 1970. The following year saw the opening of the Plaza Tunnel in the basement of the Concourse Plaza Hotel in the West Bronx near Yankee Stadium.
 
Herc, Phase, Stay High and Super Kool all came, and sometimes snuck in without paying. They were all into tagging and crafted unique tags, and likely carried markers and/or spray cans and tagged on their way to a party at the Tunnel, where DJ John Brown spun records.
 
The entrance to the Tunnel was obviously a prime spot to hit, and the picture shows Phase2, Herc, Lee 163 and others. The Plaza Tunnel was the only place to be if you were an aspiring b-boy because that is the crucible where b-boy culture was forged.
 
Downtown, disco was a gay invention, but not uptown. Discos were classy places where adults could dance in pairs and show off moves. Teens in jumpsuits and sneakers were not welcome. Disco Mario and Pete Jones were two of the deejays who would shut off the music if b-boys started going off. They weren’t dancing in pairs like they were supposed to, and they were taking up way too much space. When the b-boys appeared with their strange fashions and ghetto blasters, they provoked immense disdain from adults of all cultures. They reveled in being hated by all because they knew they carried the true soul of their generation.
 
Early on the b-boys had a few songs for which they reserved their best moves. Apache, Just Begun and Giveituporturnitaloose were three, but every b-boy had his favorite break.
 
I assume Herc started as a b-boy along with Phase, Caz, Sasa, Flash, Melle Mel, Trixie, Clark Kent, the Twins, James Bond, Eldorado Mike and all the other first generation pioneers. Whoever started the style we don’t know, but it erupted when Phase and Herc were juniors in high school, and every cool kid in the Bronx suddenly wanted to be part of a crew of dancers.
 
Most early discos uptown did not allow sneakers.
 
There was a moment when Herc stood in the Plaza Tunnel disco watching Brown when he said to himself, “I can do that.” And from the moment he organized his first jam, he knew the b-boys had to be there because they were the real stars of the show. Until the rappers appeared.
 
Cholly Rock had just entered high school and saw it going down and became a b-boy at 15, but he could still sometimes put on slippery shoes and do the hustle because Fred Astaire was one of his biggest influences.
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The Deficiencies of Theocracies

Herman Wouk had been completely secularized by the time he entered Columbia University at age 15. He’d been raised by an Orthodox family in the Bronx, but was so secularized that his first novel contained no Jews. In his most famous novel, The Caine Mutiny, the sole Jew is the lawyer who defends the mutinous crew and delivers an impassioned defense of the paranoid captain after winning the case.

Wouk was a comedy writer who had been editor of Columbia’s Jester and author of two Varsity Shows before becoming a joke writer, mostly for Fred Allen. But following the attack on Pearl Harbor, he joined the Navy and served in the Pacific Theater aboard two minesweepers, participating in six invasions and winning numerous battle stars.

Once the war was over, Wouk traveled to Europe and began researching what happened because he was disturbed by the systemic racism inside the US State Department that had allowed the extermination of Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals from Europe in cold-blooded massacres. The impact on German troops carrying out the atrocities was so emotionally harmful that they stopped shooting and began building gas chambers. The ovens came later, after the buried bodies began leaking into the ground water.

Racism against Jews had been stoked for millennia by Christians and especially by the Vatican. The discovery of ancient Greek and Roman literature and philosophy suddenly spread across Europe like a wildfire, and there was a tremendous shift in zeitgeist that shook the Vatican to its core, which is why the Jesuits emerged as a military force designed to roll back the Renaissance. The Inquisition concentrated on Spain and Portugal where Conversos had attained immense power and authority. They attended Catholic mass on Sundays but held Hebrew ceremonies in secret on Saturdays.

When the leading Conversos heard a Jesuit inquisitor was coming to investigate them, they tragically decided to hire a hit man, and the Jesuits sought revenge for that crime, so all the Conversos were banished, many fleeing to the New World, although the Netherlands was a popular destination as the Dutch merchant class had fomented a successful and largely non-violent revolution that had democratized the new republic.

When the Jews were originally banished from their homeland it was only men who were forced to leave. The women were useful as slaves, midwives, prostitutes and wives. So single men spread out across Europe, looking for wives.

If you know anything about genetics, you know that when you marry two vastly different DNAs, you get hybrid vigor. Racism is an affront to spirituality because the great spirit welcomes the melting pot, which always produces great talents, while inbreeding produces only problems.

In Germany a new language emerged, a mishmash of Hebrew and German called Yiddish. The German Christians pushed the Jews into the Ukraine, Poland and other Eastern European countries, but the Russians began pushing from the other direction.

Even though hybrid vigor and universal education had sparked immense cultural contributions from the relatively tiny Jewish population, the pogroms never ended, nor did the dream that one day the Jews would reunite in their ancestral homeland, a place now occupied by the descendants of the Mycenae Greeks who attacked Egypt and were bribed and resettled in Gaza, first becoming known as the Philistines.

The decade Wouk spent studying the Holocaust shook him to his core, and led him back to the Talmud. His first work of non fiction was “This is My God: the Jewish Way of Life,” written seven years before the Six Day War, when the existence of the fragile state of Israel was in great peril. This existential threat cemented the religious rightwing into permanent power.

In the 1990s a peace messiah emerged, Yitzhak Rabin, and he orchestrated a two-state solution that might have begun the process of healing and mutual respect necessary for ending the never-ending terror show. Like all peace messiahs, Rabin was assassinated to erase his influence, and there was no more talk of two-state solutions.

Were Wouk alive today, I believe he would be horrified at what Israel has become and especially horrified by the destruction of Gaza in what seems to have been an orchestrated black flag event designed to keep the rightwing in power.

Populations have always been directed and influenced by propaganda and the science of propaganda has grown immensely since Goebbels. The kraken has been unleashed and now we are raining bombs on Iran. This insures that for generations, suicide bombers will be plotting revenge against America.

Embracing orthodox religion may provide emotional comfort, but it is the wrong direction and will not lead out of this morass. Wouk leaned on the Talmud for his morality and empathy, but it blinded him to the deficiencies of theocracies.

When Wouk published Winds of War and War of Remembrance, it was the first time the Nazi horror show was revealed. In the early 80s, the two books became one of the greatest television events ever, although the 50-hour series was never streamed and has largely disappeared.

So I put the entire 50-hours up for free on Youtube. Two families are explored, one deep inside the WASP oligarchy and one deep inside an educated and secularized Jewish family, and Wouk covers both with amazing insight. It is some of the best dialogue since Shakespeare, Chekov and George Eliot.

The end of war and the beginning of peace starts in remembrance.