The Jewish Court Nominee: Hell in a Very Small Place?

If nothing else at least we can be assured Elena Kagan has a sense of humor. During today’s hearings Sen. Lindsey Graham asked Kagan, in relation to a question about the Christmas Day Bomber, “where were you on Christmas day?” Responded Kagan, to a deserved round of applause: “You know, like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.” Point Kagan.



Be that as it may.

There is a famous episode of the TV sitcom Seinfeld called The Chinese Restaurant. The Chinese Restaurant  revolves around protagonist Jerry and his friends Elaine Benes and George Costanza waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant, on their way to see Plan 9 from Outer Space. Unable to get a table, they loiter and talk, while George tries to use the phone that is constantly being used by another customer and Jerry sees a woman he recognizes.  At one point in the episode, Mr. Cohen, a regular, gets a table right away despite the fact that Jerry and company have been waiting for some time.

The episode is widely considered to encapsulate Seinfeld's "show about nothing" concept, with The Tampa Tribune critic Walt Belcher calling it "the ultimate episode about nothing" and Lavery and Dunne describing it as "existential."  Critics had a similar reaction to season three's "The Parking Garage", in which the four central characters spent the whole episode looking for their car.  The structure of "The Chinese Restaurant", described as "elongation", drags a small event out over the course of an entire episode. Lavery and Dunne suggest that this structure critiques sitcoms with implied moral lessons (such as those found in so-called "very special episodes").  Vincent Brook, as part of his analysis regarding the influence of Jewish culture on Seinfeld, has said that the episode also conveys the theme of entrapment and confinement in a small space, a recurring theme on the show.

I suppose entrapment and confinement were themes for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan imprisoned for several days of interrogation by the Senate Judiciary Committee in room 216 of the Hart Senate Office Building!  Do you think Solicitor General Kagan is a Seinfeld fan, has perhaps seen The Chinese Restaurant, and was thinking about her own private Hell in a very small place?  Psychoanalysts can speculate.

There's interesting confirmation for Vincent Brooks' theory that confinement and entrapment are special themes for Jews.  In college I took a course on Modern Southeast Asian History (History 19) at Penn State, taught by Dr. Claire Hirshfield.  We studied the history of the Vietnam War, both the French Indochinese war in the 1950s and the American war in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s.  On several occasions Dr. Hirshfield referred to a seminal work by Bernard Fall, a French war correspondent, titled Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu, written in 1966 about the decisive French defeat.

Last night, when I read about Vincent Brooks' theory about a Jewish preoccupation with the theme of confinement I thought of the book Hell in a Very Small Place -- and I immediately asked myself, "I wonder if Bernard Fall was Jewish?  Was it Bernard Falls' Jewishness that determined the title of that book, pointing to a particularized Jewish concern with confinement?"

I looked up the biography of Bernard Fall on Wikipedia, and, lo and behold, I read the following account of Falls' life history:

"Bernard B. Fall (November 19, 1926 – February 21, 1967) was a prominent war correspondent, historian, political scientist, and expert on Indochina during the 1950s and 1960s. Born in Austria, he moved to France as a child after Germany's annexation and fought with the Resistance. In 1950 he first came to the United States for graduate studies, returning and making his residence there, where he taught at Howard University for most of his career.

Born in Vienna, Austria, to Jewish parents Leon Fall and Anna Seligman, Bernard Fall and his family migrated in 1938 when he was a child to live in France, when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany. After France fell to Germany in 1940, Leon Fall aided the French Resistance. Leon Fall was tortured and killed by the Gestapo. Seligman was deported to Auschwitz, where she died.

In 1942 at age 16, Bernard Fall followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the French Resistance, after which time he fought the Germans in the Alps. As France was being liberated in 1944, Fall joined the French Army, which he served in until 1946. For his service, he was awarded the French Liberation Medal. Following World War II, Fall worked as an analyst for the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, in which capacity he investigated Krupp Industries."

Bernard Fall was a Jew after all!  Perhaps it's not a mere coincidence that he titled his book Hell in a Very Small Place: a title consistent with a Jewish concern with confinement.  But then, Bob Strauss once said he didn't believe in coincidences.  Maybe Strauss knew what he was talking about.

In any event, I suppose this post serves as a kind of case study of my thought processes.  I am constantly associating ideas -- sometimes very remote ideas -- forming theories, then looking for confirmation for my theories.  But then, I have paranoid schizophrenia.  We schizophrenics tend to suffer from remote associations and flights of ideas.