Gilad Atzmon is a jazz & world music artist, a novelist and an author focusing on ID politics.
Welcome to Gilad Atzmon's webpage. This site provides information about Gilad's musical and intellectual activity.
In what proved to be a technical difficulty laden show, Gilad Atzmon, author and one of the hardest gigging jazz musicians on the British scene, joined Dennis Fetcho, aka "The Fetch" on Inside the Eye - Live! on the Oracle Broadcasting Network.
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http://www.zimoz.co.uk/news/culture/the-wandering-who-a-study-of-jewish-identity-politics/
I first came across Gilad Atzmon on a website called the Jeff rense program; it had become known as a beacon for independent journalism on the Internet and covered stories that the mainstream media would not cover for many reasons; subjects which were viewed as taboo. And so it was, I kept on coming across this name Gilad Atzmon; a writer who was not afraid to tackle some very thorny issues. I read more and more from Gilad and visited his website where I discovered he was also a jazz musician. Coincidentally, around the same time, a friend contacted me to tell me a great Jazz band was playing locally and we should go see them. The band in question was called:- the Orient House Ensemble featuring Gilad Atzmon. This is where my initiation into the world of Gilad Atzmon began some 6 years ago…
His book ‘The Wandering Who?’ begins in Israel where Gilad was born, and tells how he was brought up and indoctrinated into the Zionist ideology. At first he embraced it and all went well until one day he heard some Jazz playing on the radio. It was Charlie Parker the legendary Bebop saxophone player. It seems that Gilad had an epiphany whilst listening to Charlie Parker, his curiosity was ignited and he had to find out more. Shortly after he rushed into Jerusalem to buy all the Charlie Parker records he could find (two), he quickly became obsessed with Jazz and began to lose all interest in the IDF which he was about to join. When eventually the time came to join the IDF Gilad decided to join the Israeli Air Force Orchestra, preferring music to armed conflict. Whilst playing for the IAFO he and his fellow musicians noticed if they played badly they had less bookings, which they all wanted, and so they practiced playing badly.
How to sabotage the system in order to strive for a personal ideal.
Gilad on playing badly for the Israeli Air Force Orchestra.
Gilad Atzmon: The following is a very a deep and thoughtful reading of my work by William A. Cook
Gilad Atzmon’s insight into the organism created by the Zionist movement in his book, The Wandering Who, is explosive; it tears the veil off of Israel’s apparent civility, its apparent friendship with the United States, and its expressed solicitude for western powers—Britain, Canada, Australia, France and Germany—exposing behind the veil, the assassin ready to slay any and all that interfere with its tribally focused ends. In February of this year, Atzmon characterized Islam and Judaism as tribally oriented belief systems rooted not in “enlightened individualism,” but rather in “…the survival of the extended family.” These belief systems have nothing to do with personal liberties or personal rights; they have to do with securing the realm of their respective “ways of life.” But unlike tribalism in Islam, tribalism in Judaism “can never live in peace with humanism and universalism” (4). “Both religions stand as systems that provide thorough answers in terms of spiritual, civil, cultural and day to day matters.” In this regard, “…both Islam and Judaism are more than just religions: they convey an entire ‘way of life,’ and
The Wandering Who is a personal journey of a man born in Jerusalem, raised in the Jewish ‘way of life,’ infused with the myths of the founding of the Jewish state; “Supremacy was brewed into our soul, we gazed at the world through racist, chauvinistic binoculars. And we felt no shame about it either” (5). Inducted into the Israeli military during the 1980s he served in Lebanon, and, in his late teens, experienced an epiphany caused in good measure by careful listening to voices beyond the wall that encircled him in the ghetto that is the Israeli state. This epiphany forced a distinction in identity versus identifying, between self-reliance and obedient servant to an ideology, a distinction that recognized Jews as people, Judaism as a religion, and Jewishness, an ideology that determines identity politics and a resulting political discourse.
A review of Gilad Atzmon's new book, The Wandering Who?
Gilad Atzmon, OpEdNews contributing writer, has just published a study of Jewish identity politics. The Wandering Who? chronicles his journey away from his Jewish identity, and by extension away from all exclusive identities, into an inclusive humanness. It's a painful journey, a brutally honest self exploration of these internalized tribal impulses. He emerges from the struggle deracinated but emancipated, freed of a destructive load of cultural baggage.
The magical and yet extremely subtle gift that Gilad Atzmon offers through his personal journeys in The Wandering Who? is the wisdom of disillusionment; the gift of not floating above water, but having to take an insightful dive into a shrouded underworld of appearances and disappearances.
The Wandering Who?: intelligent, bold, unapologetic.
At a certain stage, around 2005, I thought to myself that I might be King of the Jews. I have achieved the unachievable, accomplished the impossible. I have managed to unite them all: Right, Left, and Centre. The entirety of the primarily-Jewish British political groups: the Zionists, the anti-Zionists, Jewish Socialists, Tribal Marxists, The Board of Deputies, Jewish Trotskyites, Jews for this and Jews for that, for the first time in history all spoke in one single voice. They all hated Gilad Atzmon equally.
Gilad begins his book, The Wandering Who? with a brief story of his childhood and the tremendous influence of his grandfather on his adolescence. He writes “my grandfather was a charismatic, poetic, veteran zionist terrorist. A former prominent commander in the right-wing Irgun terrorist organization …” He writes about his attraction to jazz, his enlistment in the IDF (Israel Defense Force), and finally being sent to the first Lebanon war. He writes of his experience in Lebanon saying:
I studied the detainees. The looked very different to the Palestinians in Jerusalem. The ones I saw in Ansar were angry. They were not defeated, they were freedom fighters and they were numerous. As we continued past the barbed wire I continued gazing at the inmates, and arrived at an unbearable truth: I was walking on the other side, in Israeli military uniform. The place was a concentration camp. The inmates were the ‘Jews’, and I was nothing but a ‘Nazi’. It took me years to admit to myself that even the binary opposition Jew/Nazi was in itself as result of my Judeo-centric indoctrination.
Gilad Atzmon, scholar, prolific writer and leading jazz saxophonist has authored the book The Wandering WHO? In it he astutely explores the identity crisis he himself experienced and one faced by many Jews.
Gilad struggled with the conflict between his early experiences as an Israeli Zionist and his awakening as a humanist.
His book reveals an innate ability to switch between the qualities of a down-to-earth artist (the successful sax player and word-smith) and the knowledgeable philosopher.
Without doubt, The Wandering WHO? will awaken many readers– pleasing some and disturbing others.
The pleased will include those who have experienced similar awakenings or resolved identity crises by continuously asking questions.
The book will also find welcome readers among those who have sought honest answers to the many contentious issues involving Jewish identity, Jewish politics and Israel.
The disturbed will include those Gilad might refer to as “separatist Jews…kind of a bizarre mixture of an SS commander and a Biblical Moses.”