I MEDIA MONITOR I AILANN Southfield The Original" In The New Orleans Mall 10 Mile & Greenfield Mon.-Thurs. & Sat 10-5 Fri. 10-9 Sun. 12-5 • 559-7818 West Bloomfield On The Boardwalk Orchard Lake Road South of Maple Mon.-Wed. & Sat. 10-7 Thurs. & Fri. 10-9 Sun. 12-5 • 626-3362 Downtown Birmingham 111 S. Woodward South of Maple Mon-Wed. & Sat. 10-6 Thurs. & Fri. 10-9 Sun. 12-5 • 647-0550 THE JEWISH NEWS 354-6060 ARTHUR 1. MAGIDA \MESA ARTS Assistant Editor T AMERICAN SOUTHWEST • Paintings • Kachinas • Jewelry . • Folk Art N • Pottery • Sculpture Gallery Hours: Tues.-Fri. 10-4 p.m., Sat. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. or by appointment tv 14 MILE RC, MESA ARTS 32800 Franklin Rd., Franklin, MI (313) 851.9949 Giroux Recalls Poet Pounds' Anti-Semitism thc mandmilk Orchard Lake Road, South of Maple, West Bloomfield SUMMER CLEARANCE All Sterling Silver 50% OFF Retail Price LaBret's Always 20%-30% OFF Sale ends Sept. 1 LaBret Jewelers Fine Jewelry And Gifts IN ROBIN'S NEST • WEST BLOOMFIELD • 7421 Orchard Lake Road Corner of Orchard Lake Rd. and Northwestern Hwy. Mon.-Sat. 10-5:30 • Thurs. 10-8 • Repairs done on premises • 737-2333 Visa, American Express, Mastercard, Diners Club • Free Gift Wrap • Cash Refunds he worst mistake I made," confessed poet Ezra Pound in 1955 to fellow bard Allen Ginsberg, "was that stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism!" At age 70, Pound was final- ly repentant after several decades of dedicated anti- Semitism and war years spent in the Italy shilling for Mussolini. Pound, who had spent 13 post-war years in St. Elizabeths, the federal hospital for the criminal in- sane in Washington, also told Ginsberg, "I realized that in- stead of being a lunatic, I was a moron:' Pound's treason and anti- Semitism are recounted in an article in the August issue of the Atlantic, written by Robert Giroux. Giroux is chairman of the editorial board of the publishing house of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. "The Poet in the Asylum" recounts Giroux's 1948 meeting with Pound at St. Elizabeths. Poet Robert Lowell asked Giroux to ac- company him on one of his regular visits to Pound. What awaited Giroux was a "dapper, bearded" — and virulently anti-Semitic — Pound. He called Franklin Roosevelt "the supreme swine and betrayer, who infected the whole State Department with his moral leprosy!' Calling FDR the then-popular anti- Semite's nickname of "Franklin Rosenfeld," Pound said "there never would have been a war" if "Americans had the sense to abandon Rosenfeld and his Jews." Pound eventually turned his attention to world politics and international finance and kept repeating a name un- familiar to Giroux — Weins- tein Kirschberg. Suddenly, Giroux realized Kirschberg's identity — Winston Churchill. Pound's anti-Semitism, writes Giroux, "was not only childish and inane in itself, but was also hard to reconcile with Pound's cultural back- ground and devotion to literature!' Giroux notes that novelist Katherine Anne Porter once told him that Pound's "irra- tionality" about Jews was related "to his paganism and hatred of rigid orthodox and religious fundamentalism!' But Giroux believes the poet's prejudices were related "to • 20 FRIDAY, AUGUST 19, 1988 his bizarre economic theories, especially his strictures against usury [i.e, lending money for interest], which he acknowledged before his death to be a mistake: In his last years, he said what the world was suffering from was not usury, but human avarice and greed!' K Revisionists Tackle Israel's Birth Three recent studies by Israeli scholars of the events surrounding the birth of Israel place greater blame on the Jewish state for the Palestinian problem than did previous studies by Israelis. The new works also blame Israel for the continued political impasse in the Mid- dle East. In the New York Times, reporter Richard Bernstein N The Arab-Israeli conflict has gone back to where it was. concluded that the three studies "seem to continue a trend toward a more self- critical approach" by Israeli students of the Middle East conflict, "an area in which much previous scholarship tended to present one side or the other in the conflict as the repository of pure good or of unadulterated evil?' Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes, director of the Foreign Policy Institute, said the cur- rent interest in the 1948 period stems from "the fact that the Arab-Israeli conflict has gone back to where it was . . primarily between the Israelis and the Palestinians!' One of the new books, "The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities" by Simha Flapan has been viewed by Mideast specialists in the U.S. as "militantly anti-Zionist." Flapan intended his work, writes Bernstein, to counter "one of the major Western perceptions of the Israeli- Arab conflict — the notion that Israel has always held itself to a higher moral stan- dard than its [Arab] neigh- bors did!' Among the "myths" challenged by Flapan is that the Palestinian flight from Israel after its 1948 declara- tion of independence was prompted by Arab leaders' call for them to temporarily <