Einstein & Faith

He was slow in learning how to talk. "My parents were so worried," he later recalled, "that they consulted a doctor." Even after he had begun using words, sometime after the age of 2, he developed a quirk that prompted the family maid to dub him "der Depperte," the dopey one. Whenever he had something to say, he would try it out on himself, whispering it softly until it sounded good enough to pronounce aloud. "Every sentence he uttered," his worshipful younger sister recalled, "no matter how routine, he repeated to himself softly, moving his lips." It was all very worrying, she said. "He had such difficulty with language that those around him feared he would never learn."

His slow development was combined with a cheeky rebelliousness toward authority, which led one schoolmaster to send him packing and another to declare that he would never amount to much. These traits made Albert Einstein the patron saint of distracted schoolkids everywhere. But they also helped make him, or so he later surmised, the most creative scientific genius of modern times.

His cocky contempt for authority led him to question received wisdom in ways that well-trained acolytes in the academy never contemplated. And as for his slow verbal development, he thought that it allowed him to observe with wonder the everyday phenomena that others took for granted. Instead of puzzling over mysterious things, he puzzled over the commonplace. "When I ask myself how it happened that I in particular discovered the relativity theory, it seemed to lie in the following circumstance," Einstein once explained. "The ordinary adult never bothers his head about the problems of space and time. These are things he has thought of as a child. But I developed so slowly that I began to wonder about space and time only when I was already grown up. Consequently, I probed more deeply into the problem than an ordinary child would have."

It may seem logical, in retrospect, that a combination of awe and rebellion made Einstein exceptional as a scientist. But what is less well known is that those two traits also combined to shape his spiritual journey and determine the nature of his faith. The rebellion part comes in at the beginning of his life: he rejected at first his parents' secularism and later the concepts of religious ritual and of a personal God who intercedes in the daily workings of the world. But the awe part comes in his 50s when he settled into a deism based on what he called the "spirit manifest in the laws of the universe" and a sincere belief in a "God who reveals Himself in the harmony of all that exists."

Einstein was descended, on both parents' sides, from Jewish tradesmen and peddlers who had, for at least two centuries, made modest livings in the rural villages of Swabia in southwestern Germany. With each generation they had become increasingly assimilated into the German culture they loved--or so they thought. Although Jewish by cultural designation and kindred instinct, they had little interest in the religion itself.

In his later years, Einstein would tell an old joke about an agnostic uncle who was the only member of his family who went to synagogue. When asked why he did so, the uncle would respond, "Ah, but you never know." Einstein's parents, on the other hand, were "entirely irreligious." They did not keep kosher or attend synagogue, and his father Hermann referred to Jewish rituals as "ancient superstitions," according to a relative.

Consequently, when Albert turned 6 and had to go to school, his parents did not care that there was no Jewish one near their home. Instead he went to the large Catholic school in their neighborhood. As the only Jew among the 70 students in his class, he took the standard course in Catholic religion and ended up enjoying it immensely.

Despite his parents' secularism, or perhaps because of it, Einstein rather suddenly developed a passionate zeal for Judaism. "He was so fervent in his feelings that, on his own, he observed Jewish religious strictures in every detail," his sister recalled. He ate no pork, kept kosher and obeyed the strictures of the Sabbath. He even composed his own hymns, which he sang to himself as he walked home from school.

Einstein's greatest intellectual stimulation came from a poor student who dined with his family once a week. It was an old Jewish custom to take in a needy religious scholar to share the Sabbath meal; the Einsteins modified the tradition by hosting instead a medical student on Thursdays. His name was Max Talmud, and he began his weekly visits when he was 21 and Einstein was 10.

Talmud brought Einstein science books, including a popular illustrated series called People's Books on Natural Science, "a work which I read with breathless attention," said Einstein. The 21 volumes were written by Aaron Bernstein, who stressed the interrelations between biology and physics, and reported in great detail the experiments being done at the time, especially in Germany.

Talmud also helped Einstein explore the wonders of mathematics by giving him a textbook on geometry two years before he was scheduled to learn that subject in school. When Talmud arrived each Thursday, Einstein delighted in showing him the problems he had solved that week. Initially, Talmud was able to help him, but he was soon surpassed by his pupil. "After a short time, a few months, he had worked through the whole book," Talmud recalled. "Soon the flight of his mathematical genius was so high that I could no longer follow."

Einstein's exposure to science and math produced a sudden transformation at age 12, just as he would have been readying for a bar mitzvah. He suddenly gave up Judaism. That decision does not appear to have been drawn from Bernstein's books because the author made clear he saw no contradiction between science and religion. As he put it, "The religious inclination lies in the dim consciousness that dwells in humans that all nature, including the humans in it, is in no way an accidental game, but a work of lawfulness that there is a fundamental cause of all existence."

Einstein would later come close to these sentiments. But at the time, his leap away from faith was a radical one. "Through the reading of popular scientific books, I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of free thinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression."

Einstein did, however, retain from his childhood religious phase a profound faith in, and reverence for, the harmony and beauty of what he called the mind of God as it was expressed in the creation of the universe and its laws. Around the time he turned 50, he began to articulate more clearly--in various essays, interviews and letters--his deepening appreciation of his belief in God, although a rather impersonal version of one. One particular evening in 1929, the year he turned 50, captures Einstein's middle-age deistic faith. He and his wife were at a dinner party in Berlin when a guest expressed a belief in astrology. Einstein ridiculed the notion as pure superstition. Another guest stepped in and similarly disparaged religion. Belief in God, he insisted, was likewise a superstition.

At this point the host tried to silence him by invoking the fact that even Einstein harbored religious beliefs. "It isn't possible!" the skeptical guest said, turning to Einstein to ask if he was, in fact, religious. "Yes, you can call it that," Einstein replied calmly. "Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious."

Shortly after his 50th birthday, Einstein also gave a remarkable interview in which he was more revealing than he had ever been about his religious sensibility. It was with George Sylvester Viereck, who had been born in Germany, moved to America as a child and then spent his life writing gaudily erotic poetry, interviewing great men and expressing his complex love for his fatherland. Einstein assumed Viereck was Jewish. In fact, Viereck proudly traced his lineage to the family of the Kaiser, and he would later become a Nazi sympathizer who was jailed in America during World War II for being a German propagandist.

Viereck began by asking Einstein whether he considered himself a German or a Jew. "It's possible to be both," replied Einstein. "Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind."

Should Jews try to assimilate? "We Jews have been too eager to sacrifice our idiosyncrasies in order to conform."

To what extent are you influenced by Christianity? "As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene."

You accept the historical existence of Jesus? "Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life."

Do you believe in God? "I'm not an atheist. I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws."

Is this a Jewish concept of God? "I am a determinist. I do not believe in free will. Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine. In that respect I am not a Jew."

Is this Spinoza's God? "I am fascinated by Spinoza's pantheism, but I admire even more his contribution to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and body as one, and not two separate things."

Do you believe in immortality? "No. And one life is enough for me."

Einstein tried to express these feelings clearly, both for himself and all of those who wanted a simple answer from him about his faith. So in the summer of 1930, amid his sailing and ruminations in Caputh, he composed a credo, "What I Believe," that he recorded for a human-rights group and later published. It concluded with an explanation of what he meant when he called himself religious: "The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man."

People found the piece evocative, and it was reprinted repeatedly in a variety of translations. But not surprisingly, it did not satisfy those who wanted a simple answer to the question of whether or not he believed in God. "The outcome of this doubt and befogged speculation about time and space is a cloak beneath which hides the ghastly apparition of atheism," Boston's Cardinal William Henry O'Connell said. This public blast from a Cardinal prompted the noted Orthodox Jewish leader in New York, Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein, to send a very direct telegram: "Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid. 50 words." Einstein used only about half his allotted number of words. It became the most famous version of an answer he gave often: "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind."

Some religious Jews reacted by pointing out that Spinoza had been excommunicated from Amsterdam's Jewish community for holding these beliefs, and that he had also been condemned by the Catholic Church. "Cardinal O'Connell would have done well had he not attacked the Einstein theory," said one Bronx rabbi. "Einstein would have done better had he not proclaimed his nonbelief in a God who is concerned with fates and actions of individuals. Both have handed down dicta outside their jurisdiction."

But throughout his life, Einstein was consistent in rejecting the charge that he was an atheist. "There are people who say there is no God," he told a friend. "But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views." And unlike Sigmund Freud or Bertrand Russell or George Bernard Shaw, Einstein never felt the urge to denigrate those who believed in God; instead, he tended to denigrate atheists. "What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos," he explained.

In fact, Einstein tended to be more critical of debunkers, who seemed to lack humility or a sense of awe, than of the faithful. "The fanatical atheists," he wrote in a letter, "are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who--in their grudge against traditional religion as the 'opium of the masses'-- cannot hear the music of the spheres."

Einstein later explained his view of the relationship between science and religion at a conference at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. The realm of science, he said, was to ascertain what was the case, but not evaluate human thoughts and actions about what should be the case. Religion had the reverse mandate. Yet the endeavors worked together at times. "Science can be created only by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding," he said. "This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion." The talk got front-page news coverage, and his pithy conclusion became famous. "The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

But there was one religious concept, Einstein went on to say, that science could not accept: a deity who could meddle at whim in the events of his creation. "The main source of the present-day conflicts between the spheres of religion and of science lies in this concept of a personal God," he argued. Scientists aim to uncover the immutable laws that govern reality, and in doing so they must reject the notion that divine will, or for that matter human will, plays a role that would violate this cosmic causality.

His belief in causal determinism was incompatible with the concept of human free will. Jewish as well as Christian theologians have generally believed that people are responsible for their actions. They are even free to choose, as happens in the Bible, to disobey God's commandments, despite the fact that this seems to conflict with a belief that God is all knowing and all powerful.

Einstein, on the other hand, believed--as did Spinoza--that a person's actions were just as determined as that of a billiard ball, planet or star. "Human beings in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free but are as causally bound as the stars in their motions," Einstein declared in a statement to a Spinoza Society in 1932. It was a concept he drew also from his reading of Schopenhauer. "Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity," he wrote in his famous credo. "Schopenhauer's saying, 'A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills,' has been a real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life's hardships, my own and others', and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance."

This determinism appalled some friends such as Max Born, who thought it completely undermined the foundations of human morality. "I cannot understand how you can combine an entirely mechanistic universe with the freedom of the ethical individual," he wrote Einstein. "To me a deterministic world is quite abhorrent. Maybe you are right, and the world is that way, as you say. But at the moment it does not really look like it in physics--and even less so in the rest of the world."

For Born, quantum uncertainty provided an escape from this dilemma. Like some philosophers of the time, he latched onto the indeterminacy that was inherent in quantum mechanics to resolve "the discrepancy between ethical freedom and strict natural laws."

Born explained the issue to his wife Hedwig, who was always eager to debate Einstein. She told Einstein that, like him, she was "unable to believe in a 'dice-playing' God." In other words, unlike her husband, she rejected quantum mechanics' view that the universe was based on uncertainties and probabilities. But, she added, "nor am I able to imagine that you believe--as Max has told me--that your 'complete rule of law' means that everything is predetermined, for example whether I am going to have my child inoculated." It would mean, she pointed out, the end of all moral behavior.

But Einstein's answer was to look upon free will as something that was useful, indeed necessary, for a civilized society, because it caused people to take responsibility for their own actions. "I am compelled to act as if free will existed," he explained, "because if I wish to live in a civilized society I must act responsibly." He could even hold people responsible for their good or evil, since that was both a pragmatic and sensible approach to life, while still believing intellectually that everyone's actions were predetermined. "I know that philosophically a murderer is not responsible for his crime," he said, "but I prefer not to take tea with him."

The foundation of morality, he believed, was rising above the "merely personal" to live in a way that benefited humanity. He dedicated himself to the cause of world peace and, after encouraging the U.S. to build the atom bomb to defeat Hitler, worked diligently to find ways to control such weapons. He raised money to help fellow refugees, spoke out for racial justice and publicly stood up for those who were victims of McCarthyism. And he tried to live with a humor, humility, simplicity and geniality even as he became one of the most famous faces on the planet.

For some people, miracles serve as evidence of God's existence. For Einstein it was the absence of miracles that reflected divine providence. The fact that the world was comprehensible, that it followed laws, was worthy of awe.

From Einstein by Walter Isaacson. © 2007 by Walter Isaacson. To be published by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1607298-1,00.html
Thursday, Apr. 05, 2007                     By WALTER ISAACSON

His Jewish Problem

In his counterfactual Holocaust novel, Philip Roth transports his unresolved conflicts with American Jews into the Oval Office.



By Keith Gessen Published Sep 20, 2004




In the Connecticut woods these days, there is Roth and there is Death: Death versus Roth; Roth versus Death. He has managed to clear his life of everything that is not writing; uninterrupted, he now spends hours and hours at work. How much longer can he keep this up? Every novel might be his last. Death and Roth, Roth and Death. That’s what’s happening up in Connecticut. Also: the New York Times.


Roth gets the Times, and it drives him nuts. Owned by proper German Jews and written by Philistines, the Times is the quintessence of everything he loathes. In the seventies, he did battle with its daily book critic, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, disdaining his intelligence, referring to “the ‘thoughts’ of a Lehmann-Haupt,” and even, at one point, publicly suggesting in all seriousness that the Times could easily replace him by holding a contest among qualified college seniors. Lehmann-Haupt was eventually released from book reviewing and made into the Times’ head obituary writer, and Michiko Kakutani took over the most prominent daily reviewing spot at the paper. She has hardly been better to Roth, however; in 1995 she panned Sabbath’s Theater, his greatest novel.


And as it happens, for Roth in Connecticut, Death and the Times are inextricably linked. The Times is the record-keeper of death. In Sabbath’s Theater, Mickey Sabbath, contemplating suicide, composes his own obituary. “Morris Sabbath, Puppeteer, 64, Dies.” After a lengthy, deadpan description of his crazy life, the final section lists his surviving relatives and then, out of nowhere, concludes, “Mr. Sabbath did nothing for Israel.” And what, in all likelihood, awaits Roth in the Times when Death has finally had with him its inexorable way? An obituary from Christopher Lehmann-Haupt.

“Famously rageful Roth is weirdly unenraged by the fascist takeover of America.”


Yet Roth’s epic struggle with the Times is also his struggle with contemporaneity, and it is what makes him the most compelling of living writers. He has performed a hollowing-out of all the accoutrements the individual self gathers in this world—children (none), wives (divorced), parents (dead)—so that he could instead contain multitudes. He has become a novelist whose every book is like a dispatch from the deepest recesses of the national mind. He devoted a good portion of the opening of his last major novel, The Human Stain, to excoriating the “enormous piety binge” surrounding the Clinton impeachment. Before that, American Pastoral was a withering attack on the excesses of the sixties. Even Sabbath, in the final scene of that monstrous book, is clothed in nothing but an American flag and a GOD BLESS AMERICA yarmulke when he is caught urinating (affectionately, we are assured) over his lover’s grave by two policemen. At a time when the business of book publishing has become a kind of rookie league at which pro scouts, from the movies, might occasionally drop in, Roth has managed to maintain his sense of a novelist’s public role. “Professional competition with death” is how Roth’s alter ego Zuckerman defines writing. It is also, if you’re Roth, professional competition with the New York Times.


It is this public role, and Roth’s acceptance of it, that makes The Plot Against America such a puzzling book. It is a counter-historical novel. What if Charles Lindbergh had given his infamous Des Moines speech, in which he blamed the Jews for pulling the U.S. into the European war, in 1940 instead of 1941? He might have been nominated for the presidency instead of Wendell Willkie. With a folksy campaign consisting of solo flights to all the 48 states, and a platform that repeatedly promised to keep the country out of war, he just might have beaten the stiff, patrician, intellectual FDR. And then he might, given his beliefs, have embarked on a programmatic campaign to forcibly relocate and deracinate the American Jewish population.


A number of novels in recent years have fictionalized or fabulized the Holocaust. Roth is up to something different; he is wondering what his own life might have been like if history, which is so fragile, had moved in a different direction. The novel is framed as a memoir of his boyhood in Newark. “Fear presides over these memories,” he begins, “a perpetual fear.” He then recounts the crumbling of his reasonably pleasant New Jersey life in the wake of the Lindbergh ascendancy: the gradual inducements for Jews to be less Jewish; the erosion of resistance and cohesiveness within the Jewish community; the FBI surveillance. Some Jews move to Canada; others, like the Roths, believe that they are Americans and that the Constitution will protect them.

The narrative proceeds slowly. Roth has become a very essayistic writer, often repetitive, always exhaustive. The coiled concision of his early work is a thing of the past. In The Plot Against America, he leaves no shred of meaning unexamined, so that even the weirdest sentences in this book have an unhurried rhythm. Playing with the rambunctious new downstairs neighbor, little Philip is “derailed for the moment thinking that, on top of Mayor La Guardia’s being under arrest and President Roosevelt’s being under arrest and even Rabbi Bengelsdorf’s being under arrest, the new boy downstairs wasn’t going to be any more of a picnic than the one before him had been.” Famously rageful Roth is weirdly unenraged by the fascist takeover of America.

Everything one is used to in a Roth book is here, but upside down. In The Ghost Writer, the young Nathan Zuckerman has the following conversation with his mother, after Zuckerman fails to reply to a letter from Newark’s Judge Wapter in which the judge compares one of his early stories to the works of Julius Streicher and Joseph Goebbels:


[Mrs. Zuckerman:] “He only meant that what happened to the Jews—”


“In Europe—not in Newark! We are not the wretched of Belsen! We were not the victims of that crime!”


“But we could be—in their place we would be. Nathan, violence is nothing new to Jews, you know that!”


“Ma, you want to see physical violence done to the Jews of Newark, go to the office of the plastic surgeon where the girls get their noses fixed.”


Now it is happening in Newark. And Judge Wapter appears, in inverted form, as the unctuous Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, Newark’s most esteemed religious leader and opportunist, who becomes the New Jersey head of Lindbergh’s Office of American Absorption, or OAA, the agency charged with assimilating the Jews. Roth’s brother, Sandy, is here—as ever, a nice boy too easily swayed by more charismatic personalities, in this case Bengelsdorf. But the words that come out of Sandy’s mouth are the ones usually reserved for the Roth character: “And when are we moving to Canada,” he asks his mother sarcastically, “because of your persecution complex?” The only thing congruent in this counter-universe with ours is the perfidy of the Times. Although founded and owned by Jews (“and highly esteemed for that reason by my father”), the paper piously supports the firing of broadcaster Walter Winchell for his fierce and ostentatiously Jewish anti-Lindbergh rhetoric.


Some of this novel also reads like straight Rothian political satire, which crops up in a sort of auxiliary but satisfying way. Roth has hated every Republican since Eisenhower, he has particular contempt for the Bushes, and he summons a nice retroactive antipathy to President Lindbergh. He is, throughout, the creature of his advisers, including Secretary of the Interior Henry Ford and Vice President Burton K. Wheeler. An attack dog, Wheeler is turned loose when the defeated but still-revered FDR makes an appearance to criticize Lindbergh’s invitation of Hitler’s foreign minister to a White House dinner. “Roosevelt,” Roth recalls, “was immediately attacked by Vice President Wheeler for ‘playing politics’ with a sitting president’s conduct of foreign affairs.” The name of the program meant to deracinate the Jews by sending them into the American provinces—“Just Folks”—has a perfectly terrifying modern innocuousness to it. And of course the First Couple must have been irresistible to Roth: W., the truant Texas Air National Guard pilot, is nothing but a farcical version of Lindbergh, the genuinely courageous stunt aviator, and Laura, the banal pro-war librarian, has got to be some kind of reference to Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the antiwar author of The Unicorn and Other Poems.


In the book’s eeriest episode, the Roths visit Washington, D.C., in some part to dispel their fears about the new Lindbergh administration. Instead, their fears are confirmed. After getting kicked out of their hotel, they see that everyone on the street is looking up at a fast plane, the Lockheed Interceptor, zooming over their heads. Their tour guide explains that every day around this time President Lindbergh likes to take a “little spin along the Potomac.” Roth reports:


We all watched along with Sandy, who was unable to conceal his enchantment with the very Interceptor that the president had flown to and from Iceland for his meeting with Hitler. The plane climbed steeply with tremendous force before disappearing into the sky. Down the street, the people out walking burst into applause, somebody shouted “Hurray for Lindy!” and then they continued on their way.


Writing this passage, had Roth already read in his Times that for the infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech to the troops, Bush had landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln in an S-3B Navy plane, sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, just like a grown-up? Bush is not, as some on the left would have it, much like Hitler, but he is, in Roth’s telling, an awful lot like Lindbergh.


But the heart of the book is the way it functions as perhaps the final chapter in Roth’s history of the Jews. Roth has, of course, always been Jewish—this has been the content and the force of his fiction. “I thought of myself,” he once wrote, “as something of an authority on ordinary Jewish life.” But in a sense Roth did not write Jewish—his language did not employ the Yiddish cadences of Henry Roth or Saul Bellow (or, for that matter, of the English-language translations of Isaac Bashevis Singer). For someone like Irving Howe—who was Roth’s intellectual nemesis in the way that Updike was his writerly one, strong where Roth was weak and weak where Roth was strong—Roth was cut off from the Jewish tradition, and had indeed come to represent, as Howe repeatedly wrote, “the point at which the underground springs of both Yiddish culture and the immigrant experience had finally dried up.”

Roth found this idea terribly offensive, but in fact it framed his dilemma. There really were important aspects of Jewish life in America that Roth could not abide. As the child of lower-middle-class parents, he loathed the invidious class distinctions made under the guise of organized religion (Goodbye, Columbus). He opposed the reflexive Israel-worship of many of his contemporaries, the idea that the Promised Land was anywhere other than Newark, or at least New York (Portnoy’s Complaint, Operation Shylock). But most of all, Roth rejected the claims that groups of people—what he has called “the tyranny of the we”—always tried to make on the individual born into those groups (the early story “Defender of the Faith,” and everything since).


In the background to all this, and as the final screaming endpoint to every argument, was the still-recent murder of the European Jews. Goodbye, Columbus appeared four years after Anne Frank’s diary became a hit on Broadway and four years before Hannah Arendt was pilloried for her report on the Eichmann trial (by many of the same people who would later attack Portnoy’s Complaint). In the decades to come, the American obsession with the Holocaust became something extremely strange, crossing over at times into a fantasy of persecution on these shores. Irving Howe was voicing a profound generational discomfort when he wrote, “But for an accident of geography, we might also now be bars of soap.” But this sentiment of identification and solidarity was very quickly, and possibly too easily, transformed into an entire industry—with movies and tour groups and even intellectual arbiters who decided what was (and is) a permissible attitude to take toward Auschwitz, and what is not. The template for the Times’ painfully trite mini-obituaries for all the 9/11 victims came from the tradition of Holocaust commemoration. The script for the fetishization, and politicization, of 9/11 was written by Leon Uris, not Karl Rove.


Throughout all this, Roth’s has been a voice of moral discernment. He has been appropriately serious about the catastrophe, as in the powerful description of the Ivan Demjanjuk trial in Operation Shylock: “The mystery isn’t that you, who had the time of your life at Treblinka, went on to become an amiable, hardworking American nobody, but that those who cleaned the corpses out for you, your accusers here, could ever pursue anything resembling the run-of-the-mill after what was done to them by the likes of you—that they can manage run-of-the-mill lives, that’s what’s unbelievable!” But he has also been playful: In what is perhaps his finest joke, in The Ghost Writer, Roth has a young Zuckerman begin to believe that he’s found Anne Frank, who has in fact survived the camps and is living incognito in the United States. She is beautiful. Zuckerman imagines courting her, and then imagines the conversation with the Zuckerman parents, who believe that his stories are bad for the Jews. “I met a marvelous young woman while I was up in New England. . . . We are going to be married.” “Married? But so fast? Nathan, is she Jewish?” “Yes, she is.” “But who is she?” “Anne Frank.” To be serious about the Holocaust is to understand it, first of all, as an actual historical event. The important underlying idea of Roth’s work, until now, is that anything can happen in America—that is the peculiar burden and hope of this country—and that it is the writer’s task to see clearly what exactly is happening and what it means.


The Plot Against America is being greeted in some quarters as Roth’s late-life capitulation on the question of whether it could—even whether it did—happen here. Ron Rosenbaum, in a giddy New York Observer column, suggested that the novel, with its Schindler-y overtones, was ripe for cinematization by Steven Spielberg—“thrilling, suspenseful, and profound” would be the movie that resulted, according to Rosenbaum.

“Many of the things Roth imagines happening to the Jews under Lindbergh have in fact happened in this country—to blacks.”


This is too easy, and too bad. The book is a tribute to Roth’s parents—it imagines that under conditions of extreme duress, they would have acted with courage and dignity. “My father was a rescuer,” Roth writes toward the end, “and orphans were his specialty.” It is the most tender Roth has been toward his parents—it is the most tender he has been toward anyone. But the novel’s historical argument is not a historical argument about the Jews. “It is not here, and not now, that the Jew is being slaughtered,” James Baldwin once wrote, “and he is never despised, here, as the Negro is.” That’s never felt truer than in this strange book, where so many of the things Roth imagines happening to the Jews under Lindbergh have in fact happened in this country—to blacks. Roth’s Holocaust novel becomes something like a Holocaust anti-novel, where the crucial point appears to be that what’s happening on the page has never actually happened in life.


So Spielberg really should make this into a movie. But he must literalize Roth’s metaphors: “1940” is actually 2001; “Lindbergh” is, of course, W.; the craven antiwar lies of the America Firsters are in fact the craven pro-war lies of the American Enterprise Institute; and “American Jews,” believers in the American Constitution and pursuers of the American Dream whose rights and protections are slowly stripped away by a hostile government and a mostly indifferent population, are, of course, Arab-Americans.


One thing Spielberg won’t be able to capture, and the one persistently counter-historical element of the book, is Roth’s subdued tone, so out of character for him. Everything else in the novel eventually returns to normal—so that the Lindbergh years in this universe become just a terrible detour. The only thing that’s different in the alternate future is Roth. He is frightened and overly cautious and needlessly loquacious. The narrator of this book is not the tirading monologuist of Portnoy’s Complaint or Operation Shylock or even The Human Stain. Had it happened here, we might have got this sentimental, essayistic champion of Jewish Newarkers. Instead we got the Roth who continues to reinvent himself, who has stared down death and read the New York Times and pondered the meaning of his freedom. And who still hasn’t done anything for Israel.

http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/books/reviews/9902/

Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?

By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: February 14, 2008

A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from “American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”

Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.”

Such, uh, lack of global awareness is the kind of thing that drives Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason,” up a wall. Ms. Jacoby is one of a number of writers with new books that bemoan the state of American culture.

Joining the circle of curmudgeons this season is Eric G. Wilson, whose “Against Happiness” warns that the “American obsession with happiness” could “well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation.”

Then there is Lee Siegel’s “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob,” which inveighs against the Internet for encouraging solipsism, debased discourse and arrant commercialization. Mr. Siegel, one might remember, was suspended by The New Republic for using a fake online persona in order to trash critics of his blog (“you couldn’t tie Siegel’s shoelaces”) and to praise himself (“brave, brilliant”).

Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn’t zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge. She is well aware that some may tag her a crank. “I expect to get bashed,” said Ms. Jacoby, 62, either as an older person who upbraids the young for plummeting standards and values, or as a secularist whose defense of scientific rationalism is a way to disparage religion.

Ms. Jacoby, however, is quick to point out that her indictment is not limited by age or ideology. Yes, she knows that eggheads, nerds, bookworms, longhairs, pointy heads, highbrows and know-it-alls have been mocked and dismissed throughout American history. And liberal and conservative writers, from Richard Hofstadter to Allan Bloom, have regularly analyzed the phenomenon and offered advice.

T. J. Jackson Lears, a cultural historian who edits the quarterly review Raritan, said, “The tendency to this sort of lamentation is perennial in American history,” adding that in periods “when political problems seem intractable or somehow frozen, there is a turn toward cultural issues.”

But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.

She pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds don’t think it is necessary or important to know where countries in the news are located. So more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map.

Ms. Jacoby, dressed in a bright red turtleneck with lipstick to match, was sitting, appropriately, in that temple of knowledge, the New York Public Library’s majestic Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue. The author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the library when she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”

Ms. Jacoby doesn’t expect to revolutionize the nation’s educational system or cause millions of Americans to switch off “American Idol” and pick up Schopenhauer. But she would like to start a conversation about why the United States seems particularly vulnerable to such a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism. After all, “the empire of infotainment doesn’t stop at the American border,” she said, yet students in many other countries consistently outperform American students in science, math and reading on comparative tests.

In part, she lays the blame on a failing educational system. “Although people are going to school more and more years, there’s no evidence that they know more,” she said.

Ms. Jacoby also blames religious fundamentalism’s antipathy toward science, as she grieves over surveys that show that nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism to be taught along with evolution.

Ms. Jacoby doesn’t leave liberals out of her analysis, mentioning the New Left’s attacks on universities in the 1960s, the decision to consign African-American and women’s studies to an “academic ghetto” instead of integrating them into the core curriculum, ponderous musings on rock music and pop culture courses on everything from sitcoms to fat that trivialize college-level learning.

Avoiding the liberal or conservative label in this particular argument, she prefers to call herself a “cultural conservationist.”

For all her scholarly interests, though, Ms. Jacoby said she recognized just how hard it is to tune out the 24/7 entertainment culture. A few years ago she participated in the annual campaign to turn off the television for a week. “I was stunned at how difficult it was for me,” she said.

The surprise at her own dependency on electronic and visual media made her realize just how pervasive the culture of distraction is and how susceptible everyone is — even curmudgeons.

http://www.nytimes.com

In Bronx School, Culture Shock, Then Revival

Another school day starts: Shimon Waronker, the principal of Junior High School 22, on station outside school, which is overwhelmingly black and Hispanic. Attending to the details Mr. Waronker was greeted with near disbelief when he arrived in 2004 after his training in the Leadership Academy. In the classroom Mr. Waronker has helped attendance rise to 93 percent.


By ELISSA GOOTMAN
Published: February 8, 2008

Junior High School 22, in the South Bronx, had run through six principals in just over two years when Shimon Waronker was named the seventh.

On his first visit, in October 2004, he found a police officer arresting a student and calling for backup to handle the swelling crowd. Students roamed the hallways with abandon; in one class of 30, only 5 students had bothered to show up. “It was chaos,” Mr. Waronker recalled. “I was like, this can’t be real.”

Teachers, parents and students at the school, which is mostly Hispanic and black, were equally taken aback by the sight of their new leader: A member of the Chabad-Lubavitch sect of Hasidic Judaism with a beard, a black hat and a velvet yarmulke.

“The talk was, ‘You’re not going to believe who’s running the show,’ ” said Lisa DeBonis, now an assistant principal.

At a time when the Bloomberg administration has put principals at the center of its efforts to overhaul schools, making the search for great school leaders more pressing than ever, the tale of Mr. Waronker shows that sometimes, the most unlikely of candidates can produce surprising results.

Despite warnings from some in the school system that Mr. Waronker was a cultural mismatch for a predominantly minority school, he has outlasted his predecessors, and test scores have risen enough to earn J.H.S. 22 an A on its new school report card. The school, once on the city’s list of the 12 most dangerous, has since been removed.

Attendance among the 670 students is above 93 percent, and some of the offerings seem positively elite, like a new French dual-language program, one of only three in the city.

“It’s an entirely different place,” Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein said in a recent interview. “If I could clone Shimon Waronker, I would do that immediately.”

Not everyone would.

Mr. Waronker has replaced half the school’s teachers, and some of his fiercest critics are teachers who say he interprets healthy dissent as disloyalty and is more concerned with creating flashy new programs than with ensuring they survive. Critics note that the school is far from perfect; it is one of 32 in the city that the state lists as failing and at risk of closing. Even his critics, though, acknowledge the scope of his challenge.

“I don’t agree with a lot of what he’s done, but I actually recognize that he has a beast in front of him,” said Lauren Bassi, a teacher who has since left. “I’m not sure there’s enough money in the world you could pay me to tackle this job.”

Mr. Waronker, 39, a former public school teacher, was in the first graduating class of the New York City Leadership Academy, which Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg created in 2003 to groom promising principal candidates. Considered one of the stars, he was among the last to get a job, as school officials deemed him “not a fit” in a city where the tensions between blacks and Hasidic Jews that erupted in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1991 are not forgotten.

“They just said he may be terrific, but not the right person for that school,” Chancellor Klein said.

Some parents at J.H.S. 22, also called Jordan L. Mott, were suspicious, viewing Mr. Waronker as too much an outsider. In fact, one parent, Angie Vazquez, 37, acknowledged that her upbringing had led her to wonder: “Wow, we’re going to have a Jewish person, what’s going to happen? Are the kids going to have to pay for lunch?”

Ms. Vazquez was won over by Mr. Waronker’s swift response after her daughter was bullied, saying, “I never had no principal tell me, ‘Let’s file a report, let’s call the other student’s parent and have a meeting.’ ”

For many students and parents, the real surprise was that like them, Mr. Waronker speaks Spanish; he grew up in South America, the son of a Chilean mother and an American father, and when he moved to Maryland at age 11, he spoke no English.

“I was like, ‘You speak Spanish?’ ” recalled Nathalie Reyes, 12, dropping her jaw at the memory.

He also has a background in the military. Mr. Waronker joined R.O.T.C. during college and served on active duty for two years, including six months studying tactical intelligence. After becoming an increasingly observant Jew, he began studying at a yeshiva, thinking he was leaving his military training behind.

“You become a Hasid, you don’t think, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to suppress revolutions,’ ” Mr. Waronker said. But, he said, he drew on his military training as he tackled a school where a cluster of girls identifying themselves as Bloods stormed the main office one day looking for a classmate, calling, “We’re going to get you, you Crip.”

He focused relentlessly on hallway patrols, labeling one rowdy passageway the “fall of Saigon.” In an effort to eliminate gang colors, he instituted a student uniform policy.

He even tried to send home the students who flouted it, a violation of city policy that drew television news cameras. In his first year, he suspended so many students that a deputy chancellor whispered in his ear, “You’d better cool it.”

In trying times — when a seventh grader was beaten so badly that he nearly lost his eyesight, when another student’s arm was broken in an attack in the school gym, when the state listed J.H.S. 22 as a failing school — Mr. Waronker gathered his teachers and had them hold hands and pray. Some teachers winced with discomfort.

At first Mr. Waronker worked such long hours that his wife, a lawyer, gently suggested he get a cot at school to save himself the commute from their home in Crown Heights.

He also asked a lot from his teachers, and often they delivered. One longtime teacher, Roy Naraine, said, “I like people who are visionaries.”

Sometimes teachers balked, as when Mr. Waronker asked them to take to rooftops with walkie-talkies before Halloween in 2006. He wanted to avoid a repetition of the previous year’s troubles, when students had been pelted with potatoes and frozen eggs.

“You control the heights, you control the terrain,” he explained.

“I said, if you go on a roof, you’re not covered,” said Jacqueline Williams, the leader of the teachers’ union chapter, referring to teachers’ insurance coverage.

Mr. Waronker has also courted his teachers; one of his first acts as principal was to meet with each individually, inviting them to discuss their perspective and goals. He says he was inspired by a story of how the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitch spiritual leader, met with an Army general, then inquired after his driver.

“That’s leadership,” he said, “when you’re sensitive about the driver.”

Lynne Bourke-Johnson, now an assistant principal, said: “His first question was, ‘Well, how can I help you, Lynne?’ I’m like, ‘Excuse me?’ No principal had ever asked me that.”

The principal enlisted teachers in an effort to “take back the hallways” from students who seemed to have no fear of authority. He enlisted the students, too, by creating a democratically elected student congress.

“It’s just textbook counterinsurgency,” he said. “The first thing you have to do is you have to invite the insurgents into the government.” He added, “I wanted to have influence over the popular kids.”

These days, the congress gathers in Mr. Waronker’s office for leadership lessons. One recent afternoon, two dozen students listened intently as Mr. Waronker played President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s address after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, then opened a discussion on leadership and responsibility.

When an etiquette expert, Lyudmila Bloch, first approached principals about training sessions she runs at a Manhattan restaurant, most declined to send students. Mr. Waronker, who happened to be reading her book, “The Golden Rules of Etiquette at the Plaza,” to his own children (he has six), has since dispatched most of the school for training at a cost of $40 a head.

Flipper Bautista, 10, loved the trip, saying, “It’s this place where you go and eat, and they teach you how to be first-class.”

In a school where many children lack basic reading and math skills, though, such programs are not universally applauded. When Mr. Waronker spent $8,000 in school money to give students a copy of “The Code: The 5 Secrets of Teen Success” and to invite the writer to give a motivational speech, it outraged Marietta Synodis, a teacher who has since left.

“My kids could much better benefit from math workbooks,” Ms. Synodis said.

Mr. Waronker counters that key elements of his leadership are dreaming big and offering children a taste of worlds beyond their own. “Those experiences can be life-transforming,” he said.

So when Emmanuel Bruntson, 14, a cut-up in whom Mr. Waronker saw potential, started getting into fights, he met with him daily and gave him a copy of Jane Austen’s “Emma.”

“I wanted to get him out of his environment so he could see a different world,” Mr. Waronker said.

Mr. Waronker has divided the school into eight academies, a process that has led to some venomous staff meetings, as teachers sparred over who got what resources and which students. The new system has allowed for more personalized environments and pockets of excellence, like an honors program that one parent, Nadine Rosado, whose daughter graduated last year, called “wonderful.”

“It was always said that the children are the ones that run that school,” she said, “so it was very shocking all the changes he put in place, that they actually went along with it.” Students agree, if sometimes grudgingly, that the school is now a different place.

“It’s like they figured out our game,” groused Brian Roman, 15, an eighth grader with a ponytail.

Back in Crown Heights, Mr. Waronker says he occasionally finds himself on the other side of a quizzical look, with his Hasidic neighbors wondering why he is devoting himself to a Bronx public school instead of a Brooklyn yeshiva.

“We’re all connected,” he responds.

Gesturing in his school at a class full of students, he said, “I feel the hand of the Lord here all the time.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/nyregion/08principal.html?_r=1&sq=hasidic&st=nyt&oref=slogin&scp=2&pagewanted=all

http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=a3aeb4233f40d123c23345d063b9654cc3b02b1a

En français
http://www.frenchmorning.com/ny/spip.php?article281

ISM non facturer

Indice spécifique aux Etats-Unis, l'ISM donne un niveau de prix à l'achat de différents secteurs.

ISM Manufacturier : calculé mensuellement sur la base d'un échantillon de 300 entreprises de 20 secteurs manufacturiers différents, auxquelles on demande de préciser les conditions actuelles et futures dans 6 mois sur six sujets différents comme le niveau des commandes, prix d'achat, production, emploi, livraison des distributeurs, niveau de stocks. L'indice est publié avec ses différentes composantes pour fournir des informations sur l'emploi, les prix et la conjoncture en général. Il est donc très suivi par les marchés.

ISM Non Manufacturier (services): Il couvre 370 entreprises US dans 60 secteurs (comme l'agriculture, les mines, les constructions le transport, les communications, les commerces de gros et de détail). Il est un indice de non-composite, également très suivi par les marchés financiers.

Contrairement au CPI ou au PPI, l'ISM est le résultat d'une étude réalisée auprès des directeurs d'achats de grandes entreprises. Il ne s'agit pas d'une statistique industrielle ou économique.

Cet indice permet aux analystes d'anticiper la santé économique à venir de l'économie américaine. Un indice supérieur à 50 s'observe dans un pays en croissance. Inférieur à 50, le pays se dirige vers un état de récession.



-info relative-

Paris décroche après un chiffre américain
[05/02/08 - 18H07]

La prudence était de mise depuis l'ouverture, mais la publication de l'indice ISM non manufacturier aux Etats-Unis a mis le feu aux poudres. Le baromètre américain a mis au jour une contraction de l'activité dans les services en début d'année. Ce phénomène ne s'était pas produit depuis presque 5 ans, selon Natixis. Ce chiffre a en outre amené les investisseurs à réexaminer les mauvaises nouvelles économiques de la semaine passée, notamment le rapport sur l'emploi américain, que les opérations de fusions-acquisitions avaient alors fait passer au second plan. Dans ce contexte, le CAC 40 a abandonné 3,96% à 4.776,86 points. Il n'avait pas cédé autant de terrain depuis la débâcle du 21 janvier, où il avait chuté de 6,83%, sous le coup d'annonces désastreuses dans le secteur financier. Hier, les volumes ont finalement atteint 7,4 milliards d'euros sur le SRD, dont 6,3 milliards d'euros sur les quarante valeurs vedette.

A New York, le Dow Jones reculait de 1,85% et le S&P 500 de 1,98%, vers 17h30 (heure de Paris). Le Nasdaq perdait 1,6%.

Contraction de l'activité aux Etats-Unis

Peu avant 16h, les investisseurs ont découvert avec stupeur l'indice ISM non manufacturier aux Etats-Unis. L'indice synthétique s'affiche à 44,6 points, alors que les économistes sondés par Bloomberg attendaient 52,5 points en janvier, après 53,2 points en décembre. Le baromètre, basé sur un sondage auprès des directeurs d'achat, a enregistré sa plus forte chute depuis sa création et atteint son plus bas niveau, d'après l'équipe de Natixis. Il fait ressortir "une contraction dans les services, pour la première fois depuis mars 2003," a souligné Marie-Pierre Ripert. L'économiste a attiré l'attention sur le fait que quasiment tous les grands indicateurs américains font désormais apparaître une contraction de l'activité en début d'année : le nombre d'heures travaillées a diminué en janvier et l'économie a détruit des emplois au lieu d'en créer. "Nous sommes en train de revoir nos prévisions de PIB pour le premier trimestre; nous pensons toutefois que le stimulus fiscal associé à une politique monétaire souple soutiendra l'économie américaine, vers le milieu de l'année," a-t-elle tempéré.

Les prises de bénéfices se sont accélerées, notamment sur les valeurs financières. Celles-ci étaient affectées depuis le matin par des recommandations négatives d'analystes sur les titres d'établissements américains comme American Express, Wells Fargo, et Wachovia. Les bureaux d'études analysaient les effets d'une récession sur le niveau de défauts de paiements.

Dans la matinée, l'indice Nikkei à la Bourse de Tokyo a cédé 0,82%. Hong Kong a perdu 0,89% et Shanghai 1,55%.

Les financières pèsent sur la tendance

Les financières ont mené la baisse. Société Générale a poursuivi sa dégringolade après la forte enregistrée la semaine passée, pour des raisons spéculatives. Le titre a abandonné 5,27%, faisant perdre 10 points à l'indice vedette. Pourtant, de source de marché, Merrill Lynch a estimé que le groupe avait 70% de chance d'être racheté. Par ailleurs, le gendarme de la Bourse américaine (SEC) et le département américain de la Justice ont ouvert des enquêtes liées aux pertes colossales de la banque, selon le "Wall Street Journal".

JPMorgan a publié une note sur la banque de gros en Europe et voit "une lumière au bout du tunnel pour 2008". En France, l'analyste préfère Société Générale à BNP Paribas (-5,76% et -17 points d'indice), mais a un conseil positif uniquement sur Crédit Agricole, qui a quand même chuté de 4,68%. Dexia a perdu 4,8% et Axa 5,08%.

Le compartiment automobile, très suivi et volatil ces dernières semaines, a aussi été en première ligne. Peugeot a décroché de 6,05%. JPMorgan a relevé sa recommandation sur le titre de "sous-pondérer" à "neutre". Dans une note sur les constructeurs automobiles européens, l'analyste a réduit sa valorisation sur Renault, de 115 à 90 euros. L'action a abandonné 7,41% à 71,68 euros. Michelin a dégringolé de 8,4%, signant la plus forte baisse du SRD, et Valeo a glissé de 5,41%.

Les valeurs liées au secteur des semi-conducteurs ont pâti de la révision en baisse des prévisions de ventes de National Semiconductor. Le fabricant américain a invoqué un ralentissement plus fort que prévu des livraisons aux équipementiers télécoms. STMicroelectronics et Soitec ont respectivement lâché 4,5% et 5,19%.

Nyse Euronext a finalement baissé de 7,16%. Le groupe boursier transatlantique a plus que triplé son bénéfice net au quatrième trimestre, à 156 millions de dollars. C'est la première fois que l'entité née de la fusion d'Euronext avec le New York Stock Exchange présente des résultats annuels.

UBS est passé à l'"achat" sur Unibail-Rodamco, contre un conseil de vente jusqu'alors. Le courtier a relevé son objectif de cours de 148 à 175 euros. La valeur a cependant perdu 4,29%.

ArcelorMittal a annoncé une hausse de 12% à 15% des prix des aciers plats en Europe à partir du mois d'avril. La tendance s'est aussi inversée sur le titre, qui a terminé en baisse de 4,13%.

Veolia (-2,36%) a dégagé un chiffre d'affaires en hausse de 14% en 2007, à 32,62 milliards d'euros, supérieur aux attentes. La direction a confirmé ses objectifs pour l'année et à moyen terme.

Altran s'est effrité de seulement 0,48% après avoir relevé sa prévision de marge d'exploitation pour le second semestre 2007. Le groupe de conseil en technologies a engrangé un chiffre d'affaires de 423,2 millions d'euros, en hausse de 7,3% au quatrième trimestre.

Téléperformance s'est déprécié de 5,84%. Le spécialiste du télémarketing a annoncé un chiffre d'affaires en hausse de 23,4% au quatrième trimestre, à 489,1 millions d'euros. CM-CIC Securities indique qu'il s'agit d'une "très bonne performance", mais "gâchée par la démission de Christophe Allard" de son poste de Président du directoire.

Credit Suisse est passé de "surperformance" à "neutre" sur CNP Assurances (-4%).

Ciments Français, filiale de l'italien Italcementi, a publié un chiffres d'affaires en hausse de 3,6%, à 1,14 milliard d'euros, au quatrième trimestre. L'action a abandonné 2,1%.

Neuf cegetel (+0,52%) s'est distingué en inscrivant la seule hausse du SRD.