Oy! So I was, with mild inter­est, read­ing over at Alas the con­ver­sa­tion that was begin­ning to develop around the post writ­ten by Julie about J Street open­ing local chap­ters. I say “mild inter­est” because I find so much of the pol­i­tics sur­round­ing the con­flict between the Israelis and the Pales­tini­ans – which also means the con­flicts between and among all the var­i­ous groups who have an inter­est in how that con­flict is, or is not, resolved – not only tire­some, but also, all too often, child­ish. It’s not that I think the issues are not pro­foundly, world-changingly impor­tant; it’s just that I no longer have the patience that I once had for sift­ing through the par­ti­san nit­pick­ing and polit­i­cal oppor­tunism, not to men­tion the out­right hatred, into which so many dis­cus­sions of those issues inevitably devolve. Still, the lit­tle bit that I have heard about J Street has sug­gested to me that they are try­ing to be adults by, at the very least, broad­en­ing the con­ver­sa­tion both in terms of con­tent and in terms of who gets to par­tic­i­pate, and that is refresh­ing, even though I don’t know enough about most of their posi­tions to say how much I sup­port them beyond the state­ment I have just made.

What caught my inter­est about the con­ver­sa­tion Julie’s post started was that it con­cerned lit­er­a­ture, the role of lit­er­a­ture in polit­i­cal move­ments, the stance polit­i­cal move­ments should take towards indi­vid­ual works of lit­er­a­ture, what it means to write polit­i­cally engaged lit­er­a­ture and what it means to engage lit­er­a­ture polit­i­cally. The first part of the con­ver­sa­tion is about the play Seven Jew­ish Chil­dren, writ­ten in 2009 by Caryl Churchill in response to Israel’s inva­sion of Gaza. The play con­sists of a series of sim­ple imper­a­tive sen­tences, each begin­ning with “Tell her” or “Don’t tell her”–her being a female of inde­ter­mi­nate age, though she is prob­a­bly pretty young. Col­lec­tively, these imper­a­tives rep­re­sent some of the posi­tions that Jews, as groups and as indi­vid­u­als, Israeli and not, have taken in response to both the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict and Israel’s exis­tence. In my own opin­ion, the play, which I have not read as care­fully as I might, and so I am will­ing to be con­vinced oth­er­wise, walks a fine line between expos­ing and cri­tiquing, but also human­iz­ing, the denial and hypocrisy of many who sup­port Israel’s poli­cies out of fear for their own and the Jew­ish community’s sur­vival, and pro­pa­gan­diz­ing that posi­tion as a tool to demo­nize both Jews and Israel. Ulti­mately, I don’t think the play crosses the line into pro­pa­ganda, though I can see how oth­ers might rea­son­ably say that it does. More­over, since it is a play, I sup­pose that what really mat­ters in terms of this ques­tion is how the play is pro­duced, not sim­ply how it reads on the page.

The first com­ment on Julie’s post is by Sebas­t­ian, who says:

I do not remem­ber see­ing any dis­cus­sion of J Street [on Alas]. Before you rush and sup­port them, check at least the Wiki entry… and maybe look into how main­stream Israel sup­port­ers feel about them. Maybe also read Seven Jew­ish Chil­dren and remem­ber that J Street endorses the play.

Ching­ona then points out that J Street did not “endorse” the play. Rather, the orga­ni­za­tion asserted that the play is not nec­es­sar­ily anti­se­mitic and they defended the the­ater com­pany that put the play on. Sebas­t­ian then admits not that he’d mis­read J Street’s posi­tion on the play, but that he hadn’t even both­ered to read the orig­i­nal state­ment; he also explains that he thinks “it’s worth read­ing and dis­cussing [Seven Jew­ish Chil­dren], but stag­ing it accord­ing to the terms of the author is tak­ing a stance with which I most cer­tainly do not agree.” Pre­sum­ably, since he does not spec­ify, the part of the terms of per­for­mance that Sebas­t­ian objects to is the text in bold­face below:

The play can be read or per­formed any­where, by any num­ber of peo­ple. Any­one who wishes to do it should con­tact the author’s agent (details below), who will license per­for­mances free of charge pro­vided that no admis­sion fee is charged and that a col­lec­tion is taken at each per­for­mance for Med­ical Aid for Pales­tini­ans (MAP), 33a Isling­ton Park Street, Lon­don N1 1QB, tel +44 (0)20 7226 4114, e-mail info@​map-​uk.​org, web www​.map​-uk​.org.

Cer­tainly, Sebas­t­ian is within his right to dis­agree with these terms, and he is within his right not to attend any per­for­mance of the play and to try to con­vince oth­ers not to attend; he also would be within his rights to orga­nize a boy­cott of the play in his com­mu­nity were some­one try­ing to put it on there. What I am inter­ested in, how­ever, is that the dis­agree­ment he expresses is not with the text of the play itself, which he thinks is worth read­ing and dis­cussing, but with peo­ple putting the play to polit­i­cal use, to serve a prac­ti­cal pur­pose in the world, one that involves human being, human bod­ies and the rela­tion­ships between and among them. Some might argue that med­ical aid is not polit­i­cal, or at least that it ought to be beyond politi­ciza­tion. In prin­ci­ple, I agree, if by politi­ciza­tion you mean the kind of par­ti­san­ship that is more about who wins and who loses than about find­ing solu­tions; but it’s not just that there is noth­ing about the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict that is not already, always, polit­i­cal and politi­cized; it’s that med­i­cine is itself, wher­ever and how­ever it is prac­ticed, is already, always, polit­i­cal sim­ply because it is about human being and human bod­ies; and to sug­gest that lit­er­a­ture ought not to be used to make med­ical care avail­able to peo­ple who need it, regard­less of the pol­i­tics of the orga­ni­za­tions involved, is to sug­gest that lit­er­a­ture needs to be con­trolled, hemmed in, fenced in, to be kept safe from those who would cor­rupt it, to pro­tect its purity, so that it can be read and dis­cussed, for exam­ple, with­out the taint of an overt polit­i­cal agenda. Or maybe it is to sug­gest that it’s us who need to be kept safe from lit­er­a­ture, because lit­er­a­ture has the power to move peo­ple to act, not just to think and to feel.

How­ever one under­stands the impulse to keep lit­er­a­ture out of the mate­r­ial real­ity of people’s lives, that impulse at its core is the impulse to cen­sor, to con­trol mean­ing and thereby to con­trol people’s imag­i­na­tions. Let me be clear, though: I am not accus­ing Sebas­t­ian of cen­sor­ship or of want­ing to cen­sor any­one. He is nei­ther mak­ing nor advo­cat­ing pol­icy in his com­ments on Alas; and let me be clear about some­thing else as well: I am talk­ing in this post about lit­er­a­ture, works that aspire to the level of art, the pur­pose of which is to explore human being and feel­ing, not – as pro­pa­ganda attempts, and is designed, to do – dic­tate it. I can imag­ine, for exam­ple, a pro­duc­tion of Seven Jew­ish Chil­dren that might qual­ify as pro­pa­ganda, one in which, say, the char­ac­ters were all wear­ing Nazi uni­forms and in which there was no irony to make that cos­tum­ing deci­sion any­thing other than a sim­ple equat­ing of Israel with Nazi Ger­many. I would not argue that such a pro­duc­tion should be cen­sored, but it is unam­bigu­ously a pro­duc­tion nei­ther I nor any­one I know would sup­port, no mat­ter how wor­thy the goal of fund rais­ing for Med­ical Aid for Pales­tini­ans might be – and from what I can tell that is a wor­thy goal. What if, though, the direc­tor of the play, the one who made the choice to put Nazi uni­forms on the actors, was Jew­ish, and let’s say he or she was mak­ing in this pro­duc­tion a seri­ous attempt to use that cos­tum­ing in an ironic way, as a ref­er­ence to the fact that the Jews – and I am assum­ing that the char­ac­ters in Seven Jew­ish Chil­dren are Jew­ish – who were the vic­tims in the Holo­caust, are now, in Israel, in the posi­tion of being an occu­py­ing oppres­sor, of vic­tim­iz­ing the Palestinians.[1. I wish I didn’t feel the need to add this foot­note, but I do: To make this ref­er­ence is, of course, not to deny that the Pales­tini­ans have also been guilty of vic­tim­iz­ing Israelis.] The point of the com­par­i­son, in other words, is not to say that Israel – and, by exten­sion, the Jews – are no dif­fer­ent from the Nazis, that the Israelis are com­mit­ting what is tan­ta­mount to geno­cide against the Pales­tini­ans, but rather to illu­mi­nate the dynamic by which vio­lence begets vio­lence, all too often turn­ing those who were vic­tims of vio­lence into per­pe­tra­tors of the kinds of vio­lence they suf­fered. Fur­ther, imag­ine that the pro­gram notes for this imag­i­nary pro­duc­tion make clear that it is intended to explore what it means that the vio­lence done by the Israelis to the Pales­tini­ans has become part of Jew­ish iden­tity, in the sense that if one is Jew­ish, one must be account­able in some way for one’s responses to that vio­lence. More­over, let’s even say that there is a note in the pro­gram explain­ing that the choice of Nazi uni­forms was because the Holo­caust, more than any other per­se­cu­tion the Jews have suf­fered, can stand for all the per­se­cu­tions through which the Jews have lived. The com­par­i­son to the Holo­caust per se, in other words, is not even the point.

It is not hard to imag­ine the kinds of vit­riol that the Jew­ish com­mu­nity would direct at the peo­ple involved with this pro­duc­tion. More to the point, it is hard not to imag­ine that this vit­riol would be well-deserved. Assert­ing an ironic frame for the pro­duc­tion I have imag­ined in the way that I have imag­ined the direc­tor assert­ing it would be an empty ges­ture, a cop out, because even if it were pos­si­ble to put the char­ac­ters in Seven Jew­ish Chil­dren into Nazi uni­forms and have it not be anti­se­mitic – and I don’t think it is pos­si­ble – the play’s text is too sim­ple to sup­port the ironic read­ing such a cos­tum­ing deci­sion would require. Nonethe­less, I’d like for the moment to assume that the director’s inten­tion to be ironic was gen­uine, not because her or his intent would make the pro­duc­tion less prob­lem­atic, or excuse his or her pro­foundly poor artis­tic judg­ment, but because I think the impulse to that irony is an impor­tant one to exam­ine, espe­cially because I think it is often char­ac­ter­ized within the Jew­ish com­mu­nity as self-hatred, accu­sa­tions of which are often used to dis­miss from legit­i­macy peo­ple who make cer­tain kinds of crit­i­cisms of the Jew­ish com­mu­nity and/or Israel. I have writ­ten at length about Jew­ish self-hatred else­where, so I am not going to go into that here. Rather, I want to con­sider the dif­fi­culty Jews have accept­ing the valid­ity, the poten­tial value, of under­stand­ing the insti­tu­tional and mil­i­tary vio­lence that Israel does to the Pales­tini­ans in the con­text of the vio­lence that the Nazis did to the Jews, and I want to go beyond the easy and patron­iz­ing, and I think sub­tly anti­se­mitic, violence-begets-violence logic that makes of Israel a wounded child, man or woman who has learned the pri­mary les­son of abuse: that the only way to make sure you are never abused again is to be ready to kill any­one who even smells like they are going to try to abuse you; and I am not inter­ested in the obvi­ous and some­what tired cliché that, you know, we all have the poten­tial for evil within us, and so Israel is only show­ing that it too and, by exten­sion, the Jews have the capac­ity to do evil in the world. Because I think the fun­da­men­tal dif­fi­culty peo­ple have with what I am talk­ing about is that putting the vio­lence Israel does to the Pales­tini­ans in the con­text of the vio­lence the Nazis did to the Jews – and I am not sug­gest­ing any­thing even remotely resem­bling equiv­a­lence here – ulti­mately human­izes the Nazis, sug­gest­ing that the vio­lence they did, as hor­ri­ble as it was, can also be under­stood in human terms, and so if the Nazis too are human, then the pos­si­bil­ity of for­give­ness and under­stand­ing has to exist for them, as it exists for every other human being on the face of the earth.[1. This para­graph was edited Jan­u­ary 19 to cor­rect mis­takes that resulted from care­less cut­ting and pasting.]

Let me say first what I do not mean by this: I am not talk­ing about for­give­ness in any­thing resem­bling what I under­stand to be the Chris­t­ian turn-the-other-cheek sense (which I do not triv­i­al­ize, even though it is not a value that I hold). So I do not mean that any Jew, espe­cially any Jew who sur­vived the Holo­caust, is oblig­ated to for­give any­one for being or hav­ing been a Nazi or for sym­pa­thiz­ing or com­plic­ity with the Nazis. I am not sug­gest­ing that there is some pre­de­fined for­mula through which the for­give­ness I am talk­ing about can be earned; and I believe firmly that for­give­ness for some deeds can­not be earned by the peo­ple who com­mit­ted them from the peo­ple against whom they were com­mit­ted. Nonethe­less, to see peo­ple who com­mit the most hor­ri­ble crimes, even crimes against human­ity, not as mon­sters whose incom­pre­hen­si­ble deeds have for­ever exiled them from the human com­mu­nity, but as peo­ple who have com­mit­ted inhu­man acts, is to insist on the com­pre­hen­si­bil­ity of those acts, on the pos­si­bil­ity of under­stand­ing those peo­ple and on the pos­si­bil­ity that they might some­how find a way to take respon­si­bil­ity, to hold them­selves – and to allow them­selves to be held – account­able for what they have done.

To put it another way, and using for the moment an exam­ple that is not specif­i­cally Jew­ish, it is one thing for some­one who has never raped to acknowl­edge that he or she nonethe­less has within them­selves what­ever it is that can moti­vate rape, but it is quite some­thing else for some­one who has sur­vived rape to con­tinue to see in her or his rapist the same human­ity – which means the same poten­tial for vul­ner­a­bil­ity – that he or she pos­sesses and that the rapist demon­strated so unam­bigu­ously and inescapably in the act of rape. Now, let’s sup­pose this rape sur­vivor com­mits an act that is not rape, that nonethe­less bears on its sur­face char­ac­ter­is­tics that are sim­i­lar to rape and that is clearly and unam­bigu­ously vic­tim­iz­ing within a power struc­ture that could very eas­ily become rape, if the will and desire to rape were there. Let’s also say – just to make my anal­ogy, which I am assum­ing is already more than obvi­ous, even more bla­tant – that the rape sur­vivor expe­ri­ences what he or she has done as an act, a nec­es­sary act, of self-preservation, and let’s say there is incon­tro­vert­ible evi­dence to sup­port if not the pre­cise method of self-preservation the rape sur­vivor has cho­sen, then cer­tainly the valid­ity of tak­ing some form of action. Finally, let’s imag­ine that cen­tral to this rape survivor’s iden­tity is a polit­i­cal com­mit­ment to stand in sol­i­dar­ity with all peo­ple who are vio­lated, sex­u­ally or oth­er­wise, and to fight such vio­la­tions wher­ever they occur.

For this rape sur­vivor not to see as self-evident the par­al­lels between the vio­lence he or she has com­mit­ted and the rape he or she expe­ri­enced is under­stand­able. We are often blind to aspects of our own actions until they are pointed out to us. Assum­ing the par­al­lels are really there, how­ever, once some­one does point them out, the sur­vivor would be derelict not to explore them, not to see if there were con­nec­tions to be made that might not only illu­mi­nate her or his expe­ri­ence, iden­tity and com­mit­ment as a rape sur­vivor, but also change her or his under­stand­ing of her or his own vic­tim­iz­ing acts and the peo­ple who sur­vived them.The sur­vivor, in other words, would have to human­ize the per­son by whom he or she was raped in order fully to grasp whether and to what degree hav­ing been raped led to the vio­lence that he or she (the sur­vivor) com­mit­ted. If you’ve ever been raped, or oth­er­wise sex­u­ally assaulted, then you know how dif­fi­cult it can be just to con­tem­plate what I have been talk­ing about. In my own expe­ri­ence as a sur­vivor of child sex­ual abuse, it took many years before I could enter­tain, with­out feel­ing like I was betray­ing myself, the pos­si­bil­ity that the men who abused me were, sim­ply, peo­ple who’d made the choice to abuse me, not inher­ently evil mon­sters who hap­pened to look like men.

I think the Jew­ish community’s dif­fi­culty with Jews who want to explore par­al­lels between the poli­cies and actions of the State of Israel regard­ing the Pales­tini­ans and the poli­cies and actions of Nazi Ger­many regard­ing the Jews is sim­i­lar. What the peo­ple who have this dif­fi­culty for­get, how­ever, is that par­al­lelism is not the same thing as equiv­a­lence. To say that some of Israel’s poli­cies and actions resem­ble poli­cies enacted and actions taken by the Nazis dur­ing the Holo­caust is not by def­i­n­i­tion to sug­gest that Israel is com­mit­ting geno­cide against the Pales­tini­ans, though there are anti­semites who do make that sug­ges­tion. More to the point, a Jew who sees those par­al­lels and remains silent – leav­ing aside for the moment the ques­tion of whether and to what degree the par­al­lels he or she sees are accu­rate – has a lot more in com­mon with the peo­ple of Ger­many whose silence was their com­plic­ity in the Final Solu­tion than with the image of the Jew that I was taught to make part of my iden­tity: some­one who, pre­cisely because the Jews have expe­ri­enced and sur­vived cen­turies of oppres­sion and per­se­cu­tion, speaks out for social jus­tice even when it is dif­fi­cult to do so.

I am not argu­ing that any asser­tion of a par­al­lel between Israel’s behav­ior in the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict and the Holo­caust is valid sim­ply by virtue of its hav­ing been put for­ward by a Jew. Rather, I am argu­ing that we need to take seri­ously the irony out of which such asser­tions are made and to under­stand them also as responses to that irony, per­haps espe­cially when the asser­tions are made in works of art, like the pro­duc­tion I imag­ined of Seven Jew­ish Chil­dren in which the direc­tor makes ironic use of Nazi uni­forms as cos­tumes, or like the poem “Cho­sen,” which helped get its author, Josh Healey, and two other poets, Kevin Coval, and Tracy Soren, unin­vited from J Street’s con­fer­ence last year. The three poets were sup­posed to run a ses­sion on poetry in the con­fer­ence track called “Cul­ture as a Tool for Change,” but when right-wing blog­gers, among them Michael Gold­farb at The​Weekly​Stan​dard​.com, pointed out that two of Healey’s poems, “Cho­sen” and “Queer Intifada,” draw com­par­isons between the Holo­caust and cur­rent events in Israel and the United States, J Street decided to can­cel the ses­sion and issued this state­ment to explain why:

As a mat­ter of prin­ci­ple, J Street respects the dis­sent­ing voice that poetry can rep­re­sent in soci­ety and pol­i­tics. We acknowl­edge that expres­sion and lan­guage are used dif­fer­ently in the arts and artis­tic expres­sion when com­pared to their use in polit­i­cal argumentation.

Nev­er­the­less, as J Street is crit­i­cal of the use and abuse of Holo­caust imagery and metaphors by politi­cians and pun­dits on the right, it would be inap­pro­pri­ate for us to fea­ture poets at our Con­fer­ence whose poetry has used such imagery in the past and might also be offen­sive to some con­fer­ence participants.

We are sorry for any dis­trac­tion that this issue may cause for those inter­ested in work­ing with us to advance the cause of peace and secu­rity for Israel and the Mid­dle East.

The pol­i­tics of the can­cel­la­tion are unsur­pris­ing. The bat­tle that would have ensued had J Street allowed the poets to read at the con­fer­ence was one in which the orga­ni­za­tion was not will­ing to get mired, some­thing that – accord­ing to Healey and Coval–J Street’s exec­u­tive direc­tor admit­ted to them when he explained his deci­sion. “I know what I’m doing is wrong,” they quote him as say­ing, “but there are some bat­tles we choose not to fight.” While I per­son­ally agree with the poets that J Street would have done bet­ter to fight, because “giv[ing] in […] only embold­ens the right and legit­imizes their attacks,” I am also aware of how easy it is to sec­ond guess deci­sions like the one J Street made from a dis­tance, and so I don’t want to do that here. Nonethe­less, the organization’s state­ment does reveal some­thing about the pol­i­tics of “Holo­caust imagery and metaphor” within the Jew­ish com­mu­nity that would be worth talk­ing about even if the poetry ses­sion hadn’t been can­celed, though it will prob­a­bly be use­ful first to take a closer look at poems by Healey and Coval that J Street, Michael Gold­farb and oth­ers on the right found so prob­lem­atic. Here are the offend­ing lines from “Cho­sen:”

we call our­selves the cho­sen peo­ple
but I’m ask­ing cho­sen for what?
cho­sen to recre­ate our own his­tory
merely revers­ing the roles
with the script now read­ing that
we’re the ones writ­ing num­bers
on the wrists of babies born in
the ghetto called Gaza?

As I read it, “Cho­sen” is Healey’s attempt to explore his own dif­fi­culty in defin­ing for him­self a sta­ble Jew­ish iden­tity in an era where assim­i­la­tion, com­mer­cial­iza­tion, con­sumerism and the Israeli occu­pa­tion have cor­rupted (in Healey’s opin­ion) the social jus­tice tra­di­tion within Judaism and Jew­ish cul­ture and also made it increas­ingly dif­fi­cult to see the Jews as the arche­type of the oppressed nation, which is how, at least in my Jew­ish edu­ca­tion, we were taught to see our­selves. Here is the poem’s conclusion:

I wish there was a cho­sen peo­ple
and that I could claim them as my own

but when it comes to my peo­ple
we’ve cho­sen to assim­i­late into
the world of Six Day Wars and Chanukah Harry’s
lead­ing me to see that all peo­ple are
going to be just that — peo­ple
no mat­ter how many points
we put on our stars or how hard
we pray that they’re different

When I fin­ished read­ing “Cho­sen,” it was hard not to think of the joke – I think the writ­ers of Fid­dler on the Roof actu­ally put it in Tevye’s mouth – in which the long suf­fer­ing Jew­ish man, whose heart is filled with the long suf­fer­ing of the Jew­ish peo­ple, says to God some­thing like, “I know we are your cho­sen peo­ple, and it’s a bless­ing; but couldn’t you, maybe, choose some­one else for a change?” In Healey’s poem, though, it’s not God who chooses some­one else, it’s the Jew­ish peo­ple who have cho­sen to be some­thing else, and, like the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, Healey wants his words to be a clar­ion call to the Jews to back away from that choice and return, as my rebbes would have put it, to their yid­dishe neshama, their Jew­ish souls, and the essen­tial truth of what it means to be a Jew. Unfor­tu­nately, Healey’s prophetic ambi­tions don’t amount to much more than a list of tired cliches:

last week I saw Moses cry­ing in the sub­urbs of Chicago
wan­der­ing through the strip malls and fancy tem­ples
won­der­ing why we ignored his last les­son that until all peo­ples
are free, we might as well still be slaves in Egypt

yes­ter­day I saw Rabbi Hil­lel beg­ging on the streets of Jerusalem
ask­ing for spare shekels but all the passers-by already gave their money
to false cam­pus idols erected in his honor, pay no atten­tion when he pleas
if you are only for your­self, son, then what are you really for?

Indeed, pretty much the only move in the poem with the poten­tial to yield some­thing that is not cliché, that might do some real jus­tice to the large ambi­tions Healey has for the piece, is the one that got him in trou­ble in the first place, com­par­ing the Pales­tini­ans in Gaza to the Jews in the ghet­tos and con­cen­tra­tion camps of Nazi Ger­many. That Healey does not want this com­par­i­son to be a facile one is indi­cated first by the fact that he makes it in the form of a ques­tion and, sec­ond, by the way he puts his ques­tion in the con­text of the Jews’ image of them­selves as the cho­sen peo­ple, an idea fraught with con­flict both within the Jew­ish com­mu­nity and between the Jew­ish com­mu­nity and the rest of the world. At stake in Healey’s ques­tion, in other words, are issues of iden­tity, moral­ity and com­mu­nity; of respon­si­bil­ity and account­abil­ity; of how one gives mean­ing not only to one’s own suf­fer­ing, but the suf­fer­ing of oth­ers; not only to the oppres­sive actions of oth­ers, but to oppres­sive actions per­formed in one’s name. More to the point, these issues are not just rel­e­vant, they are cen­tral to any dis­cus­sion of how to make peace between the Israelis and the Pales­tini­ans, because the con­ces­sions and com­pro­mises that peace will require of Israel – and, there­fore, by proxy, of world Jewry as well – go by def­i­n­i­tion to the heart of what it has meant to be Jew­ish since Israel’s inde­pen­dence was declared in 1948. Unfor­tu­nately, though, through an inex­cus­ably shal­low and fac­tu­ally inac­cu­rate use of Holo­caust imagery – Israel is not tat­too­ing num­bers onto the wrists of babies born in Gaza – Healey does not merely avoid those cru­cial issues. He ren­ders them invis­i­ble, set­ting aside the irony he might have so use­fully explored in com­par­ing Gaza to a ghetto and going instead for the easy and sen­ti­men­tal­ized guilt trip on which ren­der­ing Israel Nazi-like is sup­posed to send those of us who don’t “get it.”

On the whole, “Queer Intifada” is more suc­cess­ful than “Cho­sen.” The poem’s entirely authen­tic energy comes from the jux­ta­po­si­tion of a Pales­tin­ian Sol­i­dar­ity March and Gay Pride Parade that are tak­ing place on the same day in more or less the same place, and when Healey gets to the Holo­caust com­par­isons that made this poem also prob­lem­atic for Michael Gold­farb and com­pany, the impulse to make the com­par­isons, if not the com­par­isons them­selves, arise out of the poem’s energy and movement:

my friends,
Anne Frank is Matthew Shep­ard
Guan­tanamo is Auschwitz
Gay Mar­riage is Pales­tine
and we are all walk­ing on occu­pied land

Unfor­tu­nately, here too, Healey reaches for what is easy rather than look­ing for com­plex­ity. Equat­ing Guan­tanamo with Auschwitz is insult­ingly gra­tu­itous, not only because Guan­tanamo – what­ever else might be wrong with it – is most decid­edly not a death camp, but also because it has noth­ing to with the rest of the poem; and while there cer­tainly are those in the US who would like to hunt down queer peo­ple in the same way that the Nazis hunted both Jews and queers, what hap­pened to Matthew Shep­ard, hor­ri­ble thought it was and wor­thy of being memo­ri­al­ized in many dif­fer­ent kinds of poems though it is, was not the result of a gov­ern­ment spon­sored Final Solu­tion. My point is not that that it is wrong to com­pare either the expe­ri­ences of or the oppres­sions suf­fered by Matthew Shep­herd and Anne Frank; espe­cially because the Nazis also sought to exter­mi­nate gay peo­ple, there is a lot that can prob­a­bly be learned from explor­ing the depths of that com­par­i­son. How­ever, to elide, as Healey does, the spe­cific char­ac­ter­is­tics of the dif­fer­ent oppres­sions under which they lived, to reduce each of their lives to what their names can stand for – Anne Frank=Jewish girl hunted and killed by Nazis; Matthew Shepard=gay man hunted and killed by homo­phobes – is to flat­ten the truth of each of their expe­ri­ences to a sin­gle truth that does jus­tice to nei­ther of them and, frankly, triv­i­al­izes what hap­pened to both of them. (Even the com­par­i­son between gay mar­riage and Pales­tine, in my opin­ion, ought to give peo­ple pause for the same reasons.)

Clearly, I don’t think either of these poems is entirely suc­cess­ful, but their fail­ure stems not from Healey’s impulse as a Jew­ish poet to use the Holo­caust as a lens for exam­in­ing his place as a Jew in today’s world or to see echoes of the Final Solu­tion in the oppres­sions that plague our time. Rather, their fail­ure is a fail­ure of lan­guage. Healey’s Holo­caust com­par­isons are embod­ied not in the kind of lan­guage that J Street talks about in the first para­graph of its expla­na­tion for can­cel­ing the poetry event, lan­guage that is “used dif­fer­ently in […] artis­tic expres­sion [than] in polit­i­cal argu­men­ta­tion.” Instead, they are expressed pre­cisely as they would be were polit­i­cal argu­men­ta­tion – albeit a score-cheap-points species of such argu­ment – the kind of dis­course in which Healey was involved, which is what made them such per­fect fod­der for the right-wing blog­gers who attacked him. Yet I also want to acknowl­edge the courage it took for Healey to write what he wrote, to risk putting him­self for­ward as – again, in J Street’s words – “the [kind of] dis­sent­ing voice that poetry can rep­re­sent in soci­ety and pol­i­tics.” That was the role played by the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, whose voices Healey seems to me to have wanted to invoke in these two poems, and that is a role that poets can and should play today, which is why it is a shame that J Street felt it nec­es­sary to cut the poets out of its con­fer­ence, instead of find­ing a way to make the sub­stance, the fail­ure and the courage of Healey’s poems part of the dis­cus­sion. One way to do this might have been to ask the poets to explore the poet-prophet con­nec­tion at which I have just hinted. Cer­tainly there is an argu­ment to be made that Israel has “lost its way” in try­ing to deal with the Pales­tin­ian issue, though how much it is lost may be up for debate and I know there are peo­ple who will say that Israel is not lost at all; and while the politi­cians and activists, the nego­tia­tors and aca­d­e­mics, ham­mer out the prac­ti­cal aspects of find­ing a way to peace, maybe it is the Jew­ish poet’s job – or at least the job of those Jew­ish poets who feel them­selves com­pelled to do it – to call Israel back to its bet­ter self (and I mean here not only the cur­rent State of Israel, but Israel as it is often used in the Hebrew Bible to sig­nify the Jew­ish peo­ple). To prac­tice what Josh Healey and his fel­low poet Kevin Coval call in Search­ing for a Minyan: Our Response to Being Cen­sored by J Street “the Jew­ish maxim of the refusal to be silent in the face of oppres­sion, anyone’s oppression.”

By way of exam­ple, here is a video of Kevin Coval per­form­ing the poem – of which I have been unable to find either the title or a tran­script – for which he was taken to task because he accuses Israel of whor­ing itself “to sleep in the hands of men who [will?] beat you after morn­ing coffee.”

Coval’s poem – what­ever you might think of its pol­i­tics – is more suc­cess­ful than either “Cho­sen” or “Queer Intifada” for a num­ber of rea­sons, among them the fact that when Coval con­jures the Holo­caust, he does so with a far more devel­oped sense of Jew­ish col­lec­tive, and his own per­sonal, vul­ner­a­bil­ity. The sug­ges­tion that Israel ought to exam­ine its actions – that Jews ought to exam­ine Israel’s actions – in light of what the Nazis did to the Jews is still there, but there is none of Healey’s cyn­i­cal, pro­pa­gan­dis­tic rant. Instead, Coval’s asser­tion of his own aware­ness that he, that the Jews could very eas­ily become vic­tims of another Gestapo, thereby val­i­dat­ing in the con­text of the poem the emo­tional com­mit­ment most Jews have to the neces­sity of Israel as a safe haven, allows the full com­plex­ity with which Israel con­fronts the Jews – as an idea, an ideal and as a real­ity – to emerge. More­over, when Coval calls Israel to task, he does so in terms of very spe­cific events, giv­ing details and tak­ing respon­si­bil­ity for his own per­spec­tive – note the rep­e­ti­tion of “I see you” and “I saw you” – in ways that make sure what he is say­ing does not descend into an ad hominem attack; as well, these crit­i­cisms of Israel are couched in metaphors that invite con­sid­er­a­tion not just of the spe­cific deeds he is crit­i­ciz­ing, but of the larger, uni­ver­sally human issues involved.

When he com­pares Israel to a pawn, for exam­ple, and the Mid­dle East to a chess­board, he is not just char­ac­ter­iz­ing Israel as a tool that the United States uses to fight its bat­tles for it; he is also ask­ing his audi­ence to think about what it means to con­ceive of inter­na­tional rela­tions in terms of bat­tle and how that con­cep­tion shapes the roles that the nations of the world then have lit­tle choice but to play. More to the point, he is ask­ing a moral ques­tion: Given the real­i­ties of world pol­i­tics and world anti­semitism, given the moral his­tory of the Jews and the moral imper­a­tive in Jew­ish cul­ture to take a stand against oppres­sion, what mean­ing­ful response can an indi­vid­ual Jew have to those actions Israel has taken against the Pales­tini­ans that are clearly immoral that does not also deny the real­i­ties of the world, betray the Jews or both?

The poem, of course, is itself Coval’s answer to that ques­tion, though it is not as straight­for­ward an answer as it might at first appear. When he implores Israel at the end to stop killing itself, he is, in essence, ask­ing Israel to find a way to live within the con­tra­dic­tions and com­plex­i­ties its exis­tence embod­ies. The poem, in other words, is most emphat­i­cally not anti-Israel; it is, rather, a plea for Israel’s con­tin­ued existence.Yet Michael Gold­farb ignores that entirely when he links to Coval’s YouTube video with these words:

Or maybe it wasn’t Healey but his fel­low pan­elist, Kevin Coval, seen here call­ing Israel a “whore,” that some­one [at J Street] was wor­ried about [when the orga­ni­za­tion can­celed the poetry event]. (Empha­sis mine)

It is not gra­tu­itous intel­lec­tual nit­pick­ing to point out that there is a mean­ing­ful dif­fer­ence between call­ing some­one a whore and telling them that cer­tain of their behav­iors are who­r­ish. More to the point, though, to reduce Coval’s line – “whor­ing your­self to sleep in the hands of men who [will?] beat you after morn­ing coffee” – to name call­ing is will­fully to mis­read the poem; it is to avoid hear­ing the voice of the poem, of its speaker bear­ing wit­ness to the vio­lence such men do, whose hope is that the woman they are so hor­ri­bly exploit­ing will some­how find the strength, the sup­port, the com­mu­nity to free her­self and live her own life. Gold­farb does not merely to dis­par­age Coval’s poem, how­ever; he also implies what Jen­nifer Rubin states more explic­itly on Commentary’s blog, that Coval (and Healey) are merely say­ing in their work what J Street really stands for, a “peace” that will actu­ally result in Israel’s demise as a Jew­ish state. (This is why, accord­ing to Rubin, J Street’s “def­i­n­i­tion of what’s good for [Israel] in no way matches up with the views of even reli­ably lib­eral Amer­i­can Jews or Israelis them­selves” and why it’s “posi­tions invari­ably line up so neatly with the Pales­tin­ian pro­pa­ganda machine.”) Regard­less of how much you dis­agree with Coval’s and Healey’s pol­i­tics, regard­less of how offended you are by their metaphors (I find Healey’s Holo­caust metaphors very offen­sive, for exam­ple, and I gen­er­ally agree with his pol­i­tics), to take the posi­tion argued by Gold­farb and Rubin is to deny that Coval and Healey are Jew­ish poets work­ing in a Jew­ish lit­er­ary tra­di­tion which was explic­itly about try­ing to guar­an­tee Israel’s sur­vival – the peo­ple and the nation – not call­ing for its destruc­tion. If you are offended by Coval’s  char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of some of Israel’s behav­ior as who­r­ish, for exam­ple, then you should find the poetry of the bib­li­cal prophets equally offen­sive. Here, for exam­ple, is the prophet Jere­miah call­ing Israel a whore, though this trans­la­tion uses the word pros­ti­tute instead:

2:19 “Your own wicked­ness shall cor­rect you, and your back­slid­ing shall reprove you. Know there­fore and see that it is an evil thing and a bit­ter, that you have for­saken Yah­weh your God, and that my fear is not in you,” says the Lord, Yah­weh of Armies. 2:20 “For of old time I have bro­ken your yoke, and burst your bonds; and you said, ‘I will not serve;’ for on every high hill and under every green tree you bowed your­self, play­ing the pros­ti­tute. 2:21 Yet I had planted you a noble vine, wholly a right seed. How then have you turned into the degen­er­ate branches of a for­eign vine to me? 2:22 For though you wash your­self with lye, and use much soap, yet your iniq­uity is marked before me,” says the Lord Yahweh.

And here is Ezekiel doing the same thing:

16:15 But you trusted in your beauty, and played the pros­ti­tute because of your renown, and poured out your pros­ti­tu­tion on every­one who passed by; his it was. 16:16 You took of your gar­ments, and made for your­selves high places decked with var­i­ous col­ors, and played the pros­ti­tute on them: the like things shall not come, nei­ther shall it be so. 16:17 You also took your beau­ti­ful jew­els of my gold and of my sil­ver, which I had given you, and made for your­self images of men, and played the pros­ti­tute with them; 16:18 and you took your embroi­dered gar­ments, and cov­ered them, and set my oil and my incense before them. 16:19 My bread also which I gave you, fine flour, and oil, and honey, with which I fed you, you even set it before them for a pleas­ant aroma; and thus it was, says the Lord Yah­weh. 16:20 More­over you have taken your sons and your daugh­ters, whom you have borne to me, and you have sac­ri­ficed these to them to be devoured. Was your pros­ti­tu­tion a small mat­ter, 16:21 that you have slain my chil­dren, and deliv­ered them up, in caus­ing them to pass through the fire to them? 16:22 In all your abom­i­na­tions and your pros­ti­tu­tion you have not remem­bered the days of your youth, when you were naked and bare, and were wal­low­ing in your blood.

Had there been a Holo­caust to which Jere­miah and Ezekiel, Isa­iah and Hosea, could have referred in focus­ing the atten­tion of Israel on its way­ward­ness, I have no doubt the prophets would have done so; and I have no doubt as well that there were peo­ple like Michael Gold­farb and Jen­n­fier Rubin who sup­ported the sta­tus quo the prophets were speak­ing against by point­ing out that in the verses prior to the ones I quoted just above, Ezekiel’s metaphor for the covenant with God that Israel has betrayed by pros­ti­tut­ing her­self is sex; and I am sure those peo­ple pointed out the even more morally ques­tion­able fact that, in this pas­sage, the prophet shows God groom­ing Israel almost from the moment of her birth so that when her “time of love” arrived, He could claim her sexually.

16:1 Again the word of Yah­weh came to me, say­ing, 16:2 Son of man, cause Jerusalem to know her abom­i­na­tions; 16:3 and say, Thus says the Lord Yah­weh to Jerusalem: Your birth and your birth is of the land of the Canaan­ite; the Amor­ite was your father, and your mother was a Hit­tite. 16:4 As for your birth, in the day you were born your navel was not cut, nei­ther were you washed in water to cleanse you; you weren’t salted at all, nor swad­dled at all. 16:5 No eye pitied you, to do any of these things to you, to have com­pas­sion on you; but you were cast out in the open field, for that your per­son was abhorred, in the day that you were born. 16:6 When I passed by you, and saw you wal­low­ing in your blood, I said to you, Though you are in your blood, live; yes, I said to you, Though you are in your blood, live. 16:7 I caused you to mul­ti­ply as that which grows in the field, and you increased and grew great, and you attained to excel­lent orna­ment; your breasts were fash­ioned, and your hair was grown; yet you were naked and bare. 16:8 Now when I passed by you, and looked at you, behold, your time was the time of love; and I spread my skirt over you,[2. In the Bible, this is a metaphor for sex­ual inter­course, not the mod­esty we might see in it. When Boaz has sex with Ruth, for exam­ple, the expres­sion used in the text has to do with his cov­er­ing her with his blan­ket.] and cov­ered your naked­ness: yes, I swore to you, and entered into a covenant with you, says the Lord Yah­weh, and you became mine. (Empha­sis mine.)

I am, of course, not argu­ing that Coval and Healey are prophets; but to refuse to rec­og­nize that they, as I read them, are work­ing very self-consciously within the prophetic lit­er­ary tra­di­tion is not merely to deny the fun­da­men­tally Jew­ish nature of what they are try­ing to accom­plish in their poems; it is also to estab­lish, at least by impli­ca­tion, an ortho­doxy around whether and how Jew­ish writ­ers can deal with dif­fi­cult top­ics like Israel and the Holo­caust – top­ics that are inescapably, irre­ducibly, unequiv­o­cally Jew­ish – in writ­ing about Jew­ish iden­tity, Jew­ish cur­rent events, the rela­tion­ship between the Jew­ish com­mu­nity and the rest of the world or any other Jew­ish issue for that mat­ter. It is, in other words, to pre­scribe an appro­pri­ate Jew­ish iden­tity, to insist that the lan­guage of poetry should not move beyond the bound­aries estab­lished by the lan­guage of polit­i­cal dis­course. In fact, what dis­turbs me most about the state­ment J Street issued explain­ing its rea­sons for can­cel­ing the poetry event that was sup­posed to fea­ture Healey and Coval is its clear endorse­ment of this kind of ortho­doxy, some­thing that the crit­i­cism lev­eled by both the left and the right at J Street’s realpoli­tik has not addressed. Here, for ease of ref­er­ence, is the full text of J Street’s statement:

Over the week­end, J Street can­celed the poetry ses­sion sched­uled as part of the “Cul­ture as a Tool for Change” track at its upcom­ing National Conference.

As a mat­ter of prin­ci­ple, J Street respects the dis­sent­ing voice that poetry can rep­re­sent in soci­ety and pol­i­tics. We acknowl­edge that expres­sion and lan­guage are used dif­fer­ently in the arts and artis­tic expres­sion when com­pared to their use in polit­i­cal argumentation.

Nev­er­the­less, as J Street is crit­i­cal of the use and abuse of Holo­caust imagery and metaphors by politi­cians and pun­dits on the right, it would be inap­pro­pri­ate for us to fea­ture poets at our Con­fer­ence whose poetry has used such imagery in the past and might also be offen­sive to some con­fer­ence participants.

We are sorry for any dis­trac­tion that this issue may cause for those inter­ested in work­ing with us to advance the cause of peace and secu­rity for Israel and the Mid­dle East.

In terms of mean­ing, the first and last para­graphs are the most clear, and if you were to read only those two para­graphs – replac­ing the words “this issue” in the last para­graph with a more explicit ref­er­ence to Healey and Coval – J Street’s rea­son­ing for can­cel­ing the event would also be pretty clear. Tak­ing on the con­tro­versy that was build­ing over Healey and Coval’s work would have under­mined the core pur­pose of the con­fer­ence which was “to advance the cause of peace and pros­per­ity for Israel and the Mid­dle East.” It’s impor­tant to rec­og­nize that this assess­ment might have been accu­rate. More to the point, though, and assum­ing for the moment that it was an accu­rate assess­ment, J Street could have approached the can­cel­la­tion of the poetry ses­sion very dif­fer­ently. The organization’s state­ment could have focused on the impor­tance of the ques­tions raised by the poets’ work and the fact that those ques­tions will still be rel­e­vant no mat­ter how the issue of peace between Israel and the Pales­tini­ans is resolved. J Street could have offered to cre­ate another forum where those ques­tions could be addressed more fruit­fully, not by walling poetry away from the pol­i­tics of Mid­dle East peace, but by mak­ing sure there would be enough time and space to address the very com­pli­cated literary-political issues to which writ­ing poetry about the Mid­dle East gives rise.

What­ever flaws you might find in such rea­son­ing – and how­ever wrong you might think it is polit­i­cally, strate­gi­cally or oth­er­wise – it would be hard to call a can­cel­la­tion framed in those terms out­right cen­sor­ship, espe­cially if the state­ment had been writ­ten in con­sul­ta­tion with the poets. J Street, how­ever, chose instead to issue a state­ment that can­not be called any­thing but cen­sor­ship, and that comes pretty close to cen­sur­ing Healey and Coval as well, despite the ges­ture in the statement’s sec­ond para­graph acknowl­edg­ing that poetry, while it can be polit­i­cally engaged, is not polit­i­cal dis­course. This is an impor­tant and use­ful dis­tinc­tion to make, espe­cially since ignor­ing this dis­tinc­tion was part of the strat­egy employed by the right-wing blog­gers who used Healey’s and Coval’s work to make J Street’s life so dif­fi­cult. Remark­ably, how­ever, J Street ignores that dis­tinc­tion in the very next para­graph, equat­ing the Holo­caust imagery and metaphors in poems like Healey’s to the “use and abuse of Holo­caust imagery and metaphors by politi­cians and pun­dits on the right.” Even leav­ing aside the fact that the phrase “use and abuse” sug­gests that “politi­cians and pun­dits on the right” ought, in J Street’s opin­ion, never to use Holo­caust imagery or metaphors, it’s hard to escape the impli­ca­tion in that third para­graph that J Street also believes, when it comes to the Holo­caust, that there is no dif­fer­ence between pol­i­tics and poetry; and since you can­not sep­a­rate either the estab­lish­ment of the State of Israel or the rea­son that most Jews not born in Israel believe Israel ought to exist from the his­tor­i­cal real­ity of the Holo­caust and the way the Holo­caust has been made cen­tral to Jew­ish iden­tity since the end­ing of World War II, it’s hard as well to escape the fur­ther impli­ca­tion that the dis­tinc­tion between poetic and polit­i­cal dis­course dis­ap­pears when it comes to Israel as well.

My guess it that the per­son who wrote J Street’s state­ment did not intend for it to mean any of what I have just said. Indeed, the state­ment as a whole strikes me as hav­ing been very quickly and care­lessly writ­ten, but it is what it is, and it says what it says, and it now rep­re­sents J Street’s offi­cial posi­tion – since, as far as I can tell, no fur­ther state­ment has been issued. My point, how­ever, is not to use this state­ment to char­ac­ter­ize J Street as a hyp­o­crit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion. One care­lessly writ­ten state­ment does not an organization’s over­all agenda make. Rather, what I want to point out is that adher­ing to the ortho­dox­ies and pieties that a com­mu­nity tries to impose on the dis­cus­sion and rhetor­i­cal use of cer­tain sub­ject mat­ter will inevitably mire you in the kinds of hypocrisy J Street’s state­ment so clearly embod­ies; and if there are any two sub­jects about which the Jew­ish com­mu­nity has tried to impose such ortho­dox­ies and pieties, they are Israel and the Holo­caust. I have writ­ten at length about this in terms of Israel in the series “What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) anti­semi­tisn and Israel” (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; each link will open in a dif­fer­ent win­dow), and so I am not going to touch on that sub­ject here; and I have already argued that I think it is a Jew­ish poet’s right and respon­si­bil­ity to use the Holo­caust as a lens through which to under­stand her or his Jew­ish iden­tity in a world where Jews have become oppres­sors. There is, how­ever, more at stake in the ques­tion of how one should or shouldn’t make art deal­ing with the Holo­caust than the ques­tions raised by Israel’s treat­ment of the Pales­tini­ans, because the ques­tions raised by the Holo­caust are, among oth­ers, fun­da­men­tal ques­tions about the exis­tence and nature of evil in the world and the place that evil occu­pies – that we give it – in the process of liv­ing that is human being.

Part 2 to fol­low soon.