Inci­dent #1

It’s 1993. I am walk­ing out of the mail­room in the build­ing where I work and one of my non-Jewish col­leagues – some­one I am not close to but with whom I have pleas­ant enough exchanges when we hap­pen to meet – approaches me with a small news­pa­per arti­cle in his hand. His mouth tilted in a mis­chie­vous grin, he says I really ought to know about this and holds the arti­cle out for me to read. I know that what’s com­ing next is sup­posed to make me laugh, and so when I take the clip­ping from him and read about how the designer Jean Paul Gaultier’s new col­lec­tion is based on tra­di­tional Cha­sidic garb, it is the absur­dity that hits me first, and I do laugh. My col­league laughs with me, the moment is over and we walk off into the rest of the day. Later, as I am grad­ing papers, I find the ques­tions that Gaultier’s col­lec­tion raises about cul­tural appro­pri­a­tion, among other things, gnaw­ing at the edges of my think­ing – not to men­tion ques­tions about why my col­league would choose to show me the arti­cle – but I am busy. My col­league, I decide to assume, just wanted to share a laugh with some­one who would find real sig­nif­i­cance in the trans­gres­sive nature of Gaultier’s design, and so I put the whole inci­dent out of my mind. (If you’re inter­ested, YouTube videos of the fash­ion show where Gaultier’s designs were unveiled are here and here; parts 3 & 4 are up there as well.)

A few days later, this col­league and I are walk­ing towards each other on cam­pus; I lift my hand in greet­ing and nod hello; he does the same. As we pass each other, he says with a smile, “So how come you’re not wear­ing the new fash­ion?” I give a short laugh, and so does he, and we move on to where it is we are going. When I see him on cam­pus again the next day, how­ever, he asks me the same ques­tion; and it hap­pens again the day after that, and again the fol­low­ing week, and I don’t remem­ber how many times exactly this man finds only this one way to inter­act with me – truly, other than that ques­tion, he did not seem to have any­thing else to say to me – but it’s clear to me that he’s sin­gling me out as a Jew, and it makes me very uncom­fort­able. I tell the chair of my depart­ment what’s going on but ask him not to get involved. I have no prob­lem con­fronting some­one with their own anti­semitism, but my col­league stops ask­ing the ques­tion and there is no rea­son to pur­sue the issue any further.

Inci­dent #2

It’s still 1993. Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn are in the news, as is Sol Wachtler; each of the men are Jew­ish, and each one is involved in a sex scan­dal. I am sit­ting in the same colleague’s office, talk­ing to his office mate, who is a good friend of mine, about some pieces I have been writ­ing about gen­der and male het­ero­sex­u­al­ity. The col­league he walks in, lis­tens for a few sec­onds to get the gist of our con­ver­sa­tion and then inter­rupts, look­ing straight at me, “First Sol Wachtler and now Woody Allen! What is it with Jew­ish male sexuality?”

“It’s because we’re cir­cum­cised,” I answer, the sar­casm drip­ping from my words. “It makes us feel like we have some­thing to prove.”

My col­league doesn’t say any­thing in response, goes to his desk and starts to work. Since it feels like I made my point, I decide there is no rea­son to engage him fur­ther and I go back to the con­ver­sa­tion I was hav­ing with my friend.

Inci­dent #3

This also hap­pened in 1993. I am stand­ing near the radi­a­tor in the same colleague’s office, talk­ing again with the office mate who is my friend. My col­league walks in, says hi, does a kind of dou­ble take in my direc­tion, and then says, “Oh, wait, I have to show you this!” He starts rum­mag­ing around his desk and finally pulls out a news­pa­per clip­ping that might have been this one about Nor­man Rosen­baum, the brother of Yankel Rosen­baum, the Hasidic scholar who was killed in the 1991 Crown Heights riot. There is a pic­ture of Nor­man Rosen­baum in the arti­cle that my col­league wants to show me, so he walks up very close to where I am stand­ing and actu­ally backs me into the wall; and he is point­ing at the pic­ture of the dead man’s brother, mak­ing a joke about how, given his size and his tra­di­tional Jew­ish cloth­ing, he looks like a line­backer dressed up for Hal­loween – or some such joke point­ing out the osten­si­ble incon­gruity between the man’s size and the fact that he is dressed as a reli­gious Jew.

My back is to the wall and there is no room on either side of me to slide past my col­league, so I stand here, say­ing noth­ing, star­ing at him, until he moves out of the way, and I walk out of the office with­out a word.

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There is a lot that can be said about each of these inci­dents and how they fit into the his­tory of anti­se­mitic dis­course about Jew­ish sex­u­al­ity, Jew­ish mas­culin­ity and more, not to men­tion, in rela­tion to my com­ment about cir­cum­ci­sion, Jew­ish self-hatred. There is also a lot to say about how com­ments like my colleague’s can have a silenc­ing effect on the per­son towards whom they are directed, but that is not what I want to talk about. The inci­dents them­selves were rel­a­tively minor – though I imag­ine they take on greater sig­nif­i­cance when they appear here, one after the other in quick suc­ces­sion – but while they made me uncom­fort­able, they did not dis­rupt my life to the point that I want to focus on them here. As well, the col­league in ques­tion later apol­o­gized to me, explain­ing that he had been try­ing to make with me the kinds of jokes he and his office mates made all the time about their own eth­nic­i­ties and back­grounds. In other words, he had been try­ing to treat me as “one of the guys,” and that, he real­ized, had been a mis­take. Such an expla­na­tion, of course, does not excuse the anti­semitism inher­ent in the things my col­league said, but I do rec­og­nize that peo­ple speak to mem­bers of their inner cir­cle very dif­fer­ently than they would speak to those out­side its perime­ter, and so I would rather, for the pur­poses of this essay at least, attribute the inci­dents them­selves more to my colleague’s social awk­ward­ness than to any intent to be antisemitic.

What I want to talk about instead is my colleague’s ini­tial reac­tion, as it was reported to me the fol­low­ing day by his office mate, to the silence with which I met his show­ing me the pic­ture of Nor­man Rosen­baum – because he got the point, and he was angry.

Jews, he appar­ently com­plained, had become the “teflon minor­ity.” You couldn’t crit­i­cize or joke about them in any way, and the trump card of Jew­ish suf­fer­ing was respon­si­ble for this state of affairs. Either Jews actu­ally played the card to silence crit­i­cism, or crit­ics were afraid to say any­thing because the moment they did, the card would be played and they would be accused of anti­semitism, a taint that was very hard to wipe off. (Note that the issue of jok­ing about Jews dis­ap­peared very quickly.) This phe­nom­e­non needed to be inter­ro­gated, my col­league told his office mate, and he saw the sit­u­a­tion between us – and notice how quickly it had become a “situation” – as the per­fect oppor­tu­nity to do so. What my col­league pro­posed, his office mate said, was that he and I should each write some­thing about the Palestinian-Israel con­flict out­lin­ing our dif­fer­ent posi­tions. We would then dis­trib­ute these doc­u­ments to the depart­ment, sched­ul­ing a department-wide col­lo­quium shortly after­ward to dis­cuss them. He, he asserted to his office mate, had noth­ing to hide; the idea that he might be anti­se­mitic was pre­pos­ter­ous. His teach­ers had been some of the most well-known left-wing Jew­ish intel­lec­tu­als of his time. The ques­tion was whether I was will­ing (read: had the courage) to engage in such a forum.

If you’re won­der­ing how “the sit­u­a­tion” between us had gone so sud­denly from my silence at being asked to laugh at a pic­ture of a man deal­ing with the after­math of his younger brother’s vio­lent death to our osten­si­bly dif­fer­ing posi­tions on the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict – not to men­tion the teflon coat­ing that made sure any crit­i­cism any­one any­where lev­eled at Israel and/or the Jews slid off as eas­ily as a per­fectly cooked sunny-side-up egg – so was I. Not only had this col­league and I never even had a con­ver­sa­tion about the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict, but I could not see how any of the inci­dents I told you about above involved that con­flict in any way at all. The anti­semitism of what my col­league was try­ing to do, I hope, is obvi­ous. By turn­ing the lens of inquiry onto me, he made me, my ideas, my Jew­ish iden­tity (at least as he assumed I would define and expe­ri­ence it) not only the source of the prob­lem that existed between him and me, but also rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the larger prob­lem that Jew­ish iden­tity posed through­out the world, i.e. the ques­tion of Zion­ism and the Jew­ish State. Indeed, the impli­ca­tion of my colleague’s chal­lenge was that the ques­tion of Zion­ism and the Jew­ish State could be said to encom­pass the entirety of my Jew­ish identity.

I told my friend the office mate that if our col­league wanted to know my think­ing on the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict, he could ask me him­self; and that if he wanted to write some­thing about Jews as the teflon minor­ity, he should have the courage to put his ideas out there with­out try­ing to use not so much my ideas them­selves, but the fact that my ideas would be the ideas of a Jew­ish per­son, as cover in case any­one should call either the ques­tions he wanted to ask or the answers he wanted to give anti­se­mitic. I have no idea what the con­ver­sa­tion was like when my friend returned to his office and reported to our col­league what I’d said, but the pro­posed “intel­lec­tual exchange” was never men­tioned again, and the apol­ogy I have already told you about fol­lowed shortly thereafter.

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There is, again, a wealth of mate­r­ial to mine here if you’re inter­ested in talk­ing about how anti­se­mitic dis­course and how it used to silence Jews. How­ever, while my col­league was try­ing to silence me, at least in terms of what­ever I might have had to say about the anti­semitism I expe­ri­enced from him, he was also try­ing to make me speak, and it’s what he was try­ing to make me say that I am more inter­ested in here. Clearly, he thought he knew what my stance on Israel was and, just as clearly, he assumed that it would be the oppo­site of his, which I knew some­thing about because I’d used in one of my classes an inter­na­tional lit­er­a­ture anthol­ogy he’d edited and it con­tained a stan­dard left-wing, anti-Zionist posi­tion. But it’s not even the arro­gance of this assump­tion that I find so prob­lem­atic, and while it would have been less wrong than it would be today, it was wrong nonethe­less.  Rather, it was his insis­tence on yok­ing any con­ver­sa­tion I might want to have about anti­semitism to dis­cussing the ques­tion of Zion­ism and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

I am bet­ting that not a few Jew­ish read­ers of this essay are already very famil­iar with this tac­tic, which implies – among other things – that the con­flict between the Israelis and the Pales­tini­ans some­how prob­lema­tizes the ques­tion of anti­semitism. Not that one issue can’t be dis­cussed inde­pen­dently of the other, but that to do so, espe­cially if one is Jew­ish, some­how fails in one’s respon­si­bil­ity to take account of the con­flict. This posi­tion  was artic­u­lated to me most clearly, albeit in an extreme ver­sion, by a rel­a­tive of my wife’s in the course of kitchen-table argu­ment that took place a few years ago after Thanks­giv­ing din­ner. “We live,” this rel­a­tive pro­nounced, “in a post-antisemitic world.” He had just fin­ished read­ing The Holo­caust Indus­try, by Nor­man G. Finkel­stein, and one of the lessons he drew from that text was, basi­cally, that anti­semitism is no longer a fac­tor in the lives of Jew­ish peo­ple – just look at how well “you” are doing in the United States, he said – and that world Zion­ism uses the specter of anti­semitism to guilt-trip peo­ple into sup­port­ing Israel and its poli­cies against the Pales­tini­ans. (I have not read the book and, so I have no idea if, though I do strongly doubt that, such con­clu­sions based on the text are at all jus­ti­fied.) He then went on to talk about how any objec­tive look at not only the salaries of the top Wall Street CEOs, but also at which CEOs man­age the most money, would reveal that – “and I don’t know what else to call it,” he said – “Jew­ish money” and “Jew­ish con­trol over money” was help­ing to fur­ther Zion­ist aims. Then, to drive his point about Jew­ish guilt-tripping and manip­u­la­tion of the world home even fur­ther, he told us a story about a col­league of his, a Jew­ish man whom he had con­sid­ered a friend, who accused him of anti­semitism and stopped talk­ing to him when he made these same asser­tions about Jew­ish money.

Per­haps the most frus­trat­ing and infu­ri­at­ing aspect of this entire con­ver­sa­tion was that my wife’s rel­a­tive seemed to have no idea that what he was say­ing might be offen­sive to me, might be about me, in any way, shape, or form. He and I had been able to have rea­son­able con­ver­sa­tions before. We rarely agreed entirely, but we’d been able at least to hear each other – or so I’d thought–and he was a rel­a­tive, which made me want to find some way of being able to sit at the same table with him with­out feel­ing like I was betray­ing myself. So, with­out refer­ring explic­itly to him or the ideas he was putting forth as anti­se­mitic, I pointed out, first of all, that his argu­ment implied that Jew­ish iden­tity could be reduced to an individual’s rela­tion­ship to the State of Israel, and that this was wrong; sec­ond, I said, even though we might not be actively dis­crim­i­nated against in the way we once were, anti­semitism was indeed still a fac­tor in the lives of Jew­ish peo­ple, inde­pen­dently of the exis­tence of the State of Israel, even in the United States, and I gave him some examples.

He con­ceded that maybe there were some loonies on the right whose anti­semitism might have an effect on indi­vid­u­als, but they were loonies, and you never, ever saw that kind of thing on the left. When I tried to give him some exam­ples of left-wing anti­semitism – very care­fully choos­ing ones that did not so obvi­ously relate to the ones he had put before me at the begin­ning of our con­ver­sa­tion – he went into com­plete denial, started not quite shout­ing, but rais­ing his voice about how the left stood for the free­dom and lib­er­a­tion and dig­nity of all peo­ples, and the con­ver­sa­tion pretty much ended there, except that when we were say­ing good­bye, he kind of mut­tered that maybe there were some peo­ple on the left who were “sick,” but that I should be sure not to con­fuse them with the “real” left that he rep­re­sented. We said good­bye and have had very lit­tle to do with each other since.

As I said above, this is an extreme exam­ple of one of the ways that my colleague’s invi­ta­tion to dia­logue was prob­lem­atic, but it is a phe­nom­e­non I have encoun­tered more than a few times over the years, even from peo­ple who express tremen­dous sen­si­tiv­ity to and respect for what they inevitably call “the his­toric suf­fer­ing of the Jew­ish peo­ple.” They just don’t see, they explain very politely, how that is rel­e­vant to what “the Jews are doing to the Pales­tini­ans.” (More recently, thank­fully, they are care­ful to say “Israelis” rather than “Jews.”) Or, some­times, these peo­ple respond to sto­ries about anti­semitism, such as the ones I have told in this series (Part 1, Part 2) or that are being told over at this post on Alas, with some ver­sion of a state­ment like, “That’s ter­ri­ble, but you don’t think that jus­ti­fies what the Israelis are doing to the Pales­tini­ans, do you?” The idea that because the Pales­tini­ans are in cri­sis – and let’s be clear: there is never a day when a mil­i­tary occu­pa­tion is not a cri­sis for the occu­pied peo­ple – the idea that because of those cir­cum­stances a Jew in the United States, like me, should shelve my con­cerns about anti­semitism in favor of focus­ing on what­ever the cri­sis maybe is, of course, a form of guilt-tripping in itself, one that I have encoun­tered more often than you might think. More to the point of this essay, though, it is one that becomes espe­cially prob­lem­atic for Jews when talk about Israel and Pales­tine is the only con­text in which talk about anti­semitism is allowed to come to the fore.

The furor that broke out over the way David Schraub intro­duced his first post at Fem­i­niste is a good exam­ple of this, I think. The Israeli assault on Gaza was ongo­ing and esca­lat­ing, and not only did David begin his post by talk­ing about how con­flicted he was over whether the Israeli mil­i­tary action would “‘work’ in any mean­ing­ful sense,” but he also made no men­tion of what was actu­ally hap­pen­ing to the peo­ple liv­ing in Gaza, what the Israelis were actu­ally doing to those peo­ple. This was wrong. No mat­ter where you stand on ques­tion how the sit­u­a­tion between Israel and Hamas should be dealt with, the only two things that should have mat­tered from the day the bomb­ing began were con­cern for the civil­ians whose lives were being destroyed and find­ing a way to stop the bomb­ing as soon as pos­si­ble. The abstract and abstract­ing intel­lec­tu­al­ism with which David started his post made it seem like he con­sid­ered the analy­sis of anti­semitism with which he was going to con­cern him­self far more impor­tant than the lives lost in the attack, includ­ing the 13 Israelis who were killed, not to men­tion the dam­age done to the lives of the Pales­tini­ans who have sur­vived the bomb­ings, and not to men­tion the dam­age to any real hope for any real move­ment towards peace in the region. (To be fair to David, this is not his posi­tion, as this post on his blog should make clear.)

David was roundly, and rightly in my opin­ion, crit­i­cized for begin­ning the post the way he did, and, to his credit, he rec­og­nized the mis­take, though the inten­sity of the rhetoric directed at him made back­ing off from where he started more dif­fi­cult than it should have been. Still, I’d like to con­sider the way in which Feministe’s invi­ta­tion to guest blog about Gaza posi­tioned David in rela­tion to what I am talk­ing about here, because no mat­ter how appalled he may have been by the cost to the Pales­tini­ans of the Israeli assault on Gaza – and I am assum­ing he did find that cost appalling – there is no way, for all of the rea­sons that I have been giv­ing in this series, that the oppor­tu­nity to talk about Gaza, even while Gaza was still going on, could not have pre­sented itself also as an oppor­tu­nity to talk about anti­semitism. David made the wrong choice when he tried to con­nect the two top­ics in the way that he did – i.e., using talk about his own con­flicted posi­tion vis-a-vis Gaza as a way into the think­ing he wanted to do about anti­semitism. Nonethe­less, I would guess the fact that he saw those two top­ics con­nected at all had a great deal to do with how the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict is almost the only forum in which peo­ple, espe­cially non-Jews, are will­ing to engage anti­semitism as a real issue, even if only in highly cyn­i­cal ways, such as the “dia­logue” pro­posed by my colleague.

I don’t want to be in the busi­ness of pre­tend­ing to know David or his posi­tions any bet­ter than i do; I am an occa­sional reader of his blog; I have read his com­ments on some other blogs, and he and I have, on occa­sion, been on the same side of online dis­cus­sions about anti­semitism (almost always in the con­text of dis­cussing Zion­ism, Israel and Pales­tine). I do not know him per­son­ally, out­side of his online per­sona, and I cer­tainly would not pre­tend to know any­thing about the inner work­ings of his mind or his moti­va­tions. So I am not try­ing to defend either the state­ments he made in his post on Fem­i­niste or him as a per­son. As I said above, I think David made the wrong choice in start­ing the post the way he did, but I think it is impor­tant to rec­og­nize that he made that choice within con­straints set by forces far beyond his con­trol, and that those forces are, often, at best, neu­tral towards his exis­tence as a Jew and, at worst, openly hos­tile; and I want to acknowl­edge that it can be very dif­fi­cult to know the right choice to make when one is faced with that kind of hos­til­ity, espe­cially from peo­ple one has thought of as one’s allies.

I should be clear that I am think­ing when I say that nei­ther of Feministe’s invi­ta­tion nor of the crit­i­cisms that were lev­eled at David, but rather of another Thanks­giv­ing din­ner with my wife’s fam­ily. I was talk­ing with the wife of the rel­a­tive I told you about above. She was at the time, if not more mod­er­ate in her beliefs than her hus­band, then cer­tainly more aware of and sen­si­tive to the con­cerns that oth­ers might bring to coalition-building around issues like the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict. We were not talk­ing about Israel and Pales­tine, though, but about Iran­ian Pres­i­dent Ahmadinejad’s prob­lem­atic state­ments con­cern­ing the Holo­caust, specif­i­cally the con­fer­ence he con­vened in Iran, to which he invited for­mer Grand Wiz­ard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, a man with impec­ca­ble anti­se­mitic cre­den­tials. The ques­tion at hand was whether Ahmadine­jad was an anti­semite and Holo­caust denier. I sug­gested that he was, because one of his jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for the con­fer­ence – the idea that the ques­tion of whether the Holo­caust took place, or was as bad as peo­ple say it was, needed to be re-examined from all sides – implied that the work done by at least two gen­er­a­tions of schol­ars in sift­ing through all the evi­dence, includ­ing the evi­dence pre­sented by Holo­caust deniers, was some­how invalid, that there was some kind of Jew­ish con­spir­acy to man­u­fac­ture the facts prov­ing that geno­cide took place.

“Wait,” the man’s wife said, “you mean to tell me that I should worry about whether Ahmadine­jad is an anti­semite when there are peo­ple dying in Pales­tine and when he is one of the few world lead­ers will­ing to stand against the United States and Israel and their mur­der­ous and impe­ri­al­ist policies?”

We had not, I pointed out, even been talk­ing about Israel. More to the point, we were not stand­ing out­side of, say, the Israeli embassy protest­ing the actions of the Israeli gov­ern­ment; we were not engaged in a debate with peo­ple who were argu­ing that Israel’s treat­ment of the Pales­tini­ans was nec­es­sary and/or rea­son­able; nor were we engaged in a debate with those peo­ple over US pol­icy regard­ing Israel, Iran or any­thing else. In each of those cases, given the right cir­cum­stances, I would absolutely agree that my con­cerns about Ahmadinejad’s anti­semitism could and should be put aside in favor of focus­ing on other, more press­ing con­cerns. Rather, we were two peo­ple sit­ting in the com­fort of my wife’s uncle’s home in sub­ur­ban Long Island, at a time when there was no imme­di­ate cri­sis – like, for exam­ple, Israel’s recent inva­sion of Gaza – and while we dis­agreed on some fun­da­men­tal things, there were also broad areas of agree­ment when it came to Israel’s poli­cies towards the Pales­tini­ans and on US for­eign pol­icy and more. And if I could not, I asked her, in this moment of safety for both of us, talk to her about my con­cerns about anti­semitism and feel like she was will­ing to lis­ten, if she was sim­ply going to dis­miss those con­cerns out of hand, then on what basis would she assume that I would ever become her polit­i­cal ally? Even if we were at the same demon­stra­tion, did she really think I would feel safe stand­ing shoul­der to shoul­der with her?

She had no answer for me, and I moved on to another part of the house and another part of the party, where, if I remem­ber cor­rectly, I started danc­ing with my wife; and when the party was over and we were all say­ing good­bye, the woman to whom I had been talk­ing took my hand, looked hard into my eyes with an expres­sion of deep sad­ness and – though this could be entirely my pro­jec­tion – pity, and then left with­out a word. We have had almost noth­ing to say to each other since.