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.
///
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.
///
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.
I hope you don’t mind me continuing the discussion here. Given the last several posts at Alas, I feel a little more comfortable talking about this over here.
Another great post.
After reading it, I was left wondering why it is that people do this, beyond just “antisemitism.” Then Barry put up the post about criticizing Israel, and I clicked through and read Ezra and started thinking about this whole narrative that it’s courageous to criticize Israel.
Certainly the accusation of antisemitism has been severely abused and cheapened by certain pro-Israel factions. The only way to get out from under them that I can see is just to ignore them/stand up to them and make their accusations irrelevant.
But it seems to me that this problem has morphed into a narrative that simply denying antisemitism exists or denying that it’s serious also is considered courageous, that standing up to an individual Jewish person and dismissing something they’re saying is the equivalent to standing up to the entire Israel Lobby, even when the topic isn’t Israel.
And I’m not sure entirely what the motive is or what the person doing it gets out of it. I’m very hesitant to ascribe prejudice to external factors. As in, I am not at all convinced that if Alan Dershowitz didn’t do what he does, this wouldn’t happen.
Chingona– I need to go click through to read the Ezra Klein piece Barry linked to before I can say anything meaningful. I just haven’t had a chance to do it yet. But I will.
To be clear, what I’m saying is not what Ezra is saying. What I’m saying is something that occurred to me after reading the three posts in relatively quick succession, then sleeping on it. And I’m not really positing some sort of universal theory, just some speculation about one possible reason/motive.
Regardless, take your time. There’s no hurry.
Okay, so this is kind of a disconnected post about some of your points that stuck out for me:
I’ve lately only had sporadic time to comment on the internets, and I just got through reading your post. I wanted to thank you for this. This is a missing link that I – in my ignorance – was not aware of:
“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 did not know this, so I did not have any understanding as to why David might have linked the two. Unaware that this was a common experience, it seemed to me that he was doing it to make a political point that I did not agree with – and to dismiss criticisms of the policies of Israel as antisemitic. He went on to name “anti-Zionism” as a political position that is intrinsically antisemitic, which also confused me because I wasn’t sure how he was defining Zionism (Though I see now that it had something more to do with Jewish identity as a whole – and was not just limited to the state of Israel. But, again, David’s definition of Zionism confused this matter. He suggests that it’s merely the belief that Israel should continue to exist. I mean… I believe that it should – to be clear – but to detract from the politics – and the history – of the word seemed… Well, confusing?).
Anyway, I’m glad that you’ve pointed this out because, otherwise, I would never really have understood it. It seems counterintuitive to me. I mean, the famous (living) antisemites in this country – such as David Duke – have nothing to do with the policies of Israel – and are no more sympathetic to the Arab populations that criticize the country’s policies than they are to “the Jews.” (Chinonga: I’m putting that in quotations to denote how these groups would see Jewish populations. I was always taught – as a kid – that it was problematic to refer to someone as “a Jew” and that “Jewish person” is far better.) So, yeah…
While I recognize that critiques of Israel are often used to justify attacks on Jewish people throughout the world, I am not sure this is exactly the case in the US. The Klan doesn’t care about the liberation of the Palestinians. Nor do any of the neo-Nazi groups from whence most of our “homegrown” antisemitism comes. They might demonize the “Jewish menace” in Israel, but this has nothing to do with any political commitment to Palestinian liberation. This is not to suggest that US history can be completely separated from European history, but I *do* think the particularities of oppression and bigotry in specific contexts (including this one) matter. So, all of this is to say…
Of course, I believe you that this happens, but I was operating from a context in which I just.… Didn’t get it. Of course antisemitism directed against individuals matters, and it matters separately from the I/P context – and it would have been a lot easier for *me* to hear from David if it had been separated from the I/P context (since the way that he framed his piece to me read like apologism for a state’s actions). So, I’m not the one who shuts down conversation about antisemitism whenever it’s not about I/P, but I’m glad you made me aware of this tactic. To make it all about the I/P conflict somehow positions All Jews Everywhere as being responsible for the oppression of Palestinians, when this is obviously a ludicrous assumption. I’ll try to be more aware of this tendency now that you’ve discussed it here. Thanks.
Anyway, I agree with you that it’s not particularly productive to romanticize the Left. Not much to say about that, only… The history of the Left in incorporating women and people of color is also really…fraught. While I think self-reflection can often turn into paralysis, I don’t think the Left should be anymore immune to the need for self-reflexivity than anyone else. There are just as many assholes among our ranks as elsewhere, after all.
I have not read Norman Finkelstein’s books either, but I think… So, I heard him speak once, and my guess would be that his polemic – though it is definitely polemic – is not quite as polemical as the argument that your relative outlined. I *also* think that Alan Dershowitz’s successful campaign to diminish his chances at tenure are…despicable. He was framed as a “self-hating Jew” over and over again over the course of this campaign, and I’m not a fan of anyone who goes after academics in that way (There are opinion pieces throughout the Chronicle of Higher Education and even in the New York Times that document this issue.). I think his take is a little more nuanced than this person allows. I was not particularly impressed with his talk. Most of my objection, I think, had to do with his way of framing the I/P conflict as being “all about him.” So, I didn’t – and probably won’t – read his books. He does make some polemical claims about antisemitsm, but I mostly think he’s trying to separate the structural antisemitism that led to the Holocaust from individual examples of antisemitism in everyday life – and particularly in the US. I could be wrong – again, haven’t read him – but that’s what I took from that. I’m not arguing in favor of that claim, but well… That’s my interpretation.
And, finally, whoah… I didn’t know about the stereotypes about Jewish male sexuality. As someone familiar with the way in which racist assumptions about Black sexuality are made, this isn’t exactly surprising. Horrifying, though. I’ve recently transitioned from the social sciences to a PhD program in the humanities, and I have to say… Not to diminish your former colleagues actual antisemitism, but I honestly think that academics in the humanities often display a very Special level of willfully clueless. I have heard some of the most ridiculous statements in my life since transitioning into Philosophy. Did you know, for instance, that the Obama presidency “officially” means that “racism is not a problem in the US anymore”? Yeah. And I go to one of the *competitive* schools… It’s extremely demoralizing, honestly, to think of such people as one’s future colleagues in the profession.
I’ve just finished reading the whole anti-Semitism series, Richard — superb. Thanks. I’m passing this on.
In terms of talking to, with, and past each other, folks might find this interesting.
My very first attempt ever to put a link in the text is moderately successful. Sorry about the double this.
Chingona–
Fixed.
“In terms of talking to, with, and past each other, folks might find thisthis interesting.”
Yeah, “some folks,” meaning *cough*me*cough. I did find it useful, in any case. Thanks. This gives me a little more patience for my students who are so clueless about racism, I have to say.
No, not just you, Kristin. In light of all these discussions, I really had to smile at the story Bronner uses to open the piece. Of course, I also appreciated it as a journalist. We like to say that if both sides are pissed at us, we did our job, but nothing I write about (I cover local government, development, water issues and the like) is as fraught as this or carries such high stakes.
This is certainly true, but I think you’re still falling into a habit of seeing antisemitism only — or even mostly — as outright expressions of hate towards Jewish people and excluding more subtle forms of prejudice from that term.
Richard wrote:
Richard goes on to write that his colleague’s assumption isn’t the most problematic aspect of the whole thing, and I agree, but I want to stay, for a moment, on this assumption. One of the more frustrating things, for me, in discussing this has been that frequently when I make a comment from which readers might infer that I’m Jewish or that I’m familiar with how Zionists view Zionism, as opposed to how anti-Zionists view it, some number of people in the discussion immediately assume the worst about me and about my views on the conflict and attribute all sorts of ideas to me that I never expressed. In some ways, I think this happened to David, though he certainly didn’t help himself with the Gaza framing, which he acknowledged and backed away from. I think a lot of people assumed things about his views that weren’t actually in what he wrote (which is not to say that I agree with everything he says, but is to say that I don’t see any evidence he thinks the bombings in Gaza were a good thing).
This idea that because someone is Jewish and doesn’t immediately preface his or her statement with denunciations of Israel, you automatically know what he or she is really getting at, without actually listening to what they’re saying or even asking them what they think, is, I think, a form of prejudice that comes from seeing members of certain groups not as individuals but only as representative of the group. I have seen this with some frequency on the left. In some ways, it’s a corollary to the experience of those Palestinian women Lauren linked to on Feministe, where just by saying they are Palestinian, people fill in all the blanks with their own preconceptions. That latter certainly is more common and has a more nefarious effect on our public discourse in the United States — I want to take a moment to acknowledge that — but in certain circles, the former is more common, and it’s not any less unfair because Israel is the one with the guns and the power. And I think it’s a form of antisemitism.
you automatically know what he or she is really getting at
That’s the general you, not you, Kristin.
Chingona: I really relate to this. I’m still working through a lot of my thoughts on particular Israeli policies (there are some things I’m pretty secure in, like my two-statism, but the more tactical “who has to what, when” type questions I’m more unclear on). But it does seem like, in some circles at least, if I don’t preface my commentary with an acknowledgment that Israel is some hideous monstrosity, I’m going to be imputed all sorts of positions I don’t hold, and sometimes have specifically disclaimed.
For example, on Daisy’s thread I was asked whether I supported a strengthened Christian right “pragmatically” because I thought it’d be “good for Israel”. The relationship between the Christian right and groups like AIPAC is one I had described in that thread prior to the question (and in the linked posts) as, at various points, “despicable”, “based on mutual contempt” and “utterly unforgivable.” The subject of the post the thread was responding to was (in part) my view that the Christian Zionist conception of “pro-Israel” is anti-Semitic, and actually quite bad for Israel. I said “I totally support crashing the Christianist ‘pro-Israel’ party” and advocating “wrenching the narrative away from bogus Christianist frames”. To me, that’s a pretty unambiguous statement of position on the question. But when all of that isn’t enough to raise me from suspicion that I really hold positions I find quite risible, it’s very disheartening. I feel very boxed in by it. And it happens a lot.
David: This was a claim that Tfb made on behalf of hirself and “the Jewish community” on that thread. I think you were asked this question because Tfb presumed that sie was articulating more of a universal “Jewish Position.”
I don’t think that Daisy’s language is completely unproblematic, although I agree with the major point she’s making (Sarah J and belldame do a much better job than I would have of expressing their discomfort with some of that language over on that thread.).
I don’t speak for Daisy, but I assumed that she was getting defensive because a *number* of people had just flamed her with the assumption that she supports the religious right. A cursory reading – even a quick glance at the first page of her blog – should be enough to get that this isn’t so.
I actually… Gah… My issue David, is that I don’t much care for *you personally,* and I am sure you feel the same, so I wish we could just leave it at that. I am an *academic,* and I find your academese on *normally much more casual blog posts* a bit insufferable. Also, see, for example: being a straight white dude lecturing a bunch of women regulars on a feminist blog. I am sorry that some of the flaming you’ve been getting hurts your feelings, I really am. And I’m just speaking for myself, but… Maybe I shouldn’t bother; belldame pretty much said anything that I would’ve said on your own blog, and you ignored her… Basically, just, what belledame said on your post. For me, personally, it’s not any deeply-held beliefs about any group you belong to. It’s… I. Don’t. Like. You. I don’t much like Thomas either (He’s another guest blogger there.). In fact, my Not Liking You simply means you fall into the same category as the vast majority of the rest of the world’s population, frankly.
The problem that a lot of people (continue to) have with some of what you’re saying is that you conflate Israel with Jewish people worldwide, and continue to do so even though you were called out on it several dozen times on feministe. So, in some ways, you make it difficult for anyone to criticize the policies of Israel at all without being a de facto “antisemite.” *You* are doing that. Not chingona or Richard. Not several of the other people on those threads – you personally, given the sort of rhetoric you’ve been choosing. I object to your continued conflation of the two (and to your essentialism about “Jewishness.”). Also, your framing of the story with the Gaza bombings and your use of language about how we should be “open to the world and each other” makes me think you’re the sort of person who turns humanitarian disasters into opportunities for personal growth. Whatever growth *may* end up coming out of whatever tragedy, it rubs the *wrong* way when people use language like that. All people. Because I am kind of a cynical fuck that way. I hope we’re clear now.
Sorry, Richard and chingona, I thought I was doing a pretty good job of keeping the snark off of your blog. I’ll try to tone it down after this one.
In any case, David, I *don’t* think it’s *always* useful to keep talking to each other, despite what you think Habermas (and Iris Young) think. (btw, if I weren’t annoyed by academese on blog posts, I’d offer your use of Young as a Good Example as to Why Non-Humanities People Should Not Write Philosophy, Except for Wendy Brown.). As it stands, I’ll just say that you’re reading her in an overly simplistic way – and from a period in which her political thought was *not* considered all that progressive because she had conceded way too much to Habermas. In any case, *she* would never have suggested that we all keep talking even though we only piss each other off for reasons having to do with Personal Quirk (Mine: I don’t like flowery language, badly done theory, or people who abstract from my views about *them personally* to my views about *an entire group.*
Finally, I agree with everyone that the Christian Right has a really problematic view toward Israel and toward Jews in general. So does Daisy. I think she’s being a bit polemical even though she agrees with much of what many people are saying there, and I’m not signing on to absolutely everything she says.
But I posted links and sources as to why I (and Daisy) think the Christian Right is so crucial for people to understand wrt the US and its relationship to Israel. I’m not entirely sure that most folks who did not grow up in fundie families really actually get it – that is, the amount of power the Christian Right has within the US state apparatus or just how well-organized they are. See that thread below.
btw, it’s in Richard’s first post on his blog in this series.
chingona:
“This is certainly true, but I think you’re still falling into a habit of seeing antisemitism only — or even mostly — as outright expressions of hate towards Jewish people and excluding more subtle forms of prejudice from that term.”
I think you’re right about this. Sorry about that.
I feel like I should add, to be fair, that some of this surely comes out of a desire to see things as clear and obvious, out of very strongly held political views, out of the passion and outrage that so much death and suffering can provoke, as opposed to prejudice in and of itself. But it’s hard to sort out what the motivation is when I have been told — not all the time, but with enough frequency that I had no trouble coming up with stories for Richard and could have told a few more — that the Jews do this, the Jews do that, the Jews blah, blah, blah, including from people who really ought to know better.
And I don’t know if this happens to other groups. Do second– and third-generation Cuban-Americans get railed at when they refuse to get misty-eyed over Che or Fidel, even as their elders accuse them of betrayal for thinking the embargo has outlived its usefulness? Perhaps they do. Perhaps I make more of all this than I should. (And forgive the imperfect analogy. It is very difficult to come up with a scenario that really mirrors the relationship the American Jewish community has with Israel.)
“This idea that because someone is Jewish and doesn’t immediately preface his or her statement with denunciations of Israel, you automatically know what he or she is really getting at, without actually listening to what they’re saying or even asking them what they think, is, I think, a form of prejudice that comes from seeing members of certain groups not as individuals but only as representative of the group.”
I believe what you’re saying here, although I think David’s situation *in particular* (if we’re talking about that) had to do with the fact that he framed the whole thing by mentioning Gaza. Now, I’m going to agree with you specifically, and about what Richard is pointing to as a more subtle form of antisemitism. I am also going to suggest that – for some – maybe it *was* this phenomenon. For me personally, it was like, “Dude, you’re using Gaza as a *jumping off point* to discuss your own journey? What kind of asshole uses human tragedy as a jumping off point?” For others, maybe there was a de facto, “Dude, you’re Jewish, so you have to criticize Israel like Right Now if you want a dialogue with me.” I wasn’t coming from that position, and I did not appreciate being treated as though I was.
And I get the impression from David’s earlier writings that… This is not a one time deal. See: David Schraub on Racialicious and David Schraub on the Iraq War (“Oh, how meaningful it is that this soldier died in Iraq on *my birthday.*”).
But I totally hear what Richard says in the post and what you’re saying chinonga. I kind of wish the feministe posts had not been brought back up because we all know what I thought of those already, and I had really appreciated where Richard and others were going with this. So, I don’t want to derail too much. Sorry.
“But it’s hard to sort out what the motivation is when I have been told — not all the time, but with enough frequency that I had no trouble coming up with stories for Richard and could have told a few more — that the Jews do this, the Jews do that, the Jews blah, blah, blah, including from people who really ought to know better.”
Makes sense. Yeah, generalizing essentialisms are kind of…always bad and oppressive.
“And I don’t know if this happens to other groups. Do second– and third-generation Cuban-Americans get railed at when they refuse to get misty-eyed over Che or Fidel, even as their elders accuse them of betrayal for thinking the embargo has outlived its usefulness?”
Well, comparisons are always hard, but yes, the nature of stereotypes is that they’re stereotypes, right? And there are certainly a lot of stereotypes about Blacks and Latin@s in this country and a lot of folks who’ll say “Blacks beleive this…” “Blacks like fried chicken and are good dancers.” Is that the kind of thing you mean? Because, yes, that does happen to other groups, even in the more subtle ways that are being discussed here.
I was writing my last comment while Kristin was writing above, so it’s not in response to Kristin. Just trying to close the circle on my thoughts up above.
I mean, for example, more subtle racism: White women who clutch their purse or lock their car doors when they see a Black dude. Blacks getting followed around by the store clerks in department stores. Racial profiling. Yeah.
Oh, I know people have all sorts of stereotypes. Even the apparently neutral ones can be oppressive. I guess I mean a scenario where political feeling around something being done by or to a foreign government, but with support from some people of the same ethnicity in this country, gets turned into an anger toward that people of that ethnicity, and how to tease out the political feeling from prejudice on the part of the speaker. So that I don’t let things slide that shouldn’t be let slide but don’t get too oversenstive either.
On Christians and Jews, I asked my husband last night what he was taught about Jews when he was a kid. It was amazing to me to realize that never once in the more than a decade that we’ve been together has this topic ever come up. He said he wasn’t taught anything at all about the Jews. Nothing good. Nothing bad. He said he was vaguely aware that Jews had something to do with the Old Testament, and that was it until Sarah Goldberg* invited him to her bat mitzvah and he learned to dance the running man and learned that several other classmates were Jewish and they went to temple like he went to church and that Jews were actually people alive today doing normal things.
“Who killed Jesus?” I asked quickly, like it was a pop quiz.
“Pontius Pilate,” he said. “I always thought it was the Catholics who were on about the Jews killing Jesus.”
I then gave him the general outlines of the conversation we’ve been having over the last week. He said the people around him always were supportive of Israel but it wasn’t a huge focus of the theology he grew up with and he never really heard any explanation of why they were suppportive of Israel. But thinking back, he said, he always heard people use the words Israelite and Israeli interchangably, as if they were the same thing, which probably offers some insight into their thinking.
We agreed that the obsession with all things Jewish (Richard, this is where that mezuzah comes in.) has racheted up quite a bit in recent years, and this is definitely related to thinking the End Times are upon us. Rick Warren talks about how there will be large-scale conversion by Jews as we come to the end of the world at #37 here.. It shed a (for me) rather disturbing light on why this Christmas’ theme — even before the fight — seemed to be Jews for Jesus.
*Not her real name.
And lest I leave you with the impression the church he grew up in was particularly liberal, in this same conversation he told me about a babysitter he had when he was in elementary school. Upon learning she was Presbyterian, he told her quite matter-of-factly, “Oh, so I guess you won’t be going to Heaven.” So it definitely was one of those churches were there was only one, very narrow way to believe. But this is not the same church that his parents go to now. That church is more liberal in some ways (more ethnically diverse, more focus on social justice), but more theologically frightening in other ways.
Okay Richard, I’m apologizing to you in advance for this, but I have to say it.
Kristen, I was under no delusions you have anything but utter contempt for me. As for my opinions of you … I don’t know you well enough to say (I’m reticent to assume someone’s anonymous online persona reflects who they are in person, though I’m not sure if that’s meaningful because what people say online matters, and in any event I’m self-aware enough to recognize that forming an opinion of someone whom you met through a nasty, knockdown drag out fight is probably a poor decision).
But, your online persona, here and now? Unbelievably, spectacularly, obnoxiously arrogant and dismissive. Each of your responses to Richard have been variations on the theme of “oh, well I guess I can see how people do that — but I don’t ever because I have no problem with Jews or anyone else! I just personally have an unrelenting hatred of David Schraub!” I certainly don’t doubt the last part (nice job finding a random post on Iraq from two years ago to poorly buttress your point — how long did you spend on the search engine to pull that one out?), but maybe — maybe — the former isn’t for you to decide. I’m not the only person who thinks you’ve been deliberately attempting to create an unremittingly hostile environment, not just towards me but to a whole lot of other folks on and off the Feministe threads.
I’ve been part of the Feministe community since October of 2005. I don’t comment that often on Feministe, because I don’t really like comment threads period. But that doesn’t mean I’m not part of their community, and I reject your right (as opposed to Lauren’s or Jill’s or the other mods) to determine who is and who isn’t validly a member. I didn’t grab a microphone, I was invited; and I have since been encouraged by them to keep writing for them. A lot of people have since contacted me and said they don’t participate in Feministe comment threads because they’ve noticed that folks like you work together to create a climate of rage, fury, hostility, and misery. In fact, the Feministe mods themselves warned me about that dynamic. I noticed that was the one part of the post Belledame responded to that she said nothing about. It’s a silence fraught with implication. For every person who is angry at my temerity to speak on Feministe and disagree stridently with some of the “regulars”, I’ve gotten emails from Feministe readers (many of them lurkers) begging me to continue because they see the environment you’ve created as poisonous and think that my series might create some space for them to breathe.
You don’t like me. I get that. That’s your prerogative. You’re allowed to like, or dislike, whomever you please. For someone who repeatedly has said how much she doesn’t want to engage people like me, you sure do keep coming back to it, though, and I’m not entirely sure why. And when you do “engage”, you quite deliberately distort my arguments so that I fit into a framework of Christian Zionism that I not only have clearly, explicitly, and emphatically been rejecting, but is utterly non-sensical within the project I’ve been pursuing. The level of intellectual dishonesty you display towards me is absolutely astounding. I don’t think it’s a lack of capability — you’re clearly very smart — it’s a burning desire to see me as something monstrous and evil. I won’t pretend to know why that is, but my assumption is that if I’m not some sort of ogre, then you’d have to consider that somebody might hold the views I do without cackling in a dark room about my plan to bring evil down upon the world.
I don’t think you have a clue what my positions are regarding any particular Israeli policy — certainly, it’s not “Israeli policies are always right and just” — and I’m positive you have no desire to find out. The way you side-stepped my opinions on Christian Zionism because they didn’t fit with your image of a Zionist Jew are pretty clear evidence on that score. The “no desire to find out” would be fine if you’d actually take your own advice and stop referencing me, but insofar as you’re going to make claims about what I believe or what my project is, I don’t think it unreasonable (but I’m beginning to think it futile) to request some basic intellectual honesty.
There are a lot of people who have problems with how I connect “Israel” and “Jews”? I don’t doubt it — I think they’re distinct but very closely related, and a lot of Jews see the way Israel is treated as a function of broader global opinions about Jews in general, and to some (quite a large, really) extent I buy that. Does that make it hard for you to criticize Israel without being “anti-Semitic”? Well, I’m sorry for that, but (a) the number one issue facing anti-Semitism today is not “how do I avoid setting Kristen off”, (b) I can tell you it’d be a hell of a lot easier if you didn’t assume knowledge of what and how all pro-Israel, Zionist identifying Jews think about Israel and Zionism, and © it’d be much easier if you didn’t wave around anti-Zionist Jews like a talisman while chanting a mantra of “anti-essentialism”. That you’ve found a portion of the Jewish community you find amenable doesn’t absolve you of your obligation to talk with the Jewish community writ large, and this juvenile version of anti-essentialism that boils down to “Jews have differences of opinion, so it doesn’t matter if I swat aside a whole school of thought that the majority of them do adhere to” is asinine.
If you don’t want to talk with me, fine (really — at this point I’d think it fabulous), but yeah, I think you do need to engage fairly and in good faith with that portion of the Jewish community that does think of Israel as being in one form or another essential to their liberation. I don’t think you’ll be able to, though, because I think you’ve committed yourself to this idea that the only way someone could conceive themselves as Zionist is through some mixture of Christian eschatology and imperialist racism, because that’s how you’ve experienced it interacting with Christian Zionists in the South. Unbelievably, your experiences might not tell the whole story, and it might do you some good to sit back and listen with an open mind to some alternative perspectives. As Julie said somewhere else, if you can’t even conceive of a reason why Jews might see Israel as essential to their liberation as human beings beyond being savage, colonialist monsters with a thirst for Palestinian blood — you know what? You’re being anti-Semitic.
People have problems with what I’m saying? Well, there are a lot of people who have serious problems with some of the stuff you’ve been saying too — trying to negate the perspective of most major Jewish organizations that the way Israel gets treated and talked about affects their lives in a deep, personal way and is symptomatic of views about Jews, not just Israel; trying to box any defense of Israel at any level of abstraction or specificity as a defense of all Israeli policies everywhere; refusing to see Zionism, even when Jews are the one’s talking about it, through any light but the Christian dominionist frame which most Jews find abhorrent. Many, many problems.
Look — with regards to your personal problems with me, obviously I find it troubling because I prefer it when folks like me to when folks don’t, but given how much of it stems from willful hostility and dishonest readings on your part, it doesn’t bother me too much, though I’d hope you’d find better things to do with your time. But the amount of privilege you assert in simply fiating to all of us how you’re a friend to all the peoples of the world and totally fair-minded and egalitarian, so anything that goes wrong in any discussion about anti-Semitism is never your fault (though if you strain your imagination you can see how other people might fall into the trap), is going to lead you astray.
Finally, to the extent I see a “purpose” in tragedies, it’s in figuring out what they can teach us to avoid more tragedies. The only “lesson” worth taking away from Gaza is “how do we avoid more Gazas?” I feel like you see a different “purpose” in them, though, and that is to express how outraged and righteous and morally superior you are, someone who Really Sees How Israel is Nazi Germany in Tefellin because You’re A Serious Progressive And Really Care, Not Like Those Posers. And that type of mentality can’t survive in anything but an enraged state, and ultimately needs and revels in the conflicts it yells about. It’s destructive, it’s illiberal, and it’s no longer worth my time.
Um… What. the. fuck. I… uh… I have never said that Israel was like Nazi Germany. Also, you’ve just attributed a whole hell of a lot of things to me that I never said. And you’ve misunderstood most of what I *have* said, frankly. I don’t remember whether or not anyone *did* compare Israel to Nazi Germany on those threads, but um… If they did, it wasn’t me. I’ve never made that comparison, not once. Nor do I believe that such facile comparisons can *ever* be made, thanks. Thank you for attributing that to me, though. Speaking of assumptions… *clears throat*
So, no, I didn’t actually go into your blog history, no. That particular post had pissed a friend of mine off back then, and she pointed it out to me when I was betching about “who the hell is this dude on feministe?”. It did seem…consistent, in a way. I don’t think you’re an ogre, but I will say that you remind me of a certain brand of male blogger whom particularly repulsive. Have you heard of Kyle Paine? Your writing style reminds me of him; It’s all about you and your inner process. So does that of another blogger who seems to get off (no one here) on writing about how repentant he is about all the sex he had with his female students back in his days of early professorhood. I’ve flamed the hell out of him too, and he’s convinced that I hate animals and chinchillas in particular. Unfair comparison? Yeah, probably. There’s just something about the whole “let me use this person’s explotation/tragedy/personal experience in order to grow as a person” that does indeed set me off.
And the post that my friend sent me? *That* just about made me vomit. Your thesis is basically: “I was a supporter of the Iraq war, but now I’ve…evolved? And I got to participate in reading the names of Iraq war dead, and one of them died on my birthday. It was all so meaningful.” Now, seriously? I’m not interested in psychoanalyzing you, but… Ick.
Dude, the “my lurkers support me in email” line is pathetic. I could pull it as well, but I won’t. The option of guest posting about Gaza was opened up to me, but I actually said that I wasn’t interested since I thought that a number of people who were partipating in the threads could do a much better job. Flaming is kind of a part of the culture of the internets. (Although, um, I hadn’t really planned on doing it here.) You keep trying to attribute horrific things to me that I never said, and yep, it’s pissed me right. the. fuck. off. You also suggested to some of my RL Jewish friends that they are “lethally wrong” about Israel. And I’m sorry, but you don’t get to play upon political beliefs to “disfellowship” a whole bunch of Jewish people who don’t agree with you. That was asinine.
Finally, I never said anything about your particular Zionism. I never attempted, to… What? “Merge it with Christian eschatology”? No, I simply think you are ill-informed about it and how it is relevant to the politics of US/Israel relations. I think that was demonstrated on Daisy’s thread (when you misreaad her as… I don’t know, but honestly, I think right now you’re mistaking me for her or something. You did that with me and Galling Galla earlier.). Anyway, I’m attributing your ignorance of this phenomenon (outside of a very superficial understanding) to the fact that you’re misreading my words – not suggesting that you’re an ogre, even if I do personally find you unpleasant. And I’d think you’d find it interesting even if it does come from the posts of someone you’ve decided is your enemy.
Anyhoo:
“It’s destructive, it’s illiberal, and it’s no longer worth my time.”
I’m not a liberal. I’m a poststructuralist Marxist, thanks. More Foucauldian than anything else, but more interested in Marx than Foucault ever really was. Now, I’m maybe being more Nietzschean than anything else. I’m also not offended at being called an asshole. I can be. I have been toward you. You sort of push all of my little Sadist Buttons. I haven’t acted morally superior. I do think I’m probably smarter, and, yep, I can be arrogant that way. This is true. I’m actually okay with that. I’m one of the very few women in my profession, and we have to be that way in order to make it.
What I don’t appreciate is the way in which you twisted everything I said here and attributed such nefarious motives to every remark. And attributed a multitude of things to me that I never actually said. Also, you know what I was really trying to engage here, and this just… Oh, well, you know? Really am sorry, Richard, for contributing to a clusterfuck here. I was actually learning a lot here and enjoying the conversation, but I’ll understand if you need to tell me to fuck off. Seriously. This is kind of…well, why I wasn’t engaging in the threads over at Alas.
Okay, done. I posted that without seeing your comment.
chingona:
Thanks for sharing this experience:
“On Christians and Jews, I asked my husband last night what he was taught about Jews when he was a kid. It was amazing to me to realize that never once in the more than a decade that we’ve been together has this topic ever come up. He said he wasn’t taught anything at all about the Jews. Nothing good. Nothing bad. He said he was vaguely aware that Jews had something to do with the Old Testament.”
I think this is actually fairly common, honestly. In other words, we (people in the US) didn’t all grow up in New York City or any other metropolitan region in the North, and the frame of reference we have for this is all very…different. Until just now, the only people I’d heard bring up antisemitic slurs like “jew you down” were older Jewish men (professors) talking about past experiences (usually in New York, always up North). I wasn’t taught anything about the “character” of Jews, even though I know it’s very deeply ingrained in a lot of Western thought.
I’ve tried to own what I have done: That is, I haven’t been sufficiently sensitive to the ways in which historical experiences infuse the responses that we – any of us – have to various arguments. I have not. I apologize for that. Moreover, I made assumptions about the way David framed his argument (as I tend to do when I read anything), but given the context and the fact that my words might have been experienced as antisemitic (even if they were not motivated as such), I might have been a little less harsh. And I might have tried to better understand the response. I apologize to anyone who was put off by that. Also, I apologize for flaming on your space, Richard. I’ll stop that.
I have appreciated the way that the two of you – Richard and chingona – have engaged me here. I have realized that we really *do* mean different things when we use various words, and I’ll try to do better with that from now on.
Also, chingona, your husband’s childhood sounds a bit similar to mine. No one in my family ever, ever, said anything about Jews “killing Jesus.” No one I ever went to school with either. If you’d asked me that question, I’d have given the same answer as your husband. I was taught about Judas, even, in a really sympathetic way: He was deeply conflicted because of his love for Jesus, etc., etc. Since I was a moderately well-read kid, I was aware of overt antisemitism places like New York. That is, I *knew* that some people thought of Jews as “Jesus-killers,” but yeah…That – and most of these hateful stereotypes – were not a part of my cultural backdrop. Which is part of…my confusion to be honest. It definitely makes me think… Specificity and context are hugely important here. It also makes me realize that, well, if *I* had grown up in a rural area like my students and hadn’t *really ever known any* Black people, I might well have assumed that racism was over in America too. And while I didn’t quite claim that antisemitism was over in America, I can see that David is reading me as doing the equivalent of that wrt antisemitism. And I’m not. I don’t think it’s true. I am not convinced that it’s “structural” in the way that racism is structural here, but I would never say that it’s “over.”
And Richard is probably right that more education should have been done, but I’m not sure how that would have gone… I got my education wrt race through personal experiences and personal interactions and observations… My educators taught me about slavery and segregation *in the past,* just as they taught me about the Holocaust *in the past.* So, it’s not as if I went to some kind of…extremely progressive school. My eighth grade biology teacher would punish Black students much more severely – and more often – than white students for similar offenses. Things like that. I heard racial slurs. I never heard the more overt antisemitic slurs (except for one or two isolated incidents that I contributed to the thread about stories at Alas.). I have heard some of the subtle types of things that Richard is pointing out here, so I think it’s been helpful to have those pointed out. It probably would’ve been much more clear to me if I’d grown up in a Northern city.
Okay. I’m going to stay the hell out of that. This is sort of tangential, but I’ve never really seen antisemitism as a particularly Northern phenomenon, though it certainly takes different forms in different parts of the country. I got the Christ-killer thing in Texas (yes, yes, whether Texas qualifies as “the South” is a subject of much debate), but never up north. It happened in Girl Scouts, and I remember the troop leader sorta, kinda intervened. She said, “That’s why we don’t talk about religion.” And I didn’t live in a big city in Pennsylvania. I lived in a small town where I was one of maybe four or five Jewish kids in my high school. It was a very insular, xenophobic place, where most people were from families that had lived there for more than a hundred years. They were racist as hell, too.
I understand the lack of exposure that you’re talking about. For me, it was American Indians. I never knew any Indians or met any Indians and thought of Indians as something in history books. I read a few Sherman Alexie books and short stories in college, but had a really hard time imagining people actually having the hatred or contempt for Indians that some of his characters experience. Then I moved to Arizona. Yeah. Sherman Alexie wasn’t making any of that stuff up or exaggerating it. It’s real.
(Interestingly, on the subject of “jewing people down,” I grew up using expressions like Indian giver without even thinking of it. My boss, who is in his early 60s and grew up here in Arizona, said he used expressions like “jew down” without ever thinking about it or realizing it had anything to do with Jews. But he never, ever would have said Indian giver because there were real, live Indians around who would punch you in the face if they heard you say something like that.)
So, I’m not asking you to somehow magically not have the life experience you had. But I want you to understand that it’s not as simple as Northern big city-Jews-antisemitism/Southern small towns-no Jews-Chosen People. And I would suspect the few Jewish kids around where you grew up might have had one or two experiences that you wouldn’t know about.
chingona:
“So, I’m not asking you to somehow magically not have the life experience you had. But I want you to understand that it’s not as simple as Northern big city-Jews-antisemitism/Southern small towns-no Jews-Chosen People. And I would suspect the few Jewish kids around where you grew up might have had one or two experiences that you wouldn’t know about.”
I am sure this is true, yes. I’m not trying to make blanket statements about the North/South divides. As I’ve said, I did not grow up in a tiny town, but in a relatively decent-sized city in North Carolina. I also grew up within fifteen miles each of Duke University, UNC-Chapel Hill, and NC State University (the latter less well known, but also a large Research 1 university). I went to a public school, but I also went to school with a number of professors’ children and the children of researchers at Research Triangle Park… Which is to say… My community was certainly unusually progressive and also unusually diverse as far as that goes – in the South. Also, very highly educated. So, I don’t want to make blanket claims about the North/South either. And, absolutely, I am sure that the one Jewish family in my high school (There was really only one – a brother and sister.) when I came through had experiences that I was unaware of. Absolutely, yes. I only meant to say that, in general, people were not *all that* committed to hiding their bigotry, and I certainly heard a lot of slurs against other groups (especially Blacks, Latin@s, and LGBTQ folks.). So, in any case, I don’t mean to draw a North/South dichotomy.
Richard: Glad you unpacked this idea. As stated here, it makes a lot more sense to me. As stated by… Well, nevermind.
Anyway:
“I appreciate all of this, not just because this is my blog, but because I think it’s not often that people are willing and able to say these kinds of things, and I think you’ve tried to do so here with integrity. So, thank you.”
Thanks.
chingona: wrt your right wing Christian in-laws…? I’m curious what… Hrm… So, have you recognized that there are, say, different levels of extremism within these groups as well?
So, I knew people in my public school who were relatively sympathetic to James Dobson, members of Young Life – but who wore normal clothes, were free to date, etc. Then, I also knew these people who were friends of my parents during their extremist fundie phase – and who remained their friends afterward. This is perhaps not unusual since my dad was a pastor – a pastor in a liberal denomination who had a fundamentalist conversion experience and went to an evangelical seminary. So, I grew up getting hugely conflicting religious messages. It was a bit confusing…
To wit, my parents were close friends of a Presbyterian homeschooling family who made their daughters all wear long skirts and head coverings (From what Kristen J has said in comments here and elsewhere, I think she grew up in this kind of a community.). Also, their children were not allowed to date and were commited to “courtship/betrothal” relationships (seriously… Jonathan Lindvall is the fundamentalist who’s known for bringing the word “betrothal” back into the evangelical right.). These were the people – along with people I met through them as well as people I knew throughout my childhood who shared their extremist beliefs – from whom I heard the most “idealization” of Jews and of Israel. These are the types of people who are associated with the Quiverfull Movement, and they are, in my experience, the most likely to go on about how they “love” Jews. An Israeli woman who went to my university (a secular place, UNC) told me a story about some fundamentalist woman from there who called her in order to “witness” about Jesus and who ended up “crying for her soul” over the phone. This sounds like a horrific experience to me. At the very least, I know what it’s like to be “prayed for” by these people, with all of the condescending “pity” it entails, and I’d hate – HATE – to be this kind of subject of idealization.
But then there are also people like my family, who did at one time constitute a more… Liberal version of evangelicals. Now, they’re divorced and not particularly evangelical at all. My parents always voted for Democrats, but they were very definitely evangelicals. My family never said anything at all about Jews or Israel. When I was five, my dad’s church invited Elias Chacour – a well-known Christian Palestinian peace activist – to speak at our church, and maintained a relationship with him since then. Even through that, they never, ever said anything about Jews. So, while we knew that Jesus was Jewish, we didn’t quite… Jews were not centered in my parents’ brand of evangelicalism. There was a sense that Jewish people had served as a vehicle through which Jesus could “share his message of love and forgiveness” with the rest of the world. So, Jewish people were highly, I think, instrumentalized by this form of evangelicalism (also problematic, I would argue). But, like your husband, I would also say that I grew up hearing nothing about Jews (Though I was aware of their idealization among various strands of Christians.).
Due to my parents’ odd religious phases – and shifting in allegiances – I’m perhaps unusually aware of the various subsets of people who comprise evangelical Chrsitianity.
My familiarity with them all is why I don’t go to church anymore, though I do consider myself “culturally” Christian, as far as that goes. In the sense that Christian imagery will always hold meaning for me and I’ll say a prayer in a time of crisis.
I’d just like to make a couple points. I am one of the commenters over at Feministe who was very critical of David’s posts. I won’t into all of that here, there’s no need to repeat that.
To clarify my following words, I am a white Jewish queer trans woman.
But I think, Richard, that you are universalizing the Jewish experience in much the same way that David did. For one thing, neither you nor David even bother to acknowledge that there are many Jews of color, whose experiences are very different from the white middle-class Jews whose viewpoints both you and David seem to be representing. I have to wonder if Jews of color view israel as the safe haven that you seem to view it as, given that they can see how Falasha and Mizrahi Jews have been treated?
Believe me, I experienced plenty of antisemitism while I was growing up, and well into adulthood (I was born in 1959), and I still do a slow burn during the holiday season with everything being Christmas, Christmas, oh here’s a menorah, happy now? And although antisemitism doesn’t really affect me in daily life anymore, I still have a fear that the US could turn really antisemitic again, and I do believe that it’s not far below the surface.
But, let’s look at those identities again: I am a white Jewish queer trans woman. Because I am queer and trans, israel is NOT an option for me. I do not see israel as a safe haven for me, because I am quite aware how hostile the israeli society and government is to queer and trans people, to the point that I would fear for my life if I found myself in israel.
Why do I bring this up? Because I see you committing the same error that David did — you are universalizing your experience as a white, middle-class, straight, cisgender Jew and totally ignoring the fact that a lot — a LOT — of Jews do not fit that profile.
I will also mention this: Antisemitism has really faded from my day-to-day life in the last ten years or so. What I fear more, and what you fail to even consider, is being silenced by pro-Zionist Jews who yell at me that I’m antisemitic and self-hating and a traitor for daring to be critical of israel’s policies wrt the Palestinians. I have had to leave two synagogues because of this. So when David tells me that I and other anti-zionist Jews are “lethally misguided” and “But they’re adopting a position that most Jews consider not just wrong, but extremely dangerous to Jewish lives and equality”, he is casting our critique of zionism as an act of treason. I was, and am, very frightened by this, and I wonder if David, or someone who agrees with him, will take the next step and commit acts of violence against anti-Zionist Jews. When I read those words, I was more afraid to be Jewish than I have been in more than a decade. I feel that this is a physical threat to my safety, merely for critiquing the policies of a government, and that is why I got my back up at Feministe. I won’t accept this, and I won’t be disfellowshipped from the Jewish community, though David may try.
The point that you seem to be making through this series, if I am understanding you correctly, is that we need to separate discussions of antisemitism from discussions of israel/Palestine. I totally agree with this. One way that this separation needs to happen, is that we Jews have to stop silencing each other wrt disagreements about I/P, and I feel that the language that David uses is silencing of a large segment of Jews.
Yes, definitely there are variations in extremism. Coming from such a secular background, I thought they were very conservative and out there when I first met them, but now I know they aren’t even that bad, as far as these things go. My husband grew up Baptist, General Conference, not Southern, so not even the most conservative kind of Baptist. But both his grandfathers were ministers and his father was a youth minister, so defintely had the PK issues. And they burned secular and “demonic” records and books as part of church activities, attributed misfortune, particularly health problems, to Satan trying to stop them from spreading the word, thought that only a very particular kind of Christian would get to heaven (Catholics definitely weren’t making it), never drank, never gambled (once in college, a group of us were playing penny ante poker, and my husband — then my boyfriend — wouldn’t participate), never had a deck of cards in the house, They don’t believe in evolution and take the Bible to be the literal and unerring word of God. But his mother always worked, and they weren’t homeschooled, unlike some of his aunts/cousins, and most of the women wear pants and make-up and cut their hair (one aunt doesn’t). One of his aunts became a minister in the United Church of Christ, and she is politically very liberal.
I’ve been prayed over, and I’ve had hands laid on me. I’ve been told that it’s okay, they don’t expect me to know right from wrong, given how I was raised (the back story to this is too long and irrelevant to get into here, but I did not do anything “wrong” by any normal standard, and actually I was raised with a very firm sense of right and wrong, thank you very much).
The first time I met his family, his grandfather said, “I understand you’re from a Jewish background. That’s wonderful. I like Jewish people.” At the time, I thought he said Jewish background because they were aware that I wasn’t observant (obviously, if I were, I wouldn’t have been dating his grandson), but I’ve come to see the term as less neutral than that. I find they use it a lot for people who have converted, and I think they think they’re letting you have your cake and eat it too. You can retain our Jewishness and not burn in hell! It’s a win-win!
Every Jewish person I’ve ever told that story of my first encounter to immediately understands that it was pretty awkward. It’s a rather alienating thing to have someone say to you, even as you know it’s not said with bad intentions.
A few years ago, that grandfather died. When his birthday came around, about six weeks after his death, the whole family went to his favorite restaurant. We went around the table, and each person shared a favorite memory. For some reason, all I could think of was that first encounter. I leaned in to whisper to my husband, and he thought it was a fine thing to share. He and I both understood the story the same way: sure, we kind of got off on the wrong foot, but we came to appreciate and understand each other. But when I told it, everyone reacted by saying “Oh, how sweet.” They understood it as me saying I was so grateful he was so welcoming.
So mostly, there’s just a feeling of being a bit on the outside. It’s only occasionally that something comes up that’s a real problem.
But this Christmas was very strange. We always go to Christmas Eve services. It’s the only time all year that we go, and it makes his grandmother happy because it’s the church where her husband was a pastor for many decades, and she loves to be there surrounded by her family, showing off her great-grandchildren. The service is usually unobjectionable, and I think it’s really pretty when the lights go off and the candles are lit as everyone sings Silent Night.
But this year, a really prominent part of the service involved watching a video presentation from a congregant who grew up as a secular Jew describing how empty and meaningless his secular Jewish life was, how the New York Times, bagels, the Holocaust, and Woody Allen movies just aren’t going to get you through that long, dark night of the soul. He talked about how much better his life was now that he was a Christian. Then they put up a caricature of Woody Allen from a recent Newsweek interview (and I think you can imagine how a caricature of Woody Allen that would seem to represent only Woody Allen when it ran in Newsweek could take on a more sinister appearance in this context) and quoted extensively from the interview to show how neurotic Woody Allen is, and a good bit of the sermon was dedicated to how Woody Allen and all the people like him would feel so much better and could let go of all that pain if they just accepted Jesus. I was intensely uncomfortable and very relieved that my son was 1) too young to really follow any of this and 2) sleeping through most of the service. I don’t know that I’ll be going back next year.
GallingGalla:
I think this is a fair critique of how what I have written thus far reads, and it’s something I need to think about in terms of how I might have written it differently. At the same time, though,
This is something that I am writing about quite explicitly in the fourth post in the series and it may address some of the issues you have. I am not using that as an excuse or to avoid the critique you level at the first three posts. I mean quite sincerely that I need to think: given the length of this series, which I conceive of as a single piece of writing, and given that I am still relatively new to blogs, the modular fashion in which a connected series of posts is read, etc., and given that my mindset is still writing for journals, etc. how I might have structured this differently – aside from simply stating explicitly that I am writing from my perspective (which I acknowledge I could have done, but didn’t) – to address the issues you raise.
Kristin, I just want to be clear that the stuff up above about North/South was really only meant informationally, from my personal experience, not in a brow-beating, you’re-still-wrong, apologize-again sort of way. It’s not my intent at all to put you in that position.
I disagreed with David’s characterization of anti-Zionist Jews, and I thought his language was exaggerated, but I didn’t think through the implications of his words. You’re right. The potential for violence is there. I’m sorry I didn’t see it.
chingona:
“Kristin, I just want to be clear that the stuff up above about North/South was really only meant informationally, from my personal experience, not in a brow-beating, you’re-still-wrong, apologize-again sort of way. It’s not my intent at all to put you in that position.”
It’s cool, I didn’t see it that way.
Richard: Well, obviously, I’ll be sticking around for the remaining posts in this series, so we shall see…but thank you for clarifying your writing style and for acknowledging the viewpoint from which you are writing.
Kristen: I know it wasn’t directed at me, but I appreciate what you said about recognizing how your reaction was tempered by certain assumptions you made, and that if you had to do it all over you’d have phrased things differently. For my part, I understand how a seeming outsider coming onto a new site with this big multi-part series (with the references to this part or that section) could have come off as high-handed and/or condescending (and the bit on Gaza certainly didn’t help). I doubt we’re ever going to be tight friends, or even particularly friendly, but hopefully we can put the stage of “smoldering rage” behind us.
I also want to acknowledge what GG wrote: I of course write from a particular perspective as a Ashkenazi male heterosexual American Jew, and while I try to be mindful that Jews from different social locations have different outlooks on things (e.g., my post on how the Mizrachi Jewish community view the Gaza conflict), there’s always more work to be done on that score. In general I think the Jewish community needs to do a lot more to enhance the plurality of voices who are recognized as our public faces, beyond the typical Ashkenazi American heterosexual male set.
More importantly, I firmly believe that any Jewish institution — a community center, a synagogue, or a state — that is not open and welcoming of each and every Jew, regardless of race, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, cis– or trans-gendered status, or politics, is committing a failure of the first order; because I think the first order of any Jewish institution is to be a place where Jews feel safe and secure as Jews. Of all the things that I think and have heard went wrong in the thread (and I think there is plenty of blame to go around), the fact that you felt physically threatened in its wake is far and away the worst possible result. The guiding light of my politics with regards to Jews in the world is that no Jew, anywhere, for any reason — background, race, sexuality, gender, class, support of Israel, lack of support for Israel, or anything else — should ever be forced to be afraid due to their Jewishness even for a moment. For failing in that primary obligation, I apologize profusely.
With that, I’m going to duck out of the thread and revert to my usual lurker status. I think the conversation that is going on here is going in very interesting directions, and I’m skeptical that my presence will contribute more than it distracts.
Peace, all.
David: Thanks. In particular – and I don’t speak for Galling Galla – but I appreciate your apology to her. I know I can be mean, and it’s easy sometimes to get angry at me on the internets. I don’t have much more to say than that. I’m surprised, and like you, I doubt we’ll ever be BFFs.
And for the health and well-being of everyone involved, I’ll probably stay away from your blog and subsequent feministe posts from now on. But I do appreciate your willingness to say what you said.
You’re wrong about one thing, though. That comment (apology) was kind of directed at you. I mean, I wouldn’t have flown off the handle and offended a whole lot of other people – and these threads would have been quite a lot different – without my response to your posts. Anyway, that’s all.
Ugh… I hate it when smileys turn into emoticons. Sorry about that.
David,
Thanks for this comment. I appreciate it for the same kinds of reasons I appreciated Kristin’s comment above.
Pingback: Alas, a blog » Blog Archive » What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) antisemitism and Israel - 4
chingona: Okay, so in response to your story about what your husband heard about Jewish people when he was growing up. That made me wonder about my own family, so I asked my mother. She now teaches elementary school in the Raleigh area but grew up in a very rural part of Eastern North Carolina. So, I asked her the same question that you asked your husband: “What did you hear about Jews when you were growing up?” She said, “Nothing at all. I never met any Jewish people at all until I got older and moved out of [rural town].” So, I pushed a little further: “Did you ever hear that the Jews killed Jesus?” She responded, “No, we were taught that the Romans killed Jesus. We never heard anything about the Jews, beyond the fact that Jesus was Jewish.” So, I asked about the various antisemitic tropes that have seemed most common over the course of these threads. She said, “Oh, you mean like… Stereotypes about Jews having a lot of money, things like that? No, I never heard anyone say them in real life. I mean… I knew about them from reading history books and from TV, but I don’t think I ever heard anyone actually say them.” So, I asked why she thought that might be given that people from the community are not exactly prone to hide their bigotry most of the time, and she just said, “I mean, it probably never came up just because we never knew any Jewish people and never thought about it.”
Also, of interest… She now teaches in a highly diverse public school in the Raleigh area. She’s been teaching (because students change classses) approximately fifty students per year for the past twenty years and is now in her mid-fifties. Over the past five or ten years, even, a shift in her student population has become very evident. That is, she now teaches a majority of non-white students. While she has always had a very large Black population, she now teaches a great many Latin@, Arab, and South Asian students. About ten percent of her students each year come from Muslim families.
And so… I asked her about Jewish families. She said, “Well, hmm… Since I started teaching here, I really don’t think I’ve had anymore than… Three Jewish students as opposed to… Well, I have a lot more Arab students than that just this year.” So, I asked again about whether or not she thinks of the area as fairly diverse, and she said, “Well, yes, and certainly a lot more diverse now than it used to be. But I guess… No, we don’t have a lot of Jews in this area, no.” And three students out of a thousand in twenty years would seem to validate this. So, yeah, I really do think… It’s no excuse for ignorance, but even in the US, I’d argue that what we’re exposed to varies demonstrably across geographic location.
I told her that I’d recently heard some folks talk about people asking them if they had horns, and she said, “WHAT? Are you serious??? People actually think that??”
Even I was shocked that people were asking about horns. I mentioned this on the Gentile Privilege Checklist thread on Alas, but I thought that was something from the Middle Ages.
For anyone still reading, I want to point out that this is not true. Not to criticize anyone, but as a reminder that antisemitism is a huge subject that’s often counter-intuitive and difficult to keep up with.
White supremacists often get into internal debates over what groups they should hate more. In Britain, the BNP can’t quite make up their minds to hate Muslims more than Jews. In France, the fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front has teamed up with the Black antisemite, Dieudonné.
In the US, many white supremacists and David Duke in particular have taken an active concern in the Palestinian’s plight. It isn’t that they don’t view the Palestinians as inferior, but they view the Palestinians as non-threatening and distant, while Jews are a threat. Some openly praise the 9/11 bombers in the same way they praise Tim McVeigh. Several recent anti-Israel demonstrations have included Skinheads. Blatantly fascist writings have also passed, via right-wing Muslim groups, into far-left, anti-Israel spaces. And then there’s the leftists who have taken from Stalinist propaganda.
And it has led to an increase of arson attacks, antisemitic graffiti, and such. Fortunately, the recent cases of Gaza-inspired, domestic terrorism were thwarted. They’re not well reported. (A few shootings earlier in the Iraq War, blamed on Israel, including a shooting at a Jewish day school and one at a JCC in Seattle that killed one person. They were well reported, but I’m not sure they’re well remembered.) And the guys who wanted to kill 88 black people, 14 by decapitation? No one seems sure what to do with the blatantly Nazi characteristics of that. The 88 stands for “Heil Hitler,” and whether it was a plan to kill Blacks or Jews, that makes me feel less safe.
Matt: I agree, and that’s more or less precisely the point that I was making. The neo-Nazis hate all non-white groups and Jews. No one could call them part of any kind of “emancipatory” coalition. And neo-Nazis are, well, racist hate groups. Where are we disagreeing?
You’re right that Duke has taken an interest in the plight of Palestinians, but I think this is largely an instrumentalization of suffering (“Your suffering could serve my purposes, so let me express public concern for your well-being…”). I don’t think it’s actual concern motivated to bring about real emancipation for anyone.
“The 88 stands for “Heil Hitler,” and whether it was a plan to kill Blacks or Jews, that makes me feel less safe.”
Well, me neither, frankly. And, yes, I’d heard about it. They were from Washington state and had planned to do this in Tennessee. I’m not sure how “no one seems able to deal with the blatantly Nazi characteristics of that.” My understanding is that white supremacist groups have a long history of ties to neo-Nazi ideologies and are largely sympathetic – and often synonymous. Dude, wtf did you think we were disagreeing about? I think your interpretation of Duke’s statements is slightly different from mine, but beyond that… Um… The Klan and other white supremacist groups have a blatantly Nazi-sympathizing history and politics. I can’t imagine that *anyone* would ever dispute that. Seriously…?
We’re disagreeing because neo-Nazis are, actually, significantly more sympathetic to the Palestinians than to Jews. It’s really not reducible to “they hate everyone.”