To me, the point was obvious. Basing the Jewish claim to the land of Israel on the Jews’ own reading of the Hebrew Bible was asking the overwhelmingly non-Jewish world to accept as objective and incontrovertible the truth that Judaism claimed as its own, never mind the implication that the disenfranchisement of the Palestinians was somehow the will of the monotheistic god. To assert that line of reasoning as an argument for Israel’s right to exist, I suggested, was self-defeating at the very least – even if, as a believing Jew, it was a cornerstone of your faith.
“I never took you for an SHJ,” said one the colleagues with whom I was talking.
“An SHJ?”
“A self-hating Jew.”
The other agreed. “My husband,” she said, “would say you were an antisemitic Jew.”
I stared at my colleagues across a sudden gap of estrangement I did not know how to bridge. I had never been called self-hating before, but I understood it meant that, in their eyes, I’d revealed myself as a Jew who accepted an antisemitic definition of Jewishness. It was a logic I had heard often when I was in yeshiva, though my teachers always used it to explain the antisemitism of non-Jews who were critical of Israel: To suggest that there might be a perspective from which Israel’s existence as a Jewish state was not self-evidently valid, my rebbes would say, in many different ways, over and over again, was to suggest that the Jews had no right to claim such a state in the first place, which was also to imply that the Jews as a people ought not even to be.
When a Jew took that position, my rebbes would explain, they had clearly been deceived by the promise of assimilation: that if only we would stop identifying as Jews, we would be accepted into the body politic and made full members in good standing of the majority culture. Such Jews were self-hating because they had chosen the goyim over their own people. Yet I was not trying to argue that Israel should not exist. Rather, I was expressing discomfort with arguments that suggest not only that the Jews’ claim to the land, on whatever basis, renders all intervening history irrelevant, but also that, in the act of staking this claim, the Jews were and are beyond reproach.
In December of 1917, for example, when David Ben Gurion said that, in a “historical and moral sense,” then-Palestine was a country “without inhabitants,” what he meant, according to Amos Elon in The Israelis, was that “only the Jews really felt at home in Palestine; all other inhabitants were merely the ethnic remains of various waves of conquerors” (156). In Ben Gurion’s eyes, in other words, the Palestinians were essentially displaced, a people who didn’t really belong where they were, and the stereotypes I grew up hearing about the Palestinians corresponded to that image of who they were. In the 1970s, for example, I had as my teachers men and women who talked about the Palestinians as naturally less intelligent, dirty, promiscuous, diseased, congenitally dishonest, and motivated in their desire to destroy Israel entirely by hatred of Jews. They envied us, this reasoning went, our sense of purpose, our unity as a people, our ability to survive and other qualities they lacked because of the characteristics I listed for you above.
I can go on: In the 1980s, when I worked as an advisor for a Conservative Jewish youth group, I heard my boss and other officials of the community, describe the Palestinians as being without a culture of their own and as unfit for anything other than manual labor, and if the Jews (not the Israelis; the Jews) needed to exploit that labor to build our nation, well, that was what we had to do. And in the 1990s and in these first few years of the 21st century, I have heard those stereotypes repeated over and over again, perhaps with less frequency, and often with a good deal more subtlety, but – especially when they come from people in positions of power – no less harmfully; and I am not even going to get into the ways in which Palestinians are still, subtly and not, portrayed as terrorists simply by virtue of being Palestinian.
When I told my boss that I was struck – as I continue to be even now – by how much these images and attitudes resemble the antisemitic images and attitudes the original Zionist settlers were fighting against, he insisted that I was missing some very important distinctions, most of which boiled down to his claim that Jews don’t kill innocent people (demonstrably false) and that Jewish suffering in Europe justified whatever “small price” the Arabs – he would not use the word Palestinians – might have had to pay had they simply allowed us to have our land (also, even leaving aside the enormous arrogance of such a statement, not as simple as he was making it sound). The Jews had been living in exile for thousands of years, he said. What possible claim could the Arabs have that would trump that?
I don’t want to imply that my boss’ thinking was the rule among Jews in the United States at the time, since I have no way of knowing that for a fact, but his thinking did represent, albeit in a particularly naked form, the attitudes that shaped the way I was taught about Zionism and the founding of the State of Israel. What I would like to focus on here, though, is not the anti-Arab racism, along with all the issues relating to Israel and Zionism that devolve from that, in what my boss had to say. Rather, what I want to focus on, in a very narrow way, is the part of what he said that is, in fact, the story the mainstream Jewish community has, in one form or another, been telling ourselves about ourselves for at least as long as I have been alive; and I want to try to draw some connections to my colleagues’ accusing me of self-hatred because I challenged not even necessarily the story, but rather one use to which the story has been put.
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That the Jews have been, throughout our history, a displaced people is hard to deny. Even leaving aside the Babylonian exile of 597 BCE, and even if you accept the argument that the Roman exile in 70 CE was not, in fact, an exile, there are plenty of examples of Jewish displacement to draw on. England, for example, expelled its Jews in 1290; France, 1306. Spain followed suit in 1492, and Portugal followed Spain in 1497. In Switzerland in 1348, all Jewish children under the age of seven were ordered baptized and their families murdered for allegedly conspiring to spread the Black Plague. Closer to our present time, in January 1919, in Argentina, the Semana Trajica, the “tragic week,” which was a battle between strikers and employers allied with the state, had at its center a series of pogroms that were ignited in part by the charge that Jewish radicals were working to overthrow the state; and I should have to remind no one of how many times, by how many countries, the Jews trying to escape Nazi Germany were turned away and forced to return to their own slaughter. Even after World War II, in Kielce, Poland, in 1946, several dozen Holocaust survivors were killed following the reemergence of the blood libel, the belief that Jews murder Christian children and use their blood for such things as the making of matzah. (See Jewish Women, Jewish Men, by Aviva Cantor, 25.)
To drive home a little further the point that Jews were often not welcome in the countries where they were born, and also to move a little closer to the topic of this essay, in 1947, five days before the Political Committee of the UN General Assembly voted on the partition plan for Palestine, Heykal Pasha, an Egyptian delegate made the following statement:
The United Nations … should not lose sight of the fact that the proposed solution might endanger a million Jews living in the Moslem countries. Partition of Palestine might create in those countries an anti-Semitism even more difficult to root out than the anti-Semitism which the Allies were trying to eradicate in Germany… If the United Nations decides to partition Palestine, it might be responsible for the massacre of a large number of Jews.
He then elaborated further:
A million Jews live in peace in Egypt [and other Muslim countries] and enjoy all rights of citizenship. They have no desire to emigrate to Palestine. However, if a Jewish State were established, nobody could prevent disorders. Riots would break out in Palestine, would spread through all the Arab states and might lead to a war between two races.
The article from which these quotes are taken, “Why Jews Fled the Arab Countries,” by Ya’akov Meron, was published in The Middle East Quarterly (MEQ) in 1995. MEQ is published by the Middle East Forum, an organization the partisanship of which I do not share–Campus Watch, for example, is one of their activities – and so I want to be clear that I do not endorse Meron’s conclusions, which suggest that Pasha was making a threat with these remarks that alluded to a planned expulsion of the Jews if the partitioning of Palestine were approved. Indeed, the question of whether “expulsion” or “emigration” is the accurate term to describe the movement of Jews out of Arab lands before and after the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 is, at the very least, contested territory, and deserves a good deal more scrutiny than I can give it here. Nonetheless, even if Heykal Pasha was not making the threat Meron claims that he was, even if Pasha was simply describing a reality that he hoped desperately to avoid, even if we grant that the dangers he is talking about cannot be understood outside the context of Arab response to the Zionist project, what Arab Jew, after hearing or reading his words, would or could feel entirely welcome in any of the Arab states Pasha mentions?
The anti-Jewish feeling that Pasha worried would be unleashed upon the partitioning of Palestine, in other words, had to pre-exist that partitioning, and if you have any doubts about the continuing persistence of antisemitism throughout the world, a glance at an of the Anti-Defamation League’s Global Anti-Semitism: Selected Incidents Around the World reports should persuade you. The incidents listed there do not necessarily point to the kind of systemic antisemitism that existed in the 19th and 20th centuries, even in the United States, or that the Nazis perfected during World War II, but given the context provided by a thousand-year-long history of oppression and persecution, even small occurrences take on a significance that cannot be ignored. More to the point, in that context, it’s very difficult to read the results of a 2007 ADL survey, which show that more or less 50% of Europeans think it is probably true that “Jews are more loyal to Israel than to this country [the one in which the survey was taken] and not see those attitudes as a [for now dormant] ideological infrastructure of hatred just waiting to be plugged into the way the Nazis, the Soviet Union and other governments going back centuries have plugged into it; and if you would like to see those attitudes in action, take a look at what went on in South Africa in the midst of Israel’s attack on Gaza (here and here; via).
I will have more to say about the situation of Jews in the United States below. For now, I just want to point out that the same undercurrent of antisemitism exists here, though it appears to be significantly less virulent than in Europe. According to another 2007 ADL survey, only 15% of Americans hold strong antisemitic beliefs, though 31% believe that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the US, a number that represents a decrease of 2% since 2005; and 27% believe that the Jews were responsible for the death of Christ, also a decrease (3%) since 2005. Still, that more than a quarter of the population of the country that I call home believe these canards is disconcerting to say the least, as is the outpouring of antisemitism on the web that the ADL has documented (see here and here) since the arrest of Bernard Madoff. The same infrastructure of hatred that exists in Europe, in other words, exists here; and I mean the same, because it is not as if antisemitism in the United States is different in kind from the antisemitism in Europe. To deny that fact, to deny that antisemitism is a single, global phenomenon is, if you are Jewish, at best foolishly naïve and, at worst, dangerously ignorant.
Yet the idea that the Jews should have a country of our own is not, at least not among Jews, only a reaction to the realities of global antisemitism. The existence of a Jewish nation is also-by whatever centuries-long trail of genetics and cultural inheritance that makes me Jewish-part of my history, part of what being Jewish means. In Jewish Women, Jewish Men, Aviva Cantor points out that the Jews did not intend to create the Diaspora, a word which means, simply, dispersion. Rather, they were exiled, forced out of the land that had been their home, and while I do not think there is a single authentically Jewish stance towards the notion of a Jewish homeland, it is a profoundly antisemitic convenience of those who would deny the authenticity of Jewish experience that the original exile, and thus also the idea of a Jewish nation – that the Jews are a people and that we, as a people, have the right to desire a return to national status – is either irrelevant or a meaningless fiction.
Nonetheless, it is the space between the idea of a Jewish nation and what actually happened in the formation of the State of Israel that gets contested when people debate whether Zionism was and is a justified and justifiable nationalist movement or a colonial/imperial, racist movement invested in ethnic cleansing as a way of bringing the Jewish state into being. Figuring out where I draw my line in that space is, in part, what this series has been about; and while I would never suggest that drawing that line defines Jewish identity, I would argue that it is nearly impossible to have a Jewish identity without drawing that line somewhere, and the question of self-hatred – as my colleagues made sure to remind me – is one of the things at stake when Jews talk amongst ourselves about where that somewhere is.
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Here’s the thing about Jewish self-hatred, at least as far as I can see: It’s in all of us. Not in the sense that we actively loathe our Jewish selves (or ourselves for being Jewish), but that we have internalized, whether we like it or not, the negative images of the Jew that exist in our culture. I can’t unlearn the fact that the Jews are seen as a greedy, sneaky, manipulative people determined to control the world; I can’t not know that an awful lot of Christians think my ancestors were, and therefore I personally am, responsible for the death of their messiah, or that I and my tribe – as they would put it – control the media, or the economy, or even the Congress and the White House. I know how to sound like a nebbish and a laughable old Jewish man; I know about the stereotype of the Jewish mother that transforms her into reason for her Jewish son’s social, psychological and sometimes literal emasculation; and I know the image of the Jewish American Princess: manipulative (especially sexually), childish, materialistic, shallow, spoiled.
Not only do I know these images and stereotypes, but I have told the jokes that rely on them – Why do “JAPS” use gold diaphragms? Because they want to know their men are coming into money? – used them as insults, and even employed them as a kind of cultural shorthand to describe the behaviors/character of people in situations where “Jewishness” (whatever that means) was not an issue. I have, in other words, done my part to perpetuate these images; and I would have a hard time believing any Jew who claimed never to have done something along the same lines. More the point, these images are still alive and can have tremendous resonance in popular culture. In the movie David & Layla, for example, which has gotten rave reviews for telling the based-on-a-true-story tale of a Jewish man and a Muslim woman who fall in love, marry and manage to mesh their different religious cultures, the Jewish culture in which David exists is represented as entirely and successfully emasculating, especially in the person of his fiancée Abby, who is one of the most egregious caricatures of the Jewish American Princess that I have ever seen. It is only by going outside of his culture, by escaping the oppressive umanning that his American Jewish world is perpetrating on him, that David is able to find/assert/recover his manhood and find/assert/claim a Jewish identity of his own.
To be fair, the cut I saw of this film is not the one currently being shown, and so it is possible that the portrayal of Jewish culture no longer relies so strongly on stereotypes, though I doubt it since so much of the film’s comedy relies on them. As well, especially because I am a Jewish American man married to an Iranian Muslim woman, I think it is important to point out that there is a lot the movie gets very right, without stereotyping, in terms of the general ignorance that Jews and Muslims, not to mention Americans and the peoples of the Middle East and western Asia, have about each other – Layla is Kurdish–and about the comedy that can ensue when two people from those different cultures fall in love and try to have a relationship, never mind get married and have a family. Nonetheless, the fact that David’s manhood is a large measure of what’s at stake in his decision to choose the non-Jewish Layla – a choice that David’s family sees, at least at first, as self-hating – suggests the degree to which, for Jewish men, the question of self-hatred is bound up with the question of what Jewish manhood is and what it means to posses it, or not.
In his book Jewish Self-Hatred, Sander Gilman argues that, for the medieval Christian world, Jewish difference was defined largely by the Jewish language, Hebrew (23). Understood by the Church to be that which prevented Jews from acknowledging Jesus as the messiah – because reading biblical texts in, and perceiving the world through the limited and limiting framework of their own language made it impossible for Jews to perceive Christ’s presence in the world – this linguistic difference was understood to be not cultural, but natural. As speakers of Hebrew, in other words, the Jews were slaves to the world view implicit in Hebrew, which obviously did not include the notion of Jesus as the messiah, and so they were incapable of commanding any other language or of seeing the world in any other way. Moreover, since their way of seeing the world was inherently false – Jesus, after all, really was the messiah – the Jews were congenital liars. This essential dishonesty placed the Jews in the same category as women, who were also believed to be liars by nature.
Perhaps the most explicit connection between the essential dishonesty of women and the Jews’ polluted essence was in the myth of Jewish male menstruation, the belief that Jewish men were marked by the same sign that in women signified Eve’s fall from grace. In the thirteenth century, Thomas de Cantimpré, citing St. Augustine as his source, offered the first ostensibly scientific discussion of this aspect of Jewish male anatomy, explaining as well how these men attempted to cure themselves. According to de Cantimpré, the Jews were told by one of their prophets that the cure lay in drinking “Christiano sanguine,” the blood of a Christian, an assertion that proved the Jews’ linguistic handicap, since, in fact, the curse could only be lifted when the Jews converted and accepted the sacrament of “Christi sanguine,” the blood of Christ. It was, in other words, the Jews’ inability to hear the truth, represented by this prophet’s inability to get the Latin right – presumably he would not have made the same mistake if the language had been Hebrew-that gave rise in the Christian imagination to the blood libel, the charge that Jews ritually murdered Christian children to obtain Christian blood. In turn, the blood libel was linked to the Jews’ original and ultimately emasculating, Eve-like denial of Christ (Gilman 74 – 5), thus forging a connection between Jewish and female psychology that would continue to be deployed in antisemitic rhetoric even when the religious basis for that connection was no longer considered so important.
Even a casual overview of nineteenth century philosophy, for example, will unearth in the thinking of our most revered philosophers a misogyny directly descended from the medieval Church’s view of women. The authors of The Malleus Maleficarum, for example – which was first published in 1486 as the Inquisition’s legal, procedural and informational reference on witchcraft and witches – answered the question why “Women are chiefly addicted to Evil Superstitions” by explaining that women are, among other things, intellectually undisciplined, devious, vengeful and fundamentally carnal (41−7, these page numbers refer to this published edition of the book; a new translation is also available). Immanuel Kant echoed those views in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime when he wrote that women “do something only because it pleases them […] I hardly believe the fair sex is capable of principles” (qtd. in Rosemary Agonito, ed. History of Ideas on Women: A Source Book 133). Georg Hegel asserted that while women could, “of course, be educated,” the female intellect was not “adapted to the higher sciences, philosophy, or certain of the arts” (ibid. 167). In “On Women,” Schopenhauer wrote that women existed solely for the purpose of reproduction, and since neither intellect, a sense of justice, honesty nor aesthetic awareness were in his view required for having babies, he believed that women either did not possess these qualities or possessed them in only the most limited fashion.
Compare those images of women with antisemitic images of the Jews and some striking parallels emerge. Where, for example, Kant saw women as motivated entirely by self-indulgence, Bruno Bauer, in his 1843 work “The Capacity of Present-Day Jews and Christians to Become Free,” characterized the essence of Judaism as “the mere cunning of sensual egoism” (qtd. in Gilman 192). Similarly, Hegel’s definition of female intellectual inferiority finds a parallel in Ludiwg Wittgensteins’s pronouncement that the “Jewish mind does not have the power to produce even the tiniest flower or blade of grass that has grown in the soil of another’s mind and to put it into a comprehensive picture” (qtd. in Gilman 128). In 1903, Otto Weininger, a baptized Jew, published Sex and Character, a highly influential book in which he rendered the conceptual parallels I have just outlined in concrete biological and psychopathological terms. Human psychology, Weininger argued, existed along a continuüm running from the Jewish mind on one end to the Aryan mind on the other, and this continuüm, he asserted, runs parallel to another one, defined by masculinity and femininity. The connections Weininger makes between these two continuums are many. Neither Jews nor women, he says, possess true creativity; both are congenitally dishonest, lack a genuine sense of humor, and each exists without fully believing in the authenticity of that existence.
Women, however – and of course he means Gentile women – have one advantage over Jews, for while neither Jews nor women believe
in themselves[,] the woman believes in others, in her husband, her lover, or her children, or in love itself; she has a center of gravity, although it is outside of her own being. The Jew believes in nothing, within or without him. (qtd in Gilman, 246)
According to Weininger, this inability to believe in anything meant that, for the Jews, the world is reduced to the merely material. Transcendence, the ability to perceive the mystery beneath and beyond the commonplace, is impossible. Women, of course, were also materialistic in Weininger’s view, but they were at least partially able to transcend this flaw by believing in others, and if all else failed, (Christian) women could always fall back on faith in Jesus.The Jews lacked even that basic belief, making them, in Weininger’s schema, an even more fully realized version of female inferiority than any actual woman could ever be.
(I need to pause here to acknowledge an awkwardness in what I am writing: To the degree that I have to accept Weininger’s discourse, or any of the antisemitic discourse I am talking about, in order to explain it, Jewish women are rendered doubly invisible, since they are subsumed under the category Jew, which was understood to refer to Jewish men, Jewish women being more or less beneath notice anyway. Maybe there is a way to write this without falling into that trap and without having constantly to twist around to remind the reader of the presence of Jewish women – a rhetorical strategy that, I think, would make it difficult to write about this material clearly – but I haven’t found it. It is an example of the double bind that antisemitism, that any oppression puts the oppressed in: how to talk about the terms of our own oppression without accepting – even if only to argue against them – the rhetorical and discursive, if not semantic, boundaries set by those terms. I will talk a little bit about this phenomenon below. Here I want simply to acknowledge that I am caught in it with regards to Jewish women.)
Jewish materialism, Weininger believed, contaminated every aspect of life in which Jews were involved. Medicine, for example, had once been “closely allied with religion,” which meant with questions of morality and the spiritual significance of human existence. As more and more Jews began to enter the profession, however, they turned healing into a matter of drugs, a mere administration of chemicals, which Weininger saw as evidence of the Jew’s lack of creativity: “The chemical interpretation of organisms sets [those organisms] on a level with [the Jews] own dead ashes.” In response to this contamination, Weininger understood the time in which he lived to be a time of choice “between Judaism and Christianity […] between male and female” (qtd in Gilman’s The Jew’s Body 137 – 7). It is in the context of this choice – which Weininger may have articulated for his generation, but which has been implicit in antisemitic rhetoric since at least as far back as Thomas de Cantimpre’s “explanation” of Jewish male menstruation – that the significance of Zionism for the Jews needs to be understood. For Jewish nationalism was not motivated simply by the long-held desire to return to the Jewish homeland in Palestine. Zionism was also, or at least also became, an explicit refutation of the notion of Jewish male effeminacy; and the apotheosis of that refutation, Zionists believed, lay in realizing Jewish claims to the land of Palestine.
The irony, of course, is that in order to refute the notion of Jewish male effeminacy, Zionists almost had no choice but to accept its basic premise as valid. As Gilman points out “[…] Jewish scientists […] needed to accept the basic ‘truth’ of the statistical arguments of medical science during this period. They could not dismiss published statistical ‘facts’ out of hand and thus operated within [the] categories [those facts established]” (ibid. 47). Among those facts was statistical evidence showing a higher incidence of mental illness among Jews in Germany than among German Catholics or Protestants. Gilman suggests that this difference probably reflected a higher rate of hospitalization of Jews for mental illness, but the data were used at the time to argue that Jews were innately prone to psychopathology, specifically neurasthenia and hysteria, quintessentially feminine (and feminizing) mental disorders. Why the Jews were subject to these diseases was a matter of some debate. Members of the Parisian Anthropological Society offered explanations ranging from the Jewish practice of endogamous marriage, which resulted in the marriage of first cousins – defined in 19th century Europe as incest – to the Jews’ ostensible preoccupation with mysticism and the supernatural (Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred 286 – 88). In either case, however, the cause was understood to be innate. Incest, of course, was thought to weaken a people genetically, and the idea of Jewish superstition stood in the long tradition of the Jews’ inherently deficient way of seeing the world. (Recall, as well, The Malleus Maleficarum had to say about women and superstition.)
The trigger for these Jewish psycopathologies, according to the science of the time, was the fact that Jews generally lived in cities and that they were often employed in high-stress fields. Krafft-Ebing, in a study on neurasthenia, for example, made explicit the connection between the image of the urban Jew as diseased and the idea of Jewish masculinity as flawed or deficient. Jewish men, he wrote, are “over-achiever[s] in the arena of commerce [or] politics.” Believing that “time is money,” they read “reports, business, correspondence, [and] stock market notations during meals,” causing tremendous anxiety and leading naturally to the nervous disorders mentioned above (ibid. 289). Jewish men, in other words, were simply not “man enough” to live the kind of life they’d chosen to lead.
In contrast to the antisemitic explanations non-Jewish scientists gave for this condition, Jewish scientists focused on another explanation: antisemitism. In 1902, for example, Martin Engländer asserted that if the Jews were more prone to neurasthenia than non-Jews, the reasons had to be sought in the fact of “a two-thousand-year Diaspora” and its accompanying “struggle for mere existence” (qtd in ibid. 290). To put it another way, living in exile had sapped Jewish men of their virility. The cure, these Jewish scientists proposed, was Zionism, not simply as a political movement calling for the creation of Jewish state; but as an ideology of Jewish manhood, specifically of rescuing the Jewish male body from the emasculating effect of diaspora and recreating it in the image of what Max Nordau called “Judaism with muscles” (Eros and the Jew from Biblical Israel to Contemporary America, David Biale 179). Nordau’s idea was that Jewish men could overcome their predisposition to neurasthenia, and therefore their effeminacy, by developing their bodies, thus counteracting the debilitating effects of life in exile. Life in exile itself, however, was understood to be a disembodied existence – remember Weininger and the Jews’ inability to believe in the authenticity of their own existence? – and that disembodiment was the result of the Jews having been wrenched, like a soul from a body, from the land of Israel. Truly to re-embody the Jewish people, in other words, was not only to rebuild the bodies of Jewish men in exile, but also to eliminate what Meir Yaari, an early leader of Hashomer ha-Tzair (The Young Guard), called the “instinctual impotence” of the “conventional” or Diaspora Jew (qtd in ibid. 186).
Represented on postcards that juxtaposed images of the virile Jewish farmers reclaiming Palestine with ones of the weak, old and fragile Orthodox Jews of the European shtetl, this masculinizing agenda was framed within a reciprocal relationship between the people and the land. In the words of a song popular at the time, the Zionists believed that they “came to the land to build it and to be built by it” (ibid. 179 & 182). To be built by it, David Biale explains, was “to change one’s values and practices and […] one’s […] body and psyche by agricultural work” (Ibid. 182 – 3), an erotic transformation in which the Jewish settlers took on the role of a male lover possessing the female land. Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948, in this view, was metaphorically the consummation of a long and difficult courtship. The newly-muscled Jewish man had won his bride, proving not only that he was as much a man as anyone else, but also the self-evident validity of Zionism as an ideology: the existence of the State of Israel was proof that Jewish manhood could only manifest itself when the historical connection between the Jewish people and the Jewish homeland had been reestablished. To question the project of establishing Israel’s existence, in other words, was not merely to question, say, the justice or wisdom of settling a land that was already inhabited. It was to question as well even the possibility of Jewish manhood, which meant to question the possibility of a strong and healthy Jewish identity, which meant accepting the antisemitic image of the Jew as weak and diseased and feminine, which meant making oneself the very definition of the self-hating Jew.
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This, then, is the accusation my colleagues leveled at me for suggesting that the words of the Torah might, for most of the world, not be a convincing argument in favor of Israel’s existence as a Jewish State – and please make no mistake: it was an accusation of treason. Not treason against Israel, though. Rather, they were telling me I had betrayed the entire Jewish people. More to the point, though, the form they gave their accusation rendered my betrayal a physical one, made it of my body, not unlike the “betrayal” that someone who is gay or lesbian is understood to have committed against heteronormative culture, even though my body had never been explicitly at stake in our conversation. You may think I am overstating the case, but that’s how I felt it. I could never have articulated it the way I am doing so now, but I knew immediately, with the totality of apprehension of which only the body is capable – that anyone will recognize who has ever had the validity of their gender questioned in a way intended to other them out of a group in which they had assumed and valued membership – that my colleague’s accusation of self-hatred was an accusation of unmanliness; and the thing about unmanliness, of course, is that the only way to “prove” one is not contaminated by it is to prove one is a man according to the standards of those who made the accusation in the first place.
All nationalisms that I know of share this dynamic. As I am writing, I cannot think of one that does not rely in some way on heteronormativity as a core value, if only because of the requirement that the nation reproduce itself. Obviously, a nation could reproduce itself without being heteronormative, but every nationalism that I can think of has as part of its narrative the story of traditionally heterosexual men and women coming together to have families that will guarantee the nation’s continued existence. The nationalism of white supremacists certainly takes that story as central to itself; German nationalism did as well (I don’t think there is a European nationalism that did not); so did the American nationalism of, say, the communist-scare 1950s (one did not want to be labeled a commie-pinko–fag); the nationalisms that emerged in eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union did; as did the Japanese nationalism of the mid-20th century. The list could go on and on, and so it should come as no surprise that Zionism shares this characteristic.
Now, just to be clear, when I use the word nationalism, I am not talking about the fact of valuing the place and culture into which one was born – a notion I will talk a little bit more about later. Rather, I am talking about nationalism as an ideology that, in one form or another, essentializes (or at least argues for the essential nature of) group identity and/or the characteristics that identify membership in a particular national group. Recognizing this distinction is important because I have, until now, been writing about the Jews as if we are an undifferentiated group, as if being Jewish means the same thing to each of us and as if Jewish identity – i.e., membership in the Jewish nation – is the center of how each of us defines her or himself as a human being. I have been writing this way because I have been talking about antisemitism and, the fact is that, ultimately, the antisemite doesn’t care whether you are gay or straight, trans– or cis-gendered, white or of color, wealthy or not, a patriot or not, a relative or not – and that list could go on and on. What matters to the antisemite is that you are a Jew, period, and if the antisemites are in power and are going to try to wipe the Jews out, you can be sure – because this is what the Nazis did – that every other feature of who you are will be made irrelevant or will be used to prove further the corrupt and diseased nature of the Jew, thereby justifying the project of eliminating us from the face of the earth.
In writing about Zionism and the founding of Israel as responses to antisemitic oppression, in other words, it is almost impossible not – some might even argue that it is necessary–to talk about the Jews as if we were an undifferentiated mass of people. To the degree that the antisemite doesn’t care about whatever else might be true about us, nothing else that is true about us should matter when it comes to protecting us from the antisemite. This is one reason why Israel’s Law of Return was revised in 1970 so that the definition of “Jew” matched, more or less, the broader definition of “Jew” that was used by the Nazis, rather than the traditional, religious definition of someone whose mother was Jewish or who converted to Judaism. Yet even the Law of Return, broad as it is intended to be, makes distinctions that, at the very least, complicate the matter of how the Jews answer the question, Who is a Jew? This is section 4A(a) of the 1970s revision to that law:
The rights of a Jew under this Law and the rights of an oleh under the Nationality Law, 5712 – 1952,*** as well as the rights of an oleh under any other enactment, are also vested in a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew, except for a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion. (Emphasis added)
Even though the Nazis deemed Jewish even those Jews who had converted to Christianity, in other words, Israel’s definition of a Jew is fundamentally religious, suggesting that conversion is the ultimate act of Jewish self-hatred, one which exiles you permanently from the fold; and here’s the thing: as long as there is one act that can result in this kind of exile, there is nothing to prevent others from being added to the list.
Take, for example, the case of transgender people who undergo sexual reassignment surgery. According to Orthodox Judaism, such surgery is prohibited outright; as well, while there is some debate on the matter, as far as I have been able to tell, Orthodox Judaism considers a person who has undergone such surgery to retain her or his pre-surgery gender. According to Orthodox Judaism, in other words, which holds that gender is immutable because it is God-given, sexual reassignment surgery is an extreme act of self-hatred, and given the relatively strict division of gender roles within Orthodox Jewish practice, the implication must be there that, whatever else it might be, sexual reassignment surgery is also an act of hatred against oneself as a Jew. Now, in the limited research that I have done, I have found no one who argues that position, and I seriously doubt that any such argument exists among credible religious authorities. What would happen, however, if we were talking about this not as a question primarily of one’s religious status, but of whether one could become a naturalized Israeli citizen. Consider the following scenario::
Country X is taken over by a fascist régime one goal of which is to eliminate the Jews within its borders, and, just so this example doesn’t get bogged down in comparisons to present-day situations and politics, let’s say that this is happening two hundred or so years from now, when the memory of the Holocaust is no longer so intense and the guilt that might motivate nations to react differently than I am going to ask you to imagine is no longer much of a factor. The Jews are given a certain amount of time during which they will be allowed to leave with all their possessions. Any Jews who remain after that time is up, however, will be killed. Israel responds as Jews throughout the world have been led to expect it to respond, by throwing its doors open to all the Jews of Country X, while the other nations of the world react as many of them probably would have had Israel been around during World War II; they are perfectly happy to say that this is a Jewish problem and so the Jews and Israel are responsible for solving it.
Here’s the problem. Israel, in this future I have imagined, is as small a country as it is now, and it simply cannot physically accommodate within its borders all of the several millions of Jews who live in Country X. Reluctantly, given these limited resources, the Israeli government decides that it must, somehow or other, establish standard to determine which Jews it can and will accept and which it won’t; and let’s assume it is also working feverishly, but with little or no success, to convince other governments to take in the Jews it can’t. So, imagine a married male-to-female transgender Jew – and just to make things a little easier let’s assume the spouse is also Jewish – who goes with her husband to the office that determines which Jews can and cannot go to Israel. The person interviewing them discovers that the woman is transgender and informs the couple of several things:
- Because Orthodox Jewish law [which in this future-Israel is the law that governs all matters related to marriage and sex] does not recognize the validity of transgender identity, if they are allowed to go to Israel and the transgender woman’s identity is discovered, she would, under the law, be considered a man;
- As a result, their marriage would become null because, by Israeli law, it would be defined as a homosexual marriage, which Israel does not recognize;
- A movement is under way to disqualify gay and lesbian Jews from the Law of Return under section 2(b)(2): “An oleh’s visa shall be granted to every Jew who has expressed his desire to settle in Israel, unless the Minister of Immigration is satisfied that the applicant […] (2) is likely to endanger public health or the security of the State.”
The interviewer is very sympathetic and indicates that she is willing to approve the application; she just wants to make sure the couple knows what they are getting themselves into. (Please note: I am making no claims with this example about current Israeli law or policy; especially about #1 and #2, I am simply ignorant. Depending on who holds power in Israel, however, I can see these three items becoming the law of the land.)
If you were that couple, would you go?
I, frankly, don’t know whether I would or not. The hypothetical situation I have created does not contain enough information about the entirety of this couple’s life to be able to make such a decision. I do know for sure, however, that if I did decide to go, it would not be with a sense of having been saved or protected, except in the most limited sense of those words, and it most certainly would not be with any sense of belonging, of having been welcomed “home,” or any of the other metaphors that one would expect to apply to me as a Jew being rescued by the Jewish people and brought to live in the Jewish homeland. Given even the limited knowledge that I have about what it costs transgender people to come to terms with their identity and to win acceptance in a culture that is decidedly hostile to their existence, I could understand a person deciding, in the situation I described above, that she would rather stay and fight the fascist régime than flee to a country where she would, essentially, have to live in hiding (again) in her own home. I can also understand a spouse in that situation deciding that he, too, would rather stay and fight than live the lie they would have to live in the Israel I have imagined.
Some of you, no doubt, will argue that the policy I have imagined is not Zionism, or even part of Zionism. I assume you would say something along the lines of this: that Zionism is – or, if it was not originally, should now be understood as – merely, the belief that the Jews should have a state; and that since a Jewish state already exists in Israel, Israel should continue to exist as a Jewish state. Here’s the thing, though: the transgender woman I have imagined above is being forced to choose between her Jewish identity and the full complexity of her gender identity, between her full human being and her Jewish being, and she is being forced to do so in the name of Israel’s need to determine which Jews will and which will not be accepted as citizens of the Jewish nation. In the name, in other words, of Zionism.
I recognize that there are people working very hard to ensure that a scenario such as the one I have laid out for you will never happen, who have as their goal a definition of what it means to be Jewish that embraces as wide an inclusiveness as possible, and I recognize that the work such people have done is largely responsible for making Israel the most queer-friendly country in the Middle East. Not that there aren’t problems with anti-gay violence and with Israel’s version of Jerry Falwell’s scapegoating gays and lesbians (among others) for the September 11th attacks, but the gay community in Israel has racked up some impressive victories. Chas Newkey Burden summed some of them up in an article he wrote for Ynet News in 2007:
Workplace discrimination against gay people is outlawed; the Knesset had an openly gay member; in schools, teenagers learn about the difficulties of being gay and the importance of treating all sexualities equally. The country’s army, the Israel Defence Force has many dozens of openly gay high-ranking officers who, like all gay soldiers in its ranks, are treated equally by order of the government.
The Supreme Court has ruled that gay couples are eligible for spousal and widower benefits. Nearly all mainstream television dramas in Israel regularly feature gay storylines. When transsexual Dana International won the 1998 Eurovision Song Contest as Israel’s representative, 80 per cent of polled Israelis called her “an appropriate representative of Israel.” (A fuller account of LGBT rights in Israel can be found here.)
Transgender issues have also started to become part of the political process in Israel, though that work is just beginning; and while acceptance of a transgender celebrity is certainly not the same thing as full recognition under the law, the fact that the internationally famous Dana International–who was born Yaron Cohen – was called by 80% of Israelis an “appropriate representative of Israel” when she won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1998 demonstrates at least the possibility of full acceptance of transgender people among the Israeli public.
Nonetheless, to avoid the issues raised by my scenario is to deny that trans– and homophobia, racism, classism and all the other odious otherings we protest so loudly against also exist among the Jews; and, at least as importantly, it is to deny the experience – and therefore, implicitly, the existence – of all those “Jewish Others” who have experienced such othering at the hands of their fellow Jews. It’s important to state this plainly: given the oppression and discrimination that LGBT Jews suffer on a daily basis, at the hands of Jews and non-Jews alike, it would be even more foolish of them not to fear the possibility of my scenario, or some scenario like it, than it would be for me not to fear the possibility of another Hitler taking power somewhere in the world. More to the point, to call self-hatred the doubts about Zionism to which these fears might reasonably give rise, to suggest, as David Schraub did that any Jew who questions Jewish nationalism on the grounds I have outlined here is “adopting a position that [is] not just wrong, but extremely dangerous to Jewish lives and equality”, is to force on those Jews precisely the choice forced on the transgender woman in my scenario. It is to ask them for a promise of loyalty to the Jewish people even if that promise costs them other, equally (if not more) fundamental parts of who they are. No movement that demands such an oath can ever claim fully to represent everyone whose identity overlaps with the territory the movement claims for itself, and any such movement that makes the claim has at its core a fundamental dishonesty that, to me anyway, disqualifies it from the loyalty it presumes to demand.
///
So, does that mean I think Israel should not exist? No.
Does that mean I think there should be no such thing as a Jewish state? No, though I think the question of whether Israel should remain a Jewish state in its present form should be left to the people who actually live there.
Does that mean I think Zionism should be eliminated? No, I acknowledge that movements can evolve, though a nationalism that does not include some kind of loyalty test or some form of an othering accusation of self-hatred is hard for me to imagine.
Does that mean I do not think the Jews need a safe haven in the world? No, of course we do, but so do a lot of other people who have suffered oppression, and the fact that I can feel like I have one, imperfect though it might be, results from a privilege that not many Jews like me, at least not the ones I have met – straight, white, cisgender, middle class – are willing to acknowledge. We are privileged first of all because Israel came into being at the cost of the disenfranchisement of the Palestinians, and we are privileged because we can take for granted a welcome in Israel that LGBT Jews – not to mention Jews of color, and perhaps other kinds of Jews as well about whom I have not even talked – cannot. (In my scenario, if the fascist régime counted Jews for Jesus as Jews, would Israel have taken them in even though they had changed their religion?)
Does this mean I am trying to talk out of both sides of my mouth? I hope not, but you’ll have to wait for Part 5, which I hope will not take me as long to post, to watch me try to work through the answer to that question.
What puzzles me is the claim that LGBT folks are more oppressed in Israel than they are in other places; that there is a reason to be particularly fearful in Israel. Israel is an improvement on the rest of the Middle East (it even has accepted non-Jewish LGBT refugees being persecuted elsewhere, whereas the U.S. government doesn’t recognize sexual orientation or gender as a basis for asylum), and I would say it is ahead of every nation except for a few European countries and perhaps Canada.
I can see no reason for an American lesbian or transgender Jew to feel *more* threatened in Israel than she does in the U.S., unless she frames things in a very localized way (i.e. compares how safe she feels in San Francisco to how safe she would feel in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Jerusalem, instead of the more appropriate comparison to how safe she would feel in downtown Tel Aviv).
Certainly there is oppression toward LGBT folks in Israel, but there is oppression against them just about everywhere. It seems unfair single out Israel as peculiarly oppressive and to hold Israel to a higher standard in this, just as Israel seems to be held to a higher standard in so many areas (e.g. minimizing civilian casualties when acting in self-defense). No place is perfect.
Also, on a practical basis, in your hypothetical Country X’s planned genocide of Jews, I would think Israel would have the easiest time persuading other countries to accept the Jews who were most socially acceptable in those countries (the Einsteins and the easily-assimilated). So it would be logical for Israel to take the Jews who were less acceptable to the other countries, i.e. those who belong to racial or sexual minorities.
Okay, just a couple of points about language:
“Male-to-female” is considered by many to be offensive language because it has a way of third gendering trans women who are – simply – women.
Likewise: “Trans woman” (two words) is better than “transwoman” because it posits “trans” as an adjective, in a sense, while “transwoman” as one word sounds like “a specific – and other – type of woman.”
I’m not trans. And not trying to speak for the trans community as a whole. They’re mistakes I could’ve made not that long ago, but I did want to point them out. Julia Serano’s book, Whipping Girl, is a good place to start for learning why certain language choices like this can be hurtful.
On to the content of your post: I find this “scenario of the future” tactic a bit confusing, and I’m curious as to why you chose to frame your piece in this way? I’ll admit that I find it a bit off-putting, given that trans people are dealing with real, on the ground forms of persecution and discrimination right now.
As someone who is queer (but not Jewish or trans): I can’t get married right now. I live in fear of beatings, abuse, and job discrimination should I happen to come out to the wrong people. I live in a small university town where LGBTQ organizations sometimes receive death threats. I can’t be out to my (mostly het male) students; at best, they’ll exclaim on how “hot” this is. At worst, they’ll follow me home and assault me. It has happened around here; it’s a palpable fear for a queer woman living alone. Moreover, I’ve watched the ascendancy of the Christian Right – and its rhetoric about the Gay Agenda – with more than a little fear of political persecution.
I point these things out because I think it’s important to acknowledge that people who are not traditionally gendered are dealing with forms of oppression here on the ground, in the US and everywhere we go, and your cataclysmic scenario of the future seems to diminish that reality. The point is: Some of us can’t think that far ahead because we’re preoccupied with our own survival right now. To be able to abstract to some scenario of the future feels (to me) like a very privileged move, and I’d like for you to say more about it.
In addition, just jumping off one of the comments over at Alas: I think that one of the reasons it’s possible to read your piece as suggesting some kind of scenario of the future in which Jewishness is the only sort of “othering” that matters is your claim that: “Once they know you’re Jewish, that’s the only thing that will matter about you.” I don’t think it’s terribly difficult to misread your piece in that way, so I hope that you’ll expound upon that section a bit further as well.
Kristin:
One more quick thing, which just occurred to me: I just realized that while I was reading this section, I was, without really being conscious of it, writing to a Jewish audience. I was not really thinking about how this would read to non-Jews, which is not to say that the questions you raise are any less valid, but that I think, given a non-Jewish readership, some of what I wrote could have been framed a little differently.
There’s a lot here that I’m still trying to process, and I don’t know that I have a very intelligent response at this point.
I do have a concern about the conclusion you draw from your future scenario. You write:
This framing seems to suggest that if Zionism could somehow be “perfected,” such that every other identity that Jewish people might have could be not just accommodated but honored and respected (as David has said it should), then Zionism might have a right to demand the loyalty of all Jews.
Based on everything else you’ve written, I don’t think this is your position. In looking at this question of “self-hatred” (on which I have some other thoughts that I’ll try to articulate later), I’m curious why you chose to conclude with this scenario in which someone’s multiple sources of identity come into conflict, as opposed to say, the broader issue of two people who look at all the same historical facts and simply come to different conclusions. It seems to me that in this question of self-hatred/Zionism/anti-Zionism, there is a very basic principle of freedom of conscience at stake that applies no matter how we shape our identities as Jews and no matter how that identity intersects with our other identities.
Richard: Thanks for your response. I’ll have to think more about what you’ve said here as well. One of my other concerns, though, is your claim that antisemitism has more or less the same structure worldwide. I was wondering if you could say more about what you mean by this?
I’ve mentioned here that I have poststructuralist inclinations, so that’s part of where I’m coming from here. Blanket statements like this don’t make a lot of sense to me since, of course, antisemitism has a different history in the US from that in South Africa from that in Germany from that in… Well, I would think that specific historical contexts would have a lot to do with the way in which any “-ism” manifests itself on the ground anywhere. And while there might be similarities (and certainly, if one is talking about the influence of Western philosophical thought, it does transcend location.), I would think… Well, in any case, I was surprised that you claimed this, and I wanted to verify… Is this your position, or are you claiming that it is something you were taught? And if it is your position, could you say more about why? And, given differences in the way in which things are expressed on the ground everywhere, what specifically are you claiming is uniform?
btw, chingona, I’m continuing our discussion wrt the Religious Right in a thread below.
chingona: My response is in part 3 of this series.
Perhaps I should let Richard speak for himself, but his claim that antisemitism is basically the same around the world seemed to me self-evident. It seems to me that antisemitism exists around the world in basically the same form, and only varies in degree and in the political leverage wielded by those who espouse it.
I don’t really have a theoretical vocabulary here, and I’m not really debating structural vs. nonstructural, but it seems to me that most ethnically based forms of oppression are very context specific. If a Kurdish person of Turkish nationality comes to the United States, he’ll likely face the same discrimination or prejudice directed toward Muslims/Middle Eastern people in general that have as their base our political conflicts with the Muslim world. But he’s not going to face prejudice directed toward him as a Kurd, the way he would in Turkey.
But antisemitism seems to follow Jews around the world regardless of the political context, and everywhere it consists of the same basic beliefs — that Jews control everything, that Jews represent a fifth column whose loyalty is to Israel or to each other and not to their country, that Jews are a poison or cancer who must be rooted out, and in Christian countries, that Jews are Christ-killers. That was part of what I was getting at with my stories about Paraguay. David has a post up now about some disturbing stuff going on in Venezuela that is different only in degree to what’s going on in South Africa.
I don’t know if that addresses your question, but that’s how I see it.
chingona: I guess what I’m getting at is… What is the content that gives this the same form, when, for instance, a South African state official can get away with saying something like what she said whereas an American state official could not? What’s the same about it? So, perhaps the ideas of the person who would say them in either context are similar, but the consequences of the statement (here vs. there) are not.
Also, the antisemitism (or whatever you would call it) of the Christian Right seems to be of a different form based on the idealization of the Jews as “God’s Chosen people,” right? It just seems to me that… Every form of oppression differs according to the context in which it takes place.
So, I would suspect that – while there might be similar trends in the way in which antisemitism is expressed worldwide – well… I think everything happens in a very specific historical context, and it’s not possible to say, “This example of antisemitism in South Africa is exactly the same as the example of antisemitism at a DC ANSWER rally.” While the content may (in some cases) be similar…
Certainly the consequences will differ, as will the responses of the crowd, the likelihood that the comment will be challenged, and the likely effects of the sentiments on the greater (Jewish and non-Jewish) community. On one hand, I fear violent expulsion and at least a willingness of the authorities to turn a blind eye if Jews should be violently targeted in South Africa. I don’t think this is as likely in the States, and while certainly not impossible, it’s hard to imagine it taking such a widespread form as (it possibly could) in South Africa.
What I see in statements like this is an insistence that antisemitism is fixed, and I don’t see how anyone can claim that. If it’s so fixed, then why has it become demonstrably less virulent in some parts of the US in recent years? And why is there a fear at the back of anyone’s mind that it could get worse at some point? It wouldn’t change if it really took the same form worldwide. So, my confusion is… I’m confused about what it is that people are suggesting is uniform.
“But antisemitism seems to follow Jews around the world regardless of the political context, and everywhere it consists of the same basic beliefs — that Jews control everything, that Jews represent a fifth column whose loyalty is to Israel or to each other and not to their country, that Jews are a poison or cancer who must be rooted out, and in Christian countries, that Jews are Christ-killers.”
So, if the claim is that the content is demonstrably the same, I really don’t see what differences that makes since… It’s the *effects* of the antisemitism that matter in people’s lives. Also, I do think the antisemitism of the Christian Right takes a different form. To wit, you won’t here many people drawing on these more traditional forms of antisemitism among them, but they *do* want to get all of the Jewish people in the world to move to Israel so that they can either be killed (in Armageddon) or accept Jesus.
Also, I really believe… The context of an antisemitic person matters. A Palestinian who expresses antisemitism in response to colonial occupation or a South African who expresses antisemitism in thinking about the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa… While the words these people use may in some cases be the same, I do think this is different from… Oh, I don’t know, an exceptionally privileged person spouting antisemitism (for instance, Mel Gibson). And while I’m not attempting to justify any form, I do think it’s important to recognize the contexts in which these things are said. Even if it’s hard for people to hear them differently, I would argue that they are. A South African and a Palestinian may have a harder time viewing this as anything but an oppressive colonial situation, whereas someone who has never been harmed by such a situation might not. And their bigoted views would be coming from a very different place than that of the self-entitled white dude who simply despises everyone who is Other. I’m not excusing either. I am saying… I’d be able to sit down with the South African claiming a commitment to anti-oppression work and challenge his or her view. With the neo-Nazi, I probably wouldn’t even bother.
I just think… Context is important in these discussions. The statements *can* certainly affect people in parallel ways, but I think the statement sounds as if one is saying: “Antisemitism takes the same form – that is, that of the Nazis – everywhere.” And I don’t see how that could be the case. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be the more subtle cases that Richard talks about, for instance, in Part 3.
The consequences right now are not the same. As I said in the other thread, I’m about 95 percent confident that we won’t see a return of widespread, state-sponsored antisemitism in the United States. But when somewhere between a quarter and a third of the population ascribe to certain beliefs that are fundamentally antisemitic (Jews are not loyal to America, the Jews killed Jesus), well, that last 5 percent of me isn’t going away anytime soon.
And as David said in the other thread, there’s a bit of a Catch-22 in that if attempts to make antisemitism less socially/politically acceptable in other countries are successful, that just feeds into antisemitic ideas about Jewish control of everything and has consequences here.
You’re right that this is different in a very important way. However, it doesn’t really give me a lot of comfort. One thing that’s very clear to me is that the final form of Israel’s borders is of absolutely vital importance to Christian Zionists. If the Israeli government were to accept a two-state solution that returned Israel to its 1967 borders and allowed a viable Palestinian state to exist in the West Bank, I could imagine this being perceived as an incredible betrayal and an effort to thwart God’s will, and I could imagine those Christians becoming quite hostile to all Jews as proxies for the Israeli government.
chingona:
Yeah, I think Pat Robertson actually claimed that Sharon’s ill health was a result of “God’s punishment” or something.
“You’re right that this is different in a very important way. However, it doesn’t really give me a lot of comfort.”
This is understandable. I’m not in a position to suggest how much concern one should – or should not – have about a certain outcome. But I do think it’s important that the difference is…on the table.
Also, yeah, the statistics are troubling and surprising to me, to be honest. I wonder… So, I took a lot of statistics back when I was a social scientist, and I’m not – generally speaking – particularly trusting of them. Ever. Richard, did you have a link to the statistical study that came up with these statistics?
A couple of quick points, Kristin, that I hope respond to some of what you are asking:
1. I think it would have been more accurate if I had specified 20th (and maybe 19th) century antisemitism; historically, bias against Jews in Muslim countries – as I understand it at least – had a different rhetoric, though I think there, too, there were questions about, for example, the sexually diseased nature of the Jews.
2. Much, though not all, of what you see in Arab countries, Muslim countries outside the Middle East, Asian nations is transplanted European antisemitism.
3. I don’t know enough about the antisemitism of which Christian “idealization” of the Jews is a part to know whether or not those people, if you scratch the surface, might not also hold some of the more conventional antisemitic attitudes. If they do not, if the only thing about them that was antisemitic was this “idealization,” then I would agree that is a radically different form of antisemitism than I am acquainted with.
4. I think what I am suggesting is uniform is not so much the expression of antisemitism at any given time all over the world, but rather the attitudes, etc. More, if you look at the span of Jewish history and you consider how often, in how many centuries and in how many countries those attitudes have formed the basis of violence against Jews: pogroms, expulsions, genocide, it’s hard to avoid feeling like it is a phenomenon that weaves itself in and out of history and that it can appear anywhere at any time.
5. I am not arguing that antisemitism is essential, which is what it would have to be in order to be fixed and universal, but I am not sure that claiming it is global is the same thing; nor do I think that asserting that it has similar characteristics when it does “flare up” (to use an understating metaphor), even if it flares up in different times and places, is arguing that it is essential.
6. I am not trying to compare the oppression of the Jews to the oppression of women in scope or degree, but think about how consistent the terms of the oppression of women have been across time and place. Obviously sexism is different in degree according to any number of variables, but it is, nonetheless, global and consistent. (Now that I have written that, I am not sure it works, but I am going to leave it here as a spark to discussion.)
7. Ok, you have to promise me not to keep talking about this in a way that compels me to break my promise to myself to focus on the pile of papers sitting on my desk.
Damn! I forgot about the emoticons. I hate that too.
Because German Jews before the 1930s were assimilated, successful, intermarried, German-speaking, German-identified, integrated socially and politically in their communities, everything that American Jews are today.
This question of how much weight we give the Holocaust in our understanding of our own world is a pretty big question for modern Jews, and it’s part of the discussion of this post over at Alas. It’s a complicated question, and I tend to think a lot of us give it too much weight. But each individual brings a lot of different experiences into the discussion, and I don’t think there’s one right way to view it.
But that’s why it’s at the back of everyone’s mind.
The links to the statistics I quoted are in the post; they are to the Anti-Defamation League’s reporting on the antisemitism, if that is what you are talking about.
Okay, most of what you’re saying here makes sense, and I agree with some of it. But here:
“I am not trying to compare the oppression of the Jews to the oppression of women in scope or degree, but think about how consistent the terms of the oppression of women have been across time and place.”
While I can be sympathetic to your claim that antisemitism is global, and I’m sympathetic to claims that sexism is global, I… I saw more of a claim about content in your piece, though. To be clear, I’m doing a dual PhD in Women’s Studies, and while I understand that there are in fact many feminists who hold this view (I have had them as professors.), I am not one of them. I don’t think it’s generally helpful to generalize about women’s oppression, and I think that the way in which this was done throughout Second Wave feminism ended up being very oppressive for many women of color, trans women, queer women, postcolonial women, and working class women. So, I don’t view people who dismiss the term “feminist” because they feel excluded by many dominant feminist voices are being “traitors” or are in any way “dangerous” to women. You did walk into some interesting parallels, there, I must say. So, I’m not okay with people making this claim about women either, no.
But otherwise, yes, what you say is interesting, and I agree with the vast majority of your seven points here, but I think it might be helpful to be clearer about what you mean.
“But that’s why it’s at the back of everyone’s mind.”
Yes, I know. I understood the context and didn’t ask that question. I was claiming that I’m not in a position to speak about the…legitimacy of this fear or not, but that I understand why it exists.
Richard wrote:
This, too. It’s not just the Holocaust. It’s that the last 2,000 years are marked by periods of not just tolerance but actual acceptance giving way to oppression and horrific violence with a change in the political or economic environment.
The United States is different than Europe in some important ways in regards to this question, and I think Jewish identity, particularly in the United States, is changing in ways that are unprecedented in Jewish history, and all of this could add up to the conclusion that history doesn’t tell us much about the position of Jews in this country and this century or for the indefinite future. But if someone were to counter that by scoffing at the notion of the end of history or some brave new post-antisemitic world, well, I’d have to give that some weight, as well.
And though the content might in some cases be the same, it’s hard for me to accept that Arab antisemitism is nothing but “transplanted European antisemitism.” Of course, I get that there are parallels and similarities. But I firmly believe that nothing gets transplanted in any “pure” form, and is always stated and restated by people who are speaking out of a particular social, historical, political, and cultural context. So, I could accept the claim that European antisemitism has influenced Arab antisemitism to a great degree, but I do not think they are exactly the same thing.
Richard: Also, in response to what you said on your blog. I too felt that this post sounded as if it were written with more of a Jewish audience in mind, which is why it took me so long to comment in the first place. Obviously, I’m out of place if this is meant to be a conversation among Jewish people. That said, my claim is about generalizations, largely because it’s what I do in academia (That is, I critique generalizations.), and because I never find them helpful when they are deployed to explain my own oppressions. So, again… Similiarities, comparisons, sure. But, yeah. I’m uncomfortable with the generalizations.
“But if someone were to counter that by scoffing at the notion of the end of history or some brave new post-antisemitic world, well, I’d have to give that some weight, as well.”
Understood. What do you mean, though, by the “notion of the end of history”? Are you talking about Hegel here? Because I don’t think we’re moving toward some kind of Idealized End of History (as its understood in German Idealist thought) either, but I’m not certain whether or not that’s what you’re referring to.
Richard wrote:
This makes sense. After I wrote my first comment, I started thinking about how an individual’s anti-Zionist principles might well be set aside if moving to Israel were a question of saving your own life or the life of your loved ones. Talking about who gets to be a Jew and who gets to count and why puts a different perspective on the question.
I think the really open way that we get to make our own Jewish identity in the United States presents a lot of challenges here, as well. My mother was a non-Orthodox convert, so in some circles my own Jewishness is questionable, which in turn casts doubt on my son’s Jewishness. We’d all be covered under the current Law of Return because of my father’s unquestionable Jewishness, but give American Jews another three or four generations of intermarriage, conversion and self-made identity and it could get pretty complicated.
I also think the connection between Zionism and masculinity is important. If I think of anything more to say on this, I might comment over at Alas.
correction:
“Richard: Also, in response to what you said on your blog.”
I meant what you said at Alas… Sorry.
I should have remembered that you study philosophy. I don’t know about Hegel. I’m using it in a way I’ve heard it used in more popular (not academic) contexts to refer to the idea that somehow we’ve reached this place where everything that came before is irrelevant and doesn’t apply. I could very well have used the phrase incorrectly.
That’s more or less what it means in philosophy – that societal transcendence is possible and the creation of a kind of idealized society can be attained. But I don’t think the trajectory of history is quite that neat – or that it clearly moves toward “progress” in any sense of the word. Oddly, I’ve never heard it in popular usage. How funny. So, in any case, I think it’s kind of an unhelpful notion – because I *do* think that history, context, culture, and specificity will always be important. But also because the history of human atrocities does not seem to me to clearly move toward…well, less atrocity. So, I agree with you that it’s important to be on guard against it. My claim was – more specifically – about the more generalizing claim about how antisemitism operates.
But, btw, the term “end of history,” did get more…play in the public sphere when Francis Fukayama wrote his famous neocon screed about it (and badly used Hegel to do it).
Oh, hey, I’d also like to trouble the claim that queer people in Israel are better off than queer people anywhere else in the Middle East. I can’t speak to the situation in Israel, at all, but I never like to see the ME painted in such broad strokes. I have spent a good bit of time in Morocco, for instance, and while I am sure one’s level of safety has a lot to do with one’s presentation (i.e., my experience in Morocco may have been different if I appeared only a *little* less femme. But it would also be quite different in the US. So, I do have the privilege that comes with being able to “pass” in dangerous situations as straight.)… I mean, some people include Morocco as “the ME” and some don’t (fwiw, Moroccans themselves do tend to think of themselves as Arabs.). And I felt safe there. I traveled alone, all over the country, over a period of a few months.
I think the level at which rights are codified in law are only a *small* part of what go into making a queer person feel safe in any given context. It also has a lot to do with the way in which people respond to this knowledge about you on the ground (and whether or not the government is going to be inclined to want to protect you on the ground given this…Other that you represent.). Again, I don’t know the details here wrt Isreal, *but*… I feel much less “safe” in terms of being out in many small towns in the US than I ever did in Morocco. And I think there have been far too many generalizations about the Middle East over the course of some of these threads.
Kristin: re queer people in Israel: Middle East may have been too broad a term – though, I will confess to my own unexamined assumption here, I never seem to think of Morocco as part of the Middle East. But it would be worth your while to check out the links in the post to sites and articles dealing with queers in Israel. I understand that codified rights are a very small part of the picture, but there are significant ways in which Israeli society seems to have moved beyond that.
Yeah, actually, a lot of Arabs don’t think of Moroccans as part of the Middle East, who are hugely discriminated against in the Arab world… In turn, Moroccans think of themselves as Arabs and discriminate against the Black Africans – and sometimes the Berbers – in the country. A terrible cycle, that kind of nationalism. And a broad statement, but yeah, Moroccans do think very much of themselves as part of the ME and “Arab world.”
In any case, I’ll check out your links at some point soon. I wasn’t making a claim about Israel, just stating that I’d rather the ME as a whole not be dismissed quite so easily.
I probably picked up “end of history” on the op-ed pages. I don’t believe in it, either.
Yeah, that was my guess.
Re: antisemitism being “fixed” — I think the reason that someone would worry about antisemitism increasing in the United States while still seeing it as more or less “fixed” (I don’t think that I, or Richard, or chingona think of it as “fixed” in the way that Kristen is using the term) is that the person believes that antisemitism still exists in the United States in higher concentrations but that it has, for a variety of reasons, been de-emphasized and submerged recently. It’s still there, is just not being officially or widely tapped into, and so it appears to be “less” when really it’s just less visible or less conscious but no less there.
Emily: It’s honestly not clear to me how it’s being used, which is why I keep asking for clarification.
Except that Richard never described antisemitism as “fixed” — that was your word, introduced in response to Richard calling it “a single, global phenomenon.” I don’t think the average reader would read “a single, global phenomenon” to mean a fixed level of hatred of jews that manifests itself in the same way in every culture and context. It just means that it has the same basic principles and exists all over the globe, with prominence and acceptability varying over time and place but with the same basic structure and never really going away. Different apples look rather different, some are red, some are green, some are yellow, but they’re all apples. They share enough characteristics that it’s useful to us to give them one name. My interpretation of Richard’s point was that antisemitism shares enough of the same characteristics, manifestations and results accross the world as to be a single phenomenon.
Up above, I referred to my own “right of return” and that of my son being secured by my father’s Jewishness. After I wrote that, I remembered reading this article about the difficulties some Israelis of American descent have “proving” their Jewishness before rabbinic authorities when they want to marry. (If you don’t want to read the whole thing, the gist is that Israel has no civil marriage and the Orthodox have a stranglehold on family matters and they run the non-Orthodox through the wringer.)
And I realized that my own son, even if he grows up to be straight and male-identified — that is, a white, Ashkenazi, straight, cisgender man — exactly the person who is supposedly the most privileged in Israeli society — might well not be able to marry in Israel.
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PG:
I am unsure what the point of your first three paragraphs is, especially since I made clear in the post that Israel is the most queer friendly country in the region – and, though I did not say this explicitly, is in some ways more progressive than the US on these issues. Are you responding to me or to GallingGalla’s assertions elsewhere that Israel is very hostile to LGBT folk?
And I am similarly unsure about the point of your last paragraph. It is, of course, always possible to reimagine a scenario, but the point of mine was not about other possible outcomes, but about the choice forced upon the transwoman in the specific outcome I imagined. You might want to argue that you think the outcome I imagined is not likely, but that still does not invalidate the questions raised by the scenario as I described it; and it is those questions that I am interested in exploring.
Kristin: First, thanks for the bits about language. It’s good to know. Regarding the future scenario: I wanted a situation in which a trans woman would be forced by Israel to choose between her gender identity and her Jewish identity and, as I understand it, current Israeli law – because it is, in fact, quite progressive when it comes to LGBT issues – does not make that choice as starkly necessary as the situation I posited. Not that the situation in Israel is by any means perfect, but from what I understand there is certainly more “room to maneuver” than in a lot of other places.
I think you are right that my scenario does leave out the oppression people who are not traditionally gendered deal with right here and right now in the United States, and it is part of why I wrote this sentence:
I am not claiming that this ameliorates your concerns entirely, and perhaps I could have said more or said it differently; I am just pointing out that I tried to address those concerns. It’s also, I think, important to remember that I am talking in this post about accusations of Jewish self-hatred and I was trying to show, using an (admittedly imperfect) example involving a trans woman, how such an accusation positions LGBT Jews within the Jewish community in such a way that, if they want to be accepted as Jews by those who are making the accusation, they have on some level to deny their experience of oppression because of being LGBT, which may have very little to do with their experience as Jews. (I am thinking of GallingGalla’s points about where antisemitism fits into her experiences.) If I understand you correctly, you read my scenario as also rendering that experience invisible in a way that reflects my privilege, and you may be right. It may be that I have overreached in constructing the scenario as I did, or that I need to construct it differently. I need to think about that.
Finally, you wrote:
As I understand it – and I could be wrong – once the Nazis found out someone was Jewish, any other axis along which that person might have been oppressed, gender, sexual orientation, whatever was seen as proof of the corrupt nature of the Jew. In other words, regardless of how the individual person might have experienced their identity, the Nazis construed and constructed it all as aspects of the disease that was Jewishness. The full passage from which you are quoting, which was setting the context for what I wanted to say about the Law of Return, was this:
When I was first learning about Zionism, The Law of Return, etc., I was taught that Israel would offer a safe haven to any Jew. The only thing that mattered, I was taught, was that the antisemite should define you as a Jew according to the criteria used by the Nazis. In actual fact, however, depending on who is in power in Israel – and, even right now, if you are a Jew who converted – that is not the case.
I am writing quickly because I need to get back to my work, and so I am starting to fumble for words a bit and so this comment is beginning to feel disjointed, so let me just say this: I was in the section you are talking about writing about the ways in which antisemites conceive of the nature of the Jew, not the way Jews of color or LGBT Jews or whatever other sub-group of Jews might fit might experience the various facets of who they are. More to the point, I was trying to point out that, if the Law of Return is supposed, among other things, to guarantee Jews a safe haven from antisemitism, then precisely because one’s being Jewish is, ultimately, the only thing the antisemite cares about – because everything else becomes subsumed under the the notion of the Jew as diseased and corrupt – then being Jewish, according to the antisemite’s criteria, should be the only criteria that Israel takes in account when applying the Law of Return. In the case of Jews who have converted, this is explicitly not the case, and, depending on who is in power in Israel at any given time and what their attitudes are, the Law of Return could also be interpreted to exclude other groups of Jews in a similar way.
Oy! I have a lot of work to do and I really shouldn’t be responding to this now, but.…
Chingona, you wrote:
The simple answer is that, before I get to the second possibility you mention, I wanted to bring out the fact that there are very concrete ways in which questions of Zionism, etc. are not simply about a matters conscience, but can in fact become legal ones. I could have, and in retrospect maybe I should have, made the trans woman in my example someone who saw herself as a committed Zionist. The question you raise about basic freedom and conscience are things I want to talk about in Part 5, which I was hoping I would not have to wrote (I have so much else to get to).
Also, you wrote:
In fact, I think you are right that this is not my position, but I am willing to acknowledge that I could be wrong, that Zionism is a movement that could evolve into something very different than it is now and it is not my place to declare as impossible the possibility you see implied in what I wrote.
Ok, now I am really going back to work; so if it takes me a while to respond to comments, I hope you will understand.