I have no idea what it is like for an African-American boy or girl to come fully to the real­iza­tion that it was not so long ago in this coun­try that they would have been someone’s prop­erty, or for a girl con­sciously to expe­ri­ence her body for the first time through the knowl­edge of her own sex­ual objec­ti­fi­ca­tion in a patri­ar­chal soci­ety, or for some­one who is gay or les­bian to under­stand that it is the con­tent of their desire, in all of its com­plex­ity, as much as, if not more than, what they do sex­u­ally with their bod­ies for which this soci­ety so reviles them. The list, of course, could include many more groups – Native Amer­i­cans, for exam­ple, or trans­gen­dered peo­ple, or dis­abled peo­ple – but I imag­ine that, for mem­bers of each group, the moment of aware­ness I am talk­ing about is sim­i­lar to what I felt when I really under­stood for the first time that you could draw a direct line from, say, the expe­ri­ences of Jew­ish money lenders in the Mid­dle Ages to what I expe­ri­enced when my third grade class­mates threw pen­nies at me, or that the silence of my teacher in fifth grade, not to men­tion that of the town gov­ern­ment in the face of the graf­fiti on the library wall, or that of my “friends” who stood by while the anti­se­mitic kids in the neigh­bor­hood threw rocks at me, was really not so dif­fer­ent from the silence of the peo­ple and the gov­ern­ments who stood by while the Holo­caust was being per­pe­trated. The world was, or at least was for me, a dan­ger­ous place to be Jew­ish. If I had been born in Ger­many twenty years ear­lier, or if Hitler had won…well, you can imag­ine where that train of thought leads.

Not that I thought for one moment my sit­u­a­tion was as bad as the Jews had it in Nazi Ger­many or medieval Europe or, to take what would have been a con­tem­po­rary exam­ple at the time, the for­mer Soviet Union, where Jews were being pretty openly per­se­cuted just for being Jews. That it could get that bad pretty quickly and eas­ily, how­ever, was more than appar­ent to me, and so the Jew­ish edu­ca­tion I received, in both the Con­ser­v­a­tive syn­a­gogue where I went to Hebrew School until I was in 8^th grade and the ortho­dox yeshiva I attended from 8^th through 11^th grades, which focused pretty exten­sively on con­struct­ing Jew­ish his­tory as one long and coher­ent nar­ra­tive of per­se­cu­tion and mar­tyr­dom, until the for­ma­tion of the State of Israel, was one that I felt the right­ness of with a phys­i­cal sense of things “click­ing” into place. The per­sonal – and I am, of course, very explic­itly invok­ing fem­i­nist con­scious­ness rais­ing as a par­al­lel – was becom­ing the polit­i­cal; and it was, absolutely, an embod­ied pol­i­tics. My body – because no mat­ter how you cut it, it was ulti­mately about my body – was, to para­phrase June Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights” the wrong body, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. (And if you don’t know the poem I am refer­ring to, you should put this post aside right now and go read it; it is that important.)

On the one hand, of course, as I men­tioned in part one of this series, my phys­i­cal safety was threat­ened. I remem­ber once being backed up against the brick wall of a build­ing across the street from the school­yard where John Bar­tow and I had our fight – I was in high school at the time – by four or five kids, one of them swing­ing a chain, all of whom were try­ing to goad me into throw­ing the first punch so they would have a self-defense ratio­nale for hav­ing attacked me. (They had, all or most of them, been in trou­ble with the police and did not want the trou­ble that hit­ting me first would bring down on their heads.) Not a sin­gle per­son who walked by stopped to help.

Another time, on Hal­loween, this same group of kids exe­cuted a care­fully planned ambush when I got off the school bus. To get to my build­ing, I had to walk through a fairly long park­ing lot, with garages on the right and the out­door park­ing spaces on the left. Some of these kids were hid­ing behind the parked cars, wait­ing for me to pass them so they could come out and start throw­ing eggs and other things at me. I refused to run and kept walk­ing at my nor­mal pace, despite the fact that some of the things being thrown were quite painful when they hit me in the back. When I got to the end of the park­ing lot, as I walked up the stone steps that led to the walk­way at the side of my build­ing, the lead­ers of this gang came out from where they were hid­ing, and I was sud­denly sur­rounded by about 10 boys – some of whom had been kids I played with when I was in ele­men­tary school – who knocked me to ground and started kick­ing and punch­ing me, call­ing out anti­se­mitic epi­thets the entire time they did so. This was in broad day­light, and they were loud, and I know for a fact there were moth­ers at home because they were the moth­ers of kids I knew, and maybe there were peo­ple who walked by – this I don’t know because I was curled in the fetal posi­tion on the ground – but no one seemed to notice what these boys were doing to me.

Even­tu­ally, there was a lull in their attack and I was able to stand up. I don’t know why, but when I did so, the group backed away, and when I started to walk towards my build­ing, they opened the cir­cle so I could leave – sud­denly they were silent – and I walked home with­out even a glance back­wards. Remark­ably, I was unhurt, but when I closed the front door behind me, my mother took one look at me and called the police. One of the things the boys had thrown at me had red dye in it, and since I was wear­ing white pants, the dye looked like it might be blood. When the offi­cer arrived, I opened the door, and he imme­di­ately asked if I needed an ambu­lance. I had for­got­ten to change my pants. Once he real­ized I had not been stabbed, his demeanor changed. He took my state­ment, mut­tered some plat­i­tudes about how kids will be kids and you can’t do much about it, and then he left. I changed my clothes, put the pants in to be washed – the red never came out and so I did not wear them ever again – and went on with the rest of my day, and as far as I know noth­ing was ever done to fol­low up on my com­plaint. Except for mine and my mother’s mem­ory of it, the entire even seemed to have van­ished into nothingness.

Phys­i­cal safety, how­ever, was not the only way my body was at stake in the anti­semitism that per­vaded so much of my child­hood. Once I started to grow, espe­cially once I hit puberty, the kids in my neigh­bor­hood latched on to the fact that I had “a Jew­ish nose,” and they teased me about it mer­ci­lessly, some­times to the point where I would run home in tears and refuse to show my face out­side for the rest of the day. Nei­ther they, nor I, at the time, had any way of know­ing that “the Jew­ish nose” is an anti­se­mitic trope with a long his­tory. As Beth Pre­minger points out in “The ‘Jew­ish Nose’ and Plas­tic Surgery: Ori­gins and Impli­ca­tions,” the promi­nent anthro­pol­o­gist Robert Knox, described the Jew­ish nose in 1850 as “large, mas­sive, club-shaped, hooked [and] three or four times larger than suits the face.… Thus it is that the Jew­ish face [is never and can never be] per­fectly beau­ti­ful.”  This lack of beauty, Sander Gilman argues In The Jew’s Body, was under­stood “not merely [as] a mat­ter of aes­thet­ics but [as] a clear sign of pathol­ogy, of dis­ease [and] syphilis [was the dis­ease under­stood to be respon­si­ble] for the form of [the Jew­ish] nose” (173). The Nazis, of course, made use of the Jew­ish nose as an iden­ti­fy­ing fea­ture of the Jew. Here, for exam­ple, is “Lit­tle Karl” from How To Tell A Jew, a story in Der Gift­pilz, an anti­se­mitic children’s book pub­lished by Julius Stre­icher, the pub­lisher of Der Stürmer:

One can most eas­ily tell a Jew by his nose. The Jew­ish nose is bent at its point. It looks like the num­ber six. We call it the Jew­ish six. Many non-Jews also have bent noses. But their noses bend upwards, not down­wards. Such a nose is a hook nose or an eagle nose. It is not at all like a Jew­ish nose.

Look at any anti­se­mitic car­i­ca­ture of the Jew from the 19^th cen­tury until today, and the the Jew­ish nose will fig­ure quite promi­nently. You can find these car­i­ca­tures in Nazi pub­li­ca­tions like Der Stürmer, in anti-Israel car­toons through­out the Arab world, in France in the 1890s and even as recently as 1996, in plas­tic surgery man­u­als that, accord­ing to Pre­minger, con­tin­ued to por­tray the Jew­ish nose as a deformity.

As I said above, nei­ther I nor the kids who teased me so cru­elly could pos­si­bly have known at the time that they were con­tin­u­ing a long tra­di­tion of see­ing the Jews’ body as deformed and dis­eased, but the effect of their teas­ing was, nonethe­less, to make me see my body in pre­cisely that way, and so I grew up with an image of myself as hor­ri­bly ugly. Even when I entered the yeshiva in eighth grade, despite the great relief it was to spend my day with other Jews, to whom my nose – not to men­tion every­thing else that was Jew­ish about me – was no more remark­able than the fact that I had two hands, it was hard to shake the feel­ing that I was some­how phys­i­cally defi­cient because I was Jew­ish. Still, at least I was among Jews, and the feel­ing of safety, of being wel­come, of being able to be, sim­ply, myself was more affirm­ing and more exhil­a­rat­ing than almost any­thing I had ever expe­ri­enced till then. Even if I did not feel fully at home in my own skin as a Jew, within the walls of the school build­ing, I was home.

Not that my class­mates, or the school admin­is­tra­tion for that mat­ter, accepted me com­pletely. There were class issues: My mother was twice-divorced and had to work to sup­port four chil­dren – and most of the jobs she held dur­ing that time barely kept us above the line where we would have been eli­gi­ble for food stamps – so we did not have the money and stan­dard of liv­ing that my mostly upper-middle class school­mates enjoyed. As well, I knew a lot more about sex and drugs than they did – some­thing I will write about in the series on con­doms (shame­less, shame­less, shame­less plug) that I inter­rupted work on to put this series of posts together – and so I was seen as a lit­tle bit dan­ger­ous, though I did not know I had this rep­u­ta­tion until one of them told me when we ran into each other years after we’d left the school. None of that, how­ever, was enough to get me ostra­cized the way being Jew­ish got me ostra­cized at home. In the yeshiva, I was a mem­ber of the com­mu­nity, one of the fam­ily; or, to put it more accu­rately, I had finally found my com­mu­nity, a place where I belonged, where the legit­i­macy of my pres­ence would not be ques­tioned because to do so would be to ques­tion the legit­i­macy of every­one else’s pres­ence as well.

Given this con­text, as you might imag­ine, I iden­ti­fied very strongly with the story of Zion­ism and the found­ing of the State of Israel that I was taught, which por­trayed the Jews who set­tled Pales­tine in the 19^th and early 20^th cen­turies, and then the Jews who defended Israel after its found­ing in 1948, as heroic fig­ures fight­ing against all odds for a national home­land, a place where they could have the kind of com­mu­nity I had found in yeshiva. I became a deeply com­mit­ted Zion­ist, bought fully into the image I was shown of the Arabs, Pales­tin­ian and oth­er­wise, as evil and blood­thirsty ter­ror­ists, unwill­ing to rec­og­nize the obvi­ously legit­i­mate claim that Jews had to the land, who resented that the Jews had been able, in the phrase I remem­ber, “to make the desert bloom” and whose sole con­cern, there­fore, was to fig­ure out how to push the Jews of Israel into the Mediter­ranean so that the State of Israel would cease to exist. It would be many years before I came to accept that the his­tory of Zion­ism, much less the his­tory of Israel, was much more com­pli­cated – fac­tu­ally, ide­o­log­i­cally, and eth­i­cally – than this.

Equally to the point, I accepted almost unques­tion­ingly that Israel was the only proper response to the fear of anti­semitism that I knew first­hand and that my Jew­ish edu­ca­tion incul­cated in me even fur­ther: that no coun­try on earth, not even the United States – which had, as recently as the 1940s, to take just one exam­ple, enforced Jew­ish quo­tas in edu­ca­tion and which had turned away Jews try­ing to escape Nazi Ger­many – could be counted on as a place where Jews would always be safe as Jews. We could not trust, we should never trust, we were told, the goyim who were our neigh­bors. Scratch the sur­face of any one of them, even the most friendly, even the ones who seemed the most deeply com­mit­ted to social jus­tice, and you would find an anti­semite, and we could be sure, we were taught, that if a Hitler ever did come to power in the US, those anti­semites would quite hap­pily look the other way. Yes, there were excep­tions among them, but did you really want to bet your life on whether or not your neigh­bor just hap­pened to be the excep­tion? The truth – and this was what the Zion­ists rec­og­nized when they con­ceived of the State of Israel in response to the anti­semitism of their time – was that only a Jew­ish State would pro­vide a per­ma­nent solu­tion to the per­se­cu­tion the Jews faced, and had been fac­ing, world­wide, through­out his­tory. We needed Israel; the world needed us to have Israel; I needed Israel, because with­out Israel, the world did not feel like a place I could call home.

David Schraub’s argu­ment in his two posts on Fem­i­niste (here and here) are moti­vated, I believe, by a fear very sim­i­lar to the one I have just described, and it is in part, per­haps in large part, out of this fear that he made one of the com­ments that peo­ple found most objec­tion­able, “If you’re [a Jew­ish] anti-Zionist critic of Israel — well, yes, I’m going to say that I think your ide­ol­ogy is mis­guided and unten­able for a lib­er­a­tionist agenda.” What­ever one thinks about the exis­tence or poli­cies of the State of Israel, or of Zion­ism in its entirety, not to rec­og­nize as rea­son­able the fear out of which David wrote, which I still feel and which I think any Jew who knows any­thing about Jew­ish his­tory would be fool­ish not to feel, is to deny a real­ity of Jew­ish expe­ri­ence in a way that is unequiv­o­cally anti­se­mitic. There is no other word for it, and here’s the thing: when the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict is the only con­text in which I can talk about that fear and have it be taken seri­ously – because I, as a Jew, get to tell you that you have to be care­ful how you crit­i­cize Israel so that you do not appear anti­se­mitic, and so I get at least to try to explain some ver­sion of every­thing I have just writ­ten in this essay – then the stakes of talk­ing about the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict become, for me, poten­tially, a mat­ter of life and death, because my his­tory tells me that anti­semitism is always poten­tially a mat­ter of life and death. If you are unwill­ing to hear that, then it doesn’t mat­ter to me how accu­rate and fair your cri­tique of Israel’s poli­cies is, you damned well bet­ter believe I am going to call you an antisemite.

No sin­gle con­ver­sa­tion, how­ever, as I said in Part One, should have to bear the bur­den of that kind of his­tory, which is one rea­son why, despite the fact that I have now writ­ten sev­eral thou­sand words, I have yet to say any­thing sub­stan­tive about the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict in gen­eral, or about Gaza specif­i­cally, and it may that I won’t for sev­eral thou­sand words more. For now, I will say this: I no longer agree with David that found­ing the State of Israel, espe­cially in the way it was founded, was the best response to the fear he and I share, but I do – and I hope that this and my pre­vi­ous post explain why – empathize with that fear. More to the point, I think that any­one, Jew­ish or not, who wants to take a respon­si­ble stance in rela­tion to the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict needs to be will­ing to empathize with that fear, regard­less of what their stance on the con­flict may be. One of the most elo­quent state­ments of that empa­thy that I have ever read was writ­ten by Torill in com­ment #229 in response to David’s sec­ond post. (Please go read the entire com­ment as well.)

I am against Zion­ism as a prin­ci­ple, and I have tried to explain why, and main­tain that my rea­sons are not anti-semitic — but I do under­stand how the expe­ri­ence of the hor­ror that is [the] Holo­caust and the lack of enough safe havens then makes many Jews feel that the state of Israel is a good idea, even nec­es­sary for them to feel safe in the world now. I am not hold­ing it against any indi­vid­ual if they move there after expe­ri­ences of real oppres­sion, and I don’t think the Jews who live there today are all evil mon­sters. This prob­a­bly needs to be said clearly in this con­text by any­one who declares them­selves to be anti-Zionist.

Make some ver­sion of that sen­ti­ment clear to me; under­stand why I will not take it for granted in you just because you hap­pen to be a fem­i­nist, a com­mit­ted anti-racist, a mem­ber of some other oppressed group or hap­pen to have what­ever pro­gres­sive cre­den­tials you might assume would lead me to take it for granted; real­ize that, even though you have made that sen­ti­ment clear to me, I will still need you to make it clear to oth­ers when you and I are part of any con­ver­sa­tion that is larger than the two of us; take the ini­tia­tive to call out anti­semitism when you see it whether I have called it out or not, whether I am present or not – do those things and I will go with you any­where a con­ver­sa­tion about Israel and Pales­tine might lead. I may not always agree with you, but I will go there with you because you have shown me I can, at least with you, at least for that time being, put my fear aside, and because the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict is impor­tant enough that no area of inquiry that might lead to a solu­tion should be out of bounds sim­ply because of fear – even if the only prob­lem that gets solved, because this really is the prob­lem that I am talk­ing about here, is how peo­ple out­side of Israel can talk to each other about the con­flict with­out get­ting bogged down in the kind of anger and frus­tra­tion that devolved from David’s posts.

One post­script: A book that changed my life in terms of think­ing about the ques­tions related to anti­semitism and the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict is Yours In Strug­gle: Three Fem­i­nist Per­spec­tives on Anti-Semitism and Racism . Writ­ten by three les­bians, Elly Bulkin (Jew­ish), Min­nie Bruce Pratt (white, south­ern Chris­t­ian) and Bar­bara Smith (African-American Chris­t­ian), the book takes on some very hard ques­tions about the pres­ence of anti­semitism in the les­bian fem­i­nist com­mu­nity and does so in ways that, despite what will now be the dat­ed­ness of some of the mate­r­ial, are still rel­e­vant. I would also rec­om­mend, though I can­not give you any cita­tions because my copies of these books are, unfor­tu­nately, in stor­age, the polit­i­cal essays of June Jor­dan that deal with these issues.