Category Archives: Jewish

What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) antisemitism and Israel — 1

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Anti­semitism has been a tan­gi­ble and, to vary­ing degrees, vio­lent pres­ence in my life since at least third grade, which would have been in 1970 or so, when John W – it’s amaz­ing that I remem­ber his name – hav­ing learned the day before that I was Jew­ish, came up to me in the play­ground while we were choos­ing sides for dodge­ball and said, “My father told me I’m not allowed to play with Jews.” I can’t recall whether or not I was per­mit­ted to be part of the game that day, but I can see very clearly the one and only fist­fight I have ever had, which hap­pened later that year. I don’t know why John B and I ended up in the mid­dle of the school­yard cir­cle of boys push­ing us towards each other, try­ing to get one of us to throw the first punch, but I do know that John W was not the only voice I heard reas­sur­ing John that I was “only a Jew” and there­fore “weak and easy to take.” In the end, the first and only punch was mine. I landed one right on John’s chin and he started bleed­ing and the sight of his blood fright­ened us all into run­ning wher­ever it was that we ran to. I was scared because I thought I’d really hurt him, but I found out later I’d only bro­ken a scab on his face. For the next cou­ple of years at least, no one called me a “weak Jew” again.

Next came the pen­nies. Still in third grade, my class­mates started throw­ing pen­nies at me in the school­yard. At the time, I did not know the anti­se­mitic canard of the cheap Jew, and so I did not at first under­stand why they thought it was so funny when I picked the pen­nies up. Since I would often end up with as much as twenty cents – an amount that meant some­thing to a third grader back then – I laughed at them for being so stu­pid that they were giv­ing me free money; I wasn’t even curi­ous about why they were also laugh­ing at me. Even­tu­ally, some­one explained to me just what the pen­nies were sup­posed to sig­nify – I wish I could remem­ber who it was – but I con­tin­ued pick­ing them up any­way, since it still seemed to me that my class­mates were the ones mak­ing idiots of them­selves. Then, in fifth grade – which means peo­ple had been throw­ing pen­nies on and off for two years – some­one started one day to throw pen­nies at me in the class­room; some­one else actu­ally handed me an entire roll of pen­nies; and then a group started chant­ing “Jew! Jew! Jew! Jew!” My teacher stood by and did noth­ing, and even after he’d calmed the class down and got us all back in our seats, he did noth­ing to acknowl­edge the anti­se­mitic nature of what had just hap­pened. And I was one of his favorite students!

Then there was the music teacher, who made a point of embar­rass­ing me in front of the entire class for not know­ing a ref­er­ence in a Christ­mas song – “Don’t you Jews know anything?” – and who was mor­ti­fied when I asked if we could learn to sing a Chanuka song, and who once almost refused to let me go the fif­teen min­utes early I had per­mis­sion for so that I could get to my Hebrew School class on time because “Jews were always ask­ing for spe­cial favors,” and why should I get out of singing the Christ­mas songs that every­one ought to know? In sixth grade, in my grad­u­a­tion sig­na­ture book, Jim wrote on the very first page, “Rose are red, vio­lets are blue/I never met a nicer Jew.” Evan: “To the Jew, Have a penny good time in 7th grade.” Andy: “Of all the pushy Jews, you top them all.”

Con­tinue read­ing →

Was Roman Vishniac a Propagandist?

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Based on what I’ve just read over at Body Impolitic (tip of the hat to Alas), it looks like the answer might very well be yes. His images of Jew­ish life in Europe have come to define for us what Jew­ish life was like before the Holo­caust and, there­fore, what the Holo­caust destroyed. But

As [Maya] Ben­ton [the cura­tor who has dis­cov­ered new work by Vish­niac] has dis­cov­ered, Vish­niac released, over the course of a five-decade career, an uncom­monly small selec­tion of his work for pub­lic con­sump­tion — so small, in fact, that it did not include many of his finest images, artis­ti­cally speak­ing. Instead the cho­sen images were, in the main, those that advanced an impres­sion of the shtetl as pop­u­lated largely by poor, pious, embat­tled Jews — an impres­sion aided by crop­ping and fab­u­list cap­tion­ing done by his own hand. Vishniac’s curat­ing job was so com­pre­hen­sive that it would not only limit the appre­ci­a­tion of his tal­ents but also skew the pop­u­lar con­cep­tion of pre-Holocaust Jew­ish life in Europe.

…

Jew­ish life in East­ern Europe, espe­cially in the inter­war years, was roil­ing and diverse. All kinds of peo­ple — sec­u­lar and reli­gious, urban and rural, wealthy and poor — con­sorted freely with one another in all aspects of what many of us would con­sider the pil­lars of a mod­ern soci­ety: a lively and con­tentious polit­i­cal cul­ture, a the­ater scene that rivaled those of most major Euro­pean cities, a lit­er­ary tra­di­tion com­pris­ing not only Yid­dish and Hebrew work but also Euro­pean fic­tion and a thriv­ing eco­nomic trade that suc­cess­fully linked cities and coun­try­sides (one of Vishniac’s unpub­lished pic­tures shows a store in a tiny East­ern Euro­pean town sell­ing oranges imported from Pales­tine). Even Hasidic life, so eas­ily car­i­ca­tured as provin­cial and iso­lated, was noth­ing of the sort: yeshivas, like today’s uni­ver­si­ties, often attracted stu­dents from all over East­ern and Cen­tral Europe. The con­cen­tra­tion of poverty and piety in Vishniac’s pic­tures in “Pol­ish Jews” cre­ated a dis­tinct impres­sion of time­less­ness, an unchang­ing, “authen­tic soci­ety” cap­tured in amber.

The quote is from a New York Times arti­cle by Alana New­house, which is worth reading.

As I sit here think­ing about this, aside from the cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance that comes from know­ing I will have to revise my image of what those pho­tographs stand for – espe­cially given the fact that some of them were con­sciously manip­u­lated to cre­ate an image that, while not pre­cisely false, did not reflect the real­ity of the peo­ple in the pic­tures Vish­niac took – I am also think­ing how much the eth­i­cal ques­tions sur­round­ing doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­ra­phy and the way images can be manip­u­lated resem­ble the eth­i­cal ques­tions that have been raised in terms of mem­oir. Each genre claims to rep­re­sent real­ity; each genre is rooted – as is all art – in the choices made by the artist; each genre depends for its suc­cess on an audience’s trust, a trust that is enlisted by the nature of the genre – in other words, a trust with­out which the genre can­not be read the way it is meant to be read – and it is a trust so very eas­ily betrayed. What Roman Vish­niac did does not sound so dif­fer­ent to me from what James Frey did, but Vish­niac was also claim­ing in a very gen­eral way to speak for me, not merely to rep­re­sent his own expe­ri­ence, and that makes the betrayal – but is it a betrayal? as I write this, I am still not com­pletely sure – bit­ter.

Fragments of Evolving Manhood: A Full-Throated Protest Against Existence and the World

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I have writ­ten before about the book of per­sonal essays deal­ing with man­hood, mas­culin­ity and male sex­u­al­ity that I tried, unsuc­cess­fully (even with the help of an agent) to get pub­lished in the 1980s. Evolv­ing Man­hood was the work­ing title, though my agent pre­ferred and used my sec­ond choice–What Kind of a Man Are You Any­way?–because she thought it might sell bet­ter. When my agent finally dropped me because it was clear that no one was going to buy the man­u­script – which I may one day make the sub­ject of a whole other essay – I put the mate­r­ial aside and went back to work­ing on my poetry, and then I was com­mis­sioned to do the trans­la­tions of Per­sian lit­er­a­ture that I am still work­ing on, with the result that Evolv­ing Man­hood receded into the back­ground of my writ­ing life, and this makes me sad, not only because I worked damned hard on those essays, but also because I think some of the writ­ing has held up pretty well, even though it is, some of it, 20 years old, and because I think the ques­tions I was try­ing to explore are still pro­foundly rel­e­vant. More, I am sad­dened by the fact that the odds are over­whelm­ingly against my return­ing to this mate­r­ial in any sub­stan­tial way. Time, both in the sense of what my com­mit­ments are now, per­sonal and pro­fes­sional, and of my dis­tance from what I wrote back then, is work­ing against me.

So, since I don’t want what I think is worth keep­ing to dis­ap­pear into my fil­ing cab­i­net for­ever, I have decided that I will start a series called Frag­ments from Evolv­ing Man­hood made up of just what the title says, though the posts may be edited if I think it is nec­es­sary. I decided to make this the first one because it is Passover, a hol­i­day that, broadly speak­ing, is (or should be) about social jus­tice but that is also about what it means to be Jew­ish in a world where being Jew­ish can get you killed.

***

A Full-Throated Protest Against Exis­tence and the World

As a Jew­ish man, like it or not, my iden­tity within the Jew­ish com­mu­nity as both a man and a Jew is defined by the fact of my cir­cum­ci­sion. Even though I am Jew­ish first because my mother is Jew­ish, at least accord­ing to the tra­di­tion accepted by most of the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties in the world, I entered God’s covenant with Abra­ham, became fully a mem­ber of my own peo­ple, only after my fore­skin was removed, and for the first fif­teen or so years of my life, I roman­ti­cized the moment of that cut­ting. Imag­in­ing a blood­less cer­e­mony sat­u­rated with self-conscious majesty, I saw my boy’s body wrapped warmly and securely in a blan­ket, held peace­fully at ease in the lap of my Uncle Max, smil­ing drunk on the wine-soaked cloth I’d been given to suck on to dull the (as it was explained to me by my grand­mother) very small pain I would feel. Prayers were uttered over my flesh, and after the cut­ting was done, my mem­ber­ship in the covenant, not to men­tion into the com­mu­nity of Jew­ish man­hood, was cel­e­brated with food and drink. I pic­tured myself being passed lov­ingly among the guests, cud­dled and cod­dled as they talked about the man I would grow up to be.

When I turned six­teen, how­ever, I wit­nessed an actual brit milah, or cir­cum­ci­sion cer­e­mony. The house was full of peo­ple. I could see in the room beyond the room where I min­gled with the other guests the feast that had been laid out for after the cut­ting. Peo­ple were chat­ting, jok­ing, shak­ing hands with old friends, and mak­ing new acquain­tances, but when the mohel—the man who per­forms Jew­ish cir­cum­ci­sions — arrived, the atmos­phere became imme­di­ately seri­ous. As he shook hands with the boy’s father and with those other men who would par­tic­i­pate in the cer­e­mony, the women left and the room grew quiet. The boy, bun­dled tightly in a blan­ket, was brought in and placed in the hands of the man who had been cho­sen for the honor of hold­ing the child while the pre­lim­i­nary prayers were recited. Then, the boy was given to the sandek, the man upon whom had been bestowed the priv­i­lege of hold­ing the infant in his lap when the cut­ting was actu­ally done. My view was blocked as the older men crowded around so they could see, but I knew when the cut came because that lit­tle boy howled. A full-throated protest against exis­tence and the world, his scream filled my ears, the room, the entire house with his pain.

The men smiled and laughed as if they did not hear the child’s voice. Above his wail­ing, they shouted mazel tov! — congratulations! — and shook hands with each other and with those who had par­tic­i­pated in the cer­e­mony. Some of them even began to sing. The boy’s scream­ing did not stop. I was taken to meet the child’s father. He smiled at me proudly, grip­ping my hand and, as his still shriek­ing son was car­ried from the room, steered me into the din­ing area where peo­ple were begin­ning to eat. This was not the peace­ful cer­e­mony I had imag­ined. This was hypocrisy, the sanc­ti­fi­ca­tion and cel­e­bra­tion through denial of the pain of the boy who’d just been cut, and also of the pain I had felt, and of the pain of every man in that house. I felt mocked, betrayed, and tremen­dously angry, but I had no words to express what I was feel­ing. Even now, hav­ing rejected cir­cum­ci­sion in my own fam­ily, it’s hard to dis­miss the rit­ual merely as the patri­ar­chal mark­ing that, at its roots, it is. Because what­ever else that rit­ual might be, the his­tory of the oppres­sion of the Jews has made it also a sign of defi­ance, a bod­ily affir­ma­tion of Jew­ish (male) iden­tity and Jew­ish (male) worth in the face of enor­mous persecution.

I put the word male in paren­the­ses in the last sen­tence because, while cir­cum­ci­sion marks only men and is there­fore prob­lem­atic from the point of view of gen­der equal­ity within the Jew­ish tra­di­tion, I do not want to deny the courage that it took for Jew­ish moth­ers to con­tinue to allow their sons to be cir­cum­cised, or for Jew­ish women to con­tinue to value cir­cum­ci­sion as a reli­gious rit­ual, a phys­i­cal mark and as a metaphor for the rela­tion­ship between the Jews and their god at times when forc­ing a man to pull down his pants was one way that anti-semites would iden­tify appro­pri­ate tar­gets for their hatred and vio­lence. In Hasidic Tales of the Holo­caust, for exam­ple, Yaffa Eli­ach tells a story that, whether it is com­pletely true or only an embell­ished ver­sion of the truth, illus­trates pre­cisely what I mean. In the midst of a “children’s Aktion,” a mas­sacre of Jew­ish chil­dren, the tale goes, a Jew­ish woman demanded of a Nazi sol­dier, “Give me [your] pocket knife!”

She bent down and picked up something…a bun­dle of rags on the ground near the saw­dust. She unwrapped the bun­dle. Amidst the rags on a snow-white pil­low was a new­born babe, asleep. With a steady hand she opened the pocket knife and cir­cum­cised the baby. In a clear, intense voice she recited the bless­ing of the cir­cum­ci­sion. “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Uni­verse, who has sanc­ti­fied us by thy com­mand­ments and hast com­manded us to per­form the circumcision.”

She straight­ened her back, looked up to the heav­ens, and said, “God of the Uni­verse, you have given me a healthy child. I am return­ing to you a whole­some, kosher Jew.” She walked over to the Ger­man, gave him back his blood-stained knife, and handed him her baby on his snow-white pil­low. (152)

I am that boy; that boy was me. Had I been alive dur­ing the time of the Nazis, they would have tried to kill me pre­cisely for being “whole­some and kosher.” Yet while the vio­lence that mother did to her son absolutely pales in com­par­i­son to the vio­lence the Nazi intended to do to him, the story nonethe­less omits the boy’s pain, glosses over the blood that must have stained the pil­low, the mother’s hands and the German’s knife. It is that blood which haunts me, for my cir­cum­ci­sion is my con­nec­tion to that mother’s courage, to the courage of the men who cir­cum­cised and were cir­cum­cised at a time when a cut penis could have got­ten them killed. Yet that blood is also about the mak­ing of men, and as long as the mak­ing of men requires such blood­shed, man­hood will con­tinue to require the spilling of blood as its proof.

J Street and Poetry and Jewish Politics and Jewish Poets and Jewish Poetics and Holocaust Trivialization and Israel and Palestine and antisemitism and How Can Culture be a Tool for Change if You Won’t Let Culture do its Work? — Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Myths of Liberal Zionism,” by Yitzhak Laor — I want to read this book

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Writ­ing in the Jan­u­ary issue of Harper’s Mag­a­zine, Joshua Cohen wrote this at the end of his review of Laor’s book:

It often seems that the Israeli-Palestinian con­flict is just […] a tex­tual prob­lem. If so, then the mud­dle of mean­ing that must be ana­lyzed lies in pars­ing not Pales­tin­ian from Israeli, but “Israeli” from “Jew.” Only once those epi­thets have been dis­sev­ered can some sort of dia­logue begin, between two polit­i­cal enti­ties and not between two (or three) reli­gions or Peo­ples. Until then, “Israel” will con­tinue to be vil­i­fied as a word that means some­thing other than what it should, while all crit­ics of Israel will be accused of anti-Semitism.

It is not clear to me from the review how much of this is Cohen, how much of this is Laor and how much of it is Cohen putting into his own words what he agrees with in Laor’s book, but any book that leads to this kind of think­ing, to ask­ing these kinds of ques­tions, whether I ulti­mately agree with the book or not, is a book worth read­ing. Now, if there were only 36 hours or more in a day. Sigh.

A New Covenant

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They say it’s a shame we didn’t do it
when we should have, that prob­a­bly you’ll need it
later in life, when it’s more com­pli­cated,
more painful and, worse, you’ll remem­ber it.

They say women won’t want you, that you’ll not
for­give us, ever, espe­cially me, and that
the Jews who’ve died for what it means to be cut
will have died in vain because we left you complete.

And I know I can’t not bur­den you with that.
You have to, have to, res­onate with what
your body would have meant to all that hate,
and you will — but sit­ting here alone tonight,

my ampu­tated life aching anew,
I’m grate­ful for all that’s merely whole in you.

Who Is a Jew? Court Ruling in Britain Raises Question  — from The New York Times

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The Supreme Court in Eng­land is set to rule by the end of this year on a case involv­ing a ques­tion that has vexed Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties through­out the world for cen­turies: Who is a Jew? The case began because a 12-year-old boy whose father was born Jew­ish and whose mother con­verted to Judaism was denied admis­sion to an Ortho­dox Jew­ish high school on the grounds that, because his mother was con­verted not in an Ortho­dox syn­a­gogue, but in what the Times arti­cle refers to as a “pro­gres­sive syn­a­gogue” (which I assume cor­re­sponds to some­thing like Reform here in the States), she is not really Jew­ish; and so, there­fore, nei­ther is he. The boy’s fam­ily decided to sue the school for dis­crim­i­na­tion and lost. The Court of Appeal, how­ever, reversed that deci­sion on grounds that ques­tion one of the foun­da­tional tenets of Jew­ish iden­tity: that, short of con­ver­sion, the only way one can be Jew­ish is to have been born to a Jew­ish mother.

In an explo­sive deci­sion, the court con­cluded that bas­ing school admis­sions on a clas­sic test of Judaism — whether one’s mother is Jew­ish — was by def­i­n­i­tion dis­crim­i­na­tory. Whether the ratio­nale was “benign or malig­nant, the­o­log­i­cal or suprema­cist,” the court wrote, “makes it no less and no more unlawful.”

The case rested on whether the school’s test of Jew­ish­ness was based on reli­gion, which would be legal, or on race or eth­nic­ity, which would not. The court ruled that it was an eth­nic test because it con­cerned the sta­tus of M’s [which is how the boy is referred to in court doc­u­ments] mother rather than whether M con­sid­ered him­self Jew­ish and prac­ticed Judaism.

“The require­ment that if a pupil is to qual­ify for admis­sion his mother must be Jew­ish, whether by descent or con­ver­sion, is a test of eth­nic­ity which con­tra­venes the Race Rela­tions Act,” the court said. It added that while it was fair that Jew­ish schools should give pref­er­ence to Jew­ish chil­dren, the admis­sions cri­te­ria must depend not on fam­ily ties, but “on faith, how­ever defined.”

The same rea­son­ing would apply to a Chris­t­ian school that “refused to admit a child on the ground that, albeit prac­tic­ing Chris­tians, the child’s fam­ily were of Jew­ish ori­gin,” the court said. (via Who Is a Jew? Court Rul­ing in Britain Raises Ques­tion — NYTimes​.com.)

Con­tinue read­ing →

Reading “The Man In The White Sharkskin Suit,” by Lucette Lagnado

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I just fin­ished read­ing The Man in the White Sharksin Suit: My Family’s Exo­dus from Old Cairo to the New World, by Lucette Lagnado, a reporter for The Wall Street Jour­nal whom we have invited to read as part of Nas­sau Com­mu­nity College’s Lit­er­a­ture, Live! read­ing series, spon­sored by The Cre­ative Writ­ing Project (CWP). A mem­oir that is at once a love let­ter to her father, Leon, and also her mother, Edith, as well as to the city of Cairo and its way of life in the days of King Farouk, The Man in the White Sharksin Suit chron­i­cles the dif­fi­cul­ties Lagnado’s fam­ily faced as they nav­i­gated the often tor­tu­ous path they were forced to travel from the priv­i­leged life they enjoyed in Egypt to the dif­fi­cult and, espe­cially for her father, often humil­i­at­ing exis­tence that life as exiles forced them into. The book has a lot to say about the arro­gance with which Euro­pean and Amer­i­can Jews – as indi­vid­u­als and as work­ers in agen­cies that were sup­posed to help fam­i­lies such as Lagnado’s – treated their Mizrachi core­li­gion­ists, who fled or were forced to leave their home coun­tries in the years fol­low­ing Israel’s found­ing; and when she tells the story of Sylvia Kirschner, the New York Asso­ci­a­tion for New Amer­i­cans (NYANA) case­worker assigned to the Lagnado fam­ily, and how Kirschner refused to find any com­pro­mise between her pro­gres­sive val­ues relat­ing to women and Lagnado’s father’s deeply patri­ar­chal old world val­ues, it is hard not to sym­pa­thize with Leon. Not because there is any­thing defen­si­ble in his desire com­pletely to rule the lives of the women in his fam­ily, but because Lagnado makes it so clear that Sylvia Kirschner’s intol­er­ance only served to accel­er­ate the unrav­el­ing of the Lagnado fam­ily by encour­ag­ing the inde­pen­dence of Lagando’s older sis­ter Suzette. I’m not sug­gest­ing that Suzette should have allowed her­self to remain firmly held in place beneath her father’s patri­ar­chal thumb, but surely there were gen­tler ways of intro­duc­ing Leon and Suzette to the greater inde­pen­dence of women in the United States than Kirschner’s dis­missal of and dis­re­spect for the val­ues Leon had brought with him from an older gen­er­a­tion in a far more tra­di­tional part of the world.

There are many other moments in this mem­oir that are wor­thy of note – the Ital­ian Catholic friend Lagnado found and lost because of a hous­ing dis­pute between their par­ents and the neighborhood’s anti­se­mitic response to that dis­pute; the con­trast Lagnado draws between her expe­ri­ence being treated for Hodgkin’s dis­ease by a pri­vate physi­cian in New York City and her father’s dis­mal treat­ment at the Jew­ish Home and Hos­pi­tal, and then at Mt. Sinai Hos­pi­tal, in the last years of his life (and each of these con­trasted with the med­ical treat­ment the fam­ily had been able to com­mand when they lived in Egypt, and Leon could sum­mon the best doc­tors in Cairo to look after him and his fam­ily); Lagnado’s meet­ing with the woman whose father-in-law and uncle had nego­ti­ated the pur­chase of the Lagnado fam­ily home when Leon finally, reluc­tantly, real­ized he and his fam­ily could no longer remain in Egypt – but what struck me most as I read this book was how much it hinted at things I didn’t know about Mizrachi Jews. Leon’s fam­ily was from Aleppo, in Syria, and Lagnado’s dis­cus­sion of that culture’s fam­ily tra­di­tions left me frus­trated that I had never learned about them when I was in Hebrew School, or later when I was in yeshiva, and it was ham­mered into us that kol yis­rael are­vim zeh lazeh, all Jews are respon­si­ble for each other. That lofty sen­ti­ment notwith­stand­ing, the cur­ricu­lum we were taught cer­tainly made it seem like the only Jews in the world, or at least the only Jews in the world that mat­tered, were those of Euro­pean, and espe­cially east­ern Euro­pean, descent.

It’s not that I didn’t know Mizrachi Jews existed, and I cer­tainly can­not blame my con­tem­po­rary igno­rance on the faulty edu­ca­tion of my youth. After all, noth­ing has stopped me from edu­cat­ing myself other than the way I have set the pri­or­i­ties of my life (and it’s entirely pos­si­ble that I would not have picked Lagnado’s book up except that the CWP has cho­sen to invite her), but so much of my early Jew­ish edu­ca­tion was focused on Israel – the need for Israel, the value of Israel, the strug­gle to found Israel – that it’s sur­pris­ing I remem­ber no atten­tion being paid to the fact that, after Israel’s inde­pen­dence was declared in 1948, nearly a mil­lion Mizrachi Jews were either forced to leave their coun­tries or chose to leave because the con­di­tions there had become unten­able. Surely learn­ing about Israel ought to have meant learn­ing some­thing about the cul­ture of the mil­lions of Mizrachi Jews who chose to set­tle there. Equally sur­pris­ing to me is that nowhere in Lagnado’s mem­oir is Israel men­tioned except as either a pri­mary cause of the prob­lems the Jews of Egypt were start­ing to have after 1948 or as one the places where the Jews of Egypt could go that would accept them with­out fail. Lagnado does not laud Israel as the Jew­ish home­land, nor is there any sense from her book that the Jews of Egypt saw Israel in that way at all; even when she talks about the Egypt­ian Jews who chose to go to Israel, she presents the choice as matter-of-fact, even as des­per­ate, not as one that might con­tain within it some small part of the hope with which the Euro­pean Zion­ists clearly embraced the idea of a Jew­ish home­land there.

The Man in the White Shark­skin Suit, how­ever, is a mem­oir, not a his­tory. I am sure that there were Mizrachi Jews who embraced the found­ing of Israel as fer­vently and hope­fully as the Euro­pean Zion­ists did. More, I am sure that the feel­ing I had after read­ing Lagnado’s book, that the Jews of Egypt were far bet­ter off in Egypt than in any of the places to which they fled, has more to do with the priv­i­leged life her fam­ily lived there than with the real­ity of the lives of all Egypt­ian Jews. I am fully aware, in other words, that the story of the Mizrachi Jews is, has got to be, far more com­plex than any­thing I could learn from read­ing Lagnado’s mem­oir; and yet read­ing the book, espe­cially the chap­ter called “The Last Days of Tar­boosh,” brought me back to a trans­la­tion con­fer­ence panel I was on with Ammiel Alcalay and Sami Chetrit, a Mizrachi Jew (Moroc­can, if I remem­ber cor­rectly). Dur­ing his talk Chetrit spoke of how – and I am para­phras­ing here; I wish I could remem­ber his exact words – the Euro­pean Zion­ist Jews col­o­nized the Mizrachi Jews, replac­ing the Mizrachi nar­ra­tive with the Euro­pean Jew­ish nar­ra­tive, even to the point of usurp­ing the language(s) Mizrachi Jews had been speak­ing for cen­turies, if not mil­lenia, before Israel was founded. (I am not sure if this was a ref­er­ence to the European-based revival of Hebrew as the Jew­ish national lan­guage or to some other con­flict over lan­guage.) His state­ments sur­prised me in much the same way that read­ing Lagnado’s books did, because they hinted at a story I did not know, that felt like I should have known it.

Like Lagnado, Chetrit obvi­ously has a per­spec­tive, and a bias, and I am in no way informed enough to judge the accu­racy of what he said. What I can say is that any Jew­ish edu­ca­tion worth its salt should have as one of its goals mak­ing its stu­dents that informed, or at least teach­ing them that they should feel respon­si­ble for inform­ing them­selves; and that most cer­tainly is not the Jew­ish edu­ca­tion I received. Indeed, the Jew­ish edu­ca­tion I received ren­dered both Chetrit’s per­spec­tive and Lagnado’s story entirely invis­i­ble, and it did so not only in the inter­est of mak­ing Israel cen­tral to Jewish-American iden­tity, but also to estab­lish­ing the Zion­ist nar­ra­tive of the found­ing of Israel as the uni­ver­sal Jew­ish nar­ra­tive of the found­ing of Israel. Sto­ries like Chetrit’s and Lagnado’s demon­strate that such uni­ver­sal­ity is a myth. Con­fronting that myth is impor­tant not because it calls into ques­tion Israel’s right to exist (it makes me angry that I feel I even have to say that) but because com­ing to terms with the full com­plex­ity of the nar­ra­tive of Israel’s found­ing is the only way I know to come to terms with the fact that I, as a Jew – and maybe this applies to con­cerned peo­ple who aren’t Jew­ish as well – can­not not take a posi­tion regard­ing Israel’s exis­tence as a Jew­ish state.

(I’ve writ­ten more about this issue in the series I wrote called What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) anti­semitism and Israel. The link will take you to part 4 of the series; there is a list of the other posts in the series at the bot­tom of that post.)

Lucette Lagnado’s read­ing at Nas­sau Com­mu­nity Col­lege is sched­uled for March 2010, date and time to be announced. For more infor­ma­tion, please visit the Cre­ative Writ­ing Project web­site.

Talk about a goyishe kop!

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I saw this on Fem­i­niste:

CRESAPTOWN, Md. (AP) — You’ve heard of kosher salt? Now there’s a Chris­t­ian variety.

Retired bar­ber Joe Godlewski says that when tele­vi­sion chefs rec­om­mended kosher salt in recipes, he won­dered, “What the heck’s the mat­ter with Chris­t­ian salt?”

By next week, his trade­marked Blessed Chris­tians Salt will be avail­able from sea­son­ings man­u­fac­turer Ingre­di­ents Cor­po­ra­tion of Amer­ica. It’s sea salt that’s been blessed by an Epis­co­pal priest.

The company’s pres­i­dent hopes to mar­ket the salt through Chris­t­ian bookstores.

Go here to read the rest.

Cross-posted on Alas.

Iran Outs Harry Potter as a Member of the World Zionist Conspiracy

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Late last month, the Daily News pub­lished this arti­cle: Harry Pot­ter part of Zion­ist con­spir­acy, Iran­ian film claims. The ridicu­lous­ness of the video speaks for itself, and so, except for a cou­ple of points that I think bear mak­ing, I am loathe to spend too much time respond­ing to the analy­ses and accu­sa­tions the Iran­ian so-called experts make:

  1. Note the sub­tle (and not so sub­tle) con­fla­tion of Jews with Zion­ists throughout.
  2. Note as well the ref­er­ence to the idea of Jew­ish racial supremacy, which the film attrib­utes to the Zion­ists in a way that – at least as I read the trans­la­tion – could be read to sug­gest that the Jews (and not just the mem­bers of the pur­ported global Zion­ist con­spir­acy) do indeed believe in our own racial superiority.
  3. Note the por­trayal of Judaism as a reli­gion of witch­craft and wiz­ardry, a trope that has a long his­tory in Euro­pean antisemitism.
  4. Note the men­tion of Chris­t­ian Zion­ists, which I con­fess I almost missed. It’s inter­est­ing to think about the sig­nif­i­cance of that men­tion in light of the dis­cus­sion of Chris­t­ian Zion­ism in part one my anti­semtism series.

There are, I am sure, other things worth point­ing out. Please have at it.