I posted over at Alas with the idea that it would be inter­est­ing if peo­ple, Jews and non-Jews alike, were to tell sto­ries about their expe­ri­ences with anti­semitism. Here is what I wrote:

Read­ing through the com­ments gen­er­ated by my two posts (here and here) on anti­semitism so far has got­ten me think­ing about how many of us – Jew­ish or not, but espe­cially Jew­ish – ever really talk about our expe­ri­ences with anti­semitism, not in the con­text of argu­ing a point about the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict or of any other issue that is not, sim­ply, an asser­tion of the fact that anti­semitism exists and that it has real con­se­quences in Jew­ish (and non-Jewish) lives. I know that the first post I wrote was the first time ever that I tried to con­struct a chronol­ogy, a nar­ra­tive of the anti­semitism I have expe­ri­enced in my life, and it brought home to me all over again just how enor­mous and pro­found an effect it had on my world­view, not all of which I wrote about in the sec­ond post, since my focus in those posts is really quite spe­cific. I was moved when AndiF chose to share her/his (sorry, I real­ize I don’t know) expe­ri­ences from a gen­er­a­tion before me, and I was inter­ested to read some other people’s expe­ri­ences from the gen­er­a­tions after me. So here’s what I pro­pose: a post where the point of the com­ments is, sim­ply, to tell sto­ries about our expe­ri­ences with anti­semitism, not to ana­lyze those expe­ri­ences, but just to tell them and then let them speak for them­selves. I am not talk­ing about polit­i­cal analy­sis of some politician’s or scholar’s or blog posts’ rhetoric, and I am not talk­ing about list­ing anti­se­mitic inci­dents at which you were not present. I am talk­ing about moments when you saw or expe­ri­enced anti­semitism in action.

I am not going to limit this post to Jews, because I think it’s impor­tant to hear from non-Jews about their expe­ri­ences, but it is my plan to delete any com­ment that is not a story. (I am not going to make that an absolute rule, since there are always excep­tions, but it is my plan.)

Let’s see what kind of col­lec­tive story our indi­vid­ual sto­ries com­bine to tell.

Take a look.

The issue for me is not the pic­tures per se – though the absence of con­text is a prob­lem there too. There are fright­en­ing par­al­lels, that even some Holo­caust sur­vivors I have read about have noticed, between some of the ways the Israeli gov­ern­ment has treated the Pales­tini­ans and the ways in which the Nazis treated the Jews. The dan­gers I am talk­ing about become more evi­dent in the com­ments.

The Babies by Sab­rina Orah Mark

My review

rat­ing: 5 of 5 stars
A won­der­ful book of prose poems. This is what I wrote on one of the pages in the book. I will make no claims that it is accu­rate, but it records part of my expe­ri­ence of the work: “Each per­cep­tion con­tains every other pos­si­ble per­cep­tion and it’s a mat­ter of choos­ing what to con­nect to what, and all the impli­ca­tions of those choices are con­tained in each choice, and orches­trat­ing all these choices is a con­scious­ness that has been through a dis­ori­ent­ing trauma.…” That trauma is very much con­nected to the Shoah, though the Shoah is not men­tioned specif­i­cally by name, as far as I remem­ber, which makes the book that much more powerful.

View all my reviews.

I have been think­ing for a few days now about how to answer this ques­tion, not because the answer is dif­fi­cult, but because all of the answers that spring most eas­ily to mind have more to do with per­sonal sto­ries that I have no doubt are essen­tially no dif­fer­ent from all the other per­sonal sto­ries that men and women who are pro-choice can tell about why they are, or why they became, pro-choice: women in their lives who, for what­ever reasons, desperately needed to have abor­tions; women who died from botched ille­gal abor­tions; women whose lives were ruined because they did not have access to safe, legal abor­tions; and so on. It’s not that these sto­ries are unim­por­tant; they are vitally impor­tant, and telling and retelling them is vitally impor­tant as well. The choir does need to be preached to on occa­sion; remind­ing our­selves of the real peo­ple in whose bod­ies the issue of women’s repro­duc­tive choice takes its most imme­di­ate and irre­ducible form is essen­tial. Not only are there a lot of peo­ple out there who would like the lives of those women, of their born and poten­tial chil­dren and of the men with whom those chil­dren were con­ceived to mat­ter less than the ide­ol­ogy which says that ensoul­ment takes place at the moment of con­cep­tion, but imag­in­ing the kind of world that full repro­duc­tive choice would make pos­si­ble requires us to be true to the lives of those people.

As impor­tantly, though, telling the sto­ries that make us pro-choice is a way of mak­ing sure that those who are not do not con­trol the dis­course, are not able to hide the lives of actual women — and their born and poten­tial chil­dren, and the men who helped con­ceive those chil­dren — behind ide­al­ized images of the so-called “unborn chil­dren” that they claim are mur­dered in geno­ci­dal pro­por­tions mer­it­ing the label holo­caust when abor­tions are per­formed. In my own work, I have tried to tell some of these sto­ries in the poems that I write. The Silence Of Men, my first book of poems, con­tains two poems that tell these kinds of sto­ries. I wrote them after read­ing Back Rooms: Voice From The Ille­gal Abor­tion Era, a book that is worth get­ting, espe­cially if, like me, you are young enough that you do not remem­ber the time before Roe vs. Wade, when abor­tion was ille­gal. These are the poems:

Melissa’s Story

The doc­tor gave instruc­tions like a spy:
Be there, seven pm, on the dot.
If you’re not, I’m gone. Don’t even think about
another appoint­ment. Got it? That day,
of course, there was traf­fic, and the money
had to be in small, old bills. You will get
in my car as if we were lovers. At the spot,
you’ll step out first. Walk when and where I say.
Make a mis­take and I leave. Under­stood?
I did. Some­how it went with­out a snag,
and there I was, legs open on a bed,
with a man crouched between them like a dog.

He reached into me and scraped away the life
I’d almost made, not yet mine to give.

And here is the sec­ond one: 

Bill’s Story

He talked about her like she was a boat.
You just loaded the ship, son. Where the wind
takes it is out of your hands, hear? She’ll find
a port to dock in. Just be glad you got
what you wanted with­out get­ting shot.
Her par­ents were no bet­ter, as if I’d planned
to make her preg­nant. We begged them not to send
her away. Once she was gone, they moved out.

Not long after the birth-month, her sin­gle
let­ter came: I named him Bill. Then they took him.
Years later, I drove to where the post­mark
pointed. No one would speak to me. I still
hope, though. My son is old enough to look,
and I deserve to tell him who I am.

I think about these sto­ries, and I think about my own mother’s story, which I heard not from, but from my father, who told it to me more than thirty years after the two of them first sep­a­rated. Actu­ally, though, he didn’t really tell me the story, in the sense of pro­vid­ing any of the actual details of what went on between them. What he told me more the Cliff Notes ver­sion: he and my mother ended up get­ting mar­ried because she was preg­nant with me. This was in 1962, before abor­tion became legal, and she, he said, would not even think about get­ting one. Mar­ry­ing her, he decided, was the right thing to do, and I guess she agreed, though their mar­riage lasted barely five years, dur­ing which time my mother gave birth to my brother — about 20 months sep­a­rate our births — whom my father said was an accident.

My mother’s story does not end there. She had two other chil­dren, my twin sisters, with her sec­ond hus­band, who left us when they were around six — thought that is a part of the story I will not tell here — and while I will not say that my mother regrets hav­ing us, I will say, and I know this to be a fact, that the chil­dren my mother had made her life incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult, not just because each of the men with whom she con­cieved us was not around to help, financially and oth­er­wise, with rais­ing us, but because — and this had to be espe­cially true of my own, unin­tended birth — hav­ing chil­dren, by def­i­n­i­tion, nar­rowed the pos­si­bil­i­ties of my mother’s life and forced her to har­ness what­ever ener­gies she might have devoted else­where to being a mother, and a sin­gle mother with four chil­dren at that.

I do not know whether, had abor­tion been legal and eas­ily avail­able, my mother would have cho­sen to abort the fetus that even­tu­ally became the man who is writ­ing this today, and on some level I don’t really care. I am here; she made the choice she made; and if she had made a dif­fer­ent choice back then it would have had noth­ing to do with who I am now and who I have been to her as a son for the past 45 years. She might even­tu­ally have had chil­dren; she might not. The point is that her life would have been her own, which is pre­cisely what it was not the moment she decided, for what­ever rea­son, to carry me to term, and because her deci­sion to carry me to term meant decid­ing that her life was no longer wholly her own, had that choice been imposed upon her, had the con­di­tion of becom­ing my mother been some­thing she had no choice but to accept (and I am except­ing here the choice she might have had to kill her­self), then that con­di­tion, it seems to me, would be a form of enslavement.

And that, finally, is why I am pro-choice: because I oppose enslave­ment in any form, and that answer, I think, is what ele­vates sto­ry­telling above preach­ing to the choir or merely argu­ing on a point-by-point basis with the oppo­si­tion, as valu­able as those activ­i­ties are, because if you under­tand a world empty of women’s repro­duc­tive choice to be a world in which women are enslaved, not merely to their own bod­ies and biol­ogy, but to the state because of the inter­ests the state has in polic­ing women’s bod­ies and biol­ogy—and make no mis­take: any place where repro­duc­tive choice is not legally avail­able to women is a place where it has been leg­is­lated away because the state has an inter­est in har­ness­ing women per­ma­nently to their repro­duc­tive biol­ogy—if you under­stand that, then you under­stand that women’s repro­duc­tive choice is an issue not merely of how we value women’s human­ity, though women’s human­ity is the pri­mary focus here, but that it is a mat­ter of how we value human­ity period.

A cou­ple of other posts on this blog that may be of interest:

• Know Thine Enemy: Fetal Per­son­hood as Metaphorical Thinking
• Revis­ited: Dal­ton Conley’s “Men’s Right To Choose,” Nadia Anjuman’s Death and What Male Honor is Really About
• Abor­tion in Jewish Law
• Abor­tion In Jew­ish Law 2
• Excerpt from “My Daughter’s Vagina”

I wish I had time to say more about this piece, “America’s Rottweiler, by Uri Avn­ery in the August 26/27 edi­tion of Coun­ter­punch, but I don’t. It needs to be read, though, and it needs to be talked about and debated and, most of all, it needs to be heard. Please go read it now.