Richard Jeffrey Newman

I have just fin­ished read­ing the first set of essays writ­ten by my stu­dents in ENG 261, Lit­er­a­ture of the Holo­caust. The prompt asked them to con­sider whether or not they think there is an oblig­a­tion to remem­ber the Holo­caust, with an empha­sis on the word oblig­a­tion, and to con­nect what they think to the char­ac­ters in the story “Miss­ing Pieces,” by Stanis­law Ben­ski, which I found in the anthol­ogy Here I Am: Con­tem­po­rary Jew­ish Sto­ries from Around the World. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing story about a Pol­ish man, Gabriel Lewin, who sur­vived the Nazi attempt to exter­mi­nate the Jews because he hap­pened to be vaca­tion­ing at his brother’s in Amer­ica when the war broke out. The prob­lem is that no one in Poland – he returned when the war was over – believes him, and this embar­rasses him. Indeed, the feels so much the out­sider that he goes out of his way to marry a woman who also spent the war years else­where, and then goes to the extreme of cre­at­ing an alter­na­tive iden­tity for him­self so that he can pose as a “real” sur­vivor. His wife, Rose, agrees to cre­ate an alter­na­tive iden­tity for her­self as well, and the story goes on to explore the pro­found impli­ca­tions of this kind of “memo­ri­al­iz­ing,” con­trast­ing Gabriel and his wife with Gabriel’s brother who, from his safe perch in the United States, tells Gabriel that it’s best not to dig up mem­o­ries of the war years, and a woman named Janeczka, who was orphaned dur­ing the war and spends a great deal of time try­ing to recon­struct a pic­ture of her child­hood from the frag­ments of mem­o­ries that she does have.

One of the most inter­est­ing aspects of the story to me is that Gabriel and Rose’s responses to the false mem­o­ries they are cre­at­ing are gen­dered in some­what stereo­typ­i­cal ways. For Gabriel, the point of cre­at­ing a false his­tory for him­self is to cement his stand­ing in the com­mu­nity; he is con­cerned not with the emo­tional con­tent or con­se­quences of the sto­ries he con­structs, but with how he can use them to estab­lish his bona fides, so to speak. Rose, on the other hand, actu­ally begins to feel the “mem­o­ries” she is cre­at­ing for her­self, so much so, in fact, that she finds it hard to sleep at night when she real­izes that, given the kind of per­son she is, she prob­a­bly would not have sur­vived the life she is cre­at­ing for her­self. This dichotomy, between the emo­tional woman and the status-conscious man is not really explored in the story, but it made an inter­est­ing segue into the next three sto­ries I had my stu­dents read: “The Block of Death” and “Esther’s First Born,” from the mem­oir Auschwitz: True Tales From a Grotesque Land by Sara Nomberg-Przytyk and “My Quar­rel with Hersh Rasseyner,” by Chaim Grade. (The text I am using, the includes these three sto­ries is Truth and Lamen­ta­tion: Sto­ries and Poems on the Holo­caust.)

The first two sto­ries, the ones by Nomberg-Przytyk, deal with women’s expe­ri­ence in the camps, specif­i­cally, child­birth and sex­ual exploita­tion by men. In “Esther’s First Born,” a preg­nant woman insists on giv­ing birth in the hos­pi­tal, despite the fact that it will mean her cer­tain death, since Joseph Men­gele will not allow any newly born Jew­ish chil­dren, or their moth­ers, to live. One of the most dis­turb­ing dis­cus­sion we had in class was about the sig­nif­i­cance of his logic:

Orli had told me once how Men­gele explained to her why he killed Jew­ish women together with their chil­dren. “When a Jew­ish child is born, or when a woman comes to the camp with a child already,” he explained, “I don’t know what to do with the child. I can’t set the child free because there are no longer any Jews liv­ing in free­dom. I can’t let the child stay in the camp because there are no facil­i­ties in the camp that would enable the child to develop nor­mally. It would not be human­i­tar­ian to send a child to the ovens with­out per­mit­ting the mother to be there to wit­ness the child’s death. That is why I send the mother and the child to the gas ovens together. (87)

In response to this most decid­edly inhu­man logic, when a woman gave birth – and this had to hap­pen in secret and, if you can imag­ine, in com­plete silence – the doc­tor would kill the baby as soon as it was born, telling the mother that it had been born dead. In this way, at least the mother would have a chance of surviving. The story presents Esther’s deci­sion, to have the baby in the open, even – and, actu­ally, espe­cially, after she learns about what I have just described, is pre­sented in the story as its own act of resis­tance, despite the fact that she ends up being sent to the ovens with her baby.
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Com­ment­ing in the dis­cus­sion on Alas about a post deal­ing with the cir­cum­ci­sion ban that has been pro­posed in San Fran­cisco, Ching­ona wrote the following:

Sec­ondly … and here I’m try­ing to put into words some­thing that I think is felt on a sub­con­scious and instinc­tual level (with addi­tional caveats that I can­not speak for every Jew every­where) … with all the blood that has been spilt to main­tain Judaism over the cen­turies, there is a feel­ing that one, as an indi­vid­ual, does not actu­ally have the right to just dis­pense with some­thing so fun­da­men­tal as this. For more sec­u­lar Jews, to not cir­cum­cise is to say that not only do you not care if your kids aren’t Jew­ish, but to actu­ally push them away from it. You might be a scofflaw in a hun­dred dif­fer­ent ways, but to not cir­cum­cise would be to renounce your cit­i­zen­ship. It’s the step too far. And to take that step is to spit on the mem­ory of every Jew who died for being Jewish.

Even as I write this, I imag­ine you laugh­ing at how ridicu­lous it sounds. Do other Jew­ish peo­ple on this thread think I’m exag­ger­at­ing? Like I said, I’m try­ing to put some­thing into words that is more felt than thought, and it’s entirely pos­si­ble that I’m over­stat­ing the mat­ter. But in my expe­ri­ence, it’s some­thing in the neigh­bor­hood of what I wrote above.

It reminded me of some­thing I wrote in my first Frag­ments of Evolv­ing Man­hood post, called A Full-Throated Protest Against Exis­tence and the World. (I should add I have not edited this excerpt to take into account Grace Annam’s gen­tle admo­ni­tion to remem­ber that “there are women who have the expe­ri­ence of hav­ing had a penis.”)

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.

It was not an easy thing for me to arrive at the point where, as a Jew­ish man, I could choose not to have my son cir­cum­cised and also not feel like I was betray­ing my com­mu­nity at a much, much deeper level than any rejec­tion of circumcision’s reli­gious sig­nif­i­cance might rep­re­sent for me. This is some­thing I might choose to write more about at a later time, but for now I will say that it had to do with let­ting go of a cer­tain kind of cul­tur­ally incul­cated anger and fear, with decid­ing that doing vio­lence to my son’s body – to the body of any Jew­ish infant born with a penis – in order to mark that body over and against the vio­lence that has been done to Jews through­out our his­tory was, in some sense, only a con­tin­u­a­tion of that violence.

Nonethe­less, I have tremen­dous respect for the feel­ings of peo­ple who con­tinue to see brit milah – we might as well call the cer­e­mony by its proper name – as a way of say­ing not only to the cir­cum­cised child, but to the his­tor­i­cally hos­tile world in which that child will grow up, “You are here, in this world, as a Jew; we are here in this world, as Jews, and we are not going any­where.“

Some videos I think are worth watching.

First, The Daily Show on at least one Fox Net­work host’s insis­tence that no one on that net­work ever com­pares peo­ple on the left to the Nazis for rhetor­i­cal effect:

Sec­ond, a link to Yad Vashem’s Per­sian chan­nel–I could not find the embed data – which hope­fully will serve as a coun­ter­weight to the kind of infor­ma­tion cir­cu­lat­ing in Iran about the Holo­caust as shown in this video from the open­ing of a Holo­caust Car­toons Expo in August 2006:

And third, this TED video of a talk by Hanna Rosin, author “The End of Men,” pub­lished in The Atlantic Monthly, “which asserts that the era of male dom­i­nance has come to an end as women gain power in the postin­dus­trial economy.”

I am not quite up to typ­ing a full-fledged post yet, though I will be soon. Still, I couldn’t resist post­ing a link to this piece on The Lede, by Robert Mackey.

Greek Bishop Equates Zion­ism to ‘Satanism’ — NYTimes.com:

The bishop, known as Met­ro­pol­i­tan Seraphim of Piraeus, said dur­ing an inter­view on Greek tele­vi­sion on Mon­day that Jews “con­trol the inter­na­tional bank­ing sys­tem.” He added: “Adolf Hitler was an instru­ment of world Zion­ism and was financed from the renowned Roth­schild fam­ily with the sole pur­pose of con­vinc­ing the Jews to leave the shores of Europe and go to Israel to estab­lish the new Empire.”

In response to the out­rage his state­ments caused, the bishop issued a state­ment, which Mackey quotes in full:

Decem­ber 23, 2010

On the occa­sion of the con­cerns raised by the Euro­pean Jew­ish Con­gress with regard to my inter­view with the MEGA tele­vi­sion chan­nel on Decem­ber 20, I have to say the following:

1. The things I said dur­ing my tele­vi­sion appear­ance on the show “Soci­ety Hour Mega” are strictly my per­sonal views and opin­ions, which I have repeat­edly expressed… ver­bally and in writing.

2. I respect, revere and love the Jew­ish peo­ple like any other peo­ple of our world accord­ing to the teach­ing of the incar­nated Son of God and the true Mes­siah the Lord Jesus Christ the Sav­ior and Redeemer, who was her­alded by all the Prophets and was incar­nated through the Jew­ish nation.

3. My pub­lic vehe­ment oppo­si­tion against Inter­na­tional Zion­ism refers to the organ that is the suc­ces­sor of the “San­hedrin” which altered the faith of the Patri­archs, the Prophets and the Right­eous of the Jew­ish nation through the Tal­mud, the Rab­bini­cal writ­ings and the Kab­balah into Satanism, and always strives vig­or­ously toward an eco­nomic empire set up through­out the world with head­quar­ters in the great land beyond the Atlantic for the preva­lence of world gov­ern­ment and pan-religion.

4. I con­sider like any sane per­son on the planet the Nazi régime and the para­noid dic­ta­tor Adolf Hitler as hor­ri­ble crim­i­nals against human­ity and take a stand with all honor and respect against the Jew­ish Holo­caust and any other heinous geno­cide such as that of the Pon­tic Greek and Armen­ian peo­ple. Besides, the Greek nation mourns thou­sands of mar­tyrs from the crim­i­nal Nazi atrocities.

+ The Met­ro­pol­i­tan of Piraeus, Seraphim

On the one hand, I am not sur­prised; on the other hand, the whole thing leaves me speechless.

I first read about the ADL’s state­ment sup­port­ing those who would stop the build­ing of Cor­doba House, a Mus­lim com­mu­nity cen­ter mod­eled on the YM/YWHA’s and CA’s you can find all over New York City over at The Debate Link. In read­ing the state­ment, I was struck by these two paragraphs:

How­ever, there are under­stand­ably strong pas­sions and keen sen­si­tiv­i­ties sur­round­ing the World Trade Cen­ter site.  We are ever mind­ful of the tragedy which befell our nation there, the pain we all still feel – and espe­cially the anguish of the fam­i­lies and friends of those who were killed on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001.

The con­tro­versy which has emerged regard­ing the build­ing of an Islamic Cen­ter at this loca­tion is coun­ter­pro­duc­tive to the heal­ing process.  There­fore, under these unique cir­cum­stances, we believe the City of New York would be bet­ter served if an alter­na­tive loca­tion could be found.

These words raise, of course, the obvi­ous ques­tion: Sup­pose the build­ing at stake were a Jew­ish com­mu­nity cen­ter and sup­pose the peo­ple opposed it were doing so out of “strong pas­sions and keen sen­si­tiv­i­ties” that were anal­o­gous to what the peo­ple who oppose the Cor­doba House feel, would the ADL argue that such a build­ing in a such a place was “coun­ter­pro­duc­tive to the heal­ing process” and urge that the cen­ter be built else­where? More than that, though, I found myself won­der­ing about whose feel­ings the ADL is being so con­sid­er­ate of here. As Michael Bar­baro wrote on July 30^th in an arti­cle on The New York Times web­site–the arti­cle was on the front page of the July 31^st edi­tion of the paper – attribut­ing the point to Oz Sul­tan, Cor­doba House’s pro­gram­ming direc­tor, “He said that Mus­lims had also died on Sept. 11, either because they worked in the twin tow­ers, or responded to the scene.”

Sul­tan was respond­ing to a state­ment made by Abra­ham Fox­man, ADL’s national direc­tor, to the effect that the peo­ple whose feel­ings his orga­ni­za­tion feels ought not to be hurt by the build­ing of cen­ter at its cur­rent loca­tion are the fam­i­lies of those who died in the Sep­tem­ber 11^th attacks. Mr. Sultan’s response, of course, is pre­cisely to the point, and I don’t think there isn’t much else to add to that. I do find Foxman’s rea­son­ing, at least as it is quoted in Barbaro’s arti­cle, pro­foundly trou­bling, though:

Asked why the oppo­si­tion of the [Sep­tem­ber 11^th vic­tims’] fam­i­lies was so piv­otal in the deci­sion, Mr. Fox­man, a Holo­caust sur­vivor, said they were enti­tled to their emotions.

“Sur­vivors of the Holo­caust are enti­tled to feel­ings that are irra­tional,” he said. Refer­ring to the loved ones of Sept. 11 vic­tims, he said, “Their anguish enti­tles them to posi­tions that oth­ers would cat­e­go­rize as irra­tional or bigoted.”

It’s hard for me to know where to begin tak­ing this apart. First, though, let me say that I do think Fox­man is right about this: peo­ple who have been through trauma are enti­tled to their feel­ings about things that may force them to return to or relive that trauma, and even when those feel­ings are irra­tional, the valid­ity of the feel­ings them­selves should not be ques­tioned, even when those feel­ings can rea­son­ably be cat­e­go­rized as “big­oted.” The rest of us, how­ever, should not be held hostage to the legit­i­macy of those feel­ings. More, pre­cisely because those feel­ings can be rea­son­ably cat­e­go­rized as big­oted, defer­ring to them in mat­ters of pub­lic pol­icy and dis­course can end up per­pet­u­at­ing that big­otry in con­crete ways. Wit­ness the ADL’s state­ment which, even grant­ing the most gen­er­ous pos­si­ble read­ing – and I am not sure what that would be – mar­gin­al­izes Mus­lims sim­ply for being Muslim.

Even more than that, though, I think it is cyn­i­cal beyond belief for Fox­man to enlist the moral author­ity that inevitably attaches to men­tion of Holo­caust sur­vivors, espe­cially because he is him­self a sur­vivor, to jus­tify the ADL’s posi­tion. It is insult­ing of my intel­li­gence; triv­i­al­iz­ing of the Holo­caust; it ren­ders Mus­lims invis­i­ble on all kinds of lev­els by equat­ing the Sep­tem­ber 11^th vic­tims’ fam­i­lies with the Jews; and it is, fun­da­men­tally, more about guilt-tripping the peo­ple who want to build the Cor­doba House and their sup­port­ers than it is about a search for heal­ing and that can be noth­ing but, to use Foxman’s own word, counterproductive.

I have not been fol­low­ing the Cor­doba House issue very closely and so I have not read much about the ques­tions that have been raised about some of the sources for its fund­ing, but I would like to say this: even if it turned out that Cor­doba House were being funded with money that could be tied back to the same peo­ple who per­pe­trated the Sep­tem­ber 11^th attacks, or some sim­i­larly objec­tion­able group, [ETA: the fact of that fund­ing would be the rea­son to pre­vent the build­ing of the Cor­doba House any­where in the United States; the fact of that fund­ing] would still not jus­tify the ADL’s posi­tion that would not jus­tify the ADL’s posi­tion. I hope that those ques­tions about fund­ing, if they have been legit­i­mately raised, are resolved pos­i­tively and that the Cor­doba House gets built. The con­tro­versy sur­round­ing it con­vinces me that we really, really need it.

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.

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.

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. » Read the rest of this entry «