I haven’t thought about those speeches of Rabbi Wehl’s in years, but then yesterday I was read this in an article by Joshua Hammer in Fast Company called “The Land of Oil and Money:”

How much crude could there be here? Bartov and I drive from the Valley of Elah to a wheat field at the edge of a road near the town of Kiryat Gat. This is the site of one of seven exploratory holes that IEI has drilled over the past two years. The rock samples were analyzed by IEI chemists at Ben Gurion University in Be’er Sheva and at Weatherford Labs in Houston. Bartov says their estimates matched the company’s “highest expectations”; if so, the equivalent of 500 million barrels of oil may lie beneath this wheat field. “What you see here would supply Israel’s needs for five years,” he says. And that’s just a tiny percentage of the territory controlled by IEI. According to Bartov and other IEI geologists, oil-shale deposits in Israel could produce as much as 250 billion barrels of crude. That’s roughly equal to the total reserves of Saudi Arabia.

IEI stands for Israel Energy Initiatives and the oil-shale deposits are rich in kerogen, which can be converted into oil if the shale is heated to a high enough temperature. The entire article is worth reading for the science of it, and it’s interesting to read some of the rest of the press about this (here, here, here and here’s a blog post that goes into quite a bit of detail). Clearly there are serious implications for Israel’s future, the future of the Middle East in general and even for the world if Israel does become a major energy supplier, but for me the most lasting impression of this news will be the moment when I was reading Hammer’s article and all I could think was, “Holy shit! Rabbi Wehl was right.“

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 regime 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.

He was talking to some Palestinian women sitting in the front and then–I don’t remember exactly who said what–identified some Jewish people sitting in the same row, more or less, but across the aisle. He asked them to wave at each other, which they did, and made the predictable joke about the peace process starting right there as part of the Maz Jobrani show. There followed some other patter and then he said, addressing himself to someone else in the audience, saying something like, “See, now, we need to start with a wave. Can’t go too far too soon; there’s just too much distrust.” Then he turned to the Palestinians and said, “Please, now, don’t go throwing anything at them; I don’t know what you brought with you, but don’t throw it. Not tonight.” And then he turned to the Jews and said, “And don’t you go taking her seat; it’s her seat. Okay?”

The audience exploded with laughter. It was not his funniest joke of the evening, but it was in some ways his most pointedly political, and he carried it off so lightly, so well, I was clapping as much in admiration as I was in laughter. It made me wonder what he would have done with us had we been sitting close enough: a Jewish American man, a Muslim Iranian woman and our son. It also reminded me, for some reason, of one of my favorite poems by the 12th century Iranian poet Saadi. Here it is in my tranlsation:

Everyone thinks his own thinking is perfect and that his child is the most beautiful.

I watched a Muslim and a Jew debate
and shook with laughter at their childishness.
The Muslim swore, “If what I’ve done is wrong,
may God cause me to die a Jew.” The Jew
swore as well, “If what I’ve said is false,
I swear by the holy Torah that I will die
a Muslim, like you.” If tomorrow the earth
fell suddenly void of all wisdom
no one would admit that it was gone.

Having two countries that I could call my home–Israel and the United States–brought with it the question of divided loyalties: Are you a Jewish-American or an American-Jew? If the United States and Israel went to war, on whose side would you fight? I remember thinking, when one of my Hebrew school teachers asked the latter question–and if I was in Hebrew school, then I was still in elementary school–that it would depend on which side I thought was right, but I also remember being afraid to give that answer, since I knew I would be told that I was wrong. The United States might be a good place for us to live as Jews for now, but not only did we have to remember that it–meaning the Holocaust–could happen here too, and so Israel, the Jewish State, the place we could all flee to if we had to, was the only place we could really call home; the very fact that Israel was a Jewish state, founded in the blood of Jewish heroes, on the land that had been the kingdom ruled by David, our ancient God-given homeland, meant that it could claim, that we owed it, a commitment transcending the accident of our place-of-birth.

Mine, in other words, was not entirely a secular Zionism. God’s hand could be seen everywhere in the story of Israel’s founding, most especially in its victory over the surrounding Arab nations when they invaded in 1948 after Israel declared its independence. Contemporary Israeli historians have been questioning the traditional narrative of that war–i.e., that the Arabs invaded to prevent Israel’s founding–but even if the alternative narratives that some of those historians have proposed are indeed closer to the truth than what I was taught, I doubt it would have changed significantly the conclusion to which I was supposed to come: that God wanted to give Israel back to the Jews and that it was his right as the creator of the world to do so. The fact of Israel’s existence was all the proof anyone should need.

It wouldn’t have mattered, in other words, that Israel’s provisional government could have avoided the 1948 war–at least according to Simha Flapan in his book The Birth Of Israel: Myths and Realities–by accepting, as the Arabs had already done, an American proposal for a three month truce (cited here) and that this truce might conceivably have led to a peaceful declaration of Israeli statehood. My teachers, especially once I’d entered yeshiva, would still, I believe, have quoted to me the commentary given by Rashi on the very first word of the Torah, b’reisheet, which is usually translated as “In the beginning,” but which is more accurately rendered as “at the beginning of.” Rashi quotes Rabbi Isaac, who points out that since the Torah’s main purpose is to teach the commandments Jews are expected to follow, it was not necessary to begin the Torah with the creation of the world. So why did God begin at the beginning?

For if the nations of the world should say to Israel: “You are robbers, because you have seized by force the lands of the seven nations” [of Canaan], they [Israel] could say to them, “The entire world belongs to the Holy One, Blessed Be He, He created it and gave it to whomever it was right in his eyes. Of His own will He gave it to them and of His own will He took it from them and gave it to us.”

I read those words now and it’s hard for me to believe I actually believed them; and I also, as I read, remember very clearly when my belief started to unweave itself. I was an undergraduate arguing with another student in my dorm about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict–which was then known as the Arab-Israeli conflict–and I was citing chapter and verse of every argument I had been taught to justify both Israel’s presence in the world and its treatment of the Palestinians, including the horribly racist canard of Palestinian mothers breeding their sons to become terrorists, which was repeated as common knowledge in the circles where I got my initial Jewish education.

I don’t remember exactly how I said it, but when I uttered whatever words I uttered, my dormmate’s lower jaw dropped, and he looked at me with a mixture of speechless pity and absolute disbelief. “Do you really think,” he asked me, “that Palestinian mothers are any different from your mother or mine? Do you really think they want for their sons anything other”–and here he began to count off on his fingers–“than a long and full and happy and productive life?” He went on to say some other things as well, but I don’t remember what they were because I had stopped paying attention. It was my turn to stare, slack jawed and  filled with disbelief. How could it never have occurred to me that Palestinian mothers and their sons were actual human beings?

///

During my undergraduate years, I spent my summers working at a Federation of Jewish Philanthropies sleep away camp. Part of my job was to be the camp’s Jewish Resource Specialist, someone sent by the New York City Board of Jewish Education to help make Jewish cultural programming a more integral part of the daily activities the camp offered. On rainy days, when outdoor activities were impossible, we would herd the kids into the largest room available and show them movies. On this particular rainy day, we were told there would be a movie from I forget which Jewish organization about Israel, and I was excited because I thought it would provide material for me to work with as I planned activities for the rest of the week. Part of what I was supposed to do, after all, was to get the campers at least to think about, if not fully appreciate, the central place Israel occupied in Jewish identity and the role it played, historically and on a daily basis, in Jewish survival.

I don’t remember the beginning of the movie well, though I think it started innocently enough, with scenes of Israelis living their lives in cities–especially Jerusalem–on the beach, a kibbutz, and there were plenty of shots of young people, spanning the age range of the campers in the gym, from about 7 or 8 to about 15 or 16, and there were lots and lots of happy families. At some point, though, the music went tragic and we were looking at scenes from some well known PLO attacks within Israel. I recall this one in particular:

A young Israeli man carries in his arms a young Israeli woman whose legs are bloody from bullet wounds.

It’s from the Ma’alot massacre, which took place in 1974, when three members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine killed 22 Israeli high school students. As I remember it, the image was often used in programs directed at young people to impress on them both the dire situation in which Israel found itself and the ostensible fact that what happened in Israel was directly relevant to their lives as Jews growing up in the United States. If the mere fact of living in Israel, the Jewish State, placed young Jews at risk, how much more so might we someday be at risk in the United States; and if they were willing to live with that risk for the sake of the Jewish State, what could we do to be worthy of that sacrifice? The movie we were watching, however, did not continue in that vein. Instead, what followed was a piece of propaganda intended to impress the audience with the advanced weaponry being used by the Israeli military to fight what the narrator referred to as the barbaric Arab terrorists threatening Israel’s existence. The film’s narration lauded the aid Israel received from the US as absolutely necessary to prevent the inhumanity of the terrorists from destroying America’s only true friend in the Middle East, and it also included a pitch for more money, though since the campers were clearly not the pitch’s intended audience, it was not clear to whom precisely the appeal was being made.

I was indignant, though not because I disagreed in principle with what the movie had to say. I may have started to understand that most Palestinians were ordinary people just like me, but it was still a fact that the PLO was sworn to destroy Israel; attacks such as the one at Ma’alot were still going on; and so Israel needed to be able to defend itself, even if that defense meant going on the offense, as it did when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 with weapons like the ones described in the movie. Rather, what I objected to was the fact that the film had no educational value whatsoever. It was intended not to provoke thought, but to inspire feelings, and I complained that we had no business showing it to kids who deserved to learn about the situation in Israel without such overt manipulation. I said this to the person the camp had called in to show the film and lead the discussion afterwards. To be honest, he told me, he was not an educator. The film was part of a fundraising presentation he gave regularly at Hadassah meetings, but he didn’t understand why I was complaining. Sooner or later the kids would understand what animals the Arabs were, so why not now? Israel, he said, should just wipe them all out; the Middle East would be far better off, and the Jews, at last, could live in peace.

It was hard for me then, as it is hard for me now, to know how to respond to such a statement, not because I don’t have a response, but because my experience has been that pointing out to Jewish people who say such things that they are advocating genocide is throwing a pebble of reason against a brick wall of denial. Are you seriously comparing me to the Nazis? they will ask; and neither a yes nor a no will move the discussion any closer to talking about the issues raised by what they said. Since I did not have the authority to do what I wanted to do–which was to start a new discussion with the campers about how to know propaganda when you see it, and how to read it critically–I walked out into the rain, pretending there was something I needed to get from bunk.

As I wandered down to the lake that was just a few dozen yards from the building where that man was now leading his discussion, the one thing I was certain of was that his Zionism was not a Zionism I wanted any part of, and I started to think some version of what many Zionists probably think when they hear Jews say the kinds of thing that man said. That’s not Zionism; it can’t be. Zionism, plain and simple, is the belief that Israel’s founding and continued existence as a Jewish State was and is legitimate. This legitimacy needs to be recognized and respected as such by the rest of the world, as does every Jew’s right to settle in Israel if he or she chooses, and as does Israel’s right to protect itself against aggression. None of this requires the oppression of the Palestinians or the military occupation of their land; but if the Palestinians make such measures necessary, Israel is within its rights to do what it needs to do to protect itself.

What that man said, however, was (and is) Zionism. Certainly it was the Zionism to which I was first exposed, and certainly it is the Zionism expressed by many of the people in this video posted on Jewschool. “There’s only way to deal with a cancer,” one woman says. “You either burn it out or you remove it.” And check out the woman who, at around 2:04, answers the interviewer’s question about how many civilian casualties would cause her to question the recent Israeli invasion of Gaza by describing a picture she saw that morning of a girl in Lebanon whose father was slashing her head with a dagger as part of a custom of ritual bloodletting that some Shiite Muslims observe on the day of Ashura, when they mourn the death of Imam Hussein and his family, inflicting symbolic suffering on themselves in order to express their grief. The woman’s point is that, clearly, the question of civilian casualties needs to be seen in the context of the Muslim Arab’s barbaric nature, and when the interviewer interrupts her to point out that his parents hired a mohel to slash his penis when he was just eight days old, she is left almost speechless. “I don’t think you can compare this,” she says. “That’s inappropriate.”

To claim that the anti-Arab racism these sentiments express is not part of Zionism is not only to deny historical fact–the Zionist movement has been shot through with anti-Arab racism from its beginning, some of which I pointed out in Part Four of this series–but it is also implicitly to suggest that Zionism exists primarily not in the real world, where the actions it inspires are shaped by the beliefs of the people who take those actions, which then have real consequences in the lives of real people, Jewish, Palestinian and otherwise, but rather in a realm of pure semantics, where it is possible to isolate from its ideological consequences the assertion that the Jews–all of us, everywhere–are a single nation and that Israel’s founding and continued existence as a Jewish State was and is legitimate. Despite the initial willingness of the Zionist movement to consider a Jewish state in Madagascar, for example–and leaving aside the obvious reality that Madagascar was not uninhabited at the time–how could any Jewish nationalistic reading of Jewish history and tradition not have eventually lead the Zionists to conclude that the Jewish homeland they were pursuing had to be founded in the Middle East? How, given the logic of European nationalism which informed Zionism from its inception–even if Zionism is not, properly speaking, understood as European nationalism–could the idea of that Jewish homeland not have become the idea of the Jewish state that we have today.

Sure, it’s possible to argue that the logic of Jewish nationalism did not have to lead Zionism as a movement to these conclusions. More to the point, it is a fact that there were Zionists who did not reach these conclusions. Not a few Zionists, for example, Judah Magnes among them, believed that Israel should be a binational state, though even that position does not address the question of why the people already living in the region should have had to accept such a state to begin with. It is important to be able to make this argument in response to those who want to define Zionism as a monolithic movement which has found its apotheosis in the actions and policies of the current Israeli government and who then hold all Jews worldwide, Zionist (of whatever stripe) or not, responsible for those policies and actions. Not that I think you can argue an antisemite out of her or his antisemitism; but it is important to be able to educate people, Jews and non-Jews alike, that talking about Zionism as if it were one thing to all Jews is both misleading and irresponsible.

So if the Zionism of the racists is Zionism, and the Zionism of the anti-racists is Zionism, and the Zionism of those who want a Jewish state in Israel is Zionism, and the Zionism of those who wanted something other than a Jewish state in Israel is Zionism; if, in other words, any version of a stance towards Israel that does not question the underlying notion that it should somehow, in some form, be a home for any Jew who wants to live there is Zionsim, because the Jews are a single nation with a right to such a place, then what is Zionism? I am reminded of the joke in which two men ask their rabbi to settle a dispute between them. The first man tells his side of the story.

“You’re right!” the rabbi says.

Then the second man tells his side. After listening closely, the rabbi says, “You’re right!”

The two men look at him in exasperation. “Wait a minute! We can’t both be right!”

Without missing a beat, the rabbi looks at them both and says, “Also right!”

///

I am not a Zionist, and I have not been one for quite a long time now, and yet writing those words still makes me cringe a little, the way I imagine people are supposed to cringe when they tell family secrets, or the way, in certain contexts, I still cringe when I reveal that I was sexually abused as a boy. Not that I am comparing the experience of no longer being a Zionist to the experience of sexual abuse, but each is a revelation that leaves me vulnerable, not necessarily to attack–though that, too–but to instances of misunderstanding and misrepresentation, willful and otherwise, that can sometimes be worse than a full-on frontal assault. I know, for example, that there are Jewish anti-Zionists who will use what I have said about my early Jewish education as further evidence that Zionism is a racist ideology of Jewish supremacy; but then, in the same breath, those same people will argue, as the charter of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network does, that “Zionism is not just racist but anti-Semitic. It endorses the sexist European anti-Semitic imagery of the effeminate and weak ‘diaspora Jew’ and counters it with a violent and militarist ‘new Jew,’ one who is a perpetrator rather than a victim of racialized violence.” (I wrote a little bit about the stereotype of the effeminate Jew in Part 4 of this series.)

To be Zionist, in other words, at least according to this logic, is to believe both the antisemitic oppressor’s definition of the Jew and the white oppressor’s definition of all those who are not white. It is to be within oneself, simultaneously, the oppressed and the oppressor, truly a fucked up state of affairs for anyone trying to live a reasonably meaningful life; but while I can disagree with Jewish anti-Zionists about what it means to be an authentic Jew–because you cannot have, within a single ethnic group, one identity-related movement that is anti another identity-related movement without raising the question of authenticity–what am I to make of the fact that the very same analysis of Zionism will be made by non-Jewish anti-Zionists who are unambiguously and unapologetically antisemitic? David Duke, for example, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and a former Louisiana State Representative–whose website I will not link to–includes in his book, Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening To The Jewish Question, the following quote by Dr. Stephen Steinlight, a former Director of National Affairs at the American Jewish Committee:

I’ll confess it, at least: like thousands of other typical Jewish kids of my generation, I was reared as a Jewish nationalist, even a quasi-separatist. Every summer for two months for 10 formative years during my childhood and adolescence I attended Jewish summer camp. There, each morning, I saluted a foreign flag, dressed in a uniform reflecting its colors, sang a foreign national anthem, learned a foreign language, learned foreign folk songs and dances, and was taught that Israel was the true homeland. Emigration to Israel was considered the highest virtue, and, like many other Jewish teens of my generation, I spent two summers working in Israel on a collective farm while I contemplated that possibility. More tacitly and subconsciously, I was taught the superiority of my people to the gentiles who had oppressed us. We were taught to view non-Jews as untrustworthy outsiders, people from whom sudden gusts of hatred might be anticipated, people less sensitive, intelligent, and moral than ourselves. We were also taught that the lesson of our dark history is that we could rely on no one.

The quote is from “The Jewish Stake in America’s Changing Demography: Reconsidering a Misguided Immigration Policy,” a long and thoughtful essay (here’s the pdf) that I don’t ultimately agree with, but which asks important questions about the Jewish community in the United States in relation to trends in  immigration that have been changing the demographics of this country for some time. Duke wants to use the quote to show that Jewish supremacism (read: Zionism) is the dominant force in Jewish life, and one can find throughout his website many instances of the world-Zionist-conspiracy canard. More to the point, Duke too is concerned with who is and who is not an authentic Jew–or in Duke’s case perhaps “good Jew” would be more appropriate–and he cites Israel Shahak as an example. Shahak, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto and Bergen-Belsen who became a professor of chemistry at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a former president of the Israeli League for Human and Civil rights, was an outspoken critic of both the Israeli government and orthodox Judaism. Shahak’s writing about Judaism, which has been seriously challenged –see as well the Wikipedia entry on Shahak–is one of the sources that informs Duke’s antisemitic tract, but whether or not Shahak’s ideas about Judaism and Zionism are accurate, the fact that Duke uses him to show that there are “good/authentic Jews” in the same way that the International Anti-Zionist Jewish Network uses its critique of Zionism to demonstrate that they are the “good/authentic Jews” should give pause to anyone who continues to see the questions surrounding Zionism in such neatly binary terms. (And please note: I am not accusing the International Anti-Zionist Jewish Network of being self-hating; I want merely to point out that when Jews acting in good faith and antisemites, whom I believe are acting in bad faith by definition, approach the question of Zionism using an intellectual framework built on the same kind of good-Jew/bad-Jew dichotomy, then it is important to question the nature of the framework itself.)

Steinlight’s confession, however, is not–as Duke’s decontextualized use of it makes it sound–an expression of guilt over having been an adherent of so-called Jewish supremacism. Rather, Steinlight is describing the Jewish version of an idea that most, if not all, oppressed communities have in common: the idea that the oppressed are somehow more moral, more sensitive and, in general, “better people” than the oppressor. I’ve heard this sentiment expressed by, among others, women about men, Black people about white people, gay people about straight people and, of course, Jewish people about non-Jews; given how close Steinlight’s generation is to the generation of the Holocaust–I believe, though I could be wrong, that he is about 15 or 20 years older than I am–it is not surprising that he grew up with a particularly hard core version of this sentiment. (I should also point out that the white nationalism of which David Duke is a primary spokesperson has its own version of this sentiment as well.)

Steinlight makes his confession in the context of explaining why “Jews need to be especially sensitive to the [fact that] one person’s ‘celebration’ of his own diversity, foreign ties, and the maintenance of cultural and religious traditions that set him apart is another’s balkanizing identity politics.” He continues:

For Jews, it is at best hypocritical, and, worse, an example of an utter lack of self-awareness, not to recognize that we are up to our necks in this problem. This has been especially true once we were sufficiently accepted in the United States to feel confident enough to go public with our own identity politics. But this newfound confidence carries its own costs; people are observing us closely, and what they see in our behavior is not always distinct from what we loudly decry in others. One has to be amused, even amazed, when colleagues in the organized Jewish world wring their hands about black nationalism, Afrocentrism, or with cultural separatism in general–without considering Jewish behavioral parallels.

In my own experience, the thing that made Jewish identity politics different from any other identity politics, at least according to the Jews who were my teachers, was that we’d just been through the Holocaust. The trauma of recent history, they argued both implicitly and explicitly, allowed us to claim a special status that it was just not possible for Blacks, for example, to claim. (While it may be different now, when I was receiving this education during the 1970s, African-Americans were the only point of comparison ever used.) No one questioned, according to this line of thinking, that African-Americans were in fact American, or at least not anyone with a significant amount of power; and slavery–while it was of course fairly recent and had, of course, been horrible, with consequences still being felt–had not been a genocide, which meant that the relationship of African-Americans to the United States was radically different from the relationship of the Jews to a world that had, for the most part, turned its back on us while the Nazis tried to wipe us out.

To argue that there are no significant differences between the Holocaust and slavery would be pointless, as it would be pointless to argue that those differences don’t make a difference in how Jews and African Americans experience themselves both psychologically and in terms of their socio-economic, cultural and political positioning relative to those groups that hold power. What is not pointless to argue, and this is what Steinlight says, is that Blacks–along with all other similarly situated groups–are as entitled to their nationalisms as the Jews are to ours. Nor is it pointless to point out the Jewish community’s self-indulgent hypocrisy when it refuses to recognize that fact. More to the point, though I am not sure Steinlight would put it quite this way, that hypocrisy is one means by which the Jewish community in the United States either finds it difficult to acknowledge or–more insidiously–willfully hides from itself a central fact of our existence here: “[P]ound for pound,” Steinlight writes, and he is right, Jews have the most political power “of any ethnic/cultural group in America.”

Not that this power is absolute, not that it means antisemitism has disappeared or that Jews don’t need to be as vigilant as ever in defending ourselves against it; but to deny that we have the political clout Steinlight talks about, or that we have worked damned hard as a community since, say, the 1950s (if not before) to acquire and hold this power, or that this power affords us privileges that other oppressed minorities in the United States do not yet have, is not merely hypocrisy of the worse sort, aligning us with the status quo that had formerly discriminated against us. It is also to be blind to the fact that we could lose that power very easily, and that blindness, Steinlight asserts, could turn out to be our tragic, if not fatal, flaw:

We cannot consider the inevitable consequences of current trends [in immigration]—not least among them diminished Jewish political power—with detachment. Our present privilege, success, and power do not inure us from the effect of historical processes, and history has not come to an end, even in America. We have an enormous stake in the outcome of this process, and we should start acting as if we understood that we do. A people that lost one-third of its world population within living memory due to its powerlessness cannot contemplate the loss of power with complacency. We rightly ask, “If I am not for myself who will be for me?” (Emphasis mine)

Whether current trends in immigration will indeed result in the diminished Jewish political power Steinlight is worried about is not entirely clear to me, and since my goal here has nothing to do, really, with what he has to say either about US immigration policy or what the Jewish position on that policy should be, I am going to put the substance of his essay aside. Instead, I want to call attention to the way Steinlight’s argument positions the Jewish community in the United States as a community not simply with real political power, but also with a vested interest in preserving that power as the continuing source of our claim to a legitimate place in American society. Nowhere does he suggest, for example, that the Jewish response to the dangers he sees should be–as I believe it would have been when I was getting my Jewish education–to work for a stronger Israel to which we can all move/flee when the time comes. Nowhere does he suggest that we are Jews who just happen, by virtue of our centuries-long exile, to have been born in the United States, and so we should assume that nothing we do to protect ourselves here will ultimately work, since no one, including ourselves, believes we truly belong here. Rather, he wants the Jewish community in the United States to consider the kinds of immigration policies that will, in his opinion, help us preserve our status and standing as a community of American citizens who are Jewish, for whom being of the US is our national identity and for whom the quality and character of US culture and society is a paramount concern. Whether or not you agree with what Steinlight has to say about immigration, you cannot call his stance towards what it means to be a Jew in the United States conventionally Zionist, at least to the degree that conventional Zionism in the US can be measured by the degree to which he and I–and many, many Jews of our generations–were taught to see ourselves as, for want of a better term, contingent Americans.

///

The feeling that one doesn’t really belong where one is, that one doesn’t have an inalienable right to one’s own physical presence in that place, is part of what it feels like to have been victimized; and if there’s one thing that Jews have a right to feel in the aftermath of the Holocaust, it is that we have been victimized. More to the point, given the context of century after century of having been oppressed in almost every place we have ever lived, it was entirely reasonable for those Jews who either survived the Holocaust or who witnessed it from afar to make this feeling of victimization not only part of their identity as Jews, but also part of the Jewish identity they passed on to future generations. At some point, however, victims have a choice to make: either they continue to hold on to the idea of themselves as victims or they begin to see themselves as survivors, and–at least in my experience–one of the primary differences between the two is that victims tend to be reactive in relation to their surroundings, while survivors tend to be proactive.

Certainly for the Jews of my grandparent’s generation, and probably my parents’ generation as well, the moment when Jews chose decisively to be survivors rather than victims corresponds, more or less, to the moment when Israel declared its statehood in 1948, and it is a deeply sad irony that acknowledging the validity of that sentiment means, almost by definition, subordinating to it the suffering of the Palestinians, for whom the founding of the State of Israel marks the beginning of their own oppression. To survive on the coattails of someone else’s victimization is not a survival that can be sustained indefinitely, especially if the survivor is the one doing the victimizing, and even if Israel is not the only party in the Middle East to have victimized the Palestinians, that does not absolve Israel, or the original Zionist settlers, of its own acts of victimization. Nonetheless, it would constitute a falsification of history to deny that, for my grandparents, Israel’s founding represented a moment of psychological–if not actual, since they lived here–liberation. It was, certainly in their lifetimes, the first proactively Jewish stance that Jews had taken in the world, both as an assertion of Jewish national identity and as a response to world antisemitism, not to mention that Israel’s founding spoke very strongly, if not without ambivalence and ambiguity, to the religious belief in the Jews’ eventual return to that land.

Looked at from the perspective of my lifetime, however, which spans slightly more than the last third of the 20th century and, now, the first decade of the 21st, the Jewish community in the United States has also been nothing if not proactive. The political power that Steinlight talks about is real, and we have worked very hard over the years to claim it. Not that it means we control the news media, Hollywood or the financial system, or that we run Congress–when my wife was visiting Iran about 10 or so years ago, someone told her that Newt Gingrich was Jewish, a Zionist agent who was posing as a Southern Baptist–or that there is a secret, Protocols-like cabal that controls the presidency, or any of the other unfortunately all too common canards that antisemites use to perpetuate the myths of Jewish power. Nonetheless, to deny that the Jews in the United States have reached a point where members of our community, in not insignificant numbers, have power and influence is to deny a reality of our lives. More to the point, it is to deny that power as an assertion of the fact that we belong here.

The Jews in the United States, in other words, as a community, are no longer victims. Antisemitism is alive and well here–the minority for and to which David Duke speaks, minority though it is, is not inconsequential–but we are not victims. We do not need to worry about systemic police brutality or employment discrimination; the criminal justice system is not stacked against us; we can marry whomever we want, live pretty much wherever we want; we are not subject to any of the various official profilings that are used to victimize, among others, Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, Arabs and Iranians; large pockets of our community do not live in a poverty that has at least some of its major roots in slavery and other forms of oppression/discrimination or outright genocidal violence (I am thinking here of Native Americans); and this list gets much longer if I start to count the ways in which Jews in the US are no longer made victims in the ways we were right from the start of the European colonization of this land. As Leonard Dinnerstein shows in Anti-Semitism In America, the earliest colonists imported classical European antisemitism to these shores when they came here. The Jews who were allowed to settle in New Netherlands, for example—only after the Dutch West India Company told Peter Stuyvesant he had no choice but to accept them—were legally prohibited from worshipping in public, voting, holding public office, purchasing land, working as craftsmen, engaging in retail operations, trading with Indians, or standing guard with other members of the community—a fact which did not prevent the community from taxing Jews for not performing this duty. One merchant, most probably expressing the feelings of his peers, explained that Jews had “no other God than the Mammon of unrighteousness [i.e., money], and no other aim than to get possession of Christian property,” a standard European antisemitic canard (5).

One of the reasons Jews in the United States have, as a community, been able to leave our status as victims behind is that Jews here are generally assumed to be white people. This assumption, of course, renders Jews of color invisible, and I do not want to overlook the fact that Jews of color–especially if they are women and/or queer–are subject to multiple invisibilities and oppressions that effect them in complex ways I could not even begin to address; but, as far as I know, and if I am wrong about this then I will obviously have to rethink what I am saying here, Jews of color are not systematically victimized in the United States as Jews in any of the ways I have just described. My point, in other words, is that Jew as a category of victimization no longer has the currency it once did in this country, and that matters to me, because if I take seriously the fact that the Jews in the United States are no longer victims, if I am willing to accept that we have, as a community, become survivors, then my relationship to the Zionism I was taught when I was younger must change. Because that Zionism is predicated on the notion that all Jews living outside the land of Israel are living in a permanent state of victimization, that living outside the land of Israel, in fact, defines Jewish victimization.

I am not naive. I recognize that the potential for a resurgence in the victimization of the Jews exists here, as it exists almost everywhere I know of, even in countries where few if any Jews live. I know that antisemitic violence still happens in the United States, and I know the dangers of the antisemitic rhetoric that gets woven, purposefully and not, into many of the discourses of my daily life; I know that the Jews are still a minority community and that our culture and traditions–religious and otherwise–remain unacknowledged in many parts of this country; and I know that if the inclusion of Jew in the category white is the only thing we rely on to keep the potential for government sanctioned, institutionalized, systemic oppression of the Jews from once again becoming a reality, then we are relying on a very precarious inclusion indeed. Not only does the mere existence of Jews of color give the lie to the guarantee such inclusion might otherwise be assumed to imply, but even for someone like me–a middle-class, nearly middle-aged white guy who, if you did not know I was Jewish, would be just a middle-class, nearly middle-aged (assumed to be Christian) white guy–the question of whether Jews are really white people is fraught with ambivalence, not because I have not benefitted from white privilege, because I have, but because I have also seen how easily white privilege can be taken away from me.

Not one of the people from whom I experienced antisemitism in the long list I gave at the beginning of Part 1 of this series was a person of color; they were all white, and the fact that I was Jewish clearly trumped for them whatever solidarity one might otherwise have assumed them to feel based on the shared color of our skin. As well, when I have experienced antisemitism from people of color, it has not been the case that the white people in the room all rallied around me because I was one of them and we needed to stand united against this discrimination coming from people who were not white–not that I would have wanted that kind of solidarity. My point is simply that, in my experience, once my being Jewish has become an issue it very clearly takes precedence over the fact that, in appearance anyway, I am white. Indeed, the racial status of the Jews has long been at issue in antisemitic discourse. Sander Gilman writes, for example, about the association of the Jews with blackness–not racial blackness per se, but the blackness of the devil–and how that association informed the racialized antisemitism of the 19th and 20th centuries, in which the Jews were considered to be an even more deeply “mongrelized” race than the Blacks; and in the late 19th and early 20th century United States, while Jews were not considered people of color per se–i.e., we were not Black people–we were also not considered white.

To begin with–this is quoted in Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man–consider that E. D. Cope, America’s leading paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the time declared that mixing the “fine nervous susceptibility and mental force,” of the “highest race of man” (read: white people) with “the fleshly instincts, and dark mind of the African” would result not only in “the [white] mind [being] stagnated, and the life of mere living introduced instead”–remember what Otto Weininger, in Part 4, had to say about the Jews’ ability to live a meaningful life?–but also in the dubiousness or impossibility “of resurrection,” which would have been assured, in the absence of some disqualifying sin, to a child born to two white Christian parents. The Jews, of course, did not need to intermarry to lose their chance at heaven, they were already excluded from resurrection by definition, and so in that way they were not, properly speaking, white. Leonard Dinnerstein gives other, more explicitly obvious, examples: A credit-rating investigator in the nineteenth century, for example, wrote of one potential customer, “We should deem him safe but he is not a white man. He is a Jew…” (20). In 1889, a Baptist publication observed that “the Hebrews are still as distinct a race among us as the Chinese” (42). Writing in support of President Woodrow Wilson’s nomination of Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court, Ellerton James noted that Brandies “is a Hebrew, and, therefore, of Oriental race” (69). Towards the end of World War I, the Department of the Interior appointed a “Special Collaborator and Racial Advisor on Americans of Jewish Origin” (76, italics mine). Even as late as the 1930s and 40s, many academics believed that the “Jewish race” should be excluded from academia, and letters of recommendation for some of the few Jews who managed to get in contained phrases like “has none of the offensive traits which people associate with his race” and “by temperament and spirit…measure[s] up to the whitest Gentile I know” (88).

Yet another example comes from Madison Grant, who wrote in his 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race that

The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew. (18)

I had my own small encounter with a particularly ignorant version of this thinking when a Catholic girlfriend of mine told me that her aunt had advised her not to marry me unless I got a nose job, so our kids “wouldn’t look so Jewish;” and I remember seeing pictures of the signs that read “Burn Jews not oil” during the 1970s oil embargo; and I have read what people have been saying about the Jews on message boards in the wake of the Bernard Madoff scandal; and so I recognize that the distance between the relative safety of my existence here and the kinds of things happening in Venezuela–which could easily, and probably should, be read as the potential beginnings of a more systematic oppression of the Jews there–or the kinds of things that have been said recently by an official of the South African government or by an official of one of that country’s major unions, is not as large as it can feel to me on days when I can be just me, without an issue being made one way or the other of the fact that I am Jewish.

Nonetheless, in the nearly half-century that I have been alive in this world, I have come to value very deeply the stated commitment to pluralism that is a central tenet of United States culture, the idea that we should be a society in which we all can be “just me,” and where “just me” means all of who we are, and where a threat to me as an individual because I am Jewish, or to the Jewish community as a whole, is understood as a threat to all. I know that not everyone in this country accepts this vision of pluralism and that there are many who are right now working assiduously to make sure that it is never fully realized; I know that this notion of pluralism bears little resemblance to what the white, land-owning men who wrote our founding documents envisioned when they put the words “all men are created equal” down on paper. I know, but I also know–because I have seen it happen more than once in my lifetime–that the system of government those men established has turned out to be flexible enough that community after community has been able to argue its way to inclusion. That they have to make such an argument at all, of course, is a problem of no small significance; that the inclusion they do win is rarely fully realized, even in the legal terms by which it is first defined, means that the struggle is a long one. Given the reality of when and where we live, however, the struggle itself does seem to me the point; and to continue to see myself as a contingent American, as a Jew for whom Israel is, just in case, my fallback country–no matter how legitimate the feeling of “just in case” may be (and I continue to believe it is more than legitimate)–is ultimately to play that struggle false.

Yet even as I write that last sentence, I know I do not have the luxury of thinking about these issues only in terms of myself. I have a family, a wife and a son, who are not Jewish, at least not according to traditional Judaism. My wife is Muslim, which means that, at least religiously, my son is not considered a member of my tribe. The fact that neither my wife nor my son is Jewish, technically speaking, however, would not have have saved them from the Nazis; nor, I am guessing, would it matter to anyone, or any group, who decided to target, violently or otherwise, me as an individual Jew or a Jewish group of which I was a part; and so I would be lying if I did not admit that a small part of me still breathes a sigh of relief that Israel and its Law of Return exist–because if the need ever arose, and fleeing to Israel was what I needed to do to save the lives of my wife and son, I can’t imagine that I would not do it. I do not deny that the possibility of such escape affords me a privilege not shared by other oppressed groups in the United States, groups that suffer far greater victimization than Jewish-Americans currently do, but the uncomfortable fact is that the privilege is mine, and when I think about my family, I am glad for it–guiltily glad, but glad nonetheless–even if it seems right now like I would never have to use it.

Suppose, though, that the only life at stake were my own? I like to think I would have the courage of my convictions, that if the United States were to turn against its Jews in ways that would make it not unreasonable to flee, I would choose to stay to fight, but there is no way I can know. Everyone has a limit beyond which they cannot go, and were I to reach, or be pushed to the edge of, mine, I might in fact give up and escape to Israel–assuming such an escape were even possible. David Schraub, in a post called The Superseded Jew, makes the case for Israel’s safe-haven existence as a logical necessity devolving from the treatment Jews have received throughout our history, and pretty much throughout the world, as strongly as I have seen it made. The fact remains, however, that while Israel could easily be a safe haven for me now, if I thought I needed it; and while Israel could probably accommodate a couple of hundred Jews from, say Venezuela pretty easily, because let’s assume only that many have decided to leave and move to Israel; and Israel might even be able to accommodate a couple of thousand Jews. But what about 20,000 Jews, or 100,000 Jews, or a million or three million Jews? It’s easy to forget that Israel is, as I suggested in Part 4 of this series, a very small country with limited resources, and that this limit will by definition put a limit on the number of Jewish refugees Israel could reasonably accommodate–especially if the conflict with the Palestinians remains unresolved. As well, as I also suggested in Part 4, it is willfully naive at best to imagine that racial, gender, sexual, class and many other politics will play no role in how the Law of Return is applied should Jews throughout the world start claiming, en masse, their rights under that law.

The fact is that if we think not in terms of individual or small groups of Jews who right now, for whatever reason, want to “return” to Israel, but in terms of the future Holocaust-like oppression in response to which the Law of Return was written, the safe haven that Israel provides for most of us is primarily, for the very practical reasons I outlined above, a psychological one. I doubt very much that we would all fit, even assuming that every Jew in Israel–and let’s even imagine the Israeli Arabs agree, because peace has finally been achieved and a truly deep sense of mutual trust and commitment has developed–desperately want to make room for us. Yes it is comforting to know that Israel is there, even though that comfort is a privilege I wish I did not (often feel like I have to) have; and yes, there is in the fact of Israel’s existence a sense of justice having been done, however much I might wish that Israel had been founded otherwise and however much I oppose the policies of the Israeli government towards the Palestinians; but neither of those affirmations makes Israel my home, not by a long shot, and the first makes Jewish a nationality I can claim more by virtue of Israel’s existence than because the Jews worldwide are, objectively and without dispute, ambivalence or ambiguity among us, a nation; and so neither of those affirmations makes me a Zionist.

At the same time, however, I am not, and I would refuse the label, anti-Zionist. Not that I don’t take a stand in opposition to Israel’s policies regarding the Palestinians; not that I have not been critical of other aspects of Israeli governmental policy–its particularly cozy relationship with apartheid South Africa, for example–and not that I do not have opinions about the issue that are central to Zionism and to the Zionist/anti-Zionist debate, including the ways in which anti-Zionism is and is not used as a front for antisemitic agendas and whether or not Israel should continue to be a Jewish State. It’s just that I do not have the same kind of stake in those issues as I did when I was younger. Whether or not Zionism is racist by definition, in both ideology and practice; whether or not Israel should be a Jewish State; whether a one or two state solution offers the best hope for peace in the Middle East; these are questions that Zionists have to answer in other than theoretical terms, not me, and it is up to progressive Zionists to make sure that the movement in which they believe so fervently does not become, or ceases to be (depending on how you look at it), racist and oppressive.

Equally to the point, it is important to distinguish between the Zionism that is the Jewish nationalism embraced by Jews living outside of Israel and the Zionism that is the Jewish-Israeli nationalism of Israeli-Jews–whether they were born there or emigrated there. It is one thing to call Israel a Jewish homeland from afar; it is quite something else to call Israel home because it is indeed your country. I don’t mean to suggest that one of these nationalisms is necessarily less problematic than the other, but I think that Israel, as its own nation, with its own identity and culture, its own native population (by which I mean people who were born Israeli, Jewish or otherwise) becomes all too easily invisible in discussions such as these because the lens through which those of us outside of Israel, Jewish and otherwise, tend to look at the question of Zionism is the lens of exile through which the original European Zionists framed the whole question of establishing a Jewish homeland to begin with. Understood in this way, the centrality that Zionists outside of Israel give to the idea of Israel-as-safe-haven, as sympathetic as I am to that thinking, seems to me remarkably arrogant, if only because it frames Israel as what “we” need it to be and does not at all account for what Israelis themselves, all of them, including those not yet born, might feel. Ultimately, it is Israelis who get to decide, and who will get to decide over time, the degree to which that country can and should be a safe haven for all Jews worldwide, and I think that non-Israeli Jewish Zionists all too often forget that.

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There is another arrogance that needs to be called out as well in the way people outside of Israel talk about Zionism and anti-Zionism, though it has more to do with how we frame our understanding of the Palestinians than the Israelis. Take, for instance, the following story, which Jake told in his comment on this post at Alas:

PALESTINE

I once met a man standing outside his house, locked in struggle with a snarling dog that was chained to a tree. The man was beating the chained dog with a baseball bat, and the dog was snarling and snapping, trying to bite the man’s arm as it brought the bat down.

“Stop!” I shouted. “What in the world are you doing?”

The man stopped for a moment and turned to me. “You don’t understand,” he said. “I have to beat this dog; he keeps trying to bite me.”

“But why not just stop beating him and walk away?”

“Then I would be giving my yard up to him.”

“But maybe he would stop attacking you if you stopped beating him.”

“I have to defend myself.”

“But when did he start this snarling and biting?”

“Always. Ever since I first got him and chained him up around this tree, and it got even worse when I stopped feeding him. See? Just something in his breeding.”

Note: In commenting on what I saw that day, I am required by all conventions of American polite discourse to say, “But, of course, I don’t approve of dogs biting people…” I am also required to see some sort of moral equivalence here, or maybe even to say, “of course, I totally support the man’s inalienable right to chain and starve his dog.”

I think it’s fair to say that this parable and accompanying note captures a truth–not the whole truth, but a truth–about much of the pro-Israel thinking vis-a-vis the Palestinians and the way we are expected to talk about the conflict here in the States. As well, the metaphor of the abused dog chained to the tree captures a truth about the situation of the Palestinians that is rarely acknowledged on the pro-Israel side. Who, after all, would reasonably expect the dog to do anything other than try to bite the man who was beating it?

Compelling as it is, however, the metaphor–by asking us to see the Palestinians as an abused animal–actually obscures more than it clarifies. First, since animals cannot own land, the most likely solution to the situation represented in Jake’s parable would be for a third party to rescue the dog, removing it from the abusive situation and giving it a home where it could, at the very least, live in peace. Clearly that is not, nor should it be seen as, an acceptable solution for the Palestinians in their conflict with Israel. More insidiously, however–and, I would argue, equally as arrogant–the metaphor removes from the Palestinians any notion of human agency, of acting through conscious choice rather than merely reacting to whichever localized violence happens to be prominent at the time. The metaphor flattens, in other words, all forms of Palestinian resistance, equating them to the dog’s desperate, if futile attempts to stop the man from beating it. Not only does this flattening misrepresent the full range and complexity of the Palestinian resistance on its face, but it suggests that the Palestinians themselves are incapable of making choices and decisions about, and/or distinctions between, the various forms of resistance, and negotiation and compromise, available to them. And if the Palestinian state of mind is essentially no different from that of the dog in Jake’s story, how can we reasonably expect them to be trustworthy partners in negotiating a resolution to the conflict?

The metaphor in Jake’s parable thus ends up positing, implicitly at least, a conflict that has no end, despite the fact that his intention was clearly to say something in support of the Palestinians by critiquing the “conventions of American polite discourse.” Yet this metaphor shows up consistently, in various guises, on all sides of conflict, allowing people to profess a desire for peace, a willingness to make whatever compromises are necessary, while at the same time pointing at the Palestinians-as-abused-dogs and saying some version of either, “How can the Israelis be expected to negotiate with such people?” or “What else do you expect the Palestinians to do?”

I have neither the expertise nor the desire to work my way through the complexities of this rhetoric and how it shapes the actions and policies of all interested parties. I would simply like to note that both the Israelis and the Palestinians, despite this rhetoric, know better, and that those of us standing outside the conflict need to take that knowledge into account when we critique or support either side, no matter how much our critique or support is shaped by the fact that we are talking about an oppressed and an oppressor. I suppose I should be more clear: Israel is the oppressor and the Palestinians are the oppressed, but that means neither that Israel is always wrong in the stance it takes towards Palestinian resistance or the demands they make in negotiation nor that the Palestinians are always right in their demands or in the forms they allow their resistance to take. I am not arguing here for a moral or ethical equivalence between the two sides. Military occupation is wrong; resistance, even violent resistance, is the right of those who are occupied, and this is still true when there is no overt violence being committed by the occupiers. (We forget that military occupation is itself an ongoing act of violence.) I am arguing that it is important to remember that the Palestinians are, even in their resistance, neither more nor less human than the Israelis are in their occupation, and that to forget this equivalence is an arrogance that ultimately perpetuates and exacerbates the conflict.

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I have been very aware throughout the writing of this series of feeling like I have been talking out of both sides of my mouth, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that this feeling has come from the fact that I refuse to choose between the sides that have been laid out for me to choose: I am Jewish, but I am not a Zionist, nor am I a Jewish anti-Zionist. I think progressive Zionists have a lot of work to do before their movement can fully lay claim to the progressiveness they want it to have, but that is not my work. Still, because I am Jewish, because I was raised with a particular kind of Zionist education, because–as I said elsewhere in this series, while Jewish identity cannot be reduced to Israel, one cannot have a Jewish identity without having a position in relation to Israel–I have opinions about Zionism, especially because the Zionists claim me, even though I don’t want to be claimed. At the same time, though, despite the fact that I see the US as my home, and that I identify nationally as a US citizen, the realities of antisemitism make me want to allow that claim, just a little bit, just in case. I wish Israel had been founded very differently than it was, but Israel exists, and it exists as a Jewish State, and to deny the validity of that existence is both futile and, usually, antisemitic. I find the notion of a Jewish state problematic because I find it hard to imagine such a state as a truly pluralist society, but I think it is up to the people who live Israel Jewish and otherwise, not people who do not live there and who, most likely, will never live there, to decide what a Jewish State means and whether it should continue. The Palestinians are an occupied people; they have the right to resist that occupation; they have a right to their own nation, but whether that nation is a neighbor of Israel or is a binational/multi-ethnic state where Israel now stands is not for me to decide. Israel, on the other hand, also has the right to take seriously Hamas’ stated intent of destroying the Jewish State and of killing the Jews (go read the charter) and to see and respond to Hamas’ attacks on Israel in the context of that intent. (A similar logic, I think, applies to Israel’s stance towards Hezbollah.) This neither excuses nor in any other way ameliorates the injustices Israel has committed against the Palestinian people.

And I suppose I could go on. These positions are not easily reconcilable one with the other, and there are people who will say that by holding them I am really trying to hold no position, that I am trying to avoid the responsibility, the hard choices, that comes with taking sides; they will argue that taking sides is necessary in order to prove who I am and where I stand, and so, essentially, what I have just written demonstrates that I don’t really have an identity, that I am nobody, and I suppose, in their terms, they are right; but being a nobody in this way does bring with it a freedom that I cherish, because it allows me to pay attention more to actual human beings rather than an ideology–which does not mean I don’t have an ideology or that my ideology is beyond critique or growth–and if I have paid less attention than I could have in this series to the actual human beings who are Palestinians in this conflict (and I readily admit this is true), it is because I have been trying to work through some ideas and questions I have had about my own Jewish identity in relation to Zionism, Israel, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and antisemitism. I am not sure if I have done much more than clarify the questions I have been trying to ask, but that is no inconsequential task, and I will be happy if I have succeeded in that.

“I never took you for an SHJ,” said one the colleagues with whom I was talking.

“An SHJ?”

“A self-hating Jew.”

The other agreed. “My husband,” she said, “would say you were an antisemitic Jew.”

I stared at my colleagues across a sudden gap of estrangement I did not know how to bridge. I had never been called self-hating before, but I understood it meant that, in their eyes, I’d revealed myself as a Jew who accepted an antisemitic definition of Jewishness. It was a logic I had heard often when I was in yeshiva, though my teachers always used it to explain the antisemitism of non-Jews who were critical of Israel: To suggest that there might be a perspective from which Israel’s existence as a Jewish state was not self-evidently valid, my rebbes would say, in many different ways, over and over again, was to suggest that the Jews had no right to claim such a state in the first place, which was also to imply that the Jews as a people ought not even to be.

When a Jew took that position, my rebbes would explain, they had clearly been deceived by the promise of assimilation: that if only we would stop identifying as Jews, we would be accepted into the body politic and made full members in good standing of the majority culture. Such Jews were self-hating because they had chosen the goyim over their own people. Yet I was not trying to argue that Israel should not exist. Rather, I was expressing discomfort with arguments that suggest not only that the Jews’ claim to the land, on whatever basis, renders all intervening history irrelevant, but also that, in the act of staking this claim, the Jews were and are beyond reproach.

In December of 1917, for example, when David Ben Gurion said that, in a “historical and moral sense,” then-Palestine was a country “without inhabitants,” what he meant, according to Amos Elon in The Israelis, was that “only the Jews really felt at home in Palestine; all other inhabitants were merely the ethnic remains of various waves of conquerors” (156). In Ben Gurion’s eyes, in other words, the Palestinians were essentially displaced, a people who didn’t really belong where they were, and the stereotypes I grew up hearing about the Palestinians corresponded to that image of who they were. In the 1970s, for example, I had as my teachers men and women who talked about the Palestinians as naturally less intelligent, dirty, promiscuous, diseased, congenitally dishonest, and motivated in their desire to destroy Israel entirely by hatred of Jews. They envied us, this reasoning went, our sense of purpose, our unity as a people, our ability to survive and other qualities they lacked because of the characteristics I listed for you above.

I can go on: In the 1980s, when I worked as an advisor for a Conservative Jewish youth group, I heard my boss and other officials of the community, describe the Palestinians as being without a culture of their own and as unfit for anything other than manual labor, and if the Jews (not the Israelis; the Jews) needed to exploit that labor to build our nation, well, that was what we had to do. And in the 1990s and in these first few years of the 21st century, I have heard those stereotypes repeated over and over again, perhaps with less frequency, and often with a good deal more subtlety, but–especially when they come from people in positions of power–no less harmfully; and I am not even going to get into the ways in which Palestinians are still, subtly and not, portrayed as terrorists simply by virtue of being Palestinian.

When I told my boss that I was struck–as I continue to be even now–by how much these images and attitudes resemble the antisemitic images and attitudes the original Zionist settlers were fighting against, he insisted that I was missing some very important distinctions, most of which boiled down to his claim that Jews don’t kill innocent people (demonstrably false) and that Jewish suffering in Europe justified whatever “small price” the Arabs–he would not use the word Palestinians–might have had to pay had they simply allowed us to have our land (also, even leaving aside the enormous arrogance of such a statement, not as simple as he was making it sound). The Jews had been living in exile for thousands of years, he said. What possible claim could the Arabs have that would trump that?

I don’t want to imply that my boss’ thinking was the rule among Jews in the United States at the time, since I have no way of knowing that for a fact, but his thinking did represent, albeit in a particularly naked form, the attitudes that shaped the way I was taught about Zionism and the founding of the State of Israel. What I would like to focus on here, though, is not the anti-Arab racism, along with all the issues relating to Israel and Zionism that devolve from that, in what my boss had to say. Rather, what I want to focus on, in a very narrow way, is the part of what he said that is, in fact, the story the mainstream Jewish community has, in one form or another, been telling ourselves about ourselves for at least as long as I have been alive; and I want to try to draw some connections to my colleagues’ accusing me of self-hatred because I challenged not even necessarily the story, but rather one use to which the story has been put.

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That the Jews have been, throughout our history, a displaced people is hard to deny. Even leaving aside the Babylonian exile of 597 BCE, and even if you accept the argument that  the Roman exile in 70 CE was not, in fact, an exile, there are plenty of examples of Jewish displacement to draw on. England, for example, expelled its Jews in 1290; France, 1306. Spain followed suit in 1492, and Portugal followed Spain in 1497. In Switzerland in 1348, all Jewish children under the age of seven were ordered baptized and their families murdered for allegedly conspiring to spread the Black Plague. Closer to our present time, in January 1919, in Argentina, the Semana Trajica, the “tragic week,” which was a battle between strikers and employers allied with the state, had at its center a series of pogroms that were ignited in part by the charge that Jewish radicals were working to overthrow the state; and I should have to remind no one of how many times, by how many countries, the Jews trying to escape Nazi Germany were turned away and forced to return to their own slaughter. Even after World War II, in Kielce, Poland, in 1946, several dozen Holocaust survivors were killed following the reemergence of the blood libel, the belief that Jews murder Christian children and use their blood for such things as the making of matzah. (See Jewish Women, Jewish Men, by Aviva Cantor, 25.)

To drive home a little further the point that Jews were often not welcome in the countries where they were born, and also to move a little closer to the topic of this essay, in 1947, five days before the Political Committee of the UN General Assembly voted on the partition plan for Palestine, Heykal Pasha, an Egyptian delegate made the following statement:

The United Nations … should not lose sight of the fact that the proposed solution might endanger a million Jews living in the Moslem countries. Partition of Palestine might create in those countries an anti-Semitism even more difficult to root out than the anti-Semitism which the Allies were trying to eradicate in Germany… If the United Nations decides to partition Palestine, it might be responsible for the massacre of a large number of Jews.

He then elaborated further:

A million Jews live in peace in Egypt [and other Muslim countries] and enjoy all rights of citizenship. They have no desire to emigrate to Palestine. However, if a Jewish State were established, nobody could prevent disorders. Riots would break out in Palestine, would spread through all the Arab states and might lead to a war between two races.

The article from which these quotes are taken, “Why Jews Fled the Arab Countries,” by Ya’akov Meron, was published in The Middle East Quarterly (MEQ) in 1995. MEQ is published by the Middle East Forum, an organization the partisanship of which I do not share–Campus Watch, for example, is one of their activities–and so I want to be clear that I do not endorse Meron’s conclusions, which suggest that Pasha was making a threat with these remarks that alluded to a planned expulsion of the Jews if the partitioning of Palestine were approved. Indeed, the question of whether “expulsion” or “emigration” is the accurate term to describe the movement of Jews out of Arab lands before and after the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 is, at the very least, contested territory, and deserves a good deal more scrutiny than I can give it here. Nonetheless, even if Heykal Pasha was not making the threat Meron claims that he was, even if Pasha was simply describing a reality that he hoped desperately to avoid, even if we grant that the dangers he is talking about cannot be understood outside the context of Arab response to the Zionist project, what Arab Jew, after hearing or reading his words, would or could feel entirely welcome in any of the  Arab states Pasha mentions?

The anti-Jewish feeling that Pasha worried would be unleashed upon the partitioning of Palestine, in other words, had to pre-exist that partitioning, and if you have any doubts about the continuing persistence of antisemitism throughout the world, a glance at an of the Anti-Defamation League’s Global Anti-Semitism: Selected Incidents Around the World reports should persuade you. The incidents listed there do not necessarily point to the kind of systemic antisemitism that existed in the 19th and 20th centuries, even in the United States, or that the Nazis perfected during World War II, but given the context provided by a thousand-year-long history of oppression and persecution, even small occurrences take on a significance that cannot be ignored. More to the point, in that context, it’s very difficult to read the results of a 2007 ADL survey, which show that more or less 50% of Europeans think it is probably true that “Jews are more loyal to Israel than to this country [the one in which the survey was taken] and not see those attitudes as a [for now dormant] ideological infrastructure of hatred just waiting to be plugged into the way the Nazis, the Soviet Union and other governments going back centuries have plugged into it; and if you would like to see those attitudes in action, take a look at what went on in South Africa in the midst of Israel’s attack on Gaza (here and here; via).

I will have more to say about the situation of Jews in the United States below. For now, I just want to point out that the same undercurrent of antisemitism exists here, though it appears to be significantly less virulent than in Europe. According to another 2007 ADL survey, only 15% of Americans hold strong antisemitic beliefs, though 31% believe that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the US, a number that represents a decrease of 2% since 2005; and 27% believe that the Jews were responsible for the death of Christ, also a decrease (3%) since 2005. Still, that more than a quarter of the population of the country that I call home believe these canards is disconcerting to say the least, as is the outpouring of antisemitism on the web that the ADL has documented (see here and here) since the arrest of Bernard Madoff. The same infrastructure of hatred that exists in Europe, in other words, exists here; and I mean the same, because it is not as if antisemitism in the United States is different in kind from the antisemitism in Europe. To deny that fact, to deny that antisemitism is a single, global phenomenon is, if you are Jewish, at best foolishly naive and, at worst, dangerously ignorant.

Yet the idea that the Jews should have a country of our own is not, at least not among Jews, only a reaction to the realities of global antisemitism. The existence of a Jewish nation is also-by whatever centuries-long trail of genetics and cultural inheritance that makes me Jewish-part of my history, part of what being Jewish means. In Jewish Women, Jewish Men, Aviva Cantor points out that the Jews did not intend to create the Diaspora, a word which means, simply, dispersion. Rather, they were exiled, forced out of the land that had been their home, and while I do not think there is a single authentically Jewish stance towards the notion of a Jewish homeland, it is a profoundly antisemitic convenience of those who would deny the authenticity of Jewish experience that the original exile, and thus also the idea of a Jewish nation–that the Jews are a people and that we, as a people, have the right to desire a return to national status–is either irrelevant or a meaningless fiction.

Nonetheless, it is the space between the idea of a Jewish nation and what actually happened in the formation of the State of Israel that gets contested when people debate whether Zionism was and is a justified and justifiable nationalist movement or a colonial/imperial, racist movement invested in ethnic cleansing as a way of bringing the Jewish state into being. Figuring out where I draw my line in that space is, in part, what this series has been about; and while I would never suggest that drawing that line defines Jewish identity, I would argue that it is nearly impossible to have a Jewish identity without drawing that line somewhere, and the question of self-hatred–as my colleagues made sure to remind me–is one of the things at stake when Jews talk amongst ourselves about where that  somewhere is.

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Here’s the thing about Jewish self-hatred, at least as far as I can see: It’s in all of us. Not in the sense that we actively loathe our Jewish selves (or ourselves for being Jewish), but that we have internalized, whether we like it or not, the negative images of the Jew that exist in our culture. I can’t unlearn the fact that the Jews are seen as a greedy, sneaky, manipulative people determined to control the world; I can’t not know that an awful lot of Christians think my ancestors were, and therefore I personally am, responsible for the death of their messiah, or that I and my tribe–as they would put it–control the media, or the economy, or even the Congress and the White House. I know how to sound like a nebbish and a laughable old Jewish man; I know about the stereotype of the Jewish mother that transforms her into reason for her Jewish son’s social, psychological and sometimes literal emasculation; and I know the image of the Jewish American Princess: manipulative (especially sexually), childish, materialistic, shallow, spoiled.

Not only do I know these images and stereotypes, but I have told the jokes that rely on them–Why do “JAPS” use gold diaphragms? Because they want to know their men are coming into money?–used them as insults, and even employed them as a kind of cultural shorthand to describe the behaviors/character of people in situations where “Jewishness” (whatever that means) was not an issue. I have, in other words, done my part to perpetuate these images; and I would have a hard time believing any Jew who claimed never to have done something along the same lines. More the point, these images are still alive and can have tremendous resonance in popular culture. In the movie David & Layla, for example, which has gotten rave reviews for telling the based-on-a-true-story tale of a Jewish man and a Muslim woman who fall in love, marry and manage to mesh their different religious cultures, the Jewish culture in which David exists is represented as entirely and successfully emasculating, especially in the person of his fiancee Abby, who is one of the most egregious caricatures of the Jewish American Princess that I have ever seen. It is only by going outside of his culture, by escaping the oppressive umanning that his American Jewish world is perpetrating on him, that David is able to find/assert/recover his manhood and find/assert/claim a Jewish identity of his own.

To be fair, the cut I saw of this film is not the one currently being shown, and so it is possible that the portrayal of Jewish culture no longer relies so strongly on stereotypes, though I doubt it since so much of the film’s comedy relies on them.  As well, especially because I am a Jewish American man married to an Iranian Muslim woman, I think it is important to point out that there is a lot the movie gets very right, without stereotyping, in terms of the general ignorance that Jews and Muslims, not to mention Americans and the peoples of the Middle East and western Asia, have about each other–Layla is Kurdish–and about the comedy that can ensue when two people from those different cultures fall in love and try to have a relationship, never mind get married and have a family. Nonetheless, the fact that David’s manhood is a large measure of what’s at stake in his decision to choose the non-Jewish Layla–a choice that David’s family sees, at least at first, as self-hating–suggests the degree to which, for Jewish men, the question of self-hatred is bound up with the question of what Jewish manhood is and what it means to posses it, or not.

In his book Jewish Self-Hatred, Sander Gilman argues that, for the medieval Christian world, Jewish difference was defined largely by the Jewish language, Hebrew (23). Understood by the Church to be that which prevented Jews from acknowledging Jesus as the messiah–because reading biblical texts in, and perceiving the world through the limited and limiting framework of their own language made it impossible for Jews to perceive Christ’s presence in the world–this linguistic difference was understood to be not cultural, but natural. As speakers of Hebrew, in other words, the Jews were slaves to the world view implicit in Hebrew, which obviously did not include the notion of Jesus as the messiah, and so they were incapable of commanding any other language or of seeing the world in any other way. Moreover, since their way of seeing the world was inherently false–Jesus, after all, really was the messiah–the Jews were   congenital liars. This essential dishonesty placed the Jews in the same category as women, who were also believed to be liars by nature.

Perhaps the most explicit connection between the essential dishonesty of women and the Jews’ polluted essence was in the myth of Jewish male menstruation, the belief that Jewish men were marked by the same sign that in women signified Eve’s fall from grace. In the thirteenth century, Thomas de Cantimpré, citing St. Augustine as his source, offered the first ostensibly scientific discussion of this aspect of Jewish male anatomy, explaining as well how these men attempted to cure themselves. According to de Cantimpré, the Jews were told by one of their prophets that the cure lay in drinking “Christiano sanguine,” the blood of a Christian, an assertion that proved the Jews’ linguistic handicap, since, in fact, the curse could only be lifted when the Jews converted and accepted the sacrament of “Christi sanguine,” the blood of Christ. It was, in other words, the Jews’ inability to hear the truth, represented by this prophet’s inability to get the Latin right–presumably he would not have made the same mistake if the language had been Hebrew-that gave rise in the Christian imagination to the blood libel, the charge that Jews ritually murdered Christian children to obtain Christian blood. In turn, the blood libel was linked to the Jews’ original and ultimately emasculating, Eve-like denial of Christ (Gilman 74–5), thus forging a connection between Jewish and female psychology that would continue to be deployed in antisemitic rhetoric even when the religious basis for that connection was no longer considered so important.

Even a casual overview of nineteenth century philosophy, for example, will unearth in the thinking of our most revered philosophers a misogyny directly descended from the medieval Church’s view of women. The authors of The Malleus Maleficarum, for example–which was first published in 1486 as the Inquisition’s legal, procedural and informational reference on witchcraft and witches–answered the question why “Women are chiefly addicted to Evil Superstitions” by explaining that women are, among other things, intellectually undisciplined, devious, vengeful and fundamentally carnal (41–7, these page numbers refer to this published edition of the book; a new translation is also available). Immanuel Kant echoed those views in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime when he wrote that women “do something only because it pleases them […] I hardly believe the fair sex is capable of principles” (qtd. in Rosemary Agonito, ed. History of Ideas on Women: A Source Book 133). Georg Hegel asserted that while women could, “of course, be educated,” the female intellect was not “adapted to the higher sciences, philosophy, or certain of the arts” (ibid. 167). In “On Women,” Schopenhauer wrote that women existed solely for the purpose of reproduction, and since neither intellect, a sense of justice, honesty nor aesthetic awareness were in his view required for having babies, he believed that women either did not possess these qualities or possessed them in only the most limited fashion.

Compare those images of women with antisemitic images of the Jews and some striking parallels emerge. Where, for example, Kant saw women as motivated entirely by self-indulgence, Bruno Bauer, in his 1843 work “The Capacity of Present-Day Jews and Christians to Become Free,” characterized the essence of Judaism as “the mere cunning of sensual egoism” (qtd. in Gilman 192). Similarly, Hegel’s definition of female intellectual inferiority finds a parallel in Ludiwg Wittgensteins’s pronouncement that the “Jewish mind does not have the power to produce even the tiniest flower or blade of grass that has grown in the soil of another’s mind and to put it into a comprehensive picture” (qtd. in Gilman 128). In 1903, Otto Weininger, a baptized Jew, published Sex and Character, a highly influential book in which he rendered the conceptual parallels I have just outlined in concrete biological and psychopathological terms. Human psychology, Weininger argued, existed along a continuum running from the Jewish mind on one end to the Aryan mind on the other, and this continuum, he asserted, runs parallel to another one, defined by masculinity and femininity. The connections Weininger makes between these two continuums are many. Neither Jews nor women, he says, possess true creativity; both are congenitally dishonest, lack a genuine sense of humor, and each exists without fully believing in the authenticity of that existence.

Women, however–and of course he means Gentile women–have one advantage over Jews, for while neither Jews nor women believe

in themselves[,] the woman believes in others, in her husband, her lover, or her children, or in love itself; she has a center of gravity, although it is outside of her own being. The Jew believes in nothing, within or without him. (qtd in Gilman, 246)

According to Weininger, this inability to believe in anything meant that, for the Jews, the world is reduced to the merely material. Transcendence, the ability to perceive the mystery beneath and beyond the commonplace, is impossible. Women, of course, were also materialistic in Weininger’s view, but they were at least partially able to transcend this flaw by believing in others, and if all else failed, (Christian) women could always fall back on faith in Jesus.The Jews lacked even that basic belief, making them, in Weininger’s schema, an even more fully realized version of female inferiority than any actual woman could ever be.

(I need to pause here to acknowledge an awkwardness in what I am writing: To the degree that I have to accept Weininger’s discourse, or any of the antisemitic discourse I am talking about, in order to explain it, Jewish women are rendered doubly invisible, since they are subsumed under the category Jew, which was understood to refer to Jewish men, Jewish women being more or less beneath notice anyway. Maybe there is a way to write this without falling into that trap and without having constantly to twist around to remind the reader of the presence of Jewish women–a rhetorical strategy that, I think, would make it difficult to write about this material clearly–but I haven’t found it. It is an example of the double bind that antisemitism, that any oppression puts the oppressed in: how to talk about the terms of our own oppression without accepting–even if only to argue against them–the rhetorical and discursive, if not semantic, boundaries set by those terms. I will talk a little bit about this phenomenon below. Here I want simply to acknowledge that I am caught in it with regards to Jewish women.)

Jewish materialism, Weininger believed, contaminated every aspect of life in which Jews were involved. Medicine, for example, had once been “closely allied with religion,” which meant with questions of morality and the spiritual significance of human existence. As more and more Jews began to enter the profession, however, they turned healing into a matter of drugs, a mere administration of chemicals, which Weininger saw as evidence of the Jew’s lack of creativity: “The chemical interpretation of organisms sets [those organisms] on a level with [the Jews] own dead ashes.” In response to this contamination, Weininger understood the time in which he lived to be a time of choice “between Judaism and Christianity […] between male and female” (qtd in Gilman’s The Jew’s Body 137–7). It is in the context of this choice–which Weininger may have articulated for his generation, but which has been implicit in antisemitic rhetoric since at least as far back as Thomas de Cantimpre’s “explanation” of Jewish male menstruation–that the significance of Zionism for the Jews needs to be understood. For Jewish nationalism was not motivated simply by the long-held desire to return to the Jewish homeland in Palestine. Zionism was also, or at least also became, an explicit refutation of the notion of Jewish male effeminacy; and the apotheosis of that refutation, Zionists believed, lay in realizing Jewish claims to the land of Palestine.

The irony, of course, is that in order to refute the notion of Jewish male effeminacy, Zionists almost had no choice but to accept its basic premise as valid. As Gilman points out “[…] Jewish scientists […] needed to accept the basic ‘truth’ of the statistical arguments of medical science during this period. They could not dismiss published statistical ‘facts’ out of hand and thus operated within [the] categories [those facts established]” (ibid. 47). Among those facts was statistical evidence showing a higher incidence of mental illness among Jews in Germany than among German Catholics or Protestants. Gilman suggests that this difference probably reflected a higher rate of hospitalization of Jews for mental illness, but the data were used at the time to argue that Jews were innately prone to psychopathology, specifically neurasthenia and hysteria,  quintessentially feminine (and feminizing) mental disorders. Why the Jews were subject to these diseases was a matter of some debate. Members of the Parisian Anthropological Society offered explanations ranging from the Jewish practice of endogamous marriage, which resulted in the marriage of first cousins–defined in 19th century Europe as incest–to the Jews’ ostensible preoccupation with mysticism and the supernatural (Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred 286–88). In either case, however, the cause was understood to be innate. Incest, of course, was thought to weaken a people genetically, and the idea of Jewish superstition stood in the long tradition of the Jews’ inherently deficient way of seeing the world. (Recall, as well, The Malleus Maleficarum had to say about women and superstition.)

The trigger for these Jewish psycopathologies, according to the science of the time, was the fact that Jews generally lived in cities and that they were often employed in high-stress fields. Krafft-Ebing, in a study on neurasthenia, for example, made explicit the connection between the image of the urban Jew as diseased and the idea of Jewish masculinity as flawed or deficient. Jewish men, he wrote, are “over-achiever[s] in the arena of commerce [or] politics.” Believing that “time is money,” they read “reports, business, correspondence, [and] stock market notations during meals,” causing tremendous anxiety and leading naturally to the nervous disorders mentioned above (ibid. 289). Jewish men, in other words, were simply not “man enough” to live the kind of life they’d chosen to lead.

In contrast to the antisemitic explanations non-Jewish scientists gave for this condition, Jewish scientists focused on another explanation: antisemitism. In 1902, for example, Martin Engländer asserted that if the Jews were more prone to neurasthenia than non-Jews, the reasons had to be sought in the fact of “a two-thousand-year Diaspora” and its accompanying “struggle for mere existence” (qtd in ibid. 290). To put it another way, living in exile had sapped Jewish men of their virility. The cure, these Jewish scientists proposed, was Zionism, not simply as a political movement calling for the creation of Jewish state; but as an ideology of Jewish manhood, specifically of rescuing the Jewish male body from the emasculating effect of diaspora and recreating it in the image of what Max Nordau called “Judaism with muscles” (Eros and the Jew from Biblical Israel to Contemporary America, David Biale 179). Nordau’s idea was that Jewish men could overcome their predisposition to neurasthenia, and therefore their effeminacy, by developing their bodies, thus counteracting the debilitating effects of life in exile. Life in exile itself, however, was understood to be a disembodied existence–remember Weininger and the Jews’ inability to believe in the authenticity of their own existence?–and that disembodiment was the result of the Jews having been wrenched, like a soul from a body, from the land of Israel. Truly to re-embody the Jewish people, in other words,  was not only to rebuild the bodies of Jewish men in exile, but also to eliminate what Meir Yaari, an early leader of Hashomer ha-Tzair (The Young Guard), called the “instinctual impotence” of the “conventional” or Diaspora Jew (qtd in ibid. 186).

Represented on postcards that juxtaposed images of the virile Jewish farmers reclaiming Palestine with ones of the weak, old and fragile Orthodox Jews of the European shtetl, this masculinizing agenda was framed within a reciprocal relationship between the people and the land. In the words of a song popular at the time, the Zionists believed that they “came to the land to build it and to be built by it” (ibid. 179 & 182). To be built by it, David Biale explains, was “to change one’s values and practices and […] one’s […] body and psyche by agricultural work” (Ibid. 182–3), an erotic transformation in which the Jewish settlers took on the role of a male lover possessing the female land. Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948, in this view, was metaphorically the consummation of a long and difficult courtship. The newly-muscled Jewish man had won his bride, proving not only that he was as much a man as anyone else, but also the self-evident validity of Zionism as an ideology: the existence of the State of Israel was proof that Jewish manhood could only manifest itself when the historical connection between the Jewish people and the Jewish homeland had been reestablished. To question the project of establishing Israel’s existence, in other words, was not merely to question, say, the justice or wisdom of settling a land that was already inhabited. It was to question as well even the possibility of Jewish manhood, which meant to question the possibility of a strong and healthy Jewish identity, which meant accepting the antisemitic image of the Jew as weak and diseased and feminine, which meant making oneself the very definition of the self-hating Jew.

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This, then, is the accusation my colleagues leveled at me for suggesting that the words of the Torah might, for most of the world, not be a convincing argument in favor of Israel’s existence as a Jewish State–and please make no mistake: it was an accusation of treason. Not treason against Israel, though. Rather, they were telling me I had betrayed the entire Jewish people. More to the point, though, the form they gave their accusation rendered my betrayal a physical one, made it of my body, not unlike the “betrayal” that someone who is gay or lesbian is understood to have committed against heteronormative culture, even though my body had never been explicitly at stake in our conversation. You may think I am overstating the case, but that’s how I felt it. I could never have articulated it the way I am doing so now, but I knew immediately, with the totality of apprehension of which only the body is capable–that anyone will recognize who has ever had the validity of their gender questioned in a way intended to other them out of a group in which they had assumed and valued membership–that my colleague’s accusation of self-hatred was an accusation of unmanliness; and the thing about unmanliness, of course, is that the only way to “prove” one is not contaminated by it is to prove one is a man according to the standards of those who made the accusation in the first place.

All nationalisms that I know of share this dynamic. As I am writing, I cannot think of one that does not rely in some way on heteronormativity as a core value, if only because of the requirement that the nation reproduce itself. Obviously, a nation could reproduce itself without being heteronormative, but every nationalism that I can think of has as part of its narrative the story of traditionally heterosexual men and women coming together to have families that will guarantee the nation’s continued existence. The nationalism of white supremacists certainly takes that story as central to itself; German nationalism did as well (I don’t think there is a European nationalism that did not); so did the American nationalism of, say, the communist-scare 1950s (one did not want to be labeled a commie-pinko–fag); the nationalisms that emerged in eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union did; as did the Japanese nationalism of the mid-20th century. The list could go on and on, and so it should come as no surprise that Zionism shares this characteristic.

Now, just to be clear, when I use the word nationalism, I am not talking about the fact of valuing the place and culture into which one was born–a notion I will talk a little bit more about later. Rather, I am talking about nationalism as an ideology that, in one form or another, essentializes (or at least argues for the essential nature of) group identity and/or the characteristics that identify membership in a particular national group. Recognizing this distinction is important because I have, until now, been writing about the Jews as if we are an undifferentiated group, as if being Jewish means the same thing to each of us and as if Jewish identity–i.e., membership in the Jewish nation–is the center of how each of us defines her or himself as a human being. I have been writing this way because I have been talking about antisemitism and, the fact is that, ultimately, the antisemite doesn’t care whether you are gay or straight, trans– or cis-gendered, white or of color, wealthy or not, a patriot or not, a relative or not–and that list could go on and on. What matters to the antisemite is that you are a Jew, period, and if the antisemites are in power and are  going to try to wipe the Jews out, you can be sure–because this is what the Nazis did–that every other feature of who you are will be made irrelevant or will be used to prove further the corrupt and diseased nature of the Jew, thereby justifying the project of eliminating us from the face of the earth.

In writing about Zionism and the founding of Israel as responses to antisemitic oppression, in other words, it is almost impossible not–some might even argue that it is necessary–to talk about the Jews as if we were an undifferentiated mass of people. To the degree that the antisemite doesn’t care about whatever else might be true about us, nothing else that is true about us should matter when it comes to protecting us from the antisemite. This is one reason why Israel’s Law of Return was revised in 1970 so that the definition of “Jew” matched, more or less, the broader definition of “Jew” that was used by the Nazis, rather than the traditional, religious definition of someone whose mother was Jewish or who converted to Judaism. Yet even the Law of Return, broad as it is intended to be, makes distinctions that, at the very least, complicate the matter of how the Jews answer the question, Who is a Jew? This is section 4A(a) of the 1970s revision to that law:

The rights of a Jew under this Law and the rights of an oleh under the Nationality Law, 5712–1952,*** as well as the rights of an oleh under any other enactment, are also vested in a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew, except for a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion. (Emphasis added)

Even though the Nazis deemed Jewish even those Jews who had converted to Christianity, in other words, Israel’s definition of a Jew is fundamentally religious, suggesting that conversion is the ultimate act of Jewish self-hatred, one which exiles you permanently from the fold; and here’s the thing: as long as there is one act that can result in this kind of exile, there is nothing to prevent others from being added to the list.

Take, for example, the case of transgender people who undergo sexual reassignment surgery. According to Orthodox Judaism, such surgery is prohibited outright; as well, while there is some debate on the matter, as far as I have been able to tell, Orthodox Judaism considers a person who has undergone such surgery to retain her or his pre-surgery gender. According to Orthodox Judaism, in other words, which holds that gender is immutable because it is God-given, sexual reassignment surgery is an extreme act of self-hatred, and given the relatively strict division of gender roles within Orthodox Jewish practice, the implication must be there that, whatever else it might be, sexual reassignment surgery is also an act of hatred against oneself as a Jew. Now, in the limited research that I have done, I have found no one who argues that position, and I seriously doubt that any such argument exists among credible religious authorities. What would happen, however, if we were talking about this not as a question primarily of one’s religious status, but of whether one could become a naturalized Israeli citizen. Consider the following scenario::

Country X is taken over by a fascist regime one goal of which is to eliminate the Jews within its borders, and, just so this example doesn’t get bogged down in comparisons to present-day situations and politics, let’s say that this is happening two hundred or so years from now, when the memory of the Holocaust is no longer so intense and the guilt that might motivate nations to react differently than I am going to ask you to imagine is no longer much of a factor. The Jews are given a certain amount of time during which they will be allowed to leave with all their possessions. Any Jews who remain after that time is up, however, will be killed. Israel responds as Jews throughout the world have been led to expect it to respond, by throwing its doors open to all the Jews of Country X, while the other nations of the world react as many of them probably would have had Israel been around during World War II; they are perfectly happy to say that this is a Jewish problem and so the Jews and Israel are responsible for solving it.

Here’s the problem. Israel, in this future I have imagined, is as small a country as it is now, and it simply cannot physically accommodate within its borders all of the several millions of Jews who live in Country X. Reluctantly, given these limited resources, the Israeli government decides that it must, somehow or other, establish standard to determine which Jews it can and will accept and which it won’t; and let’s assume it is also working feverishly, but with little or no success, to convince other governments to take in the Jews it can’t. So, imagine a married male-to-female transgender Jew–and just to make things a little easier let’s assume the spouse is also Jewish–who goes with her husband to the office that determines which Jews can and cannot go to Israel. The person interviewing them discovers that the woman is transgender and informs the couple of several things:

1. Because Orthodox Jewish law [which in this future-Israel is the law that governs all matters related to marriage and sex] does not recognize the validity of transgender identity, if they are allowed to go to Israel and the transgender woman’s identity is discovered, she would, under the law, be considered a man;
2. As a result, their marriage would become null because, by Israeli law, it would be defined as a homosexual marriage, which Israel does not recognize;
3. A movement is under way to disqualify gay and lesbian Jews from the Law of Return under section 2(b)(2): “An oleh’s visa shall be granted to every Jew who has expressed his desire to settle in Israel, unless the Minister of Immigration is satisfied that the applicant […] (2) is likely to endanger public health or the security of the State.”

The interviewer is very sympathetic and indicates that she is willing to approve the application; she just wants to make sure the couple knows what they are getting themselves into. (Please note: I am making no claims with this example about current Israeli law or policy; especially about #1 and #2, I am simply ignorant. Depending on who holds power in Israel, however, I can see these three items becoming the law of the land.)

If you were that couple, would you go?

I, frankly, don’t know whether I would or not. The hypothetical situation I have created does not contain enough information about the entirety of this couple’s life to be able to make such a decision. I do know for sure, however, that if I did decide to go, it would not be with a sense of having been saved or protected, except in the most limited sense of those words, and it most certainly would not be with any sense of belonging, of having been welcomed “home,” or any of the other metaphors that one would expect to apply to me as a Jew being rescued by the Jewish people and brought to live in the Jewish homeland. Given even the limited knowledge that I have about what it costs transgender people to come to terms with their identity and to win acceptance in a culture that is decidedly hostile to their existence, I could understand a person deciding, in the situation I described above, that she would rather stay and fight the fascist regime than flee to a country where she would, essentially, have to live in hiding (again) in her own home. I can also understand a spouse in that situation deciding that he, too, would rather stay and fight than live the lie they would have to live in the Israel I have imagined.

Some of you, no doubt, will argue that the policy I have imagined is not Zionism, or even part of Zionism. I assume you would say something along the lines of this: that Zionism is–or, if it was not originally, should now be understood as–merely, the belief that the Jews should have a state; and that since a Jewish state already exists in Israel, Israel should continue to exist as a Jewish state. Here’s the thing, though: the transgender woman I have imagined above is being forced to choose between her Jewish identity and the full complexity of her gender identity, between her full human being and her Jewish being, and she is being forced to do so in the name of Israel’s need to determine which Jews will and which will not be accepted as citizens of the Jewish nation. In the name, in other words, of Zionism.

I recognize that there are people working very hard to ensure that a scenario such as the one I have laid out for you will never happen, who have as their goal a definition of what it means to be Jewish that embraces as wide an inclusiveness as possible, and I recognize that the work such people have done is largely responsible for making Israel the most queer-friendly country in the Middle East. Not that there aren’t problems with anti-gay violence and with Israel’s version of Jerry Falwell’s scapegoating gays and lesbians (among others) for the September 11th attacks, but the gay community in Israel has racked up some impressive victories. Chas Newkey Burden summed some of them up in an article he wrote for Ynet News in 2007:

Workplace discrimination against gay people is outlawed; the Knesset had an openly gay member; in schools, teenagers learn about the difficulties of being gay and the importance of treating all sexualities equally. The country’s army, the Israel Defence Force has many dozens of openly gay high-ranking officers who, like all gay soldiers in its ranks, are treated equally by order of the government.

The Supreme Court has ruled that gay couples are eligible for spousal and widower benefits. Nearly all mainstream television dramas in Israel regularly feature gay storylines. When transsexual Dana International won the 1998 Eurovision Song Contest as Israel’s representative, 80 per cent of polled Israelis called her “an appropriate representative of Israel.” (A fuller account of LGBT rights in Israel can be found here.)

Transgender issues have also started to become part of the political process in Israel, though that work is just beginning; and while acceptance of a transgender celebrity is certainly not the same thing as full recognition under the law, the fact that the internationally famous Dana International–who was born Yaron Cohen–was called by 80% of Israelis an “appropriate representative of Israel” when she won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1998 demonstrates at least the possibility of full acceptance of transgender people among the Israeli public.

Nonetheless, to avoid the issues raised by my scenario is to deny that trans– and homophobia, racism, classism and all the other odious otherings we protest so loudly against also exist among the Jews; and, at least as importantly, it is to deny the experience–and therefore, implicitly, the existence–of all those “Jewish Others” who have experienced such othering at the hands of their fellow Jews. It’s important to state this plainly: given the oppression and discrimination that LGBT Jews suffer on a daily basis, at the hands of Jews and non-Jews alike, it would be even more foolish of them not to fear the possibility of my scenario, or some scenario like it, than it would be for me not to fear the possibility of another Hitler taking power somewhere in the world. More to the point, to call self-hatred the doubts about Zionism to which these fears might reasonably give rise, to suggest, as David Schraub did that any Jew who questions Jewish nationalism on the grounds I have outlined here is “adopting a position that [is] not just wrong, but extremely dangerous to Jewish lives and equality”, is to force on those Jews precisely the choice forced on the transgender woman in my scenario. It is to ask them for a promise of loyalty to the Jewish people even if that promise costs them other, equally (if not more) fundamental parts of who they are. No movement that demands such an oath can ever claim fully to represent everyone whose identity overlaps with the territory the movement claims for itself, and any such movement that makes the claim has at its core a fundamental dishonesty that, to me anyway, disqualifies it from the loyalty it presumes to demand.

///

So, does that mean I think Israel should not exist? No.

Does that mean I think there should be no such thing as a Jewish state? No, though I think the question of whether Israel should remain a Jewish state in its present form should be left to the people who actually live there.

Does that mean I think Zionism should be eliminated? No, I acknowledge that movements can evolve, though a nationalism that does not include some kind of loyalty test or some form of an othering accusation of self-hatred is hard for me to imagine.

Does that mean I do not think the Jews need a safe haven in the world? No, of course we do, but so do a lot of other people who have suffered oppression, and the fact that I can feel like I have one, imperfect though it might be, results from a privilege that not many Jews like me, at least not the ones I have met–straight, white, cisgender, middle class–are willing to acknowledge. We are privileged first of all because Israel came into being at the cost of the disenfranchisement of the Palestinians, and we are privileged because we can take for granted a welcome in Israel that LGBT Jews–not to mention Jews of color, and perhaps other kinds of Jews as well about whom I have not even talked–cannot. (In my scenario, if the fascist regime counted Jews for Jesus as Jews, would Israel have taken them in even though they had changed their religion?)

Does this mean I am trying to talk out of both sides of my mouth? I hope not, but you’ll have to wait for Part 5, which I hope will not take me as long to post, to watch me try to work through the answer to that question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

In seventh grade, I was accused of truancy because I stayed home from school for the first two days of Succot, the Festival of Booths, a holiday in the Jewish calendar that is as major as Passover–meaning that it is a holiday you are not supposed to work or go to school on–but which very few Gentiles know about because it does not coincide with any Christian holidays and is not as easily explainable as Rosh HaShana, the New Year, or Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. When the attendance officer called my house, she was surprised that I answered–I guess she figured I would try not to be found–and when I explained to her about Succot, she thought I was lying. “There are Jews at work here today,” she said. When I suggested to her that maybe they were not religious (I was, at the time time, thinking I might want to be a rabbi when I grew up), she told me to stop being so sneaky. “You’re all alike,” she said.

In eighth grade, I changed schools and started going to a yeshiva about twenty minutes by car away from my house. I no longer had problems with antisemitism at school, and I cannot even begin to explain how relieved I felt not to have to explain myself all the time, but the problems in my neighborhood continued. From about ninth grade on, I was more or less constantly harassed in the street, called Jew, kike, heeb.I was threatened with being cooked in an oven, crucified as revenge for the killing of Christ and being sacrificed to the devil because all Jews were going to hell anyway; I had beer bottles thrown at me, rocks the size of softballs. My home was robbed and my room was singled out for particularly vicious attack. The thieves carved the word “Kike” into the door of my closet; they threw the books of Jewish learning that I had on my shelves on the floor and walked all over them. There were entire years when I had to carry something I could use as a weapon if I was going into certain areas of my neighborhood, especially if I was walking alone, but even when I went with “friends,” because the antisemites hung out in those areas and I had learned from experience that I could only rarely count on my friends to stand with me if I was assaulted or even just threatened with physical assault.

These antisemites wrote antisemitic graffiti about me on the walls of the library. The cop who arrested the kid doing the spray painting was very smart; he made sure to wait until the kid was done so that the antisemitic nature of the graffiti was clear, and the kid could be charged with a more serious crime. It took the town where I lived, however, three years before they decided to try to clean the graffiti off the wall, and then they did such a bad job of it that, fifteen years later, when I brought the woman who is now my wife to meet my mother for the first time, you could still read the words, “Newman is a penny Jew,” and make out the drawing of a penny that the artist had drawn, just in case you didn’t get the point. Sixteen more years later, actually just one year ago, making it thirty one years after the graffiti had originally been written, when I drove by one day with my son, I stopped to show him where I lived when I was growing up, and you could still make the graffiti out, though I don’t know if you’d be able to read it if you didn’t already know what it said. The point is that the town never actually bothered to erase it; they waited for the elements to do it.

In eleventh grade, my class went on a trip to somewhere that included a tour of a ship of historical importance. (I don’t remember which one.) We were standing on the deck, when a group of much younger kids, probably in elementary school, came on board. One of the girls asked one of the adults accompanying them why the boys in my group were wearing those “funny hats.” The adult explained that they were called yarmulkes and it meant we were Jewish. “Oh,” the kid said, a tone of wonder completely bereft of irony creeping into her voice. “Then where are their horns?” I did not hear the adult’s answer.

Finally, in twelfth grade English class–I had switched from yeshiva back to public school–while discussing Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” Mr. Giglio asked if anyone knew the biblical reference in the poem’s closing lines: “Thus, though we cannot make our sun/Stand still, yet we will make him run.” I raised my hand and said it referred to Joshua making the sun stand still at the battle of Gibeon. Mr. Giglio looked at the rest of the class, “You should be ashamed of yourselves! This boy who doesn’t go to church knows the bible better than you; the Battle of Gibeon was in the reading this past Sunday!”

That same year, Joan invited me to her house for dinner. It was a big deal for me. I didn’t have many friends in my class, and it helped a lot that she was cute. As we sat around the table after the meal, I don’t remember why, but the subject of the Holocaust came up. Joan’s father said something to the effect that, well, maybe a couple of thousand Jews at most had been killed in the concentration camps, but the idea that 6 million had died was just preposterous. Moreover, he said, the fact that so much of the world believed it was 6 million the result of some very good propagandizing on the part of the Jews and, particularly, Israel. He said this in the most friendly of ways, trying to educate my misguided self. To her credit, Joan argued with me against him, but I sat there feeling like I was being punched in the stomach over and over again. I wanted to throw up. I had heard about Holocaust deniers, but I had never actually met one in the flesh, and hearing what he said made me physically sick. I was not invited to Joan’s house again, and what had been the beginnings of our friendship stopped growing right there.

If I were to continue this accounting of antisemitism in my life and tell you about things that happened to me in college, in the working world, in my career as a college professor, and in my marriage to an Iranian Muslim woman, the examples would, in general, grow less and less frequent, more and more subtle and the overt violence or threat of violence would completely disappear. With the exception of having been advised when I was a teenager not to bother applying for a job at the country club near my home, since it was well-known that they did not hire Jews, I have never been denied a job because I am Jewish; I have never had a hard time getting a loan, renting or buying an apartment, or in any of the other aspects of life that are made difficult if not impossible for people who are structurally discriminated against in this country. I live a relatively comfortable life. I am not afraid when I walk down the street that someone, because of who I am, will decide to call me out in some way or attack me outright—though it’s also important to acknowledge that I live in New York City, probably one of the safest places to be Jewish in the US, and that there are places in this country where it would be foolish of me not to feel that fear at least a little bit. (I also should point out that all of the examples of antisemitism I gave above took place in a town on Long Island just over the border dividing Queens from Nassau County; for all intents and purposes, in other words, in New York City.)

So, on the one hand, antisemitism was a central experience of my growing up a Jew in the United States; on the other hand, as I have grown older, it has receded in prominence, partially because of where I live and partially because its structural manifestations have been almost, if not entirely eliminated–to the point where I can sometimes pretend it does not exist.

Except when it comes time to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Zionism.

I have never, not even among Jews, not even among Jews with whom I pretty much agree 100%, had a discussion about that conflict where the question of antisemitism has not arisen. Either someone’s critique of Israel is nakedly–or not so nakedly–antisemitic, or someone who is not Jewish feels it necessary to instruct me when I want to point out the antisemitism in a critique of Israel or Zionism that not all such critiques are by definition antisemitic, or someone who is Jewish calls antisemitism when it isn’t there, or, among Jews, we spend time analyzing the antisemitism in critiques of Israel, or complaining about the antisemitism in critiques of Israel, and so on and so on and so on.

Indeed, it often feels these days that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the only context in which a discussion antisemitism is taken seriously. It gives antisemites an opportunity to cloak their antisemitism in an argument that has a considerable amount of moral high ground built into it, and to call foul when Jews and our allies say, “Wait a minute! We’re not going to let you get away with antisemitism just because the policies of the Israeli government deserve criticism.” More importantly, I think, for Jews and our allies, precisely because antisemitism is not taken seriously enough as a phenomenon in and of itself, a reality of Jewish lives independent of what goes on between Israel and the Palestinians, and precisely because secular Zionism and that State of Israel were founded largely in response to antisemitism, discussions of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict become one of the few opportunities we have to talk about antisemitism period, all of it, how it has worked and continues to work all over the world. The result is that what should be a conversation about Israel and Palestine and the people who are living and fighting and dying there ends up bearing the burden of, for example, not only every instance of antisemitism I listed above, but the history out of which that antisemitism arises and that continues to give it context. No single conversation should have to bear that burden. Antisemitism is thousands of years old; millions upon millions of Jews have suffered and died, and there are places where they continue to suffer and die, worldwide because of it. Inevitably, then, trying to fold into a discussion of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict all of the discussion that needs to happen around the fact that antisemitic values are still very much alive in the world, including within the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, is going to result in the invisibility of the extreme suffering the Palestinians endure daily at the hands of the Israelis, of which the recent assault on Gaza is only an extreme example.

This is the point, though I am late in the game in terms of the timeliness of this post, at which I want to enter the frustrating, fascinating, and, at times, infuriating discussion generated by David Schraub’s guest posts on Feministe titled, “We Cannot Live Without Our Lives” Either: Jews, Privilege, and Anti-Subordination and Anti-Semitism and Subordination Part II: The Myth of Jewish Hyper-Power. I am not going to recap all of the ways in which David was critiqued, accurately or not, nor am I–at least not at first–going to address head on the points where I disagree with him. Rather, I want to explore the ways in which I empathize with him, because even though I disagree with him now quite profoundly, there was a time when I would have agreed with him almost absolutely and the empathy that would have led to that agreement still remains.

Final note before I move on to Part 2: There have also been a number of posts at Alas in response both to David’s posts and the discussion they have generated that I think are important to read: Talking about anti-semitism now, by Maia and Posts About Anti-Semitism Often Hit Home For Me by Mandolin. Julie has written Why I’ve Stopped Talking About Gaza, as well as Dear Non-Jewish Activists: and This is not my community. (Other posts on Alas that are important include Links to Israeli and Jewish voices opposing Israel’s attacks on Gaza and Inhuman. There are others as well.)

There is also a tangentially related post up at Feministe, “Distinguishing a Political Stance from a Racist Stance”, the discussion of which deals with the issues raised by the common use of the term anti-Semitism to mean Jew-hating, especially when the term is used to describe the words or actions of Arabs, who, obviously, are Semitic (far more so than I am, for example). Indeed, the rhetorical question asked by the Arab author of the paper to which this post refers is, “How can we, as Semites, be anti-Semitic?” Julie’s comment, I think, does a fine job of critiquing that question and how it is often used, so I am not going to repeat it here. My point in raising the whole question of the term anti-Semitism is to explain why I write it the way I do: antisemitism.

I wish I could remember the book where I first encountered this tactic so I could quote for you accurately the original rationale behind it, but I can’t. I have been writing the term this way ever since I read that book, however, because it allows me to continue using the word in common usage for Jew-hating while at the same time drawing attention away–however slightly–from the fact that in its original form it referred to Semitic people, and even then, it did so inaccurately. When Wilhelm Marr popularized the term in 1879 so that Jew-hating would have a scientific and therefore objectively, legitimizing word that could be used to refer to it, he obviously did not even consider the Arabs worthy of notice. The term, in other words, has a double oppression embedded in it, and it would be much better if we could find a different word, especially since discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the situation of Jews in the Arab world and so on inevitably involve questions of Arab antisemitism. Antisemitism, however, is the word that we have. “Jew-hating” is difficult, I think, because the word “hating” inherently raises the stakes and implies that all expressions and manifestations of antisemitism exist at the same level of intensity and harmfulness and so it removes, for me anyway, the feeling that nuance is possible in these discussions. “Orientalism,” which is mentioned in a quote in one of Julie’s comments might be a term that encompasses as April Rosenblum–the person Julie quotes–says, “a larger oppression that both groups [Arabs and Jews] experience,” but it would take quite a bit of work, I think, to make that term really useful in describing the oppression of European Jews who are so clearly not “Oriental,” even though I would agree they were “orientalized” as part of their oppression; and since I do not want this series of posts to have to do that work, I am going to stick with the term that we have, though in a form that is, I hope, alienated enough from itself that people will be willing to accept it as the word that refers to the (usually racialized) hatred of the Jews.

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.

It is not hard to imagine the kinds of vitriol that the Jewish community would direct at the people involved with this production. More to the point, it is hard not to imagine that this vitriol would be well-deserved. Asserting an ironic frame for the production I have imagined in the way that I have imagined the director asserting it would be an empty gesture, a cop out, because even if it were possible to put the characters in Seven Jewish Children into Nazi uniforms and have it not be antisemitic–and I don’t think it is possible–the play’s text is too simple to support the ironic reading such a costuming decision would require. Nonetheless, I’d like for the moment to assume that the director’s intention to be ironic was genuine, not because her or his intent would make the production less problematic, or excuse his or her profoundly poor artistic judgment, but because I think the impulse to that irony is an important one to examine, especially because I think it is often characterized within the Jewish community as self-hatred, accusations of which are often used to dismiss from legitimacy people who make certain kinds of criticisms of the Jewish community and/or Israel. I have written at length about Jewish self-hatred elsewhere, so I am not going to go into that here. Rather, I want to consider the difficulty Jews have accepting the validity, the potential value, of understanding the institutional and military violence that Israel does to the Palestinians in the context of the violence that the Nazis did to the Jews, and I want to go beyond the easy and patronizing, and I think subtly antisemitic, violence-begets-violence logic that makes of Israel a wounded child, man or woman who has learned the primary lesson of abuse: that the only way to make sure you are never abused again is to be ready to kill anyone who even smells like they are going to try to abuse you; and I am not interested in the obvious and somewhat tired cliche that, you know, we all have the potential for evil within us, and so Israel is only showing that it too and, by extension, the Jews have the capacity to do evil in the world. Because I think the fundamental difficulty people have with what I am talking about is that putting the violence Israel does to the Palestinians in the context of the violence the Nazis did to the Jews–and I am not suggesting anything even remotely resembling equivalence here–ultimately humanizes the Nazis, suggesting that the violence they did, as horrible as it was, can also be understood in human terms, and so if the Nazis too are human, then the possibility of forgiveness and understanding has to exist for them, as it exists for every other human being on the face of the earth.[1. This paragraph was edited January 19 to correct mistakes that resulted from careless cutting and pasting.]

Let me say first what I do not mean by this: I am not talking about forgiveness in anything resembling what I understand to be the Christian turn-the-other-cheek sense (which I do not trivialize, even though it is not a value that I hold). So I do not mean that any Jew, especially any Jew who survived the Holocaust, is obligated to forgive anyone for being or having been a Nazi or for sympathizing or complicity with the Nazis. I am not suggesting that there is some predefined formula through which the forgiveness I am talking about can be earned; and I believe firmly that forgiveness for some deeds cannot be earned by the people who committed them from the people against whom they were committed. Nonetheless, to see people who commit the most horrible crimes, even crimes against humanity, not as monsters whose incomprehensible deeds have forever exiled them from the human community, but as people who have committed inhuman acts, is to insist on the comprehensibility of those acts, on the possibility of understanding those people and on the possibility that they might somehow find a way to take responsibility, to hold themselves–and to allow themselves to be held–accountable for what they have done.

To put it another way, and using for the moment an example that is not specifically Jewish, it is one thing for someone who has never raped to acknowledge that he or she nonetheless has within themselves whatever it is that can motivate rape, but it is quite something else for someone who has survived rape to continue to see in her or his rapist the same humanity–which means the same potential for vulnerability–that he or she possesses and that the rapist demonstrated so unambiguously and inescapably in the act of rape. Now, let’s suppose this rape survivor commits an act that is not rape, that nonetheless bears on its surface characteristics that are similar to rape and that is clearly and unambiguously victimizing within a power structure that could very easily become rape, if the will and desire to rape were there. Let’s also say–just to make my analogy, which I am assuming is already more than obvious, even more blatant–that the rape survivor experiences what he or she has done as an act, a necessary act, of self-preservation, and let’s say there is incontrovertible evidence to support if not the precise method of self-preservation the rape survivor has chosen, then certainly the validity of taking some form of action. Finally, let’s imagine that central to this rape survivor’s identity is a political commitment to stand in solidarity with all people who are violated, sexually or otherwise, and to fight such violations wherever they occur.

For this rape survivor not to see as self-evident the parallels between the violence he or she has committed and the rape he or she experienced is understandable. We are often blind to aspects of our own actions until they are pointed out to us. Assuming the parallels are really there, however, once someone does point them out, the survivor would be derelict not to explore them, not to see if there were connections to be made that might not only illuminate her or his experience, identity and commitment as a rape survivor, but also change her or his understanding of her or his own victimizing acts and the people who survived them.The survivor, in other words, would have to humanize the person by whom he or she was raped in order fully to grasp whether and to what degree having been raped led to the violence that he or she (the survivor) committed. If you’ve ever been raped, or otherwise sexually assaulted, then you know how difficult it can be just to contemplate what I have been talking about. In my own experience as a survivor of child sexual abuse, it took many years before I could entertain, without feeling like I was betraying myself, the possibility that the men who abused me were, simply, people who’d made the choice to abuse me, not inherently evil monsters who happened to look like men.

I think the Jewish community’s difficulty with Jews who want to explore parallels between the policies and actions of the State of Israel regarding the Palestinians and the policies and actions of Nazi Germany regarding the Jews is similar. What the people who have this difficulty forget, however, is that parallelism is not the same thing as equivalence. To say that some of Israel’s policies and actions resemble policies enacted and actions taken by the Nazis during the Holocaust is not by definition to suggest that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians, though there are antisemites who do make that suggestion. More to the point, a Jew who sees those parallels and remains silent–leaving aside for the moment the question of whether and to what degree the parallels he or she sees are accurate–has a lot more in common with the people of Germany whose silence was their complicity in the Final Solution than with the image of the Jew that I was taught to make part of my identity: someone who, precisely because the Jews have experienced and survived centuries of oppression and persecution, speaks out for social justice even when it is difficult to do so.

I am not arguing that any assertion of a parallel between Israel’s behavior in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the Holocaust is valid simply by virtue of its having been put forward by a Jew. Rather, I am arguing that we need to take seriously the irony out of which such assertions are made and to understand them also as responses to that irony, perhaps especially when the assertions are made in works of art, like the production I imagined of Seven Jewish Children in which the director makes ironic use of Nazi uniforms as costumes, or like the poem “Chosen,” which helped get its author, Josh Healey, and two other poets, Kevin Coval, and Tracy Soren, uninvited from J Street’s conference last year. The three poets were supposed to run a session on poetry in the conference track called “Culture as a Tool for Change,” but when right-wing bloggers, among them Michael Goldfarb at TheWeeklyStandard.com, pointed out that two of Healey’s poems, “Chosen” and “Queer Intifada,” draw comparisons between the Holocaust and current events in Israel and the United States, J Street decided to cancel the session and issued this statement to explain why:

As a matter of principle, J Street respects the dissenting voice that poetry can represent in society and politics. We acknowledge that expression and language are used differently in the arts and artistic expression when compared to their use in political argumentation.

Nevertheless, as J Street is critical of the use and abuse of Holocaust imagery and metaphors by politicians and pundits on the right, it would be inappropriate for us to feature poets at our Conference whose poetry has used such imagery in the past and might also be offensive to some conference participants.

We are sorry for any distraction that this issue may cause for those interested in working with us to advance the cause of peace and security for Israel and the Middle East.

The politics of the cancellation are unsurprising. The battle that would have ensued had J Street allowed the poets to read at the conference was one in which the organization was not willing to get mired, something that–according to Healey and Coval–J Street’s executive director admitted to them when he explained his decision. “I know what I’m doing is wrong,” they quote him as saying, “but there are some battles we choose not to fight.” While I personally agree with the poets that J Street would have done better to fight, because “giv[ing] in […] only emboldens the right and legitimizes their attacks,” I am also aware of how easy it is to second guess decisions like the one J Street made from a distance, and so I don’t want to do that here. Nonetheless, the organization’s statement does reveal something about the politics of “Holocaust imagery and metaphor” within the Jewish community that would be worth talking about even if the poetry session hadn’t been canceled, though it will probably be useful first to take a closer look at poems by Healey and Coval that J Street, Michael Goldfarb and others on the right found so problematic. Here are the offending lines from “Chosen:”

we call ourselves the chosen people
but I’m asking chosen for what?
chosen to recreate our own history
merely reversing the roles
with the script now reading that
we’re the ones writing numbers
on the wrists of babies born in
the ghetto called Gaza?

As I read it, “Chosen” is Healey’s attempt to explore his own difficulty in defining for himself a stable Jewish identity in an era where assimilation, commercialization, consumerism and the Israeli occupation have corrupted (in Healey’s opinion) the social justice tradition within Judaism and Jewish culture and also made it increasingly difficult to see the Jews as the archetype of the oppressed nation, which is how, at least in my Jewish education, we were taught to see ourselves. Here is the poem’s conclusion:

I wish there was a chosen people
and that I could claim them as my own

but when it comes to my people
we’ve chosen to assimilate into
the world of Six Day Wars and Chanukah Harry’s
leading me to see that all people are
going to be just that — people
no matter how many points
we put on our stars or how hard
we pray that they’re different

When I finished reading “Chosen,” it was hard not to think of the joke–I think the writers of Fiddler on the Roof actually put it in Tevye’s mouth–in which the long suffering Jewish man, whose heart is filled with the long suffering of the Jewish people, says to God something like, “I know we are your chosen people, and it’s a blessing; but couldn’t you, maybe, choose someone else for a change?” In Healey’s poem, though, it’s not God who chooses someone else, it’s the Jewish people who have chosen to be something else, and, like the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, Healey wants his words to be a clarion call to the Jews to back away from that choice and return, as my rebbes would have put it, to their yiddishe neshama, their Jewish souls, and the essential truth of what it means to be a Jew. Unfortunately, Healey’s prophetic ambitions don’t amount to much more than a list of tired cliches:

last week I saw Moses crying in the suburbs of Chicago
wandering through the strip malls and fancy temples
wondering why we ignored his last lesson that until all peoples
are free, we might as well still be slaves in Egypt

yesterday I saw Rabbi Hillel begging on the streets of Jerusalem
asking for spare shekels but all the passers-by already gave their money
to false campus idols erected in his honor, pay no attention when he pleas
if you are only for yourself, son, then what are you really for?

Indeed, pretty much the only move in the poem with the potential to yield something that is not cliche, that might do some real justice to the large ambitions Healey has for the piece, is the one that got him in trouble in the first place, comparing the Palestinians in Gaza to the Jews in the ghettos and concentration camps of Nazi Germany. That Healey does not want this comparison to be a facile one is indicated first by the fact that he makes it in the form of a question and, second, by the way he puts his question in the context of the Jews’ image of themselves as the chosen people, an idea fraught with conflict both within the Jewish community and between the Jewish community and the rest of the world. At stake in Healey’s question, in other words, are issues of identity, morality and community; of responsibility and accountability; of how one gives meaning not only to one’s own suffering, but the suffering of others; not only to the oppressive actions of others, but to oppressive actions performed in one’s name. More to the point, these issues are not just relevant, they are central to any discussion of how to make peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, because the concessions and compromises that peace will require of Israel–and, therefore, by proxy, of world Jewry as well–go by definition to the heart of what it has meant to be Jewish since Israel’s independence was declared in 1948. Unfortunately, though, through an inexcusably shallow and factually inaccurate use of Holocaust imagery–Israel is not tattooing numbers onto the wrists of babies born in Gaza–Healey does not merely avoid those crucial issues. He renders them invisible, setting aside the irony he might have so usefully explored in comparing Gaza to a ghetto and going instead for the easy and sentimentalized guilt trip on which rendering Israel Nazi-like is supposed to send those of us who don’t “get it.”

On the whole, “Queer Intifada” is more successful than “Chosen.” The poem’s entirely authentic energy comes from the juxtaposition of a Palestinian Solidarity March and Gay Pride Parade that are taking place on the same day in more or less the same place, and when Healey gets to the Holocaust comparisons that made this poem also problematic for Michael Goldfarb and company, the impulse to make the comparisons, if not the comparisons themselves, arise out of the poem’s energy and movement:

my friends,
Anne Frank is Matthew Shepard
Guantanamo is Auschwitz
Gay Marriage is Palestine
and we are all walking on occupied land

Unfortunately, here too, Healey reaches for what is easy rather than looking for complexity. Equating Guantanamo with Auschwitz is insultingly gratuitous, not only because Guantanamo–whatever else might be wrong with it–is most decidedly not a death camp, but also because it has nothing to with the rest of the poem; and while there certainly are those in the US who would like to hunt down queer people in the same way that the Nazis hunted both Jews and queers, what happened to Matthew Shepard, horrible thought it was and worthy of being memorialized in many different kinds of poems though it is, was not the result of a government sponsored Final Solution. My point is not that that it is wrong to compare either the experiences of or the oppressions suffered by Matthew Shepherd and Anne Frank; especially because the Nazis also sought to exterminate gay people, there is a lot that can probably be learned from exploring the depths of that comparison. However, to elide, as Healey does, the specific characteristics of the different oppressions under which they lived, to reduce each of their lives to what their names can stand for–Anne Frank=Jewish girl hunted and killed by Nazis; Matthew Shepard=gay man hunted and killed by homophobes–is to flatten the truth of each of their experiences to a single truth that does justice to neither of them and, frankly, trivializes what happened to both of them. (Even the comparison between gay marriage and Palestine, in my opinion, ought to give people pause for the same reasons.)

Clearly, I don’t think either of these poems is entirely successful, but their failure stems not from Healey’s impulse as a Jewish poet to use the Holocaust as a lens for examining his place as a Jew in today’s world or to see echoes of the Final Solution in the oppressions that plague our time. Rather, their failure is a failure of language. Healey’s Holocaust comparisons are embodied not in the kind of language that J Street talks about in the first paragraph of its explanation for canceling the poetry event, language that is “used differently in […] artistic expression [than] in political argumentation.” Instead, they are expressed precisely as they would be were political argumentation–albeit a score-cheap-points species of such argument–the kind of discourse in which Healey was involved, which is what made them such perfect fodder for the right-wing bloggers who attacked him. Yet I also want to acknowledge the courage it took for Healey to write what he wrote, to risk putting himself forward as–again, in J Street’s words–“the [kind of] dissenting voice that poetry can represent in society and politics.” That was the role played by the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, whose voices Healey seems to me to have wanted to invoke in these two poems, and that is a role that poets can and should play today, which is why it is a shame that J Street felt it necessary to cut the poets out of its conference, instead of finding a way to make the substance, the failure and the courage of Healey’s poems part of the discussion. One way to do this might have been to ask the poets to explore the poet-prophet connection at which I have just hinted. Certainly there is an argument to be made that Israel has “lost its way” in trying to deal with the Palestinian issue, though how much it is lost may be up for debate and I know there are people who will say that Israel is not lost at all; and while the politicians and activists, the negotiators and academics, hammer out the practical aspects of finding a way to peace, maybe it is the Jewish poet’s job–or at least the job of those Jewish poets who feel themselves compelled to do it–to call Israel back to its better self (and I mean here not only the current State of Israel, but Israel as it is often used in the Hebrew Bible to signify the Jewish people). To practice what Josh Healey and his fellow poet Kevin Coval call in Searching for a Minyan: Our Response to Being Censored by J Street “the Jewish maxim of the refusal to be silent in the face of oppression, anyone’s oppression.”

By way of example, here is a video of Kevin Coval performing the poem–of which I have been unable to find either the title or a transcript–for which he was taken to task because he accuses Israel of whoring itself “to sleep in the hands of men who [will?] beat you after morning coffee.”

Coval’s poem–whatever you might think of its politics–is more successful than either “Chosen” or “Queer Intifada” for a number of reasons, among them the fact that when Coval conjures the Holocaust, he does so with a far more developed sense of Jewish collective, and his own personal, vulnerability. The suggestion that Israel ought to examine its actions–that Jews ought to examine Israel’s actions–in light of what the Nazis did to the Jews is still there, but there is none of Healey’s cynical, propagandistic rant. Instead, Coval’s assertion of his own awareness that he, that the Jews could very easily become victims of another Gestapo, thereby validating in the context of the poem the emotional commitment most Jews have to the necessity of Israel as a safe haven, allows the full complexity with which Israel confronts the Jews–as an idea, an ideal and as a reality–to emerge. Moreover, when Coval calls Israel to task, he does so in terms of very specific events, giving details and taking responsibility for his own perspective–note the repetition of “I see you” and “I saw you”–in ways that make sure what he is saying does not descend into an ad hominem attack; as well, these criticisms of Israel are couched in metaphors that invite consideration not just of the specific deeds he is criticizing, but of the larger, universally human issues involved.

When he compares Israel to a pawn, for example, and the Middle East to a chessboard, he is not just characterizing Israel as a tool that the United States uses to fight its battles for it; he is also asking his audience to think about what it means to conceive of international relations in terms of battle and how that conception shapes the roles that the nations of the world then have little choice but to play. More to the point, he is asking a moral question: Given the realities of world politics and world antisemitism, given the moral history of the Jews and the moral imperative in Jewish culture to take a stand against oppression, what meaningful response can an individual Jew have to those actions Israel has taken against the Palestinians that are clearly immoral that does not also deny the realities of the world, betray the Jews or both?

The poem, of course, is itself Coval’s answer to that question, though it is not as straightforward an answer as it might at first appear. When he implores Israel at the end to stop killing itself, he is, in essence, asking Israel to find a way to live within the contradictions and complexities its existence embodies. The poem, in other words, is most emphatically not anti-Israel; it is, rather, a plea for Israel’s continued existence.Yet Michael Goldfarb ignores that entirely when he links to Coval’s YouTube video with these words:

Or maybe it wasn’t Healey but his fellow panelist, Kevin Coval, seen here calling Israel a “whore,” that someone [at J Street] was worried about [when the organization canceled the poetry event]. (Emphasis mine)

It is not gratuitous intellectual nitpicking to point out that there is a meaningful difference between calling someone a whore and telling them that certain of their behaviors are whorish. More to the point, though, to reduce Coval’s line–“whoring yourself to sleep in the hands of men who [will?] beat you after morning coffee”–to name calling is willfully to misread the poem; it is to avoid hearing the voice of the poem, of its speaker bearing witness to the violence such men do, whose hope is that the woman they are so horribly exploiting will somehow find the strength, the support, the community to free herself and live her own life. Goldfarb does not merely to disparage Coval’s poem, however; he also implies what Jennifer Rubin states more explicitly on Commentary’s blog, that Coval (and Healey) are merely saying in their work what J Street really stands for, a “peace” that will actually result in Israel’s demise as a Jewish state. (This is why, according to Rubin, J Street’s “definition of what’s good for [Israel] in no way matches up with the views of even reliably liberal American Jews or Israelis themselves” and why it’s “positions invariably line up so neatly with the Palestinian propaganda machine.”) Regardless of how much you disagree with Coval’s and Healey’s politics, regardless of how offended you are by their metaphors (I find Healey’s Holocaust metaphors very offensive, for example, and I generally agree with his politics), to take the position argued by Goldfarb and Rubin is to deny that Coval and Healey are Jewish poets working in a Jewish literary tradition which was explicitly about trying to guarantee Israel’s survival–the people and the nation–not calling for its destruction. If you are offended by Coval’s  characterization of some of Israel’s behavior as whorish, for example, then you should find the poetry of the biblical prophets equally offensive. Here, for example, is the prophet Jeremiah calling Israel a whore, though this translation uses the word prostitute instead:

2:19 “Your own wickedness shall correct you, and your backsliding shall reprove you. Know therefore and see that it is an evil thing and a bitter, that you have forsaken Yahweh your God, and that my fear is not in you,” says the Lord, Yahweh of Armies. 2:20 “For of old time I have broken your yoke, and burst your bonds; and you said, ‘I will not serve;’ for on every high hill and under every green tree you bowed yourself, playing the prostitute. 2:21 Yet I had planted you a noble vine, wholly a right seed. How then have you turned into the degenerate branches of a foreign vine to me? 2:22 For though you wash yourself with lye, and use much soap, yet your iniquity is marked before me,” says the Lord Yahweh.

And here is Ezekiel doing the same thing:

16:15 But you trusted in your beauty, and played the prostitute because of your renown, and poured out your prostitution on everyone who passed by; his it was. 16:16 You took of your garments, and made for yourselves high places decked with various colors, and played the prostitute on them: the like things shall not come, neither shall it be so. 16:17 You also took your beautiful jewels of my gold and of my silver, which I had given you, and made for yourself images of men, and played the prostitute with them; 16:18 and you took your embroidered garments, and covered them, and set my oil and my incense before them. 16:19 My bread also which I gave you, fine flour, and oil, and honey, with which I fed you, you even set it before them for a pleasant aroma; and thus it was, says the Lord Yahweh. 16:20 Moreover you have taken your sons and your daughters, whom you have borne to me, and you have sacrificed these to them to be devoured. Was your prostitution a small matter, 16:21 that you have slain my children, and delivered them up, in causing them to pass through the fire to them? 16:22 In all your abominations and your prostitution you have not remembered the days of your youth, when you were naked and bare, and were wallowing in your blood.

Had there been a Holocaust to which Jeremiah and Ezekiel, Isaiah and Hosea, could have referred in focusing the attention of Israel on its waywardness, I have no doubt the prophets would have done so; and I have no doubt as well that there were people like Michael Goldfarb and Jennfier Rubin who supported the status quo the prophets were speaking against by pointing out that in the verses prior to the ones I quoted just above, Ezekiel’s metaphor for the covenant with God that Israel has betrayed by prostituting herself is sex; and I am sure those people pointed out the even more morally questionable fact that, in this passage, the prophet shows God grooming Israel almost from the moment of her birth so that when her “time of love” arrived, He could claim her sexually.

16:1 Again the word of Yahweh came to me, saying, 16:2 Son of man, cause Jerusalem to know her abominations; 16:3 and say, Thus says the Lord Yahweh to Jerusalem: Your birth and your birth is of the land of the Canaanite; the Amorite was your father, and your mother was a Hittite. 16:4 As for your birth, in the day you were born your navel was not cut, neither were you washed in water to cleanse you; you weren’t salted at all, nor swaddled at all. 16:5 No eye pitied you, to do any of these things to you, to have compassion on you; but you were cast out in the open field, for that your person was abhorred, in the day that you were born. 16:6 When I passed by you, and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you, Though you are in your blood, live; yes, I said to you, Though you are in your blood, live. 16:7 I caused you to multiply as that which grows in the field, and you increased and grew great, and you attained to excellent ornament; your breasts were fashioned, and your hair was grown; yet you were naked and bare. 16:8 Now when I passed by you, and looked at you, behold, your time was the time of love; and I spread my skirt over you,[2. In the Bible, this is a metaphor for sexual intercourse, not the modesty we might see in it. When Boaz has sex with Ruth, for example, the expression used in the text has to do with his covering her with his blanket.] and covered your nakedness: yes, I swore to you, and entered into a covenant with you, says the Lord Yahweh, and you became mine. (Emphasis mine.)

I am, of course, not arguing that Coval and Healey are prophets; but to refuse to recognize that they, as I read them, are working very self-consciously within the prophetic literary tradition is not merely to deny the fundamentally Jewish nature of what they are trying to accomplish in their poems; it is also to establish, at least by implication, an orthodoxy around whether and how Jewish writers can deal with difficult topics like Israel and the Holocaust–topics that are inescapably, irreducibly, unequivocally Jewish–in writing about Jewish identity, Jewish current events, the relationship between the Jewish community and the rest of the world or any other Jewish issue for that matter. It is, in other words, to prescribe an appropriate Jewish identity, to insist that the language of poetry should not move beyond the boundaries established by the language of political discourse. In fact, what disturbs me most about the statement J Street issued explaining its reasons for canceling the poetry event that was supposed to feature Healey and Coval is its clear endorsement of this kind of orthodoxy, something that the criticism leveled by both the left and the right at J Street’s realpolitik has not addressed. Here, for ease of reference, is the full text of J Street’s statement:

Over the weekend, J Street canceled the poetry session scheduled as part of the “Culture as a Tool for Change” track at its upcoming National Conference.

As a matter of principle, J Street respects the dissenting voice that poetry can represent in society and politics. We acknowledge that expression and language are used differently in the arts and artistic expression when compared to their use in political argumentation.

Nevertheless, as J Street is critical of the use and abuse of Holocaust imagery and metaphors by politicians and pundits on the right, it would be inappropriate for us to feature poets at our Conference whose poetry has used such imagery in the past and might also be offensive to some conference participants.

We are sorry for any distraction that this issue may cause for those interested in working with us to advance the cause of peace and security for Israel and the Middle East.

In terms of meaning, the first and last paragraphs are the most clear, and if you were to read only those two paragraphs–replacing the words “this issue” in the last paragraph with a more explicit reference to Healey and Coval–J Street’s reasoning for canceling the event would also be pretty clear. Taking on the controversy that was building over Healey and Coval’s work would have undermined the core purpose of the conference which was “to advance the cause of peace and prosperity for Israel and the Middle East.” It’s important to recognize that this assessment might have been accurate. More to the point, though, and assuming for the moment that it was an accurate assessment, J Street could have approached the cancellation of the poetry session very differently. The organization’s statement could have focused on the importance of the questions raised by the poets’ work and the fact that those questions will still be relevant no matter how the issue of peace between Israel and the Palestinians is resolved. J Street could have offered to create another forum where those questions could be addressed more fruitfully, not by walling poetry away from the politics of Middle East peace, but by making sure there would be enough time and space to address the very complicated literary-political issues to which writing poetry about the Middle East gives rise.

Whatever flaws you might find in such reasoning–and however wrong you might think it is politically, strategically or otherwise–it would be hard to call a cancellation framed in those terms outright censorship, especially if the statement had been written in consultation with the poets. J Street, however, chose instead to issue a statement that cannot be called anything but censorship, and that comes pretty close to censuring Healey and Coval as well, despite the gesture in the statement’s second paragraph acknowledging that poetry, while it can be politically engaged, is not political discourse. This is an important and useful distinction to make, especially since ignoring this distinction was part of the strategy employed by the right-wing bloggers who used Healey’s and Coval’s work to make J Street’s life so difficult. Remarkably, however, J Street ignores that distinction in the very next paragraph, equating the Holocaust imagery and metaphors in poems like Healey’s to the “use and abuse of Holocaust imagery and metaphors by politicians and pundits on the right.” Even leaving aside the fact that the phrase “use and abuse” suggests that “politicians and pundits on the right” ought, in J Street’s opinion, never to use Holocaust imagery or metaphors, it’s hard to escape the implication in that third paragraph that J Street also believes, when it comes to the Holocaust, that there is no difference between politics and poetry; and since you cannot separate either the establishment of the State of Israel or the reason that most Jews not born in Israel believe Israel ought to exist from the historical reality of the Holocaust and the way the Holocaust has been made central to Jewish identity since the ending of World War II, it’s hard as well to escape the further implication that the distinction between poetic and political discourse disappears when it comes to Israel as well.

My guess it that the person who wrote J Street’s statement did not intend for it to mean any of what I have just said. Indeed, the statement as a whole strikes me as having been very quickly and carelessly written, but it is what it is, and it says what it says, and it now represents J Street’s official position–since, as far as I can tell, no further statement has been issued. My point, however, is not to use this statement to characterize J Street as a hypocritical organization. One carelessly written statement does not an organization’s overall agenda make. Rather, what I want to point out is that adhering to the orthodoxies and pieties that a community tries to impose on the discussion and rhetorical use of certain subject matter will inevitably mire you in the kinds of hypocrisy J Street’s statement so clearly embodies; and if there are any two subjects about which the Jewish community has tried to impose such orthodoxies and pieties, they are Israel and the Holocaust. I have written at length about this in terms of Israel in the series “What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) antisemitisn and Israel” (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; each link will open in a different window), and so I am not going to touch on that subject here; and I have already argued that I think it is a Jewish poet’s right and responsibility to use the Holocaust as a lens through which to understand her or his Jewish identity in a world where Jews have become oppressors. There is, however, more at stake in the question of how one should or shouldn’t make art dealing with the Holocaust than the questions raised by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, because the questions raised by the Holocaust are, among others, fundamental questions about the existence and nature of evil in the world and the place that evil occupies–that we give it–in the process of living that is human being.

Part 2 to follow soon.

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.

During lunch that day—her reading was in the evening—Suheir and I spoke about “One Stop (Hebron Revisited)” a poem from her first book, Born Palestinian, Born Black, that I had used in a class I’d taught the previous semester called Introduction to World Jewish Studies. The poem is a response to Baruch Goldstein’s February 1994 massacre of 29 Muslims—approximately 100 were injured—in which the speaker, a woman, imagines the violence she would have done to a Jewish man she sees had she “caught [him] on the train/on an empty car into flatbush.” The poem is painful to read, not only for the specific details of the violence it describes, but also for the nakedness of the rage it expresses. The speaker is in pain, and it is hard not to feel implicit in the details of what the woman describes how much she hates herself for even imagining that she would perform those acts.

When I taught the poem, I asked my students, all of whom happened to be Jewish and most of whom came from conservative and orthodox religious backgrounds, if they thought it was anti-Semitic. I was truly surprised when they said no, that if they were in the writer’s shoes, they would have felt a similar anger and that Suheir Hammad therefore had every right to express herself in the way that she did. I told Suheir this and she also was shocked and then she told me that “One Stop” was a poem she never read when she gave readings. I don’t remember her precise words, but I think she told me she was afraid to. It was so angry and so violent that she was not sure how her audiences would react. I told her I thought it was a poem that people needed to hear, that she owed it to herself and to her audiences to read it, precisely because the pain and the violence in the poem are so deeply embedded in the emotional center of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and no one should be spared a confrontation with that center.

My own opinion is that, to the extent the speaker in “One Stop” holds the Jewish man she sees on the train in New York City responsible for the views of Baruch Goldstein and, by extension, the policies of the State of Israel, the poem is anti-Semitic, or, to be more precise, the speaker expresses her rage in anti-Semitic terms. Because her rage is comprehensible, however, it is also an excusable moment of Jew-hatred, no different than the way, say, the rage of a Black South African during apartheid might be directed at all South African whites, despite the fact that there were many whites in South Africa who opposed apartheid. What matters is whether the speaker, once she has calmed down, takes responsibility for that moment. In “One Stop,” she does not, nor do I remember, frankly, whether Hammad takes on the question of that responsibility in any of the other poems in Born Palestinian, Born Black, and since I do not have the book handy, I can’t go back and check. My overall recollection of the book, though, is that it is more angry than it is about coming to terms with anger. I remember a couple of withering poems protesting the way Middle Eastern women are exoticized in the US, and I remember poems that were clearly intended to confront the reader with the physical horrors of occupation. (It occurs to me as I write this that I also should state explicitly that I am not accusing Suheir Hammad of Jew-hatred in any form. Not only is it a mistake to confuse a poet with the speakers of her poems, but I have met her and talked to her, and I just don’t think she harbors that kind of hatred for anyone.)

Almost ten years separate Born Palestinian, Born Black from ZaatarDiva, and the poems are correspondingly more mature, more subtle, more emotionally complex and more technically accomplished. The anger is still there, but it is tempered by sadness, by regret, by a desire not to have to be so angry, as Hammad says in “palestinian ‘98.”

i did not want to write this
type of poem again poem
places political before beautiful
but swallowing anger burned
a hole in my soul this poem
has kept me up this poem
will not lend itself easy
to revisionist history
nor to sleep

this poem begging to be
beautiful poised
articulate this poem
palestinian and too late

Most of all, though, the anger in ZaatarDiva is tempered by love. Suheir Hammad has written some gorgeous love poems. Here is the last stanza of “whole hands”

and his hands cupped
have caught me as
i fell drop by glisten
fingers coaxing my
arrival whole

Not all of ZaatarDiva hits the mark, though. At times, Hammad relies too heavily on technique. In “land,” for instance, the syncopated rhythm created by her enjambed lines cannot mask the fact that the language goes no deeper into the metaphor from which the poem is supposed to emerge than its rather cliché surface:

his approach
to love he said
was that of a farmer

most love like
hunters and like
hunters most kill
what they desire

he tills
soil through toes
nose in the wet
earth he waits
prays to the gods
and slowly harvests
thankful

Suheir Hammad is in many ways a poetic daughter of June Jordan, who was one of my earliest teachers and has remained a profound influence on me throughout my own writing career. One of the lessons I learned from June was that a poet cannot write political poetry without being responsible and accountable for her or his own position in the politics he or she is writing about. Towards the end of “The Bombing of Baghdad,” from Kissing God Goodbye, a poem that is relentless in it critique of the US bombing of Iraq during the first Gulf War, Jordan writes the following:

And in the aftermath of carnage
perpetrated in my name
how should I dare to offer you my hand
how shall I negotiate the implications of my shame?

In “no cover up,” a poem in which she accepts responsibility as a member of the human community for “what we have/done” to each other, Hammad gestures in the direction of the kind of responsibility Jordan takes in her poem. Jordan, however, takes responsibility for belonging to a specific nation that has committed horrible and horrifying acts in her name, despite the fact that she has stood against those acts with everything she has in her. Hammad, on the other hand, universalizes her responsibility, and while “no cover up” is a powerful poem that speaks a powerful truth, the lumping together of all the atrocities people have visited upon each other throughout the ages into one mass atrocity inevitably dehistoricizes and therefore renders invisible the individual experiences of the people who lived through and died from those atrocities.

Though she was born here, Hammad claims for herself a place in Palestine as a Palestinian—as well she should—and she writes passionately and persuasively in her poems against the dehistoricization of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, especially the way supporters of Israel try to represent the Palestinians as ahistorical, but with one exception, which I will get to in a moment, she does not claim for herself a politicized place here, in the United States, as an American, in the way that Jordan does in the quote above. And let me clear that I am not talking here about patriotism or nationalism, at least not in any simplistic sense, but rather about how poets situate themselves in their poetry in relation to the place where they live, the place that formed them as they grew up, the place that gave them the language they use, and so on. She begins to think along these lines in “first writing since,” her poem written in the aftermath of September 11^th

yet when people sent emails saying, this was bound to happen, lets
not forget u.s. transgressions, for half a second i felt resentful.
hold up with that, cause I live here, these are my friends and fam,
and it could have been me in those buildings, and we’re not bad
people, do not support america’s bullying.
can I just have a half second to feel bad?

In the stanza before the one I just quoted she talks about “dead iraqi children, the dead in Nicaragua. the dead in Rwanda,” but she does not take on the complexities of what it means to her that she lives in the country she holds responsible for many of the things she writes against, where the aforementioned dead “had to vie with fake sport wrestling for […] attention.” Nor, frankly, does she have to. It is neither my place nor my desire to tell Suheir Hammad what kinds of poems she should write. The ones she has written stand on their own and speak for themselves, but it is precisely because they do so with such power that I am interested in what she would make of the complexities I just talked about, and that is why I bring it up here.

Kazim Ali’s The Far Mosque is, as I said, a very different book. Quiet and introspective, it takes you on a journey, that begins in “the desert [where you came], illiterate, spirit-ridden/intending to starve” (“Gallery) and ends in the graveyard where “the gray-green sky came down in breaths to my lips and sipped me” (“July”). What happens in between the intention to starve and the becoming of that which the sky can drink can perhaps best be described as a search, though the terrain of the search is internal rather than external. Indeed, the terrain outside the speaker’s interior landscape is represented primarily through allusion and the transformational power of metaphor, and is often refracted through the pieces of a fragmented and broken syntax that Ali weaves nonetheless into a music that is quite moving. These are the first four lines from “Agnes Martin”

Wetten to work here seen against the sky sandscape sandbox silent
Alone mind unleashed mouth a close open cave stone breathe
Stone whiten away sharp sky edge dusk blend down dark self edge
Thrown aloft five birds little surface wind lettered and fettered

I will not pretend to know what these lines “mean,” but there is something about the rhythm—no word has more than two syllables—and the alliteration that carries an emotional meaning in much the same way that a melody line does. Then add to that the fact that parts of each line—“Alone mind unleashed mouth,” “Wetten to work here seen against the sky,” “dusk blend down dark self edge”—read as if they were sentences pared down to the bare minimum and you have an impressionistic word-melody-portrait of what it feels like to be alone and feel yourself become one with nature.

I read The Far Mosque immediately after I finished ZaatarDiva and I was struck by what I saw as similarities not in the content of the poems, but in their technique, and this intrigued me. I have always found it unfortunate when writers, or artists of any sort for that matter, mistake technique for ideology or essentialize any given technique by insisting that it belongs irrevocably to any given ideology. Much of the free verse vs. formal verse debate, and all of its various permutations, has always seemed to me to be rooted in that mistake. Anyway, it struck me as I read The Far Mosque that, in terms of technique, there wasn’t much difference between these lines from Hammad’s “glitter girl”

know how a mirror breaks
seven years bad luck
breaks into shards sharp edge
glitter like blood
if you touch it
bleed bad luck

that’s what happens to girls
too when they get touched
get broken they break
i broke
into shards flowers into thorn
sharp edge pretty
blood and all

And the lines that I quoted from Ali’s “Agnes Martin” above, which I am going to relineate so that my point become clearer:

Wetten to work here
seen against the sky
sandscape sandbox silent

Alone mind unleashed mouth
a close open cave
stone breathe

Stone whiten away sharp sky edge
dusk blend down dark self edge

Thrown aloft five birds
little surface
wind lettered and fettered

My point is not that the techniques in the two poems are identical, but merely that they echo each other: the same paring away of articles and other function words, the same jamming together of words to create meaning through juxtaposition, the same grouping of rhythm and meaning into two and three beat units. And yet the poems themselves are so radically different in so many ways—though I suppose it is also possible to argue that the poems echo each other in terms of substance as well: each book is in some way about a search for wholeness, though Ali’s is much more explicitly spiritual, while Hammad’s focuses more on the physical and political.

Most of the poems in Ali’s book are less obscure than “Agnes Martin,” and several are ghazals or variations on the ghazal form, or they make use of the free-associative discontinuity that is one of the conventions of the ghazal form. Indeed, the whole book can be seen as a meditation on the relationship between unity and discontinuity that is at the center of the ghazal form. Since I have been for the past two years translating classical Persian poetry, I found this aspect of The Far Mosque delightful and intriguing and so I’d like in closing to offer you the poem “Rain,” which is the poem that comes closest to following the rules of the ghazal form:

With thick strokes of ink the sky fills with rain.
Pretending to run for cover but secretly praying for more rain.

Over the echo of the water, I hear a voice saying my name.
No one in the city moves under the quick sightless rain.

The pages of my notebook soak, then curl. I’ve written:
“Yogis opened their mouths for hours to drink the rain.”

The sky is a bowl of dark water, rinsing your face.
The window trembles; liquid glass could shatter into rain.

I am a dark bowl, waiting to be filled.
If I open my mouth now, I could drown in the rain.

I hurry home as though someone is there waiting for me.
The night collapses into your skin. I am the rain.