Tag Archives: Jewish

What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) antisemitism and Israel — 4

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To me, the point was obvi­ous. Bas­ing the Jew­ish claim to the land of Israel on the Jews’ own read­ing of the Hebrew Bible was ask­ing the over­whelm­ingly non-Jewish world to accept as objec­tive and incon­tro­vert­ible the truth that Judaism claimed as its own, never mind the impli­ca­tion that the dis­en­fran­chise­ment of the Pales­tini­ans was some­how the will of the monothe­is­tic god. To assert that line of rea­son­ing as an argu­ment for Israel’s right to exist, I sug­gested, was self-defeating at the very least – even if, as a believ­ing Jew, it was a cor­ner­stone of your faith.

“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.

Con­tinue read­ing →

What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) antisemitism and Israel — 3

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Inci­dent #1

It’s 1993. I am walk­ing out of the mail­room in the build­ing where I work and one of my non-Jewish col­leagues – some­one I am not close to but with whom I have pleas­ant enough exchanges when we hap­pen to meet – approaches me with a small news­pa­per arti­cle in his hand. His mouth tilted in a mis­chie­vous grin, he says I really ought to know about this and holds the arti­cle out for me to read. I know that what’s com­ing next is sup­posed to make me laugh, and so when I take the clip­ping from him and read about how the designer Jean Paul Gaultier’s new col­lec­tion is based on tra­di­tional Cha­sidic garb, it is the absur­dity that hits me first, and I do laugh. My col­league laughs with me, the moment is over and we walk off into the rest of the day. Later, as I am grad­ing papers, I find the ques­tions that Gaultier’s col­lec­tion raises about cul­tural appro­pri­a­tion, among other things, gnaw­ing at the edges of my think­ing – not to men­tion ques­tions about why my col­league would choose to show me the arti­cle – but I am busy. My col­league, I decide to assume, just wanted to share a laugh with some­one who would find real sig­nif­i­cance in the trans­gres­sive nature of Gaultier’s design, and so I put the whole inci­dent out of my mind. (If you’re inter­ested, YouTube videos of the fash­ion show where Gaultier’s designs were unveiled are here and here; parts 3 & 4 are up there as well.)

A few days later, this col­league and I are walk­ing towards each other on cam­pus; I lift my hand in greet­ing and nod hello; he does the same. As we pass each other, he says with a smile, “So how come you’re not wear­ing the new fash­ion?” I give a short laugh, and so does he, and we move on to where it is we are going. When I see him on cam­pus again the next day, how­ever, he asks me the same ques­tion; and it hap­pens again the day after that, and again the fol­low­ing week, and I don’t remem­ber how many times exactly this man finds only this one way to inter­act with me – truly, other than that ques­tion, he did not seem to have any­thing else to say to me – but it’s clear to me that he’s sin­gling me out as a Jew, and it makes me very uncom­fort­able. I tell the chair of my depart­ment what’s going on but ask him not to get involved. I have no prob­lem con­fronting some­one with their own anti­semitism, but my col­league stops ask­ing the ques­tion and there is no rea­son to pur­sue the issue any further.

Inci­dent #2

It’s still 1993. Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn are in the news, as is Sol Wachtler; each of the men are Jew­ish, and each one is involved in a sex scan­dal. I am sit­ting in the same colleague’s office, talk­ing to his office mate, who is a good friend of mine, about some pieces I have been writ­ing about gen­der and male het­ero­sex­u­al­ity. The col­league he walks in, lis­tens for a few sec­onds to get the gist of our con­ver­sa­tion and then inter­rupts, look­ing straight at me, “First Sol Wachtler and now Woody Allen! What is it with Jew­ish male sexuality?”

“It’s because we’re cir­cum­cised,” I answer, the sar­casm drip­ping from my words. “It makes us feel like we have some­thing to prove.”

My col­league doesn’t say any­thing in response, goes to his desk and starts to work. Since it feels like I made my point, I decide there is no rea­son to engage him fur­ther and I go back to the con­ver­sa­tion I was hav­ing with my friend. Con­tinue read­ing →

What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) antisemitism and Israel — 2

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

Not that I thought for one moment my sit­u­a­tion was as bad as the Jews had it in Nazi Ger­many or medieval Europe or, to take what would have been a con­tem­po­rary exam­ple at the time, the for­mer Soviet Union, where Jews were being pretty openly per­se­cuted just for being Jews. That it could get that bad pretty quickly and eas­ily, how­ever, was more than appar­ent to me, and so the Jew­ish edu­ca­tion I received, in both the Con­ser­v­a­tive syn­a­gogue where I went to Hebrew School until I was in 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. Con­tinue read­ing →

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

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

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

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

Con­tinue read­ing →

Was Roman Vishniac a Propagandist?

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

A Full-Throated Protest Against Exis­tence and the World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New Covenant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Con­tinue read­ing →