Tag Archives: Palestine

Went to See Maz Jobrani Last Night

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I took my wife and my son for their birth­days, which are a day apart later this month, to see the Iranian-American comic Maz Jobrani last night at Town Hall. He is very tal­ented and very funny. One of the things he does to great effect is bring the audi­ence into dia­logue with him as part of his show, and so – since part of this agenda is quite explic­itly polit­i­cal, i.e., to use com­edy as a way of call­ing out and break­ing down stereo­types and other kinds of bar­ri­ers between dif­fer­ent kinds of peo­ple – he asks mem­bers of dif­fer­ent groups to iden­tify them­selves in the audi­ence: Ira­ni­ans (obvi­ously), white peo­ple, Arabs (mak­ing sure to spec­ify which coun­try they come from, to make the point, you know, that the Arab Mid­dle East is not all one coun­try), Jews, Lati­nos, etc. Per­haps my favorite joke of the evening resulted from this – not that it was the fun­ni­est, but it was my favorite.

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.

What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) antisemitism and Israel — 5

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I am not a Zion­ist. For the first half of my life and then some, the idea that a Jew­ish man or woman could say those words and mean them was almost as far-fetched as the idea that Jews had horns. Israel – it had been drilled into me from the moment I was old enough to under­stand there was a place called Israel – was a cat­e­gor­i­cal imper­a­tive of Jew­ish exis­tence. To sug­gest the Jews were not a nation was not just to be in league with all those who had tried to wipe us out, not just to deny a cen­tral truth of how we’d man­aged to sur­vive in spite of those attempts, but also to cut your­self off from your own peo­ple, to make your­self like a limb sev­ered from its body, and what kind of exis­tence was that? Despite the fact that I’d never been there, that I had no inten­tion of mak­ing aliyah, Israel was my coun­try too, with­out ambi­gu­ity, but not with­out ambivalence.

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?

///

Con­tinue read­ing →

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 →

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.

Reading Suheir Hammad’s ZaatarDiva and Kazim Ali’s The Far Mosque

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Talk about two very dif­fer­ent books by two very dif­fer­ent poets, but there are con­nec­tions, and since I read the books back to back, I want to talk about them side by side.[1. This review was orig­i­nally posted on a lit­er­ary blog that no longer exists called The Great Amer­i­can Pinup. My under­stand­ing is that the blog was hacked and that attempts by the peo­ple who ran the blog to resolve things using Google’s help screens were unsuc­cess­ful. I am repost­ing the review here because I think the books are impor­tant enough that the review should con­tinue to be avail­able.] I first met Suheir Ham­mad some years ago when she came to Nas­sau Com­mu­nity Col­lege (NCC), where I teach in the Eng­lish Depart­ment, to give a read­ing as part of a day-long pro­gram on the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict. The pro­gram was spon­sored by NCC’s Inter­na­tional Stud­ies Com­mit­tee and it gen­er­ated, even in the plan­ning, a lot of con­tro­versy. I was not involved in putting the day together, so I do not know the specifics of went on, but I do know that the col­lege admin­is­tra­tion voiced con­cerns about ade­quate secu­rity, about who the pan­elists would be and whether a bal­anced view of the con­flict would be pre­sented. What they meant by “bal­anced,” how­ever, at least as I under­stand it, was that no one who spoke for the Pales­tin­ian side should express views that were overtly hos­tile to Israel. It did not seem to bother them that peo­ple rep­re­sent­ing the Israeli side might express views overtly hos­tile to Pales­tini­ans and/or Arabs, and, sure enough, one of the speak­ers was a woman rep­re­sent­ing a far-right Jew­ish orga­ni­za­tion — not Israeli, but Jew­ish — who spoke quite force­fully about the Arab/Muslim plot to take over the world. It was almost as if she were quot­ing from the Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion,[2. The link is to an edu­ca­tional page about the Pro­to­cols that con­tains a link to a pdf ver­sion of the text, if you want an html ver­sion click here] except that all the ref­er­ences to Jews had been changed to Arabs.

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.) Con­tinue read­ing →

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

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

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

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