Richard Jeffrey Newman

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 The point of the com­par­i­son, in other words, is not to say that Israel – and, by exten­sion, the Jews – are no dif­fer­ent from the Nazis, that the Israelis are com­mit­ting what is tan­ta­mount to geno­cide against the Pales­tini­ans, but rather to illu­mi­nate the dynamic by which vio­lence begets vio­lence, all too often turn­ing those who were vic­tims of vio­lence into per­pe­tra­tors of the kinds of vio­lence they suf­fered. Fur­ther, imag­ine that the pro­gram notes for this imag­i­nary pro­duc­tion make clear that it is intended to explore what it means that the vio­lence done by the Israelis to the Pales­tini­ans has become part of Jew­ish iden­tity, in the sense that if one is Jew­ish, one must be account­able in some way for one’s responses to that vio­lence. More­over, let’s even say that there is a note in the pro­gram explain­ing that the choice of Nazi uni­forms was because the Holo­caust, more than any other per­se­cu­tion the Jews have suf­fered, can stand for all the per­se­cu­tions through which the Jews have lived. The com­par­i­son to the Holo­caust per se, in other words, is not even the point. » Read the rest of this entry «

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.