Church in Florida to Host “International Burn the Quran Day” to Commemorate the September 11 Attacks

August 20th, 2010 § 2

The poet Kazim Ali posted this to his Face­book page, say­ing that he thought it “had to be a myth,” and that is what it sounds like at first, but the Dove World Out­reach Cen­ter is indeed invit­ing peo­ple to burn a Quran on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2010. It’s easy to dis­miss this as quack­ery, as not worth giv­ing the atten­tion that it got through CNN’s cov­er­age, but the truth is that if we don’t pay atten­tion to it, if we don’t call it out for what it is – and it’s grat­i­fy­ing to see that the Face­book page protest­ing the event has close to twice as many fans as the Face­book page announc­ing the event – it will spread. More than that, though, it will become – it already has become, actu­ally, and this is kind of fright­en­ing – part of the way per­cep­tions of Islam are framed by our national rhetoric. Here’s the video:

Rick Sanchez, I think, proves him­self to be a par­tic­u­larly inept inter­viewer here – I don’t watch him, so I don’t know if he’s usu­ally bet­ter than this – but one of the things that dis­turbs me about the way he tries to respond to Terry Jones, Dove World Outreach’s pas­tor, is his but-there–are–moderate-muslims-out-there tone, as if those “mod­er­ate Muslims” – and more about that phrase in a moment – are some­how the excep­tion to the rule. Or as if they are, you know, out there, but really well hid­den, and so you have to know the secret code or some­thing to get them to reveal them­selves. Equally trou­bling to me, though, is the way the phrase “mod­er­ate Mus­lims” has taken on the same descrip­tive weight and author­ity as, say, Ortho­dox Jew or Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian, as if “mod­er­ate” were some­how actu­ally a sect of Islam. Well-meaning as it may be, the phrase actu­ally con­tributes to rather than decon­structs the way in which Islam is being defined as a pro­foundly hos­tile theologically-informed, we-want-to-rule-the-world polit­i­cal stance towards the West, broadly speak­ing, and the United States in par­tic­u­lar, rather than as a reli­gion. This is to me – and I’d be inter­ested to hear what other peo­ple think of this – very sim­i­lar to the way in which the anti­se­mitic rhetoric of Europe framed Judaism from the 18th cen­tury, and cer­tainly the 19th cen­tury on, and it is cer­tainly one of the under­ly­ing assump­tions – i.e., that the Jews want to rule the world – of the “World Zion­ist Con­spir­acy” theories.

It’s also worth not­ing that Jones and his group also declared August 2 “No Homo Mayor” day, a day to protest Gainesville’s openly gay mayor. Both groups – Mus­lims and homo­sex­u­als – are god­less accord­ing to Jones, a logic sim­i­lar to the one that cre­ated the asso­ci­a­tion between being Jew­ish and homo­sex­u­al­ity, to men­tion being com­mu­nist, Jew­ish and homo­sex­ual, that was an impor­tant point of anti­se­mitic rhetoric in this coun­try dur­ing 50s, 60s and even 70s.

It’s easy to dis­miss Terry Jones and his church as a bunch of nuts, espe­cially when his argu­ments for why Islam is a devil’s reli­gion, as quoted in the text accom­pa­ny­ing the Rick Sanchez video, include doozies like this:

“I mean ask your­self, have you ever really seen a really happy Mus­lim? As they’re on the way to Mecca? As they gather together in the mosque on the floor? Does it look like a real reli­gion of joy?” Jones asks in one of his YouTube posts.

“No, to me it looks like a reli­gion of the devil.”

The prob­lem is that Jones and com­pany are only giv­ing expres­sion to the log­i­cal con­clu­sion of what an awful lot of peo­ple in the United State., con­sciously or not, already believe. The term Islam­o­pho­bia may be rel­a­tively new, but the (often racial­ized and racial­iz­ing) hatred of Mus­lims has a long his­tory in this coun­try – and that is some­thing I will per­haps write about in another post – a his­tory that pre­dates the Sep­tem­ber 11th attacks not by decades, but by cen­turies, and its assump­tions, its images, its rhetoric is/has been as much a part of our cul­ture as the assump­tions, images, rhetoric of, say, racism.

I am not an alarmist, though I do think there is a com­par­i­son to be made between the way in which anti­se­mitic rhetoric was deployed so as to make the Nazi’s cam­paign against the Jews and the way Islam­o­pho­bic rhetoric has been more and more mak­ing its way into our pub­lic dis­course. Indeed, I think this com­par­i­son would prob­a­bly work with the rhetoric of any geno­ci­dal cam­paign, though I do not think and I am not imply­ing that this is the begin­ning of some kind of anti-Muslim gov­ern­ment action. Rather, I think, plain and sim­ple, that those com­par­isons should make clear to us how imper­a­tive it is not to let the actions and the rhetoric of peo­ple like Terry Jones go unanswered.

It’s Good to Remember Our History

August 15th, 2010 § 1

From an August 11th arti­cle by Jonathan D. Sarna pub­lished on The Jew­ish Daily Forward’s web­site:

When New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg stood on Gov­er­nors Island, in sight of the Statue of Lib­erty, and force­fully defended the right of Mus­lims to build a com­mu­nity cen­ter and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero, he expressly made a point of dis­tanc­ing him­self from an ear­lier leader of the city: Peter Stuyvesant, who under­stood the rela­tion­ship between reli­gion and state alto­gether dif­fer­ently than Bloomberg does.

As gov­er­nor of what was then called New Ams­ter­dam, from 1647 – 1664, Stuyvesant worked to enforce Calvin­ist ortho­doxy. He objected to pub­lic wor­ship for Luther­ans, fought Catholi­cism and threat­ened those who har­bored Quak­ers with fines and impris­on­ment. One might eas­ily imag­ine how he would have treated Muslims.

When Jew­ish refugees arrived in his city, in 1654, Stuyvesant was deter­mined to bar them com­pletely. Jews, he com­plained, were “deceit­ful,” “very repug­nant” and “hate­ful ene­mies and blas­phe­mers of the name of Christ.” He wanted them sent elsewhere.

Stuyvesant’s supe­ri­ors in Hol­land over­ruled him, cit­ing eco­nomic and polit­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions. He con­tin­ued, how­ever, to restrict Jews to the prac­tice of their reli­gion “in all quiet­ness” and “within their houses.” Being as sus­pi­cious of all Jews as some today are of all Mus­lims, he never allowed them to build a syn­a­gogue of their own.

It was not until the early 1700s that Jews won the right to wor­ship in pub­lic in New York City. In Con­necti­cut that right was not granted until 1843, and the reac­tion of The New Haven Reg­is­ter, which “viewed the syn­a­gogue as a pub­lic defeat for Chris­ten­dom,” is instructive:

“The Jews…,” the paper thun­dered, “have out­flanked us here, and effected a foot­ing in the very cen­tre of our own fortress. Strange as it may sound, it is nev­er­the­less true that a Jew­ish syn­a­gogue has been estab­lished in this city — and their place of wor­ship (in Grand Street, over the store of Heller and Man­del­baum) was ded­i­cated on Fri­day after­noon. Yale Col­lege divin­ity deserves a Court-martial for bad generalship.”

It took an act of Con­gress, signed by Pres­i­dent Franklin Pierce, for Jews to be able to wor­ship in pub­lic in Wash­ing­ton, DC, where some con­tended that the Reli­gious Cor­po­ra­tion Act granted the right to pur­chase real estate only to Chris­t­ian churches; and just in case you think that Jews no longer run into such prob­lems in the United States, Sarna cites a case from 1999 in which “oppo­nents of a new Ortho­dox syn­a­gogue seek­ing to build in New Rochelle, N.Y. [used] warn­ings [about] ‘rats,’ ‘traf­fic’ and ‘creep­ing com­mer­cial­iza­tion’ [to hide their] real fear, [which was] that ‘the iden­tity of the neigh­bor­hood would change.’”

Mus­lims have been wor­ship­ing in pub­lic near Ground Zero for three decades. The Cor­doba House com­mu­nity cen­ter will not, in other words, be bring­ing some­thing entirely new to the area. Rather, it will pro­vide much needed space for a com­mu­nity that already exists there – not to men­tion the much needed space it will pro­vide for Mus­lims and peo­ple of other faiths to inter­act. The sim­i­lar­i­ties between much of the rhetoric being employed to argue against the build­ing of Cor­doba House and The New Haven Register’s The Jews have out­flanked us ought to dis­turb us all.

The Anti-Defamation League Should Be Ashamed of Itself

August 2nd, 2010 § 0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 8th, 2010 § 1

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?

///

» Read the rest of this entry «

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

June 8th, 2010 § 45

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.

» Read the rest of this entry «

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

June 8th, 2010 § 59

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. » Read the rest of this entry «

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

June 8th, 2010 § 6

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. » Read the rest of this entry «

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

June 8th, 2010 § 60

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.”

» Read the rest of this entry «

Was Roman Vishniac a Propagandist?

May 1st, 2010 § 0

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

March 31st, 2010 § 1

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.

Where Am I?

You are currently browsing the Jewish category at Richard Jeffrey Newman.