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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 «
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 «
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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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.