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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

» Read the rest of this entry «

I just fin­ished read­ing The Man in the White Sharksin Suit: My Family’s Exo­dus from Old Cairo to the New World, by Lucette Lagnado, a reporter for The Wall Street Jour­nal whom we have invited to read as part of Nas­sau Com­mu­nity College’s Lit­er­a­ture, Live! read­ing series, spon­sored by The Cre­ative Writ­ing Project (CWP). A mem­oir that is at once a love let­ter to her father, Leon, and also her mother, Edith, as well as to the city of Cairo and its way of life in the days of King Farouk, The Man in the White Sharksin Suit chron­i­cles the dif­fi­cul­ties Lagnado’s fam­ily faced as they nav­i­gated the often tor­tu­ous path they were forced to travel from the priv­i­leged life they enjoyed in Egypt to the dif­fi­cult and, espe­cially for her father, often humil­i­at­ing exis­tence that life as exiles forced them into. The book has a lot to say about the arro­gance with which Euro­pean and Amer­i­can Jews – as indi­vid­u­als and as work­ers in agen­cies that were sup­posed to help fam­i­lies such as Lagnado’s – treated their Mizrachi core­li­gion­ists, who fled or were forced to leave their home coun­tries in the years fol­low­ing Israel’s found­ing; and when she tells the story of Sylvia Kirschner, the New York Asso­ci­a­tion for New Amer­i­cans (NYANA) case­worker assigned to the Lagnado fam­ily, and how Kirschner refused to find any com­pro­mise between her pro­gres­sive val­ues relat­ing to women and Lagnado’s father’s deeply patri­ar­chal old world val­ues, it is hard not to sym­pa­thize with Leon. Not because there is any­thing defen­si­ble in his desire com­pletely to rule the lives of the women in his fam­ily, but because Lagnado makes it so clear that Sylvia Kirschner’s intol­er­ance only served to accel­er­ate the unrav­el­ing of the Lagnado fam­ily by encour­ag­ing the inde­pen­dence of Lagando’s older sis­ter Suzette. I’m not sug­gest­ing that Suzette should have allowed her­self to remain firmly held in place beneath her father’s patri­ar­chal thumb, but surely there were gen­tler ways of intro­duc­ing Leon and Suzette to the greater inde­pen­dence of women in the United States than Kirschner’s dis­missal of and dis­re­spect for the val­ues Leon had brought with him from an older gen­er­a­tion in a far more tra­di­tional part of the world.

There are many other moments in this mem­oir that are wor­thy of note – the Ital­ian Catholic friend Lagnado found and lost because of a hous­ing dis­pute between their par­ents and the neighborhood’s anti­se­mitic response to that dis­pute; the con­trast Lagnado draws between her expe­ri­ence being treated for Hodgkin’s dis­ease by a pri­vate physi­cian in New York City and her father’s dis­mal treat­ment at the Jew­ish Home and Hos­pi­tal, and then at Mt. Sinai Hos­pi­tal, in the last years of his life (and each of these con­trasted with the med­ical treat­ment the fam­ily had been able to com­mand when they lived in Egypt, and Leon could sum­mon the best doc­tors in Cairo to look after him and his fam­ily); Lagnado’s meet­ing with the woman whose father-in-law and uncle had nego­ti­ated the pur­chase of the Lagnado fam­ily home when Leon finally, reluc­tantly, real­ized he and his fam­ily could no longer remain in Egypt – but what struck me most as I read this book was how much it hinted at things I didn’t know about Mizrachi Jews. Leon’s fam­ily was from Aleppo, in Syria, and Lagnado’s dis­cus­sion of that culture’s fam­ily tra­di­tions left me frus­trated that I had never learned about them when I was in Hebrew School, or later when I was in yeshiva, and it was ham­mered into us that kol yis­rael are­vim zeh lazeh, all Jews are respon­si­ble for each other. That lofty sen­ti­ment notwith­stand­ing, the cur­ricu­lum we were taught cer­tainly made it seem like the only Jews in the world, or at least the only Jews in the world that mat­tered, were those of Euro­pean, and espe­cially east­ern Euro­pean, descent.

It’s not that I didn’t know Mizrachi Jews existed, and I cer­tainly can­not blame my con­tem­po­rary igno­rance on the faulty edu­ca­tion of my youth. After all, noth­ing has stopped me from edu­cat­ing myself other than the way I have set the pri­or­i­ties of my life (and it’s entirely pos­si­ble that I would not have picked Lagnado’s book up except that the CWP has cho­sen to invite her), but so much of my early Jew­ish edu­ca­tion was focused on Israel – the need for Israel, the value of Israel, the strug­gle to found Israel – that it’s sur­pris­ing I remem­ber no atten­tion being paid to the fact that, after Israel’s inde­pen­dence was declared in 1948, nearly a mil­lion Mizrachi Jews were either forced to leave their coun­tries or chose to leave because the con­di­tions there had become unten­able. Surely learn­ing about Israel ought to have meant learn­ing some­thing about the cul­ture of the mil­lions of Mizrachi Jews who chose to set­tle there. Equally sur­pris­ing to me is that nowhere in Lagnado’s mem­oir is Israel men­tioned except as either a pri­mary cause of the prob­lems the Jews of Egypt were start­ing to have after 1948 or as one the places where the Jews of Egypt could go that would accept them with­out fail. Lagnado does not laud Israel as the Jew­ish home­land, nor is there any sense from her book that the Jews of Egypt saw Israel in that way at all; even when she talks about the Egypt­ian Jews who chose to go to Israel, she presents the choice as matter-of-fact, even as des­per­ate, not as one that might con­tain within it some small part of the hope with which the Euro­pean Zion­ists clearly embraced the idea of a Jew­ish home­land there.

The Man in the White Shark­skin Suit, how­ever, is a mem­oir, not a his­tory. I am sure that there were Mizrachi Jews who embraced the found­ing of Israel as fer­vently and hope­fully as the Euro­pean Zion­ists did. More, I am sure that the feel­ing I had after read­ing Lagnado’s book, that the Jews of Egypt were far bet­ter off in Egypt than in any of the places to which they fled, has more to do with the priv­i­leged life her fam­ily lived there than with the real­ity of the lives of all Egypt­ian Jews. I am fully aware, in other words, that the story of the Mizrachi Jews is, has got to be, far more com­plex than any­thing I could learn from read­ing Lagnado’s mem­oir; and yet read­ing the book, espe­cially the chap­ter called “The Last Days of Tar­boosh,” brought me back to a trans­la­tion con­fer­ence panel I was on with Ammiel Alcalay and Sami Chetrit, a Mizrachi Jew (Moroc­can, if I remem­ber cor­rectly). Dur­ing his talk Chetrit spoke of how – and I am para­phras­ing here; I wish I could remem­ber his exact words – the Euro­pean Zion­ist Jews col­o­nized the Mizrachi Jews, replac­ing the Mizrachi nar­ra­tive with the Euro­pean Jew­ish nar­ra­tive, even to the point of usurp­ing the language(s) Mizrachi Jews had been speak­ing for cen­turies, if not mil­lenia, before Israel was founded. (I am not sure if this was a ref­er­ence to the European-based revival of Hebrew as the Jew­ish national lan­guage or to some other con­flict over lan­guage.) His state­ments sur­prised me in much the same way that read­ing Lagnado’s books did, because they hinted at a story I did not know, that felt like I should have known it.

Like Lagnado, Chetrit obvi­ously has a per­spec­tive, and a bias, and I am in no way informed enough to judge the accu­racy of what he said. What I can say is that any Jew­ish edu­ca­tion worth its salt should have as one of its goals mak­ing its stu­dents that informed, or at least teach­ing them that they should feel respon­si­ble for inform­ing them­selves; and that most cer­tainly is not the Jew­ish edu­ca­tion I received. Indeed, the Jew­ish edu­ca­tion I received ren­dered both Chetrit’s per­spec­tive and Lagnado’s story entirely invis­i­ble, and it did so not only in the inter­est of mak­ing Israel cen­tral to Jewish-American iden­tity, but also to estab­lish­ing the Zion­ist nar­ra­tive of the found­ing of Israel as the uni­ver­sal Jew­ish nar­ra­tive of the found­ing of Israel. Sto­ries like Chetrit’s and Lagnado’s demon­strate that such uni­ver­sal­ity is a myth. Con­fronting that myth is impor­tant not because it calls into ques­tion Israel’s right to exist (it makes me angry that I feel I even have to say that) but because com­ing to terms with the full com­plex­ity of the nar­ra­tive of Israel’s found­ing is the only way I know to come to terms with the fact that I, as a Jew – and maybe this applies to con­cerned peo­ple who aren’t Jew­ish as well – can­not not take a posi­tion regard­ing Israel’s exis­tence as a Jew­ish state.

(I’ve writ­ten more about this issue in the series I wrote called What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) anti­semitism and Israel. The link will take you to part 4 of the series; there is a list of the other posts in the series at the bot­tom of that post.)

Lucette Lagnado’s read­ing at Nas­sau Com­mu­nity Col­lege is sched­uled for March 2010, date and time to be announced. For more infor­ma­tion, please visit the Cre­ative Writ­ing Project web­site.

I saw this on Fem­i­niste:

CRESAPTOWN, Md. (AP) — You’ve heard of kosher salt? Now there’s a Chris­t­ian variety.

Retired bar­ber Joe Godlewski says that when tele­vi­sion chefs rec­om­mended kosher salt in recipes, he won­dered, “What the heck’s the mat­ter with Chris­t­ian salt?”

By next week, his trade­marked Blessed Chris­tians Salt will be avail­able from sea­son­ings man­u­fac­turer Ingre­di­ents Cor­po­ra­tion of Amer­ica. It’s sea salt that’s been blessed by an Epis­co­pal priest.

The company’s pres­i­dent hopes to mar­ket the salt through Chris­t­ian bookstores.

Go here to read the rest.

Cross-posted on Alas.

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

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

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

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtGNtaSXeO4&eurl=http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/2009/01/28/2009 – 01-28_harry_potter_part_of_zionist_conspiracy_.html&feature=player_embedded]

I learned about Hajaig’s “apology” almost simul­ta­ne­ously from two dif­fer­ent places. Here is the full text as reported by Z Word Blog:

I have just returned from a visit to Japan and learnt of the con­tro­versy sur­round­ing some com­ments that I was pur­ported to have made. I have reviewed the pro­ceed­ings of the meet­ing and wish to say, to state the fol­low­ing: Through­out my life I have been opposed to apartheid and all forms of racism. It is this oppo­si­tion that drove me into exile and to work with the African National Con­gress for decades. Along with all in the ANC and con­sis­tent with the recent res­o­lu­tions adopted at our Polok­wane con­fer­ence in Decem­ber 2007, I have long been cog­nisant of the immense suf­fer­ing the Pales­tini­ans have expe­ri­enced in the form of expul­sions, col­lec­tive pun­ish­ment and mas­sacres, of which the recent war in Gaza is but the lat­est exam­ple. It is to this suf­fer­ing that I spoke at the meet­ing. I deplore the attempts of Zion­ists to jus­tify poli­cies that have wors­ened the cri­sis in the Mid­dle East, in par­tic­u­lar unmit­i­gated state vio­lence directed against unarmed civil­ians as much as I deplore indis­crim­i­nate attacks against Israeli unarmed civilians.

At a sin­gu­lar point in my talk, and entirely unre­lated to any South African com­mu­nity, I con­flated Zion­ist pres­sure with Jew­ish influ­ence. I regret the infer­ence made by some that I am anti-Jewish. I do not believe that the cause of the Pales­tini­ans is served by any anti-Jewish racism. As a mem­ber of the South African gov­ern­ment and a com­mit­ted mem­ber of the African National Con­gress, I sub­scribe to the val­ues and prin­ci­ples of non-racism and con­demn with­out equiv­o­ca­tion all forms of racism, includ­ing anti­semitism in all its man­i­fes­ta­tions and wher­ever it may occur.

To the extent that my state­ment may have caused hurt and pain, I offer an unequiv­o­cal apol­ogy for the pain it may have caused to the peo­ple of our coun­try and the Jew­ish com­mu­nity in par­tic­u­lar. I wish to reit­er­ate that the major issue in rela­tion to the Pales­tin­ian Israel con­flict is the enor­mous suf­fer­ing of the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple and the strug­gle for peace for all its’ peo­ple based on jus­tice and secu­rity for Israelis and Pales­tini­ans alike.

As Deputy Min­is­ter of For­eign Affairs, I reaf­firm the government’s com­mit­ment to engage all par­ties in Israel and Pales­tine to find an ami­ca­ble and just res­o­lu­tion to the con­flict in that region.

There is no need for me to go through this point by point, since both David Schraub and Z Word Blog do a fine job. I want to empha­size one thing that they each allude to but don’t say quite this way. When Hajaig finally gets around to her apol­ogy, she makes the fol­low­ing state­ment, “At a sin­gu­lar point in my talk, and entirely unre­lated to any South African com­mu­nity, I con­flated Zion­ist pres­sure with Jew­ish influ­ence.” It’s not, in other words, that there is no such thing as “Jew­ish influ­ence.” The prob­lem is that she, this time, inac­cu­rately con­flated it with “Zion­ist pres­sure.” If you wanted a clearer exam­ple, in the antisemite’s own words, of how anti-Zionism is all too often used as a cloak for anti­semitism, you’d be hard pressed top find one. Then she has the audac­ity to say, though of course she also has to say or the whole exer­cise of her apol­ogy would be mean­ing­less, that she “regret[s] the infer­ence made by some that I am anti-Jewish,” show­ing that she is far more con­cerned for her own rep­u­ta­tion than for the feel­ings of the peo­ple to whom she is osten­si­bly apologizing. 

A final note. Take a look at how the story was reported on AfricaA​sia​.com:

South Africa’s deputy for­eign min­is­ter apol­o­gised Tues­day for a speech in which she said “Jew­ish money” con­trols the United States.

“To the extent that my state­ment may have caused hurt and pain, I offer an unequiv­o­cal apol­ogy for the pain it may have caused to the peo­ple of our coun­try, and the Jew­ish com­mu­nity in par­tic­u­lar,” Fatima Hajaig said in a statement.

Hajaig told a polit­i­cal rally in Johan­nes­burg last month that Jews “con­trol Amer­ica, no mat­ter which gov­ern­ment comes into power, whether Repub­li­can or Demo­c­ra­tic, whether Barack Obama or George Bush.”

“Their con­trol of Amer­ica, just like the con­trol of most west­ern coun­tries, is in the hands of Jew­ish money,” she said.

Out­raged by the remarks, the South African Jew­ish Board of Deputies — a civil rights group — said it filed a com­plaint against Hajaig at the human rights commission.

“Through­out my life I have been opposed to apartheid and all forms of racism. It is this oppo­si­tion that drove me into exile and to work with the African National Con­gress for decades,” the min­is­ter said.

“At a sin­gu­lar point in my talk, and entirely unre­lated to any South African com­mu­nity, I con­flated Zion­ist pres­sure with Jew­ish influ­ence. I regret the infer­ence made by some, that I am anti-Jewish. I do not believe that the cause of the Pales­tini­ans is served by anti-Jewish racism,” she added.

I just find it telling that the shap­ing of the story makes, or at least tries to make Hajaig sound not only like she is sin­cerely apol­o­giz­ing, but also like she really under­stands the mean­ing of her own words when she says that “the cause of the Pales­tini­ans is [not] served by anti-Jewish racism.”

I read about this first on David Schraub’s blog:

They in fact con­trol [Amer­ica]. No mat­ter which gov­ern­ment comes in to power, whether Repub­li­can or Demo­c­ra­tic, whether Barack Obama or George Bush. The con­trol of Amer­ica, just like the con­trol of most West­ern coun­tries, is in the hands of Jew­ish money and if Jew­ish money con­trols their coun­try then you can­not expect any­thing else.

That state­ment was made by South African Deputy For­eign Min­is­ter Fatima Hajaig, at a Pales­tin­ian “sol­i­dar­ity” rally. Read the rest of David’s post and more here and here.

I am rush­ing out the door, but I think the con­nec­tion to what I have been writ­ing about, not to men­tion what David has been say­ing on his blog about this issue, will be self-evident.

Edited to add: I am almost done with the fourth anti­semitism post; it’s been hard to work on it con­sis­tently now that school has started, but it’s just about there.

Update 1÷31÷09: The Chicago Sun-Times reports that Ms. Hajaig “has been taken before [South Africa’s] human rights body for allegedly say­ing that “Jew­ish money” con­trols the United States, offi­cials said Thursday.”

And one more update: Things in Venezuela are worse than in South Africa, much worse.

I posted over at Alas with the idea that it would be inter­est­ing if peo­ple, Jews and non-Jews alike, were to tell sto­ries about their expe­ri­ences with anti­semitism. Here is what I wrote:

Read­ing through the com­ments gen­er­ated by my two posts (here and here) on anti­semitism so far has got­ten me think­ing about how many of us – Jew­ish or not, but espe­cially Jew­ish – ever really talk about our expe­ri­ences with anti­semitism, not in the con­text of argu­ing a point about the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict or of any other issue that is not, sim­ply, an asser­tion of the fact that anti­semitism exists and that it has real con­se­quences in Jew­ish (and non-Jewish) lives. I know that the first post I wrote was the first time ever that I tried to con­struct a chronol­ogy, a nar­ra­tive of the anti­semitism I have expe­ri­enced in my life, and it brought home to me all over again just how enor­mous and pro­found an effect it had on my world­view, not all of which I wrote about in the sec­ond post, since my focus in those posts is really quite spe­cific. I was moved when AndiF chose to share her/his (sorry, I real­ize I don’t know) expe­ri­ences from a gen­er­a­tion before me, and I was inter­ested to read some other people’s expe­ri­ences from the gen­er­a­tions after me. So here’s what I pro­pose: a post where the point of the com­ments is, sim­ply, to tell sto­ries about our expe­ri­ences with anti­semitism, not to ana­lyze those expe­ri­ences, but just to tell them and then let them speak for them­selves. I am not talk­ing about polit­i­cal analy­sis of some politician’s or scholar’s or blog posts’ rhetoric, and I am not talk­ing about list­ing anti­se­mitic inci­dents at which you were not present. I am talk­ing about moments when you saw or expe­ri­enced anti­semitism in action.

I am not going to limit this post to Jews, because I think it’s impor­tant to hear from non-Jews about their expe­ri­ences, but it is my plan to delete any com­ment that is not a story. (I am not going to make that an absolute rule, since there are always excep­tions, but it is my plan.)

Let’s see what kind of col­lec­tive story our indi­vid­ual sto­ries com­bine to tell.