Richard Jeffrey Newman

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?

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To me, the point was obvi­ous. Bas­ing the Jew­ish claim to the land of Israel on the Jews’ own read­ing of the Hebrew Bible was ask­ing the over­whelm­ingly non-Jewish world to accept as objec­tive and incon­tro­vert­ible the truth that Judaism claimed as its own, never mind the impli­ca­tion that the dis­en­fran­chise­ment of the Pales­tini­ans was some­how the will of the monothe­is­tic god. To assert that line of rea­son­ing as an argu­ment for Israel’s right to exist, I sug­gested, was self-defeating at the very least – even if, as a believ­ing Jew, it was a cor­ner­stone of your faith.

“I never took you for an SHJ,” said one the col­leagues with whom I was talking.

“An SHJ?”

“A self-hating Jew.”

The other agreed. “My hus­band,” she said, “would say you were an anti­se­mitic Jew.”

I stared at my col­leagues across a sud­den gap of estrange­ment I did not know how to bridge. I had never been called self-hating before, but I under­stood it meant that, in their eyes, I’d revealed myself as a Jew who accepted an anti­se­mitic def­i­n­i­tion of Jew­ish­ness. It was a logic I had heard often when I was in yeshiva, though my teach­ers always used it to explain the anti­semitism of non-Jews who were crit­i­cal of Israel: To sug­gest that there might be a per­spec­tive from which Israel’s exis­tence as a Jew­ish state was not self-evidently valid, my rebbes would say, in many dif­fer­ent ways, over and over again, was to sug­gest that the Jews had no right to claim such a state in the first place, which was also to imply that the Jews as a peo­ple ought not even to be.

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I have no idea what it is like for an African-American boy or girl to come fully to the real­iza­tion that it was not so long ago in this coun­try that they would have been someone’s prop­erty, or for a girl con­sciously to expe­ri­ence her body for the first time through the knowl­edge of her own sex­ual objec­ti­fi­ca­tion in a patri­ar­chal soci­ety, or for some­one who is gay or les­bian to under­stand that it is the con­tent of their desire, in all of its com­plex­ity, as much as, if not more than, what they do sex­u­ally with their bod­ies for which this soci­ety so reviles them. The list, of course, could include many more groups – Native Amer­i­cans, for exam­ple, or trans­gen­dered peo­ple, or dis­abled peo­ple – but I imag­ine that, for mem­bers of each group, the moment of aware­ness I am talk­ing about is sim­i­lar to what I felt when I really under­stood for the first time that you could draw a direct line from, say, the expe­ri­ences of Jew­ish money lenders in the Mid­dle Ages to what I expe­ri­enced when my third grade class­mates threw pen­nies at me, or that the silence of my teacher in fifth grade, not to men­tion that of the town gov­ern­ment in the face of the graf­fiti on the library wall, or that of my “friends” who stood by while the anti­se­mitic kids in the neigh­bor­hood threw rocks at me, was really not so dif­fer­ent from the silence of the peo­ple and the gov­ern­ments who stood by while the Holo­caust was being per­pe­trated. The world was, or at least was for me, a dan­ger­ous place to be Jew­ish. If I had been born in Ger­many twenty years ear­lier, or if Hitler had won…well, you can imag­ine where that train of thought leads.

Not that I thought for one moment my sit­u­a­tion was as bad as the Jews had it in Nazi Ger­many or medieval Europe or, to take what would have been a con­tem­po­rary exam­ple at the time, the for­mer Soviet Union, where Jews were being pretty openly per­se­cuted just for being Jews. That it could get that bad pretty quickly and eas­ily, how­ever, was more than appar­ent to me, and so the Jew­ish edu­ca­tion I received, in both the Con­ser­v­a­tive syn­a­gogue where I went to Hebrew School until I was in 8^th grade and the ortho­dox yeshiva I attended from 8^th through 11^th 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 7^th grade.” Andy: “Of all the pushy Jews, you top them all.”

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Oy! So I was, with mild inter­est, read­ing over at Alas the con­ver­sa­tion that was begin­ning to develop around the post writ­ten by Julie about J Street open­ing local chap­ters. I say “mild inter­est” because I find so much of the pol­i­tics sur­round­ing the con­flict between the Israelis and the Pales­tini­ans – which also means the con­flicts between and among all the var­i­ous groups who have an inter­est in how that con­flict is, or is not, resolved – not only tire­some, but also, all too often, child­ish. It’s not that I think the issues are not pro­foundly, world-changingly impor­tant; it’s just that I no longer have the patience that I once had for sift­ing through the par­ti­san nit­pick­ing and polit­i­cal oppor­tunism, not to men­tion the out­right hatred, into which so many dis­cus­sions of those issues inevitably devolve. Still, the lit­tle bit that I have heard about J Street has sug­gested to me that they are try­ing to be adults by, at the very least, broad­en­ing the con­ver­sa­tion both in terms of con­tent and in terms of who gets to par­tic­i­pate, and that is refresh­ing, even though I don’t know enough about most of their posi­tions to say how much I sup­port them beyond the state­ment I have just made.

What caught my inter­est about the con­ver­sa­tion Julie’s post started was that it con­cerned lit­er­a­ture, the role of lit­er­a­ture in polit­i­cal move­ments, the stance polit­i­cal move­ments should take towards indi­vid­ual works of lit­er­a­ture, what it means to write polit­i­cally engaged lit­er­a­ture and what it means to engage lit­er­a­ture polit­i­cally. The first part of the con­ver­sa­tion is about the play Seven Jew­ish Chil­dren, writ­ten in 2009 by Caryl Churchill in response to Israel’s inva­sion of Gaza. The play con­sists of a series of sim­ple imper­a­tive sen­tences, each begin­ning with “Tell her” or “Don’t tell her”–her being a female of inde­ter­mi­nate age, though she is prob­a­bly pretty young. Col­lec­tively, these imper­a­tives rep­re­sent some of the posi­tions that Jews, as groups and as indi­vid­u­als, Israeli and not, have taken in response to both the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict and Israel’s exis­tence. In my own opin­ion, the play, which I have not read as care­fully as I might, and so I am will­ing to be con­vinced oth­er­wise, walks a fine line between expos­ing and cri­tiquing, but also human­iz­ing, the denial and hypocrisy of many who sup­port Israel’s poli­cies out of fear for their own and the Jew­ish community’s sur­vival, and pro­pa­gan­diz­ing that posi­tion as a tool to demo­nize both Jews and Israel. Ulti­mately, I don’t think the play crosses the line into pro­pa­ganda, though I can see how oth­ers might rea­son­ably say that it does. More­over, since it is a play, I sup­pose that what really mat­ters in terms of this ques­tion is how the play is pro­duced, not sim­ply how it reads on the page.

The first com­ment on Julie’s post is by Sebas­t­ian, who says:

I do not remem­ber see­ing any dis­cus­sion of J Street [on Alas]. Before you rush and sup­port them, check at least the Wiki entry… and maybe look into how main­stream Israel sup­port­ers feel about them. Maybe also read Seven Jew­ish Chil­dren and remem­ber that J Street endorses the play.

Ching­ona then points out that J Street did not “endorse” the play. Rather, the orga­ni­za­tion asserted that the play is not nec­es­sar­ily anti­se­mitic and they defended the the­ater com­pany that put the play on. Sebas­t­ian then admits not that he’d mis­read J Street’s posi­tion on the play, but that he hadn’t even both­ered to read the orig­i­nal state­ment; he also explains that he thinks “it’s worth read­ing and dis­cussing [Seven Jew­ish Chil­dren], but stag­ing it accord­ing to the terms of the author is tak­ing a stance with which I most cer­tainly do not agree.” Pre­sum­ably, since he does not spec­ify, the part of the terms of per­for­mance that Sebas­t­ian objects to is the text in bold­face below:

The play can be read or per­formed any­where, by any num­ber of peo­ple. Any­one who wishes to do it should con­tact the author’s agent (details below), who will license per­for­mances free of charge pro­vided that no admis­sion fee is charged and that a col­lec­tion is taken at each per­for­mance for Med­ical Aid for Pales­tini­ans (MAP), 33a Isling­ton Park Street, Lon­don N1 1QB, tel +44 (0)20 7226 4114, e-mail info@​map-​uk.​org, web www​.map​-uk​.org.

Cer­tainly, Sebas­t­ian is within his right to dis­agree with these terms, and he is within his right not to attend any per­for­mance of the play and to try to con­vince oth­ers not to attend; he also would be within his rights to orga­nize a boy­cott of the play in his com­mu­nity were some­one try­ing to put it on there. What I am inter­ested in, how­ever, is that the dis­agree­ment he expresses is not with the text of the play itself, which he thinks is worth read­ing and dis­cussing, but with peo­ple putting the play to polit­i­cal use, to serve a prac­ti­cal pur­pose in the world, one that involves human being, human bod­ies and the rela­tion­ships between and among them. Some might argue that med­ical aid is not polit­i­cal, or at least that it ought to be beyond politi­ciza­tion. In prin­ci­ple, I agree, if by politi­ciza­tion you mean the kind of par­ti­san­ship that is more about who wins and who loses than about find­ing solu­tions; but it’s not just that there is noth­ing about the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict that is not already, always, polit­i­cal and politi­cized; it’s that med­i­cine is itself, wher­ever and how­ever it is prac­ticed, is already, always, polit­i­cal sim­ply because it is about human being and human bod­ies; and to sug­gest that lit­er­a­ture ought not to be used to make med­ical care avail­able to peo­ple who need it, regard­less of the pol­i­tics of the orga­ni­za­tions involved, is to sug­gest that lit­er­a­ture needs to be con­trolled, hemmed in, fenced in, to be kept safe from those who would cor­rupt it, to pro­tect its purity, so that it can be read and dis­cussed, for exam­ple, with­out the taint of an overt polit­i­cal agenda. Or maybe it is to sug­gest that it’s us who need to be kept safe from lit­er­a­ture, because lit­er­a­ture has the power to move peo­ple to act, not just to think and to feel.

How­ever one under­stands the impulse to keep lit­er­a­ture out of the mate­r­ial real­ity of people’s lives, that impulse at its core is the impulse to cen­sor, to con­trol mean­ing and thereby to con­trol people’s imag­i­na­tions. Let me be clear, though: I am not accus­ing Sebas­t­ian of cen­sor­ship or of want­ing to cen­sor any­one. He is nei­ther mak­ing nor advo­cat­ing pol­icy in his com­ments on Alas; and let me be clear about some­thing else as well: I am talk­ing in this post about lit­er­a­ture, works that aspire to the level of art, the pur­pose of which is to explore human being and feel­ing, not – as pro­pa­ganda attempts, and is designed, to do – dic­tate it. I can imag­ine, for exam­ple, a pro­duc­tion of Seven Jew­ish Chil­dren that might qual­ify as pro­pa­ganda, one in which, say, the char­ac­ters were all wear­ing Nazi uni­forms and in which there was no irony to make that cos­tum­ing deci­sion any­thing other than a sim­ple equat­ing of Israel with Nazi Ger­many. I would not argue that such a pro­duc­tion should be cen­sored, but it is unam­bigu­ously a pro­duc­tion nei­ther I nor any­one I know would sup­port, no mat­ter how wor­thy the goal of fund rais­ing for Med­ical Aid for Pales­tini­ans might be – and from what I can tell that is a wor­thy goal. What if, though, the direc­tor of the play, the one who made the choice to put Nazi uni­forms on the actors, was Jew­ish, and let’s say he or she was mak­ing in this pro­duc­tion a seri­ous attempt to use that cos­tum­ing in an ironic way, as a ref­er­ence to the fact that the Jews – and I am assum­ing that the char­ac­ters in Seven Jew­ish Chil­dren are Jew­ish – who were the vic­tims in the Holo­caust, are now, in Israel, in the posi­tion of being an occu­py­ing oppres­sor, of vic­tim­iz­ing the Pales­tini­ans.¹ 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.

Talk about two very dif­fer­ent books by two very dif­fer­ent poets, but there are con­nec­tions, and since I read the books back to back, I want to talk about them side by side.¹ I first met Suheir Ham­mad some years ago when she came to Nas­sau Com­mu­nity Col­lege (NCC), where I teach in the Eng­lish Depart­ment, to give a read­ing as part of a day-long pro­gram on the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict. The pro­gram was spon­sored by NCC’s Inter­na­tional Stud­ies Com­mit­tee and it gen­er­ated, even in the plan­ning, a lot of con­tro­versy. I was not involved in putting the day together, so I do not know the specifics of went on, but I do know that the col­lege admin­is­tra­tion voiced con­cerns about ade­quate secu­rity, about who the pan­elists would be and whether a bal­anced view of the con­flict would be pre­sented. What they meant by “bal­anced,” how­ever, at least as I under­stand it, was that no one who spoke for the Pales­tin­ian side should express views that were overtly hos­tile to Israel. It did not seem to bother them that peo­ple rep­re­sent­ing the Israeli side might express views overtly hos­tile to Pales­tini­ans and/or Arabs, and, sure enough, one of the speak­ers was a woman rep­re­sent­ing a far-right Jew­ish orga­ni­za­tion — not Israeli, but Jew­ish — who spoke quite force­fully about the Arab/Muslim plot to take over the world. It was almost as if she were quot­ing from the Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion,² except that all the ref­er­ences to Jews had been changed to Arabs.

Dur­ing lunch that day — her read­ing was in the evening — Suheir and I spoke about “One Stop (Hebron Revis­ited)” a poem from her first book, Born Pales­tin­ian, Born Black, that I had used in a class I’d taught the pre­vi­ous semes­ter called Intro­duc­tion to World Jew­ish Stud­ies. The poem is a response to Baruch Goldstein’s Feb­ru­ary 1994 mas­sacre of 29 Mus­lims — approx­i­mately 100 were injured — in which the speaker, a woman, imag­ines the vio­lence she would have done to a Jew­ish man she sees had she “caught [him] on the train/on an empty car into flat­bush.” The poem is painful to read, not only for the spe­cific details of the vio­lence it describes, but also for the naked­ness of the rage it expresses. The speaker is in pain, and it is hard not to feel implicit in the details of what the woman describes how much she hates her­self for even imag­in­ing that she would per­form those acts.

When I taught the poem, I asked my stu­dents, all of whom hap­pened to be Jew­ish and most of whom came from con­ser­v­a­tive and ortho­dox reli­gious back­grounds, if they thought it was anti-Semitic. I was truly sur­prised when they said no, that if they were in the writer’s shoes, they would have felt a sim­i­lar anger and that Suheir Ham­mad there­fore had every right to express her­self in the way that she did. I told Suheir this and she also was shocked and then she told me that “One Stop” was a poem she never read when she gave read­ings. I don’t remem­ber her pre­cise words, but I think she told me she was afraid to. It was so angry and so vio­lent that she was not sure how her audi­ences would react. I told her I thought it was a poem that peo­ple needed to hear, that she owed it to her­self and to her audi­ences to read it, pre­cisely because the pain and the vio­lence in the poem are so deeply embed­ded in the emo­tional cen­ter of the con­flict between Israel and the Pales­tini­ans, and no one should be spared a con­fronta­tion with that center.

My own opin­ion is that, to the extent the speaker in “One Stop” holds the Jew­ish man she sees on the train in New York City respon­si­ble for the views of Baruch Gold­stein and, by exten­sion, the poli­cies of the State of Israel, the poem is anti-Semitic, or, to be more pre­cise, the speaker expresses her rage in anti-Semitic terms. Because her rage is com­pre­hen­si­ble, how­ever, it is also an excus­able moment of Jew-hatred, no dif­fer­ent than the way, say, the rage of a Black South African dur­ing apartheid might be directed at all South African whites, despite the fact that there were many whites in South Africa who opposed apartheid. What mat­ters is whether the speaker, once she has calmed down, takes respon­si­bil­ity for that moment. In “One Stop,” she does not, nor do I remem­ber, frankly, whether Ham­mad takes on the ques­tion of that respon­si­bil­ity in any of the other poems in Born Pales­tin­ian, Born Black, and since I do not have the book handy, I can’t go back and check. My over­all rec­ol­lec­tion of the book, though, is that it is more angry than it is about com­ing to terms with anger. I remem­ber a cou­ple of with­er­ing poems protest­ing the way Mid­dle East­ern women are exoti­cized in the US, and I remem­ber poems that were clearly intended to con­front the reader with the phys­i­cal hor­rors of occu­pa­tion. (It occurs to me as I write this that I also should state explic­itly that I am not accus­ing Suheir Ham­mad of Jew-hatred in any form. Not only is it a mis­take to con­fuse a poet with the speak­ers of her poems, but I have met her and talked to her, and I just don’t think she har­bors that kind of hatred for any­one.) » 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.

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.”