Because I am a glutton for punishment with no sense of restraint, when the email came in saying that J Street was opening up local chapters, not only did I immediately sign up, but I checked off every single skills/interests box. (Can I help it that I’m so well-rounded?)

Sooo, I’m going to need some help, people! Sign up, please! And maybe we can even get a Long Beach branch going? (I have no idea what these local chapters entail, by the way, but I’m pumped.)

(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)

I find it just wonderful that conservatives are still pulling out the “A government bureaucrat between you and your doctor” canard in their fight against health care reform. I guess I can see that argument working during the Clinton years, when things weren’t quite as bleak as they are now (although, being a teenage dependent with two well-off parents, I never had to worry about health insurance during the Clinton years, so what do I know?). But relying on it again now? Balls, folks: that takes some.

For a little under twenty years, I’ve been dealing with chronic pain. (No, not my back problems. I’m going to refrain from discussing my specific condition itself in order to keep the focus on the politics.) Because this condition is hard to diagnose and often misunderstood, I’ve gone without treatment for most of my life. In fact, the only two times I’ve had regular treatment for it were in college and grad school, when I had the twin luxuries of student health insurance and autonomy from my parents. In college, the doctor I found was well-meaning, but ineffective. In grad school I had a great doctor, and together we started to make progress. But then I finished grad school.

For about a year, I went untreated again until a flare-up made me realize that I needed to find a doctor despite the cost. My husband and I did some budgeting - I currently subscribe to Blue Shield’s cheapest plan, which only covers basic exams and major disasters - and found a doctor who charged a sliding scale. She was awful. For a few months, I went untreated again, and had another flare-up. It turned out that a friend of mine has a similar condition, and she gave me the name of her specialist.

Here’s where the story gets interesting.

I made an appointment with the specialist - and loved her. Within ten minutes of our first appointment, she’d described my condition with eerie accuracy and outlined what sounded like an effective treatment plan, with options that I’d barely even known about. Her bedside manner and level of expertise were terrific; she put even my grad school doctor to shame. At the end of the appointment we talked money. My current insurance didn’t cover regular office visits, so I’d be paying completely out of pocket. I gulped at her office visit fee - even paying for that first appointment was going to be interesting. I talked to my husband and we agreed that I’d have to get a new insurance plan. If we ditched the cable, the Netflix subscription, and a couple other amenities here and there, we could pay more for something better.

I looked at other Blue Shield plans while my husband looked at Kaiser. I figured that while I was getting a new plan, I might as well search for something that covered maternity. I looked at plans going up to $200, $250 a month - nope, nope, nope. Blue Shield doesn’t like its members having babies.

Meanwhile, my husband found a Kaiser PPO (at least, we thought it was a PPO, but I guess that’s kind of rare for Kaiser) just barely within our price range. It was $139 a month - yikes, but okay. It had a fairly good maternity plan. We called their office to find out if this doctor was in their network. They didn’t know. They gave us a regional number to call. We called. No, this doctor was not in their network.

Next we tried Blue Cross. I don’t even remember what plan we eventually found, because the whole website was so labyrinthine. We didn’t bother calling them before we filled out the form because, hey, everyone takes Blue Cross, right? The application took all morning - and we even left off in the middle because I needed to dig up some old information.

Later that day, I talked to the doctor to reschedule our next appointment, since it was taking so long to find a new plan. I asked if she took Blue Cross (just to be absolutely sure - because everyone takes Blue Cross!). “Uh, some of their plans,” she said. “I don’t know, some but not others. It’s all very strange. I don’t even handle that part of it.”

We called Blue Cross. No, the plan we’d selected didn’t cover her. Were there any plans in our price range that did? Tappa tappa tap, pause. No, there were not.

So we went back and called Blue Shield, told them I was already a member. We asked for any plans at all that covered this one doctor. Damn the cost! We’d use our savings! We’d move into a smaller apartment! We’d rob a bank if we had to! What was the doctor’s name again? We spelled it. Nope, they said. Blue Shield of California does not cover this doctor at all.

We called the doctor again, canceled the appointment, told her we just couldn’t afford her. I still owe her for our first (now useless) meeting - $150 down the drain. I cried, I was so disappointed. All that work, all that hope, for nothing.

I’ll probably never know why no insurance plan would touch her. She wasn’t some bizarre, esoteric practitioner or anything; my best guess is that only employer-paid plans cover her. But when I hear conservatives trotting out the specter of “a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor,” I have to laugh. Because right now, at this moment, I am gritting my teeth through 20-year-old pain while the doctor who could have treated me goes about her business 2 miles from my apartment. Bureaucrats are standing between me and my doctor.

On the one hand, if conservatives are going to try to block affordable health care, the least they could do is come up with a less insulting argument. On the other, I guess it’s to my advantage that they’re making themselves look like total idiots.

We’ll go ahead and give Pacificare and Aetna a call, but I think my course of action now is to go for the original Kaiser plan we found and hope that there’s a doctor as good as this one in their network. (Of course, the maternity coverage raises some troubling questions. Does Kaiser have midwives? Doulas? Birthing centers? Will I have to give birth on my back? But I’m not pregnant, so I can cross that bridge when I come to it.) If we ever get a national health plan in place, then sign me up - but I’m not holding my breath. My one wish for those who oppose it is that they someday experience health insurance that is comparable to mine.

(A note on comments: because I know what types of comments posts like these tend to receive, I am declaring myself Queen Tyrant on this thread and will delete offensive comments without warnings or justification.)

(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)

This is genocide:

CROW AGENCY, Mont. – Ta’Shon Rain Little Light, a happy little girl who loved to dance and dress up in traditional American Indian clothes, had stopped eating and walking. She complained constantly to her mother that her stomach hurt.

When Stephanie Little Light took her daughter to the Indian Health Service clinic in this wind-swept and remote corner of Montana, they told her the 5-year-old was depressed.

Ta’Shon’s pain rapidly worsened and she visited the clinic about 10 more times over several months before her lung collapsed and she was airlifted to a children’s hospital in Denver. There she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, confirming the suspicions of family members.

A few weeks later, a charity sent the whole family to Disney World so Ta’Shon could see Cinderella’s Castle, her biggest dream. She never got to see the castle, though. She died in her hotel bed soon after the family arrived in Florida.

“Maybe it would have been treatable,” says her great-aunt, Ada White, as she stoically recounts the last few months of Ta’Shon’s short life. Stephanie Little Light cries as she recalls how she once forced her daughter to walk when she was in pain because the doctors told her it was all in the little girl’s head.

…

American Indians have an infant death rate that is 40 percent higher than the rate for whites. They are twice as likely to die from diabetes, 60 percent more likely to have a stroke, 30 percent more likely to have high blood pressure and 20 percent more likely to have heart disease.

American Indians have disproportionately high death rates from unintentional injuries and suicide, and a high prevalence of risk factors for obesity, substance abuse, sudden infant death syndrome, teenage pregnancy, liver disease and hepatitis.

While campaigning on Indian reservations, presidential candidate Barack Obama cited this statistic: After Haiti, men on the impoverished Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations in South Dakota have the lowest life expectancy in the Western Hemisphere.

This leads to genocide:

Four Muslim men also pleaded their innocence before a judge in a White Plains, N.Y., courthouse after being accused of plotting to blow up a pair of synagogues and down military aircraft with a shoulder-fired missile. The feds had been keeping tabs on the men for a year and sold them the missile and explosives, which had been deactivated. The four were reportedly angered over the deaths of Muslims in Afghanistan at the hands of U.S. forces.

A note on the second one - this is not an example of Muslims being evil. This is an example of oppressed groups being encouraged to scapegoat Jews for what those who are actually in power are doing. In other words, this is how anti-Semitism works.

(Cross-posted at Alas, A Blog.)

Remember that awesome CD that’s out right now? The spoken word collection that features the work of BFP, Black Amazon, Little Light, and so many others? The one that combines personal history and movement making in truly inspiring ways? If you live in or around Long Beach, CA and haven’t heard it yet, now’s your chance! On Sunday, June 14th, Petit Poussin, Christine, and I will be hosting a listening party from 2-5. As we listen to the CD, you’ll be able to participate in discussion and respond by making your own media, whether it’s visual art, handwritten text, a zine, blogging or twittering, or whatever combination of the above you can come up with. Afterwards, we’ll sit down to a potluck dinner. CDs will be available for sale - remember that all proceeds go towards getting single mothers to the Allied Media Conference next month.

Address available upon RSVP. A quick warning for people with allergies: a friendly medium-haired cat will be present.

RSVP to modernmitzvot at yahoo com or ppoussin at gmail com!

I’ve taken a long time to write about this because I wanted to make sure I had my thoughts on it sorted out. This article by Naomi Klein finally brought me around to the BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) campaign against Israel. (Note: as you can probably tell, I’m very new to BDS, so this post is directed at other people who are new to it, too. I realize that many readers have been working on this for a long time.) This passage was what turned the lightbulb on for me:

Why single out Israel when the United States, Britain and other Western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan? Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the BDS strategy should be tried against Israel is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work. (Emphasis hers.)

The problem, up until I read the article, was that most of the calls for boycotts I read were the dogmatic kind. Boycott Israeli academics! Boycott Israeli artists! Boycott non-Israeli Jewish business owners! Why? Because we hate them, that’s why! Because Zionism is racism! Even the ones that didn’t come off as dogmatic - or that made passing references to tactics - failed to address Jews’ concerns about anti-Semitism, and that turned me off to them. Was that irrational of me? Yeah, sometimes. But Jews have good reason to be wary.

I know, of course, that BDS will continue to attract anti-Semites, and I still fear that anti-Semitism will drown out pragmatism. I don’t know how to solve that problem - but we can address it by emphasizing, as Klein does, that it’s a tactic, not a dogma. We’re doing it because it works. We’re doing it out of love (for Israelis, too!). And, as Klein says, we’re targeting “the Israeli economy but not Israelis.” Strategy, not punishment.

Do check out the whole article - she responded very effectively to almost every concern that I had.

The Global BDS Movement’s website is here.

Thoughts? (When you comment, please remember that this is a very sensitive and complicated subject. Rude or hostile comments will be deleted.)

(Cross-posted at Alas, A Blog.)

We’re still at it!

Image description: Protesters in orange T-shirts reading "PJA" picket outside of a carwash.

This Sunday, May 3rd, the CLEAN Carwash Campaign and Progressive Jewish Alliance will be picketing the Vermont Hand Wash at 1666 N. Vermont Avenue from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Although no carwash in Los Angeles can be described as “good,” the owners of the Vermont Hand Wash in Los Feliz are among the worst in the industry. By protesting the Vermont Hand Wash, we hope to send a message to other carwashes throughout the city. For more information, visit cleancarwashla.org.

Please repost or link to this message on your blog, or forward this to any Los Angeles residents you might know.

Also, please leave a comment if you or someone you know plans to attend. Thanks!

Last Sunday, sitting on the steps next to my container garden outside my Long Beach apartment, I heard a group of people singing in the next building. I thought of the seder I’d had a couple of nights before; my friends and I had sung the Ma Nishtana, which I only learned a few years ago and forget every year. Only two of the guests remembered the melody at first, but it only took a line or two for it to come back to the rest of us. I wondered if the neighbors could hear us. I’ve never had an anti-Semitic incident in this neighborhood, so I thought it’d be kind of cool if on the other side of our open windows, people were listening to us sing.

I watched families walking in and out of apartments, carrying children, greeting relatives. I smiled as I listened to the singing. Then I realized it wasn’t a hymn or some other Easter song - they were all singing a pop song. Blink 182 or something.

Oh. Well, it was still nice to hear singing. Yellow jackets buzzed around my bacopas. My bean seedlings were just starting to twine around the railing, and my lavender was blooming like the world was going to end.

***

According to the Slingshot Collective, “the modern world is the ugliest, saddest, dirtiest, and most stressful and dangerous place humans have ever created.” I don’t know if it’s the ugliest, the saddest, or the est of any of those other things, but many parts of it certainly are ugly and sad. I was thinking about that quote, along with various discussions I’ve witnessed about the “lack” of white American culture - whiteness as negative space - and white Americans’ need to appropriate more exotic cultures, when I tested a theory out on my husband: that the United States has one of the shallowest national cultures on the planet. Read the rest of this entry »

Laila El-Haddad has written a powerful and infuriating post about going home to visit her parents:

“Its not very comfortable in there is it?” said the stony faced official, cigarette smoke forming a haze around his gleaming oval head.

“Its OK. We’re fine” I replied wearily, delirious after being awake for a straight period of 30 hours.

“You could be in there for days you know. For weeks. Indefinitely. “So, tell me, you are taking a plane tomorrow morning to the US?”

****
…

I hold a Palestinian Authority passport. It replaced the “temporary two-year Jordanian passport for Gaza residents” that we held until the Oslo Accords and the creation of the Palestinian Authority in the mid ’90s, which itself replaced the Egyptian travel documents we held before that. A progression in a long line of stateless documentation.

It is a passport that allows no passage. A passport that denied me entry to my own home. This is its purpose: to mark me, brand me, so that I am easily identified and cast aside without questions; it is convenient for those giving the orders. It is a system for the collective identification of those with no identity.

Please, please, please read the whole account.

Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.

(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)

Okay, everybody, CALM DOWN. You can stop panicking now. I am delighted - no, relieved - to announce that we finally have a klezmer song about toxoplasmosis.

Via JVoices:

What is toxoplasmosis, you ask? Why, it’s the scary brain parasite that I PROBABLY TOTALLY HAVE. I’m forgetful. Also I get writer’s block a lot. Therefore: toxo.

It’s the only plausible explanation.

Also, if you’re in L.A., you should come to the Doikayt seder tomorrow. I will be there! We will exchange sholem aleychems and then do hipster dances.

(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)

In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster argues that there are essentially two types of characters: flat and round. (I’m describing this from memory, since for some unfathomable reason I’m a novelist who doesn’t own the book, so correct me if I get anything wrong.) A round character is a fleshed-out character. A round character has a history and a fully developed personality. A round character has contradictions - they long to be the center of attention, say, but when they get their wish, they want to escape back to obscurity. A flat character, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to rise up off the page. Rather, they’re tagged with one or two traits, often recurring lines or verbal tics, and those define them. If they spend the novel talking about how they can’t wait for spring break, then they’re the character who can’t wait for spring break. Nothing they do will ever call that into question. Note that there’s nothing wrong with a flat character; fiction mimics real life, even when it claims not to, and real life contains people you meet only a few times and never learn a whole lot about. The only time a flat character becomes problematic is when their flatness starts to feel constrictive or artificial to the reader.

In Dollhouse, Echo, to some extent, is a round character. (Spoilers below!) Read the rest of this entry »

Via JVoices:

(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)

(Note: soon after I started writing this this morning, I realized that it’s heavily influenced by BFP and Jess’s (Re)Thinking Walking series at Flip Flopping Joy. I’ve had a troubled relationship with walking for a few years, but their essays helped me crystallize a lot of thoughts that were amorphous, and I doubt I would have come to this essay without them.)

About five years ago, I worked as a computer services aide at a public library. Most of my job consisted of running around the main branch fixing problems and installing software. Sometimes the running around was virtual - we had a program called VNC, which allowed us to freak out librarians by manipulating their computers remotely - but more often than not, it was physical. I’d run around. Well, walk. I loved this job because it allowed me to move, exercise, be active, interact with people, hide out occasionally in the stacks with a book as software installed or there was a lull in demand. So one day I was walking around, carrying a box of floppy disks from one project to another, when on the mezzanine between two floors, I felt a sudden stabbing pain in my hip.

I stopped, stunned. I’d never felt pain like that in my life. Holy shit, was it strong! What the fuck!?

But by the time I’d even registered it, it was gone, so I kept walking. About ten minutes later, I felt it again. It was so absurd that I actually laughed out loud. It was perversely fascinating.

That day, my hip felt tender for awhile but it went away by nightfall. I didn’t even think to mention it to my boyfriend. Over the next few days, though, it started to come back gradually - not a sudden, stabbing pain anymore, but rather a sharp ache, like a cramped muscle or a joint that needed popping. It would almost reach a crisis point and then fade. I’d always had back problems, so I assumed it’d go away on its own, but it didn’t - instead, over the next few weeks, it got so bad that I began to have trouble walking. Not that I stopped walking; after all, I didn’t think anything was actually wrong. I considered myself kind of a sissy about pain. The limping? Oh, whatever, I figured everyone got that sometimes. Every day I’d walk downtown to meet my boyfriend for lunch and ignore the stabbing, aching, and squeezing that was going on around my tailbone. I’d have to stop several times to rest it and rub it (not that either had any effect). I still rode my bike. I refused to take pity on my pelvis. I kept pushing it to do whatever I felt like doing - except, as the pain got worse and worse, I began pushing it just to behave normally. Read the rest of this entry »

I was curious about this book until I saw this little gem by the author on Jewcy:

Whatever we say about women and men being equal now and tomorrow - I have three daughters who I want to see beat the world - throughout the whole human past, including the Jewish past, men and women have had different rules, different roles, different thoughts, and different lives.

Biology and common sense both tell us sex is something women have and men want. We can try as hard as we want to talk our way around this, but we can’t make it any less true–for the Jews or any other people.

But I’m sure your book is very smart. Jewish men? You guys have got a long way to go. (That goes for all you Gentile fellas, too.)

PS - So, when I feel aroused, is that really just the need to unload myself of all that pesky sex? Or maybe Judith Butler has just brainwashed me into imagining that I enjoy it.

Dang, think of the poor lesbians - so much sex and nowhere to put it.

UPDATE: The author has responded to a comment I left on the Jewcy post, defending what he wrote as “an exaggeration, but a useful one.”

(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)

From the New York Times:

Prof. Marshall Grossman has come to expect complaints whenever he returns graded papers in his English classes at the University of Maryland.

“Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor Grossman said. “Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.”

He attributes those complaints to his students’ sense of entitlement.

“I tell my classes that if they just do what they are supposed to do and meet the standard requirements, that they will earn a C,” he said. “That is the default grade. They see the default grade as an A.”

A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.

…

James Hogge, associate dean of the Peabody School of Education at Vanderbilt University, said: “Students often confuse the level of effort with the quality of work. There is a mentality in students that ‘if I work hard, I deserve a high grade.’ “

In line with Dean Hogge’s observation are Professor Greenberger’s test results. Nearly two-thirds of the students surveyed said that if they explained to a professor that they were trying hard, that should be taken into account in their grade.

Jason Greenwood, a senior kinesiology major at the University of Maryland echoed that view.

“I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade,” Mr. Greenwood said. “What else is there really than the effort that you put in?”

“If you put in all the effort you have and get a C, what is the point?” he added. “If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.”

What else is there really than the effort you put in? Well… you know, there’s the finished product. The one thing that I, the educator, actually see? But that’s inconsequential, right?

Here’s the bad news - I originally wrote a pretty detailed response to this article, including both my outraged reaction as an adjunct who has experienced this sort of behavior, and a more thoughtful response on how race and gender play into student entitlement. But I found I couldn’t write it without divulging details about past jobs. So no commentary for you!

Instead, here’s an education-themed tab dump (it’s been a fertile week at NYT):

The humanities continue to have to justify their existence to college administrators. The best justification, in my opinion: the humanities explore what it means to be a human being. It’s true that you don’t need to go to college to do that, but college would be a pretty barren place without it.

18 students have been suspended from NYU following a sit-in. The students were demanding, among other things, an annual reporting of the university’s operating budget and the right of TAs to organize. Oh, the horror.

Speaking of university labor and operating budgets, coaches, star faculty members, and administrators can make millions of dollars a year while adjuncts and TAs - you know, the people doing the actual teaching? - subsist on salaries as low as $4,000. (That last part’s not in the article - it’s the salary I received my first year as a TA, after tuition was deducted.)

(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)

From the AP wire:

LOS ANGELES – Police said Thursday they will investigate death threats against octuplet mom Nadya Suleman and advise her publicist on how to handle a torrent of other nasty messages that have flooded his office.

Word that the 33-year-old single, unemployed mother is receiving public assistance to care for the 14 children she conceived through in vitro fertilization has stoked furor among many people.

Police Lt. John Romero said officers were meeting with Suleman’s publicist Mike Furtney about the flood of angry phone calls and e-mail messages against Suleman, her children and Furtney.

“We are aware of the media accounts of the threats, and that they are being sent to the West Los Angeles detectives for appropriate action,” Romero said.

Furtney said 500 new e-mails were received early Thursday.

The logic here is impeccable. I don’t like the fact that I will have to indirectly help pay to take care of this woman’s children. Therefore, I will kill her, necessitating several foster parents, and thus HEIGHTEN the cost to the state, which I will still have to help pay.

Kugelmass has it right: this actually has very little to do with who has to pay what and how many kids an unemployed single mother should or shouldn’t have. You don’t get this type of widespread, hyper-violent reaction from a question of economics - not even, I would argue, from people disgusted with the Wall Street bailouts. No, this is about “the worship of motherhood and the hatred of mothers.” And I don’t think you can have one without the other.

(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)

I know most of us have pretty much said what we need to say about the Feministe debacle, but there’s one more thing I want to address before I try to put it behind me.

There were a few bloggers and commenters who, when responding to David’s reference to gentile privilege (a concept that immediately made sense to me), stated, explicitly or implicitly, that they didn’t believe it exists. In doing so, they broke one of the fundamental rules of anti-oppression work: you never, ever dictate to a group what its own experience looks like. If you haven’t lived as a member of that group, you simply do not have the right to tell them how they are or aren’t oppressed. This, for me, was the most hurtful aspect of the whole debate. If you don’t think you need to understand anti-Semitism in order to understand why Israel launched an outrageous and inexcusable attack on Gaza - fine, I’m glad you’ve got it figured out. If you feel you have the energy to learn about Palestinian oppression or Jewish oppression, but not both - fine, I’ll see you at half the meetings. But I think it’s clear here that if you’re not acknowledging the existence of gentile privilege, then you’re not acknowledging the existence of anti-Semitism. Oppression cannot exist without corresponding privilege. It’s just not possible, folks.

I feel like I should be inured to it - after all, it’s not like it hasn’t happened to WOC, the disabled, Muslims, and countless other groups who thought that social justice meant justice for them, too - but it’s been bothering me for days. Indeed, looking over my last post on the subject, I’m reminded that I mentioned it there, too. I didn’t think for a second that the concept of gentile privilege would, in a feminist, anti-racist space, be controversial. I should have, though. (No wonder so many activists I know just don’t read comment threads at all.)

So: a checklist. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s that time again!

Who: Progressive Jewish Alliance and the CLEAN Carwash Campaign. More importantly, though: YOU.
What: A picket line to protest a failure to pay minimum wages, a lack of basic health and safety protections, and numerous other workers’ rights violations in the Los Angeles carwash industry.
When: This Sunday, January 25th, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Where: Vermont Hand Wash at 1666 Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles.
Why: Although almost no carwash in Los Angeles can be described as “good,” the owners of the Vermont Hand Wash in Los Feliz are among the worst in the industry. By protesting the Vermont Hand Wash, we hope to send a message to other carwashes throughout the city. For more information, visit cleancarwashla.org.

Please repost or link to this message on your blog, or forward this to any Los Angeles residents you might know. Last time we protested, we managed to bring business to a standstill. The more support we have, the bigger a statement we’ll make - and the closer we’ll come to getting the owners to agree to meet minimum labor standards and allow their workers to organize.

Short answer: because I can’t think of anything to say.

A few days ago, I came across this video on Jewschool:

There’s a midrash on the Jacob story that Avraham Burg mentions in his new book. According to the story, Jacob was “anxious and distressed” as he went to fight his brother Esau. He was anxious, the Talmud explains, because he knew he might die - but he was distressed because he knew he might kill.

Even if the attack on Gaza were 100% justified - even if there was absolutely no other action Israel could have taken - don’t these people care about how un-Jewish it is to celebrate killing people? Even if you believe this had to be done, what about it makes you want to dance a horah? Even if you believe that every single Palestinian who has died deserved to die, why would the task of ending someone’s life make you happy?

I meant to write about that video days ago, but I was distracted by the slew of anti-Semitic comments on, ironically, two parts of an essay about anti-Semitism. If we can wrap our heads around the idea that one can do something racist without hating POC, then surely we can fathom that, say, denying the existence of Gentile privilege is anti-Semitic even if some of one’s best friends are Jewish. I want Gaza to be centered in anti-racist, anti-capitalist work right now simply because at the moment, their situation is one of the most desperate and time-sensitive. But I can’t stand it when non-Arab, non-Jewish Americans shriek that even mentioning global violence against Jews is somehow hurting Gazans, and then develop a martyr complex when a Jew angrily points out that decrying Jewish liberation work is anti-Semitic. (I also can’t stand it when the rhetoric in a “discussion” becomes so angry and inflammatory that anti-Zionist Jews are accused of being self-hating and are basically forced to leave. Fuck. That. Shit.)

If you seriously can’t believe that we can work on dismantling anti-Semitism without advocating the deaths of Palestinians, then I doubt I can work with you. If you’re itching to leave a comment along the lines of, “Jewish liberation?! That means ZIONISM,* right!? You must be a Zionist, right!? Because only Zionists care about Jewish liberation!!” then for God’s sake, read a book or two before you accuse me of being a racist anti-Palestine warmongerer because I don’t like it when flaming cars are driven into synogogues.

(On the anti-Semitic attacks in Europe - you wouldn’t believe the number of people I’ve seen saying, “Well, those Israelis have to learn somehow.” If you can’t figure out the distinction between a European Jew and an Israeli, and if you can’t figure out that violence against any ol’ Jewish person probably isn’t stemming from a sincere desire to help Palestinians, then I say it again: I doubt I can work with you.)

I think Mandolin’s post is right on.

I saw Waltz With Bashir the other night. I’d planned on writing a very nice, eloquent review of it, but really it would have all boiled down to this: it helped me stay human. Please see this movie and stay human. Now if only Palestinian filmmakers could enjoy international exposure.

By the way, how do I personally feel about Zionism? Do I identify as a Zionist, an anti-Zionist, a non-Zionist, or a post-Zionist? I honestly don’t know. If we accept that Zionism has come to mean a Jewish state in Palestine, then I’m anti-Zionist. If we were to consider a Zionism that meant a Jewish state anywhere, then, depending on how much violence or alienation I was personally experiencing, I would be either a Zionist or a non-Zionist (someone who supports a Jewish state but doesn’t plan on moving there). But I feel like the whole question of whether there should be a Jewish state is moot; the fact is, there is one, and it’s not going anywhere. So does that make me a post-Zionist? Not quite; that term means something slightly different. What about the question of keeping Israel Jewish? What will happen when/if Arab births outnumber Jewish births, and the ratio begins to change? More ethnic cleansing is unacceptable (even having to write that seems to diminish its truth) - but if Israelis let their national character change, do they risk violence against Jews? Why is addressing root causes always out of the question?

Why do I feel like any time I write something that’s not explicitly condemning the actions of Jews, readers are combing over my sentences, looking for anti-Palestinian oppression? Why can’t anyone accept that it’s harmful when so many liberal and radical Jews feel like our Jewish identities have to revolve around feeling ashamed of Israel? I’ve literally seen people - Jews! - claiming that Zionism is the sum total of Jewish identity. That doesn’t make any sense! Maybe sometimes I want to read my great-grandmother’s letters or take my Yiddish classes without thinking about Israel!

I wanted this post to be about Gaza, but the truth is, I don’t know anything about Gaza. I’m sitting here in California with palm trees swaying outside my spacious apartment and I have no fucking clue.

I think I’m going to start using my other blog, in part, to rediscover and examine Yiddish culture. Partly it’s because I suck at timely commentary. Partly it’s because a Youtube search reveals a wealth of Yiddish theater, music, and dance. Partly it’s because the introspective styles of writers like BFP, Joan Kelly, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, and Little Light have taught me more about activist work than even the best political commentary. Maybe, by developing a firmer idea of where I came from, I can stop defining myself against the people celebrating the deaths of Gazans. Maybe if we remember how vibrant Jewish cultures can be, we can funnel our energy into art and writing and dance instead of wars. Maybe we can do the same for American cultures, maybe even for white cultures. Please, please, please, someone tell me you’re with me on this.

(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)

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* I’m not even getting into the problem with the “Zionism=murderous bloodthirsty racism” mentality… maybe in another post. I know I can’t hope for people to just look it up themselves, or ever believe that early twentieth century European Jews could possibly have sensible reasons for wanting a state. I know it’s too troublesome and complicated to accept that, while the decision to “buy” Palestinian land was obviously racist and unjust, the desire to escape violence by forming autonomous territory was understandable.

On the radio today: news about the recession. Story after story about dismal holiday sales. Explanations of why it’s not a good idea to be thrifty when money’s tight: if you don’t go out and buy stuff, people will lose their jobs! Why is it that our very survival depends on accumulating and then discarding useless luxury items? How did we get to the point where my lack of interest in a plasma screen may eventually lead to my starvation? What would happen if we decided that some of our needs and wants would be bought with currency, and some we would make or procure ourselves? What if the workweek was only 20 hours long? Why have we forgotten how to grow our own fucking food?

The military industrial complex: a mutually dependent relationship between a government, its armed forces, and the commercial sector producing weapons and other equipment. According to the documentary Why We Fight, every single state in the union has a stake in keeping this industry healthy - and, consequently, every single legislator faces pressure to green-light wars. Why do you think democrats cave so easily every time hawks want to attack someone?

As an interviewee in Young, Jewish and Left points out, Israel has never benefited from the occupation of Palestine; it’s the American weapons manufacturers who are making a profit. Could it be that the US, happy to have a foothold in the Middle East, isn’t just giving Israel its blessing - but actually pressuring Israelis to keep driving those tanks, keep using those bombs? Because when Israel attacks, Americans keep their jobs. When Palestinians die, Americans eat.

When will we figure out that capitalism is killing us?

(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)