This review was originally posted on a literary blog that no longer exists called The Great American Pinup. My understanding is that the blog was hacked and that attempts by the people who ran the blog to resolve things using Google’s help screens were unsuccessful. I am reposting the review here because I think the books are important enough that the review should continue to be available.

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. 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, 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 »

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.)

So the guy who shot up the Holocaust Museum is James W. von Brunn, Holocaust denier, neo-Nazi, and generally swell guy:

James W. von Brunn holds a BachSci Journalism degree from a mid-Western university where he was president of SAE and played varsity football.

During WWII he served as PT-Boat captain, Lt. USNR, receiving a Commendation and four battle stars. For twenty years he was an advertising executive and film-producer in New York City. He is a member of Mensa, the high-IQ society.

In 1981 Von Brunn attempted to place the treasonous Federal Reserve Board of Governors under legal, non-violent, citizens arrest. He was tried in a Washington, D.C. Superior Court; convicted by a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys, and sentenced to prison for eleven years by a Jew judge. A Jew/Negro/White Court of Appeals denied his appeal. He served 6.5 years in federal prison. (Read about von Brunn’s “Federal Reserve Caper” HERE.) He is now an artist and author and lives on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Swell fellow. Lovely that he’s part of Mensa; really, that’s become almost a badge of douchebaggery.

Von Brun’s web site features a few quotes, including this one from Cicero: “A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within.” Obviously, in von Brun’s mind, the treason was on the part of white people who weren’t willing to put down the Jewish menace. His website boasts of his book, Kill the Best Gentiles, which is said to be “A new, hard-hitting exposé of the JEW CONSPIRACY to destroy the White gene-pool.” The book includes:

350pp of FACTS condensing libraries of information about the Talmud, Democracy, Marx, Genetics, Money, Aryans, Negroes, Khazars, The Holy Bible, Treason, Mass-media, Mendelism, Race, the “Holocaust” and a host of suppressed “bigoted” subjects, all supported by quotations from many of history’s greatest personages. Learn who is responsible for the millions of Aryan crosses covering the world’s battlefields. Why our sons and daughters died bravely but in vain.

[...]

This carefully documented treatise exposes the JEWS and explains what you must do to protect your White family. Kill the Best Gentiles! Is a must for every concerned parent and a manual for every student of World History.

So yeah, he completely sucks. But he sucks in a consistent way. I don’t see it as accidental that this is yet another in a series of shootings by conservative white males, striking out violently against the forces of multiculturalism. Whether it’s Scott Roeder killing a doctor providing medical care for women, or Richard Poplawski killing police because of his fear of the “Obama gun ban” and the influence of Jews, or this attack on Jews by a neo-Nazi, we’re seeing exactly the sort of desperate, searing, homicidal anger from the extreme right that we expected we’d see, once an African-American had the temerity to actually win the presidency. I fear that we’ve reached our tipping point, that we are getting close to a point where political violence, and especially right-wing violence, is going to become the norm. I hope not. But hope is awfully hard to find on a day like this.

So as you may recall, Arkansas State Sen. Kim Hendren, R-Gravette, yesterday was forced to apologize for calling Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., “that Jew” during a colloquy in which Hendren was explaining how he was in favor of returning America to a 1950s-era morality. Why he apologized is unclear to me; it seems to me Hendren has a great understanding of how America used to function.

At any rate, Hendren has felt the need to expand on that apology, to let people know that just because he gave every evidence that he’s an anti-Semitic bigot, he’s totally not. Why, some of his best friends are Jews!

Defending himself again to the Arkansas News, Hendren went further, saying he didn’t know why the words “that Jew” came out of his mouth. He added that there is a Jewish person in history he admires — Jesus. He’s also partial to Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman.

That’s right — Jesus and Joe Lieberman! Of course, Lieberman’s going to hell, but he’s pro-torture, so that’s okay. And nothing says Judaism like Jesus Christ!

Somehow, I don’t think Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., is going to have to worry too much about Hendren’s planned 2010 challenge.

TPM: Arkansas state Sen. Kim Hendren, who is currently the only announced Republican candidate for U.S. Senator against Democratic incumbent Blanche Lincoln in 2010, has apologized for referring to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as “that Jew,” at a county Republican meeting last week.

“I don’t use a teleprompter and occasionally I put my foot in my month,” Hendren told Arkansas blogger Jason Tolbert.

Demonstrating his point, Hendren explained that when he referred to Schumer as “that Jew,” he was drawing a contrast between his own “traditional values” and those of Senator Schumer.

Still later, Hendren added “When I referred to him as Jewish, it wasn’t because I don’t like Jewish people.” Phew, what a relief!

Via David, who entitled his post “That One.” Interesting observation from PG in David’s comments, too, but you have to go there to read it because I’m a tease.

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.)

I had vaguely heard of Uncensored; I knew they were not my sort of people. But I didn’t realise just how much not my people until Scott Hamilton wrote about them. Here’s his summary:

The January-March issue of Uncensored offers examples of the magazine’s anti-semitism. The cover of the issue shows Barack Obama with a star of David on his sleeve, suggesting he is a tool of Jews. An article inside called ‘The Unspeakable Truth of 9/11′ insists that the Israeli spy agency Mossad orchestrated the attacks on the World Trade Centre, and another article called ‘The Real Agenda behind the Monetary Crisis’ calls the world’s media ‘Jewish-occupied’ and claims that Jews control the American Federal Reserve. Yet another article claims that Monica Lewinsky was a Mossad agent, and calls her ‘President Clinton’s chunky Jewish girlfriend’. The new, April-June issue of Uncensored takes the anti-semitic theme even further - it includes an article alleging that the diary of famous Holocaust victim Anne Frank was a hoax.

I had no idea people like this existed in New Zealand. I knew there were neo-nazis, and I knew there were conspiracy theoriests. But I thought conspiracy theorists were just stupid, not holocaust-denying-evil.

Uncensored have booked the Mt Albert War Memorial Hall for a conference at the end of April, and Scott Hamilton wrote a letter to Cathy Casey (a left-wing Auckland city councillor) asking her to stop Uncensored from using the hall.¹

Scott Hamilton also posted this on indymedia (can anyone guess where this is going? I actually advise against following that link). The comment thread on indymedia is full of holocaust denial, and even more horrific forms of anti-semitism. I’m not quoting any of it, it’s too disgusting. There are a few people attempting to stand against the waves of awfulness. But they’re outnumbered (and once you’re arguing ‘yes the holocaust actually happened’ you’re already disrespecting the dead and the survivors).

It blows my mind that there are people who think and write such vile, hateful, nonsense, but the internet has a lot of everything, so it’s no surprise that includes vile hateful nonsense. That’s not the point of this post.

The point of this post, is that each of those comments are still on indymedia. This is the indymedia mission statement:

The Independent Media centre is a grassroots organization committed to using media production and distribution as a tool for promoting social and economic justice. It is our goal to further the self-determination of people under-represented in media production and content, and to illuminate and analyze local and global issues that impact ecosystems, communities and individuals. We seek to generate alternatives to the biases inherent in the corporate media controlled by profit, and to identify and create positive models for a sustainable and equitable society

. I don’t think providing space for a discussion about whether or not the holocaust happened is creating a positive model for a sustainable and equitable society. Many of the statements on that thread are direct impediments to social and economic justice. One of the moderators of indymedia has posted on that thread, and nothing has been hidden, despite two requests to do so.

The problems with indymedia as an open space is something I’ve written about before. Open spaces replicate all the power imbalances that already exist in society (and also allow space for some that have been festering for some time). I shouldn’t even have to write this, but what happened to Jewish people under the Nazis is not some abstract point of academic argument, it’s an open wound that causes actual people, actual pain. To fail to hide this stuff is to have a huge sign saying “Jews not welcome”. Indymedia is part of the problem, unless it understands that there are many ideas that are directly in opposition to anyone’s liberation, and to host them is to be part of that opposition.

1. What I originally wanted to write about, which is now relegated to a footnote, is my feeling that the way Scott Hamilton wrote about World War 2 in the post is problematic:
   

   The hall is a public asset that is supposed to commemorate the loss of New Zealand life in war, and to serve the needs of the community around it. I don’t believe that our community needs Jew-baiting and Maori-bashing. I think it is particularly inappropriate that Uncensored plans to use the hall on an Anzac weekend, when New Zealanders will be remembering the thousands of their countrymen and women who died opposing the same Nazi ideology that so many of the contributors to Uncensored promote.

   I don’t know if Scott Hamilton actually believes that or if he’s being disingenuous. From what I know of his politics I suspect the latter. I can see why it’s very tempting in circumstances such as these, to play on the popular image of world war two as a great war against fascism, and ‘our brave boys’. However, for anyone with a serious criticism of imperialism it’s important that we acknowledge that that while there may have been many soldiers who saw their participation in the war as part of the fight against fascism in defence of liberty, that’s not what was being prioritised by those who were commanding the armies. I don’t think it’s acceptable to play dumb about these issues, even for a good cause. (back)

February’s up, and that seems as good a time as any to bring this guesting stint to a close. I want to thank everyone very much for reading, listening, reacting and commenting. I hope you found what I said interesting, and for my part I know I’ve been pushed to think in new ways by all the responses I’ve given. Some of the ideas I’ve been forwarding I’ve been baking for a long time; others were developed all in the course of this discussion. I don’t know where they’ll go, but I’m grateful for the opportunity to partake in this little corner of the conversation. If you want to follow me back home, you can find me at The Debate Link, where I blog about identity issues of all stripes, politics, law, philosophy, and occasionally boxing.

I started my contribution here by noting that anti-Semitism lacks a theory — those victimized by it can feel it grabbing and pulling and ripping at them, but we still can’t quite wrap our heads around what is happening to us. The issue is shrouded by layers upon layers of obscuring fabric: the Whiteness of Ashkenazi Jews, the ongoing Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the meaning of Zionism, the meaning of anti-Zionism, the meaning of oppression, the idea that anti-Semitism is itself a fiction (or is primarily deployed as a distraction), the various motivating ideologies that lead one to partake in or justify hating, harassing, or killing Jews, and above all, constant, unrelenting fear. I’m not saying these elements are not themselves important to discuss, but if they have to be resolved before we can speak intelligibly about anti-Semitism, then we better resign ourselves to a lot of inchoate gibberish.

Jews exist at the margins of the margin — on the fissure point between power and weakness. We have influence, but not rights; [some of us are] White, but not quite. We have enough power and security that the marginalized do not accept us as brother- and sister-sufferers, but not enough to render us truly safe or secure (or truly accepted as equals). Taken together, it makes for a yawning silence, and it is untenable. It will be filled by something — not necessarily the most productive something, not necessarily the most coherent something, but something.

Christine Littleton defines the feminist method as starting “with the very radical act of taking women seriously, believing that what we say about ourselves and our experience is important and valid, even when (or perhaps especially when) it has little or no relationship to what has been or is being said about us.”¹ It was one of those statements that really stuck with me — an empathetic approximating experience (if I may borrow from a co-blogger). The situation as it is now is one where I really, genuinely don’t feel like Jews are taken seriously when what we say differs from what is said about us. If we try to separate Jewishness as something independent from “Judeo-Christianity”, we are not taken seriously. If we try to explain what we mean by concepts like Zionism, or how we perceive many forms of anti-Israel criticism as being extensions of anti-Jewish hate, things that actually threaten us and threaten us as Jews, we aren’t take seriously.

What Jews say about themselves matters. It is important. Even when it isn’t perfectly coherent or cohesive — perhaps especially when it isn’t — something very important is being expressed. Not all Jews agree on everything, of course, that cannot be deployed as an excuse to not listen to Jews at all (or only a tiny fraction of them that confirms pre-existing beliefs), because the most damaging thing of all is the belief that you can understand us without talking to us or without taking our own accounts seriously. We are our own entity. We are not encompassed within the categories of others.

Some Jews are European, but even those of us who are, are not just that. Some Jews are White, but even those of us who are, are not just that. Many Jews are many things — rich and poor, powerful and vulnerable, male and female, straight and queer,  kind and cruel, but whatever it is we are, we are not just that. We have the right, as everyone else, to be addressed on our own terms — not forced into boxes constructed by others.

* * *

The Eighth Jewish Child — for Caryl Churchill

In response to Seven Jewish Children, written by Caryl Churchill, and condemned by Howard Jacobson, supported by Jacqueline Rose, and labeled a ‘blood libel’ by Melanie Philipps.

Tell her that it’s more complicated than that.

Tell her that we love Israel.

Tell her that we hate Israel.

Tell her that Israel is in our veins, like oxygen, like a virus, like an antibody.

Tell her that to be Jewish is far more than watching the news and looking for balance, and far more than being a Zionist, and far more than just praying to God.

Tell her that Zionism isn’t a dirty word like racism. Zionism is a complicated word with good intentions and ambiguous results, like idealism.

Tell her that everyone is a human being, everyone is their own story, and everyone you meet is a potential friend however different they may discover you are.

Tell her that everyone is a potential enemy because they fear your difference, because they fear your memory, because they fear the Muslims, because they fear.

Don’t tell her that.

Don’t mention Muslims. Don’t mention anti-Semites. Don’t mention the Holocaust. Don’t mention Gaza. At least not in the same sentence.

Tell her that she can be Jewish anywhere in the world, but that Israel will come with her. Israel is the biggest project that the Jewish world has taken on in the last few thousand years, and it needs all the help it can get, even when it says it doesn’t. Sometimes helping Israel will mean backing its actions, sometimes helping Israel will mean protesting them.

Tell her to say what she thinks about Israel wherever and whenever she wants to. Tell her not to worry about giving ammunition to our enemies, because they create their own ammunition. They do fine without needing ours.

Tell her that Howard Jacobson is right, and wrong. So is Jacqueline Rose. And Melanie Philipps. And Jonathan Freedland. And so am I.

But Caryl Churchill is just plain wrong.

Tell her that those who don’t like us will always pretend to understand us.

We don’t even understand us.

And we would never dare write a 10-minute play about it.

Tell her it’s much more complicated than that.

1. Christine A. Littleton, Feminist Jurisprudence: The Difference Method Makes (Book Review), 41 STAN. L. REV. 751, 764 (1989) (back)

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.

Finally, here ’tis. The last post in my antisemitism series. Getting it done, once my semester started and I had to go back to work, turned out to be more difficult than I had anticipated. Anyway, I am glad to post it, and I look forward to what people have to say about it.

///

Author’s Preface: GallingGalla’s comment on the third post in this series has made me think I should add this preface: I see each post in this series as one section of a single piece of writing, not as a discrete essay unto itself. As a result, while each section may contain its own argument, it is not really possible to know whether an issue that a reader feels is important, such as GallingGalla’s concerns about how accusations of self-hatred are also accusations of treason, will or will not be left out of the argument made by the entire piece if you’ve only read a part of the series. As I said in my response to GallingGalla, I certainly do not mean this caveat to be, in any way, an inoculation against critique, but given the modular nature of posting to blogs and of how blogs are read, it is a caveat I’d like you to keep in mind if you find yourselves wondering, and commenting on, why I have not addressed something you feel needs to be addressed. Thanks.

///

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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A few weeks after South African minister Fatima Hajaig set off a firestorm by saying much of the world is under the heel of “Jewish money”, it is becoming more and more apparent that this is not a one-off. COSATU, a major South African union deeply tied to the ruling ANC, recently lead a march to protest Israeli government policies. Not necessarily bad in of itself. Where did they march? On the Israeli embassy? Nope. They decided the best place for their march was a Jewish community center. Bongani Masuku, International Relations Secretary for COSATU, phrased the goal this way:

We want to convey a message to the Jews in SA that our 1.9-million workers who are affiliated to COSATU are fully behind the people of Palestine… Any business owned by Israel supporters will be a target of workers in South Africa.

Well, if you want to “convey a message to the Jews” then targeting a Jewish community center is the way to do it. Of course, it does make it more difficult to take seriously the statement of the Palestine Solidarity Committee’s Salim Vallie (which helped coordinate the march), “We are not going to support the canard that says if you are opposed to the policies of Israel you are anti-Semitic, this does not intimidate us.” As Howard Jacobson put it in another context “No, you don’t have to be an anti-Semite to criticise Israel. It just so happens that you are.”

Mr. Masuku then got into an email correspondence with the head of South Africa’s It’s Almost Supernatural blog, which is dedicated to identifying and exposing anti-Semitism in South Africa, after leaving this comment:

Hi guys,

Bongani says hi to you all as we struggle to liberate Palestine from the racists, fascists and zionists who belong to the era of their Friend Hitler!

We must not apologise, every Zionist must be made to drink the bitter medicine they are feeding our broathers (sic) and sisters in Palestine. We must target them, expose them and doo allthat (sic) is needed to subject them to pereptual suffering until they withdraw from the land of others and stop their savage attacks on human dignity. Every Palestinian who suffers is a direct attck (sic) on all of us!

In the email exchange, he expressed his view “that Jews are arrogant, not from being told by any Palestinian, but from what I saw myself,” and proclaimed that “If the offices of the Zionist Federation and that loud-mouthed Rabbi and his SABJD [South African Board of Jewish Deputies] were in town we would have marched there.” More distressingly, he made and reiterated a call for all Jews who did not actively disavow Israel to leave the country — to wit, “all the people who deny that occupation is wrong must be encouraged to leave South Africa before they infect our society with much more racism” and “none of those who tolerate Israeli apartheid and racism should ever imagine it [South Africa] to be their home.” Mr. Masuku made it very clear that full-throated condemnation was what was required — not “silently consenting or grumbling under tables.” Ultimately, the only permissible Jews are those who “have proven to be reasonable and humane.”

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Paul Berman gets at something important in this interview:

We like to think of hatred of the Jews as a low, base sentiment that is entertained by nasty, ignorant people, wallowing in their own hatefulness. But normally it’s not like that. Hatred for the Jews has generally taken the form of a lofty sentiment, instead of a lowly one - a noble feeling embraced by people who believe they stand for the highest and most admirable of moral views.

In the Middle Ages, Christians felt they were upholding the principles of universal redemption, and they looked on the Jews as terrible people because the Jews had refused the word of God - had insisted on remaining Jews. And so, the loftiest of religious sentiments led to hatred of the Jews.

In the 18th century, the Enlightenment philosophers looked on the Enlightenment itself as the loftiest form of thought - the truest of all possible guides to universal justice and happiness. The Enlightenment philosophers detested Christianity because it was a font of superstition and oppression. But this only led them to despise the Jews even more - no longer because the Jews had refused the message of Christianity, but because the Jews had engendered the message of Christianity. And the damnable Jews insisted on remaining Jews, instead of repudiating religion altogether.

The religious wars wreaked all kinds of damage on Europe. But the Treaty of Westphalia came along in 1648 and put an end to religious wars by establishing a system of states with recognized borders, each state with its own religion. The new Westphalian system embodied yet another Enlightenment idea of lofty ideals - the grandest guarantee of universal peace and justice. But the Jews were scattered throughout Europe, instead of being gathered together in a single state. The new state system was supposed to be a comfortable shoe, and the Jews were a pebble. And they insisted on remaining Jews, instead of helpfully disappearing. So one hated the Jews for failing to conform to the new system of states.

Today we have arrived at yet another idea about how to bring about universal peace and justice - the loftiest, most advanced idea of our own time. Instead of looking on well-established states with solid borders to keep the peace, Westphalia-style, we look on states as a formula for oppression and war. Lofty opinion nowadays calls for post-state political systems, like the European Union. Unfortunately, nowadays the Jews possess a state. Thus one hates the Jews in the name of lofty opinion, no longer because the Jews lack a state but because, on the contrary, they have a state. They seem keen on keeping their state. And once again the Jews are seen to be affirming a principle that high-minded people used to uphold but have now rejected as antiquated.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, people with advanced ideas began to look on Christian hatred of the Jews as a retrograde prejudice - and the advanced thinkers embraced, instead, the pseudo-science of racism. They no longer hated the Jews on religious grounds - they hated the Jews on racial grounds. The word “racism” originally applied to hatred of the Jews. Racial hatred seemed up to date. Today, however, racism itself has come to seem like a retrograde prejudice. And so, people with advanced opinions hate the Jews on anti-racist grounds, and they regard the Jews as the world’s leading racists.

And so forth. The unstated assumption is always the same. To wit: the universal system for man’s happiness has already arrived (namely, Christianity, or else Enlightenment anti-Christianity; the Westphalian state system, or else the post-modern system of international institutions; racial theory, or else the anti-racist doctrine in a certain interpretation). And the universal system for man’s happiness would right now have achieved perfection - were it not for the Jews. The Jews are always standing in the way. The higher one’s opinion of oneself, the more one detests the Jews.

[...]

To be sure, lofty disdain comes in different versions. In its respectable version, lofty disdain right now adopts a position of long-faced sadness over Israel for being such a reprehensible place, for existing at a moment when states ought to fade away, for being racist, for perpetuating religion, for being an example of European imperialism, and so forth. One shakes one’s head in sorrowful regret that the Israelis are the way they are.

But the disdain takes another shape, too, which is cruder, though it follows more or less from the first version. In the cruder version, the Jews are not just regrettable for being retrograde. Much worse: the Jews have done something really terrible. By forming their state and standing by it, they have set out actively to oppose the principle of universal justice and happiness - the principle that decrees that a people like the Jews should not have a state.

This, I think, helps fuse together points I made in my Superseded Jew post,  and the ones I explored in I Think You’re Insulting Me Wrong.

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Dennis Prager, in an essay about how evil the left is, writes:

The same holds true for the greatest character-building institution in American life: Judeo-Christian religions. Once again, the left knows how to destroy. Everywhere possible the left works to inhibit religious institutions and values — from substituting “Happy Holidays” for “Merry Christmas” to removing the tiny cross from the Los Angeles County Seal to arguing that religious people must not bring their values into the political arena.

Because nothing is more “Judeo” than saying “Merry Christmas” and putting a cross on all documents carrying a government seal. How included I feel!

* * *

The implication that non-Judeo-Christians are lest likly to successfully build character is also lovely. (Although perhaps by “greatest” he meant “largest,” not “most effective.”)

The rest of his essay is nonsense, as well. In a discussion of California’s economic crisis, Prager claims that “California’s Democratic legislature has been more or less able to do whatever it wants with California.” But that’s not true; California law lets voters pass unfunded mandates through ballot measures, and gives the Republican minority in the legislature an effective veto of tax increases. The problem is structural.

Prager also spends a great deal of time blaming the left for the Boy Scout’s troubles. Apparently the Scout organization itself isn’t at all responsible for the predictable consequences of its own decisions.

Curtsy: Dissenting Justice. (He also claims that the Boy Scouts biggest problem isn’t anti-homophobia activism, but liability lawsuits from parents of injured kids. That seems odd to me, if that’s so; don’t parents have to sign waivers when their boys join up? Do you know anything about that aspect of things, Ron?)

This was originally to be Part IV of my anti-Semitism series. I’ve mostly been side-tracked from it — I don’t think the rest of it flows organically from discussions we’ve been having. This post, though, I think remains important on its own merits.

When Christianity first came about, it did not see itself as a rival to Judaism. Rather, it viewed itself as its completion. The coming of Jesus was the next step in the natural progression of Jewish history. Early Christians were thus surprised when Judaism refused to die off in the face of its claims. This presented a problem: if Christianity is merely the new and improved form of Jews (as they like to see themselves, hence names like “The New Testament”), what does it mean if there continues to exist a live and vibrant Jewish community that rejects the divinity of Christ?

Christian theologians solved this problem by holding that post-Christ Judaism was vestigial, a dead tree that would bear no more fruit. This doctrine, of course, runs into trouble insofar as Jews still were running around making theological claims and arguments, and Christian rulers worked extraordinarily hard as a result to suppress Jewish religious practice and particularly the creation of Jewish religious scholarship. The goal was make the declaration of Jewish irrelevancy a reality, by force if necessary. Christianity could only be said to be complete insofar as it was totalizing; it could only be totalizing if it entirely incorporated (dominated, colonized) Judaism.

As the Enlightenment swept through Europe (and came to America), a similar problem emerged. Like Christianity, Enlightenment Liberalism was a totalizing ideology. Its assertions of universal human rationality were colored by the experiential backdrop of the persons making the claim. What was said to be “universal” was, in reality, primarily a reflection of the values of the dominant castes: European (later White), male, middle-class, and secular/Christian. Some Enlightenment thinkers were Christian, and others were not, but regardless of their religious affiliation they had to make allowances for the overwhelmingly Christian majorities they represented. Explicitly sectarian rules were abandoned, but they principles which replaced them did little to undermine Christian hegemony.

Once again, though, Jews presented a problem. Jewish difference was incompatible with the universalism that characterized Enlightenment thought. “Neutral” laws written with the Christian majority in mind did not fall equally upon the Jewish community – for example, Sunday closing laws, which are easily defended as neutral in purpose (to give people a day off) and selection (Sunday is the day most people would want off). Even the vaunted separation of Church and State, an enlightenment triumph and a hallmark of efforts to protect minority faiths, has been operationalized to perpetuated the social subordination of Jews. In such situations, once again the Jew was called upon to erase her or himself. Jewish requests for accommodation were shot down as special pleading or violations of equal treatment. But conditioning equality upon sameness, as Catherine MacKinnon argues, “simply means that…equality is conceptually designed never to be achieved. Those who most need equal treatment will be the least similar…to those whose situation sets the standard against which one’s entitlement to be equally treated is measured.” As Albert Memmi, a Tunisian Jew and one of the key figures in contemporary post-colonial philosophy, memorably put it in The Liberation of the Jew, Jewish inclusion into majority Christian “secular” institutions was done under the conditions of “the poor man who enters a middle-class family: they demand that he at least have the good taste to make himself invisible.” The idea that Jews could only become equal by abandoning their Jewishness was sometimes expressed in distressingly violent terms. In 1793, the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte wrote that “As for giving them [the Jews] civil rights, I see no remedy but that their heads should be cut off in one night and replaced with others not containing a single Jewish idea.”

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With the ADL charting a disturbing persistence in anti-Semitic attitudes in Europe, and a flurry of anti-Semitic activities racing through the continent over the past month, the head of the European Jewish Congress, Moshe Kantor, says that he believes that the actions have nothing to do with the conflict in Gaza, but instead represent economic scapegoating of Jews due to the current financial crisis.

Kantor is obviously more familiar with the facts on the ground than I am. And to some extent, I think he is clearly right: for the most part, I think hatred shines through when people are scared, angry, hurt, aggrieved, or vulnerable. Even people who might harbor anti-Semitic or otherwise hateful attitudes are less likely to act on them when they are feeling happy, content, fulfilled, and secure. So in that sense, it strikes me as extremely likely that the economic crisis was a primary spark in setting off this anti-Semitic wave.

Still, some things leave me nervous (not that I’d be any less nervous knowing that I’m liable to be stabbed because I’m associated with the Jewish banking cabal than because I’m associated with the Zionist war machine), and unsure that the rhetoric surrounding Israel in the international system isn’t also playing its part.
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The London Conference on Combatting Antisemitism has released the following declaration (via HP):

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Another blizzard is coming through Chicago.

Julie’s post on the ADL’s 2009 European anti-Semitism survey inspired me to read the survey memo for myself [UPDATE: You know what would rock? Actually linking to the survey memo!]. The data can be a little hard to parse at times, but overall paints a rather disturbing picture.

The survey was conducted over 7 European countries: Austria, France, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom (500 questioned in each country, MoE +/- 4%). The heart of the survey was contained in these four questions:

1) Jews are more loyal to Israel than to this country. (49%)
2) Jews have too much power in the business world. (40%)
3) Jews have too much power in international financial
markets. (41%)
4) Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in
the Holocaust. (44%)

Percentages are of respondents who labeled this statement “probably true” across all countries. Each country’s response rate for each question was also broken out individually. The worst case country-to-stereotype was Spain’s answer to “Jews have too much power international financial markets” — a whopping 74% agreed. For every question, the UK demonstrated the lowest levels of support. As noted though, the statement which got the highest overall level of support was “Jews are more loyal to Israel than to this country” (high: Spain 64%, low: UK: 37%).

The ADL then charted what percentage of respondents agreed with at least three of the above four statements. The “winners” were Spain, Poland, and Hungary, with 48%, 48%, and 47% (respectively) fitting this criteria. Austria came next at 30%, followed by France and Germany (20%) and finally the UK (10%).

The ADL also asked several follow-up questions which were not included in evaluating the overall levels of anti-Semitic sentiment. For example, 23% of Europeans believe that Jews are responsible for the death of Christ (Poland is the far and away leader in this category, at 48%). The survey also asked respondents if they felt that violence directed against Jews in their country was the result of anti-Israel or anti-Jewish sentiment. For the most part, they believed it was due to anti-Jewish feelings (38% to 24%). The exception was Spain, where “anti-Israel” held a 38% - 26% lead over “anti-Jewish”.

Finally, the ADL also tried to get a feel for whether Jews were being blamed for the global financial crisis. They asked

How much blame do you place on Jews in the financial industry for the current global economic crisis? Do you blame them a great deal, a good amount, a little or not at all?

The ADL here charted those answering “a little” or higher, and found that 31% of respondents blamed the Jews at least “a little” for the crisis. Hungary led the way with 46%, followed by Austria (43%) and Poland (38%).

Finally, these were the questions that elicited the strongest levels of support for each country:

More loyal to Israel: France (38%), Germany (53%), Poland (63%), UK (37%)

Power in business: Hungary (67%)

Power in international markets: Spain (74%)

Too much talking about the Holocaust: Austria (55%)

And the least support:

More loyal to Israel: Hungary (40%)

Power in business: Austria (36%), Germany (21%), UK (15% — tie)

Power in international markets: France (27%), Poland (54%), UK (15% — tie)

Too much talking about the Holocaust: Spain (42%)

In the field of criminal law, there are two main philosophical schools on how society is allowed to punish offenders. The first is the retributive school — basically arguing that we can punish people solely based on how much they “deserve” to be punished, no more and no less. Punishment is seen as a matter of just deserts, apportioned to the moral culpability of the offender. We can’t raise or lower punishments because might make society better off (a more severe punishment might serve as a superior deterrent, a less severe one might allow a brilliant scientist to continue his work unhindered by a jail term).

The second school is utilitarian (or consequentialist) — it says we can punish because and only when society benefits from it. Deterrence (preventing further crimes) is a utilitarian rationale, as is incapcitation (preventing the criminal from committing more crimes) and rehabilitation (making the criminal a productive, socially beneficial member of society). We can punish up to point where all parties continue to reap a net benefit, but no further. This might mean we can’t punish at all, in certain situations, where the social consequences of punishment would outweigh its gains. Alternatively, it might mean we’d be justified punishing completely out of accordance with moral fault if there were socially compelling reasons to do so. Hanging an accused thief by his entrails may be wildly out of sync with just deserts, but it would probably make other accused thieves think twice before picking pockets.

Retributivists and utilitarians are not friends. Utilitarians allege that punishment without social benefit is barbaric — solely seeking to quench the victim’s or society’s thirst for blood. Moreover, punishment that isn’t tailored to increase social benefit imposes huge costs on society by, for example, missing critical opportunities to change behaviors. Insofar as we are missing opportunities to, say, deter rape, a utilitarian would say that we are in a lot of ways responsible for the rapes we could have prevented but didn’t. Retributivists counter that utilitarian punishment has no checks to insure it products the basic human dignity of the condemned and risks devolving into state-sponsored torture if the state claims a net benefit from it. On the other hand, it also provides an out for politically or economically-powerful individuals to escape liability for even the most horrific of crimes, if they claim that society would suffer more by their removal than it would gain through punishment. Because the idea of “social gain” is always indeterminate, punishment becomes solely the province of the poor and marginalized, and even can become a collateral weapon against social dissidents who are labeled “undesirable”. This a just a sampling — the literature in this field is rich and dense, and won’t be resolved in the space of a blog post.

Outside the academy, though, I suspect most of us blend together elements of both schools. We want our mechanisms of punishment to achieve social goals — make us safer, rehabilitate wrongdoers, recompense victims — while still staying at least tied to some rational conception of culpability.

One other function of punishment that I think sometimes gets elided in these categories is the function punishment serves of communicating social outrage. When we punish someone by, for example, sending them to prison, we are implicitly communicating a message by society that the behavior they were convicted of is deeply offensive and wrong to our communal sensibilities. The longer or harsher the punishment, the more outrage we are communicating. In its simplest form, I think this can be folded into a retributive model. The claim that X conduct “deserves” Y punishment is another way of communicating the degree the wrongdoer has deviated from communal norms, and our ensuing anger. You could argue that this expressive function of punishment also serves utilitarian ends in the form of social catharsis, or checking the potential for vigilante justice.

I don’t think this is per se invalid. One of the reasons I support hate crimes legislation is because I think it is important for society to send a message that such actions are not “taken in our name”, are not silently endorsed by the majority, but represent an egregious violation of community standards whose voice is communicated most clearly through law. But sometimes, the expressive element of punishment bursts beyond the constraints of either retributive or utilitarian considerations and takes on a life of its own.

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Trust me, we’ll all be in agreement about this former Arizonia Congressman.