I’m going to imagine “2012″ happens in the same universe as “The Ugly Truth,” so all those characters die horribly.

Dave Weigel

Consider this an open thread for you to share thoughts, self-promotion, and random bits of arcana.

Is there a “My mother was pro-choice” / “My mother is pro-choice” bumpersticker? And if not, why not?

I vaguely wish there were a “Sorry your mother was pro-life. My mother chose me” bumpersticker, but it’s too long, and there’s no way to make sure the snark would just reach those who deserve it with their asinine assumptions that the only way a woman would have a baby is if she didn’t believe she had any other option.

ETA: Oo, or for mothers, “Pro-choice: my children are wanted.”

But you wouldn’t want to put that out there because it would be cruel to the still-children kids of pro-life mothers who are old enough to process the implication they aren’t wanted, but not old enough to understand that the political point is about challenging preconceptions about pro-choice mothers. “Pro-choice and a mom” is probably better, if less amusingly snark-ridden. That’s got to already exist somewhere, right?

I don’t believe in “natural” rights. Rights are a human institution; those rights that aren’t institutionalized by humans don’t exist. The only rights I, or any of us, have, are the rights that are recognized by the society in which we live.

So I don’t think — for example — that same-sex couples have a right to equal treatment under the law when it comes to marriage, in most US states. They don’t. They should, and I think they will in my lifetime. But we’re not there yet.

When people speak of having rights that aren’t recognized by society, I can’t agree. Where would rights like that come from? From God, I suppose, but I don’t believe in God. From nature, one could say, if one has never ever watched a nature show in one’s life. If you have a right to live, and the government shoots you anyway, and there are no consequences for those who shot you, then in what meaningful sense did the right to live ever exist?

Of course, it can be powerful to speak as if there are rights that exist outside of human institutions. It’s a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy; if you say “I have a right to blah, and that right is being denied to me,” then that use of the rights rhetoric makes it more likely that someday you will have the right to blah. I acknowledge that speaking of rights that way can be useful. But I don’t think it’s accurate.

Illustration via TRG’s Flickr page.

I need to do a little self-promotion. This past Saturday, my colleague and friend Marcia McNair interviewed me about my book The Silence Of Men on her BlogTalk Radio show, The Power of Poetry. I hope you’ll give a listen.

Marcia is a perceptive reader and wonderful interviewer and her questions led me to see things in my poetry that I hadn’t seen before. My favorite part of the conversation was about the poem called “Working The Dotted Line,” which tells the story of the first time an old girlfriend and I had sex, and she was a virgin. What I liked best about Marcia’s reading of this piece was her noticing my mother’s presence in the poem and how that started me talking about something I often encounter but have never given much serious thought. Most of the men I know, even as adults, are deeply uncomfortable with their mother’s sexuality, and I don’t understand it. Or, to be more accurate, while I understand intellectually, I don’t get it emotionally. As well, they often it profoundly disturbing that I am not made uncomfortable not just by the idea of my mother as a sexual being, but by the fact that, when I was growing up, I knew–that she made no effort to hide the fact (though she certainly did not rub it in my face either)–that she had sexual relationships with at least some of the men she dated. I even knew that my mother would occasionally go to bars, or dancing, where men would try to pick her up, or where she might try to pick someone up herself, and it didn’t bother me. Indeed, it seemed to me perfectly natural. Why wouldn’t my mother, who was in her 30s at the time, go out and have a good time, and do things that other single 30-year-old women did when they socialized? My mother has been a single woman since I was around 12 years old, and I have always known that she had a sex life. More to the point, I have never expected her not to have one or to keep it hidden from me. I met all, or at least most (as far as I know), of the men she dated when I was growing up, and it never seemed strange to me or wrong or awkward that she should have men in her life or that I should know she was having sex with them. (Though it was often, I think, awkward for them.) I don’t really have much else to say about this for now, but it is something I want to write about, something I had never really thought to write about until Marcia brought it up. Here is the poem:

Working The Dotted Line

I don’t remember what vacation
I was home for, or how Beth
managed to be in New York
on the one day we’d have
the apartment to ourselves,
but I think I recall
my mother’s hanging crystals
scattering the afternoon sunlight
in small rainbows that shimmied
on the walls and on our skin,
and I can still see Beth stretching
nervous along the length
of the daybed’s mattress,
and my fingers tracing
the ridges of her ribs
as she tugged at my erection.
I’m ready. Let’s do it!

It was her first time, not mine,
but it was my first condom,
and I’d forgotten to read the directions,
so I stood there growing soft,
squinting at the print on the box
telling me the step-by-step
I needed to learn
was on the inside.
I ripped the cardboard open
and sat reading on the bed’s edge,
thumbing the foil-packed
lubricated circle,
trying to visualize
what I had to do.
Beth reached into my lap
to ready me again,
but when I tore along the dotted line,
our protection, like a goldfish
taken by hand from its bowl,
slipped from my grasp
and landed under the desk
my mother sat at
when she paid the bills.
When I picked it up,
it was covered with the dust
and small particles of dirt
that settle daily into all our lives,
so I didn’t put the next one on
till I was kneeling hard
between Beth’s open legs.
She raised herself on her elbows,
smiling that the second skin
we needed to keep us safe
should make me so clumsy,
but once I let go
of what the instructions called
the reservoir tip—I thought
of the dams holding water back
in the mountains near where she lived
and what would happen if they broke—
her smile disappeared
and bunching the sheet beneath her
into her fists, she lifted
her butt onto the pillow
we’d heard would make things easier.

I bent for a quick look
at where I had to go
and climbed up onto her,
trying with one hand
to be graceful and accurate
and with the other
to balance over her
without falling.
At her first grimace
I pulled back. No!
She shook her head, eyes
clamped shut and then
staring wide, her voice
a whisper through clenched teeth,
Just do it! Get it over with!

So I entered her again, trying
from the tightness in her face
to gauge how hard not to push,
but when she cried out anyway,
I left her body one more time
and crouched over her,
my latex-covered penis
nosing downward
towards her navel,
and I placed my palms
against her cheeks,
I cannot hurt you like this!

Look, it’s going to hurt, she said.
There’s no other way.
And I’ve chosen you!

And since I wanted so much to be her choice,
I kissed her eyelids and her mouth,
and with my eyes buried
in the hollow of her neck
moved slowly in
till I felt her flesh
stop giving way. Then,
with one arm around her rib cage
and the other around her head,
holding her tight against my chest,
I pulled down and thrust up
in a single motion I breathed through
like I was lifting heavy boxes.
She screamed into the muscle
just above my collar bone,
bit deep into my flesh,
and, as she bled onto me,
I bled.

We said nothing afterwards.
We didn’t cuddle
or smile at each other as we dressed
or walk hand in hand
to the train that took her home;
and I did not ask her
what her silence meant,
nor she mine, but if she had,
I would’ve told her this:
My wordlessness was shame.
I’d no idea how not to hurt her;
and I would’ve told her
I wanted it to do over,
which is what I’d tell her even now.

I linked to these a couple years ago when they were published, but the magazine’s website seems to be down. So, here they are in a blog entry. Happy Halloween (in a couple days)!

i.

Gwennie the good-hearted ghoul
did her best to avoid being cruel.
She offered to mate
with the men that she ate
and then let them drown in their drool.

ii.

Nanette the near-sighted ghost
was frequently witnessed to boast
that her spectral sneer
froze mortals with fear.
In fact, she was haunting a post.

iii.

Maureen the malingering mummy
felt aches in her kidneys and tummy.
“I feel pale and drawn,
but my organs are gone!
So why do I still feel so crummy?”

Said her doctor: “In matters of health,
the issue’s not absence, but wealth.
You’ve got too much time
to moan, groan and whine.
You’re too wrapped up in yourself.”

My brief, light-hearted fantasy story “Great, Golden Wings” is available on Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Check it out, if you like. I’m told it will also be available in audio soon.

Lady Percivalia watched the young cinematographist’s hands as he set up his equipment. They were narrow and graceful, dusted with pale-colored hair. His limber fingers moved rapidly as he angled his screens and adjusted his projectors.

Beside Lady Percivalia, the Lady Harrah gave a dramatic sigh. She sank back in her chair, fluttering her lashes, her face arrayed to look attractively ill. Lady Harrah was well-known for feigning such attacks of faintness. They’d won her the attentions of several young men who, while not known for their intelligence, were smart enough to seize the opportunity for getting close to a distressed young woman with a heaving bosom. Unfortunately, Lady Harrah’s best efforts had failed to make any impression on the cinematographist.

Lady Harrah enjoyed a miraculous recovery from her faint. She leaned over to Lady Percivalia. “Watch this,” she whispered. “I’ll get his attention.”

She unpinned a dragonet brooch that adorned her ruffled bodice and tapped its head. The intricate gold carving blinked into a semblance of life. It stretched like a waking cat and flew brightly into the air, a whir of jeweled wings. It caught the cinematographist’s sleeve in its jaws and tugged politely.

Sorry for the delay in this week’s dollhouse episode. I’ve been a bit busy, and this was a solid episode. Not so world-changing that I had to spend the next three days searching for superlatives, or so incompetent that I was instantly driven to rant. Just solid. I think in some ways it proves that Dollhouse can have solid Engagement of the week episodes, so I was wrong last week.

So for those who haven’t been following dollhouse ratings from the edge of your seats – the news has been all over the place. The episodes were appalling, they were better but still awful, Fox was going to pull it, Fox was committed to making and airing all 13 episodes, Fox had confirmed airdates for the next 5 episodes

Well four days or so after that good news Fox has announced that they’re not airing Dollhouse during sweeps, but instead they’re airing double episodes through December. This means I’m going to be in withdrawl all through November, and also I’m grumpy. If anyone out there has a Nielson box, the offer is still on for a very small bribe.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m looking for non-fiction about Mars, or possibly fiction that’s as educational as non-fiction. Please leave your suggestions!

A few choice quotes

What he was accused of is not only considered rape because she was underage, and not only because he gave her drugs and alcohol to set it up, but also because he did it while she was saying no and telling him to stop.

There’s nothing ambiguous about that.

That is an account of a rape.

And

This plea bargain was set up by the family and their attorneys because they saw no other way to protect this girl from a trial that would take away her anonymity and subject her to an endless media frenzy. They did not set up that plea bargain because they had any doubts about being able to prove her original charges. They set up the plea bargain because they saw a system that could not adequately protect this child, so they felt that they had no other choice but to compromise and settle for something less than justice.

In the way he always does, Jay lays things out incredibly clearly, and absolutely demolishes every single objection from Polanski’s supporters.

Basically, what it comes down to is that Jay Smooth is a badass and Roman Polanski is a jackass.

Oh, sorry, I meant rapist.

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

Reprinted from Therinth, a burn ward RN.

Having spent the past twelve hours hanging out with a bipolar person in their full blown manic state, i’d like to make a few comments. And i’m making this post public, unlike most of them here.

(Perhaps them being manic wore off on me some, because i can’t get to sleep without saying some of these things.)

I watched the first 30 mins of the first episode of House for this season. Let me list the ways this show is wrong: House attacks another pt, and is still bunked with that pt, and not moved to the violent psych ward with people who are manic with a side of stabby. They give House haldol. Haldol by mouth is like the unicorn. NO ONE HAS EVER SEEN IT. If someone’s fighting you, you think you’re going to stick your finger in their mouth to give them a pill where they can bite you, and/or spit out the pills, or cheek them? No. Haldol is an IV/IM drug. House’s manic buddy, who helps him out, is mildly plausible as a character, until he starts…helping House out. Rhyming, yes, too much energy, yes. Annoying? Hell yes. Responsible enough to help someone else follow through on a plot? Oh hell no.

And also, the time he’s cuffed, no one is in the room with him, that’s UNLIKELY, given restraint laws these days, and when he’s in solitary…for reals? That room is *that* white? No fucking way. Not a single stain of shit, piss or blood? Unnnnnnnnnnlikely, my friends.

House is usually enjoyable enough that i can suspend my disbelief. But if i’m going to keep watching, the next hour had better have him have his ass back in the hospital, where i can merely smirk at the thought of doctors hanging IV meds.

So, while i’m babysitting this patient, stopping him from picking off all of his dressings with continual reorintation and redirection, what plays in the background? That new medical show, Three Rivers.

Gah. I didn’t pay attention to the whole thing. I didn’t have to. What i heard was enough. The part where someone who doesn’t have insurance (and isn’t even an American?) needs a transplant. The doctor smugly tells some secondary character that, “You’ll find a way…” implying that somewhere there’s a loophole big enough to drive that truck through. I’m sure by the end of the episode it happened — someone reached up their rectum, and found a quarter of a million dollars that they didn’t know was there to fund the operation.

I hazard a guess that this is what is wrong with America’s interpretation of their current healthcare system. Perhaps, not having recently been ill, or having always been well monied, you’ve never pondered what typical medical care is like, or how much it all might cost, were you without insurance. You think it’s all like it looks on TV. And even if the worst does come to pass, and you’ve blown through one liver and need a new one, well, surely someone will break some rules for you, too.

No.

You lose your job, find out you need coverage for cancer-car-wreck-diabetes-your baby-can’t-breathe the next day?

You’re fucked. (Unless you pay into Cobra’s outrageous system. And when that runs out? Still fucked.)

You never had a job with health insurance?

Way fucked.

While i’m so very damn proud of my profession, i believe we cannot continue to go honorably on. Not when the real deal is that people are denied care every day because of situations they cannot control. Even if they could control them — they shouldn’t be denied.

There’s no Dr House or Grey’s Anatomy blowhard who is going to come down from on high to save you on your worst day, no matter how much TV you have viewed.

You’re one job away from losing it all, or going bankrupt to pay for it. Not only you, but your children, your parents, your neighbors. (All you people who are getting by on Medicare, get off my fucking lawn unless you see the irony in the care that you receive.)

We need a public option. We needed it yesterday. We sure as hell need it tomorrow.

Please, if there’s anyone you can talk to about this, do so. Get the word out. We are all in this together, honest to fucking god, as humans on this planet, as Americans, as people who at the very least should have the wisdom and self preservation to hope their nannies and dishwashers won’t have untreated TB.

I have conservative friends who argue that it’s unfair of the left to paint them all as a bunch of tea-party-attending, Glen-Beck-listening yahoos. They argue that conservatism has a rich intellectual foundation, and that by cherry picking their worst-sounding supporters, we willfully ignore the writers today who uphold that intellectual foundation.

Writers like the folks at The National Review.

Writers like John Derbyshire¹.

Why do I bring this up? Well, its just that as Faiz Shakir points out over at Think Progress, John Derbyshire went on Alan Colmes’ radio show yesterday and took a stand against female suffrage.

DERBYSHIRE: Among the hopes that I do not realistically nurse is the hope that female suffrage will be repealed. But I’ll say this – if it were to be, I wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep.

COLMES: We’d be a better country if women didn’t vote?

DERBYSHIRE: Probably. Don’t you think so?

COLMES: No, I do not think so whatsoever.

DERBYSHIRE: Come on Alan. Come clean here [laughing].

COLMES: We would be a better country? John Derbyshire making the statement, we would be a better country if women did not vote.

DERBYSHIRE: Yeah, probably.

Okay, so that’s bad enough, but Alan Colmes, rightly gobsmacked by this, next asked

COLMES: What’s next, you want to bring back slavery?

DERBYSHIRE: No. No, I’m in favor of freedom, personally.

COLMES: But women shouldn’t have the freedom to vote?

DERBYSHIRE: Well, they didn’t and we got on along ok.

He goes on to argue against The Civil Rights Act of 1964. Of course.

Anyhow, all this illustrates two things for me.

First, it really perfectly encapsulates the strange sort of doublethink you see in conservative political philosophy all the time.

“We believe in individualism! (Just so long as you don’t have sex in ways we disapprove of.)”

“We believe in freedom! (As long as people who disagree with us are not allowed to vote.)”

“We believe in free speech! (But people who criticize the (Republican) president should watch their goddamn mouths.)”

You see this a lot in discussions about economics, where the argument is that government intervention and collective solutions are illegitimate (not just wrong, mind you), no matter how much of the electorate is in favor of them. You see it in the faux-troversies about President Obama’s legitimacy. You see it in Glenn Beck’s rhetoric about how ‘real Americans’ are opposed to President Obama, despite him having won the presidency by an overwhelming majority ². You see it in the analysis we hear every election about how “if it weren’t for the African-American vote, Democrats would be a permanent minority party³ ”

The central idea is this: If you disagree with them, you ought not be allowed to participate in the democratic process in the first place. I contrast this with the way the liberal ACLU operates, fighting for the free speech rights of white supremacists and the religious rights of fundamentalists, both groups who are not (to put it mildly) their ‘core constituency’.

‘Rights for all,’ versus ‘rights for the people who agree with me.’ That’s the difference.

Hell, John Derbyshire makes no bones about it! He says outright, “The conservative case against [female suffrage] is that women lean hard to the left.” That’s not an argument. That’s thuggery.

Anyhow, that’s the first thing I took from it.

The second thing I took away is that when people talk about the rich intellectual tradition of Conservatism, it’s guys like John Derbyshire they’re talking about, so … jeez … maybe they mean something different by ‘intellectual?’

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

1. Who, as Andrew Sullivan ably documents, continues to believe that gay people are all child molesters. Or at least enough where we shouldn’t let them around our children, best to be safe, etc, etc, etc. (back)
2. And the Democrats having won both houses! (back)
3. Hey look, here’s an example or two from a while back. (back)

From a neurologist’s blog:

Dear President Obama,

I’m writing to you for the first time.

I don’t want this to be a political blog. There are plenty of other sites for that. But we now face a national crisis of such serious proportions that it dwarfs other issues, such as global warming, health care, and middle-east peace. It now threatens the very fabric of our society, and directly affects every citizen. And I can remain silent no longer.

It’s still September, and every store near me ALREADY HAS THEIR CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS UP!

I have nothing against the holidays, Mr. President. Peace on Earth and all that stuff. But moving them up as if they were being held in another time-zone or alternate universe is getting out-of-hand. As far as I know, Christmas hasn’t budged in my lifetime. And treating every day like it was Christmas (like the stores seem to want me to do) is not helping.

The well-respected Nick documentary program, The Fairly Oddparents, has carefully researched what would happen if Christmas were held every day (Episode 107, air date 12-12-01 I have kids, OKAY!). Their conclusion? It would be catastrophic.

More.

This panel should be very interesting and, given what’s been going on in Iran and the new protests that took place there yesterday, I think it’s a good time to learn more about Iranian culture. If you’re in NY, I hope you’ll come.

THE PHILOCTETES CENTER FOR THE MULTIDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF IMAGINATION
at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute
(EDWARD NERSESSIAN AND FRANCIS LEVY, DIRECTORS)

invites you to a Poetry Reading & Discussion
Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 7:00pm
at
The Philoctetes Center
247 East 82nd Street
(Phone: 646-422-0544; email: info@philoctetes.org)

This event is free and open to the public.

Persian Poetry: Origins, Translations, and Influences

This reading and discussion among five distinguished Persian poets and translators will begin by touching on the two-thousand year history of poetry in Iran. Panelists will highlight the significance of such classical masters as Sa’di, Hafez, Rumi, and Omar Khayyam, as well as contemporary Iranian poets like Nima Youshij and Forough Farrokhzad. Special attention will be given to what often gets lost in English translation. The poets will consider how their understanding of Persian verse and culture, from its origins in Iran, influences the poetry they and others write in English.

Iraj Anvar is the translator and editor of Jalal al Din Rumi’s Divani-I Shams-I Tabriz: Forty Eight Ghazals of Rumi. He has been a leader of the New York Ava Ensemble, which is dedicated to promoting traditional Persian music and performing classical Persian poetry.

Here’s what I want: A program which will keep track of both my twitter feed and my facebook feed, with pop-up notifications to let me know when one of my friends posts something new. And that pop-up should have useful information, along the lines of “Kip just tweeted: Blah blah blah blabbity blah blah…”

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be such a program out there. At least, not one I’ve found.

Twhirl: Perfect, except it doesn’t cover Feedbook. But since my sister, aunt, brother-in-law, high school buddy, and several others I know use Feedbook and not Twitter, I really want Feedbook included.

bDule: The pop-ups notifications are worthless. It says “1 New Message For Barry Deutsch,” but doesn’t tell me who the message is from, let alone what the message contains. I don’t want to have to stop drawing in Photoshop and open up a different program to see what the message is. If I was willing to do that, I could just use my browser and visit twitter and facebook directly. The whole point, for me, is to keep track of what my friends are up to without interrupting my work.

Tweetdeck has the same problem as bDule. Which is a shame, because if they only had good pop-up info, they’d be the best two programs I’ve tried.

Add Seesmic to the list of good programs with useless notifications. (Apparently having a notification that says something useful is more difficult to do than I’d imagined.)

AlertThingy has the best name, and comes the closest to being what I want. But it’s programming feels a bit clunkly compared to others; for example, there’s no obvious way to get it to show me tweets directed to me from people I’m not watching. The biggest problem is the flickering. AlertThingy’s pop-ups flicker, and — worse — when AlertThingy is running, Photoshop’s menus and “crawling ants” flicker. If I kept this program, I’d eventually be forced to gouge out my eyes in self-defense.

Guess I’ll try Digsby next, although it does a lot more than I’m looking for, which means it might be a memory hog. Feedalizr is another possibility, as is Peoplebrowsr. And Skimmer.

If anyone has a suggested program for me, please post it in the comments.

UPDATE: Tried Feedalizr. Although it claims to be connected to the Facebook account, I don’t see any Facebook updates. Nor does there seem to be any way to see replies sent to me by people I don’t follow. So I guess I’ll try another program.

UPDATE THE SECOND: We have a winner! Digsby turns out to have pretty much everything I want. And because it doesn’t use Adobe Air (or whatever that’s called), it uses less memory than almost all the other programs do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.

Consider this an open thread.

I read aloud a short story for Podcastle: “Hall of Mirrors” by Bruce Holland Rogers. It’s a funny piece, and only about 14 minutes long.

This is the third story I’ve read for Podcastle. Previously, I’ve read “On The Banks of the River of Heaven,” by Richard Parks, and “Gordon, the Self-Made Cat,” by Peter Beagle.

Podcastle is edited by Rachel Swirsky, who in her secret identity as Mandolin is a blogger and moderator here at “Alas.”

Strange Horizons is an online magazine that publishes short stories, poetry, art, and articles. Part of their mission is to increase diversity in the publishing sphere, which includes getting work out there by women, people of color, and people on the LGBTQQI spectrum.

They’ve published The Angry Black Woman and they’ve published Nojojojo. They publish other kick-ass people who you should read, too.

Strange Horizons is in the middle of its annual fund drive so that it can continue offering excellent free fiction to the public. They’re struggling a bit this year — they’ve just reached $1,500 of their $7,000 goal. John Scalzi has stepped into the ring to offer matching donations up to $500 if you donate before midnight today.

I’ve thrown in $20. I hope you’ll consider donating, too, if you have the means. And whether or not you donate, I hope you enjoy the excellent, mind-bending fiction in their archives.

Link to the Strange Horizons fund drive.

I think this speaks for itself. Note: I have replaced the YouTube version with the version from NBC’s website.