ignoblus, for the moment

Bananas and Lacunas

2012-01-27T23:32:00.003-05:00

This post from Jeffrey Goldberg, in which he zeroes in on an incredibly remarkable passage in an interview:

Pierre Sauvage: The biggest lie is that we didn't know. It's possible, I suppose, for some rancher in Montana who wasn't reading the press or listening to the radio maybe not to know. But it was massively present. God, this question goes in so many directions. When you think of movies that come out, like Woody Allen's Radio Days. What is Woody Allen's Radio Days about? A happy childhood in Brooklyn, in a Jewish family, during the years of the Holocaust. Lost in Yonkers, which is a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Neil Simon about nothing to do with the Holocaust. Wonderful play, by the way. It's like Hitler is totally removed from their frame of reference. This is nonsense. This is absolute nonsense. Woody Allen's parents--Woody may not realize it--but Woody Allen's parents were in their bedroom scared to death what was happening to their relatives in Europe. So, that is the biggest lie.

Go read the whole interview.

In a press

2012-01-19T20:15:00.000-05:00

I pretty much agree with David here.

I've noted before that, my general affinity for J Street notwithstanding, one thing I do not like is their "mushiness" on anti-Semitism. They really seem either uninterested or incapable of taking a strong stand on the issue, and it is really alienating. I've written about the serious problems with the "dual loyalties" charge even on a conceptual level, but in a sense I'm even more concerned about Ben-Ami's demand that Jewish groups "tread lightly" in talking about anti-Semitism.

In fact, I find myself feeling increasingly alienated from the Left.

Jeremy Ben-Ami said that if Jews talk about antisemitism too much, "when they do need to use that word [antisemitism], people won’t take you seriously." So in order to be taken seriously regarding antisemitism, Jews must not talk about antisemitism. Catch-22.

I don't think many non-Jews understand how powerfully this acts on Jews or how it actually plays out. We must balance the fear of present antisemitism with the fear of more distant (but possibly worse antisemitism). We "save it up" for something really, really bad. But, of course, that strategy simply allows antisemitism to flourish until it's too late when we finally do speak out, doesn't it? In the meantime, the psychological pressure to talk/not talk really does a lot of work.

But all of us have somewhat different ideas of what's "really, really bad." Maybe some of us are more optimistic about the future, so we find it more important to fight the antisemitism right before us. Others, more anxious about the future, perhaps find it harder to speak out today. Maybe some of us laugh off strongly racialist antisemitism but find conspiracist antisemitism far scarier. There's too many complications to really try to analyze how we decide what's more important, but we can talk about the effects with more certainty. It's part of why certain conversations can get so heated so quickly.

And it's part of why non-Jews can manipulate the conversation so easily, by pitting some Jews against others. In contrast to the view some people have of antisemitism as sporadic violence, I see a system of levers that non-Jews use to colonize Jewish communities constantly, punctuated by massive violence. I find this mushiness absolutely frightening.

Persian Jewry

2012-01-05T21:41:00.000-05:00

This story from Tablet is worth reading.

For centuries, Persian Jews marked the holiday of Purim by traveling to the shrine in Hamadan. There they were often joined by Christian and Muslim supplicants seeking divine cures to infertility and other human ailments.... The memories of Persian Jews born in Iran are increasingly all that remain of their heritage. The Hamadan shrine is not the only site at risk of destruction. In April 2008, for example, seven ancient synagogues in Tehran’s historically Jewish Oudlajan district were razed to make way for high-rise developments.

Either/Or

2011-11-09T01:57:00.000-05:00

Yes, this is serious. Yes, it is structural. When you're talking about protesting at Hillel, you're not protesting Israel. You're protesting the rights of Jews to have a Jewish life on campus. When you protest at a JCC, you're actually protesting the rights of Jews to have a Jewish life. For anyone who couldn't guess, "CC" stands for "community center." The fact that the majority of people there have politics you don't share is not enough reason. There are good reasons the majority of people at any random Jewish Community Center have the politics in question.

No, I don't see Occupy Judaism dealing with it. That's why I couldn't sign the pledge from Occupy Judaism (a Jewish movement within OWS), which read, in part: "We are committed to keeping Occupy Wall Street free of anti-Semitism and other forms of oppression. We are committed to holding accountable those who would attempt to discredit Occupy Wall Street with unfounded allegations of anti-Semitism." It's not that there haven't been plainly outrageous claims made by right-wingers about OWS -- it's that there's no room to talk about actual antisemitism. The bit about keeping OWS free of antisemitism is, in practice, mostly refusing to see it. I have supported OWS, and I'd love to embrace it more fully, but I can't until there is real space to talk about antisemitism.

Occupy Wall Street: a bleg

2011-10-11T00:04:00.000-04:00

Not exactly a full post here, but I was at the Kol Nidre service at Occupy Wall Street and found it incredibly moving. However, I have some fears ans skepticism regarding the protests. For one, Adbusters is involved. And I'd noticed a peculiar absence of reference to the Israeli Tent City protests. According to one activist who was involved in both, the

“There is some hesitancy with proclaiming to be in solidarity with the tent protests in Tel Aviv, because there has not been a direct call from those protests to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine,” said Ari Cowan, 21, who said on September 26 that he had slept in the plaza all but two of the nine nights of the occupation.
The complaint, which is not uncommon, is one for which Eidelman has little patience.
“To look at a social movement only through the prism of the Palestinian struggle, that’s very limiting,” Eidelman said. “What do you expect, we’re going to change the whole system in two months?”

So the protesters in New York refuse to look at Israelis, even anti-Zionists, through any other lense. Can you imagine how I, a avowed Zionist, would be treated? Well, there are plans to build a sukkah at OWS. I have every intention of going to show support for the protest through a specifically Jewish lense. The protesters deserve support, but they can and need to do better. With that, I thought I'd bring copies for the OWS library of: the Forward article above, April Rosenblum's pamphlet, "The Past Didn't Go Anywhere," and Steve Cohen's "That's Funny, You don't look antisemitic." Any ideas on other materials? Maybe the Emma Goldman letter here?

Again, on broad definitions of racism

2011-07-14T02:22:00.003-04:00

I disagree with these two posts, but the comments on both are well worth reading.

Like Phoebe, "I do not gasp in horror when Palestinians adopt the symbolism or vocabulary of sinister, old-school, Western anti-Semitism, or if they condemn Jews and not just Israel/Israelis." At least not most of the time.. Sometimes I'm startled by just how blatant and extreme it is (which is meaningful even if, per Phoebe, we take it as an attempt to coral the prejudices of others rather than as some more essential quality of the speaker), but often I just feel sad. What usually bothers me in a more immediate way is when Western "allies" take up the same antisemitic tropes (and there are more than enough people who are far too uncritical of Palestinian claims to keep me busy if I wanted to make that my sole focus) or when Arab or Muslim leaders who have more actual power in global relations (such as Ahmadinejad) do so. And I completely agree that we need to find better ways to recognize the legitimate interests of both sides, which I think is the major point of the posts. When we call a speaker racist (as opposed to their speech), it typically means that that speaker should be banned from the discourse because their presence is unproductive. If we ban too many Palestinians or too many Jews, we wind up completely disrupting the discourse in a way that is certainly unproductive, because there's no one left to convince. A conversation between Nonie Darwish (who harbors no antisemitism whatsoever) and Richard Silverstein (who harbors no anti-Palestinian prejudices whatsoever) would be plain dumb and would not adequately represent the legitimate claims of either side. Further, since few people would be evenhanded in banning speakers on both sides, we might introduce a bias that probably ought to be called racist. Still, I disagree with Phoebe over whether it's useful to call certain behaviors by Palestinians or Jews "racist." She distinguishes very clearly between the immediate actors and outsiders, and I think that distinction is worth preserving.. but not by banishing terms like "racism." For starters, I don't think the distinction she seeks to make works. We can distinguish between actors on the basis of their role in the conflict, but why should we distinguish between the claims of different actors on that basis when the claims are identical? And while we might seek to be inclusive of a variety of perspectives and actors in our conversation, that doesn't mean that all claims are equal in that conversation. In short, I don't think it's often useful to think of racism as a matter of intent or as an exercise into soul divination.

Often, I go back to the 1929 Hebron Massacre. (Phoebe talks about the "ultimate" cause being about land, so lets go back in time.) Palestinian leaders spread a rumor that Jews were massacring Palestinians in Jerusalem. Palestinians (enough) in Hebron chose to believe that rumor because they were willing to believe almost anything about Jews, and they chose to respond by killing Jews. Ultimately, it was about preventing Jewish immigration and the possibility of Jews forming a state when Palestinians, themselves suffering under British colonialism, wished the land for their own state. The Palestinians sought to frighten Jews away and to force the hands of the British (who, we shouldn't forget, had actual control over immigration but prioritized keeping the peace and keeping control). But I look at how Jews were prevented from immigrating to so many places, and I feel I must understand this (together with the sad story of the MS St. Louis, the Evian Conference, and plenty of other stories for which the whole world bear responsibility) as a part of the murder of 6 million. I can't not call that privilege. I can't not call that racism. I think I can understand how Palestinians might have thought their cause (not their methods) was just, but that doesn't mean agreeing that their cause was just. Isn't that indifference to the lives of Others, evidenced in restricting immigration, the very heart of privilege? And isn't privilege just a different perspective on racism?

Defining Antisemitism broadly

2011-06-20T06:08:00.000-04:00

A good piece over at Flesh is Grass (and not just because she quotes a comment of mine). (via Bob.)

It's commonplace in anti-racism that racism should be broadly defined, focused on the impact on minorities rather than the "soul" of the racist. Racism against Blacks in America cannot be reduced to slavery. It's also when people say, "I don't hate Blacks, just N*****s." Yet it's an unfortunate commonplace that antisemitism is treated differently. The EUMC definition of antisemitism is like any definition of racism that focuses on the specific tropes of racist discourse, which is to say it's limited but useful for what it is. We need elaborations of stereotypes and disingenuous arguments that have already been repeatedly addressed. That's why people keep making bingo cards, like this one. That's why definitions of racism are "working definitions."

Now treating antisemitism differently. That's racist.

links

2011-06-07T23:55:00.001-04:00

I really like this piece at Lilith blog:

There are rules, somewhere, about how to be a Chasid on an airplane. In that same rulebook there are most likely also a set of behavioral norms for a woman in stretch pants lying about in the back of the plane.

________
Palestinian protesters at a Syrian refugee camp, mourning the loss of life in the protest at the Israeli border, blamed the PFLP. Palestinian leaders responded by killing 14 of the Palestinian mourners. (From Rebecca. If "Yom ha-Naksa is her phrase, kudos.)

________
Ameinu posted this on Facebook. I should have checked the byline before spending so much time pondering the resurrection of that bizarre calumny about Hamas: that they were prepared to implicitly recognize Israel. (Hamas spokesmen denied the charge repeatedly, but certain left-wing journalists continued anyway to put words into their mouths.) However, this is Robert Fisk quoting Munib Masri on Khaled Meshaal. If the quote is delivered accurately, there's just a touch of interpretation to muck up:

"The only thing we didn’t get from Meshaal was that the government has to be by agreement. We told him the government has to be of natiuonal [sic] unity -- on the agreement that we would be able to carry out elections and lift the embargo on Gaza and reconstruct Gaza, that we have to abide by international law, by the UN Charter and UN resolutions. He asked for three or four days. He agreed that resistance must only be ‘in the national interest of the country’ – it would have to be ‘aqlaqi’ – ethical. There would be no more rocket attacks on civilians. In other words, no more rocket attacks from Gaza."

If I read it correctly, the end of rocket attacks is conditioned on the reconstruction of Gaza but ultimately based on the principle that the government of a Palestinian state would have to have a monopoly on violence. One thing I haven't seen discussed is that if there is a Palestinian state, with Hamas in a unity government, and Hamas launches a rocket, then that would probably be seen as an act of war rather than an act of terrorism. It would be tough to claim international law in criticizing Israel's response. If Hamas is willing to operate within the constraints of human rights law, even conditionally, and intra-Palestinian talks recognized the importance of this for the legitimacy of a Palestinian state, that's a big step forward.

________
I only caught a few minutes of this so far, but I'll be listening to it soon. The title of this book about Iran is clearly a reference to that famous German poem, "First they came for the Communists..." That's most likely going to be interesting (or blasphemous, but given the radio show it was on, I'm expecting interesting).

AsAJews in MoveOverAIPAC

2011-05-25T14:40:00.001-04:00

Adam Holland reports that "As a Jew" protesters are "heckling" an AIPAC event. I think there are a few things worth being clear on.

Jews, even those with fairly weak Jewish identities, have every right to protest at AIPAC. In fact, it's exactly the right place for them to do so. AIPAC is a more-or-less democratic organization. Its members are Jewish organizations rather than individuals. Orthodox groups are over-represented. And it uses a flawed model of consensus which is organized around that which every member group, from the far-right ZOA to leftists like Meretz USA and Ameinu, can agree on. That consensus is then pitched in a rightward direction by the leadership, which I think is in small part because of the over-representation of Orthodox groups and (this next bit is important) in large part because that's what sells with non-Jewish, American politicians. Despite those flaws, it's still an organization that has a valid claim to represent a large portion of American Jews (and in which leftist Jews can be heard). I want Jews protesting inside AIPAC so that it better represents the American Jewish community.

However, when Jews leverage the power of the dominant, non-Jewish society rather than working inside the Jewish community, and they do so "As a Jew," then there's a problem in that it disrupts the voices of other Jews. These protests are being organized by Move Over AIPAC, which isn't a Jewish organization. That, I have a major problem with -- mainly with those gentiles who refuse to engage the whole of the Jewish community. Overall, it diminishes the power of Jews in society.

To those Jews who protest against AIPAC in good faith, I ask, "Have you tried Meretz?" (Here's their blog.) To those non-Jews protesting, my words would be less kind.

Creepy

2011-05-01T16:12:00.000-04:00

Christian women with Jewish Jewelry

Football (soccer) chants

2011-04-15T15:32:00.000-04:00

It's about time people started to take this more seriously. As near as I can tell, though, there are no Jews in the video. That could have been better.

Bris

2011-01-12T23:38:00.000-05:00

Today we had a bris for my son. Not the big family-type event, since my Korean wife doesn't want non-family visitors for another two weeks, according to Korean custom. But her sister and a 9-year-old niece are here to help. It was really a moving ceremony, to welcome him to this world and to the Jewish people.

Announcement

2011-01-08T13:31:00.001-05:00

Ok, so I just had a baby boy. Born Wednesday at 12:53 pm, 8 lbs, 5 oz. Don't know what this means here yet.

Muzzlewatch on Alison Weir

2010-12-27T23:35:00.000-05:00

For various reasons I decided to look up Muzzlewatch's response to Alison Weir. You know, Alison Weir who promoted the Blood Libel in the online Lefty mag, Counterpunch? And I found... nothing. You know, since they claim to take antisemitism seriously, you'd think JVP might have mentioned it. So what about jewishvoiceforpeace.org, since Muzzlewatch is a sub-project? Still nothing. So while they try to position themselves as somehow middle of the road (Just like Michael Steele) let's dispense with that.

Or does someone else have a case of blatant antisemitism that they'd like to check out? Has JVP spoken out against something else? Let me know.

Allies? What allies?

2010-12-15T19:06:00.002-05:00

There's a section from April Rosenblum's "The Past Didn't Go Anywhere":

Our political decisions are also affected. Historical attitudes toward Jews taught us to believe our own struggle was not worthwhile. Gentile European intellectuals, including thinkers who heavily influenced the Left, like Hegel, taught that Jews were a people ‘outside’ of history; prominent theories held that because Jews had no land of our own, we were a deformed group without a role to play in history and revolution. In addition, much developing revolutionary theory saw the groups that mattered in creating social change as the industrial laborers or peasants. But European Jews, having been excluded from many traditional trades, often didn’t fit neatly into those categories. From both directions, Jews learned we didn’t matter; our only meaningful role in
changing the world would be supporting other peoples’ struggles; in making ourselves useful. All this has compounded the biggest piece of internalized antisemitism: After centuries of experiencing other people not coming to our defense when we were targeted by violence and persecution, Jews have internalized the idea that there’s no hope of getting other people to stand with us. For Jews who struggle for social justice, that means we often stay quiet about anti-Jewish oppression: We learn to fight in support of other groups without requesting the solidarity we, ourselves, need. For Jewish communities, it means we lose sight of building a strategy for our liberation by finding allies in other grassroots communities. Instead, we depend on those in power, hoping that if we are useful to them, they will protect us. At times that leads us to cooperate in the oppression of others.

Well, leftists are still defining oppression to exclude anti-Jewish oppression. Has any anti-racist group, blog, or individual of note talked about Glenn Beck's "expose" on George Soros, "The Puppermaster"? Because, that would be the sort of prominent, classically conspiracist, right-wing antisemitism that I would think would make an easy target for anyone who cared about antisemitism even just a little. But while I've seen plenty about it from Jewish groups and individuals (all the way from the ADL to Jewish Funds for Justice), I've seen nothing from the anti-racist discourse I follow most closely. Am I missing something?

For that matter, nothing about Howard Jacobson winning the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question. Of course, nothing on Ahmadinejad saying that Wikileaks was a Zionist conspiracy. Frankly, nothing at all, except when Jews are being criticized for not being white or for not being good enough allies to other people. If it were one story here or there, it would be one thing, but it's terribly consistent, and the failure to even mention Beck's antisemitism just really highlights how completely Jews are ignored by so many "anti-oppression" activists. A lot of anti-racists seem to see no problem with completely erasing Jews. If there's a criticism of Rosenblum I'd make here, it's that the lack of hope for real, consistent allies isn't so much a bit of internalized antisemitism so much as an honest assessment of continuing realities.

(And if anyone wonders why some Jews might turn to "Christian Zionists" for support, stop wondering.)

The no-true-liberal fallacy

2010-12-03T12:42:00.000-05:00

Perhaps it's a variation of the no-true-Scotsman fallacy, but there's something that's been bothering me for a while. That's the claim that lots of liberal Jews are liberal except when it comes to Israel. That's the premise of this piece at +972 by Jerry Haber (and posted to Facebook by Meretz USA), titled "Zionist, Yes; Progressive, Maybe."

But when push comes to shove, many progressive Zionists I know will let their Zionism trump their progressiveness. As one pointed out to me, the State of Israel is the bedrock of their Jewish identity. So while they can conceive a tactical compromise on their progressive values, they cannot countenance any move by any third party that will have the slightest negative effect on Israel

But, of course, lots of liberals are pro-Israel precisely because they're liberal (or even, like me, Leftist). Haber's piece could easily be turned around as "Critic of Israel, Yes; Progressive, Maybe." I'm not sure what's meant here by "the State of Israel is the bedrock of their Jewish identity" -- I might say that Israel provides self-determination on which is based my ability to speak to my Jewish identity and on behalf of my Jewish identity in the public sphere with somewhat less fear, making my political rights more practical and not merely theoretical, but I don't think that's entirely what's meant here -- but let's take it for granted that the State of Israel is indeed the bedrock of Jewish identity for a great many Jews, enough that it is a meaningful example. Then I have to ask what is progressive about denying an oppressed minority their identity? Indeed, isn't that the basis for many of the criticisms of Israel's claim to be a Jewish state - that it denies its Palestinian minority their identity?

But why will they sit in coalitions with the likes of ZOA, but not with the likes of JVP?

I'm in no position to sit in coalition with the ZOA or anyone else, but I will happily and loudly say that I despise them. I can think of no reason more significant than historical accident that the ZOA should be part of AIPAC while JVP isn't. But I'm no fan of JVP, either, because I believe they traduce my rights. Since when is "stop playing the race card" a progressive argument? True progressives -see what I did there- recognize that the race-card-card always trumps the race-card, and that "Stop playing The Race Card™" is constantly used to derail discussions about race and racism. Supposedly some powerful trump card, The Race Card™ is more like the 2 of clubs. Yet this is the basis of JVP's Muzzlewatch website. JVP claims to take antisemitism seriously, but when have they ever said, "now that's some serious antisemitism"? I would take them more seriously if they were to also point out when pro-Israel arguments or discussions about antisemitism were muzzled by, for example:

Is it too much to ask from progressive Zionists in the US to emulate their Israeli brothers and sisters and, at the very least, not diss JVP in public?

Now, of course, Haber does say:

Of course, I have my red lines; I wouldn't join a coalition with Neo-Nazis Against the Occupation.

But, of course, any anti-racist with more than an hour's experience talking with racists knows how quickly they start saying, "I'm not a Klansman or a neo-Nazi." Usually, they start the conversation with "Now, I'm no racist, but..." Again, this is Anti-Racism 101: Racism is more than just the extreme edge that most people easily recognize as racist. I will not abandon these lessons and principles just so that Jerry Haber can accept me as a liberal in good standing.

If Haber wants to broaden the debate, rather than chastising Jews with good, solid, leftist reasons for supporting Israel as a bulwark against antisemitism, he would do better to acknowledge what is right in what they say. He would do better to say that broad coalitions provide relationships in which it is easier to criticize than to say that we shouldn't criticize. And if I'm more likely to sit down with someone too anti-Palestinian than to sit down with Haber, it may be because it's Haber who wants me to keep quiet.

Gut Yontif

2010-12-01T13:25:00.001-05:00

Hannukah was the only Jewish holiday I ever celebrated as a kid. Twice, with paper napkins on our heads since we had no yarmulkes or prayer shawls. Often, really often, I would hear Jews say that it's "not even that important a holiday" when someone else talked about how important it was to say "Happy Holidays" or something equally inclusive. I'd briefly wonder at what they were getting at and gradually just accepted, after hearing from many Jews, that it wasn't an important holiday. It was a long time before I realized they were lamenting the sorry state of American multiculturalism. Hannukah is the only Jewish holiday most Americans know. And what they know of it is basically that they have no idea how to spell it. (It's transliterated from another language that doesn't use Roman script, so there are lots of variations.) In recent history, it has actually gained some prominence in parts of the Jewish world for "Jewish" reasons, re-establishing a Jewish state has had some resonance with rejecting assimilation into ancient Greek society, but in America it's been about proximity to Christmas. Because some Christians wanted to be inclusive, they picked a simple (for them) and Christian-centric way to do so. Nice going, lazy mamzers. If people in America want to actually be inclusive, they can do better.

I don't actually want to devalue Hannukah. I like it, and celebrating the rejection of assimilation (even if there are some icky bits in the story, like fundamentalist terrorism and whatnot) seems really appropriate to me. Let's make Hannukah newly important. Just let's not celebrate it by settling for half-hearted assimilation.

And here's Ben Kweller talking Hannukah songs (there is no video, however, because it's radio - silly WNYC):
View Full Audio on WNYC

View Audio? Here's a segment on Jewish foods.

And, of course, Happy Joel doing Christmas Kicks Hannukah's Ass:

Nothing suprising in Wikileaks

2010-11-29T20:23:00.000-05:00

Very little overall seems all that surprising in the recent leaks, except perhaps for some people. Ahmadinejad is convinced the whole thing is a conspiracy. I wonder what Mearsheimer and Walt think, given how much they have invested in the notion that it's American Jews pushing us to war.

UNRWA chief on charm offensive

2010-11-17T19:33:00.001-05:00

Note that the UNRWA is directly under the general assembly, which is run as a direct democracy of nations without any formal protections for minorities. The General Assembly discriminates heavily against Israel. Many feel the existence of the UNRWA, an organization exclusively for Palestinian refugees which defines Palestinian refugees differently from all other refugees and which does not aim to resettle them, is intended to prolong the conflict. (cf.) He is clearly being diplomatic and vague, but even the gesture is itself interesting. Where he is clear, it is remarkable.

In one appearance, he says,

Talking about sanctions and boycotts is not going to bring about anything positive

There's also an interview posted at Adi Schwartz (with much commentary from Schwartz, an Israeli journalist) which is somewhat critical of the UNRWA, itself, of Hamas, and of Gazan society.

“We shouldn’t exist after so many years”, says Ging, “and I perfectly understand the Israeli negative view towards my organization, because it is the manifestation of the political failure of the international community to resolve the conflict. Our 60th anniversary was not a moment of celebration but a commemoration of failure because we should not have had to exist after 60 years”.

If this is the manifestation of an underlying problem, then surely that problem is the widespread failure to recognize that Jews have the same rights to self determination as other peoples.

Israel, more average than you think

2010-11-04T14:02:00.000-04:00

Israel is routinely characterized as "the worst [whatever] in the world" in order to justify singling it out for criticism or sanction. Except it's ~~rarely~~ never true. Though, like any society, and in particular like any post-colonial society, there are clearly problems, the exaggerated criticism is almost completely the product of antisemitism. For example, I've regularly seen the claim that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is the longest-lasting occupation in the world. People making such a claim must never have heard of Tibet or Western Sahara. That doesn't mean Israel's occupation shouldn't be criticized -it should- but those who criticize it should be aware of the problem and avoid exaggerated rhetoric. And if they have a singular focus on Israel, they should acknowledge that. Anyway, what I just heard on the radio:

The world's biggest buyer of arms is.... India.

conspicuous Jewish philanthropy, an AJWS appeal

2010-10-29T19:25:00.002-04:00

There's a new AJWS ad made by Judd Apatow that's really funny. For the time being at least, you can see it on the front page at ajws.org. Or any of several more convenient webpage for the lazy. You can also see it embedded here, but it cuts off a third of the screen. As Sarah Silverman says about the AJWS, "that really throws a wrench in the Jews are cheap premise." As ~~Jodie Foster (I think that's Foster)~~ Helen Hunt says, "it fosters civil society, sustainable development, and human rights for all people, not just Jewish people." And Patrick Stewart, "That's something you don't need to be Jewish to support." I'm cutting out the jokes here, so watch the video:

It's a good cause, and I don't want for a moment to convince people not to give, but I do want there to be a discussion about this. Why is it necessary to have a conspicuously Jewish group that gives to causes other than Jewish ones? I think there are some good reasons. For instance, a lot of Jewish activists work with Churches because there aren't enough Jews in an area to recreate the organizational structure of the Church groups. If this gives Jews a way to act in ways they already want to while doing it within a Jewish space where they're more comfortable and respected, then that's great. But a lot of it feels to me, for whatever my feelings are worth, like they're acting specifically against the stereotype that Jews only give to Jews.

To that, I think the most appropriate response is to point out that Jews, in fact, give time and money to all sorts of worthy causes. If people don't notice, because people never really notice Jews,* that's their fault. Would you be shocked to hear that there are Jews who give to Greenpeace, the ACLU, or the NAACP? Well, a lot of people would for some reason. Furthermore, we really ought to ask: is there something wrong with giving to Jewish organizations? Certainly Christians give to Christian organizations all the time. Are Blacks who give to organizations like the NAACP seen as selfish? Are Muslims who give to CAIR seen as selfish?

When the motivation is to defy the stereotype, as opposed to pointing out the inherent stupidity in the stereotype, I don't think that ever really works. In fact, I think it gives the stereotype a certain strength because it reifies a standard of behavior against which people can be judged.

*Seriously, a friend watched Apatow's Funny People. I asked her about the Jewish content, and she said she didn't notice. There was a bit in the trailer about Seth Rogen being Jewish. Adam Sandler accuses him of hiding it, to which Rogen responds, "my face is circumcized." Flew right past my friend.

In that vein, I think the Andy Samberg bit, "People often come up to me and they'll say, 'Hey Samberg, I didn't even know you were Jewish,'" could be interesting, but it goes in a different direction.

Ahmadinejad in Lebanon

2010-10-15T16:38:00.000-04:00

With Ahmadinejad recently in Lebanon, I thought I'd check Juan Cole so that I could understand exactly how Ahmadinejad was being misrepresented. In comments, Yaakov Lozowick asks Cole:

Prof. Cole,

Any comment on Ahmadinejad’s explicit call for the destruction of Israel? In the past you’ve suggested he doesn’t really say such things; this time it seems a bit hard to deny, don’t you think?

Cole responds:

Hi, Yaacov. What I said was that Ahmadinejad hasn’t threatened to kill any Israelis, roll tanks against Israel, etc., which the invented mistranslation ‘wipe Israel off the map’ implies. He does want a collapse of what he calls the Zionist regime, on the analogy (for him) of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and some odd form of the one-state solution. But he also says that if the Palestinians accept a two-state solution, he will too.

According to the Washington Post, what Ahmadinejad said was

Today the Zionist occupiers have no choice but to surrender to reality and return to their homes and countries of origin.

That would indeed be a particularly odd form of one-state solution.

Current UNSC membership

2010-10-12T16:21:00.000-04:00

In addition to the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, there's Austria, Japan, Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lebanon, Uganda, Brazil, Mexico, Gabon, Nigeria. Israel remains the only UN member-nation barred from the UNSC.

An observation

2010-10-01T06:18:00.000-04:00

To say that a Jew sees everything through the lens of Israel is the same as saying a person of color sees everything through race. In both cases, it's a statement of privilege and ignorance proving only that the (gentile) speaker has the luxury to ignore antisemitism/racism.

Tony Curtis

2010-09-30T12:24:00.000-04:00

Tony Curtis (aka Bernard Schwartz) has passed away. Ji Jang Bosal. WNYC has put up a link to an old interview which somehow I didn't pass on at the time.

Interview on Roma Rights

2010-09-23T15:34:00.000-04:00

The Leonard Lopate show (guest hosted by Andy Borowitz) has a really great interview regarding the situation faced by the Roma today, fittingly in their "Underreported" series.

In recent weeks, France has been locked in a war of words with the European Union over its effort to expel the Roma living there. But the Roma in Italy have also been facing discriminatory policies and prejudice. On today's Underreported, Bernard Rorke, director of Roma Initiatives at the Open Society, discusses what’s behind these restrictive policies towards Roma.

Happy Chusok!

2010-09-22T07:12:00.001-04:00

Go eat songpyeon.

Of imperialism and second campists

2010-09-20T11:27:00.005-04:00

I've been thinking this since Noam Chomsky's reply to Mearsheimer and Walt (Why now? I don't know) but I want to commit it, especially the emphasized part below, to paper.

The first thing to note about it is:

But recognizing that M-W took a courageous stand, which merits praise, we still have to ask how convincing their thesis is. Not very, in my opinion.

I have to wonder why such an unconvincing argument (to Chomsky) would deserve praise and merit (from Chomsky). I've noted before that his explanation for the appeal of M&W looks a lot like Chomsky is accusing M&W of scapegoating Jews for American imperialism:

The reason, I think, is that it leaves the US government untouched on its high pinnacle of nobility, "Wilsonian idealism," etc., merely in the grip of an all-powerful force that it cannot escape.

Except Chomsky doesn't seem to recognize the familiar pattern of scapegoating Jews.

M-W focus on AIPAC and the evangelicals, but they recognize that the Lobby includes most of the political-intellectual class -- at which point the thesis loses much of its content.

What Chomsky seems to appreciate is not the argument, but the target.

Israel, for Chomsky, is a client state of the US, not the other way around. He cites several cases where Israel has furthered the interests of the US or bowed down to the interests of the US. (Here, Chomsky shares the definition of American interests with Mearsheimer and Walt as specifically being national security and business interests. I disagree with that definition.) But if Israel is a client state, it should follow that Israel has interests that we, the Left, ought to liberate Israel from American imperialism. I imagine Chomsky may agree with that so far. I've also seen others write in the same vein about how the Miltary Industrial Complex in the US profits off Israel's conflict. But it's plain that if we are to liberate Israel from American imperialism, then we, as Americans, ought to do a better job of listening to Israelis. Otherwise, we're only presenting a different face of American imperialism; you can't liberate anyone by forcing something on them. Israelis want security, and so American anti-imperialists ought to be concerned with Israeli security. Here, it's also plain that Chomsky disagrees that such a principle ought to be applied to Israel. He isn't interested in exploring how Israelis view their interests, except to criticize and undermine Israelis. It's exactly the sort of stance Moishe Postone singles out. Chomsky isn't interested in anti-imperialism, per se, but a perverted form of anti-imperialism. Chomsky is a second campist -- and here I choose the phrase second campist over similar terms such as Manichean entirely on purpose.

calendar

2010-09-10T13:45:00.003-04:00

Shana Tova, if anyone reads this in time. And also Eid Mubarak to Muslim readers.

And, for September 11, if anyone is in New York, there will be an interfaith/Buddhist memorial at Pier 40. Things will start at 6:30 pm, but people should gather at 6, especially if you want to write a message on a lantern. The organizer, a Japanese Buddhist priest, sends out wonderful news:

This weekend, I am arranging "Hibaku" Piano (the piano which was survived from atomic bombing of Hiroshima) Peace Concert at various places, so I hope that you can join the concert and enjoy yourself.

The schedule will include interfaith prayers and meditation for peace and a Buddhist ceremony. At 8pm lanterns will be set out into the Hudson River (modeled on the Japanese commemoration of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). It's a beautiful ceremony.

I'll be in a meditation retreat, so I won't be there, but I'll talk to our teacher about some chanting. In Korean Buddhism, we chant Ji Jang Bosal for the dead. However, s/he (Boddhisattva's don't really have fixed gender, though Ji Jang Bosal is usually depicted in a male form) is known for the vow to save all being in the hell realms. That would include those who would do such awful things as 9/11 or the Florida preacher who plans to burn Korans. So I chant for them as well. I hope they hear my chanting and realize the truth.

Ji Jang Bosal Ji Jang Bosal Ji Jang Bosal
Ji Jang Bosal Ji Jang Bosal Ji Jang Bosal
Ji Jang Bosal Ji Jang Bosal Ji Jang Bosal
Ji Jang Bosal Ji Jang Bosal Ji Jang Bosal
Ji Jang Bosal Ji Jang Bosal Ji Jang Bosal
Ji Jang Bosal Ji Jang Bosal Ji Jang Bosal
Ji Jang Bosal Ji Jang Bosal Ji Jang Bosal
Ji Jang Bosal Ji Jang Bosal Ji Jang Bosal

And, for the victims of hatred and prejudice, I also chant:

Kwan Seum Bosal Kwan Seum Bosal Kwan Seum Bosal

Korean Buddhists chant for specific occasions, such as the death of a loved one, but also at New Years. At that time people chant Ji Jang Bosal for all those who have died in the past year but especially with a certain flavor of karma, such as those who died in war. There are many events on the calendar to remind us to strive to be better. And many ways to strive. But please remember, that is a moment-to-moment struggle within. It's dogma that blinds us when we look for that struggle outside ourselves.

Peace,
-Matt

The goyishe kopf (or the plainest case of gentile privilege)

2010-09-06T16:03:00.005-04:00

How can I not say: What a goyishe kopf. And by that, I mean, what an outrageous example of privileged stupidity. According to a piece from The Guardian and reproduced at Engage:

Karel De Gucht, the European commissioner for trade, and a former Belgian foreign minister, sparked outrage after voicing his scepticism about the prospects for the negotiations which opened in the US this week. He told a Belgian radio station that most Jews always believed they were right, and questioned the point of talking to them about the Middle East.

De Gucht, who negotiates for Europe on trade with the rest of the world, and is one of the most powerful officials in Brussels, was forced today to issue a statement declaring that the views he expressed were personal.

“Don’t underestimate the opinion … of the average Jew outside Israel,” he told the radio station. “There is indeed a belief – it’s difficult to describe it otherwise – among most Jews that they are right. And a belief is something that’s difficult to counter with rational arguments. And it’s not so much whether these are religious Jews or not. Lay Jews also share the same belief that they are right. So it is not easy to have, even with moderate Jews, a rational discussion about what is actually happening in the Middle East.”

Explaining why he thought the peace talks were probably doomed, he added: “Do not underestimate the Jewish lobby on Capitol Hill. That is the best organised lobby, you shouldn’t underestimate the grip it has on American politics – no matter whether it’s Republicans or Democrats.”

First off, what an odd sort of apology to say that one's bigotry is 'personal.'

“I gave an interview … I gave my personal point of view,” he said. “I regret that the comments that I made have been interpreted in a sense that I did not intend.

“I did not mean in any possible way to cause offence or stigmatise the Jewish community. I want to make clear that antisemitism has no place in today’s world.”

In fact, the comments were surely interpreted in exactly the sense in which they were said. His comments did not regrettably cause offense so much as they are plainly offensive in their nature. Look, there's a long history of claiming that Jews aren't rational, but even setting aside that stereotype, his claim about Jews being irrational only points to his inability to listen to what Jews have to say. More importantly, the stuff about that powerful "Jewish lobby" is plainly antisemitic. Whenever you find yourself about to make such an outrageous generalization, you should first assume that the problem is your own insensitivity. Like so many people, he doesn't seem to get the most basic fact of antisemitism: claiming Jews have power way beyond what we actually have is one of the most dangerously antisemitic things that can be said. The immediate implication is that something has to be done to take power away from Jews in order to right the world. In other words, Jews must be oppressed. Because the problems of the world are not actually the fault of Jews, however, that's a useless strategy which inevitably escalates to more severe oppressions in order to sudbue the "powerful" Jews. If he wants to make clear that "antisemitism has no place" he should certainly disavow the whole making-incredibly-antisemitic-comments thing, rather than merely expressing his sincere regret that other people are so irrational and don't get what he's saying when he's making incredibly antisemitic comments. No apology can mean anything here unless De Gucht can take responsibility for the plainly bigoted nature of his remarks. Regardless of his intention, he has precisely "stigmatized" and threatened Jews.

Also, I think it's time the words organized and grip should be seen as inherently problematic in these debates, just like the word cabal. I don't know why I keep seeing grip but it turns up strangely often. Such as here.

Feel Good Video

2010-08-29T21:55:00.001-04:00

contemporary Anti-Roma/Traveler depictions

2010-08-21T16:26:00.004-04:00

My wife started watching The Riches, with Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver as Irish Travelers in the American South, on Netflix. Twenty episodes aired from 2007-2008 on the FX Network and got quite good critical response. I have to say, in many ways it's a fun show. It paints buffers (a word Travelers use for non-Travelers) as mean, hypocritical, selfish, cheats, and we enjoy watching the protagonists cheat them. But still, it's just a plainly racist show. Even if we enjoy watching the heroes scam and steal, it's a show predicated on the stereotypical depiction of Travelers as scammers and theives. There's a nice scholarly article by Peter Kabachnik from the journal Romani Studies.

Most revealing about The Riches is the decision to base the show on how Irish Travelers take on another family’s identity and become settled buffers, parking their caravan in the woods behind the house and ceasing their traveling way of life. Apparently the only way for Irish Travelers to live the American Dream is to steal it.

He also deals with the film Traveller and mentions a few other films, including Snatch. Add these to the standard "gypsy curse" plot from Thinner (the only thing here besides The Riches I've seen) and Drag Me to Hell, and despite the general invisibility of Roma and Travelers there's really quite a lot of plain racist depictions in high profile projects and big star roles.

Catching up -- closet edition

2010-08-17T08:25:00.005-04:00

Things I missed while my computer was down:

The ADL's position on the "Ground Zero Mosque" was pretty shameful. I applaud Fareed Zakaria who returned prize from the organization. But, ummm, hey guys, this is not an opportunity for Jew-bashing. For starters, at least the ADL's rejection of the community center (it's not a mosque) was tepid. Many Americans, even many New Yorkers are not nearly as tepid in rejecting it. It's not like the ADL or any other Jewish organization or leader is responsible for the general response. As near as I can tell, the ADL actually doesn't even represent Jewish opinion very well on this particular matter. Other organizations and people, particularly Mike Bloomberg (who is Jewish, if you didn't know), did better.
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Brett Domino doing Lady Gaga. I really love these guys. They really lay bare a lot of stuff about popular music. In this case, I think it highlights some of what's so great about Lady Gaga, though previously it was what's so silly about Justin Timberlake. I don't think any of the members of the BD Trio are Jewish, but I think there appeal to me does have something to do with my being Jewish. A lot of Jewish theater and comedy (Seinfeld, e.g.) makes fun of the outsider assimilating into mainstream culture in a way that similarly lays bare the arbitrary conventions and assumptions of that culture.
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Racialicious and Mad Men: It's not that Latoya Peterson hasn't got a point when she notes that Mad Men is, like many shows on television, mostly about white people. (This, however, via Racialicious, is much more interesting on that point.) I do think the disagreement with her from the comments, some of it quite pointed, is well worth reading. (And I tend to stand with that disagreement.) But what gets me is that one of the biggest, most important Jewish characters isn't part of the discussion. Latoya writes:

I refer to Rachel Menken, not because “OMG, there’s a Jewish woman” but because she got to say, on screen, that people are racist. She was able to articulate her suffering, she was able to articulate her feelings of being seen as lesser, she was able to make a salient point about being the recipient of prejudice, all while people still claim to like the individual.

But Jimmy Barret (aka Jimmy Bernstein), the comedian from season two, is nowhere in the discussion. Though Latoya says, "most discussion of Jews is framed as anti-Semitic jokes, open curiosity, or thinly veiled contempt," in fact, Jimmy is the target of one of the most blatant, hateful, in-your-face moments in the series when Betty tells him, "You people are ugly and crude." And that line does exactly what Betty intended with it: it silences Jimmy. In fact, the purpose of his character was to show the fine line that most minorities walk if they want to express themselves. Some never can in public. Others, those who have some control over the extent to which they are perceived as minorities (for instance, through name changes) can only express themselves in indirect ways - the source of Barrett's anger. He is introduced in the series on the set of a commercial where he is the consummate professional (instructing the cameraman how to shoot him) playing the fool. If anyone can walk that line, it should be Jimmy Barrett. But in the end, he got shot down. Jimmy Barrett is one of the pivotal characters in a work about closeted identities, yet he's missing from the discussion.
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Norm Geras criticized an article by J.J. Goldberg, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward. Norm is plainly right that Goldberg is redefining antisemitism so as not to offend anyone who isn't named Adolph Hitler. As luck would have it, someone else discussing racism just yesterday wrote:

At the moment, the right’s standard for legitimate charges of racism are quite high: as Chris Rock once put it, you have to have shot Medgar Evers to be a racist. Sliming civil rights leaders, depicting Obama as a thug or a monkey or a watermelon-eating pickaninny, writing about Michelle eating ribs all day—that’s not racist. Shooting Medgar Evers, OK, that’s racist.

But this isn't a conservative, here. This is the editor of the Jewish Daily Forward. Goes to show (further to Jimmy Barrett) that it's not so easy for minorities to speak plainly. But Goldberg also said something Geras didn't address:

Few seemed to notice the irony: Two of the most powerful men in Hollywood, both Jewish, urging a third power player, also Jewish, to punish Stone for suggesting that Jews dominate the media. The bottom line: Stone’s comment that Jewish influence in the media stifles open discussion brought the media crashing down on his head.

Ummm, no. The fact that there are powerful Jews in Hollywood does not mean Jews "dominate" or "control" the media. It only means Jews have some influence and some power. Notably, Jews in the media have never really spoken openly about being Jewish out of fear, which is to say they didn't really have much power even if many were in positions of power. So the New York Times didn't cover the Holocaust, and Hollywood didn't make a film about antisemitism until well after WWII (1947). And they're still making crap like The Reader. But if two of the most powerful men in Hollywood, both Christian, were trying to blacklist a director for being racist, would anyone be decrying the inordinate power of Christians in Hollywood? And, though maybe it would be a good idea, let's note that no one has successfully stopped Stone from anything, yet.
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Is England antisemitic? Anthony Julius addresses a controversial statement by Shimon Peres. Julius says a lot of smart things there, but there's something I don't quite like about the interview.

Muslim leaders visit Nazi death camps

2010-08-14T02:27:00.002-04:00

Too good to just put in the shared links over on the right. (Via Talk Islam.) Muslim leaders visit Auschwitz and Dachau. At the end, this is great:

Qadhi stressed the importance for Jews and Muslims to understand and accept each other’s narratives of suffering. “There’s no denying that we have problems we need to talk about, but dehumanizing the other is not going to solve our problems...

Liveblogging a Racialicious fiasco

2010-08-12T14:37:00.004-04:00

Too much, too much. Elle complains:

I am shocked at the level of anti-Semitism allowed on this blog.

And the response?

Ellen, this is the mission statement of the ADL, taken directly from their website:

I know I sometimes get names wrong, but I make an attempt to replicate them exactly as is. It's just a matter of decency. More importantly, while the response pointing to the ADL's mission statement is technically correct, it hardly matters. Elle made a number of points, none of which are refuted with this.

Furthermore, we could ask why it is that the ADL's mission statement is that way. I would suggest it's because Jews have always felt an inappropriate pressure to subsume our issues to "larger" issues, which is part of what makes us so vulnerable to "colorblind" (really, the analogue of) racism.

Previous. I sincerely hope I have the chance to update this repeatedly.

UPDATE: Well, so far only one more comment. From a Jew disappointed by the whole affair:

I am also terrified that my fellow “progressives” are using this as one more way of painting Jews as the bad guys, the ones in power, the oppressors, the evil Zionists who keep those poor Muslims down. Come on, you guys are smarter than that.

I hope they prove me wrong, but I am afraid, having watched Racialicious fail time and again, that they're not smarter than that.

Computer fixed, plus yet still more anti-racist antisemitism

2010-08-12T13:47:00.007-04:00

But I'm going away for the weekend, so that post catching up on what I missed will have to wait.

In the meantime, it's really time Racialicious figures out why they get comments like this:

ADL is beholden to Zionist doctrine, and standing up against islamophobia or for muslim rights are nowhere to be found there. All Zionist linked organizations are in line with this. The Simon Wiesenthal Center is sponsoring a Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem that’s being built on top of muslim graves with complete government approval. Imagine the inverse situation.

Further, why on Earth do they approve those comments. All comments at Racialicious are hand moderated. Granted, none of them are Jews (and really, that's potentially a problem right there, if it's indicative of who they think is worthy of a voice), but still, you'd think they could recognize THAT!

Zionist doctrine? Is that where Jews demand dignity and equality? Then, hell yeah, I'm all for it! Or is it the doctrine that says all Jews hate Muslims, just because we're Jews?

Plus:

yeah i just want to re-iterate that the ADL has long been a state-sponsored terrorist organization. they are zionist. they are racist. end of story

announcement

2010-08-02T18:36:00.001-04:00

Oy! Computer died, an due to peculiar circumstances, we're not getting a new one for at least a month. Blogging will be light or lighter.

Oliver Stone, scraping his shoe

2010-07-28T08:50:00.004-04:00

Well, after getting caught with saying something horribly racist, Oliver Stone has now said,

“In trying to make a broader historical point about the range of atrocities the Germans committed against many people, I made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am sorry and I regret. Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry. The fact that the Holocaust is still a very important, vivid and current matter today is, in fact, a great credit to the very hard work of a broad coalition of people committed to the remembrance of this atrocity – and it was an atrocity.”

I don't doubt he saw the Holocaust as an atrocity, but critics were right that he was oafish in discussing the other atrocities that also happened. As for Hitler having had help, that was Pat Buchanan's contention when he said that it was American Jews who forced Hitler's hand, but I think Stone is still on shaky ground with that one. As for Jewish control of the media, I'm not sure what to think about Stone. Here's how it was reported in the Sunday Times (of London):

He also seeks to put his atrocities in proportion: "Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, 25 or 30m."

Why such a focus on the Holocaust then? "The Jewish domination of the media," he says. "There's a major lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has f***** up United States foreign policy for years."

(It's behind a paywall, but you can get an even fuller version of the quote here.) One day, it's the Jewish domination of the media. The next day, no Jewish domination of the media. What could explain this sudden dramatic shift? Not a clumsy association, that's for sure. There are only two possible explanations: (1) They got to him, or (2) You know Oliver Stone is Jewish right? So this must be clever propaganda, elaborately planned from the start.

Or, who knows. Maybe it's just a cheap apology. I'd kinda like to think someone gave him some facts and he realized he was wrong, but it's not clear what exactly changed. What I quoted above is the complete statement. Note to Stone's PR hack: I wish I had a fuller picture. Perhaps even something that talked about Stone's love of conspiracy theories.

UPDATE: ADL accepts second apology. At least he's a bit more specific. But, now the apology comes down to acknowleging it was a mistake to be "glib." Interesting... Whether it's right or wrong to accept that apology, I feel confident Michael Richards would never have had his apology accepted (not that it was accepted anyway, or that I'm commenting on whether it should have been) had he said he was wrong to be so "glib." However, Paul Mooney (of all people) said Michael Richards was out of character when he did that. This seems entirely in character for Oliver Stone. Let me be clear about something, for anyone who doesn't understand: I consider Stone's remarks to be every bit as bad as standing on stage shouting "Nigger" at a Black audience member and talking about lynching them. I don't think many anti-racists understand that this idea of Jewish control of the media or government, of Jewish power generally -- these words that Stone used are the words that have been used before, repeatedly, to justify the mass murder of Jews. It is not "controversial." It is antisemitism.

Yup, Oliver Stone stepped in it

2010-07-26T23:45:00.001-04:00

Hard to believe it's a one off. I guess now all the conspiracism he's always dealt with has a little more context. This is unabashed antisemitism. No getting around it.

Gentile privilege in a global world

2010-07-26T15:53:00.004-04:00

Sometime ago, Julie tried to create a gentile privilege checklist. Good stuff, and a good idea. As she said,

But I think it’s clear here that if you’re not acknowledging the existence of gentile privilege, then you’re not acknowledging the existence of anti-Semitism. Oppression cannot exist without corresponding privilege.

As she also said, there are still questions about what constitutes gentile privilege. Strange as it may be, antisemitism is still undertheorized. And one of the most ignored aspects is its global nature. Going back to this picture, an important example of Nazi propaganda:

It was a German propaganda poster, but note how it depicts a Jew as controlling the UK, Soviet Union and US. With the bowler hat, it's a particularly English Jew, associated with "Manchester" (or "free market") Capitalism, even though the physical depiction is stereotypically Jewish. Why were the Germans so concerned with the power of Jews outside their own country? Because they saw Jews as part of "international Jewry." The perception of Jews was as a global force, associated with capitalism and communism and the big isms of the day that determined world events. If the Germans had been more strictly concerned with German Jews, they would have found they could effectively oppress Jews locally and they wouldn't have needed a world war to eradicate Jewishness from the world. But, of course, that's not what happeneed, because that's not how antisemitism works.

Today, half of Venezuela's Jews have fled to escape state-sponsored antisemitism, including two police raids on the largest synagogue in Caracas. But, of course, what scares Venezuela's antisemites isn't the power of Jews in Venezuela as much as it's the power of Jews in the US. Also, many Jews have fled Sweden, antisemitism there taking the superficial disguise of criticism of Israel. In many places, like Malaysia, antisemitism is a significant force even though there are few (if any) Jews. Throughout the world, there is a pressing need for a new way to talk about the oppression of local Jews in a global world as well as the privileges located inside the local community.

So we need to understand gentile privilege in a global perspective. I offer this addition:

If my group is widely recognized as a national group,
If my group is the dominant group in my country,
If my group is dominant in multiple UN member states,
then these things translate to real political power in the world.

Jews are widely dismissed as a national group. Often, we are told we are just a religion, and not entitled to the political powers that come with nationhood. We are the dominant group in Israel, which, of course, is the idea. At the same time, Israel is discriminated against within the UN. Since many members of what would be Israel's regional group do not recognize it, Israel is not permitted to participate in much of the work of the UN, which is organized by region. So, for example, Israel was not involved in any of the planning meetings for either the Durban conference or its follow up.

I think that's particularly relevant for those discussions which blamed Jews for sabotaging the discussion of reparations that was supposed to go on at those conferences. For instance, in discussing Mahmoud Amadinejad's speech at the Durban Review conference, which was toned down but still incredibly antisemitic, Naomi Klein presented it as a matter of protocol that he was allowed to speak. All heads of state would be allowed to speak (it's not clear if an Israeli head of state would actually have been allowed to speak), so it shouldn't be seen as a big deal. And Klein used this to shift blame for the conference's failures from Ahmadinejad to those who protested his speech. Not only was Klein wrong, I think she was grotesque in that article. I think this offers a better language for discussing why.

A little bit of this...

2010-07-20T19:04:00.004-04:00

Recent facebook stuff.

For a good background article, read this from POZ (a magazine for HIV+ people). There are a lot of issues involved, but Williams had sex with multiple partners while infected with HIV and apparently in some state of denial about his status. Being young, black, poor, and HIV positive, media spun the story as a "sex monster" who intentionally infected women. Now, the news:

A [NY] State Supreme Court Judge ruled this morning that Nushawn Williams will stay in jail as a dangerous sex offender even though he already served his 12-year prison term.

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Thich Nhat Hanh:

Without suffering, you cannot grow. ... The Buddha called suffering a Holy Truth, because our suffering has the capacity of showing us the path to liberation. Embrace your suffering, and let it reveal to you the way to peace.

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Good luck to some friends with this.
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An Adjunct Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign has been fired for sending this email out to students. A friend comments:

At first I was dubious of the idea that he should be fired. You know, because academic freedom is sort of important for someone with a post-Marxist foundation for theory. But, OMG.

I note, however, that other professors have not been fired when behaving similarly. Kevin MacDonald, though never accused of teaching his beliefs to students is a white supremacist. His university removed him from teaching and his department distanced itself from him, but he kept his job. The university received support in not firing him from some perhaps-unlikely places. When William Robinson sent out emails to students comparing Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto and Israel to Nazi Germany, his university never got past a preliminay investigation. I guess tenure is a powerful thing.
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This is kafka-esque.
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This article on Mike Huckabee made me cringe in a few places. Especially at the word pharisaical and at the suggestion that there's no such thing as a Palestinian. But my friend is right, I think, that Huckabee's simply a better sort of Republican than many.
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And a novelist comes forward:

Apropos of nothing, the author [that would be me - Matt] evokes Marx and the working class, who in all frankness, remain largely absent from my tale of fallen petite bourgeoisie. Unlike the brief morality play Ida and I enjoyed within the context of Leverage, the means of production here are not quite so quantifiable as tapes. Moreover, there is a merger of capital and worker that I daresay Marx might never have envisioned. The dilemma then is merely in methods of distribution. The media, like the tapes on that television morality play, becomes central to the conundrum.

There's a question of whether a writer is working class. It's a good question, and it think it can change depending on what the writer is writing --perhaps technical specs-- but I'm more sympathetic to it than this novelist, apparently. (Although I'm not sure I ever gave an answer to that, and I'm sure whatever answer was not apropros of nothing.) Perhaps I should say "allied to the working classes," but whenever someone is "selling out" to keep from losing their house, I think Marx's ghost is already present.

Climate change

2010-07-13T13:39:00.002-04:00

Eve Garrard, posting at Normblog:

I don't think this would have happened 10 years ago. There certainly was anti-Semitism (of a relatively mild kind) around the place, among academics as elsewhere, but they used to know that there was something wrong with it, and hence restrained themselves, at least in public. I haven't met anything quite as nakedly direct as this in the universities before now, not even in the UCU during the boycott debates: venomous though those debates were, the fig-leaf of anti-Zionism was usually kept more or less in place.

I'll leave you to go there to read about the actual incident. Aside from actually challenging antisemites, I wonder how it would have gone if she had said she was a Zionist.

Things Jews are not resposible for

2010-07-11T17:05:00.004-04:00

If you live in NYC, you'll see t-shirts all over the place that say "zogsports." Just a guess, but I don't think it was a Jew who came up with that. For that matter, I also doubt it was a Jew who founded Independant Truck's "Iron Cross" logo. For that matter, the Iron Cross seems to have had a resurgence in fasion, which I doubt was the fault of any Jew. I'm sure there are more examples.

What the debate over Israel means

2010-07-09T11:47:00.007-04:00

David links to this article in the Forward. His comments are well worth reading. I'd like to add my comments on one particular line, and put that one line more clearly in context.

“Malmo reminds me of the anti-Semitism I felt as a child in Poland before the war,” she [Judith Popinski] told the Forward

Frightening, and I don't doubt it's entirely true. In part, I don't doubt it because I know something about how people described Poland before the war when they actually described it before the war. (Not quite the same as after.) But consider this:

During an interview in his office, Imam Saeed Azams said it was wrong to blame Swedish Jews for Israel’s actions. The wheelchair-bound Azams stressed the importance of teaching young Muslims to stop equating the Jews of Malmo with Israel. But this seemed to include an assumption that Jews, in turn, should not permit themselves to be seen as pro-Israel.

“Because Jewish society in Sweden does not condemn the clearly illegal actions of Israel,” he said, “then ordinary people think the Jews here are allied to Israel, but this is not true.”

I am pro-Israel because I care about having a place to go if things get as bad as Poland before the war. Won't happen here in the Good Ol' US of A? No one would think it would have happened in Sweden. By coincidence, I was born in Lund, according to Google Maps only about 20 minutes away from Malmo.

And I am pro-Israel because I care about having the right to speak out in defense of my life, a right which has been traduced and effectively if not formally restricted in every other society but Israel. That doesn't mean I support every action of the Israeli government or that I am anti-Palestinian, but I certainly support Israel's existence and Israel's right (see David's point about supporting a two-state solution) to provide for it's own defense against very real threats even when I disagree with the decision (as I often do).

Consider if I disagree with this imam on what actions of Israel's are "clearly illegal"? I've seen almost everything Israel does described as illegal and often disagreed. I've seen changes to road signs described as "ethnic cleansing." But should that mean it's a simple and understandable mistake for people to try to kill me, because I was insufficiently rabid in my hatred of Israel? That's certainly a recipe for silencing me and making it easy for various people to falsely claim, "but this is not true" that "the Jews here are allied to Israel." I'm guessing most of the Jews of Sweden, and particularly those fleeing Sweden for Israel, are like most other Jews in the world and see themselves very clearly as "allied" (whatever that means) to Israel. At least every bit as much as anti-Israel activists who attempt to murder Swedish Jews are "allied" to Palestine.

But this conflation, wherein people who support Israel in any visible fashion are responsible for everything Israel does, is not just the framing of one Swedish imam. I won't say who, except that this person will surely have a much bigger effect on the progression of antisemitism in America than that Swedish imam, but I will quote something from a recent Racialicious conversation:

Maybe you would like to elaborate on how arguing that the term “Israeli Apartheid” bars Israeli people from participating? The only way I can see it barring people from participating is if they themselves identify entirely with the Israeli government, something that you yourself go to a great extent to point out is a dangerous assumption about Israeli people.

Of course, the very point of the word Apartheid is to destroy the middle ground on which peace can be built. It is a word about which one is not allowed to have moderate feelings. The word entirely in that quote is entirely meaningless. One is not allowed to have the tiniest positive feelings about Apartheid anything. That's not just the fact of how people understand the word, but it is explicitly the point and argument of the BDS movement that pushes the use of the word and openly declares the aim of making "pariahs" of those who support Israel. Including those who support Israel by living or visiting there. Or performing music or accepting literary awards there. Or even trying to bring Jewish and Palestinian children together to learn conflict resolution skills at summer camp. Think I'm exaggerating on that last one? Sadly, no.

So, of course, one is not allowed to defend Israel from even the tiniest of slanders. One is simply not allowed to disagree. To do so would be to present oneself as allied with ethnic cleansing, as a fair target for hatred and discrimination. Perhaps as a target for murder. (And we're accused of bullying tactics and silencing debate!)

It's not just my life which is potentially at stake in this conversation. It's my right to live, my right to have my life protected by something other than lesser antisemites, my right to speak out in defense of my life. Somehow, dying does not frighten me nearly so much as having these rights taken away. No wonder, when so many people think they can tell me what I'm allowed to think, that the debate over Israel is so emotional and difficult and scary. And when "anti-racists" try to spin that as privilege because my skin is white, fuck that.

Recent search terms

2010-07-08T08:53:00.003-04:00

is judd apatow jewish
jew apatow
judd apatow public relations israel

I figure two of these to be antisemitic. As google explains,

If you use Google to search for “Judaism,” “Jewish” or “Jewish people,” the results are informative and relevant. So why is a search for “Jew” different? One reason is that the word “Jew” is often used in an anti-Semitic context. Jewish organizations are more likely to use the word “Jewish” when talking about members of their faith.

And, if the idea that Apatow is Jewish immediately sends someone searching for his thoughts on Israel, well, that's a problem.

As for the first, I imagine anyone who needed to know that would easily find the answer in his films. But, the knowledge is pretty crucial to avoid erasing his Jewishness from his films. So that, I don't mind at all.

Commerce will set the workers free?

2010-07-06T17:09:00.006-04:00

“Let the readers choose. Whoever pays the most on a given day can leave a comment with plot details or characters.”
“Or product placements?”
“Why not?”
“The Great American Cybernovel.”
“Or at least an interesting experiment.”
“I love you.”
“Not tonight, sweetheart.”
Colin, for a moment, believed it might work. Generosity. Commercialism. Sex. Violence. Americana in a digital age, but what would he call it?
“Commercial Novel.”
“Get out of my head, Sylvia.”
The luster of clouds dimmed. Summer mosquitoes swarmed. Colin and Sylvia took their dogs inside, and Colin, facing the blank page, buoyed by his wife’s faith, began to type the first line of a serialized behemoth that could be quite good, career suicide, or a minor lark. But at the very least it had the potential to save his house and provide antidepressants for his dog.
-from Commercial Novel

There's an interesting point (or two) in Marxism that's usually overlooked by Marxists. Capitalism is not the worst way to organize an economy; it was an improvement over the feudal systems it replaced. And it will end when the people come to understand what will replace it; the workers will bring into effect their own liberation. That's the basis between a rift between some Cultural Studies Marxists, who see progress and an in-between-ness, and some "Manichean" Marxists who see only evil in capitalism.

Personally, I have a great deal of sympathy for someone like the Reverend Billy Talen, founder of the Church of Stop Shopping. He's funny, which a person taking on such a project ought to be. Plus, I was best man at a wedding he performed in Union Square, where his sermon was truly touching. He wasn't aware he'd be performing a ceremony, so he gave an impromptu sermon on the history of Union Square and the role of public space in society. According to Wikipedia, the square wasn't named for the labor unions that formed there, but I'm pretty safe imagining myself walking in the footsteps of Emma Goldman whenever I pass through. But, however emotionally satisfying I sometimes find anti-consumerism, I also come across criticism of "culture jamming" and countercultural posturing that are intellectually quite satisfying. I know, in the end, that the in-between-ness of capitalism means a lot of critiques are going to be in-between. In the end, we have to trust the workers or any other group to know and act in their own best interest, and we ought to be respectful of their understanding of their own perspective even when we disagree. The point there is to persuade rather than disempower, while countercultures instead aim to shock.

And sometimes rank consumerism is a progressive force. Sure, it leads to the abuse of sexuality and horrible mysogyny on primetime tv. But that mysogyny, even if tv can be a force for perpetuating the ideology (and I believe it can), was not created by tv. And it also leads to lesbians on tv (and, very slowly coming around, gay men portrayed as something other than fodder for straight, male fantasies) and challenges to heteronormativity. Like it or not, crass consumerism can be (in-between) empowering. At the very least, we can use pop culture to talk about what people want rather than telling them what they want and why it's not what they ought to want. That's why I'm fascinated by this project, the polar opposite of Rev. Billy. It contravenes many of the basic assumptions I'm not sure I realized I hold, but at least it's funny, which a project of this sort ought to be. And if you want Colin to create "a lasting memorial to the conservative socialist agenda of [his] latent Christian atheism," go for it!

Commercial Novel is a novel that's for sale, but not in the traditional sense.

Instead, the very fabric of the novel is for sale. You can change the plot, change the characters, add your own details. All you have to do to participate in literary history is donate the most on a day when we post.

Comments working

2010-07-05T18:19:00.003-04:00

I know I don't get a lot, except for spam from Chinese dating services (I think that's what they are)~~, but hang on with me~~. So I wonder how often this happens. But I couldn't moderate comments last night. Now I can. And, there's actually one that wasn't a Chinese dating site. The problem didn't last long enough, I think, to necessitate pulling out so that no one misses it. But thanks for the comment!

Poll results from the Geneva Institute

2010-06-30T08:55:00.002-04:00

See here for more.

Clinton/Geneva Parameters

The Clinton parameters for a Palestinian-Israeli permanent settlement were presented by President Clinton at a meeting with Israeli and Palestinian officials almost ten years ago, on December 23, 2000, following the collapse of the July 2000 Camp David summit. The Geneva Initiative, along similar lines, was made public around the end of 2003. These parameters address the most fundamental issues which underlie the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: (1) Final borders and territorial exchange; (2) Refugees; (3) Jerusalem; (4) A demilitarized Palestinian state; (5) Security arrangements; and (6) End of conflict. We address these issues periodically since December 2003, and in the current poll we revisited these crucial issues following the diplomatic activity of the US with regard to the conflict and the beginning of the proximity talks between the parties.

· The findings indicate an increase in support for the overall package in both publics compared to 2009. The change is larger and is consistent across all parameters among Palestinians.
· Palestinians are now split half between support and opposition to the overall package: 49% support and 49% oppose it. This level of support represents an increase in support of 11 percentage points from 2009.
· 52% of Israelis support the overall package, versus 37% who oppose it. This level of support is similar to that obtained in 2006 through 2008, and larger than the support indicated in 2009 (46%).
· Since we have been tracking these issues in 2003, there was only once majority support for this package on both sides, in December 2004, shortly after the death of Arafat which was followed by a surge of optimism and considerable moderation in both publics. Among Israelis there was majority support for the Clinton package since 2004, except in the 2009 poll.

Naming is power

2010-06-29T11:48:00.003-04:00

Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post:

Lately, Anwar [Ibrahim, the leader of Malaysia's political opposition] has been getting attention for something else: strident rhetoric about Israel and alleged "Zionist influence" in Malaysia. He recently joined a demonstration outside the U.S. embassy in Kuala Lumpur where an Israeli flag was burned. He's made dark insinuations about the "Jewish-controlled" Washington public relations firm Apco Worldwide, which is working for Malaysia's quasi-authoritarian government.

The scare quotes hint at it, but the word antisemitism is entirely missing from the piece. Matt Yglesias, though he's not without a point, is tamer still:

Presumably there are some specific issues in the area that we care about. But certainly it would be odd to make Israel the top agenda item during a discussion with Malaysian officials (one striking thing about being in China during the Gaza flotilla raid is that nobody there cared at all) or the main criterion by which we judge a politician.

Well, yes, antisemitism is still only one criteria by which to judge a Malaysian politician. Of course, Yglesias could direct criticism a little differently. What's odd is probably less Diehl's conclusions, but rather that antisemitism is such a significant piece of Malaysian politics. (Actually, it's not odd, so much as it's antisemitism.) It's not Diehl or American politicians who have created that bit of surrealism. But, even more, I really wish Yglesias would acknowledge that the issue at stake in Diehl's piece is broader than simply Israel and that antisemitism is actually a problem worth talking about sometimes.

(As an aside, the article also provides more proof that Paul Wolfowitz is no "Zionist," unless the word is used only as a euphemism for "Jew.")

Why is it that no one can say the word antisemitism? Actually, I think I know the answer to that, and it pisses me off. Is it any wonder so many Jews feel abandoned by "progressives"?

Update: David has the same response.

My hands are trembling reading another comment thread

2010-06-24T14:06:00.004-04:00

Let me quote again from David Schraub's post, Of Matters 101:

Being a Jew who disagrees with the bulk of the community does not earn you super-standing.

In that sentence, David links to a post elsewhere called The Rules of Racial Standing. It's common sense among anti-racists that racists will try to shut down discussion by saying "not all [Black/Latino/Gay/whatever] thinks so." Or to use a phrase from a "cultural appropriation bingo" card posted at Racialicious some time ago, "I asked a person from that culture, and s/he said it was ok." So why is Deputy Editor Thea Lim of Racialicious responding to criticism with:

Many QuAIA members are Jewish and have Israeli family members – I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them are Israeli.

Well, most Jews disagree with them, so stop giving them super-standing, Thea.

The complete dismissal of a Jewish commenter (including other intentional derails and the blanket failure to deal with the strongest part of the commenters aargument) is just really disturbing. And, among the many, many things too many anti-racists don't get, they don't get just how really scary this stuff is for me.

And with an update, the post now includes the language:

“This is a victory for the Palestine solidarity movement, which has faced censorship and bullying tactics from the Israel lobby for far too long,”

Because, of course, complaints from Jews are never reasonable. They're always "bullying." See, Jews have so much power that...

On Populism

2010-06-22T21:52:00.004-04:00

An interesting argument about direct democracy (via Bob):

And if Israel's behaviour is short-termist (we will only know if it is short-termist in the long run, see Keynes aphorism on this matter) and it's continuance as a democracy with secure borders would be better served by a more nuanced and humane approach, are we seeing another instance in which a debased, creepingly direct democracy is threatening the moral foundations of democracy?

I think he undervalues one aspect of the particular case. The particular case is really a stepping off point for Paulie, though it's an important case for me, but I can use it in the same way as Paulie. A huge part of the Zionist perspective is "we have a right to make decisions about our own self-defense, since the rest of the world has demonstrably failed to care," and a huge part of the world replies, "ummm, no you don't, because you're not a real nation unless we say so. And we promise to protect you next time (provided you obey us right now, but otherwise, we'll force ourselves on you), so stop bringing that up." That kind of discourse is just.. Well, it really shouldn't be a surprise that one goal of Israeli governance to make it's own decisions with pointed stubbornness just to spite those who deny Israeli sovereignty. I think you see that all the time in postcolonial states, usually mocked by the privileged who see themselves as enlightened. Israel is founded on the notion that Jews cannot thrive without sovereignty, but that discourse is about denying Jews that sovereignty. Often, denying Israeli sovereignty while either ignoring or even championing that sovereignty for others. Disagreement is often important, but mocking and hateful shows of economic or political force aren't particularly productive in such cases.

In the general case, however, let me respond to this end:

Is a simple concerted re-statement of the values of representative democracy our only salvation? And if so, why isn't it a growing political movement?

Increasingly direct and populist democracy may be a symptom of the information age or merely a cyclically recurring problem. Perhaps, after a period of adjustment, we'll look back and say this was when Democracy grew up. I have my guesses, but I'd feel out of my depth to put them forward. There are, however, other responses besides such restatements. These restatements happen all the time, and they're usually a good thing. Toni Morrison's endorsement of Obama during the campaign, where she credited him with wisdom, being one such case (that I found moving and persuasive). Of course, when populists talk about politicians they can trust, which is something they do constantly, they're also (however dysfunctionally) working inside the rhetoric of representative democracy. But there is another, existing response, easily overlooked. What it doesn't do is deny the value of direct participation, because direct participation is actually a genuinely good thing. Instead, it expresses a measured skepticism of populist movements that criticizes populist rhetoric for excluding people from the democratic rights such movements claim for themselves.

With Zionists (like me) one of the winningest arguments is "Don't the Palestinians have the same right to sovereignty?" That's why a two-state solution is favored today by almost all Jews worldwide, which wasn't the case some 25 years ago. Unfortunately, a great deal of the rhetoric arrayed against Israel is exactly that sort of short-sighted, populist rhetoric we ought to be criticizing. That's why so much support for the Palestinians (which would be a good thing, if it were more genuinely progressive) is about the supporters getting to feel good about themselves.

Breaking News Alert: Judd Apatow is Jewish

2010-06-22T08:46:00.003-04:00

An interesting review of the latest Apatow-gang film, here at Zeek.

Although religion is rarely evoked, it is nonetheless clear to anyone who is educated on the subject that their male protagonists are at least culturally Jewish. Indeed, Apatow’s camp has been called a “Jew Tang Clan,” playing off the name of the Wu-Tang Clan, a highly productive Staten Island hip-hip collective. By itself, this emphasis on identity might not seem particularly noteworthy. It’s not as if Hollywood has avoided Jewish humor in recent decades. What distinguishes the representation of Jewishness in films like Get Him to the Greek is that it exaggerates the schlub in its boyish men to the point where they veer perilously to negative stereotype.

These aren’t “stealth” Jews, getting to have their ethnic heritage and transcend its historical burden. Even when their romantic exploits succeed, against daunting odds, they remain marked by their deviation from the urbane, polished and post-ethnic masculinity of conventional male leads. Apatow projects may be Cinderella stories, but the magic wand doesn’t redress the superficial imbalance between their male protagonists and the love interests they improbably win over. They are both “everymen,” devoid of the special traits that stardom normally demands, and decidedlyJewishmen.

The character of Aldous Snow (in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, at least - I've yet to see this one), by being British and named Snow, is an exaggeration of whiteness every bit as much as these schlubs are exaggerations of Jewishness. Unfortunately, most audiences, reviewers, and critics just ignore the Jewish elements of the Jew-Tang Clan.

Unless, that is, members of the audience fail to recognize them as ethnic at all. One of the signal developments in postwar American Jewish history is a gradual decrease in visibility. While it might seem obvious that the protagonists featured in films from the Apatow camp are Jewish, there are plenty of moviegoers in the United States who lack the knowledge and experience to reach that conclusion. Although some of these pictures’ popularity may be a function of this ignorance – would Middle America respond to them as favorably if they were understood as ethnic films? – the degree of integration it indicates is still largely salutary.

Salutory? That's fair, as long as it is recognized that's not always the most important question. It's pretty clear from Apatow's films and a host of other places -- indeed, from the creation of Zeek, itself, founded with the recognition that Jews in journalism tend to hide their Jewishness -- that there's been a need to find new ways to express Jewishness. To be Out. That word appears in Michaelson's editorial and also in Jon Stratton's Coming Out Jewish. It's a word I like to describe a dilemma of contemporary Jewihsness.

This isn't always the most important question, either, but it's one I find interesting because it points to the relationship between Jews and the Left: Would feminists respond as critically if the ethnic character of these films, which the filmmakers strive to exaggerate, weren't so thoroughly erased? Such criticisms are right, so far as they go (in that they're not the only audiences erasing Jewishness), but it sure is frustrating.

Yeah, that's antisemitism, too

2010-06-21T13:42:00.003-04:00

From the Rabbi who asked Helen Thomas about Israel:

Isn't it amazing that the vulgar hate mail and offensive threatening words to me and my family (and the Jewish People) are of no concern to some people. The jsut want to know if I ambushed Helen an dwhy did I report on this etc..

(Btw, my internet's been sketchy the past few days, which means this probably won't be the time when my blogging suddenly becomes regular. The more you know..)

The goals of Birthright Israel

2010-06-16T08:55:00.004-04:00

Post at Tablet on Birthright Israel, by Adam Kirsch, reviewing Shaul Kelner's book, Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage, and Israeli Birthright Tourism.

An older post from Phoebe Maltz also discusses Birthright.

Both suggest, Phoebe in her particular experience, and Kirsch in reviewing an academic work on the tours, that Birthright Israel is not about indoctrinating kids into Zionism. Kirsch:

It is that the whole premise of Birthright is opposed to the classical Zionist idea that Jews, to flourish as Jews, must settle in the Jewish State. Birthright trips are round-trip, not one-way; as Kelner provocatively puts it, “since the program’s inception, it has funded the departures of almost 200,000 Jews from the Jewish state.” Really, the tours are not Zionist enterprises but “diaspora-building” ones, meant to increase Jewish consciousness among American Jews once they return to America.

Phoebe:

And every time Birthright comes up, someone, soon enough, will refer to "Zionist brainwashing." This could be the case on some trips, but the one I went on was far more devoted to convincing wary American Jewish guys to embrace (literally, figuratively) American Jewish girls - and, in the person of IDF soldiers, to convince American Jewish girls of the potential of Jewish masculinity - than it was about anything to do with our surroundings.

I'm sure some Birthright tours are Zionist brainwashing, but probably those would be the ones where the kids (well, young adults, and perhaps the parents as well) were looking for that particular experience. Which means it's not exactly brainwashing, then.

To reduce Birthright tours to Zionist brainwashing is to be unable to relate to Jews except as "Zionists." It stems primarily from the idea that Jewish narratives of the conflict are artificial and fake. That they must be propped up by powerful (and cynical) interests.

AK:

Like most teenagers, too, Birthright tourists are also clearly more interested in sex and drinking than in politics and religion. Kelner notes that the programs are practically designed to encourage hooking up, among the participants and between Americans and Israelis—especially American women and male Israeli soldiers, during the “cross-cultural peer-to-peer encounters known in Hebrew as mifgashim.” (Female soldiers, Kelner observes, are not nearly as interested in the male tourists.) No wonder it has earned the nickname “Birthrate Israel”—which is, come to think of it, not a bad description of the program’s ultimate goal.

PM:

If my group took anything away from the trip relating to Israel in particular, it was probably that the country's drinking age is under 21. The whole thing might as well have taken place in Montreal. Israel was at best a picturesque environment, one from which we had to be shielded by a security guard and rules preventing us from wandering off on our own for ten minutes because OMG terrorism. What I'd like to see isn't indoctrination, just more discussion of Israeli history, contemporary life in Israel, and so forth, including but not limited to the conflict, and less pleading instruction on how to be a Jew in America.

In desiring more focus on Israel, including discussion of the conflict, Phoebe is being so very Zionist. I am, too, but I don't really have a problem with such tours if people like them. Then again, I never went on one.

The failures of anti-oppression activists to deal with antisemitism

2010-06-15T17:37:00.004-04:00

Left antisemitism matters.

David talks about the failures of anti-oppression activists to apply the basics of anti-oppression theory when the oppressed are Jews.

What distinguishes the rare discussions of anti-Semitism in these forums is not that folks universally mock and deride the concept. On the Feministe thread, you will find many that don't. What is different is that folks that would in other context be seen as trolls, here are just "the other side". The lack of 101 penetration is astounding. Respect how the Jewish community describes its own experience. Don't accuse us of being psychopaths, overly sensitive, manipulative, or flat out liars. Don't group our history and experience into the narrative of others. Being a Jew who disagrees with the bulk of the community does not earn you super-standing. The "anti-Semitism card" can and is easily trumped by the "anti-Semitism card card". Calling a particular statement respecting Israel anti-Semitic does not mean one condemns all criticisms of Israel as anti-Semitic. For that matter, critiquing one's statement regarding Israel does not necessarily mean we've called you anti-Semitic at all.

And, indeed, in a space like Racialicious, I've seen plenty of comments that are truly shocking. Unlike Feministe, every single comment at Racialicious is hand-moderated, so it's much better (but it can also be more worrying). It's really amazing that a commenter here would have to write:

Also, I really [don't] recommend starting anything with, “I have nothing against the Jewish people.” Really, that can only end in tears.

It's common wisdom at Racialicious that anyone who starts a sentence with "I have nothing against..." is about to say something racist.

It seems to me Racialicious, in particular, has made some progress (though Racialicious, in particular, also started pretty ignominously, despite their sincerity), but there's certainly still work to be done in all such forums. Sometimes a comment may be allowed by moderators who know that another comment will respond. Indeed, there was a response in another comment. But then look at the links provided that sparked these comments. There's a model there for dealing with antisemitism, in which Jews are seen primarily as privileged. The occasion of Helen Thomas's bigotry against Jews was used to remind people that antisemitism isn't that important. Particularly for sites that already struggle to include Jewish issues, that's not living up to their ideals.

The anarchist Left is not the anti-racist Left, so it's no surprise to find them doing worse, but they have generally absorbed some 101 lessons and desire to be strong anti-racists. There is a common root that makes it sometimes useful to view the anti-racist Left together with other Lefts. A guest post at Contested Terrain, shows how an anarchist website published an article from a right-wing, antisemitic website, then silenced criticism of the antisemitism.

Why? According to a study by Christopher MacDonald-Dennis, who interviewed "Jewish peer facilitators in a nationally recognised social justice program at a university in the Midwest":

The participants explained that many people, especially people of color in the minds of many respondents, saw Jews as not only agents but as “super-privileged White people”.

I don't think it's exactly "people of color" who are especially guilty of this (though I think there is obviously something that they felt they had to say and didn't know how else to say). Perhaps it may be more accurate to say it's the Left. But when I say that, I am including many people of color who may not be Leftists in a broad sense.

Sometimes, conflicts between different people of color have to do with resentment of the relatively more successful group. That's often been the case with Jews and other people of color in America. It's what James Baldwin was mostly talking about in Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White. But that interacts with antisemitism, which creates an impression of Jews as far more powerful than we are, in funny ways which non-Jewish anti-racists really have to take more seriously. And, contrary to the common perception that antisemitism among POC is driven primarily is this sort of resentment, a lot of it has simply to do with the nature of antisemitism. Because Jews are seen as powerful and scapegoated when things "go wrong," people with real greivances have powerful incentives to antisemitism, while the powerful are often in a better position to see the illogic.

Much of what Baldwin wrote is just not relevant to today's debates about antisemitism centered on Israel and anti-Zionism in the way it would be if we were talking about the Crown Heights riots. It's not just that the "White people" part of the MacDonald-Dennis quote, which reduces and minimizes the experience of Jews, needs to be made more complicated. It's that "super-privileged" part, which goes far beyond that, that needs to be explicitly countered. Baldwin wrote, in part,

For one thing, the American Jew's endeavor, whatever it is, has managed to purchase a relative safety for his children, and a relative future for them.

But, of course, the violence against Israel and the sanctioning and apologizing for that violence (as well as the attacks on Israel that deny Jews the sense of safety we otherwise draw from having that bolthole) means precisely that this isn't a relevant a part of todays discussions. Jews have fears that are real. It is not being "hysterical" for Jews to express those fears when someone calls Israel a "colonial" or "apartheid" state, and anti-oppression websites need to face up to that if they ever hope to achieve their ideals.

But anti-racists, who rarely understand antisemitism any better than the general public, routinely deny and minimize that fear at the same time they claim that Jews are privileged because we don't have to be afraid. In the name of creating a safe space, they may create bizarre and arbitrary rules for what is allowed, because they only see one kind of disruption. All of which is part of the process of subsuming the struggle against antisemitism into a more general anti-racist campaign that doesn't begin to serve the interests of Jews. Which is, in turn, part of the wider process of silencing and suppressing Jewish voices in general.

In some places, I'm glad to say they've begun to do better, but there is still more to do. Moderators are still learning what it takes to make a space welcoming for Jews. And I'd say anyone who moderates discussion of racism needs to read Steve Cohen's "Funny, You Don't Look Antisemitic" and realize that the failures of the Left with regards to antisemitism are not accidental. It's the nature of antisemitism that Left antisemitism has always been a meaningful and significant part of the problem. And it's not our job to educate you.

Paternalism

2010-06-14T16:06:00.003-04:00

Jeet Heer writes here about paternalistic racism.

In one sentence we get the two faces of paternalism: the smiling face that claims to have a special knowledge and affection (“I have deep love for our colored people” combined with the scowling desire to maintain power (“I know where they should be kept”).

He continues:

Smith’s two-faced take on race relations seemed very familiar to me. Don’t we see the same two-faces in the way neo-conservatives talk about Arabs? On the one hand there is the smile of condescension (we need to bring democracy to the Arabs) which quickly becomes the scowl of contempt (if they reject what is good for them, we’ll have to use the only language they understand which is force). The psychodynamics of racial paternalism deserve a deeper look from scholars.

Yes, we do see a lot of paternalistic racism directed toward Arabs. Also, a lot of paternalistic racism directed toward Jews. From people who have great love for Jews but fear that Israel will increase antisemitism. Or people who have great love for the Jews but fear that our constant "crying wolf" will keep them (somehow, I don't know how) from helping us when the time comes that we need their support. People who have great love for the Jews, so long as we are stateless, weak, and dependent on their protection.

I can't help but think of this, from George Galloway (apologies, but if you open the page, it will try to print; just hit "cancel"):

I cannot accept that the accusation of anti-semitism is part of the badinage of political debate. It’s a most serious allegation and hurling it at critics of Israel and its policies does nothing other than belittle victims of genuine anti-semitism down the decades, who are numbered in their millions.

He positions himself as the one who really has reverence for the victims of the Shoah. He said that after suing to shut down a Jewish radio station, which had dared to mock him for his support of the genocidal Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Not only did he say, "We are all Hezbollah, now," but also, "I am here to glorify the Lebanese resistance, Hezbollah, and to glorify the resistance leader, Hassan Nasrallah." He quite likes a bit of badinage, doesn't he, when he's the one speaking? He has a great deal of love and respect for Jews, so long as we let him do all the talking.

Paternalistic racism sure gets around.

Activism probably shouldn't be emotionally satisfying

2010-06-14T14:10:00.004-04:00

If it is, you're probably in it for the wrong reasons.

Two points especially worth taking from this post at Meretz USA. First, the execrable blog, MondoWeiss, is "a project of The Nation Institute." Anti-Israel activists have always loved to claim they're outsiders, but in reality, they're not. Actual Palestinian voices are still unfortunately rare, but anti-Israel and antisemitic voices are as much a part of the mainstream as ever. Second, maybe first in importance, is Ralph Seliger's wonderful answer to the question, "What do you tell young people who want to feel they’re making a difference?"

It isn’t boycott, it’s more engagement that you need. The United States should be more engaged in finding a solution and we should be more engaged in reaching out to all sides.

That probably wouldn’t be very emotionally satisfying to someone who was upset about the issue. But I think it’s part of growing up to understand that the world is not here to give you emotional satisfaction, and in this issue there is both complexity and perplexity, and you need to learn as much as you can, and be receptive to all sides, and be discerning.

That's huge for anti-Israel types. They want to "do something." They say, "We have to do something. We can't just sit by." That's wrong. There are other options. There are organizations, like Seeds of Peace and OneVoice trying to bring people together. That's real peace activism. And the whole damn mess is not about somebody's feelings as an activist sitting comfortably in Europe or the US! Talk about privilege, yeesh!

Linda Grant in Haaretz

2010-06-11T16:11:00.002-04:00

This is the tight place in which liberal Jews in the Diaspora find ourselves, and we can hardly breathe, let alone speak. Wanting to articulate the same critique of Israeli policy as Israeli critics, we find ourselves adding our voices to a condemnation of the Jewish state, which is turning into hate speech here. There is no evil crime of which Israel cannot be accused: It's an outlaw state, a pariah state, a demonic force. Calls for an end to the occupation are now regarded as merely propping up Zionism, an apartheid system. The right of return is sacred; the law of return is a racist abomination.

I wonder if "tight place" is meant to conjure Egypt of the Exodus, which I've seen translated as "narrow place." Yes, we need space. We need space to be able to criticize the Occupation without adding to the demonization of Israel. For that to happen, the demonization must be confronted by a wider community of anti-racist activists which has, thus far, been uninterested.

Two more, with nuance. Plus one more

2010-06-10T13:14:00.004-04:00

Stephen Kinzer on Leonard Lopate. The most interesting thing I heard was that the inclusion of Islamists in Turkish democracy was the end of Islamism as a threat to Turkish democracy. Less interested in the claim that peace talks are counterproductive with the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

I'm a little surprised that I like this Tony Judt piece at the NYTimes. He's wrong in some ways that he ought to find embarrassing. Consider, Israel does not have a Constitution, but he claims it does. (Before people think, "OMG, Israel is evil," England doesn't have a Constitution, either.) And though it's a less simply factual matter, there's another way that he's wrong which is more serious. He's wrong, as he always is, as this is a major point for him, about the Israel lobby. "Why else do an overwhelming majority of congressmen roll over for every pro-Israel motion?" In fact, the so-called Israel lobby loses more often than it wins when the issue is significant. "No more than a handful [of congressmen] show consistent interest in the subject." And the lack of interest in the issue is most certainly not the product of Jewish lobbying! He's right to say, "It is one thing to denounce the excessive leverage of a lobby, quite another to accuse Jews of 'running the country.' " But being significantly wrong about how much power Jews have in America is worthy of denunciation.

And, well, Judt is wrong all over the place. But he says a few good things, too. And overall, the intent of the piece is largely right, when he insists that both sides have a point. I'll leave it at that since I keep seeing more to dislike about the piece.

Plus, bonus content! This interview, on Tell Me More:

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of “That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation,” says gay people should stop fighting to uphold what she considers to be the failed institution of marriage.

The issues raised are fasinating --and I'm always for "resisting assimilation"-- but there's a great deal there that I hate about a great deal of "radicalism." I have no question that marriage equality is a step toward equality, even if we allow that not everyone wants to get married and that universal health care is still an important goal. I have two uncles (one is my uncle by marriage to the other) who have gone back and forth on marriage, between viewing it as a "straight thing" they would want no part of and viewing it as an important matter of equality. So, I know people can have mixed views about what the goals of queer rights movements should be. (And would agree with Sycamore that straight America underestimates the anti-marrigage sentiment among queers.) But in the end, my uncles have gotten married in as many places as they could. It seems to me there was a discussion in queer communities about goals and a decision that marriage equality was worth fighting for. Sycamore, herself, goes back and forth. At one point, the decision to focus on marriage equality was made because it was winnable. But at another point it was imposed by gay elites. When radicalism actually derides the choices made by those it claims to represent (scapegoating them as "elites," no less), it has ceased to be viable. I am all for continuing the fights against conservative cultural values and for universal health care (or universal insurance), but Sycamore is wrong to pit these fights against the fight for marriage equality.

Two bits

2010-06-09T10:29:00.003-04:00

Pheobe on Helen Thomas:

For supposedly educated, informed non-Jews today to throw their arms up and ask what the heck these white-as-white Jews were thinking, setting up shop in the Middle East of all places, is, on a historical level, disingenuous.

She refers to the chant of "Go back to Palestine!" As for "supposedly educated," I would also point out that about (but over) half the Jews of Israel are Mizrahim, which means they never had ancestors in Europe. A senior white house correspondent, I would hope, would be aware of both of these things before making any comments on the issue.

Here's Michael Chabon writing in the NYTimes to say that Jews aren't really smarter than anyone else:

Regardless of whether we chose in the end to condemn or to defend the botched raid on the Mavi Marmara, for Jews the first reaction was shock, confusion, as we tried to get our heads around what appeared to be an unprecedented display of blockheadedness.

Albert Einstein was right when he said the only reason Jews weren't as notably blockheaded in just the same way as every other nation on Earth was that the lack of Jewish power made it impossible to notice. Of course, that's a terrible reason to attack Jewish empowerment. But here's Sander Gilman, proving himself to be quite the smarty, back in 2007:

At least they [Jews] have “smartiness,” a quality analogous to and proven by Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness”: “truth that comes from the gut, not books.” It isn’t really that Jews are smarter than everyone else; it is just that everyone believes they are.

Here's a relevant bit:

Something very similar takes place within Evangelical Christianity, which envies the Jews—because they were God’s first “chosen people” and are necessary for the plan of the End of Days—but detests Jewish religious practice because the Jews continue to deny Christ. Like Murray, the Evangelicals can never “be” Jews; they remain always a poor simulacrum of Jewish belief or, in Murray’s case, Jewish “smartiness.” Philo-Semitism creates the Jews as a universal and therefore poisoned category. All Jews are…. The same happened by extension to the Israelis after the Six-Day War: they were all powerful and resistant and ethical; since then, and as international sympathy for the Palestinians has grown, when any given Israeli acts against type all are damned as too powerful, too rigid, too corrupt. The stereotype of Super Jew has transformed itself in Jewish barbarity.

The problem with stereotypes is often that failing to conform to them brings outrage. If Israel behaves far better than every other nation in such a situation (an argument for another time, but we have no way of knowing how any other nation would act in such a situation, because no other nation could be), the occasional failing will still be cause for condemnation. That doesn't automatically make such condemnation wrong, but it should make it clear why Israel doesn't always react to condemnation by saying "Oops. Our bad."

Hagee in the Forward

2010-06-05T15:14:00.004-04:00

I'm a bit behind on this one, but I recently got an email from Zeek asking if I'd like them to continue their presently suspended coverage of Hagee. A few weeks ago, the Forward published an op-ed by John Hagee in which Hagee defended "Christian Zionism" from charges that it's antisemitic. I have a lot of problems with Christian Evangelical support for Zionism. (For starters, I don't like the term "Christian Zionism.") That includes the hawkishness. Jews who have engaged in dialogue with Evangelicals have said the support for Israel and for Jews was sincere, but many of the charges against Hagee claim that he (and the whole movement, I guess) is flat out lying on a number of issues. This goes beyond questioning whether the movement is as sensitive as it should be toward Jews or whether it is helpful. I don't believe that it is either of these to a sufficient degree, but if that's the nature of the problem, then I've had enough with too many despicable attacks on some Jews because they have found him to be sincere.

Some of the charges against Hagee are far more serious than what I'll deal with here at this time. But if Hagee's followers can be shown that these charges are true, then they will disown him. The goal of discussion should follow from that, but instead, criticism of Hagee is used to prove a whole range of antisemitic stereotypes to discredit "bad Jews" and promote "good Jews."

There is one point where it seems particularly clear to me that Evangelicals are wrongly maligned. Hagee writes:

Like all people of faith, we Christians firmly believe that our religion is true. But we also believe in religious freedom and have enormous respect for the Jewish faith. The first rule adopted by Christians United for Israel was that there would be no proselytizing at our events. CUFI exists only to honor and support the Jewish people, never to convert them.

I don't think it's controversial to say Hagee is, here, both defending himself from real attacks and addressing real concerns among Jews. Neither do I think it's controversial to say that there is work to be done among Christians to more fully realize this goal of refusing to proselytize. I think especially of the disparity between Orrin Hatch's Hannukah song (and that he wears a mezzuzah-inspired necklace) and the continuing Mormon practice (Hatch is Mormon) of baptizing Jews by proxy without consent. Christians who claim to support Jews in the way Hagee and Hatch do could, for instance, lobby the Church of LDS to stop that practice. But I do believe the desire to be sensitive to Jewish concerns is sincere.

My view on this is partly shaped by having had a roommate in college who was a member of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. He appeared in every way typical of the conservative Evangelical movement. [UPDATE: At least, the younger part of the movement. In comments, Rebecca mentions Falwell and Robertson. I don't think this post would be true if it were about them.] I had a lot of disagreements with him, including that he thought I was going to Hell. But the reason wasn't that I wouldn't convert to Christianity. His view, the dominant view in conservative Evangelical circles, is that Christ came to broaden the message of G-d, but that His covenant with Jews remained as valid today as it had ever been. In other words, I was going to Hell because I wasn't a very good Jew. If I'd kept kosher and observed the Sabbath, believing in Jesus was optional. That doesn't mean he wouldn't have preferred me to be an "Evangelical Jew" but it wouldn't keep me from Heaven if I didn't believe in Jesus. This replaces the incredibly problematic and historically dominant supercessionist view, that Christianity had replaced Judaism and that the Covenant with the Jewish people had been broken. There is still Supercessionism around, but mainstream Evangelicals have used "supercessionist" as a charge with which to discredit. If Hagee can indeed be shown to be a supercessionist, he will be discredited among his own followers.

Really sucky tropes with long histories, 1

2010-06-04T08:42:00.004-04:00

"Jews are responsible for antisemitism"

Today: Israel causes antisemitism. NOT cool to say this. Israel's actions often ought to lead to sharp criticism of Israel's actions -- not to antisemitism.

job cohen

2010-06-02T10:57:00.001-04:00

See the NYTimes Magazine piece.

The Labor Party in the Netherlands — which several weeks ago emerged from the endless gray muddle of the country’s multiparty system to take the lead in polls as the nation approaches an election on June 9 — was unveiling its candidates. On a makeshift stage, before banners bearing the party’s logo of a fist inside a rose, stood two people. At the top of the list of candidates — the man responsible for the recent shake-up of Dutch politics, who is making some people in Europe begin to wonder whether he represents a way for mainstream parties on the Continent to successfully combat the swelling tide of populist, anti-immigrant voices — was Job Cohen, who until March was the mayor of Amsterdam. Cohen was raised in a secular Jewish household in the hamlet of Heemstede, not far from Amsterdam; his parents spent World War II in hiding from the Nazis; his paternal grandparents died at Bergen-Belsen. At Cohen’s side, No. 2 on the candidate list, was Nebahat Albayrak, who was born in the central Anatolian region of Turkey and moved as a child to Rotterdam, where her father worked as a scaffold builder.

disproportionate

2010-06-01T18:46:00.005-04:00

According to a recent op-ed in the LA Times , Los Angeles County saw it's first confirmed case of the measles in roughly 4 years. Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Agatha has killed 146 in Central America and created a sinkhole 200 ft. deep. Turkey kills 19 Kurdish rebels (in Iraq).

So why does Israel get so much attention? There are probably lots of reasons, some better than others. I don't know if I'd put any of those stories ahead of the current Israeli/Gaza crisis if I were an impartial editor, but I do know that the attention paid to Israel in the mainstream media (and often even more so in alternative media) is neither idiosyncratic nor reasoned. At times, I think something Mahmoud Darwish said is particularly relevant: The great disadvantage of the Palestinians is that their enemies are the Jews, while the great advantage of the Palestinians is that their enemies are the Jews.

Churning Butter

2010-06-01T01:24:00.004-04:00

There's a story I came across recently. I'd heard it before, and it made very little sense. But this time I thought of the Beinart piece. And then something I'd heard long ago, "the only rational position on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is an irrational optimism." Following recent news, it seems more important. The story begins with two frogs in a bowl of milk. The milk is deep enough and the bowl is high and steep enough that things are clearly hopeless for the two frogs. Already you know how improbable it is, and why I've hated this story. Of the two frogs, one is very smart. Seeing the situation to be hopeless, it allows itself to drown. The other frog is so stupid, it strives furiously until, eventually, its treading churns the milk to butter.

Israelis boarded a Free Gaza ship. A few Israeli soldiers have been injured, and at least 10 anti-Israel activists have been killed. Perhaps as many as 60 have been injured. There are many, many things to say. Too many. A friend posted an article to facebook in which Glenn Greenwald writes:

As Americans suffer extreme cuts in education for their own children and a further deterioration in basic economic security (including Social Security), will they continue to acquiesce to the transfer of billions of dollars every year to the Israelis, who -- unlike Americans -- enjoy full, universal health care coverage?

And that's part of the problem. No, neither Jews nor Israelis are to blame for the lack of an adequate American healthcare system. Despite whatever else Greenwald might say in the article that's absolutely right, it's outrageous and offensive to suggest this, and fuck him.

Hussein Ibish is better. He's wrong to so completely dismiss "Tohar HaNeshek, the 'purity of arms' that the Israeli military boasts of." But he is deeply impressive when he points out:

Flotilla organizers are no doubt shocked, horrified and appalled by the way this has turned out. But if they were engaged in classic civil disobedience, their action has actually produced some version of the intended result. If the point is to provoke a reaction, and indeed an overreaction, to make a point, they have succeeded beyond their wildest imagination.

In fact, the activists were not engaged in "classic civil disobedience." See the discussion here and follow David's link to see the videos here. When the Israelis boarded the ship, they were attacked, and they responded to lethal force with lethal force. As military personal, their capacity to cause harm greatly exceeded that of the activists, but military and police forces always rely on an advantage in force (especially when outnumbered) to prevent escalations. Still, the confrontation stems from the blockade of Gaza. I could, in turn blame that on the rockets from Hamas, but however nuanced I want to be, I refuse to shift blame for these deaths from Israel. However, antisemitic and outrageously one-sided Free Gaza has been, it's close enough to civil disobedience that I can only blame Israel for these deaths.

There is, however, a not-so-nuanced point I do insist on: Nothing can "delegitimize" the idea that Jews have the right to self rule. I am not any less of a Zionist because of this tragedy. Only, I must try harder to churn butter.

Not teaching our kids about Israel

2010-05-25T10:36:00.003-04:00

Marjorie Ingall writes at Tablet on how Jewish parents aren't teaching their children about Israel.

When you’re an American Jewish parent, ambivalence and sorrow about the state of Israel aren’t necessarily bad. Disengagement is. What I need to fight in myself is the tendency to tune out when I’m confused and upset. When I tune out, I can’t learn, and I can’t teach my own kids. Disagreement with Israel doesn’t mean not loving Israel, just as being upset with your own children doesn’t mean you don’t love them. But I need to engage with what frightens me, and my failure to do so is why it’s taken eight years to write this column.

I have a suspicion this is more significant than the many factors that have been blamed for the growing rift between Israel and American Jews. (Of course, when we say "rift" we should remember that even among young, liberal Jews most do believe Israel should exist.)

Ibish on Berman on al-Husseini

2010-05-24T17:52:00.005-04:00

If you don't know, Amin al-Husseini was the Mufti of Jerusalem for a time. Promoted by the British, he was the strongest Palestinian leader (though not uncontested) during the Mandate period. He preached vicious antisemitism and gleefully collaborated with the Nazis. Hussein Ibbish continues his review of Paul Berman's latest here. Earlier, he had said it was "important and frequently brilliant, but also seriously flawed." This post is more critical than the last (which I criticized here).

I'm not as familiar as I'd like to be with the subject matter here. I do know Mizrahi Jews often view the role of Amin al-Husseini in their Nakba as being greater than Ibish allows. I also wonder if Berman is making greater use of German historians, mainly Matthias Küntzel, who begin with the Nazi account of German/Arab collaboration.

Ibish does not address the role of the Mufti in antisemitic violence prior to 1948 and the role this had on the development of the conflict. That's not to criticize Ibish, since this is not the major topic of the post, but to point out that there are important points that would be integrated into a wider discussion.

In any case, the discussion is an interesting and important one, and I'm grateful for the following passage from Ibish. Arabs and Muslims are often leery of any discussion of antisemitism in their communities. To some degree, it's understandable, but it's also counterproductive and damned frustrating. At times, it can be profoundly patronizing to refuse to take groups like Hamas and Hezbollah seriously when they spout antisemitic crap, but many defenders will outright refuse to even read the Hamas charter. Anyway, Ibish:

Berman asks, "Will someone argue that in my presentation of these developments in the Middle East, I am making too much of the Nazi contribution?" Yes, indeed I will, and I think the passage cited above is a good example of that. There is no doubt whatsoever that much of the present Islamist movement is infected with a very virulent form of anti-Semitic paranoia, largely imported from the West and that was promoted by many forces, including the Nazis, but which has a complex and overdetermined political and cultural history. It is at very best a reductive caricature to imagine that at the center of this wretched turn of events were laughable and totally ineffective Nazi propaganda efforts, particularly radio broadcasts that very few people listened to and no one appears to have heeded, and that certainly produced none of their intended effects, made by a man who was partly discredited at the time and completely discredited within three years after the end of the war, and has been almost entirely forgotten by Arab political culture except as an embarrassment and the author of a gigantic defeat. There have been plenty of other very significant, and indeed much more powerful, sources of these terrible ideas, not least of them anti-Semitic Western Christian missionaries in late 19th and early 20th centuries. One might observe, very plausibly, that it really doesn't matter what the trajectory of the growth of the Islamist movement and the development of its anti-Semitic strain that combines certain Muslim traditions and anti-Israel fanaticism with modern European anti-Semitic political paranoia might be, but the fact remains that it exists and it is a huge problem. But I do think it's important to understand what phenomena really combined produced this effect and not to get sucked into false leads and incorrect analyses that will only complicate the process of developing the necessary correctives. History matters.

Also, I'd like to point out a very interesting point Ibish makes:

Had he paid attention to Achcar, Berman wouldn't have gotten so badly wrong the central role of Rashid Rida, one of the key founders of the Salafist revival movement and publisher of the hugely influential journal al-Manar, who Burman cites as "express[ing ] sympathy for the Zionist settlers" in the 1920s. This is correct, but it misses, rather badly, Rida's subsequent introduction of the very Nazi-like anti-Semitic ideas that Berman associates most strongly with al-Husseini, and probably in a much more lasting and influential manner. And, Rida was not the only such influential voice. Indeed, Achcar provides a far better, more sophisticated, and much better informed, roadmap to the development of Nazi-like anti-Semitism among Islamists and sympathy among them for the Nazism generally, than Berman's somewhat ham-handed attempt at this.

Rida died in 1935. Just one more thing that makes it ridiculous to dismiss Arab antisemitism as purely a reaction to Zionism, which is a too frequent way of ending discussion. (And, especially, consider the role of Jews and Arabs at the time. The present power of Jews in Israel cannot be projected onto the past.) Rather, it was only natural that Arab nationalism would draw some influence from European nationalism and even European fascism.

Defamation

2010-05-21T18:22:00.003-04:00

Saw the documentary Defamation, by Yoav Shamir, today. It's available for instant watching on Netflix. Here's David Hirsch's review at Engage Online:

The Bolsheviks used to aim to hit an enemy hard at its strongest point in the belief that a telling blow there would bring down the whole edifice. By contrast, Yoav Shamir, the Israeli director of the film Defamation, shown on More4 this week, chooses mainly easy targets. He presents some interesting material but he does so in a way that does not make the most of it.

My problem isn't the the filmmaker goes after easy targets, but he does so with a proud lack of context and an uninquiring mind. Hirsch also complains that the scene in which he appears was not accurately depicted. The filmmaker focused on some right-wing Jewish responses, ignoring most of the room. Hirsch, who found his way into the film by criticizing Israeli policy in the West Bank, goes on:

The truth is it doesn’t require much courage at all to stand up and oppose Israeli human rights abuses. People do it all the time. Israelis do it all the time. It is the illusion of the moment, pushed by films such as Defamation, pushed by the self-promotion of the anti-Zionists that there are fearsome prices to be paid for supporting Palestinian liberation. Personally, I find it much more frightening to stand up for a democratic and genuinely liberational kind of criticism against the current British orthodoxy of casting Israel, and the Jews who support it, as uniquely and especially threatening.

In many ways, Defamation seems to aim at a particularly sophisticated audience. One that will understand that when the director's voice says (about 11 min in), "The headline [on antisemitism] in the Israeli paper was quite worrying. I wanted to see how the Anti-Defamation League actually fights antisemitism" it's only the setup to a joke. The next shot uses a handheld camera, intentionally off-kilter, to suggest an unprofessional feeling and that the ADL isn't to be taken seriously. An audience that would understand why he contrasts his narrator's voice saying that he's never known real antisemitism, since he grew up in Israel, with his own grandmother saying, "Jews love money. Jews are crooks." In other words, an audience of Sander Gilman.

There are serious questions there, but Shamir has more fun playing around, poking fun at a particular Jewish self-image without ever looking at the context of the Jewish condition. However, it's well worth seeing just to get a look at how pathetic Norman Finkelstein is at the end. even though Shamir is predisposed to portray Finkelstein positively, as reminiscent of "the Biblical prophets of Doom, who were always being pelted with stones for saying things nobody wanted to hear," Finkelstein is himself a pretty soft target for abuse. Throwing Nazi salutes while complaining about being called a self-hating Jew is perfect material for Shamir. After being challenged on comparing Abe Foxman to Hitler, Finkelstein ups the ante, "It's an insult to Hitler." But he's also an important enough target and a public figure.

Hussein Ibish on Paul Berman on Tariq Ramadan

2010-05-15T19:48:00.002-04:00

I haven't read the Berman, myself, but I think there's probably enough here to talk about the response from Ibish is a limited way. This interview of Berman may help set the stage. And here's Ibish:

Paul Berman's important and frequently brilliant, but also seriously flawed, new book "The Flight of the Intellectuals" (Melville House, 2010) is an old-fashioned polemic that takes aim at two main targets.

Ok. Notably, Ibish praises Berman for reading Ramadan carefully and reporting on Ramadan's views accurately, despite disagreements on how to characterize and interpret those views.

Here's what I want to address:

Berman's efforts to paint Ramadan as an anti-Semite and an apologist for terrorism are somewhat weaker, and although there is no fire exactly, there certainly is some smoke. On anti-Semitism, the direct case against Ramadan is based on a fairly shoddy article he wrote about French supporters of Israel that casually and in some cases wrongly leveled the accusation of ethnic preference and tribalism. It was a bad article, and a bad argument, but hardly prima facie evidence of anti-Semitism. If it is, the number of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigots in the United States is infinitely greater than anything I've ever imagined or claimed, and the standard for such an accusation really ought to be a lot higher than that.

This is defining away the middle, a common problem confronting all anti-racism. What does it mean to say there's "smoke" that is different from saying something is antisemitic?

And there's a curious phrase here, "prima facie evidence of anti-Semitism," that indicates that antisemitism is "what you are inside" (which can only ever be infered) rather than simply actions and statements. Yes, there're an awful lot of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigots in the US (and an awful lot of antisemites), but it's more important to talk about the power of that bigotry. The important point in talking about racism is the effect of racism on minorities, not the effect on the dominant group(s).

To be significantly wrong about the motivations of Jews in such a way, particularly if it is a peculiar inability to hear what Jews actually say about our own motivations (and this is probably a charge Ibish would accept), IS antisemitism. There is no need to prove that it is motivated by malice toward Jews. The behavior is in and of itself antisemitism. The effect of shutting Jews out of the public debate is powerful, dangerous, and real regardless of intention.

Here's what Berman wrote earlier in a lengthy piece (really, a short book) for The New Republic, Who's Afraid of Tariq Ramadan. If you never read it (or The Flight of the Intellectuals, which looks just like a longer version of the same), it's worth the time. Here's a sample:

Ramadan argued that, by intervening in Iraq, the United States "certainly acted in the name of its own interests, but we know that Israel supported the intervention and that its military advisers were engaged among the troops." More: "We also know that the architect of this operation in the heart of the Bush administration is Paul Wolfowitz, a notorious Zionist, who has never concealed that the fall of Saddam Hussein would guarantee a better security for Israel with its economic advantages assured." It ought not to require an exceptionally fine mind to detect the conspiracy theory at work in these remarks. I cringe at having to add that Wolfowitz, whatever his other sins, has never been known for his Zionism (though I realize that, given the confluence of z's, hardly anyone will believe me). Ramadan's description of the Jewish intellectuals in France pretty much harmonizes, by the way, with his description in Western Muslims and the Future of Islam of the American Jews as well--the American Jews who, en bloc, are said by Ramadan to form a "lobby" (the word has been internationalized) that advocates Jewish interests and the promoting of Israel in lieu of standing for "right, justice, and ethics," which is what he thinks that Muslims should do.

Yes, to assume that Wolfowitz is a Zionist when he isn't, simply because he is Jewish, is indeed antisemitism. Relatedly, to treat all Jews as a homogenous bloc "lobby" is indeed antisemitic. To emphasize a Jewish advisor as the "architect" of a policy -- practically erasing the much more powerful President, Vice President, and Secretary of Defense, not to mention the powerful support of the populace at large -- is indeed antisemitic. And to suggest that Jews act selfishly and lack ethics and a sense of justice is indeed antisemitic.

"We're not like that" (Or, there are antisemites besides neo-Nazis)

2010-05-13T15:57:00.008-04:00

This article from the Daily Mail has a few problems. First, as a British paper, it must feel like a great relief to criticize antisemitism in America. It isn't like we haven't got problems over here, but Britain (which invented the Blood Libel) has more than enough problems of its own. Second, the focus on neo-Nazis is always an issue. Yes, they're sensational and entertaining subjects, and news is ultimately an entertainment industry. But again, it's a great relief to swell our chests in pride and say, "we're not like those people." Antisemitism exists in different forms, and it can be difficult to criticize precisely because people only think of antisemitism as this kind of kooky far-right. When Jenny Tonge is criticized for antisemitism, she responds by saying, "I'm not like those people." Third, the beliefs of these neo-Nazis are hardly described. This article is actually better than most on this account, but still falls short of really informing anyone, focusing instead on the openness of the family's hatred. The family are described more than once as Holocaust deniers. Beyond that, there's this bit (toward the end, where an editor might have cut it off for length):

'I have read a little bit about their religion and a lot of it is very damaging to people,' she said.

'The Jews are definitely the worst race in America.'

But there is nothing more specific about their beliefs about Jews. Why do they think the Jews are the worst race in America? That's not to say that antisemitism is worse than other forms of racism. It's important to note the distinction that these antisemites make, which is not the same as reifying the distinction. They see people of color as animals but see Jews as demons. Animals could never take control of the government, but demons can and will. Watch The Omen if you don't already get why people who don't look so different can be so scary; the film features an infant as the ultimate evil for a reason. Neo-nazis view the US as occupied territory, controlled by a "Zionist Occupied Government." It's here that someone who likes to talk about the power of Jews (like Stephen Walt or John Mearsheimer or Jenny Tonge) might find a similarity they couldn't dismiss so simply by saying "We're not like that." And, of course, such a similarity is far more important than the swastika tattoos.

People simply don't know enough about antisemitism, which makes it difficult to keep antisemitism from being subsumed into a more general anti-racist effort that doesn't come close to meeting the needs of Jews. Articles like this, which discourage any sort of self-criticism, are part of that problem.

Is a cultural boycott "non-violent"?

2010-05-12T21:52:00.007-04:00

From the acceptance speech of Amitav Ghosh and Margaret Atwood (via Adam Holland), awarded the Dan David prize in Israel:

We two fiction writers are very small potatoes indeed in the context of the momentous political events now unfolding. But writers everywhere are soft targets. It’s easy to attack them. They don’t have armies, they can’t retaliate. We have both received a number of letters urging and indeed ordering us not to attend, on the grounds that anything connected with Israel is tabu. (Oddly enough, neither the President of Italy, Giorgo Napolitano – winner of the “Past” category for reason and moderation in political affairs – nor the three computer scientists – Leonrad Kleinrock, Gordon Moore, and Michael Rabin – who were awarded in the “Future” category — were targeted by these correspondents.) We have both sent letters to many but not all of the urgers and orderers. (Not all, because in some cases the petitions etc. have appeared online without having been sent to us first.) The letters we have received have ranged from courteous and sad to factual and practical to accusatory, outrageous, and untrue in their claims and statements; some have been frankly libelous, and even threatening. Some have been willing to listen to us, others have not: they want our supposedly valuable “names,” but not our actual voices.

In other words, the all-or-nothings want to bully us into being their wholly owned puppets. The result of such a decision on our part would be – among other things – to turn us into sticks with which to beat other artists into submission, and that we refuse to do. We are familiar with what other artists of many countries have been put through in similar circumstances.

The metaphor of beating others into submission is apt. Even discounting the threats they received as the fringe of a movement (though I don't think it is the fringe), the boycott is fundamentally coercive. It is not about bringing people together. It is not in the tradition of nonviolent movements such as Gandhi's or Martin Luther King, Jr's. At least, not as I understand those movements. Looking through MLK quotes, I find:

At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.

It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.

Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.

The "white intifada" has yet to take this step, loving and sacrificing for peace, rejecting hate. I hope it evolves. Perhaps it will evolve as Israelis respond in kind. Perhaps as it becomes less bizarre to Palestinians to reject violence. But for now non-violence is a tactical choice, not a moral decision.

I recently saw the film Budrus. One thing (among many) that stands out is how shocked Ayed Morrar, an organizer of non-violent protests, was that there are Israelis who would join them in protesting the separation barrier. The impression was that he had imagined Israelis as evil. Eventually, peace activists who hope to be truly effective must come to love even those who hate.

I don't say that as someone who embraces non-violence the way Gandhi did; I think it is often the only acceptable option, but not always. In fact, I have real problems with Gandhi's stance on WWII. But I do hope, in part because I believe only non-violence will work, in part because I think violence against Israeli citizens is wrong, that it becomes the dominant strategy among Palestinians. I hope the white intifada continues to grow and evolve.

The cultural boycott against Israel is not about making peace through love and sacrifice. The Montgomery bus boycotts were about proving Blacks to be an integral part of society; the boycott of Israel is about proving Jews to be dispensible in the world. It is about proving the weakness of Jews, incapable of standing up against the world. It is about making Jews weaker by depriving Israel of support. So, we should ask how history will one day view a boycott against a weak minority.

Paul Berman with Brian Lehrer

2010-05-05T11:53:00.005-04:00

Because the hosts at WNYC are so great, this interview of Paul Berman surpasses, in some ways, (my memory of) Berman's well-known "book" on Ramadan. Here, for starters, Berman notes that he [Berman] has been as important as anyone in promoting Ramadan in America through his criticism. And he brings the critique to a sharp point: though Ramadan cites liberal values such as equality for women, he argues for an Islamic process of reverence for Islamic scholars. That's not necessarily so incompatible with Democracy -I wish I could ask Berman this- provided that one understands that such an inherently conservative, religious process is not and cannot be a political mechanism. But it is a question worth putting to Ramadan, to which Ramadan seems quite dismissive (or unaware). At the same time, he's clearer that Ramadan's family history does not determine his views. Further, Berman is quite right to criticize Ramadan's support for Qaradawi.

Oh, and the interview touches on other things, including Berman's flawed support for the Iraq War.

I see WNYC has a new (beta) format that requires logging in to comment. That should help the quality of discussion online. (Audio should be available within a few hours of this posting.)

Kai Bird's Jerusalem

2010-05-03T14:29:00.005-04:00

Two pieces from Kai Bird. First, an interview from NPR. As noted in the interview, he begins with an "Arab" perspective. His father was an Arabist, and he has many Palestinian friends. However, his wife was the child of Holocaust survivors, and he slowly came to understand the Jewish perspective somewhat better. Unfortunately, in the interview he describes both sides as victimized without recognizing how both sides continue to be victimized. And the host claims that millenialist groups are dominant on both sides. Though we could debate the significance of Hamas (and it's millenialist tendencies) among Palestinians, they have significant institutional power and the millenialist attitude cannot be ignored. However, it's untrue to say that of Israeli society, where security concerns are absolutely dominant and millenialism amounts to a tiny segment of society. But, with these reservations, people should listen to the interview.

Then, also read his op-ed in the NYTImes. It's biggest flaw is that it fails to mention his perspective. *East Jerusalem is not like the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territories.* It is more sensitive, and damage to the peace process by building in East Jerusalem is less easily reversed. I don't generally agree that settlement activity makes a two-state solution impossible; without a negotiated solution, Israel is likely to impose a unilateral solution, as with Gaza, by withdrawing inside the security barrier. The changed borders and new conditions would be less than ideal but wouldn't prevent an eventual peace. However, changes in Jerusalem are a much bigger deal.

Anthony Julius interviewed by Leonard Lopate

2010-04-30T14:03:00.006-04:00

Here.

A fairly good interview, though I think it really says something that Leonard Lopate is wrong about a few significant facts. At one point, Lopate lists a string of criticisms of Israel, to which Julius replies that none of them are true. (Without listening to it again, some are true and some aren't, but Julius can't be blamed for treating them in bulk when they were presented that way.) This isn't FOX News or even CNN. This is one of the best radio shows out there, and yet there's some stuff from the host that's simply wrong. Julius is right to note that Arabs in Israel are allowed to serve in the military -- what is different is that Arabs are not generally compelled to do so, with some exceptions from communities that asked to be compelled to serve. Portraying this choice as Israeli compassion is probably going too far, but he could have added that Israeli Arabs (as are all Israelis) are allowed to do civil service in their own communities to substitute for military service. Few Arabs, though the number was growing last I heard, elect to do so because they feel it would legitimize the state. In that way, they refuse the benefits given to those who do military service. Here, before we address the legitimacy of a policy with such an effect arising in such a way, we must notice that this question hinges on whether it is legitimate to criticize Israel (uniquely) for simply existing, since that is the reason underlying the refusal to do service.

Btw, the comments online are not so much better than would be expected elsewhere.

UPDATE:

But there are people who bridle at any criticism of Israel just like there are people who bridle at any defense of Israel. And I've had that experience on this show both ways. I'm afraid to say that I think Avidgor Lieberman is somebody who may be engaged in something the equivalent of racism because I know I'm going to get angry mail. So I didn't say that.

Something the equivalent of racism?? Would he describe Hassan Nasrallah so tepidly? (I imagine he would, but I expect he'd only bridle at different criticism.) I wish Julius had offered a more comprehensive response than merely, "Yes." Lopate's description of Lieberman just after is really flawed. Lieberman's argued for redrawing the borders so that many Israeli Arabs (currently Israeli) would be citizens of a new Palestinain state. And he's talked about a loyalty oath for those left (and for Orthodox Jews, who aren't Zionists, as well). That's not the same as "expelling" Arabs -- at least, not in the way most commonly understood and in the way previously used in the interview to describe the expulsion of Jews from England. That expulsion of Jews from England forced people to actually leave their homes; Lieberman's policies wouldn't require anyone to move. And it's certainly nothing like Nasrallah's desire to kill all Jews worldwide. I bridle at the absurd phrase "something the equivalent of racism" to describe someone who is clearly racist, but this is hardly unique to describing Israelis. Regardless of what side he's on, or his views on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Lopate ought to be afraid of simply getting facts wrong.

The fact that both sides are oppressed means there's not a lot of room for poetic expression. And if Lopate can't get the facts right, how are we supposed to expect anyone to.

And, blatantly, the "antisemitism of fools" should be attributed to August Bebel and not Thomas Mann.

To Have and Have Not

2010-04-24T21:22:00.002-04:00

Watching the film on PBS with my wife, introduced by a film scholar. Didn't know Lauren Bacall (aka Betty Joan Perske) was Jewish. Or that she hid her Jewishness in the face of Howard Hawks casual antisemitism.

Disability Studies and The Shannon Technique

2010-04-23T13:08:00.005-04:00

I've tried to pimp Michael Bérubé's book, The Left at War. But that book is generally about The Left and politics and that kind of stuff. He actually specializes in disability studies, and this post on that is too cool to not pass along. The videos of artist Bill Shannon are awesome. And the rest of the post has a great deal going for it (though non-regular readers will have to sift through some thoughts about Bérubé's life).

With his reference to Total Recall, I thought just how completely an issue can be erased from public consciousness even as it features prominently in major blockbuster films. And the line from Goffman.

(And perhaps soon I'll update the post on tL@War I rushed before my extended absence.)

Remembrance, and the righteous among the nations

2010-04-12T15:22:00.003-04:00

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. So, remember. On Passover, we're injoined to remember as if we had personally been there, and we should remember this as if it had happened to us personally.

Last night there was a documentary on PBS with a Ukranian survivor, Fanya Gottesfeld-Heller. As a teenager, she entered into a sexual relationship with a man much older than she. If it hadn't been necessary to survive --he was her protector-- it would have been remarkably creepy. Her father softly encouraged her, "Be nice to him." With her parents and brother, she hid in a ditch big enough only for 2 people, for 2 years. Without even the most basic sanitation. Without the freedom even to get out of the ditch. With barely any food. And when the Nazis left and they could get out, her father disappeared. She'll never know what happened to him, but she's sure it was her lover who murdered her father.

My grandmother, born in Kiev, left after the Revolution, but it's not hard to imagine it could have been my family. Actually, I imagine my grandmother left some family behind. Cousins or such. If they were so lucky to survive, they probably had similar stories.

Tonight, PBS airs a show, The Righteous Among the Nations, about Arabs who saved Jews. There are clips here.

ex-neo-nazi skinhead's memoirs

2010-04-08T16:38:00.002-04:00

Ex neo-nazi skinhead, Frank Meeink. The excerpt, here, details his socialization into white supremacism. It's notable just how he had to be socialized. There's a break between the center-right racism we see all the time and the far-right racism that's less common, and it's important to understand that break.

Liberal authoritarians and radical liberals

2010-04-06T10:41:00.007-04:00

I'm not a liberal reformist in my temperment. In my ideology, perhaps some might see me that way. I don't argue against radical change -I'm all for it- but I do think the means matter. Anyway, Alan Johnson has a piece at Dissent's blog in which one line particularly hits me:

“Revolutionary politics” he told us, “is not a matter of opinions but of the truth on behalf of which one often is compelled to disregard the ‘opinion of the majority’ and to impose the revolutionary will against it.”

That "he" in "he told us" is Slavoj Žižek, and what hits me is the incredible inadequacy of any revolution that requires authoritarianism to quell the masses it has failed to persuade. I'm going to go ahead and call Žižek a liberal reformist for his indifference to the radical project of convincing people. He's still attached to the view that it's only what the elites do that matters, but I don't think you can ever have real, meaningful change (especially on issues such as racism) merely by switching one set of elites for another.

Johnson links to an older piece he wrote for Workers' Liberty (some punctuation corrected here, for clarity):

[Noberto] Bobbio made many other contributions to socialist thinking. A leading figure in the peace movements of the 1980s, he had criticised the post-war pro-Soviet fake "peace movements". His words of 1952 should cause some - those waving the "victory to the Resistance" placards - to think about the kind of "anti-war movement" they are building today.

"Strange peacemakers, these 'partisans of peace'. They offer themselves as mediators to establish peace between the two contenders. But they announce from the outset and without any reticence that one of the contenders is right and one is wrong."

I'm definitely gonna use that! In that piece, he calls Bobbio "part of an Italian tradition of radical liberalism." Perhaps that's what I am, a radical liberal, but I'll probably just go on using the catch-all term, Leftist.

Sunday Times on Biases at HRW

2010-04-02T09:57:00.006-04:00

Rebecca at Mystical Politics put up a link to this at the Sunday Times (of London). There's any number of interesting bits, and it's well worth reading her post and the whole article.

In June 2006, Garlasco had alleged that an explosion on a Gaza beach that killed seven people had been caused by Israeli shelling. However, after seeing the details of an Israeli army investigation that closely examined the relevant ballistics and blast patterns, he subsequently told the Jerusalem Post that he had been wrong and that the deaths were probably caused by an unexploded munition in the sand. But this went down badly at Human Rights Watch HQ in New York, and the admission was retracted by an HRW press release the next day.

Well, I suppose that makes Marc Garlasco, their Nazi-memorabilia-collecting expert, look just a little bit better. (Supposedly, though, Garlasco had a close look at the beach, so I wonder how he came to his initial conclusions when he already knew what Israel was saying publicly. He couldn't have waited to talk with Israel?) And HRW as a whole looks a lot worse. I remember just how much press this beach incident got. And leftists pushing the story as "ethnic cleansing." I didn't know Garlasco had challenged the initial story. As they say, a lie goes round the world before the truth has a chance to put on pants.

media in ME

2010-03-30T13:59:00.001-04:00

Some interesting observations in here. (the audio should be available within a day.)

back from my long retreat

2010-03-30T11:27:00.002-04:00

Hey, I'm back. What have I been doing for the past 3 months? Well, mostly staring at the floor in a Buddhist monastery. Good times. But I've had no access to news, so help me catch up. What are the vital stories I missed?

More on The Left at War

2010-01-02T11:40:00.002-05:00

Within a few hours I'll fall silent for 3 months. I promise, the reason is time limited, so I'll be back without fail. For now, though, I have only a short time to write. This post won't include the substantiating links or extended quotes I'd like. But I do want to give a fuller account of Michael Bérubé's book, The Left at War.

Most of all, it is a clear and insightful account of one particular, devastating division on the Left. The loud and seemingly omnipresent Chomsky/Z/Counterpunch-Left versus those who are less iconoclastic, much more in touch with reality, and hopefully form a widespread 'silent majority.'

One downside I can't ignore: it's far less funny than Bérubé's other popular books. At one point, I blamed Chomsky for sucking the air out, but that's not quite the issue. The titles, including chapter titles like 'Nowhere Left to Go' (perhaps that's slightly inaccurate, but I'm not checking it, for time), introducing the absurdity of leftier-than-thou politics, or 'Is it Hegemonic, Yet?,' are often witty. However the few jokes sprinkling most chapters fall flat because they don't add up to a funny tone. It is only in the chapter 'What is this cultural in cultural studies' (again, the title is probably slightly off) where the jokes really flow. One of the best is aimed at one of Bérubé's heroes, Richard Rorty.

More seriously, is the issue of Israel and antisemitism. Very quickly, he quotes Moishe Postone and Ellen Willis. His view, generally, on Israel, is to be commended. He writes that, when he opposed Israel's invasion of Lebanon, he found a professor from DePaul (and this should probably be considered context for Norman Finkelstein's failure to get tenure there; the professor here is not Finkelstein) calling him a Nazi apologist for not doing so as rabidly as the other professor thought appropriate.

But he largely drops the matter. He quotes Postone arguing that Islamic antisemitism, like other antisemitism, is a fetishistic backlash in a world perceived as threatening, but he moves on to other issues. Perhaps that's because he views the discourse surrounding the issue as "toxic," and steers away from it.

He takes on James Petras, because it's easy to get agreement on Petras, but he doesn't really get to the more influential Alexander Cockburn (Counterpunch is mentioned twice, in general statements, but Cockburn only warrants a footnote where he's taken to task for his position on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan). The book was written too early for Bérubé to comment on the attempt at Counterpunch to rehabilitate the Medieval blood libel or Cockburn's most blatant attempt to reach out to the antisemitic/isolationist far right. But Cockburn had already published plenty of Gilad Atzmon and Paul Craig Roberts, the 'father of Reaganomics' who also writes for the white supremacist vdare.com. Bérubé doesn't mention the SWP (in Britain) which hosted Gilad Atzmon repeatedly at its Marxism festival.

I don't want to criticize Bérubé for not writing the book I would have written, because then I'd have learned nothing, but I think it would have served the book to detail why antisemitism is often a part of Manichean movements for change, whether on the right or left, and often leads to dangerous left/right alliances. In fact, antisemitism often seems to define a certain cutoff point (even better than the "we are living in The Matrix"/"Manufacturing Consent" view he criticizes) where violence (from Timothy McVeigh, al Qaeda, or the Red Army Fraktion) comes to be seen as reasonable.

And, of course, he could have done a lot to explain why so many Jews are worried about these trends on the Left. This might have served to make the topic less toxic. But then it might be a different book. The one he wrote is absolutely worth reading, and one reason is what he does include on antisemitism. The bigger reason, though, is the summary of Stuart Hall that every other review will mention.

See you all in April!!

The Left at War

2009-12-28T20:34:00.002-05:00

I hope, before taking a sabbatical of sorts, to review Michael Bérubé's The Left at War. However, I have occasion, ahead of schedule, to point out one of his arguments for this discussion here. It's terribly premature, in part because I've yet to get to chapter 5, but with the kids over I doubt I'll read that chapter tonight. Speaking of which, I'm drinking, and any typos are mine.

At one point, Bérubé contrasts a Tom Tomorrow cartoon (read it; good stuff that I'd copy, except I don't want to deal with copyright here) with some stuff said by Todd Gitlin, Marc Cooper (and, I'm sure, many others).

Bérubé writes (92, cartoon on 91):

Following a line of thought laid down by Richard Rorty in the 1990s (Achieving Our Country) (a line of argument to which I return in chapter 5), Gitlin and Cooper chastised the Manichean Left for (among other things) it's lack of patriotism; but, by the logic of the argument I am developing here, that was the wrong line of thought to pursue, for it hardened that wing of the left in its conviction that "mainstream opinion" attributed the attacks simply to al-Qaeda's "hatred for the values cherished in the West as freedom, tolerance, prosperity, religious pluralism and universal suffrage," and that such an explanation was, as Chomsky said, "completely at variance with everything we know" though it has "all the merits of self-adulation and uncritical support for power" (Radio B92). For the Manichean left, Gitlin's and Cooper's appeals to American patriotism were prima facie evidence that such appeals were craven accomodations to power; but because Tom Tomorrow's appeal to American values clearly--and ironically, because tacitly--suggests that (a) secular humanist ideals should properly be international ideals and (b) American leaders are traducing them even as they invoke them, there is a qualitiative difference between this cartoon and Gitlin's and Cooper's analyses of patriotism and the left.

He goes on to clarify his point, in case anyone thinks he simply supports witty cartoons. It was important for leftists to lay claim to certain values without making this a concession to the right. One might limit the impact of Bérubé's claim by saying it's a matter of poetics, of being able to craft rhetoric to accomodate multiple constraints, but if so it's surely an important matter of poetics.

Another matter, that one (at least one coming from a certain direction) must also understand as informing the argument, arises early and often when Bérubé rejects what I'll call "windowless" relevatism. Much of what he writes is informed by the simple acknowledgement that a debate, in order to be productive, must be conducted according to agreed upon rules of debate. More often, in this world, there is no such agreement, and so there is little productive engagement. But it is a mistake to assume that your own rules of debate are superior. To do this, you wind up arguing in circles. "I'm right because my arguments produce a better result according to my standards." Or, "The Bible is true because it's God's word, which I know to be true because the Bible tells me so." He deals with this at great length in Rhetorical Occasions while discussing the Sokal affair and the relevance to that affair of the Jean-François Lyotard/Jürgen Habermas debate. Following Lyotard to an extreme could produce a certain relativism that ought to be criticized, but it is a mistake of many anti-postmodernists to exaggerate that view to make it a strawman supportive of any convenient value system. There's a story in my Zen tradition. A student once asked Dae Soen Sa Nim, "What if we take all the candles and incense and robes and just throw them all out the window?" One of the great draws for students of Zen these days is the teaching, "no form," but there's lots of form everywhere in the teaching, so students have questions like this. Dae Soen Sa Nim replied, "You still have a window." Windowless relativism fails because it simply ignores the window. (Attachment to emptiness or perhaps "nirvana sickness" in Zen lingo.) It isn't the absence of any value system; rather it is a particular value system that only thinks it's the absence of a value system. Bérubé gets this, so he's able to recognize his own view as his own view. It's a strength of his, to be a relativist of sorts standing on solid ground. In The Left at War Bérubé repeatedly acknowledges that he finds it useful to have values, contrasting himself with Slavoj Žižek, for instance, who is too quick to reject values such as freedom for vague promises of a superior and leftier leftiism.

So he's not about compromising or de-emphasizing his values, which are geniunely leftist even if he doesn't emphasize how leftist they are. He is about engaging with the political center. What he's against is the attitude of superiority that says, "I'm better than all those sheeple," that reinscribes elitism in the name of populism. It may seem he's walking a ridge between the liberal reformists and those leftier-than-thou. It would be better to say he's walking a ridge between those complaining of cliffs on each side, but it would be better yet to redefine the landscape.

Garrison Keillor

2009-12-28T10:52:00.008-05:00

Haven't been around too much lately, and that's going to get worse for a while. But for now, here's my take on a controvery that probably won't get the attention it deserves. Christmas was interesting, being a child of mixed heritage: in some places, quite enjoyable; in other places, suffocating. Kudos to Google for a genuinely inclusive "happy holidays" message, with snowmen and such. Jeers for Fox which put up "Seasons Greetings" in red and green with mistletoe during football games. If you're going to write in red and green with mistletoe, you might as well just say "Merry Christmas."

I have really liked Garrison Keillor. But his article bemoaning the secularized Christmas is horribly wrong. Perhaps Keillor thought that the most offensive part of his article -where he complains about Jews writing Christmas songs- was just joking, but in the main thrust of the article he really does wish for a less secularized Christmas. For all that he recognizes the impossibility of the dream and even the advantages of change, he's still a small-town romantic pining for a real Lake Wobegon. He can be inclusive and cosmopolitan at times, but his schtick is all about the authenticity of small town living.

Jerry Haber (via) is on the right track, though a little tone deaf. What Keillor misses is that Christmas holds a dominant place in American society. Or, in the words of Happy Joel, Christmas "makes other holidays its bitches." Demanding purity for Christmas is demanding that a major part of the public sphere in America exculde minorities. An article at Huffington Post (found while googling for updates) misses this, too:

What seems to offend is a brief and benign swipe at Jewish songwriters who appropriated Christmas for commercial purposes with shallow, meaningless songs about Rudolph, etc.

That word, appropriated, so heavy in the anti-colonialist literature from which it's gained political weight, suggests something pretty awkward about the relative power of Jews and Christians in American society. Here, I'll draw a convenient but artifically sharp line in the dictionary between the-powerful-appropriating-that-owned-by-the-weak and the-weak-co-opting-that-of-the-powerful. Jews could never really appropriate anything. We just don't have the power to do so. For anything to we've co-opted to take root in society, it must be because Christians have re-appropriated our work. In fact, a different way of looking at "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" is to wonder why a Jew would feel the need to write such a song and realize it has something to do with the power of Christians in this society where Jews feel a need to assimilate.

Keillor can keep his pure Christmas in his own home, but telling Jews:

And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write “Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah”? No, we didn’t.

Christmas is a Christian holiday – if you’re not in the club, then buzz off.

Keillor needs to say more than just that it was a joke, or he can just buzz off.

And, btw, it's kind of shocking no one at this Crooked Timber post brings up that the song "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" was written by a Jew.

Moishe Postone on recent events

2009-12-22T11:11:00.002-05:00

Read this, from Moishe Postone (via).

"Arbeit Macht Frei" sign stolen from Auschwitz

2009-12-18T14:55:00.003-05:00

Wow. There's a replica already in place, but that's just really disturbing.

We have to DO SOMETHING

2009-12-11T15:18:00.005-05:00

One of the big arguments of the BDS movement is "we have to do something." Clearly, however, people anxious to do "something" haven't done the very first thing they ought to, which is to examine options for doing something. There are, in fact, many options which are considerably more productive. Add to the list another.

Joint Ventures for Peace brings together Palestinian and Israeli women entrepreneurs and artists to work as equal partners and create a unique discourse on peace. This innovative project couples dialogue with creative business development.

It doesn't look like their products are available for sale yet (though buying those produxts will be a great way to support peace), but tax deductible contributions can be made in America through PEF Israel Endowment Funds or through the New Israel Fund. See here for details.

On Purity of Arms

2009-12-11T13:42:00.004-05:00

David Schraub has a post on the IDF's investigations of the Gaza War. I would quibble with the word credible -- Israel's refusal to cooperate does make the Goldstone Report less credible. The report is, consequently, less well informed than it could be and so less believable. In fact, even the Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, criticized the report for going too far while also praising it in parts. What Israel's refusal does not effect is the report's integrity, which is more a matter of the relationship between Goldstone and the UNHRC. With regards to its integrity, the suggestion of internal investigations is quite reasonable, but many commenters seemed to misunderstand that Israel was already investigating many allegations.

Some commenters have presumed that such internal investigations, carried out by the IDF, are incapable of being fair. I believe (not that every internal IDF or civil Israeli investigation is necessarily fair and unbiased, but that) those commenters woefully misunderstand the debate going on within Israel. Though there are right-wingers arguing that Israel did nothing wrong and that Goldstone's existence is a travesty of Justice, they are relatively few. A more moderate position, widely held (though sometime abbreviated) is that Israel ought to continue internal IDF investigations (and perhaps initiate civilian investigations depending) but that the Goldstone Report was biased from the start. Many of those attacking the Goldstone report understand that Israel is already investigating.

There's been a pretty robust debate within Israel, owing to the tradition of purity of arms. Israeli critics of IDF actions in Gaza cite the shared Israeli value of purity of arms, which lends great force to their arguments for thorough investigation. Here's my tiny contribution: Those outside Israel who support peace and a two-state solution would do well to appeal to this shared value when arguing for thorough investigation. In part, by distancing themselves from those for whom Israel can never be justified, they would receive a fairer hearing from Israel's defenders.

Quoting from JPost, via David:

The IDF has completed a review of the 36 "most serious" cases of alleged war crimes as cited by Judge Richard Goldstone in his damning report on Operation Cast Lead, and concluded that 30 of them are "baseless accusations," The Jerusalem Post has learned. The other six were found to relate to genuine instances, where operational errors and mistakes were involved.

David goes on to make comments, most interestingly, about the role of internal investigations in international law.

Referral to international legal organs is supposed to be an extraordinary step, taken only when the internal mechanisms of the state in question are either so biased or so dysfunctional as to make justice impossible. The upshot of this is that the IDF report cannot be evaluated de novo -- that is, it is not acceptable or unacceptable based solely on whether it comes to the same conclusions Judge Goldstone would have come to were he the original arbiter. This concept of deference is, I believe, quite well entrenched in the mechanics of international law.

Antisemite on USHMM oversight board

2009-12-10T17:25:00.000-05:00

This is a big WTF.

Return of the Jewess

2009-12-04T11:42:00.004-05:00

So this article is disturbing. True, it's been terribly damaging that the ideal of beauty in our culture tends to exclude Jewish women. Actually, it excludes most women, but there are also a whole bunch of stereotypes about Jewish women that have made it doubly damaging. Even though I'm not a woman, and am married to a non-Jewish woman, I feel like it's had an effect on me. So I've enjoyed some of the attention Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis, Esti Ginsburg, Bar Rafaeli, etc. have gotten.

But there's a difference between recognizing that Jewish women can be attractive, sometimes even exceptionally so, and making a fetish of "JILFs." It really wasn't so long ago that the stereotypes of Jewish women generally ran along the lines of exotic fetish objects. Those stereotypes were just as harmful. And any familiarity with the history of antisemitism should suggest that this pattern of alternating stereotypes is part of the way antisemitism propagates. It's not progress when the pendulum swings back. We need to just make it stop.

I do like the quote from Joanna Angel at the end of the article, though:

"I've desecrated Christian traditions before," says Angel. "In one video, I put a cross-shaped dildo inside me, but I'd never do that with a menorah—that's just creepy."

Speechless

2009-12-04T09:35:00.000-05:00

BROOKLYN, N.Y. — With the FBI paying for his plane ticket, white supremacist Hal Turner flew to Brazil on behalf of the National Alliance because a Brazilian had offered to donate money to the neo-Nazi group, a government witness testified today.

As the government began presenting its case during the second day of Turner’s trial, testimony from several FBI agents provided a glimpse into Turner’s former role as a confidential informant known as “Valhalla.” The blogger and Internet radio host is charged with threatening to assault and murder three federal judges in Chicago.

On not subsuming the fight against antisemitism

2009-12-03T19:25:00.003-05:00

Often, I'm told that it's the same people who hate Muslims and Jews. This is often true, but not always. The problem arises, however, when this flawed generalization is used to subsume the fight against antisemitism in a general fight against racism that really doesn't address antisemitism at all. It's really pisses me off when someone who doesn't know jack about antisemitism, who is often enough saying things that are offensive, who is often arguing that fighting against antisemitism is a bad thing, tells me to shut up because "we're on the same side."

So, I thought I'd share something. Some time ago --way back in June-- I'd commented on a blog somewhere and subscribed to that conversation. (I don't even remember how I found that post.) Well, it wasn't actually much of a conversation, but someone else did respond. I'm not sure why I got email about it now, when the response is dated August on the blog, but here it is:

As a member of the Knights Party, and a Aryan seperatist (not supremist) I have never understood the unrest between Christians and Muslems. These are two different religions, both with a center belief in a loving, forgiving God (yes…sometimes wrathful) who’s followers understand that you cant convert a dead man! I mean, as a Christian, I dont know that much about the Muslem religion, but it seems to me your Jahad (holy wars) wer’nt that much different from our crusades, inquisitions, and ex-communications of Roman Catholisism. You call God “Allah”, we call him “Jehova”…you believe in his great prophet “Mohammad”…we believe in his son “Jesus”. We have segregation in our communities, and there is no reason we two peoples could not co-exist.

But now, lets look at the jew. We see through nearly two thousand years of history in Christiandom that these “peoples” are of a “religion” that precludes anyone outside their race to be a part of. If only whites could be Christian…then yes, all other races would be heathens; but our religion, I think like yours, is not contingant on race…but of faith. This allows the jew justification for being the most racist of all the tribes of Israel, and an excuse to bring harm to others.
Why even their “god” (which is actually money) tells them to go about and “gobble up” all the peoples of the earth! Look at what is going on in America today. Every single time you hear of illegal, criminal white collar crime involving banks and investment companies, those in the center have “son” or “man” at the end of their name! To say “the jew is not OUR enemy” is flawed, because the jew is EVERYONE’S enemy!!!…unless you are a jew dog yourself, therefor “born” into being the “chossen” people of god. The evil that killed Christ still walks amongst us!

Now, I'm not going to bother debunking the incredibly obvious racism. The writer admits to being an Aryan separatist. I guess that's more extreme than just being a white separatist? But, I do want to point out the obvious: his attitudes toward Muslims and toward Jews are different. In the histories of white supremacism and antisemitism, this is common.

Kaifeng Jews in Israel

2009-12-01T01:34:00.001-05:00

Amazing.

more hate crimes

2009-11-25T13:40:00.003-05:00

News of two (actually, more, but I'll pass on two) arrived in my inbox today from the SPLC.

Coeur d'Alene's Human Rights Education Institute is the target of another hate crime. The staff found a swastika Thursday morning taped on the front door.

The sticker is just the latest in a series of incidents against the institute and staff that work there. A few months ago, the executive director found a noose on her front yard. Over the weekend, someone set off the building's alarm.

And,

A prominent member of a Canadian neo-Nazi group is wanted for attempted murder in connection with two bombings in Calgary.

Perhaps it was a practice bombing, though it may have been a case of rivalry among racists:

McKee, a slight man with a shaved head, has “Kill Jews” tattooed on his shins. He often acts as spokesman for the Aryan Guard, a racist gang whose “white pride” marches have caused a stir in Canada’s third-largest city. However, police say there’s no evidence that the bombings were hate crimes. “The victims in this case knew the offenders and share similar beliefs and values,” stated a news release from the City of Calgary.

back from retreat

2009-11-23T10:44:00.005-05:00

A wonderful time staring at the floor for a week.

It will, however, take me a little time to get back to speed. For now, here's two at Contested Terrain that need to be read:

Leftists use violence to prevents the showing of the Claude Lanzmann's film "Why Israel?" When you use violence to prevent Jews from taking an active and robust role in politics within any country other than Israel, then opposition to Israel's existence is the denial to Jews of all political rights.

The anti-Zionist and antisemite Alexander Cockburn, still widely respected as a Left journalist, is now actively seeking alliance with right-wing antisemites.

He wrote: “What I’m sure is attractive about the idea of the left-right opposition to war is the idea of a shared moral outlook, which of course then has to confront or perhaps gloss over temporarily economic and political differences. And I think the shared moral outlook should extend beyond war into other very, important areas.”

This, of course, was the great claim of fascism, that it could unite those with disparate interests.

short break

2009-11-13T09:36:00.000-05:00

I'll be on retreat for a week.

Kristallnacht

2009-11-09T22:55:00.002-05:00

In my Buddhist tradition, when people die we chant Ji Jang Bosal. (In Japanese, it's Jizu, which I'm sure more people have heard of. Boddhisattvas are technically gender neutral, but we often speak of Ji Jang Bosal as male and Kwan Se Um Bosal as female.) Ji Jang Bosal is the Boddhisattva who has vowed to save all beings in the hell realms. We chant so that he may guide our loved ones, if they hear the chanting and are open to the teaching, to a favorable rebirth.

Like many who are relatively secular and less devotional, I've wondered why. But I do know that chanting is a form of meditation practice. And though Buddhists talk about reincarnation, we also don't believe in a "self," so we can ask, "who reincarnates?" I'm sure it's half the answer, but I've come to believe I chant to make this tiny part of the world I call "myself" better, so that the world is a tiny bit better place. The next time someone is reincarnated (i.e. born with similar karma, in a similar situation), their life will be a little better.

This meditation means that I'll be better able to put aside my own desires. Meditation is, directly, practicing attention and putting down the desires that distract. But it is not only so that I can be more generous with time or money. More importantly, it is so that I can perceive my situation more clearly.

Kristallnacht always hits me, because this is the night Jews throughout Germany finally understood the nature of Nazi antisemitism. Prior to that, believe it or not, there was great debate. Even with the Nuremberg Laws, some thought it was merely a temporary step backwards. It was only with Kristallnacht that many, even many Jews, finally understood the gravity of the situation. So Kristallnacht is a horrible reminder of the cost of not preceiving situations clearly.

Ji Jang Bosal
Ji Jang Bosal
Ji Jang Bosal
Ji Jang Bosal
Ji Jang Bosal

Converging Narratives

2009-11-06T11:47:00.008-05:00

So, last night I went to an event at the JCC. It began with a few short film clips and then broke into discussion groups.

Join other young social justice and Israel activists for an exciting evening of short films and an open, facilitated dialogue, which will grapple with the Arab experience in Israel.

A lot comes to mind, including just how open the Jewish community can be to such things. Afterall, this and the previous event were both at the JCC in Manhattan. Also, it's always worth noting how solidly even the leftwing Jews who come to these things stand behind Israel. They're critical but not anti-Zionists by any means. One person, a journalist stationed in Israel for a few years, offered an experience of seeing IDF "purity of arms" in action. At the same time, I'm also participating in a Jewish social justice discussion group, where people are similarly critical but not anti-Zionist. I forget where, but in comments at a blog post discussing this article, someone claimed that when Hannah Arendt thought Israel was truly threatened, in the '73 war, she donated money to the JDL. (For those unfamiliar, the JDL is a reactionary Jewish group, listed by the SPLC as a hate group.) I think most Jews, even many who are awfully critical will similarly turn to hawkish defense if they actually perceive Israel as threatened. Much of the difference between the Jewish "left" and "right" (I'm coming to hate those terms as applied to Israel) is simply the perception of how serious the attack on Israel is.

Anyway, the event was largely about Palestinian narratives. I was a bit surprised none of the clips mentioned the Nakba or dispossession (though the speaker who introduced the event did mention it). I don't know if that's an oversight by the organizers or not, but I do feel it helped me a lot to be less defensive. Instead, two of the three clips focused on the problems of identity. In the third, a Bedouin woman complained specifically that Bedouin children are assimilating, even as she herself was quite thoroughly assimilated.

I wanted to say to her that I understand that complaint, because that's my history, but it's also why I'm a Zionist. Jews everywhere for three thousand years since the Babylonian conquest have had to deal with that very problem. And it's been terrible for us. I want Israel to be a multicultural state where she doesn't have to deal with that, but I also want it to be a Jewish state so Jews don't have to either. Or, at least, so Jews have a choice, in either Israel or the Diaspora, of what kind of society to assimilate to.

Palestinians don't want BDS

2009-11-06T11:43:00.003-05:00

Hopefully, this should be quite a blow to the BDS movement. Palestinian workers and unions don't want it, because they understand that it will hit them hardest. It becomes clear the boycott is being pushed by (1) Palestinian elites who don't represent their people and (2) Westerners with a distorted need to "do something" and a lack of imagination on what can be done. Unfortunately, I think the drive to do something is awfully powerful.