What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) antisemitism and Israel – 2

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

Not that I thought for one moment my situation was as bad as the Jews had it in Nazi Germany or medieval Europe or, to take what would have been a contemporary example at the time, the former Soviet Union, where Jews were being pretty openly persecuted just for being Jews. That it could get that bad pretty quickly and easily, however, was more than apparent to me, and so the Jewish education I received, in both the Conservative synagogue where I went to Hebrew School until I was in 8th grade and the orthodox yeshiva I attended from 8th through 11th grades, which focused pretty extensively on constructing Jewish history as one long and coherent narrative of persecution and martyrdom, until the formation of the State of Israel, was one that I felt the rightness of with a physical sense of things “clicking” into place. The personal–and I am, of course, very explicitly invoking feminist consciousness raising as a parallel–was becoming the political; and it was, absolutely, an embodied politics. My body–because no matter how you cut it, it was ultimately about my body–was, to paraphrase June Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights” the wrong body, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. (And if you don’t know the poem I am referring to, you should put this post aside right now and go read it; it is that important.)

On the one hand, of course, as I mentioned in part one of this series (if you’re reading on It’s All Connected, click here), my physical safety was threatened. I remember once being backed up against the brick wall of a building across the street from the schoolyard where John Bartow and I had our fight–I was in high school at the time–by four or five kids, one of them swinging a chain, all of whom were trying to goad me into throwing the first punch so they would have a self-defense rationale for having attacked me. (They had, all or most of them, been in trouble with the police and did not want the trouble that hitting me first would bring down on their heads.) Not a single person who walked by stopped to help.

Another time, on Halloween, this same group of kids executed a carefully planned ambush when I got off the school bus. To get to my building, I had to walk through a fairly long parking lot, with garages on the right and the outdoor parking spaces on the left. Some of these kids were hiding behind the parked cars, waiting for me to pass them so they could come out and start throwing eggs and other things at me. I refused to run and kept walking at my normal pace, despite the fact that some of the things being thrown were quite painful when they hit me in the back. When I got to the end of the parking lot, as I walked up the stone steps that led to the walkway at the side of my building, the leaders of this gang came out from where they were hiding, and I was suddenly surrounded by about 10 boys–some of whom had been kids I played with when I was in elementary school–who knocked me to ground and started kicking and punching me, calling out antisemitic epithets the entire time they did so. This was in broad daylight, and they were loud, and I know for a fact there were mothers at home because they were the mothers of kids I knew, and maybe there were people who walked by–this I don’t know because I was curled in the fetal position on the ground–but no one seemed to notice what these boys were doing to me.

Eventually, there was a lull in their attack and I was able to stand up. I don’t know why, but when I did so, the group backed away, and when I started to walk towards my building, they opened the circle so I could leave–suddenly they were silent–and I walked home without even a glance backwards. Remarkably, I was unhurt, but when I closed the front door behind me, my mother took one look at me and called the police. One of the things the boys had thrown at me had red dye in it, and since I was wearing white pants, the dye looked like it might be blood. When the officer arrived, I opened the door, and he immediately asked if I needed an ambulance. I had forgotten to change my pants. Once he realized I had not been stabbed, his demeanor changed. He took my statement, muttered some platitudes about how kids will be kids and you can’t do much about it, and then he left. I changed my clothes, put the pants in to be washed–the red never came out and so I did not wear them ever again–and went on with the rest of my day, and as far as I know nothing was ever done to follow up on my complaint. Except for mine and my mother’s memory of it, the entire even seemed to have vanished into nothingness.

Physical safety, however, was not the only way my body was at stake in the antisemitism that pervaded so much of my childhood. Once I started to grow, especially once I hit puberty, the kids in my neighborhood latched on to the fact that I had “a Jewish nose,” and they teased me about it mercilessly, sometimes to the point where I would run home in tears and refuse to show my face outside for the rest of the day. Neither they, nor I, at the time, had any way of knowing that “the Jewish nose” is an antisemitic trope with a long history. As Beth Preminger points out in “The ‘Jewish Nose’ and Plastic Surgery: Origins and Implications,” the prominent anthropologist Robert Knox, described the Jewish nose in 1850 as “large, massive, club-shaped, hooked [and] three or four times larger than suits the face…. Thus it is that the Jewish face [is never and can never be] perfectly beautiful.” This lack of beauty, Sander Gilman argues In The Jew’s Body, was understood “not merely [as] a matter of aesthetics but [as] a clear sign of pathology, of disease [and] syphilis [was the disease understood to be responsible] for the form of [the Jewish] nose” (173). The Nazis, of course, made use of the Jewish nose as an identifying feature of the Jew. Here, for example, is “Little Karl” from How To Tell A Jew, a story in Der Giftpilz, an antisemitic children’s book published by Julius Streicher, the publisher of Der Stürmer:

One can most easily tell a Jew by his nose. The Jewish nose is bent at its point. It looks like the number six. We call it the Jewish six. Many non-Jews also have bent noses. But their noses bend upwards, not downwards. Such a nose is a hook nose or an eagle nose. It is not at all like a Jewish nose.

Look at any antisemitic caricature of the Jew from the 19th century until today, and the the Jewish nose will figure quite prominently. You can find these caricatures in Nazi publications like Der Stürmer, in anti-Israel cartoons throughout the Arab world, in France in the 1890s and even as recently as 1996, in plastic surgery manuals that, according to Preminger, continued to portray the Jewish nose as a deformity.

As I said above, neither I nor the kids who teased me so cruelly could possibly have known at the time that they were continuing a long tradition of seeing the Jews’ body as deformed and diseased, but the effect of their teasing was, nonetheless, to make me see my body in precisely that way, and so I grew up with an image of myself as horribly ugly. Even when I entered the yeshiva in eighth grade, despite the great relief it was to spend my day with other Jews, to whom my nose–not to mention everything else that was Jewish about me–was no more remarkable than the fact that I had two hands, it was hard to shake the feeling that I was somehow physically deficient because I was Jewish. Still, at least I was among Jews, and the feeling of safety, of being welcome, of being able to be, simply, myself was more affirming and more exhilarating than almost anything I had ever experienced till then. Even if I did not feel fully at home in my own skin as a Jew, within the walls of the school building, I was home.

Not that my classmates, or the school administration for that matter, accepted me completely. There were class issues: My mother was twice-divorced and had to work to support four children–and most of the jobs she held during that time barely kept us above the line where we would have been eligible for food stamps–so we did not have the money and standard of living that my mostly upper-middle class schoolmates enjoyed. As well, I knew a lot more about sex and drugs than they did–something I will write about in the series on condoms (shameless, shameless, shameless plug) that I interrupted work on to put this series of posts together–and so I was seen as a little bit dangerous, though I did not know I had this reputation until one of them told me when we ran into each other years after we’d left the school. None of that, however, was enough to get me ostracized the way being Jewish got me ostracized at home. In the yeshiva, I was a member of the community, one of the family; or, to put it more accurately, I had finally found my community, a place where I belonged, where the legitimacy of my presence would not be questioned because to do so would be to question the legitimacy of everyone else’s presence as well.

Given this context, as you might imagine, I identified very strongly with the story of Zionism and the founding of the State of Israel that I was taught, which portrayed the Jews who settled Palestine in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and then the Jews who defended Israel after its founding in 1948, as heroic figures fighting against all odds for a national homeland, a place where they could have the kind of community I had found in yeshiva. I became a deeply committed Zionist, bought fully into the image I was shown of the Arabs, Palestinian and otherwise, as evil and bloodthirsty terrorists, unwilling to recognize the obviously legitimate claim that Jews had to the land, who resented that the Jews had been able, in the phrase I remember, “to make the desert bloom” and whose sole concern, therefore, was to figure out how to push the Jews of Israel into the Mediterranean so that the State of Israel would cease to exist. It would be many years before I came to accept that the history of Zionism, much less the history of Israel, was much more complicated–factually, ideologically, and ethically–than this.

Equally to the point, I accepted almost unquestioningly that Israel was the only proper response to the fear of antisemitism that I knew firsthand and that my Jewish education inculcated in me even further: that no country on earth, not even the United States–which had, as recently as the 1940s, to take just one example, enforced Jewish quotas in education and which had turned away Jews trying to escape Nazi Germany–could be counted on as a place where Jews would always be safe as Jews. We could not trust, we should never trust, we were told, the goyim who were our neighbors. Scratch the surface of any one of them, even the most friendly, even the ones who seemed the most deeply committed to social justice, and you would find an antisemite, and we could be sure, we were taught, that if a Hitler ever did come to power in the US, those antisemites would quite happily look the other way. Yes, there were exceptions among them, but did you really want to bet your life on whether or not your neighbor just happened to be the exception? The truth–and this was what the Zionists recognized when they conceived of the State of Israel in response to the antisemitism of their time–was that only a Jewish State would provide a permanent solution to the persecution the Jews faced, and had been facing, worldwide, throughout history. We needed Israel; the world needed us to have Israel; I needed Israel, because without Israel, the world did not feel like a place I could call home.

David Schraub’s argument in his two posts on Feministe (here and here) are motivated, I believe, by a fear very similar to the one I have just described, and it is in part, perhaps in large part, out of this fear that he made one of the comments that people found most objectionable, “If you’re [a Jewish] anti-Zionist critic of Israel – well, yes, I’m going to say that I think your ideology is misguided and untenable for a liberationist agenda.” Whatever one thinks about the existence or policies of the State of Israel, or of Zionism in its entirety, not to recognize as reasonable the fear out of which David wrote, which I still feel and which I think any Jew who knows anything about Jewish history would be foolish not to feel, is to deny a reality of Jewish experience in a way that is unequivocally antisemitic. There is no other word for it, and here’s the thing: when the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the only context in which I can talk about that fear and have it be taken seriously–because I, as a Jew, get to tell you that you have to be careful how you criticize Israel so that you do not appear antisemitic, and so I get at least to try to explain some version of everything I have just written in this essay–then the stakes of talking about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict become, for me, potentially, a matter of life and death, because my history tells me that antisemitism is always potentially a matter of life and death. If you are unwilling to hear that, then it doesn’t matter to me how accurate and fair your critique of Israel’s policies is, you damned well better believe I am going to call you an antisemite.

No single conversation, however, as I said in Part One, should have to bear the burden of that kind of history, which is one reason why, despite the fact that I have now written several thousand words, I have yet to say anything substantive about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in general, or about Gaza specifically, and it may that I won’t for several thousand words more. For now, I will say this: I no longer agree with David that founding the State of Israel, especially in the way it was founded, was the best response to the fear he and I share, but I do–and I hope that this and my previous post explain why–empathize with that fear. More to the point, I think that anyone, Jewish or not, who wants to take a responsible stance in relation to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict needs to be willing to empathize with that fear, regardless of what their stance on the conflict may be. One of the most eloquent statements of that empathy that I have ever read was written by Torill’s in comment #229 in response to David’s second post. (Please go read the entire comment as well.)

I am against Zionism as a principle, and I have tried to explain why, and maintain that my reasons are not anti-semitic – but I do understand how the experience of the horror that is [the] Holocaust and the lack of enough safe havens then makes many Jews feel that the state of Israel is a good idea, even necessary for them to feel safe in the world now. I am not holding it against any individual if they move there after experiences of real oppression, and I don’t think the Jews who live there today are all evil monsters. This probably needs to be said clearly in this context by anyone who declares themselves to be anti-Zionist.

Make some version of that sentiment clear to me; understand why I will not take it for granted in you just because you happen to be a feminist, a committed anti-racist, a member of some other oppressed group or happen to have whatever progressive credentials you might assume would lead me to take it for granted; realize that, even though you have made that sentiment clear to me, I will still need you to make it clear to others when you and I are part of any conversation that is larger than the two of us; take the initiative to call out antisemitism when you see it whether I have called it out or not, whether I am present or not–do those things and I will go with you anywhere a conversation about Israel and Palestine might lead. I may not always agree with you, but I will go there with you because you have shown me I can, at least with you, at least for that time being, put my fear aside, and because the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is important enough that no area of inquiry that might lead to a solution should be out of bounds simply because of fear–even if the only problem that gets solved, because this really is the problem that I am talking about here, is how people outside of Israel can talk to each other about the conflict without getting bogged down in the kind of anger and frustration that devolved from David’s posts.

One postscript: A book that changed my life in terms of thinking about the questions related to antisemitism and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is Yours In Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism . Written by three lesbians, Elly Bulkin (Jewish), Minnie Bruce Pratt (white, southern Christian) and Barbara Smith (African-American Christian), the book takes on some very hard questions about the presence of antisemitism in the lesbian feminist community and does so in ways that, despite what will now be the datedness of some of the material, are still relevant. I would also recommend, though I cannot give you any citations because my copies of these books are, unfortunately, in storage, the political essays of June Jordan that deal with these issues.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.