What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) antisemitism and Israel – 3

Incident #1

It’s 1993. I am walking out of the mailroom in the building where I work and one of my non-Jewish colleagues–someone I am not close to but with whom I have pleasant enough exchanges when we happen to meet–approaches me with a small newspaper article in his hand. His mouth tilted in a mischievous grin, he says I really ought to know about this and holds the article out for me to read. I know that what’s coming next is supposed to make me laugh, and so when I take the clipping from him and read about how the designer Jean Paul Gaultier’s new collection is based on traditional Chasidic garb, it is the absurdity that hits me first, and I do laugh. My colleague laughs with me, the moment is over and we walk off into the rest of the day. Later, as I am grading papers, I find the questions that Gaultier’s collection raises about cultural appropriation, among other things, gnawing at the edges of my thinking–not to mention questions about why my colleague would choose to show me the article–but I am busy. My colleague, I decide to assume, just wanted to share a laugh with someone who would find real significance in the transgressive nature of Gaultier’s design, and so I put the whole incident out of my mind. (If you’re interested, YouTube videos of the fashion show where Gaultier’s designs were unveiled are here and here; parts 3 & 4 are up there as well.)

A few days later, this colleague and I are walking towards each other on campus; I lift my hand in greeting and nod hello; he does the same. As we pass each other, he says with a smile, “So how come you’re not wearing the new fashion?” I give a short laugh, and so does he, and we move on to where it is we are going. When I see him on campus again the next day, however, he asks me the same question; and it happens again the day after that, and again the following week, and I don’t remember how many times exactly this man finds only this one way to interact with me–truly, other than that question, he did not seem to have anything else to say to me–but it’s clear to me that he’s singling me out as a Jew, and it makes me very uncomfortable. I tell the chair of my department what’s going on but ask him not to get involved. I have no problem confronting someone with their own antisemitism, but my colleague stops asking the question and there is no reason to pursue the issue any further.

Incident #2

It’s still 1993. Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn are in the news, as is Sol Wachtler; each of the men are Jewish, and each one is involved in a sex scandal. I am sitting in the same colleague’s office, talking to his office mate, who is a good friend of mine, about some pieces I have been writing about gender and male heterosexuality. The colleague he walks in, listens for a few seconds to get the gist of our conversation and then interrupts, looking straight at me, “First Sol Wachtler and now Woody Allen! What is it with Jewish male sexuality?”

“It’s because we’re circumcised,” I answer, the sarcasm dripping from my words. “It makes us feel like we have something to prove.”

My colleague doesn’t say anything in response, goes to his desk and starts to work. Since it feels like I made my point, I decide there is no reason to engage him further and I go back to the conversation I was having with my friend.

Incident #3

This also happened in 1993. I am standing near the radiator in the same colleague’s office, talking again with the office mate who is my friend. My colleague walks in, says hi, does a kind of double take in my direction, and then says, “Oh, wait, I have to show you this!” He starts rummaging around his desk and finally pulls out a newspaper clipping that might have been this one about Norman Rosenbaum, the brother of Yankel Rosenbaum, the Hasidic scholar who was killed in the 1991 Crown Heights riot. There is a picture of Norman Rosenbaum in the article that my colleague wants to show me, so he walks up very close to where I am standing and actually backs me into the wall; and he is pointing at the picture of the dead man’s brother, making a joke about how, given his size and his traditional Jewish clothing, he looks like a linebacker dressed up for Halloween–or some such joke pointing out the ostensible incongruity between the man’s size and the fact that he is dressed as a religious Jew.

My back is to the wall and there is no room on either side of me to slide past my colleague, so I stand here, saying nothing, staring at him, until he moves out of the way, and I walk out of the office without a word.

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There is a lot that can be said about each of these incidents and how they fit into the history of antisemitic discourse about Jewish sexuality, Jewish masculinity and more, not to mention, in relation to my comment about circumcision, Jewish self-hatred. There is also a lot to say about how comments like my colleague’s can have a silencing effect on the person towards whom they are directed, but that is not what I want to talk about. The incidents themselves were relatively minor–though I imagine they take on greater significance when they appear here, one after the other in quick succession–but while they made me uncomfortable, they did not disrupt my life to the point that I want to focus on them here. As well, the colleague in question later apologized to me, explaining that he had been trying to make with me the kinds of jokes he and his office mates made all the time about their own ethnicities and backgrounds. In other words, he had been trying to treat me as “one of the guys,” and that, he realized, had been a mistake. Such an explanation, of course, does not excuse the antisemitism inherent in the things my colleague said, but I do recognize that people speak to members of their inner circle very differently than they would speak to those outside its perimeter, and so I would rather, for the purposes of this essay at least, attribute the incidents themselves more to my colleague’s social awkwardness than to any intent to be antisemitic.

What I want to talk about instead is my colleague’s initial reaction, as it was reported to me the following day by his office mate, to the silence with which I met his showing me the picture of Norman Rosenbaum–because he got the point, and he was angry.

Jews, he apparently complained, had become the “teflon minority.” You couldn’t criticize or joke about them in any way, and the trump card of Jewish suffering was responsible for this state of affairs. Either Jews actually played the card to silence criticism, or critics were afraid to say anything because the moment they did, the card would be played and they would be accused of antisemitism, a taint that was very hard to wipe off. (Note that the issue of joking about Jews disappeared very quickly.) This phenomenon needed to be interrogated, my colleague told his office mate, and he saw the situation between us–and notice how quickly it had become a “situation”–as the perfect opportunity to do so. What my colleague proposed, his office mate said, was that he and I should each write something about the Palestinian-Israel conflict outlining our different positions. We would then distribute these documents to the department, scheduling a department-wide colloquium shortly afterward to discuss them. He, he asserted to his office mate, had nothing to hide; the idea that he might be antisemitic was preposterous. His teachers had been some of the most well-known left-wing Jewish intellectuals of his time. The question was whether I was willing (read: had the courage) to engage in such a forum.

If you’re wondering how “the situation” between us had gone so suddenly from my silence at being asked to laugh at a picture of a man dealing with the aftermath of his younger brother’s violent death to our ostensibly differing positions on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict–not to mention the teflon coating that made sure any criticism anyone anywhere leveled at Israel and/or the Jews slid off as easily as a perfectly cooked sunny-side-up egg–so was I. Not only had this colleague and I never even had a conversation about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but I could not see how any of the incidents I told you about above involved that conflict in any way at all. The antisemitism of what my colleague was trying to do, I hope, is obvious. By turning the lens of inquiry onto me, he made me, my ideas, my Jewish identity (at least as he assumed I would define and experience it) not only the source of the problem that existed between him and me, but also representative of the larger problem that Jewish identity posed throughout the world, i.e. the question of Zionism and the Jewish State. Indeed, the implication of my colleague’s challenge was that the question of Zionism and the Jewish State could be said to encompass the entirety of my Jewish identity.

I told my friend the office mate that if our colleague wanted to know my thinking on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he could ask me himself; and that if he wanted to write something about Jews as the teflon minority, he should have the courage to put his ideas out there without trying to use not so much my ideas themselves, but the fact that my ideas would be the ideas of a Jewish person, as cover in case anyone should call either the questions he wanted to ask or the answers he wanted to give antisemitic. I have no idea what the conversation was like when my friend returned to his office and reported to our colleague what I’d said, but the proposed “intellectual exchange” was never mentioned again, and the apology I have already told you about followed shortly thereafter.

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There is, again, a wealth of material to mine here if you’re interested in talking about how antisemitic discourse and how it used to silence Jews. However, while my colleague was trying to silence me, at least in terms of whatever I might have had to say about the antisemitism I experienced from him, he was also trying to make me speak, and it’s what he was trying to make me say that I am more interested in here. Clearly, he thought he knew what my stance on Israel was and, just as clearly, he assumed that it would be the opposite of his, which I knew something about because I’d used in one of my classes an international literature anthology he’d edited and it contained a standard left-wing, anti-Zionist position. But it’s not even the arrogance of this assumption that I find so problematic, and while it would have been less wrong than it would be today, it was wrong nonetheless. Rather, it was his insistence on yoking any conversation I might want to have about antisemitism to discussing the question of Zionism and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

I am betting that not a few Jewish readers of this essay are already very familiar with this tactic, which implies–among other things–that the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians somehow problematizes the question of antisemitism. Not that one issue can’t be discussed independently of the other, but that to do so, especially if one is Jewish, somehow fails in one’s responsibility to take account of the conflict. This position was articulated to me most clearly, albeit in an extreme version, by a relative of my wife’s in the course of kitchen-table argument that took place a few years ago after Thanksgiving dinner. “We live,” this relative pronounced, “in a post-antisemitic world.” He had just finished reading The Holocaust Industry, by Norman G. Finkelstein, and one of the lessons he drew from that text was, basically, that antisemitism is no longer a factor in the lives of Jewish people–just look at how well “you” are doing in the United States, he said–and that world Zionism uses the specter of antisemitism to guilt-trip people into supporting Israel and its policies against the Palestinians. (I have not read the book and, so I have no idea if, though I do strongly doubt that, such conclusions based on the text are at all justified.) He then went on to talk about how any objective look at not only the salaries of the top Wall Street CEOs, but also at which CEOs manage the most money, would reveal that–“and I don’t know what else to call it,” he said–“Jewish money” and “Jewish control over money” was helping to further Zionist aims. Then, to drive his point about Jewish guilt-tripping and manipulation of the world home even further, he told us a story about a colleague of his, a Jewish man whom he had considered a friend, who accused him of antisemitism and stopped talking to him when he made these same assertions about Jewish money.

Perhaps the most frustrating and infuriating aspect of this entire conversation was that my wife’s relative seemed to have no idea that what he was saying might be offensive to me, might be about me, in any way, shape, or form. He and I had been able to have reasonable conversations before. We rarely agreed entirely, but we’d been able at least to hear each other–or so I’d thought–and he was a relative, which made me want to find some way of being able to sit at the same table with him without feeling like I was betraying myself. So, without referring explicitly to him or the ideas he was putting forth as antisemitic, I pointed out, first of all, that his argument implied that Jewish identity could be reduced to an individual’s relationship to the State of Israel, and that this was wrong; second, I said, even though we might not be actively discriminated against in the way we once were, antisemitism was indeed still a factor in the lives of Jewish people, independently of the existence of the State of Israel, even in the United States, and I gave him some examples.

He conceded that maybe there were some loonies on the right whose antisemitism might have an effect on individuals, but they were loonies, and you never, ever saw that kind of thing on the left. When I tried to give him some examples of left-wing antisemitism–very carefully choosing ones that did not so obviously relate to the ones he had put before me at the beginning of our conversation–he went into complete denial, started not quite shouting, but raising his voice about how the left stood for the freedom and liberation and dignity of all peoples, and the conversation pretty much ended there, except that when we were saying goodbye, he kind of muttered that maybe there were some people on the left who were “sick,” but that I should be sure not to confuse them with the “real” left that he represented. We said goodbye and have had very little to do with each other since.

As I said above, this is an extreme example of one of the ways that my colleague’s invitation to dialogue was problematic, but it is a phenomenon I have encountered more than a few times over the years, even from people who express tremendous sensitivity to and respect for what they inevitably call “the historic suffering of the Jewish people.” They just don’t see, they explain very politely, how that is relevant to what “the Jews are doing to the Palestinians.” (More recently, thankfully, they are careful to say “Israelis” rather than “Jews.”) Or, sometimes, these people respond to stories about antisemitism, such as the ones I have told in this series (Part 1, Part 2) or that are being told over at this post on Alas, with some version of a statement like, “That’s terrible, but you don’t think that justifies what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians, do you?” The idea that because the Palestinians are in crisis–and let’s be clear: there is never a day when a military occupation is not a crisis for the occupied people–the idea that because of those circumstances a Jew in the United States, like me, should shelve my concerns about antisemitism in favor of focusing on whatever the crisis maybe is, of course, a form of guilt-tripping in itself, one that I have encountered more often than you might think. More to the point of this essay, though, it is one that becomes especially problematic for Jews when talk about Israel and Palestine is the only context in which talk about antisemitism is allowed to come to the fore.

The furor that broke out over the way David Schraub introduced his first post at Feministe is a good example of this, I think. The Israeli assault on Gaza was ongoing and escalating, and not only did David begin his post by talking about how conflicted he was over whether the Israeli military action would “‘work’ in any meaningful sense,” but he also made no mention of what was actually happening to the people living in Gaza, what the Israelis were actually doing to those people. This was wrong. No matter where you stand on question how the situation between Israel and Hamas should be dealt with, the only two things that should have mattered from the day the bombing began were concern for the civilians whose lives were being destroyed and finding a way to stop the bombing as soon as possible. The abstract and abstracting intellectualism with which David started his post made it seem like he considered the analysis of antisemitism with which he was going to concern himself far more important than the lives lost in the attack, including the 13 Israelis who were killed, not to mention the damage done to the lives of the Palestinians who have survived the bombings, and not to mention the damage to any real hope for any real movement towards peace in the region. (To be fair to David, this is not his position, as this post on his blog, and this one, should make clear.)

David was roundly, and rightly in my opinion, criticized for beginning the post the way he did, and, to his credit, he recognized the mistake, though the intensity of the rhetoric directed at him made backing off from where he started more difficult than it should have been. Still, I’d like to consider the way in which Feministe’s invitation to guest blog about Gaza positioned David in relation to what I am talking about here, because no matter how appalled he may have been by the cost to the Palestinians of the Israeli assault on Gaza–and I am assuming he did find that cost appalling–there is no way, for all of the reasons that I have been giving in this series, that the opportunity to talk about Gaza, even while Gaza was still going on, could not have presented itself also as an opportunity to talk about antisemitism. David made the wrong choice when he tried to connect the two topics in the way that he did–i.e., using talk about his own conflicted position vis-a-vis Gaza as a way into the thinking he wanted to do about antisemitism. Nonetheless, I would guess the fact that he saw those two topics connected at all had a great deal to do with how the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is almost the only forum in which people, especially non-Jews, are willing to engage antisemitism as a real issue, even if only in highly cynical ways, such as the “dialogue” proposed by my colleague.

I don’t want to be in the business of pretending to know David or his positions any better than i do; I am an occasional reader of his blog; I have read his comments on some other blogs, and he and I have, on occasion, been on the same side of online discussions about antisemitism (almost always in the context of discussing Zionism, Israel and Palestine). I do not know him personally, outside of his online persona, and I certainly would not pretend to know anything about the inner workings of his mind or his motivations. So I am not trying to defend either the statements he made in his post on Feministe or him as a person. As I said above, I think David made the wrong choice in starting the post the way he did, but I think it is important to recognize that he made that choice within constraints set by forces far beyond his control, and that those forces are, often, at best, neutral towards his existence as a Jew and, at worst, openly hostile; and I want to acknowledge that it can be very difficult to know the right choice to make when one is faced with that kind of hostility, especially from people one has thought of as one’s allies.

I should be clear that I am thinking when I say that neither of Feministe’s invitation nor of the criticisms that were leveled at David, but rather of another Thanksgiving dinner with my wife’s family. I was talking with the wife of the relative I told you about above. She was at the time, if not more moderate in her beliefs than her husband, then certainly more aware of and sensitive to the concerns that others might bring to coalition-building around issues like the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. We were not talking about Israel and Palestine, though, but about Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s problematic statements concerning the Holocaust, specifically the conference he convened in Iran, to which he invited former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, a man with impeccable antisemitic credentials. The question at hand was whether Ahmadinejad was an antisemite and Holocaust denier. I suggested that he was, because one of his justifications for the conference–the idea that the question of whether the Holocaust took place, or was as bad as people say it was, needed to be re-examined from all sides–implied that the work done by at least two generations of scholars in sifting through all the evidence, including the evidence presented by Holocaust deniers, was somehow invalid, that there was some kind of Jewish conspiracy to manufacture the facts proving that genocide took place.

“Wait,” the man’s wife said, “you mean to tell me that I should worry about whether Ahmadinejad is an antisemite when there are people dying in Palestine and when he is one of the few world leaders willing to stand against the United States and Israel and their murderous and imperialist policies?”

We had not, I pointed out, even been talking about Israel. More to the point, we were not standing outside of, say, the Israeli embassy protesting the actions of the Israeli government; we were not engaged in a debate with people who were arguing that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians was necessary and/or reasonable; nor were we engaged in a debate with those people over US policy regarding Israel, Iran or anything else. In each of those cases, given the right circumstances, I would absolutely agree that my concerns about Ahmadinejad’s antisemitism could and should be put aside in favor of focusing on other, more pressing concerns. Rather, we were two people sitting in the comfort of my wife’s uncle’s home in suburban Long Island, at a time when there was no immediate crisis–like, for example, Israel’s recent invasion of Gaza–and while we disagreed on some fundamental things, there were also broad areas of agreement when it came to Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians and on US foreign policy and more. And if I could not, I asked her, in this moment of safety for both of us, talk to her about my concerns about antisemitism and feel like she was willing to listen, if she was simply going to dismiss those concerns out of hand, then on what basis would she assume that I would ever become her political ally? Even if we were at the same demonstration, did she really think I would feel safe standing shoulder to shoulder with her?

She had no answer for me, and I moved on to another part of the house and another part of the party, where, if I remember correctly, I started dancing with my wife; and when the party was over and we were all saying goodbye, the woman to whom I had been talking took my hand, looked hard into my eyes with an expression of deep sadness and–though this could be entirely my projection–pity, and then left without a word. We have had almost nothing to say to each other since.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.