J Street and Poetry and Jewish Politics and Jewish Poets and Jewish Poetics and Holocaust Trivialization and Israel and Palestine and antisemitism and How Can Culture be a Tool for Change if You Won't Let Culture do its Work? – Part 1

Note: Portions of this post were edited on January 19 to correct problems that resulted from careless cutting and pasting.

Oy! So I was, with mild interest, reading the conversation that was beginning to develop around the post written by Julie about J Street opening local chapters. I say “mild interest” because I find so much of the politics surrounding the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians–which also means the conflicts between and among all the various groups who have an interest in how that conflict is, or is not, resolved–not only tiresome, but also, all too often, childish. It’s not that I think the issues are not profoundly, world-changingly important; it’s just that I no longer have the patience that I once had for sifting through the partisan nitpicking and political opportunism, not to mention the outright hatred, into which so many discussions of those issues inevitably devolve. Still, the little bit that I have heard about J Street has suggested to me that they are trying to be adults by, at the very least, broadening the conversation both in terms of content and in terms of who gets to participate, and that is refreshing, even though I don’t know enough about most of their positions to say how much I support them beyond the statement I have just made.

What caught my interest about the conversation Julie’s post started was that it concerned literature, the role of literature in political movements, the stance political movements should take towards individual works of literature, what it means to write politically engaged literature and what it means to engage literature politically. The first part of the conversation is about the play Seven Jewish Children, written in 2009 by Caryl Churchill in response to Israel’s invasion of Gaza. The play consists of a series of simple imperative sentences, each beginning with “Tell her” or “Don’t tell her”–her being a female of indeterminate age, though she is probably pretty young. Collectively, these imperatives represent some of the positions that Jews, as groups and as individuals, Israeli and not, have taken in response to both the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and Israel’s existence. In my own opinion, the play, which I have not read as carefully as I might, and so I am willing to be convinced otherwise, walks a fine line between exposing and critiquing, but also humanizing, the denial and hypocrisy of many who support Israel’s policies out of fear for their own and the Jewish community’s survival, and propagandizing that position as a tool to demonize both Jews and Israel. Ultimately, I don’t think the play crosses the line into propaganda, though I can see how others might reasonably say that it does. Moreover, since it is a play, I suppose that what really matters in terms of this question is how the play is produced, not simply how it reads on the page.

The first comment on Julie’s post is by Sebastian, who says:

I do not remember seeing any discussion of J Street [on Alas]. Before you rush and support them, check at least the Wiki entry… and maybe look into how mainstream Israel supporters feel about them. Maybe also read Seven Jewish Children and remember that J Street endorses the play.

Chingona then points out that J Street did not “endorse” the play. Rather, the organization asserted that the play is not necessarily antisemitic and they defended the theater company that put the play on. Sebastian then admits not that he’d misread J Street’s position on the play, but that he hadn’t even bothered to read the original statement; he also explains that he thinks “it’s worth reading and discussing [Seven Jewish Children], but staging it according to the terms of the author is taking a stance with which I most certainly do not agree.” Presumably, since he does not specify, the part of the terms of performance that Sebastian objects to is the text in boldface below:

The play can be read or performed anywhere, by any number of people. Anyone who wishes to do it should contact the author’s agent (details below), who will license performances free of charge provided that no admission fee is charged and that a collection is taken at each performance for Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), 33a Islington Park Street, London N1 1QB, tel +44 (0)20 7226 4114, e-mail info@map-uk.org, web www.map-uk.org.

Certainly, Sebastian is within his right to disagree with these terms, and he is within his right not to attend any performance of the play and to try to convince others not to attend; he also would be within his rights to organize a boycott of the play in his community were someone trying to put it on there. What I am interested in, however, is that the disagreement he expresses is not with the text of the play itself, which he thinks is worth reading and discussing, but with people putting the play to political use, to serve a practical purpose in the world, one that involves human being, human bodies and the relationships between and among them. Some might argue that medical aid is not political, or at least that it ought to be beyond politicization. In principle, I agree, if by politicization you mean the kind of partisanship that is more about who wins and who loses than about finding solutions; but it’s not just that there is nothing about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that is not already, always, political and politicized; it’s that medicine is itself, wherever and however it is practiced, is already, always, political simply because it is about human being and human bodies; and to suggest that literature ought not to be used to make medical care available to people who need it, regardless of the politics of the organizations involved, is to suggest that literature needs to be controlled, hemmed in, fenced in, to be kept safe from those who would corrupt it, to protect its purity, so that it can be read and discussed, for example, without the taint of an overt political agenda. Or maybe it is to suggest that it’s us who need to be kept safe from literature, because literature has the power to move people to act, not just to think and to feel.

However one understands the impulse to keep literature out of the material reality of people’s lives, that impulse at its core is the impulse to censor, to control meaning and thereby to control people’s imaginations. Let me be clear, though: I am not accusing Sebastian of censorship or of wanting to censor anyone. He is neither making nor advocating policy in his comments on Alas; and let me be clear about something else as well: I am talking in this post about literature, works that aspire to the level of art, the purpose of which is to explore human being and feeling, not–as propaganda attempts, and is designed, to do–dictate it. I can imagine, for example, a production of Seven Jewish Children that might qualify as propaganda, one in which, say, the characters were all wearing Nazi uniforms and in which there was no irony to make that costuming decision anything other than a simple equating of Israel with Nazi Germany. I would not argue that such a production should be censored, but it is unambiguously a production neither I nor anyone I know would support, no matter how worthy the goal of fund raising for Medical Aid for Palestinians might be–and from what I can tell that is a worthy goal. What if, though, the director of the play, the one who made the choice to put Nazi uniforms on the actors, was Jewish, and let’s say he or she was making in this production a serious attempt to use that costuming in an ironic way, as a reference to the fact that the Jews, who were the victims in the Holocaust, are now, in Israel, in the position of being an occupying oppressor, of victimizing the Palestinians. ((I wish I didn’t feel the need to add this footnote, but I do: To make this reference is, of course, not to deny that the Palestinians have also been guilty of victimizing Israelis.)) The point of the comparison, in other words, is not to say that Israel–and, by extension, the Jews–are no different from the Nazis, that the Israelis are committing what is tantamount to genocide against the Palestinians, but rather to illuminate the dynamic by which violence begets violence, all too often turning those who were victims of violence into perpetrators of the kinds of violence they suffered. Further, imagine that the program notes for this imaginary production make clear that it is intended to explore what it means that the violence done by the Israelis to the Palestinians has become part of Jewish identity, in the sense that if one is Jewish, one must be accountable in some way for one’s responses to that violence. Moreover, let’s even say that there is a note in the program explaining that the choice of Nazi uniforms was because the Holocaust, more than any other persecution the Jews have suffered, can stand for all the persecutions through which the Jews have lived. The comparison to the Holocaust per se, in other words, is not even the point.

It is not hard to imagine the kinds of vitriol that the Jewish community would direct at the people involved with this production. More to the point, it is hard not to imagine that this vitriol would be well-deserved. Asserting an ironic frame for the production I have imagined in the way that I have imagined the director asserting it would be an empty gesture, a cop out, because even if it were possible to put the characters in Seven Jewish Children into Nazi uniforms and have it not be antisemitic–and I don’t think it is possible–the play’s text is too simple to support the ironic reading such a costuming decision would require. Nonetheless, I’d like for the moment to assume that the director’s intention to be ironic was genuine, not because her or his intent would make the production less problematic, or excuse his or her profoundly poor artistic judgment, but because I think the impulse to that irony is an important one to examine, especially because I think it is often characterized within the Jewish community as self-hatred, accusations of which are often used to dismiss from legitimacy people who make certain kinds of criticisms of the Jewish community and/or Israel. I have written at length about Jewish self-hatred elsewhere, so I am not going to go into that here. Rather, I want to consider the difficulty Jews have accepting the validity, the potential value, of understanding the institutional and military violence that Israel does to the Palestinians in the context of the violence that the Nazis did to the Jews, and I want to go beyond the easy and patronizing, and I think subtly antisemitic, violence-begets-violence logic that makes of Israel a wounded child, man or woman who has learned the primary lesson of abuse: that the only way to make sure you are never abused again is to be ready to kill anyone who even smells like they are going to try to abuse you; and I am not interested in the obvious and somewhat tired cliche that, you know, we all have the potential for evil within us, and so Israel is only showing that it too and, by extension, the Jews have the capacity to do evil in the world. Because I think the fundamental difficulty people have with what I am talking about is that putting the violence Israel does to the Palestinians in the context of the violence the Nazis did to the Jews–and I am not suggesting anything even remotely resembling equivalence here–ultimately humanizes the Nazis, suggesting that the violence they did, as horrible as it was, can also be understood in human terms, and so if the Nazis too are human, then the possibility of forgiveness and understanding has to exist for them, as it exists for every other human being on the face of the earth.

Let me say first what I do not mean by this: I am not talking about forgiveness in anything resembling what I understand to be the Christian turn-the-other-cheek sense (which I do not trivialize, even though it is not a value that I hold). So I do not mean that any Jew, especially any Jew who survived the Holocaust, is obligated to forgive anyone for being or having been a Nazi or for sympathizing or complicity with the Nazis. I am not suggesting that there is some predefined formula through which the forgiveness I am talking about can be earned; and I believe firmly that forgiveness for some deeds cannot be earned by the people who committed them from the people against whom they were committed. Nonetheless, to see people who commit the most horrible crimes, even crimes against humanity, not as monsters whose incomprehensible deeds have forever exiled them from the human community, but as people who have committed inhuman acts, is to insist on the comprehensibility of those acts, on the possibility of understanding those people and on the possibility that they might somehow find a way to take responsibility, to hold themselves–and to allow themselves to be held–accountable for what they have done.

To put it another way, and using for the moment an example that is not specifically Jewish, it is one thing for someone who has never raped to acknowledge that he or she nonetheless has within themselves whatever it is that can motivate rape, but it is quite something else for someone who has survived rape to continue to see in her or his rapist the same humanity–which means the same potential for vulnerability–that he or she possesses and that the rapist demonstrated so unambiguously and inescapably in the act of rape. Now, let’s suppose this rape survivor commits an act that is not rape, that nonetheless bears on its surface characteristics that are similar to rape and that is clearly and unambiguously victimizing within a power structure that could very easily become rape, if the will and desire to rape were there. Let’s also say–just to make my analogy, which I am assuming is already more than obvious, even more blatant–that the rape survivor experiences what he or she has done as an act, a necessary act, of self-preservation, and let’s say there is incontrovertible evidence to support if not the precise method of self-preservation the rape survivor has chosen, then certainly the validity of taking some form of action. Finally, let’s imagine that central to this rape survivor’s identity is a political commitment to stand in solidarity with all people who are violated, sexually or otherwise, and to fight such violations wherever they occur.

For this rape survivor not to see as self-evident the parallels between the violence he or she has committed and the rape he or she experienced is understandable. We are often blind to aspects of our own actions until they are pointed out to us. Assuming the parallels are really there, however, once someone does point them out, the survivor would be derelict not to explore them, not to see if there were connections to be made that might not only illuminate her or his experience, identity and commitment as a rape survivor, but also change her or his understanding of her or his own victimizing acts and the people who survived them.The survivor, in other words, would have to humanize the person by whom he or she was raped in order fully to grasp whether and to what degree having been raped led to the violence that he or she (the survivor) committed. If you’ve ever been raped, or otherwise sexually assaulted, then you know how difficult it can be just to contemplate what I have been talking about. In my own experience as a survivor of child sexual abuse, it took many years before I could entertain, without feeling like I was betraying myself, the possibility that the men who abused me were, simply, people who’d made the choice to abuse me, not inherently evil monsters who happened to look like men.

I think the Jewish community’s difficulty with Jews who want to explore parallels between the policies and actions of the State of Israel regarding the Palestinians and the policies and actions of Nazi Germany regarding the Jews is similar. What the people who have this difficulty forget, however, is that parallelism is not the same thing as equivalence. To say that some of Israel’s policies and actions resemble policies enacted and actions taken by the Nazis during the Holocaust is not by definition to suggest that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians, though there are antisemites who do make that suggestion. More to the point, a Jew who sees those parallels and remains silent–leaving aside for the moment the question of whether and to what degree the parallels he or she sees are accurate–has a lot more in common with the people of Germany whose silence was their complicity in the Final Solution than with the image of the Jew that I was taught to make part of my identity: someone who, precisely because the Jews have experienced and survived centuries of oppression and persecution, speaks out for social justice even when it is difficult to do so.

I am not arguing that any assertion of a parallel between Israel’s behavior in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the Holocaust is valid simply by virtue of its having been put forward by a Jew. Rather, I am arguing that we need to take seriously the irony out of which such assertions are made and to understand them also as responses to that irony, perhaps especially when the assertions are made in works of art, like the production I imagined of Seven Jewish Children in which the director makes ironic use of Nazi uniforms as costumes, or like the poem “Chosen,” which helped get its author, Josh Healey, and two other poets, Kevin Coval, and Tracy Soren, uninvited from J Street’s conference last year. The three poets were supposed to run a session on poetry in the conference track called “Culture as a Tool for Change,” but when right-wing bloggers, among them Michael Goldfarb at TheWeeklyStandard.com, pointed out that two of Healey’s poems, “Chosen” and “Queer Intifada,” draw comparisons between the Holocaust and current events in Israel and the United States, J Street decided to cancel the session and issued this statement to explain why:

As a matter of principle, J Street respects the dissenting voice that poetry can represent in society and politics. We acknowledge that expression and language are used differently in the arts and artistic expression when compared to their use in political argumentation.

Nevertheless, as J Street is critical of the use and abuse of Holocaust imagery and metaphors by politicians and pundits on the right, it would be inappropriate for us to feature poets at our Conference whose poetry has used such imagery in the past and might also be offensive to some conference participants.

We are sorry for any distraction that this issue may cause for those interested in working with us to advance the cause of peace and security for Israel and the Middle East.

The politics of the cancellation are unsurprising. The battle that would have ensued had J Street allowed the poets to read at the conference was one in which the organization was not willing to get mired, something that–according to Healey and Coval–J Street’s executive director admitted to them when he explained his decision. “I know what I’m doing is wrong,” they quote him as saying, “but there are some battles we choose not to fight.” While I personally agree with the poets that J Street would have done better to fight, because “giv[ing] in […] only emboldens the right and legitimizes their attacks,” I am also aware of how easy it is to second guess decisions like the one J Street made from a distance, and so I don’t want to do that here. Nonetheless, the organization’s statement does reveal something about the politics of “Holocaust imagery and metaphor” within the Jewish community that would be worth talking about even if the poetry session hadn’t been canceled, though it will probably be useful first to take a closer look at poems by Healey and Coval that J Street, Michael Goldfarb and others on the right found so problematic. Here are the offending lines from “Chosen:”

we call ourselves the chosen people
but I’m asking chosen for what?
chosen to recreate our own history
merely reversing the roles
with the script now reading that
we’re the ones writing numbers
on the wrists of babies born in
the ghetto called Gaza?

As I read it, “Chosen” is Healey’s attempt to explore his own difficulty in defining for himself a stable Jewish identity in an era where assimilation, commercialization, consumerism and the Israeli occupation have corrupted (in Healey’s opinion) the social justice tradition within Judaism and Jewish culture and also made it increasingly difficult to see the Jews as the archetype of the oppressed nation, which is how, at least in my Jewish education, we were taught to see ourselves. Here is the poem’s conclusion:

I wish there was a chosen people
and that I could claim them as my own

but when it comes to my people
we’ve chosen to assimilate into
the world of Six Day Wars and Chanukah Harry’s
leading me to see that all people are
going to be just that – people
no matter how many points
we put on our stars or how hard
we pray that they’re different

When I finished reading “Chosen,” it was hard not to think of the joke–I think the writers of Fiddler on the Roof actually put it in Tevye’s mouth–in which the long suffering Jewish man, whose heart is filled with the long suffering of the Jewish people, says to God something like, “I know we are your chosen people, and it’s a blessing; but couldn’t you, maybe, choose someone else for a change?” In Healey’s poem, though, it’s not God who chooses someone else, it’s the Jewish people who have chosen to be something else, and, like the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, Healey wants his words to be a clarion call to the Jews to back away from that choice and return, as my rebbes would have put it, to their yiddishe neshama, their Jewish souls, and the essential truth of what it means to be a Jew. Unfortunately, Healey’s prophetic ambitions don’t amount to much more than a list of tired cliches:

last week I saw Moses crying in the suburbs of Chicago
wandering through the strip malls and fancy temples
wondering why we ignored his last lesson that until all peoples
are free, we might as well still be slaves in Egypt

yesterday I saw Rabbi Hillel begging on the streets of Jerusalem
asking for spare shekels but all the passers-by already gave their money
to false campus idols erected in his honor, pay no attention when he pleas
if you are only for yourself, son, then what are you really for?

Indeed, pretty much the only move in the poem with the potential to yield something that is not cliche, that might do some real justice to the large ambitions Healey has for the piece, is the one that got him in trouble in the first place, comparing the Palestinians in Gaza to the Jews in the ghettos and concentration camps of Nazi Germany. That Healey does not want this comparison to be a facile one is indicated first by the fact that he makes it in the form of a question and, second, by the way he puts his question in the context of the Jews’ image of themselves as the chosen people, an idea fraught with conflict both within the Jewish community and between the Jewish community and the rest of the world. At stake in Healey’s question, in other words, are issues of identity, morality and community; of responsibility and accountability; of how one gives meaning not only to one’s own suffering, but the suffering of others; not only to the oppressive actions of others, but to oppressive actions performed in one’s name. More to the point, these issues are not just relevant, they are central to any discussion of how to make peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, because the concessions and compromises that peace will require of Israel–and, therefore, by proxy, of world Jewry as well–go by definition to the heart of what it has meant to be Jewish since Israel’s independence was declared in 1948. Unfortunately, though, through an inexcusably shallow and factually inaccurate use of Holocaust imagery–Israel is not tattooing numbers onto the wrists of babies born in Gaza–Healey does not merely avoid those crucial issues. He renders them invisible, setting aside the irony he might have so usefully explored in comparing Gaza to a ghetto and going instead for the easy and sentimentalized guilt trip on which rendering Israel Nazi-like is supposed to send those of us who don’t “get it.”

On the whole, “Queer Intifada” is more successful than “Chosen.” The poem’s entirely authentic energy comes from the juxtaposition of a Palestinian Solidarity March and Gay Pride Parade that are taking place on the same day in more or less the same place, and when Healey gets to the Holocaust comparisons that made this poem also problematic for Michael Goldfarb and company, the impulse to make the comparisons, if not the comparisons themselves, arise out of the poem’s energy and movement:

my friends,
Anne Frank is Matthew Shepard
Guantanamo is Auschwitz
Gay Marriage is Palestine
and we are all walking on occupied land

Unfortunately, here too, Healey reaches for what is easy rather than looking for complexity. Equating Guantanamo with Auschwitz is insultingly gratuitous, not only because Guantanamo–whatever else might be wrong with it–is most decidedly not a death camp, but also because it has nothing to with the rest of the poem; and while there certainly are those in the US who would like to hunt down queer people in the same way that the Nazis hunted both Jews and queers, what happened to Matthew Shepard, horrible thought it was and worthy of being memorialized in many different kinds of poems though it is, was not the result of a government sponsored Final Solution. My point is not that that it is wrong to compare either the experiences of or the oppressions suffered by Matthew Shepherd and Anne Frank; especially because the Nazis also sought to exterminate gay people, there is a lot that can probably be learned from exploring the depths of that comparison. However, to elide, as Healey does, the specific characteristics of the different oppressions under which they lived, to reduce each of their lives to what their names can stand for–Anne Frank=Jewish girl hunted and killed by Nazis; Matthew Shepard=gay man hunted and killed by homophobes–is to flatten the truth of each of their experiences to a single truth that does justice to neither of them and, frankly, trivializes what happened to both of them. (Even the comparison between gay marriage and Palestine, in my opinion, ought to give people pause for the same reasons.)

Clearly, I don’t think either of these poems is entirely successful, but their failure stems not from Healey’s impulse as a Jewish poet to use the Holocaust as a lens for examining his place as a Jew in today’s world or to see echoes of the Final Solution in the oppressions that plague our time. Rather, their failure is a failure of language. Healey’s Holocaust comparisons are embodied not in the kind of language that J Street talks about in the first paragraph of its explanation for canceling the poetry event, language that is “used differently in […] artistic expression [than] in political argumentation.” Instead, they are expressed precisely as they would be were political argumentation–albeit a score-cheap-points species of such argument–the kind of discourse in which Healey was involved, which is what made them such perfect fodder for the right-wing bloggers who attacked him. Yet I also want to acknowledge the courage it took for Healey to write what he wrote, to risk putting himself forward as–again, in J Street’s words–“the [kind of] dissenting voice that poetry can represent in society and politics.” That was the role played by the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, whose voices Healey seems to me to have wanted to invoke in these two poems, and that is a role that poets can and should play today, which is why it is a shame that J Street felt it necessary to cut the poets out of its conference, instead of finding a way to make the substance, the failure and the courage of Healey’s poems part of the discussion. One way to do this might have been to ask the poets to explore the poet-prophet connection at which I have just hinted. Certainly there is an argument to be made that Israel has “lost its way” in trying to deal with the Palestinian issue, though how much it is lost may be up for debate and I know there are people who will say that Israel is not lost at all; and while the politicians and activists, the negotiators and academics, hammer out the practical aspects of finding a way to peace, maybe it is the Jewish poet’s job–or at least the job of those Jewish poets who feel themselves compelled to do it–to call Israel back to its better self (and I mean here not only the current State of Israel, but Israel as it is often used in the Hebrew Bible to signify the Jewish people). To practice what Josh Healey and his fellow poet Kevin Coval call in Searching for a Minyan: Our Response to Being Censored by J Street “the Jewish maxim of the refusal to be silent in the face of oppression, anyone’s oppression.”

By way of example, here is a video of Kevin Coval performing the poem–of which I have been unable to find either the title or a transcript–for which he was taken to task because he accuses Israel of whoring itself “to sleep in the hands of men who [will?] beat you after morning coffee.”

Coval’s poem–whatever you might think of its politics–is more successful than either “Chosen” or “Queer Intifada” for a number of reasons, among them the fact that when Coval conjures the Holocaust, he does so with a far more developed sense of Jewish collective, and his own personal, vulnerability. The suggestion that Israel ought to examine its actions–that Jews ought to examine Israel’s actions–in light of what the Nazis did to the Jews is still there, but there is none of Healey’s cynical, propagandistic rant. Instead, Coval’s assertion of his own awareness that he, that the Jews could very easily become victims of another Gestapo, thereby validating in the context of the poem the emotional commitment most Jews have to the necessity of Israel as a safe haven, allows the full complexity with which Israel confronts the Jews–as an idea, an ideal and as a reality–to emerge. Moreover, when Coval calls Israel to task, he does so in terms of very specific events, giving details and taking responsibility for his own perspective–note the repetition of “I see you” and “I saw you”–in ways that make sure what he is saying does not descend into an ad hominem attack; as well, these criticisms of Israel are couched in metaphors that invite consideration not just of the specific deeds he is criticizing, but of the larger, universally human issues involved.

When he compares Israel to a pawn, for example, and the Middle East to a chessboard, he is not just characterizing Israel as a tool that the United States uses to fight its battles for it; he is also asking his audience to think about what it means to conceive of international relations in terms of battle and how that conception shapes the roles that the nations of the world then have little choice but to play. More to the point, he is asking a moral question: Given the realities of world politics and world antisemitism, given the moral history of the Jews and the moral imperative in Jewish culture to take a stand against oppression, what meaningful response can an individual Jew have to those actions Israel has taken against the Palestinians that are clearly immoral that does not also deny the realities of the world, betray the Jews or both?

The poem, of course, is itself Coval’s answer to that question, though it is not as straightforward an answer as it might at first appear. When he implores Israel at the end to stop killing itself, he is, in essence, asking Israel to find a way to live within the contradictions and complexities its existence embodies. The poem, in other words, is most emphatically not anti-Israel; it is, rather, a plea for Israel’s continued existence.Yet Michael Goldfarb ignores that entirely when he links to Coval’s YouTube video with these words:

Or maybe it wasn’t Healey but his fellow panelist, Kevin Coval, seen here calling Israel a “whore,” that someone [at J Street] was worried about [when the organization canceled the poetry event]. (Emphasis mine)

It is not gratuitous intellectual nitpicking to point out that there is a meaningful difference between calling someone a whore and telling them that certain of their behaviors are whorish. More to the point, though, to reduce Coval’s line–“whoring yourself to sleep in the hands of men who [will?] beat you after morning coffee”–to name calling is willfully to misread the poem; it is to avoid hearing the voice of the poem, of its speaker bearing witness to the violence such men do, whose hope is that the woman they are so horribly exploiting will somehow find the strength, the support, the community to free herself and live her own life. Goldfarb does not merely to disparage Coval’s poem, however; he also implies what Jennifer Rubin states more explicitly on Commentary’s blog, that Coval (and Healey) are merely saying in their work what J Street really stands for, a “peace” that will actually result in Israel’s demise as a Jewish state. (This is why, according to Rubin, J Street’s “definition of what’s good for [Israel] in no way matches up with the views of even reliably liberal American Jews or Israelis themselves” and why it’s “positions invariably line up so neatly with the Palestinian propaganda machine.”) Regardless of how much you disagree with Coval’s and Healey’s politics, regardless of how offended you are by their metaphors (I find Healey’s Holocaust metaphors very offensive, for example, and I generally agree with his politics), to take the position argued by Goldfarb and Rubin is to deny that Coval and Healey are Jewish poets working in a Jewish literary tradition which was explicitly about trying to guarantee Israel’s survival–the people and the nation–not calling for its destruction. If you find Coval’s characterization of some of Israel’s behavior as whorish, for example, then you should find the poetry of the biblical prophets equally offensive. Here, for example, is the prophet Jeremiah calling Israel a whore, though this translation uses the word prostitute instead:

2:19 “Your own wickedness shall correct you, and your backsliding shall reprove you. Know therefore and see that it is an evil thing and a bitter, that you have forsaken Yahweh your God, and that my fear is not in you,” says the Lord, Yahweh of Armies. 2:20 “For of old time I have broken your yoke, and burst your bonds; and you said, ‘I will not serve;’ for on every high hill and under every green tree you bowed yourself, playing the prostitute. 2:21 Yet I had planted you a noble vine, wholly a right seed. How then have you turned into the degenerate branches of a foreign vine to me? 2:22 For though you wash yourself with lye, and use much soap, yet your iniquity is marked before me,” says the Lord Yahweh.

And here is Ezekiel doing the same thing:

16:15 But you trusted in your beauty, and played the prostitute because of your renown, and poured out your prostitution on everyone who passed by; his it was. 16:16 You took of your garments, and made for yourselves high places decked with various colors, and played the prostitute on them: the like things shall not come, neither shall it be so. 16:17 You also took your beautiful jewels of my gold and of my silver, which I had given you, and made for yourself images of men, and played the prostitute with them; 16:18 and you took your embroidered garments, and covered them, and set my oil and my incense before them. 16:19 My bread also which I gave you, fine flour, and oil, and honey, with which I fed you, you even set it before them for a pleasant aroma; and thus it was, says the Lord Yahweh. 16:20 Moreover you have taken your sons and your daughters, whom you have borne to me, and you have sacrificed these to them to be devoured. Was your prostitution a small matter, 16:21 that you have slain my children, and delivered them up, in causing them to pass through the fire to them? 16:22 In all your abominations and your prostitution you have not remembered the days of your youth, when you were naked and bare, and were wallowing in your blood.

Had there been a Holocaust to which Jeremiah and Ezekiel, Isaiah and Hosea, could have referred in focusing the attention of Israel on its waywardness, I have no doubt the prophets would have done so; and I have no doubt as well that there were people like Michael Goldfarb and Jennfier Rubin who supported the status quo the prophets were speaking against by pointing out that in the verses prior to the ones I quoted just above, Ezekiel’s metaphor for the covenant with God that Israel has betrayed by prostituting herself is sex; and I am sure those people pointed out the even more morally questionable fact that, in this passage, the prophet shows God grooming Israel almost from the moment of her birth so that when her “time of love” arrived, He could claim her sexually.

16:1 Again the word of Yahweh came to me, saying, 16:2 Son of man, cause Jerusalem to know her abominations; 16:3 and say, Thus says the Lord Yahweh to Jerusalem: Your birth and your birth is of the land of the Canaanite; the Amorite was your father, and your mother was a Hittite. 16:4 As for your birth, in the day you were born your navel was not cut, neither were you washed in water to cleanse you; you weren’t salted at all, nor swaddled at all. 16:5 No eye pitied you, to do any of these things to you, to have compassion on you; but you were cast out in the open field, for that your person was abhorred, in the day that you were born. 16:6 When I passed by you, and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you, Though you are in your blood, live; yes, I said to you, Though you are in your blood, live. 16:7 I caused you to multiply as that which grows in the field, and you increased and grew great, and you attained to excellent ornament; your breasts were fashioned, and your hair was grown; yet you were naked and bare. 16:8 Now when I passed by you, and looked at you, behold, your time was the time of love; and I spread my skirt over you[2. In the Bible, this is a metaphor for sexual intercourse, not the modesty we might see in it. When Boaz has sex with Ruth, for example, the expression used in the text has to do with his covering her with his blanket.], and covered your nakedness: yes, I swore to you, and entered into a covenant with you, says the Lord Yahweh, and you became mine. (Emphasis mine.)

I am, of course, not arguing that Coval and Healey are prophets; but to refuse to recognize that they, as I read them, are working very self-consciously within the prophetic literary tradition is not merely to deny the fundamentally Jewish nature of what they are trying to accomplish in their poems; it is also to establish, at least by implication, an orthodoxy around whether and how Jewish writers can deal with difficult topics like Israel and the Holocaust–topics that are inescapably, irreducibly, unequivocally Jewish–in writing about Jewish identity, Jewish current events, the relationship between the Jewish community and the rest of the world or any other Jewish issue for that matter. It is, in other words, to prescribe an appropriate Jewish identity, to insist that the language of poetry should not move beyond the boundaries established by the language of political discourse. In fact, what disturbs me most about the statement J Street issued explaining its reasons for canceling the poetry event that was supposed to feature Healey and Coval is its clear endorsement of this kind of orthodoxy, something that the criticism leveled by both the left and the right at J Street’s realpolitik has not addressed. Here, for ease of reference, is the full text of J Street’s statement:

Over the weekend, J Street canceled the poetry session scheduled as part of the “Culture as a Tool for Change” track at its upcoming National Conference.

As a matter of principle, J Street respects the dissenting voice that poetry can represent in society and politics. We acknowledge that expression and language are used differently in the arts and artistic expression when compared to their use in political argumentation.

Nevertheless, as J Street is critical of the use and abuse of Holocaust imagery and metaphors by politicians and pundits on the right, it would be inappropriate for us to feature poets at our Conference whose poetry has used such imagery in the past and might also be offensive to some conference participants.

We are sorry for any distraction that this issue may cause for those interested in working with us to advance the cause of peace and security for Israel and the Middle East.

In terms of meaning, the first and last paragraphs are the most clear, and if you were to read only those two paragraphs–replacing the words “this issue” in the last paragraph with a more explicit reference to Healey and Coval–J Street’s reasoning for canceling the event would also be pretty clear. Taking on the controversy that was building over Healey and Coval’s work would have undermined the core purpose of the conference which was “to advance the cause of peace and prosperity for Israel and the Middle East.” It’s important to recognize that this assessment might have been accurate. More to the point, though, and assuming for the moment that it was an accurate assessment, J Street could have approached the cancellation of the poetry session very differently. The organization’s statement could have focused on the importance of the questions raised by the poets’ work and the fact that those questions will still be relevant no matter how the issue of peace between Israel and the Palestinians is resolved. J Street could have offered to create another forum where those questions could be addressed more fruitfully, not by walling poetry away from the politics of Middle East peace, but by making sure there would be enough time and space to address the very complicated literary-political issues to which writing poetry about the Middle East gives rise.

Whatever flaws you might find in such reasoning–and however wrong you might think it is politically, strategically or otherwise–it would be hard to call a cancellation framed in those terms outright censorship, especially if the statement had been written in consultation with the poets. J Street, however, chose instead to issue a statement that cannot be called anything but censorship, and that comes pretty close to censuring Healey and Coval as well, despite the gesture in the statement’s second paragraph acknowledging that poetry, while it can be politically engaged, is not political discourse. This is an important and useful distinction to make, especially since ignoring this distinction was part of the strategy employed by the right-wing bloggers who used Healey’s and Coval’s work to make J Street’s life so difficult. Remarkably, however, J Street ignores that distinction in the very next paragraph, equating the Holocaust imagery and metaphors in poems like Healey’s to the “use and abuse of Holocaust imagery and metaphors by politicians and pundits on the right.” Even leaving aside the fact that the phrase “use and abuse” suggests that “politicians and pundits on the right” ought, in J Street’s opinion, never to use Holocaust imagery or metaphors, it’s hard to escape the implication in that third paragraph that J Street also believes, when it comes to the Holocaust, that there is no difference between politics and poetry; and since you cannot separate either the establishment of the State of Israel or the reason that most Jews not born in Israel believe Israel ought to exist from the historical reality of the Holocaust and the way the Holocaust has been made central to Jewish identity since the ending of World War II, it’s hard as well to escape the further implication that the distinction between poetic and political discourse disappears when it comes to Israel as well.

My guess it that the person who wrote J Street’s statement did not intend for it to mean any of what I have just said. Indeed, the statement as a whole strikes me as having been very quickly and carelessly written, but it is what it is, and it says what it says, and it now represents J Street’s official position–since, as far as I can tell, no further statement has been issued. My point, however, is not to use this statement to characterize J Street as a hypocritical organization. One carelessly written statement does not an organization’s overall agenda make. Rather, what I want to point out is that adhering to the orthodoxies and pieties that a community tries to impose on the discussion and rhetorical use of certain subject matter will inevitably mire you in the kinds of hypocrisy J Street’s statement so clearly embodies; and if there are any two subjects about which the Jewish community has tried to impose such orthodoxies and pieties, they are Israel and the Holocaust. I have written at length about this in terms of Israel in the series “What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) antisemitisn and Israel” (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; each link will open in a different window), and so I am not going to touch on that subject here; and I have already argued that I think it is a Jewish poet’s right and responsibility to use the Holocaust as a lens through which to understand her or his Jewish identity in a world where Jews have become oppressors. There is, however, more at stake in the question of how one should or shouldn’t make art dealing with the Holocaust than the questions raised by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, because the questions raised by the Holocaust are, among others, fundamental questions about the existence and nature of evil in the world and the place that evil occupies–that we give it–in the process of living that is human being.

Part 2 to follow soon. Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.