I have a strange memory that until now I never felt able to share. I was around eleven or twelve. Something like that. A kid, but not a small one. I was in the kitchen of our small house in Bluefield, Virginia, and my parents were arguing.
It wasn’t a traumatic argument. It was rather silly and I recall feeling that way at the time. They weren’t arguing about money, infidelity, or addiction. They were arguing about Fiddler on the Roof.
Our kitchen was a small open space with counters and appliances along one side and a table on the other. We were at the table. My father was reading the paper. My mother glanced at the open page.
“Look,” she said, pointing at an advertisement. “They’re doing Fiddler on the Roof in Roanoke.” Roanoke was the closest town of any significance, about an hour-and-forty-minutes away. We went there for the two-story mall, glamorous restaurants like Chi-Chi’s, and various shows and concerts. (My friends and I waited in vain for Michael Jackson to turn up.)
My father grunted.
“I should take the kids,” my mother continued.
“We’re not spending any money on that garbage.”
My mother looked annoyed, although I can’t imagine that she expected her husband to be enthusiastic about theater.
Before she could respond, my father went on a tirade about how he’ll support that Zionist bullshit over his dead body. He rarely did that sort of thing; it’s possible that Palestine was in the news, perhaps in the very paper he had been reading.
“It has nothing to do with Israel,” my mother screamed. “It’s a play.”
So began the routine in which they would bicker like the lead characters in an odd-couple comedy.
“The hell it doesn’t.”
“Are you crazy?
I don’t remember the argument lasting long. My mom eventually relented, probably because it spared her a high culture experience that sounded better in theory than practice. She refused to concede the point to my dad, though: Fiddler on the Roof had nothing to do with Israel and he was just being closed-minded.
I agree with her on both counts: the play takes place in Eastern Europe before 1948 and my dad was certainly being closed-minded. But that doesn’t mean he was wrong. A better formulation would have been “the play shouldn’t have anything to do with Israel,” but as Arabs we had long ago observed that if you play out the string, or let the string play out on its own, then these supposedly apolitical cultural productions always end up justifying Israel, as do their producers.
In other words, despite his crude theoretical approach, my old man saw something that nobody seemed to see except for his enemies: amid Zionism, there is no such thing as a neutral expression of Jewish culture.
*****
My dad somehow embodied the attitude of many Arab Americans I knew in young adulthood and beyond. We were a bit flabbergasted by and sometimes uneasy with the constant references to Jewish customs in U.S. pop culture. Those references seemed to come out of nowhere in movies, TV shows, music videos, and so forth. A mazel tov here. A hora there. The audience’s understanding of Judaism was no doubt superficial, but the idea of Jewish humanity was perfectly legible. And Jewish humanity was inextricably attached to the existence of Israel. This was understood. This was made to be understood. Meanwhile, Arabs and Muslims were showing up in pop culture as bloodthirsty maniacs. At best, we were depicted as incompetent brutes. We noticed the difference. Everyone did. You couldn’t miss it. But the difference actually bothered us. The idea of our humanity was an existential threat to Western civilization.
There was this thing that happened among my Arab American peers. The inevitable Jewish reference or storyline would appear in the TV show or movie we were watching. We would give each other a sideways glance, maybe roll our eyes. Here we go again. Always furtively. We knew what kind of trouble awaited if the reaction were explicit, even when nobody else was around. We knew that merely acknowledging our feelings would make us awful people, exactly what the dominant society said we were. Diverse representation is wonderful in theory, but in practice it often conveys the imperatives of power in multicultural disguise and reinforces the same hierarchies it purports to undermine. The most insidious of these representations are highly politicized in ways that feign banality. (Oh, how sweet! A magical Black sidekick with no interest in structural inequality! Wow, how touching! A servant who’s part of the family!) Pointing out the tacit politics in these feel-good stories is generally considered rude.
Did we hate Jews? Maybe some of us did, though I doubt it. We didn’t speak of hatred. I certainly didn’t hate Jews. I still don’t. I have plenty of hatred in my heart, but it’s balanced by a love which is distributed according to an oppressor/oppressed binary. Identity factors into the equation only to the degree that it clarifies the distribution. Hating or liking Jews has little to do with the moments of tension I describe. We perceived an implicit politics at play even if we didn’t understand the structures of our perception. And we knew that the politics had something to do with Israel.
We weren’t being paranoid. All those ritual inclusions, those benign interjections of ethnic flavor, helped to reify Zionism whether or not that was their purpose. We weren’t rolling our eyes at an impartial form of cultural representation. We were in awe of the subtle but unmistakable attempt to engineer our own obsolescence. We feel the same way when Zionists accuse us of “antisemitism” simply for refusing to disappear.
Because of a relentless sense of precarity, we inhabited a world of sighs, side-eyes, and half-smiles. We didn’t feel like celebrating Jewish culture. That reluctance wasn’t a visceral symptom of racial hostility; it was a remonstration that could be articulated only through an oblique and coded semiotics. It was also perhaps a lament that we were strangers to pop culture, both as subjects and consumers. We were too foreign, too dangerous, to ever be presented as banal. Our role was to produce spectacular violence. Our oppressors, it seemed to us, were fully realized, and it didn’t escape our notice that their self-realization came at our expense. It was completely obvious and at the same time perplexing and inexplicable.
I don’t want to argue that our reluctance was justifiable. Instead, I want to argue that the reluctance was rational—not only rational, but rational according to a calculus derived without our participation. We were told repeatedly that the very idea of Jewish peoplehood is contingent on Israel’s existence and were nevertheless given the responsibility of separating the two phenomena. We earnestly performed this responsibility but never made much headway because Zionists kept punishing us for daring to suggest that Jewishness could survive decolonization.
Unless one has been subject to it, then I don’t think it’s possible to imagine the relentlessness and intensity of Zionist efforts to eradicate any trace of Palestine in pop culture, politics, arts, and education. These efforts didn’t happen solely through phony accusations of antisemitism. They had an insidious social component, as well. The ability to tell stories or to flood programming with humanizing gestures made it easier to sell the idea of Israel as a spiritual counterpart to the United States. Arabs and Muslims had no such advantage. Our provenance needed to remain foreign for the relationship between Israel and the United States to make any sense. The notion that Jew-hatred is the only explanation for criticism of Israel would have gone nowhere without the cultural capital accumulated through disproportionate visibility. The sad irony of antisemitism is that in the past few decades it has harmed Palestinians more than anyone else.
*****
My strongest connection to Palestine is through my maternal grandmother. She suffered the nakba in a village that would become an artsy, upscale suburb of West Jerusalem. I had a peculiar relationship with my abuelita, as we called her. (She married a Palestinian from Latin America and moved to Nicaragua shortly after 1948.) She was the only grandparent I really knew. My abuelito, her husband, died when I was seven and I never met my paternal grandparents, who died in Madaba, Jordan, around the same time.
Abuelita was known to be difficult. She wasn’t affectionate and could be harsh and impatient. She didn’t like many people. Among the people she didn’t like were Jews, a sentiment she made no effort to hide. With abuelita, there was no distinction among “Jews,” “Israelis,” and “Zionists.” They were all the same oppressor. That was that. Good luck trying to explain to her that the three categories don’t neatly overlap. She wasn’t having it. She knew exactly who stole her country, thank you very much.
I know that abuelita was unamenable to these distinctions because my mother used to introduce them, to no avail. It often felt like another pretense to fight, as is the habit of so many parents and children.
My siblings and I—and, later, our cousins—were a bit scared of abuelita. I don’t actually remember her hitting us, but all she had to do was threaten the faja and we’d quit fucking around. It’s clear now that our real fear wasn’t corporeal; we didn’t want to be made to feel like idiots, a task at which abuelita excelled.
She had her favorites—the oldest and youngest male grandchildren, obviously—and didn’t bother to pretend otherwise. But as I grew into adulthood, we began to develop a special bond. It largely happened because of my interest in Palestine, which stirred her interest in return. We always had trouble communicating because abuelita spoke English poorly and I knew practically no Arabic. Spanish was our compromise, but I wasn’t particularly strong there, either.
“You used to speak Arabic with me when you were little,” she would say, with an undertone of reproach toward my father.
She was delighted when I returned from Palestine one summer with a functional Shami dialect. My new ability to communicate, albeit roughly, deepened our relationship and I got to be an audience for stories she wouldn’t otherwise tell. One day, we were alone in the car while my mom picked up a few things at the grocery store. (Abuelita hated shopping with my mom because in our small town everyone stopped in the aisle to chitchat.) As we idled in the fire lane, abuelita began talking.
“Your mother, she gets mad at me. About the Jews.”
I don’t know where her need of self-defense came from. She and my mother must have had another argument that morning. I could have recited the argument with near-perfect accuracy. Abuelita had said something considered off-putting in polite American society and mom had told abuelita that the comment was inappropriate. Abuelita said she didn’t care. Mom declared that it was abuelita’s business if she wanted to be hateful, but she wouldn’t be having any of it. Abuelita doubled down, ensuring that mom would in fact be having some of it.
“I know,” I said.
I expected abuelita to go on a mini-diatribe about my mother and then we would return to silence. She had no problem sharing her opinions, but never expected me to validate them. Instead, her voice became soft and reflective.
“Let me tell you, son of my daughter. It was hard. We suffered. Yes. You don’t know how we suffered. They made our lives a living hell.”
“I know.”
“So that’s why. I’m not an animal.”
I didn’t say “I know” because I knew, just as she knew, that she was indeed an animal. I was, too, along with my open-minded mother chatting about high school football with a random lady in the cereal aisle at Food City. We were made to be animals simply for recording normal emotions, despite having done so in deliberate silence, because it would have been way too cumbersome for the oppressor to perceive those emotions as human.
*****
Because we were so effectively sidelined from our own experience, all our pushback could be treated as hostile or conspiratorial. Whether valid or not, the fact remains: pop culture philosemitism felt to us less a celebration of Jewishness than a reminder of Palestinian dispossession. The feeling couldn’t be subjected to public scrutiny. It was mere bigotry, not worth anyone’s attention. We would be deracinated before being correct.
The problem isn’t that we were ignored. Being ignored isn’t pleasant—sometimes it can feel brutal—but it’s mostly tolerable. The main problem is that an entire system of upward mobility came to exist based on Palestinian misery. For the past five decades, there has been no better career move for the aspiring politician or thought-leader than undisguised malice. Get Palestinians fired, arrested, or deported; justify their murder; portray them as subhuman—whatever it takes, just make it known that you’re eager to punch down and the most important qualification will have been satisfied. The next most important qualification is the ability to wreck lives and celebrate war crimes with a veneer of civilizational rectitude.
What else could possibly explain the career trajectory of a generational nitwit like Bari Weiss? Or Bret Stephens? Or Jeffrey Goldberg? Or…? (Think about how long it would take to complete even ten percent of this list.) This kind of demented social climbing doesn’t have to be grandiose. It happens in a million smaller ways, as well. Grants, professorships, book contracts, and podcast invites have much more to do with obeisance than with merit.
Our sense of dispossession, then, isn’t simply material; it is existential. It’s an awful thing to be mistreated and then watch the offender collect money and fame. Sure, we can console ourselves by saying “they’re unhappy on the inside,” but that line of thinking rarely offers relief. It’s hard to picture inner unhappiness in others and even where possible it does nothing to change anyone’s material circumstances. It’s horrible to exist as raw material for an enemy’s sinister ambitions. To begin with, it untethers us from the possibility of a meaningful civic life in the United States. I’m not suggesting that people are obliged to agree with any subsequent behavior. I’m saying that it’s something most people who lament our supposed bigotry have never bothered to understand.
Only now, three years into the Zionist genocide, have these issues come into the open. Discursive norms changed. Old sensitivities collapsed. Feelings that once were kept politely tacit are now aired with shocking candor. The biggest of these changes has been a reluctance among many Palestinians to entertain lectures about using the proper approach and tone in discussing the relationship between Jewishness and Zionism. Although begrudgingly, we were more amenable to these suggestions—injunctions, if we’re being honest—when it appeared that some kind of accommodation with Israelis was still viable. Such optimism, if that’s what you want to call it, is all but dead.
As we see our relations being collected in garbage bags, we also see the earnest arbiters of acceptable discourse holding forth about the unfortunate crudeness (or worse) with which some Palestinians are choosing to express themselves. Our prior reticence to speak has again been validated in retrospect. As horrors beyond description continue unabated, we are still unable to articulate a politics that can satisfy both our own exigencies and the rhetorical demands of the Anglophone left.
A lot of my peers are choosing the exigencies. They don’t want to hear about the anxieties of a community they already consider overindulged. The idea of coexistence is equally unattractive. Whatever trust anti-Zionist Jews could once take for granted now needs to be earned. I wouldn’t classify this turn as nihilistic or retrograde. I would call it inevitable: it’s the same transformation every national or ethnic group undergoes when faced with genocide. It makes no sense in this instance only because in the West, Palestinians couldn’t narrate a politics beyond what liberal Zionists were willing to authorize.
When I reflect on so many years of repression and resentment, I can’t say I’m surprised by this development. I’m not particularly happy about the development, to be honest. But in the end, I cannot condemn my peers for using vocabularies of suffering and trauma. Not in this moment. Not when so many unarticulated memories suddenly fit into the world. Nor can I rescue Judaism from Zionism. I was cast out of the moderate spaces of my own movement with clear instructions never to return.
*****
A few weeks ago, my son read Elie Wiesel’s Night for eighth-grade social studies. It was the centerpiece of a unit on the Nazi Holocaust. Like any sentient being, he was disturbed by the barbarity depicted in the book and was eager to discuss his feelings.
One evening, he asked, “Was the author a Zionist?”
The question came out of nowhere. We had never discussed Wiesel’s politics, hadn’t discussed Wiesel at all, actually. Like any decent English teacher, I ask my son to transform feelings into interpretation, but I let him choose the subject-matter.
“Yes, he was,” I said. (I wasn’t going to lie to the kid—not about this, anyway.)
“I thought so.”
“Why? Did somebody mention it?”
“No, I could just tell.”
“How could you tell?”
“I don’t know. I got like a vibe from him.”
How did the child sense that Wiesel was a Zionist? Night doesn’t focus on Israel. I guess he could have searched up the author, but my son wasn’t that diligent. He uses me as his personal Google, instead. No, he figured it out on his own. I was baffled. It seemed almost magical. Did he inherit some recursive gene from his grandfather? Or is there an observable structure in written and visual texts wherein an extant but unarticulated Zionism can be detected?
Maybe his recognition didn’t come from the text itself, but from the conditions that allowed the text to make its way into his curriculum. For starters, it probably seemed curious that his class was studying the Nazi Holocaust when there is an ongoing genocide in a neighboring country. Not to mention that his school is located in a city hosting many thousands of refugees from the genocide in question. It possibly seemed curious as well that nobody was discussing the various genocides that have occurred on the African continent. Why this genocide? Why this genocide whose descendants are busy committing a genocide of their own? Why this genocide whose descendants are busy committing a genocide of their own using the prior genocide as a justification?
Acts of memorialization have ideological components which are hard to discuss because of their propensity to offend. Only a ghoul would suggest that the Nazi Holocaust should be ignored. But it requires a comparable ghoulishness to make it so that other genocides are minimized in order to sanctify the Nazi Holocaust. This kind of ghoulishness, however, gets validated by cultural and educational institutions throughout the West. Those who suffer oppression in the present take notice. We don’t want to read books about the horrors of racial violence promoted by the liberal elite because they studiously omit Palestine.
This omission, more than anything, is how we can detect Zionist sensibilities in supposedly neutral or universal environments: do the ruling classes mourn and memorialize an occupied nation or do the ruling classes treat engagement with an occupied nation as cause for punishment? Do victims of state violence become a cultural phenomenon or do they exist in perpetual disrepute? Only after decades of nonstop organizing at great cost to countless individuals and three years of real-time atrocities has it become possible to speak about how Palestinian suffering upends the chauvinistic paradigms into which generations of media consumers were inculcated, and still we risk destitution for demanding the right to name our oppressor. When we say “Israeli,” they hear “Jew.” When we say “Zionist,” they also hear “Jew.” But if we say “Jew,” then we are making bigoted conflations. We didn’t choose to eschew representations of Jewishness and Jewish culture. Zionists deliberately made them off-limits to us.
*****
In the end, it was my mother, ever the voice of reason, who upheld the old man’s sentiment. She was chatting with my son on WhatsApp and asked, “What are you learning about in school?” When my son explained that he was reading Night, she didn’t inquire about the book or the author.
“Well, honey,” she told him, perhaps considering the village downwind of Yad Vashem that she never got to visit, “it’s important to remember what’s happening in Palestine.”
Brilliant essay on the present anatomy of the Zionists and western Epstein classes’ shenanigans hiding behind and hikacking a single marker of identity: the Jewish religion. Fortunately most of us in the progressive left [yes, there is a reactionary left too, these days] don’t fall for that trick no more! Thanks. Calvyn
So, are we supposed to differentiate between Judaism/Jewishness and Zionism, or not?
The comments are proving the point that many people are not yet ready to have such discussions
It’s a fair and valid distinction to make, since there obviously are non-Zionist and antizionist Jews. Where it gets gnarly is when folks with an expressly anti-Israel agenda try to impose a moral hierarchy on Jewishness, in which the only good Jew is an antizionist one who embraces all aspects of said agenda up to and including the premise that Israel is inherently and irredeemably evil, a blight on humanity, and fully deserving of whatever harms are visited on it, up to -and preferably including- its destruction. Thus, guilt is collectivized and hatred can be freely deployed against people based solely on the presumption of guilt by association.
Bingo. My eyes are still returning from the back of my brain
“up to and including the premise that Israel is inherently and irredeemably evil, a blight on humanity, and fully deserving of whatever harms are visited on it, up to -and preferably including- its destruction”
these are all objectively true, just as in the case of nazi germany
I am stunned by the many similarities between Israeli Zionism and South African apartheid. If the latter is now globally acknowledged and accepted as a crime against humanity [the first ideology to attain this nasty label] should the same not apply to the former?
There is much in your work which is beyond me; I am fortunate, then, to have happened upon “An Honest Living.” This essay as well.
There are writers – you are one – whose excellence lies in the existence, side by side, of intellectual rigour and (more prosaic) humanity. The result, for this reader, is heartbreak – at a distance, it’s understood.
Apart from NYC (and LA?), the Toronto-Montreal corridor is surely the most substantial population of Zionists on the planet. No surprise, then, that the Jewish/Zionist melting together runs through the media, academia….I’ll take a moment here to offer up some Jewish voices which may temper that melt: Naomi Klein you will know (disparage?), her partner Avi Lewis – recently elected as the leader of the NDP…
But here are two names that might have escaped your notice: Yves Engler and Judy Haiven. Engler is the militant voice, which makes him unwelcome in polite Canadian discourse; Haiven is a retired prof in Halifax whose regular pieces are equal parts wit and indignation.
Haiven’s writing can found in her substack: “Another Ruined Dinner Party”….recommended!
Thanks, as always, for your writing.
Steven typically articulates what we instinctively feel but could not frame it in words. And does so beautifully, and evocatively, in the context of an existential reality. Thank you.
Good essay, I enjoyed reading it, especially the conversations between your son and you.
I miss my Abuelita too. Many of the conversations and ideas that anti-Zionists are having now are echoed in my own home.
Thank you!
This is an extremely well written and in-depth look at the truth of Zionism and the grand manipulation at using Jew’s and Judaism as Zionist’s/Israel’s ultimate tool to try and get away with anything.
Articles and posts like yours will be key factor for those who are blind/ignorant of the fact of this Jewish Exceptionalism and how much of it gets used to propagate and excuse the crimes and atrocities committed by Israel now.
It truly sounds like a rare gift to identify Zionists by “vibe,” although one could be forgiven for imagining that by eighth grade students would receive something more by way of context and background to go with an assignment as weighty as Wiesel in a social studies class. It’s hardly what you would classify as light reading, just as I, at least, would grant the junior high school reader a degree of maturity -and accordingly assume a level of cerebral agency and capacity for understanding- beyond that of a “child.”
Then there’s this:
“We were told repeatedly that the very idea of Jewish peoplehood is contingent on Israel’s existence and were nevertheless given the responsibility of separating the two phenomena. We earnestly performed this responsibility but never made much headway because Zionists kept punishing us for daring to suggest that Jewishness could survive decolonization.”
On the one hand, once more, one could be forgiven for imagining that having survived attempted extermination at the hands of the Nazis -to say nothing of the centuries of virulent hatred and persecution that preceded it- Jews might have good reason to feel that their peoplehood had become contingent on statehood as embodied in Israel -a position broad social segments and a large part of the international community supported wholeheartedly. On the other, as a related point, complaining about how “Zionists kept punishing us for daring to suggest that Jewishness could survive decolonization” studiously avoids explaining what form such “decolonization” would take other than the elimination of the Zionist project, to wit the State of Israel, and what provisions you envision for Jewish survival in such a scenario. One is inclined to surmise that you would take minimal to sub-zero interest in assuring such survival.
Finally, acknowledging that you knowingly harbor hatred, without offering further specifics, but asserting that it’s “balanced by a love which is distributed according to an oppressor/oppressed binary” leaves much to be desired as the basis for a mature, reasoned grasp of real-world ethics and morality, and instead strikes me as a position more in line with an underdeveloped, juvenile world view informed by the deliberately simplistic construct of, shall we say adolescent, sociology and political science at around, say, eighth grade level.
well, for what it’s worth, i get very strong zionist vibes from you–ss
So I suppose that puts me in the hated/oppressor category of your neat little moral universe, something my shoulders are broad enough to bear, fortunately (como diría mi honorable padre, QEPD). Sorry to crash your little navel gazing self-pity party, the only true purpose of which -as far as I can see- is to present a personal narrative or origin story to back up your core position, which is that you hate Jews and are seeking validation to feel good about it. If the absurd conceit that you have some kind of sixth sense that gives you the power to detect other people’s positions on an issue like Israel/Palestine is part of achieving that, more (or less) power to you.
What a pitiful word vomit. Disingenuous drivel.
Thanks Steve, sublime piece, great read and well articulated.
Luv U2… and sorry you felt that way about my comment. Unless I missed something deep here, the main points of the “essay” are: a) Steve’s granny hated Jews and passed that on to him; b) He has embraced said hatred as part of his core identity and values; and c) He wants to do everything he can to pass that legacy down to his son. Whether you agree or not, it’s not exactly deep thinking or earth shattering. If the narrative tugs on your heartstrings and you sympathize, fine; my view differs and the cockles of my heart are not warmed by so transparent an attempt to garner sympathy for what the writer himself acknowledges as hatred.
The key to this (lengthy) diatribe is a single word: “…supported…”
As in “…a large part of the international community supported wholeheartedly…”
Past tense: supported.
In 1948, perhaps. But Palestine predates 1948 by a thousand years, and exists to this day, the best efforts of Zionists notwithstanding.
And the world, finally, has woken up.
Perhaps Zionists might consider their first choices for a “homeland”: Uganda and Argentina.
This second possibility must surely be attractive, given the proclivities of Milei…
You certainly got “diatribe” right. As regards Palestine predating 1948, well duh, although its meaning as a name has nothing to do with how it’s understood today. In that sense its not unlike, say, “semitic,” which had been around long before it had the “anti” tacked on even though historically, ethnically, or culturally it had little or nothing to do with Jews, whose existence and presence in “Palestine” -for what it’s worth- predates the birth of Islam and the ensuing centuries of conquest, colonization, and human migration by thousands of years.
They don’t vibe with facts in these ‘anti- Zionist spaces, have you noticed that too? And history? Pish, only teachers are interested in that!
Being one myself and a parent also (and a new grandmother) I personally have striven to pass on to my offspring the importance of critical thinking and the ability to identify and parse rank propaganda. It’s a skill that’s sorely needed in this current discourse. Where are the serious people? The people who can face uncomfortable facts and absorb them and even, god forbid, change their position accordingly? Not many of us here or even left (in both senses of that word)
Why should he care about what fate befalls the Jewish colonisers if Palestine were to be decolonised? Land Back movements exist throughout the world, and not one of them focuses on how they will provide for their colonisers after decolonisation, because the answer is simple: the colonisers come from a different place. Many people who are alive right now are older than Israel itself, and the overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis are settlers from a different part of the world. And your comment studiously ignores that Jewish people do not face persecution in other countries of the world currently. You are once again proving the author’s point by prioritising the Jewishness of the colonisers over the humanity of the victims.
So, “Jewish people do not face persecution in other countries of the world currently”… just an unrelenting, exponential rise in targeted hate crimes, including but not limited to mass murder. Very reassuring. While I, a non-Israeli, non-Jewish atheist, disagree strongly, I must say I appreciate your candor and clarity regarding the core antizionist agenda: “decolonization” understood as denial of Jews’ historical ties to the land warranting the elimination of the state of Israel and and removal of its Jewish inhabitants “by any means necessary,” based on the underlying assumption that the people cast as victims have a greater claim not only to the land but to basic humanity, which is somehow lessened or negated by the unforgivable sins of Jewishness and colonization, however speciously defined. That’s your and the author’s point and I’m more than happy to prove it as many times as needed.
“…Jews’ historical ties to the land…”
Would you care to provide a source for this statement, one which does involve the Bible?
One that does involve the forcible removal of Palestinians, which is what is being done right now.
Thanks.
Correction: “…does NOT involve…”
No need for the Bible, with ample material in accounts by Greek and Roman historians, not to mention abundant archeological proof of Jewish presence in the region. That one should even have to point that out just shows how pervasive the brainwashing and propaganda have become.
With your permission, bofty, I will be sharing your comment, especially the clause beginning “Land Back movements exist…”
Thanks….
Again; the constant victimization of Jewishness…. The ‘decolonization’ – let’s turn it around and ask; how are you proposing the depopulation of Gaza (to make way for ‘Greater Israel’ or fancy tourist beaches or whatever the plan is), should happen? Oh; I guess that’s a moot question – because it has already happened – by genocide. And yet, you come here, angling for sympathy? Gross.
Thank you. That ‘binary’ line was the first dog whistle.
Then there’s the minimisation of the Holocaust lurking beneath the musings about why not study genocides in Africa? (And I won’t get distracted here with comparisons in size and systemic nature with say, the entire ‘Belgian Congo’ project)
Because though the author is being congratulated above for their intellectual rigour, by now at this stage of history, almost 3 years out from an intended genocidal attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians – which they have promised to repeat in line with their charter – the author grounds this entire piece on the assumption that Israel is committing a genocide.
By what metric? There is no genocide in Gaza. Let’s be adults, let’s be intellectually rigorous and honest. By WHAT metric does a genocide exist? Where are the mass graves? The bodies stacked like cordwood? The images of the walking dead?
Hamas loves to circulate images to the Western media. It circulated them of itself weaponising SA on Oct 7, for example. It has been caught repeatedly for circulating images of starving children, all of which were debunked as either from actual famines like in Sudan or Yemen, or of children and adults with unfortunate genetic conditions.
It’s curious and bizarre how much Hamas and its supporters in the West wished for famine and genocide in Gaza. But we are at the point now where the data is in, the population and birth rate actually increased, that even messing with the parameters for declaring a genocide to the point where any war would also be classed as a genocide has still failed to capture the Palestinian experience as a genocide. Even the UN has walked back its claims (founded as always on an uncritical acceptance of anything the Hamas-overseen Gazan Ministry of Health tells it, remember the ‘babies dead of starvation in the next 48 hours’ claim, also debunked and obviously never came to pass).
The weird warping of what actually constitutes a genocide and obsession over upper arm circumference in some circles still failed to produce this rubber stamped genocide.
We are at the point now surely where we can admit as intellectually and morally honest adults that there is no genocide in Gaza. Even without the images of Gazans lining up for new iPhones, markets full of diverse foods, cafes being opened (including one called ‘Cafe Nova’). I mean, sure, Gazans have every right to enjoy the same luxuries and activities that the rest of the world’s does, it’s not about that. What it IS about though is that insistence on an Israeli engineered genocide being claimed when by any metric this is spurious, false and dangerous. And given that Hamas prosecutes its war with Israel and Jews everywhere using propaganda, has anyone ever seen a genocide carried out in tandem with the targeted population also buying luxury goods, accessing well stocked markets and opening cafes, restaurants and clubs?
Founding an essay on the dangerous and now thoroughly debunked assertion that there is a genocide by Israel of Gazans is not just unserious it is utterly dangerous to Jews everywhere as evidenced, for example, by Jews dying all around the world. Not six months ago in my country, 15 slaughtered on Bondi Beach, picked off like fish in a barrel. Old people, kids, Holocaust survivors. The rhetoric of famine and genocide perpetrated by ‘Zionists’ is regular old antisemitism gussied up for the 21st century as ‘anti-Zionism’. It’s Jews being murdered and no one is asking whether they’re card carrying Zionists before the trigger gets pulled, let’s be real here.
The author is a teacher and a parent. One who seems to be proud that their child ‘sniffed out a Zionist’. Where do they think this will end? All the ‘Jewish exceptionalism’ in the world doesn’t counter the numbers. There are less than 20 million Jews on the planet and one nation they are indigenous to: Israel. There are how many billions of Muslims? A significant percentage of whom believe the Jews need to be annihilated? And Gaza is a closed society run by Hamas who were voted in by the Palestinians and who polls show still enjoy 60% approval. Hamas isn’t interested in land, peace or a 2 state solution. They’ve been crystal clear about this. The only solution they will accept is a one state solution AKA a Final Solution 2.0 for Jews and Israel.
Israel will not allow this to happen, which seems to offend its enemies almost as much as its existence. The war Hamas and friends is waging against the state of Israel is relentless and deftly fuelled with propaganda: dead babies, evil ‘Zionists’, even dogs being trained to rape Palestinian prisoners. The latter was published in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago. It was so obviously another manufactured Hamas wet dream, just like the debunked starving babies but WHEN are the actual adults and serious people going to enter the room and call it out? Because actual human beings on the other side of the planet are being slaughtered for these blood libels not 80 years since an actual genocide that still gets studied in classrooms because of the way it happened and where it happened and HOW it happened; i.e. the use of propaganda and the circulation of outrageous blood libels both in the popular press and via pseudoscience and pseudo ‘intellectual’ essays such as this. Did we learn anything?
I too failed to see the rigor. Matter of fact, by the standards I learned way back in junior high and high school, this doesn’t even qualify as an essay, since it lacks a clear hypothesis or argument to in turn arrive at a conclusion. Instead, the writer plays fast and loose with the facts, offering his core assertions as self-evident, and space is filled in with autobiographical musings and anecdotes in service of foregone conclusions confirming unproven assumptions. If there were reasoning to be found in this self-serving narrative stream of consciousness it would be circular, but I can’t even confirm that there is any.
I read Night at about the same age and it prompted me to ask my parents, ‘what’s wrong with people that they can treat each other so bad?’ It set in motion my first real adult conflict – something is wrong in us and people are basically bad. What happened that the author’s son asked a different question, ‘is Weisel a Zionist?’ It means just one thing, the child lives in circles negatively charged with that word and mitigating the horror of the holocaust to reshape victims as aggressors. We are becoming less human.
First of all, this is a beautifully written essay, but I would love to know why the play shouldn’t have anything to do with Israel, but does.
It is well known that Israeli propaganda is rampant in American movies and media, but why do ritual inclusions and benign interjections of ethnic flavor help to reify Zionism, whether or not that was their purpose?
Why is diverse representation wonderful in theory, but, in practice, often conveys the imperatives of power in multicultural disguise and reinforces the same hierarchies it purports to undermine?
Wouldn’t conceding that Jewish representation in media supports Zionism, whether or not it has anything to do with the occupation of Palestine, mean that we can no longer claim anti-Zionism is an ideology pushing back against the colonisation of Palestine, unconnected to any religious prejudice? Wouldn’t this give credence to those who try to smear it as such?
The illusion of the possibility of some kind of accommodation with settlers has indeed been shattered by relentless genocide, but that does not mean that refusing to learn about Zionism is at all productive. You cannot fight what you do not know.
Anyway, great work and free Palestine!
Heaven forbid “we” should let anything undermine our claims or make any accommodation for views (or facts) that run counter to our entrenched bias when it’s so much more convenient to reframe the historical language of Jew hatred and disingenuously insist it’s “unconnected to any religious [or other form of] prejudice.” Oddly, but hardly surprising, that’s precisely what 19th Century antisemites achieved by establishing a race-based, pseudo-scientific framework in which to cast Jews as uniquely evil and advocate for their removal from society and ultimately their destruction.
This ritual of having to prove you are not prejudiced against jewish people is a sick joke of a tactic used to stifle criticism of israel, whilst they unapologetically massacre palestinians en masse.
Is it prejudice to be weary of celebrations of a culture/people that is invoked elsewhere to subjugate another people abroad? Maybe reframe it in WW2, how would you feel about representations of german culture in hollywood right in the middle of the holocaust? Especially when jewish people are represented by the stereotypes that are used to justify their erasure. How can that possibly be neutral? Would the uneasiness felt be motivated by a prejudice against german people or a rational response to the suffering caused by german supremacy?
We shouldn’t capitulate to the zionist framing of things so unnecessarily, trying to combat them on their own terms is a losing battle.
Badempanada sent me here. Other than that all I can really say to condense the thoughts and feelings this read gave me is into words is that this article was absolutely outstanding.
To me, it seems like BadEmpanada has recently just begun to adopt the position that Jewish people and NOT Zionism is the real problem, and that even the most fervently anti-Israel Jewish person must be viewed with suspicion in any pro-Palestine or leftist space. He even seems to think that Jewish people in the west are more privileged than even non-Jewish white people just by virtue of being Jewish…which is not only absurd, but also practically a downright neo-Nazi belief. Or have I misunderstood him?
Not sure about “recently just” but otherwise that’s very much the case, for BE and apparently our writer, whose condemnation paints every manifestation of Jewish culture in American media and entertainment -as far back as the 1950s and ’60s- as nothing more than propaganda deployed to garner sympathy that would not have been forthcoming otherwise, and that despite a broad agreement (right or wrong) at the time that Israel’s creation was warranted and desirable and that its continued existence and flourishing were in the USA’s best interests. Needless to say the demographics were different but that’s how it was.
I strongly disagree with the implied or outright stated idea here that expressions of jewish culture in the west are essentially zionist propaganda; if anything, the ability for free expressions of jewish culture in america kind of goes contrary to the idea of zionism, against the idea that all jewishness belongs only in israel and against the necessity of israel for jewishness to exist; Jewishness expressed freely in america is proof of jewishness that can exist outside of and without israel or zionism.
The… un-enthusiasm for Jewish Culture is an understandable impulse given all the personal circumstances, but I don’t think this is the right way to think of it
Your comment -in particular the allegation of a supposed Zionist “idea that all jewishness belongs only in Israel”- reminds me of an article I read recently suggesting that the Zionist project had failed because not all the world’s Jews had moved to Israel. Of course neither happens to be true but pesky little details like that never matter to the ideological true believer when it comes to dictating “right” and “wrong” ways of thinking.
But obviously this is the case. Why else would Jewish culture be so shoved into everyone’s faces in a way it never was before Israel needed better PR in the 50s and 60s?
If you think that any and all depictions of Jewish culture and Judaism in media or pop culture are somehow inherently “Zionist propaganda”, then that’s YOUR problem. And the reason why it’s your problem, is that this sentiment is just antisemitism — plain and simple.
It isn’t Jewish people’s responsibility to coddle the feelings of antisemites like you. Rather, it is YOU who should probably work on your antisemitism.
It’s really just opposition to Israel and it’s government, dontcha know? NOt that anyone with three firing neurons actually believes that, but it’s the cover story.
It wasn’t “shoved” anywhere, it manifested through the presence and artistic endeavors of an American Jewish population -which included many major stars and high achievers in music, film, theater, literature, etc., etc.- that saw substantial growth across several decades, driven markedly by the events of the ’30s and 40’s in Europe and continuing into the post-war years.
YENTE. Golde darling, I had to see you before I left because I have such news for you. Golde darling, you remember I told you yesterday I didn’t know where to go, what to do with these old bones? Now I know! You want to hear? I’ll tell you. Golde darling, all my life I’ve dreamed of going to the one place and now I’ll walk, I’ll crawl, I’ll get there. Guess where. You’ll never guess. Every year at Passover, what do we say? “Next year in Jerusalem, next year in the Holy Land.”
GOLDE. You’re going to the Holy Land!
YENTE. You guessed! And you know why? In my sleep, my husband, my Aaron, came to me and said, “Yente, go to the Holy Land.” Usually, of course, I wouldn’t listen to him, because, good as he was, too much brains he wasn’t blessed with. But in my sleep it’s a sign. Right? So, somehow or other, I’ll get to the Holy Land. And you want to know what I’ll do there? I’m a matchmaker, no? I’ll arrange marriages, yes? Children come from marriages, no? So I’m going to the Holy Land to help our people increase and multiply. It’s my mission. So goodbye, Golde.
Your point?
if those are lines from fiddler on the roof, the author’s father has been vindicated lol, it has zionist propaganda.
Vindication wasn’t sought, it’s assumed. The whole piece is nothing more than the genealogy of the author’s legacy of hatred. You either agree or not, there’s no room for nuance or interpretation.
“Only a ghoul would suggest that the Nazi Holocaust should be ignored.” I have got a zionist vibe from that. Why should the Yanks learn about the Holocaust? They didn’t commit it. Better they learn about the crimes of their own country.
Canadian here: you are 100% correct. My government(s) have a real talent for pretty words and a total lack of self-awareness. Current PM Carney is a past master at promising “consultation” with First Nations, but only after the intrusion into Indigenous lands (the little left them) is complete.
Why indeed should anyone learn about anything beyond the end of one’s nose, for that matter? Especially when it might interfere with or contradict their neatly arranged moral universe.
You have replied to a nonexistent post, and ignored what ashtuosh actually said.
To wit: “…better they should learn about the crimes of their own country.”
Ignoring and/or dismissing the reality of the British/American genocide of Indigenous North Americans – what elders on both sides of the border call Turtle Island – should and will “contradict (your) neatly arranged moral universe.”
The memory hole is an essential component of the genocide: one must erase not only the physical presence of the undesired population, but also anything which might evoke the presence of that population. There’s a reason that the first thing the IDF erased was the Freedom Theater in Ramallah. Refaat Aleer’s poetry had to be smuggled out of Gaza. Susan Abulhawa’s excellent prose is deemed ‘”inappropriate.” These are not “military” operations – there is no opposing force in theater or novels or poetry. There is the culture, and that is a problem for a genocidal regime that has no place for the liberal arts. Copying the British and Americans, Israel seeks to disappear the very idea of “another.”
No place for the liberal arts? Israel? Jews? Surely you are being unserious. Jewish exceptionalism in the liberal arts field is such a threat to antisemites in my country that denying safe cultural spaces’ to ‘Zionists’ is being entertained by those closely involved in the major writer’s festivals. To the point where because an author claiming to be Palestinian or representative of Palestinians has kicked up such a stink over potentially sharing the space at a festival with Jewish artists that the entire festival was scrapped. How does this help anyone? Why are we at the point where it is acceptable to identify a group of people based on race, blood, cultural identity, religion and utterly ‘other’ them to the point they ARE actually being slaughtered? By which I mean Jews are being slaughtered, no one pulling the trigger is asking whether or not they are ‘Zionists’. Choose ANY other race or ethnic group on the planet and declare they shall have no ‘safe spaces’. How is this okay?? Isn’t this just the worst rank racism?
Because there are more Jews in America than in literally every other country except for one? Because America fought the Nazis, and even liberated a few concentration camps themselves? Because the extermination of more than a third of the world’s Jewish population is something which everyone should agree needs to be remembered, unless one is an antisemite, as you apparently are?
Such a moving essay, as always, Steven. I’m appalled that your son has to read about the Nazi holocaust in Egypt of all places. This is what happens with normalization with the enemy, though.
Also, as a Jew (an ever increasingly reluctant one given the state that claims us), Israel has ruined Jewish culture more broadly, even for Jews. Even if it isn’t inherently Zionist, like “Fiddler on the Roof” or any number of plays, novels, songs, etc., it’s become tainted and impossible to take any pleasure in.
How exactly is his son being taught about the Holocaust in Egypt in any way a result of “normalization with the enemy”? Seems to me like that’s just a vital part of any good formal education!
Also, I’m sorry that you — for whatever reason — can no longer “take pleasure” in Jewish culture, but there are plenty of anti-Zionist Jews who still very much can. No Jewish person will ever be obligated to diminish their Jewishness only because it makes someone uncomfortable. That is not their problem, it is not their fault, it is unacceptable, and yes: it is antisemitic.
i do believe hegemonic thinking has shifted and there is a lot more interest and belief in Palestinian narrative than there was before. not living in usa, maybe i dont understand completely. but i do believe that the majority of people in the world now know and support Palestinian struggles. its getting it to people in power that is the hard part. or getting people in power who are more in tune with humanity.
Ah yes, getting people in power… and yet the pro-Palestine block in the good ol’ US of A -including sitting members of Congress elected as Democrats- saw fit to whinge about the Harris campaign’s insufficient willingness to give in to their demands, leading some voters to stay home and others even to vote for Trump, thereby witlessly helping deliver Netanyahu’s clear favorite to the White House, with the consequences we’re currently enduring. Effing brilliant.
I take issue with this framing:
For starters, it probably seemed curious that his class was studying the Nazi Holocaust when there is an ongoing genocide in a neighboring country. Not to mention that his school is located in a city hosting many thousands of refugees from the genocide in question. It possibly seemed curious as well that nobody was discussing the various genocides that have occurred on the African continent. Why this genocide? Why this genocide whose descendants are busy committing a genocide of their own? Why this genocide whose descendants are busy committing a genocide of their own using the prior genocide as a justification?
Most schools are not very good, so they make World War II about the Shoah, but that is such a narrow perspective no serious thinker would even engage. WWI is probably most salient, and if the curriculum cannot connect those events to the cataclysms of nationalism, that’s not because of Zionist semiotics per se. If you don’t learn about WWI, WWII and the “Interwar” period, I don’t see how there is any way to properly place and understand the contemporary conflict. And what else is flattened in the name of History?
Personally, I am Palestine-Israel agnostic. I understand many are still on the hearts & minds campaign, but I could be convinced by a plan. I’m open to forcibly removing Israelis to other locales, I just need to know how (the horizon of conscientious, elective removal is oxymoronic). Who is brokering this Israeli population transfer? What assets are transferred? Who is staffing the new Israeli refugee initiatives? How will they be integrated into their new cultures and economies?
What lessons could we learn from the 1923 Population exchange between Greece and Turkey?
Also, anyone with eyes can see that October 7 was an act of war! Genocide aside…
I read Night at about the same age and it prompted me to ask my parents, ‘what’s wrong with people that they can treat each other so bad?’ It set in motion my first real adult conflict – something is wrong in us and people are basically bad. What happened that the author’s son asked a different question, ‘is Weisel a Zionist?’ It means just one thing, the child lives in circles negatively charged with that word and mitigating the horror of the holocaust to reshape victims as aggressors. We are becoming less human.
There is indeed a trend in some parts to use the state of Israel’s crimes as a justification for an increased toleration of antisemitism. The most coherent defenders of this position seem to think that antisemitism is something that can be leveraged to radicalize the American population against Israel, or to create a left-right alliance against Zionism. In other words, as a rather infamous “leftist” guy on YouTube says, “we should just let them ZOG”.
However, the most objectionable part of this essay is its implication that this trend is being led by Palestinians; as a matter of fact it is not. You can certainly come up with a few names like Susan Abulhawa or Rahmeh Aladwan. The former seems to me to be a (forgive me) rather gullible and impressionable person who has spent too much time in the darker corners of the Internet, and the latter is an all-around right-winger. At any rate, they are both definitely followers not leaders when it comes to this trend. I’ve seen much more creative energy coming from pseudonymous Twitter accounts based in America or Europe, who were posting Stalin-Did-Nothing-wrong memes five years ago and are posting Khamenei memes today.
It’s been leveraged and they’ve been radicalized. Also, just to expound, chicken-and-egg debates aside, the phenomenon you describe extends far beyond “the American population. And last but not least, I’m not sure where you’re going with the assertion that “the most objectionable part of this essay is its implication that this trend is being led by Palestinians.” As part of a broader movement expressly and unapologetically dedicated to Israel’s destruction, Hamas may not “lead” per se, but their certainly at the vanguard and playing an outsize role. What that does or does not say about “Palestinians” is certainly debatable but in terms of shifts in political views and public opinion it’s sort of irrelevant. For example, our writer here has made abundantly clear that he a) identifies as Palestinian and b) is firmly anti-Israel, with no nuance needed or attempted.
Okay, Smithies, you’ve worn out your welcome. Take your relentless genocide apologia elsewhere–ss
“…narcissism and prejudice…” are two words I would never use to describe Steven Salaita. I’d suggest a closer reading of his work.
The “textbook definition of prejudice,” the textbook in this case being Merriam-Webster:
A) An irrational attitude of hostility directed against an individual, a group, a race, or their supposed characteristics.
B) An adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge.
You’re not making much sense.
(And here’s a prejudice of mine: flashy vocabulary is often used to mask vacuous content.)
Thought provoking essay. I am a Jewish anti-Zionist Marxist feminist, and therefore an atheist. I do not support Israel. I think Jews can live as equals with Palestinians in Palestine. It has been proven that a Jewish “homeland”/aka Jewish nationalism, is based on capitalism, imperialism, racism, white Jewish supremacy, and genocide. I agree there is some reason to view Fiddler on the Roof as support for Israel because of the references to the Holy Land. But the play is set before Israel was created in 1948. The references are to Jerusalem. There was no Israel. And it is the pogroms of the Russian czar that drive the Jews out. Still audiences in 1964 (the play) and 1971 (the film) probably thought “Israel.” The author, Sholem Aleichem, of the stories on which the play was based lived from 1859-1916, so he wasn’t thinking of Israel, but as times move on the culture adapts to the current political conditions. Still, I do not agree that all Jewish culture is anti-Palestinian and pro-Zionist. I understand how the immense oppression and demonization of Arabs and Palestinians can cause reflexive repulsion when dealing with the omni-presence of Jewish references and culture. I can understand that Black people can think that way about white culture, although so much of US white culture is based on Black culture. However, I view myself as Jewish. I appreciate some Jewish culture and tradition — humor, support for the underdog (now almost erased by Zionist Israel), philosophy, respect for learning and intellect. I am proud that Marx and Trotsky were Jews, though neither was religious. Many Jews were part of the Russian Revolution, and were early radicals and unionists in New York city. I respect and appreciate your writings, based on your extreme persecution as a Palestinian advocate, intellectual and teacher. But I don’t toss away Jewish heritage, culture and history. I will not let Israel/US destroy Jewishness and Judaism. Also, a last thought, the Left is not just liberals/Democrats. A lot of Marxist groups support Palestine and reject Zionism and Israel.