Worrying and Limmud Oz

So, Limmud Oz has decided not to include a panel of speakers around Avigail Abarbanel’s collection of narratives Beyond Tribal Loyalties: Personal Stories of Jewish Peace Activists. Speakers included Sivan Barak, Peter Slezak, Viv Porzolt, Nicole Ehrlich, and the editor Avigail Abarbanel.

The Australian Jewish Democratic Society has responded in kind:

We view the decision by the Committee of Limmud Oz 2012 to prevent a panel “Beyond Tribal Loyalties – personal stories of Jewish peace activists” at this year’s Melbourne conference as a blatant act of political censorship.

Even though there are other panels featuring discussion on the Israel/Palestine conflict, this censorship follows a similar attempt at Limmud Oz in Sydney last year concerning a panel with a number of the same speakers.

The censorship goes against all the principles of the conference which are to engage in an exchange of ideas, which according to its website, have the following principles:

-Respects diverse Jewish expression
-Connects and engages -Communal and democratic
-Explores Australian Jewish identities
-Creating space for ideas and reflection
-Igniting activism
-Forum for Jewish dialogue

The act undertaken by the Committee–the names of which are not public–betrays these principles entirely and sends out a message that dissent is not acceptable, particularly when many of the views being expressed are precisely those being voiced in Israel itself. Serious questions have to be asked about the governance of Limmud Oz and its decision-making processes.

Furthermore, to censor the authors of a book, particularly in a university setting is a serious matter, and it is also a fiction to argue that Limmud Oz is a private community event or that it is not in direct association with Monash university. Limmud Oz markets itself as a major community event. In addition, the association between Limmud Oz and the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilization means that the Centre’s own academic independence is now severely compromised. Monash University has traditionally supported the principle of free speech and we cannot see how a conference held at Monash can pretend that it is supporting free speech when it is censoring dissenting ideas.

This culture of censorship within the Australian Jewish community is dangerous and only conveys the message that dissent will not be tolerated. This is a major freedom of speech issue for the Jewish community and the wider community concerned with a resolution of the Israel/Palestine conflict.”

The AJDS has started a statement/petition here, which you can, of course, sign.

I know this isn’t funny (perhaps I am confusing the bitterness of it) but there’s something so inane and perfect about a panel being banned by a small community for wanting to speak specifically about the struggles of speaking in a small community.

The desired panel is described thus:

Although Beyond Tribal Loyalties focuses on Jewish activism in the context of Israel- Palestine, I wanted it to be a statement about speaking out in general. I think that the challenges that Jewish activists face are no different from the challenges faced by anyone who considers speaking out. When people wish to speak out about an issue that isn’t yet recognised as a problem by the mainstream in their societies or communities, they face both internal and external struggles.

Initially when people spoke out about the rights of African Americans or Australian Aborigines, they were seen as radicals or extremists. The same happened to those who fought against slavery, for the right of women to vote and many other issues. Usually the marginalised or victim group is seen by the mainstream in an entirely negative light and those who support it as a bit crazy or even dangerous. But over time things change. Nowadays in the West we wouldn’t imagine a world where African Americans or Australian Aborigines are considered by law as less human than white people, where women are not allowed to vote or where slavery is legal or acceptable. But the initial challenge of speaking out for what one believes can be very hard. The resistance can come not only from the outside but also from the inside in the form of strong internal psychological opposition, inner conflict, fears and confusion about group loyalty and identity among other things.

(It isn’t, unfortunately, hard to “imagine a world where [Aboriginal people are] considered by law as less human than white people”, but this would be a digression).

In any case, Ghassan Hage comes to mind, as often he does in times like these.

People might use the language of ‘caring’ and ‘worrying’ in an undifferentiated way, but I think that worrying, as a kind of affective investment in the nation, is radically different from what I believe caring implies. Worrying is…a narcissistic affect. You worry about the nation when you feel threatened – ultimately, you are only worrying about yourself. Caring about the nation…is a more intersubjective affect. While one always cares primarily about oneself, caring also implies keeping others within one’s perspective of care. Most importantly, caring does not have the paranoid, defensive connotations that worrying has.

Societies are mechanisms for the distribution of hope, and that the kind of affective attachment (worrying or caring) that a society creates among its citizens is intimately connected to its capacity to distribute hope. The caring society is essentially an embracing society that generates hope among its citizens and induces them to care for it. The defensive society, such as the one we have in Australia today, suffers from a scarcity of hope and creates citizens who see threats everywhere. It generates worrying citizens and a paranoid nationalism. This brings us to the final problematic around which the issue of caring has been thought about and articulated: the institutionalisation of a culture of worrying at the expense of a culture of caring…

Hage, G. (2003) Against Paranoid Nationalism: searching for hope in a shrinking society, Annandale, p.3

Maurice Sendak Z”L

Maurice Sendak and Art Spiegelman take a walk and have a chat.

I have been thinking of the line in Where the Wild Things Are just recently that goes something like “Please don’t go, I’ll eat you up, I love you so” and just how beautiful and perfect and balanced the rhythm and cadence of it is – the kind of silliness and fun and irony of a big scary monster as confused and loving. I have the vaguest of childhood memories – embodied memories, really -  of mum munching on me as she read that line. But also I think part of this embodied memory – and it is only a part – of my childhood and Sendak’s books is the precariousness of the situations his characters find themselves in, an instability, as though his books were always teetering on the edge of something else: I suspect this is what he is referring to in his conversation with Spiegelman.

There is a good interview Sendak does on the Colbert Report but I can’t seem to get access in ‘Strayla. Try this for USA. And see previous post of when me and anzya went and saw the flick. hat tip vlada.

(untitled)

a (jewish) friend of mine has been travelling around north africa for the last year and a half or so, and the other day went across to israel. there, he was greeted with a 7 hour detention and interrogation, where he wasn’t actually told what he was being held, or questioned, for. he was given food and water, but denied the australian consular assistance that he asked for. so, y’know, there’s the state(s) in action.

seems important to share these stories, so we know what we’re up against in the mere act of travel, and the kinds of everyday ways in which the state intimidates and abandons.

(re)viewing solidarity activism

A book review I wrote of David Landy’s Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights: Diaspora Jewish Opposition to Israel (London: Zed Books, 2011) has come out in the latest edition of Arena magazine. I’m posting it here because they don’t put magazine stuff online, so here it is if you’re interested. But I highly encourage you to subscribe to arena – it’s important to read and support interesting, lefty, intelligent, political, independent, melbourne-produced, writing. So, go subscribe, and then come back here and read my review. and then go read Landy’s book…

For me, it was, as a young undergraduate, reading Ella Shohat’s breathtaking 1988 article in Social Text, ‘Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims’, that opened up a world of knowledge, history, and thought that would counter my earlier Zionist education and beliefs. For some of the respondents in David Landy’s book, Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights, it was a conversation or a trip to Israel or the reading of a newspaper article. For Alma, one of his informants, Landy explains, it was a case of resolving the ‘cognitive dissonance’ with which she lived for years, trying to reconcile her Zionism with her left-wing values. ‘Alma,’ Landy writes, ‘dated her “coming-out” to an intense all-night conversation in Israel with an anti-Zionist British Jew, by the end of which she was transformed—Zionist no longer’.

This book is one in a series of recent works—including PhD theses, articles, and books—from around the world which explore the ways that Jews are undertaking activism against the actions of the Israeli state, or against the idea of the Israeli state. It is also one of several texts which provide their authors with a way of working through their own ambivalent feelings towards Israel and Zionism (indeed, considering the importance which David Landy places on the personal histories of the movement participants he studied, it is curious and somewhat disappointing that we learn next to nothing about Landy’s own history). Landy’s work then plays an important role in helping us to understand this particular political moment, where Jews are engaging with questions of what it means to be Jewish in light of Israel’s actions. The book is, in a sense, a meta-exploration of Jewish activism; one which is approached through a sociological lens.

David Landy explores the ways that Jews in a selection of countries—primarily in Britain, but also in the United States, Australia, Canada, and briefly in a few countries in Western Europe—express, explore and develop their Jewish identities through work that opposes the ways that Israel treats Palestinians, that is in solidarity with Palestinians, and that opposes Zionist framings of Jewish identity.

If you skip through the first few chapters—which provide the important literature review material that sets up the later discussion, but which don’t offer as much to a discussion of Jewish diasporism and Jewish identities as writers such as Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Ella Shohat, Jonathan Boyarin, or more locally Jon Stratton—and move towards Landy’s original research and findings on Jewish activism regarding Israel/Palestine, and Palestinian solidarity work, then you find yourself immersed in some important research. In this second half of the book Landy explores the ways that Jews in these activist groups—some of which include Jews for Justice for Palestine (JfJfP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Independent Jewish Voices (IJV)—explain their Jewish identities and the processes of ‘coming out’ as non- or anti-Zionist; their relationships with Palestinians and ideas of solidarity; their balancing of ideas and ideologies of particularity and universality; and focuses particularly, as a sort-of case study, on their attitudes towards the global Boycott, Divestment, Sanction (BDS) movement. This allows a complex understanding of the motivations and practices which make up the activism of Jews in the diaspora who campaign in some way in opposition to Israel. Yet in setting up the book like this, Landy reinforces the idea of a distinction between Israel and the diaspora, a distinction which recently many have been working to remove, as it buttresses the idea that Israel exists as a place of exception for Jews.

One of the most significant contributions that this book makes is to put forward a claim for a cosmopolitan Jewish identity, which is based firmly in particularist ideas of Jewishness and universalist ideas of humanness. This comes to the fore in Landy’s discussion of ‘rooted cosmopolitans’, a term he borrows from Sidney Tarrow, which means ‘transnational activists … “who grow up in and remain closely linked to domestic networks and opportunities”’. Landy expands on this definition to introduce us to an idea of an activist, or ‘movement participant’ who has a ‘self-image … balanced between community and civitas’. That is, ‘while cosmopolitans move outside their origins, they continue to be linked to them’. This, they assert, distinguishes them from the particularism of Zionists and Zionism, and creates a situation wherein ‘their sociality may be emplaced within the national or Jewish field, but is conceived in universal terms’.

For those of us who work, as Jews, in activism which speaks out against Zionism and the actions of the Israeli state, it is no surprise to read that there are Jews elsewhere in the world who do so too: whose activism is informed by their Jewishness, and whose activism develops their Jewishness in a circular movement. It is no surprise too, to read of those Jews in these movements who are marginalised in their communities because of their politics, or who feel like they don’t belong to any formal Jewish community because of their alienation, opposition and disenchantment. Another of the things, then, that is so significant about Landy’s work is that he documents these ideas and practices, and thereby ensures that these movements, and these ideas, are on the historical, political and sociological records.

But, more than that what Landy offers is, particularly in the final chapter—‘Rooted cosmopolitans: participants and Palestinians’—a critique of the Orientialising which at times characterises some of these movements. Landy explores this idea of rooted cosmopolitans, and the ways that it defines the identities and work of the people and groups he studied. Because the activists have a ‘self-conception as rooted cosmopolitans’ there is ‘a lack of contact and denial of political subjectivity to Palestinians’ which hampers the movement. That is, this rooted cosmopolitanism works not just as a way of bridging divides and creating universalist sentiments, but more significantly as a way of grounding people within their own communities and identities. Thus a situation is created where ‘as Westerners we identify with the Israeli—which is no problem—but we sympathise with the Palestinian. And there lies the problem’. What does he mean by this? Landy shows that some of the solidarity work which these Jewish groups undertake silences the Palestinians with whom they claim to work, or constructs Palestinians as voiceless, feminised, uneducated or politically naive. In this work, and particularly in the pamphlets and posters which some of the organisations have published, the point of view of the (Western) Jew comes to the fore, while the Palestinian remains in the background. Palestinians are thereby, at times, presented as the focus of sympathy, but not of political agency. By pointing this out Landy pushes a more complex understanding of our activism, as Jews and as anti-nationalists, and encourages a decolonising of that activism.

This book then provides us with a sociological approach to understanding activism, and in doing so opens up important questions for any activist. Questions of strategy, of the identity of the activists and of the beneficiaries of the activism, of the language and images used to describe and further the goals of the group, are important for all of us to consider. Moreover, the ways in which our own personal biographies influence our political ideologies and tactics is an important question to be opened up.

What then is the purpose behind this Jewish activism, which challenges the practices, ideologies and effects of Zionism? Landy demonstrates through the book that there is no one simple answer to this question. Instead what we are left with is a picture of complexity: of beliefs, tactics and motivations, and of the detailed and multifarious possibilities of Jewish identities. At the centre of all this though, Landy reminds us, we need to remember that there are Palestinians. After all, as Landy quotes Philip Weiss, the influential Jewish anti-Zionist blogger, ‘For me to agonize about my Jewishness when I know about the degree of persecution [of Palestinians] is actually indulgent and a dodge’. And as Landy concludes, ‘Palestine is not simply an empty signifier to be filled up with whatever meaning the social movement activist chooses. In the end, Palestine and the lived experience of Palestinians matter’. Indeed, all activists would do well to remember this, whether we are working in Palestinian solidarity movements or in any other form of political activism: while the working through of our own identities is important—and indeed for some Jews undertaking this work is about an activist struggle over what Jewishness entails—keeping our focus and connections on the people at the centre of our work is what is truly at stake.

the jews and the poetry

just got home from the friday night poetry slam at the nuyorican poets cafe, and my head is spinning from the wonderful inspiring words. as i walked away – and walked home through the beautiful new york night – i was reminded again of how much i wish i could write poetry. but i can’t, so instead i’ll introduce you to two of jewish elements of the evening (there was a third – a male poet from seattle, but whose name i can’t remember, and i can’t find it online. if i figure it out i’ll update this).

photo property of jonathan weiskopf

one was in the photos which hung on the walls, of poets from the nuyorican. i can’t find the images online (i think they’ve only just been put out so can’t be seen yet online), but the photographer, jonathan weiskopf, has other images online, including a series called ‘chosen’, which is well worth a look.

and the second was a poet, caroline rothstein, who performed an amazing poem which talked of anti-arab and anti-muslim racism, and antisemitism, and the illogics of hatred in america. alas, i can’t find a version of it online (and, again, i didn’t catch the name of poem) but here’ another poem that she did a few years ago at the nuyorican, entitled ‘for bernie madoff’:

so that’s how i spent part of my shabbes (the earlier bit was spent at the whitney, where i heard another yid, jacob appelbaum, talk about surveillance cultures in america). and so a good and peaceful shabbes to you all, wherever in the world you may be.

of synagogues, incarceration, privilege, and discourse…

First off, apologies for my internet silence over the last month. I’m currently travelling, and while I’ve had the best intentions of blogging while away, (un)surprisingly, that just hasn’t happened. And I finally made it to New York a week ago, and have collapsed in a pile of tissues and throat lozenges. Apparently going through three continents in three days will hurt your immune system. Who’d have thought?

Anyways.

If I went back, I’d tell you about the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, which I was massively excited to see. For those unaware, the Ben Ezra Synagogue is where the Cairo Geniza was located – the storehouse of documents that Solomon Schechter took to Oxford, and which has been subsequently used by all manner of historians (most famously, I suppose by S.D. Goitein) to write histories of the Egyptian Jews. Unfortunately – as is the way with the things one most wants to see – when we finally made it to the Synagogue, which is located in beautiful, ancient, Coptic Cairo, it was five minutes to closing time on my last afternoon in Egypt. But we went in, and talked our way into staying a few extra minutes and wandering around. We found out where the Geniza documents were taken from, which was this tiny hole in the wall at the top of the second floor. Unfortunately no photos could be taken, and there was no time for any more sweet-talking, so we were left with just a moment in an incredibly stunning synagogue: a synagogue which has existed as such since the thirteenth century, and which was so intricately and beautifully designed as to be almost overwhelming. It was a moment. And then the doors were shut and we had to leave.

And from that moment of Mediterranean Jewish history – of past, present and future bound up in one space – two weeks later I found myself in New York, and on our first night here we (my travelling buddy and I) saw one of (post)modernity’s great Jewish thinkers – Judith Butler – with Angela Davis and Lena Meari, and with some short clips from documentaries by Mai Masri – talking on the topic of “Carceral Politics in Palestine and Beyond: Gender, Vulnerability, Prison”. A point that each of them made in such brilliant fashion was that the Occupation of Palestine and Palestinians is fundamentally constructed by and through carceral politics. What is meant by ‘carceral politics’?  Basically, it’s the politics of incarceration. So, in the fact that the threat of incarceration by the Israeli State is a constant threat, and one which is constantly carried out against large segments of the Palestinian population: if you want to subdue a population, you keep them under constant threat of harassment, imprisonment, maltreatment, separation from family and friends. But it’s not just that the possibility of incarceration is ever-present (although that is fundamental to the project) but also that the length of time that one will spend incarcerated is potentially unknown, potentially unending. This is the regime of Administrative Detention. So everyone has a family member, or a close friend, who has been incarcerated under this regime. It’s literally ever-present, in a temporal and a spatial sense.

Butler made the argument that this system exists not to produce docile bodies who will willingly serve the state – as Foucault has taught us it does – but rather the system works to produce empty bodies who can be incarcerated. The carceral system is the endpoint in a system of colonisation: the colonisation is made (in large part) of the incarceration system. The Occupation rests on it. (to read an important, and incredible moving, account of what it’s like to be the wife of someone imprisoned on administrative detention you should look here, where Sara writes, in part: “I asked friends of mine in Beit Ommar why no one wrote an article for the newspaper about the experience of Palestinian wives of prisoners, and if they’d like me to help them write one in English. Everyone of them laughed. “Ya Bekah”, they said, “who would read it? It’s not news, it’s life.” The wife of a Popular Committee member in Beit Ommar asked me if I’d like to write something about how to cook chicken “the Palestinian way”; it would be more news-worthy.”)

It was quite a panel, filled with amazing insights and extraordinary thinking.

And since then, of course, it’s been Pesach – and Pesach in New York means so many many different types of matzah (egg matzah without the yolk, anyone??), and seders with various different people (including a first night Haggadah-less seder which was filled just with questions and discussion; second night with haggadahs, more questions, and good friends from home; third night at a 40 person Queer Seder in Brooklyn) – as well as last night going to an amazing/crazy klezmer gig in the basement of a shul in the East Village. I’m hoping to write a proper post about the seders – there was so much (earnest) goodness there – so I’ll leave it at that, with a not really ending to this long(ish) post. That’s what you get when I’m writing when sick, I s’pose…

call for papers – book on the third generation…

I’m part of a group of people who are co-editing a book on the experiences of the third generation – the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. We’re looking for both academic texts and personal reflections, and I thought some of the readers of this blog might be interested in contributing and/or might know some others who would be interested. Here’s the call for papers – feel free to send it around to others as well!

 

Call for Papers: Forthcoming Book

In the Shadows of the Shadows of the Holocaust: Narratives of the Third Generation

The body of literature which focuses on the children of Jewish Holocaust survivors – the second generation – is extensive. From scholarly work that deals with questions of trauma and its transmission across generations, to literary and creative works that reflect the experiences of growing up carrying the burden of their parents’ trauma, much has been written on how children of survivors relate to their parents’ experiences.

Much less consideration, however, has been given to the next generation, and the impact that memories of the Holocaust have had on the survivors’ grandchildren.

This book will explore the experiences of the third generation – the grandchildren of Jewish Holocaust survivors – who will play an important role in carrying the mantle of Holocaust memory to future generations.

Questions we are interested in addressing include, but are not limited to:
-    In what ways are these ‘shadows’ cast?

-    Can these memories be characterised, or understood, as examples of postmemory or multidirectional memory?

-    How are the narratives of the third generation gendered?

-    What is the role of place in these narratives?

-    What is the relationship between the testimonies of survivors and the stories which the third generation remember?

-    What do these narratives have to say about Jewish identities?

-    How are these histories used to create stories of resistance and solidarity?

-    How do the stories which we were told by our grandparents and parents influence the ways in which we interact with others in the world?

-    What silences, absences, and gaps are there in our understandings of our personal, familial, and community histories?

-    In what ways have memories of the Holocaust influenced the ways that we conceptualise our sexual identities and practices?

-    In what ways have public representations of the Holocaust interacted with family memories to shape understandings of the past?

We welcome both scholarly contributions (6000-8000 words) and personal narratives (2000- 3000 words) – autobiographical, literary or creative – from grandchildren of Holocaust survivors that reflect the vast range of experiences of the third generation. We invite submissions from around the world, and we encourage a broad understanding of what it means to be a grandchild of Jewish Holocaust survivors.
Please send expressions of interest, including an abstract (500 words) and a short autobiographical note (200 words) as a Word Document attachment to thirdgenerationbook@gmail.com by 30th April 2012.

Dr Esther Jilovsky, Dr Jordy Silverstein, Dr David Slucki

Editors

 

“a long sojourn in a different kind of desert, a sojourn to be shared with others”

In some incredibly sad news, Adrienne Rich died last night. Rich was a poet, an author, an activist, an inspiration. There are so many eulogies flying around the internet at the moment, one of which tells us that:

Poet Adrienne Rich, whose socially conscious verse influenced a generation of feminist, gay rights and anti-war activists, has died. She was 82.

Rich died Tuesday at her Santa Cruz home from complications from rheumatoid arthritis, said her son, Pablo Conrad. She had lived in Santa Cruz since the 1980s.

Through her writing, Rich explored topics such as women’s rights, racism, sexuality, economic justice and love between women.

Rich published more than a dozen volumes of poetry and five collections of nonfiction. She won a National Book Award for her collection of poems “Diving into the Wreck” in 1974. In 2004, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for her collection “The School Among the Ruins.”

She had first gained national prominence with her third poetry collection, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” in 1963. Citing the title poem, University of Maryland professor Rudd Fleming wrote in The Washington Post that she “proves poetically how hard it is to be a woman – a member of the second sex.”

She and her husband had three sons before she left him in 1970, just as the women’s movement was exploding on the national scene. She used her experiences as a mother to write “Of Woman Born,” her ground-breaking feminist critique of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood, published in 1976.

Rich believed that art and politics should not be separate and considered herself a socialist.

“For me, socialism represents moral value – the dignity and human rights of all citizens,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2005. “That is, the resources of a society should be shared and the wealth redistributed as widely as possible.”

Rich taught at many colleges and universities, including Brandeis, Rutgers, Cornell, San Jose State and Stanford.

Rich won a MacArthur “genius” fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships and many top literary awards including the Bollingen Prize, Brandeis Creative Arts Medal, Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and the Wallace Stevens Award.

But when then-President Clinton awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1997, Rich refused to accept it, citing the administration’s “cynical politics.”

“The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate,” she wrote to the administration. “A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.”

In 2003, Rich and other poets refused to attend a White House symposium on poetry to protest to U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Born in Baltimore in 1929, Rich was the elder of two daughters of a Jewish father and a Protestant mother – a mixed heritage that she recalled in her autobiographical poem “Sources.” Her father, a doctor and medical professor at Johns Hopkins University, encouraged her to write poetry at an early age.

Rich graduated from Radcliffe College in 1951 and was chosen for the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first book of poetry, “A Change of World.”

In 1953, she married Harvard University economist Alfred Conrad. In 1966, her family moved to New York City when her husband accepted a teaching position at City College. Rich taught remedial English to poor students entering college before teaching writing at Swarthmore College, Columbia University School of the Art and City University of New York.

After she left her husband, he committed suicide later in 1970. She later came out as a lesbian and lived with her partner, writer and editor Michelle Cliff, since 1976.

But, she was of course more than her simple biography, although that is incredible in itself. We’re coming up to pesach now, and so we can return to the words that she spoke in 2004 at a reception for Jewish Voice for Peace:

I’ve been asked to say a few words about the importance of Jewish activism against the Occupation. Whether in the U.S., Israel or elsewhere, I think every shred of it matters. It’s the embodiment of an ethical Judaism, of “that which is hateful to you, do not to others.” It is the rejection of an idolatrous version of Israel and of the soil. It is a recognition that history is not Jewish alone. It is a critical, educative response to what has been claimed as “Israel’s right to exist”–at any cost and on any terms, including a blindered self-destructiveness.

This is how I see opposition to the Occupation in philosophical terms. I have to say that when I read in the Jewish Peace News, or in reports from Bat Shalom, or Gush Shalom or elsewhere, of Israeli activists non-violently protesting the Wall alongside Palestinians, or monitoring checkpoints, of Israeli refuseniks, or, going much further back, of Women in Black standing vigil for years, of American Jews demonstrating against the Occupation in city after city, when I watched the video of the Jewish Voice for Peace’s recent dignified and well-choreographed demonstration at Caterpillar, I feel emotionally strengthened in hope and resolve. I think this kind of activity—demonstrating, publishing a newsletter, writing, speaking, crossing lines to meet and stand with others in resistance—carries its message further out than we can know, including to other Jews who have been looking away or afraid to speak out. At this time, when so much hope seems to have disappeared down a political suckhole in the demonic collusion of our own rightwing government with that of Israel, we need to remember that.

Tomorrow evening, Jews around the world gather to retell and celebrate the Exodus. At some seder tables, undoubtedly, there will be some allusion to the sufferings inflicted on the Palestinian people, in our name. But I don’t think that can suffice. Our hopes and efforts really imply a new Exodus, out from the Occupation mentality, the Mitzrayim, that justifies such cruelty and the doing to others what we ourselves have found so hateful that we have retold its story for thousands of years. I spoke of Jewish activism as –educative– from the Latin to lead out. I see Jewish activism here and in Israel as leading out from the idea of tikkun olam toward a new evolution of Jewish consciousness, not only against the Occupation but in solidarity with all who are trying to liberate themselves. Let’s not deceive ourselves: this is not a simple or straightforward movement. It’s a long sojourn in a different kind of desert, a sojourn to be shared with others, and I believe the people of Jewish Voice for Peace are part of its reality.

We’ll miss your wisdom and your words, Adrienne. May your memory be a blessing.

Paul Robeson, Yiddish and Opera Houses

My grandparents had a records of Paul Robeson singing at Carnegie Hall that I always loved. Here are some youtube videos I found.

Here he sings ‘The Warsaw Ghetto Rebellion’ in Yiddish, performed in Moscow in 1949. The context of Stalinist repression is central to the description of the publication of this on youtube. His son (quoted in the youtube description) says that lyrics translate roughly as:

Never say that you have reached the very end
When leaden skies a bitter future may portend;
For sure the hour for which we yearn will not arrive
Arid our marching steps will thunder: we survive.

In this video he sings ‘Vi azoy lebt der kayser? (How does the czar live, how does the tsar drink tea?)’ Lyrics are subtitled.

Here Robeson sings for workers at the Opera House site, as it was being built. I love the songs he sings – ‘Old Man River’ and ‘Joe Hill’. ‘Old Man River’ for the inversion of lyrics from the original and defeated Showboat tune (“Ah gits weary / An’ sick of tryin’; / Ah’m tired of livin’ / An skeered of dyin’, / But Ol’ Man River, / He jes’ keeps rolling along!”) to the fighting lyrics of later years (“But I keeps laffin’/ Instead of cryin’ / I must keep fightin’; / Until I’m dyin’, / And Ol’ Man River, / He’ll just keep rollin’ along!”). And ‘Joe Hill’ because it is just such a great song and no one sings it quite like Robeson.

In any case, the picture of him singing on a worksite, in the dust of what is now an elite institution, always – somehow – slightly out of reach, is something special.

You don’t need to be racist to take the piss out of dictators

Edward Said, Orientalism, 1978:

I have begun with the assumption that the orient is not a fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the accident itself is not just there either. We must take seriously Vico’s great observation that men make their own history, that what they can know is what is what they have made, and extend it to geography: as both geographical and cultural entries—to say nothing of historical entries – such locales, regions, geographical sectors as “Orient” and “accident” are man-made. Therefore as much as the west itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and tradition of thought imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the west. The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other.

Having said that, one must go on to state a number of reasonable qualifications. In the first place, it would be wrong to conclude that the orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality. When Disraeli said in his novel Tancred that , the east was a career, he meant that to be interested in the east was something bright young westerners would find to be an all-consuming passion; he should not be interpreted as saying that the east was only a career for westerners.

There were – and are –cultures and nations whose location is in the East, and their lives, histories, and customs have a brute reality 0bviously greater than anything that could be said about them in the West. About that fact this study of Orientalism has very little to contribute, except to acknowledge it tacitly. But the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence, between orientalism and orient, but with internal consistency of orientalism and its ideas about orient(the East as career) despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a “real” Orient. My point is that Disraeli’s statement about the east refers mainly to that created consistency, that regular constellation of ideas as the preeminent thing about the Orient. And not to its mere being. As Wallace Stevens’s phrase has it.

A second qualification is that ideas, Cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force. Or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied. To believe that the orient was created= or, as I call it, “orientalized” – and to believe that such things happen simply as a necessity of the imagination, is to be disingenuous. The relationship between occident and orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony, and is quite accurately indicated in the title of K.M. Panikkar’s classic Asia and Western Dominance. The orient was orientalised not only because it was discovered to be ” oriental” in all those ways considered commonplace by an average nineteenth – century European, but also because it could be – that is, submitted to being – made oriental. There is very little consent to be found, for example, in the fact that Flaubert’s encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the oriental women; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence. Or history, he spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess Kuchuk Hanem physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was typically oriental ” My argument is that Flaubert’s situation of strength in relation to Kuchuk Hanem was not an isolated instance. It fairly stands for the pattern of relative strength between East and West and the discourse about the orient that it enabled.

This brings us to a third qualification. One ought never to assume that the structure of Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies or of myths which, were the truth about them to be told, would simply blow away. I myself believe that Orientalism is more particularly valuable as a sign of European – Atlantic power over the Orient than it is as a veridic discourse about the orient ( which is what, in its academic or scholarly form, it claims to be). Nevertheless, what we must aspect and try to grasp is the sheer knitted – together strength of Orientalist discourse, its very close ties to be enabling socio-economic and political institutions, and its redoubtable durability. After all, any system of ideas that can remain unchanged as teachable wisdom ( in academies, books, congresses, universities, foreign – service institutes) from the period of Ernest Renan in the late 1840s until the present in the United States must be something more formidable than a more collection of lies. Orientalism, therefore, is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment. Continued investment made Orientalism. As a system of Knowledge about the orient, an accepted grid for filtering through the orient into western consciousness, just as that same investment multiplied – indeed, made truly productive – the statements proliferating out from orientalism into the general culture.

Or am I just not getting the joke?

(my apologies for the awkward formatting that muddle up sentence, but I’m sure you get the picture)