via

Charlotte “Delbo describes instances in which reading becomes a matter of life and death. For example, she describes a scene of reading in which the SS find a love note. Lily, a female inmate, had left it in a hiding place for her lover; he, unable to get to the spot because of a change in his work detail, had asked a fellow inmate to get it. The latter dropped it returning to camp, and it was found by the SS. With an obsessively single-minded hermeneutics, they decide that ‘this letter was obviously a coded message to communicate political information – because for the Gestapo everything was coded, and love letters must convey political instructions’. Unable to imagine the possibility of a love letter written from one camp inmate to another, the Gestapo read it through their myopic lens of political opposition. Lily’s poignant comment that ‘We are here like plants full of life and sap, like plants wanting to grow and live, and I cannot help thinking that these plants are not meant to live’ becomes a statement of political sabotage in the distorted hermeneutics of the SS. Lily, the recipient, and the man who dropped the letter are all executed as a result of this mode of reading.”

from Jennifer L. Geddes, “Towards an Ethics of Reading Survivor Testimonies,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 41, no. 2 (Fall 2008), 9.

The Holocaust ones were my favourite. so ridiculously true. And I would also add, ‘so what do you do on Christmas? No, but, you must do something, so what do you do?’; and ‘he’s got a beard – that’s because he’s religious, yeah?’…

And you must also watch Shit White Girls Say…To Black Girls and Shit Straight Girls Say…to Lesbians

Walter Benjamin

One Way Street: Fragments for Walter Benjamin (1993)

Duration: 58 min.
Directed by John Hughes

One way street explores the life and work of German Jewish critic and philosopher, Walter Benjamin, who died escaping the Gestapo in 1940. Although Benjamin’s work is little known in this country, he is regarded in Europe as one of the most influential figures in 20th Century thought.

One way street provides clear and accessible introductions to some of the central ideas in Benjamin’s writings. Expert commentary from a range of English scholars situate Benjamin’s work in the context of their time and evoke a sense of the excitement that his work has generated. A heightened visual style, montage structure and strong musical treatments correspond in evocative and powerful ways with the concerns and the strategies of Benjamin himself.

(hat tip here and here)

Surfing Jews

Surfwise, 2008

Doc Paskowitz went to Stanford to become an MD, was successful, but (after introducing surfing to Tel Aviv) packs it all in to go surfing with his family. Part road movie, part surf flick, part doco about cultish behaviour. This is the trailer and it is available via torrents, if that’s your thing.

Judith Butler of Hannah Arendt

Judith Butler, ‘I merely belong to them’, London Review of Books

The Jewish Writings by Hannah Arendt, edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron Feldman
Schocken, 559 pp, $35.00, March 2007, ISBN 978 0 8052 4238 6

A bit that I liked:

Both the tone and substance of Arendt’s argument raise questions about her understanding of Jewish belonging. What did she mean by saying she was a Jew as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument? Was she saying she was only nominally a Jew, by virtue of genetic inheritance or historical legacy, or a mixture of the two? Was she saying that she was sociologically in the position of the Jew? When Scholem calls her a ‘daughter of our people’, Arendt sidesteps the attribution of kinship but avows her belonging: ‘I have never pretended to be anything else or to be in any way other than I am, and I have never felt even tempted in that direction. It would have been like saying that I was a man and not a woman – that is to say, kind of insane.’ She goes on to say that ‘to be a Jew’ is an ‘indisputable fact of my life’ and adds: ‘There is such a thing as a basic gratitude for everything that is as it is; for what has been given and not made; for what is physei and not nomo¯.’

Being a woman and being a Jew are both referred to as physei and, as such, naturally constituted rather than part of any cultural order. But Arendt’s answer hardly settles the question of whether such categories are given or made; and this equivocation hardly makes her position ‘insane’. Is there not a making of what is given that complicates the apparent distinction between physei and nomo¯? Arendt presents herself as a Jew who can and will take various political stands, whether or not they conform to anyone else’s idea of what views a Jew should hold or what a Jew should be. Whatever this mode of belonging might be for her, it will not involve conforming to nationalist political views. Moreover, it is difficult to read her response to Scholem as anything other than an effort to make sense of, or give a particular construction to, the physei that she is. And since, in the 1930s, she had subscribed to the idea that the Jewish people were a ‘nation’, and had even dismissed those Jews who held themselves aloof from this idea, one has to wonder: what happened to Arendt’s views of the nation and of modes of cultural belonging between the 1930s and the mid-1960s?

Throughout The Jewish Writings, Arendt struggles with what it means to be Jewish without strong religious faith, and why it might be important to distinguish, as she does, between the secular and the assimilated Jew. She does, after all, mark herself as a Jew, which constitutes a failure of assimilation (the task of which is to lose the mark altogether). In an unfinished piece dated around 1939, Arendt argues that Zionism and assimilationism emerge from a common dogmatism. Assimilationists think that Jews belong to the nations that host them (the anti-Zionist philosopher Hermann Cohen wrote at the turn of the 20th century that German Jews were first and foremost German and could thrive and receive protection only within a German state), whereas Zionists think the Jews must have a nation because every other nation is defined independently of its Jewish minorities. Arendt rebukes them both: ‘These are both the same shortcoming, and both arise out of a shared Jewish fear of admitting that there are and always have been divergent interests between Jews and segments of the people among whom they live.’ In other words, living with others who have divergent interests is a condition of politics that one cannot wish away without wishing away politics itself. For Arendt, the persistence of ‘divergent interests’ does not constitute grounds for either the absorption or the separation of national minorities. Both Zionists and assimilationists ‘retain the charge of foreignness’ levelled against the Jews: assimilationists seek to rectify this foreignness by gaining entrance into the host nation as full citizens, while Zionists assume that there can be no permanent foreign host for the Jewish people, that anti-semitism will visit them in any such arrangement, and that only the establishment of a Jewish nation could provide the necessary protection and place.

(hat tip dave slucki)

Hitler cops it

13 fictional characters beat up Hitler

TimTum

TimTum – A Trans Jew Zine

(hat tip vlada)

Familial Homophobia

A pretty wonderful lecture by Sarah Schulman on familial homophobia, shunning, silence and the like.

Northern Territory Intervention

Al Jazeera doco/report on the NT intervention. Pretty great stuff, including social workers putting their foot in it.

“It’s not personal. You know, it’s not personal. It’s actually about government policies and legislation and our job is just to explain those as best as we can.”

Aamer Rahman, Fear of a Brown Planet

Aamer’s Christmas wishes to Andrew Bolt. This is so fucking awesome, make sure you watch this.

Racism in Australian universities

NTEU report here

LOCA

THIS:

The Ladies of Colour Agency’s “Exotic Escape”

Captured in the exotic east to excite the intrigue of the civilised world, three deadly creatures pace their steel cages. The white man’s burden of taming the wild beasts has failed after much loss of blood and limb. Subsisting on a meager diet of white bread and leftovers, these exotic curios bide their time for the perfect escape… With fang, claw, cunning and rage, the creatures break out and unleash their lethal vengeance on their captors. Like a pestilence, their wrath shall spread across the civilised world, which lies trembling in the face of such peril.

From Arlene TextaQueen! Poster series here

The Tall Man

Doco on police violence and the death of Cameron Doomadgee on Palm Island, leading to riots. This looks so amazing.

Dude Magazine

Awesome new magazine. Check it out.

DUDE magazine explores sex, relationships, bodies and diversity between transguys and the wider community. Our specific goal is to facilitate smoother, less awkward interactions between transguys and other people; particularly so we can all enjoy hotter, safer sex in more places, more often, with more people!

Sex represents an intersection of bodies, gender, identity and desire which intrigues us, not just because sex for transguys is underrepresented, but because erotic encounters can be seen as extreme and explicit examples of general interactions we experience every day – with a potential and capacity for awkwardness, intimacy, confrontation, education, adoration.

DUDE recognizes and relishes that masculinity is nebulous, and that our relationships to it can be divergent, contradictory and ambiguous.

Check out the hot lads on the cover of the first issues here

Woody Guthrie

From WoodyGuthrie.org:

Guthrie’s Jewish lyrics can be traced to the unusual collaborative relationship he had with his mother-in-law, Aliza Greenblatt, a prominent Yiddish poet who lived across from Guthrie and his family in Brooklyn in the 1940s. Guthrie – the Oklahoma troubadour – and Greenblatt – the Jewish wordsmith – often discussed their artistic projects and critiqued each other’s works, finding common ground in their shared love of culture and social justice, despite very different backgrounds. Their collaboration flourished in 1940s Brooklyn, where Jewish culture was interwoven with music, modern dance, poetry and anti-fascist, pro-labor activism.

….

Woody Guthrie wrote Hanukkah songs for parties at the local Jewish community centers, he wrote songs about Jewish history and spiritual life and about World War II and the anti-fascist cause.

Totally forgot to post this on Chanukah! It is totally awesome though:

Hannuka Dance, Woody Guthrie

All you fascists bound to lose, Woody Guthrie

Some other tunes

AND…

Things I cannot say to you, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz

The three of us who organised the event put together a couple of things: a readings booklet, (which was a collection of previously published writings from the interwebs, and some bits that we wrote ourselves) which we read through as a group, each person reading a small section as we moved around the circle; and a sheet with the relevant prayers and a few Chanukah recipes from around the world. In the readings, we wrote, in part:

Thoughts on the Maccabees and their push for Jewish homogeneity…

We have a sense now that, after rededicating the Second Temple, the Maccabees fought to create a Jewish community that was homogenous and not in any way ‘Hellenized’. That is, they worked for an idea of Judaism and Jewish identity which would be ‘pure’. But as we stand here today, in the space of the Occupy Movement, at Occupy Melbourne, we purposely stand in solidarity with others. And in order to do so, we embrace an idea of Jewish identity which is diasporic: that is cosmopolitan, and stands in common, in solidarity, with other movements for liberation (and liberation from what, and towards what, must be a common question).

We take an idea of diasporism that is multiple, not singular, and that embraces both Chanukah and Occupy Melbourne, from Jewish writers such as John Docker, who lives in Canberra and who wrote that diaspora is ‘a sense of belonging to more than one history, to more than one time and place, more than one past and future. Diaspora suggests belonging to both here and there, now and then. Diaspora suggests the omnipresent weight of pain of displacement from a land or society, of being an outsider in a new one. Diaspora suggests both lack and excess of loss and separation, yet also the possibility of new adventures of identity and the continued imagining of unconquerable countries of the mind.’

We take an idea of belonging that means that we challenge the idea – perpetuated by many within the Jewish community and without, historically (such as by the Maccabees), and today – that standing alongside others amongst whom we live, and sharing cultures with them, is inherently bad, and we avow, alongside Ella Shohat, who writes from New York (via Iraq), that we will not allow ourselves to be defined as exclusively Jewish, ‘as [inherently] closer to other [Jews] than to the cultures of which [we] have been a part.’ We at Occupy Chanukah reject the idea that ethnic, racial, religious purity is superior to hybridity, or to internal difference. We also avow that forced assimilation – the pressuring of marginalised groups to conform, which is all too common in this country today – must be fought against. We stand in solidarity with those many Jews throughout history, including in the Chanukah story, who have fought against those rulers, and social pressures, which instructed Jews (and others) to conform.

And so we remember this moment in Jewish history here, at Occupy Melbourne, in order to write it anew into the history books.

For as we have seen, Chanukah has undergone many transitions of history.

So we remember this Jewish moment to remember a Jewish identity and to remember the legacy of resilience that past Jews have bequeathed us; to remember the ways in which Jewish resistance has been variously played out; to remember the beauty and creativity of forms of Jewish longevity.  But also to remember that we are a marginalised people, and that we stand with other marginalised peoples; to remember that the condition of being marginalised is, in the end, quite ordinary, and for so many an everyday affair. And that to be subjected to state-based violence is everyday, and is built into the system as it currently stands; to be subjected to material and discursive, or physical and oral violence, is, for many of us, an everyday affair.

photo credit: Sharne Vate

Here is the Occupy Chanukah at Occupy Melbourne program and the Occupy Chanukah prayer/song/recipe info, so feel free to have a read and use them (or bits of them) in any future Chanukah events you organise…

Jeffrey Shandler writes of her here:

She is perhaps best known as a concert and recording artist, one of the great interpreters of Yiddish song of her generation, both on her own and in collaboration with leading lights of Yiddish music and theater, including Josh Dolgin, Sara Felder, Beyle Schaechter Gottesman, Marilyn Lerner, David Krakauer, Frank London, Zalmen Mlotek, Jenny Romaine, Joyce Rosenzweig, Henry Sapoznik, Eve Sicular, Lorin Sklamberg, Alicia Svigals, Josh Waletzky, Michael Winograd, among many others. Based in New York, she performed at Carnegie Hall, the Public Theater, and LaMama, among other venues. Cooper also appeared in concert in Canada, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. Deeply informed by traditional Jewish practices of making music, Adrienne pushed the envelope of what Yiddish song might be through a prolific output of recitals, recordings, and music theater pieces.

Beyond her extraordinary artistic accomplishments, Cooper was a mentor, resource, and role model to so many who have lived, or at least sojourned, in Yiddishland. I first met her, as did many hundreds of other students, when she worked at the YIVO Institute in the 1970s and ’80s, running the Yiddish summer program (then held at Columbia University) and the Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies. She played a pivotal role in guiding us on our way to engaging Yiddish culture as part of our futures, whether as scholars, writers, performers, filmmakers, or activists.

Cooper also taught us to sing. At the time, I didn’t think it was all that remarkable that someone who was such a gifted musician was also so able a teacher and advisor. Perhaps it was because Cooper could move from administrator to intellectual to artist so naturally. She taught students around the world that music provided an essential point of entry into Yiddish culture and that the insights of scholars nurture and enrich a musician’s performance. Her many Yiddish musical projects integrated a joyous talent for making music with a deep knowledge of the cultures that engendered these songs and stories. Her passionate performances were rooted in an approach to Jewish culture in which heart and mind are closely coupled.

Cooper seemed to have inherited a gift for making music; both her mother and her mother’s parents were talented singers. But she did not simply continue a dynasty of Jewish musicians. She charted her own course as an artist, as has her daughter, Sarah Gordon, who is a smart and ardent musician very much in her own right. Mindful of the great Jewish cultural past, Cooper was committed not to its preservation in a narrow sense, but to its animation through intelligent, creative, and sometimes subversive, engagement.

Similarly, as Cooper worked tirelessly within a number of institutional settings, including Arbeter-Ring, KlezKamp, YIVO, among others, she invested her creative talents in testing their notions of the possible. In her own way, she followed the precedent of the great Yiddish kultur-tuers of yore like Y. L. Peretz, S. Ansky, and Max Weinreich by integrating art, scholarship, institution building, and political action in all phases of her professional life. In concerts such as “Ghetto Tango,” a suite of songs from the Lodz Ghetto or “Lost In the Stars: Jewish Song after World War II in Hebrew, English, and Yiddish,” she delivered emotionally compelling music and at the same time offered original, incisive surveys of cultural creativity at threshold moments in Jewish life.

Cooper used other performances to champion the Jewish commitment to redressing economic inequality (In Love and Struggle: Songs of Jewish Labor) or celebrated LGBT rights (Queer Wedding). Her feminism informed all her undertakings: her activism, her writing and translating, and her singing. Fittingly, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice recently honored Cooper with its Marshall T. Meyer Risk Taker Award for her contributions as a performer to movements for social change.

One of the last times I saw Cooper sing was at an Arbeter-Ring outdoor summer concert, at which she exhorted the audience to make this a besere un shenere velt, or a better, more beautiful world. The words were delivered with the same emotional force as her singing. In a world without Cooper, without her voice, her wit, her imagination, her intellect, her fervor, her convictions, it will be that much harder to do so.

there is an amazing collection of Yiddish songs here, performed by Adrienne Cooper and others (via Avi).

And to read a profoundly important and moving piece that Adrienne and her daughter, Sarah Mina Gordon (who is a teacher and musician in her own right, performing with Yiddish Princess, amongst others), penned earlier this year, originally published in Lilith, about Yiddish songs and family violence, you should head here.

I send wishes for a long life to Adrienne’s family and friends. as someone elsewhere said, the Chanukah lights are a little dimmer now.

first off, a few of us yidden who are involved in Occupy Melbourne have organised an Occupy Chanukah for erev Chanukah, or this coming Tuesday night. Here’s the info:

We invite everyone to attend a radical celebration of Chanukah.

What is Chanukah?

Chanukah is an eight-day Jewish holiday commemorating the rededication of the Holy Temple (the Second Temple) in Jerusalem at the time of the Maccabean Revolt of the 2nd century BCE.

The Chanukah story is a tale of successful revolt against an empire and of an inspiring resilience and resistance of an oppressed peoples. ‘Occupy Chanukah’ will ask what we can learn from this story, what different interpretations are offered, how we can go about building a critique of the Jewishnesses that are state-centred in the Chanukah story and will explore some of the radical possibilities that diasporic Jewishness/Judaism present us with.

Join us, whether Jewish or non-Jewish, for an evening of discussions, songs, storytelling, dreidel spinning and latke and chocolate eating.

We encourage you to bring along something to share – whether it’s a reading of some sort, some food, or a dreidel!

when? December 20th (erev Chanukah) from 5.30 – 6.30pm
where? the Occupy Melbourne site (currently Flagstaff Gardens, but keep an eye out for location changes)

so come! join us! if you want to check out the facebook event (to let us know you’re coming, or share the info around with others etc etc), it’s here

And secondly, Dave Slucki, a postdoc in Jewish Studies at Monash Uni (and whose words have appeared here at jewonthis) has a book coming out, based on his PhD thesis. The book is called The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945: Toward a Global History, and you can pre-order it here. So, we say a massive mazaltov to Dave, and tell the rest of you to get on it – get a copy so you can learn a whole lot about an important part of modern Jewish history (and you can support young Jewish academics while you’re at it)!

What makes LGBT people and their allies so susceptible to Homonationalism and Pinkwashing is the emotional legacy of homophobia. The vast majority of Queers have had profound oppression experiences, often in the searing realm of Family, reflected by the lack of legal rights, and reinforced by distorted representations in Arts and Entertainment. The relative civil equality of white gays in The Netherlands and Germany has only been achieved within a generation, and still does not erase the pain of familial and cultural exclusion. As a consequence, many people have come to mistakenly assess how advanced a country is by how it responds to homosexuality. Yet, in a selective democracy like Israel, the inclusion of LGBT Jews in the military, or the relative openness of Tel Aviv are not accurate measures of broad human rights.

And I started with the opening quotes, one from Edward Said’s Freud and the Non-European, the other from Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History”. And Benjamin’s words read

It is well-known that the Jews were forbidden to look into the future. The Torah and the prayers instructed them, by contrast, in remembrance. This disenchanted those who fell prey to the future, who sought advice from the soothsayers. For that reason the future did not, however, turn into a homogenous and empty time for the Jews. For in it every second was the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter.

It did not turn into homogenous and empty time. That is, as I understand Benjamin, it did not turn into the progressive, linear time of modernity and capitalism; it did not turn into control and domination. The future was left (is left?) to imagination and possibility; to the unpredictable, to the ever hopeful, and perhaps the impossible.

At Occupy Melbourne (OM, from now on) we’re in the process of producing a Declaration. It’s been a long process (I’m on the Declaration working group, and I’ve lost count of the number of hours I’ve spent working on this document), but we’re now moving it through the General Assembly, slowly slowly making amendments, hopefully crafting it into something that lots of people can see themselves reflected in, can identify with and feel passionate about.

In an earlier draft there was the beginning of a list of demands, or goals. That was scrapped early on, but there are people who are pushing that such a list needs to be produced soon. They say that this list will demonstrate what OM is, will be a response to those people who say we stand for nothing concrete, because we will be able to say ‘look – these are the things we want, these are the things we demand, these are the practical changes we would make.’

I fundamentally disagree.

And it was reading Benjamin’s words tonight that crystallised further for me why.

Making a set of demands means, to a certain extent, that we believe that it is possible to create change within the system we have. To suggest a different tax scheme, or to suggest that government needs to talk to the people more, or to suggest that there needs to be affirmative action measures, is to say that there isn’t something fundamentally wrong with the structures and the systems that exist. It is to discount the words of Waziyatawin, who spoke a few weeks ago at Occupy Oakland and reminded us that we need decolonisation, as to make a claim for anything else is to say that the systems we live in aren’t fundamentally based on colonialism and capitalism, on dispossession and eradication of difference.

To make a set of claims is to suggest that we can move forward, that we can develop ourselves and our society in a progressive, linear fashion.

We need instead to reject these languages of development, of progression, of demands and changes to the system. We need to instead, I think, live in a hope which rejects linearity and all that accompanies it. For this homogenous empty time is homogenous and empty because it controls us and controls our speech and interactions. Perhaps we need to take up Benjamin’s invocation of remembrance, and ponder what it would mean to think in the language and ideas of a messiah who was not external to us, but was in us, in our Movement, in our Occupation, in our politics, in our language. How can this be part of our continued building, in the words of Angela Davis at OWS, of “communities of resistance”?

(*quote in the title is from a paragraph by Edward Said that Aloni uses as the other epigraph)

From their earlier press release:

In the 1960s U.S. South, black people had to sit in the back of the bus; in occupied Palestine, Palestinians are not even allowed ON the bus nor on the roads that the buses travel on, which are built on stolen Palestinian land.

In undertaking this action Palestinians do not seek the desegregation of settler buses, as the presence of these colonizers and the infrastructure that serves them is illegal and must be dismantled. As part of their struggle for freedom, justice and dignity, Palestinians demand the ability to be able to travel freely on their own roads, on their own land, including the right to travel to Jerusalem.

Palestinian activists also aim to expose two of the companies that profit from Israel’s apartheid policies and encourage global boycott of and divestment from them. The Israeli Egged and French Veolia bus companies operate dozens of segregated lines that run through the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, many of them subsidized by the state. Both companies are also involved in the Jerusalem Light Rail, a train project that links illegal settlements in East Jerusalem to the western part of the city.

From their recent press release:

In a scene reminiscent of the early U.S. civil rights movement, border police and army surrounded and shut down Jerusalem Bus 148, blocking the Freedom Riders at the Hizmeh checkpoint. The action clearly highlights the injustice and dispossession that Palestinians face under Israeli occupation and apartheid. The six freedom riders who boarded the bus originally as well as an additional rider, were arrested and are currently at the Israeli Atarot police station.

Reading about this I started thinking about the Australian Freedom Ride in 1965, and how powerful this kind of action and image can be, even around 50 years after the original Freedom Rides in the US. Here is Charlie Perkins talking about the Australian Freedom Ride (via Koori History Web):

For more on this…

Mondoweiss describes why transportation is such an important issue in Palestine:

In my visit to Palestine this past June, the problem of transportation was discussed in virtually every conversation. The limits on transportation for Palestinians tell you virtually all that you need to know about the racist Occupation. One graphic example is that there are different license plates for Israeli settlers from those of the Palestinians. A car with Palestinian plates cannot travel into Israel. And, in fact, there are roads within Occupied Palestine, on which Palestinian vehicles are prohibited. Another graphic example, which relates directly to the matter of the Freedom Rides, was explained to me at a border crossing where Palestinian workers were going into Israel for their jobs. I was informed that once in Israel they had to ALREADY have their transportation arranged. Naively I assumed that they could simply hop on a bus and go to work. Not so fast, it turns out. The Israeli buses will not stop to pick up Palestinian workers.

The Palestinian Freedom Rides aim to dramatize that there is no freedom of movement for Palestinians. They are a population suffering from an on-going occupation that has become, as I have asserted previously, a slow-motion annexation. Discriminatory transportation policies which privilege the freedom of movement of Israelis, and Israeli settlers in particular, are part of the low-intensity violence experienced by the Palestinians on a daily basis aimed at further and further marginalizing them until they feel forced to abandon their own land.

Also read +972 mag for photos and coverage. And electronic intifada.

I highly recommend checking out what’s being posted online – there’s some really interesting links to articles and books going up there.

At this time of growing leftist movements around the world, it’s important – I think – to get behind Jewish groups and organisations in Melbourne which are putting out different ideas of what being a Jew can entail.