AN INSIDER'S VIEW ON FEMINISM AND ZIONISM----- http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/187652/my-jewish-feminist-problem?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=ffe435a071-Sunday_December_21_201412_19_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-ffe435a071-206675797
My Jewish Feminist Problem
Why my sisters can’t think straight about Israel
(Tablet Magazine / Esther Werdiger)
These days, Israel is far too dangerous a word to pronounce in a Western intellectual or social setting. Say it—and you risk uncivil argument.
For example, it’s ten months after Sept. 11, and I am having dinner
with a friend and colleague of many years. We are talking up the usual
storm, laughing a lot, enjoying each other’s company when one of us uses
the word: “Israel.” My friend, an independent and sophisticated thinker
stops talking. Suddenly, the air becomes thin. She takes a deep breath.
Her tone is no longer light; it has become dark, coarse, mocking.
“Israel?! It deserves exactly what it’s getting. And more. And don’t think America doesn’t deserve what it’s getting too.”
We are sitting a mile away from Ground Zero in New York City.
“Have you no compassion for the innocent?” I say, shocked by her cold, driven, vehemence.
“Innocent? No one is innocent. We are all guilty. Don’t tell me that
you would dare to defend the Zionist apartheid state or the
multinationals.”
Her dear face has been utterly transformed into the face of a
one-woman lynch mob. I do not want to fight: I can’t bear the ridicule
and intimidation. I know that I must say something; I am tired of having
to do so. I do not want this friendship to shatter over the Jewish
Question, that perpetual elephant in the living room of the world.
My friend is a Jew, a feminist, a leftist, and she prides herself on
being an independent thinker. “According to you,” I want to say, “only
Americans and Israelis deserve to die for the sins of their leaders? I
don’t hear you wishing a hellish death upon Chinese or Iraqi civilians
because you disagree with their government’s policies.” But my heart is
not into “making points.” My heart is beating too fast. I am afraid of
her anger.
***
I have been talking to a number of Arabs and Muslims from around the
world. They are all educated and worldly people. One man, let me call
him Mohammed, came for dinner. He is fluent in five languages, tells
charming stories, and knows “everyone” in the Islamic world. He enjoys
unmasking the hypocrisy of tyrants and mullahs. He shocked even me as he
described the foibles of major Islamic figures who are cocaine and
opium addicts, alcoholics, liars, thieves, incredibly stupid, vain,
insane, and so on. They shall remain nameless since I have no way of
knowing whether this information is true or not.
Mohammed joyfully zeroed in on hypocrisy. For example, according to
my friend, “The Saudi princes use religion; they themselves are not
particularly religious. For example, they drink. [Muslims are not
supposed to drink alcohol.] Once, when I was in Pakistan, my host and I
went to five black market liquor stores. They were all sold out. And
why? Because a world Islamic conference was taking place in town!”
This man—so charming, so well-informed—earnestly pressed upon me
three Internet articles that “proved that the Zionists really do run
America.” The fact that he understands that America is the world’s
supreme super-power does not stop him from believing that the
Zionists—who run a country about the size of New Jersey—also control
both America and the world. Nothing I said could change his mind.
Eventually, he politely, wisely, changed the subject.
If I cannot persuade him that the Zionists really do not run America, how can I hope to persuade other educated Muslims?
Another friend, an elegant woman from an Islamic non-Arab country who
has lived in exile in Paris for a long time, unsettled me with a long
and eloquent diatribe against America. She reminded me of Europe’s
colonial past, the untold grief it caused, the arrogant carving up of
the Ottoman Empire by Britain and France, and of America’s long and ugly
history of funding corrupt and sadistic tyrants in every Islamic
country. She is, by and large, correct. (Strangely, she was not angry at
the French whom, I have been told, “went native” in a way that the
British did not).
She tells me: “Please understand, what is going on is that the
frustration of the people has finally boiled over. It has come time to
pay the price for America’s having backed the Shah of Iran, a man who
was not even royal, just the son of an army colonel, bought and paid for
by the Americans. The Shah stole $36 billion from his people when he
fled Iran—and who protected him and his money? The Americans. The
American oil companies—that’s who runs the American government! They
wanted to create a pipeline running through Afghanistan and they wanted
to stop the Soviets. That’s why they approached and funded the
Pakistanis who are hardcore religious zealots, who turned around and
created the Taliban out of the illiterate and impoverished Afghan
refugees. The Taliban were originally supposed to ride shotgun and
protect the new gas and oil pipeline that would run through Afghanistan.
Well, that did not work out. So now, America has put a new puppet,
Hamid Karzai, in place. Everyone knows that Saddam Hussein is a
blood-thirsty animal. But who put him there? The Americans. Again, the
reason was oil and gas. If the Americans get rid of him they’ll only put
another puppet in his place. That’s why 9/11 happened.”
She pauses, briefly, then says, “And that’s why America has got to
stop backing Israel. When and if it does, that will signal to the
Islamic world that America is interested in brokering some justice.”
I am somewhat speechless but quickly say, “Assuming America abandons
Israel to its enemies, assuming that another sacrificial bloodbath of
Jews takes place, how will that change the historical record or improve
matters in the rest of the Islamic world?”
She answers me by coolly saying that “15 percent of the United States
Senate is Jewish. The American Jewish Israel Lobby is very powerful.
They will never allow America to broker a just peace in the Middle
East.” Actually, the 108th Congress (which includes both the Senate and
the House) has 535 members of whom 37 or 7 percent are Jews. But no
matter.
***
I have lived and loved both in the Islamic and in the Jewish-Israeli
world. My son’s father is an Israeli who now lives in America, and I
have remained active in Israeli feminist politics, first as a secular
activist, then more recently as a religious rights activist. But I also
remain close to my first husband, a Muslim from Afghanistan, who also
lives here, and to his second wife and grown Turkish-Afghan children.
Both husbands are soft-spoken and charming; each has deep black eyes and
an olive complexion. I think of them as the sons of Yishmael and of
Yitzhak. I also understand that, unlike their Biblical prototypes, these
half-brothers are now worlds apart.
I first learned how different the Judeo-Christian West and the
Islamic East really are long ago, in the early 1960s, when I was a bride
living in Afghanistan in an era of pre-Taliban gender apartheid.
Afghanistan had never been colonized, so there were no Westerners to
blame. It was there that I learned how not to romanticize wily,
colorful, third-world tyrants.
Scholars do not often gain access to insider information for years.
When they finally do gain access, they also tend to disagree with one
another about what the documents mean. Today, one scholar tells us that
Jews flourished under Islam. A second scholar strongly disagrees and
insists that Islam persecuted Jews, Christians, and all infidels on a
continuous basis. A third scholar tells us that the truth is more
complicated than that and may lie somewhere in between “savage
persecution” and “robust flourishing.” A fourth scholar says that what
is happening today bears little resemblance to what happened five or ten
centuries ago.
I am not a scholar in this area. I only know that I loved the
“soft-and-easy” of Islamic and Arab countries and people, their
sophisticated ceremonialism and familial intimacy, their trade-route
jingle-jangle. My sense is that Islam was once, in some ways, in some
places, for some people, more live-and-let-live than it is today. After
all, Muslims once presided over cosmopolitan cities, great cross-roads
of civilization, silk-routes, caravans, scientific academies. David
Warren is a non-expert expert. He is a Protestant Canadian who grew up
in Lahore, Pakistan. He posted the most interesting lecture, “Wrestling
with Islam” on the Internet. In this lecture he reminds us that the
strength of Islam was that it stayed in the background.
The religion wasn’t oppressive because it did not have an
independent Church-like vanguard…[During] the Golden Muslim Age in
Al-Andalus the Arab Court in Spain was not necessarily religious, at
least compared to the courts in contemporary Europe. The glorious city
of Cordova was where Europe went in the Middle Ages to learn Greek, and
some table manners; to see fabulous gardens and noble homes; paved roads
and street lighting; indoor plumbing and outdoor irrigation that made
the desert bloom; ladies in splendid finery; international banks—they
came and felt like country bumpkins.
Likewise, Baghdad, in the time before the Mongol invasion, was the
center of the civilized world, the New York of the 12th century.
Intellectuals would migrate there…looking for a job, or a chance to
study…[T]hey came because they preferred the more open atmosphere in the
Islamic realm, the big city feel.
I, too have romantic memories of life in the Islamic East and of a
way of life that may no longer exist. I have known utterly charming,
truly enchanting Muslims. Yes, prick them and they will bleed. Long ago,
in Afghanistan, I personally experienced enormous kindness, humor, and
good-naturedness among Muslims—more among the women and children than
among the men, but still, even among the men. The ritualized importance
of guests and the stately pace of each meal were balm to my spirit. I
had longed for a slower pace, a grand, biblical intimacy, and I had
found it.
In Kabul, behind closed doors, I also observed many kinds of
resistance: poking fun at the mullahs, the civil service, the monarchy:
protecting or at least comforting female relatives about their husbands’
cruelties, which included normalized rape, battery, and the taking of
second and third wives. I do not believe that militant Islam—which is
the most serious practitioner of gender apartheid in the world—is
capable of destroying such individual acts of sanity and goodness.
I sometimes experience the strangest but most profound nostalgia for
Afghanistan. What can I be thinking? Forty-two years ago, when I was
there, my mother-in-law tried to convert me to Islam almost every
day—this, even as she proudly insisted that some of her best friends,
the Sharbonis, had been Jews. My new relatives were utterly willing to
accept me, but only if I became more Afghan, less American—something
that I would never do.
Still, I am not likely to forget certain heart-stopping, eerily
familiar sights, sounds, tastes, smells that, at the time, moved me so:
flocks of sheep, camel-caravans, fierce, tender, turbaned men armed with
rifles, stars so thick and close-clustered you’d think you could touch
them (Afghanistan is more than 5,000 feet above the sea); ancient
bazaars, awesome mountains (I could see the foothills of the Himalayan
mountains from my bedroom window); minarets; the muezzin’s hoarse call;
cooking outdoors on an open fire; delicious, too-sweet candies flavored
with roses (!); exquisite, salted pistachios; communal sandalis
(which warmed one’s feet on freezing nights); turquoise-colored ceramic
hookahs (also known as hubble-bubbles), in which one smoked tobacco or
hashish.
Nevertheless, my life as an American, a Jew, and a wife was cheap and
I nearly died there. All great adventures take their toll. Many Western
adventurers whose hearts are in the East invariably come crawling back
with malaria, minus a limb, minus their sanity, with their tongues cut
out, either literally or metaphorically. Today, romance aside, jihadic
Islam is no longer soft and lovely. It is quite the opposite:
aggressively programmatic, intolerant, savagely misogynistic, and
militaristic in quite a new way.
The refusal of corrupt Arab and Muslim leaders to allow for open
societies, their long history of pocketing the wealth for themselves and
of torturing and executing dissidents, and the history of honor
killings, ethnic rivalries, and slavery in the Islamic world are also to
blame for Arab and Muslim suffering. Such barbarous customs preceded
both Zionism and the “Evil American Empire,” which cannot then logically
be blamed for such barbarisms.
My so-called “Western” feminism was certainly forged in that
beautiful and treacherous country where I observed and experienced the
abysmal oppression of women, children, and servants.
I regret nothing. I am not recanting my ideals as an anti-racist or
as a feminist; nor have I gone over to the dark side. And yet, and yet, I
must now calmly but clearly part company with many of my former friends
and colleagues.
This is not the first time that an internationally-minded Jew has
found herself in this position. I now find it necessary and sane to
think tribally as well as internationally, to think as an American and
as a Jew who is not only concerned with justice for all but also with
the survival of America and of the Jewish people.
There is no shame in this, only honor.
Thus, on my left stand the internationalists (some of whom are Jews).
I may remain among them as long as I am strongly anti-Zionist and
anti-religious Judaism. For my part, I must also remain silent as the
internationalists embrace all ethnicities and demonize only one: mine.
On my right, are the ultranationalists and theocrats (some of whom are
Jews). They will forgive my history as a firebrand feminist as long as I
don’t mention it, especially if I allow them to think I have renounced
it.
***
I had first encountered anti-Semitism among women on the feminist
left in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During that period it was quite
fashionable among the “radical chic” to despise Israel as a “racist,”
Eurocentric state, a puppet of U.S. imperialism, and oppressor of the
newly underdog Palestinians. Never mind the actual ethnic and cultural
diversity of the emerging Jewish state, the intransigence of the
surrounding Arab nations in their stated intention to destroy Israel and
push the Jews back into the sea where they had come from. No, my
feminist friends and colleagues could not tolerate this little nation’s
struggle for identity and survival against overwhelming odds because the
Israelis were Jews, and Jews were held to a different standard. They
were fair game for self-righteous attacks from progressive feminists who
were, in my opinion, guilty of frank and outright anti-Semitism.
I called anti-Semitism by its rightful name immediately and have not
stopped doing so ever since. But my credentials as a radical were
impeccable, so when I began wearing big Jewish stars to rallies, I was
neither challenged nor shunned. Perhaps my Star of David was seen as a
mere fashion statement; perhaps I got away with it because I was the
“right” kind of Jew: secular, ideologically sophisticated,
universalistic, anti-racist. I had even been married to a Muslim. I
worked with Iranian Muslims against the Shah. I was one cool Jew.
What do I mean by anti-Semitism? I mean the raw and filthy kind, in
which the prejudice is both blatant and eroticized, without any left
political cover. For example, I once rescued a (Christian) feminist
colleague from being psychiatrically institutionalized against her will.
Afterwards, she treated me to a monologue about how “The Jews are
dirtying up the beaches.” Poor soul, she reminded me that when one goes
mad, one’s political or philosophical orientation cannot withstand the
ideas embedded in our collective unconscious. A stream of anti-Semitic
vitriol came flying out of this genius’s mouth.
Another (Christian) feminist confided in me. She said that in her
view, “the pushy Jews had taken over the feminist and lesbian
movements;” she was very unhappy about this. She was proud of her
friendship with one particular Jewish woman, but she also viewed the
“pushy” Jewish women as “slutty, sexy” scoundrels.
A third feminist, an African-American (Christian) woman of enormous
beauty and dignity continually confronted me, albeit privately. She
said: “How can you call yourself a feminist and still support Israel, an
apartheid state?” Nothing I ever said about Israel ever got through to
her. She understood the symbolic and political importance of
African-Americans converting to Islam, of African nationalism; she
simply did not extend the courtesy to the Jews.
A fourth feminist, who was living and teaching in Colorado, told me
that she’d been thrown out of her feminist consciousness-raising group
for being “too pushy, too smart, too verbal.” I was astounded. “Are you
Jewish?” I asked. “Was anyone else Jewish in your group?”
“No, I was the only one. But I never thought of it this way.”
A fifth feminist blamed Betty Friedan’s homophobia and woman-hatred
primarily on her “heterosexual Judaism.” A sixth feminist blamed what
she saw as Bella Abzug’s rage and self-destructive ambition on her
Judaism and probable Zionism. (I must say that Bella was as
compassionate as she was angry and that her Zionism was of a limited
nature.)
Encountering such anti-Semitism within progressive political circles
sent me straight to Israel for the first time. In 1972, when I was in
Tel Aviv, I remember coming upon a review of my recently published first
book, Women and Madness, in Time magazine. Freud was
caricatured as a big-nosed, ugly, pygmy-midget, clearly “in lust” with
the tall, blonde Viking Princess on his couch. The pure racism just
leapt off the page at me. I was shocked. I hated the anti-Semitic
illustration even more than the reviewer’s anti-feminist bias.
Between 1973 and 1975 I tried, but, with the exception of Aviva
Cantor and Cheryl Moch, failed to interest other Jewish feminists in
meeting on a continuous basis to discuss the problem of anti-Semitism.
At the time, one rising feminist light said: “Phyllis, it may be a
problem, but it’s not my problem.” Another said that she didn’t identify
as a Jew anyway—and hoped I’d give it up too.
By the late 1970s I had begun working for the United Nations. I
coordinated a conference in Oslo that took place right before the 1980
United Nations World Conference on Women in Copenhagen. I saw with my
own eyes how the entire agenda, both officially and unofficially, was
hijacked by the PLO, Soviet Russia, the Arab League, and Khomeini’s
Iran. The official United Nations conference voted 94 to 4 for a
186-point “plan of action” that included a paragraph that listed Zionism
as one of the world’s main evils, along with colonialism and apartheid.
Cuba submitted this amendment when the conference formally opened.
Copenhagen was my first post-modern “pogrom,” and I put it in quotes
because it was not like the pogroms of old in which synagogues were
torched, women raped, babies thrown up on bayonets, men tortured and
murdered. It was something else: a “pogrom” of non-stop words and ideas,
an exercise in total intimidation perhaps similar to those perfected in
Russia and China that are supposed to result in ego-breakdown,
“confession,” a show trial, and death. There is no absolution. The
method was now being fine-tuned for use in an international setting
filled with ardent, active, naive women.
Official delegates blamed their own regional problems on Zionism and
apartheid. Bands of 30 to 50 Soviet-trained Arab and Iranian women,
headed by PLO representatives roved the hallways. They had been trained
to interrupt each and every NGO panel and to take them over with
propaganda against America and against Israel. Their behavior was that
of attackers on the march, bullies. They did not pretend to be feminists
or to be concerned with women. They did not have to be: No one held
them to this standard.
The bullies made no eye contact with anyone as they yelled “Jews must
die! Israel must die! Israel kills babies and tortures women. Israel
must go!” Many of the unofficial panels were also rigged so that
moderators only called upon pro-PLO speakers from the audience. In one
panel, they interrupted a speaker for five full minutes with the
following chant: “Cuba sí, yanqui no, PLO, PLO!” I heard women
say: “The only good Jew is a dead Jew,” and “Zionism is a disease which
must be attacked at the cellular level.”
Mina Ben-Zvi, who had commanded the Israeli women’s armed forces in
the 1948 War of Independence, wept in my arms. She could not believe
that both Israelis and Jews could still be so irrationally hated. Many
Jewish women were completely unprepared for the battle-level animosity,
its uniformity, omnipresence, ruthlessness. I had personally sent for
civil rights member of Knesset Shula Aloni, the founder of Israel’s
Civil Rights Party (Meretz) to debate Leila Khaled, who in 1969 became
the first Palestinian woman to hijack a plane (TWA), which she had flown
to Damascus.
“I will only talk to her out of the barrel of a gun,” Khaled said.
Aloni was unfazed, as was Tamar Eshel, then the head of Na’amat. But,
most other Israeli Jewish women experienced Copenhagen as a
psychological pogrom. For months afterward, many could not and would not
talk about it. They would start talking, then start crying, or start
talking and abruptly stop; they said that they were unable to convey
what Copenhagen had been like in words.
Thus, anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist goon squads were already
well-trained and on the march long before Israel was forced to invade
Lebanon in 1982. Such programmed hate was upon us long before Sharon
ascended the Temple Mount in 2000. And it rained down upon us from both
the left and the right, and from all four corners of the globe.
In 1980, in Copenhagen and Oslo, I met otherwise pleasant and
progressive Scandinavians who automatically supported the PLO and
automatically hated Israel—reason be damned. As socialists, they had
already been well programmed to espouse the most profound disgust and
hatred for all things American, Jewish, and Zionist—and in the most
aggressive manner. Their considerable anger with religion did not lead
them to march against the Vatican, but it did lead them to “march”
symbolically against the Zionists. Their anger at imperialism did not
lead the Danes or their counterparts all over Europe to demand that
France, England, Holland, Spain, and Germany pay serious reparations to
all those whom they formerly colonized; but it did lead them and their
European counterparts to scapegoat both America and Israel, as America’s
“imperialist” outpost in the Middle East.
***
For years, I have attended a number of synagogues in both Brooklyn
and Manhattan. All pride themselves on being politically correct. Thus,
most members remain adamantly and aggressively concerned with the plight
of the Palestinians and consumed with hatred for Israel. In one
synagogue, the rabbi carefully, dutifully, announced pro-Palestinian and
anti-American marches as “peace” marches and remained relatively quiet
in public about any pro-Israel marches. I understood he wanted to keep
his job but this was still very disquieting, disappointing. One day, I
committed an unforgivable crime in that synagogue. After services, I
stood up and said that the United Nations had just voted to condemn
Israel. I said nothing else. I was not yelling or crying or emotionally
demonstrative in any way.
Afterwards, a woman whom I did not know came up to me and began
haranguing me at close quarters. “I know who you are,” she said, darkly,
menacingly. Her rage was enormous, totally unexpected, and frightening;
she was quivering with it. I thought she would hit me. I stood there,
white-faced. This was the level of rage that I’d encountered long ago
when I’d debated people about abortion or pornography—and when I’d
worked on locked psychiatric wards. I did not want to engage in such a
hateful dialogue in a synagogue and on a Shabbos (Sabbath).
I absorbed all her vicious words until I could bear them no more and
then I tried to appease her by reminding her that I was still a Jew, and
still a progressive—not the Devil, not her enemy. She would have none
of it and after having had her say, stormed off. I stood there, a little
faint. A friend passed by. She stopped, touched my elbow, asked me if I
was all right.
“No,” I said. “I am definitely not all right.”
A few weeks later, I found myself at a Passover Seder at a friend’s
Manhattan home. I was seated opposite a young Italian Jewish woman. We
talked about Italian and French writers. My crime this time was
mentioning, with admiration, a well-known European intellectual who had
decided to leave the Communist party and who was, in addition, a strong
supporter of Israel. Woe! She turned out to be a Communist party member
whose command of English was painful to the ear. For a full 15 minutes,
she skewered both this man and Israel as if his defection from the
Communist party was brought about by Zionists like me. She grated on,
nonstop, against Israel and against anyone who would dare support the
“criminal, Zionist state.”
Please understand: She did this during a Passover Seder. My guard was
down, I felt violated as if I’d been dealt a blow to the stomach while
at prayer. It’s hard to say whether I suffered more from her training in
interpersonal brutality, her lack of respect both for the occasion and
for her elders (that’s me, because I am more than 30 years her senior),
or from the harshness of her accent in English.
She was young, smart; perhaps we could try to “hear” each other. I
asked her to step away from the table with me—not to fight but because I
did not want to engage in a public debate with her. My heart was heavy
with grief on the subject of Israel and terrorism; I had no easy
answers, certainly no doctrinaire answers. For another 15 minutes I
tried to talk with her about the tragic history of the Jews, about
Israel’s long time commitment to semi-socialism and democracy, about the
various super-utopian pro-peace projects that Israelis have engaged in.
Her mind was closed, as was her heart. Nothing any Israeli had ever
done was right; the country itself was a crime against the left.
I left the Seder early.
I am not saying that these women are not entitled to express
themselves or that I even disagree with everything they have to say.
Over the years, I have probably made some of their same points. What
struck me in each instance was their level of anger: righteous, vicious,
merciless. I might almost say it was a pathological level of anger, but
I think it is something else as well: These women have been politically
energized and empowered to express their anger—mainly on this subject
and mainly against other Jews. The very women who might be “angry” about
sexism or about human rights atrocities everywhere else in the world
are eerily silent on all subjects save one: Israel‘s wrongdoing.
In the 1960s, Albert Memmi, a Tunisian-born Jew who lived in exile in
Paris, wrote a number of mournfully elegant books about Jewish (male)
self-hatred and anti-Semitism. Permit me, in his honor, to say a few
words about female Jewish self-hatred and anti-Semitism.
Many progressive Jewish women, both here and in Israel, seem obsessed
with the Palestinian point of view. (It seems to be a new form of
Orthodoxy.) It reminds me, just a wee bit, of the women who used to
march outside the Museum of Natural History protesting the experiments
on animals, but who refused to march for abortion rights or against
rape. I believe that their rage against the oppression and frustration
in their lives, and against patriarchy in general is being unconsciously
transferred onto Israel in particular. All wrongs are Israeli; all
rights are Palestinian. American Jewish feminist pacifists are
romanticizing or at least justifying fundamentalist terrorism; they
reserve their pacifist standards only for the Jewish state.
Of course, both Jews and women have been underdogs for so long that
whenever a battle exists, both Jews and women tend to root for the
underdog. But, at some point, for reasons not entirely clear and that
may amount to a form of group madness, a good number of American Jewish
feminists stopped fighting for women’s rights in America and began
fighting for the rights of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Had
they given up on themselves—or was this a blind bid for the most
politically-correct-of-them-all-prize? Was this a classic
assimilationist tactic—or were they truly trying to practice Jewish
religious ethics in a secular way? I am not sure, but I agree with
Jacques Givet, the author of The Anti-Zionist Complex, when he says
That there should be Jews to challenge the existence of
Israel and indulge in lengthy public self-questioning on this theme
represents warped thinking, a breach of faith, and a human tragedy. And
this is a unique phenomenon, no Algerian, Cambodian, Chilean, Czech (and
now, Afghan) exile, however bitterly opposed to his current government,
questions his country’s right to exist. … The language of anti-Semitism
and anti-Zionism—blatant, insinuating, grotesque or vulgar—is
monotonous enough, testifying more to the existence of a psychological
malaise than to any originality of thought.
What does a Jew, a female Jew, do when she is faced with a conflict
between her desire to lead her one precious life and the reality that
her tribe is under siege? Some Jewish women marry and multiply as
quickly as possible so that Hitler will not have the last word, to make
up (not that this can ever be done) for the missing 6 million. Some
Jewish women refuse to be limited by misogynist tribal demands and
insist on identifying themselves in other ways.
A Jew can pretend to herself that she is not really Jewish, or
rather, that she is the “right” and only acceptable kind of Jew
(assimilated, anti-religious, anti-Zionist, pro-peace, and ironically,
pro-PLO) and therefore does not and should not have to deal with
anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism. It is not her problem; if and when it
becomes her problem—clearly, it is the fault of the other “bad” Jews who
are stubbornly, stiff-neckedly, refusing to melt away among the
nations. To fit in, get along, disappear.
The Jewish problem is not, God forbid, Christian or Muslim
anti-Semitism. Not at all. What plagues Jews are … other Jews. Jews get
other Jews into trouble. They are too rich or too poor, too pushy or too
passive, too clannish or too internationalist, too Zionist, too
anti-Zionist, too … Jewish.
Adapted from the revised and updated edition of The New Anti-Semitism.
***
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