A few words on.
Since the events of October 7, social media has been really hard to deal with. A lot of yelling, a lot of really bizarre, uninformed, bad-faith takes. It’s always disillusioning when people who align with my interests, value systems, and neurotypes turn out to be fucking exhausting. In this case, what I’m seeing is variations on what “Praxis Girl” Simone Norman has called the “hot mean girl who becomes a public leftist,” which for me isn’t necessarily contingent upon hotness or gender but rather is about the personality type that needs to WIN in certain situations, to be the MOST, and that can translate to “I’m the most elite baddie leftist in the room and I’m going to remind you of that constantly in the most belittling and threatening way because EMPATHY.” All that in-your-face DO YOU CONDEMN HAMAS Y/N stuff that is meant to call you out even/especially if your answer is more than one word or if you’re not ready to speak on it yet, and if you’re not ready to speak on it yet it obviously means you’re totally horny for genocide.
Here is what is true about me, and I’m going to say it now that I no longer feel cornered into it. And now that the U.S. has at last brokered a tentative ceasefire, which makes me a tad less hopeless than I’ve been this whole month-and-change. But who the hell knows?
I do not like genocide. Nothing I say or think or don’t say or don’t think is an endorsement of it. I don’t love silence either; it has ugly precedents. But taking space to reflect is fully okay.
I am not a Zionist. All things being equal (they’re not, I realize) I don’t know how I feel about Israel as an exclusively Jewish state. I never went on Birthright or joined Chabad, so Israel has no spiritual hold on me.
I do condemn Hamas, and I understand where their attacks came from. Similarly, I condemn Israeli state violence, and as a Jewish person I have firsthand knowledge of the deep generational trauma that has informed our lives and responses and actions across the centuries. I think we’re in similar boats, Jews and Muslims, driven to know nothing but never-ending bloodshed and tears because historical forces that have despised us both have left us fighting one another for scraps. I cry for us all.
There’s serious pain and confusion undergirding that generational trauma. We’re constantly told we’re paranoid or “centering ourselves” for worrying about antisemitism despite the cultural prominence of a Nazi-descended billionaire white supremacist, or that wanting society to acknowledge our religious holidays is woke-mob nonsense, but we’re also told we’re an illuminati lizard population controlling the world from behind the scenes. Yes, it’s shitty when we exploit and/or subjugate what we do control. Yes, we’re often crazy. And no, it’s not okay that our craziness etc has somehow given some of the most closed-loop crazy among us the green light to inflict the grossest manifestations of that pain and confusion on people who are, in a macro sense that accounts for the pecking order of real power, not the enemy. Israel needs to do the work of collective healing among themselves and across any sort of extended olive branch. It is crucial.
Jews are not, of course, an illuminati lizard population, but we do wield a fair bit of influence in media, the arts, philanthropy. The U.S. is a young country and our great successes came from us arriving here at a time when we could make our marks in nascent industries and academic fields, and we were always excluded from other industries and fields so we gave these shiny new things a shot. From 2023, I’m still proud of our fair bit of influence, and I’m also livid at certain organizational movers and shakers, whether pro-Israel or simply afraid of losing benefactor dollars or access in general from their pro-Israel orbit, canceling events because of speakers who were decidedly less pro-Israel. We should use the niche footholds we have to set better examples than this.
I enjoyed reading Naomi Klein’s recent book Doppelganger, and appreciated her section on the Palestinian sympathies in Philip Roth’s dark-comic 1993 novel Operation Shylock, and on the turn-of-the-century anti-Zionist Jewish socialist party the Bund. The abstract notion of having and retaining a Jewish homeland is appealing for sure! But perhaps, per Roth and the Bund, there’s a glimmer of sexiness in leaning into our rootless-cosmopolitan image, of defining ourselves as a permanently diasporic ragtag band of outsiders. I don’t have the answer. But these voices do help light the way. And so has Bess Kalb’s great, sensitive, bittersweet writing through all of this. (Listen to the writers, not the take machine.)
