On Jewishness as a political identity, or, Cancel Me, Daddy

[sabotabby]

This post has to do with Israel and Palestine and questions of Jewish identity, which is to say, it is a thermonuclear drama bomb. If you are avoiding this kind of discourse, I'm putting it under a cut so you can do so more easily. I realize that this is emotional for many of us, including me, so I ask that if you disagree that you keep your disagreements as respectful as possible.

Who is a Jew?

Maybe you’re unsettled by that question. I am. I’m unsettled even typing it. In this age of torches and triple parentheses and Big Data, you should be unsettled. And maybe you would feel even more unsettled if I said that there was, perhaps, a political definition of what it means to be a Jew that has nothing to do with Judaism, or lineage or culture or history, a definition that excludes me and embraces, say, Trump and Musk.

Okay, what?

The other night, as is exhaustingly often the case, it was implied that I was not a “real” Jew. This is because of many reasons but in particular it’s because at the moment I’m part of a call for a ceasefire in Gaza. I’m a very small part of an organization that doesn't even matter within Canadian politics, let alone within global politics, and if Bibi doesn’t pay attention to what Biden says he’s sure as hell not going to listen to me, or us. Nevertheless, it’s a very big deal to Jews here who care about things like that, this idea that I am somehow letting down the side, and thus not authentic. My grandparents should be ashamed (don’t worry, they had plenty of reasons to be ashamed of me that had nothing to do with my politics).

Which is ridiculous on the face of it—I’m about as Jewish as it gets. Going back as far as we know, unless someone had an affair somewhere along the line, every ancestor I have is Jewish. When I go to Eastern Europe, people clock me immediately. I’ve been in therapy since I was 20. That kind of thing.

Of course, I’m not the right kind of Jew, but follow me, if you will, on a journey through the news story that actually triggered this post.

Recently, Germany passed a series of policies that amount to defining criticism of Israel as antisemitic. I am not sure why Germany, of all the countries in the world, gets to be in charge of defining what is and is not antisemitic—in fact I think they are probably the last country that should be in charge of that, but when has that ever stopped anyone?

In light of this new position, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, affiliated with the German Green Party, withdrew from presenting the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought to the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen following their essay in the New Yorker entitled In the Shadow of the Holocaust. Gessen is Jewish and their grandfather was murdered by the Nazis. But under the definition of the very country that spawned Nazism, they are an antisemite. What would Hannah Arendt say?*

And this is why I’m wondering today who counts as a Jew. Goyim have a real problem with this, as the nature and definition of Jewish identity, like Indigenous identities on Turtle Island, predates Western ethnic and racial categorizations. So often we are defined through religion, but I am not very religious at all, nor are many—maybe most—other Jews. Perhaps it’s an ethnicity. I don’t get to check a special Jewish box on the census, and if Ethiopian Jews were the same ethnicity as Ashkenazi Jews, would they have been sterilized without their consent in Israel? There are in fact a variety of ethnicities amongst Jews, not even counting converts, so that can’t be it.

Which brings us to the one definition that matters as far as I’m concerned, which is whether Hitler would have murdered a person for being Jewish. Certainly he would have murdered Gessen, and me. Jewish identity is matrilineal, but my friends with Jewish fathers and gentile mothers wouldn’t have been spared, so that counts in my books.

But this very grim, very practical definition has a different variation within the public discourse around Israel and Palestine, and within politics in general. A Jew is not someone who Hitler would have murdered for being Jewish. A Jew is someone who it is possible to be antisemitic about. And what antisemitism is and is not is tangential to actual lived Jewish identity and experience.

The distinction between these two is slight but vital. The first definition is straightforward: Murdered/not murdered. The other is slippery. Because the definition of what constitutes antisemitism is always contested, and those in power, whether the government of Germany or the Toddler In Charge of Twitter, can easily adjust it to mean “whatever I don’t like.” If you think I’m exaggerating, go read Gessen’s article; many Jews fall afoul of the German definition, but the extreme right AfD, presumably no friend of Jews, is free to use it as a club to hammer Muslims, who they hate even more.

I am not an expert in the intricacies of German politics, or in American politics for that matter. Today, however, Christian Zionists significantly outnumber Jewish Zionists in the US. Which makes this new definition of who counts as a Jew particularly convenient—Hitler may not have killed Christian Zionists, but if anti-Zionism is antisemitism, then it is quite easy for someone—even a Jew!—to be antisemitic about a Christian Zionist. And since the evangelical right dominates US politics and exports its millenarian ideology throughout the world, any criticism of the religious right may be transfigured into antisemitism. Which is why goyish politicians in Germany can declare a Jewish writer antisemitic. In fact, isn’t any criticism of a powerful political figure who has ever declared support for the state of Israel, when you really think about it, antisemitic?

You need to look no farther than the aforementioned toddler, Elon Musk. In one of his many temper tantrums as he transforms Twitter into the Nuremberg Rallies, he managed to feud with the Anti-Defamation League, blaming them for convincing advertisers to withdraw from his failing site over concerns about ads being displayed next to extremist content. Musk himself has spread anti-Jewish propaganda worthy of Der Stürmer, including promoting the Great Replacement Theory, a grand unifying theory of racism that blames Jews for letting all those pesky Muslim immigrants in (okaaaaay?). So is Musk an antisemite? If so, why would he be palling around with Netanyahu—the leader of the state to which, apparently, all Jews owe allegiance—several days later? No, you’re being antisemitic about him. (And of course, the Great Replacement Theory is about liberal and progressive Jews, not the kind that count for anything much.)

Jews, and Israel, occupy a peculiar place in the Christian imagination. We are Christkillers and spreaders of chaos, of interracial marriage and homosexuality and woke mind-viruses and cultural Marxism. We are also the mysterious sages with a special relationship with God that predates the one that the Christians have, and our presence in the Holy Land is destined to bring about the apocalypse that they long for so dearly. In fact, many Christians are eager to declare their affinity with the Jewish people even as they hate and despise actual Jews, similar to how settlers despise Indigenous peoples—especially the ones who block pipeline development—while cosplaying as them and claiming Cherokee or Métis ancestors.

In fact the love that Christians bear for Jews, like the whiteness of Jews, is very conditional. They hate and fear the hook-nosed shadowy conspirator and the Holocaust victim, while venerating the muscular, militaristic figure of the sabra, who becomes white in the white imagination, regardless of skin tone, simply by virtue of having a class of people below him to hate and fear. Messy, bisexual real-life Anne Frank is banned from American classrooms, while the pure and saintly Boy In the Striped Pajamas, a Christian fantasy if there ever was one, is welcomed.

Particularly messy is the detail that Jewish anti-Zionism is just as old as the Zionist movement. Not just among the bad kind of Jews, the secular, cultural Marxist ones who tended towards internationalism, communism, and anarchism, but among the weird right-wing religious ones too. I don’t necessarily agree with every thought current that labels itself anti-Zionist, but it’s there, it exists, and it is no less traditional than the Jewish Zionist movement.

The other night, a person I can only presume wasn’t Jewish (in the “Hitler would have killed them” sense) declared that for the first time in their life, they lit a menorah “to show support for Israel.” I don’t mind if non-Jews light menorahs, though it seems cringe and fetishistic, and plays into the silly “Hanukkah is Jewish Christmas” meme. But I am not sure that celebrating a holiday that is not your own and is about religious extremists doing an uprising is the supportive message this person thought it was. A friend and I at the party pushed back ever so slightly, but this didn’t stop the person from going on a tear about how “disappointed” they were that the left had “abandoned Israel.” It would never occur to me that I owe any loyalty to Israel in the first place, and certainly not to its current government, whose fascism inspired nation-wide uprisings. I, a settler Canadian of Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish descent, who has lived my entire life in Canada, do not even feel a smidgen of loyalty to my own stolen country, let alone a different one in which I have never set foot.

As I am writing this, news is breaking of the three hostages in Gaza who were killed by the IDF. They were shirtless, waving white flags, and at least one cried out in Hebrew. Supposedly the atrocity of Oct. 7 justifies any atrocity committed in Gaza, including the murders of the very people the invasion was undertaken to liberate.** Were they, too, insufficiently Jewish?

I know that I am insufficiently Jewish, because many people, most of them not Jewish themselves, have told me so. This is not because Hitler wouldn’t have killed me for being Jewish. It is because I don’t actually believe that the deaths of 7700 children and counting is a fair price for the security of a nation-state. I don’t believe that the deaths of 7700 children is a fair price for anything. I want it to stop and I want nothing to do with it—this is not guilt, or shame, or self-hating***, but the product of love and compassion towards all children and all innocent civilians. If the deaths of 1200 innocent Israelis is unimaginably evil—and it is—what then is the death of 18,700 Palestinians? What would it mean if, in order to be considered sufficiently Jewish, I would have to accept that each Jewish life is worth 16 Palestinian lives? What kind of human would that make me?

Today, the Jews that Hitler would have killed are at the forefront of ceasefire calls, and the Palestinian solidarity movement in general. We are shutting down malls and highways, interrupting politicians’ speeches, signing open letters, and arguing to tears with our friends and families and communities. But these actions are erased from the narrative in both the media and casual conversation. What we hear instead are the monolithic voices of Jews as a political category, constructed to accomplish geopolitical and ideological objectives. Within this framework, some people count as Jewish and some do not. Independent Jewish Voices, Israeli peace activists, the families of many of the hostages and victims who have spoken out, do not count. Only loud allies of Netanyahu and cheerleaders of war do, only mushy-headed centrists who declare that of course they want peace, of course they want a two-state solution, it’s just so unfortunate that we’ll have to kill a bunch of Palestinian kids to get there.

Masha Gessen ends their essay in what has to be the most stereotypically Jewish way possible—with a call for what is essentially problematizing the ways in which we construct history and identity. They ask us to question and argue and to confront the contradictions with honesty, no matter how painful. My own thoughts are nowhere near as coherent as theirs, but if I have any sort of a solution to my own identity as a Jew-that-doesn’t-count, it’s this: forcing this complexity and realism into the discourse. Embracing the fact that peace, if it is to happen at all, might feel as painful and frightening as war does, and choosing to fight for it anyway. No one would need to state the concept of tikkun olam if it were intuitive or easy or convenient, if it slotted neatly into a narrative that everyone was comfortable with. Because the alternative to ceasefire is more killing, forever.

* It would be a digression to speculate on what she would say. She died in 1975. Arendt was a Zionist but also immediately clued into the problems with the movement, and advocated a binational state. Which might have been a good idea, in hindsight. It is hard to imagine her approving of the actions of modern-day Israel. Anyway, I don’t want to fall on the “Arendt was flawless and did nothing wrong” end of things but it is important to point out that her views on Zionism were complex and nuanced.

** This is not to allege some grand conspiracy or malevolence on the part of the soldiers; I am sure it was accidental in the sense that any killing in war is accidental. Armies, like bombs, are not precision weapons, and whether one agrees with me about Zionism or not, one should agree that a ceasefire is necessary if the goal of freeing the hostages is in any way desirable. Freeing the hostages is not, of course, the goal; there is an either/or question of saving these lives and exacting revenge, and it’s clear which choice has been made here.

*** Listen, I have plenty of reasons to hate myself that have nothing to do with being Jewish.

Comments

[flamingsword]

I have only listened to the first of the two-part podcast that you linked the other day, and I kept having to stop it and cuss. I knew about some of the wack shit Israel had been doing but … fucking hell, it somehow keeps getting worse.

Thank you for sharing your personal context on this. I wish you could safely publish this somewhere that people would take it seriously, but I don’t know where that would be. 😞

🫂🫂🫂

[sabotabby]

Thanks for reading. I was thinking of maybe sending it to some lefty media type places but I dunno. Sometimes my thoughts are personal blog thoughts.

[batdina]

I have no words to add to yours. I'm a Jew in the same way you are. When asked about my lineage I said "parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, great great grandparents." Unless there was an interloper here or there (and there probably was as my mom had blue eyes) I'm as Jewish as they get. I'm also a far left winger, who is also a rabbi (! and no, no idea where that came from either but ...)

At any rate, most of what I have to say about the current situation is being completely ignored, and there isn't anywhere I can go with my concerns, as if anyone actually cares what they are anyway.

This is mostly just to say I hear you, and I'm pretty much right there with you on all of this. I can only say hang in there; we're both suspended from the same wire.

[sabotabby]

FWIW I think you'd be a rad rabbi.

This is mostly just to say I hear you, and I'm pretty much right there with you on all of this. I can only say hang in there; we're both suspended from the same wire.

You too. It's a precarious position, though nowhere near as precarious as some.

[dewline]

Honoured to make your acquaintance, then!

[minoanmiss]

Thank you for writing this and sharing it with us.

[sabotabby]

Thanks for reading.

[china_shop]

What minoanmiss said. This is so well-expressed, and I appreciate it so much.

[sabotabby]

Thank you!

[dewline]

So far as I know, I'm not Jewish in any sense. Jewish-adjacent, as I count such as yourself among my friends and friendly acquaintances. Also, I know that no community is a monolith, and this is one more tragic expression of the fact.

Still, I would dare argue that you are sufficiently Jewish for your own purposes, no matter what anyone else may say to you, with love or hate or apathy or empathy in their own hearts. You are as you need to be.

I know enough of tikkun olam at this point to want to embrace it as a principle in itself. Discomfort and all.

The ceasefire must happen, and it had to start yesterday. Now would be the next-best time to make it happen.

Thank you for sharing your perspective.

[sabotabby]

The thing is, peace and empathy are pragmatic. If I was an Israeli, I would try to imagine myself a Palestinian in Gaza. Could I envision a future in which we were able to cohabit, or would I too desperately crave revenge? Neither side will ever be able to completely genocide the other so they have to shift the framing.

[moon_custafer]

Seconding Dewline’s comments

[sabotabby]

Thanks.

[altamira16]

On a lighter topic:
Tonight, I saw a Christmas tree with the Star of David on it in a church, and I did not know what to make of this. I think it is interfaith community stuff, but it was so weird. We were there because my son's former trombone instructor was playing in a concert. Holiday season is when the professional musicians have jobs and money. It is exciting for them.

On the heavier topic:
Things seem to be bad and getting worse. One of the local Muslim leaders in tech that I follow linked to this blog post that was just enumerating the extent of what all is going on, and wow. I also saw this article in The New Statesman where women in the IDF were warning people about what was going to happen, but no one was listening to ladies saying words.

[sabotabby]

That blog post is...yeah. I'm not a tech person but I've encountered people in education whose response to the dead children is to quibble with "Hamas's numbers" as if there's a numerical value of dead children that would be acceptable. I can't imagine the inhumanity, especially amongst teachers. How do they treat the Muslim kids in their classes? How can they look at their own kids and not see the facts of dead kids?

In addition to the catastrophic intelligence failure (which is misogyny and incompetence to the level that's indistinguishable from malice), there's the fact that the IDF was thin on the ground on Oct. 7 because they were busy helping settlers terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank.

[agoodwinsmith]

I am sorry, and I am horrified. I have chaotic thoughts/emotions about it all.

The crude deaths of the three hostages sums up the whole military operation: the futility, barbarity, and hollow moral self-satisfaction. Nothing matters to the people conducting the military operation except killing every living being in Gaza. I am not even convinced that "revenge" plays a role - I think it is purely death-worship.

Similarly, people who attack your identity do so because they wish to kill first and never be bothered with questions. They don't even deserve your contempt. They certainly don't deserve any of your energy regarding attempting to heal their gaping information/empathy vacancy.

I don't know what to do with the emotions that happen when the person who does the attack turns out to be someone you never thought would stoop so low as sucker-punching.

[sabotabby]

Well, fortunately most of those people have either stopped talking to me or know better than to engage. I don't really care what someone random person at a party thinks of me?

But I do care how they vote, how they speak to the media if given an opportunity, what they tell their kids and so on. So...I have to say something.

I disagree...

[greylock]

... with the (right now) Twitter trend that Auschwitz was staged, made apparently my Anne Frank's stepsister. Also the diary was as fake as the moon landing!
Twitter.... is quality right now.

I don't really have to think too deeply about questions of identity, so this is interesting to me. Thanks.

Re: I disagree...

[sabotabby]

I am not really sure why anyone is still on Twitter at this point.

[nyctanthes]

This is a beautiful, thoughtful, incisive essay. Thank you for writing it.

[sabotabby]

Thanks for reading it.

[lizbee]

Thank you for sharing this.

I've been going to the Melbourne marches for Palestine every second Sunday, and regularly see a very large Jewish family there -- grandparents, adult children, spouses, kids. They're all very upfront about their Judaism with their signs ("Queer Jews Against Genocide", "Jews Against Israel", "Shiksas For A Free Palestine" -- I think that last one was someone who married into the family, she was definitely part of the group). I'm glad they're there, but I worry about them making themselves so visible.

And at the other end of the spectrum, an old friend has revealed she is a full-on Zionist, and I'm feeling a way about it.

[sabotabby]

I had one formerly liberal Zionist defriend me, but mostly I did Palestinian solidarity work for like 20 years so anyone I know who's going to target me has already had that opportunity. Not that it stopped Sue-Ann Levy from going after me, but fortunately she's not very bright and was unsuccessful.

I wish I could have more reasonable conversations with other folks in the Jewish community, but it's kind of never not gotten personal on the other side of the spectrum. For me it's not very personal, it's just a matter of applying the principles of human rights to everyone.

[sara]

The Jews in my life remain the beautiful irritable neurotic clever creative assholes with whom I have spent my entire life in solidarity, and every damn one of you would get between a weapon and a child, every time, were you offered the opportunity to do so. I know this.

What is happening in Gaza is not happening for the Jews who are my people. It is happening for something much uglier and more horrible, something I can't really understand, but they are stapling your name to it, and that is so sad and wrong and it's clearly putting people I care for in harm's way unnecessarily.

[sabotabby]

That's what frustrates me when people say "why does the left focus so much on Israel when human rights abuses happen everywhere." For me it's that all of this horror is supposedly done to make things safer for me, even though it puts me more at risk than I would be otherwise. I have a stake in it because they say it's for me.

[gingeriana]

(random stranger comes into a chat)
Many thanks for writing this out!
You dont know me, i dont know, yet,reading this is such a huuuge relief.
Last month i had THE AUDACITY to mention the number of killed and wounded Palestinian kids... to be immediately striped off the Jewish status and got called pretty disgusting names in both Russian and Ukrainians

i know we are not alone and we are definitely not the crazy ones. still, i need my daily dose of reading sane people like yourself

so yeah, thanks again!

[sabotabby]

Hello, kind random stranger! You are definitely not alone or crazy.

Another friend sent me this, which was somehow both a harrowing and a cathartic read: https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/11/we-must-refuse-the-currency-of-fear

[umadoshi]

No words. I'm glad you wrote this, though.

[sabotabby]

Thank you for reading it!

[mandee_jayne]

Thank you for your thoughts on this. I know I haven't been around much, and I'm glad to have come back to an insightful read with a viewpoint I don't have much in my social circles.

[sabotabby]

Thanks for reading.

[smhwpf]

Ay, well written, it's gross the way anti-Zionist Jews are called anti-semites while actual anti-semites are called great friends of Israel. The ADL and co seem to have decided that the only antisemitism that matters is criticism of Israel. Which is not only wrong but incredibly stupid.

Apparently, some right-wing pro-Israel Jews in the UK have an expression, an "asajew" as a descriptor for Jews who criticize Israel. Because they supposedly (well, sometimes actually) say "As a Jew, I oppose..." etc. The implication being that they're only bothered about being a Jew when they're using it to justify their criticism of Israel, and otherwise have no connection to the Jewish community. Many left-wing Jews consider this, very reasonably, an antisemitic slur.

I used to go by the "Would Hitler kill you" definition, which includes me, but I had second thoughts, both cause of my lack of connection to any Jewish community, and because I decided that I felt that as someone who converted to Christianity (from not believing anything), and with all the awful historical baggage that goes with Jews converting, or being forced to convert, to Christianity, that I didn't have the right to claim Jewishness - certainly not when speaking of my views on Israel/Palestine. (I still reckon I can declare myself a Jew when someone is being antisemitic). But of course all these boundaries are fuzzy.

Well, at least the Heinrich Böll Foundation has done a U-turn, and Masha Gessen is getting the Hannah Arendt prize after all.

[sabotabby]

Apparently, some right-wing pro-Israel Jews in the UK have an expression, an "asajew" as a descriptor for Jews who criticize Israel. Because they supposedly (well, sometimes actually) say "As a Jew, I oppose..." etc. The implication being that they're only bothered about being a Jew when they're using it to justify their criticism of Israel, and otherwise have no connection to the Jewish community. Many left-wing Jews consider this, very reasonably, an antisemitic slur.

Oh damn, hadn't heard that one. I mean, I am bothered about being a Jew when Nazis go after Jews, mostly. And when Israel does a genocide and proclaims that it's doing that so that Jews can be safe. Those are the two times. Probably if the Jewish community had been more tolerant and accepting of me and my family growing up, I'd feel more of a connection to it, but the only connection I've ever felt was to the intensely secular Jews in the Palestinian solidarity committee. Who are my people in such a deep, profound way.

Well, at least the Heinrich Böll Foundation has done a U-turn, and Masha Gessen is getting the Hannah Arendt prize after all.

That's good to hear! (And takes some of the pressure off publishing this outside of my blog.)

[dissectionist]

I keep coming back to this because I know I should comment but it feels weird as a non-Jewish person to comment on someone’s perception of whether they fit into a group I do not share. (We did have a long-standing Jewish line in the family, but it ended when my German Jewish great-great-great grandparents baptized all their children at birth as Christians. I have no record of them also converting, though I assume they did so because otherwise there’s no reason to baptize the children, as this was well before the rise of the Third Reich and they lived in a city that was considered a center of Jewish life in Germany.)

But I am sorry you’re being negated by people who don’t want to listen to you, and I wish that things were different. You don’t deserve to have your identity called into question for not toeing the supposed party line. (I say “supposed” because, as you’ve addressed, there are plenty of other Jewish folks who feel like you. There isn’t just one singular party line.)

I don’t know what peace could look like when two sides want to genocide each other. But I have to believe that if enough of an anti-genocide critical mass grows on both sides, maybe there will be enough to counter the genocidal pushes from the Israeli government and Hamas.

[sabotabby]

One thing I'm really feeling is that you shouldn't have to be Palestinian or Jewish to get an opinion. Like, this is a human rights issue.

[rydra_wong]

Some more navel-gazing happened in return, and this is just me rambling about me, but posting just in case it's of interest:

Ironically, I was just trying to explain the degree of my Jewishness to someone a week or two ago, because via a clever series of intermarriages and conversions to and from Judaism, my ancestors have contrived to leave me in a state of ambiguous, Schrodinger's Judaism, somewhere between zero (it's on my dad's side, ergo does not count for Orthodox religious purposes, and I wasn't raised Jewish so it wouldn't count for Reform purposes either) and half. "Three-eighths", maybe.

I would probably have been spared (but a second-class citizen) as a mischling if I lived in Nazi Germany, but might have been murdered as a Jew if I lived in a Nazi-occupied country. They weren't terribly consistent.

My grandfather (half-Jewish -- actually, more than half if you count a probably-insincere conversion-for-purposes-of-marriage, but you see the complications we're getting into here) used to say ruefully and amusedly that among Jews, he was a Christian, and among Christians, a Jew.

When I was small and trying to figure this out, I asked my dad and he said "You're Jewish for purposes of persecution," which I honestly found very helpful as a rule of thumb, and which has informed my pragmatic approach on a number of issues (are trans women women? well, they absolutely face misogyny as women, and transmisogyny is clearly a form of misogyny too, so hell yeah, solidarity forever).

I also learned this the first time I Googled my surname (it was the '90s, I was young and foolish) and landed right on a neo-Nazi page declaring my dad to be one of the "JEWISH PAYMASTERS" of a particular political party he'd donated money to.

We've all been atheists and agnostics for generations anyway, and in the last couple, culturally Christian in the "celebrating Christmas as the big winter holiday" way -- while also tending to be the most stereotypically argumentative two-Jews-three-opinions intellectual book-hoarding nerds possible.

The Jewish side of the family was Polish and Dutch Jewish, and that means what you think it means.

I grew up knowing that my peripatetic great-grandparents escaped Nazi-occupied Europe on a sardine boat (and that it precipitated a marital blow-up when my great-grandmother found out that my great-grandfather had got his current mistress onto the boat as well).

I did not grow up knowing that my dad had a second cousin who was a few years older than him; she was four years old when she was murdered.

I know which side of the family the autism comes from, and I know the first obviously-autistic-spectrum person in the family tree, and I know which extermination camp he was killed at, because they shipped the Jewish mental patients off from the clinic in the Netherlands first.

My dad met his best friend at university during a discussion about Israel where they realized they were the only two non-Zionists in the room and also the only two Jews.

I have enough Jewish ancestry to be entitled to immigrate to Israel, and not nearly enough to be considered a Jew once I got there.

So you know. Jewish enough that I keep being expected to have an Opinion On Israel, and that certain leftists will regard me as vaguely accountable in some way -- certainly obliged to provide them with my opinion, so they can decide if I'm a Good Jew or a Bad Zionist Jew.

But then I'm doubly "not Jewish enough" for my objections to war crimes and occupation to count against the mainstream narrative.

Not only "asajew", but not really qualified to speak as a Jew. But not off the hook either.

[sabotabby]

Well, no one is off the hook. But "Jewish for purposes of persecution" makes a hell of a lot of sense to me, and is basically the only barometer I care about.

[numb3r_5ev3n]

I don't know why "no one should be extrajudicially killed, ever" is so hard for people. I don't know why "apartheid is bad, actually" is so hard for people.

I'm still just basically losing more and more faith in humanity by the day, and I'm not sure how to deal with it.

[sabotabby]

I don't get why it's bad if babies get beheaded by knives or however that supposedly happened but it's okay if babies get dismembered and their parents have to carry them out in plastic bags, which did definitely happen. I feel like dead babies is bad regardless of whose babies they are, and this makes me a traitor.

[radiantfracture]

Hey, this went up when I was in the thick of marking, but I've been thinking about it ever since, and I wanted to say, very late, with others, what a strong piece it is -- how well-crafted and attuned to the paradoxes of the right's arguments (or its conceptual maneuverings, anyway) -- these arguments that happen right on the ground of your self.

Embracing the fact that peace, if it is to happen at all, might feel as painful and frightening as war does, and choosing to fight for it anyway. No one would need to state the concept of tikkun olam if it were intuitive or easy or convenient, if it slotted neatly into a narrative that everyone was comfortable with. Because the alternative to ceasefire is more killing, forever.

I think that's pretty extraordinary.

[sabotabby]

Thanks. Hah, it's out of date now because Gessen got the award in the end. And because, horribly, the body count has gone up by a lot.

Y'know, if it was just the right, I would be better equipped to handle it. It's the supposed left taking on apologetics for genocide that I can't deal with. Otherwise nice, progressive people who make an exception when it comes to Palestinians.