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

[rydra_wong]

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.

Fascinating piece on what's been going on at the ADL lately, because it sounds like some of the staff (and former staff) are blazingly furious at the direction the CEO has been pushing in:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxjkzm/adl-elon-musk-controversy

[sabotabby]

Oooh, thanks for this. The ADL baffles me. We had kind of similar shifts with the Canadian Jewish Congress, which had semi-progressive roots that went increasingly fascist until (at least rumour has it) they booted out Bernie Farber for not being Zionist enough and became the Centre for Jewish and Israeli Affairs, which tells you everything you need to know about whether they prioritize Canadian Jews dealing with antisemitism or Middle Eastern geopolitics.