Anti-Semitism, Uprootedness, and Zionism

I HAVE WRITTEN HUNDREDS of articles in which I rarely addressed anti-Semitism at all, certainly not my own encounters with it. I know it’s because of unease about calling attention to anti-Semitism. I would never have that unease calling attention to other dimensions of being targeted for who I am: it’s specific to anti-Semitism; as if calling attention to it could bring on more rather than less targeting of Jews; as if by speaking of anti-Semitism I could fuel it; as if anti-Semitism is ultimately about what Jews do.This unease became clear to me only while working on this article, born of reading a definition of what it means to be indigenous, and realizing, with a physical sense of shock, that being indigenous is diametrically opposed to the experience of uprootedness that is so quintessentially Jewish. While uprootedness is indeed quite the opposite of being indigenous, it is also very distinct from the experience of colonizer cultures. Being uprooted — repeatedly — has been our quintessential experience for thousands of years, born of empires, Christianity, and colonialism. Ironically and tragically, it is only when we took steps to reclaim our indigeneity that we became colonizers.I want to tell the story of what I — an Israeli Jew in voluntary political exile — see from my particular vantage point. I want to tell the story because in so many self-defined progressive contexts, anti-Semitism is rarely a topic of conversation, even though it’s sadly alive and well, with its overt forms on the rise, especially since Donald Trump’s election, and its cyclical nature barely understood.Not long before the expulsion of Jews from Medieval Spain, Jews were highly assimilated into many dimensions of life.. Similarly, Jews were well-integrated into German society before the rise of the Nazis, as just a second of many such examples. Whenever the cycle is in its point of integration, Jews find ways of believing that it may just be over. Even Arthur Waskow, writing about anti-Semitism in the US in Tikkun, said: “Until very recently—again that foreboding phrase! —we had been fully accepted into the American culture, economy, politics, and society.” Acceptance of Jews, so far in human history, has only been temporary.Not being talked about, not being seen during parts of the cycle, is an aspect of anti-Semitism. I want anti-Semitism to be understood because I want it to end, like all forms of separation and oppression in the world. All of them.I am in Poland, on the last day of a training retreat, in a room with over forty people. I am facilitating a discussion about when and how much to involve a group in the process of making a decision. One participant raises his hand to offer an example.With a smile on his face indicating to me that he is appreciating the example and probably thinks I would, too, he begins recounting the story of Pontius Pilatus in the (in)famous passage taking place just before Jesus was crucified. For my student, this is likely an example of someone, Pontius Pilatus in this case, stepping back and putting a decision on the group that was his to make by dint of his authority.I stopped him before he was done, knowing all too well what was coming. Here’s the original passage in its entirety for anyone who is not familiar:When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood,’ he said. ‘It is your responsibility!’ All the people answered, ‘His blood is on us and on our children!’ (Matthew 27:24–25)I was simply unable to continue. The pain it brought up was physical, and searing. For anyone who doesn’t know, and perhaps many don’t, this passage has served as “proof” that the Jews murdered Jesus, and has been used for centuries as justification for killing Jews. It wasn’t until Vatican II, 1962–1965, that the Catholic Church formally repudiated this doctrine. I can’t imagine that repudiation has been propagated forcefully outward from that center.Just minutes before this incident, I had been telling the group how facilitation requires quick recovery and being able to function even when in emotional pain. So there was context for the moment. Here’s more or less what I told the group: “You may not know this, but this passage that G. is referring to is at the core of how Jews were persecuted for hundreds of years in Europe. The level of pain this brought up for me is extraordinary. I want to take a moment to metabolize this pain, and then come back to facilitating, which is the purpose of why we are here. I can then attend to the rest of the pain later, outside this context.” I then sat quietly and chose to process this internally and quickly. It took less than a minute in front of the group, allowing the knife of the experience to course through me to the other end, recovering enough to be able to function well, and tucking the experience away for later. It was exhilarating to be able to model so fully what I had just been talking with them about before.Before proceeding, I checked only one thing with the group, and learned that I was the only Jew in the group. The retreat was in Poland, a country that had recently elected a nationalist government, and where most of the extermination of Jews happened during the Holocaust; not that long ago. And it was a German who shared the example (a dear friend, and one whose utter lack of intention to harm I am 100% convinced of, even as the effect on me was so strong). The whole moment was so intense I cannot even bring clear enough words to it.Then, over lunch, I had my very first ever experience of mourning and grieving Jewish history. I sat with a group of about eight people I fully trusted, and cried and cried and cried. I told them things they didn’t know about the history of Jews in Europe. My mother, who specialized in Christian history when she did her master’s degree in history in Israel in the early 1970s, has said that it is impossible to understand Christianity and the history of Europe in the Middle Ages without the presence of the Jews as the targeted other. The Holocaust was not an isolated event; it grew out of a thick web of anti-Semitism fed by the church and the ruling elites, who used the presence of Jews to siphon the anger of masses away from themselves. Time and time again Jews found a new place to be after being expelled, killed, or otherwise persecuted. Rarely allowed access to most forms of work, they were semi-invited and semi-forced into positions that made them an easy target of anger during times of stress, economic hardship, and instability.It wasn’t only the past that I was crying about. I was also mourning the continued persistence of Jewish uprootedness, and the total impossibility of Jewish existence. There is still no place in the world where Jews — as Jews, unassimilated to the local culture — are welcome to call home, not even Israel, as I explain shortly. It’s no wonder that at least some Jews have internalized this and thus question the purpose of having a continued existence of the Jewish people, suggesting things would be so much simpler otherwise, as if the disappearance of the Jewish people and the Jewish culture would not be a loss. It would be — to me — a terrible loss.It wasn’t only Jewish suffering I was mourning during that precious forty-five minute period of grief. I was also mourning the suffering of Palestinians. I was mourning what the attempt to undo uprootedness has done. We have been uprooted for long enough that even our ancestral land, although now governed by Jews, could not be welcoming of us. As much as it was obvious to many of us, especially following the Holocaust, that our survival depended on returning to that homeland, there were other people living there, and from their perspective, the land was clearly theirs. And so it was that, in the wake of unspeakable horrors done to us, we found ourselves turning into oppressors of the Palestinian people.We can only call Israel home at immense cost to Palestinians and our own sanity. This is why I am not living in Israel, why I am in voluntary political exile. And, at the very same time, I would like to have someone, anyone, tell me what the Jews of Europe were to do after WWII, when no place was ready to accept them? Where would they go, when killings of Jews continued even after dismantling the camps; when survivors who sought to return to their homes were faced with mobs of angry European Christians who had taken over their homes and resisted their return (sometimes murdering these Jewish returnees who had once been their neighbors)? What would have been a solution then, and what is a solution now?The echoes of Pontius Pilate meet me in America. I am in a Midwestern city, hosted by a friend while doing some work. It’s morning, early in December. Svetlana, a warm and friendly woman from the Ukraine who is cleaning my friend’s house, is chatting with me about this and that. It’s a pleasant uneventful morning, and the conversation doesn’t register, until Svetlana asks me what my plans are for Christmas. I tell her, still in the same mode, easy about it, that I have no plans for Christmas, because I am Jewish, and Jews don’t celebrate Christmas. Svetlana is visibly surprised, and looks at me intently as she asks for more information. I tell her again that Christmas is not a Jewish holiday and we have different beliefs. She is not settling and keeps asking questions. The tone rises, as Svetlana struggles with the information. We both sit down, because the conversation is beyond her continuing to clean and me continuing to be casual. Finally, she looks at me and says, all earnest and clueless: “You Jews don’t recognize and accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior?”This is the moment when the many hundreds of years of persecution of Jews in Eastern Europe hit me fully. It was so often people like Svetlana, warm, friendly, passionate, and earnest who were engaging in the violence. They genuinely believed what they had been fed about the Jews by their religious and political leaders, and acted from a deep conviction. In case it’s not evident, the question Svetlana asked implies, within its framing, that Jesus simply is the lord and savior. The question cannot be answered as asked. Answering it, bridging the gap with Svetlana, requires erasing the anti-Semitism built deeply into the fabric of Christianity, exposing the simple and complicated truth that different groups have different beliefs.I don’t know how many people in the US, where I live, or even in Europe, know what violence was done to Jews because of holding a belief system in which the idea that a mortal human could be lord and savior simply doesn’t make sense. I assume that Svetlana didn’t realize she was standing in the ideological boots of Crusaders, the Inquisition, and the Nazis. I don’t know how I would begin to explain to her, or even to some of my friends, what her seemingly benign statement echoes.I don’t even know how many people in the US, including Jews, know of the blood libels that flared up around Passover, when the Jews were accused of stealing and killing Christian babies and using their blood to bake the Passover matzah, an accusation that anyone who knows even basic Judaism would recognize as an impossibility. How many know of Jews being accused of poisoning the wells in Europe during the Black Plague? This one was based on Jews having far lower rates of contracting the pathogen because of the observance of handwashing before eating, and that lower incidence is what led to the accusation.The day after my experience with the man who brought up the story of Pilate washing his hands of responsibility for killing Jesus, I received an email from Tikkun with the text of an article by Yotam Marom. Yotam is the son of Israelis who grew up in New Jersey and is a young activist, having been active in Occupy and co-founded other movements. Yotam’s writing is breathtaking in its openness and courage as he exposes anti-Semitism on the left. Still freshly opened by my experience of the previous day, I found Yotam’s words like a salve for my soul. Here’s just one passage as Yotam recounts his own complicity in saying nothing for a long time, and gives example after example of what he had been silent about prior to writing his article. I am struck by its depth of anguish, especially the very last phrase:I said nothing about the deafening silence of my friends about the children murdered at the Jewish day school in France, the shootings at Jewish community centers in Kansas City and Seattle, the Bat Mitzvah shot up in Denmark, the Jewish stores destroyed in Brussels, the synagogues firebombed in Germany, the Jewish graves defaced in Toronto — as if the only purpose of grieving Jewish death would be to justify Israeli militarism or American Islamophobia, as if mentioning these tragedies was to equate them with the oppression of other peoples, as if Jews today are too powerful to have compassion for.Yotam calls on Jews to speak about anti-Semitism, to transform their own internalized anti-Semitism and commit to exposing and changing the system of anti-Semitism, for everyone’s benefit. I am heeding his call, in my own way.I must speak about Zionism, the most high-profile attempt by Jews to respond to anti-Semitism, to find protection from continued exposure and powerlessness, to change the flavor of Jewish history. I also want to increase the number of people who can see beyond the polarized versions of what Zionism is.I hear two dominant stories about Zionism, both of which are limited and unidimensional, both of which are fed by anti-Semitism, and neither of which I believe will bring us peace. The two stories are Zionism-as-racism and Zionism-as-saving-the-Jews-from-extermination.Anti-Semitism feeds the former in the same way that it fed anger at Jews all through history: pointing the anger at the Jews as if they are the truly powerful, obscuring the ruling elites: the British Empire, and now the US government.Anti-Semitism feeds the “Zionism-as-saving-the-Jews” story as justification for ongoing use of force by Jews in the name of having “no choice” if Jews are to survive at all. The continued presence of anti-Semitism, and the fear it evokes in many Jews, allows them to tolerate violence they wouldn’t otherwise endorse.I agree with neither story. Instead, I see Zionism through a tragic and complex lens.We Jews have succeeded in creating a physical and political presence, a home of sorts, in a land that has been contested territory for the entire existence of the Jewish people, and in that act we have lost our moral standing in the world. Our long existence as a persecuted people tenaciously managing to maintain its identity among hostile or indifferent cultures has been partially or completely erased, and we are seen as successful and beyond worry in places like the US, and, in Israel, as powerful beyond measure and dominating others in what should be their land.I am an Israeli Jew in voluntary political exile because I am unable to digest the cost of establishing the state of Israel. I in with what was being done in my as the of land beyond the of Israel in and the of a on their and This by no means to me with who see Zionism or as a or in voluntary exile means I am still an Israeli and still by I being of an ongoing of the and of the world. I being from knowing that my brought us the so a for economic a rather than to religious including a for the the to at the human of the that is and attention to and than I am to know that I come from a long of people who I am by the that my people in ways to maintain their and all of this, I am by the that I don’t know what could have been done as the of the Jewish existence over into no one the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust as a group, to for themselves. This in Europe and continued anti-Semitism, or to without having or community As I the killing of Jews continued after the were anti-Semitism has been on the rise in Europe and in the US a while and more after the of Donald and the more forms of it have not been that I can I am deeply by in no way means that I am Zionism only as a Zionism at one and the same time, both a and a I see it as an because of uprootedness, as there a clearly force that it to It is for so many to see what the is because it’s the entire dominant culture that has been in Jews for so It is also in that it has Jews from where they were living to even if only to back to our original of Zionism is that the of Jews as a people, rather than as within the world as we know it, simply doesn’t ourselves with the of what has been the land of other more tragically, anti-Semitism, and the with it, has not been and fully by Jews. The has been that Zionism has of active too, are complex to anti-Semitism. of the on centuries of within and some is more — in a tragic — from European of even while being as by that very It may well take anti-Semitism, which would likely Christianity, before we can this and into a that for all who see the of land the and the as we must the and Tikkun has been at the of ongoing about how to do including the fully to these then, can be done what I am and others in this and of Tikkun make of one or both in the In my if there is a it’s not likely to come from telling Israelis and Palestinians what they have to what should of their and or what steps would bring about peace. I worry that the for more often than not an cycle of and I want to instead for that, I with with not and with the of people their own with As of says, the end, Israelis and Palestinians will the but we do it without the I see that the of from outside the as creating enough for enough to the pain and and enough and to maintain a sense of in the face of the that the with no for then the people of Israel and will be able to take steps to from on about the past — which and — to that which is then, Israelis and Palestinians will recognize the deep for things done to and by all then, Israelis will to take the immense of the and specific suffering we have brought on the Palestinians through to the through establishing the state of Israel, and through of the past cannot be and there is no specific time in history that is the Similarly, it’s not to what their because that would be too for the other then, is being fully beyond specific of especially from Israelis to beyond the as says, to to and beyond working to and political of and as and speak of, there is perhaps also a for The mourning would be both of the specific history and of all to the specific with the entirety of human history in the last many of years, including in particular anti-Semitism, and more — and is for the gap what we want and what in the world. My experience me that with enough a can come about. that time, Palestinians and can their attention and on the and of and in the context of all that has how to a that truly to all of our even without the entire dominant of the world. it be a if this could a model of

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