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Judith Butler: My rabbi told me, 'you are not well behaved.'

Philosopher, professor and author Judith Butler arrived in Israel this month, en route to the West Bank, where she was to give a seminar at Bir Zeit University, visit the theater in Jenin, and meet privately with friends and students. A leading light in her field, Butler chose not to visit any academic institutions in Israel itself. In the conversation below, conducted in New York several months ago, Butler talks about gender, the dehumanization of Gazans, and how Jewish values drove her to criticize the actions of the State of Israel.

In Israel, people know you well. Your name was even in the popular film Ha-Buah [The Bubble - the tragic tale of a gay relationship between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Muslim].

[laughs] Although I disagreed with the use of my name in that context. I mean, it was very funny to say, “don’t Judith Butler me,” but “to Judith Butler someone” meant to say something very negative about men and to identify with a form of feminism that was against men. And I’ve never been identified with that form of feminism. That?s not my mode. I’m not known for that. So it seems like it was confusing me with a radical feminist view that one would associate with Catharine MacKinnon or Andrea Dworkin, a completely different feminist modality. I’m not always calling into question who’s a man and who’s not, and am I a man? Maybe I’m a man. [laughs] Call me a man. I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women’s safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality. I was never against the category of men.

A beautiful Israeli poem asks, “How does one become Avot Yeshurun?” Avot Yeshurun was a poet who caused turmoil in Israeli poetry. I want to ask, how does one become Judith Butler -especially with the issue of Gender Trouble, the book that so troubled the discourse on gender?

You know, I’m not sure that I know how to give an account of it, and I think it troubles gender differently depending on how it is received and translated. For instance, one of the first receptions [of the book] was in Germany, and there, it seemed very clear that young people wanted a politics that emphasized agency, or something affirmative that they could create or produce. The idea of performativity – which involved bringing categories into being or bringing new social realities about – was very exciting, especially for younger people who were tired with old models of oppression – indeed, the very model men oppress women, or straights oppress gays.

It seemed that if you were subjugated, there were also forms of agency that were available to you, and you were not just a victim, or you were not only oppressed, but oppression could become the condition of your agency. Certain kinds of unexpected results can emerge from the situation of oppression if you have the resources and if you have collective support. It’s not an automatic response; it’s not a necessary response. But it’s possible. I think I also probably spoke to something that was already happening in the movement. I put into theoretical language what was already being impressed upon me from elsewhere. So I didn’t bring it into being single-handedly. I received it from several cultural resources and put it into another language.

Once you became “Judith Butler,” we began to hear more about Jews and Jewish texts. People came to hear you speak about gender and suddenly they were faced with Gaza, divine violence. It almost felt like you had some closure on the previous matter. Is there a connection, a continuum, or is this a new phase?

Let’s go back further. I’m sure I’ve told you that I began to be interested in philosophy when I was 14, and I was in trouble in the synagogue. The rabbi said, “You are too talkative in class. You talk back, you are not well behaved. You have to come and have a tutorial with me.” I said “OK, great!” I was thrilled.

He said: “What do you want to study in the tutorial? This is your punishment. Now you have to study something seriously.” I think he thought of me as unserious. I explained that I wanted to read existential theology focusing on Martin Buber. (I’ve never left Martin Buber.) I wanted look at the question of whether German idealism could be linked with National Socialism. Was the tradition of Kant and Hegel responsible in some way for the origins of National Socialism? My third question was why Spinoza was excommunicated from the synagogue. I wanted to know what happened and whether the synagogue was justified.

Now I must go Jewish: what was your parents’ relation to Judaism?

My parents were practicing Jews. My mother grew up in an orthodox synagogue and after my grandfather died, she went to a conservative synagogue and a little later ended up in a reform synagogue. My father was in reform synagogues from the beginning.

My mother’s uncles and aunts were all killed in Hungary [during the Holocaust]. My grandmother lost all of her relatives, except for the two nephews who came with them in the car when my grandmother went back in 1938 to see who she could rescue. It was important for me. I went to Hebrew school. But I also went after school to special classes on Jewish ethics because I was interested in the debates. So I didn’t do just the minimum. Through high school, I suppose, I continued Jewish studies alongside my public school education.

And you showed me the photos of the bar mitzvah of your son as a good proud Jewish Mother…

So it’s been there from the start, it’s not as if I arrived at some place that I haven’t always been in. I grew very skeptical of certain kind of Jewish separatism in my youth. I mean, I saw the Jewish community was always with each other; they didn’t trust anybody outside. You’d bring someone home and the first question was “Are they Jewish, are they not Jewish?” Then I entered into a lesbian community in college, late college, graduate school, and the first thing they asked was, “Are you a feminist, are you not a feminist?” “Are you a lesbian, are you not a lesbian?” and I thought “Enough with the separatism!”

It felt like the same kind of policing of the community. You only trust those who are absolutely like yourself, those who have signed a pledge of allegiance to this particular identity. Is that person really Jewish, maybe they’re not so Jewish. I don?t know if they’re really Jewish. Maybe they’re self-hating. Is that person lesbian? I think maybe they had a relationship with a man. What does that say about how true their identity was? I thought I can’t live in a world in which identity is being policed in this way.

But if I go back to your other question… In Gender Trouble, there is a whole discussion of melancholy. What is the condition under which we fail to grieve others? I presumed, throughout my childhood, that this was a question the Jewish community was asking itself. It was also a question that I was interested in when I went to study in Germany. The famous Mitscherlich book on the incapacity to mourn, which was a criticism of German post-war culture, was very, very interesting to me.

In the 70s and 80s, in the gay and lesbian community, it became clear to me that very often, when a relationship would break up, a gay person wouldn’t be able to tell their parents, his or her parents. So here, people were going through all kinds of emotional losses that were publicly unacknowledged and that became very acute during the AIDS crisis. In the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, there were many gay men who were unable to come out about the fact that their lovers were ill, A, and then dead, B. They were unable to get access to the hospital to see their lover, unable to call their parents and say, “I have just lost the love of my life.”

This was extremely important to my thinking throughout the 80s and 90s. But it also became important to me as I started to think about war. After 9/11, I was shocked by the fact that there was public mourning for many of the people who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center, less public mourning for those who died in the attack on the Pentagon, no public mourning for the illegal workers of the WTC, and, for a very long time, no public acknowledgment of the gay and lesbian families and relationships that had been destroyed by the loss of one of the partners in the bombings. Then we went to war very quickly, Bush having decided that the time for grieving is over. I think he said that after ten days, that the time for grieving is over and now is time for action. At which point we started killing populations abroad with no clear rationale. And the populations we targeted for violence were ones that never appeared to us in pictures. We never got little obituaries for them. We never heard anything about what lives had been destroyed. And we still don’t.

I then moved towards a different kind of theory, asking under what conditions certain lives are grievable and certain lives not grievable or ungrievable. It’s clear to me that in Israel-Palestine and in the violent conflicts that have taken place over the years, there is differential grieving. Certain lives become grievable within the Israeli press, for instance – highly grievable and highly valuable – and others are understood as ungrievable because they are understood as instruments of war, or they are understood as outside the nation, outside religion, or outside that sense of belonging which makes for a grievable life. The question of grievability has linked my work on queer politics, especially the AIDS crisis, with my more contemporary work on war and violence, including the work on Israel-Palestine.

It’s interesting because when the war on Gaza started, I couldn’t stay in Tel Aviv anymore. I visited the Galilee a lot. And suddenly I realized that many of the Palestinians who died in Gaza have families there, relatives who are citizens of Israel. What people didn’t know is that there was a massed grief in Israel. Grief for families who died in Gaza, a grief within Israel, of citizens of Israel. And nobody in the country spoke about it, about the grief within Israel. It was shocking.

The Israeli government and the media started to say that everyone who was killed or injured in Gaza was a member of Hamas; or that they were all being used as part of the war effort; that even the children were instruments of the war effort; that the Palestinians put them out there, in the targets, to show that Israelis would kill children, and this was actually part of a war effort. At this point, every single living being who is Palestinian becomes a war instrument. They are all, in their being, or by virtue of being Palestinian, declaring war on Israel or seeking the destruction of the Israel.

So any and all Palestinian lives that are killed or injured are understood no longer to be lives, no longer understood to be living, no longer understood even to be human in a recognizable sense, but they are artillery. The bodies themselves are artillery. And of course, the extreme instance of that is the suicide bomber, who has become unpopular in recent years. That is the instance in which a body becomes artillery, or becomes part of a violent act. If that figure gets extended to the entire Palestinian population, then there is no living human population anymore, and no one who is killed there can be grieved. Because everyone who is a living Palestinian is, in their being, a declaration of war, or a threat to the existence of Israel, or pure military artillery, materiel. They have been transformed, in the Israeli war imaginary, into pure war instruments.

So when a people who believes that another people is out to destroy them sees all the means of destruction killed, or some extraordinary number of the means of destruction destroyed, they are thrilled, because they think their safety and well-being and happiness are being purchased, are being achieved through this destruction.

And what happened with the perspective from the outside, the outside media, was extremely interesting to me. The European press, the U.S. press, the South American press, the East Asian press all raised questions about the excessive violence of the Gaza assault. It was very strange to see how the Israeli media made the claim that people on the outside do not understand; that people on the outside are anti-Semitic; that people on the outside are blaming Israel for defending themselves when they themselves, if attacked, would do the exact same thing.

Why Israel-Palestine? Is this directly connected to your Jewishness?

As a Jew, I was taught that it was ethically imperative to speak up and to speak out against arbitrary state violence. That was part of what I learned when I learned about the Second World War and the concentration camps. There were those who would and could speak out against state racism and state violence, and it was imperative that we be able to speak out. Not just for Jews, but for any number of people. There was an entire idea of social justice that emerged for me from the consideration of the Nazi genocide.

I would also say that what became really hard for me is that if one wanted to criticize Israeli state violence – precisely because that as a Jew one is under obligation to criticize excessive state violence and state racism – then one is in a bind, because one is told that one is either self-hating as a Jew or engaging anti-Semitism. And yet for me, it comes out of a certain Jewish value of social justice. So how can I fulfill my obligation as a Jew to speak out against an injustice when, in speaking out against Israeli state and military injustice, I am accused of not being a good enough Jew or of being a self-hating Jew? This is the bind of my current situation.

Let me say one other thing about Jewish values. There are two things I took from Jewish philosophy and my Jewish formation that were really important for me… well there are many. There are many. Sitting shiva, for instance, explicit grieving. I thought it was the one of the most beautiful rituals of my youth. There were several people who died in my youth, and there were several moments when whole communities gathered in order to make sure that those who had suffered terrible losses were taken up and brought back into the community and given a way to affirm life again. The other idea was that life is transient, and because of that, because there is no after world, because we don’t have any hopes in a final redemption, we have to take especially good care of life in the here and now. Life has to be protected. It is precarious. I would even go so far as to say that precarious life is, in a way, a Jewish value for me.

I realized something, through your way of thinking. A classic mistake that people made with Gender Trouble was the notion that body and language are static. But everything is in dynamic and in constant movement; the original never exists. In a way I felt the same with the Diaspora and the emancipation. Neither are static. No one came before the other. The Diaspora, when it was static, became separatist, became the shtetl. And when the emancipation was realized, it became an ethnocratic state; it also became separatist, a re-construction of the ghetto. So maybe the tension between the two, emancipation and Diaspora, without choosing a one or the other, is the only way to keep us out of ethnocentrism. I suppose my idea is not yet fully formulated. It relates to the way I felt that my grandfather was open to the language of exile while being connected to the land at the same time. By being open to both, emancipation and Diaspora, we might avoid falling into ethnocentrism.

You have a tension between Diaspora and emancipation. But what I am thinking of is perhaps something a little different. I have to say, first of all, that I do not think that there can be emancipation with and through the establishment of state that restricts citizenship in the way that it does, on the basis of religion? So in my view, any effort to retain the idea of emancipation when you don’t have a state that extends equal rights of citizenship to Jews and non-Jews alike is, for me, bankrupt. It’s bankrupt.

That’s why I would say that there should be bi-nationalism from the beginning.

Or even multi-nationalism. Maybe even a kind of citizenship without regard to religion, race, ethnicity, etc. In any case, the more important point here is that there are those who clearly believe that Jews who are not in Israel, who are in the Galut, are actually either in need of return ? they have not yet returned, or they are not and cannot be representative of the Jewish people. So the question is: what does it mean to transform the idea of Galut into Diaspora? In other words, Diaspora is another tradition, one that involves the scattering without return. I am very critical of this idea of return, and I think “Galut” very often demeans the Diasporic traditions within Judaism.

I thought that if we make a film about bi-nationalism, the opening scene should be a meeting of “The First Jewish Congress for Bi-Nationalism.” It could be a secret meeting in which we all discuss who we would like to be our first president, and the others there send me to choose you? because we need to have a woman, and she has to be queer. But not only queer, and not only woman. She has to be the most important Jewish philosopher today.

But seriously, you know, it would be astonishing to think about what forms of political participation would still be possible on a model of federal government. Like a federated authority for Palestine-Israel that was actually governed by a strong constitution that guaranteed rights regardless of cultural background, religion, ethnicity, race, and the rest. In a way, bi-nationalism goes part of the way towards explaining what has to happen. And I completely agree with you that there has to be a cultural movement that overcomes hatred and paranoia and that actually draws on questions of cohabitation. Living in mixity and in diversity, accepting your neighbor, finding modes of living together. And no political solution, at a purely procedural level, is going to be successful if there is no bilingual education, if there are no ways of reorganizing neighborhoods, if there are no ways of reorganizing territory, bringing down the wall, accepting the neighbors you have, and accepting that there are profound obligations that emerge from being adjacent to another people in this way.

So I agree with you. But I think we have to get over the idea that a state has to express a nation. And if we have a bi-national state, it’s expressing two nations. Only when bi-nationalism deconstructs the idea of a nation can we hope to think about what a state, what a polity might look like that would actually extend equality. It is no longer the question of “two peoples,” as Martin Buber put it. There is extraordinary complexity and intermixing among both the Jewish and the Palestinian populations. There will be those who say, “Ok, a state that expresses two cultural identities.” No. State should not be in the business of expressing cultural identity.

Why do we use term “bi-nationalism?” For me it is the beginning of a process, not the end. We could say “multi-nationalism,” or “one-state solution.” Why do we prefer to use the term “bi-nationalism” rather than “one state” now?

I believe that people have reasonable fears that a one-state solution would ratify the existing marginalization and impoverishment of the Palestinian people. That Palestine would be forced to accept a kind of Bantustan existence.

Or vice versa, for the Jews.

Well, the Jews would be afraid of losing demographic majority if voting rights were extended to Palestinians. I do think that there is the fundamental question of “Who is this ‘we’?” Who are we? The question of bi-nationalism raises the question of who is the “we” who decides what kind of polity is best for this land. The “we” has to be heterogeneous; it has to be mixed. Everyone who is there and has a claim – and the claims are various. They come from traditional and legal grounds of belonging that are quite complicated. So one has to be open to that complication.

Now I want to move to the last part of the conversation. It was over three years ago, at the beginning of the Second Lebanon war, that Slavoj Žižek came to Israel to give a speech on my film Forgiveness. The Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel asked him not to come to the Jerusalem Film Festival. They said that I should show my film – as Israelis shouldn’t boycott Israel, but they asked international figures to boycott the festival.

Žižek, who was the subject of one of the films in the festival, said he would not speak about that film. But he asked: why not support the opposition in Israel by speaking about Forgiveness? They answered that he could support the opposition, but not in an official venue. He did not know what to do.

Žižek chose to ask for your advice. Your position then, if I recall correctly, was that it was most important to exercise, solidarity with colleagues who chose nonviolent means of resistance and that it was a mistake to take money from Israeli cultural institutions. Your suggestion to Žižek was that he speak about the film without being a guest of the festival. He gave back the money and announced that he was not a guest. There was no decision about endorsing or not endorsing a boycott. For me, at the time, the concept of cultural boycott was kind of shocking, a strange concept. The movement has since grown a lot, and I know that you’ve done a lot of thinking about it. I wonder what do you think about this movement now, the full Boycott, Diversion and Sanction movement (BDS), three years after that confusing event?

I think that the BDS movement has taken several forms, and it is probably important to distinguish among them. I would say that around six or seven years ago, there was a real confusion about what was being boycotted, what goes under the name of “boycott.” There were some initiatives that seemed to be directed against Israeli academics, or Israeli filmmakers, cultural producers, or artists that did not distinguish between their citizenship and their participation, active or passive, in occupation politics. We must keep in mind that the BDS movement has always been focused on the occupation. It is not a referendum on Zionism, and it does not take an explicit position on the one-state or two-state solution. And then there were those who sought to distinguish boycotting individual Israelis from boycotting the Israeli institutions. But it is not always easy to know how to make the distinction between who is an individual and who is an institution. And I think a lot of people within the U.S. and Europe just backed away, thinking that it was potentially discriminatory to boycott individuals or, indeed, institutions on the basis of citizenship, even though many of those who were reluctant very much wanted to find a way to support a non-violent resistance to the occupation.

But now I feel that it has become more possible, more urgent to reconsider the politics of the BDS. It is not that the principles of the BDS have changed: they have not. But there are now ways to think about implementing the BDS that keep in mind the central focus: any event, practice, or institution that seeks to normalize the occupation, or presupposes that “ordinary” cultural life can continue without an explicit opposition to the occupation is itself complicit with the occupation.

We can think of this as passive complicity, if you like. But the main point is to challenge those institutions that seek to separate the occupation from other cultural activities. The idea is that we cannot participate in cultural institutions that act as if there is no occupation or that refuse to take a clear and strong stand against the occupation and dedicate their activities to its undoing
So, with this in mind, we can ask, what does it mean to engage in boycott? It means that, for those of us on the outside, we can only go to an Israeli institution, or an Israeli cultural event, in order to use the occasion to call attention to the brutality and injustice of the occupation and to articulate an opposition to it.

I think that’s what Naomi Klein did, and I think it actually opened up another route for interpreting the BDS principles. It is no longer possible for me to come to Tel Aviv and talk about gender, Jewish philosophy, or Foucault, as interesting as that might be for me; it is certainly not possible to take money from an organization or university or a cultural organization that is not explicitly and actively anti-occupation, acting as if the cultural event within Israeli borders was not happening against the background of occupation? Against the background of the assault on, and continuing siege of, Gaza? It is this unspoken and violent background of “ordinary” cultural life that needs to become the explicit object of cultural and political production and criticism. Historically, I see no other choice, since affirming the status quo means affirming the occupation. One cannot “set aside” the radical impoverishment, the malnutrition, the limits on mobility, the intimidation and harassment at the borders, and the exercise of state violence in both Gaza and the West Bank and talk about other matters in public? If one were to talk about other matters, then one is actively engaged in producing a limited public sphere of discourse which has the repression and, hence, continuation of violence as its aim.

Let us remember that the politics of boycott are not just matters of “conscience” for left intellectuals within Israel or outside. The point of the boycott is to produce and enact an international consensus that calls for the state of Israel to comply with international law. The point is to insist on the rights of self-determination for Palestinians, to end the occupation and colonization of Arab lands, to dismantle the Wall that continues the illegal seizure of Palestinian land, and to honor several UN resolutions that have been consistently defied by the Israeli state, including UN resolution 194, which insists upon the rights of refugees from 1948.

So, an approach to the cultural boycott in particular would have to be one that opposes the normalization of the occupation in order to bring into public discourse the basic principles of injustice at stake. There are many ways to articulate those principles, and this is where intellectuals are doubtless under a political obligation to become innovative, to use the cultural means at our disposal to make whatever interventions we can.

The point is not simply to refuse contact and forms of cultural and monetary exchange – although sometimes these are most important – but rather, affirmatively, to lend one’s support to the strongest anti-violent movement against the occupation that not only affirms international law, but establishing exchanges with Palestinian cultural and academic workers, cultivating international consensus on the rights of the Palestinian people, but also altering that hegemonic presumption within the global media that any critique of Israel is implicitly anti-democratic or anti-Semitic.

Surely it has always been the best part of the Jewish intellectual tradition to insist upon the ethical relation to the non-Jew, the extension of equality and justice, and the refusal to keep silent in the face of egregrious wrongs.

I want to share with you what Riham Barghouti, from BDS New York, told me. She said that, for her, BDS is a movement for everyone who supports the end of the occupation, equal rights for the Palestinians of 1948, and the moral and legal demand of the Palestinians’ right of return. She suggested that each person who is interested, decide how much of the BDS spectrum he or she is ready to accept. In other words, endorsement of the boycott movement is a continuous decision, not a categorical one. Just don’t tell us what our guidelines are. You can agree with our principles, join the movement, and decide on the details on your own.

Yes, well, one can imagine a bumper sticker: “what part of ‘justice’ do you fail to understand?” It is surely important that many prominent Israelis have begun to accept part of the BDS principles, and this may well be an incremental way to make the boycott effort more understandable. But it may also be important to ask, why is it that so many left [wing] Israelis have trouble entering into collaborative politics with Palestinians on the issue of the boycott, and why is it that the Palestinian formulations of the boycott do not form the basis for that joint effort? After all, the BDS call has been in place since 2005; it is an established and growing movement, and the basic principles have been worked out.

Any Israeli can join that movement, and they would doubtless fine that they would immediately be in greater contact with Palestinians than they otherwise would be. The BDS provides the most powerful rubric for Israeli-Palestinian cooperative actions. This is doubtless surprising and paradoxical for some, but it strikes me as historically true.

It’s interesting to me that very often Israelis I speak to say, “We cannot enter into collaboration with the Palestinians because they don’t want to collaborate with us, and we don’t blame them.” Or: “We would put them in a bad position if we were to invite them to our conferences.” Both of these positions presume the occupation as background, but they do not address it directly. Indeed, these kinds of positions are biding time when there is no time but now to make one’s opposition known. Very often, such utterances take on a position of self-paralyzing guilt which actually keeps them from taking active and productive responsibility for opposing the occupation even more remote. Sometimes it seems to me that they make boycott politics into a question of moral conscience, which is different from a political commitment. If it is a moral issue, then “I” as an Israeli have a responsibility to speak out or against, to sink into self-beratement or become self-flagellating in public and become a moral icon. But these kinds of moral solutions are, I think, besides the point. They continue to make “Israeli” identity into the basis of the political position, which is a kind of tacit nationalism. Perhaps the point is to oppose the manifest injustice in the name of broader principles of international law and the opposition to state violence, the disenfranchisement politically and economically of the Palestinian people. If you happen to be Israeli, then unwittingly your position shows that Israelis can and do take positions in favor of justice, and that should not be surprising. But it does not make it an “Israeli” position.

But let me return to the question of whether boycott politics undermines collaborative ventures, or opens them up. My wager is that the minute you come out in favor of some boycott, divestment or sanctions strategy, Udi, you will have many collaborators among Palestinians. I think many people fear that the boycott is against collaboration, but in fact Israelis have the power to produce enormous collaborative networks if they agree that they will use their public power, their cultural power, to oppose the occupation through the most powerful non-violent means available. Things change the minute you say, “We cannot continue to act as normal.”

Of course, I myself really want to be able to talk about novels, film, and philosophy, sometimes quite apart from politics. Unfortunately, I cannot do that in Israel now. I cannot do it until the occupation has been successfully and actively challenged. The fact is that there is no possibility of going to Israel without being used either as an example of boycott or as an example of anti-boycott. So when I went, many years ago, and the rector of Tel Aviv University said, “Look how lucky we are. Judith Butler has come to Tel Aviv University, a sign that she does not accept the boycott,” I was instrumentalized against my will. And I realized I cannot function in that public space without already being defined in the boycott debate. So there is no escape from it. One can stay quiet and accept the status quo, or one can take a position that seeks to challenge the status quo.

I hope one day there will be a different political condition where I might go there and talk about Hegel, but that is not possible now. I am very much looking forward to teaching at Bir Zeit in February. It has a strong gender and women’s studies faculty, and I understand that the students are interested in discussing questions of war and cultural analysis. I also clearly stand to learn. The boycott is not just about saying “no” – it is also a way to give shape to one’s work, to make alliances, and to insist on international norms of justice. To work to the side of the problem of the occupation is to participate in its normalization. And the way that normalization works is to efface or distort that reality within public discourse. As a result, neutrality is not an option.

So we’re boycotting normalization.

That’s what we’re boycotting. We are against normalization. And you know what, there are going to be many tactics for disrupting the normalization of the occupation. Some of us will be well-equipped to intervene with images and words, and others will continue demonstrations and other forms of cultural and political statements. The question is not what your passport says (if you have a passport), but what you do. We are talking about what happens in the activity itself. Does it disrupt and contest the normalization of the occupation?

You remember that in Toronto declaration against the spotlight on Tel Aviv at the film festival, it was very clear that we do not boycott individuals, but the Israeli foreign minister tried to argue that we were boycotting individuals. Yet the question is about institutions. On that note, I want to clarify: You will not speak in Tel Aviv University… forever? Well, not forever…

When it’s a fabulous bi-national university [laughter]

Udi Aloni is an Israeli-American filmmaker and writer

What woke me up from my slumber, was a statement by Alan Aziz, Director of the Zionist Federation, quoted in the ZF email, “it is pathetic that self hating Jews, who unfortunately don’t know much, try to turn these events into something they are not.” Should the director of the Zionist Federation be calling people self-hating Jews so freely? What exactly does he mean by the term? I called him to find out.

Anyway, he never got back to me, or at the very least, the person who answered the phone didn’t pass my request for an interview on, but I was going to ask him: 1) what exactly does he mean by a self hating Jew? [Alan, feel free to write us an article on the subject] 2) Does it make sense to call someone a self hating Jew just because they are critical of Israel? 3) Should the director of the ZF be using such terms so freely? 4) How was the ZF gala dinner on Sunday? 5) Is he comfortable legitimising the use of such terms within the general communal discourse?

One argument is that making an accusation that someone is a self hating Jew serves to stifle debate. For me, that is not the major issue. The issue is that such accusations feed into a community that is ever more to the right of the political spectrum, that is ever more willing to see the world in simplified ways and is ever more willing even at the level of community leaders to engage in such simplified discourse. When community representatives go around thinking and speaking in such ways this in turn legitimises such discourse, and people are thereby less likely to challenge their own similar beliefs.

I would like to say Alan Aziz’s statement is a one off. But it isn’t. In a forum on the JC, http://www.thejc.com/blogpost/british-jews-owed-apology Jonathan Hoffman called another blogger, “a lying malodorous shameless libellous trolling reptile.”

Then went on to call the blogger:

“a lying toerag, an insignificant troublemaking muckraking creep, a pathetic time-wasting nonentity, a coward who will not use his real name”

Now, the debate was about whether the ZF by asking members of the ZF to vote, was trying to skew the results of the JPR’s Israel Survey. I agree with Jonathan Hoffman – the ZF were not, they were simply encouraging people to vote, in what is an important but methodologically flawed survey (how will it be possible to judge how representative the survey is of the Jewish population as a whole?).

My point is whether the vice chair of the Zionist Federation, an organisation that represents 55,000 Jews, should enter into a slanging match where he calls someone a malodorous reptile however malodorous that person might be? Is that the level of debate we want our communal representatives to engage in? What happens when he is debating against someone who responds with sophisticated, nuanced arguments, do we have faith that our community leaders will be able to respond with sophisticated nuanced arguments of their own. Maybe one day they will come up against sophisticated and nuanced arguments. Until then, they should raise their game. It simplifies complexity. It lets themselves and us down.

A current buzzword amongst Jewish professionals is ‘peoplehood’. A strange word this, one absent from most dictionaries, and one seemingly invented by Jews, for Jews. A recent proponent of the term argued that the fact that it appears in no other cultures or languages (including Hebrew) ‘shows just how counter-cultural we are’. Or it just shows we’ve made up a stupid word.

So why is this word doing quite so well at the moment? Unsurprisingly, money has a lot to do with it. The Nadav foundation (‘advancing understanding of Jewish Peoplehood and a strengthening of the individual’s pride in being part of the Jewish Collective’) is giving substantial grants to organisations that run Jewish peoplehood themed programmes, whatever that entails

This explains the inclusion of a ‘new peoplehood track’ in the programme of the recently held Limmud UK conference. A whole host of events, panels, discussions etc, were slotted into the programme at very short notice when a grant became forthcoming. Participants could spot these by a cutesy logo of a Jewish family silhouette with a Star of David above their heads. Bless.

The sessions in said track showed the mix of quality one expects from Limmud, with some very interesting and some leading your head to sink deeper and deeper into your lap. But none could disguise the intellectual vacuity of the concept, and its utter shallowness was clearly evident. The nadir came in a supposedly high profile panel, in which David Saperstein, the respected head of the RAC (Reform Action Center) in America came up with the mind boggling statement ‘I have a dream’ (delusions of MLK here)’ that every Jewish child will go to sleep having listened to a Jewish song and played a Jewish video game’.

Sorry?   What kind of Yiddisher Stepford wives/ totalitarian dystopia is this? Is this what a few millennia of Judaism has come to? Frantic use of technology to try and guilt trip assimilated secular Jews into marrying in?  One might imagine Moses standing at the back of a Jewish Peoplehood classroom, struggling to understand how it has anything meaningful to do with Judaism, before being told by some (probably UJIA accredited) educator that, to maintain tribal loyalty above all else is the true meaning of the revelation at Sinai.

For this is the essence of Peoplehood theory, discarding all meaningful religious, linguistic, cultural, and philosophical elements, lest they offend anyone, Jewishness is reduced to a big ethnic love-in. Love your fellow Jew, the only mitzvah that remains. This is secular Judaism at is most extreme, devoid of the elements, such as the Yiddish language, or shared religious reference points, which 100 years ago made secular Judaism viable and dynamic. Jewish Peoplehood theorists take as their starting point the notion that the Jews are, in some mythic way, one people, despite the many linguistic, cultural and social barriers that separate us. From then they consider which elements can unite us, given this diversity. Religion is obviously out, given the vast gulf between the haredi and the ardently secular. Language fails to unite either, with Yiddish increasingly restricted to the Ultra-orthodox, and Hebrew hardly well spoken in the diaspora. Any gathering of European Jews immediately demonstrates the degree of linguistic separation. Culture? Jews have always had multiple cultures, dependent on geography, and this has only been disguised in modernity by the aggressive dominance of Ashkenazi culture, and the unwillingness of the state of Israel to allow the culture of its Sephardi immigrants to perpetuate judaeo-arabic culture. What about social justice/socialism, which motivated so many Jews at the turn of the last century, and was taken by liberal Jewish movements as the essence of Judaism? To the extent that this agenda has survived the embourgouisment of Western Jewry, this is now a diaspora phenomenon. In Israel, proud to be engage in realpolitik, viewing Jewish utopianism as deriving from the ‘ghetto mentality’, the tradition of centring Judaism around the ethics of the political left is virtually extinct. Social Justice Judaism is now an essentially American movement, and when its proponents turn their focus onto Israel, for example with ‘J Street’, the result shows the division rather than unity of the ‘Jewish people’. So what remains? Ultimately, we’re left with race, a (almost certainly illusory) common ethnic descent. Because to discuss race is somewhat unfashionable in polite company, terms like family (often the folksy mispocha) , common heritage or nation are used as synonyms. But make no mistake, in the absence of a genuine shared culture, religion, language, geography or philosophy, we are talking about a unity based on ethnicity, a community of race.

Despite claiming to be able to speak to the current Jewish reality, Peoplehood theory is intrinsically prescriptive rather than descriptive. It aims to return to a (perhaps somewhat imagined) more innocent age, located somewhere in the 1950s, where Jewishness was a warm club, seemed relatively homogenous and any dissent from mainstream narratives was kept firmly below the surface.  Behind Peoplehood’s shiny new façade lies an attempt to put many genies back in the box, those of intermarriage, of increased Jewish diversity and decreasing connection between Israel and diasporic communities. It is thus an agenda for reconstruction rather than renewal, to use Zalman Shachter Shalomi’s terminology, and a clue to its fearfulness is the fact that it is already moving towards dogma. Anita Shapira, of Tel Aviv University has accused Shlomo Sands (whose book ‘The Invention of the Jewish People’ will given a full analysis on Jewdas at a later date) of ‘peoplehood denial’, a phrase evidently designed to ‘evoke’ holocaust denial’, and perhaps even suggest that the two are equally dangerous. This represents another, more sinister aspect to the peoplehood concept, its attempt to buttress the legitimacy of the Zionist project. Most Zionist thinkers maintain as central dogma that ‘every nation/people has the right to self-determination’ (whatever that means), and thus maintaining the notion of Jewish nation or people is necessary to ensure the survival of Israel as a state with a Jewish majority.

None of this is to suggest that all notions of ‘the Jewish people’ are nonsense. The term Am Yisrael, though probably originally meaning something closer to tribe or cultic sect rather than nation, is indeed an ancient term. Even if we accept the Shlomo Sands notion that Judaism is essentially a religion, other religions understood themselves as a coherent group, the Ummah for Islam, and Christendom for Christianity. The claim to Jewish peoplehood has always been mythic, rather than based on any empirical uniting features, but we can acknowledge that many practising Jews throughout history understood ‘am yisrael’ to be a meaningful concept, however they interpreted it. What is new, however, is the attempt to separate the notion of the Jewish people from all other elements of Judaism, and make it the sole focus. Traditional Judaism posits a triangle: God-Torah-Israel. Peoplehood eliminates two thirds of the triangle, surely leaving us with something approaching an idolising of race.  This Judaism without content eliminates halacha, aggadah, prayer, philosophy, rabbinic hermeneutics and personal and communal ethics, in the name of building a faux unity. One need not be ‘religious’ in order to appreciate this; a ‘secular’ Judaism can be equally content driven, by Yiddish song and literature, by the Ladino language, by the modern Jewish philosophical tradition, by a knowledge of Jewish history. Such content does indeed unify its practitioners, but focussing on an ‘object’ rather than ourselves, frees us of the narcissicism and exclusivity that otherwise occurs.

It is feared that a focus on particular content, such as modern Jewish philosophy, or the Yiddish language, will fail to connect us to the whole, will in fact detach us from our collective unity and belonging. It probably will. But this is inevitable; there is no unity to which we ought to be belonging, no essence that binds us all together. Judaism/Jewishness is without centre, diverse sets of cultures, practices and politics that are bound together only polemically in the service of particular ideological projects. But so what? Is that such a problem? From Mediaeval philosophers to Kabbalists, Jews have frequently been more attached to their particular ideologies and communities than to the ‘collective’. The strongest Jewish communities had the greatest diversity and argument, only the experience of 20^th century hatred coupled with the fear of corrosive modernity has driven us to strive for an imagined unity.

A recognised trend, amongst certain Jewish commentators, is a shift away from focussing on peoplehood towards a focus on meaning. Perhaps there is something in this. It is arguably a North American phenomenon rather than a global one, and it is a move toward meanings in the plural rather than singular. And it is still an attempt to introduce a meta-narrative, to reinstate an essence to Judaism by the back door. But such a shift, if there is one, towards content(s) and meaning(s) does have a major advantage. When we next meet, for our big ethnic love-in, at least we’ll have something to talk about.

Few remain who still personally remember the peak of modern secular Yiddish culture. That period which began with the stories of the ‘grandfather’ of Yiddish literature, Mendele Moykher Sforim, in the end of the nineteenth century and ended with the Nazi and Stalinist purges of Eastern Europe. With the recent passing of Avrom Sutzkever, master of Yiddish verse, that wonderful page of Jewish existence is now perhaps over.

Sutzkever seemed to have been through it all. Born in Smorgon in 1913, (now Smarhoń, Belarus) he escaped WWI with his family by fleeing to Siberia. After the war he returned to Vilna, a city renowned as the Yerusholayim d’Lita (Jerusalem of Lithuania) because of the outstanding religious, cultural and political achievements of its relatively small Jewish community. This was the birthplace of the Vilna Gaon, YJascha Heifetz, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Jewish Labor Bund. As a young adult he helped form the Yung Vilne (Young Vilna) group of poets with Chaim Grade, Leyzer Volf and others. This interwar period produced many masterpieces of secular Yiddishkeit, but was smashed as Nazi occupation oversaw the murder or ghettoisation of the Baltic Jews. The Nazis forced Sutzkever to work in a group of Jewish intellectuals for the ‘Paper Brigade’, gathering works from YIVO for the ominously named ‘Institute for the Research into the Jewish Question’, based in Frankfurt. Instead, they made sure to hide important items – documents, art, books, and so forth – of which much would eventually reach the New York based YIVO. Crucially for the ghetto’s Jewish partisans, the United Partisan Organization (FPO), bomb making instructions were saved by the Paper Brigade. After a failed ambush against the Nazis, the FPO gave up on sparking a Warsaw style uprising in Vilna and shifted their resistance to the forest and swamp. Avrom Sutzkever and his wife escaped the ghetto and joined the FPO in Belarus, living and fighting in the woods. 90% of Vilna’s Jewish population were to be murdered by the Nazis and their local cohorts – Sutzkever’s mother and young child included. He was airlifted to Moscow towards the end of the war and then moved to Poland. In the years following WWII danger was still near for Yiddish intellectuals in the Soviet Union: Stalin was to purge even the most fervently pro-Soviet Yiddish intellectuals for their “nationalist tendencies”. So Sutzkever escaped to Palestine. There, as if in an endless series of struggles, he stood up to fierce Hebraist anti-Yiddish parochialism and set up the Goldene Keyt (Golden Chain), which he edited for forty years, establishing Israel as a post-Holocaust literary centre of the Yiddish world. He wrote his poetry through and about all of this, telling the NY Times, “When I was in the Vilna ghetto, I believed, as an observant Jew believes in the Messiah, that as long as I was writing, was able to be a poet, I would have a weapon against death.”

When Avrom Sutzkever passed away on the 20th of January 2010, at the age of 96, Jewdas contacted klezmer musician and poet Daniel Kahn, whose work has often dealt with themes of resistance, for his feelings on the passing of the Yiddish master.

Daniel Kahn:

Thanks for asking. Actually, I’ve been thinking about Sutzkever a lot in the last few days. As my friend Michael Alpert says, quoting the Jewish Belarusan musicologist Dima Slepovitch, “the mastodons are departing us”. Sutzkever was one of the first Yiddish poets I really fell in love with. I encountered his poems first in translation and then in the original. Reading about his life and struggles in David Roskies’ excellent book Against the Apocalypse was also inspiring.

In 2008 I took part in an interdisciplinary workshop under the direction of Michael Ronen, an Israeli theatre director living here in Berlin. We were a group of about 20 actors, musicians, dancers, sculptors, film makers, photographers, and writers from Israel (Jewish and Muslim), Palestine, Germany, and America (I felt like the only Jew somehow. Well, diasporic anyway.) For a few weeks we met everyday in a gallery space and simply encountered one another using various games and exercises. Most of what we did was theatrical, but I thought a project of translating poems from one language or culture to another would be interesting. I brought in several books of German, Yiddish, Israeli, and Palestinian poetry and we found poems that were especially resonant to us. Ultimately we had versions of Brecht poems in Hebrew, Palestinian poems in Yiddish, Israeli poems in German, etc. I was particularly struck by the way my friend Osama Zatar, a Palestinian sculptor now living and working with his Israeli wife in Vienna, was moved by a poem I showed him by Avrom Sutzkever. It is one of my favorites. Osama spoke of his understanding of the kind of emptiness which can come with the joy of long awaited liberation. And the alienated reckoning with the past which follows. He translated and performed the poem in Arabic.

The poem was written in 1943 in the Vilna ghetto, long from the war’s end. Sutzkever, a member of the fated “Paper Brigades” was surrounded by the collapse and destruction of his culture and civilization. In the poem, he asks us to imagine what a supposed liberation might be like in the shadow of so much loss. Last week, upon hearing of Sutzkever’s death, I sat down with the poem and decided to translate it into an english lyric I could sing with the original Yiddish. I set it to a melody by my friend Michael Winograd. We will record the song next week, hopefully to be a part of our next album. Below is the poem in its original and transliteration, and my adaptation into English. I hope it speaks to you. Lekoved zayn ondenk. Honor his memory.

all the best,
Daniel

In Chelm, where I grew up, I remember a town of many Jews and a fair few Gentiles. My family, like all the Jewish families in Chelm used to lament the Czar and then later during the Polish-Russian War they lamented the Communist occupation and then they lamented the nationalist government and when the Nazis came, they stopped lamenting. Then in the displaced persons’ camp they started lamenting again, and briefly we lamented in the land of Israel, and then in the Lower East side, a hotel in Cincinnati, on subjects ranging from the Yiddish Press to whether a Soviet Invasion of America would be a good thing or not, until finally on a vacation in Niagara Falls, I decided I had had enough of these wandering lamentations and decided to return to Chelm to live out my days.

I recall from my childhood that even in a provincial town like Chelm, far away from Warsaw, many people thought of themselves as revolutionaries. My father, who was a Bundist, took me to the hill overlooking Chelm and told me to take off my glasses. “What do you see?” he asked me. “Its blurry” I replied. “Exactly!” my father responded, getting increasingly excited, “But in the future, you will see Jews from the East unto the West.” “Which direction is East and which direction is West?” I asked. My father tutted. “Nudnigs Eat Saltbeef Whenever” he said pointing to the left and then the right. “The point is, the Bundists are going to create new Jews, no longer needing spectacles. And what are the Zionists doing? Nothing! Apart from sitting around all day discussing Zionist theory.” When as an old man he was receiving corrective eye surgery in a Tel Aviv clinic and was able to see the world again anew, I reminded my father of his words. He simply replied that my story was nonsense as there was no such hill overlooking Chelm.

I found the once proud community a shadow of its former self. The synagogue across the road from where I grew up had been converted into well to do flats for government officials. The street had lost its hustle and bustle. Jewish women in modest dresses had been replaced by gentile women who smiled knowingly at drunken men standing outside local bars making comments and winking at them as they walked past. My return doubled the number of Jews in Chelm. There were now two Jews in Chelm – myself and the local Catholic Priest. The priest was a real mensch. During the war, he had been a righteous gentile and later he had been made an honorary Jew by the state of Israel in recognition of his activities.

He had instigated a whispering campaign implying that prominent local Nazis had large noses and slight curls at the end of their hair. Nazi officers, shocked that they possessed anything other than pure Aryan features would visit the only plastic surgeon in the area, Doctor Levertov, and the best barber in town, Shmuel Grinsky and would beg to be helped.

The priest’s rumours took hold with such persuasion, that Hitler himself if he had been in the area would have visited the local barber to get imperceptible adjustments to his hair. Over time, these rumours became the major source of income to the Chelm ghetto and allowed them to purchase and smuggle in three revolvers, which were used in the famous Chelm Ghetto Brunch Uprising of August 19^th, 11.03 – 11.57 am, so called because it started when Grodzinskis in Chelm started to refuse to sell buerekas after 11am on weekdays.

Throughout all the lamentations, the worst thing that ever happened to me, happened many years later, because of Bela. Bela was the woman I married when I returned to Chelm. She was short, had black curls, dark eyes, a prominent nose and I was sure cooked the best chicken soup in South East Poland. She was a Gentile, but if you were the type to marry a Gentile, she was as close to the real thing as you were going to get.

One year, the day before Yom Kippur. I had been out trying to eat as much food as possible in anticipation of the fast ahead. I returned home having eaten the finest dishes from three of Chelm’s best restaurants. I was already looking forward to breaking the fast in just over a days time. When I entered the kitchen, Bela was just finishing a bowlful of tortellini. “Would you like some?” she asked, “There is some in the pot.” “Bela my little Bagele” I replied,  “why not?” and put some on a plate. The taste was unfamiliar to me. Not worse or better than the familiar tastes of tortellini I knew, just different. It certainly was not Spinach and Ricotta.

After a few mouthfuls I began to become suspicious. “Bela?” I asked. “What is inside this tortellini?” “Oh” she replied, “I’m sorry, pork and mushroom”. “Pork! you know I cannot eat pork.” “I’m sorry, what will happen?” An image entered my mind of a small pink animal with a short curled tail ready to blow my old house opposite the synagagogue down. “Its Yom Kippur. Nothing will happen, but it is the most important day of the year.” I looked at her and her dark ringlets and cursed my luck. I began to feel sick, as if all the sins of living in a town with only one other Jew, unable to form a Minyan were upon me. Eating pork just before the Kol Nidre service, I will have treif meat inside me on the holiest day of the Jewish year. Throughout all the wanderings, it is my own wife that brings such a calamity upon me. Truly I thought, this is the reason why they say Jews should not marry Gentiles.

But this time I’m doing it because I keep discovering new Jewish punks, and I wondered whether they hinted at some underlying rebellious super-talent that we all have inside us that’s lying dormant. Normally other Jewish people make me feel like I was dealt a dodgy hand, but then you find people like this and it’s OK. Let’s take a tour.

There’s something of a bible for Jewish punk out there – Steven Lee Beeber’s Heebie-Jeebie’s at CBGBs, which I read recently. It’s not the world’s best read, trying a bit too hard to ‘explain’ why lots of NY Jews were punks, but it’s a treat for “I didn’t know….” fans. Here’s one of them – Richard Hell:

He’s OK. He’s quite buff isn’t he? A wannabe muscle Jew in the making perhaps. But I’m not a fan of American punk especially, preferring the eccentricity and world-weariness of the first British punks, so let’s move on. If you want more on American punk Jews right up to the present day, then you should probably first check out Jewcy. And those featured on the website for the new Punk Jews film.

But in the UK, first you have to go to Malcolm McLaren. McLaren is very interesting indeed. He’s not a punk who merely happened to be Jewish, he unashamedly looks it, and he brought the mix-and-match wheeler-dealing of the shmatte trade he came from with him when he stitched the uniforms for the first punks. He has a wild eye and he’s a loner. I’m fascinated by this man who, whilst heroined-up nihilists failed to work guitars properly all around him, remained an empire-building workaholic with a flair for style and situationist pointlessness. He’s never reneged on the bored-of-it-all contract with punk, and he’s remained a strange old fellow. Here he is in 1984, being wonderful:

McLaren wasn’t involved socially with the other punk era people, but there seems to have been a little group of them who were on the squat scene together. Starting with Mick Jones of The Clash, who looks like he’s stepped in off a 30s anti-fascist march:

I know he wasn’t 100% Jewish, but he passes for me. He’s cheeky and seems to be having fun all the time. He’s cultivated an unnecessarily cockneyfied voice by this stage in his career, which is lovely.

Mick used to be in The Clash with Keith Levene, who was amazing but a bit mad. He had a birds nest hairdo and a hard stare. He always looks sad. He’s very cool. Here he is being almost silent, but when he does talk, he’s really quite beautiful:

Keith was at the deconstructing end of punk. Like my suggestion for finest Jewish punk lady ever, Vivien Goldman, who had done for Jewish-Black cultural relations than anyone else in the last 30 years. Not to be hyperbolic or anything. Here she is:

Now she really looks like a troublemaker. But if you want a real Jewish punk shit-stirrer, forget the UK or the US. In fact forget the 70s, he came before then. I give you greatest Jewish romantic nihilist, Serge Gainsbourg…

What a terrifying sight for bourgeois society. He could bring down society with one flick of his pouty Franco-Jewish chops.

Screenshot of the hacked JC Site

In an unusual and bold editorial move, Stephen Pollard today launched his one-man crusade to counteract the perceived pro-Israeli bias in the mainstream Jewish press. In a shock move, the frontpage of the JC website currently (17.01.10) sports a Palestinian flag and urges readers to stop devouring people’s wealth by false pretences. Pollard also asks readers to reconsider their support for vampires.

It seems that since Pollard’s intervention, the site has been updated, to suggest that the surprising text is the result of Palestinian hackers. But a cursory glance at the quality of journalism reveals Pollard’s trademark syntax and style. Jewdas can only conclude that the new heading is the handiwork of some fine and efficient hasbara. If only all jews were so vigilant, our support for the vampire could remain unabated.

Media analyst and teenage hearthrob Neil Lazarus was quick to comment stating ‘This is shocking. [He paused pretentiously] What we have here  is clear proof that the jews have finally lost control of the media, what next? With financial institutions in free-fall. International Communism on the wane and Democrats in the White House our traditional strangle-hold on power is becoming more and more precarious.’

Whilst the Board of Deputies has been quick, on consulting their Handbook of Antisemitsm, to decry the editorial as racist, citing especially the sections on usury and vampires, Independent Jewish Voices, finally emerging from Hampstead Starbucks countered ‘yet again, legitimate criticism of Israel is labelled anti-semitism in a knee-jerk attempt to de-limit the hermeneutic space surrounding the Zionist entity.’

Stephen Pollard was unavailable for comment.

Google listing for thejc.com

This is not a revelation to any of us who can recognise that Jewish representative groups, from extreme pro-Israel to moderate pro-Jewish, have long attempted to trade on their most recognisable point of influence with easily-swayed politicians – antisemitism. It sells better than the good deeds Jews could do for the wider world. Anyone can be a good citizen, only Jews can be victims of antisemitism, so if Governments are to look after the Jewish people that well-funded institutions are (supposedly) serving, those institutions need to get cracking on the rich fear and sympathy vote.

That’s the heart of this film. The reaction has predictably been dragged into the dirt of polarised Israel-Palestine debate, because Shamir is Israeli, and so are some of the people in his film. One of the (very mild) heroes of the doc, David Hirsch, has played down his sympathetic portrayal, by bizarrely writing that it’s OK, he doesn’t just like Palestinians, he likes Israelis too. Phew – there was me thinking that his moderate opinions that Palestinians might need human rights inevitably meant he was also saying that all Israelis were scum. Thanks for the clarification.

That Hirsch, and the usual tedious parade of Comment is free respondents after his article on there, feel that this was primarily a film about Israel is a frustrating misunderstanding. Israel features in it, but it’s mainly a film about Jewish paranoia, and that’s harder to have a debate about. It’s more painful – it exposes the void at the core of modern Jewish identity. We’re defined by negative identity.

Shamir is previously been known for a straight verite style, for example in Checkpoint observing the interactions between people full of enmity without any intervention. In Defamation though, he’s our presenter, and it’s not a style he seems entirely comfortable with. He’s charismatic, sure, but he’s also not sure what he’s doing, and I love that. He’s genuinely confused about what people say to him and how he feels, and you would not get that from a ‘normal’ on-screen guide who wants to anchor us in their persuasive rhetoric. Shamir isn’t Nick Broomfield. He’s more Louis Theroux, but without any knowing devices to get people to say things they’ll regret. They just do it anyway, because he’s apparently really not sure what to say to them. So they talk themselves into a frenzy.

And who can blame Shamir for his confusion? He exposes the endless trudge that constitutes existence for those who base their lives on antisemitism. It’s a complex world of oral nuance that can break even the most schooled of people. Shamir bounces between speakers with agendas who swing between over-careful pronouncements and wild bizarre accusation. He’s visibly shocked at times – the doc gives new life to the old cliche of the voyage of discovery. Though he’s very occasionally putting it on for show, I think he really is bemused. He claims that he made the film in response to a life in Israel which was for him entirely shielded from antisemitism. And he thinks the concept is now an exclusively diasporic obsession, and it’s become the defining feature of modern Jewish identity.

So he asks key figures who are obsessed with either antisemitism or the lack of it what it means to them. What they say might appall and depress you – Abe Foxman from the ADL especially is a loose cannon of paranoia, albeit (probably) coming deep deep down from a place of genuine concern. But Shamir’s triumph is to make a doc that easily resets the agenda of intra-Jewish dichotomies of Zionist vs Not and Diaspora vs Israel, by showing us the verbal misunderstandings and misuse of words that run over all sides. No more so than when the group of Israeli young people are whipped up by their trip leaders and by each other into verbal confusion, ignorance and finally, shocking anger.

It’s a very clever film which doesn’t judge, but comes out of a complex agenda which is above all for speaking with honesty and not misusing words to stir up conflict. But before I progress much more, I want you to watch it, and you can do so (in the UK) for another 3 weeks or so here

Watched it? Good, you can have an opinions now. My opinion is that it’s a wake-up call to resolve the crisis in what makes us retain our identities as Jewish, however small or large that identity may be. We shouldn’t retain it because we deeply support or deeply oppose Israel, because we strongly fear or strongly reject antisemitism, because we think we’re universally loved or universally hated. There has to be more, there has to be something positive, or there is no point. The time has come to declare that it’s not just boring to keep circling the same arguments about Israel and the racist bogeymen, it’s denying an alternative space for taking pride in what’s positive about our thousands of years of traditions and how we can be positive and indeed radical forces for changing the world.

Shamir is not the only Jewish fiilmmaker to have said over recent years that he finds films about inward-looking Jewish society quite boring, because they inevitably reaffirm the status quo, even if they’re critical of it. There needs to be something new to give us hope for – Jamie Kastner attempted it with his Kike Like Me, although that was hindered by its aim of exploring how non-Jews view us, rather than how we view ourselves. Eyal Sivan has repeatedly tried to imagine a space beyond the screen where we meet collectively to live a Jewish life dedicated to peace and progress. His upcoming Jaffa, The Clockwork’s Orange is an attempt to learn through the mistakes of history to imagine a single state (in both senses of the word) of Jewish-non Jewish radical collaboration. But it’s still a negative approach to what makes Jewish identity, defining us by mistakes and a lack.

Shamir embodies this lack. He does very well, even if I’m sick of films about this lack. If this could be the last film about the lack, and put it to bed for a while, I’d be delighted.

The complexities of race and nationalism in Israeli society show many of their elements in this short video.

This is a recording from a demonstration on the 25 December 2009 against the deportation of Palestinian families from Sheikh Jarakh, East Jerusalem, where Israeli settlers are taking over the Palestinian side of the city with the legal backing of the Israeli courts. [1] and [2].

It shows two Mizrahi (Jews of Arab origin) men shouting at the demonstrators who they perceive as predominantly Ashkenazi. (Jews of European origin) Although both the settlers and the judges involved the Sheikh Jarakh disaster are also of Ashekenazi decent, it is only the lefty non-zionist demonstrations who receive such anti-semitic and homophobic remarks.

The Ashkenazi’s cultural and economic dominance over Mizrahi Jews in Israel and their desperate dependence on a racist nationalist society in which ‘filthy Arabs’ are at least ranked lower than them, might explain these Mizrahi reaction to this demonstration. This antagonistic relationship has been exploited many times by Israel’s right wing political parties – who are also all led by European Jews – in order to mobilize against the Left.

One year ago it was day 16 of Operation Cast Lead, as Israeli generals had called it; the Gaza Massacre as history will surely remember it; 11 January 2009. Israeli ground forces were in the thick of combat. The sky over Gaza plumed with towering smoke. Palestinian civilians dead by this point: hundreds; injured: thousands. Supplies blocked, energy cut, hospitals and UN safe houses missiled, borders shut, no escape for refugees, that was Gaza. Palestinian militant fired rockets created craters and media circus’ in nearby Israeli towns which once had Arabic names. Ten Israeli soldiers had been killed in action, four in friendly fire, three Israeli civilians were dead. Around 1,400 Palestinians were to pay retribution with their lives. It all began on the sixth day of Chanukah, Kislev 30th 5769.

it was a piercingly frosty winter day in London. The day before saw a huge march in solidarity with the besieged Palestinians snake through the centre of the city. This day a much smaller crowd, though still thousands large, flew Israeli flags amongst blue and white placards which read ‘END HAMAS TERROR’, Israel’s catchphrase justification for its siege. The rally was called by the Board of Deputies of British Jewry and the Chief Rabbi – ie, it was called in the name of British Jewry. A blue and white sea floods Trafalgar Square in the centre of London. This was the scene Jewdas had infamously cancelled. Upon a stage in front of Nelson’s Column stands the British Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks.

Sacks: Hamas! Just say three words: Yes. To. Peace.

The crowd cheers and applauds.

Sacks: And the day will come…

Crowd: YES TO PEACE! YES TO PEACE! YES TO PEACE! YES TO PEACE! YES TO PEACE! YES TO PEACE! YES TO PEACE!

Sacks: And the day will come… It will come…

A lone voice can be heard shouting through a megaphone: JONATHAN! Join me in a song!

The crowd falls absolutely silent.

Sacks: …when Israelis and Palestinians…

The loan voice continues: Join me in a song which we both sang not very long ago.

A Youtube poster, 1979seamaster, who had been recording the Chief Rabbi’s speech on his mobile phone, swings his aim towards who we now recognise as Dov Neumann, author of this article. He stands atop of the lip of a Trafalgar Square fountain, facing Rabbi Sacks with a red megaphone at his mouth.

Crowd: Shut up, shut up! Booooo! (and other loud forms of condemnation)

Dov: It’s a song from Chanu…

Suddenly a fist smacks Dov’s belly from the hand of the person standing beside him, a Jewish man of middle age, sending Dov falling backwards onto the frozen water fountain.

Sacks, in reference to Dov’s interruption: Don’t worry, don’t worry. I knew it was a Jewish event when someone started angrily! [sic.]

Dov sings the first two lines of the children’s Chanukah song: Sevivon, sov sov sov, Chanukah hu chag tov! (‘Spinning top, spin spin spin, Chanukah is a good festival’)

Sacks: We can handle a little…

Dov: Sevivon, sov sov sov, Chanukah hu chag tov!

The tremendously loud jeering of the crowd continues.

Dov: Sevivon…

A shard of ice one foot square in size flies through the air towards Dov. It had been plucked from the frozen fountain and now sails from the direction of another rally participant. It hits Dov’s face with a loud crack.

Dov tries to persist on despite having collapsed through the ice of the fountain into the freezing water: …sov sov sov…

Sacks: And i want to tell you with your megaphone…

Another block of ice is thrown at Dov from another rally participant, a middle aged man. It narrowly misses him. The middle aged man turns awkwardly towards those around him. He bears a wide but vaguely defeated grin.

Sacks: …a day will come when Israelis and Palestinians…

Dov: One day! This is Operation Cast Lead Sevivon!

A stocky, yellow bibbed member of the Community Support Team, (CST) the UK’s Jewish security organisation whose origins lie in the militant anti-fascist struggles of post WWII London, moves behind the man who threw the second block of ice. He pauses.

Sacks: …Jews, Muslims and Christians; the people of Sderot and the people of Gaza…

The CST guard puts a hand on the shoulder of the second ice thrower, who nervously jerks around. In order to push himself up into the fountain, he uses the ice thrower’s shoulder for support. Slowly he wades through the icy fountain in the direction of Dov.

Dov jolts his megaphone aim from Rabbi Sacks to the approaching security guard and adjusts his kippah. (Jewish skullcap) He is recorded shouting “Why are you…”

Sacks: …will live together in peace; no longer fighting one another,…

Dov: Freedom to Pal…

Sacks: …helping one another to live in freedom and dignity!

The crowd cheers.

Sacks: That day will come!

The crowd roars on, animated by Sacks’ oration.

Sacks: It could be a hundred years away…

Dov kissing the CST guard. CNN

CNN footage shows Dov held in a two handed grip by the security guard. He lurches forward and kisses his interlocutors cheek, but with a sweep of the guards right hand, has his head shoved chest-wards. CNN shows the two talking strongly to one another. Meanwhile a second Jewish security guard cautiously begins his entry into the fountain.

Sacks: …or it could be today, it’s up to Hamas…

The CST guard raises his left arm to clutch Dov by the neck and Dov responds by trying for another kiss. (greeting kisses are best made once on each cheek, aren’t they?) The guard applies the palm of his hand to Dov’s face to halt the second kiss from nearing him.

Meanwhile, the second guard slips on the floor of the icy fountain though manages to hold himself up.

Sacks: …and the countries who give it arms.

Dov shouts: JONATHAN!

Sacks: And for the sake of the Palestinian children and the Israeli children: …

By this point Dov is tugged by the two security guards towards the periphery of the fountain. A member of which reaches for Dov’s megaphone and breaks off a vital element, disabling it. The surrounding crowd cheers.

Sacks: Let – it – be – to – day.

The crowd applauds tremendously and waves the flag of Israel.

Sacks: But in the meanwhile we say: Beloved G-d, the G-d we worship …

Dov: You do not represent me!

Sacks: … the G-d of life who told us to sanctify life …

Dov: You do not represent me!

Sacks: … Al-Rachman. The G-d of Abraham, Avraham, Ibrahim, father of our several faiths. Beloved G-d. Show us the way…

Dov: You do not …

Sacks: … your way, the way of salaam …

The two CST security guards pull Dov to the edge of the water fountain. Here, nearby members of the rally – middle aged with South African accents – help wrestle Dov out.

Sacks: …the way of shalom, the way of peace: Let it come today.

The crowd cheers and applauses.

Sacks: And friends, let us sing together, for the sake of peace.

Policemen arrive on scene, having been called by the security. They ask what the problem is. Dov responds that the Policemen don’t speak a common language as this crowd so they couldn’t understand what the problem might be.

Then he attempts to clamber back into the fountain.

Without success he is seized on all sides and dragged through and away from the rally. He is handcuffed and carried by his arms and legs, face-down, towards a Police van, screaming “Ani Gam Yehudit!” [I'm also Jewish], “Free Palestine!” and “Sevivon, sov sov sov“.

A Jewish prayer cantor leads the crowd in the Sabbath prayer of Oseh Shalom, which translates as, ‘May he who makes peace in high places, make peace for us and for all Israel, and let us say, amen’.

Why?

I recognise that the point of my action wasn’t necessarily obvious nor my motives clear. But then again, I’m tired of always having a clear motive, demand and message to enlighten the world with. I simply felt the urge to stand up to the Chief Rabbi and a crowd of poshetn yidn, simple Jews like myself, and sing a Chanukah song which we all knew. I feel like the spirit in which that act was received reflected these peoples spirit towards Chanukah, and of Judaism more widely.

Israel invaded Gaza as we were all lighting the sixth candle of Chanukah, the festival of lights. Chanukah has always been the most tender of festivals for me. Candles, giant Grodinsky jam donuts blessed with the miracle of going stale if left overnight, latkes and apple sauce, family, a present here or there, songs and, crucially, sevivonim. (dreidls, spinning tops) Chanukah is the celebration of how a tiny miracle can take place within the greatest of violent acts: a flame of hope lasting longer than it should have within the ruins of the destroyed Jewish Temple. As a child, Chanukah was the festival I looked forward to the most.

On the TV the opening bombardment of Gaza looked like a firework display – Israel’s equivalent of Chanukah lights par excellence – from the peripheral vantage point of the worlds media who were blocked from entering Gaza itself.

Of the 1,400 Palestinians left dead by the invasion around 320 were children, not including those who must have died from secondary causes. The Israeli military named the invasion Operation Cast Lead after a line in Chaim Nachman Bialik’s poem Lichvod Hachanukkah, (In Honour of Chanukah) a childrens’ Chanukah song.

Teacher bought a big top for me,

Solid lead, the finest known.

In whose honour, for whose glory?

For Chanukah alone.

It’s a beautiful poem, written by one of the great Yiddish and Modern Hebrew poets, whose meaning has been perverted. Its a child’s song about receiving simple presents for Chanukah: the flicker of a candle from father, a pancake from mother, an old penny from uncle, a lead sevivon from teacher. In Bialik’s time lead wasn’t considered a poisonous metal. Now, of course, it is, and you wouldn’t intentionally give one cast from lead. Unless, that is, you had some kind of sick malicious intention. Couldn’t Lichvod Hachanukah have been left to be a charmingly anachronistic poem, instead of being played out so literally, so fatally? Like the spirit of Chanukah, it was never a song about suffering: It was one of great hopes cloaked in smallness and innocence.

Growing up I always sung a different sevivon song and that’s the one I sang to Rabbi Sacks. Sevivon, Sov sov sov: Spinning top, spin spin spin. It emphasises, the randomness of the sevivon’s path and landing. It’s a lesson in mazel – luck and fate. Will it land on ג (gadol – great), נ (nes – miracle), ה (haya – happened) or ש (sham – there)? It always falls on one side of the sentence, ‘A great miracle happened there’. That’s the spirit of Chanukah: to look towards the inextinguishable but delicate fire of humanity, not towards the darkness of revenge.

Israel rained upon the children of Gaza and their parents, poisonous sevivons with the נ, the miracle, missing. Perhaps they replaced it with a ט for טבח, massacre? Or is that the sevivon given to Israeli children, poisoning them with a cry of endless retribution, for deeds which their parents have themselves caused?

I wonder if Chanukah can ever be appreciated by on oppressing people, perversely convinced that the resistance of those under their dominance can be paralleled to the empire which destroyed the great Jewish Temple. It is no miracle that the State of Israel exists as it does when it is backed by the full militaristic support of the worlds only superpower: It is an endless miracle that the people of Palestine still find hope to carry on. Surely then most Gazans inherently comprehended the spirit of Chanukah whilst those supporting Israel, at least at this point, simply did not.

The little sevivon was never meant to cause suffering. Since it was, I was singing: singing a song of innocence, of children, a stolen song, a song I wanted back, a child’s anthem. Chanukah had to be reclaimed from those who confused the blaze of the Chanukiah (the Chanukah candelabra) with the fire over humanity which Israel created. The sevivon had to have its symbolism restored: not death, but hope. Chanukah’s honour and glory, which Bialik sung of, was stolen and forgotten. It had to be returned. That’s why I sung the song of the sevivon.

Postscript

As I was being tussled out of the fountain by the guards and crowd I heard a young voice shouting at his father. I looked up and saw a teenage boy attempting to calm down his middle aged dad who was violently grappling me. Regardless, the father continued, he looked like a man possessed. Father and son came out on this frosty day to support Israel together: I wonder how they left.