An Invitation to the Anti-Zionists
Elisa Albert
You refused to sit on a literary panel with me. I invite you to my Shabbes table instead, so we can actually talk to each other and face our fears.
Tablet Magazine
As I write these words, my challah dough is in the mixer for 20 minutes before going into the fridge overnight.
Tomorrow, before Shabbat, when the time comes to braid and bake, I will break off a piece of dough, the size of an olive, wrap it up twice, and throw it away.
This is an esoteric tradition. A symbolic offering. A form of performative charity. A ridding of excess. A mini sacrifice. A gift. A casting off.
But we’re not there yet.
For now, mixer on hypnotic low, I’m puzzling over how to face the troubling situation at hand: Two writers I don’t know just sabotaged our scheduled panel at a literary festival in my hometown, on purported grounds that they refuse to share space with a “Zionist.”
(Me!)
How odd, to be a loathsome thing in the imaginations of people you’ve never met.
And … I can’t help but wonder if either of these people actually knows the definition of Zionism.
Let me help: Zionism is the belief that the State of Israel has the right to exist. Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people (literally aka “Israel”) has the right to self-determination, peace, and safety in our ancestral homeland. Zionism precludes no other peaceful nationalist ambitions or aspirations.
There are as many flavors and shades of Zionism as there are Jews alive on planet Earth. Zionism is nonbinary. Zionism is de-colonization. Zionism means, not to put too fine a point on it, that there is a place where people like me can (theoretically) exist free from the precise bullshit at hand.
Use of the word “Zionist” as a permissible pejorative is a tool of brainwashed propagandists to dehumanize the people of Israel, wherever we reside, and to blame “us” for the horrific ongoing violence in an achingly, tragically, nightmarishly endless regional conflict, the latest conflagrations of which have inflamed many a conspiracist imagination and inspired many a nihilistic trauma tourist.
This, it is apparently not needless to say, helps zero Palestinian civilians or Muslims or Christian Arabs or Bedouins or Druze or assimilated diaspora quasi-Jews or Western gentiles looking for cheap thrills in anarchist drag. It brings zero relief to anyone directly impacted by this intractable, gruesome conflict. Not in Gaza, not in the Galilee, not in the Negev, not in Judea or Samaria, not in East Jerusalem. Not in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, or Iran.
It simply further entrenches a stale, appalling, hopeless status quo.
It does, however, allow a couple of writers who live in New York and Connecticut to play at a form of primal social-political-personal pseudo-identitarian catharsis (which I guess isn’t nothing!).
Oh, the short, half-life payoffs of misplaced nationalism: It’s like a drug, in how precious little it asks of you.
In the past year, our tribe (I wonder if it helps to categorize “us” thusly … in that no reasonable person could feel politically/culturally/personally entitled to spew bigotry toward, say, Native Americans) has witnessed a tsunami of historical erasure, misinformation, and confusion about Judaism in general and Israel in particular.
Most shocking has been the specter of “allies” in so many progressive movements—anti-racism, queer liberation, art, feminism, education, pronoun-preferences, equality, sex-positivity, diversity, size-inclusive slow fashion, witty tote bags—eagerly, carelessly parroting some of the laziest, most twisted antisemitic ideas and incitement known to human history.
People like me—which is to say “Zionists,” which is to say Jews with a basic understanding of, interest in, and emotional/intellectual/familial investment in communal care for lived Judaism and “other” Jews—have been screaming about this for almost a year, now.
(Because of, you know, that unspeakable thing that happened almost a year ago.)
The heart, as poet Mary Oliver wrote, breaks and breaks and lives by breaking.
Anyway, the literary festival.
Our panel was to have been called “Girls, Coming of Age.”
When I agreed to moderate it, months ago, I privately rolled my eyes. Sure, yeah, whatever: “Girls.” Whatever that’s supposed to mean, in whoever’s imagination, for whatever purposes of rote reduction, simplification, and/or condescension.
I and the other writers in question all happen to be middle-aged, but “Women, Having Come of Age” doesn’t have the same appeal, I guess. Nor, say, “People With Vaginas, Existing in Time.”
(Meanwhile, can you imagine a panel of middle-aged male novelists being grouped together under the banner of “Boys Will Be Boys”?)
Alas, we’ll have to save the exegesis of gender for another op-ed. Squabbles over genitalia, costume, behavior, eros, and role-playing suddenly seem so adorably quaint. Everything skews a bit different in wartime.
Back to my challah.
The following day, I braid the risen dough and discard that small piece, size of an olive. Subtext alert! Olives grow on branches on trees. Many such trees exist in the Holy Land. Many a mediocre meditation on the long, gruesome conflict between Arabs and Jews in said land feature rhapsodic asides about lost olive trees. The olive branch in the mouth of the dove after the flood is a promise of … you got this.
As I remove that little piece of dough, I make a conscientious effort to symbolically remove some of the ugliness of this situation—the idiotic boycott, the utter failure of the overseeing cultural institution to unequivocally call it out, the scab ripped off so much generational trauma and rage and grief and fear over the past year, the general and specific horrors of war—from my life, body, mind, heart, and soul, if only for this brief, passing moment in time.
And while the challah rises in the oven, I wonder: What if the anti-Zionists had been brave (or brazen) enough to show up and appear alongside me at that literary festival?
What if, despite imagining me to be their enemy, and the enemy, I imagine they imagine, of everything good and decent and right in the world, they had been able to maintain even a shred of curiosity?
How many ways might we have connected? Around our “female”-ness, parenthood, I like your earrings/thanks, where’d you get those boots/I like how you wrote this one line/how’s publishing been for you/what does your tattoo mean/oh I love that pizza place too.
Might I have managed to disarm them with a joke?
Might I have put them at ease with my aspirational calm, the tenor of my speaking voice, some intentional somatic sweetness?
Might they, then, have forgotten, for a fraction of a second, their absurd conviction that I am—or am magically all-inclusively representative of—their enemy?
Might there have been some way of offering them an explicit or implicit assurance that I do not, in fact, crave the blood of gentile children?
Why is it so existentially frightening to see the “other” as potentially human and worthy of space?
(Wrong, I imagine them saying! I love “others!” It’s just you nasty warmongering Zionist monsters I will not abide!)
A hero makes a friend of his enemy, says the peace activist Bassam Aramin in Colum McCann’s ambitious novel Apeirogon, which would be a wonderful selection for discussion at next year’s book festival, incidentally.
I so wish those misguided authors could have found the courage to show up to meet me, their Big Bad Zio Bitch.
In scant public statements about this debacle, both have thus far avoided any personal accountability. They’ve misrepresented the events leading to the cancellation of the panel, they’ve mischaracterized what I’ve written and posted since the war began, and they’ve set their Instagrams to private.
“They know not what they do,” a particularly famous Jew is purported to have said.
And lookie-look how this begins to devolve into a she-said/she-said/she-said show. You know: a “girl” fight! (We should at least sell tickets.)
But the last thing on earth anyone needs is more anger, more resentment, more fighting, more hatred, more blood, more violence, heads to roll.
Haven’t we had enough, yet, of anger, fear, suspicion, hatred, fighting, bloodshed?
Are more rolling heads really the answer? More purges!?
It’s the month of Elul, a time for opening our hearts to the work of personal restitution and reconciliation. (It’s also “Banned Books Week,” funnily enough.)
So, let’s take this shit-pile of a situation and spin it into something positive. Jewish alchemy! Fun.
Here’s a new and different opportunity. As long as we’re alive, it’s never too late. The great privilege of getting to try and try again.
I take my perfectly golden-brown challah out of the oven and wish to be able to share it with my “enemies.”
Who are they, underneath the stank of fear and confusion and miseducation and epigenetic trauma and algorithmic waylay and perhaps, I don’t know, maybe a smidge of ideological perversion?
What’s the worst that could happen? They don’t like my menu? They don’t like my traditions? They don’t like my decor? They lack manners? They are ungracious? The conversation is stilted? They talk smack on the way home?
Let’s grow up, people, and take on the scary necessity of dealing with ourselves and each other. We are the only ones who can do it. No one is coming to save us.
In order to actually “come of age” (instead of remaining forever petulant, cliquish, shallow, oppositional, imitative, anxious “girls”), we have to face our fears.
Aisha Gawad and Lisa Ko, please come join me at my Shabbes table, so we can break bread together, and talk. It’s the only way.
Elisa Albert is the author of three novels and a story collection. Her fiction and essays have appeared in n+1, the Guardian, The New York TImes, New York Magazine, Lilith, Bennington Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. THE SNARLING GIRL, now out from Clash Books, represents a decade’s worth of personal essays and literary criticism.
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