Jewish Currents

Jonathan Shamir (JC fellow): There is a paucity of cinema in the Gaza Strip, which has to do with entangled material and imaginative constraints. As Sheren Falah Saab recently wrote in Haaretz, Israel’s blockade and Hamas’s religious closure of theaters have both contributed to conditions antagonistic to making films. Against this backdrop of enforced isolation, “not everyone is able to touch on the complexities that characterize the local population in Gaza,” according to Palestinian film critic Saleem Albeik. That is perhaps why Michel Khleifi’s Tale of the Three Jewels (1995)—the first feature-length movie to be filmed entirely in the Gaza Strip, which follows a young boy with an expansive imagination—feels especially remarkable.

Tale of the Three Jewels tells the story of 12-year-old Yusef, whose father is jailed, brother is on the run, and family is hungry. Desperate to escape his bleak reality, Yusef spends long hours out in nature. During one of his hunts for birds, he meets a striking girl, Aida, and falls in love instantly. He embarks on a bid to fulfill Aida’s mysterious request to find three missing jewels from her grandmother’s necklace in order to take her hand in marriage.

Khleifi’s film is a tender portrayal of childhood innocence: Yusef’s love of birds, his loss of appetite at the first pangs of young love, his fanciful plan to escape to Europe in an orange crate. But his imaginative forays are curtailed by the world’s limitations: The travel agent scoffs at his plan to travel to South America “without a passport,” his best friend, Salah, tells him that the money he raised for his trip would barely get him to Jerusalem. Seeking to acquire food for his family, Yusef sells some of his beloved birds; he even offers to sell the Palestine necklace that his incarcerated father gifted to him. Back in Yusef’s mother’s childhood, she tells him, “the children would play their games. They would run around screaming, filling the air with laughter. Now every family is split or squeezed together in this small piece of land. They want us to live like wild animals.” Still, in Khleife’s fabulist world, the childhood imagination prevails. Though the occupation is palpably present, it is ultimately Yusef’s mind—flitting between fantasy and reality—that guides the film.

In the current moment, I found the film incredibly painful to watch. Tale of the Three Jewels makes felt what Israel has stolen from Palestinians in Gaza: the right to a childhood, the right to dream of a future. In the opening sequence, when his sleep is disrupted by the routine interjection of a mother and the horrifically normalized rumbling of warplanes, Yusef quips: “If only once you’d let me finish my dream.” Today, the ordinary choreographies of family life in Gaza have receded and the warplanes are ever louder. How many more dreams have since been aborted, or turned into outright nightmares?

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): A couple of years ago, when I was quite ill and thought my time was up, I wanted to send in an omnibus recommendation of what I consider the greatest Jewish American novels. I didn’t croak—which is just as well, since I never wrote the piece. But that never-realized rec has haunted me ever since, and I continue to ponder which books merit this designation. Topping the list are Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?, Joseph Heller’s Good as Gold, and two by Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint, all of which share a dyspeptic and darkly funny vision of Jews in America. Most of them have also been branded antisemitic by those unhappy with their portrayal of Jews and Jewish life—none more vociferously than Portnoy’s Complaint, which was roundly decried by the Jewish establishment upon its 1969 publication. Back then it was not just critics of Israel who were hounded, condemned from pulpits, and cast out as self-haters and antisemites; the mainstream Jewish community also targeted Jewish writers who failed to portray their people as noble, suffering figures, and dared to depict them as real, flawed human beings.

I first read and loved Portnoy’s Complaint as a teenager, not long after its release. I finished my umpteenth and probably final reading a short while ago and still found it the most perspicacious look at American Jewry ever written. No other text has so perfectly skewered the smugness, self-satisfaction, and unearned sense of superiority endemic to the middle-class Jewish world Roth saw around him in Newark, and which existed throughout the country. But his genius is not just in his perceptive mockery of the attitudes of his parents’ generation, filtered through the voice of narrator Alex Portnoy. Rather, what makes the book so brilliant is that, for all of his condescension toward his parents, Portnoy shares so many of their attitudes. He is merely a more self-aware version of them.

What I always find remarkable when reading Roth, particularly in the two works I have cited, is that though he was my parents’ age, his experience resonates uncannily with mine and my peers’. For instance, there is no better summary of the achingly aloof Jewish attitude toward goyim that we grew up with than a passage I can find in any copy of the book in seconds, in which Portnoy describes non-Jewish baton twirler Alice Dembosky and her “pièce de résistance” of tossing a flaming baton in the air and catching it. The nice Jewish boys in the stands appreciate her skill and worry she’ll be injured by the flames, but “despite this genuine display of admiration and concern,” Portnoy observes that “there was still a certain comic detachment exhibited on our side of the field, grounded in the belief that this was precisely the kind of talent that only a goy would think to develop in the first place.”

I’ve always said that being a Jew is one of the three constitutive parts of my being, along with being a New Yorker and an atheist. But the Jew I am is a vexed Jew like Portnoy, like Roth—and like Kafka, one of Roth’s gods, who once remarked, “What do I have in common with the Jews? I don’t even have anything in common with myself.”

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): When an old colleague asked on Facebook last week—in good faith—whether “from the river to the sea” must always suggest the “non-existence” of Israel, I first shared Yousef Munayyer’s illuminating response to that question, and I then wondered what is meant by Israel’s “existence?” Couldn’t Israel continue as a center of self-determining Jewish life in some different relationship to Palestinians?

It’s obvious enough that the status quo is unsustainable, but there were also alternative roads not taken: what if the early Zionist movement had heeded the warnings of Ahad Ha’am or followed the antinationalist cultural vision put forward by Martin Buber and his colleagues in Ihud, the binationalist party founded in Palestine in 1942? I pulled the writings of an Ihud leader from the shelf after contemplating that Facebook query.

The book, long out of print, alas, is Dissenter in Zion, a collection of letters, speeches, and other writings by Judah Magnes (1877-1948). A rabbi and Jewish communal leader in the US in the early decades of the 20th century, and, after emigrating to Palestine in 1922, a founder and the first chancellor and president of Hebrew University. Magnes was an ardent binationalist who envisioned the university as a core of Jewish-Arab cooperation. Here’s a small and stirring sample from an address delivered by Magnes in Jerusalem in 1923:

And Eretz Israel? Here the Jew expects to develop a nationalism of his own. Of what kind will it be? Will the Jews here in their efforts to create a political organism become devotees of brute force and militarism as were some of the later Hasmoneans, and will they, like the Edomite Herod, become the obedient servants of economic and militaristic imperialism? Is it among the possibilities that some day it may become political treason for someone sincerely to repeat in the streets of Jerusalem Isaiah’s teaching that swords are to be beaten into ploughshares and men are to learn war no more? Or will the Jews of Eretz Israel be true to the teaching of the Prophets of Israel and attempt to work out their ideal society so that Jerusalem may be restored and Zion redeemed through righteousness and peace?

The world tumbles only forward, so it feels pointless, not to mention depressing, to imagine these alternate histories. Still, amid the moral vertigo of the Israeli assault on Gaza and its Jewish communal defenders in the US, Magnes’s vision provides a solid pillar to hang onto.

Dec

15

2023

Jonathan Shamir (JC fellow): I have witnessed no shortage of ironies while covering Germany’s addled relationship to Israel and antisemitism over the years, but the outcry over Masha Gessen’s New Yorker essay on the country’s remembrance culture, “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” has been particularly absurd. Gessen, the descendent of Holocaust survivors (and a member of Jewish Currents’s board of directors), had been slated to receive the Hannah Arendt Prize—supposedly awarded to thinkers who are “not afraid to enter the public realm by presenting their opinion in controversial political discussions”—but was told that the award ceremony would be suspended after they compared the Gaza Strip to Jewish ghettos under Nazi rule.

Gessen’s essay begins by describing Germany’s dizzying matrix of Holocaust memorials and museums. These well-meaning efforts, they write, have “solidified into dogma” that has prescribed new limits on free speech: A 2019 parliamentary resolution condemning the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign has created “a McCarthyist environment” in the country’s thriving culture sector while also serving as a “ticket to the mainstream” for the measure’s extremist sponsor, the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD).

As Gessen journeys into eastern Europe, Holocaust memory proves no more immune to realpolitik than anything else. For post-Soviet states, the road to the European Union was paved by Holocaust memorialization efforts. Both Poland and Ukraine have since made revisionist claims about their complicity in Nazi crimes, and Israel has indulged them for its own ends. For example, in 2018, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood shoulder to shoulder with his Polish counterpart to push the false historical narratives of the Polish right in exchange for political insulation from the European Union’s criticism of Israel’s occupation. And today, Israel is leveraging the trauma of the Holocaust to secure buy-in for its assault on the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu has called Hamas’s attack on the Nova musical festival on October 7th a “Holocaust by bullets,” in reference to the massacre at Babyn Yar. Comparisons, then, don’t seem to be the problem. It’s a question of which comparisons are made, and by whom.

Indeed, Gessen’s essay illustrates the very necessity of comparison to political analysis by offering illuminating transhistorical readings of its own; Hannah Arendt, Gessen writes, once compared Israel’s Herut party—the dominant Revisionist Zionist predecessor to Likud—to the Nazis. Certainly, Gessen points out, this would have constituted a violation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA)’s definition of antisemitism, which forbids “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” In a work that now reads like a preemptive defense against their German critics, Gessen, like Arendt, transgresses the ultimate prohibition of Holocaust memory as it has been rendered in Germany and beyond: to draw on the universal lessons from the history Jewish suffering to criticize Israel.

Daniel May (publisher): Reading Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s short 1923 essay, “The Iron Wall” for the first time in graduate school felt like uncovering a secret document. His overt racism against Arabs—describing them as “savages” who are “culturally five hundreds years behind us”—felt too direct and dangerous to be public. Yet there was also something oddly refreshing about the text. In his unwillingness to temper the violence of his worldview to accommodate the sensibilities of the reader, Jabotinsky cuts through many of the pieties that shape our contemporary Jewish conversation on Israel/Palestine.

For Jabotinsky, Zionism is obviously a colonial project which—like its historical precursors—will be met with resistance. The native population, he writes, have “always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilized or savage.” Or, take the notion that Palestinians ought to be grateful for the material benefits or political protections that Israel provides its citizens. No people, Jabotinsky notes, will “give up their fatherland for a good railway system.”

The endpoint of Jabotinsky’s logic is that there is no possibility that the Palestinian Arabs will accept Zionist colonization, nor should they. Therefore, he concludes, “Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population.” And if it is the latter, the only way that it can proceed is “behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.” It is only through sufficient violence that Palestinian Arabs will recognize that Zionism is not going anywhere, and only when they accept it can any kind of agreement be reached.

Jabotinsky resigned from the Zionist movement in 1935 to protest its leadership’s refusal to declare its aim as the construction of a Jewish state, yet it is difficult to overstate how much his brand of revisionism has come to dominate contemporary Zionist thought. In the Jewish world, the idea that the Palestinians will not accept a Jewish state and that resistance can only be deterred through violence has come to be perceived as common sense. The devastation unleashed by Israel in this war is the manifestation of this ideology when pushed to its logical destination.

Jabotinsky’s logic also lurks behind the question that greets any criticism of Israel’s war: what else can you do with those that reject a Jewish state but defeat them through force? But Jabotinsky offers two alternatives to the bloodshed. First, he argues that eventually the Arabs will accept a Jewish state, and when they do Jews must embrace the moment. His point underscores the immense significance of the PLO’s recognition of Israel in 1988 and the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, both of which undermine the constant refrain among Israel’s apologists that there is “no partner.” Second, Jabotinsky defines colonization in a very specific way, and only so defined does he argue that it will necessarily provoke resistance. “There is only one thing the Zionists want,” he writes, “and it is that one thing that the Arabs do not want.” That thing is a Jewish majority that would enable a Jewish government, in which “the future of the Arab minority would depend on the goodwill of the Jews.”

Despite the dark promise of the text, 100 years after his writing, Jabotinsky points to what remains the only way out of the violence he both commends and predicts: a political framework that ensures no group is able to dominate another.

Mari Cohen (associate editor): Seven years ago, while on a road trip through Pittsburgh, I ate at Conflict Kitchen, a public art project and eatery devoted to serving food from countries and communities in conflict with the US. After devouring my Iranian food, I found out that the restaurant had prompted a firestorm two years earlier when it had made Palestine its theme. At the time, B’nai Brith International wrote to the Heinz Endowments and asked them to suspend grant funding for Conflict Kitchen because, they claimed, its food wrappers featuring interviews with Palestinians were “anti-Israel propaganda.” In its press release, B’nai Brith put the word “Palestine” in quotes, as if to accuse Conflict Kitchen of centering a culture that didn’t even exist. The Heinz Endowments president wrote back to B’nai Brith and assuaged them, arguing that the Palestine iteration of Conflict Kitchen was “terribly at odds with the mission of promoting understanding.” As a college student at the time, I was not yet sure how to channel my ever-growing alienation from Zionist politics, but I recall being appalled by a response that suggested that Palestinians had no right to share their food, culture or simply exist as Palestinians in American public space.

It’s this erasure that the writer Karim Kattan takes up in a searing October 31st Baffler piece. Kattan describes being instructed by the organizer of a scheduled keynote address in Austria not to speak directly about Palestine, just one incident in a wave of repression in the US and Europe in the wake of October 7th. After Kattan pushed back, the organizer “didn’t exactly reject my humanity. It was simply a very inconvenient fact for her that I was a human; she had to contend with it and was very uncomfortable.” In beseeching him to “find a positive solution” without reserving his right to directly mention Palestine, she seemed to wish “very politely, that I could, very politely, cease to exist.” Kattan argues that a similar sentiment underlies certain handwringing over the devastation of Gaza that fails to meaningfully oppose it: “If only you could vanish, or—easier yet—if only you had never existed at all, and if only you could spare us the horror, the displacements, the bombings, the killings, the starving of a people that you are forcing us to unleash upon you.” Kattan’s prose is a powerful rebuke to those who have suggested that, for the sake of a more comfortable Zionist narrative, Palestinians should “disinvite [themselves] from the world.”

Dec

8

2023

Claire Schwartz (culture editor): On November 17th, the Palestinian poet Hala Alyan posted a 2011 photograph of children on the beach in Gaza, arms outstretched, the clear blue sky punctuated with brightly colored kites. The day the picture was taken, the children broke the Guinness world record for the most kites flown simultaneously: 12,350. The day Alyan shared the photograph, 12,350 was the estimated death toll from this iteration of Israel’s relentless assault on Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. There is, of course, no common measure to this confluence—only a devastating coincidence: The children’s insurgent exuberance recedes and Israel continues to kill, the world that might have been rattling horrifically inside the one that is.

I have been thinking of these children and their kites since yesterday, when I learned that the Israeli regime assassinated Palestinian writer and professor Refaat Alareer. I have been reading and rereading his final poem:

If I must die,

you must live

to tell my story

to sell my things

to buy a piece of cloth

and some strings

(make it white with a long tail)

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza

while looking heaven in the eye

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—

and bid no one farewell

not even to his flesh

no even to himself—

sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above

and thinks for a moment an angel is there

bringing back love

If I must die

let it bring hope

let it be a tale

In the wake of Alareer’s death, the opening line constricts, the conditional already fulfilled. Then: You must live. Trade what the poet left behind so that a Gazan child might have a vision of love beaming back at them. Alareer does not write “your kite,” or even only “my kite,” but “the kite, my kite you made.” He implores the reader: Stitch your life to the wake of my living and make of it something definite: “Let it be a tale.” A tale (like a tail) is what comes after. It is a doubled after that Alareer’s poem charges us with—not only the after of persisting in catastrophe’s wake, but also the after in “to look after,” to care for, to return. As poet and performance artist (and JC artist-in-residence) Fargo Nissim Tbakhi writes: “The past is a future we return to.” On the photograph she posted, the kites’ tails flying every which way in the wind, Alyan overlaid the words: “Oh, the promise of our long, unruly memories.” The glimpses of other worlds that persist might, if we bring them forward with our living, offer a route toward as-yet-unrealized liberated futures. This is the charge I am holding: To make of Alareer’s life a kite, to thrash with the others in the narrow aperture of the poem’s if until it widens toward other ways, until all Palestinians can again touch their sea.

David Klion (contributing editor): The death of Henry Kissinger last week at 100 has been a cause for celebration on the left, uniting those old enough to remember the Nixon and Ford administrations with a younger generation whose collective impression of Kissinger was best articulated by Anthony Bourdain. There are innumerable books on the former national security advisor and secretary of state; one that influenced my own thinking is Greg Grandin’s Kissinger’s Shadow (2016), which casts Kissinger as the prime architect of American empire as we know it today.

The book I want to recommend to Jewish Currents readers isn’t about Kissinger, but it tells us a lot about the tradition he belonged to. As I mention in my Kissinger remembrance in The New Republic, I happened to finish Fritz Stern’s Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire (1977), a hefty tome I had been making my way through for months, just days before Kissinger’s death was announced. Stern and Kissinger had much in common: Both were born to Jewish families in Germany in the 1920s, and both fled the Nazis in 1938 and settled in New York City. They both went on to have distinguished academic careers, and even ran in the same social circles. But unlike Kissinger, who pivoted to war crimes, Stern remained in academia, teaching history at Columbia for decades prior to his death in 2016. Stern and Kissinger were both leading figures of the German Jewish diaspora, a community set apart culturally and socially from the Yiddish-derived milieu of the majority of Ashkenazi Jews in New York. Much of Stern’s work concerns German Jewish history, and Gold and Iron functions almost as an origin story for modern German Jewry and its distinctive self-conception.

Gold and Iron is a history that reads like a 19th century novel about elite intrigue set against a backdrop of diplomacy, war, and social upheaval. It tells the story of Otto von Bismarck, the “Iron Chancellor” who unified the German states into a single empire in 1871, and his long relationship with Gerson von Bleichröder, a Jewish financier who had functioned as the Rothschild family’s agent in Berlin before becoming a power broker in his own right. Bismarck was a product of the Prussian Junker class—basically, a militarized landholding aristocracy whose way of life was increasingly out of step with the modernizing economy of 19th century Europe—and in order to preserve his class’s privileges, he was determined to build a sophisticated industrial economy in which finance capital would play a central role. The wealthy and continentally connected Bleichröder made this possible, financing Bismarck’s military victories over Austria and France and helping to establish Germany’s diplomatic position and overseas colonial empire over subsequent decades (a particularly fascinating chapter covers his lobbying for the basic civil rights of Jews in newly independent Romania, using German diplomatic recognition and trade ties as leverage). In the process, Bleichröder became one of the wealthiest men in Germany, and essentially the public face of a rapidly rising Jewish financial and professional class.

Inevitably, this meant Bleichröder also became a prime target for the rapidly rising antisemitism of the Junker elite, who remained politically central in Bismarck’s Germany in spite of their declining economic fortunes. Despite a career spent bowing and scraping before the German state and ignoring constant antisemitic sleights including from Bismarck himself, Bleichröder never fully achieved the acceptance as a German that he desperately sought. As for his children and grandchildren in the 20th century, well, you can imagine where this story is headed.

Kissinger cast himself in the mold of Bismarck, imposing his realpolitik and grand strategy on the global chessboard. But the figure he more closely resembled was Bleichröder, the ambitious striver willing to endure elite antisemitism—in Kissinger’s case, that of Nixon and his Jew-baiting entourage—in exchange for proximity to the heights of power. As Stern shows, this was not Bleichröder’s unique character flaw, and nor was it Kissinger’s—it was the bargain that 19th century Germany and to some extent 20th century America offered its Jews, but it was, to put it in the most German terms, a Faustian bargain.

Jonathan Shamir (JC fellow): It’s strange to say that an academic article by two sociologists is a favorite that I frequently revisit, but the meticulous noticing of “Virtual Returns to Jaffa” (1998) by Salim Tamari and Rema Hammami creates a loving yet painful portrait of the city from which the authors’ families were expelled. In six vignettes, the writers vividly detail their visits to Jaffa alongside other Palestinian exiles, cataloging the emotional toll of returning to a place that has written you out of its history. It reads as an elegy of a city that has already been lost, but given the aggressive pace of gentrification in Jaffa since the article’s publication, it has itself come to feel like a precious artifact.

The inevitability of disappointment is conveyed throughout. Hammami’s discovery of her family’s home—transformed into an institution for the infirm—fails to deliver any catharsis. Tamari fulfills a modest desire to dine at a seaside Palestinian fish restaurant in Jaffa, only for new expectations to crop up—and to be dashed as quickly as they emerge. For the two writers and their fellow returnees, this “duty to the past” is as irrepressible as the present forces that are quashing it. Nowhere is this vicious cycle clearer than in the figure of Liza, a Palestinian who has joined them for the return and who “was taking pictures of everything that moved,” leaving her suspended between tenses: absent in the present, and already reliving the mediated past of a photograph from an indeterminate future. When Arab visitors reconstitute the past “using the rubble [of the old homes] as their nodes,” the present never seems to fit together properly.

For Hammami, abandoning the past would mean being “burned at the stake for collaborating with a reality built on the demolition of dreams,” yet the authors’ encounter with Murjana, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, troubles the nostalgic frame of their return. As a present-day inhabitant of Jaffa, Murjana pays no heed to the city’s repressed past, and her family seems more comfortable in Hebrew than in Arabic. Her invitation to the group to lunch at her family home forces them to live—however uneasily and temporarily—in the present.

In the final section, Tamari and Hammami resolve to “make greater efforts to observe the existing realities of Jaffa,” but their meandering into the present defies easy legibility. They obliquely discuss the Nakba and the displacement of Middle Eastern Jews using the Arabic word “tabadul” (“exchange”) with a Mizrahi shopkeeper named Shlomo. His slow and incomplete understanding of the word’s meaning (“You see,” he concludes unnervingly after pointing to his cassette collection, “we Arabs are like you”) is the closest the Palestinians come to any sort of recognition from those who have replaced them.