Amanda Gorman banned. Librarians behind bars? The Sister Senators of South Carolina. Access abortion. The shanda of false equivalency. The Palestinian Nakba.
Newsletter #140 May 26, 2023
POLITICS
*Here’s how fascism metastasizes: First they come for the writers, (A Florida school just banned Amanda Gorman’s beautiful poem, “The Hills We Climb”). Then they come for the librarians (who are subject to prison terms in seven states for violating local book bans). Then they come for the readers, meaning everyone else. Don’t let the thought police dictate what you or your kids can read. Join PEN’s campaign against book bans. Read“The 10 Books Politicians Don’t Want You to Read.” Observe the ALA’s “Banned Books Week.” Donate to ACLU’s free speech litigation & advocacy.
*Wanda’s right, and it’s a shanda (a collective shame).
*Three cheers for the “Five Sister Senators” of South Carolina, who, despite losing last week’s abortion battle, have been models of constructive bipartisanship. After the S.C. State Senate passed a 6-week abortion ban, one of the five said, “We live to fight another day.” Another added, “If we had three more women . . .we would have been able to hold this.” (Virginia is now the only state in the South where abortion is legal through the end of the second trimester. )
* The chair of the Michigan GOP, a far-right election denier, compared gun control legislation to the Holocaust and refused to apologize claiming she was “troubled that so many now want to make it taboo to look to history.” Let’s be clear: To equate the slaughter of Six Million Jews with gun safety laws intended to save thousands of human lives is not just an idiotic statement on its face, it’s a despicable perversion of history. Ditto for those who use the Star of David (above) to cast anti-vaxxers as equivalent to Jewish victims of the Shoah.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
*Same goes for Palestinian P.M. Mahmoud Abbas’ recent equation of Israel with Joseph Goebbels. However inhumane and brutish the current Israeli government, Abbas’ comparison of Israel with Hitler’s propagandist for Jewish extermination did little but drain the vocabulary of barbarism of all meaning.
* Israelis staged a pink revolt to protest the Orthodox rabbinate’s unchecked power to deny full civil rights to Israeli women, the LGBTQ community, and all nonOrthodox Jews in matters of marriage, divorce, sabbath observance, burials, and conversion.
* Handing out flowers to Palestinians (above) are members of Tag Meir, a coalition of 48 Israeli organizations united in their efforts to eradicate racism. The group considers its work “crucial to supporting democratic values and the very traditional Jewish values of loving our neighbours [sic] and justice for all.”
* It’s past time for fresh solutions to the stalemated I/P conflict. Read “A Federation? Cantons? Autonomous Regions? Suddenly everyone is talking about dividing Israel. . Israel and Judah? Swiss-style autonomous provinces? . . . New initiatives to partition the country abound.”
PALESTINE, in particular
* I was born in 1939 to a staunchly Zionist family for whom the self-determination of the Jewish people was a cherished goal. During Hitler’s reign, my parents’ work to advance Jewish statehood revved up and my childhood devotion to “the Zionist dream” took root. I was a month from my ninth birthday when, on May 14, 1948, the U.N. recognized the Jewish State as a nation among the nations. You might say I grew up with Israel. I take great pride in the country’s cultural vitality, technological and scientific innovation, enterprising spirit, and thriving, albeit contentious and inconsistent, democracy. But for the last three decades, I’ve also opened my mind and heart to the Palestinian perspective and I’ve joined with organizations and activists on the ground to advocate for a negotiated settlement to the conflict and peaceful coexistence between our two peoples. In doing so, I’ve come to recognize the egregious misdeeds, lies, and crimes on the Jewish side, as well as the mistakes, missed opportunities, and terror campaigns by the Palestinians. If you’re open to a more balanced view of ha’matzav (Hebrew vernacular for the Israel/Palestine “situation”), the following items may interest you:
*May 15th, the day after we Jews celebrate Israeli independence, is the date on which Palestinians commemorate their Nakba (“catastrophe”) as a day of mourning. Clearly, Palestinian tragedy, dispersion, and loss was a direct consequence of the U.N.’s recognition of Israel in 1948. Those two facts can co-exist in the same reality. This May 15th, for the first time in 75 years, the UN marked the anniversary of the Nakba. Yet in 2011, Israel passed the Nakba law which criminalized any activity that marks “the day on which the state was established as a day of mourning.” Perhaps you’ve noticed a regrettable parallel between Israel’s denial of Palestinian suffering and U.S. conservatives’ attempts to whitewash African Americans’ life under slavery and Jim Crow. To me that equivalency is accurate. Each proves that suppressing the truth doesn’t change the truth, it just compounds people’s rage and makes the secret’s eventual exposure feel even more shameful.
*Kudos to Jewish Currents magazine for publishing “Our Catastrophe,” a riveting photo feature on The Nakba as experienced or remembered by those whose families were violently displaced and deeply scarred by an event most of us Jews celebrate as triumphant. If you were born a Palestinian, wouldn’t you feel the same? (Above photo above, taken in 1947, shows my Palestinian friend Nadia Saah’s mother, Nina, left, and her cousin Leila on the balcony of their family home in Jerusalem.)
*Many Jews protect themselves from the whole truth about about what happened in 1948. Unless your mind is irrevocably closed to the experience of the “Other,” I suggest you watch “Farha,” a small but heart-wrenching film about The Nakba (Netflix). Those who doubt that soldiers of the nascent Jewish State could commit the heinous acts seen in the movie should read the reports by Israel’s “new historians,” whose findings about their country’s war crimes are based on government documents declassified 30 years after the state was founded. The controversy ignited by those shocking revelations are explained in this essay byAvi Shlaim, an Israeli-British historian and Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Oxford. His piece will help you form your own opinion on the matter.
MUSIC
*Conservatives can reverse Roe, ban books, cut curricula, sanitize history. But they can’t “kill the light” if we organize and get out the vote in ‘24.
*Check out The Forward’s list of the 150 Greatest Jewish Pop Songs. My fave in the top ten is Leonard Cohen’s heart-stopping, “You Want It Darker.”
*Harry Belafonte, adored pop singer and political activist, who died a month ago, once joked that his rendition of “Hinei Ma Tov” made him “the most popular Jew in America.” His “Hava Nagila” isn’t chopped liver either.
*Cantor Azi Schwartz of Park East Synagogue marked Belafonte’s passing by singing the Hebrew hymn Ein Keloheinu to the tune of “Day-o." (Note the banana at .09 on the video timeline). )
HUMOR/POETRY
*Excerpt from “How Can You Laugh?” Esther Cohen’s poem in today’s “Overheard:”
Yesterday I got an email/ suggesting a national campaign
for drag queens to change/ their names to Rhonda Santis.
(I posted that on facebook/ and someone I know said
how can you laugh at that?)
KIDS SAY THE DARNDEST THINGS
*I’d follow this little girl anywhere, especially into the future. (Thanks to @recess therapy in which little kids answer big questions during their playground interviews with Julian Shapiro-Barnum, creator/host of the series.)
*Ballerinas are human too!
*The right way to wear bedroom slippers.
SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION
*Andrew Silow-Carroll interviewed me about Shanda in advance of The New Jewish Home’s gala, where I’ll be one of “Eight Over Eighty” to be honored next week. The others are Ron Carter, Sandy Greenberg, Dr. Billy E. Jones, Erica Jong, Peter May, Bruce McIver, Stanley Pantowich, and Eve Queler. Join us May 31 in NYC.
*Thanks to historian Annie Polland, president of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, for inviting me to chat with her in one of the museum’s impeccably restored apartments. We talked about my family’s impoverished beginnings (in similar circumstances) and how shame and secrecy shadowed their lives and the lives of so many other immigrants to NYC early in the 20th century.
Shabbat shalom and enjoy the long weekend!
I am sickened as never before. Having lived through the restrictions and Do-Gooders of the ‘50s, this country had made me happy and proud again. Now in my ‘80s, I cry because I know better.