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If you’re not doing anything on Thursday, July 23 at 6, come to Sign of the Whale, where I’ll be speaking about being a Jew in the Obama era when we’re all forcibly converted to Islam when we can take a more mature and less tribal view of the U.S.-Israel relationship. We’ll drink beer until Max Blumenthal films us. Update: Did I mention that this is a J Street happy hour? No? Well, I should have, because it is.
One issue worth covering: there are a bunch of Jews elected to play in the All-Star Game this year. And I’ve been noticing a bunch of Jews emailing that around with a rhetorical nudge in the ribs, like, Go Team Jew. Really, tribesmen: this is pathetic. So what if Kevin Youkilis is a Jew. First of all, there aren’t that many Jews on the roster. Second of all, who cares. It’s not like any of these guys are the first Jews in baseball. And it seems like every time a Jew does anything athletic, we tend to treat it as a huge accomplishment, which bespeaks a certain self-loathing.
And that’s nothing new. When was the last time you read "The City of Slaughter," Chaim Bialik’s blame-the-victim masterpiece about the Kichinev Pogrom:
Come, now, and I will bring thee to their lairs
The privies, jakes and pigpens where the heirs
Of Hasmoneans lay, with trembling knees,
Concealed and cowering -the sons of the Maccabees!
That’s fucking pathological. The description on the page I took this from calls the poem a "tribute to the victims" of the pogrom, when it’s no such thing. "Crushed in their shame, they saw it all; /they did not pluck their eyes out; they/ Beat not their brains against the wall!" Because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you survive a pogrom? Kill yourself out of shame for not defeating it? Anyway, to be sympathetic to the poem, you could read Bialik as saying that the vulnerability of the Jews of Europe is a corrosive cycle of endless enfeeblement, and the only way out is to be a macho muchacho tilling the Palestinian desert. And OK — no one wants to be a victim, and these were really serious concerns in the days before a certain State Of Our Own. But Bialik is paying way too much attention to Jewish physicality, as if some kind of redemptive path lies that way.
The All-Star Game thing is obviously not on that level, but there’s still an uncomfortable similarity, and for a people stereotyped as being awkward and unphysical, it’s unseemly to reaffirm all that shit by clapping at the handful of Jews playing in the All-Star Game as if it’s some major achievement.
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I’d be impressed if it was the hoopy All-Star game; baseball, not so much.
So now there’s a Jewish seat on the All-Star bench?
Spencer,
Love your work, love your analysis, love your ability to explain complicated COIN theory I know nothing about in a way I can understand.
But when it comes to early 20th century Zionism, I think you’re a bit off base. I’ll be the first person to find a bit of common ground with you on what the future of a Jewish state should look like. I’ll be at that J St event you’re speaking at, and my friends, with whom I lived in Israel, will be the ones staffing it.
The point of Bialik’s poem wasn’t to urge a refocusing of Judaism into peace through strength, so to speak. At the time, Jews constituted several tens of millions of people living in ghettos (shtetyls, to give them the proper name) spread throughout Europe and Russia, without civil rights, without civic engagement, without access to wealthy professions or avenues to prosperity. There wasn’t a way to achieve any of those goals through taking up arms and rebelling against the powers that be, or committing hara-kiri for not having done so.
Rather, Bialik was arguing a more metaphysical point. In the context of those ghettos, the rabbis and community leaders didn’t seek salvation through economic advancement or civic engagement, they sought it through intense, unrelenting spirituality. Hasidism in its modern form thrived in those hellholes because complete, unrelenting devotion to one’s G-d was the only way to endure life.
But that’s the mindset Bialik criticizes. That’s why he makes specific mention of the husbands, who, after the pogrom, fear the rape of their wives would make them halachically unsuitable for intercourse. That’s why he states:
“Know why you died or wherefore, for whom, nor by what laws;
Your deaths are without reason; your lives are without cause.”
Martyrdom, in other words, is pointless.
Rather, he is saying, the Jewish people needed to attain salvation and fulfillment through other means. Feel free to disagree with the strain of Zionism that was at the time manifested by the Revisionist movement of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and is currently represented by Yisrael Beitanu. But a nationalist movement derived from a desire for physical security is no different from the one that created this country. Rather, I’d ask you to find me a nationalist movement that doesn’t derive from a desire to live as a free and sovereign people within clearly defined borders (even if you take issue with where exactly those borders lie, and the way the Israeli government defines them).
Great comment, and I hope we can talk at greater length on this at the bar. I didn’t bring up Bialik’s poem to indict early-20th century Zionism, but rather to get at a certain strain of pathology that ran through it. The peace-through-strength point argument that Bialik, Ahad Ha’am and other foundational Zionist thinkers was a legitimate one, grounded in a too-real context of constant victimization. You’re right to point out that Zionism needed to reject the purity of victimization and the theodicy that often lay within Jewish reaction to the pogroms. That was pathological, too.
Bringing up the scholarship/spirituality that Bialik criticizes in the poem speaks to my point, though: he lays into those guys for thinking that their studies will save them, and he’s absolutely scathing. The poem is polemical in that way: the Zionist project needed to convince Jews in the diaspora that those answers were a dead end, but not those Jews, because (Ahad Ha’am particularly, if I remember my history correctly) the early Zionists thought the religious ones among us were hopeless cases. The poem’s aimed at the Jews living outside of the shtetl who didn’t want to be like the scholars. Bialik tells them that there’s no security outside of Zionism, and plays on their sense of disgust with the weaklings who, as you say, think about what’s religiously permissible for them to do with their raped wives.
And that’s where the poem goes into really uncomfortable territory. Not only is Bialik not concerned with speaking to Jewish women (perhaps it’s ahistorical to expect more from him) but the force of that indictment really does depend on some ugly notions of masculinity. And whose masculinity does it attack? People who’ve just survived a massacre.
Anyway. You raise good points, and I hope to discuss them further with you in person. I’ll be studying my early Zionist poetry. A final irony for Bialik…