By now you’ve probably heard about the recent Helen Thomas comments, even if you didn’t want to. Thomas has had a long and admirable career and I am sad to see it end this way. At the same time, her comments were deserving of the outrage they received.

In Thomas’s comments she overlooks some basic facts about the history of Israel/Palestine:

• European Jewish migration to Israel began well before World War II. While it picked up in earnest in the 1940s, the mass-migration began during the Ottoman Empire when many Jews were buying up land legally under Ottoman law.
• In the early 20th century many European countries were encouraging Jewish migration to British Palestine. This came out of a desire to solve the “Jewish problem” without bloodshed (i.e. to get rid of the Jews).
• Not all Jews come from Europe. There are Jewish families whose lineage has always been in Israel.
• Similarly many Jews from surrounding Arab and Muslim countries were expelled when Israel was created and, as such, don’t have a home to return to.
• Then, of course, there’s what happened in Poland after the Holocaust that might suggest that going back may not be such a good idea.

It is this denial of history that elevated Thomas’s comments above simple criticism of Israel and into anti-Semitism. There are many valid criticisms of Israel and Zionism, but “Jews Go Home!” is not one of them. By ignoring the history of the people involved (and making it about the people not the country) Thomas ended up beyond the pale.

Denial of history is a powerful tool of oppression and the Israel/Palestine conflict is rife with it. One common right wing Zionist trope is that there never was a country called Palestine. This is technically true, at least in the sense that we define nations in modern terms. For most of its history Palestine was a part of some other nation’s empire: the Greeks, the Romans, the Ottoman, the British, etc. However, there has definitely been a place called Palestine and people called Palestinians in the past.

Likewise some of the history in the list above merits further annotation. The sale of land by the Ottoman may have ignored historic land rights. The migration during the British occupation was done under occupation rule. The Palestinians may not have had their rights protected, even if the European Jewry were trying to do the right thing to protect themselves under existing, unfair rules.

Denial of history can be seen underpinning any number of oppressive situations. The situation in Arizona rests in part on an idea that no Latinos lived in the American Southwest before western expansion. Attempts to recast the Civil War as being about state’s rights (other than the state’s rights to allow slavery) are done to give credence to a sense of victimization among a portion of the white population and ignore the true extent of the victimization of Black people. (Do you really believe that the South would have benevolently given up slavery without the Civil War? Of course, that war wasn’t even about slavery.) The power that the denial of history can have is what is at the root of the Holocaust revisionist agenda on the one side, and the quest to have the Armenian genocide recognized as such on the other.

So when a trusted voice casually neglects history, it’s a cause for concern. When the Texas School Board attempts to fit history into a narrow agenda, it’s a cause for alarm. And when Arizona bans ethnic studies classes on the heels of their papers please laws, only one conclusion about both laws can be drawn: racism simple and clear.

Politics has been a potentially fertile ground for a return post to this blog, but often I find myself looking at a list of commentaries done better, or at least more visibly than I could. The Arizona law? What can I add that will be more precise and in-depth than this recent Rachel Maddow show clip?

However politics does not end at our countries shore and I’ve been facing articles about one of the most confusing political stories in a while. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown was approached by an elderly woman in the street who asked him a bunch of questions, usually in the middle of his attempts to answer her. A pair of questions jumped out immediately: a question (really statement) about people on the dole who don’t deserved to be followed by “all these eastern Europeans coming in, where are they flocking from?” Read the rest of this entry »

I love the term goyisch. I love the term goyim. I use these words often and appropriately. Yet every now and then, some goyische person tells me that the word is rude and that the word I should be using is gentile.

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Spend enough time hanging around well meaning WASPy folks and eventually someone will break out a guitar and start strumming John Lennon’s “Imagine.” I’ve always hated that song. It always seemed to me to be the theme song for unexamined privilege.

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I was biking from an appointment to one of my favorite food carts when I ran into the police barricade. Thankfully it was across the street from my destination. The Police had cordoned off one street block and most of the sidewalk opposite me. There were about six police cruisers there, maybe more, maybe less, along with the smell of smoke and something smoldering. Everything seemed under control, so why not have lunch?

As I waited for my food another patron came up to me. “Do you think there was an bomb?”

I don’t know. Doesn’t look like an explosion.

“Look, something’s smoldering, definitely a bomb.”

Definitely a fire, yeah. But I’m not sure about a bomb.

“Yeah, look, they have Homeland Security here. It was a bomb.”

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Someone set us up the prayer-bomb

By now you’ve heard about the flight that was grounded because a passenger was tying on tefillin. You have heard about it, right? Okay, maybe not. It did make a blip on international news, but with the recent glut of passengers going insane on flights, it might have gotten lost in the mix.

I’ll admit that tefillin do look a little weird. Growing up reform, my first encounter with them was later in life making them an exotic item from my own culture. However, I cannot imagine thinking that they were a bomb.

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A few years back, after the Columbine shootings, a close friend said he knew that the US was headed for a decline because we weren’t asking all of the questions. In the wake of the tragedy the focus was on banning violent video games and black trench-coats. The pervasive bullying was given lip service and the question about how two high schoolers could get their hands on such extensive arms were ignored. In the years since, the questions still have been barely addressed.

The shooting spree at Fort Hood was a tragedy regardless of your opinions about the US military, but as the report on the incident focusing exclusively on Maj. Hasan’s erratic behavior (some of which may not have been so erratic), ties to militant Islamic clerics and a failure of the US Armed Forces to address Islamism in its ranks, I can’t help but wonder, once again, if all the questions are being asked.

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I have a love/hate attitude when it comes to Joan Rivers. There’s lots to love. She’s always had a quick wit, sure there’s some bombs but she reels off jokes with such speed that it’s bound to happen. She reminds me of my Aunt Susan, what with the bleached hair, expensive coats and hired help. She’s a comedy legend that even relatively new comedians respect and admire and she was pretty trailblazing as a female comic.

At the same time, I always have a hard time reconciling her super-shallow image. Harder still is when I cringe over her obvious issues with her Jewishness. These rose to the surface after a recent airport kerfuffle where her passport saying “Joan Rosenberg aka Joan Rivers” caused confusion at the gate and ended up leaving her in Costa Rica for an extra day. Upon landing in New York, she told the local trash rag the NY Post, “If I was going to have a fake passport, I would never pick the name Rosenberg.” Read the rest of this entry »

So if ever there was a story in the news that seemed ripe for commentary here, it would be Brit Hume advising Tiger Woods to become a Christian in order to redeem himself and Hume’s later cries of persecution when people pointed out how ignorant and bigoted his comment was.

Sometimes, however, something is stated so perfectly by someone else, so instead of weighing in on the issue, I’ll leave it to Aasif Mandvi from the Daily Show. I’ll have a new original post tomorrow.

A recent episode of the WTF podcast reminded me of something I wanted to write. Sarah Silverman was the guest and during a discussion about observing Hanukah she made the comment, “I only feel Jewish because of the people who aren’t Jewish who are around me.”

Isaac Deutscher discussed a similar phenomenon in his essay “Who is a Jew?”. The phenomenon of negative versus positive identity. A positive identity is one you develop on your own and make meaningful for yourself. Negative identity is one that is put upon you whether you like it or not. That Silverman’s comment rang true to me at the time suggests I might have been drifting to the latter lately.

When I think about positive versus negative American-Jewish identity, I tend to think of things in terms of two Leonards: Lenny Bruce and Leonard Zelig.

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