My posts will get heavy from here on out. I imagine I will have a lot to share, and in advance of that, caveat emptor etc.
IANAH (I am not an historian)
I have a graduate degree in history and political science, but I am not an academic. I’ll provide cursory historical context to shade my reflections, and wherever possible I will link to resources and academics who have influenced my understanding. I’m bound to get stuff wrong. A single paragraph I share will cover material that is properly unpacked in hundreds of books with a myriad of interpretive lenses. I hold historians in high regard, and I don’t want to masquerade as one. Best to approach my writing understanding me as an avid historophile and layperson.
I am not Polish
I am a first-generation Canadian of Scandanavian heritage. I hope I will fall in love with this country, because I’ve been fascinated by its history for a long time and I have high hopes. Still, I am an outsider. This means I’m going to misstep in places. I am not trying to represent a lived experience I will never understand. Instead, I seek to illuminate my own experiences as an outsider. I will try to navigate this complicated history with respect and grace.
More critically, I want to underscore here that I am not Jewish.
I am vaguely agnostic. I genuinely and deeply respect Judaism and Jewish heritage. When I was 15 years old, I read Isaac Bashevis Singer and I was entranced. Since then, I have drunk deeply from the well of Jewish creative culture, and I have loved every moment of it. In my undergraduate degree, way back in the early aughts, this interest migrated into courses in the history of the Jewish people and Judaism in my university’s religious studies department. I even fumbled my way through first year biblical Hebrew. My graduate degree was focused on the period of the Holocaust. Again, I do not have lived experience to draw on and mine is an outsider view. I hope that my respect is made evident in my writing, but as with commenting on Poland, I’m going to make mistakes.
This is not a blog about Israel
Whew. This is probably a bad idea, but here goes.
I’m not going to be talking much about current politics vis-a-vis the Israel/Palestine situation. I did think it wise to share a bit of my positioning at least once.
I do not think you can, in any meaningful way, understand what is happening today without attempting an understanding of the past.
I am aware that the history of the Palestinian people is not addressed in the posts I will share; that is not my focus. I unequivocally do not support what the current government is doing in the state of Israel today. I’m not blind to the ringing bell of colonial impulse but I believe much of the conversation in my political home on the left can be too dismissive of the history of the Jewish peoples, the reason for the diaspora, and the urge for a homeland. I also think I lack a frame of reference, sincerely, to speak about what October 7 has done to (re)traumatize Jewish people. I think a failure to reconcile this with the past makes the prospect of peace vanishingly slim in the same way refusing to name the trauma of the Nakba is unserious and harmful.
Before I set you off, that last statement does not mean I am equating the Nakba and the Shoah. Claiming a traumatized past shouldn’t be a competition where the greatest numbers of the dead or the recency of the trauma means one side wins. Likewise, no one trauma can render someone else’s trauma irrelevant. We should do the work of understanding history but not stop there: how we mobilize history matters just as much. I’ll come to a longer version of this passage later, but I resonate deeply with this quote from Timothy Snyder (in Bloodlands): “When meaning is drawn from killing, the risk is that more killing would bring more meaning.”
I am not interested in discourse that conflates the government of Israel with the Jewish people, writ large. It’s lazy antisemitism, and it serves to further entrench the more than 2,000 year history of a virus that never ends well when allowed to run rampant. This is complex stuff, and coming to a space where you are ready to start the work of understanding doesn’t fit well into soundbites, memes, or internet arguments. We risk negligence when we abandon nuance and when we don’t build our capacity for context.
With that said, you should not listen to me lecture you on this. Instead, this excellent primer on antisemitism is a really approachable place to start, from Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, and her post “a lot of things are true“.
Many, if not most, people reading this will quibble with my points. That’s ok. I’m not an expert, and really my opinion matters only insofar as it informs my own travel experience, writing, and morals. I don’t need to convert you to my team. I don’t have one since I believe a “separate teams” approach defines the problem. If you’re a friend of mine, we can get into this over a coffee. If you’re a stranger on the internet who somehow found your way here, please resist the urge to get shouty and mean in my comments. There’s really no point, and it is unpaid emotional labour that will gain you only more anger. I probably won’t join your team (see above). If you have something constructive to add, please do!
I want to end this on a quote from the poet and writer Aurora Levins Morales that I think succinctly characterizes how past trauma informs the present, and reinforces the value of trying to know:
In my grandmother’s village there was a three-cornered argument about what, if anything, would save the Jews: The Orthodox said it was in God’s hands. The Zionists said only Jews could be counted on to stand by Jews, and we needed a defensible territory of our own where we called the shots. The communists and socialists and anarchists said only an alliance of all the working people can dismantle our oppression and everyone else’s. As a boy, my father took part in that same ongoing debate on the boardwalk in Brooklyn. But after the Holocaust, after the Nazis destroyed so much of the world of European Jews, after the solidarity that existed was not enough, and the old Russian antisemitism that had been punished as a crime against socialism became a part of Soviet policy, after all that, the three-cornered debate turned lopsided under the weight of despair, and the Zionist minority of my father’s childhood has grown to dominate all debate, aggressively silencing dissent….
I am fighting for myself. For an end to this recycling of pain. I am fighting for my deepest source of hope, the belief in human solidarity, in our ability to decide that we will expand our hearts and our sense of kinship to include each other and resist the urge to contract in fear, to huddle and bare our teeth and lash out. When I speak out for the humanity of Palestine I am defending the humanity of everyone, including all Jews. When I stand firmly against the hidden reservoirs of antisemitism that bubble up when the ruling class needs them to, when I tell my gentile friends not to get distracted from resisting the real power of the white Christian male 1%, to stay the course and stay clear-headed, I am standing for accuracy, for clarity, for revealing the structures of domination that crush our world, including the people of Palestine.
When I keep saying that Israel’s war against Palestinians only multiplies danger and pain for all of us, when I denounce and chant and recite and sing against this injustice, when I say I will have no part of it and I am accused of denying Jews a future, I know that I am fighting for the only real future there is.
When I insist that we can be on each other’s sides, that we can make sure everyone has enough allies to be safe, that this is the only work that matters, I am pushing back against despair, lifting my corner of that three-sided fight toward a justice big and beautiful enough for us all.”
Citations anyone? I love a good cite.
Morales, Aurora Levins. “Who am I to Speak” in On Antisemitism : Solidarity and the Struggle for Justice, edited by Judith Butler, 113-119. Directed by Jewish Voice for Peace (États-Unis). Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket books, 2017.
Ruttenberg, Rabbi Danya. “The Antisemitism Post (Tm).” Life Is a Sacred Text, November 16, 2024.
Ruttenberg, Rabbi Danya. “A Lot of Things Are True.” Life Is a Sacred Text, September 2, 2024.