Joel Schalit

The Blame Game

What’s the difference between a caricature and the real thing? This is the question I always ask myself whenever I hear complaints about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad indulging his anti-Jewish reflexes. This is not to deny the fact that the Iranian president’s statements are prejudiced and wrong. They should be condemned. My question is whether they have any ideological purchase.

Considering the nature of his statements, it’s easy to understand why German leftists would use his figure to combat Judeophobia. Prone to problematizing the Shoah, Ahmadinejad’s declarations parallel those of Holocaust revisionists. Similarly, his criticisms of Israel have an all-too familiar aura of scapegoating about them. Criticizing him this way illuminates both concerns.

The problem is that Ahmadinejad is Iranian. How useful can he really be, as a foil, to discourage discrimination against Jews, in Germany, instead of Iran? Doesn’t the contribution of German forces to NATO’s war effort in Afghanistan problematize such expressions of anti-racism? What about Israeli rightists, for whom the Nazi comparison serves different political requirements?

The responsibility for this situation is shared. Ahmadinejad has no difficulty reconciling the language of European anti-Semitism with anti-imperialism. It’s easy to misconstrue. Germans who emphasize his racism, without considering its significance, unnecessarily complicate their struggle against Judeophobia, by suggesting European and Iranian anti-Semitism are the same.

Photo: Lamp post sticker, west Stuttgart, July 30th.

Welcoming Committee

“In the old days, they’d paint a Magen David on your door.” So remarked my father, when I told him of the symbol scrawled at the entrance to our building.

Black bloc to the rescue. Circle A detournement, twenty-four hours later.

The final solution, so to speak. In my view, a different shade of white would do.

They Care Alot

“Never again,” was a phrase that lost its meaning for me as a child. Forever linked to then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin (it was his signature phrase) in reference to the Shoah, it eventually lost its meaning for me during the siege of Beirut, in 1982.

This is not to compare the events, because they couldn’t have been more different. Nonetheless, I was old enough to discern the discrepancies between the significance of this slogan, and the events that unfolded five years later, under Begin’s own watch.

Obviously, the late Israeli leader was troubled, not just by the past, but how it intersected with his present. As though to compare, it took 28 years for me to feel moved by the statement again. As far away as 1982 seems, the distance couldn’t feel shorter.

So Twentieth Century

Rome’s old Jewish ghetto is full of arresting political and religious posters and flyers.

World War II is everywhere, or so it seems. Famagosta tube station, Milan, mid-February.

Travel Literature

One of the things I love to do at airport bookstores is take stock of the books they carry. Inevitably, there are surprises, standout titles one would be hard pressed to immediately locate in regular bookshops, and always a good war history or two. While I am no expert on French stores, changing planes at de Gaulle last week, this send-up of Islamic fundamentalism, a collaboration between a comic artist and a journalist, stood out.

The reason? The familiarity of the title. It reminded me of a joke my brother used to make satirizing 9/11 conspiracy theorists, speculating that Bin Laden was secretly Jewish. “Ben Ladin,” (as in Ladino), he would pun, transforming “Bin” (son) into its Hebrew sibling, “Ben”. Seeing this title, stocked on a shelf near auto mags, I couldn’t help but recall David‘s sardonic translation, as though others were clued into his same wavelength.

Remixing anti-Semitism

To the post-1967 progressive mind, we had become Europeans, when, until Israel’s independence, were considered neither fully white nor adequately oriental, even though it was not uncommon for Jews to be derided as ‘Muslim’.

The problem is that the contemporary judgment of the left, committed as it is to the colonial critique of Zionism, oversimplifies this history, forgetting it, impeding the Arab connection. It also fails to acknowledge any other Jewish ethnicity than Ashkenazi, further severing any ties between Jews and the Levant.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

Branding anti-Racism

Criticism of European anti-Semitism always neglects its context. That is, it mistakes it’s object, frequently construed as being Israel, for being more important than what it has in common with other continental racisms. It is a criticism of the Jewish right to statehood, to political freedom, never an expression of a larger prejudicial impulse towards towards persons of Mideast descent, which attaches itself to different European Semitic communities at different times.

Reading the mountain of op-eds this week about the Aftonbladet affair, I could not help but wonder why, if we were really dealing with a case of anti-Semitism, not a single charge ever sought to place itself within the context of larger trends in contemporary European xenophobia. Was it because of the political persuasions of the persons making the claims, who, even if they are not sympathetic to Arabs, cannot see the similar ideological mechanism that substitutes Muslim for Jew, and vice versa?

Or was it because the critique of anti-Semitism took form before the advent of large scale Muslim immigration to Europe, and never redefined itself to include both peoples? I’m inclined to believe the latter, especially considering the degree to which the critique of anti-Jewish racism became problematized in left circles following the Six Day War. ‘Anti-anti-Semitism’ came to be considered an ideology masking Israeli transgressions against Palestinians.

Anti-Arab racism had to unnecessarily get segregated, independent of European Muslims’ experience of the same basic prejudices as the continent’s former Jewish population. There would be no concentration camps, but there would be facsimiles of everything else: specifically a combination of ghettoization and integration. They would be outsiders within the bourgeoisie, as Max Horkheimer once described Europe’s Jews, as well as perennially itinerant migrant laborers.

Just Like One of Us

He’s not considered a player in public debates about Israel, but he should be. In Wednesday’s edition of Religion Dispatches, I discuss Slavoj Zizek’s criticisms of  ‘anti-anti-Semitism’, in his new book, Violence.

Released in the UK at the beginning of 2008, the volume did not appear in the US until August. The last time I reviewed a book by Zizek was Welcome to the Desert of the Real, for the SF Bay Guardian, in October 2002.

Also worth noting: We published a review of the Independent Jewish Voices anthology in Zeek yesterday. Whereas my review tackled the book from ‘abroad’, Keith Kahn-Harris explains its significance for British Jews.

The New Anti-Semitism

What do we make of right-wing incitement against Islam in America, and Arab Americans like Rashid Khalidi? Because it is primarily directed at Jews, despite the fact that most find themselves drawn to Obama, how are we to effectively interpret it, and work to minimize it’s potential consequences? Surely there is serious damage being done here.

Such forms of agitation are designed to erect the most vulgar of barriers between peoples, in this case, two American communities, both of whom share roots in the Middle East and bear unique personal witness to that region’s troubles. In the same way that US foreign policy has made it even more difficult to reconcile Jews and Arabs in the Levant, we must recognize that these kinds of practices also tend to inscribe similar kinds of divisions in the Diasporas we share.

Indeed, it is hard to not see in the kind of language used to classify Obama as a Muslim, and Khalidi a terrorist, a perverse desire to bring the war back to the West, and make sure that the same stresses that characterize life in the Middle East also make themselves felt in America as well. It seems that wherever we go, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is inescapable.

-From an article in progress

The European Question

Given the enormity of the losses suffered by European Jewry between 1933 and 1945, the deterioration of Israeli-European relations after the Six-Day War may seem like a quaint afterthought. Or, at the very least, an event that one would expect to have originated in Jewish instead of European circles. After all, Jewry had more than its fair share of reasons to reject European civilization in toto given the tragedy that had just befallen it. As many critical, scholarly analyses of European culture since the Second World War have demonstrated, the Nazi genocide was a perverse by-product of the same historical and social developments that helped define what it means to be Western.

Anti-Semitism was not a foreign import, but European through and through. And it wasn’t backward, a residue of pre-modern Europe, either. No, the racism expressed towards the Jews from the nineteenth century onward, even as it mobilized earlier forms of anti-Semitism, went hand in hand with the outwardly rational forces of modernity. The problem for European Jews, particularly in Western Europe, is that they typically identified with these forces as well, going out of their way to convince themselves that anti-Semitism was the antithesis of modernity.

This conviction added to the difficulty of disidentifying with Europe, even after the Holocaust had demonstrated once and for all that Jews could never hope to be fully assimilated in Gentile society, however modern it seemed.  From Theodore Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”) onward, Zionist ideology has always regarded Jewish national identity as being culturally European. What “European” meant in this context, however, was complicated. Summing up Herzl’s position in the Socialist Register in 1970, Belgian Jewish Marxist Marcel Liebman argued that Herzl envisioned his Israel-to-come as a European outpost, both for practical purposes – protection from its neighbors – and for ideological reasons.

- Excerpted from Israel vs. Utopia