Joel Schalit

Greetings From Berlin

Or so I meant to title this post, originally, when I was back home, in Neukölln, last June. In town for a week, to renew our visas, I’d very much hoped to start working on this blog again. Alas, I did not have the time. The first time back in Germany, in two months, we had more than our fair share of things to take care of. Now in Torino, for the foreseeable future, I have every intention of getting back in the saddle, finally. I’ve missed blogging.

The main reason for my absence has been Souciant. Co-editor-in-chief, I’ve been serving as managing editor again, a role I am very familiar with. I’ve also been writing a thousand to fifteen hundred word piece a week, which I’ve been running every Monday, or on Tuesdays, when I am behind. I’ve written approximately twenty essays, 99% of which are keepers. The text will end up constitufting a big part of my next book. That’s been the idea.

Over the last week or so, I’ve been slowly updating different parts of this site. The Press and Clips sections have been brought up to date, with links to my recent publications, as well as to coverage. My good friend Doug Henwood was kind enough to host me a second time this year on his  Behind the News show. Our conversation aired last Saturday, courtesy of KPFA in Berkeley. The subject: Anders Breivik, and the European right.

It would be really nice if I could talk about something else going on in Europe. Hence, the wishful thinking of this leftwing sticker, with the image of Lenin. I found it pasted to a mailbox around the corner from our apartment, in Berlin.

“Transatlantic Deodorant Commercial”

It was the first thing that came to mind, as I saw this image flash across the TV screen. Standing on the platform at Stuttgart’s central station, I was waiting for a train take me to the airport, where I was to begin the first leg of a trip to the US.

Anti-anti-Semitism

“Anti-Semitism” was once an unambiguous concept. It was, quite simply, racism directed against Jews. In recent decades, however, the concept has been repurposed to include criticisms of the State of Israel. Once taken for granted, the conflation of Israel-criticism with anti-Semitism is a subject of much controversy, particularly amongst American and Israeli Jewish liberals.

Seeing the invocation of anti-Semitism in these stickers, as part of a larger platform against discrimination, by a radical political organization, albeit an anti-fascist one, cannot help but stir a certain kind of nostalgia amongst Jews. Even among those on the right, who would inevitably bridle at the clichéd leftist rhetoric, but only because its logic still makes some sort of basic sense.

Immigrant Songs

The high point of our year in Milan was discovering its longstanding hip-hop scene. Not just any artists, but the brilliantly-named MCs Marracash and  Karkadan. Routinely employing cheeky oriental signifiers, both musicians attack typically racist fantasies of predatory Arab outsiders.

Charlie Bertsch wrote an in-depth piece on Karkadan in Zeek on Tuesday, reflecting on the singer’s significance as a multilingual Tunisian immigrant, playing the role of the ‘Post-European.’ Check out the videos. They do a great job of embellishing the complexity of the MC’s music.

Irrespective of how many times I’ve commissioned articles on Arab musicians, in context, it still feels precedent-setting to run these pieces. Part of that has to do with the poor state of music criticism, in general, in Jewish publications. And part of it has to do with identity politics.

The ideological link, for me, is the original  experience of otherness that Jews once had in Europe. The situation of Arab Europeans is unbelievably close. Because of the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians, it’s something we tend to forget, precisely when it needs remembering.

Take Me to Your Leader

I was surprised to see the visage of a US president other than Obama. That is, a portrait of the only American head of state of equal iconographic significance. Painted on the surface of a section of the Berlin Wall, positioned outside the entrance to the European Union’s Brussels headquarters, Kennedy’s distant look particularly stood out.

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.

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