Perils and Victories Crossing the Divide Alice Rothchild

effrey Goldberg is a dynamic journalist whose Middle East reports a Conservative Jew in Malverne, in the New Yorker during the past few years have brought readers Long Island, found the experience J face-to-face with leaders of Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda and euphoric. “It wasn’t just Chuckie the Taliban. (Critics of his report- Greer, Malcolm X, and Meir Kahane ing have charged him with helping who turned me into the Moshe Dayan to incite the Bush Administration’s of the Howard T. Herbert Middle “War on Terror” and the invasion of School,” he writes. The bar mitzvah Iraq.) Goldberg’s new book, Prison- sparked his excitement about Jew- ers, a Muslim and a Jew Across the ish militarism, with its promise of Middle East Divide, is a brilliantly power and redemption, after years told account of his journey of self- of stoop-shouldered, Long Island discovery — from a lost, neurotic wimpiness. American college student to a dirt- under-the-fingernails kibbutznik to His tale opens like a thriller, with his a military policeman in the brutal arrest in Gaza, where he was working Ketziot prison camp in the Negev as a journalist for the New Yorker, during the firstintifada . by a militant Hamas faction at the Goldberg’s narrative, however, is Jeffrey Goldberg beginning of the second intifada. He not only an intense dialogue with himself as he searches for his own Reviewed in this essay: identity as a Jewish man. It is also Prisoners, a Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide, by Jeffrey a conversation with a number of the Goldberg. 2006, Alfred A. Knopf, 336 pages. prisoners he first meets behind barbed wire and later in offices and mosques from Eastern Europe. Descriptions of writes that he waved his passport and in the Middle East and Washington, torture in Israeli jails are juxtaposed yelled about being American. “I had D.C., where they have become the against an unabashed belief in Jewish learned, in previous encounters with Palestinian Fatah leadership. Gold- morality. dyspeptic and well-armed Muslims, berg mixes his own personal story Prisoners is also a tortured, self- the tactical importance of behaving in with direct quotes and interviews, deprecating, and intelligent ex- the manner one associates with Steve all framed by a layered historical ploration of Goldberg’s Jewish McQueen, and so I resisted the urge commentary that grounds the book inheritance, what he describes as “a to unleash, as I do in moments of in several thousand years of Jewish melancholic and mostly unmentioned tension, great gusts of words.” and Arab history. understanding of the gentile world. Goldberg maintains this crackling . . . Oppression was a birthright.” tension as exposes the reader to his The story he tells is filled with He explains that his passion for Is- own initiations into Israeli manhood mind-boggling contradictions and rael and his birth as a Zionist came and the brutality, stupidity, and in- paradoxes.Most of the Yiddish Gold- strangely enough during his frantic justice he sees around him. He is berg knows, for example, is learned bar mitzvah amidst rocking, black- in a constant argument with anyone from Palestinian prisoners who had hatted Orthodox Jews at the Western willing to listen — over politics, Zi- previously worked for Israeli Jews Wall in Jerusalem. Goldberg, raised onism, religion, and violence — and his prose is consistently fearless and Alice Rothchild, MD, is a member of The Workmen’s Circle in Boston ironic. and its community chorus, A Besere Velt. She works on issues related to Arafat’s handshake, he writes, peace in Israel/Palestine and on women’s and health care issues in the U.S. is “like herring in cream sauce.” Her book, Broken Promises, Broken Dreams, is scheduled for publication in Women sitting on a Gaza beach are April by Pluto Press. described as wearing “black scarves

70 Jewish Currents and thick cloth, and they boiled in- is with a young man named Rafiq Hi- collaborate with Israelis, the care- side them like eggs.” jazi, a Gazan whom he first encoun- fully regulated order and disciplined On joining the Israeli military, ters while serving as a prison guard at indoctrination, the vigorous resis- he exclaims: “I was exceedingly Ketziot. Goldberg is drawn to Hijazi tance to Israeli occupation. Goldberg happy — the rifle was electric with through “the enzymes of friendship writes with real credibility because the promise of Jewish power — and . . . He thought I was kind, for a Jew, he is at once the brutal Israeli soldier so, too, were my new comrades, all and I thought he was smart, for an and the guilty moralist searching of us from the Diaspora, most of us Arab.” His compulsion to create a through the American Library in having lived our lives in the company relationship with this Palestinian Jerusalem, looking for a copy of the of quisling Jews who, for reasons in- man, as both a symbol and an actual Fourth Geneva Convention. explicable and bizarre, believed that act of outreach across the Middle This leads to his increasing disaf- the main lesson of the Shoah was that East divide, becomes the central fection with the muscular Israeli those who forget the past are doomed recurring theme of Prisoners. It is a mythos. After returning to his news- to repeat it, instead of the actual les- very personal and stormy effort. As paper column at the Jerusalem Post, son of the Shoah, which is that it is Goldberg explains to his Hamas cap- Goldberg ultimately goes back to easy to kill a unilaterally disarmed tors, “I am here in search of the secret the U.S. and becomes a correspon- Jew but much harder to kill one who afflictions of the Palestinian heart. I dent for the Forward and later the is pointing a gun in your face.” About am here exploring the contradictions New Yorker and New York Times the Hamas leader, Sheikh Ahmed of Jewish power. I am here seeking Magazine. “We lived in New York, Yassin, he writes, “The thinking of the elimination of ambiguity. I’m which is sort of like living in Israel scriptural fundamentalists seems, to looking for the bridge that will carry but without the Arabs or quite as the secular-minded, or even to the me across the black hole of cogni- much yelling. I went to work for sort of person like me who feels the tion that separates Arab and Jew. I the Forward, a Jewish newspaper, constant presence of God in his life am here to quiet the conflict in my which was a substitute for religious but does not believe Him to be parti- heart. I’m here because I’m alive to devotion . . . I wrote about American san in His love, as lunacy on stilts. It hope. I’m here in search of the key Jewish groups and their leaders in a is also cruel beyond measure. Funda- to all mythologies. I’m here because disparaging way, because they were mentalism is the thief of mercy.” I’m a fucking idiot.” so small compared to Israelis, who In his relationship with Hijazi, were flawed, but grandly flawed.” Goldberg interviews an extraordi- Goldberg finds a co-conspirator; they nary array of Israeli and Palestin- issue “commentary, only to each In Prisoners, he grapples with his ian leaders. He writes about Prime other, about the farce and absurdity of experiences as a disillusioned believ- Minister Ariel Sharon, whom he met prison life.” He also finds a balm for er in the righteousness of Zionism. first in 1992 and then in 2000 shortly his Jewish guilt. Hijazi, writes Gold- “My love for Israel was so bottom- after Sharon’s bellicose visit to the berg, “understood the moral justifica- less that my disappointment with it Haram Al-Sharif (Temple Mount) tion for Zionism,” while maintaining was bottomless, too.” Eight years and the onset of the second intifada. a strict devotion to Islam. Goldberg, after their prison encounter, he learns Goldberg debates repeatedly with the for his part, recognizes the “poison- Hijazi’s full story in all its humanness founder of Hamas, Abdel Aziz Ran- ing effects of the occupation” and and brutality. Now a statistics profes- tisi, whom he knew from the prison the resilience of Palestinian national- sor in Gaza, Hijazi gradually unfolds and the second intifada, and who was ism. He seems fully able to address his sobering account: the bookish later assassinated by Israel. He also the stereotypes and racism that seep high school student from the Jebalya interviews socialist kibbutzniks and through Israeli society, and to feel the Refugee Camp arrested by the Israeli future suicide bombers, exploring consequences of using humiliation military in a retaliatory sweep against the underbelly of militant Islamic and collective punishment to control Hamas; the multiple episodes of fundamentalism as he travels all over the “enemy.” rearrest and torture; his rise in the the Middle East, from fabled Bibli- He bluntly documents the brutal Fatah leadership; his ultimate return cal towns near Hebron to post-9/11 prison rules of conduct set by Hamas to Birzeit University; his advanced Afghanistan. and Fatah factions, the punishments degrees at the American University His particular obsession, however, imposed by them on prisoners who in Washington, D.C. Goldberg also

March-April, 2007 71 learns the painful story of Hijazi’s possession of physical power and the fast-talking Zionist who is grappling father’s dispossession in 1948, his use of force. These were not, after all, with his devotion to the Holy Land struggle to survive in Gaza, and his shameful traits.” and his horror at the brutality and unwavering belief in educating his I read this book through my own contradictions of steroidal Israeli many children. lens as secular, leftwing Jew, and I military bravado. While Goldberg The author struggles to build a must admit I am not usually sym- is still unabashedly tribal and more bond with Hijazi, who has the poten- pathetic to Israeli militancy or the magnanimous towards America and tial to heal Goldberg’s inner torments endless retelling of competing reli- Israel than I will ever be, he tells a and bring a flicker of hope to a deadly gious justifications. I found Goldberg gripping, nuanced, and unsentimental situation. At the same time, Goldberg too forgiving of the inherent flaws story that bridges many of the divides comes to terms with his own origins: in the Oslo Agreements and too that haunt this world, and he offers a “[T]here were American Jewish traits sympathetic to Sharon and Barak. glimpse into the power of friendship I now had come to appreciate: irony, I have, however, never had the op- and connection in the most unlikely tolerance, and ambivalence about the portunity to crawl into the brain of a of places.

Einstein and American Racism Bennett Muraskin

instein on Race and Racism seeks to redress an egregious omission by the numerous writers who have written about Einstein.None have E mentioned his civil rights activism, his ties with W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, and his relationship to the African-American community in Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived for the last twenty-two years of his life. Co-authors Fred Jerome (the son of Communist Party intellectual V.J. Jerome and the author of The Einstein File: J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret War against the World’s Most Famous Sci- entist) and Rodger Taylor, a librarian, succeed admirably at this task, but their spare 131 pages of text, consist- ing as much of historical and political background as of Einstein’s actual anti-racist activities and pronounce- Henry Wallace, Albert Einstein, Lewis L. Wallace of Princeton, and Paul Robeson, 1947. ments, tell us something surprising: At least until 1946, there is not all that much to talk about. Just as revealing, Reviewed in this essay: however, is Jerome’s and Taylor’s Einstein on Race and Racism, by Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor. 2005, exposure of Einstein’s FBI file, in Rutgers University Press, 206 pages, indexed. which the famous scientist’s support for civil rights is equated with com- cided to remain. He was given a seat discrimination. Einstein often walked munist subversion. at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced through the African-American neigh- Study. The town had a significant borhood and became friendly with Einstein was visiting the U.S. when African-American community that many of its residents, young and old Hitler came to power and wisely de- suffered from intense segregation and alike.

72 Jewish Currents