resl?onse A Contemporary Jewish Review AParty ... You're invitedl Editors David R, Adler Join liS for an evening of intellectual exchange, jubilation, Chanita Baumhaft and cavortment as Response Michael R, Steinberg celebrates its 30th birthday! 1967 1997 New York University
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Catch Response on the radio. In the NY area? Tune in to Beyond the Pale: The Progressive Jewish Radio Winter/Spring 1997 Hour on WBAI 99,SfM, Sunday, March 30, 12 noon to 1PM, Hosted by Jews for Racial and EconomicJustice, Number 67 I response Response: A Contempo'rary Jewish Review Number 67 • Winter/Spring 1997 A Contemporary Jewish Review Copyright © 1997 by Response: A Contemporary Jewish Review Number 67 Winter/Spring 1997 All rights reserved. No portion of this journal may be reproduced by any process or technique without the fonnal consent of the editors. Response (ISSN 0034-5709) is published quarterly by Response Magazine, Inc. Letters ...... 5 Periodicals postage paid at New York City and additional mailing points. Response is indexed or abstracted in the Index to Jewish Periodicals, Dustbooks, Poet's UP FRONT Market, Writer's Market, and American-Jewish Media Directory, and is available through University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Four More Years David R. Adler ...... 7 An independent journal of Jewish expression, Response is an affiliate of the Jewish Student Press Se'rvice, a constituent member of the Committee on Independent Student Initiatives of Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, and a member SPECIAL FOCUS: QUEERJEWISHNESS of the Association of Jewish Libraries and the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. Financial contributions are tax-deductible. Students are encouraged to apply The Family Name for semester-long and summer internships. Peter Nickowitz ...... 10 SUBSCRIPTIONS Territory, 1990 In U.S., four issues: Students-$12; Individuals-$20; Institutions-$36. Canadian Robin Podolsky ...... 17 subscriptions add $2; subscriptions outside of North America add $4. Bulk and long- Queer Inheritances: Tracing Lesbian, Jewish, and Poetic Lineages tenn discounts available. Students, please include proof of status with subscription in Adrienne Rich Joshua S. Jacobs ...... 23 order. Available back issues $3 each. Single copies $6. This Is Not a Theory Essay SUBMISSIONS Alison Luterman ...... 37 Response welcomes articles, letters, fiction, poetry, reviews, artwork, and photography. Anne Frank: The Secret Annex and The Closet Student submissions are given priority. Manuscripts sent for consideration should be Allen Ellenzweig ...... 43 approximately ten pages, typed, double-spaced, single-sided. Author's name, address, phone number, and short bio must be included on the first page of each manuscript. Passing Through the Christian Nation Nonfiction may be edited as necessary. Simultaneous submissions acceptable. Sandi DuBowski ...... 61 Submissions sent without SASE will not be returned. Decisions take at least eight to ten weeks; accepted articles are published within approximately four to six months of FICTION acceptance. Authors should be prepared to forward accepted work on computer disk (IBM or Macintosh fottnats only; Macintosh Microsoft Word 5.0 and later preferred). Tuesday David Erlich All contributions, correspondence, submissions, books for review, subscription orders, ...... 33 and advertising requests should be sent to: Journey Editors/Response Gabriel Lampert ...... 77 27 West 20th Street, Suite 901 New York, NY 10011-3707 POETRY Inquiries may also be made by phone (212) 620-0350; fax (212) 929-3459; or In the River e-mail
5 A , •• ... ~UpFront~ q ~ • Four More Years • Now in its fourth volume ... Shortly after his reelection as President of the United States, Bill Clinton The Journal of > o addressed the Democratic Leadership Council and declared an end to political • ?L • Lesbian and Gay Studies conflict. His victory, he explained, signifies a nationwide repudiation of • Q ideology and partisanship. The hoary dichotomy ofteft and right is now to give ~ way to the commonsensical, pragmatic vision of the "Vital Center." Accord- ... . ingly, politicians are to act as consummate compromisers, striking deals with EorroRS Providing a forum for new work in the rapidly their putative adversaries in the interest of "getting the job done." And of Carolyn Oinshaw expanding interdisciplinary field af lesbian and gay University of California course, everyone is to agree on what "the job" is. Dissent is conveniently at Berkeley studies, GLQ: A journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies categorized as obstructionism. publishes scholarship, criticism and commentary David M. Halperin that bring a queer perspective to bear on any and all In Clinton's second term we'll witness the continued sanctification of University of South Wales topicS touching on sex and sexuality. By treating sex "bipartisanship," the Vital Center's holiest of values. Often construed as laudable Sydney, Australia not simply as a physical or psychological event but civility-"walking across the aisle and shaking your opponent's hand"-what also as a partofvarious networks of cultural exchange. BOOK REVIEW EDITORS it actually represents is the elimination of all remaining differences between the Peter M. Nardi GLQ illuminates the complex interplay among sexual Socia! Sciences and social meanings. individual and collective practices, Democratic and Republican parties. The party of FDR has been transformed Ann Pellegrini private fantasies and public institutions, erotks and by a coterie of "New Democrats" (a clever label-who wants to be aligned Humanities politicS. with what's "Old"?) into an instrument of the emerging center-right FILMNiOEO REVIEW EDITORS consensus. Nowhere was this transformation more evident than at the 1996 Patricia White GLQ presents new essays by leading and emerging B Ruby Rich scholars in lesbian and gay studies. Each issue also Democratic National Convention. Then Indiana Governor Evan Bayh, a indudes The GLQArchive, a special section featuring virtual nobody and perhaps the most right-wing Democratic official in the preViously unpublished or unavailable primary EDITORIAL BOARD country, was chosen to give the Convention's keynote address. Kwame Anthony Appiah materials that may serve as sources for future work Judith Butler in lesbian and gay studies. In an effort to achieve the Bayh promised the fruits of the American Dream "to all who share our George Chauncey,Jr. widest possible historical. geographical, and cultural values." This exclusionary message at the heart of the New Democratic Janet HaUey scope, GLQ seeks out new research into historical program sums up the creeping homogenization of political discourse and the periods before the twentieth century. into nonM Philip Brian Harper stigmatization of dissent as contrary to the national will. "Politics" itself has Sue Houchins anglopohone cultures, and into the experience of Earl Jackson, Jr. those who have been marginalized by race, ethnicity, become a dirty word. A group offirst-term congresspeople appearing on PBS's age, social class. or sexual practice. Exploring all Michael Lucey NewsHour with Jim Lehrer insisted that it was time to "put politics aside" and get areas of lesbian and gay studies. GLQ strives to Biddy Martin to work representing their constituents. Imagine: a new breed of politician represent differing viewpoints and critical Jeff Nunokawa methodologies while preserving an oppOSitional pledging no longer to tolerate politics in an institution that is political by Cindy Patton design. definition. Lisa Rofel David Roman 4 issues per volume' ISSN: I064M2684 President Clinton and his fellow New Democrats can be assured that a Gayle Rubin Current Subscription: Volume 4 (1997) sizable number in this country will .opt out of the Vital Center and remain true Sasha Torres Base list rate for individuals: US$35 to the goal of progressive social change. But where will American Jews place To order or request additional information: International Publishers Distributor, PO Box 32160, themselves? What happens to the commonplace image of the American Jew as a Newark, NJ 07102, USA, tel: +18005458398, fax: +1 2157506343 or PO Box 90, Reading steadfast liberal, a loyal Democratic voter, when the Democratic party ceases to Berkshire, RGl 8Jl, UK, tel: +44 (0) 118956 0080, fax: +44 (0) 118 956 8211 be liberal? Stereotypes and received ideas about Jewish political affiliations will Gordon and Breach Publishers have to be rethought as the landscape continues to shift underneath our feet. http;//www.gbhap.com • e-mail: [email protected] -David R. Adler 7 HISTORY (f5 MEMORY ~ Special Focus ~ QUEER jEWISHNESS Studies in Representation of the Past
Israeli Historiography Revisited Gay and lesbian Jews have been struggling for years to gain full recognition Volume 7, Number 1 and respect as equal members of the Jewish community. Many have protested Anita Shapira: Politics and Collective Memory: New York's annual Israel Day Parade since Congregation Beth Simchat Torah The Debate over the "New Historians in Israel" was prohibited from marching under an openly gay and lesbian banner. Baruch KimmerHng: Academic History Caught Controversy continues to brew over the Conservative movement's recent in the Cross~Fire: The Case of Israeli-Jewish decision to continue barring gays and lesbians from rabbinic ordination. In a Historiography particularly bold move toward the mainstream, the World Congress of Gay and Ilan Pappe: Critique and Agenda: The Post-Zionist Lesbian Jews has applied for membership in the World Jewish Congress, and Scholars in Israel has met intense opposition from the Orthodox Union. Jewish Activist Gays Uri Ram: Zionist Historiography and the Invention of Modern Jewish Nationhood: The Case of Ben and Lesbians (JAGL) recently launched the Jewish Queer Think Tank, which Zion Dinur meets quarterly in New York City to explore issues of concern to Jewish sexual Derek Johathan Penslar: Innovation and minorities. The gronp's aim, according to co-founder Marla Brettschneider, is Revisionism in Israeli Historiogrpahy "to utilize our resources as thinkers and activists in the service of developing Dan Diner: Cumulative Contingency: new / deeper theoretical and theological perspectives in the course of our Historicizing Legitimacy in Israeli Discourse efforts at concrete political transformation." (People can contact the Think Hannah Arendt and Eichmann in Jerusalem Tank care of Response.) By making their presence felt in these and many other Volume 8, Number 2 ways, gay and lesbian Jews have forced the mainstream community to rethink Richard Wolin: Operation Shylock: Arendt, and debate the very nature ofJewish collective identity. Eichmann, and the "Unheimlichkeit" of Jewish Identity One could argue that queer Jewishness occupies a place within organized Seyla Benhabib: The Morality of Narrative and Judaism not unlike intermarriage. In both cases the politics of coupling weigh the Politics of Memory in Eichmann inlerusalem upon the matter of communal boundaries-of who is thought to belong, or Leora Y. Bilsky: When Actor and Spectator Meet not belong, in the Jewish community. In both cases the campaign for Jewish in the Courtroom: Reflections on Hannah Arendt's "continuity," with its frequent characterization of (endogamous) heterosexual Concept of Judgement marriage and procreation as everybody's most pressing Jewish task, encourages Jose Brunner: Kant in Jerusalem conformity to potentially repressive communal standards of sexual conduct. Adi Ophir: "Men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish": Radical Evil and the Eradication When the Conservative movement, fix instance, warns against intermarriage of the Other with a pamphlet called "It All Begins with a Date," what are the implications for gay and lesbian Jews? The phobic imagery of the pamphlet's title highlights Subscriptions (2 issues): Individuals, $20.00; institutions, $30.00 0 Surface pOSt outside the community's power to cast suspicion not just on intermarriage, but on the USA: $7.00 Single issues: $12.95 each, plus $3.00 for the first issue, $1.00 each unsanctioned love relationships of all kinds. additionaL Orders and information from: Indiana University Press, 601 N. Morton, The works that follow serve to challenge heterosexism in the mainstream Bloomington, In 47404 USA 0 Phone: 812-855-9449 0 Fax: 812-855-8507 E-mail: [email protected] Jewish community and broaden its prevailing assumptions about the boundaries of Jewish identity and community. Through literary, historical, Visit our Web page at lmp://www.indiana.edu/-iupress political, and personal exploration, these authors shed light on the complexity of queer Jewish sexuality and personhood. The Family Name 11
David craved the shock of contact. He attacked the ball and followed it like The Family Name faith. Later, he would attack me at home in my room. Jump on top of my huddled body, knock his knuckles against my head and on my back, until I Peter Nickowitz burst my arms and legs open to push him aside. You hit like a girl, he'd spit back. He didn't share my need to sit in the unkept grass on the sidelines and only watch. It was not that I didn't like to run and play, but I felt that I shouldn't. I was tOO awkward. It seemed wrong to me, because, like an adolescent boy on a first date, I didn't know how to negotiate myself with them. Boys were I am not Jewish but my parents are. precious objects, and so fragile to the touch, but ready to be pursued. They hold Passover seders; they go to Temple on the High Holidays; they have • sent money to plant trees in Israel. My mother says but religion gives people a sense 0[ corn!ort and I tell her so does psychoanalysis, but no one prays to Freud. I would When I was studying for my Bar Mitzvah, I knew little Hebrew-in fact be a very bad Jew. I eat pork. I don't know what Shmini Azeret is. I can't read almost none. I could recognize some of the letters: aleph, bet, gimmel. But I did Hebrew and I've never been to Israel. not know the language. I learned my Torah portion and prayers by memorizing • the chant-the words set to a music that seemed old and almost haunted. The cantor sang the words into a tape recorder. I listened to his recording during I am related to no one but myself, said the infamously non-Jewish Noel the week and memorized the whole thing that way. These words I committed Coward. I feel an affinity with this quotation, because I'd like to imagine my to memory like lyrics were both special and lost. What was their meaning? own origin as a miraculous birth, like Venus popping out of a shell in the sea. Their significance to me was purely in their sounds. The harsh consonants and Mother-of-pearl and salt slick seaweed, my womb and bed. This wish does not gutturals stuck in my throat like a wishbone; they were utterly foreign and, yet, come out of a hostility toward anyone in my family. More out of a desire to their oddness contained their virtue. They exposed that words have noise, a make other people stand and take notice. wonderful music, like a fingerprint, all their own. In my inability to • • comprehend, I focused on the sounds, rhythms, cadence; they flew out of my Born in Russia, my grandmother rewrote her history. She told people she mouth differently, harder to pronounce than English. They left a new taste in was born here, in America. She claimed to be an old-time Yank, with hair as my mouth, lasting like the bitter-salt of ripe olives. red as the flag-color bursting like freedom itself in the wind. She convinced • herself of this second birth and created a persona of assimilated happiness. A carefree childhood on a Connecticut farm with animals and apple trees. Under As I write this, a confluence of memories enters my head. I view them not these trees by a lake, my grandfather proposed marriage ro her. When my father as if looking into a crystal ball to see some whole picture, but rather, as if the was planning to get married, she pleaded with him to change his last name. ball were shattered, and I were recalling each sharp shard in turn. This is what Nickowitz was far too ethnic: couldn't it be shortened? She preferred Judaism teaches, for a Sabbath candle does not illuminate all of the dark night, something a little more anglo-pleasant, like Nichols. only the immediate steps in front. But my father, constant as the sea, held fast to his name. if it was good enough • for my fother, he would say, it will be good enough for me. Nickowitz perseveres. But the work led nowhere; I never made my Bar Mitzvah. • • I watched as my sister and brother studied their prayers, their Torah When I was eight years old, my brother, David, played on a soccer team. portions, their speeches. My brother valued his religion. His lessons appeared As October fell into cool afternoons, I watched him. I remember bunches of to me a natural extension of his enthusiasm. He had the right to reap the nine-year-olds running by me. They smiled unobscured adult front teeth, as benefits of the party and the gifts that would follow from the hours of work. large and white as Chiclets. They wore satiny blue uniforms that fluttered in Believing as he did in the rituals did not help him once the day approached. I the wind and stiff shin protectors that always bore the grass-stains of play.
10 12 Peter Nickowitz The Family Name 13 heard him throwing up in the bathroom as we were about to pile into the car, knew how to invent new worlds with images and words. Worlds that people drive to the Temple. I decided, then, not to go through with it, preferring. to recognized and believed in. But he was too new for them, and, like a false god, keep all of me inside. he was without significance. It was beyond my parents' scope to understand my I was afraid too. I heard the stories of the Bible, the payoffs between God deep need for him. He might as well have been written in Hebrew. and the Israelites. I believed that there lived a very large and old man with a • • long white beard who sat in the thunderous glow of Heaven, judging me. He knew everything about me. He knew my secret (what was it? a crush?) for the When in the warm days of spring and summer my boyfriend, Bill, and I boy, named Andrew, in my class. He knew how I would hold the cool cotton play tennis in my childhood town, he could be my brother, because we are so of my pillow tightly against my still smooth chest and pretend that it was a close. I am happy playing games with him and glad to be free of the demons lover, as strong as a Hebrew consonant. A Bar Mitzvah would be just another that haunted my body, telling me that I was bad. My experiences growing up lie. I needed something to force me from my dreams; I could never be like with my parents and their friends provided no models for my life in love with David. Water splashed on me like the Red Sea over Pharaoh's soldiers. another man. We lived where even the trees are Christian and heterosexual. I can only compare my boyfriend to what I know. When I search for the exact • • words to describe my life, I turn to the rituals and rites ofJudaism, because they In college I dated a woman. She was tall and thin, like me, but with a bob are familiar: because they are what I know. I take their hollow music and blow of blond hair and bright blue eyes. TIltre is nothing as frivolous as fire-red lipstick, into them a slow breath of meaning. she said. In loose flower print dress, she was soft and feminine, except her hands. She had long fingers she said were awkward; they were hands ready for work. We had a lot of sex in our rooms, in cars, in chairs. I hungered for her, because she tasted like a sugar-coated pill to swallow, allowing me to feel entitled to the rights oflife and the licenses of being male. She made me closer to David. • • Religion is a puzzle with the center piece that links the whole picture together always missing. Just like being gay. I found another piece of the puzzle the day I came out to my parents. They came to New York for a wedding. It was a late morning in early November. Their hotel room was dark with earth- toned furnishings and smelled ofDior perfume and Lyso!. They said they knew. They said they were not upset. They were happy, if I was happy: parents just want their children to be happy and healthy. I worried that my parents wanted grandchildren. Would our family name, the name that my father had fought with his mother to keep, get wiped away like dirt onto a towel? David would have to bear this burden. He was responsible and a believer. He would have to carry on the name, but he died a week after I came out. Silently my parents crept into the closet with me . • One January, I brought my boyfriend home to them. He was a golden calf that I worshipped for his strength and intelligence. He was a filmmaker who 14 Response Winter/Spring 15
In The River and the little buoys moving in and out, 1. bouncing on the water That year spring was warm enough with their own special gravity. and every night Jack and I would go down to the water. 3. I found Jack From Manhattan, in the river last night which don't forget was an island The sun was gone sold by the indians, and everything Jack has been writing me letters, that had even a touch of orange unfaithful and infrequent, or yellow glowed like wet rocks. but there was a time He stood there in the water, when OUf future up to his ;""aist, his eyes closed was as spotted and his head turned down. with possibilities His nipples were erect as big cities on a map. and a large piece of ice floated by and sparkled like glass. 2. Chicago has pinball machines and heavy industry, 4. but I have never been. Then God said Baltimore has the Orioles I will harden Pharaoh's heart and cheap rent, that I may multiply my signs which is enticing. and marvels and Moses said San Francisco has men and hills, who am I that I should go which everyone knows, and God said hold out your arm but it's also got water, that hail may fall on all the land a lot of water, and then the sea turned red like Bermuda or Long Island, and the fish turned up and I have walked through every neighborhood, and Pharaoh who lies eating and shopping, when he is out of the water only to find myself and can't be found at night down at the docks, stood before you again and again, and Aaron fen to your feet, outside of Chinatown, like a magician's snake, watching the fishermen and then you thought jump from stick to stick only God is watching. 16 Response
5. Territory, 1990 Years later Jack would really be dead Robin Podolsky and I, now living alone in a quiet part ofVermont, and not a city at all, would dream of helping him out of the water I was born on the edge of a continent and handing him a bright red towel in a port city where it never snows, the last stop for travelers from the four and just at that moment directions. I am grafted onto this land like the metropolis that straddles the he would become a bull, desert basin. No matter where my people are, we came from someplace else. which was not so surprising, • and run past with shining teeth At a dance club, I heard one man call another man a wetback, and the and that would be it. second guy said, "Why do you talk about me crossing a river when your people came across the sea?" I would remember his body, On the edge of a continent. One foot across the ocean, on that continent which with death where most of "my" theories got started, another striding through a future of had gotten softer and softer, revisioned tribes and psychic party lines and there isn't another place I call home. and his eyes, • which snuck away like oil, In 1990, I began to stumble twice for every step. Forgotten appointments. and then the coarse cotton No oil in the car. I slept like a prisoner, bustling between dreaming and waking, would rub against my hands a stone on my chest. and I would drop the towel. • My most vivid memory of childhood ecstasy: My first grade teacher put a -Joshua Saul Beckman hardcover book in my hands and had me sound out a word that I had never memorized. The word was rooster and as it started to sink in that anywhere I saw that double 0, I could read "ooh" and that I had every letter in the alphabet under control and could just pick up books and read them for myself forever, the world ballooned to such an immensity that I was drunk with it. That year, I saw on television the first woman who made my bones giggle with desire. Her name was Peter Pan. She wore a dashing, green outfit and fought with swords. She was nothing like a boy. Breathing carefully, so that none of the grownups could tell how excited I was, I stared and itched for her to kiss Wendy who was wearing a nightgown. . . In 1990, I went to bed early almost every night. I woke up unmoving, pinned down with mass. There was a stone on my chest. My acupuncturist said, "kidney-deficient asthma." Organs correspond to attributes, kidneys to will. The year before, I had stumbled hard enough to land on a social worker's couch.
17 18 Robin Podolsky Territory, 1990 19
"Was your family dysfunctional?" not us, in part because we were Jews; about how, when I was ten years old, we "There was never enough money. We watched Walter Cronkite over had to move away from all my friends a year before I left grade school because, dinner and argued about everything. Disappointment tumbled like bacteria in our old working-class neighborhood, white people were learning to live as through the air and there was incorrigible hope. A lot of yelling and a lot more minorities and Jews were beginning to stand out. About the desolation of silence. Hitting on the butt, mostly, and cuddles above the waist always. Pretty learning that my parents were as incomplete and frightened as anyone, that they normal, I'd say." would not always live what they said. I discovered an awful pretension and an awful truth: my conscience and I were alone. I told about trying, then, like a I figured out when quite young that those Founding Fathers we read about Founding Father to uncover other people as though they were a dark were no fathers of mine, but the New England hippies were some kind of kin. continent, and what that cost me. I told those things in the name of what my Uncle Walt, the fairy giant; sweet, scary Emily, and Captain John Brown, the parents said-memory would always save me--and I made my mother cry. very last of that line. • I was a spy in junior high school. I scurried undercover from class to class I perform my nightmares in public. In 1989, when my mother was alive, I in my geek uniform of long skirts that dropped to mid-knee, books tumbling told that there had not been enough money. There was no way, and I knew it, from my hands. On the day that Kathy, leggy in her miniskirt, came to a sudden that my mother would ever understand how I could talk about family in front stop on the'stairs in front of me, I put out a hand for balance and to give her of strangers. But everybody was doing autobiographical performance that year. a shove. I swear I hadn't planned it, but somehow, that neat little rump encased And I liked to think of myself as the daughter of prophets more than I liked to in slippery nylon panties slid into my hand and stayed there. My hand. I had, think about being my mother's child. unquestionably, done the thing, but the scene had moved from routine to There's a thread that binds John Brown to Jeremiah: By the waters of impossible as a dream will, and only when Kathy started and shrieked was I Babylon we sat down and wept because the wicked had carried us away into sure that we were awake. I jerked away. Kathy told everybody in earshot, but captivity. one look at my spectral scholar's face pinched into a study of confusion There are high desert rocks that cup my city. They pulse with volcanic convinced them that she had a dirty mind. memory and turn me, when I walk their surface, into something like a lizard: • silent, alert, and utterly sufficient. How can I claim this place, the country or In 1989 tumors budded in my mother's bones. In 1989 the plague took a the land, when those rocks were painted in a language I can't read, by people friend who I'll miss for the rest of my life. In 1989 the good voters ofTacoma, who gave them names I don't know? When people cross the Atlantic as Irvine, Concord, and San Francisco let be known their mandate that pursuit of prisoners, chained below decks? happiness is not about queers. "Why do you talk about my people crossing a river when yours came In New England, the Fathers thought that a particular man was a witch. across the sea?" They put stones on his chest. More and more stones, until he suffocated and When I wander from my city on the edge into this country's center, the was crushed. place they call its heart, my Sumerian hair and fancy spectacles amount to a bull's-eye. What's the difference, a teacher asked, between a quest and a sojourn? A • quest, something answered with my voice, is when you leave home in search But it was Sandburg and Langston Hughes and Judy Grahn who told me of some precious object and the most important part is not the sought-after to go ahead and write in big, broad, looping sentences as wide and convoluted thing itself, but what happens to yon on the way, what you learn, and your as the hair and skin of this land. return. A sojourn is a time of rest, a time to stay among strangers who know nothing about you but what you tell them. In 1989 and the year before that, I told of the words and silences my The danger in a sojourn is that a wanderer may forget her quest. Now, parents gave me about being a white girl in this place. About how at five years what's the difference between sojourn and exile? old I knew that it was bad white people in the South who were prejudiced and • 20 Robin Podolsky Territory, 1990 21
At thirteen, I went questing without a guide into the sudden, certain studies philosophy and fixes her own car. When I got home, she was waiting knowledge that nothing had to turn out alright. Nobody had to love me. Shell cross-legged on the car's hood. She looked so gorgeous that I threw my arms Oil and canned food meant three dollars a day and corpses in fields with their around her neck and kissed her mouth. Then the moment's romantic solipsism eyes missing. Our government was burning children. Anything might be a lie. faded and I remembered the danger I had exposed us to, kissing on the street I found less and less to say to anyone and was vinrucated and appalled when I that way. On the other hand, none of our neighbors ever bothered about it, if saw how far that could go before anyone noticed. There were hot days when I they happened to see at all. went to school in wool because color and temperature had receded like • breakers fleeing a tidal wave. It's rough these days, for queers and girls, and now that we've won some So I wrote it down. I told that I was caught like a prisoner between victories, we've never had so much to lose. Our marble-eyed governor dreaming and waking on the edge of a continent, one foot in postwar France, continues his slash and burn on AIDS care, clinics, and jobs. Travelers from four the other in a void where no future was, and there was no place I called home. directions skid to the edge of tbis continent and nobody sees them again. In a Soon after that, one morrung, I woke up and the sky was a hard electric port city, economic apartheid holds steady and none of it has to turn out blue. The sun was a pouring crucible of gold. An overused backdrop for alright. revelation, and I don't even like the blue and gold days as much as the misty • green ones, tangy with rain, but there it was. I wore a red blouse that day and In 1990, my mother and I watched Noriega, on television, being hauled in. a short black skirt and had lunch with some girls who kept journals and there She said, "You think the CIA will have somebody kill rum before the trial?" was so much to say. For that one and only year, I threw print away. I learned to "They'd have to make it look like suicide;' I said. paint my face, raise my voice, smoke dope, flirt, and make friends. And when I "Right," she said and took my hand. hit the books again, the void had become possibility. One day, hundreds of us • closed the school and took the streets to swear we were not about to cross the Risking distraction, we who straddle exile and quest can sojourn together. sea and burn anybody. For a long minute, I was home. In my skin. Sometimes the journey returns us to places we call home. Sometimes we learn to recogruze home as the weight strapped to our backs. And then there are There's a stone on my chest and syrup in my lungs, but the city tells me those rare arrivals when word and flesh become something like one. things the painted rocks don't know.
At twenty-nine I shook the hand of a raw-boned Southern preacher woman with thighs like birches and grey eyes blazing prophecy. Jeremiah eyes. I had never met a woman who could make my elit weep with one raspy, undulant syllable. She never would have me, but in loving her I found freedom from the void of urban contempt; I learned to love believers. She was the fourth Christian whom I learned, that year, to respect. I wanted to ride home to this fractured continent on her cunt. I rode her ghost and the delirium of dead poets back to another heart that beats in this country's center, the one they keep trying to crush. My roots to this place go no deeper than concrete, but its wide sky has me by the hair. I dream in no language but this.
One evening, in 1990, I came home to take my green-eyed lover to the movies. She grew up on the desert plains with 4-H and barrel racing. She knows that if you don't plant seeds and keep them fed, nothing will grow. She 22 Response
Queer Inheritances: Tracing Lesbian, Jewish, and Poetic Lineages in Adrienne Rich
Joshua S. Jacobs
No Money, No Work Sometimes I Jeel I have seen too longfrom too many disconnected angles: white, Jewish, anti-Semite, racist, anti-racist, once-married, lesbian, middle-class, Just because someone is Jewish, Mother said, feminist, exmatriate Southerner, split at the root-that I will never hring them doesn't mean he's nice. I shouldn't be whole. telling you this, because there are enough people -Adrienne Rich, "Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity" out there saying bad things about us, but not all Jews are nice. I should know. I worked for a few of them. When it came time to pay me, some were short of money. Wen Adrienne Rich wrote "Split One wanted me to be a volunteer. I'd at the Root" in 1982 for the Jewish lesbian anthology Nice Jewish Girls, her life have told him of!, but he was a Rabbi. and career were going through radical change.! Since the publication of her I had to be respectfuL He didn't understand first book in 1951, Rich had been a celebrated American poet: first praised in that if a woman has a family she's already academic circles for her early work, she was then claimed as a major poetic not getting paid for the work she's doing. voice of the women's movement after her controversial 1973 volume Diving Into the Wreck. With her 1980 essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian -Hal Sirowitz Existence," Rich's position as the preeminent poet-commentator on lesbian feminism seemed established. But the "lesbian continuum" that Rich proposed in "Compulsory Heterosexuality," while immediately influential in the lives and thinking of many, did not correspond to any equivalent coherence of identity in her life or work. Within the same span of years in the 1970s, Rich asserted herself as Jewish after a completely assimilated childhood, and as a lesbian after eighteen years of marriage and motherhood with a non-observant Jewish man. "Becoming" a lesbian and a Jew was Rich's birth into a tense interconnection of identities, with its basis in the juncture of lesbian feminism and Jewish tradition: for Rich, her own "split root" became the basis for understanding all the lives she observed as continuous weavings from their varied communities, and from each person's place in the social and political contexts of their time. For her readers. Rich's attention to identities enmeshed in shifting American contexts has meant she is difficult to claim as a poet wholly of one community or another. Her poems most often give Jewish and gay readers visions of themselves among others. Rich locates the traditions of gay and Jewish life not in private celebration or ritual, but in the persistence of
23 24 Joshua S. Jacobs Queer Inheritances 25 connection within these communities across our century's violence and on Jewish or lesbian life showed the difficulty of responding to both of these change, as in this reflection on the Holocaust in "Sources": "new" identities at the same time. In her first works on lesbian life, "Twenty- One Love Poems" (1974-76), Rich portrays lesbian existence as engaged with The place where all tracks end both the cruelty and the imperiled pleasures of the world: after setting a scene is the place where history was meant to stop but does not stop where thinking of pornographic movies and run-down neighborhoods in Manhattan, Rich was meant to stop but does not stop asserts that where the pattern was meant to give way at last We need to grasp our lives inseparable but only from those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces, becomes a different pattern and the red begonia perilously flashing terrible, threadbare from a tenement sill six stories high, strained familiar ongoing2 No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, Rich's poetry of this period is driven by her felt responsibility to bear witness sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, to others' lives, and to suggest possible connections among those who are dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, isolated by violence or political divisions. This central motivation stems perhaps our animal passion rooted in the city.3 from her own entry into Jewishness and lesbianism, after a life in which This impassioned encounter between women, and with their lushly impure claiming those connections was explicitly prohibited within her family and by environment, characterizes this poem's exploration of the contexts for lesbian society as a whole; in "Split at the Root," Rich describes her new life as "a community. With particularly stirring language, Rich refuses to name her love moving into accountability, enlarging the range of accountability" [BBP 123]. as a miracle, or to stop living when the relationship ends: In this essay, I trace Rich's evolving placement ofJewish and lesbian identities within an "enlarged" historical and social context in her poetry. If I could let you know- Rich engaged with these traditions in her own life as her poetry assumed two women together is a work an ever-expanding burden of witnessing; asa result, the evocation of lesbian nothing in civilization has made simple, two people together is a work love and Jewish faith in her poetry of the 1980s is sometimes overshadowed by heroic in its ordinariness [DCL 35J the historical forces of violence and social rupture against which she struggles. By the later 1980s, Rich began to situate her work within a lineage of For Rich, lesbian existence is an instance of heroism in ordinary life. She American poetry of witness, including major gay and/or Jewish writers such as regards the sexual bond between women as outside the laws and events of Walt Whitman and Muriel Rukeyser. It is within this most recent period, I'll society, even outside the plane of the poem: in "The Floating Poem argue, that Rich's sense of poetic language as an ongoing force in our lives has (Unnumbered);' she evokes her and her lover's bodies together in the present, provided an overall coherence for her sense of lesbian and Jewish experience. saying "whatever happens, this is" [DCL 32]. More generally, Rich's explicit self-placement within a poetic lineage has been Another factor that informed Rich's life at this time, but which saw no taken up by younger Jewish, gay, and other readers, in whose lives we can see mention in "Love Poems," was her Jewish identity. As she notes in "Split at the Rich's poetry act as a powerful inheritance for their own self-understandings. Root," her first lesbian relationship, depicted in "Love Poems," was with a In "Split at the Root," Rich, looking back at the contradictory directions Jewish woman. This omission in "Love Poems" suggests that Rich understood in her own life, writes that "[t]here is no purity... we can't wait for the lesbian and Jewish experience as occurring on two distinct levels, even if in the undamaged to make our connections for us; we can't wait to speak until we are same person. In HLove Poems," Rich's visions of lesbian love as "heroically perfectly clear and righteous" [BBP 123]. This statement reflects the conilicts ordinary" or "outside the law" operate on an essentially metaphorical level: within American feminism as lesbians, women of color, and Jews asserted their despite the specific New York setting, the relationship is not depicted via actual particular roles in the women's movement.We can also see in Rich's words her events or by either woman's life-work external to the interaction of bodies and engagement with Jewish traditions of community and repentance, which she words. By contrast, Rich's engagement with her Jewishness, which we first see would directly address in "Yom Kippur 1984."Yet her first three major poems detailed in "Sources" (1981-2), is bound up with the actuality of her 26 Joshua S. Jacobs Queer Inheritances 27 relationships with her father and husband and with the work of historical Within this witnessing practice, Rich's sexual connection with her lover is not memory spurred by the Holocaust. This precursor to "Split at the Root" is defined as separate, as it is in "The Floating Poem (Unnumbered)"; instead, framed by Rich's return to Vermont after sixteen years, to the area where she Rich's evocation of hot physical love in wintertime is locked between a vision spent summers with her husband and sons, and where her husband traveled in of "My country stuck fast in history! wedged in the ice" and a woman's 1970 to take his own life. Rich's tenuous history in this Yankee region is the narrative of being beaten by her husband. occasion for thinking of her unaccounted-for sources in the Jewish faith of her The landscape of social injustice and physical pain in "Contradictions" is father's Southern family, and in the European Jewry that was dying during her Rich's attempt to take on everything, and to risk incoherence in order to childhood in Baltimore. represent the confluent paths of many different peoples' pain. In her rendering "Sources" serves as a memorial, a poem in which Rich's "powerful, of the places European Jews were torn from during the Holocaust, Rich womanly lens" enables her to parse her father's Jewish suffering from his illuminates a range of ordinary lives, and through her apostrophic address to patriarchal abuses, and to converse with him and her husband after their "You;' strains to bring these lives into connection with her contemporaries: unreconciled deaths. But Rich's powerful vision seems oddly isolated by these encounters: she explains this state of assurance in solitude, saying to herself that You: air-driven: reft from the tuber-bitten soil that was your portion from the torched-out village it is "Because you grew up in a castle of air/ disjuncturedllBecause without a the Marxist study group the Zionist cell faith! you are faithful" [YNL 26]. When Rich writes, "The Jews I've felt rooted care or cheder Zaddik or Freudian straight or gay among! are those who were turned to smoke" [YNL 18], we might ask woman or man 0 you whether a middle ground is possible between the vibrant lesbian connection stripped bared appalled of"Love Poems," grounded in an abstracted field of social and historical strains, stretched to mere spirit yet still physical your irreplaceable knowledge lost and the historically specific-but dead-Jewish community of "Sources." at the mud-slick bottom of the world In "Contradictions: Tracking Poems," the third major poem sequence of Rich's initial encounter with Jewishness and lesbian existence, she puts forth the You: air-driven: reft: are yet our teachers experience of the body as a common basis for exploring both of these identities. trying to help us in sleep Written at a time when Rich was invested in such global causes as the Sandinista trying to help us wake [DCL 108] government in Nicaragua and in the continuing fight to stop violence against These lives and histories that remain after torture give some detail to the women, the connections "Contradictions" offers are primarily the shared "ongoing pattern" ofJewish life after the Holocaust. Rich connects Jews to the experiences of physical pain. As with "Sources," Jewish life is largely defined here broader life with which she engages from a lesbian-feminist perspective, by deaths in the Holocaust, and also by the observance ofYom Kippur; however, however affected this life is by the numbers of the dead in the camps. Rich integrates Jewish existence more fully into her larger witnessing purview What allows this feeling of broader connection is Rich's expansive listing by suggesting a global solidarity of atonement and resolute life: of different strands of identity within the Jewish community, a poetic strategy Night over the great and the little worlds that has its counterpart in secular American poetry in Walt Whitman. of Brooklyn the shredded conununities Whitman's "Song of Myself" and other works portrayed an American nation in Chicago Argentina Poland comprised by a vast array of such listed races, professions, and places. In these in Holyoke Massachusetts Amsterdam Manchester England poems, Whitman portrays himself as the frank fellow who moves "among black Night falls the day of atonement begins folks as well as white,! Kanuck, Tu~kahoe, Congressman, Cuff," and in so in how many divided hearts how many defiant lives Toronto Managua St. Johnsbury moving-and writing-unites these groups into a national community.4 and the great and the little worlds of the women [YNL 92] Whitman is also of course the foremost American poet of male homoerotic love and comradeship, and as with Rich, this eroticism informed all his nation- This expansion of accountability does not allow for much consolidation of making visions of community. Around the time of Rich's "Contradictions," she identity-or any kind of sheltering-but leads her to find patterns of division enters a period of concerted engagement with her American poetic influences, in the hearts of Jews, gays and lesbians, Americans, and those in other places. which will transform her work in poetry and prose in the 1990s. In her most 28 Joshua S. Jacobs Queer Inheritances 29 direct poem on Jewish and gay life in America, "Yom Kippur 1984;' we see this when our souls crash together, Arab and Jew, howling our influence in a continued use of Whitmanian listing, long-lined evocations of loneliness within the tribes varied Americans; however, in the poem's consideration of Jews and others as when the refugee child and the exile's child re-open the blasted and forbidden city imperiled strangers in American society, Rich presents situations she believes when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men "our society has to reckon with as Whitman himself did not."s are chartered, tell our stories of solitude spent in "Yom Kippur 1984" begins with an epigraph from Leviticus 23, in which multitude Jews are enjoined to "afflict [their] soul throughout this day, [or they] shall be in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted, what will cut off from [their] people."The first lines ask whether a Jew or a queer woman solitude mean? [YNL 78J or man can choose such solitude for her/himself, and throughout Rich Rich's vision of redefined communal identities in the "world as it may be," wonders whether it is possible to "drift from the center, draw [toward] edges" despite its bleak and destructive milieu, coincides with a further shift in her life when the responses to a nonconformist Jew or woman are so often violent. As that would make her Jewish and lesbian-feminist agendas more integrally with her vision of a global "observance" of Yom Kippur in "Contradictions;' connected. In 1990 Rich helped launch Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists here Rich addresses Jewish, gay and lesbian, and Black Americans who all risk and Our Friends, which gave her and others a forum for the kind of Jewish the traditional Jewish openness to the Stranger. 6 In contemporary America, feminism articulated through specific, local issues that had motivated Rich's Rich suggests here, this openness can mean not only rejection from one's own poetry. The magazine has given much attention to the lives of lesbians within community, but violence when one is the Stranger among society at large: Jewish traditions, and also to Jewish feminist perspectives on broader social and To love the Stranger, to love solitude-am I writing merely about political issues,7 Bridges was linked at its inception to New Jewish Agenda, privilege whose advocacy in support of the Israeli-Palestinian peace movement was about drifting from the center, drawn to edges, already incorporated into Rich's vision of "the world as it may be" in "Yom a privilege we can't afford in the world that is, who are hated as being of our kind: faggot kicked into the icy Kippur 1984." A Jewish approach to contemporary social and political crises river, woman dragged from her stalled car became a primary influence on Rich's work in Bridges and in her own writing. into the mist-struck mountains, used and hacked to death This added to the influence of the civil rights movement and writings of young scholar shot at the university gates on a summer evening radical Black American activists, which had affected much of Rich's work in walk, his prizes and studies nothing, nothing the 1960s and 1970s.8 availing his Blackness Jew deluded that she's escaped the tribe, the laws of her exclusion, Beyond guiding Rich's choices of themes, this Jewish approach to the men too holy to touch her hand; Jew who has feminism and its contexts coincided with her affirming her own place within turned her back an American poetic lineage. This focused canon begins with Whitman, but on midrash and mitzvah (yet wears the chai on a thong between since 1990 Rich has worked most intensively with the precedent of Muriel her breasts) hiking alone Rukeyser, a Jewish lesbian poet and writer of startling range who was the found with a swastika carved in her back at the foot of the cliffs featured subject of Bridges' first issue. Rich takes the latter poet as a model for (did she die as queer or as Jew?) [YNL 77J inquiring, fearless engagement with American life and its violence. Rukeyser These scenes of violence describe a Jewish lesbian in a contemporary context, asserted that her poetry of witnessing was motivated by these identities: "My whose internal conflict over her place in either community is made as vivid as themes and the use I have made of them have depended on my life as a poet, the brutal circumstances of her death. While Rich's poetry of this period as a woman, as an American, and as 'a Jew."9 So when Rich makes explicit frequently construes "the world as it is" as unchangeable, or overwhelming our connections to Whitman, Hart Crane, and Rukeyser in her 1991 poem "An efforts toward change, the Jewish woman in this poem anticipates its quasi- Atlas of the Difficult World;' she does so to create a sense of community across apocalyptic final vision of a new world. This vision evokes a community time within an American poetic tradition, and a community whose sense of created in the coming-together of marginalized lives from different groups, a responsibility to others is grounded in a sense of queer and/or Jewish identity. new grouping that Rich makes relevant in terms of gender roles and in the Rich makes this community-through-poetry more explicit in her 1993 prose context of contemporary Jewish politics: work What Is Found There, which is devoted in large part to finding this 30 Joshua S. Jacobs Queer Inheritances 31
communal, responsible poetry at work in writers emerging in our time. By To read "Yom Kippur 1984"-with its powerfully apocalyptic final focusing her readers' attention on such younger poets as Irena Klepfisz, a images-in the context of the Stonewall Seder's culminating, traditionally lesbian American poet whose" continuing labor with Jewish meaning" takes Jewish mandate to preserve queer Jewish culture is to appreciate an essential place in Yiddish and English, Rich asserts that the inherited, varied, queer reworking and adaptation of canonical narratives, which is no less necessa;ry for power of poetic language creates the possibility for social change in the present: Horn's use of Rich than it was for her own engagement with Whitman. In her 1983 poem "North American Time," Rich wrote, "poetry never stood a I see the life of North American poetry at the end of the century as a pulsing, chancel of standing outside history" [YNL 33J, suggesting that a poet's racing convergence of tributaries-regional, ethnic, racial, social, sexual- intended meanings are always altered by successive histories and readers. No that, rising from lost or long-blocked springs, intersect and infuse each other while reaching back to the strengths of their origins. 10 doubt Rich would approve of the newly defined circumstance of her poem in this ceremony of celebration and memory; however, Rich's insistent view of Younger Jews, queers, and others have taken Rich's own work up in turn poetry as an art form moving within the violent changes of its moment likely as they search for community and identity. Mark Horn's "The Stonewall means that she will never write a poem with the full, assured promise of the Shabbat Seder;' celebrated in June 1996 as part of Gay Pride Week in New future to serve as the conclusion to any ceremony, Jewish or lesbian. In her York City, is a compendium of literary reflections on Jewish and queer life, recent poem "Eastern War Time," Rich concludes a sweeping survey ofJewish traditional prayers from the Passover service, and historical narratives of life in America and abroad, with a section beginning "Memory says: Want to persecution and resistance by queers and Jews in the modern world. Along do right? Don't count on me."We then read an entirely Whitmanian catalog, with poems by Allen Ginsberg, the other major gay Jewish-American poet of in which Rich gives first-person voice to the memory ofJewish lives across this our century, Rich's work is incorporated into the congregation's responsive century's struggles, from the Holocaust to the struggle for civil rights in the prayer. The words of "Yom Kippur 1984," which combine violence and the American South. I conclude with these final lines from "Eastern War Time" promise of a varied community beyond violence, are evoked in a section of the whose focus on the Women in Black peace activists and the poe;'s service meant to reflect the 1980, and the advent of AIDS. responsibility to "do right" shows how Rich always brings new questions and All Together: crises to bear on her varied inheritances; to the extent that we read "your What is a Jew in solitude? poem" as "our poem," as gay men. lesbians, and Jews, we cannot stand outside What is a woman in solitude, a queer woman or man? history. Leader: when we who refuse to be women or men as women and men are I have dreamed of Zion I've dreamed of world revolution chartered, I have dreamed my children could live at last like others tell our stories of solitude spent in multitude I have walked the children of others through ranks of hatred in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted, what will I'm a corpse dredged from a canal in Berlin solitude mean?11 a river in Mississippi I'm a woman standing with other women dressed in black The communal, responsive utterance of this poem's painful visions does not on the streets of Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem efface the pain, but it does suggest that an understanding of poetry within there is spit on my sleeve there are phonecalls in the night multiple, intersecting communities (of poets, ofJews, of gay and lesbian readers) I am a woman standing in line for gasmasks makes the poet's solitary work with poetic language more powerful. Rich's I stand on a road in Ramallah with naked face listening poetic discovery of this communal strength, as she explicitly positions her I am standing here in your poem unsatisfied recent work on a continuum from Whitman and Rukeyser through future lifting my smoky mirror poets, echoes in the Stonewall Seder's ceremony of "The Fifth (Empty) Cup: Filling the Cup of The Generations." This moment in the service creates a literal bond between the oldest celebrant's wine and that in the cups of "the youngest people who identify themselves as queer, [charging themJ to accept the responsibility of carrying on the celebration, the struggle, and the sanctification" into the future. 32 Joshua S. Jacobs
NOTES Tuesday lEvelyn Torton Beck, ed., Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology, Revised and Updated (Boston: Beacon. 1989). In this essay I cite from Rich's prose collection David Erlich Blood, Bread and Poetry (New York: Norton, 1986). All further references in the text as BBP. 2Rich, Your Native Land, Your Life (New York: Norton, 1986), p. 20. All further ref- erences in the text as YNL. 3Rich, Tlte Dream of a Common Language (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 25. All fur- I like them in the dark without ther references in the text as DeL. touching. In the light I'm always disappointed. 4Rich, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York: Library of America, 1982), p. The neighbors look at each other with suspicion. Not at me. I'm clean. A 193. sSee "The Genesis of 'Yom Kippur 1984,'" in Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert regular student. Just the way they'd want their son to be, red knapsack over one Gelpi, eds., Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose, 2nd edition (New York: Norton, shoulder, a nice neighborly smile, not too many girls to mess with his head and 1993), p. 257. waste precious time he needs to put into his degree. 6Many readers will note that Rich's representation of the self among Others coincides The eucalyptus trees plunge darkness into deeper darkness. I like boys in with the etrncs of Emmanuel Levinas. I discuss this connection at length in my dis- that kind of darkness. The call of birds in the air; they have the gift of sertation, "Ethics and Witnessing in Adrienne Rich's Poetry." [EDITORS' NOTE: compassIon. For more on Levinas see Michelle Sieff, "Responsibility, the Other, and Postrnodern Jewish Identity: Lessons From South Africa," Response 64 (Summer The neighbors hate each other. Me they love. I pay the maintenance fee 1995), pp. 32-39.J on time. I carry up the old people's gtoceries. I baby-sit when they ask because 7 Bridges, in a state of financial crisis since its inception, can be subscribed to or receive the baby-sitter's sick. They let me watch their little girl. donations at P.O. Box 24839, Eugene, OR 97402. The Bridges Jewish Feminist List, Darkness within darkness, like a tiger within the skin of a lion, and in the an online discussion group, can be subscribed to at
Translated from the Hebrew by E. Arnon and Naomi Seidman.
33 34 David Erlich Tuesday 35
at it-maybe a punishment. And from the side, coffee, a newspaper, a pair of He stroked me with soft fingers. He wanted a desire I didn't have in me. shoes. Loneliness is marked off with the same burning borders as the lights in He said, you're cute. It had been a while since someone had touched me. When Independence Park, borders you can't fix in space but you can feel on your the hand touches before the words, things get out of order. Once, I told him, skin. The light by the statue is still light and the light between the red and white I was pulled like that under a tree and I did things I regretted. He pulled back posts is already almost dark, a different zone, and maybe a sophisticated meter his hand. would read exactly the same intensity, but we can feel the difference. After that a long silence fell. In long silences there's always one who breaks There are days I go to the park intentionally. There are days I pass by. There first, and a long silence never ends in another silence, because then it wouldn't are days I go to the bank machine near the park so I'll happen to go to the be called a long silence. I broke first because I hate long silences, and even short park. There are days I don't go to the park and end up there. silences are harder for me than long torments.You want to know what I think, Tuesday I went there. I passed through what seemed like seven lonelinesses, I asked. He tensed because he knew the moment had come when we would like the floors of a rich man's house. When I left the park I said, let's not meet go one way or the other. Darkness swallows darkness. There's always a moment again. Leaving always takes much longer than coming. like that. I touched him for the first time. And if he looks later he won't find I was already on the street. On the other side a beautiful boy was going marks. There are none. toward the park. He was smoking a cigarette. A splinter of eye contact. In front If! go horne without you, I said to him, if! go home without you I'll be of me and behind me were people. I said to them: People, I don't give a damn happy because I won. If I go home with you I'll be happy because we'll have and turned back. He kept walking into the park without looking at me. I a good time. I was lying again, it seems, because I weighed one good option immediately took out a pocket calculator and figured: Disappointment number against another good option and still I was sad. I lied to him, or to myself, or 138 for this Tuesday evening, multiplied by a regret factor of three according to both of us. to this morning's daily index engraved on a stone tablet which always has a And there are no other options, he asked. margin of errOf, even when first inscribed. To go horne with you and then without you, I said, or with you and then I won't follow him, I said to myself, and immediately followed him without you. (disappointment 139, before factoring) with a slow step and then a fast step, so He smiled. The shadow across from us thickened. He thought. One treetop as not to lose him, and then with a slow right foot and a fast left, because I kissed another, darkness plunged into darkness, my fingers couldn't feel him knew I didn't want to follow him but I wanted to follow him. anymore. He was waiting for me on the first bench. I said hello and it was as if we Right, he said, there are no more options. had already met, and maybe we really had known each other for a long time, From far away drifted the sounds of a wedding. The little boy born to this we were in this same movie. Are you only beautiful in the dark, I asked, or also couple would marry a little girl born to another couple and the same band in the light. He smiled. I smiled. I don't count smiles. would fake the same song, maybe in a different tempo. In the darkness across from us the shadow of the eucalyptus mingled with Come home with me, I asked. the blackness of grass. The shadow of a fat man was swallowed by the shadow I looked at him. The darkness had already become different. I saw him very of a thin man. To remind you, I said to myself, that this whole place is one big clearly, a boy whose hair was fair and eyes were sweet and soul was light. graveyard. No, he said, I won't come with you. He was out of cigarettes. Without cigarettes he goes crazy. Who needs this, A breeze scattered the shades of darkness and reassembled them, and the I thought. We talked about this place in the city. We know the same cafe from park became another park. I left there amazed, having won and lost. And I two different angles. When I asked him if he was also beautiful in the light, I knew that he had found another option. I left with him, because I had was lying, because I'd already seen him under the streetlights. He spoke in a suggested it, and I left without him, because he had refused, at one and the slang of the young that I didn't like. If I live with him for many years I'll say, same time. And in my pocket I found the strip I had torn off earlier by the the first time I already disliked the way you talked. The little discomforts of mailboxes in order to write down his phone number, and on the strip there beginning are always multiplied by the number of days and sometimes even Was only one phone number, of the person who was looking, because hours. everyone's always looking for an apartment in this building. 36 Response
and from there to water (after JB.) This Is Not a Theory Essay
Alison Luterman i lay with giovanni on my narrow bed. today, he had put aside the legacy ofllis other (and i nline) and had come, between panels of downpour, past the pleasure of my italian landlady: in this flat land, her own dialect! w'en I was sixteen and seventeen from his sack emerged a thousand blue combs I was president of the aptly named Drama Club. We put on plays: Tennessee and barley soup grown cold. as the walls drew closer Williams one-acts where I staggered around stage acting out aging whores giovanni said eat this soup, this is what you need. ' dying of unnamed venereal diseases; scenes from Shakespeare and O'Neill; about this they could not have been wrong. one-acts by Pinter, and plays we wrote ourselves. I wrote one called "Farewell though not from my village, he persisted, it's the to Snow White." It was about a lonely woman, a successful executive, who goes same general idea. to her tenth high school reunion and asks a once-rejected former boyfriend to through the ozone, i saw his hands take my head, surrounding sleep with her. He refuses; she begs. When I wrote it, I had broken up with my 1t w1th forearm. everything was how i imagined, even the mole first boyfriend, a gangly, brilliant, awkward Jewish boy, and competed for (and below his left elbow. then he began to hum, a small number from the pulpit won) a political position over another boyfriend, a cool, beautiful, drug- or the hard-to-find cabaret. addicted WASP. I look back at the play I wrote and see how scared I was that telling stories in his impenetrable tongue. in times like these, he whispered, the punishment for being smart and for saying no would be to end up only my tongue. but what would i remember how will desperately alone. i be sure, i wanted to know, ' The real drama of the Drama Club was backstage. I was in love with Tim, no response then, only the march of what sounded like Wt and his the WASP Between junior and senior years, before we broke up, there was an body trembling thin and hard beneath mine. exciting, stuporous summer when Tim, Dave, Nick, and Till-the guys--and Gemma, Rachel, Enlily, and me--the girls-and various assorted other people -yernliyahu ahron taub like the Weston twins who did too many drugs-would get together and party. We'd meet at someonc's house, drink beer, smoke dope, then get into Dave's little yellow vw. Dave was short and heavyset, with a ponytail of greasy red hair; his car was so small we used to say he was wearing it. He came from the tough part of town and carried a hunting knife stuck in his boots. Dave liked to tell stories about sex. Once, he said, he made a woman come so hard, she threw him off the bed. Since Dave weighed over two hundred pounds this was an awesome thing to imagine. We'd drive to a community swimming pool under cover of darkness, climb the chain-link fence, take off our clothes and skinny-dip. At some point or another, cops would come, and then 'the game was to scramble over the fence, throwing our clothes to each other, and take off through the woods whooping and screanling. I don't think they ever chased us very hard. We were just a bunch of nliddle-class wanna-be juvenile delinquents, nothing serious. At parties I became an expert at looking like I was drinking. I'd open cans and stand around holding them, then I'd park them behind potted plants and
37 38 Alison Luterman This Is Not a Theory Essay 39 pad back into the kitchen for another one. I could often be seen opening and the words and she the music. We cooked and sang and danced and hiked posing but rarely actually drinking. I think one of the Westons would follow together; we laughed until we peed in our pants. I was jealous of her. I loved me around and finish what I'd started. her. We talked on the phone every night for an hour, then we talked to our The thing I could do was sex. I remember the first time I felt Tim's penis boyfriends for an hour, then we called each other back and rehashed everything springing to life under my hand, almost busting out of his tight blue jeans. It until it was satisfactorily processed and pureed. We walked around our high felt like a satin-smooth length of coiled rope. I was as amazed at my own power school campus holding hands with each other, and we greeted each other with to do this to him as I was at the feel of it, the skin soft as a baby's, the slit at the long kisses on the mouth. top, the sweet salty taste of the rubbery head. The way I loved her was different than the way she loved me, and it hurt, The first time we had all-the-way intercourse, it was at a party at Tim's and sometimes I wanted to punish her for it. Her friendship for me was mother's apartment, with various people passed out drunk on the couch and friendship, and she admired my ability with words, my poetry, how I thought. in the bathtub. I remember it hurt, physically, and Dave had to drive me home My love for her was physical; her voice, her face, her body, her hair. But it never afterwards because Tim didn't have his license yet. Dave was very kind, and also went beyond a vague undifferentiated ache in me. I didn't have a picture of knowledgeable, being a year older-he told me not to stop the bleeding with what I wanted, only that I could never get enough of her. I knew I wasn't a a tampon, but to take a warm bath, good advice. I remember stumbling in the lesbian, because I kept falling in love with boys. front door as if it had been just another party; my mother remarked disgustedly So, we graduated, all of us. Tim fell down a dark twenty-year-Iong rabbit how my hair smelled of cigarettes as I ran up the stairs to the bathroom. hole of alcoholism. He flunked out of Harvard and drifted back and forth Unwritten, unspoken rules evolved at these parties. One of them was that across the country. Dave's mother died. A stone alcoholic, she was dead for a we could make out with whomever we wanted. Intercourse was reserved for week on her kitchen floor before anyone found her. Then Dave died, ten years declared couples, but anything else went. Gemma and I often made out with later. My mother sent me the clipping. He'd been through drug rehab, gotten each other. Her big breasts were firm and pointy, while mine were round and clean, gotten married, and then got cancer. The town I grew up in, pretty as it soft. I remember her small mouth and sharp teeth. was, was situated next to a toxic waste dump. Another friend from that summer, Dave loved Gemma and slept with her but he was also in love with Tim. Ted, died of Hodgkins' Disease the same year. I can reel off the names of half Tim and Dave used to strip and wrestle naked while the rest of us watched. a dozen young people I knew, friends and neighbors, who died from cancer Tim was slender and pretty with shoulder-length brown hair and blue eyes. I before they were thirty. thought he looked like Jesus. Grown-up men would hit on him-our guidance My first two years in college I had the most romantic relationship I ever counselor made a pass, and there were others-and it made him scared. He had, with a Jewish man who was going to school a hundred miles away. We had began to drink and get stoned more, and to withdraw from the exciting new no money, so we would take turns hitchhiking weekends to stay with each world of sex we were exploring. At the time it seemed to me like a Jew versus other. We never drank or did drugs. I have a souvenir from that relationship, a WASP thing-I, the Jew, was more interested in sex; he was more interested in credit for six cents in food stamps from a grocery store we used to go to. All drugs. But I didn't say that to him. It seemed cooler to be interested in drugs; we did was study together, cook together, and make love, and it was perfect. less intense, less needy. "You know what I like best about your body?" he asked. All this while, I was in love with my best friend Helen. She had long ripply "What?" I said, glancing down, bracing myself. I have big breasts and it brown hair, played guitar and flute, and sung like a bird. There was something seemed like they always got more attention than I did. about her--she was not conventionally beautiful, but wherever we would go "Your face," he said. I melted. Later, he said, "You know, you always have a the men would turn their heads and follow, sniffing. She exuded earth. She had little smile on your face, like you're tr'ying to please. I don't think I've ever seen a sturdy compact ice-skater's body, and she was the only girl I knew in high you without that smile." I had to try for about five minutes to really relax my school who didn't diet. The rest of us would drink Tab and eat an apple for face and let go of that habitual little smile. It kept wanting to creep back. Finally lunch and Helen would have a regular full lunch tray, like a boy. I did it, and he carried me into the bedroom. That whole night, I felt like my I wrote reams of poetry for her, about her: "Valentine," "Helen-dreamt of body was really talking, like I didn't need words anymore. I'd move my arm and love;' "The Flute Player." She was my muse. We wrote songs together-I did it was a whole paragraph. There was no effort or straining anywhere. 40 Alison Luterman This Is Not a Theory Essay 41
We fell asleep and I woke up laughing. "I dreamed you were telling me a railroad tracks. But before they could do it, this other girl was accidentally hit joke," I said. by a truck and killed. Sylvie was brought up Catholic and thought God was He was astonished. "I was dreaming I told you a joke!" punishing them and it would be her turn next. I thought we'd be together forever. I never thought we'd break up. But we "It's OK," I comforted her as she cried against my neck. My little brother did. He confessed I looked "too ethnic" for him. It was my nose. He hated slept peacefully on and to this day he has no idea. himself for it, he said, but he'd been conditioned by magazines to want a Gemma got married. I was one of the bridesmaids. At the rehearsal dinner, woman who looked more ... regular. His mother had been a model and both I had to laugh. Of the six bridesmaids, she'd had sex with three of us. And there his sisters had modeled. When, years later, I met his ex-wife, she looked like she we all were, crammed into pink taffeta and pullY sleeves, ready to walk down could have modeled too. In fact, she looked just like his sisters and his mother. the aisle with her. One woman in particular, a very butch-looking dyke who'd She and I went to lunch and compared notes. "He told me that story and he ridden her motorcycle up from Santa Cruz and was built like a fireplug, looked still felt terrible about it;' she said. "In fact, he cried." like she wouldn't make it through the ceremony without ripping a seam. But "Good," I said. it turned out to be me who messed up; my dress was lost or stolen from my She hadn't liked making love with him. She didn't like his shoulders. car the night of the rehearsal dinner. I didn't discover this until the morning of Shoulders? I thought. I will never understand this attraction/sex/love thing. the Big Day itself. Shoulders? "It's OK," I mumbled to Gemma when I finally had to tell her, after we'd When I met Sylvie I was twenty; she was nineteen, married to an Algerian woken up the sexton and searched the church, searched the restaurant where and living with him in an apartment in Paris that was so tiny the bed took up the rehearsal dinner had been held, searched the car three times. "I'll either the whole space. The toilet was in the hall and it didn't flush. I stayed with them shoot myself here and now or move to Chicago and change my name." there a few days, the three of us sharing the bed. They had terrible, passionate "You don't have to do that, Ali;' her mother said. (How do WASP mothers fights. I was shocked and jealous. I thought she was so sophisticated. I thought get so calm?) My punishment was that I had to wear the maid of honor's pink my own life was boring. All I was doing was going to college and writing taffeta. She was three sizes smaller than me, so I went through the reception papers about Emily Dickinson. without breathing, eating, or sitting down, but it seemed like a small price to Two years later, I was in VISTA, living in Miami. Sylvie came to the States. pay at the time. When I went home for Christmas, she met my plane. She slept over my My own husband-to-be was my companion on this and many other parents' house with me--we both had to share a bedroom with my fourteen- misadventures. He winked at me supportively as I stood propped up at the year-old brother. I gave her the extra twin bed and made a pallet for myself on reception, looking like a potted plant. His mouth was full. He was going back the floor. "Aren't you uncomfortable?" she whispered anxiously. to get seconds on the salmon mousse. I couldn't believe it. Later, as the day "No, I'm fine." mercifully closed, I gave him a blow job in the bathroom anyway. I was so "But isn't the floor hard?" relieved to get that dress off. "No, it's fine." But I'm getting ahead of myself. "Come in with me, I'm afraid you'll be cold."The minute I slid in next to The second two years of college, after my Jewish lover and I split up her an electricity shot through me and she was in my arms and I was kissing her because I looked "too ethnic," I grieved and I studied. I wrote a million papers. ravenously. I felt like Celie in The Color Purple who said Shug made her feel "just Graduated Summa Cum Laude. Looking back I can see that I was lovers with like a man." With Sylvie, I felt the way men had acted when my body was Whitman and Shakespeare and Muriel Rukeyser and Emily Dickinson-all pressed against theirs; like they couldn't get enough of me, they couldn't wait, it noted bisexuals. I had transferred to ihe same college as Helen, and one night was a flood breaking through them now. Except my kid brother was snoring in I was hanging out in her kitchen when a friend of ours invited me up to a the next bed, a few feet away, and Sylvie freaked out, and pulled away. potluck with her Women's Studies class. It was free food so I didn't have to be "What?" I said, after a few minutes. She told me that when she was a little asked twice. girl she used to play little sex games with another girl a few years older whom The teacher of the class, J., was a lesbian separatist. She had been the only she had a crush on. One time, they made a date to go up and play by the girl in an Irish Catholic family of abusive men. She had been a nun. The 42 Alison Luterman students were young, questioning women, partway through the process of Anne Frank: The Secret Annex and The Closet coming out. When I filled my paper plate with rice and beans and salad and sat down, someone was asking J. how she could maintain a separatist head in a co- Allen Ellenzweig ed environment. J. replied with a sigh that of course men were in the world, and unfortunately there were many of them going to college with us, but we could choose to ignore them as much as possible. Don't make eye contact, don't speak to them, she advised. I felt a chill go up my spine. Another, more politically savvy person might have taken a moment to notice that this was not I n the summer of 1993 I made a a safe environment in which to voice differing opinions, but I was never one pilgrimage to the "Secret Annex" at 263 Prinsengracht. This is the major to wait for the right situation when the wrong one was presenting itself so tourist attraction in Amsterdam known throughout the world as the Anne irresistbly Frank House. People moved slowly from room to room. I could barely "But how can you pretend they don't exist?" I asked. "I mean, what about remember the feelings I'd had on my first visit to the Annex almost a quarter- brothers and fathers, what about your cousins-what about male friends?" century earlier. An unexpected thought struck me: the "Secret Annex" as the J. looked at me like I was an infected pimple on the gorgeous butt of gay comic Frank Maya used to quip, would make a very fine apartment in New radical feminism. A bunch of women shifted over to the other side of the room. York City With the right designer, you could fashion a real showplace. I looked I noticed that there was a lot of space around where I was sitting. around and hoped my shameful irreverence did not show On my face. Had I I don't remember any of her tirade after that, except for the punchline: not come here to breathe the air not only of eight dead souls-the Franks and "Look what happens when straight women invade our lesbian space. See how their companions in misery-but of a whole world of European Jewry? It had all our valuable lesbian energy always gets caught up in poindess discussions after all been my experience, both On my first trip to Europe almost twenty- about men." A few other young women looked as if they thought the way I five years before and on every one since, that I am most indelibly an American did, but none were brave or stupid enough to say so. Jew when I am wandering the streets of some capital city in Europe. This was Then I remember they took off their shirts and started to massage each no place to practice Camp wit. other. I wondered if they were trying to shock me. I didn't think women's I was a callow boy of nearly nineteen in 1969, the Summer of the Stonewall breasts were shocking, I thought they were beautifuL But I had no more Riots-the homosexual storming of the Bastille--an event which I do not courage in me to say that. I stayed a few minutes longer, to prove to them that believe made even a dent in my consciousness at the time. I had completed my they hadn't gotten to me at all, we had just had a civilized, theoretical, political first year of college but had no mare felt myself a member of the Hunter discussion, and then as soon as I decendy could I snuck back down to Helen's College student body than I felt myself a member of the human race. All kitchen and burst into tears. around was political dissension, demagoguery, a country On the brink-it Now I am thirty-seven. I have been married and am separated from my seemed-of civil war. husband. I hang out in a Jewish bisexual community in San Francisco where I set out for the Old World with the innocence of a Henry James heroine, we chant bruchas before we make love with each other and everyone knows hopmg, It would seem, to be transformed into one by Edith Wharton. my business. It feels like coming full-circle twenty years, back to high school, • • except now we have mOre words to say who we are and what we want. Bisexual is an unsatistying word to me, but it's the one we have now. To Amsterdam was the second stop on my itinerary Its reputation as both the me, it means almost the same as Jew; something about being on the margins, Sex and drug mecca of Europe did nor immediately impress me. Instead, what the edges, the in-between space. I am used to hungering afrer and rejecting I knew of Amsterdam Was that I could visit the "Secret Annex" where Anne safety, used to traveling back and forth between worlds. It seems like my whole Frank hid from the Nazis while writing her famous diary. I had not reread the life has been about translation, one world to another: sex and poetry, black, diary m preparation for this pilgrimage. Reading the diary often COmes as an white, Jew, Gentile, the language of touch, of friendship and community, the onerous task to young people. As a book on a junior high school reading list rough, sweet, salty, tender language of survivaL This essay is excerpted from a chapter of a work-in-progress titled Chosen People: TIle Holocaust and the Gay Imagination. 43 The Secret Annex and the Closet 45 44 Allen Ellenzweig it may be presented as a rite-of-passage narrative---along with such staples of have managed in the immediate postwar decade to attract the popular young adult literature as David Copperfield, Ethan Frome, and The Catcher in the followmg of an Anne Frank. In her first entry in March of 1941, the twenty- Rye. Thus, the diary is "universalized." On its initial American publication, for seven-year-old Etty writes: example, in her brief supporting introduction Eleanor Roosevelt managed with all her kind words never once to use the word "Jewish." Rather, she The thoughts in my head are sometimes so clear and so sharp and my feelings so deep, but writing about them comes hard. The main difficulty I think . concentrated on telling us how much Anne is like every other young girl, thus fh S ' ,1S a s.ense 0 S arne. 0 many inhibitions, so much fear ofletting go, of allowing not appearing to plead a special case: "Anne wrote and thought much of the thin~ to pour out of me, an~ yet that is what I must do if I am ever to give time about things which very sensitive and talented adolescents without the my !tfe a reasonable. and satIsfactory purpose. It is like the final, liberating threat of death will write---her relations with her parents, her developing self- scream t~at al~ays socks bashfully in your throat when you make love. I am awareness, the problems of growing up ... her diary tells us much about accomphshed m bed, just about seasoned enough I should think to be counted. amon~ the better l?vers, and love does indeed suit me to perfection, ourselves and about our own children." In the period in question it might have ~n~ yet It remams a mere tufle, set apart from what is truly essential and deep seemed perfecrly natural in recommending her diary to the "general" reading mSlde me something is still locked away. ' public for Mrs. Roosevelt not to mention something so vital as Anne Frank's being a Jew-as if that were somehow beside the point. Etty is not a young girl untried in the ways of the world. And while she like We know now that it was not even Mrs. Roosevelt who wrote those Anne, wonders ~~w itwill be possible to use her diary to free from deep within words. A Doubleday editor penned the short introduction and Mrs. Roosevelt what Anne calls all kinds of things buried in my heart:' Etty at least has adult signed on. But a moderating view of Anne Frank's Jewishness was well within sexual experience to call upon as a parallel for the emotional liberation she her father's own perspective. In a letter to Otto Frank, the Doubleday editor, seeks. Where Anne in her early entries-before the family goes into hiding-- Barbara Zimmerman, put the case that a non-Jewish dramatic adaptor of the IS frankly boy-crazy, and coquettishly describes her flirtations, we immediately diary would not fall into the trap, which a Jewish writer might, "of limiting the face m Etty a woman of some considerable sexual self-possession. Not a fitting play to simply Jewish experience. The wonderful thing about Anne's book is martyr. No, Anne appeals to so many because she is beyond the judgment of that it is really universal ... ," adult behaVIor. She IS forever frozen in eternal youth, forever "becoming" a From the diary's introduction on, then, and most especially in its later :;oung woma~. And so she may be read uncritically, thoughtlessly, and dramatizations, stage center became the tale of a young girl discovering herself umversalized as If she were a character in an allegory instead of the all-too- in the frame of familial tensions-tensions heightened, to be sure, by the war real young gIrl whose gingerly descriptions of masturbarion, along with some outside her window and the hardships of life in hiding. But still, a drama about of the sharper comme.nts made against her mother, and an explicit description growing up, defining oneself, questioning one's ideals and ethical principles, of th,e female gemtalia, were understandably edited by her father from the discovering one's sexuality, while the Oedipal family dynamic and the offstage diary s ongmal published versions. abominations serve as springs that launch these questing forces. If you will, a Alas, to some Jewish women "Anne Frank" in any incarnation has become Bildungsroman written under inordinate stress. Indeed, the American version of a burden, the perfect Jewish girl whose martyrdom is too impossible for them the diary is called Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, a benign title which to hve up to. Worse, whose belief that "people are really good at heart" suggests a universalist ethos that might assure the widest possible readership. expresses an unbearable naivete given the fate Anne herself would ultimately It is Anne's innocence itself that recommends her as "adolescent" literature. meet. Yet she remains for many young Jewish women a barometer of good How charmed we are when she declares, "... it seems to me that neither I- behaVIor, more real in her mischievo\1sness than Daniel Deronda's too virtuous nor for that matter anyone else---will be interested in the unbosomings of a and self-sacrificing Mirah, and far better than Shylock's Jessica, whose shame of thirteen-year-old schoolgirL Still, what does that matter? I want to write, but Shylock IS succinctly expressed as discomfort with his Jewishness: "But though more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in I am daughter to his blood,!I am not to his manners." Anne, alas, loved her my heart." As time has passed and other documents have come forward, father, Otto Frank, her "Pim." however, it grows all too clear that the diaries of another Dutch Jew, Etty Hillesum, published in English in 1983 as An Interrupted Life, would not likely • • The Secret Annex and the Closet 47 46 Allen Ellenzweig
My trip to the Anne Frank House in 1969 was deliberate but in no specific effects, the world outside was represented by my parents as a world of dangers, and those dangers were conflated to include both those of the anti-Semitic sense pedagogical. The diary simply held a special place in my memory; It was the first reading I had done that introduced me, in however small a way, to the Gentile world and those of the rough-housing "masculine" one. Of course I did not have the vocabulary or the experience for understanding subtle gender desperate fate met by European Jewry only a few years before my birth. I had not come to the book as a school assignment; I had known about It from about d1stmctlOns and sexual attractions when I was a child.Yet to see myself as a Jew the age of nine when my father took my older sister and me into the city to m a world full of gOytm was already to perceive myself in a defensive posture With regard to the world beyond my window where sturdy boys played rough see the movie version directed by George Stevens. One particular scene struck me with great force. Anne dreams of her best but comradely, yet m either case to my exclusion. We moved from Park Slope to Sheepshead Bay sometime in the middle of friend Lies, whom she has left behind in the Amsterdam outSide thelt h1dmg place, being herded like a zombie along with masses of other people. my career in a public school kindergarten, but not before I passed my first half- year among Christian classmates busily making Christmas trees out of colored Something in the soundtrack heightens the tension of the scene;Anne awakens paper one December day. screaming from her nightmare. Despite not entirely understandmg the Import I was already experiencing a double alienation: my outsider's role as a Jew of this sequence, I nevertheless understood that the people on screen were ran parallel to that of my role as a gay child, a child who does not conform to hated and suffering for being Jews. I knew that I was a Jew, that my family social expectations of masculinity. This does not mean that the experience of members were Jews, and that therefore the action of the story deeply implicated me in a way I could not quite grasp. Yet the sense of menace and bemg a Jew m a Gentile world is identical to being a homosexual in the impending horror was not simply happening somewhere out there m a foreign heterosexual one, but I can say for myself, and I am supported by the testimony of other lesbian and gay Jews, that many of us experience our homosexual land or in a time past, but was felt like a present truth. Something of this truth had already been communicated to me. When I ldent1t1es through the prior or simultaneous sense of being Jews in Christian was just five years old, we lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a neighborhood which Amenca. In his essay "Confessions of a 'Feygele-Boichik:" Burt E. Schuman has since become quite fashionable but was less so at the tlme we hved there. pictures the paths to his Jewishness and gayness as "u.s. 1 and Interstate 95 in England~at One day, my father told me that my sister had been chased and taunted on her New times converging, at times diverging and at times running way home from school because she was Jewish. I could not possibly have parallel ... It IS difficult to be sure which sensations came first-the sight of understood why this happened, for barely in kindergarten I would not have shabbos candles on my grandmother's kitchen table or my brother's bare chest . .. ." grasped the vulnerable social distinction of being a Jew. Still, to hear such a story immediately put me on notice that I too could be subject to harsh From my own experience as a boy soon to discover himself gay, I learned to hide, to closet myself, to hold myself apart from an outside world which is treatment, verbally abused, and a target for physical assault. This sense of my vulnerability intensified when I looked out the window rough-to use my mother's term-a world in which Gentile boys, good Germans all, could bully you into a concentration camp and taunt you while one day to watch neighborhood boys playing in the street. My mother made gassmg you In a shower. it clear that I was not to join them, that those boys were rough. She did not If these terms seem hyperbolic, we have to remember the often stark have to say to me that they were not Jewish, for it went unspoken but assumed emotional colors in which children experience the world. In discussing these that rough boys could not be Jews. For the children of Holocaust survivors (I am not one), the sense of matters, Richard Haymes, a friend of mine who is also a gay Jew, speaks physical insecurity may be a permanent feature of their upbringing. For Anne dramatlcally of how as a youngster he understood the parallel between his two Kochman, a Jewish lesbian whose father was briefly put in a concentratlon Identities. "I knew that you could be'killed for either one.You could be killed camp following Kristallnacht, it has been" deeply ingrained that the outside IS for being a Jew, or you could be killed for being gay." very dangerous. The lock on the door was very important. Keys were very What a gay adolescent might therefore learn from reading Anne Frank or Iir~m seeIng. TIte D'wry Anne Frank--separate experiences to sure--is important and answering the phone, never letting anyone have information cif be the fnghtful punishment a majority population can inflict upon a minority one in that they shouldn't have ... the world was very dangerous." Yet even without my having so stark an experience of anti-Semitism's Its nudst. Arnie Kantrowitz, one of the most humane and humorous chroniclers The Secret Annex and the Closet 49 48 Allen Ellenzweig
So what gay men and lesbians face when they are in the closet is not of gay and gay-Jewish life, speaks of the central element of "fear of discovery" equivalent to what Jews in hiding faced under the Nazis, not even equivalent that permeates our understanding of both Anne Frank's "Secret Annex" and the to what gays living in the sphere of Nazi persecution faced. Yet Anne Frank's gay closet. He sees in both experiences, the Jew in hiding and the gay in hiding, experience in hiding can have particular resonance for homosexuals, especially a common "terror." for queer youth, because young lesbians and gays live in that constant "fear of It is worth remembering that Weimar Berlin had the most developed of all discovery" whose consequences, though unknown, feel both dreadful and prewar gay communities; thus, it was perhaps inevitable that Nazi ideology, of terrifying-and the more dreadful and terrifying perhaps because they are mandated Aryan procreation and masculinism, found in homosexuality, as It unknown. The threatened loss of family love and support, the possibility of had in its fixed perception of the Jewish "race," another opportune target of sOClal shammg, the potential ridicule from and eventual ostracism by one's social deviance. As we learn from Richard Plant's study of the period, The Pink peers, and even the prospect of breaking all family ties are not to be thought 7riangle, the Nazis enforced and expanded sanctions for homosexual behavior nunor psychological disruptions in the life of gay and lesbian teenagers. A which initially emanated from the notorious Paragraph 175, Germany's anti- recent report on youth suicide conducted during the Reagan administration, homosexual penal code of1871. Student fascists destroyed Magnus Hirschfeld's and squelched from full public airing by President Bush's Health and Human Institute of Sexual Research in one of the Nazis' earliest displays (1933) of Services ~ecretary Louis Sullivan in response to pressure from Congressional cultural destruction; Hirschfeld, a renowned sexologist and activist against conservatIves, found that gay and lesbian youth are two to three times more Paragraph 175, was himself a socialist, homosexual, and Jew, and therefore, in likely to attempt suicide than other young people and that gay Ilesbian youth Nazi eyes, a triple threat. The Reich expanded its anti-gay program first by may compnse up to thmy percent of completed youth suicides each year. restricting gay life-closing bars, censoring gay publications-and then by Indeed, the report placed suicide as the leading cause of death among young increasing penalties for same-sex activities until, in 1941, the death penalty was gays and lesbIans. In New York City, the Board of Education's "Rainbow prescribed for any German engaging in sexual activity with another man. Curriculum" was abandoned because a small part of its reading list would have Ultimately, the Reich succeeded, by ferreting out information from pernutted students to become acquainted with such alternative family units as subscription lists and eager informers, and by expanding the discretionary same-sex heads of households (Heather Has Two Mommies). Congress has passed powers of Nazi judges, in sending thousands of gay men to concentration a bill whereby even mere "tolerance" of homosexuality may not be taught in camps where they were put to slave labor and used, as the non-Jewish gay schools. Th,s, at a tIme when hate crimes of all kinds have greatly escalated. survivor Pierre Seel recounts, for "medical" experiments. But while the In other words, queer children are expendable. This does not have the numbers who ultimately died in the lager may not be said to constitute a chilling quality of the SS at the door; it is quiet murder of a more passive sort. genocide, our awareness of this history must give pause: for the SS or the local police to "discover" that onc was gay was of alarming personal consequence • after the heyday ofWeimar libertinism. If the emphasis in teaching about the Holocaust is too much on its final Today, then, as we pass through a period in which ethnic, religious, gender, stages, we may miss the opportunity to alert young people to the disturbing and sexual COlnmunities vie for victim status, engaging in the truly distasteful truth: that the Holocaust did not begin with the ovens, with the showers, with spectacle of comparing oppressions, we need to approach issues of prejudice, trucks spraying Zyklon-B; it began with discrimination, in the moment a persecution, genocide, and "mere" discrimination with finer tuning. It cannot gov~,rnme~,t expressed a ~opular will toward treating a particular population as be sufficient, as an essay in the Jewish-lesbian anthology The Tribe of Dina the other. In an early entry of her diary (June 20, 1942), Anne Frank offers a argues, that "The Holocaust has ... become a measure of oppression: 'if we're stunning account of what it had been like to be part of such a group: not being marched to the showers, how bad can it be? So we should shut up about it.'" The pain of a community under siege may be greater or lesser from In 1938 after the pogroms, my two uncles (my mother's brothers) escaped to an historical perspective. But individuals in their struggle for dignity, self- the U.S.A. ... Mter May 1940 good times rapidly fled; first the war, then the esteem, mental health, and physical and economic security cannot always call caplt~atlon. followed by the arrival of the Germans which is when the upon historical comparisons for easy succor. Or rather, if they do, such sUf!"enngs of us Jews really began. Anti-Jewish decrees followed each other in qUIck succession. Jews must wear a yellow star, Jews must hand in their comparisons may bring cold comfort. 50 Allen Ellenzweig
bicycles, Jews are banned from trams and are forbidden to drive. Jews are only allowed to do their shopping between three and five o'clock and then Rock In' Roll is the Health of the State only in shops which bear the placard "Jewish shop." Jews must be indoors by eight o'clock and cannot even sit in their own gardens after that hour, Jews Alternative is a Lifestyle Accessory are forbidden to visit theaters, cinemas, and other places of entertainment. And that hairdo doesn't score anybody. Swinuning baths, tennis courts, hockey fields, and other sport grounds are all prohibited to them. Jews may not visit Christians. Jews must go to Jewish schools, and many more restrictions of a similar kind ...... In 1934 I went to school at the Montessori Kindergarten and But then there's continued there. It was at the end of the school year, I was in form 6B, when I had to say good-bye to Mrs. K. We both wept, it was very sad. In 1941 I went, with my sister Margot, to the Jewish Secondary School, she into the fourth form and I into the first ... So far everything is all right with the four The Baffler. of us and here I come to the present day. The relentless puncturer of It is astonishing to realize that this precis of her life under the Nazi occupation whatever the latest fake was written just a couple of weeks before the family would be forced into rebellion happens to be; hiding, but more important is its wealth of detail. Anne writes almost matter- The tireless flattener of of-factly of the 1938 "pogroms"-no doubt the multiple atrocities of MTV; the definitive K.ristallnacht, the night of broken glass, when Jewish shops and synagogues were vandalized with impunity-and with equal equanimity Anne mentions anti-Rollins. two uncles on her mother's side who have escaped to America. One longs to It features know why the Franks themselves have not managed to make the same journey the writing of (especially if we know of Otto Frank's youthful trip to America with his Tom Frank, university friend, Nathan Straus, heir to R.H. Macy's), but no sooner do we ask this of the text than Anne is on to a litany of the indignities imposed upon Paul Lukas, Jen Dutch Jews. Gonnerman, Robert Of course, Germany's Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 have already Nedelkoff, and stripped German Jews of their citizenship since only those of "German or Seth Sanders. kindred blood" may be citizens of the Reich. German Jews were thus no It's probably the longer entitled to civil and political rights. Anne's lengthy list of prohibitions the Jews suffer under the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands forces us to best goddam magazine in consider just what we as citizens of a free democracy understand by terms like America "civil liberties" or "civil rights," for it is here that contemporary democratic humanism either stands or falls. And it is here too that the enemies of gay men and lesbians take their stand, for by their framing the queer struggle for justice And it's virtually as a case of gays and lesbians demanding "special rights;' they may well force the courts to decide to what extent America is to tolerate us-or to sanction impossible to find a copy. intolerance of us. The outcome of the gay and lesbian struggle for equal protection under the law-protection, for example, against arbitrary job You can order The Baffler from us directly. dismissal because one is gay, or being thrown out of an apartment because one Single copies are $5; a subscription for the next four issues is $16. is lesbian, or protection against the loss of parental rights judged solely on the Write to us at P. O. Box 378293, Chicago, IL 60637. Please let us know where you saw this ad. The Secret Annex and the Closet 53 52 Allen EUenzweig
unwilling to face the extent to which their own silence helped perpetrate the basis of sexual orientation-is not a marginal question, but deals with central cnmes that were committed against the Jews of Europe and imposed upon issues of American justice and equality. . Anne Frank the very martyrdom they were so quick to find inspiring. And every public fight over gay and lesbian rights, whether gays m the At a distance of fifty years from the end of the war, it is now impossible to military or campaigns to secure domestic partnership benefits, or the current recreate the mlXture of moral exhaustion and desperate hope that must have fight over same-sex marriage, is a battle that cuts two ways m the rrunds and been felt by those who survived to see the Allied victory Yet the diary was not hearts of queer boys and girls. On the one hand, such pubhclty may provIde Immediately received as a light emanating out of darkness. Its complicated early assurances that homosexuals are everywhere, that there are gay men and b~rth suggests that m the first decade following the war there were many who lesbians willing to stand up and fight for their place in the body politic. Yet to did not WIsh to be reminded of a popularly supported dictatorship whose see and hear the outrageous remarks of those opposed to our full mtegratlOn poliCles ultImately led to genocide. into the polity-who call us diseased, sick, perverted, immoral, disgustmg, an The diary reads as a coming-of-age in extremis, but a coming-of-age full of offense to God unnatural-is also to advertise to the closeted gay and lesbIan uncommon self-mocking wit and elan, as well as one throbbing with the adolescent that 'perhaps, after all, there is more safety and security in silence. For melodramatIc Sturm und Drang of adolescence. This is what enabled Anne's even children living relatively close to gay urban centers may feel, m the face diary to appeal finally to a remarkably wide public, each reader also taking from of such alarming vocal opposition, that to come out IS to nsk ummagmable Annahes Frank the comfort that at least this quick mind this effervescent wrath at home, at school, at social events, or merely walking in the street. sprite, did not die in vain. It is these buoyant qualities of s~irit and language For example, in a 1990-91 study by Seattle's Commission for LesbIans and that gIve the dIary ItS transcendent quality, enabling many who might Gays quoted in Kurt Chandler's book Passages of Pride: Lesbian and Gay Youth otherwIse have looked away to believe they had faced the beast by reading Com~ of Age, nearly seventy-five percent of almost 1,300 lesbians and gays Anne Frank's book. For many, The Diary of a Young Girl may be the only surveyed reported having been physically or verbally abused. S,Xty percent Holocaust lIterature they have read. claimed to have been verbally abused by a stranger, twenty percent by an In this way, everyone appropriates Anne. From the beginning of her acquaintance, and sixteen percent by a member of their own family. Physical appearance as a. public .writer, however, she was blessed for her unique voice attacks were reported by sixteen percent overall. . . but largely demed JewIsh particularity. And what was also subsumed by her Chandler reports that in a national survey of six urban centers, vIctIm lCOmC status as the chIld of the Holocaust, which is to say the Innocent, was service agencies in Boston, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and New her partlculanty as a girl experiencing sexual awareness, struggling with an York documented" cases ranging from harassment to vandalism to assault to mc'p,ent ferrumsm-all the while unable to give these feelings voice to parents bomb threats to kidnapping to murder." One lesbian reported having been whose presence was Immediately proximate. HKitty," the name to whom she queer-bashed in Seattle while walking with her girlfriend. A group offrat boys addressed her diary entries, was after all her best friend, and it was to her Anne with a baseball bat "whacked me a good one and broke two ribs. And they confided, however much she shared her feelings with her sister Margot with broke her nose ... It was really traumatic. I was fifteen." whom there was some rivalry, or with Peter van Daan, for whom sh~ had • mtense feelings over a short span of time, but in whom she also lost In the aftermath of the war and with the early success of the first European confidence--in part because he was too willing to deny his Jewish heritage. So that even wlthm the confines of her hiding place, Anne Frank herself publication of his daughter'S diary, Mr. Frank hoped to see Anne reach a wide audience to "sound a healing note;' and he was confirmed m h,s beliefs by the was hIding her own heart's secrets, so much so that Otto Frank felt on reading response' of many Christian readers. Large numbers of non-Jews "testified that her dIary that he had perhaps never really known his own daughter. Hidden his daughter'S rare book was an inspiring celebratlOn of hfe m the face of secrets of the heart are the common experience of adolescence, but such secrets hostile forces. Few correspondents or friends spoke of the speClfic cnme of are far more dearly held by those gay and lesbian youth who fear not the mere Germans murdering Jews or of the more general human capacity for abusing embarrassment of discovery, but its potentially disastrous consequences. At least Anne and Margot and Peter grew up into their minority Jewish status with people of different beliefs and appearances" (See L. Graver). Were we to be uncharitable, however, we might say that many of those same people were JewIsh parents as models to follow or rebel against; queer children grow up to The Secret Annex and the Closet 55 54 Allen Ellenzweig
blossoming homosexua li tv. For it . glves . that child .. discover they are strangers within their own homes, exiled by their sexuality. joyous, honorable. penrusslOll to see it as natural, Gay and lesbian histoty, culture, and rituals are unknown in their households; Anne confided this to "Kit "Yi 1 her as they discover themselves to be sexually different from their brothers and wisdom who saw his daughter'stydi·' ears ahter'li father, Otto Frank, a man of c aryasa ea ngdocu e t' . sisters and from their classmates, queer boys and girls find themselves adrift in lor tolerance and nonsect .. C h' m n ,an mstructlve plea arIamsm lor t e unl 1 . . 1 a seascape without markers. respect toward others allowed th' ' versa pnnClp es of enlightened Reflecting at one point about her own sexual maturation, Anne writes on by the world. Otto F;a k 15 passage, potentially provocative, to be read n saw no overwhelmmg sh . A ' admissio~ January 6, 1944: high regard and erotic affection for another irl arne In nne s of the lonely struggle of co . g . For many a youngster facmg mmg out Anne here b Sometimes when I lie in bed at night I feel a terrible urge to touch my breasts confidante. ,ecomes an exceptional and listen to the quiet, steady beating of my heart. Unconsciously, I had these feelings even before I came here. Once when I was spending the night at Jacque's, I could no longer restrain my curiosity about her body, which she'd always hidden from me and which I'd never seen. I asked her whether, as WORKS CITED proof of our friendship, we could touch each other's breasts. Jacque refused. I also had a terrible desire to kiss her, which I did. Evety time I see a female Berenbaum, Michael, Ph.D. The World Must Know' . In the United States Holocaust Me . 1M' The HIStory of the Holocaust as Told nude, such as the Venus in my art history book, I go into ecstasy. Sometimes mona useum (Beste T rown and Company, 1993). n, oronto, London: Little, I find them so exquisite I have to struggle to hold back my tears. If only I B Chandler, Kurt. Passages of Pride: Lesbian and G had a girlfriend! . Toronto: Times Books, 1995). ay Youth Gome of Age (New York, Ellot, George. Daniel Deronda (ori 'nall bli h From my first reading, I always remembered the essentials of the above passage, by Barbara Hardy (Penguin E';;;r hiP: s ed 1876), edited with an Introduction ;l~ar ~eprint, ~ which even appeared in the earliest Doubleday edition, although with one Frank, Anne. Anne Frank: The YI9~2)10 r:ry 967). small elision-the sentence about Anne desiring to kiss Jacque, and doing so- Roosevelt (New York: Doubleday oung Girl, Introduction by Eleanor Frank, Anne. Anne Frank: The Dia Yo' . and I remember as a youngster finding great comfort in this passage. What by Susan Massotty, Frank, O~ooif ~ ou~g GlYl: TIle n.d!nitive Edition, translated Anne writes here is a quite pure expression of female homoeroticism in which Doubleday, 1995). . an Pressler, MItJam, eds. (New York: desire is wed to the urge for action. It is also not only about same-sex desire Frank, Anne. The Diary of Anne Frank' The C' . . . prompted by a particular person, Jacque, but about the way in which a young Netherlands State Institute for W D' . ntlCal EdJ/ton, prepared by the Stroom, Gerrold cds (New Yo akr Docubml edutation, Bamouw, David and Van Der girl appreciates the ideal beauty of her own sex "such as the Venus in [her] art G" ,. r: ou e ay 1989) les, Miep (with Alison Leslie Gold). Anne Fran ' . history book." Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family (New yk ~e~embered: He Story of the Woman Although Otto Frank eliminated a number of passages from the diary's Graver, Lawrence. An Obsession LVitlt A F or. Imon and Schuster, c. 1987). earliest publications (and different language versions were edited to fit different . University ofCalifomia Press, 1995),ne rank: Meyer Levin and the Diary (Berkeley: cultural sensibilities), this particular passage stood almost intact, at least in the Hillesum, Etty. An Interrupted Life' He Diaries if . from the Dutch by Arno Pome:ans (N Y Ok Etty H,liesum 1941-43, translated American edition of the early 1950s. It spoke deeply to me as an adolescent ~r: reader. It made normative what might in another book have seemed perverse; Kaye/Kantrowitz, Melanie and Kle fisz ew Pantheon Books, 1983). anti-Semitism and Jewish ident!:v) ,; Ire;'t. ~KGerangilln Struggle (handbook on it granted glory to a love of one's own sex embodied in an ideal figure; it Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women!s An~~ I aye(Mantro~ltz and Klepfisz, eds" The expressed as natural the curiosity about one's own and another's body, even if 1986). . 0 ogy ontpeher, VT: Sinister Wisdom that other is of the same sex; and it rendered imaginable specifically adolescent Lindwer, Willy. He Last Seven Months of19~~)Prank, A ' same-sex desire, the desire simply to touch and be touched. P Meersschaert (New York: Pantheon, translated from Dutch by Alison We need not make a claim for this as evidence of a lesbian Anne Frank. lant, Richard. He Pink Triangle: The Naz' . New Republic Books/Henry HId C' War AgO/nst Homosexuals (New York: There are many more passages attesting to her interest in boys. In any case, we 0 & Raphael, Lev. Journeys A mva. I.s. 0 nt aBn.erno ompany,Gay dJ 1986). . h (B can never know the woman she would have grown into. That said, this passage and Faber, 1996), 6 an eWJS oston, London: Faber must cut to the quick that adolescent struggling in secret with his or her own Winter/Spring 57 56 Allen Ellenzweig
Schuman, Burt E. "Confessions of a 'Feygele-Boichik, ,,' in Balka, Andy and Rose, Saturday Morning Cowboy Christie, eds., Twice Blessed: On Being Lesbian or Gay and Jewish (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). Seel, Pierre I. Pierre Seel) Deported Homosexual: A Memoir oJNazi Terror, translated from Having done my hitch, bravely soldiered the French by Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Basic Books, 1995). the manly burden of barmitzvoh, I wanted Shakespeare, William. 11" Merchant of Venice, Mowat, Barbara A. and Werstine, Paul, nothmg more to do with early morning eds. (New York: Washington Square Press, New Folger's Edition, 1992). serVIces worse than a school day. Too bad for me Van det Roi, Ruud and Verhoeven, Rian. Anne Frank: Beyond the Diary, A SadIe had set his temple on the lot next to ours· Photographic Remembrance, translated by Tony Langham and Plym Peters, with an for when they needed a tenth man Rabb· ' Introduction by Anna Quindlen (New York: Viking, 1993). alki ' 1 came w ng up the black strip of our driveway *Quotes from Richard Haymes, Arnie Kantrowitz, and Anne Kochman are taken humming, "The Tennessee Waltz." For reas~ns from interviews conducted with the subjects during the summer of 1994. he could not explain or understand, the God ofJacob and Isaac had personally asked for me.
FILMS AND VIDEOS "Mottel," he would say, using the Yiddish name that flustered and angered me "With th· G d h th ' '1 . IS 0 ere, Anne Frank Remembered, 1995, wtitten, produced, and directed by Jon Blair, in coop- ere s no p eas~, exc~se, but I'm too busy watching eration with the Anne Frank House and in associaton with the BBe and the Disney som: cowboy p,cture. He tells you pick up the ark, Channel, 122 minutes. Videorecording (documentary feature film). don t answer back like a wiseguy 'tomorro b The Attic:11u Hiding of Anne Frank, 1988, directed by John Erman, a production of but toda . . ,w, may e Telecom Entertainment, Inc. in association with Yorkshire Television. Telefilm. y, It Just so happens, I woke up with a backache ....'" The Diary of Anne Frank, 1959, directed by George Stevens, based on the Broadway play by Frances Goodtich and Albert Hackett, produced by Twentieth Century Lulled by those tremulous voices that never rose Fox, 170 minutes. Feature rum. above a whisper, I watched the hooked letters gallop The Diary of Anne Frank, directed by Botis Sagal, based on the Broadway play by backward, then imagined myself stepping down out of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, 104 minutes. Teleftlm. The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank, c. 1988, Audio-Visual-Arts Production, a Willy the saloon mto a dustblown street. High time we found out Lindwer production, ca. 73 minutes. Documentary film. who had the faster gun: this cardsharping Rabbi or me. I slowly took a breath: "Your move, padre."
Suddenly the ceiling seemed to crack beneath Its flesh of paint, but it was only the Torah being tousted from Its hiding place. Then how they jerked and trembled-as if some horritying discharge bof current.Yi h . When it passed close ,ngI tried looki away, ut u die, who still called me the litrle pische and even in his best clothes smelled of horse r cuffed . manure, me twIce on the back of the head and gestured I too must kiss the hem of my tallis and touch it . to the rough,jewel-studded cloth-but inward} . g that at least another hour remained be£ore I'd bYe setgrolamn oose. Winter/Spring 59 58 Response
But even when they squeezed my hand good s"abbos, I waS Anatomy forced to act like a mensch and celebrate. Now I could feast on the food I most hate: an oily sludge of chopped liver, Chanita Baumhafi gelatinous gefilte fish, pickled herring"that stank the b;:ath. Once at school, a kid had baited me. Watch yourself, . he'd ~inked at the girl I'd been talking to, "these kikes dnnk blood." I took that test in eleventh grade to tell you what to be, right? It came out I And though my stricken heart had tightened at his words, was supposed to be a jigsaw puzzle with all my pieces on the ground, and I was I'd kept close-mouthed, wanting to give nothmg away. cool with that but Milton Bradley wasn't hiring so I realized I better do Now, on the table, the red script on the bottle something else that's how I got into entomology, but my professor told me I said, "Concord grape;' but what I got was schnapps- had to learn how to think like an insect and that worried me, because it seemed all too easy so I decided to pursue art and I drew a picture of my family and clear, syrupy liquid in a Dixie cup they sent me to the psychologist who suggested I take a leave of absence and that burned even as I raised it to my lips. on my leave of absence I traveled but I only went in Amerika, because that's all -Max Wesder the money I had and I drove through places where all the radio stations were country and stayed at a motel called the hitching post, but I didn't get married I fell in love, but he just wanted to work at the amusement park in Santa Cruz I got a job mixing cement in New Mexico and my hands got red and blistered and that's when I found out what a sissy I really am I fell in love again but he was shot by me I went to jail where I read about Ghandi and Malcolm X and that's when I decided to mend my ways I got religion I sang in the choir but they only let me lip-sync I showed my parole office my resume ofhow I mixed cement and she helped me get a job on 495 which needed new tar I fell in love again, but he fell into the cement mixer and I went back to jail it was an accident I was pardoned I was hired as a lunch lady at myoId high school and I talked to the guidance counselor there about what I should do and she said call Milton Bradley again, you have much more world experience now, so I called them and told them about my jobs and the murders and being a lunch lady and they flew me out to headquarters and gave me my own office and they took me apart and now children play with me and try to stick my arm into my head you'd think they'd know a little more about anatomy, but who am I to judge I have a feeling someone might have read my test results wrong, because I'm not real happy with this job, but it's still better than Ira who had to be a florist or Martha who didn't g:t to be anything at all. 60 Response Passing Through the Christian Nation Into This Everything Sandi DuBowski As ifland began as mere land, unaccustomed to leaf-rash, to bulb clutched in its pocket, Sweet violent bed. As if mineral flinched,
Then turned against the primal intrusion: I .I walked to the Lincoln Memorial Lovers expelled in the grain-splay. Shock during a droopy D.c. August, 1994. Ten thousand men had caravanned to the Of their hands. Outside the gates clamped Capitol from Indiana, Nebraska, New Jersey, and beyond to stand against gun control. That summer it seemed militias cascaded from all the crevices in our Like lynx-jaws: elm in its office, a field bitter nation, and though this was before the Oklahoma City bombing, the Of oil-seed rape. And the two who trespassed awakened public seemed no longer to wonder whether "militia" was a type of Onto soil that stunned into yellow pasta. Dispersed in the crowd were big Jewish stars sewn onto protesters' shirts. Shirts like, "Is Your Church ATF Approved?""I Love My Country But Fear My Where annelids were forced to carve the first Government" "Don't Tread On Me." I asked the men wearing the stars, Darkness, woman and man slit the frult skins, "Where are you from? Are you Jewish?" They replied, "From Wisconsin. And And one of them breathed. no, we're Christian."The stars came from Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership OPFO). Their position: if the Nazis hadn't passed gun control laws, - Trayce Diskin the Jewish people would not have been disarmed and there would have been no Holocaust. Banning assault weapons as a crime against humanity. The Brady Bill as genocide. After the rally, I walked to the Holocaust Museum and saw the Jewish stars on the walls. A boy listened to an audiovisual presentation about a survivor his age and asked his mother, "Mom, this didn't really happen, did it?" Eerie that only miles away the same badge of Jewish victimhood was being worn and prized by people whose goal is a Christian nation. A cynical post- Holocaust moment. I didn't know which threw me more: believing, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that crimes against Jews never existed, or creating crimes against Jews that didn't exist. The Jews I knew didn't shoot. Brady was a 70s sitcom, not a Clintonista law. American Jews seem better suited in the United States for Interfaith Alliances or direct street action. Militancy or coffee klatch minus the bullets. So when a militia leader in Tampa and a right-wing radio host in Colorado turn out to be armed Jews, it's a shock that we're not in Hebron. The question the boy should have asked was, "Mom, is this really happening?"With the Republican revolution hurtling forward, the question "Are we a passive people?" maybe should be rephrased: Are we a passing people? The Republican revolution makes one face one's skin and the privilege that is its stain. Immigrant status can be rubbed off and nationhood and white fear embraced. Passing as past, as forgotten.
A previous version of this ess:ty originally appeared in xxx fruit #2, January 1996.
61 Passing Through the Christian Nation 63 62 Sandi DuBowski
II. I had to go to Montana to prove I wasn't scared. That I could survive a week moments. For them, supreme evidence of "the homosexual agenda." My immersed in an Aryan homeland. We zipped through the headquarters of the roommate and I sat on the couch with an expose of the San Francisco Pride Militia of Montana (MOM). Across the one-lane bridge, into the twelve- Parade 10 the VCR. We spent the time pointing out our friends. building town of Noxon with MOM up in the hills. Snapped pictures of proof, jumped in the car to Idaho. My friend jokingly called me Bubba DuBowski. V. I'm fascinated by this community that hates and demonizes me-the We sat in redneck bars, my teeth clenched and wired. Proving I wasn't a target. Chnstlan RIght. In these defensive days, passing has political power. It's the At least a visible one. I was fucked up proud that I could pass in the part of the drag we need to survIve the millennium. We should use our power well. country closest to an Aryan Nation. Downing huckleberry shakes and buffalo burgers, visiting drive-ins and glaciers, kissing boys and worshipping Adonai strictly on the side. In Idaho, met a reverend at Ruby Ridge's first public human rights meeting since the Feds' siege and murder of Randy Weaver's family, which sparked the FBI's recent $3.1 million-dollar settlement and Congressional hearings. The reverend was struggling with the idea of promoting homosexuality as part of the human rights coalition. Really sweating and struggling, stumbling over words. Openness was Helena's first Pride Parade, with the signs "Montana is for Steers Not Queers" and a Hank Williams spin, "I'd Rather Have a Tear in My Beer than a Queer in My Rear." Helped the reverend load chairs into the van. There was a sense of relief that gay lllaidel no violence broke out at the meeting. It felt good to tell the reverend after we sweated over chairs that I appreciated his struggling.
III. The camera zoomed back from a Go! Pat! Go! Buchanan for President '96 t-shirt button and a Republican National Coalition for Life sticker up a powder blue button-down polyester blend to my big face filling the ABC News screen. My • In Yiddish it means "Go Girl!" friends in New York yelled out a whoop as I sat in rapt attention at the • Queer Yiddishkeyt, Interpret Away! Christian Coalition's Road to Victory Conference listening to Pat Robertson's speech. One of this Jew's first television moments and it's as a Christian right- • Pink on black, 100% cotton shirt WInger. • 10% of the profits go to tikkun a/am-- An enthusiastic one, too. When people ask, "What does the Christian Coalition want?" I answer, "the Massachusetts Bay Colony times 10,000." to heal the world. Forget even that throwback to the Civil War-states' rights. It's county rule of To order send $15 for the first shirt (please specify size the 1600s by a council of male church elders. And this revolution is by the -sorry: no XXL) and $13.50 for each shirt thereafter to: ballot not the bullet. Where the federal government is dismantled and replaced Vicki G., P.O. Box 522, Brookline, MA 02146 by block grants, which in turn are strangled by church networks who aim to take power. Punishment for the poor, home schooling, marital and family discipline, nasty theocratic suspicion-all will be imposed.
Iv. Religious right videos are my home movies. Who but they could bother to film Lesbian and Gay Pride Parades and Stonewall 25s? For me, like Urvashi Vaid, such events seem less like community mobilization than marketing Winter/Spring 65 64 Response
Birdwatching With My Father Vertical Today, the cherry blossoms are open hands with a child's pink fingertips. Even trees, And I have no memory of visiting here in spring. the way they walk You chose the suit for your father, though it is not our tradition, to water, because your mother and brother agree-- he was of winter and its formality. even roots, the way You look small for the first time to me, they plow through graves, head bent and shoulders trying to squeeze in your erupting sadness. I thought you began with the birds when I left home. even the midnight crowd Now I remember, Grandpa started shaking then. on a Wednesday on 42nd Street. A year later, the doctors named it and he began to take L-dopa. You bought books, bird feeders, and binoculars. Stripes of bodies This weekend, when we eat breakfast around their table, ambulating toward food, sex and video. I catch you watching the kitchen steps for his usual labored arrival. Out the window, the squirrel still climbs up and tries to empty the bird feeder. And even love is sometimes best done You point out White-breasted Nuthatches, upright, against gravity. Black-capped Chickadees, and Goldfinches. I wonder if he ever knew the names. They say giving birth Later, after Grandpa is lowered into the earth, is easiest this way, also. and the dirt clumps thump onto his coffin, We walk to a park nearby. That life comes faster Along windy trails, I wonder if you will cry when pushed out downward when you spot a Red-tailed Hawk, and explain to me how the crows, smaller and more nimble, and like a waterfall, tumbles fly above and mob this wild creature. into the world. Though I know there is purpose and order to this, I want to stone their squawking mouths. -Elizabeth Cohen I think of the picture I found the other day in your parents' house-- you and your brother posing on apartment steps in Queens. You are three, shirtless in shorts and suspenders, with skinny arms and a baby's belly. Already, your dark eyes stare intently from a little face, waiting for a fierce world and a father's tricky love. And this year, when all that spoke from his withered body were two sharp eyes, the same eyes that you have felt on the back of your scalp since you could talk, did you prepare for an end? Now, his absence has a smell and a voice. It does not tiptoe or float. It continues to lumber up and down creaky steps. I ask of your favorite bird- you have learned to call the owL This night, you let go that whispered whistle. -Molly Weber A Patriarchy By Any Other Name 67
redefined masculinity as spiritual resistance and how Jewish women served as A Patriarchy By Any Other Name "altruistic-assertive enablers" clearing the way and cleaning the house for their Gwynn Kessler Jewish men. In the second part Cantor discusses assimilation, the relationship between America and Israel, and the Jewish mother. She also exposes some of the flaws plaguing Jewish communal organizations in America. In the third Jewish lM>men!jewish Men: The Legacy of Patriarchy inJewish Life by Aviva section Cantor discusses the sobering effects of the sixties on Jews, and their Cantor. Harper San Francisco, 1995. 548 pp., $32.50, cloth. subsequent awakening to a "Holocaust consciousness." Finally, in her last chapter, she returns to chart the progress, or lack thereof, ofJewish feminism'! Jewish WomenlJewish Men has already spawned two notable reviews. Paula Hyman's review appears in the Spring 1996 issue of Lilith and Naomi Graetz's My mother used to say you can't in the Summer 1996 issue of Bridges. In addition, a back-to-back exchange be a little bit pregnant. And I believed her. between Cantor and Hyman is printed in the Summer 1996 issue of Lilith. Aviva Cantor has given birth to a big book, one so sweeping in scope and Both reviews layout a critique of Cantor's hypotheses as well as bits of praise breathtaking in purpose that it is difficult to know where to begin a review. for the questions she raises and challenges she poses. It is not my intention to Jewish history is its topic. All of Jewish history, from the Bible until today: repeat what has previously been stated. Instead, I'd like to raise some questions through the Rabbinic period, the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, the not asked and delve more deeply into the aspect of Cantor's work with which Holocaust, the declaration of Israel's independence, and finally, feminism. If it I am most familiar: her representation of Rabbinic Judaism. has happened to the Jews, it's in there. Almost. I will divide my comments into two sections. First I will raise questions The underlying question ofJewish lM>men!jewish Men, what seems to have about Jewish Women !jewish Men as a whole and critique some of the general instigated and nursed Cantor's writing, is, Why hasn't feminism been accepted, assumptions upon which it is based. Second, I will discuss in detail Cantor's even embraced, by Judaism? In "proper" Jewish fashion, this question is concept ofJudaism as a "reformed patriarchy" founded on "female values" and answered with another question: "Is it [feminism] 'good for the Jews'?" The demonstrate how this concept leads to a problematic portrayal, if not a flagrant resounding reply from the (more traditionalist) Jewish community has been, misrepresentation, of Rabbimc literature. "No: Feminism is a threat to Jewish survival" [1]. Cantor writes that to "understand why Jewish women were excluded from General Critique the public religious and secular spheres of communal life and why there was so To begin with, let's mention the implausibility, perhaps the utter impossibility, much resistance to integrating them in the community as equals requires an in- of writing a comprehensive feminist analysis ofJudaism and its patriarchy from depth analysis ofJewish society from its ancient beginnings, when the patterns start to finish in four hundred pages. As nicely annotated as this book is, it of its culture were shaped, through all of history to today." Thus Cantor simply is not scholarship as scholarship has come to be. This is by no means embarks on a journey through Jewish history using feminism as her guide: cause to dismiss all of Cantor's work. Rather, it calls into question the way in "This work attempts to provide such an in-depth analysis ofJewish patterns of which Cantor's work has been and continues to be received. Perhaps Cantor culture by using feminism as the key to unlock and to solve its mysteries" [1]. has her finger on the pulse of a certain lay population, a particular popular Because of its far-reaching vision and all that it seeks to comprise, Jewish audience, that scholarship simply does not reach and often tries to ignore. Women !jewish Men is a hard book to pin down. It has sixteen chapters, divided Perhaps Cantor's innovative analyses and provocative readings into the minds into three parts: "Patterns of Traditional Jewish Culture;' "The Impact of and memories of Jewish women arid Jewish men will ring true for some. Assimilationism on Jewish Public and Private Life," and "The Struggle for a Perhaps her work should be praised for its unique activist vision rather than Correct Reading of Reality." In each of the sixteen chapters Cantor moves faulted for certain scholarly shortcomings. back and forth through history picking and choosing information that will Ultimately, however, I am frustrated by Cantor's book. I question Cantor's support her own reading(s) of reality. In the first part she discusses the meaning pro-Zionist portrait of Exile as "a national emergency,)) particularly an of Exile and its significance for the Jews. She explains how Jewish men emergency for Jewish men [101]. I wonder whether her description of the
66 A Patriarchy By Any Other Name 69 68 Gwynn Kessler
Jewish people as "a people which lives at the best of times in a perpetual, The "Reformed Patriarchy," "Female Values," subdued panic" rings true for others; it rings false for me [214]. Have Jews and Rabbinic Literature always lived, and are we still living, as Cantor claims, "with a permanent case of Fundamental to Cantor's interpretation are two very problematic assumptions. a national variation of post-traumatic stress syndrome" [31]? Is abandonment One is evident in her use of the phrase "reformed patriarchy."The other is her "the great crime in the Jewish culture" [303]? For that matter, is assimilation? labeling of certain values as "female." Moreover, how can Cantor, in good conscience, liken the JewIsh Exile to Cantor recognizes that "Jewish life is and always has been a patriarchy, a contemporary homelessness? She writes, "Multiply the dangerous and society dominated by men. Men made the rules and enforced them; men depressing situation of one homeless person by millions over two thousan~ created the structures and upheld them; men had the power, and women were years and you have the Jewish condition of Exile: permanent homelessness powerless" [2]. But she then maintains that patriarchy" exists on a continuum;' [29]. This analogy simply does not hold water. Jews have not been homeless for and that when compared to other patriarchies, Judaism's has been less severe. all or even most, of Jewish history. They have, however, been stateless. There IS Judaism's patriarchy was different from that of other cultures in that it was a difference. Overlooked in Cantor's analysis of Jewish history is any mention reformed. It was unlike" classic patriarchy, whose organizing principle is power exercised through three strategies: the club (violence), the yoke (slavery and of the Jewish people's flourishing during any, if not every, Exile.2 . . The presumptions fundamental to this book are at best ovemmphficat!Ons, exploitation), and the leash (psychological oppression)" [3]. The Jewish at worst stereotypes and cliches. Somewhere between the best and worst, they patriarchy also differed from "classic patriarchy;' according to Cantor, in its serve merely as rationalizations. For example, Cantor's claim that Jewl~h m,en "specifics of normative gender roles and behavior" [3]. Would that it were so. experienced the Exile as a "national emergency" is made in order to ra~lOna~lze I find the concept of a "reformed patriarchy" ultimately unbelievable. It is Jewish men's monopoly on spiritual resistance and the subsequent subjugatIOn like being "a little bit pregnant;' a little bit patriarchal. It cannot be done. If it of women as their" enablers." Her claim that Jews live with some vanatlon of could be done, however, let it be made clear that Judaism has not been one to post-traumatic stress syndrome is used as a rationalization for our incessant, do it. Cantor claims that Jewish men did not, indeed could not, exercise power parochial question, "Is it good for the Jews?", as well as the expected self- over Jewish women with the club, the yoke, the leash. She paints an idyllic censorship when the answer is a negative. Furthermore, Cantor's portrayal of picture of the Jewish community as a "violence-free zone" [82]. She writes, the American Jewish mother as overbearing and never quite satisfied, and the "the classic pattern so often found among oppressed people-after the Jewish father as passive, is employed to explain low self-esteem among Jews powerful man beats the powerless man, the latter beats his wife, the wife slaps [239]. This recapitulates the (negative) stereotype of the JeWIsh mother, and the kid, the kid kicks the dog-had to be smashed and every possible link furthermore, it suggests that Jews should be the only people suffenng from low eliminated" [84]. Although Cantor acknowledges that some rabbis deemed it permissible for Jewish husbands to strike "their" women, she still insists on self-esteem. Cantor's cause-and-effect picture of Jewish history ultimately lacks the portraying the Jewish community as a "violence-free zone."4 In addition to depth of vision her feminist anthropology proposes. As many questions as she whitewashing violence from the Jewish community, Cantor claims that Jewish raises, many others are left unasked; so much remains unaccounted for, so much men did not exploit or enslave "their" women. The Jewish woman's taken for granted. Cantor's Jewish history must be recognized as merely her exploitation is clear enough, however, in Cantor's own portrayal of her as an interpretation. I do not accept Exile (or assimilation) as a national emergency. "altruistic-assertive enabler" who does the dirty work so her husband can be I do not carry the burden of post-traumatic stress syndrome. I seek to free to busy himself with the much more crucial work of spiritual resistance. challenge, not perpetuate, the myths and stereotypes lurking behind the Finally, Cantor can only speculate, and in no way prove, that psychological constructs of our Jewish mothers and Jewish fathers. I personahze these oppression was not used as a leash, or a noose, around the Jewish woman's neck comments in order to make clear that these are my views. My claim is not that in Judaism's "reformed" patriarchy. Cantor's interpretations are wrong, but that she errs in assuming they are right Equally problematic in Cantor's concept of "reformed patriarchy" is her positing of intrinsically "female values." These are, according to Cantor, for others.3 cooperation, altruism, mutuality and interdependence, emotionalism and compassion, reverence for life, conflict resolution through consensus, an A Patriarchy By Any Other Name 71
emphasis on relationships, and nonviolence [4]. Cantor never questions her assumption that there are "female values," or that if there are, they are these. She ignores over twenty years of debate within academic feminist circles regarding precisely this issue. Stated simply, there are those who claim there is an innate, natural difference between men and women and their ways of being in the world; there are others who say that "female" and "male" behavior and values are socially constructed, that we learn how to behave in supposedly gender- appropriate ways, that we are not born with such inclinations. Cantor barely acknowledges the "nature/nurture" debate that is still alive and kicking on this subject.s She appears oblivious to the fact that one of the most fundamental assumptions of her book is anathema to many feminists. With unchecked optimism, Cantor states, "[i]f Jewish communities functioned for two thousand years in accordance with female values, including nonviolence, this demonstrates, in the words of the old Yiddish saying, that 'if it happened, it's possible' [9]." My contention is that it did not happen, and that Cantor's historical projections are therefore fundamentally flawed. Her insistence that Rabbinic Judiasm and its legal system are based on "female values" and that Judaism's patriarchy is "reformed" is a roundabout way of artificially inseminating Jewish history with a protofeminist consciousness. What comes out, in the end, is a bastardization ofJewish history. Cantor writes, "[i]t was the genius of the Jewish scholars and rabbis- virtually all of them men-to understand that infusing female values into their patriarchy would strengthen it in the struggle for national survival" [54]. She continues, "[t]he female values rabbinic Judaism adopted had originated in the family, where Jewish women, like women everywhere, had developed them to help one another survive under patriarchy" [54]. Cantor acknowledges, "[t]hese values initially appear in the vision of social justice and of ethical collective behavior in the Five Books and in the Prophets" [54]. Given this, I wonder at the validity of Cantor's claim that it was "female values" that the rabbis used to strengthen their patriarchy. It could just as easily be proposed that the values the rabbis passed on in their literature (Mishnah, Talmuds, and Midrash) were POZ is the ac national monthly magazine first conceived in the Torah. The seeds of social justice and ethical behavior had for anyone impacted by HIV and AIDS. POZ already been planted; the rabbis, perhaps, only nurtured them. A different offers the latest treatment information, reading ofJewish history may propose, then, that the rabbis' texts were imbued investigative reporting, celebrity profiles and not with "female values," whatever tliat means, but with human(e) values. columns on diet, nutrition, sex and much more. Cantor correctly describes Halacha as "[a ] living and evolving rather than a static or frozen body of law fixed forever" [55]. She explains, "Halacha's TO SUBSCRIBE CALL methodology is to link past laws and present realities through interpretation. The chain of law thus remains unbroken; it expands rather than becoming a 800 .. 9 READ POZ choker around one's neck" [55].6 But she uses this insight as license for her 72 Gwynn Kessler A Patriarchy By Any Other Name 73 tendentious claim that Halacha is based on "female values." Cantor's Why were the matriarchs barren? R. Levi said in R. Shila's name and R. assertion-perhaps her hope--that this is so leads her to misrepresent Rabbinic Helbo in R. Johanan's name: Because the Holy One, blessed be He, yearns for their prayers and supplications. Thus it is written, 0 my dove, thou art as literature. She quotes from the Talmud, "The Jews were liberated from Egypt the clefts of the rock (S.S. II:14): Why did I make thee barren? In order that, Let because of the righteousness of the women" [99]; "Women are a nation unto Me see they countenance, let Me hear thy voice [prayer] (ib.). R. 'Azariah said in themselves" [123]; "Women's weapons are on her [body]" [99]. These R. Hanina's name: So that they might lean on their husbands in [spite of] quotations, taken out of context, bespeak women's righteousness and strength. their beauty. R. Huna and R. Jeremiah in the name of R. Hiyya B. Abba But when she comes to less palatable, indeed horrible, passages, she does not said: So that they might pass the greater part of their life untrammelled. R. reevaluate her claim. She quotes, "when a grown man has intercourse with a Huna, R. Idi, and R. Abin in R. Meir's name said: So that their husbands might derive pleasure from them, for when a woman is with child she is little girl it is nothing, for when the girl is less than [three], it is as if one puts disfigured and lacks grace. Thus the whole ninety years that Sarah did not a finger into the eye" [86]. She remarks, "[r]egardless of whether this was an bear she was like a bride in her canopy. 8 actual atrocity or one of the hypothetical cases-such as flying towers-that Talmud scholars loved to explore, the statement shows gross insensitivity to a child's pain and terror and a lack of interest in the man's moral culpability" [86]. I quote this passage because I often find barrenness, not pregnancy, to be an apt But how many more passages showing gross insensitivity to children or women metaphor for feminist confrontations with Rabbinic literature. One necessary, or any" other" must it take for Cantor's assumption regarding "female values" honest, nonapologetic way to begin feminist analyses of Rabbinic texts is to to break down? acknowledge that sometimes this literature is a barren wasteland for feminists. Make no mistake, Cantor is not alone-misrepresentations of Talmud Sometimes the land is so desolate it is hard to find our way, to find something abound. The Rabbinic corpus is huge. It is in no way monolithic. It is full of to hold onto and call our own. Sometimes it is just a bumpy ride. And contradictory opinions and inconsistent interpretations, and so it is hard to sometimes, there is an oasis. Or at least a mirage. represent simply and concisely. For Jews today the Talmud may be viewed in If confrontations with Rabbinic texts leave feminists bereft, wherein lies much the same way as the rabbis viewed Scripture: "turn it and turn it because the oasis? Ironically, Halacha and the Halachic system may provide the answer. everything is in it."7 Thus we find in the Talmud some positive and some Let us return to Cantor's definition of Halacha as a living and evolving body negative attitudes toward women. What we cannot escape, however, is that all of law. She quotes the Talmud: "The Law will be explained now one way, now these views of women are seen through the eyes of men. another, according to the conception of the majority" [55J. She explains, "Halacha's methodology is to link past laws and present realities through interpretation" [55]. She continues: Conclusion I suggest a strategy different from Cantor's. Let us not look to Rabbinic [t]his means that circumstances and the needs of the moment can be literature, or Jewish history, for a protoferninist consciousness in Jewish men. addressed by the system's legal mechanisms rather than by automatic There is none. These texts must be confronted in their own right and on their adherence to past decisions; that explanations and reasons have to be advanced for new interpretations and modifications; that logic and reason own terms. Jewish feminists must read these texts and accept (or not accept) have to be used to reach conclusions and to justify opinions; and that the them, acknowledging both the context in which, and the audience for which, decision makers need to be accountable to the Jewish people, not only those they were written. Feminists must be free to react to these texts, interpret them, of the local community, but the nation in its entirety, past and present [55, and perhaps choose to reinterpret them. But our reactions of shock, anger, hurt, italics mine]. disgust, and profound loss, as well as our refusal to explain some of these texts away, must not be supplanted by apologetic reinterpretations. Jewish feminists must make today's decision makers-not yesterday's, perhaps A passage found in Genesis R.abbah will demonstrate both the difficulties of even in spite of yesterday's-accountable to the Jewish people in its entirety, attempting a wholly positive or negative representation of women in Rabbinic both Jewish women and Jewish men. literature, and it will also provide content that may be viewed as offensive to We need not search for "female values" underlying Rabbinic literature, or women (and men). play our patriarchy is better than their patriarchy games. The tradition, ifnot 74 Gwynn Kessler Winter/Spring 75 exactly opening the door to (or for) us, has at least given us a way to get our Bugs in the Mikveh foot inside. It has left us the key. More importantly, it has given us precedent. The rabbis may not have been feminists, but some of them were certainly Even after she changes her name radicals: "Turn it and turn it because everything is in it." Meaning, sometimes, from Christie to Rebekah, people ask turn it completely around, even stand it on its head. (in these parts, people ask) "Are you Jewish?" I try to reassure her
that her soul is Jewish, that her surname NOTES is Yiddish for horn-blower, that her face lThis is an incomplete listing of the topics addressed in Cantor's book. Given its is a luscious oval painted by Asher Lev himself immense scope, a complete summary of the topics and arguments seems impossi- to match her Ashkenazic hips making mitzvot as she ble. I have limited my review to several fundamental ideas. 21 am aware of the scar the Holocaust has left upon world Jewry and its psyche. dances toward Zion, but no matter- However, I do not agree that Exile is necessarily "bad for the Jews." Cantor clearly she has to go to the blackest Black Hats for affirmation. disagrees and writes that viewing exile as positive in any sense is not "a correct Go ahead, I say, it's institutionalized folklore reading of reality" [16]. bordering on idolatry frozen in sixteenth-century Poland 3Worthy of some exploration and possible future study is whether Cantor's take on Jewish history and my distaste for it is, at least in part, due to the generational dif- making a mockery of our ever-adapting people ferences between us. but go ahead, wear a hat over a wig over a scarf 4For an in-depth, informative discussion about violence in the Jewish community I urge the reader to look at Graetz's review [9]. over your head so you aren't flaunting your own true sexy SCantor does later write, "biology is not destiny, and nurture can override nature in blonde hairs that would distract men to denounce determining human behavior" [9]. Curiously, though, she never goes on to ques- tion her use of the term "female values." Torah, go ahead, don't pet my cats on Shabbos 6In theory Cantor is right. However, many have felt and do feel Halacha as a choker even though the original prohibition around their necks. was against beasts of burden-my cats will be miffed, 7 Pirke Avot, 5:22. and I, I will miss you, Christie-Rebekah. 8Genesis Rabbah, 45:4. This is an exegetical midrash, a "line-by-hne" interpretation of the book of Genesis, redacted about the fifth century C.B. I've met lots of converts-gutsy ones, shy ones, grandchildren of the Shoah, Mexicans and Germans and one Ethiopian all who, if they can't connect to me right away in Jewish geography,
time or space, tell me with their smiling eyes: "Oh I know you! You were standing next to me at Mount Sinai! You were the one with the little notepad transcribing everything Moses said into a language
that looked like daisies-I know you!" And I wish that Christie-Rebekah would give me that smiling look. Later, I hear it told that the council of Rabbis asked her to list 76 Response heresies ofJews, and she gave them, Journey a little wincingly-was she thinking of me? After she was dunked and pronounced officially Jewish Gabriel Lampert by three bearded men who tried not to look at her naked shape wobbling under the water, she complained that there were little bugs in the mikveh before her eyes. "Oh," said the Rabbis. Aunt Natalie wears a mother-of- "We've been meaning to get a bug-screen." pear! pin on her coat. When you get up close, you can tell that the six-pointed I don't think she's gone from me yet. star in its center was carved by hand. It says "Zion" in Hebrew. I have the other Thirty years after she's buried with all her organs intact, one; my mother gave me hers the last time I was back East. I would wear it if and thirty years after my body's stripped for donations men could get away with that out here in the desert. and flung in handfuls over the waters of Babylon, This early spring day in Philadelphia Aunt Natalie is wearing a long coat and high heels. She probably has on a pair of good earrings, also mother-of- I think our molecules will meet in outer space pear!, fine but not gaudy. Not that Mom needs to be impressed, but my aunt -and argue again. has standards no matter whom she is going to see. My aunt dresses conservatively, but she is not so plain as to cause remark. -Deborah Salazar When she was still living with my grandparents, she was the one who put the Pesach dishes on display in the mahogany china closet, and it was always Aunt Natalie who put the silver candlesticks away as soon as it got dark Saturday nights. Her clothing, and her face and carriage, say, Watch out, I'm someone to be reckoned with, even if I'm old. My other aunts and uncles have been easier on themselves as they got older, but not Aunt Natalie. It's been seven years since I've been back, so perhaps she loob different now. Her white hair must be a bit thinner, her height maybe even less than five feet. But I'm sure she still walks as erect as ever. I doubt that her face is wrinkled, except for two lines that give her mouth such intensity My mother has the same lines; when I was young, I used to wonder why Mom was angry in her sleep. I think of my aunt riding the bus into town. She sits down and smooths the front of her coat. She's not used to buses. It's been barely a year since she moved out to Bustleton, to the far northeastern edge of Philadelphia. When she lived downtown, she could walk everywhere, even if the streets posed danger. Downtown is where I last saw her, at a party for her seventieth birthday, when she at last got to chant the Haftarah and celebrate a Bat Mitzvah. I can remember how she waffled on doing it-it still makes me laugh. ''I'm too old," she'd say, "I keep forgetting things. How can I learn all this new stuff when I can't even remember where I am half the time?" But, for otice, it was me pushing her: go ahead, do it, and she did, and I kept my promise to be there. The bus pulls into the terminal. Everyone knows that the train waits until
77 78 Gabriel Lampert Journey 79 all the buses arrive before it begins its fun into town, so she doesn't have to not; I haven't seen my mother in seven years, and I don't know if I'll ever see rush. She gets down from the bus and walks to the stone steps that lead up to her again. the El platform. She makes it up the first flight, and then stops to rest her legs, When she had the first stroke four years ago, Mom asked me not to come adjusts her hair blown slightly awry, and then continues up. Maybe I shouldn't in. With my asthma-the reason I moved out here in the first place--there'd have moved so Jar from town, she thinks. Maybe I shouldn't have worn heels! Well, it's be two sick people to worry about. I talked it over with my aunt. "If I come too late to worry about that now. in anyway, you know what will happen. It's such a long trip, she'll be sure she's As she reaches the platform the train pulls away. ONE MINUTE, you can't just about to die, and they just haven't told her about it yet." Aunt Natalie wait! Now she is left alone on the platform, having to stand some ten or fifteen agreed. It was too bad that my mother was that way, she said, but we had to minutes more till the next train. She thinks over her itinerary. First, the stop in balance the risks and desires of everyone involved. Better my mother get well. Center City to get the flyers for the Hadassah rally, then maybe some lunch in My aunt sees herself as the pragmatist, her eyes never clouded over by town, that would be nice, and then she will take the other train out to visit my idealism. How many times did she tell me, "Yes, we all feel that way, honey, but mother. I moved out here to get away from the frenzy oftown, not to have to go through you've got to be realistic, you can't live your life hoping other people will be all this hustle and bustle, but no sooner do I move but people tell me I have to go here, reasonable."When she represented my uncles in the clothing business, she met I have to go there . ... every man as an equal, smiled and chatted pleasantly, but always remembered A man comes up the steps. He is well over six feet tall and heavyset, black, the goal in any meeting, uever wandering off. about thirty, with a leather jacket on. Aunt Natalie has checked him out; she She was the one who slipped me the money to apply to college when knows better than to show fear but, as the man walks towards her, she turns her Mom and Dad couldn't afford it. You might call that idealism, but Aunt Natalie head away ever so slightly, and she knows that the man has registered this. said it was just common sense; how was I going to stay off welfare without a The man is angry. HWoman, you're a racist! Don't you think I have college education? She says that 1 was the first one in the family who finished something else to do besides beat up old ladies? I see how you're afraid. It's college. But now 1 know that she had put herself through night school to because I'm black, isn't it?" become an accountant. She seems to think that night school doesn't count. My God, you can't even think wrong these days!171is big galoot is ticked offbecause The car is old. There are no graffiti, this is Philly, not New York, but some I'm afraid of him. Can you beat that? "It's because you're big. You're very, very windows are cracked, and the cracks throw slivers of light at her. The train big." rounds a short curve, leaning over, the seats creak inside and the rails groan and "Lady, you wouldn't be shaking in your shoes if some big white guy was scream outside. She has to push down on her tired legs to keep from sliding on here instead of me." the rattan-covered seats, smooth from thousands of passengers. My heavens, I'll "Are you kidding me?" My aunt almost laughs. "The hell I wouldn't!" bet I rode this same train when I was a kid. "Well." The man shows surprise at her ferocity. "I only wanted to ask As the train picks up speed, she thinks again about Mom, calls her something... Did they fix the tracks yet, or are we going to have to switch to stubborn--she should know!-and wishes that Mom would let me come visit. a bus down there in Kensington? My feet get tired of going up and down all Maybe she'll bring it up this afternoon. Aunt Natalie hopes too that I won't be the time." so stubborn, that I'll consent to stay in exile a little while longer if she can't get "I wish I knew," she says. my mother's consent. It's getting harder and harder to keep the family under Your feet? YOUR feet? How would you like to be almost eighty? control. They hear the train approach the station. The man walks to the far end of Her thoughts turn to me. At least she's not worrying anymore about me the platform and enters the last car. Aunt Natalie uses the door that opens near bringing home a shickse for a wife. In fact, she has never said a thing about my her and sits down, facing forward, where she can see everything that might being gay. That~ the way it is, we'll just have to live with it. happen. It Jeels good to be sitting again. The doors hiss shut; the train drags itself My mother never said anything either. 1 think maybe that was the reason out of the station, then picks up speed. she didn't want me to visit. But my aunt says no: "I don't know what it is, but If this were my journey, if I were the one visiting my mother in the it's not that." hospital, then this is when the plane would be taking off from El Paso. But I'm What bothers Aunt Natalie is that I'm so open about it, that I'm letting 80 Gabriel Lampert Journey 81 myself in for so much hardship, giving the world such ammunition to use children! Not that I'm complaining. There's things to be done, and when there's things against me. to be done, what you do is you grit your teeth and go do them. "OK, so you have to write your poems, but can't you just use another All that I myself remember of that period is the open-sided wooden name?" trolleys that used to go from Dauphin Street over the Schuylkill into "You never backed down from being Jewish. What about when you asked Fairmount Park. Over the river and into the woods. I loved the color of wood to take off work for Yom Kippur, what about that? And that was back in 1930!" everywhere, seats varnished or shellacked, painted posts and roof, steps After all, my father told me that his machinist rating came down sixty points alongside the car to connect down to the ground. And the enormous Park. I after he took off for Yom Kippur. I tell my aunt, "No One has to be afraid remember running through the seats of an amphitheater one sunny morning anymore for taking off for the Holidays, and whose doing was that, if not the while the Philadelphia Orchestra practiced for the evening concert. Mom people who had been so 'unrealistic' back then, people like you?" thought I should get some culture, so she ended up chasing me through the "Well, yes," she replies, every time we have this conversation, "but that was aisles till she finally caught up with me and dragged me away, but not before I different. That was only a career. These people are, takkeh, a little crazy." I threw her off balance and she crashed into the hedges at the edge of the Dell. mention Father Coughlin or the Bund-or the Aryan Nation, for that But I don't remember the house. My earliest memories ofBubbie are from matter-and she just shuts up. Finally she says, "Look, you're a grown man; I the kitchen, where I saw her start a Passover cake from a dozen eggs. In the last can't tell you what to do and what not to do, but you've got to be realistic.You year of her life, she sent a large prayer shawl to me here in New Mexico, she can't pretend no one cares." alone knowing that she was dying, knowing that I would want her approval to And then she adds that she worries. Something stops me from asking her be living in a church and immersing myself in the antiwar movement. Aunt why she never worries about herself. And, somehow, I've never gotten around Natalie thought it was commendable, but not "realistic." Mom didn't worry to telling her about when I was in college and my Jewish roommate asked me about that; she was going door-to-door with peace petitions. Maybe my not to wear the tie-clip with the tiny Jewish star. "You don't have to be so ...." mother isn't really concerned about my being gay, but I think that somewhere Now I know the word he wanted: "blatant."There's blatant, and there's realistic. down deep where she herself can't see it, she hates not getting any The train is five stops farther down the line now, and it looks like the track- grandchildren from me. repair work is finally done. T1,ank heaven! 1 don't have to sldep down another set of I'm just beginning to realize that I have no clear idea abollt how my steps, another bus, up more steps to the El. 77,,'s time 1 can sit nght here till it gets to mother's family worked. I know that Aunt Natalie's memories of Dauphin Fifteenth Street. But the rails still creak and groan, even with the new tracks; she Street are mixed. She remembers the War, her brothers and sisters running in shakes her head slightly from side to side, the same attitude of-what is it, and out, day by day, year by year. This one was wounded, that one back on furlough, disgust?-as when she saw how old and dusty the car is. it was a regular balagan. And she remembers me on Dauphin Street my first few By this time, the train is running through a more densely populated part months, while my father was out at Great Lakes. of the city. On both sides of the tracks there are small apartment houses, brick My aunt smiles, and allows a chuckle to escape, but she has to grab onto buildings three or four stories high, with windows facing the trains. It's too cold the hand rest, because the train is making its great screeching turn towards to leave the windows open, but she knows what the apartments look Iike--the town, descending into a tunnel. It's a wonder these things stay on the tracks where rose-patterned wallpaper, the wood-stained handrails on white-painted they belong. banisters. She's lived all her life in Philadelphia, and, if I never happened to live in She looks around. Sure enough, there are a few questionable people on Fishtown, well, Fishtown isn't so different from Northern Uberties, or Strawberry board, but the car is full el\ough to deter all but the most foolish attacker. In Mansion. the heart of the city, the train stops every few streets, under the big department She remembers the house on Dauphin Street, yes, 3204, in Strawberry stores and banks, places my aunt knows well. Mansion. It had a wide porch in front. The Park was just across the street. She This is the point where I'd arrive at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport and run for thinks about Bubbie, my grandmother, whom she has grown to look like more the departing plane thirty gates away, hoping to make it without losing my and more. Bubbie was a hard woman who gave the eight children little slack luggage or spraining an ankle, racing against the flight schedule of a monster in growing up. How often she had to be mother to one of the younger airport. 82 Gabriel Lampert Journey 83
As the train pulls into Thirteenth Street, Aunt Natalie decides not to stay the extra stop, Fifteenth. She stands; she would like to brush herself off, but My aunt reminds herself, at least I can navigate the subway. After the stroke there is no time or space. She holds onto one of the verucal poles. When the four years ago, my mother never recovered the use of her right hand or lower door hisses open, she steps into the throng of people, the tumult in which she right leg. She did learn to get around with a four-footed cane, and, in spite of Aunt Natalie's advice, found a way to manage the steps in their old house. had lived for twenty-five years. . She gets caught up in the frenzy of the moving crowd. Instead of movmg Where would I be at this point? Ohio, or Kentucky. It would be cloudy below, so I couldn't see the mountains. down the concourse towards the office-building exit she needs, she 1$ pulled towards the steps that lead down to the northbound subway. I don't remember the My childhood was like this: Dad was the one who told jokes: "I bought a wooden whistle but it wooden whistle, so I got a steel whistle, and it steel crowds being so big. Or the shoving. Finally, she makes it to the other statIOn, the wooden whistle. So I bought a tin whistle, and now I tin whistle." route that goes north. What is going on in this city? It's almost like it's not mine anymore. I've lived here almost eighty years! . Mom had sayings. Like one of my earliest memories, I must have been five; they were talking about the siege ofJerusalem in '48, and my uncle was telling A train is already waiting, but it is a Local. The Express will come soon, and us, "We're doing fine. We'll break out." My mother put her hand on her she'd rather not have to stop at the stations in the rundown part of town, brother's arm and said, "From your mouth to God's ear." stations like Dauphin Street. She moves to the other side of the platform. She can hear the Express train approaching. As the crowd lunges closer to the edge The train is running quietly now. It passes Dauphin Street, and the young of the platform, Aunt Natalie finds herself being pushed forward mo;e than she black man gets up for the next stop. He comes over and tells my aunt, "You wanted, feels herself falling, and grabs at the nearest coat, a woman s coat. My scared the heck out of me back there, ma'am. You need to wear street shoes!" aunt is able to right herself, but the woman, shocked by her behavior, doesn't My aunt surprises herself and laughs, agreeing heartily: "Mister, you are so seem to understand. Aunt Natalie tries dumbly to apologize, but the train is right!"They tell each other to "take care;' and he goes over to the door as the train comes into the next station. already filling up the station and the woman moves away, ignoring her. By the It is only a few stops now. The train passes near the apartment my time my aunt enters the express, she cannot find a seat. It is one of those new It~ cars without vertical poles. She's too short for the hanging straps, so she must grandparents took after the children all moved away. Steps there, too. funny; make do with a handrest attached to the seat, not enough to anchor her against for years you never even notice those things, and then it1 all you see, Twenty years ago, I had no trouble climbing up or down; it was Mama who was having a hard time with the train's side-to-side swaying while it executes a squealing S-turn. I'm like a second:floor apartment. some kind of dancing giraffe on these long, skinny legs. . In fact, she had to give it up after Zaydeh died, to take a smaller apartment Then a young black man gets up and motions to her. Oh my God, not again! m an elevator building a few blocks away. So now I've done the same thing. She The man is tall and big, and wears a leather jacket. But she sees in a moment g1ves the same grimace, the one that's mostly disgust and a little of something that it's not the same man. He wants her to take the seat. She nods; it's too loud else. to talk so she mouths, "Thank you." She sits for a while before brushing off her coat once more, and then . The train pulls in to Olney Station. This is where most people get off, reaches down to feel her ankle. That~ it! I'm not wearing heels again, period. mcluding my aunt, so the train will stay here a minute, giving her time to leave Suddenly she remembers the errand she was supposed to run while in at her Own pace. She climbs the last stone flight of steps, into the open air. Center City. That was the whole reason I took this roundabout route: to pick up the Fmally. The milky sunlight has turned to a pale overcast, with a fresh wind. I hope it won't rain) at least not until I get home. jIyers for the rally! She was going to post them at her new synagogue, and at the apartment complex where there really aren't that many Jews, anyway. Well, I'm sure . She orients herself, then heads east for a few blocks to the hospital. This as hell not going back now; it will just have to wait, or better yet someone else wtll ha~e pomt 1S a hub for bus lines that fan out from the subway. Most were trolleys to do it. What~ happening to my brain, is this senility setting in? She asks me th1s once,. and the tracks still remain in patches, so she has to step carefully to avoid catch:ng h~rse1f m them. You'd think they'd fix these things 50 people wouldn't go every so often, so I have to remind her that no one else thinks so. The city That~ cluster of Hadassah chapters still keep her on as accountant. So, maybe it's not breakmg thetr necks! A block further, she notices, where the eye-doctor was, senility So what is it? what was his name? His name was Bialystok, and the consolidated Hebrew school-I went there for four years-used to be a block farther. She enters the 84 Gabriel Lampert Winter/Spring 85 hospital's grounds. Generation X, Crown Heights She has already figured out where my Mom's room is; she moves toward the bank of elevators. She is bending down to rub her ankle when a door opens Generation X Lubavitch boys and out come six tiny poodles, yipping and jumping on and off of a Listening to Sun Ra wheelchair. The patient in the chair is a woman the same age as Aunt Natalie. And getting high She is too excited by the dogs to see my aunt. The man pushing the wheelchaIr Eating kosher coldcuts by the pound is my age, or even a bit younger, and the man to his right is his life-long Mingling Halacha with vodka partner, though Aunt Natalie probably doesn't see that. The dogs have had theIr Can you reverse Baal t'shuvah? fur dyed, each a color of the rainbow. But in the streets near home, they still Such mishugas, she thinks, afraid the poodles are going to claw at her coat, Wear their yarmulkes but they continue to dance and jump, only occasionally licking at her ankle. A And if mama begs, will straggle into shul bouquet of poodles. My aunt moves into the elevator as the Poodle Event heads toward the lobby. Upstairs, she greets Mom. In Crown Heights, staying out all night I try to picture Mom as she is now, but I can't. With Rastas on Utica-six, seven, eight, ten "You won't believe what I saw on the elevator!" my aunt says. Children in two-family home. Studying in yeshivas "Poodles!" my mother shouts gleefully. "Weren't they something? They No science, no math, no sex ed-you get married came right past here not two minutes ago!" I still can't see her; is she sitting in Go to bed. Everything is in the Talmud. bed? Does she have a cane? Lapsed Lubavitch boys in midnight discos Aunt Natalie is about to switch back into calling them mishugas, but thinks Screwing maybe a secular Jew. better of it. In the latest attack, just a week ago, Mom lost control of her left foot, the foot that has pulled her around since that first stroke. Back then she Making Felliniesque films in Robert DeNiro's academy had promised herself she would recover enough to come out West agam to see About their repressive upbringing me, to do the Grand Canyon again. But now, she has all she can do every day Want to be the Lubavitch Spike Lee to work with the nerve endings she still owns, learning still one more slow and Fundraising from aunts and uncles, you're their boy painful time how to walk steps, how to turn a corner. She has barely enough Hanging out with Allen Ginsberg wanting to be seduced by something old patience to be civil to her older, know-it-all sister, though yes, yes, she IS happy Also new. The Rebbe is like Elvis-has a shrine dedicated to him, and is for the visit. What she has left over for me is not enough for the Job she thmks Sighted on the beach. What happens to our mitzvahs if we lose our souls? she's supposed to do as a mother. That's what I know, though she won't tell me. Pragmatism is not paganism, Clinton is not Reagan She will never look again the way she did seven years ago. Th,s IS the reason Who cares what day it is, we'll be partying soon. I can't come visit, isn't it? It's not me, it's her. I am the only one left whose picture of her is not maimed by a stroke. I'm the guard at a remote outpost, -Cheryl Fish preserving the memory of some faraway empire. Now the plane would touch down at Philly International. Even a cab would take forever to get to the hospital, but I'd get one. But what could I tell her? That I want her to get well? That I hope she can come out again to my desert, to see my own rainbow? From your mouth to God's ear. Post-Zionism and the Dynamics of American Jewry 87
large-scale immigration. Others claim that non-Jewish descendants ofJews, in Post-Zionism and the Dynamics ofAmerican Jewry some cases eligible for Israeli citizenship, are abusing the state's generosity for their own economic motivations. Still others suggest that with oppressed Laurence A. Kotler-Berkowitz dlaspora communities increasingly becoming a legacy of the past, the symbolism behind the Law of Return is quickly running its course. Somewhat less marginal are calls for the Jewish state to reduce the amount of money it accepts from American Jews. Supporters of this proposal argue that I n his introduction to Response's issue a relationship between American Jews and Israel based substantially (though by on post-Zionism, David R. Adler begins to specifY three definitions of th~ no means exclusively) on American Jewish financial support for Israel is concept. [EDITORS' NOTE: See "Post-Zionism: Toward a Working DefimtlOn, unhealthy. Such a relationship, they say, makes Israel the junior partner in the Response 66 (Summer/Fall 1996), pp. 7-13.J Post-Zionism has been employed partnership. It would be better to forsake the money, develop other bases of a to designate changes in Israeli society, to identifY an academic school within relationship, and assert Israel's self-reliance. Israel challenging traditional Zionist scholarship, and to describe possible American Jews could be deeply worried, fearful, or angry over these alterations in the Israeli-diaspora relationship. Working from cultural disciplinary possible changes. The Law of Return is a powerful symbolic connection perspectives, both Menachem Feuer and Robin Podolsky address Adler's third between Israeli and diaspora Jews. Any modification to it could constitute a definition, reflecting on the critical challenges and expansive possibilities of breach of that connection and a rejection by Israeli Jews of the hope that being Jewish in America during the approach to a post-Zionist period. diaspora Jews will join them. More severe, though, could be the ramifications Because everyone, in the words of political scientist David Ricci, ought to of the state's decision to reduce the money it accepts from American Jews. stick to his or her own vocation, I won't pretend to respond to Podolsky's and Conventional wisdom holds that American Jewish philanthropy is both the Feuer's cultural performances on their ground.! Instead, I write this essay in an concrete manifestation of American Jewish support of Israel and a major basis attempt to add some social scientific contributions to the discussion of American of American Jewish identity and community. If Israel tells American Jews that Jews and post-Zionism. The following will, I hope, make clear the numer-ouS and the state no longer needs financial support, it does so at the risk of varied ways in which American Jews enact their Jewishness independent of undermining a major basis ofJewish identity for American Jews, of weakening Zionism and Israel and can continue to do so in rich and meaningful ways. American Jewry, and of harming the Israel-American Jewish relationship. Post- Zionism could be a trauma for American Jews. But such a reaction on the part of American Jews would be misguided. It Post-Zionism, according ro Hanoch Marmari, is not an ideology but would be based on assumptions about the dynamics of the American Jewish rather a forecast.2 Post-Zionism will characterize that time when Zionism has community and the real importance ofIsrael to AmericanJews that, upon closer successfully fulfilled the second of its two historical goals: achieving recognition inspection, turn out to be empirically untrue. It would also be destructive both and acceptance from the Arab neighbors of the Jewish state.3 The first Zionist to American Jews and the Jewish state, for it would convey to American Jews goal-creating a Jewish territorial, demographic, and political presence-was that they are nothing without Israel, and it would convey to Israel that American achieved with statehood. Israel's progress toward a post-Zionist reality is Jews wish it never to be a mature society. That is the real recipe for trauma. nothing short of the fulfillment of Zionist ideology: the normalization of the • • Jewish people, or at least of the Israeli Jews. Already among Israelis there is talk that the inevitable march to a post- Let's take up the first challelfge: the Law of Return and possible Zionist society, to complete normalization, must be accompanied by policy modifications to it. In the battle among competing visions of Jewish life that emerg~d changes that reflect social and cultural normalization. Though marginal still, in the nineteenth century, Zionism was victorious. Jewish political proposals have surfaced for a modification to the Law of Return, which allows sovereIgnty was reconstituted in tandem with the creation of a majority Jewish any Jew anywhere to immigrate to Israel and claim immediate Israeli sOCIety, and both were the result of mass immigration of Jews, some for citizenship. Critics of the Law of Return as it now stands have begun to argue ideological reasons and some for reasons of personal and filial survival. that Israel cannot continue adequately to address social problems created by Zionism-as-aliyah proved triumphant.
86 88 Laurence A. Kotler-Berkowitz Post-Zionism and the Dynamics of American Jewry 89
American Jews, though, have never accepted the imperative of Zionism-as- Nor should American Jews worry that in an emergency Israel will reject a1iyah. According to Marmari, about 98,000 American and Canadian Jews made them. Disregard for a moment that the likelihood of American Jews needing a1iyah between 1948 and 1994, an average of about 2,100 per year, and less than to flee the United States is extremely small. It is precisely such situations- four percent of the total number ofJews who have immigrated to Israel from saving Jews in danger-that provide one of Israel's reasons for existence. A around the world.4The great mass of Central and Eastern European Jews who change in the normal operations of Israel's immigration and naturalization at the turn of the twentieth century so enlarged the size of the American Jewish procedures is highly unlikely to undermine the Israeli belief that one of the community made the initial decision ofAmerica over Palestine. For close to one Jewish state's imperatives is to protect threatened Jews. hundred years, their descendants have rarely reversed course. Symbolically, reform to the Law of Return should neither disquiet nor Concern over a change in the Law of Return would be gronndless because anger American Jews. Concern or indignation over the removal of an invitation it would conveniently ignore the historical truth about the failure of Zionism- spurned for nearly fifty years would smack of the worst kind of hypocrisy. as-aliyah among American Jews. For all practical purposes, any modification of Rather than seeing it as a breach of the Israeli-diaspora connection or a the Law of Return will have no impact on American Jews because the current rejection by Israeli Jews of the hope that diaspora Jews will immigrate to Israel, Law of Return has never attracted them. Most American Jews are not AmencanJews would do better by themselves to put a positive spin on it. They clamoring to move to Israel, nor are they likely to in the future. Only those should see it as a recognition on the part of Israelis that most American Jews, several thousand who each year decide that they want to be citizens of Israel the largest remaining diaspora community, are unlikely to make the may be affected by a modification, but even in their case the impact will commitment to a1iyah, and that American Jews have legitimate Jewish lives to probably be limited. Modifications to the law will most likely take the form of live in America,just as Israeli Jews have legitimate Jewish lives to live in Israel. a longer naturalization process, not wholesale restrictions on the immigration If and when Israel makes this decision, it is the responsibility ofAmerican Jews of Jews who truly want to be citizens of the state. Aliyah, then, will still be to be supportIve of the change, and simultaneously to make clear to Israel their possible for those American Jews who are determined to pursue it. interpretation of the change as the beginning of a new and revitalized process of mutual recognition between Israeli and American Jews, not the final act in a falling out between them. Winter 1997 dissent . Though Zionism-as-aliyah never succeeded among American Jewry, a vanant of it-Zionism-as-philanthropy-certainly found resonance. American Labor's Renewal? Commentary by Richard Rorty, John Jews have expressed their support for Israel financially, funneling money through Sweeney, and others. Identity Politics and the a senes of mstltUtIons to Israel. But fear that Jewish identity and community in Amenca would be damaged by Israel's decision to reduce or eliminate the Essays by Zelda Bronstein, Anne Phillips, Common Good. money it accepts from American Jews is groundless, based on an erroneous and Iris Young. Plus: Todd Gitlin on the elections; Chinese assumption about dynamics among American Jews. That assumption holds that dissidents; the science wars in India. And much more. philanthropy sustains identity. But the reverse is more likely true: identity leads r------to philanthropy, as well as to a broad range of other Jewish actions and choices Subscril!tion: o $22/year o $40/two years o $IS/students o Singletopy: $7.50 that Support, maintain, and augment Jewish community in America. par~cipates o Check endosed (drawn on U.S. currency). o Bill me. . Who among America's Jews in the Zionism-as-philanthropy [Add $71,.. p<)Ibgtootli The Johns Hopkins University Press. EA7 Contributors 95 Contributors Laurence A. Kotler Berkowitz is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at Brown University. His dissertation is a comparative analysis of the effect of religious and ethnic networks on voting behavior in the United David R. Adler is an editor of Response and a New York-based writer. States, Great Britain and Canada. E. Arnon is the Executive Secretary of the Joint Doctoral Program in Jewish Gabriel Lampert teaches mathematics at New Mexico State University. His Studies at the Graduate Theological Union and the University of California at essay "Bamidbar" appeared in the Riverhead anthology Wrestling with the Angel: Berkeley. He is also a poet and translator. Faith and Religion in the lives of Gay Men He has had poetry published in Puerto Chanita Baumhaft is an editor of Response and a New York-based writer. del Sol and fiction in Evergreen Chronicles. Joshua Saul Beckman is an editor at Weighted Anchor Press and has received Alison Luterman works as an HIV-test counselor in Oakland, California. She fellowships from the Albee Foundation, the Lemelson Foundation, and the has a poem appearing in the "Poetry in Motion" series on the BART mass- Wessley Theological Seminary for his work on Edmond Jabes. transit system, and has published in The Sun, Poetry East, Whetstone, and Kalliope. Elizabeth Cohen is a poet and writer who lives in New York City. Peter Nickowitz is a Ph.D. candidate at New York University. This past Trayce Diskin earned her M.RA. at Columbia University and is now teaching summer he attended the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont. His high school English in inner-city Houston. This is her second contribution to poetry has appeared in two issues of Response and "The Family Name" is his Response. third contribution. Sandi DuBowski is a New York-based film/videomaker and a researcher on Robin Podolsky is a writer who lives and works in Los Angeles. Her forth- the Christian Right. His current project is a feature-length documentary called coming book, Queer Cosmopolis, will be published by New York University Press. Trembling Before G-d, about Chasidim, Orthodox Jews, and lesbian-gay-bi- Deborah Salazar's essays, poems, stories, and translations have appeared in transgender sexuality. His video Tomboychik is touring with the "Too Jewish?" journals such as Harper's and The Exquisite Corpse and have also been widely exhibition to Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Baltimore in 1997. anthologized. Her work is most recently found in American Poets Say Goodbye Allen Ellenzweig has most recently published commentary and criticism in to the 20th Century (Four Walls Press, edited by Andrei Codrescu). the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review. He is the author of The Homoerotic Naomi Seidman is an Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at the Graduate Photograph: Male Images from DurieulDelacroix to Mapplethorpe, published in 1992 Theological Union in Berkeley and a fiction writer. Her first book, A Marriage by Columbia University Press. Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish, will be published this David Erlich was born in Israel in 1959. After his military service in the spring. artillery he was a reporter for the Israeli radio and a features writer for Ha'aretz. Hal Sirowitz is the author of Mother Said (Crown), which soon will be For four years he traveled and taught Hebrew in the U.S., Australia, and translated into Hebrew for publication in Israel. He has received an NEA grant Greece. In 1994 he came back to Jerusalem and started Tmol Shilshom, a in Poetry and been profiled in the New York Times, Details, the Forward, and bookstore-cafe. elsewhere. Cheryl Fish has published a book of poems called Wing Span (Mellen Poetry yermiyahu ahron tanb is a project archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Press). Her poetry has also appeared in New American Writing and the Santa Research. His publication credits include Fauquier Poetry Journal, The Glass Monica Review, among others. She teaches English and Writing at Nassau Cherrry, the James White Review, Kinesis, Prairie Schooner, and Response. Community College. Molly Weber graduated in May 1996 from Tufts University with a B.A. in Joshua S. Jacobs is completing his Ph.D. dissertation, "Ethics and Witnessing English. While at Tufts she placed third in the Academy of American Poets in Adrienne Rich's Poetry," for the English Department at Rutgers University. Prize. She currently lives and teaches in Tucson, Arizona. Gwynn Kessler is a Ph.D. candidate in Midrash at the Jewish Theological Max Westler directs the Writing Program at St. Mary's College. His work has Seminary. been published in The Minnesota Review and Poetry East. 94 Subscribe to Response For thirty years Response has been the only national journal dedicated to Thank You for Your Help publishing the work ofJewish students and young writers. Response was the first Jewish periodical I ever subscribed to, and I still read and learn from it. -Arthur Waskow We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of Lillian W Adler, Lyle Berman, David Bloom, Response is one of those journals ... that has celebrated freedom Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, Justin Hoyt, not in word but in deed. Mayall of us meet again, in these pages, Rabbi Mark W Kiel, The Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, for many more celebrations of freedom through the act of free debate. Dee Nathans and Dr. Gerald A. Rosen, Professor Fred Ritchin, -Jacob ~eusner Rabbi Judith Schindler, Hedy and Yumi Schleifer, and Melvin J. Sykes. Long may they wave. -Morris U. Schappes, Response is a nationally distributed p'lblication Editor-in-Chief,Jew{sh Currents supported primarily through charitable contributions. Please join our dialogues and help us ensure an independent-minded Contributions are tax-deductible. Jewish cultural atmosphere. 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