progressive

A no-go zone for Jews?

Women and their allies across North America marched last Saturday in a massive show of feminist and progressive activism. It was the second annual such event, the first one coming the day after U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration last year.

At the Los Angeles Women’s March, actor Scarlett Johansson, who is Jewish, told the audience that she became part of the movement because she felt a rage in her on behalf of women who have been abused and because of things that have happened to her in the past.

“Suddenly, I was 19 again and I began to remember all the men who had taken advantage of the fact that I was a young woman who didn’t yet have the tools to say no, or understand the value of my own self-worth,” Johansson said.

Johansson’s experience is one of millions that have been shared in recent months since the advent of the #MeToo movement. But it was a message that was not heard by all.

Because Johansson was scheduled to speak at the event, Palestinian women’s groups boycotted it. One group accused Johansson of “unapologetic support of illegal settlements in the West Bank.”

The Palestinian groups’ complaint, ostensibly, is that Johansson was a spokesperson for SodaStream, which produces an at-home beverage carbonation system. The fact that SodaStream was based in Maale Adumim, a West Bank Jewish settlement, made it a target for BDS, the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel.

The Palestinian American Women’s Association declared: “While her position may not be reflective of all organizers at the Women’s March Los Angeles Foundation, PAWA cannot in good conscience partner itself with an organization that fails to genuinely and thoughtfully recognize when their speaker selection contradicts their message.”

In a free country like the United States, anyone is free to boycott anything. The Palestinian women’s groups were fully within their rights to stay home. But the idea that Johansson was not a legitimate voice to be heard at the rally because she does not condemn Jewish settlements in the West Bank is a bit of a stretch.

If Johansson’s association with SodaStream was the real reason the Palestinian groups stayed home, as they say it is, it presents an opportunity to reflect on a bit of recent history. In one of their few successful campaigns, BDS managed to force SodaStream to close its West Bank plant, causing unemployment for 500 Palestinians who had worked there. Some achievement.

However, something potentially more significant may be afoot, which has nothing to do with SodaStream or settlements at all.

The Palestinian movement is trying to co-opt the progressive and feminist movements in the name of a nationalist movement that gives no indication that it would, if successful, reflect anything like what North Americans would consider a progressive or woman-friendly independent country.

One of the things that progressive people have come to accept, with much thanks to #MeToo, is that intent sometimes matters less than impact. We have come to accept, for instance, that what a man might call “persistent flirtation” can be experienced by women as coercion, intimidation or worse.

Palestinian groups – and the progressive and feminist groups they infiltrate – should be conscious that what is intended as criticism of Israel, whether they like it or not, impacts on Jews. Of course, not all Jews are Zionists. Nonetheless, when you attack Israel, Jews feel it.

Consider from where we’ve come. A few short years ago, most “pro-Palestinian groups” insisted they didn’t oppose Israel’s existence, they were merely criticizing certain policies of the Israeli government. Now, it is extremely common for people to express outright antipathy to Zionism. Indeed, Zionism is a dirty word among many of the people who organized and participated in the marches last weekend. This is a far step from criticizing certain policies. To oppose Zionism is to oppose the existence of a Jewish state.

The Palestinian movement is trying to kick the Zionists (and that includes most North American Jews) out of the progressive and feminist movements. Is that OK with progressives? Is that OK with Jews?

If both sides don’t do something about it, Zionists and Jews are going to have a sworn enemy on the left and the left is going to be known as a no-go zone for Jews and Zionists. Who thinks that’s OK?

Being a young Jew in 2017

From the beginning, Jews have struggled to define ourselves within the societies we inhabit. Since the time of the Babylonian exile, we have carved out spaces in other peoples’ countries, walking the fine line between self-definition and belonging.

We have sacrificed much to belong. In becoming part of patriarchal societies, we lost knowledge of the sacred feminine goddess whose statues still stood in the Temple hundreds of years into its use. We lost countless songs and stories and figures of whose existence I will never know. We also lost members of our tribe, ancestors no one is descended from, in crusades, pogroms and massacres across Europe and elsewhere.

But still, we fought to belong. We, know that, above all else, community sustains us, so we infused our culture into traditions that keep us together and nourish us, like foods and songs. When we were exiled from one country, we found shelter in another. We did the jobs they allowed us to do, we lent money and became merchants and bankers. I was taught early that, in each generation, there are those who will oppose us, who will seek our demise. But, after each setback, we found a new place, we salvaged what we could and reinvented ourselves. This is what it is to be diasporic. We were silent about painful things as necessary, and we did what it takes to continue.

And now it is the year 2017. We live among Europeans and Americans, and everywhere in the world. The last genocide is still within living memory, my grandmother having witnessed Kristallnacht, her sister lost in the Holocaust. Now, my grandmother is hugely successful, she has the Order of Canada and never speaks German anymore. We are so adaptable.

They were persecuting us before the word genocide was even coined. Now, we almost sit at the table of whiteness. I have never walked on the street and been profiled for the way I look – any prejudice surfaces after I reveal my own identity. This is my privilege. We are meant to laugh at jokes about Jewishness, because they are not as potentially harmful as jokes about other races. They do not mask death tolls like jokes about our black or indigenous friends; Jews aren’t being murdered or incarcerated at the rates of other people. The jokes about Jews are about how supposedly wealthy we are, a thing we are expected to be proud of.

But still, we are afraid to be openly Jewish in many spaces, because we know we will be asked about Israel, held responsible for the actions of Israel, or at least asked if we have ever been to Israel. The word Jewish or a Magen David on a sign at a Pride march or other progressive gathering could well put us in danger, perceived by some as condoning colonialism or being Zionist, though displaying pride in our Jewishness in these instances has nothing to do with Israel. A minority, we are still tokenized, even by our progressive colleagues. Still proving we deserve to belong, we are used to comments like “you don’t even look Jewish.” What will we sacrifice in the search for belonging in a system that may never really accept us?

Our sages teach that our responsibility is to be a light in the world, that the world we were born into is fragmented and incomplete, and ours is the work of repairing it. I struggle with what this looks like. How can we seek to repair the world even while we ourselves are so broken? I feel very broken these days, astonished by the rise of public fascism in a world that needs healing in so many ways that call on me to help.

I remember, as a preteen, reading about neo-Nazi groups that existed in secret in Europe and being shaken to my core. Now they walk in our streets and our neighbours tell us it is rude to “fight hate with hate,” or they joke about “punching” the agitators, as if the heavy, daily history I carry in my body was as simple as a meme.

We are taught that, since all corners of our universe are fragmented, that means God is also that way. Perhaps then it is alright to be broken, to be incomplete but still trying. Our very name is our task – Yisrael, those who wrestle with God. Those who do even the hardest and most impossible work. Work that it is impossible to ever finish – no one can win against God. But we keep showing up, even as we struggle and break and repair ourselves.

Part of the task of my generation is healing the inheritance we received from elders who escaped the Holocaust or watched family perish, and parents who were raised by people with broken relationships to wealth, food and affection, among other things. We carry these legacies in our bodies and they manifest differently in each of us. For me, I see in my family the deep need to prove we deserved to be the ones to survive. I see the need for material success and productivity and external praise. I hold the grief in my body in moments when I don’t know where the small judgmental voice in my head is coming from, and I recognize the pain of my ancestors rising to the surface in me, now that it is safer to process it than it’s ever been before. My vow is that this healing will happen in my lifetime. It may not be completed, as we are taught that intergenerational trauma lives for generations, but I am not free to abandon the work. I will never tell my – or anyone else’s – daughter “you’ll do well with dating because you’re pretty for a Jewish girl,” as I was told.

Jews are supposed to question everything, our holy books are full of questions, discussions and interpretations. Let us use this training to continue to challenge the status quo. Perhaps being a broken vessel will help – perhaps if we were whole, we would not have such a capacity to hold fragments of others’ pain. Having lost so much and started over so many times in the last 2,000 years, can we not see that anything is possible? Can we not be the ones who discard systems that do not unify a fragmented world? We need to believe that anything is possible – there is nothing to lose in pursuing a world full of our own light, which reveals the light of others along the way.

Ariel Martz-Oberlander is a director, writer, teacher and community organizer seeking to find the personal in the global. As a Jewish settler on Coast Salish territories, her practice is rooted in a commitment to place-based accountability through decolonizing work.

Outlook’s final edition

The cover of Outlook magazine’s final issue features a painting by Lithuanian artist Yehuda Pen (1854-1937). The newspaper in the image, explains the caption, is Der fraynd (The Friend), which, “founded in 1903, was one of the major Yiddish newspapers of its day before it was closed down in 1913 by czarist censors.” For Outlook – “Canada’s only progressive Jewish periodical” – it wasn’t censors that caused its demise, but the economy, one that has seen many print publications close their doors.

“We have struggled uphill for quite awhile with the difficulties and expenses of sustaining a print publication with a small and specialized – although devoted – readership, and we must finally let go,” writes editor Carl Rosenberg in the magazine’s final issue, the Spring 2016 edition.

“Looking back, we are proud of having given a home to diverse voices in the left and Jewish communities: liberal Zionist, non- and anti-Zionist, Yiddishist, Marxist, feminist, anarchist, environmentalist, social democratic,” he continues. “We have covered and reflected the Canadian and international scene, including labor struggles, environmental issues, women’s issues, issues of sexuality, gender, human rights and civil liberties. We have hosted lively, often impassioned, debates on many issues, and we hope they have usually been respectful as well.

“We have upheld a cultural heritage dear to most secular Jews – that of Yiddish language and literature. We have published works by and about a wide variety of Yiddish writers, men and women, and recounted the rich and dynamic history of the secular Yiddish culture that emerged in Eastern Europe a century and a half ago and has played such a large part in modern Jewish history and culture.

“We have remembered one of the greatest crimes in recorded history – the Nazi Holocaust or Shoah against the Jews of Europe, paying tribute to those who resisted against impossible odds. We have tried to draw universal lessons from this monstrosity, speaking out against racism, chauvinism and fanaticism of all kinds. On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we have supported the rights of both peoples to exist in peace and equality, while opposing violence on all sides, and we have opposed the decades-long Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the systematic Israeli violation of Palestinian human and national rights.”

In an article by Leslie Dyson, managing editor Sylvia Friedman – whose involvement with Outlook goes back 43 years – explains a bit of the publication’s history. While she connected with the magazine in Toronto in 1973, it started in 1963, evolving, writes Dyson, “from an English-language insert in the Vochenblatt (Weekly Paper),” which closed its doors in 1978, “due to the ill-health of its editor, Joshua Gershman, who was also for a time the de facto editor of Outlook, where [Friedman] worked with him.

“In 1979, Friedman announced that she was moving with her family to Vancouver. It seemed that Outlook (known then as Canadian Jewish Outlook) would have to fold. Ben Chud and Hank Rosenthal, progressive Jewish activists in Vancouver, asked if they could jointly take over the role of editor and have Friedman manage the magazine in Vancouver – an arrangement that was accepted.”

The magazine describes itself as “an independent, secular Jewish publication with a socialist-humanist perspective.” Published six times a year, it had collectives in Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver. It has had an office in the Peretz Centre for Secular Culture (which used to be called the Vancouver Peretz Institute) since the late 1980s. Rosenberg became assistant editor in 1993 and editor in 1998.

“We didn’t follow a particular policy,” Friedman told Dyson, “but we have been critical of what’s happening in Israel, the States, Canada and B.C. I guess the focus has been on equality and principles of socialism. But even left-leaning governments never received blind support.”

Financed by fundraisers held in Vancouver, Winnipeg and Toronto; subscriptions; and funds bequeathed by “Joseph Zuken (a long-time openly communist city council member in Winnipeg) and Ben Shek (a professor, social justice activist, active member of the Toronto Jewish Folk Choir and regular contributor to Outlook),” making ends meet has always been challenging for Outlook. At its highest, circulation was 3,000 copies in the 1990s.

With older readers literally dying off and younger readers getting their information from the internet, plus constantly increasing printing and mailing costs, publishing the magazine just became too expensive.

The final issue features many comments from readers about what Outlook has meant to them, essays on such topics as the future of the NDP and the state of public broadcasting, and several book reviews.