Today a collegue at University, a friend of mine after many years, said me: "I don't know how can a jew feel in front of the tragic genocide that your people is perpetrating". I feel embarassed, because I was not able to find a rational, not emotive, possible emphatic response. My first sensation was to answer brutally, rising up any for-me-obvious issue about antisemetism (modern/ancient one) and how an entire Gaza construced on tunnesl, missles launch arrays and school-shielding on terrorism sound incoherent with the concept of innocent civils. But I didn't do that. I try to find erratic words, errand words and escaping words. I read on one breath your reflection and I feel....in peace. I feel I'm not the only one who think as you. We are all losing. For first, Democracy
I have been presented by that situation more times than I can count (and long before recent events). I find that those who ask such rhetorical and smug questions typically come from those with a long lineage of actual colonizers, violent “explorers” and religious sects of varying degrees that have done extremely damage in the world for which many continue to suffer in one way or another.
Personally, I am tired of being polite. We’ve done that and it does not work. So I have, in certain instances, turned the shaming game on them, on how little they know, on how selective their concerns about dying children are (including not selecting those who were slaughtered ion October 7th, or those who were slaughtered in the Sudanese massacre that took place soon after ... and not a single one of them put up a Sudanese flag on their social media profile to demonstrate “how deeply concerned” they are, or the women of Iran who are in jail because they have hair on their heads or, other such miseries that afflict millions, if not billions of people in many other parts of the world. I ask them about that. Not because I’m indifferent to the death of Gazans (innocent or not), but because these people tend to get more worked up about Jews fighting back (even badly or with a bit too much vigour), but not so much when hundreds of thousands of people are on the streets around the world calling “Death to Jews” and who employ the critique of “coded language” when it is a race issue but that From the River to the Sea is no code for the genocide of Jews through he demolishment of Israel. I’m tired of playing nice and ashamed. Maybe we would not have been where we are today if their ancestors had even so vocal all those time since history when Jews were being slaughtered. No. I won’t accept guilt trips from Christian goys anymore - or even Jewish ones who know previous little and who have internalized all the wrongs of the world. No. I will ask how it is that two billion Muslims have been okay with funding racist misogynistic, anti-LGBTQIA - and, oh yes, genocidal antisemites - organizations and barbaric militias that don’t actually help their own with access to many billions of dollars which they CHOOSE toto spend on weaponry and who slaughter their own instead of anything remotely positive.
And then I remind them that I have always been vocally anti-far right - in every country, and including Israel.
If you have’t read Dara Horn’s book with the off-putting title, “People Loves Dead Jews” (it makes more sense once you read it), I think you might find a lot of the answer to such questions like the ones your “friends” are hitting you up with. I’ve taken to recommending or buying the book for such people and saying, “If you want to have a conversation after you read this, then I will be more prepared than this self-righteous BS you’re pulling now.” (P.S. I recommend the audio book - it’s an excellent narration.)
But I can also understand the urge to retreat. (And bake challahs.)
Yeah i am learning a lot from these conversations …
When i was young, i spent all my free time at the house of Erich and Polli Ortenau, where everything would be discussed every day. A wonderful experience!
Meanwhile, i get the feeling that folks here are only exchanging standard opinions, do they?, nothing new …
News only seem to come from books or from ETGAR KERET, THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!
"But no matter our opinion or which camp we belong to, at the end of the day we still feel as if the stupid world around us doesn’t understand anything, the problems aren’t really being solved, and we’ve lost again." Yup. Thank you for writing this.
The global world and the Internet give us the illusion that we are better off because we know everything that is happenig, but the reality is that this kmowledge transforms us into haters precisely because this knowledge becomes a burden insofar as, just like the woman in your story, we can't do anything with it. Writing to you and condemning you was the closest she got to doing something. In a global world, being "moral" means by necessity doing what this woman did. By contrast, in a local world, we know personally the actors/actants, and can act directly to change things. In conclusion: things are only going to get worse and everybody will hate everybody.
„Affenkram“, which might be translated to „the whole monkey schmear“ is what my friend Rainer Prier used to answer when someone said something like „things are only to get worse and everybody will hate everybody“.
I agree. It's an insufficient knowledge with no possibility to act, and as somebody else said no direct contact, which worsens the situation. It probably goes for other things too.
In France, I only speak about the conflict with Jews or non Jews who are clearly sympathetic. Not speaking doesn't help for communication (although it might preserve from fights), and speaking doesn't help either, I'm afraid, at least no at my level.
That feeling of confusion and perplexity surely springs from our powerlessness to control politicians when they're not running for office. We have regulators who are supposed to control all aspects of public life: why can't we have an Office of Accountability that would hold politicians to account between elections?
I've recently been thinking something similar, here in comfortable, privileged Australia: "Objectively, my life is really good. Why the fuck am I wasting it making myself miserable on Twitter?"
You've captured it, Etgar! Might this at least guide our prayers moving forward? Not for what we personally want/believe, but for a moment of quiet to lead a way toward understanding? If only...
Exactly. The greedy people who have only wanted things and dominance have always thrown out the bones for the rest of us to fight over while they try to take everything and work their evil. If we can’t stick together and help each other, we will all continue to lose.
I wonder what it means to win. After weeks of utterly annoying written exchanges with a non-Jewish (former work colleague and “work and facebook friend”, I am left even more depleted than I thought i could be. She seems desperate ow to have my approval after doing all the things most of the people on the global left have done (ignore October 7th, refer to it as “you had it coming”, know nothing about Jewish history except the highlights’ of the Holocaust, side with those who require unexplained “context” before they will denounce calls for the genocide of Jews on university campuses (Such language in the “context” of Jews, does not qualify as the kind of hate speech that incite violence - delisted all the violence against Jews. Apparently, Jews are immune to such things.🙄). She writes me from her comfortable perch with platitudes about compassion and radical empathy, but who made an exception by critiquing the video testimony I sent her of Mia Shem, whose extraordinary strength (may she forever hold on to that) in the face of and aftermath of her Holocaust Sequel experience imposed by Palestinians terrorists and their family members. (It’s okay when everyone outside the of Israel calls for the death of Jews wherever we may be, but if a traumatized victim of extreme genocidal violence says something that is not politically correct enough, THAT is what merits criticizing? And what was that terrible things she said? She said that she felt all Gazans are terrorists. This “friend” of mine, didn’t unpack that statement in terms of who said that and why she might say that. She didn’t unpack it to ask herself how it was that Hamas could be “successful” in their illegal tunnels under schools and hospitals and residences. (Who has ever lived near a constructions site and not noticed?) She didn;t ask herself how a victim who survived the entirety that she did in and out of tunnels loaded with billions of dollars of weapons for the sole purpose of killing Jews - and anyone who gets in the way of fulfilling that mission statement - rather than food for the two million residents, textbooks for the girls and women, medical supplies ... Nope. Only weapons and supplies stolen for the terrorists themselves. And yet, people knew this was going on. And they gambled that what they were losing in the corruption of Hamas and its funders and the violence they inflict on their own - would be worthwhile. Yesterday, she wrote to me “of course, antisemitism is abhorrent.” Well .. ya. But when asked to explain what she thinks antisemitism actually is, how it is expressed in real life situations - individual, systemic and geopolitical. Crickets. More than A month ago, I had recommended she read Dara Horn’s book, People Love Dead Jews. If that doesn’t click for people, I’m seriously out of ideas. And then she said that thing that made me groan so loudly my enoghborus ust have thought there was an earthquake: Jews should be celebrated!
Oy gevult. The kitsch associated with “celebrating” a minority that has been and always will be a minority ... It reminds me of that feeling I had 20-odd years ago when I read an article about a a museum in Poland dedicated to remembering the Jews of the area - and run by non-Jews. Dara Horn also writes about such things - and more eloquently and carefully researched than I ever could.
My reply was: Celebrate, schmelebrate. Just stop killing us. Stop assuming the position that you are all better than we are and know more about us than we know about ourselves. Stop using us against ourselves. And stop expecting us to not to fight back when you* do. Go figure out what you think antisemitism actually is … beyond the official UN definition that took generations after the Holocaust to determine.
Here’s a hint: Like pornography, we know it when we see it.
By the end of these exchanges, I’m even more exhausted and emptied out than I could ever imagine. Like a processed a rumbling stomach of festering food poisoning (which is exactly what has happened when I’ve tried to respond in the tone of WASP “politesse”.
Anyone who seeks to declare themselves a winner in any of this is an ass.
But if we can all hoe to live for another day - simply to live, not to hate, not to kill, not to seek revenge, maybe even to help, grow closer, grow food together, go to school together, learn form each other what it means to be a fully realized human being who can explore their full potential of goodness - maybe on that day, 1,000 years from now, we can declare that while no one “won” and everyone “lost”, we learned something about what it means to live ... and that is good enough
Yup. This is exactly it.
מאה אחוז...Thanks for this...
Sadly too many people in positions of influence and power lack compassion and your words will be alien to them.
But , hopefully, a few would listen 🐇
Yes. I hope so too. I shouldn’t have been quite so fatalistic. But it’s easy to slip into that at the moment.
Today a collegue at University, a friend of mine after many years, said me: "I don't know how can a jew feel in front of the tragic genocide that your people is perpetrating". I feel embarassed, because I was not able to find a rational, not emotive, possible emphatic response. My first sensation was to answer brutally, rising up any for-me-obvious issue about antisemetism (modern/ancient one) and how an entire Gaza construced on tunnesl, missles launch arrays and school-shielding on terrorism sound incoherent with the concept of innocent civils. But I didn't do that. I try to find erratic words, errand words and escaping words. I read on one breath your reflection and I feel....in peace. I feel I'm not the only one who think as you. We are all losing. For first, Democracy
Check out Howard Jacobson’s “When Will Jews Be Forgiven the Holocaust” :)
We shall overcome ! some day !
Roberto, it was very kind of you not to reply in brass statements.
Thank you.
Oktober 7th is nothing to „talk“ about.
I have been presented by that situation more times than I can count (and long before recent events). I find that those who ask such rhetorical and smug questions typically come from those with a long lineage of actual colonizers, violent “explorers” and religious sects of varying degrees that have done extremely damage in the world for which many continue to suffer in one way or another.
Personally, I am tired of being polite. We’ve done that and it does not work. So I have, in certain instances, turned the shaming game on them, on how little they know, on how selective their concerns about dying children are (including not selecting those who were slaughtered ion October 7th, or those who were slaughtered in the Sudanese massacre that took place soon after ... and not a single one of them put up a Sudanese flag on their social media profile to demonstrate “how deeply concerned” they are, or the women of Iran who are in jail because they have hair on their heads or, other such miseries that afflict millions, if not billions of people in many other parts of the world. I ask them about that. Not because I’m indifferent to the death of Gazans (innocent or not), but because these people tend to get more worked up about Jews fighting back (even badly or with a bit too much vigour), but not so much when hundreds of thousands of people are on the streets around the world calling “Death to Jews” and who employ the critique of “coded language” when it is a race issue but that From the River to the Sea is no code for the genocide of Jews through he demolishment of Israel. I’m tired of playing nice and ashamed. Maybe we would not have been where we are today if their ancestors had even so vocal all those time since history when Jews were being slaughtered. No. I won’t accept guilt trips from Christian goys anymore - or even Jewish ones who know previous little and who have internalized all the wrongs of the world. No. I will ask how it is that two billion Muslims have been okay with funding racist misogynistic, anti-LGBTQIA - and, oh yes, genocidal antisemites - organizations and barbaric militias that don’t actually help their own with access to many billions of dollars which they CHOOSE toto spend on weaponry and who slaughter their own instead of anything remotely positive.
And then I remind them that I have always been vocally anti-far right - in every country, and including Israel.
If you have’t read Dara Horn’s book with the off-putting title, “People Loves Dead Jews” (it makes more sense once you read it), I think you might find a lot of the answer to such questions like the ones your “friends” are hitting you up with. I’ve taken to recommending or buying the book for such people and saying, “If you want to have a conversation after you read this, then I will be more prepared than this self-righteous BS you’re pulling now.” (P.S. I recommend the audio book - it’s an excellent narration.)
But I can also understand the urge to retreat. (And bake challahs.)
Thank you for the book, תמרה
Yeah i am learning a lot from these conversations …
When i was young, i spent all my free time at the house of Erich and Polli Ortenau, where everything would be discussed every day. A wonderful experience!
Meanwhile, i get the feeling that folks here are only exchanging standard opinions, do they?, nothing new …
News only seem to come from books or from ETGAR KERET, THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!
… and baking challahs is an antidepressant, too
"But no matter our opinion or which camp we belong to, at the end of the day we still feel as if the stupid world around us doesn’t understand anything, the problems aren’t really being solved, and we’ve lost again." Yup. Thank you for writing this.
The global world and the Internet give us the illusion that we are better off because we know everything that is happenig, but the reality is that this kmowledge transforms us into haters precisely because this knowledge becomes a burden insofar as, just like the woman in your story, we can't do anything with it. Writing to you and condemning you was the closest she got to doing something. In a global world, being "moral" means by necessity doing what this woman did. By contrast, in a local world, we know personally the actors/actants, and can act directly to change things. In conclusion: things are only going to get worse and everybody will hate everybody.
Until, utterly consumed by hatred, and hoist on their own canards, they become open to some other way? (I know, perilously optimistic.)
Affenkram
„Affenkram“, which might be translated to „the whole monkey schmear“ is what my friend Rainer Prier used to answer when someone said something like „things are only to get worse and everybody will hate everybody“.
And then we looked at each other and laughed.
Rainer taught me to laugh/love.
Fear makes us slaves to Evil
I agree. It's an insufficient knowledge with no possibility to act, and as somebody else said no direct contact, which worsens the situation. It probably goes for other things too.
In France, I only speak about the conflict with Jews or non Jews who are clearly sympathetic. Not speaking doesn't help for communication (although it might preserve from fights), and speaking doesn't help either, I'm afraid, at least no at my level.
We need to find a new system. Don’t know what it will be but the current one sucks…
That feeling of confusion and perplexity surely springs from our powerlessness to control politicians when they're not running for office. We have regulators who are supposed to control all aspects of public life: why can't we have an Office of Accountability that would hold politicians to account between elections?
Exactly!☮️
I've recently been thinking something similar, here in comfortable, privileged Australia: "Objectively, my life is really good. Why the fuck am I wasting it making myself miserable on Twitter?"
Thanks Etgar, very insightful and true❤️
Hope better times come soon!🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼
Oh how Jesus wept to see how social media has torn at the social fabric of our real lives.
You've captured it, Etgar! Might this at least guide our prayers moving forward? Not for what we personally want/believe, but for a moment of quiet to lead a way toward understanding? If only...
Exactly. The greedy people who have only wanted things and dominance have always thrown out the bones for the rest of us to fight over while they try to take everything and work their evil. If we can’t stick together and help each other, we will all continue to lose.
Wise words my friend! It’s gotten so bad even those who believed in reincarnation don’t want to come back!
Perhaps we all need to lose before we realize that we need each other to win :(
And, also, that being together is more important than winning.
Yes, we win when we come together and appreciate each other!
I wonder what it means to win. After weeks of utterly annoying written exchanges with a non-Jewish (former work colleague and “work and facebook friend”, I am left even more depleted than I thought i could be. She seems desperate ow to have my approval after doing all the things most of the people on the global left have done (ignore October 7th, refer to it as “you had it coming”, know nothing about Jewish history except the highlights’ of the Holocaust, side with those who require unexplained “context” before they will denounce calls for the genocide of Jews on university campuses (Such language in the “context” of Jews, does not qualify as the kind of hate speech that incite violence - delisted all the violence against Jews. Apparently, Jews are immune to such things.🙄). She writes me from her comfortable perch with platitudes about compassion and radical empathy, but who made an exception by critiquing the video testimony I sent her of Mia Shem, whose extraordinary strength (may she forever hold on to that) in the face of and aftermath of her Holocaust Sequel experience imposed by Palestinians terrorists and their family members. (It’s okay when everyone outside the of Israel calls for the death of Jews wherever we may be, but if a traumatized victim of extreme genocidal violence says something that is not politically correct enough, THAT is what merits criticizing? And what was that terrible things she said? She said that she felt all Gazans are terrorists. This “friend” of mine, didn’t unpack that statement in terms of who said that and why she might say that. She didn’t unpack it to ask herself how it was that Hamas could be “successful” in their illegal tunnels under schools and hospitals and residences. (Who has ever lived near a constructions site and not noticed?) She didn;t ask herself how a victim who survived the entirety that she did in and out of tunnels loaded with billions of dollars of weapons for the sole purpose of killing Jews - and anyone who gets in the way of fulfilling that mission statement - rather than food for the two million residents, textbooks for the girls and women, medical supplies ... Nope. Only weapons and supplies stolen for the terrorists themselves. And yet, people knew this was going on. And they gambled that what they were losing in the corruption of Hamas and its funders and the violence they inflict on their own - would be worthwhile. Yesterday, she wrote to me “of course, antisemitism is abhorrent.” Well .. ya. But when asked to explain what she thinks antisemitism actually is, how it is expressed in real life situations - individual, systemic and geopolitical. Crickets. More than A month ago, I had recommended she read Dara Horn’s book, People Love Dead Jews. If that doesn’t click for people, I’m seriously out of ideas. And then she said that thing that made me groan so loudly my enoghborus ust have thought there was an earthquake: Jews should be celebrated!
Oy gevult. The kitsch associated with “celebrating” a minority that has been and always will be a minority ... It reminds me of that feeling I had 20-odd years ago when I read an article about a a museum in Poland dedicated to remembering the Jews of the area - and run by non-Jews. Dara Horn also writes about such things - and more eloquently and carefully researched than I ever could.
My reply was: Celebrate, schmelebrate. Just stop killing us. Stop assuming the position that you are all better than we are and know more about us than we know about ourselves. Stop using us against ourselves. And stop expecting us to not to fight back when you* do. Go figure out what you think antisemitism actually is … beyond the official UN definition that took generations after the Holocaust to determine.
Here’s a hint: Like pornography, we know it when we see it.
By the end of these exchanges, I’m even more exhausted and emptied out than I could ever imagine. Like a processed a rumbling stomach of festering food poisoning (which is exactly what has happened when I’ve tried to respond in the tone of WASP “politesse”.
Anyone who seeks to declare themselves a winner in any of this is an ass.
But if we can all hoe to live for another day - simply to live, not to hate, not to kill, not to seek revenge, maybe even to help, grow closer, grow food together, go to school together, learn form each other what it means to be a fully realized human being who can explore their full potential of goodness - maybe on that day, 1,000 years from now, we can declare that while no one “won” and everyone “lost”, we learned something about what it means to live ... and that is good enough
Thank you for this soothing soup, stirred gently, filling us with thoughtful comfort in these jarring days.