User:Aitantv/Online articles

beyond grievance, Jewish currents

https://jewishcurrents.org/beyond-grievance
"A relationship to oppression and otherness has been central to Jewish identity since the beginning of our formation as a people; Jews who agree on nothing else agree that we have repeatedly been strangers in strange lands. But the public response to Colleyville—the performance of a crude identity politics without the politics—suggests that for many this story has become a passion play, a rehearsal of suffering and isolation intent first and foremost on maintaining itself."
"I felt something, and that feeling was a burrow into a thing I call Jewishness, a nurturing of kinship and acquaintance with my ancestors, with their fear and their survival. But what would it mean to metabolize those feelings, instead of chewing them like a bitter cud? What could healing do for us?"
"To illustrate the dangers of forgoing grief, Cheng takes as a foundational text Freud’s classic 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” in which he distinguishes between “mourning”—a healthy response to loss or rejection, where the object of loss can eventually be relinquished and the pain overcome—and “melancholia,” where the mourner becomes psychically stuck in a refusal to get over the loss."
"Of course, the self would not suffer this overattachment to loss if it was not also benefiting from it; indeed, Freud identifies this unhealthy attachment as an incubator for the ego, which repeatedly gorges on the loss until it is entirely incorporated into the self. The self, now constructed on a foundation of loss and exclusion, is compelled to protect itself, making sure that “the ‘object’ never returns, for such a return would surely jeopardize [its] cannibalistic project.” Thus, “although it may seem reasonable to imagine that the griever may wish” for a resolution, for the object of loss to be restored, “the ego may in fact not want or cannot afford such homecoming.”"
Grieving over mourning - "group work dedicated to feeling and ultimately releasing the pain and to connecting with non-Jews, integrating them into the frame of the Jewish story."
"Many millions of dollars are being poured into a Jewish politics of fear; it’s not so far-fetched to imagine how curricula of healing could be institutionalized and dispersed instead."
"Jews have refused mourning in favor of a politics of grievance, it’s tempting to locate the problem in the content of the complaint, but not its form. To say, in essence, that largely white and well-off Jews are abusing the tool of grievance—fluently speaking the language of marginalization with the access and entitlement afforded by power—while groups experiencing greater degrees of marginalization are simply using it appropriately."
Olúfémi O. Táíwò - "Táíwò is concerned about the ways this opens the door for cooptation in the form of what he calls “‘elite capture’: the control over political agendas and resources by a group’s most advantaged people.”"
"In this regard, Jews appear not as opportunists appropriating the tools of the oppressed, but as one cautionary tale among many about the identitarian enshrinement of suffering; the heightened contradictions in our case only serve to make the pattern easier to spot. (What could be a better illustration of Táíwò’s thesis than the Jewish state, which continues to mobilize the memory of the Holocaust as justification for its crimes?)"
Taiwo - "Táíwò models a different orientation in the conclusion to his essay, positing his suffering not as “a card to play in gamified social interaction or a weapon to wield in battles over prestige,” but rather “a concrete, experiential manifestation of the vulnerability that connects me to most of the people on this Earth.” Indeed, to think of pain “not as a wall, but as a bridge” is to escape from the bell jar into the world, courting a shared politics and a real solidarity."