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."

how american Jews lost themselves

• https://unherd.com/2021/06/how-american-jews-lost-themselves/
• "The Netanyahu, little Bibi, who went on to become Prime Minister, really had a father called Ben-Zion who was a brooding, intellectually menacing historian, obsessed with proving that the conversos — Jews who converted to Christianity in medieval Spain and were the victims of the Inquisition — were really sincere converts. And that by racialising them in order to persecute them — by his theory so as to weaken their patrons, the nobility, in the class politics of the day — the Spanish Crown created a world where you could never stop being Jewish. His whole work really a warning to the Diaspora there was no point even trying: you can become a Communist, you can become a Nazi, you can burn an Israeli flag in Time Square — the Inquisition will always come for you." (Judah 2021)
• "Ben-Zion really did loom over his son who has ruled Israel for a fifth of his existence, warning that — “Jewish history is the history of Holocausts.”" (Judah 2021)
• "The often annoying campus comedy is marbled with totally fascinating reflections on Jewish history that merited — I think I counted five — essays on their own." (Judah 2021)
• "We’re not really obsessed with Jews. We’re obsessed with dead Jews or we’re obsessed with Israelis." (Judah 2021)
• "Wherever the energy is in American Jewish letters right now — from the anti-Zionist polemics in Jewish Currents to the anti-anti-Zionists polemics in Tablet — it is about Israel." (Judah 2021)
• "after the big joke in Curb Your Enthusiasm got old — that being Jewish in America after assimilation meant nothing but cringe — there was nothing left to say." (Judah 2021)
• "Perhaps they can only be written by Mexican-American or Asian-American writers and we should stop trying. We’re just too much a part of the furniture. The elite, the professions, feel if anything WASP-Jewish here in the North East, which is actually a pretty good description of most of our parents or our own relationships after this many generations in the New World." (Judah 2021)
• "Israel is a country whose fate is still so precarious, its life so fantastical, or if you look at it from the other side, so cruel. And here we are, in America, in our Think Tanks, Mid Level Media Jobs or MFA-track writing careers: leading some of the most undramatic and tedious Jewish lives of all time. How could we ever write about something else?" (Judah 2021)

Under the Hood: Philip Guston & the American Jewish relationship to anti-Black violence

• https://jewishcurrents.org/under-the-hood
• complicity - beneficiary - victimization -
• "Although Guston’s engagement with “toxic” Klan imagery was anti-racist, these images would nevertheless inflict pain on viewers sensitive to white supremacist harm. Walker called the postponement “courageous” because it would enable the show’s curatorial team “to map out an exhibition that is seen in the proper context, hopefully, in an environment where racism and the kind of white supremacy that we’re seeing in this moment will have subsided.”" (Samudzi 2022)
• "PHILIP GUSTON—anglicized from Philip Goldstein—was born in 1913 to a pair of Ukrainian Jews who fled to Montreal to escape antisemitic pogroms in Odessa. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1922, and Guston’s early life was complicated by personal trauma: His father, who struggled to find a job, hanged himself days after Philip turned ten, and when Guston was 19, his beloved older brother Nate walked behind a car that rolled over him, crushing his legs and ultimately killing him. " (Samudzi 2022)
• "In 1932, Guston, along with artists Reuben Kadish and Murray Hantman, created murals commemorating the injustice inflicted on the Scottsboro Boys, the nine African American teenagers who were wrongfully accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931." (Samudzi 2022)
• "This cautiousness is reflected curatorially in the omission of some of Guston’s most controversial works, including images he created in his youth and a number of the hooded figurations he returned to in the years before his death in 1980, which dealt with the horror of anti-Black lynchings. The sidelining of these images represents a truncation of his oeuvre and a neglect of his evolution as an artist. Guston took on this subject matter as early as 1930, at age 17, when he created Drawing for Conspirators, a stark pencil and ink illustration showing Klan members hanging a Black man in the background with another member in the foreground tying a rope." (Samudzi 2022)
• "On the gallery’s wall above Blackboard is a line from Guston’s 1978 lecture that reads, “I perceive myself as being behind a hood.” Even if the show treats this statement as self-evidently important, it fails to take its implications seriously. An avid reader of Søren Kierkegaard among other philosophers, Guston deployed the motif of the hood autobiographically as an existentialist reflection of the relationship between the self and the violence represented by the painted figure. This striking self-implication is made visible most clearly in The Studio (1969), which does appear in the show. This symbolic culmination of the informal series of Klan imagery is a meta-self-portrait: a portrayal of a Klansman surrounded by his palette and brushes, smoking as he paints a self-portrait." (Samudzi 2022)

+ the implication is that he is a klansman, he has the white gaze, the position of supremacy - he witnesses racial atrocity, but he is not the victim of it, he is a sympathizer, a bystander.

• "The hood is a veil marking the ways that civil, quotidian white life obscures the brutality that structures it. The Klan hoods disguised judges, teachers, farmers, and other upstanding members of civil society as they terrorized Black communities under the cover of darkness, but they also represent a racial consensus: Even though your average white citizen—whether in the 1930s, 1960s, or today—wouldn’t readily or publicly agree with the Klan’s politics, their whiteness nevertheless implicates them in the system of racial domination that their violence enforces." (Samudzi 2022)

+ Perhaps Israel/Palestine places me in a similar position - Jewish quotidian reality obscures the brutality that structures it.

• "Guston, in other words, was a white Jew articulating a liminal position as someone victimized by Klan intimidation and antisemitic persecution, and a beneficiary of whiteness himself." (Samudzi 2022)
• Both a victim and a beneficiary
• "white Jewish protection, however conditional, is afforded through assimilation into a system of whiteness that expanded and absorbed European immigrant groups as it solidified around anti-blackness and particular forms of xenophobia."(Samudzi 2022)
• Guston "recognized the multidimensionality of his victimization and complicity" (Samudzi 2022)
• "it’s clear that art institutions remain eager to dampen any ripple of alarm that threatens to disrupt the circulation of racial capital within their white walls." (Samudzi 2022)