My Jewish question amid some related shit going down

Zionism to me is partly a metaphor for the ideological legitimation of the destruction of what was most vital in European culture by way of the triumph of a largely English-influenced American culture. Its triumph was and remains a narrative of American hegemony.

Further, Jews have been oppressed in various ways, and American anti-semitism was an effective national policy in an indirect way that took the form of anti-Communism. It was not explicitly anti-Jewish at all, since both Judaism and Israel were affirmed. It was only latently anti-Jewish because so many victims of the anti-Communist hysteria were Jewish.

I have an abiding interest in Judaism and in aspects of "Jewish" culture that seem to an inseparable part of world and especially European culture. They were inseparable until modern nationalism, anti-semitism, and Zionism, which not only arose along with it and was justified as reaction to it but also was kind of its very similar complement. True, Christian anti-semitism had preceded this and persisted for centuries. I think Christianity was an effect of empire. And it was certainly communitarian, certainly identitarian, certainly ideological, certainly inclusionary and thus exclusionary. And modern Zionism begins to seem in context not as its antithesis but a variant of the same phenomenon.

I mourn a world where identities and communities were not separated formations. As they were in feudalism, and began to cease to be as the European world, and then the rest of the world in the wake of capitalist globalism, became modern. Among other things, printing made books available, eventually not only to members of the same village extended family communities. Have the enforcers of identity not failed to reflect sufficiently on the simple fact that today anyone can learn to read a text in any language and can also read many works in translation? Among the consequences are that there is no text that founds a world at which some subjectivity stands at the center. There are no bounded territories in the way there once were. Disclosure: I am a film-goer and sometime critic, and I see films from everywhere. None of them belong in a containable way to a place. There are frames in which objects belong and are contained, but there is also movement, and it is no respecter of places, a bit more so persons who may move or be displaced between them, and may shift attributes while remaining recognizably the same, or not. I am who I am says someone assured he stands in the place of God and I am not where you are and you had better not bother me. Since I am here and you are there and this whole situation like life in a fragile world makes me anxious, what the fuck is wrong with you that I have to be nervous in your presence and thus hate you much. Maybe the thing to do about the unsettled character of everything is to abolish, you, them, everyone here, everything, I don't like daytime bring on the endless night or the sleepless night when will it start stop and maybe we'll just be who we are, what should be will be, you can do it be all that you can be in the army but actually it doesn't matter or have to mean anything because it's quick easy and it's the law wham bam thank you uncle sam. What madness, yes, there's your original sinner, I told you there was only mental illness everywhere, it is that there as many guns or so many crazies, do you want republican or democratic total policing. The important thing to realize is when they say things like that really it's just that. It's just the old prejudice, they just hate us all, it's just their neurosis, it's just men women Americans foreigners gypsies misfits losers the knower in the tower it's just that, you know what I mean. The pricks. That's it all it is they're just pricks they're just assholes they're just fuckers losers nothings whatever forget it change the channel anyway I'm sick of this shit.

Yes, identity can be violated absolutely in murder, defended absolutely in enforced isolation, ignored in operations from a console, disregarded in operations where bodies are casualties, accidents, and details, interrogated by police with genuine spiritual concerns to find out the truth about the other and his or her possibly wayward desires, or we can just wonder what all these things mean and think in order to understand without trying to win, conquer, be control, secure territories and be safe from the possible harm from the other or the weather. Strategies of containment of peoples are aspects of the warfare carried out by regional entities on behalf of global capital. The people to be contained often migrate, often for work opportunities or survival, and as migrating bodies they are wanted and unwanted both, by economic forces that want to profit from their labor but also keep it controlled. Often these people are not needed and then may be expendable. Perhaps they will be imprisoned, or made objects of warfare. Most of the Jewish people who were murdered in the last great war were not bankers but peasants and they were in someone's way. The grandchildren of many of those who did survive are now safe and often quite militant about it, and their distant relatives and namesakes in America are often just as militant if not more so about this. They at least will not be victims anymore. Let's make this clear: there will be victims, and thousands, maybe millions, expendable perhaps, who will die, but not us. We will not be victims. Don't fuck with me. Don't fuck with me because I'll fuck you. That's something to say or do, isn't it. So let's just make our own territory great again in the corporate interest of its people, us. We are the ones who matter as far as we are concerned, and what could be more obvious and less questioned than that.

I have no ability to appreciate modern Jewish identity politics and the political nationalism of the Jewish nation-state. I find most remarkable the rather blatant fact that its popularity and the militancy with which it is insisted upon are functionally in large part projections of American neo-imperial hegemony. I think that whenever people, and it usually Americans who do this, ask, "but are you Jewish?" and they start on this identity thing, that Americans of every stripe, in our corporate business society in which almost everyone thinks the essential thing that is so important and so insisted upon, almost everywhere except some parts of art world associated bohemia, I am unable to not un-appreciate this. I find it ugly. I never knew what to do about it either. It was a double bind. I could never find a way to convince the people with these insistent demands, nor I admit sometimes myself in their presence, that I either am or am not "Jewish." My culture partly is, but I could never feel comfortable either being or not being "that." I think it is the great idol of the American Jewish people and accounts for much of the right-leaning tendencies among them. And I cannot stand it. I never could.

There were German-speaking people in my ancestry, and I grew up around semi-educated middle-class people who valued the arts and sciences and gave me to understand these things are important. I cannot shake even today the feeling that someone might read a "Jewish" German or French language author as well as a non-Jewish one, and we never asked among composers whose music we liked (my mother and her mother were trained in classical music) whether they were Jewish or Christian.

I have dated (few people, and among them) three women who had Jewish parents. One had a Polish Jewish father she never met. One was the daughter of a Holocaust survivor who had, wanted, and needed, nothing to do with the religion of his ancestors, as she did not, and I admired her. The third was a poet who wound up rejecting me because neither of my parents was Jewish and that disqualified me from marriage. A book I had given her by one of the great French Jewish poets went apparently unappreciated. Then I realized that she had been trying to find encouragement and reassurance in her identity: she was a poet but had to be a feminist poet, and was curious about left wing Yiddishkeit because it was Jewish. I understood; she needed reassurance and had to situate herself in her identity, because that's the thing that matters and you can't get away from it.

I read widely, and I'm interested in Judaism, as literature, as something to study. The war that started a bit after that daring attack from Gaza on October 7 that I do consider a war crime, one of history's many acts of war that have opposed what is undeniably social oppression and injustice in ways that seem excessive in their cruelty to say the least, this war and the willful and pitiless massacre of innocents in a Blitzkrieg that compares with perhaps nothing in recent history since the American obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this ended my appreciation for any and every form of Jewish nationalism.

My father, who was right-wing, and I quarreled about the war in the last year of his life. He was a veteran of the Cold War's first defining tragic military conflict, in Korea. I understood his anti-Communism, but hated his appreciation for the carpet bombing of Vietnamese peasants and Pinochet's torturing and murdering of dissident intellectuals and artists and rebellious youth, and I knew that the right's support of Israel is of a piece with this. After he passed, I thought more about the German-speaking world of our ancestors, including the Austria my grandmother's parents left on the eve of World War I. They spoke the language of Kafka and Rilke, Freud and Wittgenstein. Some of my grandmother's great-grandchildren married Jews, in one case converting themselves. I toyed with converting myself, and then became ashamed of this, as I partly still am. My Dad had said to me in my youth, "Do you have a religion?" Have? How very American, Tocqueville understood this, an American e pluribus Protestant idea of identity, nationality, and religion. I don't want to be religious, I don't want to be part of an identity club. "Do you have an identity?" (Well, you're a man, you've got a prick, don't you?" Is that what he really meant? I have encountered several Jewish women who talk with hysterical gimme eagerness about "Israel," and it seems to me what they are insisting on is something similar. This is American, it's fascist, and now we have a quasi-fascist president-elect. Our very own Berlusconi, Putin, Bolsonaro, Orban, Netanyahu, etc. etc.

I have a fluid sensibility, and want no identity. My cultural background is European and European-American and where I am, the United States today and New York City, is a bit more than that, broader still. I recognize that there are differences but I don't want to emphasize them. I know there are boundaries and I want them to be porous, not defended with walls and prisons.

And walls and prisons is what there is, but mainly for the poor and excludable. For those who are in the class of people who don't have freedom to travel, go to art exhibits, read books and magazines at leisure, versus those of us who do. Those of us who do don't need so much boundaries and may not want them. Those who cannot may have little or no choice. The world has become a lot more barbaric.

And this is the new division. The world is not divided between Jew and gentile. It is not divided between nation and nation. Not the way so many people still think.

Intellectualism and cosmpolitanism, yes, nationalism and identity/community insistence, no. On the side of the latter, Trump's Republican party and, among other things, the conservative Jewish establishment. They are absolutely wrong. I separate myself from their community, and am ashamed that I ever wandered into its precincts at all, or associated with any people in it.

Europe today is divided between cosmopolitans and nationalists.
We cosmppolitans never conceded that there is can be a Jew-free Europe, and if we are right, there is not a Europe-free Judaism either. Zionism like Hitlerism is one of those lies that can be made effective true through violent enforcement, as Apartheid and slavery were, and yet this effective truth remains a lie, and like every golden calf will not stand.

Unless maybe it is only taking the right stand with the right statue that will put an end to the reign of stupid statues. So let's find a fucker to end all fuckery, the one who fucks all the women in the tribe and is the figure of that in us which is not lacking so all of us who lack can suppose that we've got it at last. Remember Werner Erhard, né Rosenberg, hard act to follow this man was but he looked like a Kennedy and he had high hopes, and he said, you got it. That's it man, you got it. What more do you want, assholes?

Who said real problems don't have false solutions? Who said that there being false solutions to problems doesn't prove they aren't real? Performance is fun. Somewhere far away but visible, children, mothers, fathers, teachers and doctors, friends and lovers, writers and readers and people who are not very different from you and me are murdered in ways that I can only try to find ways to think and write and talk about and that are not fun.

At the end of a commanding performance, you feel satisfied, you got it. After unsettling events, you feel unsatisfied, you don't get it, you must work to understand. There's a choice, or a problem.