Is this how the conservative Jewish American world operates?

Conversation overhead in theater in New York:
”Your Jewish state is fascist, militarist, colonialist, and engaged now in murderous ethnic cleansing.”
”And I’m proud of that!”

Commentary:
The context of the current war in Gaza has set many of us on edge, or led us to rethink some things. Myself among them. It was during this time that I again noticed Alice (not her real name), a very nice sixty-ish woman who writes on a commercial blog about classic European cinema, on which she seems to be a knowledgeable expert, for which she clearly is justly proud. As a long-time film-goer cum film critic, I often see some of the same people at the cinemas, and I am familiar with the practice of cinephilia, having long been part of it (it is wondrous enjoyment, to be sure, comparable in New York perhaps to virtual tourism in restaurants). So that’s how I know Alice, who tends to sit in the same general part of the theater. The current series of Italian films, largely from the 60s and 70s, tends often to involve some kind of radical left politics, which is a draw for me, for reasons I would like to think are not only a self-indulgence in the way we were or something like that (common enough). It was after seeing a Soviet film by a major director that she greeted me warmly and told me of her most recent blog piece, while not failing to mention to me that among her concerns as a critic is “the oldest hatred,” which of course I knew is anti-semitism, though later I wondered, is this the thing to be saying now, and if so, how is it best mentioned and discussed? I skimmed the piece, and noticed mainly that it seemed to me the kind of criticism that is part of a discourse of knowledge. Most American film criticism is this way: telling the reader informatively what this or that is about or references, and what its meaning and importance is. She mentioned a few twentieth century European writers and artistic movements, informing her undergraduate-level readership in one sentence of what they were essentially about. My own approach to writing criticism on film and other things, partly aspiring to follow the model of what I think is the best literary and art criticism, is not one of knowledge, wielding and representing “facts,” so much as one of inquiry, and I see inquiry not as a search for “facts” but as a questioning of what sense as a viewer and writer I can best make today of what I am seeing, including what was made “then.”

(Aside: The fact claim is interesting and I will come back to it. I think such talk is largely obfuscatory. It is relevant to what we were arguing about, as well as to the larger dispute I am trying to call attention to here of argumentative tactics. Alice told me during our brief but (for my purposes) friendly argument, that the Israeli war in Gaza, which she defends, has to be seen in light of the “facts.” These included that the Palestinians really come from Turkey and other places, implying that they don’t belong here, which implies that our people do, and that it is presupposed that whoever can say they “really” belong here has the right to be here, even if other people must be displaced. She’s actually wrong about the Palestinians not coming from there, though she may have meant historically; in other words, the Jews have a right to this land because they were (wrongly) displaced from in 2000 years ago by the Romans, and that prior claim (we were here first) means that today they are right to have displaced the people who were living in Palestine at the time (but apparently did not have the right property status claim). Some pro-Palestinians do argue that their property claim is correct, but I think the starting point here needs to be the recognition that what is in question is a question of right and not fact. Now what fact will justify the killing of 20,000 people in Gaza and Israel’s obvious campaign to remove them from proximity to Israel itself, because it has decided that these people, whose parents and grandparents did live in what is now Israel proper, and were driven away from it because the Jews of Israel found them inconvenient? Israel has had the problem of how to deal with these displaced persons, and what to do about them. This problem has defined the nation’s existence. Now, using the plausible (enough to their own citizenry) excuse of responding to the October 7 massacre and the need to crush Hamas to prevent any future such attacks (not, obviously, the mass expulsion of the Israeli Jews, not something Hamas or anyone else at present is in a position to do, nor is that what anyone thinking clearly could want, whatever people may say in the understandable heat of anger), Israel has decided to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza and to somewhere else. It may or may not be genocide, which may only be a consequence, but the purpose at least is what can be called ethnic cleansing. Israel does not want the Palestinians in Gaza any more; to its leaders, the Palestinians there now are too much of a risk, and of course that is represented by the belligerence of Hamas. What people are right to want will never be decided merely by a set of facts. Or of course a religious text: should anyone who is not themselves Jewish believe that the Israelis have a right to do what they please with some other people because of something they can find in the Talmud or the Shulchan Aruch? I believe in philosophy. Philosophers do not find and then represent a set of facts; what we do, which we think is uniquely a way of thinking in a way that journalism is not, is a bit different. We also do not believe that anything is true or right because “God” said so, a notion that also is contrary to some Talmudic and other characteristically “Jewish” ways of thinking, though I certainly have encountered many Jews who believe that God gave them the land they occupy now, and the right to its completed conquest, a perfectly absurd notion to anyone but religious fundamentalists.)

I prefer to write on film when it gives me something to think about it and I want to work at thinking about it, and, if I believe I have done so in an interesting way, then I may want to share that thinking with the reader. I believe in writing that is experimental, not merely informative. Of course, in this my own position is rare, and many people, brought up on empiricist and positivist styles of thinking, and on the styles of discourse in the media, will even say that my objection is nonsense; what else do you ever legitimate say except the true facts about what happened where, when, and how; never mind what it means. My quarrel with her style of writing is for me a friendly one and one I am happy to not say anything that might be taken for inculpatory. But I admit I was thinking this annoying, though of course the prudent and more useful thing to do is not even bother too much with stuff you don’t find so interesting.

But tonight I saw her in the company and proximity of a couple of other people who have said or done things that I did not appreciate at all. Sitting next to her was Paul (not his real name), a man who frequents the same theater and whom I had last seen at MoMA’s remarkable series of pre-revolutionary Iranian film. I had asked if he was there for these films, and he said, “no, I can’t stand the Iranians!” I did not inquire further but I remembered his telling me that the celebrated Israeli director Amos Gitai “is an anti-semite”; though puzzled by this remark, I inferred that he meant some of Gitai’s were critical in regard to some aspects of his country, and now I gathered that he hates the Iranians for similar reasons to a Roumanian filmmaker’s reportedly saying recently that he can no longer read Tolstoy, because he hates the Russian people and their language along with, and because of, Mr. Putin’s war of conquest. I suppose that to understand this way of thinking one has to understand ethnic nationalism; people who think that way in America will claim that critics of their country’s government and things it does “hate America”; I take it that what this means is that things done or proposed are right or wrong according to who you are when you do it or have it done to you. Then maybe that justifies anything you might do or support.

It is true that I was itching for a bit of a fight, but my way of being a combative Irishman (and New Yorker) could only be confused with anything approaching physical violence by someone who is pretty stupid, and I know that in this instance neither Alice nor Paul believed I was assaulting them. But I have the sense that they would say that if they could, and that they would like to, or at least to threaten it; if they were not threatening to claim that, then they were blatantly saying either that they can have me punished for exercising my own freedom of speech, or that they consider that my freedom of speech ends when said to anyone who can defend themselves by claiming an identity and to have been personally wounded in it. I find this interesting, indeed. And I find it interesting in the context (that of the current war, which has indeed divided the New York left-liberal and Jewish communities both), though it is also true that America is like this. Disagreement is often treated as assault, just as when someone is in a position to expect others to obey, or comply with their way of doing things, often very little is tolerated in the way of the slightest deviance from the most compliant behavior, which is supposed to think itself voluntary and not servile (this is one of the things that happened after the 60s with the rise of neoliberalism; interpretations were made that are friendly to business of what had been at stake before, and often those interpretations are matters of psychology; one way to put this is with the Talking Heads: “Got a wiggle in his style… Mr. Jones is back!”).

Now I want to report exactly what was said. I wanted to provoke a friendly argument. Many people don’t understand this, but I’ve always known that it’s possible to have a really enjoyable, to both parties, verbal argument in which real accusations are made, but there are no blows, not even hatred. (Ever been to a Passover Seder? They typically end this way, and it’s great fun). I don’t hate these two individuals, though the argument does have a substance, and for me this has much to do with the way people like them do business, get things done, and the way they do so for political motives, and with blatant dishonesty and dirty tricks. The police and people working with them have done that to me, too. America is a place where power often operates through nasty manipulative tactics that are blatant. The British call this giving someone shit. In America, this is usually not even noticed, and so the people doing this fuckery get by with it, and only the victim can be blamed, which was their purpose from the outset. If you are going to fight, fight dirty, hit below the belt, that’s the American way. And it’s perfectly game to threaten someone and then claim they threatened you, or tell someone to their face that this is what they will do and that they know you can do nothing about it, not even report to anyone else or any public what they actually did and said, even word for word. A police officer, a medical police officer (in effect) employed as a doctor, your landlord, a boss (who may say it behind closed doors), may threaten you blatantly and even in unambiguous terms, knowing that if you tell anyone what they said, they will deny it, and you will not be believed. They will throw that at you like a gauntlet, certain that they can win. The Nazis told Jews that no one would remember what was done to them at Auschwitz; they would destroy the records, and lie. Power can do this: say “I am threatening you now (with some great harm or violence) and you cannot say that I said this, because I am a liar who has the power to enforce a lie.” As we know from this example, it doesn’t always work, but it can, and apparently does often enough that some people will be happy to threaten it.

I said to Alice, “Your Jewish state is a fascist, militarist enterprise now engaging in mass murder.” She replied, “And I’m proud of that!” I said, let me get this conversation on record, pulling out my cell phone as I looked for the audio recording program. She then said, “If you publish that I said that, I will sue you.” Then she said, “You have to pay me if you want to record me, because you cannot do so without my permission.” (This is not true today in New York state, whose law requires only one participant in a conversation, which can be the person recording it, to know of it in order for it it to be legal.). Either I could record our conversation if she could use it to make money, or she would sue me, on some grounds. It would be interesting to wonder what a lawyer representing her cause and “with prejudice” as they say in the military, make up as the excuse for suing me. Given that the only thing I was proposing to do was to record the actual conversation and post it. Paul then threatened to throw me “in the gutter.” He shortly after amended this to say that he would have someone do this for him.

I thought, so this is what scoundrels will do to protect their own power. I do believe that the privileges and comforts they enjoy (as I do also, some of them, anyway) are what they ultimately want to protect. I also thought about how other people with conservative social positions and interests have done to me personally that I have not liked. Then I thought, oh, but if you think that, then they say you’re an anti-semite. The problem is of course that now this is being said about anything and everything.

Alice would claim that I assaulted her, which is not true, and she knows that, since I have not threatened her in any way, though her partner did threaten me (albeit in a not visibly emotional way, so he could defend himself by saying that his manner did not seem threatening — were I to make a claim against him, and of course I would not do that, partly as there would little to be accomplished thereby. For Alice and Paul are not individually a threat or problem as I see it, but a symptom of something that should be criticized, called attention to, made a problem of; which, by the way, is to my thinking one of the things a critic should do, as art at its best does: to problematize; to make an issue of something and try to understand more fully how this problem should be construed and understand, a matter not of fact so much as theoretical modeling, which is what science does, though journalism does not, and history written naively does not). Indeed, I would not publish her name partly because I don’t want any of my readers to act in some irresponsible and stupid way; I would not like it if anyone bothered her personally, and I have not mentioned her name publicly and will not for that reason; what she said and did is a symptom. But there’s a more important reason. I would not do to these people what they would be quite happy and quick to do to me, which is the tried and true American pseudo-liberal and right-wing tactic (it really is a right-wing one), which is to try to take out individuals for their real or supposed transgressions, against whatever rule or party line one is enforcing, as a way of trying to fight against something in the society at large that they do not like. That is, using law as a substitute for politics.

This ultimately is a fascist tactic. The left that I know does not generally do this, though in America on the liberal-left or what passes for it, it is common. I think it’s a terrible tactic. If Alice wanted to sue me for defaming her and undermining her business, my position would be that both of these things are among the last things I would want to do. And then she would presumably attack me for supposedly having personally attacked her. But I am not interested in personal vendettas, and these people are also not among the major spokespersons of the American mainstream Jewish world that is conservative. I would like to ‘attack’ that, but only in order to contest what these people are saying and doing, and partly in light of what we now are seeing so manifestly as its consequences. The conservative American official Jewish world is complicit now in mass murder. We on the left need to be contesting that world and its leadership.

And of course these are powerful people and institutions. As I see it, their conservativism and the lousy things that they do, that I think I know quite a bit about, is part of a larger tendency that simply is proper to American conservative, right-wing and conservative-liberal, establishment, which certainly is moneyed, is able to easily have recourse to lawyers and threaten lawsuits, and generally is a bourgeois establishment that is capitalist and that I have regarded as problematic since the Vietnam War. I was a victim of police harassment and false imprisonment on medical pretenses during the so-called “war on terror,” and I remain very curious to learn more about what is wrong with this country that made that possible. It also happened with the active participation of certain “friends.” It left me angry and unsettled. It renews my anger whenever I see anyone defending the kinds of things that were done to me, or the kinds of things that this country does.

I don’t see any easy way to do this without risking some form of “antisemitism,” but when the ability to claim that is weaponized and used to apply to almost everything (though Paul informed me that he is not against “legitimate criticism”: so you can be permitted to criticize a system of legitimacy (a state or something like it) if and only if you criticize the legitimacy in a legitimate way!).

But it is a fascist tactic to take out people individually. The left engages in protests, criticism, and sometimes, as I try to in my modest way, artistic and intellectual labor. A fascist state will arrest people who are political dissidents and charge them individually with some crime or other. That is what I am against; I sense that is what these people are for. And why? Alice will sue me, or demand payment, or fight back any way she can, using any means necessary, just as Paul will threaten to have me thrown in the gutter. Only I am very lucky, because in places other than New York it’s even more common that people in authority will literally kill people who disagree with or oppose what they are doing, and do so with impunity. Israel tortures people. It imprisons many. Paul said scornfully, when I told him what I had said to Alice about Israel: “You forgot to add colonial.” Well, is it? That clearly is not at question for Paul; what he meant is: look what stupid things you say, you psychological deviant. And they would take me out.

Should I throw down the gauntlet? I only want to invite Alice to sue me if she can do so in the name of the Jewish community in New York that supports the war in Gaza. Because talking in reply about what is wrong with that war is the main reason now to impugn any representative of that community. Does she want to be that? Do you? I prefer not to. She can write what she likes; so can Commentary magazine. And I wish her and her community, family, etc., well. I just am a bit upset now about the way some Jews who are part of the conservative bourgeois power structure use their power.

In America, everyone is supposed to think that every criticism or disagreement is against their identity, against “who they are.” So if anyone can say, “I am This,” then, since all identities are untouchable, criticizing anything that people who are or are in any way part of their “This” is considered fighting words, and not allowed. This dumbs down critical discourse and, along with the psychological discourses of power, have depoliticized much of American life. This is perhaps at its most essential what should be challenged.

The legal world does operate the way Alice and Paul do. It is fundamentally dishonest and rougish, but many a lawyer will go after the other side with no scrupules whatsoever, and the idea is that to sue someone, or accuse them of a crime, you do not need to believe that they have done something wrong and you are in the right. You might not believe that at all, but only want to protect your own financial interest. That is what most lawyers do. To me, they seem very conservative and cynical people on the whole (though certainly some are not). More importantly perhaps, they are used by unscrupulous people like Alice and Paul (if we take them at their word, based on what they said to me in our conversations) for purely self-interested ends, often using means very different in character and meaning from the ends being pursued, or claiming to pursue ends very different from their real motives. I think people who act like them are scoundrels. But their kind (I mean people who think that way) would likely win, certainly in an American court. And a lawyer will always advise you to be cautious and protect your own self-interest (the capitalist world is often a matter of everyone for himself, and himself alone), and will rarely fail to remind you that they know that the truth is one thing and what people can say is another. So lawsuits do not revolve around what is true or right, but what can be proven. Evidence, facts that can be shown.

The empiricist mind believes that “facts” that can be represented are all there is. Which means there is no truth, only opinions. Alice “informed” me that everything depends on the facts, but I don’t believe for one minute that her ethnic nationalist “Jewish” politics are based on facts; how can you derive a proposition of what should be from a set of facts? Yes, I know there are a putative set of facts about why the Jewish national state is a consequence of some events in history or sacred literature, though I don’t see how any historical facts can decide that there ought to be national states exclusive to an ethnicity.

There is also hermeneutic creativity, and if she sues me her lawyer will use a lot of that. But I should not be on trial, and I think it would be pointless for me to want her to be. What each of us is for is what should be on trial, but that cannot be resolved in a courtroom. There is a contestation involved here. It is a political one, and in my way of thinking, also a philosophical one.

The fact of what type of person you are bodily or genetically (this predominant view today is by definition racist, and it implies that the Jewish people are a race), or where you come from, or what holidays you are observe, or where you prefer to live, what do any of these “facts” of themselves decide? It is unfortunate for those of us who love philosophical thinking that, although Zionism as we know it today is not obviously defensible, and there are many good reasons to find it indefensible. But it is not being defended by reasoned arguments, but sophistry at home, and mass killing abroad. I have no quarrel with Alice and Paul, whom I wish well (the things they enjoy, some of which I share, are worth not only thinking about but also just enjoying), but much indeed with that.

I must admit I wondered what Alice and Paul were doing at a series of Italian films, which are mostly more or less leftist, in ways I can’t imagine either of them much appreciating (unless it’s to reminisce about ‘the old days’; we all know how often today’s conservatives will congratulate themselves that they were yesterday’s radicals - or even victims of some genocidal massacre). It seems to me people like them should be more comfortable with evocations of the mafia. In many countries, it is well known how often the police, business administrators, and others act not very differently from the mafia. It is possible to think like the mafias and do so under cover of law. Indeed, today this is more the norm than the exception.

Companies, government agencies, even universities, will take out statements that are against company policy, or not profitable, or both, and sometimes they will try to do this with people. I know of ‘liberal’ rabbis in New York whom I have heard advocate this from their pulpits.

But if the right operates by attacking persons and censoring statements, the left responds by criticizing what is said and done and aiming to problematize situations and provoke questioning about the meaning of what some people and institutions, including governments, are doing. Law cannot do this very well. War cannot do it at all, and neither can policing, not even with doctors at their disposal. Criticism can do this, though it often does not. Philosophy and “theory” can help us do this. The right politics will also help us do this. Meanwhile, some just want to defeat their enemies, and they will do so by any means necessary, and with little or no moral scrupules. Shame on all of you who do or support that. Je vous accuse, j’accuse!

These people are itching to counter-attack. If Alice learns of this post, will she try to get my web hosting company to take it down? If this post goes off line, I’m going to publicly post an inquiry as to whether she was involved in doing this, and then I will have to mention her name. I would prefer not to.

But it’s not her that I want to go after; it is something she and many people quite like her support with all their heart and all their power. And this today is a controversy. It’s more than that, as we cannot just “legitimately” engage in controversy with the very sovereignty that decides legitimacy, as Paul insisted. It is a controversy, and it is a social struggle, or whatever you want to call it, much as the Vietnam war was publicly in America. We are living now in the American Jewish world’s Vietnam. It is not a comfortable position to sit in. By definition, it’s troubling. Where are Israel’s troublers now? It’s more than a matter for prophetic voices; it’s a real battle. And is it being fought “legitimately”? These people and I have different notions of what that means. Such people who think they ‘know’ can threaten, which they do with such proper manners (appearances perhaps to the contrary, I don’t contradict that at all), including with lawsuits, and whatever other means members of some family-like entity might, like our mafias, central to the same capitalism whose wars they support with such militancy, all the while pretending they are threatened and it’s about their identity (but what about that?). I am poor indeed, having only the tools and ‘weapons’ of language, one who reads philosophy and writes criticism of film. Others wield ‘knowledge’ to defend their position; my job is to question. And that is one reason why I think art and film criticism can be so vital today.