[Cross-posted at Z Word.]
This Sunday, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), the New York-based activist group, will dedicate part of its weekly WBAI radio program Beyond the Pale to a live reading of Caryl Churchill’s play Seven Jewish Children, to be followed by a discussion with the actors.
Novelist Howard Jacobson has denounced the play as antisemitic. Churchill has defended it. Jacobson’s case strikes me as compelling, and Churchill’s haughty dismissal of it as “the usual tactic” does not speak well of her. But I’ll be in a better position to discuss the play after I listen on Sunday.
I was active with JFREJ during the mid 1990s. For one year I served on the board of directors. I appeared on Beyond the Pale twice, moderating discussions on Jews and music. I know the show’s hosts, and I know they’re good people. But I’m sorry to see that JFREJ might give a Jewish seal of approval to what seems, at the very least, to be a dubious piece of agitprop. (I’ve read the script.)
Via a sidebar link, JFREJ prompts us to “Support the Free Gaza Movement,” which is backing George Galloway’s ridiculous Viva Palestina convoy. So it’s clear enough that JFREJ’s politics, at least on the Middle East, are no longer mine. In the ’90s, JFREJ took no official position on Israel, preferring to stick to a domestic political agenda. I will admit that my own position on Israel/Palestine 15 years ago was well to the left of what it is now.
That said, I’ve stated my opposition to the Gaza siege, and am now sick over the ascendancy of Bibi Netanyahu and even more sick over the appointment of the vicious Avigdor Lieberman as Israel’s foreign minister. Still, JFREJ’s alliance with a rather crude anti-Zionism hits me where I live — well, where I used to live.
An after-the-fact summary of Beyond the Pale’s March 1 program reads: “Waltz with Bashir, is it a soul searching effort to face up to Israeli responsibility for the massacre at Sabra and Shatila during the 1982 Lebanon invasion? Or a propaganda coup for Israel?” Here we have an Israeli cultural product greeted with tough, withering skepticism from the start, as the very basis for discussion. So the question I’d pose is this: Will the hosts bring the same skepticism to their treatment of Seven Jewish Children? Or will JFREJ’s March 22 program be a propaganda coup for Caryl Churchill?
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