JFREJ on Churchill, Part 2

I love it, and I hope this inspired work will see completion in the near future. See also Norm Geras’s more serious version.

I’m laughing to keep sane because I’ve just heard the podcast of Sunday’s Beyond the Pale broadcast, and it’s as I feared — Seven Jewish Children received rapt, fawning treatment from the show’s hosts, my erstwhile colleagues from Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ).

Under a post at the NYT blog The Lede some weeks ago, a commenter named Jumanne Langston scribbled: “Given the amount of Jewish money behind many of the non-profit arts organizations in New York City I doubt [Churchill’s] piece will ever see the light of day this side of the Atlantic.” What a laugh. Seven Jewish Children is breaking out all over. It’s being staged by Ari Roth of Washington’s Theater J; Jeffrey Goldberg, a friend of Roth’s, has published their heated argument on the topic. Goldberg: “[Churchill is] trying to close a circle. ‘Once the Jews were oppressed, now they are the oppressors.’ That’s her story of Jewish people. Oh, what a tragedy. It’s easy, it’s smug, it’s fetid.”

I agree. To those who would accuse me of trying to stifle criticism of Israel, or shield the Israeli military from charges of war crimes: Nice try.

No, that’s not the issue. The issue is Churchill’s standard-issue anti-Zionist propaganda dressed up as literary exploration, deep thought. The Jews in Churchill’s play are moral idiots at best, brutes at worst, and the Palestinians are — well, absent from the narrative, except as passive victims, certainly not as militants in organizations that slaughter Israeli teenagers at dance clubs, or fire rockets indiscriminately at Israeli towns and refer to the people in those towns, well within Israel’s ’67 borders, as “settlers.” Again, this does not excuse the Israeli occupation, or the brutality of Israel’s latest Gaza incursion, or the horrendous toll all of it has had on Palestinian civilians. But Churchill’s account, supposedly searing and complex, sidesteps every complexity. It does nothing but play to the Chomskyite left.

Progressive Jews, legitimately angry over Israeli human rights abuses, and dissenting from the pro-Israel line of mainstream Jewish organizations, are misguidedly lapping up Churchill’s work as a tonic and a pushback, now more than ever with an emerging Netanyahu-Lieberman government. But if the hosts of Beyond the Pale hear the play a certain way, as a devastating inquiry into injustice and communal denial, how does someone like our Jumanne Langston, quoted above on the subject of “Jewish money,” hear it? Why is it that a play like Churchill’s attracts a person of such views, and what might that say about the politics guiding the work? This is the kind of scrutiny that Seven Jewish Children deserves, and did not even remotely get, on Beyond the Pale.

Actor Una Ayo Osato speaks up toward the end of the broadcast, saying: “So often, Jews — I’m Jewish — I see Jewish people around me don’t want to talk about Israel, or the history, or look at what our role is as Jews — I don’t even live in Israel, but what my role in that occupation is. And I think that this play brings about discussions and conversations that need to be happening.” Striving to make the right moral calls in politics is a good thing. Wallowing in guilt is not so good; falling for Caryl Churchill’s guilt trip is the least good, and painful to listen to.

We mustn’t forget what Mahmoud Zahar of Hamas said during Operation Cast Lead: “The Zionists have legitimised the killing of their children by killing our children. They have legitimised the killing of their people all over the world by killing our people.” Maybe Ms. Osato wants to believe that he really means “Zionists.” But as for her role in the occupation — even though she doesn’t live in Israel — it would be instructive to hear Mr. Zahar’s view on the matter.