“Look,” said Cohen, pointing to his bloody nose swollen three times its
normal size, “what that sonofabitchy bird did. It’s a permanent scar.”
“Where is he now?” Edie asked, frightened.
“I threw him out and he flew away. Good riddance.”
Nobody said no, though Edie touched a handkerchief to her eyes and
Maurie rapidly tried the nine times table and found he knew approximately
half.
In the spring when the winter’s snow had melted, the boy, moved by a
memory, wandered in the neighborhood, looking for Schwarz. He found a
dead black bird in a small lot near the river, his two wings broken, neck
twisted, and both bird-eyes plucked clean.
“Who did it to you, Mr. Schwarz?” Maurie wept.
“Anti-Semeets,” Edie said later. — “The Jewbird,” Bernard Malamud.
As the proposed Antisemitism Awareness Act worked its way through Congress, Kenneth Stern of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate in New York state, started getting worried. The bill, which passed the House Wednesday on a bipartisan 320-91 roll call, would write an expanded definition into federal anti-discrimination law. It goes now to the Senate, where its prospects are uncertain.
According to congressional reporter Farnoush Amiri of the Associated Press, the bill would codify in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a definition of antisemitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, broadening the current language to include the “targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity.”
If that language sounds fuzzy, that’s because, well, it’s fuzzy.
And one reason Stern’s worried is that he led the group that drafted the IHRA’s definition, and he wanted the language to be precise.
“For 25 years I jealously guarded the term anti-Semitism,” he said on Christine Amanpour’s TV show. “To have a sting it has to be used only in the clearest cases. […] Now there’s a push to make it almost ubiquitous, and when everything becomes anti-Semitic, nothing is anti-Semitic. And that makes it harder to fight anti-Semitism.”
Here’s the immediate problem: The Antisemitism Awareness bill has gotten tangled up with partisan politics and the culture wars.
While the House roll call was bipartisan (187 Republicans and 133 Democrats voted aye), the House Education and Workforce Committee, led by Republicans, has launched a months-long, scattershot crusade against “pro-Palestinian encampments, allegations of discrimination against Jewish students and questions of how [university administrators] are integrating free speech and campus safety.” The same day the bill passed, Amiri reported for the AP, a congressional delegation visited a peaceful encampment at George Washington University, where “GOP lawmakers spent the short visit criticizing the protests and Mayor Muriel Bowser’s refusal to send in the Metropolitan Police Department to disperse the demonstrators.” The partisan overtones are inescapable.
“Antisemitism is a virus and because the administration and woke university presidents aren’t stepping up, we’re seeing it spread,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said at a press conference back on Capitol Hill. “We have to act, and House Republicans will speak to this fateful moment with moral clarity.” Performative outrage was the order of the day, as Katherine Knott of the online newsletter Inside Higher Ed reported:
“We have a clear message for mealy-mouthed, spineless college leaders: Congress will not tolerate your dereliction of duty to your Jewish students,” Virginia Foxx, the North Carolina Republican who chairs the committee, said at the press conference. “American universities are officially put on notice that we have come to take our universities back.”
Progressives have their own well-documented issues with free speech, but the House Republicans clearly think they have a winning election issue.
The AHRA’s non-binding definition
All partisan politicking aside, the AHRA’s “non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism” is clear enough on its face:
Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.
But the AHRA also gives examples of what it deems antisemitic, and they leave room for interpretation — and, if the House bill passes, for litigation.
Stern says that’s problematic, because the examples were included in order to “guide IHRA in its work,” as the AHRA website stipulates. But the examples, especially relating to the conduct of Israel’s right-wing government, were intended primarily for the give-and-take of internal discussion. The AHRA’s explanation is also clear on its face. For example:
Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic. Antisemitism frequently charges Jews with conspiring to harm humanity, and it is often used to blame Jews for “why things go wrong.” It is expressed in speech, writing, visual forms and action, and employs sinister stereotypes and negative character traits.
But, again, when charges of antisemitism turn into partisan talking points, clarity goes out the window. Do chants of “from the river to the sea / Palestine will be free” call for the destruction of Israel, for example? Or for a binational state in which all Israeli and Palestinan citizens have freedom of religion and other human rights? It depends on who’s chanting.
Here’s another example. The IHRA suggests it can be antisemitic to accuse “Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations” So is it antisemitic when Donald Trump says, “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion?” Or when he adds, “They hate everything about Israel and they should be ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed?”
I think it’s arguable either way, and reaction was divided. “If (Trump) loses the 2024 election, his comments prepare the way for blaming the Jews for his defeat,” Jeffrey Hert, an antisemitism expert at the University of Maryland, told an AP reporter. “The clear result would be to fan the flames of antisemitism and assert that, yet again, the Jews are guilty.” But Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson of American Jewish University in Los Angeles said Trump’s remarks were “in a complex middle zone,” not explicitly antisemitic but reliant on derogatory tropes or stereotypes. Quoting Artson, Peter Smith and Tiffany Stanley of the AP explained:
American Jews base their votes on a complex mix of issues and values, “among them inclusion, diversity, climate change, civil rights,” said Artson, a leader within Conservative Judaism. “While they love Israel diversely, many of us also care about the wellbeing and self-determination of Palestinians.”
My takeaway, for what it’s worth: The whole issue of what’s antisemitic and what isn’t lands in, to use Rabbi Artson’s words, a “complex middle zone.”
It’s also a zone where I think Christians, practicing or otherwise, ought to tread lightly. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., isn’t entirely wrong (as much as I hate to admit it) when she says the House bill “could convict Christians of antisemitism for believing the Gospel that says Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews.”
I try to get around it by telling myself that St. John, or whoever wrote the gospel in his name, scapegoats “the Jews” (hoi Ioudaoi in New Testament Greek) because his community had just been thrown out of the synagogue in Ephesus and feelings were still raw. Similarly, when other gospel writers trash-talk the “scribes and the Pharisees,” I tell myself they’re talking about the first-century equivalent of respectable going-to-church-on-Sunday folks like me.
But the explanations don’t quite wash, and there are still 2,000 years of Easter celebrations and Passion Plays that ended, to quote Jim McDermott of the Jesuit magazine America, “with Christians throwing rocks through synagogue windows and attacking Jewish people.” Good church-going Christians like me. We need to remember where antisemitism came from.
Free speech and empathy on campus
Kenneth Stern is uniquely well qualified to discuss antisemitism on campus. For 25 years, he was director of antisemitism, hate studies and extremism for the American Jewish Committee. It was in that capacity that he worked with the Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of antisemitism. In 2014 he came to Bard College, which has its own sterling credentials. During the Nazi era, according to Wikipedia, Bard was “a haven for intellectual refugees fleeing Europe,” including Hannah Arndt and her husband, philosopher Heinrich Blücher. (Wikipedia notes they are buried on campus, along with novelist Philip Roth.)
One of Stern’s basic concerns with the House antisemitism bill, he recently explained to Inside Higher Ed, is that “codifying the definition won’t actually address the root causes of antisemitism.” Katherine Knott, who covers federal policy for the newsletter, reported their conversation like this:
“If you look at how antisemitism actually works, this will backfire,” he said. The growing vilification of immigrants, Muslims and other groups in the U.S., he said, primes the population to identify another group as a threat—constituting a “conveyor belt to antisemitism.”
“I’m much more concerned about that than I am with an 18-year-old who may be saying ‘From the river to the sea’ and probably doesn’t know which river or which sea.”
At bottom, Stern suggested in his Ammpour & Co. interview, “we don’t want to engage in the complexity of why these things are so contentious. We want somebody to tell us what side of a ledger we should put it on.” That may serve the interests of partisans who have an “us versus them” attitude, but it isn’t what college is all about. And political gambits like the proposed Antisemitism Awareness Act will fail because they don’t address the root problem. He said:
Anti-Semitism is a real problem, and there are Jewish students who are being intimidated. But the way to deal with it is not to use law to try to suppress speech we don’t like. It’s to encourage students how to treat each other, how to realize that that we’re all in the same community together.
That’s especially true on a college campus. Stern suggested the issue runs deeper than free speech and academic freedom. When “pro-Palestinian” and “pro-Israeli” students face off on campus, it presents a teaching moment. An opportunity for learning. Stern put it like this:
It’s not a competition, you know, between faculty and students. How do we engage this moment together? And why don’t we have the intellectual curiosity [to engage people with opposing viewpoints]? Aren’t you curious as to why they have that view? Can’t you have the emotional empathy to imagine yourself in their their shoes? So those are the types of things that I think we need to focus on, as opposed to just what words should be the ones that get you into trouble.
In other words, it’s more complicated than the politicians think it is. And a little human empathy just might be called for.
‘It’s complicated’
When I’m on social media, one of the things I see in Facebook user profiles is a Relationship Status that says: “It’s complicated.” According to the Urban Dictionary, my go-to guide for social media and all things relating to people younger than, oh, say 65, the phrase: “Refers to a couple in an ambiguous state between ‘friends’ and ‘in a relationship’. May also be used to indicate dissatisfaction with an existing relationship.” I’ll leave it to others to figure out how that might, or might not, relate to Israel and Palestine, students and the dean’s office, or the dynamics of getting a bill through Congress. But, well, relationships are complicated.
Another definition in Urban Dictionary definitely applies here: “An easy brush off when you don’t want to explain something.” Contributor “aerospaceeng” even has a suggested usage example:
Aunt: How is that internship search going?
Joe: It’s complicated.
Exactly. I don’t think I want to hold my college experience up as an example of anything, even though I was on campus during the Vietnam era and I have firsthand experience of how politicians handle student protests. Spoiler alert: I was not favorably impressed.
But I think I learned some of what Kenneth Stern advocates. I learned about cultural competence and intercultural communication as a grad assistant in the International Student Affairs Office. (I was even given a copy of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry by a Palestinian student.) But I was an English major, and I learned most of what I know by reading, writing seminar papers and talking about books and life in general with friends from International House and the English Department.
In the 1960s and 70s, you couldn’t not read Jewish authors like Bernard Malamud, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, Chaim Potok and Isaac Bashevis Singer. (I was especially the right age for Potok’s stories of young Hasidic Jews grappling with their heritage in a secular world — I blogged about him HERE a few months ago.) In fact we joked that we all got to be a little bit Jewish by osmosis, just from keeping up with the best-seller lists, even though we were going to school 700 miles from New York.
One story that has stayed with me over the years is “The Jewbird” by Malamud. It’s ambiguous, and my reaction was complicated. According to his contemporary book public intellectual and book editor Clifton Fadiman, who also was deeply familiar with the world of Jewish intellectuals and ernste Menschen (serious people) in New York City, it’s “a shaggy dog story made to yield rich emotional dividends.” That it is.
A shabby-looking blackbird flies in Harry Cohen’s window on the lower East Side at suppertime. Cohen swats at the bird, and the bird exclaims, “Gevalt, a pogrom!” The bird, whose name is Schwarz, takes up residence. He tutors Cohen’s son Maurie, “a nice kid though not overly bright,” and wife Edie takes a liking to him. But Cohen can’t stand him, and eventually throws him out on the street.
“In a way it’s about anti-Semitism,” says Fadiman, “in another way about Jewish anti-Semitism. But perhaps it is really about one of Malamud’s pervading themes: how the experience of suffering changes its face as humor is brought to bear upon it.” I thoroughly liked the bird. As soon as he flies in the window, he begins dovening, reciting a liturgical prayer; asked why he isn’t wearing a hat and phylacteries, traditional garb for the occasion, he replies, “I’m an old radical.” I fancied myself a young radical at the time.
Without being asked, the Jewbird takes on “full responsibility for Maurie’s performance in school/” He even listens to the kid practice the violin, “taking a few minutes off now and then to rest his ears in the bathroom.” In my eyes, the bird is a mensch. His behavior matches the values of the characters I was reading about in Potok and Philip Roth (this was before Portnoy’s Complaint). The Jewbird’s values were the values I aspired to.
And for being a mensch, he gets thrown out into the street?
My upbringing was high-church Episcopalian, but Malmud’s Jewbird raised questions I was struggling with. How much of my own heritage was worth hanging onto? The bird is bedraggled and smelly, and, as Cohen points out, he’s a bit of a freeloader. “If you haven’t got matjes, I’ll take schmaltz,” he tells Edie. But he’s got Cohen’s number. “What can you say to a grubber yung?” he asks himself.1 A young lout, that is. And I got a hint, reading this along with the bit about dovening and phylacteries, he speaks for the wisdom of the ages.
So I identified with Schwarz the Jewbird. I identified with the kid who had a hard time memorizing the multiplication tables. (Boy, did I ever!) I identified with Edie, who would sneak tidbits to the bird when her husband wasn’t looking. I even identified with Cohen. It’s complicated. Life is complicated.
Most of all, I’d like to think I was learning, as Kenneth Stern might say, the emotional empathy required to imagine myself in the shoes of people (and a fictional blackbird) who aren’t like me.
Notes
1 The Jewish English Lexicon defines a “grober yung” as: “A coarse, ignorant, uneducated young person.” As an example of usage, it offers this 2016 quote from Jewish Currents magazine: “They believe that maybe the crude, rude, bully — the grober yung — and sly real estate wheeler-dealer can force through change to brighten their future, as a ‘strongman’ president who doesn’t just utter the usual flapdoodle about hope and change.”
Links and Citations
Farnoush Amiri, “House passes bill to expand definition of antisemitism amid growing campus protests over Gaza war,” Associated Press, May 1, 2024 https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinian-campus-protests-columbia-congress-df4ba95dae844b3a8559b4b3ad7e058a.
Antisemitism Awareness Act, H.R.6090, 118th Congress https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/6090.
Jill Colvin, “Trump says Jews who vote for Democrats ‘hate Israel’ and ‘their religion’,” Associated Press, March 19, 2024 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-says-jews-who-vote-for-democrats-hate-israel-and-their-religion.
“Grober yung,” Jewish English Lexicon https://jel.jewish-languages.org/words/3168.
“He Helped Define ‘Antisemitism’; Now He Says the Term Is Being Weaponized,” Amanpour & Company, PBS, May 1, 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FFAcHMO488&t=971s.
“It’s Complicated,” Urban Dictionary https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=It%27s%20complicated.
Ron Kampeas, “Taylor Greene: Antisemitism bill rejects ‘Gospel’ that Jews handed Jesus to executioners,” Times of Israel, May 2, 2024 https://www.timesofisrael.com/taylor-greene-antisemitism-bill-rejects-gospel-that-jews-handed-jesus-to-executioners/.
Katherine Knott, New Battle Lines Drawn in Congressional Fight With Colleges,” Inside Higher Ed, May 1, 2024 https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elections/2024/05/01/house-republicans-expand-investigations-campus.
__________, “What the ‘Antisemitism Awareness’ Bill Could Mean for Higher Ed,” Inside Higher Ed, May 3, 2024 https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elections/2024/05/03/what-antisemitism-awareness-bill-means-higher-ed.
Jim McDermott, “The Gospel of John has been used to justify anti-Semitism—so we should stop reading it on Good Friday,” America, April 14, 2022 https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2022/04/14/good-friday-gospel-john-jews-242822.
Bernard Malamud, “The Jewbird,” 1963, rpt. ShulCloud https://images.shulcloud.com/3435/uploads/Pictures/TheJewbirdbyBernardMalamud.pdf
Peter Smith and Tiffany Stanley, “U.S. Jews upset with Trump’s latest rhetoric say he doesn’t get to tell them how to be Jewish,” Associated Press, March 22, 2024 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/u-s-jews-upset-with-trumps-latest-rhetoric-say-he-doesnt-get-to-tell-them-how-to-be-jewish.
“Taylor Greene votes against bill to combat antisemitism, invokes antisemitic trope in her reasoning,” CNN, May 1, 2024 https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/video/marjorie-taylor-greene-antisemitism-bill-vote-zanona-sot-ebof-digvid.
“Working Definition of Antisemitism, ” International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism.
[Uplinked May 5, 2024]
Ordinary Time 