#Consider themselves supporters of the state of yisrael and this is called human beings have a complex relationslity to the world and

[rotzaprachim]

imho the left had just as much issue with philosemitism as Christian Zionists but in different ways and it’s become super obvious with the open season on the Jews. Like there’s been years of posts treating Judaism like the ultimate liberal self-help book rather than its own complex and varied set of traditions and cultures with their own cultural inter community complexities and problems (right wing tziyonut, the political actions of medinas yisrael, and colorism among others) as the oppositional Good Religion that was everything Christianity was not. Like people kept holding up Judaism as the Good Ones when it came to abortion, birth control, lgbt rights, trans rights, and so forth and it’s true many Jews (though not all) do hold progressive opinions on those topics including those who consider themselves religious but treating a whole group as either a moral positive or negative is so strange especially once after some Jews in a specific part of the world started doing something really bad, people everywhere have decided that Jews as a whole and Judaism as a whole are morally corrupt and impure and at the heart of the worlds problems

[fuploudly-blog]

Intersectionality.

I’ve been thinking a lot about intersectionality lately, a word the right bloviates as hate-speak at my feminist-queer-Jewish-New-York-living-body. Its image appears as a Venn diagram: concentric circles of identity, story, culture, race, religion, you name it, that are within each of us. “The personal is political,” says writer Hannah Arendt, and so I have turned a more focused eye on intersectional aspects within me. The contradictions, the privilege I enjoy as a white, middle-class, well-educated woman, and the misogyny I also experience daily as a woman. I am not particularly special, but I am the only example I feel comfortable writing about to give a clear idea of what’s been in my mind.

My father is Jewish, my mother is Christian, and for my entire life they have meditated and studied many forms of Buddhism, beginning with a teacher named Thich Nhat Hanh. I know very little about my father’s family and their Judaism. My Jewishness growing up consisted of bagels with lox on Christmas morning, Grandma Rose’s horror at what she perceived to be my “cross-shaped” earrings, and an immense capacity to imagine the worst happening at any moment. What I do know is that my great-grandfather immigrated to the United States sometime in the early 20th century, I believe in 1913, during the worst of the pogroms in Odessa. During my free trial on ancestry.com (One of those white privilege perks that we have an ancestry.com to use. Where do my black friends go for their history?) I found three US census forms dating from 1920-1930 that showed Russia, Poland, and Romania as possible countries of origin for Louis Liebman, his wife Rebecca, and their four children, including my grandfather Charles Liebman. Bits and pieces of stories I have picked up from various family members indicate that Louis was a rather nasty bit of business. In my own work dealing with generational trauma, I can almost feel the darkness emanating from my great-grandfather, a sense of failure. Louis Liebman had been a shopkeeper in the Old Country, so the legend goes, and was brought to the US via land grants in rural Connecticut purchased by Lord Rothschild and given to Jews fleeing the pogroms, where they would make their homes as tobacco farmers.

Apparently Louis made a terrible farmer, and his rage and bitterness swelled to the point of forbidding my grandfather to attend high school in order to work, despite young Charles’ love of learning. To give you an idea of the extreme disconnect and pain on my father’s side, we only learnt in 2016 (and by we I mean me, my father, and his brother and sister) that my great-grandmother Rebecca had committed suicide after the family settled in the United States. I was twenty-eight, my dad, uncle, and aunt in their sixties learning this tragic and essential part of our history. I don’t even know for sure the date that Rebecca died. As an adult, I have become more of a practicing Jew and am endlessly fascinated with Judaism, primarily in an effort to reclaim this part of my spiritual and familial DNA. The knowledge of my ancestors’ Jewish faith, how they practiced if it all, their stories, are all lost. The more I learn about epigenetics, and delve deeper in Buddhist, Jewish, and shamanic knowledge, the more I feel certain that the trauma of persecution, assimilation, and lost identity my family experienced has indelibly marked my family and our collective spirit in deep and varied ways.

My mother’s family feels like old money Revolutionary War heroes compared to my Jewish patriarchal displacement and relatively recent arrival in the United States. The specifics like dates are equally hazy, but my mother’s line is descended from English and German immigrants who arrived in America in the 1840s (or 1830s) and settled in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with the Moravian Church. Founded in the fifteenth century and one of the oldest Protestant denominations in the world, the Moravians’ beliefs were quite similar to those of the Quakers, with an emphasis on community, music, and a belief in the divinity of the self with less deference to a minister-figure. The Moravians had been established in Winston-Salem since 1766, and my mother’s ancestors were active in both community and church life, founding Salem Academy, an all-girls school that sparked my intention to go to boarding school. During a 7th grade visit to North Carolina over Christmas break, I remember attending Christmas Eve “lovefeast” service at the Moravian church, a beautiful white building still standing. The blissfully short yet music-filled service concluded with the congregation sitting together holding hands, then literally breaking bread together. I munched the traditional soft buns and drank the sweet milky coffee and felt utterly at peace.

As an adult, though, as my own wokeness in the aftermath of police brutality and Black Lives Matter developed, I questioned for the first time something so nakedly obvious: Had my coffee drinking, Southern school founding ancestors owned slaves? The fact that I was nearly thirty before it even occurred to me to consider that question is evidence that white privilege is in all of us, even the radically liberal ones. “Can’t be,” I thought to myself anxiously, “the Moravians were so chill! They were like the Quakers in so many ways, and they were abolitionists! Can’t have been slave owners.” Immediately I Googled “Moravian Church owning slaves North Carolina.” I was initially delighted to learn that the state of North Carolina had more free black people residing there than were in the entire South. Even better when I read that Moravians believed that while individuals may have different stations on the earthly realm, that all Moravians were equal under God, and in 18th century Winston-Salem, white and black Moravians worshipped and were buried in the same church. My moral superiority bubble lasted only an instant longer, as I continued to read that the Moravian Church did not believe in their members owning personal slaves, only the church itself. Apparently the South grew more deeply attached to the institution of slavery, and by the early 19th century the Moravian egalitarianism had faded. African Americans soon were required to sit in a balcony separate from the white Moravians, then had to be buried in the Strangers Graveyard far away from the white God’s Acre cemetery, and finally forced to have their own segregated black Moravian church. The memory of the sweet lovefeast coffee I had consumed turned to ash in my mouth. This is all of the information I know thus far. It is possible that my ancestors did own slaves, it is possible that they did not. It is certain that the religious institution that was such a large part of their lives did.

So. Bitter traumatized Jew on one side, Southern potential slave-owners on the other. Descended from terrified refugees persecuted for religious beliefs, and descended from a genteel people whose religious beliefs excused and allowed them to profit off of the subjugation of a human being. I use myself as a starting place to make a point. I believe these inherent contradictions in ourselves are what unite, not divide us. There is no place on earth (except perhaps New Zealand. Can we all move to New Zealand?) that is not built on generations of bloodshed, subjugation, and displacement. This act of looking inside ourselves is just the first step of a larger, much more crucial process: the act of recognizing the oneness we share with all living things. We are each made of the dust of the bones of our ancestors, each of us descended from people who were conquerors and oppressed, and within each of us are those concentric circles: in my case “Jewish” “female” “slavery supporters” “white” “feminist” “writer” “wife” et. al living in diametric opposition, suspended animation. Look at your own history for a moment; I am convinced that in your own unique, divine flavor, these opposites live inside you, too. Even the source of all of my fear these days, 45 cannot wall up, shower off, or alternative fact them away for himself.

Shema yisrael! Adonai Eloheinu adonai echad. This is the most important prayer in Judaism, one that observant children are taught to say first thing upon arising in the morning, before going to sleep, and the last words they say before death. My husband served in the Israeli army and told me stories of soldiers in the last Lebanon War screaming the Shema as they launched themselves on top of a grenade to shield their fellow soldiers. I am not a rabbi, but my un-nuanced translation is  “Hear Israel! Our Lord Our God is One.” I have been taking Hebrew for a year, and am falling in love with the brevity and poetic simplicity of the language. It is evocative in a way that makes me believe in the presence of Spirit manifested in words. A whole tradition of mystical Judaism called Kabbalah explores this in depth. I love the Shema because it expresses the crucial idea of self-examination, and the importance of intersectionality: we are all one. It is an idea that I see beginning to mobilize and unify the resistance. Our collective liberation is personal liberation. Our self-care, as Queen Audre Lorde wrote, is our radical act of resistance. The unwillingness to accept intersectional, radically different parts of ourselves only serves to enforce the walls, the us versus them, the sense of superiority towards the “other,” when in actuality it is only evidence of a deeper, divine separation within us.

Resist. We must resist together, and be as one. At one with our neighbor, at one with our planet and all the life it holds, and at one with ourselves. We have the space to contain an infinitude. The infinitude within us, our different stories and ideas and cultures and cooking styles and religions are assets to share with the world. Let us unite, and in uniting, use what they seek to divide us.

Shabbat shalom, Inshallah, Namaste. In Peace.