Bastille Day: An Essay for Tisha b'Av - first half

 Bastille Day: an essay for Tisha B'Av:

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I saw an article yesterday I found so disturbing for entirely selfish reasons. Apparently Israeli writers are being boycotted unless they wash their hands of Zionism altogether. So are American Jewish writers. Agents are refusing to even represent them because there's no point in even hawking the books to publishers. When Israeli writers mentioned this, the president of PEN International Association of Writers resigned his post.

I'm not going to link to it here. For selfish reasons I just found it too disturbing, but here's what The Atlantic had to say about that article:

"On Thursday morning, PEN America, the free-speech organization, posted an article detailing the “isolation and exclusion” many Israeli and Jewish writers have felt since October 7, 2023. The authors describe being blacklisted at publishing houses, boycotted by activists, pressured to downplay their Jewishness, and called out in online witch hunts including a viral crowdsourced spreadsheet that asked: “Is your fav writer a Zionist???”

PEN America currently sits on a widening fault line, one that divides old-school liberalism, which treats the right to speak as more important than any particular ideology, from a surging and fiercely ideological left that sees Israel and Zionism as its enemy. Still, it was a shock to learn that this article—mainly a collection of writer testimonials—set off an eruption.

Mengestu had been in his position for only seven months following a few years of turmoil at the organization, much of it over Israel and Gaza. When I reached him, he described the PEN article as a possible threat to the constitutional rights of those who advocate for shunning Israeli products (including art) according to the standards of the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement. Apparently setting aside the question of defending free expression for Israeli and Jewish writers, he focused on the rights of pro-Palestinian activists. A document like this from PEN, he felt, could provide more fuel for legislation that targets proponents of BDS. Such legislation already exists in most states, though it is usually aimed at businesses and individuals seeking government contracts. “It’s the first amendment that allows all of us to engage in boycotts, not PEN America,” Mengestu wrote in an email. “PEN America as a free expression organization is supposed to defend that right.”"

...So much for my book getting published, if I ever finish it.

For better or worse it's a book designed to be unfinishable: a kind of "Jewish Mentaculus" meant to create a counter-Jewish history, outlining another way it may ahve happened. Is it the most likely way it happened? Absolutely not. But I find it the most fun way it might have happened, designed to make points about the meaning of Jewish History, being Jewish, the Jewish relationship to the Holy Land and the world's, and how we just might create a better understanding between Jews and Gentiles: if such a thing is 1% possible.

Is it ego meant to create the most 'important' Jewish book since the Bible? Well... maybe?... but you can't really help what takes shape in your imagination. More likely, it's just that my imagination tends that way. Some of us were not born with an edit button. Most people connect from A to B with little trouble. Type-A people connect from A to Z. My mind connects from A to Q to X to 7i.

Until this fog lifts of Jewish writing, there's no point in sending anything at all to a publisher. I borderline hate Israel: not just the Israeli government but a perpetual annoyance with the rudeness of Israelis, the worship of strength and weaponry, the arrogance toward Americans who have supported them so loyally for decades, and the swamp-ass heat. The majority of Israelis are everything that set my teeth on edge. But I will not wash my hands of Israel, Zionism, the capability of a better country, a better Jewish nation and a Zionism that is once again compatible with multilateral liberalism. I'm not particularly fond of my hometown either, but twenty years after I lived there, Israel remains a kind of second home. The node around which my entire view of the world revolves. We literally gave the world the idea that humanity has a purpose and a destiny, and if the world does, then a world without Israel is a world without itself.

More and more of my friends turn anti-Zionist, and if even they always were, anti=Zionism becomes ever more important to their own worldviews. I cannot help questioning whether friendship is really possible between these two sides. Blame the people who raised me if you like, but the belief in Israel is too deep in my kishkes to ever give it up. Perhaps that belief is futile and self-penalizing. Perhaps God will have us thrown out of our countries like He ever does, for if He exists, then He is a cruel God, a jealous God, using us as labrats to teach world's souls moral lessons in the next world. But even if there is no God, what progress is even possible without believing that He is there? You can try if you like to make the world work for justice: but you'll never get more than half of it. The world has so many different motivations to get them out of bed in the morning, but there is no more effective motivator than God. Those who work for justice work for victory here on earth. Those who work for God work for victory for all eternity.

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Most Israeli authors, most Jewish authors, are probably Zionists, but they're exactly the sort of Zionists you want to foster. 

This shit isn't going away. Zionism will exist long after you and I are long gone, dear reader. Your anti-Zionist children will either face Zionists who compel Israel to comply with the rules of a liberal world order, or you will face Jewish nationalists whose mentality comes increasingly to resemble the radical Islam so embraced by the very peoples you champion. 

Perhaps if Zionism kills enough people, you'll become sympathetic to it again...

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You may find the current plight of the Jewish liberal trivial and misinformed, but you should pity us just a little. There is no situation more comically pathetic than the Zionist liberal (and yes, for the purposes of just this point, they're one and the same). The rest of the left-liberal world views us with contempt, the rest of the Zionist world views us with contempt too. The writers among us are basically boycotted by other Jews as by other Gentiles. 

As always, the people cancelled by the left are only the liberals who care what you think. The conservatives didn't give a shit before, they certainly don't give a shit now. 

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Here's the main problem with preventing Zionists from publishing. You may be interested in authors who believe in banning other authors. I am not. If I find out an author consciously boycotts other authors, I respect them a little less: not because I find their point of view morally wrong, but because I think their capacity to think is less than writers who believe in freedom. My mind naturally assumes they don't have things to say as interesting as a writer who thinks differently on that issue. Whether or not censorship is wrong or right: censorship is boring. It makes for less interesting books, it makes for less interesting discourse, it makes for less interesting people.

It's not just about freedom of expression: I don't even know if it's about freedom of expression at all. Here's the point: if you believe that a point of view is evil, then the best way you have to understand how they came to that view is to READ them. Reading isn't just validation or comfort: it's espionage and surveillance. It's one thing to hear their thoughts broadcast into your head when you don't want to hear them: anybody would find that annoying; but to reserve 10% of your reading time for points of view you find abhorrent at a moment of your choosing is necessary to put the stuff you do agree with into context. If you want to understand the opposition properly, you have to know what you're disagreeing with.

And it goes even further. If you need to understand the point of view of Nazis, you have to read Nazis. If you need to understand the point of view of a Zionist, you have to read Zionists. If you want to understand the point of view of Republicans, you have to read Republicans. If you need to understand the point of view of sexual harassers and assaulters and abusers, you have to read them. If you want to prevent people from going down their paths, you need to understand exactly what leads them down such paths, and you need armament for the crucial moments when you can prevent people from committing evil acts. The best way to do that is, by far, to read the precedents and locate the root circumstances of what makes such people turn to things we find abhorrent.

Don't do it out of obligation, wait for the moments when you're ready. Wait for the moments when you have the presence of mind to confront it. Wait for the moments when you are ready to change your own thinking. Don't expect to be convinced: if anything the opposite. Just as reading people you support may make you a better ally, reading people you oppose can make you a better opponent: an opponent who can target your arguments more precisely because you understand what makes them tick. Don't expect them to be convinced any more than you do, but it makes them understand that they have formidable opponents, and if they want to do everything they want, they will have more opposition than they thought, and once in a while they will retreat. Every time they do is another victory in a war of attrition

What is the alternative?

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The alternative is to let these people go through life feeling perpetually misunderstood. The alternative is to ignore people you find dangerous: isolate them with their own thoughts, their own fears, their own pathologies. The alternative is to let them fester and often grow into things you find still more abhorrent.

How do you think Donald Trump happened? How did so many millions of Americans feel comfortable electing him? How did 78 million Americans vote for him just when he lost? How did he win again?

Part of it is that yes, Republicans have gone down a path just that evil, but part of it was us, and the more victories he gets, the less willing we are to acknowledge it. Between 2016 when he won and 2020 when he lost, Trump gained 15 million votes! How did it happen?

Part of it was inflation, part of it was immigration, but part of it was because people feared liberals. Whether or not they were right to, they feared us. Why did they fear us? Because we isolated them. We made them pariahs.

Why and how did we?

American society has increasingly relied on medication and therapy to manage emotional issues. It's made families more pleasant, it's made friends more pleasant, it's made the workplace more pleasant, but it hasn't made everybody more pleasant. Those who have not become more pleasant, who cannot become more pleasant in certain interactions, who cannot afford to be more pleasant, have broken the new social contract and are left out of this newer more pleasant world where everybody who partakes can validate the shit out of each other in a way they couldn't before.

Those who lose their tempers, those who are insulting, we simply write them off. We ignore them. We isolate them. We cancel them. So many unpleasant actions are now considered some form of abuse. Videos on the internet proliferate about the importance of writing off the narcissists in your life, and it is sometimes estimated that narcissists constitute 7% of the world population, with a full 1% exhibiting psychopathic tendencies and another 1% exhibiting sociopathic.

Even if all that is true, what happens when you isolate the nearly one-in-ten of the population that exhibit antisocial tendencies?

If it's true, then these are the ones more likely to stock up on guns, who turn to opiates, who consume political propaganda. If these are the people with inordinate amounts of rage, then they are the ones who either find outlets for their rage that are truly antisocial, or they use substances to nullify themselves into non-being.

Just look at Trump rallies, they are giant mass demonstrations of antisocial rage where people get to pour out the two-hours hate society no longer permits them. But it is not just an act of rage and hatred, it is an act of mourning by people who feel that they've devoted their all to others for whom they were responsible, only for their contributions and love to go completely unappreciated--often accompanied by accusations of abuse, selfishness. Many of us are willing to exonerate our worse moments by the unfortunate circumstances in which we found ourselves, but for many others we do not give nearly the same charity. It's one thing for the people who are truly in danger, but every person you write off as toxic is another person whom, if they are toxic, their pathogens grow and rot.

If you really want to understand how Trump happened, view one statistic:

27% of Americans today do not speak to their parents:

TWENTY-SEVEN PERCENT!

This is as big a breakdown in our country's socializing as that 50% of Boomer marriages failed. It may only be half as many, but marriage is choice.

The relationship between parent-child is necessity, it is the basic unit of human interaction. It is a bond beyond humanity, made by the most powerful releases of blood and oxytocinm and dopamine and endorphens and vasopresin a person will ever experience in their lifetimes.

But the moments when those chemicals are not released feel all the worse for the precedents of good feeling, made still worse by adrenaline and cortisol. The people you love most are also liable to be the people you most hate.

In nearly every case, I'm sure the families were as difficult as everybody claims, but is the alternative really any better?

A similar 28% of adults under thirty have been diagnosed with major depression. Among teens 12-17, 20% exhibit a major depressive episode every year! 42% of Generation Z reports struggling with depression.

22% of young adults from 18-29 report having zero close friends. Only 56% of Gen-Z reports having come to adulthood ever being in a relationship.

Is this really better?

Meanwhile, 37% of Americans age 18 to 29 report getting their news from social media influences, with a larger portion getting them from right-wing influencers than left-wing.

Is depression as bad as abuse? True abuse? Probably not, but I dare you to try major depression and tell me if you don't occasionally wonder. There is a way in which depression is the worst of all possible illnesses, because depression is the one illness designed to strip us of our resilience. If one is already feeling hopeless, how much harder becomes resilience?

In the worldwide 'Happiness Index' Baby Boomers still report being happy enough to qualify for the top 10 countries in the world. 

Adults under 30? #62. 

It's entirely possible that Boomer entitlement reserved the happiness for themselves and hogged some sources of happiness they should have passed on to later generations. It's entirely possible that Boomer divorce rates set a example to later generations telling them that family is not important. It's entirely possible that technology has been the great destroyer of this country's entire fabric: leaving what we should have gotten from people who love and like us to screens who cannot love us back. 

But that does not change that something terrible has happened in the American social contract. 

#2? The second-happiest country in the world for young people?

Israel.

Not Palestine, but Israel.

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What is the point of family?

The point of family is a declaration of faith. Not faith in god, faith in closeness and bonds and emotional connection. Family is faith that through it all, through all the difficult moments, through all the moments that make you want to commit acts of violence against others or yourself, the people to whom you are most closely bonded are not worth giving up on.

We think we can choose our family, but try having a kid and telling yourself that the bonds of friendship are thicker than blood.

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