Some interesting and certainly challenging things on victimhood from Christopher Isherwood, Peter Beinart and Caryl Churchill. Not sure if I entirely agree and it’s important to read the entire pieces for context, and Isherwood’s is from a work of fiction and is intentionally confrontational, but the idea of victimhood equating to ‘moral abdication’ and that the opposite of being a victim is being a morally clean is worth questioning and can’t be taken for granted. On the other hand, you cannot explain away persecution and prejudice on the basis of it being human, natural and inevitable, on the only thing not inevitable being who is oppressing who at the time. Individual cases of hate remain just that, hate.
Jean Amery says there’s no honour in being a victim, by which he doesn’t mean there’s dishonour, but mere survival. I think what he means is it doesn’t necessarily elevate the individual. But at the same time, this is not easy subject matter and is so often discussed from the perspective, as in the first piece here, from the majority (though George, like Isherwood, ‘belongs’ to a minority, and is likely struggling with and even denying this struggle in this lecture.) In Amery’s case in Auschwitz, there is the further complication of the levels one is reduced to in the process of surviving making it all but impossible to not be somehow tainted, but that’s another discussion altogether.
As spoken in a lecture by George, Christopher Isherwood’s single man in A Single Man:
And now comes the question George has been expecting. It is asked, of course, by Myron Hirsch, that indefatigable heckler of the goyim. ‘Sir, here on page 79, Mr Propter says the stupidest text in the Bible is they hated me without a cause. Does he mean by that the Nazis were right to hate the Jews? Is Huxley anti-semitic?’
George draws a long breath. ‘No,’ he answers mildly. And then—after a pause of expectant silence; the class is rather thrilled by Myron’s bluntness—he repeats, loudly and severly, ‘No—
‘Mr Huxley is not anti-semitic. The Nazis were not right to hate the Jews. But their hating the Jews was not without a cause. No one ever hates without a cause—
‘Look—let’s leave the Jews out of this, shall we? Whatever attitude you take, it’s impossible to discuss the Jews objectively nowadays. It probably won’t be possible for the next twenty years. So let’s think about this in terms of some other minority, any one you like, but a small one—one that isn’t organised and doesn’t have any committees to defend it—’
George looks at Wally Bryant with a deep shining look that says, I am with you, little minority sister. Wally is plump and sallow-faced, and the care he takes to comb his wavy hair and keep his nails filed and polished and his eyebrows discreetly plucked only makes him that much appetizing. Obviously, he had understand George’s look. He is embarrassed. Never mind! George is going to teach him a lesson now that he’ll never forget. I’m going to turn Wally’s eyes into his timid soul. Is going to give him courage to throw away his nail-file and face the truth of his life—
‘Now, for example, people with freckles aren’t thought of as a minority by the non-freckled. Theyaren’t a minority in the sense we’re talking about. And why aren’t they? Because a minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority, real or imaginary. And no threat is ever quite imaginary. Anyone here disagree with that? If you do, just ask yourself, what would this particular minority do if it suddenly became the majority, overnight? You see what I mean. Well, if you don’t—think it over!
‘All right—now along come the liberals—including everyone in this room, I trust—and they say, ‘minorities are just people, like us’. Sure, minorities are people; people, not angels. Sure, they’re like us—but not exactly like us; that’s the all-too-familiar state of liberal hysteria, in which you begin to kid yourself you honestly cannot see any difference between a Negro and a Swede—’
[…]
‘So, let’s face it, minorities are people who probably look and act and think differently from us, and have faults we don’t have. We may dislike the way they look and act, and we may hate their faults. And it’s better if we admit to disliking and hating them, than if we try to smear our feelings over with pseudo-liberal sentimentality. If we’re frank about our feelings, we have a safety-valve; and if we have a safety-valve, we’re actually less likely to start persecuting. … I know that theory is unfashionable nowadays. We all keep trying to believe that, if we ignore something long enough, it’ll just vanish—
‘Where was I? Oh yes … Well, now, suppose this minority does get persecuted—never mind why—political, economic, psychological reasons—there always is a reason, no matter how wrong it is—that’s my point. And, of course, persecution itself is always wrong; I’m sure we all agree there. … But, the worst of it is, we now run into another liberal heresy. Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure. Can’t you see what nonsense that is? What’s to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse? Did all the Christian victims in the arena have to be saints?
‘And I’ll tell you something else. A minority has its own kind of aggression. It absolutely dares the majority to attack. It hates the majority—not without a cause, I grant. It even hates the other minorities—because all minorities are in competition; each one proclaims that its sufferings are the worst and its wrongs are the blackest. And the more they all hate, and the more they’re all persecuted, the nastier they become. Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesn’t! Then why should it make them nice to be loathed? While you’re being persecuted, you hate what’s happening to you, you hate the people who are making it happen; you’re in a world of hate.’
(A quick aside on Isherwood from somewhere else: ‘I was present when Christopher Isherwood tried to make this point to a young Jewish movie producer. “After all,” said Isherwood, “Hitler killed six hundred thousand homosexuals.” The young man was not impressed. “But Hitler killed six million Jews,” he said sternly. “What are you?” asked Isherwood. “In real estate?”‘)
From ‘The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment‘ in the New York Review of Books by Peter Beinart (himself Jewish):
But the message of the American Jewish establishment and its allies in the Netanyahu government is exactly the opposite: since Jews are history’s permanent victims, always on the knife-edge of extinction, moral responsibility is a luxury Israel does not have. Its only responsibility is to survive. As former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg writes in his remarkable 2008 book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes, “Victimhood sets you free.”
This obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why Zionism is dying among America’s secular Jewish young. It simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have seen of Israel’s. Yes, Israel faces threats from Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, Israelis understandably worry about a nuclear Iran. But the dilemmas you face when you possess dozens or hundreds of nuclear weapons, and your adversary, however despicable, may acquire one, are not the dilemmas of the Warsaw Ghetto. The year 2010 is not, as Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed, 1938. The drama of Jewish victimhood—a drama that feels natural to many Jews who lived through 1938, 1948, or even 1967—strikes most of today’s young American Jews as farce.
But there is a different Zionist calling, which has never been more desperately relevant. It has its roots in Israel’s Independence Proclamation, which promised that the Jewish state “will be based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew prophets,” and in the December 1948 letter from Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and others to The New York Times, protesting right-wing Zionist leader Menachem Begin’s visit to the United States after his party’s militias massacred Arab civilians in the village of Deir Yassin. It is a call to recognize that in a world in which Jewish fortunes have radically changed, the best way to memorialize the history of Jewish suffering is through the ethical use of Jewish power.
For several months now, a group of Israeli students has been traveling every Friday to the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where a Palestinian family named the Ghawis lives on the street outside their home of fifty-three years, from which they were evicted to make room for Jewish settlers. Although repeatedly arrested for protesting without a permit, and called traitors and self-haters by the Israeli right, the students keep coming, their numbers now swelling into the thousands. What if American Jewish organizations brought these young people to speak at Hillel? What if this was the face of Zionism shown to America’s Jewish young? What if the students in Luntz’s focus group had been told that their generation faces a challenge as momentous as any in Jewish history: to save liberal democracy in the only Jewish state on earth?
“Too many years I lived in the warm embrace of institutionalized elusiveness and was a part of it,” writes Avraham Burg. “I was very comfortable there.” I know; I was comfortable there too. But comfortable Zionism has become a moral abdication. Let’s hope that Luntz’s students, in solidarity with their counterparts at Sheikh Jarrah, can foster an uncomfortable Zionism, a Zionism angry at what Israel risks becoming, and in love with what it still could be. Let’s hope they care enough to try.
And Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children:
Waiting for Siberia 