This Friday, October 8, at Noon ET, my guest for our weekly Zoom call will be Professor Omri Boehm, author of the new book, Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel. In it, Boehm argues for reviving a lost Zionist tradition, which he argues is compatible with full equality for Palestinians in one state. It’s an eloquent and provocative argument, which contains a powerful critique of the way Israeli political culture exploits the Holocaust to justify the oppression of Palestinians. As always, we’ll take your questions.
I'm not keen on this characterization of wokeness, which seems to me a step or two away from calling people SJWs (as though fighting for social justice is somehow a bad thing).
I don't think the tactic are dishonest. I think they're just unwilling to entertain the sort of argumentative tactics that have favored the privileged since the first commons room opened. They cut straight to the chase and leave bigots to do their own homework on why, exactly, they're being called bigots.
Some years ago I stopped doing men's homework for them online. I'd make a point, and some jerk would come out of the woodwork and insist that I become his free librarian and tutor and sparring partner, not because he was actually interested, but because he wanted a way to defeat or derail whatever I was saying. And he would do this despite the fact that entire libraries were already available for his edification. His position would be, every time, that it was *my job* to wrestle his mind to the floor.
I refuse that notion. I already do a tremendous amount of work for free, mostly for men. Much of it sneered at, or simply not regarded as work, by men. Am I capable of having an intellectual playground fight? Or just teaching? Sure. But having spent most of my adult life being robbed of my labor and disrespected in ways I'd find not just annoying but deeply angering if I happened to need a lot more money or respect, I feel absolutely no compunction about showing up to yet again serve some bunch of men in this way.
In fact it happens so often that I'd say that if you're presenting some argument closely associated with bigotry, and you want me to believe you're not a bigot (because it's all about you and your reputation, in the end), then it's up to you to get my attention and show me that you're not in fact a bigot. Personally? I don't care. But if it matters enough to you to prove this to me, a stranger, have at it; I'll probably listen, and unlike your friends, I'll listen with an open mind. Just don't be surprised if it turns out that the explanation/justification/defense you think is totally reasonable is larded with a whole lot of deeply-held bigotries and presumptions which you haven't bothered examining.
My recent awakening about one such thing comes from subsistence gardening. Never done it before, though I've had small gardens. From here on in I'll likely be relying on food I grow myself. You spend a lot of time with land, that way; food becomes very expensive, that way. I enjoy it, and the food is excellent, but it's an immensely timeconsuming way of feeding yourself. If you're not simply maurading and trying to pull as much out of the land as possible in an industrial way, you pay a lot of attention to the land and beign to work with it, develop a relationship with it. If I were forced out of my house and into an apartment, the loss of that land would now be a significant loss. Economically, vitally -- one must eat -- but in deeper ways as well. Part of me would be gone. That relationship would be gone. And my labor with the soil and coming to know the ecology would have been for nothing: my years would be thrown out in the garbage, valued at nothing. And I can see how people might come to feel that to be picked up and moved, even to a nice place, was a deep injustice, rather than a thing that happens to people. That's after a couple of years, not generations, and without wars in defense of this patch of ground.
I'm a third-generation American Jew; there were, unsurprisingly, almost no farmers in my family before America, and I don't know any relatives who've had so much as a veg garden. My grandma had a little prune plum tree. But Jews have gotten shuffled around all the time and lived in cities, so I didn't hear anything but fascism underneath blood-and-soil rhetoric: what's one place or another, so long as you have a place, an apartment, a neighborhood. So you learn a new language, big deal.
Now I hear a thing underneath that isn't just fascism. Which is still there, of course. So if I talk with a local Trump-voting farmer and he goes on about his land I say, all right, and I understand this and that, and I see it's all real and meaningful but: you are still a frothing xenophobe and, end of day, racist. Marbled all through your talk about farms it isn't *people* you're worried about coming and taking your land: you're worried about people from particular places, who look particular ways, which you associate with particular bad things, because you learned some cartoons about why you're better than them. When in fact, just as a hundred years ago, you're most likely to be dispossessed by someone who looks very like you, and goes to a similar church, but wears highly-polished loafers.
I'm not keen on this characterization of wokeness, which seems to me a step or two away from calling people SJWs (as though fighting for social justice is somehow a bad thing).
I don't think the tactic are dishonest. I think they're just unwilling to entertain the sort of argumentative tactics that have favored the privileged since the first commons room opened. They cut straight to the chase and leave bigots to do their own homework on why, exactly, they're being called bigots.
Some years ago I stopped doing men's homework for them online. I'd make a point, and some jerk would come out of the woodwork and insist that I become his free librarian and tutor and sparring partner, not because he was actually interested, but because he wanted a way to defeat or derail whatever I was saying. And he would do this despite the fact that entire libraries were already available for his edification. His position would be, every time, that it was *my job* to wrestle his mind to the floor.
I refuse that notion. I already do a tremendous amount of work for free, mostly for men. Much of it sneered at, or simply not regarded as work, by men. Am I capable of having an intellectual playground fight? Or just teaching? Sure. But having spent most of my adult life being robbed of my labor and disrespected in ways I'd find not just annoying but deeply angering if I happened to need a lot more money or respect, I feel absolutely no compunction about showing up to yet again serve some bunch of men in this way.
In fact it happens so often that I'd say that if you're presenting some argument closely associated with bigotry, and you want me to believe you're not a bigot (because it's all about you and your reputation, in the end), then it's up to you to get my attention and show me that you're not in fact a bigot. Personally? I don't care. But if it matters enough to you to prove this to me, a stranger, have at it; I'll probably listen, and unlike your friends, I'll listen with an open mind. Just don't be surprised if it turns out that the explanation/justification/defense you think is totally reasonable is larded with a whole lot of deeply-held bigotries and presumptions which you haven't bothered examining.
My recent awakening about one such thing comes from subsistence gardening. Never done it before, though I've had small gardens. From here on in I'll likely be relying on food I grow myself. You spend a lot of time with land, that way; food becomes very expensive, that way. I enjoy it, and the food is excellent, but it's an immensely timeconsuming way of feeding yourself. If you're not simply maurading and trying to pull as much out of the land as possible in an industrial way, you pay a lot of attention to the land and beign to work with it, develop a relationship with it. If I were forced out of my house and into an apartment, the loss of that land would now be a significant loss. Economically, vitally -- one must eat -- but in deeper ways as well. Part of me would be gone. That relationship would be gone. And my labor with the soil and coming to know the ecology would have been for nothing: my years would be thrown out in the garbage, valued at nothing. And I can see how people might come to feel that to be picked up and moved, even to a nice place, was a deep injustice, rather than a thing that happens to people. That's after a couple of years, not generations, and without wars in defense of this patch of ground.
I'm a third-generation American Jew; there were, unsurprisingly, almost no farmers in my family before America, and I don't know any relatives who've had so much as a veg garden. My grandma had a little prune plum tree. But Jews have gotten shuffled around all the time and lived in cities, so I didn't hear anything but fascism underneath blood-and-soil rhetoric: what's one place or another, so long as you have a place, an apartment, a neighborhood. So you learn a new language, big deal.
Now I hear a thing underneath that isn't just fascism. Which is still there, of course. So if I talk with a local Trump-voting farmer and he goes on about his land I say, all right, and I understand this and that, and I see it's all real and meaningful but: you are still a frothing xenophobe and, end of day, racist. Marbled all through your talk about farms it isn't *people* you're worried about coming and taking your land: you're worried about people from particular places, who look particular ways, which you associate with particular bad things, because you learned some cartoons about why you're better than them. When in fact, just as a hundred years ago, you're most likely to be dispossessed by someone who looks very like you, and goes to a similar church, but wears highly-polished loafers.