Yiddish Literature beyond the Singer Brothers

The following was written as a letter to the New Yorker. Since they elected not to print it, I am posting it here, for anyone interested in what I have to say about Yiddish literature.

As a translator of Yiddish fiction, I read Adam Kirsch's profile of I.J. Singer with delight. Yet I finished it concerned that, since so much of it refracts the elder Singer's work through the prism of the works of his younger, more widely lauded brother, it would leave English-language readers with a limited sense of the wide range of literary achievement in the Yiddish language.

Kirsch contrasts the elder Singer's "panoramic social realism" to the "fable," "fantasy," and "romanticism" of the younger. A reader could be forgiven, then, for thinking that I.J. Singer shared the disdain of some critics for more allegorical forms of writing, and that had he survived to witness his younger brother's bravura career, might have likewise regarded it as a retrogression. Such an inference, however, would go against the evidence of the elder Singer's own critical judgment, which showed broad-minded appreciation for allegorical modes of expression.

An example: Among the writers I.J. Singer met in Kyiv was one Pinkhas Kahanovitsh, who had taken the pen name Der Nister, a Yiddish phrase with the portentous meaning, "the hidden one." Of Der Nister, he went on to write that "if the writers of the world could have read him, they would have broken their pens." In 1921, the same year that I.J. Singer returned to Warsaw, Der Nister emigrated to Berlin, where he published Gedakht ("Imagined"), a two-volume collection of short stories and novellas heavy on allegory and symbolism, complete with recondite allusions at turns to Talmudic and Kabbalistic scholarship and to the folk-religion of Ashkenazi shtetls. (Full disclosure: I am currently translating a collection of all the stories published by Der Nister in the 1920s under the title Gedakht, in both its Berlin and Kyiv editions.)

Had Franz Kafka, among other contemporaries, been able to read Der Nister, perhaps he would not have broken his pens, but he would have recognized a kindred spirit. Whereas Kafka's writing career and artistic development were cut short in 1924 by tuberculosis, Der Nister survived until his unjust incarceration in the Soviet gulag system in 1950, pushing his fiction and nonfiction in new directions. His one venture into novel-length fiction, The Family Mashber, published in the late 1930s, combines a study of social development that is clearly informed by the writings of the elder Singer with a sensitivity to the unfulfilled hopes expressed through religious belief, in this case, of the Breslover Hasidim.

So little of the corpus of Yiddish literature has been translated into English or other Western European languages that it remains tempting to categorize it according to binary oppositions derived from the history of European and American canons--realism vs. romanticism, naturalism vs. symbolism. As lesser known writers like Der Nister, Hersh Dovid Nomberg, Fradl Shtok, and Kadya Molodovsky, to name just a few, are more widely translated, it will be less tenable to view the Singer brothers as isolated dwellers on the peaks of genius, separated by an abyss of generational and stylistic differences. Instead, they were participants, among others, in an ongoing conversation, in which the sacred and profane, the heavenly, earthly, and the diabolical, the historical and the allegorical, jostle one another rapidly in a variety of men's and women's voices.

Goodbye, Lenin

A former comrade of mine recently shared with me a note that he had sent to a long-time leader of the small Trotskyist organization we had both been part of (the League for the Revolutionary Party, or LRP for short; those unfamiliar are welcome to Google them, but I am not providing a direct link so as to spare you the temptation of seeing evidence of their severe political and organizational degeneration, or their ca. 1999 web design), on the subject of Leninism, Trotskyism, and their political ineffectiveness. A brief correspondence developed, in the course of which I articulated in writing some thoughts that I had thus far kept to private conversation. I concluded therefore that it might be of broader interest than the ranks of those who might once have crossed paths with one idiosyncratic organization. The following has been edited lightly to remove some personal details about individuals who are not public figures, and to correct some minor errors of fact. The title of this post represents my perspective, not that of my correspondent.

G. wrote:

While I am engaging in this political exchange of thoughts with you, I would like to make a more general comment. This is for the benefit of you and other comrades in the group, so that you may have a better overall picture of where I am at politically. Naturally a lot of what has happened to me is simple demoralization and loss of interest in politics. The Middle East conflict drags me back into political thinking not even because I want to or because I enjoy it, but because I have to think about it in order to carry on my everyday social and personal life, regardless of my personal interest in politics or lack of it in recent years. As Trotsky wrote, "You may not [still] be interested in politics, but politics may [still] be interested in you." The politics of the recent events in the Middle East seem to be interested in almost everyone, perhaps especially in the New York City area.... Nowadays in the New York metropolitan area, if you have nothing to say about political events, people think you're either a boring person or you're just an idiot. I admit that this dynamic has a lot to do with my current interest in discussing the events with somebody, with anybody. [Yes, Trump had the same effect, but it was and is easy to denounce Trump in almost any conversation in the NYC area; this did not stimulate further political discussion and thinking.]

But keeping in mind my demoralization and general loss of interest in politics, I do also want to share with you and comrades in the group a more general picture of where I stand politically these days. To put it in general terms, I question the correctness of Leninism as a political program. It's hard to argue with the Marxist analysis of all history as the history of class struggle; if anything, I agree with that analysis even more so now than I did before, because it holds up so well and almost any historical research confirms it, regardless of one's current interest in politics in the present day. It's also hard to deny that Das Kapital is a brilliant analysis of the capitalist mode of production. Further, I still recognize that Lenin's leadership of the Bolsheviks in the revolution in 1917 was simply brilliant, effective, and necessary, as were the policies and actions of the new Soviet government and the Bolshevik leadership during the Russian Civil War and for a few years thereafter until Stalin's "Soviet Thermidor". If the White Army had won the civil war, they would have committed every major crime against humanity of the 20th century rolled into one (the Holocaust, Stalin's Great Terror, and much more) and then doubled, tripled, or quadrupled. Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolshevik leadership of the Red Army stopped that catastrophe from happening. So unlike some other critics of Leninism, none of that is where my questioning of Leninism lies.

Here is the problem I have: It has now been a full entire century since Stalin's Thermidorian reactionary takeover of power in the Soviet Union. During that entire 100 years of history since then, Leninism or Trotskyism, which we both recognize are actually the same thing, simply hasn't worked at all. Not even once. Not anywhere. Not in any time period. I have described my crude analysis of the last 100 years of global political history as follows:

After Lenin's death, to put it in crude terms, the socialist movement divided into thugs on the one hand--Stalin, Mao, and all the political leaders and tendencies whom Trotskyists describe as "Stalinist"--vs. intellectuals on the other hand--Trotskyists, but also including other far left anti-Stalinists of various stripes. Over the past 100 years, the "thugs" have succeeded in seizing and holding power all over the place. The "intellectuals" have provided logical and insightful analysis of political events, including cogent political critique of the "thugs"--but they haven't been able to successfully lead mass movements and seize or hold power anywhere at any time.

When this state of affairs persists not just for a decade or a few decades, but for a whole entire 100 years, something is wrong. For almost the last 50 of those years, the LRP has believed that it was the only true representative of the Leninist political program in the global socialist movement. I don't disagree with this either, even now. My issue is whether Leninism itself can possibly be an effective political theory and guide to action in today's world. Think about it this way: As much time has elapsed since the founding of the LRP up to now, as had elapsed since Trotsky's exile from the Soviet Union up to the founding of the LRP. That is quite a long time period. The LRP explained the failures of the revolutionary socialist movement after Trotsky as the failures of Pabloism (primarily). This might have made sense to explain the time period from 1945 to 1976, but it is much harder to blame Pabloism for the political failures and ineffectiveness of revolutionary socialism for the past 50 years. [Note by J-KT: "Pabloism" is a political tendency within post-World War II Trotskyism, of which there are as many definitions as there have been Trotskyist organizations which have defined themselves, at one time or another, as "anti-Pabloite".]

In recent years the LRP felt the need to abandon its 40+ year programmatic position of rejecting support for voting for any capitalist party in elections. But this raises the question: If such a mistake can go unnoticed and uncriticized by any comrade for 40 years, how many other such mistakes may still lie lurking in the LRP / Leninist political program, which will only eventually be noticed and criticized when some other new traumatic political event (such as Trump's rise to power) forces a reexamination and reconsideration?

A Leninist political program is inarguably and undoubtedly effective in accomplishing at least one type of goal: maintaining the internal organizational functioning of the Leninist group itself through Leninist political discipline of the comrades of the group. But such a goal is only worthwhile, if the end result of the group's political activity has a significant positive and successful impact on the outside world, on major political events on a grand scale. Meanwhile, such internal discipline does not come without its own personal costs in myriad ways. Example: I am afraid that a certain person's very sad recent descent into an openly Zionist pro-Israel view may not be unrelated to the personal toll of many years of the physical and mental stresses of carrying out all of the tasks mandated by the political discipline of a Leninist group.

I'm sorry to say, after expressing all of those comments, that I don't have any good answers or solutions. Sure, I could point to some "gentler" group such as Peter Hudis and Kevin Anderson's International Marxist-Humanist Organization (IMHO), but I cannot pretend to believe that it is likely that such a group has found the answer to the problem of the right form of socialist organization either.

Everything worked out perfectly for Lenin's Bolshevik Party: The timing of its founding was such that it had just enough time, a couple decades, to build an effective organization in preparation for the revolutionary events of 1917, but not too many decades, such that it would suffer internal political and organizational decay, as every Leninist tendency apparently has over the course of the past 100 years. Lenin himself was well aware of his own very good fortune in this respect. But he also did not have to contend with well-organized groups of "socialists" run by thugs (i.e., Stalinists) within the Russian social-democratic movement in the 1890s, 1900s, or in 1917 itself. Yes, the Bolsheviks had political opponents within the socialist movement, but nothing like the Stalinist groups who have emerged over the past 100 years.

Again, I did not write all of this in order to arrive at any kind of brilliant answer or solution to the problems that I have described. I do not have any answer or solution of my own. I share these comments simply as some food for thought for any comrades who are interested in reconsidering what is still valid and what may not be valid in the LRP / Leninist political program, including Leninism itself.

To which I replied:

Your letter is well-written and approximates where I was in my thinking approximately 3-6 years ago, 2017-2020.

My turn toward anarchism over the last three years has been gradual but ultimately decisive, and coincides--not coincidentally--with my coming out as trans. My initial coming-out blog post contains a veiled critique of the LRP. Frankly, my situation is a much better illustration of the personal toll argument that you make than the one you gave. The fact that, for years after that Convention, I remained convinced that I could not explore my gender identity without breaking "discipline" (and then the hangover after that, no longer under the LRP's organizational discipline but having internalized enough transphobia that I believed that I could not be politically effective in the way I wanted to be without staying in the closet), is a lasting indictment of it. I don't disclaim responsibility for my own suffering. I made the choices I made, based on my own understandings of Leninism, and based on considerations that were not at all political (e.g. the fear of what would happen to my marriage). But I learned those understandings from the members of the LRP's Central Committee, and Sy Landy is the only one of those whom I am prepared to alibi at all (and only because of his age at the time and the fact that he is now dead).

I am not as convinced as you are that the LRP's turn on the electoral question was right, i.e., that their old arguments against it were wrong. But it is quite clear that their analyses of "the Gay question" (and all the other questions they swept under that rug) were wrong. Having been better than the Spartacists in the 1970s is a positive historical point, but one of limited utility.

That crack having been made by circumstance, I was able over time to question other things. At some point recently, I think 2021, I finally actually read Paul Avrich's history of the Kronstadt rebellion. One can read it without accepting the latter-day anarchist mythology that the rebellion's success would have opened up Soviet democracy. There's clear evidence actually of there having been substantial antisemitism in the 1921 peasant revolts, of which Kronstadt was a symptom. Even passing familiarity with Russian history renders this unsurprising. But the details of how the revolt was put down, in connection with the 10th Party Congress, show pretty clearly that the seeds of Thermidorean reaction were present not only in the dominant apparatus but in its contemporaneous oppositions ("Workers Opposition") and the oppositionists yet to come (Trotsky). Inasmuch as historical events fit into dramaturgical conventions, Kronstadt fits the definition of a "tragedy". All actors were doomed.

So much then for Leninism and Trotskyism. More recently--and this is the topic of what I wrote in the Anarchist Review of Books--the arguments of The Dawn of Everything call into doubt some central pillars of Marxism. (Along the way, a lot of classical anarchist literature, e.g. Kropotkin, also gets pulled down.) I don't think it's accidental that what did it was something David Graeber did with a co-author. I find most of Graeber's writing annoyingly snide and sectarian toward Marxism, in ways that prevented me from appreciating moments when he might have had a point. Wengrow seems to have reigned in some of his co-author's worst rhetorical tics. The book as a whole is a masterpiece.

The net effect is, I am no longer looking for a theory of everything. On a practical level, also, I am less interested in politics of the spectacle (which is often what the demand to take a stand on Palestine boils down to) than in the politics of trying, as a member of a marginalized minority grouping facing the end stages of capitalist decay, to collaboratively survive.

To which G. replied with a further letter asking this question: 'You mention “the politics of trying, as a member of a marginalized minority grouping....” I cannot directly relate to this political priority of yours, because I am a cis hetero middle-aged white male native-born US citizen from a middle-class background. I cannot claim to belong to any oppressed group in any way. Does this mean, according to your views, that I cannot possibly have the same political perspective or views that you do?' The following was my reply:

I think it's more a matter of praxis than of theory. For me part of setting aside Leninism--and particularly the variant of it that we learned in the LRP--was a diminution of the importance of theoretical (or, to use the term Sy preferred, methodological) agreement in favor of the importance of practical coordination. In simplified form, it doesn't matter if we agree precisely on what is the case so long as we are able to coordinate on what is to be done (ha!) about it.

From a practical perspective the differences of what postmodern feminist theorists would call "positionality" are important, because they condition what it is realistic for a person or a grouping to do. For example: I am always going to default into suspicion that cisgender people will not immediately understand why a particular issue that arises is a threat to me as a transgender person. This suspicion is based on personal experience both pre-dating and post-dating my coming out. It's not a foregone conclusion that particular persons or groups will not be able to overcome this suspicion. It's just that, until they do, I will be cautious about how I collaborate with them around certain issues.

In his more democratic moments this is hardly a line of thought that's extraneous to Lenin. It shows up most saliently in his writings on the national question, when he differentiates between the responsibilities of socialists in oppressor and oppressed peoples. (A shame that the actual practice of the Bolsheviks with regard to non-Russian nationalities and peoples in the period 1917-1921 often fell so far short of that theoretical argument, but that's a historical question.) While I am using "postmodernist" language to express it, it's hardly incompatible with a materialist understanding of class such as would be associated with Marxism.

For me the question of the relative importance of class as a means toward achieving a kind of transcendent unity of practice is a matter of political prognosis rather than metaphysical theory. If, as I have been arguing for almost 10 years now, climate change imposes a limited (but not precisely calculable) time horizon for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, as opposed to its decay into new unforeseen types of barbarism, then a politics which takes proletarian unity as its aim has to have a plausible strategy for achieving that unity within a limited time, not the indefinite by-and-by. I am skeptical of that: I am aware of no one who has even articulated such a strategy, let alone is putting it into practice. (My son, bless his heart, is sometimes more optimistic. I remember what it was like to be 16.)

So if my political goal is no longer "the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system achieved through the practical unity of the international proletariat," but "the survival of myself and people I care most passionately about despite the likely further degeneration of the world into new forms of barbarism," then smaller units of solidarity that are achievable within a given time horizon take precedence. These need not be identity-based. It could be a matter of unionizing one's workplace (or building counterhegemonic alternatives to the union bureaucracy in workplaces that are already unionized), mutual aid projects with one's near neighbors, etc.

G. is happy to see this correspondence posted here, because he believes it is beneficial for himself, for myself, and indeed for current and former supporters of the LRP as well as for the LRP itself. G. would also like to make it clear to all readers that his participation in this correspondence does not necessarily imply his endorsement of or agreement with other statements and views expressed in other posts on this blog about the LRP and its current and former leaders and other supporters.

Revised Notes on How to Get in Touch With Me

I gave up on Mastodon, but you can find me on Bluesky (bsky.app) as @raconteuse.

The fact that I am more consistently referring to myself in public as Joseph-Kass, or just Kass for short when in person, and the fact that my handle, while still French, takes a feminine ending, has implications that are consistent with my overall sense of identity.

Notes on How to Get in Touch with Me

If I don't blog often these days, it is partially because I microblog too much. My preferred locus for that latter mode of expression, Twitter, has however been getting less and less congenial.

If you would like to discuss a publishing opportunity, either for my own writing or for my translations of Der Nister, you are welcome to reach out to me at first-name-dot-last-name-at-Google's-commercial-email-utility. For the purposes of email, just the first, given part of my name (Joseph) is needed; my recent chosen hyphenated addition (-Kass) does not appear in that address.

If you would like to see my microblogging, and for whatever reason can't find much on the aforementioned website beginning with a T, you can check me out as @epateur@mastodon.lol.

Citational Politics

Let's get the positivity out of the way: I loved Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed. There is a different, related essay (perhaps a book?) to be written about what it is like to be a "feminist killjoy" when one's femininity is not universally recognized, when it runs orthogonal to the assignations that have been put on a person. But that is not the essay I have time for.

What strikes me as a weak point of the book is Ahmed's "citational policy" of not quoting white men. It ends up undermining her argument in two key ways that I could identify, one through what it ended up including, and another for what it ended up omitting. First the inclusion problem:

Chapter 9 of the book represents an effort on Ahmed's part to make a case for the importance of a specifically lesbian feminism, which she ends up defining as a feminism in which women relate to one another without the mediation of relationships to men. Let us leave aside, for the moment, the fraught question of whether it is even possible to fully exclude such mediations. There is a more immediate philological challenge in that, historically, manifestations of a specifically lesbian feminism have functioned as fertile soil for the trans-exclusionary ideologies which Ahmed, in this chapter, elsewhere in the book, and elsewhere in her writings, so vociferously and accurately rejects. The result is a performative contradiction that is only evident to a reader with some measure of archival knowledge. This contradiction becomes most evident on page 227, where Ahmed writes,

You have to wrap life around being. I would suggest that it is transfeminism today that most recalls the militant spirit of lesbian feminism in part because of the insistence that crafting a life is political work. Transfeminist manifestos carry the baton of carry the baton of lesbian feminist manifestos such as "Woman Identified Woman": from Sandy Stone's (2006) "The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto" to Julia Serano's (2007) "Trans Woman Manifesto" and Susan Stryker's (1994) "My Words to Victor Frankenstein".

It is wonderful that she has cited trans women such as Sandy Stone, Julia Serano, and Susan Stryker, though each of these manifestos has a slightly different perspective on how best to "wrap life around being," how the crafting of a life politicizes. As a transfeminist myself, I find myself most sympathetic to the positions articulated by Stone. But what is strange, and not so wonderful, is that each of these writings is compared to an older (1970) document which Ahmed has already praised, without acknowledging the historical fact that the collective which authored "Woman Identified Woman," Radicalesbians, was explicitly trans-exclusionary.

It is not enough, then, to cite people's writings. When those writings are artefacts of material struggles in which the authors of certain writings opposed, oppressed, and negated the authors of others, then what does it mean to say that the latter carries on the "militant spirit" of the former? Is the militant hovering unseen over the entryway to the feminist bookshop, waiting to see who will gain admittance to a controversial event? Such passivity seems quite the opposite of militancy.

It would have been better, not simply to praise WIW for the things that it says that Ahmed finds congenial, but to recognize which of its formulations were quite compatible with an exclusionary approach to womanhood that Ahmed finds repellent. It is not enough to praise Stone, Serano, and Stryker for their militancy, but to highlight specific points on which they have advanced feminism, by way of transfeminism, beyond what could be achieved by Radicalesbians. As Ahmed herself writes in the "Feminist Killjoy Manifesto" conclusion to the book, "I am not willing to be included if inclusion means being included in a system that is unjust, violent, and unequal." At that point on page 227, the inclusion of transfeminists within lesbian feminism comes across--again, only to those with archival knowledge--as inclusion in something unjust, unequal, and even on occasion, violent.

The second problem I identified is the problem of omission. Again, this depends on archival knowledge. Ahmed is, methodologically, a phenomenologist. Some phenomenologists have been explicitly feminist (e.g. de Beauvoir) or anti-oppression (Fanon), others arguably recuperable (Judith Butler might make the case for Sartre; I would make my case for Merleau-Ponty), and still others appalling (most notably, Heidegger). Because of her previously stated citational policy, only Beauvoir and Fanon are cited, but that does not mean that the concepts developed by the others are wholly absent from the book. In particular, I was struck by how frequently she used the phrase "being thrown". Because I have read Being and Time, I could not help but hear resonances of Heidegger and Geworfenheit. So though I could recognize both similarities and differences in how she uses the phrase, in how she derives it from life. The notion of "wrapping life around being" is a wonderful hint at how distant Ahmed's political vision is from Heidegger's, he who would crush life under the ponderous imponderable Seinsfrage. But because she never cites him, she never makes precise what her differences are.

Resonances occur independently of the will of the speaker. As I modulate my voice through a series of pitch changes, sometimes it will hit a low point, and a listener who is predisposed to perceive me as a man will hear that rumble, the way a particular frequency of air motion makes the material of the ear drum resonate, with a cruel "A-ha!" I want to hear Ahmed's Heideggerian resonances as either accidental or parodic, critical, showing how being thrown--far from being an ineluctable trait of Dasein--is something that certain existences experience more often than others when they encounter forces that negate their lives and being. But because she never makes this explicit, there is too much space, in the blank white spaces of the book, to enable a reader who is differently disposed to attempt to abuse Ahmed's phenomenology in elements of a recuperative reading of Heidegger.

Policy and politics are both derived from the same root, the polis. But they have very different significations. In practice, policy is something that is used by institutions of power to try and avoid politics, to put certain ways of doing things beyond dispute, to depoliticize. "That's just how we do things around here, it's policy." Ahmed acknowledges that her citational policy is a blunt instrument. In both these cases, the blunt instrument ended up, perhaps contrary to Ahmed's intentions, depoliticizing the citations in their presence and absence--including some, excluding others, but not making explicit what is at stake in the inclusions and exclusions, and how the mere fact of inclusion is not necessarily an index of agreement or even agreeability.

By making this the entire topic of the blog post, I fear I may have created the impression that I think this is a bad book. On the contrary, it is a very good and necessary one. With the exception of the awkwardness of Chapter 9, and occasional dissonant resonances involving the word "thrown," I found many more moments of shared killjoy experience. That this is all I have to say in criticism of it stands as high praise.

Undying Admiration

Before Anne Boyer deleted her Twitter account, she was my favorite mutual. We never met in person, but I admired her poems, and one of our interchanges on there contributed some inspiration and ideas that found their way into my story "Ruins of a Future Empire". However I hesitated to read her breakout success book, The Undying, as it seemed voyeuristic for a "man", as I still believed myself to be, to seek out a book about breast cancer.

As it happens, though, we are all implicated in breast cancer. My mother-in-law had it, and as she stubbornly works herself to exhaustion caring for my father-in-law, who is currently much more ill, my greatest fear is not that he becomes more ill, but that she has a recurrence, and suddenly worsens to a point where she can no longer insist on their capacity to manage on their own. Because my mother-in-law has had it, and because my partner inherited "dense breast tissue" down her matrilineal line, my partner is classified as being of greater risk, and gets imaged regularly. She recently had a scare. It turned out to be artefactual, a flicker of the ultrasound machine misunderstanding itself.

And the time will come, soon enough, for me to join the diagnostic parade. According to a presentation I attended on trans health, for trans women and nonbinary people who had previously been assigned male, the risks of breast cancer appear to reach parity with cisgender women's risks after about five years of HRT. Assuming that I remain on HRT for at least five years--and I have every intention of remaining on HRT--then I should get mammography at the same ages as women of my risk category. Fortunately, I am aware of no breast cancer history in my family, so it would not begin until 50. At the age of 50, my nonbinary gender identity will receive a peculiar sort of confirmation through the androgyny of my routine examinations: A doctor will examine my prostate, and then write a radiology prescription for me to get my tits smashed in between glass plates.

So I have read The Undying, now, and I would urge everyone to. As Anne points out, anyone with breast tissue--including men--can get breast cancer. And we all live in the capitalist carcigenosphere that she describes as no one else has or can.

This post is not so much about Anne Boyer or about The Undying, though, as it is about my own very peculiar experience of reading it. That is, imagining the possibility that the A cups which I waited so long to pursue, that I am so glad to have grown, that fill me with joy whenever they are caressed lovingly by my partner, that they could someday betray me. Having delayed my transition for so long, I want to live, if for no other reason than to have the duration of my joys outlast that of my self-suppression. If continuation of life should at some point require the sacrifice of the portion of my body that most readily symbolizes the reality of my transition, it would still be worth it, but the irony would be agonizing.

A Note about the Palestinian General Strike

This post takes some scattered comments made recently in various formats on social media and attempts to synthesize them into something resembling a coherent argument. I should begin with a necessary disclaimer: It has been a decade since I made a point of routinely keeping up to date on Israel's social statistics and political events. I no longer pretend to be a researcher on Israeli society and the role therein of Palestinian workers. So this post will not contain any detailed quantitative analyses, nor will it attempt to provide a meticulously documented overview of various contending forces and trends within Israeli society. However, though my attention to Israel has waned over the last 10 years, compared to the period before, I remain interested, as a Jew who unconditionally supports the rights of the Palestinian people and therefore politically opposes the State of Israel and the Zionist movement. And the fact that I can read Hebrew sometimes gives me access to information that other such casual observers may have missed.

Many observers, both internationally and within Israel, were surprised at the impact of this Monday's Palestinian general strike on the Israeli economy, which hit sectors such as construction and food production and delivery particularly hard. They should not have been, though one can understand where the misperception of reality and the resulting surprise came from. Many people--myself included--have at times overstated the degree to which Palestinian workers have been excluded from participation in the economy, which is overwhelmingly controlled by Israeli employers in portions of the land under the direct military control of Israel. Palestinians suffer greatly from this exclusion, and therefore it is important to emphasize it, but one runs the risk thereby of overemphasizing it. Thus, for example, I once wrote something characterizing the response of the Israeli state and capital to the last time that Palestinians made extensive use of the strike, the first Intifada, as a "general lockout," in which the State sped up Jewish immigration from Ethiopia and the ex-USSR, while capital shoved the new migrants into the types of jobs that had hitherto been stigmatized as avodah aravit (Arab work). This was accurate, but only for a limited span of time. Thanks to the internationalization of racial-caste barriers the Ethiopian Jews are still largely stuck at that economic stratum, but most of the "Russians" have moved on. Internationally, Israel is running out of marginalized communities of Jews which it can import and exploit.

This is a problem, then, both for the Israeli state and for Israeli capital. Through dispossession of Palestinians, Israeli capital took possession, with the state as an active intermediary, of land and natural resources which were preconditions to accumulation. However land and resources are merely necessary conditions to accumulation, not sufficient. Capital requires labor, and it accumulates especially rapidly when the labor force is sharply segmented and therefore politically weakened in its resistance to accumulation. The degree and modality of this segmentation varies according to historical conditions. Israel is part of the subtype of colonial-settler states and societies. There is, however, no pure, Platonic form of colonial-settler society, and Israel is a particularly messy blend. At one end of the spectrum, one finds societies such as North America and Australia, where the native population is so thoroughly subordinated, so extensively expelled and destroyed, that the survivors of the resulting genocide can play only a relatively small role in the composition of the labor force. The extent to which the working-class of the settler population can be exploited is limited therefore by the material concessions which capital has to make in order to assure that they place their loyalty to the "white race" ahead of their loyalty to the international working class. These concessions did measurably slow the accumulation of capital in Canada and Australia at key moments in history, relative to their imperialist peers. It was less of a brake on the accumulation of capital in the U.S., for two reasons: First, the existence of an enslaved portion of the proletariat, and its demographic and temporal extension through the enforcement of a racial-caste barrier against all Black Americans, enslaved or free, which provided a model for the prolongation of superexploitation following slavery's formal abolition. Then secondly, in part through the operationalization of the racial-caste boundary, the staged and partial admittance of immigrant groups into the contingent and limited benefits of whiteness. The history of immigration and the formation of the U.S. working class is the history of the successive (but sometimes partial or revocable) admission of meticulously defined and re-defined groupings into hegemonic whiteness.

At the other extreme, we find the Apartheid model, exemplified, but never exclusive to, South Africa in the period from 1948-1994. That is, a state in which the native population is classified, segregated, and subjected to innumerable restrictions on where and how they may work, live, and even die and be laid to rest. Every colonial-settler society is, potentially and in reality, at certain moments of its history, an Apartheid state, even in the historical epoch before the Afrikaans word was coined and disseminated world-wide. For example, it can be argued that colonial society in what is now the United States pioneered Apartheid well before that name, with the establishment first of all of a category of hereditary chattel slavery to which laborers both of indigenous and African descent were subjected. It was only after indigenous labor was, in most areas of the emergent polity, genocidally destroyed that the mark of hereditary chattel slavery came to be confounded with the racial-caste mark of Blackness. Through the subsequent elaboration of an global discourse of "race," the indigenous labor of Africa came into the circuits of world capital already branded by irons that had been forged for their enslaved cousins in the Americas.

With this historical understanding of the range of colonial-settler societies, it becomes possible to recognize the degree to which Israel, in its treatment of the indigenous Palestinian population, has heterogeneously mixed and matched elements from both the Apartheid model of settler-colonialism (segregate and exploit) and the American/Australian model (expel, expropriate and destroy). The dynamic tension between these models has enabled Israeli capital to accumulate over the last 73 years with almost unmatched rapidity. (The document in which I argue for this is about 10 years out of date, and I would likely want to revise some of its subordinate conclusions before publishing it, but I do have back-up for these assertions.) The current working class of historic Palestine is complexly and multiply segmented. The most important division has been and remains that between Jews, on the one hand, and Palestinians, on the other, which is at least partly comparable to the Black/white division in the United States, or the African/European division in South Africa. However within each of these two major groupings there are multiple subdivisions that are at least partially recognized and reinforced by state policy, along lines of "race," ethnicity, religion, migration status, and geography. In this respect it is also comparable to both the United States and South Africa, inasmuch as both those countries were always also complex, and complexified, in ways that have been expertly turned into modalities of power. As in these predecessors, however, the complexities ought not to obscure the stark moral difference between those who are oppressed and excluded, and those whose identity depends upon participation in the mechanisms of oppression and exclusion.

And there are also, it must be added, groups that do not fit into the core dichotomy. These groups have proliferated especially in the thirty years since the first Intifada. I refer here primarily to groups of non-Jewish migrants, who can be put to use by Israeli capital as a source of labor comparable to Palestinian workers' in their precarity, but without the risk to profits that arise whenever Palestinians attempt to assert and defend their rights as indigenous people.

There have been two major categories of such migrants. The first consists of refugees and asylum seekers, mostly from various parts of Subsaharan Africa. For these migrants, Israel is more a destination of convenience than a preferred destination, because, unlike EU member states (with the partial exception of Spain, with its colonial enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the coast of Morocco), Israel has a land border with an African country, Egypt. The second consists of economic migrants, who are usually employer-sponsored--in other words, guest workers--and who mostly from non-Muslim countries and ethnicities in South Asia and Southeast Asia. The first flow is irregular and subject to militarized interdiction by both Israeli and Egyptian state forces. It was not even possible until after the return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egyptian control under the Camp David Accords and the Taba Agreement of 1989 (which coincided, helpfully for Israel, with the beginning of the subsidence of the first Intifada). The second flow is subject to tight bureaucratic supervision. This is not to say that migrants who enter via this route do not sometimes remain in irregular visa status, of course, as is the case with state-supervised economic migrants throughout the world. With both these groups of migrants--the refugees/asylum seekers and the guest workers--recruited for similar jobs to those available to Palestinian workers, there is of course some element of labor competition among these groups, and between these groups and Palestinians.

However, the same fact that keeps Palestinians in "48" (the original boundaries of the State of Israel) in a subordinate social position despite their Israeli citizenship, and that utterly dispossesses the Palestinians in "67" (Gaza & the West Bank)--namely, the avowedly "Jewish" nature of the state--also keeps both these categories of migrants in a very precarious position.

Let us consider, for example, how difficult it would be for a migrant to marry an Israeli citizen, either for love or for convenience. There is no civil marriage in Israel, due to a political power-sharing agreement with the Orthodox Jewish Rabbinate dating back to 1948, under David Ben-Gurion. Marriage must therefore be carried out by a state-recognized officiant of a state-recognized religion--Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or Druze. Each of these religions have limitations or prohibitions on marriage to someone of another religion. And perhaps the most stringest such prohibitions are those observed by the Jewish authorities in Israel. I don't know the details of what it would take for a migrant to marry an Israeli citizen of Christian, Muslim, or Druze faith, but I do know this: None of those marriages will qualify that migrant for permanent residency or citizenship in Israel. They will remain precarious. To become a citizen, only marriage to a Jew will do, and that is only possible following a conversion to Judaism that has been administered according to Jewish law in its most stringently Orthodox interpretation, as rendered by the Rabbinate. This sort of conversion is no easy matter.

Ironically, the traditional difficulty of conversion to Judaism evolved, not as an exercise in ethnoreligious chauvinism in service to a powerful state, but as a method of Jewish communal self-defense over centuries in "exile." So long as most Jews lived in the power of state authorities that were avowedly Christian or Muslim, and those authorities defined "apostasy" (e.g. conversion to Judaism) as a crime, any desire of non-Jews to become Jews was implicitly dangerous for the community as a whole. To reassure state authorities that Judaism was not a proselytizing religion, a whole host of restrictions proliferated--based of course on Talmudic precedent, but driven largely by matters of political convenience. Since "Jewish Emancipation" (dating, in North America, largely to the American Revolution), and in Europe, to the French Revolution and the partial spread of its juridical accomplishments through the Napoleonic conquests), there have been debates among Jews about whether such stringency is even needed any more. The Reform and Conservative movements have loosened up significantly. But remember, Reform and Conservative Judaism have little legal standing in Israel.

Consider the case of the Lemba people. They are an ethnic group found in parts of Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique, and Malawi, who have traditions claiming patrilineal descent from Jews. Because Orthodox Judaism, and therefore Israel's immigration laws, does not recognize the validity of patrilineal descent, a group of Lemba who had formally converted to Judaism petitioned recently for permission to migrate to Israel. They were denied, however, because their conversion had been performed by a Conservative Rabbi. That stated, the authority of the Rabbinate is not absolute, due to the complexity of the power-sharing agreement with the state and the so-called "Law of Return". There have been other groups of migrants to Israel whose Jewishness, by the terms set by the Orthodox Rabbinate, was dubious--e.g. many former Soviet Jews--but for whom the State found ways of bringing them in as citizens. Comparing the Lemba to the cases of Soviet Jews, some of whom only had patrilineal descent--and some of whom were even practicing Christians!--suggests strongly that Anti-Blackness is a factor in their treatment.

That stated, if this happens with a coherent grouping of people with cultural traditions linking them to Judaism, imagine then how much more difficult it would be for individual migrants, of African or Asian origins, to become Jews, either sincerely or for opportunistic reasons. The traditional religious restrictions on conversion, therefore, serve the Israeli state and Israeli capital, then, as a means of conserving and enforcing the precarity of migrant workers. Therefore, while migrants are in daily competition with Palestinian workers for labor and pay, both groups are oppressed by the same mechanisms of chauvinist exclusion. Another glaring example on this point: It is commonplace, on the part of Netanyahu, other right-wing Israeli politicians, and the media, to refer to refugees and asylum seekers from Africa as "infiltrators". The same Hebrew word, mistanenim, was used after 1948 to refer to Palestinian refugees who attempted to cross the "Green Line" armistice border, in most cases for reasons as innocuous as trying to return home or trying to tend the crops they had planted.

This chauvinist maltreatment, which treats all non-Jews a priori as "infiltrators" is not qualitatively different from what migrants face in most of the world's wealthy nations. But there are many ways in which migrant life in Israel is worse than in many other countries, and migrants have a grapevine of sorts.

Meanwhile, among the Jews of Israel, the Orthodox population is growing faster than the population as a whole. If there was ever a window of opportunity for undoing Ben Gurion's compromise with the Rabbinate, it closed long ago. Thus, so as long as Israel defines itself exclusively and primarily as a Jewish state, the Rabbinate's hold on matters such as marriage & migration is irrevocable. Thus migrant workers, Palestinians of all classes, and any Israeli Jew who chafes under the ingrained conservatism and violence of their society, has grounds to be opposed the Zionist (Jewish-chauvinist) nature of the State of Israel.

The comparative unpopularity of Israel as a destination country, and its internal political reasons for making itself hostile to migrants, means that migrants will never fully supplant Palestinian workers' important economic role. And this is a source of hope, because it means that Palestinian workers still have a great deal of power that has yet to be fully unleashed against the Israeli state and capital, as was shown by the one-day general strike earlier this week. I will not end this essay by pretending to have the answers to how that power can be unleashed or what those workers should fight for. But I don't see anything compatible with human dignity short of a single, democratic state, from the river to the sea. (I'd prefer no state at all, anywhere, but that's my inner Emma Goldman speaking.)