Mike Marqusee, author of If I Am Not For Myself: a Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew. Photograph: Felix Clay'The first time I was called a self-hating Jew
It was America in the 1960s, and his parents were civil rights activists who encouraged their children to speak their minds. Until, aged 14, Mike Marqusee criticised Israel. In this extract from his new book, he recalls his father's fury
The first person to call me a self-hating Jew was my father. It was in the autumn of 1967. Dad was 39, a successful businessman who was also, along with my mother, active in the US civil rights and anti-war movements. I was the oldest of his five children and had already, at age 14, intoxicated by the ideals of justice and equality, begun my career as a footsoldier of the left. It was not only the first time I had been called a self-hating Jew, it was the first time the phrase, the idea, entered my consciousness, and it was a shock.
As a young man, against the family grain, my father had taken an interest in social and especially racial justice and at college was drawn to the Communist party, which is how he met my mother, who was the product of a very different strand of the New York Jewish tapestry. This was in the heyday of anti-communist hysteria, of which my parents were first victims, then accomplices. After giving a speech against the Korean war at a student conference in Prague in 1950, dad was denounced as a traitor. His passport was seized. His father told the press that if his son had said such things, he was no son of his. It was in this period, I think, that he came to rely implicitly on my mother, the girlfriend who stood by his side when his life seemed most precarious.
They were married in 1952 and a year later I was born. Shortly after that, the FBI came knocking on the door. After months of pressure, from his own family as much as from the repressive organs of the state, my father, with my mother by his side, just as before, agreed to name names. "To this day we regret the mutual decision we made," my mother wrote. "It has been a source of incredible pain and shame." When my father, 45 years after the event, lay dying, sapped by chronic pain and humiliating dependence, he went over it yet again, as he had with me many times. "I fucked it up," he moaned. There was no absolution anyone could give him. All the other contributions he had made seemed outweighed by this ineradicable betrayal.
In the early 60s, having a wife and five kids, a big suburban home and a blossoming career as a real estate developer, was not enough, and he and my mother threw themselves into the struggle in the American south, raising money, organising meetings, sheltering young activists, supporting boycotts and pickets. In 1964, my dad went to Mississippi to deliver supplies to the beleaguered grassroots movement. It was a frightening time: they were now killing whites as well as blacks. Years later I learned that my mother was furious with my father over this adventure. She told him he was trying to compensate for his earlier sin, that he had no right to put his life at risk, to put this need for redemption above his obligation to his children. But in my eyes, the Mississippi visit, followed by his participation in the Selma march for voting rights in Alabama a year later, made my father a hero, along with the other heroes of the movement, which for me in those days included everyone from Martin Luther King to Stokely Carmichael.'
The first person to call me a self-hating Jew was my father. It was in the autumn of 1967. Dad was 39, a successful businessman who was also, along with my mother, active in the US civil rights and anti-war movements. I was the oldest of his five children and had already, at age 14, intoxicated by the ideals of justice and equality, begun my career as a footsoldier of the left. It was not only the first time I had been called a self-hating Jew, it was the first time the phrase, the idea, entered my consciousness, and it was a shock.
As a young man, against the family grain, my father had taken an interest in social and especially racial justice and at college was drawn to the Communist party, which is how he met my mother, who was the product of a very different strand of the New York Jewish tapestry. This was in the heyday of anti-communist hysteria, of which my parents were first victims, then accomplices. After giving a speech against the Korean war at a student conference in Prague in 1950, dad was denounced as a traitor. His passport was seized. His father told the press that if his son had said such things, he was no son of his. It was in this period, I think, that he came to rely implicitly on my mother, the girlfriend who stood by his side when his life seemed most precarious.
They were married in 1952 and a year later I was born. Shortly after that, the FBI came knocking on the door. After months of pressure, from his own family as much as from the repressive organs of the state, my father, with my mother by his side, just as before, agreed to name names. "To this day we regret the mutual decision we made," my mother wrote. "It has been a source of incredible pain and shame." When my father, 45 years after the event, lay dying, sapped by chronic pain and humiliating dependence, he went over it yet again, as he had with me many times. "I fucked it up," he moaned. There was no absolution anyone could give him. All the other contributions he had made seemed outweighed by this ineradicable betrayal.
In the early 60s, having a wife and five kids, a big suburban home and a blossoming career as a real estate developer, was not enough, and he and my mother threw themselves into the struggle in the American south, raising money, organising meetings, sheltering young activists, supporting boycotts and pickets. In 1964, my dad went to Mississippi to deliver supplies to the beleaguered grassroots movement. It was a frightening time: they were now killing whites as well as blacks. Years later I learned that my mother was furious with my father over this adventure. She told him he was trying to compensate for his earlier sin, that he had no right to put his life at risk, to put this need for redemption above his obligation to his children. But in my eyes, the Mississippi visit, followed by his participation in the Selma march for voting rights in Alabama a year later, made my father a hero, along with the other heroes of the movement, which for me in those days included everyone from Martin Luther King to Stokely Carmichael.'
1 opmerking:
Today, as cracks show in the presumed monolith of Jewish backing for Israel, increasing numbers of Jews are interrogating and rejecting Zionism. Nonetheless, the existence of anti-Zionist Jews strikes many people - Jews and non-Jews - as an anomaly, a perversity, a violation of the first clause in the ethical aphorism of Hillel, the first-century rabbi and doyenne of Jewish teachings: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?"
Dat maken de (religieuze) zionisten er misschien van, maar dat is op zichzelf al een pervertering van dit aforisme. Het luidt volledig:
Als ik niet voor mijzelf ben, wie is voor mij?
Maar als ik voor mijzelf ben, wat ben ik?
En zoniet nu, wanneer dan?
Niet erg eendimensionaal dus, deze uitspraak van onze vriend Hillel (eerste eeuw voor/na Chr.).
Aan wie natuurlijk ook, net als aan Jezus, wordt toegeschreven het "Wat gij niet wilt dat u geschiedt.."
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