Chasing Justice/Seeking Truth:or It's Just Not That Safe Anymore

(c) Aaron Davidman
A work-in-progress

Projection: Part I. Idealism

My father's early years as a young gangster on the streets of Brooklyn, hustling pool halls and chasing girls, ended abruptly one July afternoon in 1944 when his father, a Yiddish teacher, offered to send him to a Jewish summer camp in upstate New York. Camp Kinderland was built on the ideals of Socialism and there my father met Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and other notable activists, poets and artists who passed through this free-thinking and politically righteous summer retreat. 

Years later, I was sent to this camp. The cabins were now named after progressive individuals who helped shape American history: Harriet Tubman; Emma Lazaras; Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. We learned about the civil rights movement.  We played sports and had cook-outs and chased girls too. But that's not what left a lasting impression on my conscience. Here's what did: We held a camp-wide ritual in August to commemorate the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: hundreds of children dressed in white, walking in silence, in the early morning quiet before breakfast, down to the lake to release paper cranes into the water. The humanity of this act was breath-taking. And while this Jewish camp was in no way religious--no prayers, no bibles, no Torah study--those precious little paper cranes so meticulously folded in arts-and-crafts the day before and now placed into the water by so many sweet little hands had to be a prayer to a God that had to be listening. I was sure of it. And we thought about the obliteration of so many innocent souls on that day that won the war against fascism and the tyranny of Hilter's Final Solution at the same time as sending us plummeting, blood on our hands, into the nuclear age. 

My father's friends stayed close even as they outgrew camp and spread out across the country with families of their own. They grew up to be teachers and social workers. There were no synagogues, no Sabbath meals, no prayers in Hebrew or talks about Torah. But there was caring. And there was mistrust of government. And there was a love of learning. And there was something called conscience.  And there was an obligation to make the world a better place. There was an obligation not to accept things as they are, but rather to look at the world as it might be, as it should be. Looking at the world in an ideal way uses one of the most important muscles given to the human mind; a muscle whose strength has proven its centrality in the cultures of all humanity throughout time: this muscle is called Imagination. And imagining has always been a central practice in Jewish life. It is with imagination, whether we're religious or not, that we approach the central tenet of Judaism, tikkun olam: the mending or the transformation of the world.      

Projection: What The Hell Is Going On?

In 2003 a 23 year-old woman named Rachel Corrie dies when she's run over by an Israeli military bulldozer in Gaza while acting as a human shield to protect Palestinian homes from being demolished, and a few years later some Brits make a play about her and it's well received in London and when they want to bring the play to New York there's a big controversy because the New York theatre that's going to produced it suddenly postpones it because they say times are sensitive for the Jewish community, because they say they need more time to prepare, but the Brits say the play is being cancelled and they're pissed and they cry “censorship!” and a famous British actress even weighs in calling it “an act of catastrophic cowardice” and the American theatre intelligentsia goes wild, it is censorship-it's not censorship--and accusations of a Jewish conspiracy to silence dissent quickly rise up from the underbelly of the American Left and those of us who are Jewish and theatre artists and who like to think of ourselves as progressive people who by-and-large don't think too kindly of military bulldozers that run over non-violent activists and who tend to think that young writers who happened to have been killed while standing up for what they believe in should, at least, have the chance to have their material heard by the public even if their words might be controversial and probably especially because they are controversial, in other words, those of us who align ourselves on the Jewish Left, for lack of a better categorization, we stand on the sidelines of this explosive debate and watch in horror as if a slow-motion train-wreck were on a video loop above us as we're strapped into the dentist chair having a root canal. 

And, it just so happens, that in the same month that the play My Name is Rachel Corrie premieres in London, two cats, one a professor from the University of Chicago and the other a professor from a little school called Harvard, publish a paper in which they argue that there is an inappropriate amount of influence upon the US government from what they call the Israel Lobby who have for the past several decades helped shape foreign policy decisions in the Middle East that have, in effect, compromised the security interests of the United States. Furthermore, they assert that this Lobby, made up primarily of Jewish organizations, bullies any voice that is critical of Israel, stifling our democratic process and manipulating the public conversation in favor of the policies of the Jewish state.

Then! I pick up a little book at my neighborhood book store by a fella named Jimmy Carter who's trying to grab our attention and get us to take a serious look at the disastrous situation in the West Bank and Gaza. And there are issues with this book, apparently, because it is reported that--providing further proof of the great Jewish conspiracy against dissent--a number of Jewish members of the board of directors of the Carter Foundation resign in protest of the book, and other prominent Jewish figures rip the book--some who read it before they rip it, some who rip it before they don't read it--but I did read it and will tell you, if you don't already know, that it warns of the current development of a system of…I'll say it, I'll say it, I'll say it, a system of-I will say it but I should first say that you might not know if I agree with it our not, because if you knew now if I agreed with it or not then you might try to write me off or write me in, sidle up next to me or push me away, jump up on the stage or run for the exits, and I've got a whole evening to take you through so when I do say it, at the moment, it's just by way of reporting…anyway, you know it already because it's in the title of the book, but former President Carter warns us of the current development of a system of apartheid in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

And, just for fun, all this hoop-la occurs during a period when Egyptian television airs a 30 part mini-series called Horseman Without A Horse, which focuses on exposing the “truth” of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the 19th Century fraudulent document from Russia which purports to be a Jewish plot to take over the world.

So on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War which sent the state of Israel and Jews world-wide into a drunken militaristic euphoria, the same 1967 War that marks the beginning of the corruptive and corrosive occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and which began the slow and steady deepening of the marriage between the United States and Israel, on the eve of this cheery and commemorative moment, these recent controversies, scandals, “outrages”-call them what you will, have stirred debate (or non-debate) in the Jewish community--depends on who you talk to-and one thing for certain is that they have generated a lot of tsuris…trouble…in me… and in my friend Ari Roth who, like me runs a Jewish theatre and has better things to do than daydream about this mishigas but who, nonetheless, like me, got caught up it in all because he cares about things like free speech and progressive values and he also cares about the insidious nature of discrimination for which Jews get an extra helping or two now-and-again, and he did some verbal wrestling on the sticky issues and some public theoretical jousting and even a little soul searching to try to wade his way through the morass of the moment, and then he had the bright idea to ask me to dig deep down into the soul of the American Jew and get up on this stage in front of you and reflect on WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!

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