Rachel Corrie

M.J. Rosenberg has a terrific piece on TPM about his alma mater Brandeis saying that Jimmy Carter can only speak there if he's balanced by Alan Dershowitz.

It is with real pain that I note that Brandeis is yielding to what amounts to an academic boycott of a former President for criticizing Israel.... We look like mini-Joe McCarthys and we are all being hurt by this...

Israelis themselves just laugh. How is it, they ask, that they can debate Israel-Palestine with absolute freedom but we Americans are afraid to...

Invite Carter to speak. Alone. Like any other speaker. Your students can handle it. Trust me. Trust them.

The Boston Herald reports that the Dershowitz act was dreamed up by Brandeis trustee Stuart Eizenstat, a former Carter adviser, along with Brandeis Prez Jehuda Reinharz. Just like when the New York Theatre Workshop decided it could only put on Rachel Corrie's show last spring if it was suitably "contextualized," with pro-Israel voices. These paroxysms speak to the same lesson: the Israel lobby isn't a control room in Washington, it's a general climate of fear about Israel's future that clouds the minds of goodthinking liberals who are empowered—with the ability to shut off debate. Even a former president lacks standing.

But watch out. The success of Carter's book, the contract to Walt/Mearsheimer, the Corrie run at the Minetta Lane, the Iraq Study Group's hail Mary to Syria—the world is changing.

The delayed, and most welcome, production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie, now at the Minetta Lane Theat  read more »

As I went downtown to see the play "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" last night, I read the Forward's coverage of Jimmy Carter's much-awaited book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Forthcoming from Simon & God bless them Schuster.. The article said that supporters of Israel are most upset by the characterization in the title, apartheid. That characterization used to upset me too, as being tendentious and emotional, till I went to Hebron last summer, the second largest city in the West Bank, where Arabs cannot set foot in large portions of the city center, and met a South African church worker who had lived through apartheid and who said that the conditions of the Israeli occupation were worse than apartheid. The people in the occupied territories have lived under Israeli administration for 40 years and had two elections in that time, yet we call Israel a democracy.

This is in the end the power of Rachel Corrie's words. I know people in the theater world, and so I have heard the rap against the play in the last few months. That it is a piece of polemics, not theater, and that as theater qua theater it is not that effective, too spare and one-note.  read more »

A side-note to Gur's excellent, news-making interview with Jonathan Tasini on Room Eight: It's kind of interesting that Tasini's views on Israel have remained below the radar until this point, even if he is a protest candidate. Here's a picture of him back in March addressing a memorial event for Rachel Corrie, the pro-Palestinian American activist who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer while protesting the demolition of a home in the Gaza Strip. The event was organized after the New York cancellation of a biographical play, "My Name is Rachel Corrie."

I don't know what Tasini said there, but the text accompanying this photo gallery describes the event this way:

"Declaring that the Sharon government could destroy her body but could never kill her spirit, people have stood up to those who would cave in to the new McCarthyism that attempts to stifle opposition and protest to the unjust policies of the U.S. and Israeli occupations."

-- Josh Benson

My most frequent commenter, a Mr. Anonymous, calls me a "Judenrat" for noting that Leonard Greene, the inventor who takes out ads against the killing of Muslims, is Jewish. Anon goes on:

What difference does it make what religion Leonard Greene is? In the name of fair reporting, why not report the religion of every person mentioned in every article about the Middle East—like Mearsheimer, Walt and Rachel Corrie? Maybe you can put a little yellow star next to the Jews, and a red one next to the ones with "Jewish sounding names".

Anonymous has a good point. Issues should be discussed on their merits. Whereas I'm being ad hominem, talking about the man. This is a hard one to think through. Some answers:  read more »

Garrett Eisler, at Playgoer, led the New York theater community in its uprising a few months back over the cancellation of the play "My Name Is Rachel Corrie." Today he offers a sharp interpretation of the news that the play will be staged at the Minetta Lane in October:

This seems a perfectly fitting venue. The Minetta Lane is a beautiful small space, it's in the Village, with a politically sympathetic audience built in, and which also attracts the kind of adventuresome tourists that made the play such a success on the West End. Seems like a good choice.

And so the guessing game is over. Who knows what took so long. Waiting on the Public and other high profile non-profits? They must have passed.... But all along, a commercial mounting has seemed the only way to go with this controversial piece of material. No funders, no grants, no board. Just a committed producing team who doesn't have to answer to anyone. Could it be that such a model is the last best bet for guarantees of free speech in the theatre?

The big question a commercial production raises, of course, is... what about that "context"? One thing that most distinguishes the experience of going to a commercial production as opposed to a company is the absence of any supporting materials or, usually, post-show talkbacks. Commercial producers are great believers in letting the play stand for itself because...it's cheaper! Non-profits may get special grants and funding to cover all the dramaturgy and events they do around a play. So it will be interesting to see if Hammerstein and Pariseau make any gesture toward contextualizing at all.

Dennis Nealon, a spokesman for Brandeis, tells me the school did take down the exhibit.

"The university had to make a decision. We were getting complaints from people that the exhibit was one-dimensional. There was no other context... It was as if someone was looking at this issue with one eye closed. People were upset and confused. Some people found the images distrubing. We had to make a decision."

Nealon says that the school hopes to mount the exhibit after all, some day, but with context.

This is, by the way, precisely what happened in the case of the Rachel Corrie play cancelled, or postponed, who knows, in February by the New York Theatre Workshop. It couldn't mount the show without more context, it said. It needed to palliate or balance Rachel Corrie's harsh words about the Occupation.

When will Americans be able to hear a differing point of view on the Israel/Palestine situation without having to explain those views away?

P.S. Lior Halperin tells me she won't let Brandeis have the show. "They took it down without asking me. I'm taking it away from this place."

I went home for Passover yesterday and felt guilty. I feel close to my family but little closeness to my tribe. I am less Jewish than I have ever been, and certain statements I have made in the last year, both out loud and in my head, about my problem with religion, about official Judaism countenancing the treatment of the Palestinians, seem to have dissolved some of the knots that held me close. Saying the words of the Passover seder, I did not feel the thrill I sometimes feel. I wondered, Who is this story for? Whose lives does it apply to? When we say, Next year in Jerusalem, what does it mean that Israel controls all of Jerusalem, with the holy sites so meaningful to so many different tribes? I was silenter than I've ever been at a seder. I pulled faces for my nephew, next to me, and made him laugh, but more often I felt suffocated by selfish Jewish concerns and troubled by the knowledge that I have broken not a faith, I don't know that I ever had much, but like a blood oath to a people.

There is a portion of the seder text that talks about how the different sons respond to the story. There is the wise son, the contrary son, the simple son and so forth, each of them talking to his dad. The point of this episode is that you are supposed to be the wise son, who asks of his father, Why did the Lord do this for me? The contrary son asks, Why did the Lord do this for you? Excluding himself. It struck me last night that I am the contary son. I might wish that it was otherwise, and indeed the seder text seems to suggest that a kid might choose. But I have made my choices and am now having to live with them. It's not that I regret them, but I do feel guilty and awful about some of the consequences. Yet I feel that in the Seder text there is even some room for the contrary son. He has his place. The father may be upset about it, but he has his place.  read more »

Noam Chomsky has, on Znet (at zmag.org), now joined the chorus criticizing the Walt-Mearsheimer article in LRB on the power of the Israel lobby. Chomsky gives the authors credit for debating a verboten subject, but says, It's the oil and corporate interests, stupid (that have dictated policy in the Mideast). It's typical of Chomsky, as a materialist, to say this. He has always missed the sociological component of this issue, and he's doing so now. Hitchens does the same thing on Slate (http://www.slate.com/id/2138741/) when he shrugs off the pro-Israel advisers in the Administration's war party as just a bunch of passionate Jewish neocons who happened to end up at Bush's elbow. What both men are missing is the transformation of the establishment in the last generation, the growing strength of Jews in our leadership class. I am part of this transformation, and it has largely been a great thing: reflection of diversity, openness and growing sophistication in educational and cultural values. The problem of the Jewish arrival in the leadership class is that we deny we've arrived. To say so goes against Jewish identity, as persecuted outsiders. Or it seems to echo anti-Semitic arguments the Nazis used about conspiratorial Jewish influence. But the result is that we completely fail to recognize our power, and fail, in certain respects, to exercise it responsibly. That failure is evident in the most questionable aspect of U.S. policy in the Middle East: the refusal by anyone in the Establishment to condemn Israel's near-40 year occupation of Arab lands. To his credit, Hitchens, a fellow traveler of the neocons, says as much in his Slate article.

Almost everybody also concedes that the Israeli occupation has been a moral and political catastrophe and has implicated the United States in a sordid and costly morass.

But such statements are rarely heard in the mainstream. Congressmen can't make them, at the risk of their careers. Artists can't make them--witness the censorship of the play My Name Is Rachel Corrie at a progressive New York theater. I know where it comes from. The refusal to condemn the occupation grows out of Jewish existential fears: the sense, born of the Holocaust, that at any minute we're going to be wiped off the map. Hey, we are powerless victims. But (at a time of the fifth largest army in the world and Ivy League presidents who stand up for it) this is an unrealistic fear, and meantime the effect of that fear, the refusal to acknowledge the occupation (the "so-called occupation," Congressman Elliot Engel said on BBC yesterday) means ignoring what most other states see plainly as an ongoing disaster. It's all well and good to condemn radical Islam and suicide bombers. As I do. But what about the religious/nationalist zealots who are colonizing the west bank? Mum's the word. It's like the Catholic hierarchy refusing to admit the church has a pedophilia problem. That is the real strength of the Israel lobby: taking this issue off the table in American public life, whether it's the Congress, The New York Times or the Washington thinktanks. It's not a conspiracy, it's simply the reflection of the fact that people who grew up loving Israel are now an important part of the establishment, and they are inflexible when it comes to this issue. And that is the "stranglehold" Mearsheimer and Walt identified in the paper that couldn't be published in America.

Kabul Scribe Writes One for the Record

To the Editor:  read more »

On the morning of March 10, Cindy Corrie stopped inside Union Station and called her daughter overse  read more »