somehow, and I think most of the people here feel something like that. So to be like all the other nations seems to me to be a waste of nationhood, a waste of statehood, a waste of energy, and a waste of life. describe an experience I had in Israel about a year and a half ago. We visited a kibbutz and we stayed for a couple of nights with people there. All the members of this kibbutz were South African. They had come to this very kibbutz about thirty years ago. But we found them very interesting because they had come from South Africa. At one point I was talking with our host about what was happening in Israel, and this was a year and a half ago, not last week. Having lived on this kibbutz all these years, having raised their children there?their daughter now in the working world, their son in the army?this man said to me: think we should talk to the PLO, and I really think we should get out of the territories.? I said, (I?m in another person?s country, after all.) And he said, never would have said anything like this two years ago, but I say it now because I don?t like what's happening to my son and his friends. That?s the main thing. Not just that they?re in danger, but I don't like what?s happening to them.? \Y/ell, we Spoke a little further and I was saying to him, you?re in danger, Israel is in great danger, maybe the Diaspora was a kind of a back-up for Jews, and so forth. And he looked at me and he said: ?Ah, but who said that the Jews have to continue?? Well, I was hit, so stunned by that remark. And I was brought back to that day in my childhood when my want to say just two morelthings. First, I want to BANQUET ADDRESS The Cry for Justice mother spoke to my father at the kitchen table. Although it was a totally different sentence, it was one that I would never forget. He said to me, ?\Vho says we have to continue?? And such a possibility had never occurred to me. So I said to this man in Israel, this Israeli, and I spoke from the Diaspora, I said: ?We have to.? Now I just want to end with a short poem which is about generations: PEOPLE IN MY FAMILY In my family people who are 82 are very different from people who are 92 The 82-year-old people grew up The year was 1914 This is what they knew War \World \War \War That?s why when they speak to the grandchild they say poor little one World War I The 92-year-old people grew up The year was 1905 They went to prison They went into exile They said ah soon That?s why when they speak to the grandchild they say ?rst there will be revolution then there will be revolution then once more then the earth itself will turn and turn and cry out Oh I have been made sick then you my little bud will ?ower and save it. Alfred Kezz'rz mother was Orthodox and my father was an ortho- dox socialist. Even when I was a boy, my sympathy with Jews was stronger than my belief in their beliefs; I grew up between two competing religions?my Alfred Keznz?s most recent book is A Writer's America: Land- scape in Literature (Knop? 1988). His next book, Our New York, written wit/3 David Firm, will be puhit'rbed by Harper Row in September 1989. it took me a long time to realize that father and mother were really in agreement on one thing: the idea of eternal justice. The Creator, Blessed be He, with whom the Jews had a covenant, had a design for the universe, with the Jews right at the center of His design. This Creator, in the goodness of time, would justify the tribulations of the Jews because of their sinfulness, yet work everything out so that, in the Land of Israel, the 77 Jews would be restored to their destined status as the favorites of God, their light bestowed on the gentiles, and the world made right by justice and mercy everywhere. The socialists, especially if they thought of themselves as Marxists?this made them ?scienti?c thinkers ??knew that the eventual con?ict with capitalism would be the ??nal conflict.? All history, as the history of successive class struggles, led up to the necessary and inevitable victory of the working class, which, though it would rule by eliminating all previously competing and ex- ploiting classes, would itself become the human race, annul all existing class relations, and thus project the ?rst truly human society. Whence, in the blessed words of the prophet Karl Marx, all relationships would follow from the formula ?from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs?? I spent the ?rst twenty years of my life in a Brownsville tenement. The tribulations of the immigrant working class, especially during the Depression, when whole families were every day thrown out on the street with all their goods, and one would see them clinging together while compassionate neighbors dropped coins into a cup, certainly made the dream of an paradise urgent to me. Jewish activism was before me in the example of my morher, who led a pack of women in de?ance of the city marshals to restore a family to its home. And the more I read of Jews in the Middle Ages slain by the Crusaders on their way to the Holy Land to rout the other in?dels?the Moslems?the more I felt wedded to the struggles of this people, proud of its obdurate faith, its willingness to face death for the kiddf?'h ba?rbem, the sancti?cation of the Holy Name. When, as a young writer, I ?rst entered into middle- class and gentile society, I was always amazed to meet Jews who regarded being Jewish as a stigma, who had changed names, ?xed their noses. It seemed to me, for better or worse (usually for worse, since this was the 19305 and Hitler was as much a presence in our lives as unemployment), that there was no belonging on the face of the earth like Jewish belonging. Although I was for the Jewish rebels against the Establishment; for the Jewish Jesus, Yehoshua ben Joseph, against Caiaphas the Head Priest; for Baruch Spinoza against the elders in the Amsterdam Synagogue who pronounced anathema against him; their very struggles the Jewish com- munity made me think of them?and of so many other rebel Jews?as sons of the people. When Isaac Bashevis Singer?~50 bitterly criticized by provincial and jealous mediocrities for dating to write about sex as if Jews were as human as anyone else?raised his voice in the Great Hall in Stockholm in 1978, he identi?ed himself as ?the son of the people who received the worst blows that human madness can inflict.? Reading his Nobel lecture I thought, ?There it 78 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 3 is again, the unbeatable touch ofJewish love and attach? ment.? What a family in history we make up! Or, as the Irish writer Arland Ussher wrote, magic people.? Pascal was right when he wrote in the Penr?es, #619, ?Advantages of the Jewish people. . .. I ?rst see that they are a people wholly cumposed of brethren . .. and being thus all one ?esh, and members one of another, they constitute a powerful state of one family. This is unique.? Alas, the God of Israel, the godly purpose supposed to be present in history, could not keep the Jews from being slaughtered by Hitler. And with the Jews again conspicuous among the victims, so-called scienti?c socialism in Russia came to create the most unrelenting despotism. I am perfectly sure that without Lenin, the greatest political influence on our century, fascism would not have attained its ?endish sense of history as the creation of a sacred political party. I had stopped believing in eternal justice and what follows from it?the justi?cation of terror as supposedly transitional-dong before Stalinisrn and then the Holo- caust dominated the middle of the century. In 1933, with the ?rst persecutions of the Jews, I heard a famous rabbi explain that the Jews were being punished for their sins. And even in America, there were enough people, among them writers and intellectuals, who could explain, explain away, the Moscow Trials, the Nazi- Soviet pact, and much else during and after the war. quality. They felt supported by a logic, either of the Divine Will or of Purposeful History, that tool: care of them. But when the logic was clearly untenable, when, as the Bible says, the veils were stripped away, many of these people became intellectually ?prag- matic,? grimly realistic by the standards of the Reagan era, justifying this time not a hidden purposc to our existence but their own greed, sel?shness, and some primitive animal need to stay uninvolved. What remains when there disappears something so profound as the belief in eternal justice? After all, it was never the idea of justice itself that one challenged; only the supposed providence and timelessness of it, the idea of some ultimate consummation that in the imagination of the true believer would drive away every human tear. And more than an idea, justice was a claim on other human beings?not abstractions called God or all these pe0ple, life had a certain miraculous and History?that expressed itself from the very depths of life as a cry: the cry of people thrown out on the streets, of the Jew in 1938 Vienna forced by storm troopers onto his hands and feet to clean the street, of - the Blacks in America?s eternal race war, before a carnival crowd?women carrying babies; people eating, drinking, and laughing at the sight of a body torched after its neck has been broken. Ana-?h? I don?t think I am better than other people because I can say, in my experiences as a New Yorker, that the amount of suffering, destitution, and disease I live with on the streets of New York makes me ashamed. I am perfectly aware that things go out of control when there are just too many people to take care of at once, that many humane and public-spirited people are doing their best, that many of the people they are trying to help are so drugged, ill, crazed, and generally unresponsive that eating for them is like caring for the wounded under the worst battle conditions. And the city in a state of war. I am also aware that for all Jews in our time, death and life are so mixed together that none of us can escape the shadow of the Holocaust; and, no matter how much we may dislike the current brutalities in Israel, there is good reason to be anxious about Israel?s survival. Never- theless, the emergence of Jews as a powerful force on the American stage offers scenes that make me laugh, just as I want to weep when I read an article in Commentary virtually defending Latvian Nazis in the service of Hitler because of their passionate anticommunism. When President Bush appointed New Hampshire Governor John Sununu as his chief of staff, ?Jewish leaders? met with Sununu, who is partly Lebanese, to make sure that his refusal as governor to condemn the ?Ziouism is Racism? resolutiOn (and he was the only governor who so refused} did not make him a dangerous fellow to have next to Bush in the White House. There was a lunch at the Princeton Club, a smaller dinner the next night at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel. Jacob Stein, the leader of the Jewish group meeting with Sununu, was national co-chairman of the Jewish Bush for President Committee and past president of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organiza- tions. This-last is an honor that always makes me think of the colloquy back in 1948 between President Truman and President Chaim Weizmann of Israel. When Truman said that he was the president of over 200 million peOple, Weizmann did him one better by saying that he was the president of some six hundred thousand presidents. came away with a feeling,? announced Stein, that we are going to be able to enjoy a continuing close relationship with the new chief of staff. We opened up a process of communication that will serve the interests of everyone.? Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B?nai B?rirh, said, ?\Ve put the past behind us.? Theodore Ellenoff, president of the American Jewish Committee, announced: ?His explanations satis?ed the group. There was a reasonably higher comfort level achieved at the meeting.? Among the organizations represented at the meeting were Hadassah, the American Jewish Congress, the National Council of Young Israel, the Synagogue Council of America, the Rabbinical Assembly, and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. Imagine an American politician being disagreeable to all of them! I was fascinated by the ?reasonably higher comfort level? felt by the head of the American Jewish Com- mittee. The American Jewish Committee publishes Commentary whose editor worries that continued peace is a threat to manly honor. Commentary decries equal pay for women as the threat of coming socialism. Its off- shoot, Conterztz'our (sometimes known as Corzm'ptz'ons), regularly features attacks in a tone of exasperated irony On every and any magazine piece, review, observation that dares to express a View just a mite different from the Podhoretz family line on any subject whatsoever. The amount ofsa?erz'ag, destz'tatz'oa, anal disease I live wit/9 0a the streets ofNew 16% makes me ashamed. Commentary, Contentions?the extreme Jewish right long ago painted itself into a corner. As Santayana said, a fanatic redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim. It has been obvious for some time that the aim of Commentary and the like is to continue the cold war through eternity, no doubt in the hope that William F. Buckley, Jr., will yet become president and so make the war hot. Anyway, a ?reasonably higher comfort level achieved at the meeting? made me remember the prophet Amos: Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, And to those who feel secure on the mountain of Samaria the notable men of the first of the nations, to whom the house of Israel come! It also made me remember what I saw at the Allenby Bridge after the great 1967 victory of Israel. The bridge had caved so neatly into the Jordan that the Palestinians, moving their goods from one side to the other, could walk down one side and up the other. It was quite a thing to watch; the Palestinian women seemed to do all the work, carrying everything, but everything: refrig- erators, furniture, what weren?t they carryingi?down and up, up and down, while their families anxiously watched and waited for them to make the hazardous backbreaking trips. Standing guard, an Israeli gunner, very fully equipped, was at a corner of the bluff overlooking the broken bridge. It was very hot. The women, though seemingly tireless, were beginning to totter under their loads. It was all quite a pitiful scene, and I suppose my face THE CRY FOR JUSTICE 79 showed what I felt?the pity of war. Without a word from me the Israeli gunner cried out: ?Don?t forget what we have gone through!? Alas, I don?t seem to forget or even overlook any- thing ?we? go through?or what in my own country PAPER some of them have always made me go through. These are bonds that never break, that I have no wish ever to break. But it is precisely this refusal to forget that enables me to speak as I do even if?God forbid?I speak only for myself. El Women and Tikkun/tikkun Judy Chicago an Fink, publisher of Tikleztrz magazine, recently wrote a column discussing the problems the magazine was having ?nding women writers (Tihlezm, Sept./ Oct. 1988). At the time, I was working on an image from the Holocaust Project dealing with genocide in the twentieth century, linking it to the destruction of Eastern European Jews. I was doing a lot of reading on the subject of genocide and had noticed, rather sadly, that almost all the writing I was encountering was by men. It upset me that women weren?t dealing with these issues because I believe we have a signi?cant contribution to make about what it will take to repair and heal the world. Like Nan, I wondered where our voices were. When Nan asked me to participate in the Tz'hhzm conference, I suggested, and she agreed, that we do a panel entitled ?Women and because I believed that the problem she had outlined reflected a much larger issue?that is, women?s relationship to the overall problem of transforming the world into a more humane place. In preparation for the conference, I thought a lot about this issue and concluded that there are two basic problems, an internal one and an external one. The ?rst problem, the internal one, is what I would call female narcissism; by that I mean an overbearing obsession among women with the nature of our identities as women. I myself shared this obsession for many years and, in fact, made quite came to a point in 1982 when I could no longer make images of women. I realized that women are everybody?s love (or hate) object. Women paint women, men paint women?and when women?s bodies are used, even by Judy Chicago is an artist and writer who is committed to the idea that art can to changing consa'oasness while retaining its integrity and meaning as art. She is presently working or: a major project about the Holocaust with her hushand, photographer Donald Woodman. 80 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 3 women, as the exclusive form through which certain human attributes are represented (such as'vulnerability and sensuality), we implicitly reinforce the identi?cation of femininity with a range of human feelings that sup- posedly remain outside the sphere of men. Hence, we perpetuate sexist attitudes, albeit unconsciously. Why was I obsessed for more than a decade with the nature of female identity? Because the images that exist as part of the mainstream culture promote a concept of womanhood that is still unacceptable to any conscious, evolved woman?and I?m referring to cultural icons all the way from the most degrading pornography to the most exalted images of women found in all the museums of the world, images that do not reflect our own experi- ence of ourselves as full human beings. It?s not that other images of women don?t exist, but that the alterna- tive views forged by women artists and writers for the lasr two centuries are still outside the mainstream. There fore, as part of one's self-development, and for one?s own sanity, one is forced to provide?for oneself and one?s peers?a healthier image of the female self than that which is prevalent. This process occupies a lot of time and energy, which is one reason why there seem to be so few women dealing with ?larger issues.? The problem is that until our own images of ourselves as women vie equally with those of men?s in the marketplace and the museums, a certain amount of female energy will continue to be lost in the endless reinventing of the self that is essential in a world that continues to deny female self-de?nition. But what happens if and when one breaks out of this narcissism? I am a case in point. As threatening as it is for a woman to de?ne herself outside of male de?nition, it is even more threatening for her to transcend self- de?nition as her focus and insist on her place in the larger world as a woman with a woman?s point of view. When I stopped painting women, I lost a lot of my