FUCK THEORY

Experiments in visceral philosophy.

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Avodah Zarah
(click)
“One little boy was instructed to pose for cameras with his hands raised in surrender, mimicking a famous photograph of a small, frightened Jewish boy surrendering to the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II.”
Instructed.
“More broadly, mainstream Israelis have been expressing growing resentment of the ultra-Orthodox sector, which makes up about 10 percent of the population but is rapidly expanding. More than 60 percent of ultra-Orthodox men prefer full-time Torah study and welfare subsidies to work, and a vast majority receive exemptions from military duties required of all other Jewish Israelis.”
There really isn’t any other population on Earth that can incite in me the kind of visceral loathing and raging anger that ultra-Orthodox Jews can. If you think political life in America proceeds in the shadow of the religious right, imagine a nation in which the Westboro Baptist Church has several million members and not only has a voice in Congress but actually wields enough political power to sabotage and derail any legislative agenda they choose.
Unless you’ve spent a significant amount of time in Israel (or been openly black in certain parts of Williamsburg), it’s really hard to convey how revoltingly awful these religious fanatics are. Unless you’ve seen a little girl get spat on and cursed by a group of adult men for not dressing modestly enough; unless you’ve seen children holding up signs that say “Faggots burn in Hell” at a gay pride march in Jerusalem; unless you know someone who had the shit kicked out of them for sitting in the wrong part of the bus in a Hassidic neighborhood; unless you have friends who were killed in the line of duty protecting ultra-orthodox settlements in the West Bank while the very people they were protecting threw rocks and curses at them, you probably can’t grasp the vile depths of hypocrisy and violence (physical, emotional, and sexual) that are the organizing principles of the ultra-orthodox community.
Let’s leave aside the fact that the incomprehensible rites and idol worship in which these people engage not only barely resemble but in some ways explicitly contradict the laws of Moses. Let’s ignore the fact that the Kabbalah, the numerological mumbo-jumbo these people use to make magic amulets, was invented as a direct and reactionary ideological response to the spread of rational philosophy in southern and central Europe in the Middle Ages. Let’s leave aside the fact that religion is a mafia to these people, who use their disgusting facade of piety to squeeze every possible penny out of secular Israeli taxpayers. Let’s leave aside the mind-blowingly convoluted leaps of logic these people use to justify the gap between their practice and the written letter of the law (an ultra-orthodox homosexual once explained to me very earnestly that it’s not a sin to have gay sex standing up, because Leviticus says “thou shalt not lie with a man as with a woman”). Let’s even leave aside the the mind-blowingly high incidence of rape and child abuse in the Hassidic community (when I was in Israel this summer, the news was full of a report about an ultra-orthodox couple who didn’t have enough money to take all their kids on vacation, so they just took 4 out of 8 and left the other 4 alone at home; two of the children, aged 4 and 3, died).
Instead, let’s focus on those same conceptual standbys I usually organize my political arguments around: freedom and action.
As I’ve noted many times before, I consider “oppression” to be a function of privation: you are oppressed if there is an action that some or all other members of your society can perform which you cannot, or if you suffer different consequences for that action than some or all other members of your society. The reason I’m fond of this formulation, which draws heavily on Spinoza, is that it eliminates, or at least side-steps, the question of discourse (i.e., it eliminates a phenomenological blurring between being oppressed and being offended, AKA “political correctness”). Organizing the concept of oppression through the concept of privation helps separate the particularity of a given political struggle from the popular and institutional perception of the group doing the struggling, which, given the nature of hegemonic ideology, can be extremely important.
In other words, the concept of oppression that I put forth here and elsewhere on this blog is one designed explicitly to help evaluate the political valence of this particular “protest” separately from my personal view on religion in general and on Hassidic Jews in particular, not to mention separately from my personal family history, and the fact that my mother’s father lost 8 siblings in Auschwitz.
For me, the conceptual problem is not that this protest “insulted the memory of victims of the Nazis.” That’s a personal problem, like every other form of insult. Rather, the conceptual problem - in other words, the reason that this protest fills me to the brim with revulsion - is that I don’t see the privation. More bluntly, what the fuck are you upset about?
What exactly are you protesting? Are you protesting the fact that the police allow you to proselytize on on the street, in direct contravention of Israeli law, which prohibits missionary activity? Are you protesting the fact that the police allow you to shut your neighborhoods to traffic on Saturdays, even though in many cases this means closing public streets that are paid for and owned by the taxpayer? Are you protesting the fact that 60 fucking % of you live on welfare as a permanent state, having never attempted or had any intention of getting a job in your life, despite having 12 children, none of whom you can adequately support? Are you protesting the fact that while Israeli teenagers die under fire protecting your illegal settlements on occupied land, you’re not obligated to serve in the military at all, even to protect your own homesteads?
Not only is there no privation here, no oppression, there’s actually a mind-boggling number of advantages granted to these people, which is why it’s so fucking offensive that they organize their protest through the symbolic language of the Holocaust. What drives me crazy here isn’t the fact that the ultra-orthodox community in Israel is saturated by charlatans, hypocrites, liars, and rapists; what drives me crazy here is the way in which the language and symbolism of both political struggle in general and the cultural legacy of a particular historical oppression are being co-opted and twisted to protect and increase monstrous, overwhelming, illegal privilege.

Avodah Zarah

“One little boy was instructed to pose for cameras with his hands raised in surrender, mimicking a famous photograph of a small, frightened Jewish boy surrendering to the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II.”

Instructed.

“More broadly, mainstream Israelis have been expressing growing resentment of the ultra-Orthodox sector, which makes up about 10 percent of the population but is rapidly expanding. More than 60 percent of ultra-Orthodox men prefer full-time Torah study and welfare subsidies to work, and a vast majority receive exemptions from military duties required of all other Jewish Israelis.”

There really isn’t any other population on Earth that can incite in me the kind of visceral loathing and raging anger that ultra-Orthodox Jews can. If you think political life in America proceeds in the shadow of the religious right, imagine a nation in which the Westboro Baptist Church has several million members and not only has a voice in Congress but actually wields enough political power to sabotage and derail any legislative agenda they choose.

Unless you’ve spent a significant amount of time in Israel (or been openly black in certain parts of Williamsburg), it’s really hard to convey how revoltingly awful these religious fanatics are. Unless you’ve seen a little girl get spat on and cursed by a group of adult men for not dressing modestly enough; unless you’ve seen children holding up signs that say “Faggots burn in Hell” at a gay pride march in Jerusalem; unless you know someone who had the shit kicked out of them for sitting in the wrong part of the bus in a Hassidic neighborhood; unless you have friends who were killed in the line of duty protecting ultra-orthodox settlements in the West Bank while the very people they were protecting threw rocks and curses at them, you probably can’t grasp the vile depths of hypocrisy and violence (physical, emotional, and sexual) that are the organizing principles of the ultra-orthodox community.

Let’s leave aside the fact that the incomprehensible rites and idol worship in which these people engage not only barely resemble but in some ways explicitly contradict the laws of Moses. Let’s ignore the fact that the Kabbalah, the numerological mumbo-jumbo these people use to make magic amulets, was invented as a direct and reactionary ideological response to the spread of rational philosophy in southern and central Europe in the Middle Ages. Let’s leave aside the fact that religion is a mafia to these people, who use their disgusting facade of piety to squeeze every possible penny out of secular Israeli taxpayers. Let’s leave aside the mind-blowingly convoluted leaps of logic these people use to justify the gap between their practice and the written letter of the law (an ultra-orthodox homosexual once explained to me very earnestly that it’s not a sin to have gay sex standing up, because Leviticus says “thou shalt not lie with a man as with a woman”). Let’s even leave aside the the mind-blowingly high incidence of rape and child abuse in the Hassidic community (when I was in Israel this summer, the news was full of a report about an ultra-orthodox couple who didn’t have enough money to take all their kids on vacation, so they just took 4 out of 8 and left the other 4 alone at home; two of the children, aged 4 and 3, died).

Instead, let’s focus on those same conceptual standbys I usually organize my political arguments around: freedom and action.

As I’ve noted many times before, I consider “oppression” to be a function of privation: you are oppressed if there is an action that some or all other members of your society can perform which you cannot, or if you suffer different consequences for that action than some or all other members of your society. The reason I’m fond of this formulation, which draws heavily on Spinoza, is that it eliminates, or at least side-steps, the question of discourse (i.e., it eliminates a phenomenological blurring between being oppressed and being offended, AKA “political correctness”). Organizing the concept of oppression through the concept of privation helps separate the particularity of a given political struggle from the popular and institutional perception of the group doing the struggling, which, given the nature of hegemonic ideology, can be extremely important.

In other words, the concept of oppression that I put forth here and elsewhere on this blog is one designed explicitly to help evaluate the political valence of this particular “protest” separately from my personal view on religion in general and on Hassidic Jews in particular, not to mention separately from my personal family history, and the fact that my mother’s father lost 8 siblings in Auschwitz.

For me, the conceptual problem is not that this protest “insulted the memory of victims of the Nazis.” That’s a personal problem, like every other form of insult. Rather, the conceptual problem - in other words, the reason that this protest fills me to the brim with revulsion - is that I don’t see the privation. More bluntly, what the fuck are you upset about?

What exactly are you protesting? Are you protesting the fact that the police allow you to proselytize on on the street, in direct contravention of Israeli law, which prohibits missionary activity? Are you protesting the fact that the police allow you to shut your neighborhoods to traffic on Saturdays, even though in many cases this means closing public streets that are paid for and owned by the taxpayer? Are you protesting the fact that 60 fucking % of you live on welfare as a permanent state, having never attempted or had any intention of getting a job in your life, despite having 12 children, none of whom you can adequately support? Are you protesting the fact that while Israeli teenagers die under fire protecting your illegal settlements on occupied land, you’re not obligated to serve in the military at all, even to protect your own homesteads?

Not only is there no privation here, no oppression, there’s actually a mind-boggling number of advantages granted to these people, which is why it’s so fucking offensive that they organize their protest through the symbolic language of the Holocaust. What drives me crazy here isn’t the fact that the ultra-orthodox community in Israel is saturated by charlatans, hypocrites, liars, and rapists; what drives me crazy here is the way in which the language and symbolism of both political struggle in general and the cultural legacy of a particular historical oppression are being co-opted and twisted to protect and increase monstrous, overwhelming, illegal privilege.

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