[Editor’s note: Pressley has issued a clarifying statement:]
“Last week, in support of a fellow Congresswoman, I chose a quote from Alice Walker. Like many, the Color Purple has carried deep meaning for me and I have evoked Walker’s words about ‘furious dancing’ in the past.”
Unfortunately, I was unaware of the author’s past statements. I fully condemn and denounce anti-Semitism, prejudice and bigotry in all their forms – and the hateful actions they embolden. I appreciate my friends, including my brothers and sisters in the Jewish community, who brought these statements to my attention.”
[In addition, I’ve turned off further commenting on this post. I’ve seen some commentary here that in my judgment, comes too close to excusing (by “contextualizing”) Walker’s notorious anti-Semitism. I don’t want to go within 1,000 miles of that. So I’m calling a time out for now. — Charley]
I know we face much bigger problems, but I don’t think we should let this tweet from Rep. Ayanna Pressley pass without comment:
I have to think that Pressley reads the news and knows that Alice Walker was most recently in the news after being criticized for praising the books of notorious anti-Semite David Ickes in the New York Times, and that that affair brought renewed attention to her 2017 poem, of which the following is an excerpt:
Where to start?
You will find some information,
Slanted, unfortunately,
By Googling. For a more in depth study
I recommend starting with YouTube. Simply follow the trail of “The
Talmud” as its poison belatedly winds its way
Into our collective consciousness.
Some of what you find will sound
Too crazy to be true. Unfortunately those bits are likely
To be true. Some of the more evasive studies
Will exhibit unbelievable attempts
At sugar coating extremely disagreeable pills.
But hang in there, checking
And double checking, listening to everybody,
Even the teachers with the twisted pasts
That scare you the most,
And the taped rants of outraged citizens that sound
Like madcap characters on Car Talk
Except they are not laughing
But are righteously outraged.
Study hard, with an open
If deeply offended mind,
Until you can sift the false
From the true.
Is Jesus boiling eternally in hot excrement,
For his “crime” of throwing the bankers
Out of the Temple? For loving, standing with,
And defending
The poor? Was his mother, Mary,
A whore?
Are Goyim (us) meant to be slaves of Jews, and not only
That, but to enjoy it?
Are three year old (and a day) girls eligible for marriage and intercourse?
Are young boys fair game for rape?
Must even the best of the Goyim (us, again) be killed?
Pause a moment and think what this could mean
Or already has meant
In our own lifetime.
So if Pressley reads the news, what was the purpose of quoting Walker in January 2019?
I have a suspicion. I suspect that it was a calculated dog whistle, meant to appeal to progressives who approve of Walker’s views, to signal “I’m one of you, please give me your support” without taking responsibility for the forces she (Pressley) is encouraging. I hope she is doing this for reasons of expediency rather than personal conviction, but either way, it needs to be called out. Leave the dog whistles to the Republicans!
Seriously?! Pressley uses one quote and you hang the quoted person’s entire body of views around her neck? I’m not at all sure that Pressley would have known (I didn’t), and I definitely don’t think we should insist on the idea that endorsing one opinion of a given person we should be presumed to endorse all of them. There are a lot of great people better known than Alice Walker whom we could never quote by that standard.
It’s possible she didn’t know, of course. But if she did, then surely the quote was a dog whistle.
Can you step back a little bit? Not everyone considers the spectrum from pro- to anti-semitism the focal point of their lives most especially a black woman in America… Not every politician is making n-dimensional chess moves nor signally same to some phantasm of purported progressive anti-semites (if there are such people…)
You’re concocting a whole lot of ifs and maybes from no actual evidence. If you had taken the time to write up a diary of Alice Walkers purported anti-semitism and its effects upon the body politic, we might have the chance for a productive discussion. Instead you’ve chosen to conjure up wisps of maybe-perfidy and sorta-devilry and might-be-underhandedness which are, frankly, hard to countenance.
Speaking of dog-whistles … I’m a bit weary of commentary that seems to view each and every issue through a lens of whether or nor any of it is anti-Semitic.
I like, respect and admire Alice Walker. I have no doubt that some of her work is offensive to me. In fact, I strongly suspect that some of her work is offensive to just about every person on the planet. So what.
I’m perfectly fine with Ms. Pressley quoting Alice Walker — more than “perfectly fine”, it increases my respect for Ms. Pressley.
I must say that as Mr. Netanyahu drives Israel further and further into the abyss, the knee-jerk complaint of “anti-Semitic” for anything critical of Israel gets less and less credible. Donald Trump is an embarrassment to anyone who cares about America and American values. Mr. Netanyahu is a similar embarrassment to anyone who cares about Israel and Jewish values. I, for one, am sick to death of knee-jerk Democratic support for increasingly racist and increasingly extremist Israeli policy.
I don’t need any dog-whistles to welcome a Representative that is willing to stand up and say loud and clear that they reject Mr. Netanyahu and everything he stands for.
Did you read the poem? It’s not “Netanyahu is a war criminal,” it’s “Jews enslave the goyim around the world”—the classic antisemitic stuff. Alice Waller is a great novelist and we should continue to read her books. But to name-check her this week sends a very bad message.
Regarding the “one-trick pony” thing: I’ve written a lot that is very critical of Trump and the GOP, as you know. But I am sounding the alarm about lazy antisemitism on the left (and also of course the antisemitism in the right!) because I, like many American Jews, am worried about the Jewish future here. And it’s not just a matter of self-interest. The Jews, through history, have often been a canary in the coal mine for intolerance.
Just to be clear, I am not accusing Pressley of being antisemitic. I am saying she has lazily name-dropped an antisemite.
“The Jews, through history, have often been a canary in the coal mine for intolerance.”
Which is why, in my opinion, the war crimes being committed by Israel and advocated by Mr. Netanyahu are so unacceptable. That’s my concern about “dog-whistle” references.
I’m glad that we agree that Ms. Pressley is not being antisemitic. I’m glad we agree that Ms. Walker is a great novelist and that we should continue to read her books.
I’m also glad that we share a concern about the Jewish future here. I react to the cited poetry very differently from you. I see it as a response to certain passages of Hebrew Scripture that I find vile and reprehensible, and that Ms. Walker does as well. The foundation of my concern for the Jewish future here is the willingness (or eagerness) of some to defend Israeli actions that I find indefensible.
The conflict between American blacks and Jews is deep and long-running. I’m disappointed to see Ms. Walker wading more deeply into those toxic waters. My fundamental reaction is “a pox on all their houses”.
Tom, I think your whole line of argument — that Walker’s anti-Semitism is just art; and that after all, there’s Netanyahu — totally unacceptable. I don’t know whether I’ll censor it, but I don’t want to make this site someplace where we shrug at anti-Semitism. No way.
You’re wrong and you need to fix it.
Whoa, slow down.
I did not say that “Walker’s anti-Semitism” is just art, I said instead that the cited poem is just art. There is a difference.
I agree that it is impossible to read the New York Times reporting of Ms. Walker and her support for Mr. Ickes without concluding that she is becoming (or has been) anti-Semitic. I do not defend that.
I am not in any way suggesting that “we shrug at anti-Semitism”.
The final paragraph of the thread-starter says this (emphasis mine):
Perhaps I’m just naive. I see no evidence at ALL that any significant number of progressives support anti-Semitism (unless the author is making some oblique racist reference to Ms. Pressley’s black constituents). I see, instead, a great many progressives who passionately oppose what they see as Israeli war crimes being committed against Palestinians. To me, the “dog-whistle” this paragraph refers to is calling to progressives who oppose Mr. Netanyahu and his policies. If I’m mistaken about that, then I of course apologize.
In the current political climate (and BMG is still a political site), the POLITICAL issue is Mr. Netanyahu, Israel, and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. The flagrant support of Mr. Trump and the GOP offered by Mr. Netanyahu in the 2016 campaign is certainly a factor.
My own visceral reaction to the behavior of Israel against the Palestinians — and to the unseemly meddling of Mr. Netanyahu in the 2016 campaign — is the origin of my reaction to this post.
I do not shrug at anti-Semitism, and I join you in asserting that anti-Semitism has no place here at BMG.
I think the real issue, when it comes to leaders of the progressive movement, is what company they keep. I don’t think Walker is good company for Pressley to be keeping. Other recent examples include the scandalous association between the leaders of the women’s march and, for example, Louis Farrakhan (and, in the case of the March, more direct claims of animus as recounted by Vanessa Wruble, one of the March’s original organizers. You see this on the left in the UK, too, with Jeremy Corbyn’s strange habit of standing on stages or otherwise associating with antisemites.
By the way, this isn’t to say that antisemitism is a left-wing phenomenon. Antisemitism on the right is certainly a more direct physical threat to Jews in America today, and there is also the third aspect of modern antisemitism, Islamist antisemitism, which doesn’t really have much to do with our left/right perspectives.
I don’t think that’s Tom’s argument. But I do think he was ill-advised to attempt to re-litigate the awfulness of the Talmud in a way that could be taken to be agreement with Walker’s poem. Tom has a well documented history of engagement with religious issues in general and scriptural interpretation in specific and I think this piqued his interest.
I think you need to be more careful. Speaking for myself only, I have no problem shrugging off TedFs rather specious accusation of anti-semitism against Ayanna Pressley. And say directly to you, this is not the same thing as shrugging off anti-semitism.
OK. Appreciate the clarification — and I agree the suggestion of a dog-whistle is also unseemly. I think we should extend Pressley the benefit of the doubt, but I also think — to avoid any confusion — that it’s not a great time to be citing Walker.
As I posted upstream in response to TedF, I’m not sure he or you get to litigate what is or who is important to Ayanna Pressley.
Alice Walker is a big deal to many African Americans, especially women. She’s just shy of Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou in the canon… For a white guy to say they can’t quote her because she might be anti-semitic, and therefore might hurt this other white guys feelings is as big a problem as the anti-semitism.
She “name-dropped” an author whose writings, absent any purported anti-semitism, have likely had a far larger impact on her than anything having to do with your Judaism. Yet, somehow, you think your Judaism is supposed to be more important to her?
Alice Walker wrote a searing, indeed, brutal novel about the abysmally poor and viciously wrong way African-American women have been treated in America. Said novel, and other writings, are very likely to have a visceral and encompassing impact upon Ayanna Pressley, a survivor of child sexual abuse herself. Now you want Ayanna Pressley to turn her back on that because, maybe, sorta, if-you-squint-and-try-real-hard, you’ll find anti-semitism…
Or, put another way, you don’t get to say what Alice Walker means to Ayanna Pressley. I wish you would get that, and soon.
I MUST ask whether YOU read the poem — the whole poem, not your excerpt from it.
In my opinion, your “summary” (” it’s ‘Jews enslave the goyim around the world’—the classic antisemitic stuff”) is a flagrantly misleading distortion of what’s actually there.
How about this stanza, for instance:
I passionately reject your dismissal of this piece is an anti-Semitic rant.
Walker’s “poem” is absolutely repulsive and deserves absolutely no entertaining audience here. And bringing Netanyahu or Israel into it …. nope nope nope.
Strongly encourage you to re=think, Tom.
Why bring Walker’s poem into it? Pressley didn’t quote it.
It is art. It is poetry. It is intended to be repulsive.
I strongly encourage you to re-read the more toxic portions of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Perhaps I misunderstood the concluding paragraph of the thread-starter, that’s what I’m responding to.
Repulsive? Consider, for example, 2 Kings 6:24-32 (emphasis mine):
Or you might consider Judges 19:20-31, which I won’t quote here because it is so vile.
The poem cited in the thread-starter is intended to be offensive. The “holy scripture” of the three Abrahamic faith traditions contains much material that is even more offensive.
It seems to me that if we are going to talk about “dog-whistles” regarding our religion (never mind the multitude of dog-whistles about Islam that have permeated our culture since 9/11), then we must be willing to confront the vile and repulsive aspects of that religion.
“You think Alice Walker is offensive? Wait until you read the Old Testament!
Yeah, that’s pretty much it — with a proviso — nobody has ever claimed that any part of Ms. Walker’s writing is the inerrant Word of an omniscient and omnipotent deity.
In other words, whataboutism.
I have to imagine — I dearly hope — that Pressley was unaware of Walker’s views, and that they’ve been in the news lately. Now’s really not the time to be quoting Walker. I honestly doubt she meant it as a dog whistle. It’s worth it to ask her.
If she did mean it like you suspect, Ted, it would be totally disqualifying. Here’s hoping. It deserves a clarification.
Here’s hoping! I wish Pressley well and hope she does a good job in Congress. And of course representatives have lots of folks doing social media stuff for them without their personal knowledge or involvement. Still, if you don’t speak up when you see stuff like this, it becomes acceptable.
That makes it sound like I missed a big story. This diary is the first I’m hearing about any of this. I also probably would have had to look up who Alice Walker was if not reminded by some of the comments.
Are we not allowed to quote anything at all from Alice Walker now? She’s a fairly well known author with quite a few quotable passages, the far greater majority of which have nothing to do with Israel or Judaism, except insofar as they have much to do with the relationship of the oppressed and the oppressors. (Also, and not for nothing, if you have to invoke a counter-quote longer than the original quote, to somehow prove the perfidy of the original quote… you’re stretching the elasticity of your accusation beyond, IMHO, what it can bear.)
It’s also putting Ayanna Pressley in quite a situation: a young, up and coming, black woman and survivor of childhood sexual assault, likely to have been very much influenced by Alice Walker who wrote a book called The Color Purple with themes likely to resonate strongly with Pressley. And now that is to be taken away from her? I think that’s an interesting twist on the unfairness and brutality visited upon African-American women.
All’s well that ends well! Pressley tweeted the following statement, which I think is satisfactory and appropriate.
Good – that’s what I would expect. Carry on …
The above fragment of Ms. Walker’s writing is an excerpt from 2017 poem by Ms. Walker titled “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty“.
Ms. Walker’s 2017 piece is ABOUT the 6-day war and Israel’s occupation of Palestine. So the discussion of Mr. Netanyahu and his policies strikes me as entirely relevant to a discussion about an excerpt from that piece. In fact, I have to ask whether the thread-starter might even be considered a misquote — taking a fragment of a larger work out of its context, then attacking it as anti-Semitic.
The full poem, including the portions excerpted in the thread-starter, is an attack on specific aspects and memes from both the Talmud and from the Hebrew Scriptures. A misguided attack? Perhaps. An anti-Semitic attack? Sadly, perhaps. An attack that reveals the difficulty of understanding the Talmud by anyone except trained rabbinical scholars? Perhaps true as well, though that last argument strikes me as self-serving — a similar argument can be used to defend pretty much ANY abhorrent philosophy.
Still, the complaint of tedf is that Ms. Walker is using “’Jews enslave the goyim around the world’—the classic antisemitic stuff”. I view that as well outside the envelope of legitimate criticism.
My reaction to the thread-starter was that the cited text from Ms. Walker was making thinly-veiled poetic references to very specific passages from texts that I am familiar with. Those poetic references were intended to be disturbing, and they are.
For example, consider this offensive line:
“Are three year old (and a day) girls eligible for marriage and intercourse?”
That is a clear reference to Jewish law. The very first hit in my Google search came up with a cite from 2010 (emphasis mine):
That 2010 exchange predates the poem in question by nearly a decade.
I stand by my assertion that the poetry in question is challenging us to examine the misogynist and hateful teaching embedded in the fundamental texts of the Abrahamic faith tradition. In my view, the attempt to dismiss this as the ranting of a discredited anti-Semite is, well, not constructive.
The Babylonian Talmud is more than 7,000 pages long and has a bit of everything. Unless you think that the Jews today allow three-year-old girls to be married (or even that Jews back then did in practice—that’s the point of the Google thing you cite), what do you suppose Walker’s purpose was in citing it? Especially when taken with her professed respect for David Ickes, there is in my opinion no way to read the poem except as part of a long tradition of attributing absurd and awful practices to the Jews as a way of showing they make up a secret cabal bent on world domination (“Are Goyim (us) meant to be slaves of Jews, and not only / That, but to enjoy it?”)
If you want a humorous Jewish take on the absurdity of Walker’s poem, read this post.
I think the poem is an attack on:
– Christians
– Jews
– Muslims
– Racists
– George H. Bush
– Bill Clinton
– Barack Obama
– Israel
– Texas
– The GOP
When you say “Unless you think that the Jews today allow three-year-old girls to be married”, I fear you miss the point. The conclusion of the piece targets the meme of “chosen people”. That is most certainly clear and present across America right now. The Israelis are the “chosen people”. The Palestinians are not. White evangelical Americans are the chosen people. Black, Hispanic, Latino, Asian, and other Americans — and EVERY immigrant — are not.
An ENORMOUS number of Americans — arguably a majority of American Christians and nearly all current Trumpist Evangelicals — argue that “we” (whoever that is) are the CHOSEN people. That phrase — “chosen people” — is repeated in every Episcopal mass that I attend. It is part of the Episcopal Catechism (emphasis mine):
This division of our world into “chosen” and “unchosen” is what this piece is about.
I don’t know what’s up with David Ickes. I think he’s a complete loon. But to flip the narrative, I think the problem is those policing the debate to only allow a dichotomy: The more you suppress any criticism of Israel, in the name of fighting anti-semitism, the less nuanced any criticism will be until it is indistinguishable from the character of the extremes… that is to say the loons. Unfortunately, it looks like Alice Walker fell into this trap.
I think the poem is decidedly very very critical of Israel. The problem is she’ s not allowed to be… I think Alice Walker would not say she is anti-semitic in the sense of simple, reflexive, hating of Jews (she married one, in the sixties, after all and they had a daughter whom they named Rebecca) but would say that she is anti-Israeli based upon Israeli actions against the Palestinians. In her anger at Israel, I think she got caught up in a youtube wormhole where there are simpleminded reflexively anti-semitic rants, in the context of the debate that is not allowed to happen… Then she wrote a poem about it.
Or, put another way, looking for language to describe her anger at Israel the only thing she could find was ‘Israel all good’ and ‘Israel all bad.’ (in fact, the poem itself addresses this obliquely) Not able to believe the former, and in trying to create new language, she was heavily influenced by the latter… and by the exclusion of an in-between space.
Well, I find it highly unpersuasive to say that this celebrated writer couldn’t find the language to say what she thought without falling into the “wormhole” you describe or to say, as many have said over centuries, that the Jews have it coming.
I agree with Ted 100% here. This is not as interesting or as mysterious as some of us are making it out to be, and I find the conversation depressing. I’ve turned off commenting on this post. Do better, BMG.