A Jewish Peace Activist on Baraka’s Poem

The writer is a founding member of the Jewish Mobilization for a Just Peace, a grassroots organization in Philadelphia.

Last year, not long after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, I overheard two well-dressed businessmen talking in the streets of Philadelphia. “Oh yes,” one of them told the other. “All of the Jews called in sick on September 11. 4,000 of them never came to work that day.”

This ludicrous and blatantly anti-Semitic tale began making the rounds of the Internet shortly after the WTC attacks. Groups that monitor the extremist Right documented its appearance in the newsletters and websites of various white supremacist and neo-nazi organizations throughout last fall. It even cropped up in a variety of foreign media outlets.

It was certainly chilling to hear this kind of trash spoken out loud – an unwelcome reminder that there’s always plenty of cultural sewage coursing beneath the streets of our collective awareness. But, well, there really wasn’t much more to say (or do) about it. So far, unfortunately, no one has found a cure for conspiracy theories – or, for that matter, for idiotic urban legends.

This tired tale suddenly became news last week, when it made a cameo appearance in a lengthy poem by Amiri Baraka, a longtime Black radical who is currently the poet laureate of New Jersey. Jewish community media outlets are alive with alarm about this latest manifestation of Black anti-Semitism. The New York Times picked up the story when the governor of New Jersey tried to fire Baraka as poet laureate and found he didn’t have the legal authority to do so. The last I heard, the New Jersey legislature was rushing through a bill to give him that authority, and to ensure that all future poets laureate would serve only at the governor’s pleasure.

I was curious enough to look up the full text of the poem in question, entitled “Somebody Blew Up America.” In addition to the allusion that has caused all the controversy, it also references other signal moments in Jewish political memory, including the assassination of Rosa Luxembourg, the Reichstag fire, the World War II-era pro-Nazi “America First” movement, and the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, casualties of the McCarthy era.

The trouble is, none of these statements could remotely be considered anti-Semitic; each of them, in terms of both content and the way they are framed, affirms Jewish humanity and historic moments in Jewish struggles for justice. And that’s without even mentioning the other 95 percent of this poem, which calls out milestones in historic struggles for justice and freedom around the globe – as well as key moments in the history of racism and repression.

Let me be clear that I’m not looking for ways to explain away Baraka’s anti-Semitic allusion. The story he repeats is both ridiculous and offensive; conspiracy theories about mysterious and menacing Jewish power have been a staple of anti-Semitic iconography for centuries. My point is rather to raise some questions about what’s going on here: about how and why a story like this becomes news, and what happens then. Questions, above all, about what we risk, and what we lose, when we react to incidents like this without exploration, without nuance, and without context. As if, so to speak, such matters were entirely black and white, with no shades of gray.

The Anti-Defamation League has played a prominent role in condemning this poem and relating it to what they term Baraka’s long history of anti-Semitism. Within a few days of the poem’s public performance, their website displayed a lengthy page of quotes from his writings to prove their point. In reality, all but two of the quotes are criticisms either of Israeli policy or of attempts by U.S.-based institutions to suppress such criticisms, mostly dating back to the 1970s and 1980s. The ADL even quotes a 1980 essay by Baraka, “Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite,” perhaps so they can include some of the language from his writings in the 1960s that he himself was repudiating. Their evidence that his “confession” was not to be believed? A paragraph in which he distinguishes Jewish people and the Jewish religion from his critique of Zionism and its supporters.

Now, you can agree with Baraka or disagree with him, you can like his poetry or dislike it, you can appreciate the militance of his tone or find it distasteful. But all of that is a far cry from believing that he should be stripped of his honorary public position, his voice silenced and disgraced. In that context, it’s hard not to understand the whole controversy as the latest salvo in the battle to brand any and all criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.

“Anti-Semitism” has become one of those epithets, like “communism” or “terrorism,” that tell you it’s time to circle the wagons and, above all, stop thinking. The very suggestion that a little thoughtful consideration might be helpful is held to be equivalent to condoning prejudice, hate violence, or even mass murder.

Do we have any alternatives to knee-jerk condemnation (or equally knee-jerk defense) of Baraka or any other public figure accused of anti-Semitism? Here are just a few of the questions we might be talking about [3 ellipse] if we wanted to open up our understanding, rather than choosing up sides so we can end the discussion:

“Somebody Blew Up America” is, above all, a poem about how to understand the events of the past year: in the polarized language of holy war favored both by Bush and bin Laden, the language of “the west against the rest,” or in the framework of global struggles for freedom, dignity, and equality. Baraka seeks to question how “the enemy” is defined and constructed; who we see as “us” and who as “them”; how we understand our interests, and our humanity. His poem may work for you or it may not – but these are questions that all of us should be asking, as urgently and as loudly as we can.

Is the reference to “4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers [who stayed] home that day” anti-Semitic? I think so, and when I hear things like that I speak up to challenge them. Does that cancel out everything else the poem says, or prove that everyone who questions Israeli militarism is motivated by anti-Semitism? I don’t think we can afford to live any more in that kind of either-or world. The simple answers are mostly false – and often fatal.

We’ve got to do better than that.

Commentaries in this issue:

Permanent War: Permanent State of Emergency

Trojan Horse Watch: Bob Johnson’s message invades Black radio…Rep. Harold Ford: mess of the blue dog…The Trojan Horse TV show

Briefs:The Four Eunuchs of War…The most dangerous game…Smack, Blow, and Blowback…Lethally stupid and more…

IRAQ, WAR & COLOR RACISM: By Dr. David Graham Du Bois, Guest Commentator

e-MailBox: The Real Rosa Parks…NAACP challenged on war…Plato and the Emperor George…Deceitful billionaire busted…Anglo-Saxon alarmed

RE-PRINT: Harry Belafonte on Colin Powell…CNN Larry King Live Interview with Belafonte

Interview: Educate and Advocate – Henry Nicholas on social justice in America

Commentaries in Issue 13 October 3 , 2002:

Lantern of Liberty:
Harriet Tubman Mural Replaced by a Parking Lot

BET’s Black Billionaire Trojan Horse:
“Democrat” Bob Johnson Fronts For GOP

Black Children Still Victimized by “Savage Inequalities”:
Public education amid racism and isolation
by Elena Rutherford, Guest Commentator

e-MailBox:
Black political self-financing
Senator Ed Brooke mislaid
Hip Hop and heroin
Anglo-Saxons beware

A letter to our readers:
Black America and Bush’s New World Order