Corinne Blackmer writes in Tablet on The Queering of Antisemitism - how the doctrines of Queer Theory have become tied in with a vicious hostility to the Jewish state, thanks to the work of postmodernists like Judith Butler:
Some years ago, I was the target of a series of antisemitic, homophobic, and anti-Zionist hate crimes on the campus of Southern Connecticut State University, where I teach. Aside from the death threats and property defacement, what troubled me most was how authorities and colleagues only acknowledged the homophobic part of the crime. Despite my protestations, the anti-Zionism was erased and the antisemitism, which was not subtle—a swastika drawn on my car with mud—was severely minimalized. On college campuses these days, LGBTQ concerns (as well as racial ones) always count. Anti-Zionism never does, and antisemitism only when it occurs alone—not in relation to other forms of social animus.
This series of hate crimes against me took place—in a way I have never found coincidental—during one of the periodic eruptions of hostilities between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Several days later, I again found my office door defaced, and death threats left on my office telephone. One faculty member I knew who had read about the hate crime on the front page of The New Haven Register rushed to empathize, calling me the victim of “the homo-hating patriarchy.” I winced at my colleague commiserating with me in an ideological language that I knew targeted me in other ways.
As a lesbian Zionist academic, I have felt my once-solid alliances shatter, and my beloved communities of belonging descend into warring camps. Over the past few decades, as the academic field of queer studies has become more visible and influential, some of its leading proponents have pushed the idea that opposing Israel’s existence is a natural position for gays and lesbians to adopt. But, of course, it is not at all obvious why the progressive academics I once considered allies, who see themselves as champions of LGBTQ rights, have come to regard Israel—which has a sterling record of civil rights for gay people, ranging from housing and workplace protections to adoption and inheritance rights—as the “hetero-patriarchal,” homophobic, and “homo-nationalistic” enemy of queers.
The fact that the academic notion of queerness and hostility to the Jewish state are now virtually synonymous is largely the accomplishment of a small group of postmodern leftist scholars, the most prominent of whom is Judith Butler. It is therefore worth examining the ideas expounded by Butler and others in her camp, and the effects they have had on universities and the broader political culture of the left, to understand my own sense of vulnerability and isolation.
The standard response on the academic left to the fact that Israel has a gay-friendly culture, alone among countries in the Middle East, is to invoke the concept of "pink-washing" - a supposed way of deflecting attention from its mistreatment of Palestinians. Pointing out the appalling treatment of gays in Islamic countries is a waste of breath:
My colleagues’ responses introduced me to the post-factual, Alice in Wonderland mindset of the academic left. First, I was Islamophobic for daring to broach the subject, since I had “no right,” as a “colonizing Westerner,” to speak critically about Islamic cultures. Second, I was told that most of the videos and still photos showing the hangings, floggings, and other brutal punishments were somehow forgeries or “fake news.” Third, supposing some of the representations were accurate, the “victims” were punished not for being gay but because they were anti-Islamic and pro-Western collaborators, out to “corrupt” and “destroy” their cultures—in other words, according to these enlightened progressives, they had it coming. Fourth, and relatedly, I was told that Arab countries resorted to homophobia only because of Western colonialism. Thus, even if these men were targeted for torture or death, they were partially at fault because they had courted danger by imitating “foreign fashions,” following the “Western model” of coming out of the closet. By this torturous logic, identifying themselves as gay or homosexual in public made these men accomplices of Western imperialism which meant, once again, that they should be seen as responsible for their own victimization....
Judith Butler, famously, stated that “Understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.” She supports the elimination of Israel in favour of a "bi-national" state, with details left necessarily vague...
[A]cademic audiences living far from the realities and complexities of the Israel-Palestine conflict greet her ideas with enthusiastic gratitude. At last, an ideal solution to an intractable problem that privileges the “victimized Other” while returning Jews to their traditional “ethical” (if marginalized) positions as disempowered (if indispensable) “middlemen.” Further, since a world-famous Jew endorses this plan, it cannot possibly be antisemitic. Despite her objections to the concept of authenticity, Butler performs the role of the “virtuous Jew” for her audiences.
And that performance, it must be said, has been something of a success. In universities today, Butler’s doctrines are repeated like religious dogma. Occasionally, there are quips about her inscrutable prose or whispers about her intellectual and ethical misadventures, but she is mostly embraced as a queer and Jewish intellectual icon. Her canon has become something that wields such power in the humanities and, increasingly, in the social sciences, that it threatens academic freedom and intellectual innovation. As I have observed and have been told, graduate students, particularly Jewish ones, are regularly subjected by “woke” professors to harangues about Jews (and Israelis) that they would never contemplate with other minorities. Those who object to the singling out and demonization of Israel are often treated coldly, given bad grades, or refused letters of recommendation should their identities or alliances become known. Jewish undergraduates are assailed in their professors’ and adjuncts’ offices with posters reading END THE OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE, or maps that erase Israel.
Nor is this limited to university campuses. Dyke marches in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other cities across the country have banned the Israeli flag from their parades on the grounds that these are anti-Zionist events, and displaying the Jewish Star of David might “make people feel unsafe.”
Jewish and Zionist allies are getting the message that they are despised and unwanted. In queer and women’s studies programs, the topic of Palestine is regularly inserted into the most unlikely contexts, to the extent that one student in a class about queer history told me that they discussed nothing but Palestine. The bitter irony is that by ostracizing and marginalizing Jews in the name of a postmodern ideology of queerness, actual queer people are made less safe. I would know: I am one of them.
Comments