Let’s Talk About Here!

Opinion, The Conspiracy; by Jonathan Katz for newvoices

Publications aimed for a queer Jewish audience, like any niche-aimed work, tend to concentrate on certain themes. There are your coming out to your community publications, there are your famous-queer-Jews publications, there are your “my story” publications.

And then there is another trend: a deep, heavy, nearly-overwhelming concentration on Israel.

Israel is everywhere in the queer Jewish community – and we’re not talking objective or straightforward discussions here. (Mention “pink-washing” and things might not go so well for you.) “Look at the equality and glory of Israel” is a message almost ubiquitous in the queer Jewish community – of course, with a heavy dose of hasbara (Hi AIPAC!), nationalist feel-good rhetoric, and reproduction of racist stereotypes. Almost always, one finds highly distorted truths. To a certain point, I – the son of a mother raised in Israel – do not completely mind. But in fact, I mind quite a lot.

To a point, this focus is simply annoying – and exclusionary for those who are even mildly critical of Israel’s government or its policies, for it has developed a culture of “you’re with us or against us.” There’s also the point at which it is obsessive – it feels as if nothing else is discussed.

And what I’m concerned with is that this obsession comes at the expense of discussing queer Jewish experiences right here, right now in the United States.

Of course, it can already be argued that the American Jewish community is dangerously obsessed with Israel, to the point of damage to our own communal health. As one Israeli filmmaker aptly said, Israel is “too cherished.” Yet, in my own experience, I find that the wider American Jewish community is less concentrated on Israel than the queer Jewish community.

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