I have a complicated relationship with Judaism, at best. I don’t need to get into my whole life experience . . . but (briefly) I really enjoy the cultural aspects of Judaism and appreciate its long history, yet have serious problems with Judaism as a religion and integrating the less-positive parts of Jewish history into the modern functioning of the religion.
Expanding on that, slightly, I have moved from being ambivalent to how I feel about Israel to being specifically anti-Israel. To wit, the ends don’t (shouldn’t) justify the means: The (sort of) peaceful (mostly) democratic State of Israel as a beacon of Western Civilization to the rest of the Middle East can’t, to me, excuse its horribly colonialist founding or head-in-the-sand attitude toward the idea of a Palestinian state. (I know things are much more complicated than that, and the obvious fact that Israel does exist today means grumblings over how things came to be this way are somewhat moot. Nevertheless…)
All of which means I’m not sure how I feel about Birthright Israel.
Continue reading 'Any experiences with Birthright?'»
Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day “set aside to memorialize those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice.” There’s an expectation that The Trans Community is supposed to come together and mourn our dead, celebrate our living. (Indeed, I’ll be performing tomorrow night at Center on Halsted’s Night of Fallen Stars, set up to do just that.)
I mentioned last year that I felt really disconnected from the TDOR, and I’m not sure my feelings have changed.
QueenEmily at Questioning Transphobia wrote a post, the drowned and the saved, today in which she said
There was an Italian atheist Jewish writer called Primo Levi who wrote about his experience of Auschwitz, over and over. In his last book The Drowned and the Saved, he drew up a distinction between “the drowned” (those who died) and “the saved” (those who lived). He argued that only the drowned could give true and full witness to the horror of the Shoah.
I’m not comparing the murders of trans people to the Shoah directly – the murder of trans people, which horrific, is not institutionally organised towards genocide in quite the same way. But what I want to point out is the structure of witnessing. Even Levi, a man who lived through the camp, at the end of his life felt inadequate to witnessing, unable to have fully experienced the violence he wrote about. Even his proximity was not enough.
She goes on to say that, even with her own experiences of transphobic hatred, it is impossible to properly give witness to those murdered, particularly across cultural or racial lines (most of those murdered this past year where latino or black, and in Central or South America). But that we should try, anyway, because it is our duty and responsibility to the dead.
Continue reading 'Transgender day of what?'»
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