Writing Jewish Stories in a Silencing Moment

The Special Challenges of Language in this Moment

A few days ago, Zadie Smith wrote an excellent essay about the way in which language has become weaponized to ensure we not only don’t, but can’t, have real conversations about the war between Israel and Hamas (and Iran and its other proxies). She writes:

In these constructed narratives, there are always a series of shibboleths, that is, phrases that can’t be said, or, conversely, phrases that must be said. Once these words or phrases have been spoken (river to the sea, existential threat, right to defend, one state, two states, Zionist, colonialist, imperialist, terrorist) and one’s positionality established, then and only then will the ethics of the question be attended to (or absolutely ignored).

Her larger point is that these shibboleths make conversation across positions impossible. I’d like to add that I think they also make dedicated partisans on both sides unintelligible to the vast majority of people who are uninitiated into the layered meanings, and political usages, of these specific phrases. (I would argue that this includes many of the student protestors, who are parroting the phrases that Islamist organizations are feeding to them without fully understanding them.)

I’m also thinking about how this poses a particular challenge to writers. The work of this summer is to turn the first draft of my book into a strong third draft. In the current draft, the second, I’m focused on removing redundancies and including linkages between and among the individual essays. The next pass will be for language; where have I fallen into cliché, where have I been abstract when concreteness is called for, where do phrases clunk against one another, that sort of thing. It’s usually the pass I enjoy the most; I think of first drafts as the worst of the work, second drafts as a puzzle challenge of the sort I’m not particularly good at, and the third as the reward for all that other work. But this time, for this book, I will need to add to the language pass the task the searching out of phrases—shibboleths—that, should I include them, will effectively break the project of the book by rendering it unreadable by most.

Of course, the most significant of these shibboleths I won’t be able to avoid because this is a book exploring what it means to be both Jewish and Appalachian, and (once again, as it so often has before) “Jew” has become itself a word that will render anything I write unreadable for some. There may be backlash against the press when it publishes the work, though I hope not. There are a number of awards for which I had hoped, at the start, the book might be considered that now explicitly state they will not consider Zionist work. Most haven’t provided any definition of Zionist, but I have to imagine that just having the book end in Israel, as it does now, will be enough for the sort of organizations that would issue such a statement. And so be it. Not getting awards, reduced sales, none of this is of particular import. If I wrote to sell books, I would write mildly transgressive YA novels. If I wrote to win awards, I’d pay more attention to the zeitgeist rather than almost always writing against it.

But I do want to write a book that can be read, a book that doesn’t silence itself by accidentally setting up landmines of language that shut the reader out. And as the war grinds on, more of the everyday language of Jewishness is being weaponized against us, making our stories harder to tell.

All of this has reminded me of one of the most compelling pieces of theory I studied during my PhD. (What I’m saying is, buckle up, things are about to get nerdy.) French philosopher and literary theorist Jean-François Lyotard posits that there exists something called “the differend,” a failure of language such that a dispute can only be won by the silencing of one of the parties. His primarily example of this is taken from a French trial in which revisionist historian Robert Faurisson demanded proof of the murder of Jews in Auschwitz in gas chambers, but sets at the only proof he will accept the testimony of those murdered in the gas chambers, who by definition cannot give testimony. He wrote:

It is in the nature of a victim not to be able to prove that one has been done a wrong. A plaintiff is someone who has incurred damages and who disposes of the means to prove it. One becomes a victim if one loses these means..the perfect crime does not consist in killing the victim or the witnesses…but rather in obtaining the silence of the witnesses, the deafness of the judges, and the inconsistency (insanity) of the testimony.  You neutralize the addressor, the addresses, and the sense of the testimony; then everything is as if there were no referent (no damages).

I’ve been thinking quite a lot, then, during this revision and during this dark moment, about the concerted effort to create such a differend in conversations about the Hamas/Israel war by the protest organizers and the PR wing of Hamas through the use of the shibboleths Smith accurately identifies (and others she shies away from, and which I will shy away from here because I cannot name them without invoking their power to render this essay unreadable by many (most?), but I would say their unwriteability makes my point). It’s most apparent to me in the horrific failure of those whose mission is to end sexual violence of all sorts to speak up against the use of sexual violence by Hamas on October 7th.

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I had wanted to embed the film Screams Before Silence here, because one can’t mention this violence without being shouted down with accusations of falsity, and this film lays bare the horror of what happened. But it, too, requires multiple levels of work before it can be accessed… it can’t be embedded, and to watch it the user must be age-verified. I am not saying that I mind that, or that I think this shouldn’t be true. But I will add that the photograph by Ali Mahmud of Shani Louk’s dead body, bloody crotch and all, can be viewed across the internet without such precautions and was even given a prestigious award.

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The challenge of how to write around and through shibboleths and differends is particularly critical right now for Jewish and Palestinian writers, particularly those who write toward peace and away from either of the extreme positions that at the moment hold such control over the language we need to discuss the conflict. How do we write honestly about our lives and experiences when our positionalities determine, as Smith rightly notes, whether or not what we write will “be attended to (or absolutely ignored)?”

I’d love to hear how you are meeting this challenge, writer friends.