The Cultural Appropriation Stops at “Genocide”
We Jews have been fine with “cultural appropriation” from Jesus to bagels – from Einstein to Jonas Salk to Hollywood. The Yiddish of Ashkenazi Jews is now part of Americana – klutz, schmooz, oy vey! schlep, chutzpah, shlemiel and shlimazel. If there were more Sephardi, Mizrahi and Arabic Jews like me in the U.S. we’d have some doozies from Judeo Arabic and Ladino.
But there is a line. Our Shoah, our Genocide, and October 7th are not up for appropriation.
The cries of Israel committing “genocide” the day after October 7th is not only twisted but pure appropriation of Jewish suffering and trauma.
Appropriation of our culture and religion has gone on for millenia, and it has been used against us. Take our Torah and rename it the Old Testament, fine, but demanding we give it up for a “New” Testament, not fine. Take a cool Jewish rabbi from the Galilee, a Jew who kept Shabbat, and turn his Passover seder into his Last Supper and his Jewishness into his death knell and blame the Jews! That lie was a terrible line to cross.
The Church pointed at us, Judean Jews living under Roman occupation, where the Romans changed the name of our land to Syria-Palestina to distance us from our identity. We hardly had the power to conduct the cruel Roman-style crucifixion of Jesus, who got too popular among Jews flocking to him, making the Romans uncomfortable. Were we Jews unhappy with Roman Rule priming him for Resistance against the Empire? I imagine this upstart rabbi was a political threat. We don’t know. What we do know is that Jews were in no position to crucify anyone.
But we paid for it. We paid for it terribly in the Spanish Inquisition. Even converting out from Judaism to Catholicism did not save everyone from gruesome deaths and eventual expulsion.
We hid, we ran when we could, from one country to another. Palestine, our Israel, was no longer ours. After the Romans the Ottoman Empire conquered and ignored the land. Jews from every continent we wandered into prayed daily, facing Jerusalem, to return.
Expulsion after expulsion, from adopted homes in Christian and Muslim lands under demeaning laws and normalized Jew hatred, we lived with the demand that we convert into what was appropriated or face pogroms and persecution.
I know this history in every cell of my body. I grew up politically powerless, a stateless Egyptian Iraqi Jewish girl in a Catholic school in Japan.
The nuns of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary taught us in every classroom that the Jews killed Christ, the Son of God, and that Hitler would go to heaven “because he was a baptized Christian,” after giving my oral book report on the Holocaust.
Mother Roberts was clear, I the intransigent Jew would “never see the face of God,” she said. She lectured us on how Jews will continue to be persecuted “with more Holocausts until Jews accept Jesus Christ as (our ) Lord and Savior.” Not one classmate spoke up.
That was in Seventh Grade. Earlier when I was in Third Grade, my teacher Mother Joan of Arc, whom I adored, lovingly took my hand in hers and placed me in front of the life size statue of Jesus dying in torment on the cross. I still feel the pain, who could not? But I knew Jesus was not my god.
“Look Racheline, “she said, “See above his crown of thorns, it is written, ‘Jesus King of the Jews’, He was a Jew, just like you.” I looked at her warm eyes and asked, “but if he was a Jew, then why must I convert?”
Everything in a missionary school is about conversion. At the time I had no choice but to go to this school.
Islam did its own version. It took parts of our Torah into their Quran, it took Abraham, Moses and Jerusalem. It built mosques over our holiest places and forbids us entry. It took our prophets and our stories. It decided that Jews corrupted our own scriptures and that the real versions belonged to Islam.
How many “River to the Sea” marchers know Jews lived in the Middle East and North Africa for centuries before Mohammed was born? And how many know our lives as despised second-class dhimmi for refusing to convert or accept Islam’s version of us?
My family, from a long line of Egyptian and Iraqi Jews, from ancestors who were in those lands before Islam, lived that arrangement as despised “dirty” Jews. We were legalized second class citizens, forced to pay a special tax, tolerated when it was convenient and punished with no recourse when it wasn’t.
We the Jews of the MENA lived precariously – co-existence a fantasy, life too frequently marred by horror. Both my parents’ native lands are Jew-Free now. Ask why.
Have you heard about the Farhud in 1941? The expulsions from Egypt in 1956?
Nearly a million Jews were pauperized and forced out of Arab lands within a generation in the 1950’s – our property stolen, our nationalities and passports confiscated, our communities of two thousand five hundred years erased. Humiliated and told never to return.
Today a new museum has opened in Baghdad in what used to be a Jewish school. The museum houses everyday stuff of life along with religious artifacts appropriated when Iraq forced its Jewish population to leave with only one suitcase of clothing. Our stuff feeds the curious. As Dara Horn painted the picture for us in her book,“People Love Dead Jews” – Iraq is Jew free.
Most of us Jews from what became Arab lands are now in Israel. Most of us had nowhere else open to us, even if what was open were cramped tent cities, the maabarot, in a dirt poor Israel of the 1950’s.
The world ignored us, ignored our ethnic cleansing all over the Arab world. No one asks “Where are your Jews?”
We survived the Holocaust, the pogroms, the Farhud, the terrible toll of war in 1948, then 1967, then 1973, and the slaughters of October 7.
And we are commiting “genocide”? The charge is obscene.
The word genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, dozens of his family members were murdered in the Holocaust.
Now “Genocide” gets shouted at us on campuses and spray-painted on synagogues? “Ethnic cleansing,” spouted by people who have never once heard the word Farhud, who never saw what my mother witnessed in Baghdad in 1941. I heard those bloodcurdling screams through her memories and through Granny’s stories of the rape, pillage, and slaughter.
Recently I saw Haviv Rettig Gur in San Francisco. He said, “You know who Israeli Jews are? The Jews who didn’t get into America.” The Jews who survived the Holocaust and had nowhere to go. Jews who survived pogroms in the Middle East and North Africa and had nowhere to go. Jews who were kicked out or forced out in the 1950’s from Arab Lands had nowhere to go. And by the way, Eastern Jews, the Mizrahim, comprise half of Israel’s Jewish population.
Playing the “Genocide!” game against us instead of shutting down the Qatar & Co. enterprise, the charismatic Islamists appropriating our genocide like charismatic Zohran Mamdani and ridiculous Greta Thunberg echo Islamist propaganda and claim Israel should not exist.
Wars are a hell no one should have to experience. No Israeli, no Gazan, no one. The Gaza war brought on accusations of genocide manufactured by Hamas. Hamas started a terrible war, Hamas refuses to surrender. Hamas depends on as many as its own people dying for its ultimate cause to destroy Israel.
I grew up in postwar Japan. I met survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I saw the burns and disfigurement on Nagasaki and Hiroshima survivors. The war weary amputees. The beggars and their children picking lice off their bodies on the streets. I saw a small bit of Hell that wars are.
I remember hearing Japanese adults talk about the war and admit, “Hai, sensō maketa kara, ganbarō”: Yes, we lost the war, now we courageously rebuild. They surrendered. They rebuilt. They gave up war. Hamas does the opposite.
Genocide is the intent to destroy to exterminate a people. The word has a meaning, and that meaning matters precisely because it was built out of what happened to us.
That Hamas wants every Jew in Israel slaughtered is genocide. Appropriating our history by claiming “genocide” as Hamas forces its people to suffer horribly, is its long game in getting rid of the Jewish state.
Genocide? What army bent on destroying a people warns them first? The IDF drops leaflets, sends text messages and makes phone calls telling Gazans where it is about to strike so they can get out.
It’s not rocket science. If Israel wanted genocide, it would have happened.
On October 13, 2023, the IDF warned about 1.1 million people in northern Gaza to move south, out of harm’s way. Did Egypt open its doors? And who forced Gazan women men children not to go anywhere? Who caged them in?
Hamas.
“There will be no ‘displacement’,” Hamas euphemistically, cruelly, decreed. Hamas set up roadblocks on the main road south to stop people from escaping.
Hamas needs its people stuck where the bombs fall. Hamas needs children killed for world support. Hamas has told us they are willing to have as many of its own to be killed in order to get world opinion on their side in order to annihilate the Jews, in order to get rid of Israel.
Instead of outrage and horror against Hamas’ barbaric October 7 attack on men, women, children, babies, they proudly recorded beheadings and rapes on their body cams for all to see, the next day, on October 8th the mass “protests” against Israel commiting “genocide” had already begun.
The Hamas Charter vows death to Israel, death to the Jew. They carry out the vow in their actions, on their bodycams, in their every move. That is what intent to genocide a people looks like. They refuse co-existence. They want one state.
Israel, as imperfect as any country is bound to be, has tried several times for a Two State Solution. I shouldn’t have to repeat this, but it’s so easily “forgotten.” We want a country, no matter how small, so we will share, we will and have partitioned. We tried to give up more to resounding NO’s each time.
Under Islamic doctrine, once a land has been Islamized, as the Ottoman Empire did in Palestine, the land can never revert to its original owners.
Every version of Jew hatred does and says the same thing: the Jew is the source of the world’s evil, and the world will be redeemed when the Jew is punished. Two thousand years ago a Jew was hung on a cross so he could carry the sins of the world. Today it is Israel the Jew, carrying the sins of the world – All the colonialism, racism, every war and every injustice the West feels guilty about, all of it hung on one Jewish state the size of New Jersey.
The word Genocide will not be appropriated to twist our suffering, our Holocaust, into ostracizing and killing Jews. Genocide will not be appropriated and handed back to us as an indictment. You don’t get to nail us to the cross again.
