What’s in a Name
My sister and I were the unfortunate bearers of names with Cultural Significance, but not in the way you might think. I was born just a few years before the movie Star Wars appeared on the scene, and my relatively uncommon name was suddenly everywhere. It only got worse after She-ra Princess of Power became one of the most popular female superheroes and my sister Shira and I were asked – did your parents name you after princesses? – on a regular basis. Even without considering my royal namesake, I complained that my parents, when naming me for one of the Matriarchs, had chosen the unwanted fertile daughter as a model for their firstborn. Was that the future they envisioned for me?
My children are no different when it comes to their own names, lovingly chosen and bestowed upon them. Too frum. Too Israeli. Too hard for Americans to pronounce. Too esoteric. Too popular. Maybe it was always going to be this way. Maybe we would inevitably complain that our parents had been given the task of deciding how we would be presented to the world, wanting so desperately to decide for ourselves who we are.
For Jews, naming is a consequential act. From our first introduction into the world, where friends and family listen with excitement as the new title is announced, comically large for such a small being, our names aren’t just the way we appear on the classroom roster. Or on our Passports. Or on our diplomas.
Our names are the way we are called up to the Torah. The way people pray for us when we have something momentous happen, when we go through a challenging time and come out grateful on the other end. They are a reminder of our ancestors. They’re a parent’s hope for our future.
So it’s curious that names are so easy to change. Avram and Sarai become Abraham and Sarah, Jacob becomes Israel. And with the divine imprimatur to boot. Every person who chooses Judaism also chooses a new label to go with their new identity. And, notably, there is a widespread custom of changing the name of someone who is gravely ill. There are many different explanations for this practice. Some believe that this ‘tricks’ the evil eye, some that it forces the decree of death to be revoked (since it was a decree for someone with a different name) and there are those who believe mishaneh makom mishaneh mazal – changing your circumstances will change your luck.
For most of my life, calling myself a Zionist has been part of who I am. The Jewish people has a right to self determination in its ancestral homeland? Sign me up. Pretty much every Jew I knew growing up in the United States considered themselves a Zionist. We sometimes had wildly disparate political positions. We supported different candidates, had fundamental disagreements about what we thought the state should look like. Sometimes the only aspect agreed upon was that one word. Zionist. It was a way to soften even the most unhinged argument. We were diametrically opposed about nearly every piece of Israeli politics, but we could always walk away agreeing on one thing, our peoplehood linking us together even as our vision for what Israel should be was fighting to pull us apart. And so, that word, the one that causes so much consternation these days, was like crazy glue, holding us messily together, excess adhesive seeping out the sides and grabbing onto so much detritus along the way.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), those days are behind us. No amount of lamenting that fact will change the reality. I first started to hear rumblings of discomfort with the term Zionism more than a decade ago. Kids who were very much Jewish insiders – day school, Jewish camps, summers or years or more in Israel – saying they were uncomfortable with the term. A few complained that in all their years of Jewish education, they hadn’t ever been made aware of Israel’s faults. This, I still think, was disingenuous. Twelve or more years of day school, and a significant amount of time in Israel, plus, in all cases, a college education, meant these young people had access to the news, to scholarly articles, to alternative media, to best selling books. Information about Israel, both the good and the bad, was available to them if they wanted to hear it.
What I did hear, from young people, over and over again, was that Zionism meant supporting the Israeli government no matter who was in charge, supporting the occupation, supporting Tzahal in every choice it made or action it took. That absent these commitments one could not call oneself a Zionist. But, I objected, I call myself a Zionist and I am critical of many of those things! As are many Israelis who would also use the term. We’re not fighting over whether Israel should be allowed to exist. We’re fighting over semantics! And indeed we are. But even if I were correct about the nature of the argument, it makes no difference.
Like it or not, the word Zionist has been taken over by two separate groups who would not appreciate being put in the same basket. But in this case, in their unwavering use of the term to mean something other than I ever understood it to, they have common cause. A Zionist, says the far left (and not occasionally the far right meets them at the other side of the political circle) is someone who believes in Jewish supremacy. A colonizer. An apologist for the Christian far right. A hater of Arabs.
A Zionist, says the far right outside of Israel, is also secretly manipulating governments to do its bidding, is part of a cabal that runs the world, is a JEW, spoken not with pride or with love, read like the word is printed on a yellow star, spat out with open contempt and searing hatred. A Zio.
I don’t want to cede the meaning of our words to antisemites. They don’t get to decide what we mean when we define ourselves. But the influence of the broader culture is, at this moment, inescapable. On a daily basis, the word Zionist is being used as, at best, a warning, and at worst, a slur. Given this, allow me to make a proposal. Let’s consider, at least for the moment, dropping the term entirely, at least when dialogue is the goal. This would include the use of the term anti-Zionist as well. Only fair. Of course, it may be painful for some to give it up. But for the sake of peoplehood, we ought to try. It is, after all, just a name. No one need change their views, their strongly held political positions. Just, for now at least, rather than focusing on the label and all the baggage that accompanies it, maybe we can talk about ideas. Say what we believe, as Jews. As a big, messy, disagreeing family.
There’s another word I’d like us to consider removing from our lexicon when talking about Israel, and it’s not because Israel’s actions are beyond reproach. Just like the word Zionist, people are defining it so differently as to have utterly blurred the meaning. Just like the word Zionist, the word has the power to immediately shut down a conversation. And just like the word Zionist, it is being used by our enemies as a blot against every Jew in the world.
The word is genocide.
I’m not prepared here to present a definitive definition of the term. There are numerous attempts to perfect the understanding of the word first coined by Raphael Lemkin, himself a Holocaust survivor, who had already been attempting a definition before his own family was lost. Suffice it to say, there are expansive definitions of the word, ones that might include a surprising number of current conflicts.
But for Jews, the Holocaust eclipsed all other genocides in such a way that the definition most of us took for granted was much simpler and clearer. It involved an expressed intent for extermination, clearly planned and executed mass murder, government sponsored, with receipts. And, I would venture to say, this is largely the way Americans understand the term as well. Most have little knowledge of the death marches of the Armenians or the Khmer Rouge, or even the Russia’s actions in Ukraine, much less other actions that could be classified as genocide under more expansive descriptions.
Given that to most of us Genocide = The Holocaust, it’s not surprising that many Jews react the way that they do when Israel is described as perpetrating a genocide. After all, there is no Final Solution, there are no death camps or gas chambers, no crematoria, no packed boxcars and yellow stars.
No matter that in theory genocides can look very different, in practice that is what Jews and Americans envision when they hear the word. And that is why, if we want to have real meaningful dialogue about Israel, we’re better off leaving that term aside, and talking about the facts in this particular conflict, facts which in and of themselves can be hard to hear. But if we use the word genocide, we risk alienating a large portion of our communities whose understandable response to being called ‘genocide enablers’ will be to close their ears and eyes, and shut down any chance of discussion. It will, maybe counterintuitively, shield people from confronting the brutality that has taken place in Gaza, that deserves, demands, our attention.
Discussion – dialogue – is what is being lost when we use buzzwords and namecalling instead of nuance and understanding. There are 8.3 billion people on the planet, 15 million of them Jews. That’s 0.018%. Even if we maintain outsized influence on the broader culture, it will be meaningless if we allow ourselves to reject our fellow Jews out of hand.
Sometimes a name is stolen from us, and there’s just no going back. I would no more name a child Elmo than I would Snuffalpagus. And all those older men I grew up with in shul, saddled with a name that will surely never make a Jewish comeback, Adolf. They might have been thrilled to have been saddled with Elmo, or Grover. Even Big Bird.
Maybe my children will learn to love their names. I’m still only so-so with mine. Or maybe they’ll decide that when it comes to a name, a fresh start is the best approach as they make their way in the world. Underneath the name, they’ll still be the complex, unique, funny, brilliant, periodically exasperating people they are on the inside.
That’s it. My modest proposal. Maybe the path forward includes finding new names for ourselves. Not for external PR. But because we, as a community, as a people, could use a fresh start. We could certainly use some healing. I don’t personally believe that a name change is magic. We’re still gonna do a whole lot of fighting about issues we care about, and we may still be left bloody and bruised. But if it reminds us that we are committed to trying a new path forward, maybe, God willing, the new name can help us create some magic all for ourselves.
