Our Refusal to be Silent

Last month, The Nation , a progressive American news journal, ran an article praising Caryl Churchhill's play, "Seven Jewish Children" by two gay Jewish writers, Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon. The debate continues in the letter section of this month's Nation and I want to bring to your attention a poem by Stan Smith. He introduces the poem by saying "To AIPAC and to those who resist allowing Seven Jewish Children and My Name is Rachel Corrie, etc., to be performed:

"You are dead

If you will not talk about

What you will not talk about

Or allow me to talk about.

I do not allow you to be dead.

Do not be frozen in the Camps.

Do not stop us from suggesting that

America

Could be a better friend to Israel

differently,

Or that to criticize is an act of love.

Do not disallow that Israel might be

partly wrong,

Or that the Palestinians might be only

partly wrong.

If you will not talk abut how they

might be partly right,

Then you are dead.

Judaism is ethical;

To be Jewish is always to see oneself

on the edge of being wrong

And not to flinch from the balancing act

Of being fully alive and fully

seen by God.

We must talk.

We must talk about it all.

I do not allow you to be dead.

Do not do that to yourself."

Stan Smith, The Nation, May 18, 2009

posted by Joan Nestle for WIB, Melbourne

If we do not talk about it all--something I never thought we would have a problem with--then we find ourselves forbidding other people to talk about it all--as in the Israeli's government's pending law to make public commemoration of the el Nakba a traitorous act. Repression of memory is an impossible act and the sign of a morally bankrupt regime.