criticism, yiddish & jewish

“Ceci tuera cela”

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[written october/november 2021]

i was poking around in an anthology the other day, and found something about one of my favorite poets’ work that kinda blew me away. i saw in the table of contents that among celia dropkin’s poems was one called “tsu lutsifer / to lucifer”. that wasn’t surprising; part of why i adore her work is its gothy edge. the surprise came when i turned to it and found not a single poem but a triptych: a first section addressed (as promised) to lucifer, and then two poems i know quite well. they’ve been printed under a few titles; their first lines are “ikh hob dikh nokh nit gezen / i still haven’t seen you” and “du kvelst, ikh kvel / you rejoice, i rejoice”.

both are intense and erotic: in “ikh hob dikh nokh nit gezen”, dropkin declares “i want to see how you sleep / when you lose your power / over yourself, over me / … / i want to see you / helpless… / i want to see you / dead.” in “du kvelst, ikh kvel”, she demands “burn me up, be burnt up / take up all my desire”. but seen as parts of a larger piece, especially one dedicated to the light-bringing fallen angel, they take on a whole new dimension.

i’ll put the triptych below, in yiddish and english – you might want to skip down to read it now.

the three parts move from a cold, compelling, dominating object of desire to a fantasy of a lover stripped of all power to an image of sanctified purgation through excess. so far, so wonderfully goth: creepy, hot, disturbing, cosmic.

but what gets my head spinning in interesting ways is that all of this is done with specifically christian occult imagery. there’s not a jewish reference point to be found, and, as in a great deal of yiddish poetry by women, there’s barely a word from the hebrew/aramaic side of the language, which bears liturgical resonances as well as everyday meanings (to be precise, there’s one: “תל / tel” [ruin]).

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longer writing, revolution, yiddish & jewish

is this the feast that we desire?

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on adar and genocide warrants

or, how many massacres will it take until you’re ready to stop telling the fucking esther/mordekhai story already?

i wrote a piece about the month of adar, and carnival, and how we celebrate purim, for the 5785 edition of the wonderful Dreaming the World to Come planner (you can still get this year’s edition, and you should!).

i just made a slightly remixed version, because as the israeli and u.s. governments again wage war on iran, the use of the Megila as a justifying reference point has already begun.

you can read it here.

and on iran and solidarity in the face of this new war, i think some of the best writing to think with is from the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective. their article “Solidarity and Its Discontents” is from 2009, but is still perfectly applicable to the new crops of useful idiots – both the dithering sanctions-fan liberals and the enemy-of-my-enemy leftist apologists for the iranian theocracy (now often using a rhetoric of “multipolarity” to justify their embrace of murderous regimes). and their 2011 “Essential Readings” remains an excellent starting point.

there is also a long history of revolutionary organizing in iran, in opposition to both local oppressive regimes (whether theocratic or monarchist) and imperialist interventions. here is a brief 2022 interview with members of one of the current iranian anarchist groups; and here is a much longer 2005 interview with the editor of an iranian anarchist magazine (including an account of the theocratic counter-revolution that installed the current regime).

gay wrath, revolution

files and conspiracies

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(1)

so: the core module of u.s. conspiracist thinking is the one it inherited from the european christian intelligentsia, whose history norman cohn traced brilliantly in Europe’s Inner Demons (if a little dryly, especially if you’re not an archive-rat like me). it goes back to ancient roman political maneuvering – in sallust’s account of the “catiline conspiracy”, from the last century before the christian era, for instance – and perhaps even further1, but consolidated itself through anti-jewish and anti-christian attacks over the first few hundred years of the christian era.

that module says:

there is a hidden group of people who seek power for themselves and control over our society; they gather in secret and hold perverse sexual rites, abusing children (and also adults – willing or unwilling – often incestuously); they ritually kill humans (often children, specificially) and drink their blood or eat their flesh; their ultimate goal is to undermine the political and social systems that we live within.

i won’t go into the history of that module (i’d only be summarizing cohn, and you should just read him instead) but it moves essentially unchanged from roman anti-christian polemic through christian anti-heresy and anti-witchcraft polemics and the anti-jewish blood libel, inspiring and excusing a massive number of murders and massacres along the way. almost all of those deaths, importantly, were carried out by the state (whichever one, of whatever form), or with the explicit or implicit support of the state.

we’ve seen a very classical version of this module emerge and grow over the past decade: the ongoing Pizzagate/QAnon movement.

and we’ve seen an equally classical mobilization of it in a more open-ended form over a slightly longer period: the ongoing anti-trans campaigns centered in the u.k. and u.s.

and we have also, over more or less the same years, seen more and more detailed evidence of something else:

the actual involvement of an impressive number of public figures with someone they knew was actively involved with the sexual exploitation of both children and adults on a very large scale, which many of them directly participated in or saw happening.

(2)

one response to that has been “the conspiracy theorists were right”.

it’s a tempting throw-away line, and i can understand why i’m seeing it so often from people in my circles.

but it’s also both untrue and dangerous.

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criticism, gay wrath, yiddish & jewish

sex, lies, and primeval matriarchy

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or, how i learned to stop worrying and hate fake history written by fascists

or, you can’t fool me, it’s enemy feminisms all the way down


i’ve been thinking about this for a while, and picking up pieces of the story here and there, but i haven’t had the time (or, to be real about it, the languages) to do the deep dive it needs. so here’s what i know, in hopes that others will run further with it.

one of the most lastingly popular narratives to come out of the cultural feminist sphere1 is the idea of an ancient matriarchal culture, suppressed by later patriarchal oppressors. this currently appears in all kinds of forms: contemporary “noble savage” depictions of indigenous cultures of turtle island; historically dubious accounts of the medieval and early modern european/euro-colonial anti-“witchcraft” moral panics2; and, above all, grand presentations of the prehistory of europe and west asia, or/and of “indo-european cultures”.

that last one is not only central to a widely popularized cultural feminist “common sense”, but central to most contemporary paganisms. at its core, it holds that prehistoric goddess-worshiping societies were supplanted by patriarchal invaders (either physical or ideological) who brought with them monotheism as well as misogyny.

leaving aside the straightforward critiques of the basically laughable idea that there was a common culture across the vast geography involved in these claims – and that it would be reconstructable if there were3 – this simply doesn’t hold up to any detailed scrutiny. but that’s not what i’m interested in here; and neither is the narrative’s transparent recapitulation of the christian myth of the Fall from Eden. where i’m headed is towards the history of that narrative, the history of the fantasy itself. this is all still preamble.

frequently, but not invariably, this narrative of indo-european prehistory turns explicitly anti-jewish. take, for example, the version presented by z budapest, founder of Dianic Wicca and one of the most influential figures in the history of feminist paganism. at a 1976 Women’s Spirituality Conference in boston, she declared “the Jewish religion began as a backlash to the goddess religion”.4 another presenter at the same conference, mary daly, a post-Catholic theologian who played a similarly central role in women’s spiritual movements outside the pagan sphere, held a similar position.

if that sounds like a feminist version of the openly anti-jewish strains of “reconstruction”-oriented paganism – from slavic “native faith” groups to U.S. Odinism; often though not always aligned with neo-Nazi politics – it ought to, because that’s exactly what it is. and that’s what this piece is about.

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criticism, revolution

half a pardes

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a critique of a book i liked a lot

i adore ruthanna emrys’ writing.

i first fell into it through her Innsmouth Legacy series (two novels and a novella so far), which reshapes h.p. lovecraft’s world in ways that i hope he would have appreciated, after his definitive late-life turn towards antifascism – and that i certainly do, for the changes she plays on the first and second red scares, on the many faces of u.s. fascism (and the pervasive xenophobia and eugenics that feed it) past and present, on the pleasures and dangers of closed communities and port cities. and her “the word of flesh and soul” made me fall even harder for the lovely and chilling things it does with the entanglement of words and bodies, sex and scholarship, archives and autonomy.

i’ve just finished emrys’ latest novel, “a half-built garden”, which is a first-contact story, a trans/queer/poly story, a climate-apocalypse story, a jewish diasporist futurist story, and even, in its subtle way, a monsterfucker story – and, according to its acknowledgements, has been (accurately) accused of being a “diaperpunk” story. it’s sweet, and tense, and very satisfyingly balanced between familiar and new. i enjoyed the hell out of reading it, and slowed down to draw out the pleasure.

i’m writing about it here because part of its power, to me, is as a very specific kind of cautionary tale – but in a way that i don’t think the novel itself sees. whether emrys does or not isn’t particularly important to me; i know very well from my own work that what i understand about and intend with a piece and what the piece understands and does have only a tenuous relationship.

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criticism, revolution

state-controlled is not the same as “public”

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it is, in fact, just as opposite as “private”. probably more so.

the only difference is what kind of organization is in control – and every state (by virtue of being a state) considers itself to have the discretion to defend its control with deadly violence.

if “public” means anything, it means “controlled by the people involved with it”. it means socially-managed, not state-managed. it means that a person with a gun and a uniform doesn’t get to decide things about it.

for the love of life, please stop saying “public” when you mean “state-controlled”.

criticism, revolution, Uncategorized

the inside game

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i just read an interesting piece by an old comrade and awesome researcher/writer: dania rajendra’s “go short”. it’s an extended analogy between the NFL and the Democratic Party, using a careful look at the history behind the belated shift towards the “passing game” in u.s. football as a lens to see the absence of any comparable strategic evolution in the electoral party. it’s worth reading, but to me its imaginative horizon – made very visible by what it carefully doesn’t say – is what’s most revealing.

the piece crisply explains the history of u.s. football and the monopolistic organization that controls it, going into its direct and explicit connections to militarism, white supremacy, and misogyny, but staying concretely anchored in the destruction of human bodies that is inextricable from the sport’s structure, and focusing on the various rounds of ‘reform’ that have incrementally lessened its immediate harms (centered, from teddy roosevelt’s 1906 rule-change to this century’s un-legislated shift in dominant strategy, on replacing running the ball with throwing it). it nods to the parallels with the monopolistic organization that controls the electoral liberal and left spheres, clearly naming its structural function of “stomping out challenges to the status quo”, but going into far less detail about how this inextricable counterinsurgency function operates.

doing that would, very plainly, give away the game. it would open questions that the piece quite openly excludes as it frames its intent: to extract from contemporary NFL football “lessons for American leftists interested in trying to advance strategies that could win a new feature of the only opposition party we have”.

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gay wrath, revolution

the fantasy of “the rule of law”, and the concrete reality of the state

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As the U.S. President and other members of his administration say aloud that they will ignore court orders that disagree with their actions just as steadfastly as they will ignore legislators’ objections, there’s more and more talk about “the rule of law” and a “constitutional crisis”. That may, for certain purposes, be a reasonable account of what’s happening within the state, but it’s useless as a lens for looking at what’s happening in the country – that is, on the expanse of stolen land that the U.S. state rules. In fact, it is a way of actively avoiding dealing with what is going on in any way that can inform strategic or tactical thinking about how to resist.

Again and again, over the past five years of uprisings and discontent, we’ve seen progressive and radical groups (especially, but not exclusively, 501c corporations) and prominent movement figures fall back on two core strategies for responding to the far right.

One is elections: either backing the Democratic Party as a whole, as it moves steadily from the right to the far right1, or backing liberal candidates within it, who are uniformly marginalized, attacked, and defanged by the party leadership even as their presence legitimizes that leadership. It would be nice if that approach’s abject failure to win any material victories over the past decade discredited it, but given that its abject failure over the previous four decades didn’t, we can’t count on that.

The other is lex ex machina – intervention by the courts. That alleged strategy is based on the idea that legal decisions command a moral force that cannot be countered (which every U.S. justice movement’s history disproves), or that they are fundamentally self-enforcing magic words that control the state.

On the practical side, Andrew Jackson pointed out the problem with that last position back when the U.S. Supreme Court tried to restrict the State of Georgia’s authority over the Cherokee Nation. “Justice Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it” is the way Horace Greeley imagined him phrasing it; Old Hickory himself just called the decision “still born” (and in practice embraced, rather than rejecting, the court’s guidance on how exactly to go about committing genocide). But the problem for movement strategy isn’t the practical side, it’s the ideological underpinnings that let so many radicals who know that punchline continue to act as if they’ve never heard any such thing.

There is no such thing as a government of laws. There is no such thing as the rule of law. Laws are words on paper (or graven in stone, or incised on clay tablets, or preserved as digital 1s and 0s). They do not rule, they do not govern, any more than the Statue of Liberty does, or a pothole on I-95, or any other inanimate object.

States are made of people, say the state-preservationists of the left, and they’re correct. There’s even a grain of partial truth in their fantasy that this makes the state as a structure infinitely malleable. Laws are products of the state – of specific people within its structures – but what being a state means is that the people who act in its name decide what concrete effects its laws will have. The state is a specific kind of structure, and a key part of that specificity is the discretion that its agents hold.

We see this every day.

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ראָזעלע זושוק האַלעװי