If you want to attend an event organised by VUJU, the new Jewish student association, you have to complete a lengthy questionnaire and provide a link to at least one of your social media accounts; apparently so they can check whether you’re a secret anti-Semitic agitator. Ad Valvas interviewed the founders last year, who already stated then that they had to announce parties and events via word-of-mouth marketing and personal invites instead of in the usual way.
They held the first in a series of three meetings on the VU campus yesterday, in the context of ‘Reclaiming the Narrative’. Because there’s a lot of debate about Jews and what Jewishness is, what constitutes a good or bad Jew and what Zionism is, ‘but I won’t be told by a non-Jew what it is to be Jewish’, stated the Scottish writer Ben M. Freeman, who was interviewed by Full Professor of Jewish Studies, Jessica Roitman. The ‘M’ in his name stands for Maxwell and he uses it to distinguish himself from the ‘hundreds of other Jews who are called Ben Freeman’, he explained when asked.
Pinball machine
Freeman is the author of three books: Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People, Reclaiming our Story: The Pursuit of Jewish Pride and The Jews: An Indigenous People. He talks like a pinball machine, goes off on tangents at rapid speed and has a rather thick Scottish accent. This sometimes makes it fairly challenging to follow what he’s saying but he certainly knows how to hold people’s attention. If the interviewer or an audience member asked a question that strayed too far from the topic, he brought them firmly back on track. He also doesn’t like to be interrupted. He’s more direct than the most direct Dutch person but is nevertheless charming, with a certain natural authority.
Freeman is a strong advocate for Jewish Pride: not as a resistance movement, he emphasised several times, but more as a form of self-realisation. ‘It’s about how we feel about ourselves, not how we present ourselves to the outside world.’
This idea originated from Gay Pride, which helped Freeman overcome his shame and guilt about being gay. At a certain point, he realised that if people responded to his sexuality in a certain way, it was their problem, not his. There’s nothing wrong with being gay but everything’s wrong with people who make a big deal out of it.
Of course, the same applies to his Jewishness. Born and raised in Glasgow, he was part of a small minority that wasn’t discriminated against per se, but there were always things that made clear to him that he was different, such as not being able to go out drinking on a Friday evening with his non-Jewish friends. And worldwide, even if Jews in the diaspora are not openly discriminated against, they’re still ‘othered,’ as Freeman called it. Singled out, labelled.
Swastikas
This was also evident from the experiences of some audience members present in the room; many Jews of all ages, including students and schoolchildren, one of whom reported that her schoolmates had said about her: ‘This is that Jew I was talking about.’ Not direct evidence of anti-Semitism, but certainly not in any way inclusive. Another pupil, after reporting swastikas scrawled on the walls to her school management, was asked whether she was constantly on the alert for such signs of anti-Semitism.
Jews are made to feel that they should be ashamed of themselves, stated Freeman. According to him, there are even Jews who internalise anti-Jewish sentiments in society and join in the denigration of Jews. A notable example is prominent anti-Zionist, Norman Finkelstein. Jews like Finkelstein are often accused of ‘self-hatred’, but Freeman rejects this notion. ‘Finkelstein doesn’t hate himself; he’s simply internalised anti-Jewishness from his environment’, he said. He referred to scientific studies into internalised anti-Blackness among African Americans. The internalisation of anti-Jewishness is inherently human. ‘Call a person a dog often enough and they become convinced they’re really a dog’, stated Freeman.
According to Freeman, anti-Jewishness has become normalised, causing many Jews to jump through hoops to be accepted as ‘good Jews’ and to be liked. For example, they emphasise their criticism about Israel and Netanyahu, denigrate Orthodox Jews and reject Zionism.
Selfish
And then things got heated. ‘Anti-Zionist Jewish leaders should be excommunicated’, stated Freeman, prompting Roitman, who seemed momentarily thrown off balance, to draw parallels with Spinoza, who was also excommunicated by his Sephardic community because of his ideas. According to Freeman, Jews who state that Israel isn’t needed as a Jewish safe haven because they feel safe are simply being selfish. ‘They don’t take Ethiopian Jews or Jews from the former Soviet Union into account at all’, he said.
Freeman and Roitman both view anti-Zionism as anti-Jewish. ‘People are shocked if I say I’m a Zionist’, stated Roitman. ‘But being a Zionist doesn’t mean that I’m also genocidal, it simply means that I believe that the State of Israel has a right to exist.’ Freeman added that he finds it humiliating ‘as a descendant of a three-thousand-year-old civilisation’ to be told by non-Jews what Zionism means. ‘We need to take back control of our language,’ said Roitman. Reclaiming the Narrative.
Indigenous peoples
Another important theme in Freeman’s work is that Jews are all Indigenous Israelis. He substantiates this by referring to the seven criteria the United Nations uses to determine whether a people is indigenous. Jews meet these criteria because, among other things, their Hebrew language and culture are rooted in the land formerly known as Palestine. However, Freeman rejects the criterion that Indigenous peoples must be a minority in their own country, which he considers colonial and racist.
Roitman asked him whether he also considers Palestinians to be an Indigenous people of Israel/Palestine. ‘I don’t know that because I’ve not studied Palestinian history’, he answered. ‘It’s not my place as a non-Palestinian to make pronouncements about that.’ He did, however, also state he was in favour of a two-state solution. ‘Because it doesn’t matter whether they’re indigenous or not, however you look at it Palestinians are connected to the land.’