My Pinkwashed Life

The title of this post is a tip of the nib to Ma Vie En Rose, a great film!

So I heard about Pinkwashing last spring, but it's gotten a lot of press recently with Sarah Shulman's Op Ed in the New York Times.

The basic accusation of pinkwashing is that Israel, seeking to win support of both gay and left-leaning people around the world, touts its record on gay rights to obscure the serious violations of the rights of Palestinians. For a well done example of this kind of PR, see Bret Stephens' video, Will Israel Survive?.

I have two responses to Sarah Shulman and those who accuse Israel of pinkwashing. The first was summed up on my friend Rich's facebook post with the link to her article: No matter what we do, they hate us. I would say it differently like this: When Israel is wrong we're wrong and when we're right we're wrong.

My second response is that of course I agree. Of course gay rights are an incomplete indicator of human rights. I've had ample time to think over the past 11 years about whether it is right that my partner and I took advantage of the benefits allowed us under the law of return and moved here while millions of Palestinians do not have the right of return to this area and while my neighbors across the green line in Wadi Fukin and Husan do not have the right to vote and have limited freedom of movement.

But for me it's not about pinkwashing, it's about reality. It's about my life. And my reality is that my family can't live in the US because my partner and I are a bi-national same sex couple. So gay rights in Israel isn't theory for me, it's fact. It's not something to like or not like, it's something that makes my family life possible. And no David, this is not about my pain. This is about my reality.

The reality is the every country that surrounds Israel has human rights issues. Nothing is black and white, and every country lives with a messy reality. Because Israel is subject to an organized media campaign of de-legitimization, and because Israel cares about its image in the eyes of the western world, for self-serving reasons no doubt, we have people out there making the case for what's good about the reality here. Whether you like that or not, it doesn't make a difference to me. I can't live in the US as a lesbian and I'm here because of the reality of gay rights in Israel.

It's not lost on me that Sarah Shulman is in all likelihood, like myself, a descendant of Sarah Imenu. And perhaps that's a good thing. We are a people with a conscience and our arguments and differences are leshem shamayim. For better or worse, the Jewish people still want Israel to be a light unto the nations and for many people it is love of justice and of the Jewish people and the Jewish tradition that motivates their criticisms of Israel. I would not for one minute want my brothers and sisters to stay silent about what they believe is right. I just ask that they remember that there are people, including gay Palestinians, for whom these issues are not words on a page, are not a matter of spin or of "washing" one way or another. There are many people whose lives are directly impacted by the reality of gay rights here - for the good.

None of us knows where this is all leading - if the decline of women's rights in Israel is any indication, nothing is working out the way we planned. I'm grateful that the anti-gay policies of the US government compelled my family to move to the place where the Jewish tradition and politics are intertwined, where the messy imperfection of reality is the challenge that faces me every day.

What Dad Wrote Me in 1983

Here's some excerpts from two letters I treasure that Dad wrote me in 1983, when I was in Israel for the year. The letters are on two airletters, so there aren't really paragraphs:

My grandfather Burstyn was, I suppose, nominally Orthodox (he was once a mashgiach (is that the word? Kashrut supervisor) on Hamburg-America line ships to the U.S. But I don't recall that they even kept a kosher home when I knew them or went to services. My father essentially gave up Jewish ritual after his bar mitzvah, moving instead into the kinds of Jewish socialism that led to the State of Israel (Mapai) as well as to Bolshevism. He was, I believe, a member of the Arbeiter Ring in his youth in the US. I never heard him utter a word of Hebrew (except maybe the Shma), and I doubt that he would have even joined a synagogue had my mother not come from a religious family. So the religious behavior of my family was conditioned by my mother - - I expect this is true for most families. We did not belong to a synagogue until after my grandfather died in 1940. Before then holidays revolved around the Pezrow...house.

Remember that Aunt Vera lived downstairs with her husband Henry Goldsmith and their son Clifford, in what had been a one-family house, and that Aunt Lil, unmarried, lived at home, as I guess did Uncle Ken until he was married in 1939. My grandfather was a pillar of one of those small, Orthodox synagogues that had never built more than the basement, as short a walk in one direction from his house as his grocery store was in the other. I'll show you the neighborhood sometime if you like. The synagogue had no rabbi in my time, because, my grandfather told me, any of the men could conduct the service and the rabbi was needed only to teach the children, who were then (ca. 1938) all grown up. They did have a cantor, who probably had another occupation. Though I have only the vaguest recollections of going to that synagogue (one of Sukkot where I and some other little boys, also grandchildren, went into the succah with my grandfather who draped his huge tallit over all of us while he read something from a scroll or prayerbook), I obviously imbibed a lot of ritual behavior at that impressionable age...


...I can't remember where I left off. I guess I wanted to say that the rigid, unyielding, narrow orthodoxy of my grandfather could not survive the decline of persecution. And considering that he lost his eldest son (cut off for marrying a shikse [yiddish word for non-Jewish woman- ed.], a story so painful that my mother never told me about it-- [your mother] found out from my aunt before she died), it's not clear to me that his religion did anything for Jewish survival, thus rendering practically as well as morally dubious what I take to be the principal argument for Orthodoxy....

There's more which I'll put in another post. If you are reading this, please pray for more to be revealed about my great-Uncle Jack - the oldest son mentioned above. We've learned so much about him this year and understand more that this was a complicated story. I truly believe that my great grandfather Mendel Pezrow of blessed memory would have done it all differently if he had it all to do over again, and I pray that the coming year will reveal more - G-d willing leading us to know when Uncle Jack died and where he is buried. His birth date was August 1, 1898, and he is remembered in the names of my son Alexander Yakov and his second cousin Jacob. Thanks to the kindness of cousins and strangers, we know the name of the woman Uncle Jack married, Edith, that she had a son, and I've made contact with that son's son. May my great grandfather and Uncle Jack's memories be for a blessing.