When I was in Syria last year I tried to have a conversation in a restaurant with an Arab friend, a woman, about women’s rights in the Arab world and she held up her hand. "Let’s have this discussion back at the hotel," she said. There are a lot of things you can’t talk about in the Arab world. Just ask Salman Rushdie.
I’m more interested in Jewish identity, and it saddens me to think that over the last year and a half, a strong pattern has emerged inside the Jewish community of suppressing free speech. The Rachel Corrie play, banned in New York. The several Carter Center’s advisory board members (all Jews, the Jerusalem Post reported) who quit because they didn’t like a book Jimmy Carter had written. J.J. Goldberg refusing to moderate a panel at City University of the important new Walt-Mearsheimer book. Brandeis pulling down an exhibit of Palestinian children’s art. A speech by Tony Judt to the Polish consulate, canceled under pressure from Jewish groups. A report by the American Jewish Committee smearing Jewish critics of Israel as "anti-semites", in an effort to shut them down. The list goes on and on. No wonder Jewish Voice for Peace started a new website called Muzzlewatch to track the stifling of debate over Israel/Palestine.
All of this comes out of the Jewish community’s dedication to protecting Israel no matter what. "A sacred mission" (as Dershowitz wrote in The Vanishing American Jew). Thou Shalt Not Criticize Israel in the United States (as a girl from the ZOA stated in my presence last year). When it comes to a free-form conversation about Israel, we’re as bad as the Catholics were over Andres Serrano’s Piss/Christ or the elephant dung virgin at the Brooklyn Museum. Only our omerta is distorting foreign policy.
We’ve got a problem. A lot of Arab intellectuals are embarrassed by their communities’ behavior over
women’s rights and free speech, and I’m embarrassed by my community
over free speech issues. The Jewish community needs to reform. If you can’t have conferences about Walt and Mearsheimer, can you have them about censorship?
