The purpose of this blog is to create a controlled-burn at the Shabbat table. Please print and share...
Do you realize how very soon we'll be dipping apples in honey??
Walk into a room full of Torah scholars and you'll hear a lot of heated arguments. Why is that?
Dialectical argument is one of the best ways to get closer to Truth.
Most of these arguments depend on logic and reason. But every once-in-a-while, a scholar may find support for his position in the writings of an earlier or more senior scholar.
Upon such validation, the scholar may utter a two-word quasi-blessing: Baruch sheh'kavanti. It's something of a humble alternative to "I told you so."
I had a baruch-sheh'kavanti moment last week here in this space. You may recall that I asked, "Is tribalism the same as racism?" and, "Does being Jewish mean to be tribalist?"
While I was writing that blog last Thursday, it turns out, a fellow member of our tribe was blogging her confession to having posed (and built her career) as a member of another tribe.
In case you didn't hear the story (because you might have something bigger to worry about?), here's the basic outline:
• Jewish woman from Kansas City gets a prep-school education, goes to University of Kansas then University of Wisconsin-Madison for a PhD.
(Her dissertation: "They glorify in a certain independence" : the politics of identity in Kisama, Angola, and its diasporas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries"
• At some point, probably during a post-doc research fellowship in the Caribbean, she decides to abandon her own people's ship and join the tribe of "Afro-Latina".
(Here she is in character.)
(She may have even started a trend at UW-M.)
• Pens a critically-acclaimed slave-history (finalist for Yale's Frederick Douglass Book Prize and the Harriet Tubman Prize).
(Here's a taste of her writing: "To gloss Kisama as a simple toponym referring to the arid lands between Angola's Kwanza and Longo rivers is to miss the cross-regional, trans-Atlantic political processes thru which thousand of the most individually weak and vulnerable people of the 16th and 17th century Angola collectively fashioned dynamic political identities originated around renouncing state formations, martial idioms for social organization, and resisting slavery, the slave trade and the imbrication in market economies.")
• After eight years of this conversion/charade/fraud/satire, she's about to be outed so she comes clean.
(Not surprisingly, her academic career is evidently over.)
In her blog-confessional, she calls her tribal conversion "the very epitome of violence". Others have called her decision to convert to Afro-Jamaican "racist."
So which is it? Is tribalism itself racism (per Michele Norris, last week's blog)? Or is it racist to join another tribe uninvited (per Jessica Krug's critics, and Krug herself)?
Or, wonders Professor Jonathan Zimmerman from the University of Pennsylvania, is it racist to heap praise on her book when we thought it was written by a woman of color, and to trash it now that we know it was written by a Jewish woman from Kansas City with no blackness in her genetic and cultural history?
OK, it was bad to lie and say she grew up Afro-Latina. But if she wants to be black, shouldn't that be her choice? (If a person can become transgender, why not transracial?)
Or perhaps Michael Laitman is onto something when he frames Krug's tale as a very Jewish story because "there's a Jessica Krug in every Jew"....?
Final thought and question for your table:
In her confessional, Ms. Krug writes, "I have no identity outside of this. I have never developed one. I have to figure out how to be a person that I don’t believe should exist, and how, as that person, to even begin to heal any of the harm that I’ve caused."
Question - if you could speak to her right now, what would you say?
Walk into a room full of Torah scholars and you'll hear a lot of heated arguments. Why is that?
Dialectical argument is one of the best ways to get closer to Truth.
Most of these arguments depend on logic and reason. But every once-in-a-while, a scholar may find support for his position in the writings of an earlier or more senior scholar.
Upon such validation, the scholar may utter a two-word quasi-blessing: Baruch sheh'kavanti. It's something of a humble alternative to "I told you so."
I had a baruch-sheh'kavanti moment last week here in this space. You may recall that I asked, "Is tribalism the same as racism?" and, "Does being Jewish mean to be tribalist?"
In case you didn't hear the story (because you might have something bigger to worry about?), here's the basic outline:
• Jewish woman from Kansas City gets a prep-school education, goes to University of Kansas then University of Wisconsin-Madison for a PhD.(Her dissertation: "They glorify in a certain independence" : the politics of identity in Kisama, Angola, and its diasporas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries"
• At some point, probably during a post-doc research fellowship in the Caribbean, she decides to abandon her own people's ship and join the tribe of "Afro-Latina".
(Here she is in character.)
(She may have even started a trend at UW-M.)
• Pens a critically-acclaimed slave-history (finalist for Yale's Frederick Douglass Book Prize and the Harriet Tubman Prize).
(Here's a taste of her writing: "To gloss Kisama as a simple toponym referring to the arid lands between Angola's Kwanza and Longo rivers is to miss the cross-regional, trans-Atlantic political processes thru which thousand of the most individually weak and vulnerable people of the 16th and 17th century Angola collectively fashioned dynamic political identities originated around renouncing state formations, martial idioms for social organization, and resisting slavery, the slave trade and the imbrication in market economies.")
• After eight years of this conversion/charade/fraud/satire, she's about to be outed so she comes clean.
(Not surprisingly, her academic career is evidently over.)
In her blog-confessional, she calls her tribal conversion "the very epitome of violence". Others have called her decision to convert to Afro-Jamaican "racist."
So which is it? Is tribalism itself racism (per Michele Norris, last week's blog)? Or is it racist to join another tribe uninvited (per Jessica Krug's critics, and Krug herself)?
Or, wonders Professor Jonathan Zimmerman from the University of Pennsylvania, is it racist to heap praise on her book when we thought it was written by a woman of color, and to trash it now that we know it was written by a Jewish woman from Kansas City with no blackness in her genetic and cultural history?
OK, it was bad to lie and say she grew up Afro-Latina. But if she wants to be black, shouldn't that be her choice? (If a person can become transgender, why not transracial?)
Or perhaps Michael Laitman is onto something when he frames Krug's tale as a very Jewish story because "there's a Jessica Krug in every Jew"....?
Final thought and question for your table:
In her confessional, Ms. Krug writes, "I have no identity outside of this. I have never developed one. I have to figure out how to be a person that I don’t believe should exist, and how, as that person, to even begin to heal any of the harm that I’ve caused."
Question - if you could speak to her right now, what would you say?
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