Readercon

The politics book club decided our August read was going to be Peter Bienart’s Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, a short little book that nevertheless took me the better part of an entire week to read. (I’ve been real busy.)

A pretty significant chunk of the regular members of the book club are Jewish, but I am not. As such, I was definitely not the primary target audience for this book. That’s OK; I enjoy reading books where I am not the target audience sometimes. I think it’s good for people to do that now and again. Also, Beinart explains most things well enough that as an outsider I can follow along (or at least the things about Israel and Palestine; there are a number of references to things in Jewish religious culture that I wasn’t always familiar with, but I don’t think that hindered my understanding of the arguments in the book).

I learned quite a bit from this book, not just in terms of things that have actually happened in historic Palestine but also about things that did not happen that I didn’t realize people were being told they did, like that it was totally somebody else that ran three-quarters of a million Palestinians out of their homes at gunpoint when the State of Israel was established.

Beinart’s perspective is also heavily shaped by the fact that he grew up in apartheid South Africa, where white people were absolutely certain that if they gave the Black population an ounce of freedom, they’d all get murdered, and what actually happened was that once the Black population got moderately less crushed under oppression they largely disbanded the guerilla armies because, contrary to popular opinion, people don’t go to all the trouble and danger and expense of forming guerrilla armies just for kicks, they do it because they don’t believe they’ll ever be able to do get anything better until the oppressors are overthrown, and they don’t believe the oppressors will be overthrown in any way except physical force. This is one of those very obvious things that oppressors throughout history have been very averse to learning. This is, also very obviously, because nobody wants to think of themselves as oppressors, and that’s what ends up being the main argument in Beinart’s book: Essentially, that narratives of Jewish victimhood–narratives that have sprung up due to several centuries of actual victimhood, to be clear–are being used to deny Israel’s capacity as a moral agent (and a heavily armed, nuclear state with wealthy Western benefactors) and avoid looking at the stuff it’s actually doing to other people. This argument seems fairly convincing to me, at least from my view in what must admittedly be the cheap seats, which is basically that I’m friends with a lot of left-wing and anti-Zionist Jews and they sometimes tell me what their less left-wing friends and relatives say about stuff, and it seems to correlate.

I figure I will be doing a lot more listening than talking during this book club, and that should hopefully be much less awkward than trying to write a review, where there is no one but me to do the talking.

I have had adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy sitting on The Big Shelf of Unread Leftist Literature for a few years, although not nearly as embarrassingly long as some other items on that shelf. I brought it with me to the DSA Convention in Chicago and read it mostly in O’Hare airport and on the plane back.

I admit I had very mixed feelings about this book, coming to it through almost a decade of socialist organizing and having developed a number of my own suspicions, cynicisms, and general discourse allergies (and also coming immediately out of convention). The bits I liked best were the parts where brown was being either a) concrete or b) gently mean. Frankly, this meant that for me, 80% of the value of the book came in the final 20%, where we get actual tools for facilitation, like agenda templates, sample community agreements, assessment checklists, further reading recommendations, and–my favorite–a list of People Not To Be In A Meeting. (My favorite “don’t be that person in meetings” piece is Mao’s On Practice, but trying to get other people to read Mao can be iffy, so I’m frankly pretty stoked to have a similar list from someone with anarchist credentials.)

The first part of the book has some interesting ideas and anecdotes and was frankly fun to read in a “I would like to hang out in a coffeeshop with adrienne maree brown and shoot the shit about sci-fi” kind of way, but I found it a bit vague and touchy-feely for my liking. I am a deeply vagueness-averse person to start with, and extra suspicious of vagueness in activist spaces. “Emergent strategy” as a concept is based on Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series, which is in fact great and brown is right that you should in fact drop whatever you’re doing and go read it immediately, and seems to be kind of like a variation on dialectics except it’s about the synthesis of more than two sides rather than two opposing sides. This is more reflective of real life but also, apparently, harder to pin down into real concrete case studies that the reader can follow in detail, so instead we get a lot of short anecdotes, references out to other resources, and metaphors about nature. I don’t think the book is entirely intended to be a how-to manual so it seems vaguely unfair to judge it as a how-to manual, but frankly, I want a how-to manual. I just don’t want, need, or trust any more poetical-sounding frameworks. (Activist poetics is one of the things I’ve developed a discourse allergy to over the years.)

The main thing that tends to ruin any sort of even slightly abstract or poetical activist writing for me is I absolutely cannot turn off the little voice in my head reading everything through the lens of “How does this sound once you run it through the ‘self-absorbed straw-leftist I used to think were figments of New York Times opinion writers’ imaginations’ filter?”, or what Eve Sedgwick calls a paranoid reading. I am in theory anti-paranoid-readings because frequently it seeps into fiction that is trying to be high-minded and political and then you end up with a futuristic space opera that clearly is afraid it’s going to be yelled at on 2018 Twitter. But while I get annoyed at novels that are afraid of being yelled at on Twitter, I give a semi-defeated laugh of solidarity at activist writings that are 90% caveats, clearly trying to gentle-parent people with determinedly minimal reading comprehension and maximum defensiveness through basic ideas like “An event planning meeting isn’t therapy.” I understand why they have to do this, and I get nervous when I read stuff that doesn’t seem to be correcting for it. Brown has, in the years since Emergent Strategy was published, written a bunch of stuff specifically about the self-righteous bad habits of many social justice organizing spaces, but when she wrote this in 2017 it seems like she might have been in a more innocent place (although still clearly familiar with many of the ways people can derail meetings, waste time, and seed conflict) and the book is well short of 90% caveats. Also, some of the material seems written under an assumption of at least somewhat more definitively bounded community than the one I organize in, like a nonprofit that has staff that you can hire on purpose, rather than all-volunteer spaces with low barriers to entry and public meetings.

This filter even kind of ruined the stuff I like, because my brain couldn’t stop running through “social justice buzzword word salad” objections I have seen in the wild to things like writing proposals, starting and ending meetings on time, and not taking everything personally. And I hate that I found myself, like, slotting things I already knew away in my head for the purpose of having a properly demographically credentialed source for basic shit, because I know that if you say “decorum” that sounds conservative and fussy but if you say “community agreements” that has sufficient radical cred and is OK.

As a result I am very hesitant to say that the book is actually failing in any way; it is just clear to me that I have sustained far too much psychological damage to be a good reader for it. I get leery any time the writer assumes the reader isn’t stupid. That is unequivocally bad on my end. I need to like, meditate and then go through the book again and mark out the bits that are useful so I can refer back to them without being sent into a total mental spiral by metaphors about mushrooms or any use whatsoever of the word “sacred.”