Antisemitism and the Unspeakable

Nathan Schneider (assistant professor, Media Studies) works at the intersections of technology, religion, and social change. He is the author of several books, most recently Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy. His articles have appeared in publications such as Harper’s, The Nation, The Guardian, Vice and The Catholic Worker. Find more information at nathanschneider.info.

Originally appeared at Flaming Hydra.  Nathan Schneider appears here as a guest contributor for Yellow Scene Magazine.

On September 12, 2001, Ward Churchill, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder (where I now teach) published an essay about the terrorist attack that had taken place in New York the day before. With the subtitle “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” Churchill compared the 9/11 catastrophe to Malcolm X’s remark about the assassination of John F. Kennedy having been a matter of “chickens coming home to roost.” As Malcolm had, Churchill suggested that when calamity comes to the United States, the country may not be so entirely innocent as prevailing narratives suggest. The Nation of Islam removed Malcolm from his leadership role after he made that statement; my university investigated and ultimately fired Churchill.

Churchill’s case is a reminder that academic freedom has limits. Most recently, I’ve been thinking of his story because of the inferno on Pearl Street, the horrific June 1st attack on my neighbors as they demonstrated in support of the remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza. I am traveling, an ocean away, and it has been devastating to see scenes of my hometown on the news clips that cycle by on the trains. I have tried to follow what our community leaders are saying, and what they are not saying, and what some of us are saying only in private group chats.

The line that Churchill and Malcolm X crossed, and the line I notice my town shuffling around, is the line that surrounds what the monk Thomas Merton called “the unspeakable.” The unspeakable is the truth that lies beyond what a social order can tolerate hearing.

Merton described it this way: “It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss.”

The Catholic Worker James W. Douglass later extended the idea to the famous assassinations of the 1960s: the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Each was slain, Douglass argued, as he crossed the line of the unspeakable. The Kennedys had begun to confront the Cold War military establishment, and to call for disarmament. King had expanded his vision from domestic civil rights to criticism of the war in Vietnam; he was murdered a year to the day after first speaking out. Malcolm X had traveled to Africa to internationalize the struggle for Black liberation. Each crossed these lines at the price of their blood. Douglass’s research linked the metaphysics of the unspeakable with the circumstances of each man’s death.

The statements coming from Boulder’s institutions and leaders, from news editors and politicians I have known for years, keep repeating the word “antisemitism” to explain why someone would attack peaceful Jewish demonstrators. But it is a word that draws a line, beyond which lies the unspeakable.

This word has morphed from naming the persecution of a diasporic civilization into justifying the policies of a nation-state backed by the most powerful military in the world; from a cry against genocide into a way to excuse it. The U.S. government, under both major political parties, has used “antisemitism” to carry out assaults on human and constitutional rights—on political protest, on academic freedom, and on immigrants and asylum seekers.

The change that has come over the word is itself unspeakable. One must pretend that the word has not changed or risk accusations of antisemitism. But changed it has. As someone who lost Jewish relatives in the Holocaust, I now fear the exploitation of “antisemitism” to silence and deport political opponents more than I fear actual antisemites.

Locally, the explanation of antisemitism doesn’t compute. When I hear it, I think of a retired Jewish professor in Boulder whom I last saw from a distance, with a sign calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. The professor’s ceasefire group was not attacked, although it also demonstrates regularly in downtown Boulder. Both groups include Jews. Why was one group and not the other a target? “Antisemitism” makes this question unspeakable.

It is unspeakable that terrorism might have a cause—that however categorically wrong terrorism is, the chances of it rise when our government enables atrocities elsewhere. It is unspeakable that the eventual attacker may have been stewing in helplessness and rage, watching day after day the scenes of families and homes annihilated in Gaza, while hearing again and again in this country that the real problem is “antisemitism.” Every day the flows of media and the speeches of politicians ignore simple evidence.

George W. Bush told us that the perpetrators of 9/11 attacked us for “our freedoms”—and not, as the perpetrators themselves said, because of U.S. military interventions and bases across the Muslim-majority world. Because of what could not be spoken, this country packed up its innocence and set off into almost two decades of entirely avoidable, disastrous wars.

Only one member of the Boulder city council, Taishya Adams, declined to sign the statement declaring the tragedy on Pearl Street to be the result of antisemitism. Instead, she issued her own statement pointing out that, in addition to antisemitism, “anti-Zionism” also seems to have been involved. She has since become the target of backlash in the national news and beyond, and there is a petition circulating to remove her from office.

Adams’s small amendment was what Merton called a “raid” on the unspeakable. She invites us to remember that there is a difference between being Jewish and supporting the project of an expansionist Jewish state on land that non-Jews also inhabit; she suggests that something other than racist hatred might have been involved. Her statement enables a way of processing the horror that can connect the 32 Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers at an aid distribution site in Gaza with the firebombing of demonstrators on that same day in Boulder.

Merton wrote that true hope—for him, “Christian hope”—“begins where every other hope stands frozen stiff before the face of the Unspeakable.”