Should we set fire to churches (& mosques)? This is burning religious issue in Israel

Israel destroyed the Notre Dame of Gaza – but there was only silence from the West

As Yossi Gurvitz explained, the fire at Notre Dame has caused an argument within Israeli Orthodox circles.

Rabbi Shlomo Avineir of the Beit El settlement in the West Bank (the one that US Ambassador David Friedman has helped raise funds for) suggested that the fire at Notre Dame was divine punishment for the burning of the Talmud in France in the 13^th century! God has, it would seem, a very long memory and clearly is not only a vengeful god but spiteful too as it is not clear what responsibility the French have for what happened 800 years ago.

But what is not in doubt is that since 2009 53 mosques and churches have been vandalised or set fire to in Israel. As is normally the case with attacks on non-Jews, the Israeli Police have not exerted themselves. Only 9 indictments to date have been filed by the police.

What makes this worse is that there are sections of Israeli society who openly justify the destruction of churches and mosques on religious grounds.

The Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on fire, April 15, 2019. (Photo: LeLaisserPasserA38/Wikimedia)

Rabbi Benzi Gopstein, the head of the anti-miscegenation organisation Lehava in a panel discussion in 2015, in answer to a question as to whether he supported the burning of churches, referred to the teachings of the famous Spanish Jewish philosopher Maimonedes . Gopstein was asked by Benny Rabinowitz, a writer for an ultra-Orthodox newspaper, "Do you support burning churches in Israel, yes or no?" Gopstein, citing a Maimonides ruling that churches should be burned responded "Are you for Maimonides or against him?"

Gopstein's answer ‘shocked the attendees’ who asked "Benzti are you for burning or not?" "Of course I am," Bentzi replied "It’s Maimonides. Simply yes, what is there to question?"

This prompted the Vatican to call for Gopstein’s prosecution and the Police did call him in for interrogation. However Gopstein wasn’t an Arab who had justified the burning down of synagogues.  That would have merited a hefty prison sentence. The Attorney General refused to prosecute because in Israel racial hatred or discrimination on the grounds of religion is not a criminal offence.

FATHER NIKODEMUS SCHNABEL inspects the damage at Capernaum’s Church of the Loaves and Fishes caused by an arson attack. (photo credit: BEN HARTMAN)

However there was no such inhibition when it came to prosecuting Raed Salah, the leader of the Northern Islamic League for allegedly referring to the medieval blood libel about baking bread with the blood of non-Jewish children when opposing Israeli attacks on the worshippers at the Al Aqsa mosque. Even though Salah denied having made any such statement and an examination of his remarks confirms that he made no mention of Jews (he maintained he had been referring to the Spanish Inquisition) he was convicted and sentenced to 9 months. For a thorough investigation of the affair see the Sheik Raed Affair and May warned of weak case against Sheikh Raed Salah and Jonathan Cook’s The real preachers of hate: Britain’s arrest of Sheikh Raed Salah

Bentzi Gophstein

Prominent settler Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, ruled that burning churches outside of the Land of Israel “isn’t our job for now”, but in Israel “the issue is more complicated”.

Rabbi Shlomo Aviner (Photo: Wikimedia)

Avineir is a state official and draws a public salary as the rabbi of a major settlement Beit El. He is also the rabbi of a prominent settler Yeshiva (Ateret Yerushaliam, formerly Ateret Cohanim), ‘He  is considered to be one most important rabbis of the religious nationalist sector.’

After the fire in Notre Dame Cathedral, Aviner was asked:

“The great Christian Church in Paris is on fire. Should we feel sorry for that, or should we rejoice, as it [the cathedral] is idolatry, which is a mitzvah to burn?”

Aviner replied:

“This isn’t our job for now. There is no mitzvah [a religious commandment] to seek out churches abroad and burn them down. In our holy land, however, the issue is more complicated. Indeed, the Satmar Rabbi noted one of his arguments against immigrating to Israel, that here it is indeed a mitzvah to burn churches; and by not doing so, those [immigrating to Israel] are committing a sin.’

The problem is further compounded by the fact that if Jews do burn down churches ‘we’ll have to rebuild, and it’s a greater sin to rebuild [a church] than leave it standing.’

Gurvitz commented wryly:

‘(Oh, yes: American Jewish readers, I probably need to stress this – this is not a parody or a satire. This is actual rabbinical discourse in 2019 Israel.).’

Screenshot of Aviner’s opinion re church fires.

The point however is that many churches (and mosques) have been burnt in Israel in the last few years, and the police have been disinterested in capturing the arsonists. In several cases, the arson was accompanied by slogans familiar from ‘price tag’ attacks in the West Bank (mostly along the lines of Jewish vengeance). 

Gurvitz writes that:

‘Several immensely important rabbinic rulers, most prominent among them Maimonides, ruled that churches are places of idolatry and ought to be destroyed. The rulings are very clear. However, to support those rulings today would lead to violence, probably to a rise in anti-Semitism, and will jeopardize the alliance between the settler movement and the evangelical movement. There is also a chance of getting prosecuted for incitement for hatred, which is a crime in Israel – but then again, the law has a special exemption for “religious studies”, and the prosecution has been very leery of prosecuting rabbis for hate speech, making “religious discussions” the prime way of legally-protected incitement.’

Below is an article on the deliberate destruction of Gaza’s mosques by the Israeli military in the course of successive attacks on Gaza from 2008-2014 in Operations Protective Edge, Cast Lead and Pillar of Defence and the hypocrisy of Western indifference to this compared to the tears over Notre Dame.

Notre Dame of Gaza: our mosques and churches are also burning

Ramzy Baroud April 25, 2019

Palestinians walk past a mosque which witnesses said was destroyed by an Israel air strike during the offensive, on the second day of a five-day ceasefire, in Gaza City on August 15, 2014. (Photo: Ezz Zanoun/APA Images)

As the 300-foot spire of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris tragically came tumbling down on live television, my thoughts ventured to Nuseirat Refugee Camp, my childhood home in the Gaza Strip.

Then, also on television, I watched as a small bulldozer hopelessly clawed through the rubble of my neighborhood mosque. I grew up around that mosque. I spent many hours there with my grandfather, Mohammed, a refugee from historic Palestine. Before grandpa became a refugee, he was a young Imam in a small mosque in his long-destroyed village of Beit Daras.

Mohammed and many in his generation took solace in erecting their own mosque in the refugee camp as soon as they arrived to the Gaza Strip in late 1948. The new mosque was first made of hardened mud, but was eventually remade with bricks, and later concrete. He spent much of his time there, and when he died, his old, frail body was taken to the same mosque for a final prayer, before being buried in the adjacent Martyrs Graveyard. When I was still a child, he used to hold my hand as we walked together to the mosque during prayer times. When he aged, and could barely walk, I, in turn, held his hand.

But al-Masjid al-Kabir – the Great Mosque, later renamed al-Omari mosque – was completely pulverized by Israeli missiles during the summer war on Gaza, starting July 8, 2014.

Hundreds of Palestinian houses of worship were targeted by the Israeli military in previous wars, most notably in 2008-9 and 2012. But the 2014 war was the most brutal and most destructive yet. Thousands were killed and more injured. Nothing was immune to Israeli bombs. According to Palestine Liberation Organization records, 63 mosques were completely destroyed and 150 damaged in that war alone, oftentimes with people seeking shelter inside. In the case of my mosque, two bodies were recovered after a long, agonizing search. They had no chance of being rescued. If they survived the deadly explosives, they were crushed by the massive slabs of concrete.

In truth, concrete, cements, bricks and physical structures don’t carry much meaning on their own. We give them meaning. Our collective experiences, our pains, joys, hopes and faith make a house of worship what it is.

Many generations of French Catholics have assigned the Notre Dame Cathedral with its layered meanings and symbolism since the 12th century.

While the fire consumed the oak roof and much of the structure, French citizens and many around the world watched in awe. It is as if the memories, prayers and hopes of a nation that is rooted in time were suddenly revealed, rising, all at once, with the pillars of smoke and fire.

But the very media that covered the news of the Notre Dame fire seemed oblivious to the obliteration of everything we hold sacred in Palestine as, day after day, Israeli war machinery continues to blow up, bulldoze and desecrate.

Palestinians and Palestinian security forces inspect the damage inside a mosque torched and vandalized by arsonists in the West Bank village of Qusra, near Nablus, Monday, Sept. 5, 2011. Arsonists tossed two tires into the first floor study hall of the mosque. (Photo: Wagdi Eshtayah/APA Images)

It is as if our religions are not worthy of respect, despite the fact that Christianity was born in Palestine. It was there that Jesus roamed the hills and valleys of our historic homeland teaching people about peace, love and justice. Palestine is also central to Islam. Haram al-Sharif, where Al-Aqsa mosque and The Dome of the Rock are kept, is the third holiest site for Muslims everywhere. Yet Christian and Muslim holy sites are besieged, often raided and shut down per military diktats. Moreover, the Israeli army-protected messianic Jewish extremists want to demolish Al-Aqsa and the Israeli government has been digging underneath its foundation for many years.

Although none of this is done in secret; international outrage remains muted. In fact, many find Israel’s actions justified. Some have bought into the ridiculous explanation offered by the Israeli military that bombing mosques is a necessary security measure. Others are motivated by dark religious prophecies of their own.

Palestine, though, is only a microcosm of the whole region. Many of us are familiar with the horrific destruction carried out by fringe militant groups against world cultural heritage in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Most memorable among these are the destruction of Palmyra in Syria, Buddhas of Bamyan in Afghanistan and the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul.

Nothing however can possibly be compared to what the invading US army has done to Iraq. Not only did the invaders desecrate a sovereign country and brutalize her people, they also devastated her culture that goes back to the start of human civilization. Just the immediate aftermath of the invasion alone resulted in the looting of over 15,000 Iraqi antiquities, including the Lady of Warka, also known as the Mona Lisa of Mesopotamia, a Sumerian artifact whose history goes back to 3100 BC.

A Palestinian protester holds a cross during a demonstration against acts of vandalism on Christian sites including smashing headstones in a Christian cemetery in Israel and the occupied West Bank, outside Jerusalem’s Old City October 6, 2013. (Photo: Saeed Qaq/APA Images)

I had the privilege of seeing many of these artifacts in a visit to the Iraq Museum only a few years before it was looted when US forces failed to protect the site. At the time, Iraqi curators had thousands of precious pieces hidden in a basement in anticipation of a US bombing campaign. But nothing could prepare the museum for the savagery unleashed by the ground invasion. Since then, Iraqi culture has largely been reduced to items on the black market of the very western invaders that have torn that country apart. The valiant work of Iraqi cultural warriors and their colleagues around the world have managed to restore some of that stolen dignity, but it will take many years for the cradle of human civilization to redeem its vanquished honor.

Every mosque, every church, every graveyard, every piece of art and every artifact is significant because it is laden with meaning, the meaning bestowed on them by those who have built or sought in them an escape, a moment of solace, hope, faith and peace.

On August 2, 2014 the Israeli army bombed the historic al-Omari Mosque in northern Gaza. The ancient mosque dates back to the 7th century and has since served as a symbol of resilience and faith for the people of Gaza.

As Notre Dame burned, I thought of al-Omari too. While the fire at the French cathedral was likely accidental, destroyed Palestinian houses of worship were intentionally targeted. The Israeli culprits are yet to be held accountable.

I also thought of my grandfather, Mohammed, the kindly Imam with the handsome, small white beard. His mosque served as his only escape from a difficult existence, an exile that only ended with his own death.

From Alice Walker’s Color Purple to David Icke’s Shape Shifting Lizards

Susan Abulhawa’s toleration of anti-Semitism only helps the enemies of Palestine

 A controversy has broken out over an interview that Alice Walker, famous for the Pulitzer prize winning The Color Purple, did for the New York Times. In a written interview Alice Walker: By the Book, on the 13^th December, Alice responded to the question ‘What books are on your nightstand?’ by saying that one such book was “And the Truth Shall Set You Free,” by David Icke.

‘In Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person’s dream come true.’

When Black people and Palestinians start making excuses for anti-Semitism it has but one effect. It confirms the Zionist argument that Palestinian opposition to Israeli settler colonialism is motivated not by outrage at Israel’s behaviour but by hatred of Jews.

Of course the Zionists have leaped upon this. Zionist opposition to the anti-Semitism of people like Louis Farrahkan is not motivated by genuine outrage at his racism but by their own racism. When the Anti-Defamation League, a group that worked with the South Africa Secret Police BOSS and sends US Police for training Israel denounces Farrakhan we can smell the racist hypocrisy a mile off. [See Lenni Brenner, When Israel Was Apartheid’s Open Ally].

Anti-Semitism amongst Black people in the US is reflective racism. It is equivalent to the Jewish reaction to non-Jews and anti-Semites in Russia and Poland which was often chauvinist. When the ADL home in on Louis Farrahkan and ignores Trump, Bannon, Orban and all the other genuinely anti-Semitic white supremacists we can  be sure that what motivates them is not anti-Semitism but support for Zionism.

Nonetheless the apologetics of Alice Walker are deeply depressing. Walker is a brilliant novelist and anyone who has read her tale of racism, abuse and misogyny cannot help but be moved. 

Reactions to Alice Walker's comments

I don’t know what other planets Icke has visite but what is clear is that he is anti-Semitic. Icke isn’t dangerous in the way that the supporters of Tommy Robinson are or the supporters of Zionism are. He is more mad than bad. He believes that an inter-dimensional race of reptilian creatures control the world. His books, the Robots Rebellion and And the truth shall set you free endorse the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It is incomprehensible that Alice Walker has chosen to endorse Ike.

Reactions to Alice Walker's comments

Isaac Stanley Baker describes the book in the Washington Post thus;

“And the Truth Shall Set You Free,” which draws on the infamous anti-Semitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” includes this judgment: “I strongly believe that a small Jewish clique which has contempt for the mass of Jewish people worked with non-Jews to create the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Second World War.” The Nazi extermination, he wrote, was “coldly calculated by the ‘Jewish’ elite.”

It is therefore doubly regrettable that Alice Walker, instead of reassessing what she said, dug herself further into a hole. On her own website she defends Icke, as a fellow victim of censorship and denies that he is an anti-Semite even though he holds that Jews in effect organised their own destruction. How would Alice Walker have described someone who said that Africans were responsible for the slave trade? The fact that some Africans collaborated with the slave traders and some Zionists collaborated with the Nazis does not therefore mean that either the Slave Trade or the Holocaust was a consequence of their victims’ actions. Alice Walker wrote:

‘I find Icke’s work to be very important to humanity’s conversation, especially at this time.  I do not believe he is anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish.  I do believe he is brave enough to ask the questions others fear to ask, and to speak his own understanding of the truth wherever it might lead.  Many attempts have been made to censor and silence him.  As a woman, and a person of color, as a writer who has been criticized and banned myself, I support his right to share his own thoughts.

Walker compares the ‘attempt to smear’ Icke with the attacks on her and supporters of BDS. It is a confused melange.

But if we can ignore the racist ravings and ramblings of her Zionist critics, whose attacks on Walker are motivated only by their own racism the same cannot be said of her Black Jewish critics.  One such is Nylah Burton in Alice Walker’s Terrible Anti-Semitic Poem Felt Personal — to Her and to Me. Nylah writes about the poem It Is Our (Frightful) Duty To Study The Talmud.

Reactions to Alice Walker's comments

It’s chilling to think that such an acclaimed novelist could regard Icke’s work as “a curious person’s dream come true,” but it turned out that Walker’s endorsement wasn’t an isolated deviation. Readers soon unearthed her poem “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty to Study the Talmud,” published on her website in 2017, which confirmed that Walker had been indulging in virulent anti-Semitism, and that it permeated not just her thinking but her work.

Nylah describes how hostility to others can be blinding to oneself yet ‘it seems that Walker has willingly allowed herself to be blinded. “ She describes ‘Our (Frightful) Duty’ as

‘a terribly written poem filled with terrible things. It oozes deep paranoia, defensiveness, and rage. In every single way, it’s ugly.

The “poem” utterly fails as poetry. It isn’t lyrical. Its lines and stanzas are choppy and graceless. Each stanza seems to end with an aggressive exhale, the kind that a person expels when they finish purging the awful thoughts that consume them. In some places, it reads like a rambling lecture delivered by a tenured professor who isn’t afraid to offend her students anymore. At other times, it reads like a Breitbart article with line breaks. There is no artistry here, but there is plenty of trauma.

The most significant stanza is where Walker writes:

For the study of Israel, of Gaza, of Palestine,

Of the bombed out cities of the Middle East,

Of the creeping Palestination

Of our police, streets, and prisons

In America,

Of war in general,

It is our duty, I believe, to study The Talmud.

It is within this book that,

I believe, we will find answers

To some of the questions

That most perplex us.

Yet she couldn’t be more wrong.  The Talmud explains nothing. Attacks on the Jews in Europe often used selective quotes from the Talmud, a book of disputation and interpretation in just the same way as Zionist and Islamaphobes attack Muslim using the Quoran.

According to the sales pitch for Tommy Robinson’s Mohammed's Koran: Why Muslims Kill For Islam ‘Islam is a religion of war and conquest, ... right up until thousands of innocent Americans were wiped out on 9/11.’

Today in Israel racist rabbis such as Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur in Torat Hamelech use the Talmud to justify the right of Jews to murder non-Jews, yeah even their infants and suckling babes. Israel’s bloodthirsty Military Rabbinate likewise use the Talmud and the Torah to justify the slaughter and rape of Palestinians.  No doubt a similar exercise could be mounted with respect to the New Testament. It was Christians not Muslims who perpetrated the Holocaust.

But the point to make is that Israel’s murderous barbarities are not caused by the Talmud anymore than the Holocaust was a product of the New Testament or ISIS was the product of the Quoran.  Murderers often resort to religious texts to excuse their deeds but the same texts also exhort us to love thy neighbour as thy self.

Alice Walker and David Icke

We can of course expect the Zionists to denounce Alice Walker as an ‘anti-Semite’.  Although what Alice has done has provided fuel for the Zionist fire, we can disregard their criticisms of her as the ravings of hypocrites and racists. What is however more painful is the criticism from fellow anti-racists and friends and in this category I put the Israeli educationalist Nurit Peled-Elhanan. In A Letter From Nurit Peled- Elhanan, activist, educator, and friend from Israel and a Poem, she expressed her sorrow at what Alice had written:

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Dear Alice,

I read your poem and the criticism of it and I must react.

The people who torture and kill Palestinian have never studied the Talmud. It is not studied in Israeli state schools. And no one can read it on their own. The ones who study it are the ultra-orthodox Jews such as the pro-Palestinian Neturei Karta in NY.

The quotes (whether true or false) are surely partial and do not characterize this 12 volume work (thousand pages in every volume) whose writing ended thousands of years ago.

The Talmud is not a prescriptive book. It is an endless interpretation of the Torah, always adapting the Torah to present times so that people can live by it. Ethiopian Jews never studied it and lived by the Torah as is.

In these volumes you read discussion and polemics between different sages about every tiny aspect of human life. And the discussions are brought as they happened, more or less because it was all discussed orally.

But the main thing is that each such discussion ends with: “and so they disagreed” and people would choose the interpretation they wanted. Every argument that is brought is immediately countered by an opposite argument and the discussion that ensued. It is always open ended.

In my time we learned a bit of it and I loved it, because it is Logic, like reading Plato. Today schools don’t teach it anymore.

So in order to know what is in the Talmud – which none of the non-orthodox Israelis or Jews know – you have to read at least a whole chapter, pros and cons etc.

One of the most discussed subjects in the Talmud as in the Torah is the treatment of foreigners, workers, slaves etc. Extremely human and enlightening.

I don’t want you to be trapped in superficial propaganda of ignorant people. And again: the reason for the ruthlessness and violence towards Palestinians is not to be found in ancient writings but in Modern ones. It is Modernity and European Enlightenment that brought slavery, colonialism, Fascism and Totalitarianism, national movements such as Zionism and the way to treat people as superfluous. Auschwitz was not prescribed in any ancient scripture, neither is Israeli colonialism.

Much love

Nurit

To which Alice replied:

Prof. Nurit Peled-Elhanan

***

Dear Nurit,

Thank you, Sister Nurit, for not letting go of my hand, while informing me of your views, which I welcome and respect. Though we may have areas still to discuss, and perhaps always will, given the differences in our backgrounds and cultures, my own grip is as strong.

Can you get my website: alicewalkersgarden.com where you are?  If so, please read the entire poem.  Also read a later poem, below, “Conscious Earthlings.” About the necessity of separating “Jews” from Zionist Nazis. I am including it here.

Also, would you mind if I published your letter to help with the discussion, which seems to be, from what I hear, more about shouting. I am open to continuing our dialogue, if you are.

Love,

Alice

This controversy has not been helped by Palestinian writer and novelist Susan Abulhawa, author of Mornings in Jenin who in the guise of supporting Alice has stumbled in with hobnail boots trampling all in her path. Her In defence of Alice Walker argues that Abulhalwa ‘Alice Walker's real 'offence' is not anti-Semitism; it is her unwavering support for the Palestinian cause.’

Alice Walker and Palestinian Women

Yes that probably is what motivates some, but by no means all, of the criticism of Alice Walker, but whose fault is that? Undoubtedly Alice Walker has been viciously attacked for her support for the Palestinians and that includes the routine cry that she is ‘anti-Semitic’. 

Alice Walker is a good example of how false accusations of anti-Semitism actually create anti-Semitism. In what must be rank as one of the most fatuous analogies Abulhalwa compares the reaction to Alice Walker’s comments to that of Israeli Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour whom the Israelis gaoled for 5 months for writing a poem:

I am reminded of Dareen Tatour, who was imprisoned by Israel for a poem she posted on Facebook, on the fanciful claim it called for violence against Jews; and Gunter Grass, whom Israel banned and lobbied to have his Nobel Prize in Literature rescinded because he wrote a poem arguing that Germany should stop supplying Israel with nuclear submarines. Even the work of Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine’s greatest poet, was denounced as the equivalent of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

The Board of DYR still lists Lea Tsemel and Ilan Pappe

Unfortunately Abulhawa has kept company with some pretty dodgy people previously and it was only in 2014 with their attack on BDS that she parted company with the Board of Deir Yassin Remembered. DYR, which was formed about 10 years previously, had been taken over by a right-wing American Professor Daniel MacGowan together with an anti-Semitic Israeli/Swedish fascist Israel Shamir and a British holocaust denier Paul Eisen. Its original purpose was to build a memorial to the village of Deir Yassin in Palestine, where a terrible massacre of up to 254 people had occurred in April 1948, as a means of ‘encouraging’ the Palestinians to flee from their homes.

DYR had originally included people like Jeff Halper, Ilan Pappe and Lea Tsemel, all of them Israeli anti-Zionists.  One by one they all resigned from DYR. Yet if you go to the web page today you will still find some of them listed as members. As Halper remarked, “The Deir Yassin Remembered board is like Hotel California, you can check in any time you like, but you can never leave).” See, Jinjirrie, BDS Attacked by the Deir Yassin Remembered

Below is a very moving article by a Black Jewish American, Nylah Burton, about her feelings concerning what Alice Walker has written.

Alice Walker’s Terrible Anti-Semitic Poem Felt Personal — to Her and to Me

The Intelligencer, 26.12.18.

By Nylah Burton

Photo: Peter Earl McCollough/The New York Times/Redux

When I first read Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, I leaned into every word, inhaling Celie’s tragic and triumphant story. In Celie, I felt the presence and pain of my female family members brought up in rural Alabama. In Walker’s unflinching descriptions of misogyny, domestic violence, homophobia, and incest, I saw an open accounting of issues buried deep within the larger southern black community — and within my own family.

Above all, I was drawn into The Color Purple because it was haunted by ghosts — the ghosts of Alice Walker’s past. Eloquently and bravely, she was able to confront generational trauma by telling a universal tale that still felt faithful to her own story. And it was Walker’s ability to throw open the shutters and allow her ghosts — our ghosts — into her writing that made it so revelatory. It cemented her standing as an acclaimed novelist, a civil-rights icon, and a formidable thought leader in the field of black feminism.

That changed abruptly two weeks ago, after the New York Times invited Walker to list her favorite books in its weekly “By the Book” column. She took the opportunity to promote David Icke’s And the Truth Shall Set You Free, which contains some of the most hateful anti-Semitic lies ever to be printed between covers. As excerpted in the Washington Post, Icke’s book alleged that a “small Jewish clique” had created the Russian Revolution and both World Wars, and “coldly calculated” the Holocaust to boot. Icke has also accused Jews (among others) of being alien lizard people. After a week of criticism, Walker doubled down in her assessment of Icke’s indefensible work, calling him “brave” and dismissing charges of anti-Semitism as an attack on the pro-Palestinian cause.

It’s chilling to think that such an acclaimed novelist could regard Icke’s work as “a curious person’s dream come true,” but it turned out that Walker’s endorsement wasn’t an isolated deviation. Readers soon unearthed her poem “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty to Study the Talmud,” published on her website in 2017, which confirmed that Walker had been indulging in virulent anti-Semitism, and that it permeated not just her thinking but her work.

The ghosts in The Color Purple helped me to better understand my own identity and the suppressed history of my ancestors — a journey I’m constantly engaged in as a black Jewish woman. But the ghosts in “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty” leave me with more questions than answers. How did Walker’s curiosity curdle into paranoia? How was her commitment to improving the human condition twisted into support for genocide apologists? How could the artist who helped America to better understand black women use her writing to promote the oppression of another group?

In her essay, “The Black Writer and the Southern Experience,” Walker writes that “an extreme negative emotion held against other human beings for reasons they do not control can be blinding. Blindness about other human beings, especially for a writer, is equivalent to death.” Lately it seems that Walker has willingly allowed herself to be blinded. “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty” is a terribly written poem filled with terrible things. It oozes deep paranoia, defensiveness, and rage. In every single way, it’s ugly.

The “poem” utterly fails as poetry. It isn’t lyrical. Its lines and stanzas are choppy and graceless. Each stanza seems to end with an aggressive exhale, the kind that a person expels when they finish purging the awful thoughts that consume them. In some places, it reads like a rambling lecture delivered by a tenured professor who isn’t afraid to offend her students anymore. At other times, it reads like a Breitbart article with line breaks. There is no artistry here, but there is plenty of trauma.

Walker writes that we must examine the “root” of our broken world. For her, the rabbinical commentaries in the Talmud are this root. She claims that the Talmud has provided justification for Jews making slaves of goyim (non-Jews), which world history proves to be untrue. She also claims that the Talmud permits the rape of young boys and 3-year-olds, which is a misinterpretation often used to justify anti-Semitism. Walker is unequivocally wrong about the root of the world’s evil. But how should we begin to search for the root of Walker’s hatred? What ghosts lurk within her stanzas?

I have a deep abiding love for black women and all that we do. Because of that love, I feel betrayed by Walker, and like all scorned lovers, I find myself consumed with a need to understand why. Guided by a singular question (What the fuck happened?), I spent Christmas buried in her writings, trying to understand how Walker could turn on women like me.

The opening of the poem speaks of a male friend, a “Jewish soul,” who accused Walker of anti-Semitism because she didn’t support the state of Israel. Walker refers to this anonymous friend with a great deal of intimacy; charged with anti-Semitism, she herself reacts like a lover betrayed. When she mentions the house that they shared in Mississippi — “where black people often assumed he was a racist” — it becomes clear that she is referring to her ex-husband.

In 1967, Alice Walker married a young Jewish civil-rights lawyer named Mel Leventhal. Their interracial marriage — the first such legal union in the state of Mississippi — was still illegal in Walker’s home state of Georgia at the time. Leventhal’s mother was also deeply opposed to the union, and his other family members didn’t allow Alice to attend family events. “Leaving no question about how she felt about her son’s marriage to a shvartse (a pejorative Yiddish term for a black person), Miriam Leventhal sat shiva for her son, mourning him as dead,” Evelyn White writes in Alice Walker: A Life. A source who knows the family told me that Mel preferred to ignore rather than confront his family’s bigotry. This caused Walker to feel increasingly isolated and resentful. The marriage ended in 1976, after the pair had one daughter together, named Rebecca.

From left: Mel Leventhal, Rebecca Walker, and Alice Walker, 1970. Photo: CSU Archives/Everett Collection

When writing of Mel in her essays, Walker links him inextricably to his Jewishness, as well as his occupation as a lawyer. Even when they are not arguing (frequently, according to her) about the abuses against Palestinians, each mention of him is some variation on  “white Jewish lawyer husband.” Perhaps Walker is combining those disparate words — each a piece of his identity, yet each reductive — to make sense of his contradictions: How could he fight for the dignity of black people while allowing his white family to deny dignity to his wife and daughter? How could he be white, and yet not fully welcomed by white gentiles in Mississippi? How could he crusade for justice at home and dismiss her concern for Palestinians abroad?

I loathe the misogynist assumption that a woman’s faults must be the direct result of a man’s actions, but I find myself incapable of separating Walker’s fraught marriage from her hatred of Judaism. She doesn’t separate the two either. In her 2014 book, The Cushion in the Road, Walker writes about meeting an elderly Palestinian woman in the Occupied Territories. The woman accepted a gift from Walker, and then bestowed a blessing upon her, “May God protect you from the Jews,” to which Walker responded, “It’s too late, I already married one.”

It’s telling that Walker feels she should reference her marital strife in such a context, even as a joke. In both this comment and in her poem, she seems incapable of reconciling the conflicts inherent to Leventhal’s identity — conflicts that put a strain on their marriage. Instead of accepting that white Jews can both oppress and be oppressed, Walker leaps to blaming all Jews (and  the Talmud) for all oppression.

Walker writes in the poem of trying to educate the “Jewish soul” on the topics of “dignity,” “justice,” “honor,” and “peace.” She sets off each of these words with quotation marks, casting doubt on whether Jews are capable of learning these values. Walker is quite proud of her subsequent epiphany, insinuating that those (like her younger self) who believe that any Jew can desire peace, justice, and honor know “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

Walker’s fights with Leventhal are not the only ghosts in this poem. There is also Rebecca Walker, Alice’s daughter. Rebecca and Alice haven’t spoken in many years, and Rebecca has publicly denounced her mother for being neglectful during Rebecca’s childhood. “I came very low down in her priorities,” Rebecca wrote in 2008, “after work, political integrity, self-fulfillment, friendships, spiritual life, fame and travel.”

While Rebecca never addressed her mother’s anti-Semitism, she is known for publicly embracing her Jewish identity, most notably in her book Black, White, and Jewish. How must Rebecca be feeling right now? How would it feel to have the whole world discussing your mother’s hatred of your Jewish soul, your religious texts, your heritage?

As a black Jewish woman, I find the white Jewish community’s focus on black anti-Semitism hypocritical and distracting. Its negative impact is often exaggerated, and dwelling on it is counterproductive to racial justice and solidarity. But in an attempt to show compassion toward black people — especially black women — I sometimes find myself burying my own opinions about it at the expense of my soul. Recently, I was at an event where someone implied that Jews were naturally more conniving and exploitative. I shut down the conversation, but I wanted to flip the table in anger. What does that do to the soul of the black Jewish woman, who is often rejected by both the white Jewish community and — more rarely — by the sisters who are supposed to understand her?

In an interview for the PBS documentary “Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth,” Walker said she was hurt and confused by her estrangement with her daughter. “You bring children into the world. You love them with heart and soul,” she said. “But, as (author) Tillie Olsen told me, ‘You have your own children and do the best you can until they are able to get out in the world. And then the world takes over.’”

In the poem, Walker invokes her maternal status as a source of her authority over all of humanity. She refers to herself as an “elder” who went to Palestine to “do my job / of keeping tabs / on Earth’s children.” It’s a particularly defensive stanza in an already-paranoid poem. I feel that she is trying to convince herself that she has done her job as an actual mother. Her claim on the “Earth’s children” reads like a deflection from the one child she has, who is surely bothered by her mother’s hatred of Jews like herself.

Another source of the poem’s purported authority is age. Walker tells us that we will understand the evils of the Talmud as we get older. “We must go back / as grown-ups now, / Not as the gullible children we once were … It is our duty, I believe, to study the Talmud.” But Walker isn’t talking to us. It feels like a plea to her child. A plea for what? Understanding? Forgiveness? Permission?

I can understand Walker’s trauma: I live much of it. But I cannot understand how she could write such awful things. I understand that Walker experienced virulent anti-blackness from many in the white Jewish community — as I have — but I don’t understand how she could spin that off into a hateful conspiracy. I don’t understand why this poem was written. But I do understand that everything about it paints a picture of heartbreak. I see a person who has made terrible mistakes, and who is desperately trying to run away from them. I may not be able to forgive or excuse, but it is my frightful duty — as a black Jewish woman — to try to understand.

I spoke to a black Jewish woman who said that Alice Walker’s anti-Semitic “trolling” needed to be called out, but also that Walker was “a monster of [the white Jewish community’s] own making.” She warned that a failure to address such racism would push more people — notably, Jews of color — to this extreme. I believe this; I’ve already reported on the ways that racism was pushing black Jews away from the community. The impact of this dynamic on Walker’s work is supported by her description of her writing process in the essay “From an Interview”:

“All of my poems … are written when I have successfully pulled myself out of a completely numbing despair … Poems — even happy ones — emerge from an accumulation of sadness … I become aware that I am controlled by [the poems], not the other way around. I realize that when I am writing poetry, I am so high as to feel invisible, and in that condition it is possible to write almost anything.”

Still, I wonder how Walker could put the burden of her trauma onto us — black Jewish women. What is her responsibility to her daughter, and what is my responsibility to Alice Walker? Many of my black and Jewish friends refuse to even judge her. Perhaps it is I who know nothing, nothing at all.

I know that I will not cancel Alice Walker. I can’t erase the incredible work she created. I will continue to read The Color Purple and her other works. But I will never be able to rid myself of the ghost of this poem. It would be irresponsible and self-hating of me to do so. I will read and teach Walker’s work with love, but this poem will always be there, fluttering in the wind like a torn-out page of the Talmud.