While William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is problematic on many levels, one simple and sustaining truth surfaces in Shylock’s queries to his interlocutors: “I am a Jew! Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?”
In this instance, Shylock pleads for the basic equality and humanity between Christians and Jews as well as between all other human beings on our planet. Unfortunately for Shylock and the Jewish people, Jews have been perennially singled out for forced conversion, exclusion, deportation, and extermination. No country in the history of the world has been a long-term safe harbor for the Jewish people.
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I have studied the stereotypes and tropes used to maintain and perpetuate oppression. Regarding those employed against Jewish people, I have compiled a partial list:
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· Killers of God
· In Service of / Fathered by the Devil
· Host Desecrators
· Poisoners of Drinking Wells & Transmitters of Diseases
· Usurers
· Ritual Murderers & Abusers of Christian Children
· Forced Circumcisers of Non-Jews
· Immature / Inadequate Religious Consciousness
· Clannish
· Alien “Race”
· Wanderers / “Stateless”
· Holders of Dual / Multiple Loyalties
· Proselytizers to Judaism
· Freedom-Killing Communists
· Super Capitalists
· Sexually Perverse
· Oversexed or Sexually-Frigid Females
· Lecherous Males of Christian Women
· Feminized and Non-Athletic Males
· Controller of World Economic Systems
· Greedy for Wealth
· Financially Cheap and Cheaters
· Controllers of the Media
· Exaggerators of the Extent of Anti-Jewish Oppression
· Exploiters of the Oppressed
When anyone uses an already marginalized group to advance their own agendas or careers, that itself is an act of oppression.
The right-wing leaders and some of the population of Israel seem to have forgotten the lessons of the past and the ways that we, as Jews, have been misrepresented and treated by reversing the tables and the scores by treating others in similar ways.
Empathy is the ability to imagine oneself in another person’s shoes, to understand and feel their feelings. For Jewish people to empathize with the plight of the Palestinian people should be automatic since we have walked and, in many ways, continue to walk in very similar shoes.
As we understand in psychology, unless there is a developmental delay, infants demonstrate the rudimentary beginnings of empathy whenever they recognize that another is upset. In response, they show signs of being upset themselves. Very early in their lives, infants develop the capacity to crawl in the diapers of others even though their own diapers do not need changing.
Though empathy is a human condition, the process of socialization often teaches us to inhibit our empathetic natures with messages like, “Don’t cry,” “You’re too sensitive,” “Mind your own business,” and “It’s not your concern.” We learn the stereotypes of the individuals and groups our society has “minoritized” and “othered.” We learn who to scapegoat for the problems within our neighborhoods, states, nations, and world.
Through it all, that precious, life-affirming flame of empathy can wither and flicker. For some, it dies entirely. And as the blaze recedes, the bullies, the demagogues, and the tyrants take over, filling the void where our humanity once prevailed. By then we have lost something very precious but not irretrievable.
So I paraphrase Shylock’s questions back to my people, the Jewish people, especially those in Israel: “I am a Palestinian! Hath not a Palestinian eyes? Hath not a Palestinian hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Jew or Christian is?”
Before you answer, investigate the daily horrors that the Israeli government has perpetuated and increased against the innocent people of the Gaza Strip and occupied West Bank of the Jordan River, the images that your government has either censored or downplayed.
The flame of empathy has gone out for too many people in Israel, and unlike the flame that once sustained itself in the temple for a full eight days, the starvation, disease, and killing continue.
Israel has increasingly acted with impunity as a pariah and tyrannical nation, and in doing so it has placed Jews and Muslims across the planet at greater risk.
If you prick any person’s finger, it will bleed, and if you tickle almost any child, they will laugh and laugh and laugh. We need more sustained and self-directed laughter.
