Not in My Name: Jewishness, Womanhood, and the Ethics of Identification

To challenge the way things are is always difficult. Yet many people in Palestine/Israel, the diasporas, live the courage to reclaim another future. They refuse to abide by actions committed in their name, in our name, in my name.

–Heidi Grunebaum

In the meantime, however, it is important to come to a better understanding of how it is exactly that many of us resist and survive in this world. Given that we are systematically constructed in ways that run contrary to our own self-identifications, given that we are fundamentally viewed as illusory—as either evil deceivers or as openly bogus—how do we find the moral integrity and real-ness which has been taken from us? When we claim "reality" what do we mean? In what sense, specifically, is authenticity claimed in resistant assertions such as "being true to oneself"? What does it mean to lay claim to a gender category such as "man" or "woman" in the first place in cases in which such categories are claimed in opposition to the natural attitude? How is it so much as possible to meaningfully make such resistant claims—to oneself and to others?

–Talia Bettcher

In 2013 I attended a Cape Town screening of The Village Under the Forest, a South African film made by Mark J. Kaplan and Heidi Grunebaum, based on Grunebaum's experiences and reflections around a forest planted in Israel with donations from South African Jews, including Grunebaum as a child.¹ Unbeknownst to the donors, the forest was planted on the ruins of Lubya, a Palestinian village destroyed in 1948, whose displaced residents still return to visit the site of their former homes. The film traces Grunebaum's efforts to come to terms with what was done in her name. In a discussion held after the screening, two elderly Jewish men spoke about their differing feelings about claiming a Jewish identity. Both had been anti-apartheid activists and had faced ostracism from the organized Jewish community in South Africa, which had for the most part avoided engagement in the struggle. One of them said that now, post-apartheid, he did not identify as Jewish, but simply as South African, as a citizen of the new "rainbow nation." The other said that, in line with the politics of the film, he felt morally bound to identify as a Jew, as someone in whose name policies of the state of Israel that he abhorred were being carried out.

That second response resonated deeply with me, both reflecting my own current convictions and reminding me of what I had learned as a child (a sentiment I recall as attributed, probably apocryphally, to Einstein): I am a Jew so long as there is antisemitism in the world. Just as it is dishonorable not to speak out when wrongs are done in my name, it would, I was taught, be dishonorable to dis-identify, given the chance, from those with whom I share a stigmatized identity, to walk away from my people. But who are "my people," either as threatened (as Jews still are) or as culpable? How am I interpellated as a Jew? How does that come to be my name?

I want to think these questions alongside analogous questions about things being done in my name as a (particular sort of) woman. Two examples: racist aggression against Black men has frequently been carried out in the name of protecting white women from the mythical Black rapist, and in North Carolina and elsewhere efforts are being made to bar transgender women from using women's restrooms in the name of protecting cis women from assault. As a white cis woman I want to say in both cases: not in my name; and my standing to do so requires my acknowledging that those are in fact my names, that I am among those allegedly being protected.²

Natal Facticity

One striking similarity in all these cases is that, while there is much that I can choose to do or refrain from doing, there is a level at which I experience the relevant...