An American Bereavement

If I say to you, “Look at the snow, how white it is.” And you respond, “The snow is green,” we have a problem. We are looking at the very same phenomenon, but we don’t see it the same way. This divergence of basic perception results in a barbed wire fence on top of a brick wall that stands between us. The wall is high and opaque. We cannot explore the subject of snow any further. This communication barrier is painful and frustrating when it arises between friends or within families. But when it takes place on a national scale, when the two parties to the exchange are not equal in their power or influence and the ruling party threatens the other with dire consequences if it will not agree that the snow is green, then the fundamental premises that support social cohesion begin to collapse. We no longer agree on a set of assumptions, a structural framework, that underlies the social contract. That agreement has gone up in smoke. It is the smoke of the air at a book burning. A death has occurred. Small wonder we feel unhinged.

Photo by Freddy Kearney on Unsplash

The loss of our integrity as a nation has left us in a state of shock similar to mourning the loss of a loved one. The element of shock that we have experienced over the past two months is qualitatively different from the outrage and grief that we have also suffered. I think of it as a separate aspect of the larger bereavement. If I lose a loved one, I am likely to feel sadness and possibly anger. But the deeper anguish comes from disbelief. Where did he go? How could this have happened? Where is my wife with her lovely singing voice? Where is my country with its familiar stumbling, bumbling democracy? It’s like coming home from the funeral parlor to an empty echoing house with nothing but a quart of milk gone sour in the refrigerator and your dead husband’s slippers still lying under the bed.

I understand, believe me, that America has always been far from perfect. Your partner who died was short-tempered and impatient, but you loved him anyway. Your mother when she was alive, sometimes undermined you in public, but she was your mother, after all. The failings of our country are evident and certainly more egregious than that. We all understand the long history of racism and income inequality in America, our failure to protect the environment, adequately educate all of our children or provide for the sick. Still, there have always been aspects of the political system enshrined in our Constitution that we could point to with pride. Separation of powers. Due process. Freedom of speech, in particular academic freedom. In the last months, we have attended a series of funerals.

Academic freedom has been weaponized against us and great institutions have capitulated under threat. Academic freedom is no longer protected when the federal government, withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding, exercises a stranglehold on political speech. Not surprisingly, Jewish students and faculty, well-represented in the cadre of activists, find themselves at the center of this upheaval. Because the administration in Washington supports the right-wing government in Jerusalem, demonstrations against Israel are considered assaults on American foreign policy interests. Turning the screw even tighter, all political speech, press and assembly that do not support the war in Gaza and the settler violence in the West Bank are now regarded as antisemitic. This accusation breaks the heart of progressive Jewish students and faculty at Columbia, a mile and a half from where I was born and raised. Incidents of bullying, aggressive speech at Columbia have indeed been documented but the procedures for investigating those incidents under Title VI have not been followed. The government has simply asserted antisemitism and demanded silence from the university. But I say, the word antisemitism, the experience of antisemitism, does not belong to Donald Trump who, lest we forget, referred to the torch-bearing “Jews will be replaced” protesters in Charlottesville as “fine people.” The word has been hijacked by right-wing ideologues endeavoring to claim it as their own. The snow is green.

Words matter. When their meaning becomes frayed, there are consequences in the real world. A death occurs each time we lose the nuances of discourse in public life. If political speech is throttled and the range of opinions permitted gets narrower and narrower, minority populations, including Jews, will suffer. You can bet on it. It’s one thing to assert that the snow is green, but it won’t really matter what color it is if the government withholds all the funding for shovels.

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