Meditating on the Writing of Postcards

Like many other people in the United States, I’ve been writing postcards to voters in other states as a way of doing something about the election. I’ll vote, of course, and I’m sending a little money here and there as well.

Given the number of postcards I can reasonably write and the amount of money I can afford to send, not to mention the value of my single vote, all those things only matter if a lot of other people do them as well.

But the stress of “the most important election of our lives” is weighing on me. I don’t call people, because I despise getting such calls and cannot bear to do that to others. Postcards I can do without having to talk to a stranger who doesn’t really want to talk with me.

In general, while I worry a lot and always vote – the last time I skipped an election was a runoff between a dishonest Democrat who was going to win anyway and a well-intentioned good-government Republican whose ideas on how to run a city were disastrous – I am not excited about electoral politics. I prefer to put my energy for change into building something that might grow into better systems. Co-ops, for example.

I came to that after being active in the antiwar movement back in the day when I realized that I preferred making things to protesting them. Not that I haven’t done a lot of protesting as well – it’s kind of like voting: you gotta do it from time to time.

Anyway, I’m trying to do my small part to fend off fascism – and yes, there is a right and wrong side in this election and not just in the presidential race. I don’t think the United States survives as a nation if we don’t stop this latest effort to create an authoritarian state.

And though I can think of reasonable arguments for the dismantling of the United States, it would be hell to live through that period and while I’m old, I’m not so old that I won’t have to.

Also, I’m pretty much in favor of getting a sane base in place and trying to fix the country’s problems from there. See above, where I mentioned I preferred building things to protests.

I mean, we already had a civil war over how the country should be governed. As someone who has read a bit of history, I contend that we wouldn’t be in this mess if we hadn’t abandoned Reconstruction after that nasty war. The Civil War Amendments to the Constitution gave us a way to build the country we ought to be, but we haven’t used them as well as we should. Continue reading “Meditating on the Writing of Postcards”

Do Not Murder In My Name: The Rush to Execution

Today it feels appropriate to repost my essay on my opposition to the death penalty as a family member of a murder victim. This is from 2020.

 

Now, in the waning days of 2020, the criminal in the White House has pushed through a string of murders. I realize I have used inflammatory language, but nothing less conveys the intensity of my outrage and revulsion. Simply put, someone who initiates and demands the ending of a human life is a criminal. The deliberate, calculated, cold-blooded taking of a human life is murder.

 

From the BBC: 

As President Donald Trump’s days in the White House wane, his administration is racing through a string of federal executions.

Five executions are scheduled before President-elect Joe Biden’s 20 January inauguration – breaking with an 130-year-old precedent of pausing executions amid a presidential transition.

And if all five take place, Mr Trump will be the country’s most prolific execution president in more than a century, overseeing the executions of 13 death row inmates since July of this year.

The five executions began this week, starting with convicted killer 40-year-old Brandon Bernard who was put to death at a penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. The execution of 56-year-old Alfred Bourgeois will take place on the evening of 11 December.

I am the family member of a murder victim, and I speak from personal experience of the impulse to revenge the taking of my mother’s life. I also know that this is a natural expression of grief, and that with healing, it passes. To me it is essential that those left behind be given the support and time to process that loss and to re-engage with their lives. To focus on killing someone else freezes us in retaliation mode.

Over the years, I have spoken out against the death penalty, telling my story to groups as diverse as city councils, law students, death penalty abolition activists, and state legislators. In 2012, I was invited to participate in an international conference put on by Murder Victim Families For Human Rights. Then I met others like me, who had lost a single family member to violence, those whose loved ones had been executed or were on death row, and those who experienced both. Every single person who had experienced both was Black. There is no escaping the racial injustice in the way the death penalty is applied (or the way crimes are investigated and prosecuted). Yet the most moving part of that weekend was listening with an open heart to mothers weeping for their executed sons — and realizing their grief and loss was no less than mine. 

If you, who are reading this, take away nothing else, remember this: every person who is put to death is or has been loved by someone, and is grieved by someone, and missed like an aching hole in the heart by someone.

In 2019, I penned a blog for Death Penalty Focus, called “When we focus on revenge instead of healing, we never heal.” You can read it below.

Continue reading “Do Not Murder In My Name: The Rush to Execution”

More on returning home

Do not return from abroad. Not returning to a messy everyday is now a fixed star in the constellation of my life journeys. Of all my returns, the recent one is physically the most arduous, and also the most difficult to juggle. Yes, my everyday involves the equivalent of juggling while on a high wire with no shoes and no net.

I’ve been home over a week and I’m still juggling. What am I juggling? The theft of my purse (and its ongoing ramifications), the impossible flight home (things went wrong – not too seriously, but I left my flat in Dusseldorf at 10.30 am on Thursday and arrived at my flat in Canberra at 10.30 am on Saturday) and lots of little things that have gone not-quite-right or completely wrong since then. My favourite today was when I needed to speak to my doctor over the phone because they closed down my bus stop while I was away. It’s temporary, but I couldn’t walk to the next stop and still have the capacity to walk at the far end, see the doctor, run messages, and then everything in reverse. If I’d known the bus stop was closed, I would have left much earlier had a halfway chai at my favourite cafe.

Lots of small things add up. The last two weeks were more exhausting than the previous six weeks, which says a lot, given what I spent the previous six weeks doing.

Also, I was not wrong when I posted last week. Western Germany was easier to be openly Jewish than Australia is currently. A major political party supported a pro-Hezbollah rally in Sydney, for example, where Jewish deaths were threatened, but the party claims to not be antisemitic. I already miss talking about politics openly and easily.

My trip to Germany brought together so many things I’ve been thinking about for years. The book is writing itself at the moment. I will reach a stage soon where I will hit the research brick wall, but I have the first set of research materials all ready for when I reach that stage.

This book is on contemporary German views of their own Jewish history prior to 1700 and has become a place where a lot of things I’ve learned over my life come together. When the current Australian Greens metamorphosed into a small case study in the book, I found myself able to handle things a bit less fretfully. I need to understand and I need to help others understand… and I’m very lucky to have the luxury of a few weeks recovery time (because of my health, this time has been budgeted for) where the main thing I do is sort out the messes life produces, rest enough so that my body recovers from it all… and write.

Returning Home

My everyday was so much easier in Germany. Antisemitism didn’t play silly buggers with the ground I walked on there, as it does in Australia. Australian antisemitism is mostly gentle and kind, but no less troublesome for that. Until I went to Germany I had no idea of its place in the general scheme of things, but now I understand that, too. Five weeks where I could literally be myself taught me that I am not the heart of the problem. Nor is me being Jewish. I know about what is wrong with Australia and why bigotry triumphs right now. Around me, many people are raging about Nazis, but doing nothing about the gentler and more insidious racism. Whatever I do to handle this will be uncomfortable, and if I don’t do anything I will also be uncomfortable.

How did Germany teach me these things?

It still has all the history that cause the Shoah. It’s dealt with some of it supremely well, and other parts not at all. My research project concerned how Germany handles its Jewish past, especially the past up to 1700. I explained I wasn’t a German historian, but a French/English one. I was entirely open about my Jewishness, but also about the parts my family played in the war. There were no closed doors. In fact, it was quite the opposite. People wanted to talk to me and tell me their views and hear what I had to say. They were excited by my questions and chased things up for me: we all know a lot more about Jews in the Saarland, about the relationship between lebuchen and honeycake, about the Jews who never returned to Germany, about medieval expulsions and why they were not always as they seemed, about Roman Jews in Germania… and a whole lot more. There will be a book. In fact, nearly half the book is already written (and needs a publisher!) but this post is not about that book.

I was able to use my experience to better understand the 1930s in Germany and why so many non-Jewish Germans were silent then. Also why everyone’s favourite patriotic children’s author was murdered. The murder was death camp stuff: tragically normal that year. The silence, however, was mostly not intentional. I strongly suspect that the vast majority of non-Jewish Germans did not hate Jews and are still trying to handle what happened. Many people closed doors for emotional safety because life was too full of problems. Small lives became smaller lives. Some of them closed doors to keep out people (Jews, Roma, people with the wrong politics or sexual preferences) who might make their own lives more difficult in a chancy decade. There was fear; there was selfishness; there was small life syndrome. The actual hatred was confined to a much tinier portion of the community than we mostly think.

Those who accepted the Nazis, or got on with their lives despite the Nazis are perfectly normal people. Good people who mostly led good lives. They silenced those around them without hate (or with only a little hate, not enough to murder or throw stones) and when the worst happened were terribly shocked. I learned a lot about things from how shocked people were and how, three generations later, they are still determined to fight and ensure this does not happen again. They are still dealing with their families being a part of the horror. Good people who discovered that goodness is not enough by itself, that silencing and closing doors and leading small lives can feed terror.

Australians are doing the small life thing to most Jewish Australians. I’m largely not dealing with hate. Three people I know well clearly hate me because I’m Jewish, only three, out of hundreds. The occasional hate mail is just that – an occasional nasty piece of email from a nasty piece of work. Most of the others who make my life more and more difficult are agreeing with politics that silences or isolates (why I am so worried about the Aussie Greens – anyone who backs them without pushing them to talk to the Jewish community as a whole is helping close doors) or they are dealing with impossible situations personally and do not have energy left to find out why I’m missing from this place or that, or… there are a number of other possibilities, but they all come down to preferring small lives above shared lives.

The biggest thing I noticed in Germany was how much easier life is when one doesn’t have to do a bunch of work to be heard. In Australia, I have to run an extra mile before anyone will listen to me, because I have to prove I’m someone who deserves a little attention. I have to open closed doors. Some of the once-open doors are locked and I have to beg for a key. All attention I previously had for my books, my classes,Women’s History Month, and a truckload of other things is immaterial to the world around me. at home Bookshops do not stock my books. Reviewers won’t review my books. And this applies to the vast, vast majority of Jewish writers.  In Germany, scholars and students looked at my books and my work. My life’s work is important and interesting. I could also talk openly about my research and its impact and everyone talked openly back. Me being Gillian is sufficient.

I’m not going to spend the rest of my life contacting politicians and people I used to work with and social activists who knew me, once upon a time. I wrote to them when I could before I left, and they never answered. I am still the person who can give excellent policy advice on these things. More so now, in fact, because of my current research. I’m still the person who spent twenty odd years of her life fighting for human rights for many people, and teaching people how to fight for themselves. I am an expert they need to talk to, but their doors are closed. Those politicians and activists and most of Australia’s left have chosen small lives. If someone doesn’t bother to read my email because I’m no longer the right person or the known person, or assumes that someone else will be more acceptable, then that’s their choice. All those choices have been made. I will not write any more letters.

If someone wants to talk with me, I am still the expert I once was. I discovered this is Germany. I don’t teach what one has to do to prevent or limit the spread of bigotry: I teach how things happen and tools that can be used. Choices and paths are for the person dealing with it in their every day. I once made a living providing history and understanding and tools, and had completely forgotten about that part of my life, because of the amount that part of my life has been sidelined. Right now, just getting to see anyone and get a decent conversation that may or may not lead to changes is like running a marathon. To run marathons, one needs spoons. I’m chronically ill. Another thing I discovered in Germany is that one can lead a much better life with a chronic illness if one doesn’t have to battle to be heard.

I’m still very happy to help anyone deal with identification of bigotry, whether they are themselves unintentionally excluding, how cultural tendencies push towards how we see people. However, I’m not well, and I’m not willing to spend all my energy explaining why I can be useful (very, very useful) at this moment in Australia’s history. I tried that, and it took all my energy with no results. I left thinking that I was not the person I thought I was, and had nothing useful to give. Now I realise, thanks to the last five weeks, that it is Australia that has changed and that I am simply one of many people dealing with the downside of that change. Being Jewish is my everyday, but that everyday results in closed doors. Much of Australia is quietly and gently hiding itself from anything that might cause it emotional distress, and one of those subjects if being Australian and Jewish. Simple descriptions are applied to us and who we are and how we live our lives is not considered something worth knowing.

If you want to talk to me about these things, and the shape of prejudice in society and how to handle different manifestations of that prejudice, then I’m happy to help. Ask me. Don’t wait for me to find you. If you want to scold me for being Jewish or thinking Jewishly or keep me out of things until I know my (polite and submissive) place, then you’re not seeing me.

If you want to know who is pushing me aside in this way, just look at groups of people or events I have been involved with in the past. If I’m not there, ask the event people why. I am not given reasons why – I’m just excluded – so I can’t speak for them.

If I am at an event and especially if I’m talking about things that matter to me, then please celebrate, for the people organising that event are not closing doors. They’re not taking the lazy path into bigotry. Their lives are bigger than this.

 

PS For those who are curious, I was a Research Fellow at Heinrich Heine University for a month, and was doing research supported by Deakin University. I owe both universities a great deal, for helping me understand the incomprehensible.

Women Betraying Women

I see that the appalling woman who is currently governor of Arkansas is attacking women who don’t have biological children, specifically Vice President Kamala Harris. This follows on the equally appalling man who is the Republican nominee for vice president doing much the same.

They are part of the current “pronatalist” movement, which is white supremacist nonsense. There are plenty of babies and young people in the world; they’re just the “wrong” race and in the “wrong” countries.

I mean, there are eight billion people on the planet, which is more than enough. And before you moan about how the population is aging, you might want to look at South Africa or Nigeria, where the population is quite young. We’re not running out of people,.

Since I am a happily childless woman who has taken care of myself since I was grown, right wing proponents of women having more babies (which also means women having fewer rights and positions of power) get on my last nerve.

But what is making me most furious today are women like Arkansas Governor Sarah Sanders, Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, Alabama Senator Katie Britt, and Justice Amy Barrett. (I think I’ll avoid discussing the dog-murdering governor of South Dakota and the wild-eyed extremist women in the U.S. House.)

All these women have powerful jobs today because of feminism, and all of them are out to destroy the rights of women.

I mean, let’s get real: the Republicans wouldn’t be putting women in powerful positions if they didn’t need to cater to women’s votes. I guarantee you that if they succeed in implementing the wet dreams set out in Project 2025, you won’t see so many women — even right wing women — in positions of authority.

Once they start enforcing the Comstock Act, they’re going to go after the 19th Amendment.

As a feminist old enough to remember that the inclusion of women in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 coupled with second wave feminism gave me choices that my mother didn’t have, nothing makes me much madder than women who sell out other women for their personal gain.

These women got to get an education and a political career because of the efforts of people like me going back to the suffrage movement, and they’re using those things to harm people like me. Continue reading “Women Betraying Women”

Dusseldorf

This week may well be entirely spent in Dusseldorf. Or it may not. Things are being planned, but I don’t know the dates. I do know, however, that I am giving workshops. My favourite one is a subject I used to teach a lot and haven’t had the chance and … it’s going to be so much fun. A whole group of German translators are going to learn how to write battle scenes from the Old French epic legends. The epic legends were written in Old French. I cannot write in Old French, though i can still read it, so I teach in English. I’ve used the English writing to show how language changes the way we think about things and so, after the group had learned how to write an Old French poetic technique into English… they’re going to translate their verse into German. They are all far better linguists than me, so I’m going to learn a lot by teaching them. If I’m really lucky, I will learn some really effective German insults, along the way. I do not expect the students will use them on me. Insults just happen to be a part of that form of verse…

The details of the other workshop won’t be public for a few days (as I write this). That gives me a great quandary – do I tell you, because it will all be known by the time you read this? Or do I obey everyone and not tell you. I am obedient tonight, largely because it’s an impossible hour here and I am especially obedient when it means I get to sleep a few minutes faster! If you want to know what else I did in Dusseldorf this week (including that workshop) ask, and I’ll be forced to tell you when I return.

Trier and environs

This week I travel to the Saarland. I’ll be working with friends who are also locals, because my German is pretty bad. This is when we delve into what people know about their local landscapes, foodways, folklore and other things. The Saarland is a special region. I’m visiting it and hopefully also Aachen to try to understand the role Charlemagne and his heirs and then the Holy Roman Empire played in the lives of Jews. When they came, why they came… and what locals understand of any of this. Do they remember the importance of their Jewish neighbours, once upon a  time? I’ve already played with maps and I know just how important this region was. It’s not talked about a lot, but it was so important that France and Germany have fought over it. Most Jewish histories talk about the French side of the border, of Nancy and Metz. The German side is just as important.

I’m worried about just one thing. Very worried. I know I’m going to make Dreyfus jokes and I should not. The Australian Attorney-General is Mark Dreyfus and his father conducted me in a school choir once upon a time and, as an historian of France I’ve read up on the whole Dreyfus Affair and one of my favourite French writers wrote the  ‘J’accuse’ letter, and the whole Dreyfus name comes from that border area, some of which is now in France and some now in Germany… and… I will try so very hard not to make Dreyfus jokes. Those jokes would be wrong in so very many ways. and yet I’m already tempted

Heinrich Heine University

Heinrich Heine University in Dusseldorf is my home this week. I checked the time, and earlier today (if you read this post when it’s planned to go up) I will be working with a group of MA students on my personal take (in one of my short stories) on the Australian Gothic.  Earlier in the week, I’ll give a seminar on understanding the Australian Gothic. Everything else at the rime I’m writing is research, mostly on the memory of the Middle Ages. It takes more than a few days to even begin to understand a subject that big. Every town I visit will give me a different view, and simply going to Germany will open new horizons. By training, I’m a book research person, but the older I get the more i need to actually walk the streets in order to understand what the primary sources tell me.

This is only the first week in Dusseldorf. It’s so far a quiet week because I need to slow down every few days and give me feeble body a chance to catch up. I want to do everything, but my body won’t let me. This is one of the times when I let it complain in peace.

Also, I will have notes to write up. This is where I admit a terrible truth. I intend to take those notes next year (after I’m finished the current project) and turn them into a book. I am confronting a whole bunch of really tough emotional things as a Jewish Australian, as the descendant of a Jewish German, as an historian who tried to avoid German history because it was too damn emotionally difficult. I will write down what I face and all the mistakes I make facing it. I will write down the history I learn and anything special or amazing that I discover. And, in the process, I will learn more about why some people hate Jews for existing and why others see us as human beings. It’s not going to be easy, but it will be worth it.

Of Politics and Time Zones

I’ve been paying some attention to the Democratic National Convention this week. I didn’t watch the whole thing – I know too much about politics in this country to be able to watch a lot of political speeches – but I did listen to Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech.

While I don’t agree with everything she said, I am excited about her candidacy. I’d be thrilled to see her as President even if she weren’t running against the criminal grifter and even if she wouldn’t be the first woman in the job.

Plus she has brought a new wave of effective political action into the mix, which also makes me happy because frankly I have no more stomach for Democrats running as Republican Lite.

So I’m hopeful that the Democrats will soundly defeat the convicted felon and force the Republican Party to either remake itself or fall apart.

I checked on the convention earlier in the week and was highly amused when I saw complaints online from various political writers about the fact that the Democratic National Convention was running behind schedule and President Biden wasn’t going to be onstage during “prime time.”

By “prime time” they meant not just broadcast-television-dictated prime time, but broadcast-television-dictated East Coast prime time, which is to say between 8 and 11 pm EDT.

I had several reactions to this.

First of all, I started paying attention to U.S. political conventions in 1960 – I was a nerdy kid and my parents were both journalists and liberal Democrats – and I have never heard of a convention not getting behind schedule.

I mean, you give politicians a mike and they’re gonna talk. Plus if there’s enthusiasm – and this year there is a lot of enthusiasm – there’s going to be applause and standing ovations and other things that slow the schedule down.

And while I’m sure there were speakers that no one would have missed much – say the governor of New York – one of the purposes of a convention is to allow as many players as possible to speak as well as bringing in some folks that beef up your presentation.

Secondly, the convention is being held in Chicago, which is on Central Time. Now I grant that CDT broadcast-television-dictated prime time is actually 7-10 pm, but it still was an hour earlier in Chicago.

Thirdly, it was 8:30 pm in California when I saw these complaints. That’s just the most populous state in the union, with the sixth largest economy in the world.

I note that Vice President Harris’s acceptance speech ended a little after 8 pm PDT – 11 pm EDT. Maybe that was close enough to prime time for those doing the griping.

Every once in awhile it’s nice when something important happens on the West Coast’s schedule instead of the East Coast’s.

Continue reading “Of Politics and Time Zones”

Speyer, Germany

I’m doing research in Speyer. It’s partly for a novel, which I’ll tell you about in a moment. It’s also partly because I really, really want to know how Jews are remembered in regional culture and into Jewish life in Speyer, Mainz, Worms from the 11th-18th centuries. These three towns gave us the set of Jewish cultures that are dominant in the world right now. Ashkenazi Judaism comes from Germany (Ashkenaz) and it spread from there. We know that some of the early Jews in that region came from Italy and of them, one of the most important families had a family tradition that they were forced to Rome when the Second Temple fell. That strong link between Jerusalem and Jews over a thousand years later explains some of the traditions my family possess. That bit’s easy, and well-studied. Also well-studied are the expulsions and the massacres and the Jew-hate. The Holocaust didn’t begin everything… it was the worst by an impossible amount, not the only.

I don’t want to explore the hate. We carry too much hate with us right now and there is more to human life than hate. I’ll learn more about the lost cultures of the Jews of Speyer and Mainz and Worms, and how their work gave so many people so much. I’ll do that because I have German ancestry right up to about 1830. I need to know more, even if it isn’t quite the right part of Germany. Jews were important to Speyer, and so I want to know how Speyer sees its Jews. This is the other side of the coin to Reading. How are the Middle Ages remembered? How are the Jews of Speyer remembered? This is contemporary history. In our time, now, how do people interpret their own past, before the modern horrors changed everything?

And the novel? I can’t writ it until next year, after my current big research project is finished. I will be gathering material for it, however. I want to know the lives of the Medieval Jews and the Early Modern Jews in Speyer. I will create a town in the same future as my novel Poison and Light, and it will be a novel with two groups of Jews (from Speyer) and one group of Christians (from St Ives). At the moment that’s what it will be. Novels often change as the research opens more pathways. I’m writing this novel.