GOOD JEWISH GIRL
A Jerusalem Love Story Gone Bad
by Liz Rose Shulman
186 pps, Querencia Press, $18.00 Liz Rose Shulman’s new book, Good Jewish Girl: A Jerusalem Love Story Gone Bad, tells the story of her journey from her classically American Jewish indoctrination into Zionism, through her discovery of its colonial blind spot in the Palestinian people, finally arriving at the point of opposing Zionism. Shulman has contributed dozens of pieces to Mondoweiss since 2011, some of which constitute the essays that form the book. Those who have experienced that world, where Israel is romanticized in their early youth, will recognize her descriptions. These include the childish sensual fetishization of Israel, as in collectively finger-painting a map of Israel from the river to the sea with ice cream; but also the instrumentalization of sex for teenagers, making the young ‘Zionists-to-be’ fall in love with Israel in a very physical, carnal sense. The current “Birthright” trips for young Jewish Americans were officially established in 1999, but the project has a longer history of similar projects under other names, and Shulman participated in one such trip as a teenager. Her first group trip to Israel was at age 16, in 1986. She tells of her first trip to Jerusalem:
A Jerusalem Love Story Gone Bad
by Liz Rose Shulman
186 pps, Querencia Press, $18.00 Liz Rose Shulman’s new book, Good Jewish Girl: A Jerusalem Love Story Gone Bad, tells the story of her journey from her classically American Jewish indoctrination into Zionism, through her discovery of its colonial blind spot in the Palestinian people, finally arriving at the point of opposing Zionism. Shulman has contributed dozens of pieces to Mondoweiss since 2011, some of which constitute the essays that form the book. Those who have experienced that world, where Israel is romanticized in their early youth, will recognize her descriptions. These include the childish sensual fetishization of Israel, as in collectively finger-painting a map of Israel from the river to the sea with ice cream; but also the instrumentalization of sex for teenagers, making the young ‘Zionists-to-be’ fall in love with Israel in a very physical, carnal sense. The current “Birthright” trips for young Jewish Americans were officially established in 1999, but the project has a longer history of similar projects under other names, and Shulman participated in one such trip as a teenager. Her first group trip to Israel was at age 16, in 1986. She tells of her first trip to Jerusalem:
“I stood in front of Apple Pizza on Luntz Street near Ben Yehuda’s pedestrian mall, swaying to Naomi Shemer’s 1967 song, “Jerusalem of Gold” (“Yerushalayim Shel Zahav”) with other young teens in Jerusalem on an eight-week high school program. The song was being played on a boombox and I sang along with other American Jews who had, like me, fallen in love with the city. Rather than hold a lighter up to the music, we held each other’s waists and gave a little extra squeeze for those we had crushes on. We were in love with Jerusalem and with each other, too, as our hips moved to the music, our feet firmly planted on the limestone street”.One didn’t have to orchestrate the sensuality for these teenagers, it came completely naturally, one just had to put them in the right scenery, like on Mt. Masada, which they visited at dawn:
“I can’t remember the name of the guy I made out with on top of Masada, but I have etched into my memory every nook and crevice of Jerusalem that I stepped on and played in when I was 16”.In the book, these memories are contextualized with how she now understands how these sensations were instrumentalized to accomplish a goal unknown to her at the time:
“This was Zionism’s plan, of course, to get young Zionists like me to fall in love unconditionally with the tiny country. Their efforts succeeded; we fell in line like good soldiers. We were expected to grow up and donate money, plant trees—which I did as a child, with my allowance money—buy homes, visit often, perhaps lose our virginity in the holy land (if we hadn’t already at the Zionist-Socialist camp we attended in the U.S.) and later, marry a Jew, have kids, maybe make Aliyah [emigrate to Israel under the ‘Law of Return’], and hope for the same things for our Jewish children”.That first trip to Israel was not to be her last, and in 1992 she temporarily moved to Jerusalem for her postgraduate studies in English and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University. It was in this context, that Shulman came to fall in love in another way, with non-Jews – namely with Tavit, and Khalil. These relationships brought her to experience life from a completely different angle than the Zionist one she had been indoctrinated through. Tavit was an Armenian who lived in the Armenian quarter of the Old City in occupied East Jerusalem (which Israel had unilaterally annexed in 1967 and cemented in constitutional ‘Basic Law’ as the ‘united capital’ of Israel in 1980), and Khalil was a Palestinian-American who came from occupied Ramallah but was living in East Jerusalem for a time. When she drove with Khalil to Eilat, he was harassed by Israeli soldiers who stopped them. This immediately forces her to reckon with how Israeli soldiers had been sex symbols for her when she was on her teenage trip just a few years earlier and the role they played in her “perverse initiation into Zionism”:
“Another soldier looked like the Israeli soldier I met on my first trip to Israel at age 16. He had curly, dark hair and green eyes and a scruffy chin. I was dared by the other American Jews I was with—we were on a summer program—to kiss a soldier and ask him for the shirt of his Israeli army uniform. We made out for a minute against the wall of a bar in Jerusalem’s Russian Compound as the other American teens cheered. I brought his shirt home with me, folded carefully in my suitcase, at the end of the summer program when I returned to Chicago. It was a perverse initiation into Zionism, I would learn, that many American Jewish girls go through. His M16 pressed against my leg while we kissed. As I watched the soldiers harass Khalil, I felt sick for playing in the charade when I was a teenager, for seeing what is oppressive for Palestinians as a rite of passage for American Jews”.These experiences began to change Shulman, even if she didn’t completely understand how. These changes feature in a 1994 letter to her mother in which she said, “I’ve always been interested in the other side, but Jerusalem has changed me.” At this point, having seen that “other side”, Shulman seeks more perspectives that would illuminate it. She reads Edward Said’s 1979 essay “Zionism From the Standpoint of its Victims” and is changed, noting, “It was as though my eyes had come into focus after a lifetime of blurry vision.” A friend said she was “reading a terrorist.” Other friends said, “Said is Palestinian, so he’s biased.” The transformation took place over many years and contained my debates with Zionist friends trying to get them to acknowledge the seriousness of what she was seeing, and reach beyond their racism. This process led her to break with many of these friendships, though not all at once. Shulman continues to hope people can change like she did:
“Things are different today. Jewish communities in the US are fed up with Israeli politics shifting to the right, and with Israel’s mistreatment of its Palestinian population. I believe people are capable of great change, but it takes time. More young Jews are curious about Palestinian history and speak about it openly.”Through very personal experiences Good Jewish Girl provides a close-up view of many aspects of the role of Zionism in the American Jewish community, how it is indoctrinated, and how this indoctrination can fail. One point of critique of the book is that it could be dismaying to read, especially to Palestinian or anti-Zionist readers, due to the attention and elaborate description that Shulman pays to the juvenile, carnal experiences she had in Palestine. And yet, it is the later experiences of oppression, like with the Israeli soldiers frisking Khalil – that also force her to reflect back critically on her earlier naiveté. In the end, this is part of the uncompromisingly honest aspect of the book. Shulman lays out how she thought at the time, even when she is not proud of it. But the book aims to describe where she was, how she was moved, and where she is today. This understanding could also serve as a guide to others who may be experiencing a similar process. In the end, although Shulman has now moved away from Zionism, her journey is not finished. She has not completely cut herself off from her earlier life or friends, rather, she reflects upon these relationships to place where the American Jewish community stands at this juncture. In this way, this book may prove to be a guide for many young Jewish Americans, who will no doubt be able to relate to many of Shulman’s experiences, and reflect upon why they came to think like they do. It might also offer them a gentle pathway out of Zionism. For others, the book may offer an understanding of the ways in which Jews, internationally and particularly in the U.S., are indoctrinated into Zionism as an essential aspect of Jewish identity. Understanding this does not equal condoning it, and understanding of these psychological mechanisms can prove to be a useful instrument for change. The book has already won many accolades from the likes of Ilan Pappé, Peter Beinart, Haidar Eid and others (full disclosure, my blurb appears in the book as well). It is now on sale here (also in European markets here).