I was talking with my friend Francesca a while ago about how if I were at a party with certain members of the Brooklyn literary scene, from whom I am 0-3 degrees of social connection and whose parties I not-so-secretly wish I went to, I would think they were cool but they would not think I was cool. Francesca objected that she thinks I’m cool, but as one of my best friends for over a decade, she is biased. Ultimately, the facts are these: the literary people I know do objectively cool things like write novels and work on the editorial staff of magazines I read, whereas I do uncool things like be Jewish, very actively, and talk about it all the time.
Francesca (who is not Jewish) encouraged me to start this Substack in part as a way to challenge myself to make my life and work accessible, if not cool, to a broader audience, and it’s been very gratifying, but I’m still not convinced. First of all, I’m not really reaching a “broader audience,” not yet anyway — the vast majority of you readers are Jews, which is fine, but I sometimes have trouble believing that being cool to Jews, as fun as it is, really counts. Besides, even if I were to reach a broader audience, isn’t religion too earnest, or too old-fashioned, to be interesting? And aren’t Jews in particular too white for anyone to have a legitimate reason to care about these days?
Over the most recent Jewish holiday, I read a book that helped me contextualize some of these thoughts: Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, which I’d heard about because it was a book club book for my favorite podcast, “Still Processing,” by the phenomenal NYT writers Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris. Minor Feelings is a collection of essays about the negative feelings that accompany the experience of being a child of immigrants, drawing on Hong’s own experience as a second generation Korean American. (She also draws on the work of Sianne Ngai, a brilliant affect theorist whose book Ugly Feelings is obviously referenced by both Hong and this newsletter in our titles.) Among the feelings that come up frequently in Hong’s essays are her experiences of self-hatred and shame. These emotions are sometimes clearly the product of internalized prejudice, while others can’t be explained away so neatly. In the former category, Hong hates things that read as “ethnic” about her own appearance, and she is told and believes for a while that to focus on her ethnic identity in her art is to devalue her own poetry. As to the latter, she writes about her feelings about the behavior of Korean store owners during the 1992 L.A. riots, which she remembers living through as a young adolescent: “I am ashamed of the store clerks who followed black customers around, expecting they’d steal, for not trying harder to engage with their adopted neighborhood,” she writes. “I am ashamed of the antiblackness in that Korean community, which is why I must constantly emphasize that Asians are both victims and perpetrators of racism.”
I am white (not all Jews are white, but Ashkenazi Jews have been white in this country for 50+ years) and I’m a 4th+ generation American, so there’s lots about the specifics of Hong’s experiences that I could never relate to first-hand. But many of the feelings she describes are nonetheless familiar. I too have felt shame about certain ethnic features of my appearance (hey, at least my Eastern European body hair kept me warm when I lived in Chicago!). I’ve also had the impression that to write about my identity to a public audience is to make work that is inherently less literarily valuable. And I’ve definitely felt ashamed of the racism and other forms of hate perpetrated by people in the Jewish community, which is certainly also both victim and perpetrator of violent prejudice.
Given the recent situation in Israel and Gaza, that victim/perpetrator paradox is particularly live right now. Much seems to be at stake in the Jewish community in terms of how people wish to relate to the attendant shame of recognizing that paradox: is it a feeling to be rejected as an internalization of anti-Jewish prejudice that makes Jews believe that Jewish power is inherently bad, or is it a feeling to be listened to and cultivated as an important and useful emotion, if an unpleasant one?
To be clear, anti-Jewish prejudice is very much alive and well. I’ve been horrified to see people on Twitter being attacked as pro-genocide crypto-fascists for saying things like “Hey did you know that not all Jews are Zionists, please don’t conflate them,” and there has been a spate of anti-Semitic violence in recent days around the world in a completely gross and unjustifiable response to what’s happening in Gaza. So it’s probably worth paying attention to the unhelpful, likely complicated ways in which that hatred might be getting internalized.
But to blame all Jewish shame on the hatred of others is to deny the constructive, insightful potential of one’s own negative emotions, to lump any experience of shame into the category of “avoid at all costs.” At the beginning of my research on emotions in antiquity, I learned that the ancient Romans had two different words for shame. Iniuria, the type of shame that resulted from someone else publicly insulting you, was considered to be so bad that you could sue someone who made you feel it (this is true in ancient Jewish law as well). But pudor, the type of shame that causes you to blush when doing or thinking something uncouth, was highly valued and seen as the mark of a high-class person. Without this type of shame, people would not be compelled to examine their own actions and behave better next time.
In perhaps a similar vein to this latter type of shame, historian Paul Reitter argues that the early twentieth-century thinkers who invented and popularized the term “Jewish self-hatred”—these days frequently employed as an insult, especially towards Jews who are critical of Israel—actually viewed it as something productive, a mechanism through which to achieve a better and more authentic way of being in the world. Reitter suggests in his conclusion that scholars might do well to remember and even perhaps to reclaim this sense of the term: “But why should ‘hatred’ refer… only to self-directed antisemitic bigotry? Why shouldn’t the ‘hatred’ in “Jewish self-hatred” refer also to an animus that played itself out more fruitfully and incisively?”
Can Jews—can I—follow Hong’s lead in taking all our emotions seriously, even the “ugly” or “minor” ones, not throwing some of them out from the get-go because we’ve been taught that they are inherently destructive and have nothing to teach us? Can we rather take the time and care to figure out which of our feelings are holding us back from our full potential as creative, thoughtful, ethical people, and which ones are coming from inside the house, so to speak, giving us hard but necessary data about who we are and who we want to be?
Thank you for this article Sarah. I found some reconciliation with the complexities of Israeli politics by allowing, emotionally speaking, for both statements: I can support certain things the Israeli government does while also feeling deeply saddened at the outcomes. One of the things I find very challenging is watching fellow Jews jump to conclusions about opinions they have regarding the Israel-Hamas conflict without engaging in this act of balancing their emotions. Your article speaks to the power of emotions to help us reflect rather than react. Shame is one of those emotions that is hard to see in a positive light and you've certainly accomplished that for me. Cheers!
Thank you for sharing this, Sarah. It speaks to what I think a lot of us have been dealing with lately. I've been so sad and frustrated the past few weeks to see how many of my American Jewish friends and family are responding to the situation in Gaza.
One of the things I always admired about Judaism - especially growing up in the Bible Belt, surrounded by various sects of Evangelical Christianity - is how we were taught growing up to ask hard questions, to challenge easy answers, and to be compassionate because helping others is the goal in itself, not a means of impressing G-d or avoiding His wrath.
And seeing my fellow Jews absolutely throw that out the window when it comes to Gaza and the Palestinian people just breaks my heart.
I think if you're going to identify in some way with Israel, which I do, then it is only appropriate to feel guilt and shame in response to its recent behavior. The same way it's appropriate for white Americans to feel ashamed of racism in America - it can be a necessary catalyst for taking action and speaking up against discrimination and oppression. And I think a lot of people get defensive, like, "I'm white and I didn't do anything racist, why should I be ashamed?" and there are a lot of parallels to that in the way American Jews respond to Israel's behavior. Because people think of shame as meaning "I'm a bad person," rather than "I have an obligation to make this situation better" (the "pudor" shame you described). "Good" shame, as opposed to the unhealthy, self-hating kind, comes from a disconnect between your values and your actions. And I think a lot of us are feeling that disconnect right now.