I’m no semiotician — an expert in the study of symbols — but I am Jewish and know antisemitism when I see it. An octopus with a hook nose straddling the globe, its waving tentacles holding missiles and moneybags? Definitely. Particularly if it is marked with a Jewish star. That’s a giveaway.
Swastika spray-painted on a synagogue door? Absolutely. Elon Musk extending his arm straight out in a Nazi-like salute — well, he’s an odd duck, given to weird jigs and twitches. And since he’s gone on record supporting neo-Nazis in Germany, I’d say debating the meaning of a gesture is beside the point.
Bottom line: just as I cherish my right to speak freely, so I do not lunge toward offense, nor leap to stifle others. When I was passing through the Chicago Cultural Center last week, showing it off to a Chicagoan who had never been inside, we passed by the “U.S.-Israel War Machine” that this week is causing a fuss. I paused. My underwear remained unknotted. I took a photograph, thinking it could be used when addressing a certain kind of hysterical anti-Americanism. We moved on to look at the gorgeous Tiffany dome.
A valuable skill, moving on. I was surprised, and disappointed, Thursday to open the Sun-Times and read a story about the puppet, and a nearby one of Benjamin Netanyahu, being labeled antisemitic by Ald. Debra Silverstein (50th), the City Council’s lone Jew (I was the only Jew in my elementary school. That’s rough. I hope Silverstein isn’t constantly being called on to stand up and explain what Hanukkah is about. Embarrassing).
She asked the city to take the display down.
Sigh.
Debra, Debra, Debra. Did the creator of “U.S.-Israel War Machine” pay you for this bit of press agentry? Because you took a crude papier mache caricature sitting unnoticed in a seldom-visited corner of the Cultural Center — remember my friend, who lives blocks away, had never set foot inside — and slapped it into the pages of the Sun-Times. Nice work. Maybe next you can organize a book launch for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
I love Israel, I’m a Zionist, and I hope that a thousand years from now there is still a Jewish State of Israel. I also think Benjamin Netanyahu is the devil, that he left the door open for the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, and my big puppet of him would have longer fangs and more blood dripping off his fingers.
Does that make me an antisemite? I suppose in some eyes. The same way my thinking that Donald Trump is a criminal who should be in prison instead of the White House makes me a traitor to many. I think it makes me patriotic.
Sympathizing with yourself is common as dirt. If we look at the problems in our world, 99% of them are from people so enthralled with their own precious selves that they are unable to grasp the humanity of anybody who is not exactly like them. I don’t understand why it’s so difficult to accept that a lot of people with connections to the Palestinian territories, either through family or culture or inclination, are upset over the situation. I certainly am. And some of those people might want to express their outrage. With a pair of big puppets. At the Cultural Center.
To try to get rid of those puppets, besides failing — those who run the place said “no” — and stoking publicity, dances to the music the puppet makers are playing: that the government is in bed with the Israelis, and can’t even allow a cry of outrage, in puppet form, to besmirch the mosaic splendor of the Chicago Cultural Center. Is your hand really that poor that you have to dash the other player’s cards to the ground?
I profoundly disagree with the “Make America Great Again” mantra. In my mind, America is already great, despite MAGA’s momentary dominance, and one of the things that makes us a great nation is that we allow outraged persons to voice their displeasure about the very country that permits them to do so.
It’s like when politicians jump on the flag-burning hobbyhorse. Burning American flags — which I disapprove of without opposing — is not a violation of American freedom, but a manifestation of it. Enforced respect is no respect at all. We’re about to get a master class in that, from the guy who leaped to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” If you took a dozen Onion writers and locked them in a room for a week, they couldn’t conceive a more damning self-own. America already has a gulf — alas, it’s the yawning chasm between our ears.