A movie changed my life.
In 1981, when I was newly in solo practice and not making much money, I went to see Markus Imhoof's The Boat is Full, an unforgettable independent film from Switzerland which takes place in a single 24 hour period. A group of Jewish refugees and one Nazi deserter cross the Swiss border. At the end of the day, all except the soldier are put back across, into the hands of the Germans, to vanish into night and fog. The last image of the film: a woman puts a postcard she promised a Jewish woman she would mail, into a sinkful of water and we watch the ink washing away until the card is blank.
When I walked into the theater (it was probably a matinee, and I was probably almost alone in the auditorium) I had a pragmatic, amoral view of "illegal" immigration, that the boat was indeed full, and that there was nothing wrong with excluding outsiders to preserve our life style. That all changed in one hour and forty one minutes: within days after I left the movie, I had volunteered with the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights to defend Haitian boat people in political asylum proceeedings-- the first pro bono work of my law career. By the time the project was done, I had defended about forty people, none of whom was granted asylum. But I kept thirty-nine of them in the United States, by running the clock out until a Reagan-era amnesty came down. When a Haitian paralegal who had worked with me went back home for a visit, he looked for our one client who had been deported, and could not find him anywhere. I think of Job: "You shall look for me in the morning, and I will not be".
A few years ago, forty years after seeing the film, I found an email for Markus Imhoof,and wrote thanking him for the epiphany his film had worked. He replied in hours.
Today, I am working the hardest I have in my career since those early days of law practice, representing hundreds of students and scores of faculty undergoing repression for pro-Palestine views and criticism of Israel. There is a direct through-line, a moral continuity from that first pro bono work to this, and it all descends from The Boat is Full.
The other day, a sneering Jewish man from Australia, filming me with his phone from a foot away, narrated: "This is Mohammed, the terrorist of Sag Harbor". I replied I was bar mitzah at Beth Elohim, and he groaned. Marshaling a pro-cease-fire demo on Sundays, I have been called a Nazi pig, a Jew-hater, and frequently instructed to "go back to my country". (Brooklyn?). There are many more epiphanies in all this, but the one which concerns me today is Jews being mean and hateful, screaming in my face, calling me such epithets when they know nothing about me, even that I too am Jewish. But worst of all is the spectacle of Jews punching down, doxing Palestinian and Arab American students and other people of color on Canary Mission, and, often successfully, trying to get them expelled from school and fired from jobs-- people who are not antisemites (as I personally know from hours of conversations with them) but all share one thing: that they criticized Israel, on social media, holding a sign, making a speech at a demo.
While I have personal knowledge of situations in which Jewish people deliberately tricked and set up their targets, or at least provoked them to get video which could support a complaint or be sent to Canary Mission, there is a whole class of others who might not do such things, but can easily be drawn into supporting these projects. A letter to the interim President of U Penn, containing intolerable lies about several clients of mine, was signed by hundreds of Jewish alumni, who didn't bother to research either the antecedents or or motives of the author, nor do the least bit of investigation of the Arab American scholars whose heads they were demanding.
This is a bit boastful, I know, but please contrast these different uses of the Holocaust: as a shield used to defend marginalized and endangered people of color, and as a sword against them.
Since when did Jews start punching down? I wasn't raised that way. My own ideal world would be that of Spinoza and Einstein, smart compassionate Jews living comfortably in diaspora. Jews too can criticize Israel; why shouldn't anyone else? If I had to choose, I would select in a hearttbeat a world made by my college student clients, who have heart and courage, not by the screamers trying to end their careers. I would say the screamers have learned nothing from the Holocaust, drawn nothing from the qualities Jewish people were denied, respect, equality, freedom of speech. One of the most common accusations of antisemitism is that someone equated Israeli's mass killings in Gaza to genocide (a point of view endorsed by a federal judge, the UN, some Israelis, and me). We now apparently have a trademark on the word, which can never be used by anyone to refer to any other situation-- and which by definition we Jews cannot ourselves commit, since we now apparently claim to control the meaning of the word.
I have often thought that Israel, whose creation was supposed to make me safer and more secure in the world, has endangered me instead. Now I flash it has had another dangerous and toxic impact on some American Jews: it has imparted aspects of its own sociopathy, meanness and dishonor to them.