As we all learn from our families, there’s a fine line between honoring your heritage and getting trapped under its weight. For Michael, a professor and the somewhat wayward son of the American Jewish Fischer family in If I Forget, that line is also the subject of his first major academic publication. Writing about what he sees as the calcified nature of contemporary Jewish identity, he argues that the only way for Jewish identity to move forward—to embrace the twenty-first century, in all its plurality and geopolitical ruptures—is to forget the Holocaust: stop writing about it, stop making art about it, stop referring to it as the cultural lodestar for Jewish identity. “The Holocaust is now the centerpiece of Jewish life,” he explains to his sibling. “The lynchpin that binds us together [isn’t] culture anymore or food or religion…it’s the six million [Jews murdered by the Nazi regime].”
Set in 2000, If I Forget juxtaposes Michael’s argument against the faltering Oslo Accords, drawing a parallel between the Holocaust and Israel as the pillars of Jewish identity. The Accords, a series of agreements designed to negotiate peace in the contested lands of contemporary Israel and Palestine, focused on the extent of Palestinian autonomy, with particular attention paid to the question of the Palestinian right of return: the right for Palestinian refugees—both first-generation refugees and their descendants, over five million individuals—to reclaim the property they lost in the 1948 Palestinian exodus, in which an estimated 700,000 to 800,000 Arabs either left or were forced to leave their homes in the territory that became Israel, or the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and Palestine.
For American Jews watching the political negotiations from afar, there was another consideration: To what extent are their own religious and cultural identities wrapped up in the negotiations between two foreign countries—particularly in light of the $2.9 billion in military and economic aid that the United States gave to Israel in 2000? If American Jews question the policies of Israel, what does that mean for their Jewish identity?
These questions reflect a deep-seated ambivalence that underpins Zionism, a political ideology and national movement that argues for the right of a Jewish state to exist in the land historically defined as the Land of Israel—land that was known as Palestine and that was, from 1920 until 1948, occupied by the British. (Through the 1949 Armistice Agreements that ended the 1948 War, Israel claimed all but the territories known as the Gaza Strip and the West Bank; today, those two areas encompass the modern state of Palestine.) For progressive Jews such as Michael, who belong to a long-standing tradition of Zionist-skeptical Jewish thought, the ambivalence comes from simultaneous pride in the Jewish religion, awareness of the real threat to Jewish lives in the US, and desire to protect space for religious pluralism. Writing in response to then-Harvard President Lawrence Summers’ condemnation of petitions from MIT and Harvard professors as “anti-Semitic in effect if not their intent,” due to their opposition of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, Judith Butler observed, “A criticism of Israel is not the same as a challenge to Israel’s existence, and neither is it the same as anti-Semitic act, though each could work in tandem with each of the other claims.” Here, Butler’s pointing to another fine line: the balance between honoring not only a home but specifically a homeland in a territory that both the Jewish and the Palestinian diasporas can claim as such, without foreclosing the autonomy of individual political thought and its possibility of criticism as a prelude not to violence but to peace.
In If I Forget, Michael’s provocative argument—transcending the generational trauma of genocide; so easy!—draws ire for what many of his critics see as reductive simplicity at best and at worst as anti-Semitism (internalized or otherwise), and it would be easy to dismiss his book as a sensationalist hack job or a call to right-wing arms. But set against the geopolitical conflict between Israel and Palestine, with its protracted, agonizing struggle between peoples who can both lay claim to the same territory as homeland, Michael’s argument speaks to the desire—and the keen difficulty—of some Jews to activate their past without becoming beholden to it, not in order to erase its terrors but to better mobilize the joys, commitments, and pleasures of the Jewish culture.
—Sarah Cooke