Sarah Schulman on the Israel-Hamas War and the Manufacturing of Consent

I was born in 1958, and like many of my generation, my parents had experienced a world in which Jews were murdered, brutalized, and abandoned. My father knew his mother and father to have been helpless peasants living under pogroms and without rights in the Russian Pale of Settlement. On my mother’s side, my laundry-worker grandmother was financially unable to save her two brothers and two sisters in Poland from extermination. My parents raised me with the idea that Jews were people who sided with the oppressed and worked their way into helping professions.

They could not adjust the worldview born of this experience to a new reality: that in Israel, we Jews had acquired state power and built a highly funded militarized society, and were now subordinating others. No one wants to think about themselves that way. As a Jew and an American who has gone through the complex, painful, and transforming process of facing the injustice against Palestinians committed in my name and with my tax dollars, I have had to change my self-concept. I have had to deprogram myself from the idea that Jews continued to be victims when, in some cases, we had become perpetrators.

Introducing The City Desk, a weekly newsletter about New York. Sign up to get it every Thursday.