What James Baldwin can teach us about Israel, and ourselves
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GENE DEMBY, HOST:
What's good? You're listening to CODE SWITCH. I'm Gene Demby. And I want to take you back in time for a moment. The year was 1979. James Baldwin, the activist and author, was being profiled on ABC News.
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SYLVIA CHASE: James Baldwin is one of those lucky people who's never been unsure of his family's love.
DEMBY: The crew visited him at his home in Harlem and sat down for dinner with James Baldwin and his family.
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DEMBY: And at one point, Baldwin makes this observation.
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JAMES BALDWIN: The American sense of reality is dictated by what Americans are trying to avoid.
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DEMBY: What Americans are trying to avoid - in that moment, Baldwin was talking about the American legacy of slavery. But over the course of his life, he spent a lot of time thinking and speaking and writing about all kinds of issues that Americans were trying to avoid. One of those issues - Israel.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) Jews and Palestinians know of broken promises.
DEMBY: That line is from one of Baldwin's essays in The Nation magazine way back in 1979. You're hearing an actor reading his words.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews. It was created for the salvation of the Western interests.
DEMBY: You might be surprised to learn that James Baldwin thought a lot about what was happening in that region. And I want to be clear here - Israel was never a major theme in his work, but he still wrote and talked about it over and over again. That's because for Baldwin, Israel came to embody some issues he cared about deeply - self-determination and oppression and the stories we tell about who we are and the long legacies of colonialism.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of divide and rule and for Europe's guilty Christian conscience for more than 30 years.
DEMBY: Baldwin's views about Israel changed dramatically over the course of his life. He was fearless in questioning his own assumptions and exploring what it means to build a nation of one's own - what that might mean in Israel, in Africa, all over the world.
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DEMBY: Later in his career, Baldwin was a sharp critic of Israel back when that was a very unpopular stance to take up in public life. But he started off as a passionate supporter for Israel. And how that all changed is a story that takes us to some surprising places. It touches on divisions within the civil rights movement, divisions within his own friendships. And it's a story that is worth revisiting now because while many Americans are trying to grapple with the spreading violence and destruction in Gaza and Israel and the U.S.'s role in that violence, many more seem to be avoiding grappling with it.
So today on the show, in an age where conversations about Israel can be so messy and hard and unproductive, we're looking back to Baldwin - someone who was able to engage in these conversations in a meaningful way - and how his thoughts evolved over time and some of the people he influenced.
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DEMBY: Walking us through Baldwin's evolution on Israel is Neda Ulaby. She's a correspondent for NPR's culture desk as well as a CODE SWITCH alum. Neda, what's good with you? Welcome back to the show.
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: Hi, Gene. It's so good to be back with y'all.
DEMBY: Always good to have you here, friend. OK, so where are we starting?
ULABY: I'd like to start by introducing you to a Baldwin scholar.
DEMBY: OK.
ULABY: Nadia Alamed is a professor of Africana studies at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. And she started reading James Baldwin as a teenager while living with her family in the West Bank city of Jenin.
NADIA ALAMED: Reading Black intellectuals like Baldwin, like Toni Morrison changed my life. It was a tool I used to cope with living under occupation.
ULABY: Nadia graduated from Birzeit University in 2007.
ALAMED: And I have to tell you I read many books by James Baldwin. I remember reading "Fire Next Time" in Palestine in the context of being in, you know, the most invaded city in West Bank. As kids these days say, it hits different (laughter).
DEMBY: Wow. Yeah, I remember when I first read "The Fire Next Time." It was on my commute to work on the A train in Brooklyn when I was in my 20s, and I felt like my ears were burning. If you don't know, it's a collection of some of his essays, but the first part of the book is Baldwin writing a letter to his nephew. He talks about the importance of subjugated people not believing the lie that their oppressors tell them, that they are subhuman. So it must have felt even more potent in the context in which Nadia was experiencing it.
ULABY: Absolutely. So from there, Gene, Nadia moved to the United States for her graduate work, and Baldwin shaped the course of her studies. She read all of his books, and she learned about all of the people he was influencing and the people and ideas that influenced him. One of the early ideas that inspired Baldwin's thoughts about Israel came out of the late 1880s.
ALAMED: And the idea that, you know, Black people, Black Americans - you know, speaking in American context - deserve a state, a country of their own.
ULABY: So back in the decades before James Baldwin was born, Nadia says a lot of Black intellectuals were incredibly inspired by the new Zionist movement that was emerging among Jews around the world.
DEMBY: Right. So this was when the idea was really taking shape that Jews needed a homeland, a place where they wouldn't be subject to discrimination and marginalization that they faced, you know, everywhere else they lived. They wanted self-determination to be able to write their own laws and their own destinies and, for once, be a majority in their own country.
ULABY: And this is where Zionism made a lot of sense to a lot of African Americans right then - the idea of what it means to have a country when you're dispossessed, what it means to build power towards self-determination. Here's Keith Feldman. He's a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
KEITH FELDMAN: There was a long history from the end of the 19th century of Black intellectuals and organizers thinking deeply about what freedom and liberation might mean in the world.
DEMBY: That makes me think of Marcus Garvey.
ULABY: Right.
DEMBY: You know, he was one of the best-known Black nationalists in the early 20th century. He helped organize the Black Star Line, a Black-owned shipping company that was intended to bring African Americans to Liberia in West Africa.
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MARCUS GARVEY: I greet you in the name of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African...
ULABY: That's Marcus Garvey in 1921 in a radio broadcast about people needing their own countries.
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GARVEY: We hear the cry of England for the Englishman, of France for the Frenchman, of Germany for the German, of Ireland for the Irish, of Palestine for the Jew, of Japan for the Japanese.
ULABY: Of Palestine for the Jew, which Garvey sees as part of the same argument as Africa for the Africans.
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GARVEY: We of the Universal Negro Improvement Association are raising the cry of Africa for the Africans, those at home and those abroad.
ULABY: So you can see the connection is clear, and the urgency around Zionism became even more intense as conditions for Jews in Europe and around the world became cataclysmic. Many Black Americans felt deep sympathy for people enduring deportations, pogroms and the Holocaust. And they understood viscerally the desire to have a country to call their own. And that brings us to 1948 when James Baldwin wrote one of his first major essays.
DEMBY: 1948 - that was also the year Israel was created, right?
ULABY: Right. And Baldwin's essay was called "The Harlem Ghetto."
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) Harlem, physically, at least, has changed very little in my parents' lifetime or in mine. Now, as then, the buildings are old and in desperate need of repair. The streets are crowded and dirty. There are too many human beings per square block.
ULABY: This essay was published in Commentary magazine. It uses Baldwin's own New York neighborhood to think through a lot of complex cultural issues, including Black and Jewish relations, and how systemic discrimination has, in some ways, pitted two oppressed minorities against each other.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) They do not dare trust each other - the Jew, because he feels he must climb higher on the American social ladder and has, so far as he is concerned, nothing to gain from identification with any minority even more unloved than he, while the Negro is in the even less tenable position of not really daring to trust anyone.
ULABY: So in this essay, this early Baldwin essay, he explains how he's talking about these groups broadly and how a group's circumstances inform how they're positioned in society.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) Jews in Harlem are small tradesmen, rent collectors, real estate agents and pawnbrokers. They operate in accordance with the American business tradition of exploiting negroes, and they are therefore identified with oppression and are hated for it.
DEMBY: Yeah. We've talked about this idea on the show before, and Baldwin is trying to thread a really tricky needle here. So he's saying, look, the landlord who is charging me rent for this poorly maintained building in the ghetto that I live - that person is participating in, is benefiting from and maintaining the segregation that keeps Black folks like me in these living conditions. But that white landlord in Harlem is Jewish because Jews are the white people who live and work near the Black folks in Harlem because Jews themselves have been marginalized, like Black people in some ways.
ULABY: Right. And James Baldwin says in the essay that part of the reason why Black people in Harlem are so frustrated with that dynamic is because they know about Jewish suffering. It goes all the way back to the Old Testament.
DEMBY: It's interesting 'cause Baldwin was close to, you know, both of these communities. I know that he spoke throughout his life about the fact that his best friends in high school were Jewish.
ULABY: Right. A lot of his best friends were the original red diaper babies. These were kids who grew up in really Marxist working-class communities. And Baldwin learned about a whole different way of viewing the world from these friends.
DEMBY: And those friends helped him understand in real time the horrors of what was going on in Europe during World War II and the Holocaust.
ULABY: Right. And it was Baldwin's ability to straddle these two communities that helped him to argue that Jews could be understood as victims in some contexts but perceived completely differently in other contexts like Harlem.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) The Jew has been taught and too often accepts the legend of Negro inferiority. And the Negro, on the other hand, has found nothing in his experience with Jews to counteract the legend of Semitic greed. Here, the American white gentile has two legends serving him at once. He has divided these minorities, and he rules.
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DEMBY: I feel like so often on CODE SWITCH when we're digging into conflicts between different, you know, minority or marginalized populations in the United States, we come back to these two ideas. Like, one is this idea that oppressed people should - I'm doing air quotes - know better. But we know that oppression doesn't automatically grant people empathy. And the other idea is that conflicts, a lot of times, ain't really about the two groups that are in proximity to each other, and having the conflict is often about these powerful entrenched forces making everyone else fight over resources and status.
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ULABY: So let's go back to Israel.
ALAMED: Initially, Baldwin, as so many Black intellectuals of his time in 1948, celebrate the creation of the state of Israel.
ULABY: That's Nadia Alahmed, the professor of Africana studies that we heard from earlier. She says Baldwin took a meaningful trip to Israel back in 1961.
ALAMED: He gets a very official, a very quite fancy invitation from the Israeli government to visit Israel. Israel is only - what? - 13 years old at the time.
ULABY: That visit changed James Baldwin's life but not in the way that he expected.
ALAMED: He thinks of Israel as, like, a safe haven for himself as a gay Black man. Having experienced, you know, the horror of white supremacy and racism in America, he sees Israel, the newly created state of Israel, as this epitome of freedom and possibility, you know, a place without homophobia, a place without racism, classism, etc.
ULABY: He even dreamed, she said, about possibly working on a kibbutz.
DEMBY: OK. That was not what I was expecting there, Neda. So explanatory comment again - a kibbutz is, like, you know, a farm commune situation, you know, people singing folk songs and harvesting olives, things like that.
ULABY: Yeah. So maybe not really what we think of when we think of cosmopolitan James Baldwin.
DEMBY: Right. Exactly. Right.
ULABY: So once he got to Israel, he wrote to his editor at Harper's magazine, super excited about his experiences.
ALAMED: His first impression are very positive. His demeanor is really sunny.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) Being a guest of the government really involves becoming an extremely well-cared-for parcel post package. But the visit seems so far to have been a great success. Israel and I seem to like each other.
ALAMED: He says, Israel and I seem to like each other very much.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) Jerusalem, God knows, is golden when the sun is shining on all that yellow stone. What a blue sky. What a beautiful city. You remember that song?
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UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL GROUP: (Singing) Oh, what a beautiful city.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) Well, that's the way Jerusalem makes one feel.
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UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL GROUP: (Singing) Oh, what a beautiful city.
ALAMED: But very quickly, he becomes aware of inequalities within Israeli society itself. He notices that Jewish people who had immigrated to Israel from the Middle East and from Africa are not treated the same as Israelis who had immigrated from Europe or Canada or the U.S., from the West. Discrimination is obvious, you know, and especially for somebody who had lived as a Black man in America.
FELDMAN: You know, he saw borders everywhere.
ULABY: That was Professor Keith Feldman again.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) You can't walk five minutes without finding yourself at a border.
ULABY: Baldwin's observations were published in Harper's Magazine as "Letters From A Journey."
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) I stood on a hill in Jerusalem today, looking over the border, the Arab-Israeli border. There is really something frightening about it. There is something insane about it, something which breaks the heart.
FELDMAN: Borders and checkpoints were already, in 1961, sort of littering the political geography. And he saw the effects of Palestinian dispossession.
ULABY: So Gene, we do not know exactly what Baldwin saw. He was not specific in "Letters From A Journey" about the Palestinian dispossession that he witnessed. But he left Israel feeling a lot less positive than when he first showed up.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) And, of course, the entire Arab situation outside the country - and above all, within - caused one to take a view of human life and right and wrong almost as stony as the land in which I presently find myself.
FELDMAN: He really begins to wrestle with what a state built around trauma and around what some scholars would describe as a kind of ethnonationalism - what that means in practice. And he's really quite troubled by the ways in which he sees the nascent state of Israel treating Palestinians inside of the state and then also in this very adversarial relationship to its neighbors.
DEMBY: This all reminds me of the - I guess you can call it a genre at this point. But there are a lot of folks who've been telling moving stories recently about their own visits to Israel. And while they were maybe initially charmed, you know, by the beauty and culture of Israel, they ultimately came away disillusioned by much of it, you know, seeing all these fences and these walls and, to borrow a phrase, the violence implied by their maintenance.
ULABY: Baldwin came away with those conflicted feelings, too.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) One cannot but respect the energy and the courage of this handful of people. But one can't but suspect that a vast amount of political cynicism on the part of the English and the Americans went into the creation of this state. And I personally cannot help being saddened by the creation at this late date of yet another nation. It seems to me that we need fewer nations, not more. The blood that has been spilled for various flags makes me ill.
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DEMBY: Wow. So Baldwin starts this trip to Israel full of excitement and possibility. In the beginning, it sounds like he's really brought into the idea of it all. And, you know, by the end, he hasn't just soured on Israel itself. It sounds like he's lost faith in the whole idea of nationalism as a means of liberation.
ULABY: Yeah. It's kind of interesting. When he first got to Israel, it was initially just supposed to be a waystop. He was on his way to Africa. He was going to be writing about liberation movements there. But something about that trip to Israel changed him. He decided not to go to Africa. Instead, he went to Turkey, and he ended up living in Turkey for nearly a decade.
DEMBY: And so, in this essay, it sounds like he's beginning to reckon with the idea of nationalism being tied to this problem that's close to his heart. You know, how do you define one people's freedom over and against another's?
ULABY: I think that that is really the heart of what we're talking about in this episode. How do you define one people's freedom over - against another?
ALAMED: So that becomes a crucial step for him, and he will go back - Baldwin will go back to his trip to Israel many, many times in his writing.
DEMBY: When we come back...
FELDMAN: Baldwin shows us ways of sitting with history and sitting with pain, sitting with trauma, sitting with vulnerability.
DEMBY: That's after the break.
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DEMBY: Gene.
ULABY: Neda.
DEMBY: CODE SWITCH.
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DEMBY: So we're talking about James Baldwin, the writer and thinker whose ideas about race and power seem so prophetic that they continue to be rediscovered by new audiences at some of our most intense political moments. And that's happening right now again around Israel and Gaza and the violence spreading across the region. Neda has been talking us through how Baldwin's writing about Israel shifted over the course of his life from appreciation and support to vocal critique.
ULABY: Right. Earlier, we heard from Nadia Alamed, the Baldwin scholar at Dickinson College. She said in the 1960s, the world was embroiled in multiple violent conflicts. So you can think Vietnam or Bangladesh and the Congo. And...
DEMBY: Right.
ULABY: ...All of those could be traced back to Western colonialism. And in this context, a lot of Black radicals and intellectuals were beginning to think more deeply about where Israel fit into this. And as Baldwin was thinking about his own trip to Israel, he was influenced by those thinkers.
ALAMED: In my opinion - professional opinion - Black power is where Baldwin really kind of got his language and his discourse on Israel as a settler colonial project.
ULABY: Now, Baldwin had issues with the Black Panthers, and some of them had issues with him, too.
DEMBY: Yeah, I mean, they weren't thrilled with Baldwin being gay, for starters.
ULABY: They were not. But Nadia points out that Baldwin did develop friendships with Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, who helped found the Black Panthers. He was in conversation with Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis and Amiri Baraka.
ALAMED: He understood the necessity and urgency and the importance of Black power.
ULABY: So Nadia says, before Stokely Carmichael became known as a Black Panther, he ran SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And back then, SNCC was an incredibly influential multiracial organization aligned with the traditional Civil Rights Movement.
DEMBY: Right. SNCC organized the famous sit-ins at, you know, whites-only lunch counters. They orchestrated the freedom rides to desegregate interstate buses.
ULABY: Right. But in 1967, SNCC got divided over a ferociously worded article in its newsletter that criticized Israel and its treatment of Arabs. That was soon after the Six-Day War when Israel took over the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and parts of Syria and Egypt. Here's a reading from the newsletter.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Reading) What are the reasons for this prolonged conflict and permanent state of war which has existed between the Arab nations and Israel? Why has the United Nations, which helped create the problem, been unable to solve it? Why have hostilities continued? What is the root of the problem?
ULABY: This statement in the SNCC newsletter drew explicit parallels between Israel's occupation of Arab territory and colonialism in Africa. It also talked about racism against Black and brown Jewish people in Israel. But Gene, it was also very heavy on antisemitic stereotypes, including the idea that Zionists control the media. So, many American Jews who were active in SNCC felt very alienated.
DEMBY: Right.
ULABY: And Nadia has written an article that argues that this was a really significant moment that deepened the rift - the already growing rift between the traditional Civil Rights Movement and more militant activists moving towards Black power.
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DICK CAVETT: Where do you stand in relation to the Negro figures in our - in the media who we see who frighten us the most...
ULABY: In 1969, television host Dick Cavett used his popular show to ask James Baldwin about Black power figures like Stokely Carmichael.
DEMBY: This is at a time when Stokely Carmichael and the Panthers were calling for revolution. They were walking around with guns and weapons.
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CAVETT: ...The ones who want to burn it down, demolish it, the ones who have totally given up? I assume you haven't totally given up.
ULABY: Baldwin was not having it. Here he is clapping back at Dick Cavett.
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BALDWIN: If we were white, if we were Irish, if we were Jewish, if we were Poles, if we had, in fact, in your mind, a frame of reference, our heroes would be your heroes, too. Nat Turner would be a hero for you instead of a threat. Malcolm X might still be alive. It is that you can face, in some ways, the discontent of white people. When they rise, they are heroes.
And it - you know, everyone is very proud of brave little Israel, a state against which I have nothing. You know, I don't want to be misinterpreted. I'm not an antisemite. But, you know, when the Israelis pick up guns or the Poles or the Irish or any white man in the world says, give me liberty or give me death, the entire white world applauds. When a Black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one.
DEMBY: So in this exchange, Baldwin is really just, you know, pointing out the double standards that exist - that some people's liberation struggles are celebrated and other people's are demonized.
ULABY: Right. And then Baldwin expanded his argument the next year in a conversation with the eminent anthropologist Margaret Mead.
DEMBY: So these are two of the most respected public intellectuals of the time.
ULABY: Yeah. And their talk, says Keith Feldman, was hyped up as the rap on race.
FELDMAN: The two of them are going hash it out - what does race mean? In the post-Civil Rights moment, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, in the age of decolonization, what does race mean?
ULABY: The conversation was recorded.
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MARGARET MEAD: I learned about race when I was a child.
BALDWIN: How did you learn about that? I mean...
MEAD: Well, I lived on a farm that had been a station on the Underground Railroad.
BALDWIN: In the north, then?
MEAD: In the north, in Bucks County.
ULABY: They hashed it out for 7 1/2 hours.
DEMBY: Seven hours? Goddamn. That's, like, five long podcast episodes' worth of content. Oh, my God.
ULABY: Yeah, it's a lot of rapping about race.
DEMBY: (Laughter) I guess there's a lot to rap about, you know?
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MEAD: In any oppressive situation, both groups suffer - the oppressor and the oppressed.
BALDWIN: Yes.
MEAD: Now, the oppressed suffers more. Physically, they're frightened. They're abused. They're poor or whatever. But the oppressor suffers more morally.
BALDWIN: Yes, which is the worst kind of suffering because it's...
MEAD: 'Cause they have to deny something in themselves.
BALDWIN: Yes, that's right.
FELDMAN: It's a very lengthy discussion. The published book is several hundred pages.
ULABY: So yeah, there was a book version, too, and it's different from...
DEMBY: OK.
ULABY: ...The recordings, Gene. The book includes a transcript of part of their conversation that got cut out of the audio version.
DEMBY: Uh-oh. OK. So what got cut out?
ULABY: What got cut out was a conversation about Israel. So Baldwin starts saying that Israel was founded because, he believes, it was useful for the West.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) Five successive British mandates promised a land equally, back and forth, to the Arabs and the Jews, didn't they? That is not from my point of view. That's a matter of history. It's a matter of record. We do know that millions and millions and millions of Jews were murdered, sometimes in the harbors of friendly nations, because no one would take them in. Is that true or not?
ULABY: So Margaret Mead responds, and remember, this is the conversation that did not get included in the actual recording, which is why you're hearing the actor.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) And we do know that Israel is in the Middle East, and that's a very important part of the world, isn't it? Well, that's a matter of public record. And from my point of view, the creation of the state of Israel was one of the most cynical achievements - really murderous, merciless, ugliest and cynical achievement - on the part of the Western nations. They don't care about the Jews. The creation of the state of Israel was not for the sake of the Jews. It was given to them because it was useful for us - for the West.
ULABY: Baldwin then says he believes that Western countries did not care about the safety of Jews. From there, Keith Feldman, who's kind of our guide to this recording, says Baldwin makes another turn.
FELDMAN: Baldwin turns again to Israel's treatment of who he describes as Arabs. He describes the injustice that Arabs face at the hands of the Israeli state.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) I am against the state of Israel. I don't mean I am against the Jews when I say that. I mean I am against the state of Israel because I think a great injustice has been done to the Arabs. There is no defense for their situation. I was there.
ULABY: And Baldwin says not only was he there, he could identify with some of the players.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) You have got to remember, however bitter this may sound, however bitter I may sound, that I have been, in America, an Arab at the hands of the Jews.
DEMBY: Oh, man. So Baldwin right there is conflating Jews with Israelis. But it sounds like, you know, the larger point that he's making is that idea, again, from earlier, that the context of a society is what makes certain groups subservient or dominant at different times. It's not about the particular group of people in any given place.
ULABY: Right. But Margaret Mead still accused Baldwin of being racist at that exact moment, and the conversation turned quite sour. She said, and I quote, "fiddlesticks."
DEMBY: Fiddlesticks? Oh, she was pissed-pissed.
ULABY: So here's Keith Feldman's take.
FELDMAN: I think here, the figure of the Jew is actually a political figure - a figure that stands in for the Israeli state, rightly or wrongly, but that's what he is getting at.
ULABY: So Gene, I talked about this with somebody else - a professor named Ben Ratskoff. He's taught Jewish studies at UCLA and at Hebrew Union College, and his scholarly work looks at James Baldwin's deep engagement with American Judaism in his writing.
BEN RATSKOFF: Talking about Jewish victimhood, Jewish implication in forms of perpetration - right? - or violence, Jewish disempowerment and Jewish empowerment - all of these things he's trying to navigate and grapple with.
ULABY: And Ben says in that navigation and grappling, Baldwin is always asking this implicit question.
RATSKOFF: How can there be this undeniable history of Jewish suffering on the one hand, both historically and in the present, and at the same time, Jewish implication in a kind of white power structure that was intimately involved in the everyday exploitation and oppression of Black Americans?
ULABY: And what Baldwin would do in later writing was to explicitly talk about how the power structure in Israel was involved in the oppression of Arabs and other people of color around the world.
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ULABY: All right, Gene, I'd like us to look at just one more piece of Baldwin's writing.
DEMBY: Of course. OK.
ULABY: So it includes his most extended thoughts about Israel and American politics. This essay was published in the magazine The Nation in 1979. It responded to a controversy that was all over the news back then, including NPR.
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UNIDENTIFIED BYLINE: Andrew Young still insists he had little choice but to talk to the Palestine Liberation Organization representative to the U.N. last month. He also...
DEMBY: OK, so a lot of people might remember Andrew Young as being the mayor of Atlanta at one point, but at the time that we're talking about here, Andrew Young was America's first Black ambassador to the U.N. He was the highest-ranking Black official in the government at that time.
ULABY: Right. But in 1979, President Jimmy Carter essentially fired Andrew Young as United Nations ambassador for talking to the PLO - the Palestine Liberation Organization - because doing that was outside of U.S. policy. Nadia says that Baldwin was incensed by Young's treatment, and he wrote this essay as a letter.
ALAMED: And he is berating the American government for stripping Andrew Young - a powerful civil rights icon - of his post, but also saying something extremely insightful for the Western world, because nobody's thinking about that yet. He says, you know, what kind of negotiations are we, Western world, talking about, without even including Palestinians - without Palestinians even in the room?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) There is absolutely - repeat, absolutely - no hope of establishing peace in what Europe so arrogantly calls the Middle East without dealing with the Palestinians.
ULABY: This reading from the essay has been a little bit condensed. Baldwin goes on and talks about Carter, who's a born-again Christian, and then he ties the situation to Iran.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) The collapse of the Shah of Iran not only revealed the depth of the pious Carter's concern for human rights. It also revealed who supplied oil to Israel and to whom Israel supplied arms. It happened to be, to spell it out, white South Africa.
ULABY: The historic military ties between Israel and apartheid South Africa have been well documented. Keith Feldman says Baldwin was especially bitter about what he saw as a double standard when it came to Israel and human rights.
FELDMAN: He describes it as a kind of salvation for the West, more so than a salvation for Jews. And he describes it this way, in part, to be able to get at how the terror and violence of the Holocaust gets transmuted, that the West is sort of healing itself through the project of Israel. And this poses real problems for Baldwin precisely because of the ways in which it refuses the kind of complex humanity of Palestinians.
DEMBY: So he's saying, you know, the United States and Europe broadly are implicated in the Holocaust. And so their support for Israel is a kind of penance. Like, we committed genocide or allowed a genocide to happen against you. So here's a country in this other part of the world, but, you know, it comes at the expense of Palestinians.
ULABY: Right. And Baldwin's saying it's a kind of American Christian penance. So this essay by James Baldwin is called "Open Letter To The Born Again." Here's Ben Ratskoff.
RATSKOFF: One of the things that he describes in that letter that is almost so prescient for our current moment is this whole question of non-Jewish Zionists.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Reading) It is worth observing that non-Jewish Zionists are very frequently antisemitic.
RATSKOFF: Jewish Zionists are the minority in the world in terms of the Zionist population. Most Zionists are non-Jews. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that there just aren't that many Jews - right? - in the scheme of things. But it also just has to do with the fact that there is an enormous non-Jewish investment in this political project.
DEMBY: We talked about this on an episode not too long ago, that white conservative evangelicals, Christians, they're Israel's biggest supporters in the United States. There's one evangelical group, Christians United for Israel, that boasts a membership that is comfortably larger than the entire Jewish population of the United States.
ULABY: Right. And that movement was just getting going when James Baldwin was talking about it. And Gene, he was talking about it back when very few public intellectuals were criticizing Israel outside of people like Edward Said or Noam Chomsky. I asked Keith Feldman about what Baldwin's friends and editors thought about his position on Israel, especially those who were leftist Jews.
FELDMAN: As you might imagine, it was not particularly popular (laughter). And I don't get the sense that Baldwin cared very much.
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ALAMED: Baldwin was a radical.
ULABY: That's Nadia Alahmed again.
ALAMED: Baldwin was ahead of his time. He was on the front lines of not only participating in Black radicalism but creating Black radical thought, not just as a writer but also as an intellectual and as an activist.
ULABY: And Nadia says Baldwin has been inspiring intellectuals and activists in the Arab world and in the Palestinian territories for decades. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish is one huge example. He died in 2008. And he was a major, major deal, Gene. He was a celebrated thinker, a radical and a leader. He was a literary political leader who found common ground with left-wing Israelis. Nadia says he loved the work of James Baldwin.
ALAMED: He read "No Name In The Street" and was like, oh, my God.
ULABY: Nadia found a letter that Mahmoud Darwish wrote to James Baldwin. It's a poem, really, that he wrote when Baldwin was still alive. And it's almost like a love letter from someone who's encountered a kindred spirit. We're going to hear Nadia's translation. It's the only one in English.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Reading) I am then one of those birds that differ in color from you but share the same shape, the same fate and the same luck as you. Connecting us, there is a stretched string like the two ends of a bow. Whenever the wind touches it, it draws kindred melodies composed of a gripping medley of loud whimpers, cruel tenderness and a love force to hatred to protect the honor of its sanctity. Both of us have stood outside the chalk circle awaiting our sentence, but the judge this time was not just.
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ULABY: James Baldwin, says Keith Feldman, saw his work as a writer as bearing witness.
FELDMAN: Bearing witness in an unvarnished way to injustice.
ULABY: So I asked, what does it have to tell us now at a moment of such pain and sorrow for Palestinians, Israelis, people across the Middle East, for us?
FELDMAN: Baldwin shows us ways of sitting with history and sitting with pain, sitting with trauma, sitting with vulnerability.
ULABY: And finding connections across cultures and geographies.
FELDMAN: Baldwin reminds us that the distance between here and there is much less than it might seem sometimes, and being able to bridge that distance is a political act and is also an act of the imagination.
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DEMBY: Once again, the story we just heard was reported by Neda Ulaby, a correspondent on NPR's culture desk. Neda, thank you so much.
ULABY: Gene, what a pleasure. Thank you.
DEMBY: All right, y'all. That is our show. You can follow us on Instagram @nprcodeswitch. That's all one word. If email is more your thing, ours is codeswitch@npr.org. And you should subscribe to the podcast on the NPR App or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. You can also subscribe to the CODE SWITCH newsletter by going to npr.org/codeswitchnewsletter. And just a reminder that signing up for CODE SWITCH+ is a great way to support our show and public media more broadly, and you get to listen to every episode of ours sponsor-free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org/codeswitch.
This episode you just listened to was produced by Jess Kung. It was edited by Leah Donnella and Courtney Stein. Our engineer was Gilly Moon. Our voice actors were Leighton Harrell (ph) and Matteen Mokalla (ph). And special thanks to Tony Cavin and Paige Waterhouse. And we would be remiss if we did not shout-out the rest of the CODE SWITCH massive. That's Christina Cala, Xavier Lopez, Dalia Mortada, Veralyn Williams, B.A. Parker, Jasmine Romero and Lori Lizarraga. And as for me, I'm Gene Demby. Be easy, y'all.
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