30 years ago, Grace Paley foresaw today's clash over antisemitism

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In a scene from 1991, Jewish people are protesting Israeli policy, and a passerby calls them antisemites. Sounds a lot like campus life in 2024.

In recent months, as clashes over the war in Gaza have fractured American campuses — including my own at UCLA — I’ve been thinking frequently of Grace Paley’s 1991 story “Three Days and a Question.” In this short, autobiographical tale, the Jewish American author and activist recounts three scenes that take place over the course of three days on the streets of New York. In each case, a bare arm is proffered by someone who has suffered trauma.

Paley’s story also presciently predicts a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly prominent: the weaponization of charges of antisemitism to stifle dissent about Israeli actions. As Paley emphasizes, even a critic with the most radical personal experience of antisemitism — deportation to Auschwitz — can be accused of anti-Jewishness. Paley seems to have grasped decades in advance just how politically charged and consequential the issue of antisemitism would become.

 

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