July 26, 2021

Sometimes an ice cream cone is just an ice cream cone. But sometimes a debate that may seem to be just about dairy-based desserts can have much broader ramifications about a people’s future.

Initially, I didn’t want to write about the Ben & Jerry’s controversy sweeping through the U.S. and Israel, because I worried that discussing the life-and-death issues that frame the Israeli-Palestinian debate within the context of an ice cream boycott could trivialize such a critically important conversation.

But this isn’t an argument about desserts. It’s about terrorism and bigotry and the worst type of double standards that demonize the Jewish homeland and the people who live there. It’s the latest front in the ongoing battle that uses the threat of economic boycott and sanctions to pressure Israel into agreeing to shrink its landmass, empower its enemies and expose its citizens to an even greater threat of danger and death.

This overlap between Middle Eastern geopolitics and an American cultural touchstone demonstrates the scope of the challenge that Israel and its supporters are now facing with a U.S. audience whose support for the Jewish state has become increasingly tenuous. The legislative fights are becoming more frequent and more intense, as anti-Israel voices in Congress continue to grow. But this Ben & Jerry’s dispute is an unpleasant reminder that Israel’s challenges are spreading beyond the political arena to the broader and less manageable cultural space.

Almost every week, we hear apologies by athletes and entertainers who “didn’t understand” the hateful overtones of the jokes or the song lyrics they retweeted. Our children and grandchildren study on college campuses where progressive organizations march with pro-Palestinian zealots and then stand aside when Jewish students are demonized. Our allies in school districts and state legislatures work overtime to detoxify ethnic studies curricula that perpetuate antisemitic stereotypes, and our feminist friends battle to disentangle the national Women’s March movement from Louis Farrakhan’s apologists. Meanwhile, mainstream news media devote a comparatively small amount of attention to hate crimes committed against the Jewish community.

This culminates in a societal challenge on a scale that we have not faced in this country since the founding of the Jewish state. Isolated pockets of prejudice and discrimination are one thing, but this broader attitudinal shift is much more unnerving and has the potential to be much more damaging. Even our victories—passing an anti-BDS bill or defanging an ethnic studies proposal—seem like intermittent rear-guard actions that merely delay inevitable and unceasing movement in the opposite direction. Polls show that antipathy toward Israel is significantly greater among young Americans, which means this trend will continue to worsen unless it is addressed.

Isolated pockets of prejudice and discrimination are one thing, but this broader attitudinal shift is much more unnerving and has the potential to be much more damaging.

An effective repair effort will require extensive work both inside and outside the Jewish community. We must both rebuild our weakened relationships with other underrepresented groups for whom the Jewish role in the civil rights movement is a fading memory, and re-instill an appreciation for Israel among our younger generations for whom the importance of the Jewish homeland is often more obligatory than existential. We need to better coordinate and prioritize the commendable work being done by individual synagogues and community groups throughout the region, but largely independent of each other.

An effective repair effort will require extensive work both inside and outside the Jewish community…The question is who will lead this multi-pronged project?

The question is who will lead this multi-pronged project? The Anti-Defamation League has been heroic on this front for much of its existence, but the ADL is at its best when it is acting as a first responder rather than a general practitioner. The American Jewish Committee has recently begun to return to its historic emphasis on domestic matters after many years of prioritizing foreign policy: David Harris’s successor as the group’s CEO will hopefully accelerate efforts to return to a U.S. focus. Rabbi Noah Farkas brings an admirable record of community activism to his role as the Jewish Federation’s next CEO and is likely to emphasize such efforts. Steven Windmueller argues frequently and eloquently for the need to re-create a Jewish Community Relations Council here in Los Angeles to do the type of work that similar organizations in New York, San Francisco, Boston and many other cities have assumed.

The raw material is here, but the strategy and coordination is not. It’s time for the convening agents to come forward. This multi-front battle is bigger than ice cream or economic boycotts. It’s bigger than politics or legislation, bigger than City Hall or the state legislature or Congress. This is about the place of Jewish Americans in our society and whether we can still belong here in the way we deserve.

My attention was caught by a recent newspaper headline, “The Most Dangerous Place.” What place is that?

In Vayikra/Leviticus 14:34, God tells the sojourning Israelites that when they enter the land of Canaan, God will sometimes “inflict an eruptive plague” on a house, and then goes on to provide instructions for what they’ll have to do about it.           

“The owner of the house shall come and tell the priest, saying, ‘Something like a plague has appeared upon my house.’”

When the priest examines the walls of the house, he’s to look for green or red marks that appear to run deep, signs that this is, in fact, a plague. Finding them, he’s to embark upon a series of rituals meant to determine the severity of the disease and to rid the house of it by, for example, pulling out afflicted stones and tossing them outside the borders of the community. If all else fails, the house will be destroyed.

An obvious diagnosis of what’s going on in these walls is that there is an outbreak of mold. But I’m convinced the cause is quite different: something terrible has happened in this house.

Rabbinical commentators past and present find the notion of an afflicted house metaphoric, mysterious and evocative. They point to God’s warning that this plague will be inflicted as indicative of divine retribution. They speculate that the people in the house have been guilty of slander or gossip, or become selfish, self-absorbed. They suggest that since the home is a refuge from the outside world, perhaps the red and green streaks announce that the formerly safe space has been invaded by societal strife. Modern commentaries mention poverty, homelessness and environmental degradation among other possibilities.

But there is another way to read this moment: The plague isn’t coming from outside the house; it is coming from within. It isn’t about the interplay between the inhabitants and the outside world; it’s about the inhabitants themselves. My sense from the moment this passage jumped out at me years ago, and my even stronger sense today, is that someone is being hurt inside this house. What is happening to the physical body of the house is happening to the physical body of the inhabitants of this house, and many other houses, in overwhelming numbers—specifically with regard to women and children.

What we might call a domestic plague is a very real public crisis, perhaps more so now than ever. According to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, women experience about 4.8 million intimate partner-related physical assaults and rapes every year. Before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, an average of three women in the U.S. were murdered by an intimate partner or former partner every day. The number is higher on average for women of color and has significantly increased across the board for all women during the pandemic. More than half of mass shootings in recent years have involved a man killing an intimate partner or former partner along with others. Physical and sexual violence against children is also prevalent. Sometimes a child is a predator’s target. Sometimes a child is a useful tool in the intended goal of destroying that child’s mother.

The Jewish community is not immune from this plague. The evidence suggests that intimate partner violence occurs inside Jewish communities at the same rate as outside them.

Domestic violence is defined as a pattern of abusive behavior employed by one partner to gain or keep power and control over another within a relationship. This pattern doesn’t necessarily escalate quickly to murder; it never begins there. I’ve learned the phrase “murder in slow motion” to describe the gradual escalation of controlling behavior that ends in loss of life. I participated in online workshops this past year to learn how to recognize and safely intervene in abusive situations. But in pandemic conditions we were much less likely to witness dangerous situations in public, or to glimpse the signs of what might be happening behind closed doors.

Sheltering inside to avoid one deadly disease, staying home to stay safe, many women and children found themselves locked inside with their attackers, victims of an entirely different deadly threat. For them the most dangerous place, the place referred to in that newspaper headline, is home.

According to some commentaries, the plague described in the Torah teaches that we should take notice of the first signs of bad behavior, so that moral decay can be nipped in the bud and stopped from spreading. But this particular plague has already spread. Indeed, it is rampant.

The instruction for reporting the eruption to the priest uses the very tentative phrasing, “something like a plague has appeared upon my house.” The rabbis read in this hesitation a deference to the authority of the priest. In other words, it’s up to him to say whether a plague has actually appeared. But I find its meaning shifts according to who is giving the report. A woman making her first foray outside the confines of a violent prison, terrified to ask for help, terrified not to? A child hinting that something is not right at home? A perpetrator bringing a woman to the emergency room with a vague story about how she keeps walking into walls? A perpetrator tentatively asking, help me stop doing this?

Then there are those red and green marks running deep into the body of the house: literally the writing on the wall? Displaced bruises blooming? Maybe they’re makeup smears left by a face sliding down a wall. Maybe blood and grass stains. They could be crayoned depictions of events too hard to name. In a house I once knew they could have been both cosmetics and a child’s desperate reach for help, messages from a little girl made to play secret games with makeup, adult clothes and jewelry for the gratification of an adult perpetrator.

The passage on house affliction appears in a section of Torah detailing what to do, and what the priests must do, in a variety of states of impurity or “eruption,” bodily sorts in particular. These are instructions to a people in the midst of 40 years of nomadic existence, presumably pitching tents or sleeping under the stars, a people whose wanderings in the desert follow over 400 years of enslavement.

In other words, they don’t have houses, may have never had houses. A nomad could be stricken with a skin ailment, but only a home owner has stone walls that might erupt in a plague. This is a law about something that had never happened. Yet God anticipates that it will happen when the people are settled. Violence in intimate relationships and in families would have occurred in the desert, as it does everywhere. I imagine God thinking: these people have never been a settled, sovereign community, they have never owned houses, but they have certainly experienced family violence, intimate partner violence, sexual violence, and once they’re in homes made of stone and timber they’re going to perpetrate and suffer from these crimes until the very walls of their dwellings erupt with the disease of it.

Christine Benvenuto is the author of two books, “Shiksa” and “Sex Changes,” both published by St. Martin’s Press, and her short stories and essays have appeared in many publications.

The year was 1963. I was ten years old and my sister, Jody, was eight. We would visit my grandmother’s apartment, which she gratefully shared with my Auntie Raye, my Auntie Gertie and her husband, Uncle Jack. So it was my parents and the occasional neighbor or Auntie Raye’s best friend, Marianne, that made a captive audience of six or seven people for the performance that my sister and I would present, a condensed version of “The Ed Sullivan Show.” I of course played Ed, introducing the acts that became stranger and stranger as the night went on. My sister played all the female parts, from Connie Francis and Leslie Gore to Russian Ballerinas and Hungarian acrobats. But my favorite part of the show was the stand-up comedian, and I always chose Jackie Mason as the one to imitate. I didn’t really understand all the jokes back then, but Jackie’s accent and expressions made him unique as a performer, and, besides, my whole family loved him. I could do the accent pretty well, but the jokes—well, let’s just say they didn’t go over as fine as the originals.

After pissing off Ed Sullivan with an alleged middle finger salute, Mason was relegated to doing nightclub work, and in the late 1970s I saw him perform at a local Montréal nightspot called La Dilligence (AKA The Stagecoach). Up close and personal, Mason came across as an everyday Jew, commenting and complaining about everything that caught his eye.

Up close and personal, Mason came across as an everyday Jew, commenting and complaining about everything that caught his eye.

In another famous Montréal eatery, The Brown Derby (no relation to the Los Angeles original), you could see all of Mason’s characters as they cajoled to be first in line to get the next available table, stuffed Sweet’n’Low packets into their purses and pockets, complained about the air conditioning or heating, and made contorted changes to the menu items (“I’ll have the House Salad, but take out the tomatoes and cucumbers, change the bacon bits for extra croutons, give me two containers of dressing on the side, add some slices of cheddar cheese, but not that orange artificial stuff, and I want it on a plate not a bowl with a side order of kishka.”). I remember an older Jewish lady asking for more dinner rolls for the table. “Why don’t you finish the ones in your purse first?” asked the veteran waiter.

I didn’t think much about Mason until he re-emerged from showbiz mediocrity with his famous one-man Broadway show, “The World According to Me!” I was able to get a copy of his tape from my friend Morty. As Mason once said, “There are two things no Jew ever buys, my tapes and Sweet’n’Low.”  I listened to it over and over again until I knew most of the routines by heart. It prepared me for life as an unspeaking and un-opinionated Jewish husband whose primary job was to take out the garbage.

Mason kept showing up everywhere. I recognized him as a shackled, singing rabbi in “The Inquisition” scene of Mel Brooks “History of the World – Part 1”; complementing Rodney Dangerfield in the film “Caddy Shack II”; in over ten episodes of “The Simpsons” as the voice of Rabbi Hyman Krustofsky; and in countless appearances on late night talk shows. The next time I saw him perform live was at the 2004 Just for Laughs Comedy Festival in Montréal. His act had become much more sophisticated and polished, yet his manner and accent remained true to his roots. He really hated high-end coffee shops like Starbucks, calling anyone who would pay nine bucks for a café latté a “dumb shmuck.”

During the last decade I became less infatuated with Mason. I found his right-wing political views a little too extreme. His constant use of the word “schvartze” in his routines was starting to get him in trouble with some long-time fans and he didn’t attempt to customise his act to make it more PC. I get it—he told it like it is, with no filters and no regrets. It takes a brave and courageous individual to get up in front of an audience and speak his mind. Mason will forever be remembered as one of the great comedians alongside Lenny Bruce, Robin Williams and George Carlin, who also were not embarrassed to say it like it is.

Thank you, Jackie Mason, for all the wonderful memories and the great punch lines. Rest in peace.

Paul Starr is a recently retired systems analyst who has lived his entire life in Montréal, Canada. On Sunday mornings he is “living the dream,” hosting a two-hour Internet radio show featuring music from the 50s and 60s called “Judy’s Diner.”