The Ravenna Kibbutz

The lovers and the haters of the Jews have one thing in common: we believe passionately in conspiracy theories. Last night I went on a field trip to watch Milk with a lovely crowd from the Ravenna Kibbutz. Before going, I happened to learn two things through the Internet. The first is that Sean Penn is an agent of the Jewish Marxist-homosexulist conspiracy. The second is that the photojournalism world is in a froth over a woman named, Jewily enough, Jill Greenberg. By night’s end, I had a conspiracy theory of my own.

First, Jill Greenberg. She was hired by The Atlantic to photograph John McCain for the magazine’s October cover. She delivered and it went to press. The flap is over unflattering photos from the shoot that Greenberg posted independently to her web site, and an interview in which she described using lighting to make the Republican’s eyes and skin look bad because—well, because Jill Greenberg thinks John McCain is bad.

Right-wing pundits were predictably angry, but so was The Atlantic—accusing Greenberg of no less than betrayal and derangement—backed by a chorus of photojournalists all in fits over the shame this brings upon their profession.

This sounded nutty to me. I can see calling Greenberg’s stunt sophomoric, or deceptive. (I would call it both.) But deranged?

It seems her “betrayal”—as with Jewish photographers Arnold Newman and Annie Leibovitz before her—is that Greenberg injected her personal life into her photography. She has been loudly anti-Republican for long enough that The Atlantic could have found out in five seconds on Google (or just by asking), before hiring her to photograph the Republican candidate for President. But evidently the expectation is that personal politics shouldn’t matter to a photographer. Why, that would make photography subjective!

I think it’s goofy that this is a big, shocking deal. So, it seems, does Jill Greenberg. We don’t get it, I realized at the theater, because we are part of the same conspiracy. A conspiracy of identity politics, and of pride. The Jewish Coming-Out Conspiracy.

Which brings me to the movie. What impressed me most about Milk was how Gus Van Sant, no Jew, could direct a Mormon-written screenplay with a Catholic star and still hit all of the Jewish themes pretty much on the head. As the film tells it, Harvey Milk’s story begins the moment he comes out—of the closet, to California—to embrace rather than conceal his difference (read: chosenness). It is campaign manager Anne Kronenberg who gives Milk’s inner circle the model of coming out to loved ones. And it is with investment banker-publisher David B. Goodstein that Milk pursues a visibility-versus-assimilation debate as old as the Hellenists and the Maccabees.

Harvey Milk’s message is that politics must be made personal. His killer, Irish-Catholic Dan White, is enraged that politics cannot be kept pure. White probably wouldn’t have cared for Jill Greenberg’s photography either.

One skeptical of conspiracy theories might ask, what does LGBT identity politics (Milk) or Leftist identity politics (Greenberg) really have to do with the Jews? I would ask why, from Moses to Marx to Milk, do the Jews pop out so many of the rabble-rousing iconoclasts who keep shoving identity into politics to start with?

Vancouver-based artist Miriam Libicki (Tamar's sister!), who is speaking at UW Hillel this Thursday, explores a related question in her comix-essay “Jewish Memoir Goes Pow! Zap! Oy!” published this month in The Jewish Graphic Novel from Rutgers University Press (with cover design featuring a Libicki watercolor). The essay seeks to explain why the genre of autobiographical comix is so dominated by Jewish stories and language, not to mention authors. Why, Libicki asks, have Jewish writers and artists been quicker than most to air publicly all the disturbing, titillating, inspiring stuff in their closets? (Think Philip Roth, Art Spiegelman.)

She posits an explanation, that Jewish culture is highly tolerant of imperfect heroes. Moses was aloof, Jacob was scheming, Abraham was deceptive, and Noah was a drunk. We (and G-d) love them anyway, so maybe a Harvey Pekar, or Milk, can put himself into public view, warts and all, and gain acceptance too.

We could take it even one step further: In Jewish culture, as in Jewish mythology, the only heroes we believe in are warty, imperfect ones. Christian culture idealizes a world with no more rough edges, and seeks transcendent heroes to match. Jewish culture idealizes a world where the rough edges just don’t kill anyone, and maybe even are kind of awesome if you’re in on the joke.

Any leader, then, who makes it safe to come out, strange rough edges and all, is the prototypical Jewish hero, and you can bet that his (or her) movement will be full of Jews in on the conspiracy. Why? Because it is the lot of every Jew to feel acutely strange. And it is the dream of everyone strange to one day come out, be strange, and thrive.