My Non-Controversial Series About Jewish American Heritage
Just Pure Wholesome Content, Yessiree
May is Jewish American Heritage Month, did you know that?
I didn’t know that. Just found out a couple weeks ago. Apparently it’s been a thing since…2006? But my notice from the Elders evidently got lost in the mail, so I wasn’t able to participate in this Conspiracy For Jewish Acceptance and Normalization before this year.
(Maybe this will teach them to finally switch to email, huh? Just because you’re the Elders doesn’t mean you gotta be elderly, age is just a number, etc. I’m just saying. It’s embarrassing that the conspiracy is failing because the Council is a bunch of luddites. Gen Alpha would never have let this happen.)
Anyway. Jewish American Heritage Month!
I’ve decided to attempt a vaguely connected series of posts its honor — posts wherein I, A Jew, write about something American. Preferably something wholesome and non-controversial.
Potential non-controversial topics that arose when I tried to brainstorm included:
baseball
Star Trek (if you don’t think Star Trek is American, you haven’t seen “The Omega Glory” and honestly your life is better for it; that episode is garbage but it is One Hundred Percent American Garbage!)
baseball
apple pie (but as someone who is allergic to apples, this is just mean so never mind)
baseball
um.
IN CONCLUSION: a) I’m clearly not very good at brainstorming and b) you’re definitely gonna get stuck reading about baseball at some point.
But not today! Today, I’m going to talk about Star Trek — specifically, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
That’s because today is Yom HaAtzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day. That is, the day that Israel declared itself not to be a colony of any country, not beholden to any of the motherlands that had rejected Jews, but rather its own independent state where Jews would be welcome, in the aftermath of the Holocaust or any other anti-Jewish persecution around the world.
And last year, I marked this occasion with a post about the artistry and storytelling of the early seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
Tonight is the beginning of Yom HaAtzmaut, Israel's Independence Day. There's a lot I could say and have said about the immensity of conflicting emotions this day brings up for me and many other progressive Zionist Jews. I've talked about the difficulty of simultaneously acknowledging both the a) incredible accomplishment of a diasporic people being able to return to their homeland after thousands of years and reestablish self-governance, and b) the deep failure of that governance to be fair and equitable and all that we would hope it would be.These are two dissonant notes that many of us carry with us, and it's difficult to explain how we manage to hold them both without coming apart at the seams, or deciding to chuck one or the other, just for the sake of simplifying the mental and emotional load.
And I've been thinking for a while that if you want to understand some of the psychological underpinnings, the best recommendation I can give you is to watch Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and think about Bajor and the Bajorans.
I know, I know, but hear me out.
There is so much there that captures what it means to establish a country in the wake of utter devastation, the way that Israel was established in the wake of the Holocaust and millennia of exile.
What it means to, for the first time, have control over your people's destiny and have to face the decisions of what kind of society you will build from the ashes.
What it means to go from fighting and clawing for survival to having some measure of political power.
What it means to face down the conflicting voices within your own community and not let trauma and reactionary hatred win out over justice and hope.
What it means to have corrupt politicians, religious leaders who twist and abuse faith for their own ends, assassination attempts on the voices of reason.
What it means to see Bajor's constant failures and yet to still believe that Bajor can be better and that it deserves to be free.
This is not to say that Bajor = Israel or Bajorans = Jews or Israelis, because any decent sci-fi or fiction is better than making cheap 1-to-1 parallels. These themes apply in many liberation situations and movements, and are why so many fall apart in their infancy and why so many revolutions devolve into civil war and infighting.
Revolution is hard. Liberation is hard. Building a dream - and even agreeing on what the dream is - is hard.
None ever truly live up to their ultimate promise, but we still believe in them.
This year, the need for people to understand this dissonance is higher than ever, and the number of people willing to listen or even consider listening feels lower than ever.
A facebook Star Trek group I was in kicked me out for being a Zionist who tried to engage in conversation about it, rather than just wisely agreeing that it’s so disappointing that Ira Steven Behr, one of the main creative forces behind Deep Space Nine, liked a few tweets that expressed sorrow over the October 7 massacre and therefore is — GASP — a Zionist.
I have no idea if Behr considers himself a Zionist or not, but I did gently point out to the poster that if you consider any sympathy for Israel to be Zionist, there are a heck of a lot of Jews (like Behr) involved in Star Trek that you’ll have to write off as well. Leonard Nimoy, possibly the most recognizable Trek person of all time, was an outspoken advocate for a peaceful two-state solution, which many of the loudest voices in these internet spaces now reject in favor of the very peaceful alternative of eliminating Israel as a country entirely.
Of course, if they want to cancel Spock, I’ll happily take him. More Spock for me!
But frankly, if someone watched Deep Space Nine and came away with the simplistic understanding of Good Guys and Bad Guys, rather than the deeply tangled web of individual conflicting interests and motivations that cannot be captured by a tweet or a slogan, then they probably missed the point.
Give it a rewatch and come back to discuss.
Thank you for reading this edition of SM’s Movie Cramming Project, where I, SM, mostly watch movies so that you don’t have to, but occasionally also give the internet a stern talking-to and encourage it to think about what it’s done.
If you’re interested in reading some more Jewish American content, you can check out my novelette “Moon Melody” in Jewish Futures: Science Fiction from the World’s Oldest Diaspora, or my snapshot memoir, Millennial Quarter-Life Crisis: A Mosaic of Thinky Thoughts.