I write like a wild child, an angry child, an enraged woman old now and so not fearful of some editor. I write like a cassowary or a Cock’s Comb, burning with truth; I dance cabriole since I really am a mixture of right and blithe and warrior and uprising and never-again. O world! O world of delirious rambling wrong—I am here to protest—someone, listen to my truthful bold awakening. I awake to the fact that I am a writer, I am truth, and no editor who has not studied history, no editor who promotes anti-Semitism is going to get away with it as long as I am alive.
The shutting up of a Jew in these ever-growing anti-Semitic times—again—is like crack smoke breathed in our faces, the stink like rubber and glue and Nazi progrommes until the irises of our eyes turn back in our heads, until we’ve forgotten why we are writers, and become militant Kahanes at the ready. These literary editors who publish anti-Semitic poems and reject the Jewish point of view, a view laced with history and fact are editors offering themselves up to the mount of evil, their brains and their bodies warped and ugly as gargoyles.
This sudden downpour of anti-Semitism washes over literary journals in malevolent glass shards. And as the machetes of editors are so willing to whack at the Jews, as the editors are so willing to bow down to anti-Semitism, to bow down to Moslem writers, so willing to bow down without reading history or without caring at all about it, brandish those machetes to Jewish writers—me—who seek to set the record straight about history or to have our say in our poetry. This is equal to Nazism in Germany where they made Jews into non-humans in small increments and before the Jews knew it they were burned alive in concentration camps. I am not a Jew who hides. I am not a Jew who just wants to make nice. Nice is a word that originally meant foolish. I am not that. I am militant about not being under the boot.
Between the snobbery and the pats on the MFA backs, between the poetry about nothing interesting and the poems about magnolias that are not even metaphors for anything interesting, the editors, like bad figure skaters, skating away from truth, executing very bad triple axels on wobbly legs and wobblier brains, and the pushy writers with their Jew-hating agendas, pushing lies about Jews the way drug dealers push crack and meth and heroin—do you have any idea what it’s like to be a Jewish writer who has studied my own history and the history that does not exist about some of these pushy writers? Some Jews, I see, as writers, avoid the topic altogether; they don’t seem to mind that in the very same issue as their poems, is a poem that is anti-Semitic. These Jewish writers had better get hip to what is going on. Are they frightened beneath their imagined blue skies, the spotlight not on them—so, Phew!—so do they keep writing about sea shells and the President and anything else but the rampant vile anti-Semitism or do they ever see what I see. The rain keeps driving, and I say: My Jews: Tell me something between political correctness and mild or bold rat status and your words about Shabbat that have no connection to Ein Sof or Jewish life or neshama, just poetry that won’t make the goyim too uncomfortable that you are a Jew. Tell me something between worm-hood digging into an assimilation that didn’t work before but led to trains to crematoriums. Tell me something: Am I the only Jewish writer who won’t let these poets and editors off the hook? Am I the only Jew who tells the editors off and points out the anti-Semitism? That these editors are no better than the Germans who turned in their Jewish neighbors, who danced and drank over the stench of Jewish bodies burning? Though I get no response at all, or I get Big Brother Speak responses, they know. They know that there is at least one Jew out there who says Never Again and means it and will put militancy behind it, if necessary. For now, my contempt in words works.
While there are many more examples of poetry published lately that is anti-Semitic, I offer another example:
RATTLE LITERARY JOURNAL, considered to be somewhat prestigious.