Soccer Dad

Remembering ellen willis

Ellen Willis died last week.

I found an interesting essay by Dr. Willis at her NYU website, Is There Still a Jewish Question? Why I'm an Anti-Anti-Zionist

My point here is not that Israel should be exempt from anger. Israel is a nation-state. As such it has military, political, and social power. In the exercise of its power, it must be held accountable for its actions. Its misuses of power must be censured and opposed. The victims of its power can hardly be expected to be other than enraged. Yet as a Jewish state, Israel is also subject to layers of irrational anger, whether from antagonists who will not settle for a negotiated peace but demand that the foreign body be expelled, or from political critics who conjure up a monster that rivals Hitler. Israel's power, too, has been exaggerated, contingent as it is on the support of the United States: in the period of economic troubles, foreign adventurism, and revived protest we have entered, who knows what America will look like a few years from now, what our aims in the Middle East will be, what trade-offs we will make?

I am obviously not in agreement with everything she wrote in the essay. However I give her a lot of credit for noticing that criticism of Israel contained not a small amount of antisemitism.

As I've mentioned before I remember her mostly for her article "Next Year In Jerusalem" from the April 1977 issue of Rolling Stone. The article was about her brother, Michael's, journey to Orthodox Judaism through Aish Hatorah and her experiences in Israel talking to the people from Aish. I haven't found the article online, but it was reprinted by NCSY.

Unfortunately it doesn't appear that any of the mainstream obituaries like the one in the NYT mentioned her encounter with Aish Hatorah.

What made "Next Year in Jerusalem" fascinating is that Willis struggled with the idea of becoming Orthodox herself. In the end she couldn't reconcile a woman's role in Orthodox Judaism with her own feminist beliefs, but it seemed that she gave the idea some thought.

In addition her portrayal of the Orthodox lifestyle was sympathetic. She may not have been willing to accept it herself, but she was impressed with what she saw. "Next year in Jerusalem" is what I'll remember Ellen Willis for.

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Posted by SoccerDad at November 14, 2006 5:37 AM