Sometimes when pushing back against anti-Israel venom, the best defense is a good poem. That’s how things turned out for Talia, a 19-year-old Lafayette native in her first year at a small college in the Midwest where anti-Israel fever runs hot.
I met Talia a few years ago when she joined Write On for Israel, a pro-Israel advocacy program for which I serve as journalism teacher. She grew up attending Camp Newman and the Jewish Community High School of the Bay, so her Israel bona fides were already strong.
But Talia and I bonded over poetry.
I have a lifelong love of poetry (Keats is my guy). Talia similarly reveres the power of figurative language, only she focused her passion on performing at poetry slams, those hip, spoken-word competitions more akin to rock concerts than staid readings.
Talia traveled to Israel with the WOFI cohort and ending up staying several weeks after our 10-day trip. She spent quality time there, forging a deep connection to the country and its people.
Imagine Talia’s shock when, upon arriving at college last fall, she encountered a student body rife with anti-Israel sentiment, some of it bordering on the nihilistic.
Tensions came to a head at a writing workshop she attended, at which one Jewish student recited a poem about her shame over Israel. It included a line about a “Jewish star smeared with the blood of Palestinians.” The student planned to read it at an upcoming poetry slam.
After the workshop, Talia cried.
“Spoken word is supposed to be this open space where you can challenge ideas,” Talia said, “but usually people only write about things the audience agrees with. After the workshop, I was very upset. I didn’t know what to do. I felt as if there was no one I could talk to on campus.”
After talking to her mother and a few friends, she decided to respond the best way she knew how: Write back, and perform at the slam. “I wanted to be another voice in the room,” Talia said.
Remarkably, the very act of composing her piece changed the campus climate for Talia. Whereas she had previously been intimidated about standing up for Israel, working on the poem emboldened her.
“In the two weeks of writing I had maybe 30 conversations about Israel,” she recalled. “I just broke the silence. Now I was talking about it all the time, but it became way easier and less scary.”
Talia wrote an intensely personal poem about her love of Israel and her unease about feeling shamed for that love.
It included the lines:
Please don’t talk about her like
she’s far away
critique her like flaws in my
own father
and if you’d fight for anyone’s
right to a homeland
fight for mine too.
With the slam days away, Talia recalled, she felt “very nervous. I was totally freaking out whether people would walk out or hiss like they do at slams sometimes.”
She need not have worried. Once on stage, she delivered the poem with confidence and won over the crowd, including those hostile to Israel.
“People were listening and snapping,” she said, referring to the custom of finger-snapping approval. “People said they liked it.”
That included the young woman who had written the harshly anti-Israel poem. After hearing a preview of Talia’s poem, she told her, “If anyone has a problem with your poem, I’ll defend your right to say it,” and she went a step further, rewriting and modifying her own poem.
It wasn’t all sunshine and roses. One student wrote a poem in response, criticizing Talia’s sympathetic stance toward Israel. But that poem triggered a counter-response, too, with other students now openly supporting Talia and her views.
Open debate and dialogue had come to Talia’s campus, where before there had been only strident one-sided rhetoric.
Now some students are considering holding a slam entirely devoted to Israel-related poems.
“I was afraid of sharing my opinion, but I feel now it’s better,” Talia said. “What makes me uncomfortable is not what people will say but that I won’t be able to respond. Now people still disagree with me, but they are aware that another opinion exists.”
Dan Pine can be reached at [email protected].