I’ve been to New York City many times since September 11, 2001.  And each time, avoided going anywhere near Ground Zero, now formally known as the National September 11 Memorial.  I didn’t want to make a pilgrimage to disaster.  Didn’t want to take part in what felt like an act of national piety.  And yet I felt oddly guilty about not going.

Last Friday, I was in New York again.  It was horrible weather:  the whole city in complaint about the bitter cold, the biting wind, the snow flurries.  “And in April!” people kept saying, as though the season only added to the insult.

I had an early afternoon appointment way downtown.  And when I checked the map, realized it was just two blocks from Ground Zero.  It had taken me fifteen years, but the time had clearly come.

I’d seen photographs of the memorial, of course — and much admired the concept of it.  Not the conventional obelisk or spire lifting the eyes skyward, nor even the black marble wall built into the landscape of Maya Lin’s Vietnam War memorial in DC.  No.  This one, by comparison, was unutterably spare.  It didn’t lift off the ground or nest into it.  Instead, it went deep down into it.  Where the two towers had been, two giant squares had been dug, and filled partway with water.  Each almost an acre in size, they covered the footprints of the twin towers.  And at the center of each pool was a far deeper one, a sharp descent into what seemed to be a bottomless black square — a void within a void.

So why did I need to see this “in the flesh,” as it were?  I kept asking myself that question as I followed the thin stream of tourists who’d braved the weather, wool caps pulled low, scarves multiply wound, collars and shoulders hunched against the wind.  Were their eyes streaming in the wind like mine?  They had to be.  There is something about the iciness of a wintry Manhattan wind as it funnels through the high-rise canyons that seems to suck tears out of your eyes.

As we entered the plaza — past three guys handing out pamphlets for the memorial museum, each of them incongruously sporting green plastic Statue of Liberty headgear — I was wondering if there wasn’t something kind of ghoulish about this.  All these people going to see where all these other people had died?  The site of nearly three thousand horrific deaths becoming an item to be ticked off the tourist checklist?  What was I doing here?

Yet I resisted the urge to turn back.  As everyone else headed straight for the shelter of the museum building, I went the other way to the North Pool, the one where the North Tower had been.  I leaned over the waist-high parapet, its bronze surface etched with names of those who’d died, and the moment I did so, all my questions faded into very small, graceless quibbles.

What I saw was grey on grey on grey.  Concrete on concrete.  A square within a square, so sparse as to be brutalistic.  And this brutalism moved me — deeply and unexpectedly — because surely, it was what was needed.

I made my way to the south edge so as to get my back to the wind, but still it seemed to knife right through me — through the leather motorcycle jacket, through the fleece ski leggings, through the wool beret.  My eyes streamed more than ever — was it only the wind? — and as the tears threatened to freeze on my cheeks, I realized how utterly different this was from the photos I’d seen.

They’d showed placid water calmly spilling over from the upper square into the lower one — less my idea of a waterfall than of a large-scale ornamental water feature.  But the water this afternoon was anything but placid.  It was angry, roiled up by the wind dipping into it and howling over it, raising whitecaps and sending giant silvery curtains of wind-drift over the surface.  The water didn’t merely fall into the deep center square:  it fell over itself, boiling in icy tumult, tumbling and cascading into the void.

I stood.  Still.  Shivering.  For I don’t know how long.  In sadness, in awe, in admiration at how the designer, Michael Arad, had created what felt like sacred space out of  public place.  Not the kind of sacred space that elevates you, but the kind that fills you with dread, and with the biting awareness of how fragile life can be.

“You should have taken a photograph,” a friend said that evening.  But I had no need to.  That time I spent leaning over the parapet is unforgettable, and what I saw is etched in my mind as indelibly as the terrible images from fifteen years ago.  “There’ll be lots of photos online,” I said.  And indeed there are.  But all seem to be with the water calm.  It seems nobody pauses to takes photographs when an icy wind is blowing.  And many of the photographers had clearly waited for dusk, when the walls are lit up for dramatic effect, though all the lighting did, to my eye, was prettify what should never be prettified.  After a half-hour of online scrolling, I found not one photo that came anywhere near expressing the forlorn quality of the place last Friday afternoon — the terrible, abandoned greyness of it.

And maybe that’s as it should be.  How, after all, do you photograph absence?  How do you photograph a void?

–

This past weekend, I spoke to a Hadassah meeting – the Women’s Zionist Organization of America.  The subject, of my choosing, was “What’s a ‘nice Jewish girl’ doing writing so much about Islam?”

The easy answer to the question I’d self-imposed was “Why not?”  A perfectly reasonable answer, perhaps, but not with bigots like Peter King about to begin his witch hunt this week in the form of congressional hearings on the alleged “radicalization” of American Muslims.

The real answer is that it’s precisely because I’m Jewish that I find myself writing so much about Islam these days.  Because as a Jew, I know the dangers of prejudice.  And I can smell it a mile off.  When I hear someone talk about “the Jewish mentality,” I know I’m listening to an anti-Semite.  How else stereotype millions of people that way?   Just as when I read someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali talking about “the Muslim mentality,” I know — no matter how pretty she is, how soft-spoken, and how compelling her life story – that I am listening to an Islamophobe.

And I recognize that anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are two sides of the exact same coin:  the stereotyping of millions of people by the actions of a few.  That is, prejudice.

So it’s particularly painful, let alone absurd and self-defeating and dumb, to see that some Islamophobes are Jewish.  And equally painful – and absurd and self-defeating and dumb – to see that some Muslims are anti-Semitic.

I have no statistics to say what proportion of Jews are Islamophobic or what proportion of Muslims are anti-Semitic (though I could doubtless make some up and throw them out there with such an air of authority that they’d be repeated ad infinitum until they achieve the status of “fact”).   But the Muslim Brotherhood, for all the changes it has undergone, still distributes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  And while anti-Zionism does not necessarily mean anti-Semitism, there is a clear overlap, with a venemous hatred finding its outlet in what is now the more acceptable form of anti-Zionism.

So we need to be clear.  We badly need it.

“Islam” did not attack the US on 9/11;  eighteen people with a particularly twisted and distorted idea of Islam did.  “The Jews” do not shoot Palestinian farmers in the West Bank;   Bible-spouting settlers with a particularly twisted and distorted idea of Judaism do.

The Quran is no more violent or misogynistic than the Bible.  In fact it’s less so.  If you insist, as Islamophobes do, on highlighting certain phrases, then you should turn around and do the same with the Bible, which you will find ten times worse, with repeated calls for the destruction of whole peoples. Only the dumbest, most literal, hate-filled fundamentalist, Jewish or Muslim, takes the rules of ancient warfare as a guide to 21^st-century life.

We have to stop this stereotyping.  Now.  All of us.

We have to recognize prejudice not only in others, but in ourselves, Jewish or Muslim.

We have to be able to see that the anti-Semitic trope of “the Jews” trying to take over the world is exactly the same as the Islamophobic one of “the Muslims” trying to take over the world.

We have to acknowledge that an Islamophobic Jew is thinking exactly like an anti-Semite.  And that an anti-Semitic Muslim is thinking exactly like an Islamophobe.

We have to realize that American Jews need to stand up with Muslims against Islamophobia just as American Muslims need to stand up with Jews against anti-Semitism.

Because Islamophobia is, in essence, another form of anti-Semitism, and vice versa.  And it’s in the direct interest of both Jews and Muslims — of all of us — to stand up and confront both forms of prejudice.

In the famous words of an anti-Nazi Protestant pastor during World War II:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Socialist.

Two weeks ago, eight prominent American imams prayed in front of a sculpture at Dachau commemorating the six million Jewish dead.   Isn’t it odd how nobody paid any attention?

This week of Rosh HaShana, Eid el-Fitr, and 9/11 seems a good time to run it on The Accidental Theologist:

What a bunch of hypocrites they are at the Anti-Defamation League.   The up-front bigotry of the Dove World Church in Florida, whose redneck pastor has declared September 11 “Burn a Quran Day,” is almost refreshing by comparison.  At least he’s not trying to hide beneath a  veil of sensitivity, and he sure as hell isn’t trying to kid anyone that he’s into anything like civil rights.

The ADL has the astounding chutzpah to describe itself as “the nation’s premier civil rights agency,” declaring that it “fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals, and protects civil rights for us all.”

So yesterday it issued a statement against Cordoba House, the proposed Muslim community center whose opponents have deliberately and misleadingly dubbed it “the mosque at Ground Zero.”   (It’s not a mosque, and it’s not “at Ground Zero,” but two blocks away.)   In fact check out the Cordoba House website and you’ll see that it’s a perfect example of what Jewish tradition calls tikkun olam, repairing the world –- dedicated to interfaith communicaton in the spirit of the convivencia, the “Golden Age” of Muslim and Jewish intellectual achievement in Spain that came to a crashing end with the Catholic Inquisition and the expulsion of both Muslims and Jews.

Of course the ADL has no objection to the idea of a such a center.  My God, no.  That would be so intolerant.  Instead, yesterday’s statement concluded with this:

Proponents of the Islamic Center may have every right to build at this site, and may even have chosen the site to send a positive message about Islam. The bigotry some have expressed in attacking them is unfair, and wrong. But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain – unnecessarily – and that is not right.

You see?  Others are bigots, but the ADL is not.  It’s demonstrating its exquisite sensitivity to pain – not its own, of course, but that of the families of those who died on 9/11,  some of whom (presumably not the Muslims among them) find the idea of Cordoba House “offensive” and are,  per ADL director Abe Foxman, entitled to their bigotry because – I wish I was making this up – 9/11 is the equivalent of the Holocaust.

Asked why the opposition of the families was so pivotal in the decision, Mr. Foxman, a Holocaust survivor, said they were entitled to their emotions.

“Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational,” he said. Referring to the loved ones of Sept. 11 victims, he said, “Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.”

Wow.  So the Holocaust is now a defense for bigotry?  Howzat for new-speak?  George Orwell, kindly rise up from your grave.

Not that this is the first time the ADL has used the Holocaust in such a way.  Witness its support of the so-called Museum of Tolerance  to be built on top of a thousand-year-old Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem as a wing of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.  The Wiesenthal Center is headed by  the oleaginous right-wing rabbi Marvin Hier, who pooh-poohed the idea first that Muslims care about their dead and then that there were even any bodies buried there.  There certainly aren’t any more:  as the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz discovered, Hier hired a contractor to swiftly and clandestinely “remove nuisances in the area of the project” – the “nuisances” being hundreds of skeletons, bones, and skulls.

So in ADL-think, the Jerusalem project is just fine – they’re Muslim bones, not Jewish ones, and besides, it’s all about “tolerance.”   But when someone else proposes a far more meaningful project and that someone else is – gevalt! – Muslim, that’s going beyond the pale .

Listen, Abe Foxman:   if you want to lead an organization of bigots, at least have the intellectual honesty of that dumb-ass pastor in Florida.

Meanwhile, the least you can do is this:  DELETE ALL REFERENCE ON YOUR WEBSITE TO THE ADL AS A CIVIL-RIGHTS ORGANIZATION.  IMMEDIATELY.  Just who do you think you’re kidding?