Doppelganger, page 44
“They hurled Jews out of windows”: Weinberg, 63–64.
“Ethnic divisiveness was a centrifugal force”: Weinberg,” 75.
“I am a Jewess”: Henry Rosenthal, “Eleanor Marx: ‘I Am a Jewess,’” Jews, Marxism and the Workers Movement, Marxists Internet Archive.
“an all-out orgy of anti-Semitism”: Georg Adler, Peter Hudis, and Annelies Laschitza, eds., The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg (London: Verso, 2011), 295.
“drunk on vodka”: Quoted in Alan Johnson, “Leon Trotsky’s Long War Against Antisemitism,” Fathom, March 2019.
“in the epoch of its rise”: Quoted in Johnson.
“a set of problems”: Enzo Traverso, The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate, trans. Bernard Gibbons (Leiden: Brill, 2019).
“Religion is the sigh”: Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” trans. Anette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 131.
“Your liberation”: Antony Polonsky, “The Bund in Polish Political Life, 1935–1939,” in Essential Papers on Jews and the Left, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 172.
“things will go very badly”: Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 838.
“What do you want with this theme”: Dana Mills, “Lessons from the Life of Rosa Luxemburg,” Verso Blog, March 5, 2021.
“None is too many”: Irving Abella and Harold Troper, None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1939–1948 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2017).
“Jewish capitalism”: Abram Leon, The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation (1946; repr. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 239.
“Big business”: Leon, The Jewish Question, 234.
“Just as it is necessary”: Leon, The Jewish Question, 239.
“the war and the Holocaust”: Traverso, The Jewish Question, xv.
“Doppelgänger politics”: Caroline Rooney, “Prison Israel-Palestine: Literalities of Criminalization and Imaginative Resistance,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50, no. 2 (2014): 134.
“A land without a people for a people without a land”: Diana Muir, “A Land Without a People for a People Without a Land,” Middle East Quarterly 15, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 55–62.
“making the desert bloom”: Alan George, “‘Making the Desert Bloom’: A Myth Examined,” Journal of Palestine Studies 8, no. 2 (Winter 1979): 88.
“stucco-colored Haifa”: I. F. Stone, Underground to Palestine (New York: Boni & Gaer, 1946), 221.
“For the Zionists, the Arab was the Invisible Man”: I. F. Stone, “Holy War,” in The Best of I. F. Stone, ed. Karl Weber (New York: Public Affairs, 2006), 235.
“There was no such thing as Palestinians”: Quoted in Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 147.
“present-absentee”: Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence, trans. Sinan Antoon (New York: Archipelago Books, 2011).
“Israeli settlers continue their unbated campaign”: Yousef Al Jamal, “JNF Greenwashing as a Means to Hide Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine,” Politics Today, February 14, 2022.
“the victims of the victims”: Edward Said, The Pen and the Sword: Conversations with David Barsamian (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994), 53; Bryan Cheyette, “A Glorious Achievement: Edward Said and the Last Jewish Intellectual,” in Edward Said’s Translocations, ed. Tobias Doring and Mark U. Stein (New York: Routledge, 2012), 78.
“the new Jews”: Joseph Massad, “Affiliating with Edward Said,” in Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, ed. Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 33.
“doppelgänger politics is first of all”: Rooney, “Prison Israel-Palestine,” 134.
“the Jewish people has an exclusive”: Natasha Roth-Rowland, “Land Grabs. Homophobia. Radicalized Police: What to Expect from Israel’s Far-Right Government,” +972 Magazine, December 29, 2022.
“go into the mindset of Zionism”: Jacqueline Rose, “Nation as Trauma, Zionism as Question: Jacqueline Rose Interviewed,” openDemocracy, August 17, 2005.
around 20 percent of the Palestinian population: “General Briefing: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israeli Prisons,” Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association.
According to a United Nations report: “Key Figures on the 2014 Hostilities,” United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, June 23, 2015.
“526”: “50 Days: More Than 500 Children: Facts and Figures on Fatalities in Gaza, Summer 2014,” B’Tselem, July 20, 2016.
“citizen journalists”: L. Finch, “How a Jewish-American Author’s Facebook Page Became a Hub for Citizen Reporting on Gaza,” Global Voices, August 5, 2014.
“People are asking”: Naomi Wolf, Facebook post, July 21, 2014.
a typical headline: Shmuley Boteach, “Naomi Wolf’s Allegations of an Israeli Genocide Fuel Anti-Semitism,” Jerusalem Post, September 10, 2014.
“I was [teaching] at Barnard”: Rachel Cooke, “Naomi Wolf: ‘We’re in a Fight for Our Lives and for Democracy,” The Guardian, May 19, 2019.
a former U.S. special forces officer … Striker Pierce Investigations: “Security Consultant Shares Insider Tips on Self-Defense,” DailyClout channel on YouTube, May 19, 2022, at 6:32–6:43; Vincent M. Mallozzi, “An Author and Investigator Find Comfort in Each Other,” New York Times, November 24, 2018.
“The Nazis are an excuse for everything”: Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), 86.
“isn’t speaking only of his family”: Corey Robin, “Arendt and Roth: An Uncanny Convergence,” New York Review, May 12, 2021.
“a Jewish country without a Jewish soul”: Philip Roth, Operation Shylock (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 109.
“in many, many terrible ways”: Roth, Operation Shylock, 81.
“all human, elastic, adaptable, humorous, creative”: Roth, Operation Shylock, 126.
“Jewish anti-Zionist elements”: Roth, Operation Shylock, 358.
“I am a tribesman”: Roth, Operation Shylock, 351.
“What will the goyim think?”: Philip Roth, “Writing About Jews,” Commentary, December 1963.
“It finally happened”: Naomi Wolf @DrNaomiRWolf, Gettr post, May 13, 2022.
“Who knew that the perfect husband for a feminist”: Naomi Wolf @DrNaomiRWolf, Gettr post, May 13, 2022.
“Maybe every writer and dissident critic should have”: Naomi Wolf @DrNaomiRWolf, Gettr post, May 14, 2022.
“is not entirely enslaved like Australia”: Naomi Wolf @DrNaomiRWolf, Gettr post (video), May 24, 2022.
“How had this issue escaped me”: Naomi Wolf, “Rethinking the Second Amendment,” Outspoken with Dr Naomi Wolf, Substack, June 4, 2022.
“with our neighbor in trouble”: Naomi Wolf, Facebook post, July 21, 2014.
“fully open borders” … “a tyrant’s dream” … “Traitors are dissolving”: Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and the War Against the Human (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.: All Seasons Press, 2022), 47; Joseph Mercola, “The Last Stage of a Tyrannical Takeover—Interview with Naomi Wolf,” Bitchute (video), June 1, 2022, at 13:56.
“I am a peaceful person”: Steve Bannon, host, “‘We Are at War’: Naomi Wolf Breaks Down the WHO’s Plan to Seize Power,” War Room: Pandemic (podcast), May 12, 2022, at 5:13, posted on Rumble.
15. Unselfing
cut global pollution in half in a decade: “Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5°C,” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018; Jonathan Watts, “We Have 12 Years to Limit Climate Change Catastrophe, Warns UN,” The Guardian, October 8, 2018.
glitzy, Trumpy Las Vegas: “Nevada Caucuses 2020: Live Election Results,” New York Times, February 24, 2020.
new oil and gas drilling permits: Matthew Brown, “US Drilling Approvals Increase Despite Biden Climate Pledge,” Associated Press, July 12, 2021; “New Data: Biden’s First Year Drilling Permitting Stomps Trump’s by 34%,” press release, Center for Biological Diversity, January 21, 2022.
“second body”: Daisy Hildyard, “The Second Body,” The Learned Pig, November 15, 2017, excerpt from Daisy Hildyard, The Second Body (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017).
“It wasn’t me”: Eve Auchincloss and Nancy Lynch, “Disturber of the Peace: James Baldwin—an Interview/1969,” in Conversations with James Baldwin, ed. Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 73.
“We’re not just the center”: The Magnitude of All Things, directed by Jennifer Abbott (National Film Board of Canada, 2020), at 55:11.
“feel like a coral or a fish”: The Magnitude of All Things, at 48:38.
“an occasion for ‘unselfing’”: Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 84.
“the people who are the exploiters”: The Magnitude of All Things, at 43:13.
“I’d like to think”: The Double, directed by Richard Ayoade (Magnolia Pictures, 2014), at 1:26:52.
“pity for those who suffer”: Helena de Bres, “It’s Not You, It’s Me,” The Point, September 23, 2019.
“We can be hard and critical”: john a. powell, interview by Ivan Natividad, “To End White Supremacy, Attack Racist Policy, Not People,” Berkeley News, January 25, 2021.
“Everything worthwhile”: Eve L. Ewing, “Mariame Kaba: Everything Worthwhile Is Done with Other People,” Adi Magazine, Fall 2019.
“These days, I feel the threat”: Arielle Angel, “Beyond Grievance,” Jewish Currents, Summer 2022.
“Struggle helps us see each other”: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, conversation with author, October 17, 2022.
“they belong to a class”: John Berger, “The Nature of Mass Demonstrations,” International Socialism 1st series, no. 34 (Autumn 1968): 11–12.
“maybe somebody who doesn’t look kinda like you”: Bridget Read, “The Bernie Rally Felt So Much Bigger Than Bernie,” The Cut, October 21, 2019; Bernie Sanders, “Bernie’s Back Rally with AOC in New York,” Bernie Sanders channel on YouTube video, October 19, 2019, at 2:47:27.
“all the possibilities”: Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin, 2003), 143. Freud’s essay was originally published in 1919.
“If you have never believed”: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, conversation with author, October 17, 2022.
“I believe the starting point”: Sally Weintrobe, Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 13.
the only alternative to barbarism: Rosa Luxemburg, Socialism or Barbarism: Selected Writings, ed. Paul Le Blanc and Helen C. Scott (London: Pluto, 2010).
“when I think of the land as my mother”: Naomi Klein, “Dancing the World into Being: A Conversation with Idle No More’s Leanne Simpson,” Yes Magazine, March 6, 2013.
“precarious, dependent”: Sunaura Taylor, “Age of Disability,” Orion, November 9, 2021.
“environmentalism of the injured”: Taylor, “Age of Disability.”
Epilogue: Who Is the Double?
carefully deconstructed: Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women, featuring Jean Kilbourne (Media Education Foundation, 1979).
“I don’t know how to be myself”: The Double, directed by Richard Ayoade (Magnolia Pictures, 2014), at 41:23.
“Her intense energy”: Lisa Hix, “Did Father Know Best? In Her New Book, Third Wave Feminist Naomi Wolf Reconsiders Her Bohemian Upbringing,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 19, 2005, via SFGate.
“He’s the fake”: Philip Roth, Operation Shylock (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 367.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
After a quarter century writing books in a particular political and editorial style, it can be tough to shift gears. I was so fortunate to work with a brilliant editorial team that greeted this change in direction with excitement. Kimberly Witherspoon of Inkwell Management, now my agent, was on board for all the right reasons from our first phone call. She jumped in with commanding confidence, and we have collaborated with a rare warmth and collegiality ever since. I will always be grateful to Sue Halpern for introducing us.
Kim was determined to find an editor and a house that would break as many rules of corporate publishing as required to let this book become what it wanted to be. We found that and more in Alexander Star and the whole team at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. After an hour talking literary doubles and conspiracy theories with Alex, I knew I had found someone who would fall down the rabbit hole with me—and yank me out when needed. On the best days, the work felt like play. Alex sharpened and deepened the text in countless ways, while closely collaborating with and drawing wisdom from my longtime Canadian editor, Louise Dennys, now publisher emerita of Penguin Random House Canada, as well as Martha Kanya-Forstner, Publisher of Knopf Canada, and Thomas Penn, publishing director at Penguin Books UK. I am deeply grateful to Mitzi Angel and Stefan McGrath for placing their faith in me.
Before there were agents and editors, there was Harriet Clark. At a moment of particularly acute pandemic vertigo, I decided to use the restrictions on travel, and the wonders of Zoom, to go to the writing school I had never attended. Harriet was my school. After only a couple of months of feeling like a clumsy undergrad, the idea for this project took root. As it grew, Harriet never stopped teaching me, and my debt to this literary doula is immense.
Another great debt is to Kendra Jewell, lead researcher on this project. While completing their anthropology PhD at the University of British Columbia, Kendra made time to dig into everything from theories of doppelgangers in psychoanalysis to charter schools in Florida. Kendra’s mind is a marvel, and thinking with them has been one of the joys of my professional life. We were fortunate to work closely with two other top-notch research assistants, Isabella Pojuner and JJ Mazzucotelli, both completing master’s degrees at UBC. This research team worked with tremendous dedication for months, conducting literature reviews, checking and rechecking facts, combing over endnotes—and they all deserve danger pay for the number of War Room episodes they had to transcribe. I am also grateful to Nicole Weber, my former research assistant at Rutgers University, who was a wonderful colleague in this book’s earliest stage.
I gave drafts to several friends, colleagues, and family members for feedback: Bill McKibben, Alex Kelly, Harsha Walia, Cecilie Surasky, Jacqueline Rose, Johann Hari, Katharine Viner, Rajiv Sicora, Celeste Lecesne, Larry Zuckerman, Nancy Friedland, MJ Shaw, Christine Boyle, Michele Landsberg, and Stephen Lewis, as well as Seth, Bonnie, Michael, and Misha Klein. All came back with sharp and useful insights. The results of my never-ending conversations with Kyo Maclear and V can be felt on every page, as can my Thursday forest hikes with Kara Stanley.
I owe a particular debt to two extremely busy writers and intellectuals: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and China Miéville. Both engaged substantively with early versions of this manuscript and influenced it in ways both large and small. A conversation with Molly Crabapple about the Jewish Labor Bund had a profound impact on the text at a crucial point, as did her smaller interventions later on. I am intensely grateful to my dear friend and comrade Anthony Arnove, who continues to represent various titles on my backlist. Anthony gave feedback on this manuscript and was very helpful in steering me to key texts about “the Jewish question” in Marxist thought. Roger Hodge at The Intercept carefully edited several articles that are mentioned in this text, and supported this project even when it meant long disappearances, as did Betsy Reed.
I am always at a loss for how to thank the magnificent Jackie Joiner, who has been managing my professional and personal life since 2005. All I can say is that she makes everything possible and does so with unfailing kindness and good humor—while being a publishing savant.
In the very early stages of researching this book, I had a conversation with Gage Averill, now provost of UBC, that changed my life. I am so grateful to him for bringing me to UBC and to all my colleagues in the Geography Department and the Centre for Climate Justice, particularly Geraldine Pratt and Jessica Dempsey (both early readers), as well as Mohammed Rafi Arefin, Sara Nelson, Alec Blair, and Jarrett Martineau. My seminar students at Rutgers and UBC have been a steadying force in tumultuous times: our weekly three-hour discussions never fail to renew my faith in the possible. I am also grateful to the remarkable Barbara Ransby for including me as a fellow in the University of Illinois’s Social Justice Portal Project, a space for cross-disciplinary conversations between activists and scholars that challenged and inspired me.
There were periods when I needed to run away from home for a few weeks to write and I had some truly wonderful hosts: the Indigo cottage in Pender Harbour, Jane Walker in Squamish, Nancy and Craig in Sechelt. But nothing could have been more nourishing than being temporary springtime housemates with V and Celeste in the Hudson Valley. In these pages, I wrote about the teachers and education assistants who support and celebrate neurodivergence. They also made my writing life possible: Jeannette Lewis, Erin Wilson, Nikki Underwood, Robin Hansen, and Tania Obalek. Care labor truly is the foundation of the next world.
What richness it is to live inside a web shimmering with so much creativity, commitment, and generosity. And all of this is on top of the more private support and replenishment that is my immediate family: Avi, my forever rock on the rock, and T., my northern light. This is a book about the instability of the self, but the truth is that as long as I have you two, I will always know who I am.
INDEX
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
