Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple has been adapted yet again, as a musical movie, produced by Steven Spielberg. More on Walker can be found here: “A new ‘Color Purple’ adaptation hits theaters, returning author Alice Walker’s history of antisemitism to spotlight,” by Andrew Lapin, JTA, December 22, 2023:
“Most Jews who know their own history see how relentlessly the Israeli government is attempting to turn Palestinians into the ‘new Jews,’ patterned on Jews of the Holocaust era, as if someone must hold that place in order for Jews to avoid it,” she writes, adding that she could never “rationally discuss” Israel with her ex-husband. “He does not see the racist treatment of Palestinians as the same racist treatment of blacks and some Jews that he fought against so nobly in Mississippi, and that he objected to in his own Brooklyn-based family.” She also listed several progressive Jews whom she said were friends of hers also protesting Israel, including Zinn, Muriel Rukeyser, Amy Goodman, and Noam Chomsky.
So according to Walker, the Jews needed some other victim — the Palestinians — to turn into “the new Jews,” enduring a different Holocaust, in order to take the place of the Jews.
In 2012, Walker made her positions explicit when she turned down an offer to publish a new Israeli edition of “The Color Purple.” In a letter, she told publisher Yediot Books that she did this because she believed Israel “is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people,” and endorsed the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement — a tactic that bestselling Irish author and fellow BDS backer Sally Rooney would echo in 2021. (An earlier Hebrew-language edition of “The Color Purple” was published in the 1980s.)
So deep is Walker’s antipathy to Israel that she refused to allow a Hebrew edition of The Color Purple to be published in 2012. Her anti-Israel animus had not been as strong 30 years before, when she had been willing to allow a Hebrew edition to be published.
In 2013, the University of Michigan’s Center for the Education of Women rescinded an invitation for Walker to speak at its 50th anniversary celebration; Walker would later claim that this was due to her views on Israel. But the university never gave a clear reason, and in fact invited her to speak again the following year without incident.
Walker was quick to claim that the withdrawal of her invitation to speak at the University of Michigan was the result of Jewish pressure, but no one at the university confirmed this, and she was invited to speak the next year. Had that so-called “Jewish pressure” disappeared, or had it never existed in the first place, save in Walker’s imagination?
By 2017, Walker’s tone had hardened — not only against Israel, but also Jews more broadly. That year on her website, she published a poem entitled, “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty To Study The Talmud,” in which Walker writes, “Are Goyim (us) meant to be slaves of Jews, and not only / That, but to enjoy it?”
Six years ago, Walker tipped over into extreme antisemitism, with a poem about the need for non-Jews to study the Talmud, where they will find the wickedness of the Jews on display, for she claims that text sinisterly teaches Jews that they are to be masters, and non-Jews — the “Goyim” — to be their slaves. She might better have written a poem about the Qur’an, and the verses that assure Muslims that they are the “best of peoples” (3:110) and non-Muslims “the most vile of created beings” (98:6). It is not Jews, but Muslims, who through Jihad hope to create a world where Islam everywhere dominates, and Muslims rule, everywhere. The Jews have a different desire: they only want to keep their tiny state, one of the smallest in the world, from being obliterated. This is not something Walker will allow herself to recognize; she is blinkered by antisemitic hate.
The poem, a harsh critique of Israel and what Walker suggests is a Jewish urge to dominate non-Jews in accordance with the Talmud, continues, to describe “what may be done / With impunity, and without conscience, / By a Chosen people, / To the vast majority of the people / On the planet / Who were not Chosen.”…
Again, Alice Walker has things topsy-turvy. It is the Muslims who see themselves as deserving to rule the world, with non-Muslims to be tolerated only as dhimmis, enduring a host of political, social, and economic disabilities, of which the most onerous is the requirement to pay to the Muslim state the jizya, a capitation tax that buys non-Muslims freedom from Muslim attack. It is, in other words, a religiously-sanctioned form of extortion.
Jews have no desire to “dominate non-Jews” in the same manner that Muslims believe they have a right to rule over non-Muslims. They desire only to hold onto their resurrected tiny commonwealth in the Land of Israel.
bagsgroove says
There’s a lesson here to be learned. The blacks cried forever about being slaves and being racially hated. Now the blacks are just as racist as the KKK. Nice going. Keep on backing the muslims,the original slave traders of black africans. For the muslims had contempt for african “raisin heads” (the exact words of mohamed). If someone called mohamed black he woud be executed imediately. So study you history to find out who the bad guys were and are now.
Davidka says
There are deep currents of Jew hatred in the black community in the U.S., and the mainstream Jewish organizations not only will not confront the problem, but embrace antisemitic organizations such as “Black Lives Matter.” For example, consider the behavior of the ADL, if you have a strong stomach
WPM says
The worst enemy of the black community has is the anti-nuclear family pushed in black cultural starting in the 1960s.Its not the Jews or the “white man” that has keep the black community down in the last 50 years ,but a cultural of fatherless children. With the rate of out of wedlock babies born in the black community reaching up to 87 percent with many children never knowing their father, or their fathers(if known) having nothing to do raising them that is the problem. The chances of a male child either black or white growing up and getting in trouble with the law , or becoming addicted to drugs ,never finishing high school is much greater or getting killed in violently in street violence at a young age . The chances of that child growing up very poor, with a weak social structure , is increased greatly with no father figures around. If you look at new immigrates from Asia ,Middle ,East ,Eastern Europe very poor people they tend to do better in America because they general have and believe in the nuclear family. They push their kids in school ,they have structured life at home for their children. Blaming the “Jews” for kids joining violent gangs ,using drugs ,and having children out of wedlock before they finish high school and not looking at the future or taken responsible ,morals begin in the home. This excuse for victimhood has gone on long enough ,there are good reasons that kids born from first generations parents from China and India do well in school and excel in the work force in America and it has nothing to do with a “Jewish cabal” running the world. Of course poverty pimps both black and white can make good money and have great political power(BLM ,progressive democrats ,and others)keeping black community in the cycle fatherless children ,no social structure ,devaluing education cultural , no one taking personally responsible for their life .