Signaled Virtue

The Pink Peacock was a Jewish anarchist, anti-Zionist, Yiddish-speaking café which opened during the pandemic and closed last month.

It’s tempting to think of this experiment as another silly little eccentric leftist thing, with a bunch of silly little eccentric leftist ideas put into one basket. But closer examination reveals a coherent ideology unifying the common threads.

Much as any Jew’s support for or opposition to Zionism is inextricably linked to their perception of Jewishness and Judaism, so too was the Pink Peacock’s anti-Zionism rooted in its founders perception of Judaism. We can get clues about the owner’s perceptions of Jewish identity from their interviews with the press (they note their opposition to Zionism stems from anarchism and their belief that the Jewish state is an ineffective bolster of Jewish people), but more notably from their extremely pronounced embrace of Yiddish. They even mention that Yiddish anarchists were their main influences.

Yiddish was the language of the Ashkenazim (European Jews) until the establishment of Israel revitalized Hebrew, which coincided with the end of the Holocaust. It continues to be the language of the ultra-Orthodox (an unfortunate term, given how deeply some of these groups deviate from Orthodox Judaism in their repressiveness and cultlike mannerisms) and/or Haredi populations. Why, then, did the authors (who note their dedication to queerness and had a transgender library in their café) embrace the language of the least-representative and most-homophobic section of the Jewish population, in addition to the language’s symbolism of a repressed and witless European Jewish people?

The answer they give is that it is in homage to the Yiddish anarchist tradition. They also note in an interview:

With regards to the Jewish stuff, it’s important to us to be accessible to people who might not feel welcome in other Jewish spaces. We have a big focus on de-assimilation. We’re very welcoming to people who don’t have traditional Jewish educations or haven’t been participating in Jewish life, but are interested now.

Their use of the term “de-assimilation” is a beautiful Freudian irony. There is no larger symbol of assimilation in Jewish culture than the languages Jews adopted at the behest of their host nations. Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish, and other languages are the embodiment of Jewish assimilation into host nations. There is no larger symbol of de-assimilation than the assertion of an independent Jewish culture, language, and space that is the modern State. The Pink Peacock wants us to believe it was a force against assimilation, yet it exclusively championed assimilation for its community.

I’m not saying Jewish groups should not accept assimilated Jews. What I am saying is that in order for these groups to de-assimilate Jews, they have to actually de-assimilate them. Encouraging assimilation in multiple ways is a poor job of doing that.

Another gem from the interview:

I think it speaks to a trend towards de-assimilation among Millennials and Zoomers, a recognition that we don’t benefit from assimilation in the way that our parents and grandparents did.

Your grandparents were slaughtered like pigs for assimilating rather than fleeing. Your parents confronted antisemitism more than you ever have. I could probably make a “anarchists are anarchists because they haven’t experienced the real world” joke but that would gloss over the historical irredentism and cultural self-rejection in this sentence. But it does help the founders mentally justify their own assimilation within the modern Western left.

Another irredentist wordbite:

Learning our ancestral language is an act of de-assimilation and antifascism.

Yiddish is not your ancestral language. Yiddish is the German language with extra steps. It is a cousin of the language spoken by the guys who fried your ancestors. Hebrew is your ancestral language; it is literally the language your ancestors created.

Also, while these guys don’t mention it, and while it doesn’t apply to them because they’re already anarchists, Zionism is fundamentally socialist. Social Zionism was the philosophy of Israel until Likud came into power after the Second Intifada. It isn’t surprising or even unexpected that the State has been in decline ever since. Likud and its allies court the ultra-Orthodox in Israel, who overwhelmingly speak Yiddish and cloister themselves in their own neighborhoods. They are the definition of European assimilation; they reject Israeli (self-determined) culture at every turn. It is not surprising that their political clout has damaged Zionism; they aren’t Zionist at all. The most vocal anti-Zionists come from these groups! It’s not a coincidence that their control of government and lack of adherence to the original Social Zionist vision of the founders of the State has weakened it.