Found in the Archives: Refuting the “JAP Rap”
BOX FULL OF tape recordings—magnetic selves comfortable for years now on a bottom shelf near my Lilith desk. (Please don ’t judge! I recognize that this does not speak well for my officekeeping standards.) Until now, getting dustier by the week, these tapes were deal-with-them-later memorabilia intended to join their cousins as part of Lilith’s physical archive—ancient Rolodexes, press tags from conferences on women’ s issues, and files of paper letters from institutions where Lilith editors and authors gave talks, led panels on gender and Judaism, sparked controversy, and hosted the first Lilith salons. These were events where differences surfaced and surprising alignments took shape.
Every so often I’d skim our paper files, but revisiting the video tapes required negotiating with an ancient small TV crouching beside that bottom shelf. But because in mere months Lilith magazine will be marking 50 (fifty!) years of continuous publishing, it seemed wise to find out what those tapes might reveal before we packed them up to join the Lilith trove that has become a keystone of Brandeis University’s priceless collection of Jewish feminist documents.
So, with the help of Lilith’ s videographer-in-residence, intern Yulia Starostina, we finally had those dusty tapes digitized.
I was surprised at what was represented here. One of the tapes comes from CNN’ s coverage of a standing-room-only Lilith 20th anniversary panel discussion at 92Y in Manhattan. Another shows me holding forth with Oprah herself about the vileness of the JAP slur after a jerky college student wearing a suit and tie tries to claim there’s nothing Jewish in his new “JAP Rap” —which Oprah’s producers ran in its entirety. (I’d been invited to appear on the show following Lilith’ s extensive 1987 coverage of the outspoken prejudice against Jewish women then surfacing on college campuses.) When I saw parts of the newly digitized version a couple of weeks ago, and suppressed my embarrassment at the visual anachronisms (the hair! the clothes!) I felt the hopefulness and the appetite for change that these tapes embodied. And I could call forth again what it felt like to look into the camera and tell the audience that the term JAP “was a pernicious amalgam of misogyny and antisemitism.”Which I still believe, along with understanding the importance of alliances and partner-ships in working to cure the ills that as Jewish feminists we’veworked so hard to diagnose.
But what we didn’t know in the late 1980s is that we’d need more powerful antibiotics to get rid of patriarchal norms, gender bias, antisemitic tropes and sexual violence.Lilith’s staff has been rolling out on social media some snippets from these newly digitized tapes, and they capture for me a time of hopefulness, shaped by the feminist conviction that naming a harm or a problem, saying it out loud and describing its terms and its tenets, would be the sunlight needed to disinfect this persistent prejudice, so insulting, sexist, cruel, self-defeating and threatening to Jewish women.
The harms and the hopes are both very different now. Then, the unpleasantness on campuses and communities took the form of language. Now—as Jews, as women, as immigrants, as trans people, as people living in our actual bodies in our actual streets, as people eager to have choices in the lives we want to live—the threats are physical as well as verbal. Now, attacks are made not with words alone (nasty words, as anyone on social media knows) but also with lethal weapons.
Yet in this issue, with its cover proclaiming “Hope,” you’ll find ideas from Venezuela, Western Europe, Australia—and of course from Israel and North America— that demonstrate the power of language beyond polemics and its imitations, language shaping ideas and a blueprint with possibilities for a better future. I hope as you read you ’ll feel some small rush of hopefulness again.
