Mina Kupfermann

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David Hirsh
When they are enraged at having to live in the ordinary world

When they are enraged at having to live in the ordinary world, people who feel they deserve the womb-comforts promised by nostalgia, and who can't become the grown-ups of their memories who just lived and had no use for Eden; they want to look upon the face of the selfish, who block the road for us all, to the good life. Antisemitism is when somebody makes the effort to reconstruct the face of the Jew from the fragments of antiquated tropes they find still lying around in the sludge at the bottom of the collective unconscious. They resonate, they are plausible, they make sense of everything. And that new old mask is smeared into the faces of Jewish men and women and they are made the enemy, the key to history and they are cast out.

Maya Amrami became the Israeli essence of evil, for ratios and pile-ons of the Instagrammers, good young people, who said she murders children and lusts for their blood, that she denies evil and uses her banal, sophisticated reason to defend genocide, but the innocent hold onto their morality. How can we not? Maya internalised what was said about her and she worked self-portraits of the inhuman golem that she had been made. Her art teacher saw the truth of her work and asked why she can't re-frame "for the other side" because then she would make it as an artist.

Audiences at the National Theatre and the Royal Opera House, the '68ers who can afford the tickets, nostalgic for rebellion, are the community of the good. Intersectionality is taken to mean having good opinions in every dimension, for fear that righteous perfection crumbles. But what now? The adults, their children, supposed to protect the boundaries, were not taught where they are or why they exist.

Benzi Brofman went to Re'im to paint live, at a trance scene event, but now he paints dead, reconstructions of memory, imagination, grief; engagements with people who were there, who will not dance again.

Jews are made homeless when waves of violence against their cousins are trivialised, denied and justified, as they were against their grandparents. They are squeezed out of communities of understanding and communities of critique. They have to create in relation to the world because they are not allowed to create in relation to safe, validating, communities of their peers.

Mina Kupfermann's Witness layers meaning upon meaning in ways that swirl together into an assailing and disorienting emotional impact. I see in it the quotidian, ostensibly trivial, forms that antisemitism takes as it quietly works its way into collective and hitherto safe value systems, until suddenly it appears as a formidable fact of the thinking of the people, and then the institutions, around us.

Text by David Hirsh, Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London and Academic Director of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.