Full Name: Haley Jennifer Joy Pessin
Bio: Haley Pessin is a junior at Williams College in MA majoring in French and History. She thoroughly enjoys reading books, attending the theatre and classical music concerts, and consuming gelato.
You identify as a “JewMaican.” Would you explain what led you to identify this way?
Well, my father kinda made up the term. Since I was younger, he told me I had the best of both worlds. I was always told I was biracial, and I was always taught about both sides of my family–historically, culturally. So for me, even though, as an atheist, I don’t practice any religion, and I don’t look as a typical Jew, I couldn’t see identifying any other way. It would be to deny my heritage.
(photo courtesy of Haley Pessin)
You told me you don’t ever identify as a Black Jew. Why is biracial a more accurate way to see yourself and represent yourself outwardly?
Basically, it’s for the same reason I call myself Jewish and Jamaican. Calling myself just Black or just Jewish or a Black Jew would be to deny one over the other. A lot of people just assume that I’m Black, or they don’t have any idea who or what I am.
Both sides of my heritage have a history of slavery and resistance, which is something I’m proud of. And both sides have given me cultural experiences that i think make me who I am. Like, we have a joke in my family that if you know a Jew for 10 minutes, you’ll know their whole story, but if you knew a Jamaican for 10 years you’ll know absolutely nothing about them.
It’s also political, why I identify that way. It’s more recently a political thing for me.
How so?
Because when people place a label on me without knowing me, it’s not just from a misconception, it’s a reflection of social norms. And so my very existence in a way is sort of subversive. My parents are a multiracial couple, and that’s still not expected or acceptable in society. For example, when we go to a restaurant the waiters and other customers don’t assume we’re a family because they can’t conceive people like us living together.
Talk about how your siblings identify. Do they all call themselves JewMaican?
My siblings all identify differently, which goes to show how much the norm fails to account for diversity, and how idenitiy is malleable to your experiences. My siblings didn’t grow up in the same household. In their household, their mother was Black. One, my sister, more identifies as Black, and one, my brother, more identifies as white. My sister even joined a Black sorority. But we all identify as Jewish, even though our overall identities are different.
Unlike them, I grew up in a family with both Jewish and Carribean cultural influences. Our Jewish side is where we all came together. We all celebrate Chanukah and Passover. We all identify as ancestrally and culturally Jewish.
Are they involved in activism of any sort or are you the giraffe of the family?
Yes, and no. We’re all involved in different types of activism, I’d say, which in a weird way reflects our identities a little bit. My sister, who identifies as black, has a lot more faith in the system and sort of in a way, represents in her mind Black people who made it, who are actually are pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. She works in the juvenile justice system.
I’m probably the only one that is very pro-Palestine and is radical. They’re not so much radical at all. So the giraffe would be me.
Speaking of giraffes, when did you begin to get active in Palestine solidarity and what inspired you to do so?
I became involved in Palestine solidarity about a year ago. First, I was already in an organization that was doing Palestine solidarity work, the ISO [International Socialist Organization]. But I’d never personally been involved. It was something I’d always understood, not in a who’s-right-who’s-wrong sort of way, but in an anti-imperialist context. I didn’t know as much about the situation primarily in the occupation or in Israel. I didn’t know about the apartheid system, I didn’t know about Israel’s racist laws. All I knew was that Israel advances U.S. foreign policies, and I was against that.
The reason I got involved originally was because of a group on my campus, Students for Palestinian Awareness. They had been prevented from speaking openly on the issue of the occupation. They had their signs torn down when they tried to have meetings. There was even an altercation when they tried to pass out fact-sheets during the annual Israeli Independence Day event. Several of them received racist emails and Facebook messages. I knew it was something that our administration didn’t want talked about. It was so censored, the group could barely do anything on campus. So it became an issue of who would their advocates be when there were so few students who knew about the issue, and so few administrators or students willing to support them.
And then I had the opportunity to hear [Palestinian civil rights leader] Omar Barghouti speak and I bought his book, “BDS” ["Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights"].
At the time, I was also in a class on the Middle East in which people were really polarized on the issue, so I felt the need to learn more about it. I didn’t have all the facts one way or the other.
Once I actually learned what was going on and realized how much was being concealed or made into a taboo subject–especially at my school–I was so shoked and disgusted by the aparthdeid system and how many people were dying as a result of the occupation, as well as the fact that it was all talked about as an Israeli defensive strategy, rather than reality of Israel as an aggressor.
What really convinced me most was understanding the dynamic of the oppressor and the oppressed. Because if you have a situation in which the odds of who holds power are stacked against the oppressed, you automatically have a situation of violence and instability. You can’t say that the violence and resistance of the oppressed is the same as that of the oppressor because the reason that those conditions exist is of a fundamentally unjust state. All this pushed me to learn more about it.
It even came to the point where my own father, who was pro-Israel at the time, came to see cracks in the justification for the Israeli state being in the interest of Jews. For him, it was after the flotilla attacks and when he and I began talking more about the situation.
You talked about organizing on campus and the difficulties faced there. There’s been talk among Students for Justice in Palestine circles across the country about the first national conference coming up next month [at Columbia University in New York City]. What do you see as the potential for organizing outside campus with other Palestine solidarity activist groups?
It’s much easier when that happens because, rather than working in isolation, you’re working within a national movement with greater resources and more experienced activists. The benefit of the conference will be sharing experiences with other organizers and creating connections with a national movement.
You sound excited.
Very. This is one of the most exciting things that’s happened in a long time. I think it’s going to be a major milestone for campus organizing in the U.S. and what comes out of this conference in terms of organizing and solidarity in the U.S. can be very significant.
When I was talking with your dad he told me he used to be a pro-Israel Zionist. Do you think your involvement in Palestine solidarity had something to do with your dad coming around into what might be called post-Zionism?
Definitely. Because we used to get into heated debates about the issue. He considers himself very left, so I was surprised to hear him talking about the situation almost exclusively from a Zionist perspecteve. The argument was that the Jews never had anywhere to go. And if there was ever a Palestinian state, then there would be more violence against the Jews. He didn’t get that the none of this should justify the oppression of Palestinians.
But also, him coming around was not just because of me, but because of Israel’s own actions. Israel was making it impossible for him to believe what he had been saying before, that it was in the interest of Jews to support the state.
In July my father and I went to a Bar Mitzvah and we were both very surprised to hear one of the songs they were singing, which described peace in Israel. Because, if the interest of Jews is really peace, then everyone has to be opposed to what the State of Israel is doing. What Israel is doing is a barrier to what everyone wants, which is peace.
You are a socialist. Would you talk about your view of a future society and in what ways Palestine solidarity is relevant to that?
Well, any part of the world where oppression exists, it also exists on a class basis. It’s easier for the U.S. and Israeli governments and the small minority of profiteers they represent to perpetuate foreign policies that increase their profits when there is a scapegoat to point to as inferior or violent or less democratic.
These justifications make it easier to conceal the ways in which they exploit their own citizens. This is a thing that is most evident today in the context of an economic crisis where the lack of jobs and cuts to vital public resources ought to be a bigger concern than fighting wars that offer virtually no benefit to the vast majority of US and Israeli citizens.
In fact, it would be impossible for our governments to continue such exploitative policies without such a high degree of oppression and divide-and-conquer strategies to sever links between people who might otherwise mutually oppose them. This is why such seemingly benign actions as peaceful protest and the smallest degree of resistance are called out as terrorism in the mainstream media and repressed with such brutal and often violent force, particularly at a time when public opinion is shifting against Israel’s denial of rights to Palestinians.
So, as a socialist, I feel it is imperative to be in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation because we can’t expect to win a society that provides for everyone’s basic needs, rather than the exorbitant profits of a few, if we don’t start by challenging the racism and oppression that are barriers to winning a more equitable and just society and on which capitalism ultimately relies.
Gabriel Matthew Schivone is a Chicano-Jewish American, founder of Jewish Voice for Peace at the University of Arizona and co-founder of UA Students for Justice in Palestine. He is also a volunteer with migrant justice organization No More Deaths/No Más Muertes. He currently attends Arizona State University and can be followed on Twitter via @GSchivone. His column, Other Voices, appears here on alternating Mondays.
