The King of Jewish Pride

A personal insight into Ben M Freeman's own identity-based re-empowerment

Last night it was a great bonus that I found myself reunited with my childhood best friend, the academic and now two-time author Ben M Freeman at the Jewish Museum of London in Camden. Ben was being interviewed onstage during the eve of the release of his phenomenal second work “Reclaiming Our Story: The Pursuit of Jewish Pride” which is available NOW (and makes an excellent early Chanukah gift, right Ben?)

“Reclaiming Our Story” landed in my inbox some months ago, and I had been waiting to read Ben’s thought-provoking, essential insights since he first told me about the follow-up to his first now internationally renowned book “Jewish Pride” last year. It is a book that, in Ben’s words, seeks to educate, inspire and empower. It explores the deep-seeded phenomenon of internalized Jewish hatred among our own people, and takes the stories of five individuals who have gone through an arduous personal journey from self-loathing to a reclamation of belonging and self-acceptance. It is a truly crucial tome to understanding some of the complex and emotionally difficult conversations that we have to have in our own community in order to traverse current issues of Jew hatred within and without the Jewish tribe in 2022.

(Ben interviewed onstage, Sunday October 23, 2022)

To celebrate the release of Ben’s book, he has written this extremely moving personal piece exclusively for Blacklisted about his own experiences. To quote the mighty Kelly Clarkson (who I will rarely quote in this newsletter): what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And Ben’s story will give you an insight into the making of his resilience, leadership and global impact as a voice for our people in a time of desperate need. On a personal note, the love I have for my friend of one, two, maybe three decades now… is boundless, and it has been my honor to watch Ben grow and become the force that he is in the world today. Over to Ben…

---

My Journey to Jewish Pride

By Ben M. Freeman

*TRIGGER WARNING*

Growing up, I hated myself. I knew - even though I tried to deny it - that I was gay. And I did not want to be. Being a child of the late 80s and 90s, I had absorbed all the societal homophobia that swirled around me. I thought that being gay meant my life was worth less than those of my heterosexual peers. I thought that my homosexuality was a life-sentence to live without love and without value. During these dark years, I attempted suicide multiple times. I tried to hang myself and I cut my wrists. Lying in a bath that was quickly filling up with my blood was the battle ground of my personal war with shame.

In my book, Reclaiming our Story: The Pursuit of Jewish Pride, a deep dive into internalised anti-Jewishness (released today and the sequel to my first book, Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People), I describe the experience which kickstarted my own long journey to pride  and ultimately the modern Jewish Pride movement. During one particularly violent episode of self-harm I remember standing in my bathroom and crying. This was something I never did. My attempts to hurt myself were always carried out in an almost robotic fashion. I would disassociate and I would go to town on myself. But this time was different. I stood in my bathroom and I wept. It began to dawn on me what I had become. And I could hardly believe it. What happened to the happy little boy I used to be? Where did he go? And with these questions still unanswered, I felt waves of anger rushing over me. I realised I had done nothing wrong. I was a boy and I loved other boys and for this I was being punished. I was made to feel less than. I was forced to hide my sexuality. I was forced to live a half-life. The boy I fell in love with was so traumatised by his own internalised homophobia that we were never able to realise our budding romance. We just engaged in a painful dance of flirtation, almost-but-not-quite expressions of love and oh, so much pain. For years. 

So, as I stood in my bathroom with blood dripping down my arm, the anger I felt acted as kind of an emotional salve. Over time, I began to repeat to myself - like a mantra - that I had done nothing wrong. Being gay was not wrong. I could live a happy and fulfilled life and what’s more, I deserved to. This started my own personal journey to pride. For a decade, I worked through my trauma, my pain and my internalised homophobia. I was determined to reclaim my relationship with myself. I was not going to be governed by other people’s hate. This was not a linear journey and sometimes it was a case of one step forward, two steps back. But slowly, inch by inch, I moved forward.

On the other hand, I had always been proud of being Jewish. I always felt different to the Scottish non-Jews in my High School and I felt special. I loved Israel and our culture and our food and our music and our history and, even as a child, I felt profoundly connected to all of it. Of course, I understood Jew-hate. Like so many other Jews, I don’t remember the time I first learned about the Holocaust and I would have nightmares about the Nazis. I was warned by my mother that I was an ambassador to the Jewish people and had to be aware of how I navigated the world as a Jew. I was aware that the threat of Jew-hate still stalked us. But my relationship with my Jewishness had not been defined by the wider world. I knew it was wrong. Long before I realised my homosexuality was not a crime, I felt very strongly that my Jewishness wasn’t. The world was wrong. 

This inner Jewish Pride was tested by my time at Glasgow University, where I experienced a kind of baptism by fire. Glasgow was a hotbed of Leftist Jew-hate and it was the dominant culture everywhere on campus. So, during my time there, I was faced with a choice: I could defend Jews and Israel against vicious hate or I could shrink myself to be accepted. Having already experienced the pain of hiding my true self, as you might imagine, was not even something I really considered. I had to defend myself - and our people - against left-wing post Soviet Jew-hate. I was routinely abused by my peers and my professors. My grades suffered because I wouldn’t demonise Israel, but still, I couldn’t bring myself to betray my own kind. Fast forward almost a decade and I was once again faced with the same choice. It was now 2018 and Corbynism had swept the nation. I felt sick to my stomach seeing a Jew-hater inch closer and closer to power while being exalted by the great and the good, so I had to act. And after an argument with a friend about Jew-hate on Facebook, my partner pressed me to join Twitter (to avoid anymore Facebook arguments). Strangely, joining Twitter changed my life. I joined the ranks of proud British Jews who would not shut up. Who would not sit down. And who would not shrink themselves to be palatable. These brave modern day Maccabees invited me into their ranks and together we fought to reclaim our humanity as we battled an existential threat to British Jewish life. But, as we fought non-Jewish Corbynites we also had to contend with Jews who, for a variety of reasons, decided to stand with Corbyn and against other Jews. The ‘as a Jews’ as they were known. Watching them do as I could not and betray our own people, while also taking part in endless discussions about Jew-hate brought to mind the lesson that a crying and snotty teenage Ben had learned in his bathroom: we had done nothing wrong and we had to reject the hate we faced. We were not who they said we were. But we were locked in a never ending trial accused of crimes we haven’t committed. As it did when I was a teenager, this made me angry. But this time, I wasn’t a lost isolated gay child, I was a proud gay adult who understood the work involved in defending oneself against the constant barrage of shame we are bombarded with everyday. I knew that anger - though important - wasn’t enough of a barrier. I learned that sef-isolation couldn’t save us from these feelings of shame. No, the answer, I knew, was pride. It was the only way to navigate the world without feeling less-than. 

So, I set about starting a conversation. I began tweeting about Jewish Pride and in the summer of 2019 I filmed a video with friends explaining why I felt proud to be Jewish and asking my online community what made them proud. This video went viral and has since been seen 141,000 times. Alongside educating people about historical and contemporary manifestations of Jew-hate, I used the small platform I had at the time to tweet about Jewish Pride and to spread positivity amongst Jews. Like a dog with a bone, I wanted all Jews to remember that we are more than just fighters against Jew-hate. We have inherited a rich and wonderful civilisation and we should honour, respect and cultivate it for the next generation. In 2021, I published my first book, Jewish Pride, which I have decided to turn into a trilogy. Since then Jewish Pride has become a mainstream Jewish conversation. The second part of the trilogy, Reclaiming our Story, comes out today. Of course, I know I am not the first person to ever use the phrase ‘Jewish Pride’, and Jews have been proud for thousands of years (it is why I speak about the modern pride movement). But my work, from my social media presence, to my books to my hundreds of speaking engagements all over the world, has played a pivotal role in shaping and encouraging this modern conversation. And my contribution would not have been possible if I had not already worked towards gay pride. 

I do not discuss my role in building this movement to boast or to self-aggrandise, I say it to honour the boy I used to be. My experiences as a teen were awful, and I still bear the physical scars of that pain. But, I am immensely proud of the man I have become. So proud I was able to find peace for  that lost boy and more proud that my experiences have helped inspire thousands  of Jews to go on their own journey of pride. 

Though it can be a long and difficult road, pride is actually quite simple: we just have to love our Jewishness and reject the shame imposed on us by the wider world. We have to know that what is said about us is wrong and what is done to us is unjust. We have to know that we are so much more than the crimes committed against us. Sadly, mine and many others experiences teach us though, that this is easier said than done and that truly believing all of these wonderful inspiring slogans takes real work, both as a community and as individuals. Among other things, we have to have conversations about why we may not feel proud. We have to work on solving our communal issues - like Jewish homophobia. And we have to teach pride to our children and use it to underpin everything we do.

My first book, Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People, is the manifesto of the modern Jewish Pride movement. Being an author and a leader in 2022 is remarkable because those your work has touched are able to contact you and relay their own experiences of your work directly to you. Jews from all over the world write to me to tell me how much Jewish Pride has changed their lives. They tell me they’re working on rejecting internalised hate and that they are actively working to engage more with their Jewishness and to be proud of it. And this makes my own experiences worth it.

I feel so blessed that my path has led this way. So many other LGBTQ+ people are unable to win the battle against their demons. I know I almost lost mine, but for some reason I didn’t. I don’t really know why that is. I’m not better or stronger than they were. But for whatever reason, I survived. And I am proud to be standing with all of you as we build a better world where we reject the shame of Jew-hate as well as non-Jewish impositions on our identity. Being Jewish is wonderful. We are all survivors. And we will no longer be held in the docks for crimes we haven’t committed. And just as I learned to do as a teen, we will walk free and know that we are whole just as we are.

Am Yisrael Chai