Erasing Esther Perel
Where should we begin... with the obliteration of Perel's Judaism?
The New York Times published a recent piece by Sarah Lyall about the celebrity couple’s therapist Esther Perel. We get a well-written PR story about Perel’s remarkable career — no opposing views, no clinical critiques, yes mentions of products, TED talks and podcasts. It’s quality clickbait about an interesting celebrity.
Lyall declares the origins of Perel’s strategy for erotic thriving comes from her attitude about survival, that in recovery from hardship one can opt to flourish. This survival instinct stems from:
…her childhood among Holocaust survivors — among them her parents, Poles who met each other the day their camps were liberated — in Antwerp, Belgium.
I can’t be the only person to take a long, long pause after reading this. To not differentiate the political nationalities of being Polish with the reality of being a Polish Jew in World War II is to erase history in general and Jews in particular.
This happens all too often in mainstream journalism: Judaism is an inconvenient truth, or better yet, doesn't exist at all.
It’s also a call back to when Bernie Sanders declared his parents as Polish immigrants during the 2016 campaign trail and de-Judaized his identity. At least he did that to himself. When it happens in the country’s most important news source, the impact is wide and ineluctable.
Perel is Yiddish for Pearl. Esther is a popular Jewish girl’s name, named after Queen Esther in a later book of the Hebrew Bible. More on her later. Culturally savvy readers will assume a woman named “Esther Perel” is most likely an Ashkenazi Jew. Why does Lyall obscure this in a piece that mentions the Holocaust? It’s obvious from a Jewish perspective what’s lost in eradicating Jewishness, but what’s gained by the journalist? Does it make Perel more relatable to non-Jews by having her identity substituted for something more anodyne?
Does the writer not understand that Judaism isn’t simply a Western religious belief system, it’s an ethnicity and civilization with major subgroups in Europe (Ashkenazi, a name from a biblical northern kingdom), the Middle East (Mizrahi, the word for “Easterner” in Hebrew) and Africa (Beta Israel, meaning “House of Israel”) among others in India and beyond?
Even if Lyall reduces Judaism to only being a creed and not a people, how can ignoring that inform a story of a therapist whose work focuses on identity and belief?
That all this gets a pass from an editor makes the bigger point. Denying the Perel family their ethnicity isn’t a reporter’s mistake, it’s a system of Jewish erasure in the national discourse.
Let me back up. For decades, most stories about a celebrity Jew describe their parents as Jews, but never themselves as Jewish, as if Judaism was some uncomfortable factor better left to the past, not to be embraced or even acknowledged as a current identity. Way too uncomfortable for the majority culture.
The articles usually say something like, “Mel Brooks, the son of Jewish fishmongers…” It’s rarely the more accurate, “Mel Brooks is Jewish, same for his parents, the fish were… gefilte.”
And… I’m no Mel Brooks, but what’s changing now is that Lyall’s piece doesn’t give an oblique nod to Perel’s parents’ identity, she obliterates it. This is not bad journalism. It’s a sign of how malignant journalism can be when it encounters Judaism. Now we don’t even get embarrassment. Judaism vanishes.
More impactfully, eliding the Perel’s family Jewishness brings the New York Times within an elbow rub of Holocaust denial: if Perel’s Jewish parents are now Poles, and there isn’t a reference to Judaism anywhere in the piece, then perhaps the Holocaust is what Whoopi Goldberg said it was in an London Times interview, that it’s “not about race.” It was just a random violent spasm that happened maybe to net a few Jews. Possibly?
Like the New York Times piece, Goldberg removes Judaism from the picture of not a single family, but from history.
After the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial & Museum, the American Jewish Committee, Holocaust survivors, Congresspeople and more called Goldberg out, she issued an apology. In 2022. Breaking news to the Times.
At least it took Goldberg a convoluted interview to blunder her way into denialism. Lyall removes Jewishness from the Perel family and one of the worst traumas of the 20th century in a sentence.
Later, we’re told that Perel studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The “I” word isn’t mentioned, nor its impact on Perel — a child of Holocaust survivors who earns a Bachelor’s degree in the new state of Israel. Surely being in a Jewish country after the Holocaust make a mark on a therapist whose career is rooted in flourishing despite duress?
We’ll never know.
We do learn her husband’s name is Jack Saul, a clue for those attuned to finding obscured truths, but that’s it.
A cursory Google search finds an article in Hadassah, a Jewish women’s magazine:
Being Jewish, Perel says, is another essential part of her identity: “You can’t know me without it.”
But in the New York Times, you can’t know it with her.
This isn’t only about the Times. It’s a marker of a greater trope. The Times is an institution I rely on and subscribe to and argue with like an old friend. I wouldn’t recognize the world without it. I’m asking it to recognize me in the world, too.
What I find worse in many ways is that there’s an erasure of Jewishness in a media landscape that strives to acknowledge and valorize marginalized groups, sometimes performatively, sometimes genuinely.
Editorial fiat after the Black Lives Matter movement elevates a capital “B” for Black people, which does little to reduce systemic racism, but feels like a vital recognition that Black people are indeed a community deserving of recognition and respect. Where brown people fall into this I don’t know, and what about whites who also seem like a group....
Likewise, trans people, trans rights, trans healthcare, trans politics and trans identity are covered on a near daily basis in the New York Times. (I checked.) Ramadan holidays recipes are shared. This is fairly new for mainstream news organizations. Highlighting marginalized groups should be applauded, but only if it's inclusive. Because when it’s selectively applied... What’s going on? Why don’t Jews count in the liberal world view that wields inclusion like a knife?
The nuance here is that Jews are often in the news; we are often the news makers ourselves, but it’s almost always in the context of assimilation and a “happens to be Jewish” formula, which is the grammar of discomfort.
I promised a reference to Queen Esther, the biblical star of the Purim holiday. To some this is an obvious connection between what Queen Esther has to hide about herself, and what journalism buries about Esther Perel, the Holocaust and Jewish identity.
Esther isn’t actually a Jewish name. It’s an ancient Persian derivation from the god Ishtar. It’s the assimilative cover a young woman Hadassah takes on to survive as a Jewish Israeli refugee in ancient Persia.
While occluded, she soon rises to society’s female pinnacle as queen to the emperor. But when the world around her is threatened with annihilation by anti-Jewish forces, she drops her mask of survival, declares her identity and risks utter destruction. It’s this very bravery that saves her and her people.
Biblical heroics that rescues an entire race is a high bar for a news story to clear. I'd settle for a noun.