This piece was a reaction to a virulent argument in the Israeli Kenesset when the word, "racist" was thrown
back and forth in anger. The Oxford dictionary tells us that the word "racist" was first used in 1932 by Eastman in his translation of Trotsky's "History of the Russian Revolution: "This brief comment completely finishes off not only the old philosophy of the slavophiles but also the latest revelations of a racist! And in 1934, H.G. Wells in his "Experiment in Autobiography" writes about himself as a child, "So much for the Hitlerite stage of my development, when I was a sentimentalist, a moralist, a patriot and a "racist" and describes himself as a pasty-faced little English Nazi".
Leave that Word Alone
I don't like it
Just like I don't like
The word Nazi.
It should be blotted out
Erased
Stamped out
Before it comes alive
metamorphosed!
No, I don't like it -
the word - racist-
a mutant
born of Hitler.
It cannot become a word
For a Jew to use
Against each other.
Let it abort -
Not grow -
Asphyxiated by
Its hell,
The slaughtering of
The Holy Ones
Its infamy.
Let it be silent
In its "unholy of unholies"
Let's not belittle them
By using this obscene word
That held them captive
- and ensnares us -
For paltry extravagance,
For reaction to facile prejudice
For anger's quick catharsis,
Making their struggle
Their suffering
Light
Trivial
Leave that word alone
In its solitary odium
Unwanted
Unused
Leave that word alone
Undiluted by new meanings
Leave it what it is
The tombstone of six million.
