TranscriptArielle Angel: Hello and welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I’m Arielle Angel, editor in chief of Jewish Currents, and I’ll be your host for today. Today, we’re going to be talking about Chabad Lubavitch, a Hasidic movement with headquarters in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. They have been in the headlines recently. Itamar Ben-Gvir, a member of Knesset from the Jewish Power Party, recently came to the United States on his first official visit at the end of April, and there was a lot of controversy around his visit. Of course, Ben-Gvir is a very extremist figure in Israeli politics, a follower of Meir Kahane, who was labeled a terrorist by the Israeli government and very famously had a photo of Baruch Goldstein (who massacred 29 Palestinians at the Ibrahimi Mosque) hanging in his home. So, a very controversial figure, and many Jewish organizations refused to meet with Ben-Gvir, but a notable exception is Chabad, which shuttled him around different places in the US. At Yale University, an organization called Shabtai, led by the Chabad rabbi, Shmully Hecht, hosted Ben-Gvir in the name of pluralism. And Hecht said that he admires Ben-Gvir and that he promotes what he believes is best for his people, and called him a bold, resolute leader. And, of course, he spoke at 770, at Chabad headquarters, and there was a physical altercation outside of 770. Many people saw a viral video of a woman, who says that she wasn’t part of the protest, being chased down the street, assaulted, things thrown at her, and also, the crowd chanting “Death to Arabs.” Ben-Gvir also met with Sholom Dovber Lipskar in Bal Harbour, the Chabad rabbi of Bal Harbour in South Florida. So this is a real exception and a real embrace of what many American Jews feel is a beyond-the-pale figure in Israeli politics.
AA: So today to talk to me about Chabad Lubovitch and its history with Zionism and anti-Zionism (and maybe how things have been changing since October 7th) are two amazing academics: One is Shaul Magid, who teaches Modern Judaism at Harvard Divinity School, where he is also the senior research fellow at the Center for Study of World Religions. His latest book is The Necessity of Exile: Essays From a Distance. Hi, Shaul, thank you for being with us.
Shaul Magid: Thank you.
AA: And Hadas Binyamini, who teaches and writes about American history and Jewish politics at New York University, where she is a doctoral candidate in Judaic Studies and History. She researches right-wing movements and Jewish Cold War politics. Thanks so much, Hadas, for being with us.
Hadas Binyamini: Happy to be here.
AA: So I wanted to start just by asking about the history of Zionism within Chabad. Many Hasidic sects are commonly understood to be anti-Zionist for theological reasons, and I believe that Chabad is no exception. But of course, we are seeing what many people would consider a Zionist embrace, and particularly since October 7th. So I was wondering, maybe I’ll start with you, Shaul, if you could help us understand that.
SM: Yes. Thank you, Arielle. There is a really deep irony here in this whole story. I mean, as you said, most of European ultra-Orthodoxy were anti-Zionists. Chabad, in particular, the fifth and sixth Lubavitcher rebbes, Rabbi Sholom DovBer, who was the fifth, and then the Rayatz, who was the sixth, were both vehemently anti-Zionist. I mean, Rebbe Sholom DovBer, he dies at the really early part of the Zionist movement, but was one of the most anti-Zionist figures in Eastern Europe at the time. And it never really changed. I mean, I don’t think that Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, would ever have identified as a Zionist. I think that he saw Israel as a refuge for Jews; I don’t think that he viewed Israel as having any messianic value. He says explicitly, actually, messianism is going to come from America and not from Israel. And I still really maintain that Chabad is not a Zionist organization, but it is a strong land-of-Israelist organization. And its expressions of anger that come post October 7th really have less to do with Zionism and more to do with a certain kind of expression of tribal anger, and vengeance, and hatred of the other.
HB: But the relationship to the land is something that predates October 7th and also goes to Schneerson himself. So the 1967 war—Schneerson did celebrate this and did support this victory. And during the 1980s Land for Peace negotiations, he very much opposed any territorial compromise. And after Schneerson died in ’94, it does become a lot more extreme. And in ’96, Chabad has kind of a grassroots campaign for Bibi with the slogan, “Bibi: It’s good for the Jews.”
AA: I think what you’re saying is actually that part of the reason that Chabad might have been theologically opposed to Israel as a secular state does not contradict the fact that it is not opposed to a kind of religious settler ethos. And now that a religious settler ethos is essentially in power, that may erode some of the theological objections to Zionism.
SM: I think you’re right. And I think what really happened post October 7th, Chabad has really slipped into a certain kind of—and I use these words carefully—a certain kind of tribal racism that is embedded in its metaphysics.
AA: That’s a very strong characterization. I mean, just to remind our listenership, Chabad is an organization that most of them know from their outreach to secular Jews, but also in prisons and in many other places. And many people in this country are really getting their main Jewish nourishment from Chabad, as opposed to their synagogues and other kinds of things. So I just want to dig into what you’re saying here.
SM: So, let’s step back. If you take the basic theological framework of ultra-Orthodoxy and you switch it into a political register, it is a very reactionary worldview. The notion that the Jew has a special soul that non-Jews don’t have—and this is not particular to Chabad, this is really going back to the Middle Ages and the Zohar—it’s fine, in a certain way, if that exists in some ethereal ideational framework that doesn’t have any political ramifications. But if you start to actually bring that down into politics, I think what you end up getting is Kahanism, in some way. That’s why Ben-Gvir, he makes a lot of sense to a lot of Lubavitchers, because they see the world in the way that he sees them. And I think that it does precede October 7th, but something happened in October 7th that created a trauma that allowed this particular way of thinking about “us versus them,” especially in the kind of things that you hear from people from the Chabad community about Arabs.
SM: And I’m not talking about Hamas; I’m talking about Arabs. It’s nothing new, but it’s something that was not really said openly—and probably is not said openly in a Chabad house in Denver, Colorado, or in Los Angeles, right? But Crown Heights is different. When you get people together in a homogeneous environment, people say what they think in ways that they wouldn’t before. So, I do think that this is a real inflection point for Chabad. It’s very interesting. In the early 2000s, David Berger famously wrote this book about Chabad messianism and the scandal of Orthodoxy—how the Jewish world, the Orthodox world, really didn’t recognize the fact that Chabad had entered into some kind of idolatry or heresy, thinking the Lubavitcher Rebbe wasn’t dead, or he was going to be revived, and this was going to be the downfall of Chabad. The truth is, that did not happen, and it didn’t happen because I think Jews don’t really care about belief anymore in that way. I mean, who’s sitting up at night wondering whether the world was created or is eternal? I mean, those are not questions that really exercise Jews anymore. But they do care about safety and security, and they care about the state of Israel.
AA: I just want to clarify what you mean here. In Chabad, the Rebbe, the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, is commonly understood to be the messiah. And there’s a debate within the Chabad world, between the Mishichists who believe that it’s their job to proclaim the Rebbe as mashiach and outwardly embrace him as the messiah, and the anti-Mishichists, who either don’t believe that’s true or believe it but don’t think that it’s a good idea to lead with that or make that public in their dealings with the rest of the Jewish world (and the rest of the world in general).
SM: And in a certain sense, what’s happening now with Chabad is it’s actually, in some way, in a state of collapse because of Israel, not because they believe that the Rebbe is going to rise up from his grave.
AA: I mean, what you’re describing is actually the reinvigoration of Zionism in the United States after October 7th and the ways in which Chabad also, by virtue of being an outreach organization and having a lot more interaction with the Jewish community through donors—which other Hasidic sects are very insulated from, but Chabad is not because they are out there in their Chabad houses and whatnot—this is also another way of saying that the things that they worry about—safety, and the state of Israel—are the things that American Jews are obsessed with. Which is interesting because that definitely, I think, was not the intention of the Rebbe: for them to become Americans.
HB: Rather than becoming more American, I would say some of these examples to me seem like Israelization of Chabad. Especially—and maybe it’s worth saying explicitly—Chabad yeshiva students spend one year in Crown Heights going to yeshiva there. So, you basically have a cycling population of Israeli early adults, late teens, who know they’re going to be here for one year and then go back to Israel to either defer their enlistment or join the IDF. And Chabad, compared to other Hasidic groups, also supports IDF enlistment at higher rates. This is a huge controversy in Israel about Haredi enlistment to the military and Chabad—not everyone joins, but compared to other Hasidic groups, they really do, which is a way that they actually are integrating more into Israeli institutions. So, they are coming, they’re spending one year in Crown Heights—they are not as concerned about maintaining a good relationship with their neighbors; they’re not as concerned about maintaining a good relationship with the city. And this is really different than the people that aren’t outwardly saying that “Mashiach is here.” They own, technically, 770. They control the emissary system, they control the bureaucracies, and in general, they tend to take a more moderate perspective. It might still be, to leftist listeners, not the politics we would choose, but they are the ones that are apologizing after the mob chased this woman for two blocks.
AA: And also, technically, the line is that this visit from Ben-Gvir wasn’t sanctioned by the 770 leadership, in other words. Even though there was a tour by employees of 770, and even though Ben-Gvir met with Chabad rabbis who blessed him, this was not an official visit sanctioned by 770 leadership.
HB: It really just shows the official leadership losing control of 770, which is the global headquarters of Chabad. This is a sacred site for Lubavitchers; the Mishichist wing, which is associated with the youth and it’s associated with the Israelis that are spending one year, are really gaining control. And this is really similar to the rhetoric and to the social forces that developed in Israel since the judicial overhaul alongside the Mizrahi/Ashkenazi division—what Avishay Ben Haim, a Mizrahi scholar, calls First Israel and Second Israel, where the First Israel is the Ashkenazi hegemonic elite that has controlled the country and is trying to preserve its power, and the majority of the country—the Mizrahi, the periphery, the working class—are discriminated against and need to rise up, basically, and take power through immediate populist reactionary action. And it really corresponds with anti-Palestinian racism, with violence, and with misogyny. And the Mishichists/anti-Mishichists really falls along those lines, in rhetoric if not actually in socioeconomic factors.
AA: I mean, my understanding is that it is also socioeconomic; that the Israelis who are coming are generally lower down the socioeconomic ladder. These are also the people who are responsible for the story around building tunnels under 770. This is the young, radical, mostly Israeli population within 770.
HB: Yes. And then, the administration is kind of scrambling to try to apologize, to try to speak to Black religious leaders in the neighborhood, to politicians, but they have lost control. And the Israeli youth, the young men, really see—every time that official Chabad tries to minimize messianism, tries to minimize the racism or the misogyny, or dismiss the mob as a fringe—for them, this is just evidence of how elitist and cowardly and effeminate they are.
SM: There is a certain kind of anarchy that’s going on within the Chabad world, especially in Crown Heights and in Israel, where there’s nobody that’s actually calling shots anymore.
HB: Yes. And I think especially in the US, there is something similar that both Chabad and Zionist outreach activists are saying. That is: Their life is inauthentic; their Judaism means nothing. There is no future for them here if they continue to live as they are living. And so, of course, Zionists would say: It doesn’t matter if you do mitzvot and good deeds; you should go join the IDF, or move to Israel, or at least defend it on campuses. And Chabad has a different answer to what to do with this lack of meaning in life. But I think this convergence helps explain why they may see each other’s efforts as mutually beneficial.
AA: Yeah, and I think one of the reasons that Hasidic groups are interesting is because they actually didn’t need Zionism to define them. I think it’s interesting to think about why Chabad in particular would start to need something resembling Zionism, especially since the death of the Rebbe, now going on 30-plus years.
SM: I learned for a time in Crown Heights in the late 1970s, and I don’t ever remember talking about Israel. It just wasn’t a topic. And I think what we’re seeing is a very, very autocratic world, where the autocrat leaves, and no one replaces it, and nobody seems to be in charge, and nobody really has the power to regulate the kind of behavior that’s going on.
AA: I wanted to shift to something, Shaul, that you were starting to get into that I think is a very important point. The big story of the last year and a half in the United States is the campus encampments, antisemitism, the deportations of students based on allegations—false allegations—of antisemitism. And you have a Chabad house that rivals a Hillel on many, many campuses. And there is a way that—I mean, I know from my engagements with Chabad—that some of the way the Chabad interacts is geared toward bringing people in. And that actually creates a different culture in Chabad. There are certain things that Chabad doesn’t do specifically because it would turn people off; that it would make them seem not modern enough to be able to speak to a contemporary Jewish subject. That’s partially why their dress is a little bit more modern—not having long side locks or large shtreimels—than other Hasidic groups.
AA: And so, it’s very, very interesting to think how before, there would have been a lot more acceptance and a lot more willingness to table some of this stuff in order to cast a wider net among Jews. And also, the way that they’re explicitly now excommunicating Jews. I mean, this is a group of people that works with prisoners, that really is a kind of “come one, come all, as long as you’re a Jew.” And I just want to read something that comes from Shmully Hecht. Hecht circulated a Change.org petition through the Shabtai network that called for, quote, “the global excommunication of Jews who endanger the Jewish people.” And he names Peter Beinart, and Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street, and the IfNotNow co-founders, Norman Finkelstein, and also, even Yisroel Dovid Weiss of Neturei Karta, another Hasidic group. And Hecht says that they should be barred from synagogues, schools, community centers, nonprofits, weddings, and bar mitzvahs, as well as from burial in Jewish cemeteries and entry into the state of Israel. So, using the rabbinic laws around excommunication to talk about excommunicating Jewish leftists. So, I wondered if we could talk about, first of all, how this politics of shlichus, of outreach, conflicts with this politics of excommunication, and also about the history of Chabad with leftism, and why they are so strong in this moment against leftist movements.
SM: That goes back to socialist Russia. I mean, that goes back to the way in which Chabad in Russia saw the left—meaning the communists—as being the real enemy. I don’t think it’s very specific to the left in Israel. I think it’s the way in which Orthodox communities see the left as much more dangerous than even the autocratic right. But I think, as I see it from, where I sit, there’s something that’s actually quite tragic that’s happening. The Lubavitcher Rebbe—and not only him, but the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe too—really had a very complex and broad-based mission that he wanted to bring not only to Jews, but to the world. And it was messianic in intent and in purpose, but as you said, the creation of these institutions—the creation of places of resources—the inclusion, the way in which that they were willing to actually be non-judgmental of who visits the Chabad house, whether they were religious or not religious, whether they parked there on Shabbat morning or not. I mean, there was a real sense of generosity and openness as part of a project which they understood as preparing the world for the messianic age. I really feel like—and I would say this to the Chabad people—they are on the verge of destroying that legacy. I mean, that was one of the most important legacies of American Jewry in the 20th century. I really think that this tribalism that has embedded itself as a result of Israel, October 7th, is really threatening to undermine that. So it’s very interesting that Shmully Hecht is basically talking about this excommunication when that’s exactly what David Berger said about Lubavitch in the early 2000s, right? “We shouldn’t allow them in the synagogues, we shouldn’t eat their food, we shouldn’t allow them to be part of the world.” We’re talking about a certain kind of heresy hunting that’s getting introduced. And the heresy is not about religious practice or religious belief. The heresy is simply about Israel and antisemitism, and those two things have been locked in by Jonathan Greenblatt’s anti-Zionism equals antisemitism, full stop.
AA: Wait, but you really think that this is about Chabad listening to the ADL? I don’t think so.
SM: It’s not listening to the ADL. It’s using the ADL as an occasion to focus in on tapping into the fears of American Jews on questions of survival and antisemitism, and enabling Jewish identity to be moved from Yiddishkeit, in a broad sense, to a certain survivalism. And the survivalism is a very dangerous move, and I really think that the entire legacy of Chabad is really teetering at this point, because the more you hear things like that that you read from Shmully Hecht, the more you’re going to alienate many Jews who are not necessarily affiliated. Now, in a certain sense, what Shmully Hecht is saying, “They have self-alienated by being leftists.” But I think that’s a losing battle.
HB: To give an example of this, in the early months after October 7th, there was still, on social media, pictures of Jews in Palestine protests, which is maybe what we would expect continuing the Rebbe’s legacy to look like—it doesn’t matter your opinions, we’re going to find concentrations of Jews. You’re doing a Havdalah in the encampment? We’ll come and be with you. This is a way for you to connect to your Jewishness. And I think not doing that, it’s showing vulnerability, and that they feel under assault, and they have to find a new thing to anchor themselves to. And I think it also shows the movement toward the Mishichist sensibility in terms of the anti-establishment, populist rhetoric and style. Saying: No, accepting all of these Jews, even when they spit on your face or befriend antisemites, is a weak, cowardly thing to do—and we are not scared; we know what we believe, we know we are right, so we don’t need to go to these kinds of Jews anymore.
SM: It used to be—I don’t know whether it’s still the case—that Chabad would go to Burning Man. Chabad would go to the Rainbow Gathering. Chabad was going to go to any place, as Hadas said, that there were Jews. And I think that part of the mission—to frame it in a more Christian sense—part of the mission was a social gospel. I mean, Lubavitcher Rebbe was a social gospeler, right? That you basically go out and you make the world a better place, and that prepares the end time. And it seems like it’s shifting from a social gospel to a certain kind of apocalyptic messianism, where you’re just basically forcing and pushing the end through these violent means. And this is happening totally unconsciously, I think, in Chabad. It’s moving from the social gospel to the apocalyptic, and it’s driven by, I think, a combination of the centrality of Israel in the American Jewish psyche writ large and the way in which antisemitism gets weaponized as a tool of identity. And I think that there’s a very, very, very dangerous toxic mix.
AA: Shaul, you talked about how there is a basis within Chabad for this hostility to leftists; that one of the biggest enemies of Chabad was the Yevsektsiya, the Jewish wing of the Communist Party in Soviet Russia. And if you’re in Chabad, you’re celebrating, for example, with these farbrengens, with these parties, celebrating the moment where the Frierdiker Rebbe, the Rebbe’s father, was released from prison—who arrested him was the Yevsektsiya.
SM: It’s his father-in-law, not his father.
AA: Sorry, his father-in-law. And so, you are inculcated in Chabad with a narrative of a Jewish leftist betrayer, and I think that’s really important for people to understand when they see this kind of response to protesters outside of 770; when they see, also, a Chabad person pushing and kicking another Hasidic Jew from Neturei Karta.
SM: Here’s a very arresting example. And this is not Chabad. There’s a famous letter that the Orthodox community in Berlin wrote to Hitler in 1933. And in that letter, they basically said: We are willing to support you because we have a common enemy: the socialists. So now, you could say: Okay, Hitler in 1933. We didn’t really know exactly what was going to become by 1938 and 1940. But the way in which Orthodoxy is much more afraid of the left than they were of autocratic figures, who they felt like: Okay, we can deal with them. Which is why Trump is so popular in that world—because, yeah, we can deal with an autocratic figure. What we can’t deal with is a popular, populist movement.
AA: Maybe we’ll talk about the way that that’s playing out in Russia, also in Hungary, where Chabad figures are power brokers, connectors. I mean, this is a real internationalist movement. You have Chabadniks in every single country. So this actually networks them in a way that makes them also politically useful, and they’ve chosen to make themselves very politically useful to the autocratic right.
SM: I mean, Chabad is the only global Jewish movement that exists, and nothing has come close to that. I think that was basically Schneerson’s genius; he set up a global movement. It’s a phenomenal achievement to create a global Jewish movement from Buenos Aires to Moscow.
HB: And the way I understood this global befriending of any political leader and any autocrat is really, in order to support this missionary mission, you need to befriend whoever is in power because they will give you access to the Jews that live in that land. So there are many Jews in the Soviet Union and now Russia; if the leader is open to interacting with us, if we don’t have to go underground, we want to secure access to the Jews here. Now, when there’s the additional factor that, Arielle, you read, of excommunication, and maybe we don’t actually want to reach all Jews—I’m curious how that’s going to change that approach.
SM: The Lubavitcher Rebbe wrote a letter in the mid-’60s when the movement for Soviet Jewry came out and the marches started. He was against the Soviet Jewry marches because his position was: It’s best for the Jews to work behind the scenes. We don’t want to be out front. We don’t want to be marching. We want to work behind the scenes. And I think you see with what’s going on in Chabad now; they seem to have abandoned that. You literally had parades for Trump in Borough Park in 2020. You never had that before in the history of the Haredi world in America.
HB: I think another throughline between Chabad and the other Zionist American groups we’re seeing (and Jewish American groups in general)—and maybe this is a way to de-exceptionalize Chabad—is there is really a crisis of masculinity or Jewish masculinity here. And this is what Chabad shares, maybe, with Beitar.
AA: Which is a group that has emerged recently, actually in the last couple months, providing lists to various governmental bodies for deportation and has really spearheaded the most muscular and dangerous response to pro-Palestinian activism.
HB: So on campuses and in the streets, we’re seeing Chabad, similarly to Beitar and other groups, offering a way for young Jewish boys and young men to reclaim their identity as Jewish men and to do all of these exercises and all of these almost initiation processes, like going in front of the encampments alone and trying to provoke them, to then use those videos to show how antisemitic the encampments are. But I think the real audience of those things are themselves and their allies; to show “I am a brave, courageous man that can go into the dangerous zone and be brave and come out of it.” And so, even when we do see women acting politically around these issues, it’s with groups like Mothers Against Antisemitism, which is them acting in their gender role. And all of those groups are acting together to help soothe this anxiety of emasculating Jewish identity. And I think seeing the young men outside of 770, and seeing the violence, and the really intense misogyny—the people they most violently attacked were two women, and they said very violent, misogynist things to these women—we can’t ignore that this is something that is happening to young men, and of course, this is a part of the global right and young men really looking for strong men figures and being really attracted to the right. So, it’s Chabad, and it’s maybe ultra Orthodoxy, but it’s really young men.
AA: That’s a really interesting point. In the time that we have left, I really want to talk about, specifically, Crown Heights and the dynamics around Crown Heights. So obviously, there’s a long history of unrest in terms of the way that 770 sits within the neighborhood—a largely Caribbean neighborhood, even today, even despite massive gentrification. And there are ways that this does and does not fit the script in terms of these kinds of what have been, in the past, mostly racial flare ups, like with the Crown Heights riots in the ’90s. I mean, one thing that I’ll say is that this isn’t the first time that I saw “Death to Arabs” come out (in a leftist context) within Crown Heights. And in fact, we had a piece from a few years ago by Ari Brostoff, a contributing editor writing about tenants’ union work where there was a Chabad landlord, and they brought in, basically, some goons to harass a tenant who lived there, and in clashes with the tenants’ union people—that had nothing to do with Israel, this wasn’t a Palestine situation—they were chanting “Death to Arabs.” But I do think that this sense, that everything that is coming at them is antisemitism—I mean, the rest of us saw these videos and thought, “Oh my God, look at this violence perpetrated by Chabad”—but you have people within Chabad talking about what’s going on as a pogrom against them. And then, of course, there are ways that things come up that end up slipping into very thorny territory, especially because there’s a lot of frustration around questions about Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn as landlords and the tensions that those bring up. So, I do think that they do see a fair amount of antisemitism, and also they misinterpret a fair amount of anti-Zionism, and they’re in a very tenuous relationship with their neighbors. So, I was wondering if you guys could talk about that in the time that we have left.
HB: 770, which is in Crown Heights on Eastern Parkway—770 is both the administrative center and the spiritual center of Crown Heights. It’s a building that was built in the 1930s for a private Jewish doctor who, incidentally, did illegal abortions and other sketchy things in the basement where the shul is now located. And the neighborhood was mostly middle-class and Jewish. The Chabad headquarters was established there in 1940, and it has remained the spiritual and religious center of Chabad around the world since 1940. It’s a site of pilgrimage, it’s a sacred religious site, and it also makes the whole of Crown Heights a sacred site. The anthropologist Henry Goldschmidt has good quotes about how Hasidim called all of Crown Heights “the Rebbe’s house.” So really, just walking from your house to 770 to shul, you are in a sacred space. And in that sense, there is no neutral, merely political protest in front of 770. Even if your rhetoric and your posters are the most precise in avoiding any confusion between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, you, by protesting in front of 770, are entering messianic politics, and you’re entering a religious landscape. And the violent conflicts around 770—and the connection between the Crown Heights geography and Palestine geography and, really, global geography—really date to the ’60s and to the neighborhood changing after immigration reform, from middle class and Jewish to the center, as you said, of Caribbean life. Eastern Parkway is the dividing line between the center of Chabad residents, which is south, and the mostly Caribbean population, which is north of it. And again, Henry Goldschmidt has quotes where they call Eastern Parkway “the Green Line.” Chabadniks, that is. Or when they talk about going north of Eastern Parkway, they would say they’re “going up to Beirut.” And in the same way, Caribbean and Black activists, especially in anti-police violence activism in the 1970s, really saw their encounters with the police and with Chabad as part of global anti-Black racism and as part of a global pattern of white impunity, and of white supremacy, and anti-Black violence. And they also use the same anti-apartheid and global geographic metaphors to understand what’s happening in these streets.
SM: I just want to add one thing to that, as a footnote: In the mid-60s, because of the unrest in the changing neighborhoods, a bunch of Chabad men developed a group called the Maccabees. And the Maccabees were basically a civil patrol that used to go around to make sure that the people were safe. And there are scholars that make a very convincing argument that the Maccabees were basically the germ cell of the idea of the Jewish Defense League that Kahane developed in 1968. He knew of the Maccabees because he lived in Crown Heights for a short period of time, and he formed the JDL as an outgrowth of this idea of having a civil patrol, an urban civil patrol. So, there’s this weird connection that goes back from the Kahanist Ben-Gvir to Chabad that stems back 60 years. The other thing that’s important about Crown Heights is Crown Heights is also now becoming a place of liberal, progressive Jews, who are moving into Bed Stuy, which is the extension past the north of Eastern Parkway and Crown Heights. And you have all these progressive minyanim that are developing in Crown Heights, which is adding a whole different mix to the neighborhood, where it’s not just Chabad and the Caribbean population, but you have increasing numbers of leftist progressive Jews that are also living there, and I think it remains to be seen how that’s going to be negotiated.
AA: That’s a very good point. And of course, one of the people who was bloodied in the attack was an Israeli woman in a keffiyeh. So, this is exactly this clash personified. I think the one thing that I’m wondering about is the way that both sides are expanding the rhetoric to encompass Palestine. That also can be difficult or problematic, because if you’re talking about the way that Zionists are stealing land and the way that that maps onto gentrification, I think that Chabad is very sensitive to the ways that that might slip into “legitimate” antisemitism, quote, unquote. But then, of course, in terms of the way that we’re talking about Chabad as an internationalist movement with very strong support for settler politics—I mean, Chabad is fundraising for the Chabad in Hebron, which is Palestinian land that a small group of settlers have very much hijacked and made unlivable for the Palestinian population there. So, it’s very tricky.
SM: Yeah. I don’t know how Chabad can excise itself from this political morass that it’s gotten into. It’s so deep into it at this point, and I think the decision to invite Ben-Gvir was a real exercise of a kind of in-your-face-ism to any of those American Jews—and many of the American Jews who would question the legitimacy of the radical right politics in Israel today. It’s not clear whether this is going to cash out for them. I’m not convinced that it will. I guess we’ll see. I don’t know if anybody’s actually in control, making the decisions. I think that’s part of the problem.
HB: Yeah, and I think it really emphasizes the Chabad movement in an internal war against themselves. I can just imagine the administrators figuring out who they need to talk to now to apologize, and which religious leaders they should talk to to try to calm the tensions. Because there are people who realize they are going to live in Crown Heights for a long time. This is going to remain the global and spiritual headquarters of Chabad, and they want to have a good relationship with their neighbors. That does exist there, and I hope they figure it out.
AA: Well, thank you, Hadas and Shaul, for this conversation. I’ve definitely learned a lot from it. I really, really appreciate you both coming on. This has been another episode of On the Nose. If you liked it, share it and subscribe to Jewish Currents, JewishCurrents.org. Thanks a lot. See you next time.
