Transcript

Arielle 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. So today, we’re going to be talking about something very difficult, and we’ll talk in-depth about what makes this a difficult conversation. We’re talking about antisemitism, and not just the specious kinds of antisemitism or claims of antisemitism that we often talk about on the podcast. But what happens when there is antisemitism? We know that antisemitism rises the more Palestinians are killed by Israel. And of course, because we’re in the middle of this genocidal assault on Gaza with tens of thousands dead, it stands to reason that there is a reaction to that and that some of those reactions take antisemitic forms. To talk about this, I have Shane Burley and Ben Lorber, both contributors to the magazine on antisemitism and also the authors of a new book, Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism. Shane is also the author of Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance and Surviving the Apocalypse and Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It. Ben works as a senior research analyst at the social justice think tank Political Research Associates, researching antisemitism and white nationalism.

AA: Hi, Shane. Welcome to the show.

Shane Burley: Hey, thanks so much for having me,

AA: Ben, it’s great to have you here.

Ben Lorber: Yeah, great to be here.

AA: I just wanted to start by talking about what makes this conversation difficult. I thought maybe, I would start with an anecdote of something that happened to me two weeks ago, which was that I attended (virtually) a Zionist event that was a satellite event of the DNC, which featured people from the Office of Civil Rights and the Department of Education and Dean Chemerinsky from Berkeley Law School, as well as a student from an Oregon university, who basically recounted a story in which she was working in the office of the President and students from the encampment came protesting, chanting Intifada and From the River to the Sea, and did a die-in, and then said that Jewish students were calling up the office of the President and calling her personally (she worked in the office of the president) and saying: We can’t leave the building, We’re afraid. Nowhere in this conversation did they ask what those slogans meant to the people who were chanting them. Also, nowhere did they ask the most salient question: Was anyone blocking the exit of the Jewish students? It seems that, considering it was just a die-in, that that wasn’t actually happening, that we’re just dealing with the feelings of the Jewish students.

AA: After that, you had Catherine Lhamon from the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education saying that they are going to enforce Title VI—which is about harassment of people on identity grounds—based on the feelings of these students. I think we’re going to see a lot of crackdowns on campuses—we already are, even though the semesters have almost barely started—based on the feelings of Jewish students that they are experiencing antisemitism. I just want to name that and put that on the table right away. How difficult it is within this environment where antisemitism is so completely drained of meaning by these kinds of very punitive and very off-base accusations—let’s start there. What does it mean to talk about antisemitism in this environment?

BL: Shane and I have encountered these questions a lot. What does it mean to talk about antisemitism during a genocide? Is it a distraction? Is it inherently a distraction? I would say that defenders of Israel’s genocide often do intend to use antisemitism accusations as a distraction from Israel’s genocide. And I think there’s a certain structural philosemitism built into the West, where Jewish feelings are paid more attention. Jewish trauma is given more airtime. Concerns about antisemitism, real or imagined, are given more airtime. Alongside that, there’s obviously a massive amount of anti-Palestinian racism in the West, where the victims of the genocide are not given airtime. The demand of Palestinian students not to have their university fund the corporation dropping bombs on their families is not given airtime. We even saw that this weekend, with the massive attention given to the tragic murder of the six Israeli hostages and almost no attention given to the 47 Palestinians who were also killed that day. So, this is just a structural problem of the terrain we’re working on. But, ultimately, I think our approach is that we still need to talk about antisemitism in a principled way. As leftists, it doesn’t inherently distract altogether. There’s ways that we can intervene in the conversation to sharpen our analysis, especially because antisemitism is real, and some does show up these days.

AA: I don’t want to leave this quite yet, in terms of: How do we talk about it? One of the things that I wondered about when you were writing your book—and one of the things that we face at Jewish Currents when we are thinking about how to talk about antisemitism—is the question of: You want to support your argument that this is a phenomenon that exists, and it’s very hard to gather evidence because to do so is to indict people who it may be considered punching down. I think a lot of the examples that I would bring on this podcast are people with very public platforms that can kind of hold their own. But it’s very, very difficult when you’re going after leftist movements that are POC-led. How do you manage the risk? Because, of course, Jewish organizations and Jewish individuals have more power in this context, left-wing or not. When we say that antisemitism exists, there is a reaction. This is like a story that people wanna cover. So we know that we’re kind of drawing negative attention, and also, we don’t wanna be engaging in left-punching. So how did you think about how to talk about antisemitism in that particular way?

SB: Yeah, I think one of the first things to recognize is that, even if we’re talking about antisemitism that invokes Israel or Zionism, we are most often talking about the far right. So we are most often talking about these far-right conspiracy theories, white nationalist discourse. This is part of the problem of the way that the ADL and other organizations talk about this. They may project this onto the left, but when you actually look at the data and you look at incidents, you look at where the rhetoric is coming from, it is more often coming from the Goyim Defense League or Patriot Front than it is coming from campus protests—overwhelmingly so. I think it’s important to put it in context that this kind of antisemitism does show up, and it shows up mostly on the far right. But I think the problem ends up being that there usually is a flattening for how people confront antisemitism. You know, if the Goyim Defense League does it, we have to intervene immediately, and if it happens on the left, we’ll confront it just as forcefully. But it’s actually different communities. People operate differently. There’s different assumptions being made, and so you should try to adapt as best as you can.

SB: I think if you’re talking about the organized left when these things happen, I think there’s a gradient about how to deal with that. On the one hand, I think if you’re at a campus protest and someone has a problematic sign, most often, it’s best to talk to them, talk to organizers, work that out, and create a long-term system to deal with this. Basically, train people on these issues, have conversations about what this means—that, overwhelmingly, is going to be more successful than public callouts. I think it’s a little bit different when we’re talking about huge public social media figures, or public activists, or celebrities when they’re going into explicitly antisemitic directions. So, for example, referencing the Talmud, which I’m sure we’ll talk about—that works a little bit differently. I think in that way, the question is more often: How dangerous is this actually for the space, and what are the long-term consequences of letting it go unchallenged? I think we always are negotiating that. And that doesn’t mean accepting things. This doesn’t mean looking the other way, but it looks at what is going to be the actual most productive way of dealing with this. And particularly, if we acknowledge that the left is a space that’s dedicated towards building solidarity and confronting racism and systemic injustice, we should assume that there can be movement there.

BL: Yeah, I usually think about it in terms of: If an incident has happened, is there anything that I could add on that would be constructive, that wouldn’t just add to the pile on? If I do speak out about real antisemitism, could it have negative consequences for actual organizers? Are people getting death threats? Would it tie back to vulnerable movements or organizations? Is there a way that I can speak about it broadly but without just drawing more fire on vulnerable organizers? It’s hard to strike that balance. But I think there’s space, ultimately, to weigh in on a broad level about movement analysis. Because, again, if the left doesn’t put forward our own analysis of what antisemitism is, how it’s connected to structures of oppression and how we fight it through building relationships and through solidarity, we just leave that terrain open for all the right-wing Hasbara accounts—Stop Antisemitism, the ADL—to say: Look, here’s proof that the left is systemically antisemitic; here’s proof that antisemitism is eternal; here’s proof that it’s always going to return, and we only need a strong Israel to keep us safe. So, I think the way to intervene is to, one, stress your solidarity with Palestine and stress your opposition to weaponization and avoid naming particular names or organizations if you think it will damage them. But, ultimately, to still put forward an analysis that can really capture this conversation from the right and put it on our terms.

AA: The other side of it is not just the reaction from, like, the ADL, and the way that the right-wing and Jewish Hasbara organizations get in on the action. It’s also about, I think, Jews that we want to bring over to our side, and the ways in which—if there’s a sense that the left cannot address some of the things that they see and hear in movements, that they can’t stay in these movements. Ultimately, when I think of my role at Jewish Currents, it’s to keep Jews in these movements and strengthen the commitment of Jews to a project of collective liberation. And that becomes very difficult to do.

AA: I think about something that Rafael Shimunov (who’s an activist and sometimes columnist) said recently, to your point, Shane, about how most of the antisemitism that we see, statistically, is on the right. And Raf is saying, even if a very small minority is on the left, it’s incumbent upon us on the left to address it. And he said: “I often feel raising antisemitism in a time of genocide may feel disproportional to what is needed in the moment, but I must remind myself that it is critical to end genocide; we cannot end genocide by leaving a bomb inside the coalition working to end genocide.” And he says: “I’m sick of talking about antisemitism. I literally hate it. I hate speaking about it more than anything, because it makes me feel like I’m centering us Jews in the middle of bigger problems. But I have to constantly remind myself, this is a bomb. We cannot ignore it.” To think about antisemitism as a kind of spoiler on the left is also another thing that we have to think about because it has historically played that role.

BL: I don’t think most of us necessarily need to weigh in every time a video circulates of, like, one person at one protest saying “Go back to Poland” or whatever. But if our movements don’t address a pattern, if and where it exists, it doesn’t only alienate Jews—I think it also alienates broader segments of progressives and even liberals in America that are otherwise very supportive of a ceasefire, very supportive of ending the genocide. But they might see this inconsistency. They might see the reticence of parts of our movements to name this stuff as hypocritical or as a blind spot. Of course, it’s not the only reason, right? Some of these folks are uncomfortable with the word genocide. Some of these folks have residual Zionism they’re still working through. But I think our task right now is to win as broad support in the American public as possible for ceasefire, arms embargo, ending the genocide. I think being consistent is really indispensable for that.

SB: As we were doing the book, and as I was doing articles around the book, I don’t think I interviewed anyone that didn’t have a clear story of antisemitism in a left space. This was actually something that was pretty universal, but it’s often incidental. And I think it’s worthwhile to detach what we’re actually demanding away from these incidents because they aren’t always correlated. People have a lot of bad ideas in social movements. There’s a lot of uneven consciousness, and that says very little about the movement for ceasefire.

AA: In other words, there are things worth addressing because they feel like they’re part of a core pattern, and then there are things that are just random people saying random things, and we need to be able to pick battles in that regard.

SB: The worst sign, the worst phrase has little to do with our demands for a ceasefire. Like those kind of inflection points don’t change the fact that our demands remain. But I think, also, it’s a pretty clear sign that there’s something faltering in analysis. I mean, one of the core features of antisemitism is that it’s not true. It’s a story about power that isn’t accurate. And so when people are bringing in these sort of false narratives or are relying on conspiracy theories, things have gone off the rails in terms of where our demands are. And there’s a really critical point that we’re at, where we have to have a laser focus on how to get this done. And so I think that is also an important intervention, allowing those things in, and I think people are nervous about confronting that, because they don’t want to break the coalition. They don’t want to pull away from populist energy. But if that energy is moving us away from actually reaching the goals, then I think that actually creates a crisis in the movement.

AA: Can you give an example of that? Because I think we’re going to move now into talking about some of the kinds of things that are circulating.

SB: I mean, there was a couple of big social media moments over the last month. One was these retweetings of several memes about the Talmud and trying to trace particular IDF crimes to very vulgar restatements of quotes from the Talmud. It should go without saying most of these were manufactured or taken out of context, or the people reading them didn’t really understand what was actually being said there. But that ends up shifting our conversations about the effects of Western imperialism, colonialism, to a very Jewish religious-centric one, which misunderstands how those core systems work. Because we’re not talking about something that’s just uniquely Jewish in Israel, right? We’re talking about a whole system of colonialism that’s taking control in the Middle East and dispossessing Palestinians and other folks. And so, when we move away from looking at systems of power, and then we get into this very Jewish-focused religious language argument, we mistake how to confront that. This also gets to the use of Zionist Occupation Government or Zionist Occupied Government, which was brought up by a few prominent social media accounts on the left, repurposing a sort of neo-Nazi term. And again, that moves us into a conspiratorial understanding of where the power is controlling the effects of the US support for Israel. It’s mistaking the relationship, and therefore, we kind of lose our hold on how to confront power.

AA: You’ve named three, I would say interlocking things that have been coming up recently. One is ways of talking about the Talmud and Jewish religion that assert that there is something in the Jewish religion that allows for Jews to treat non-Jews in certain kinds of ways, and particularly relating that (at least what I’ve seen) to Sde Teiman and the places where they’ve have been torturing and raping Palestinian prisoners and saying that this is allowed under Jewish law, and therefore, that is why it’s happening. I saw, for example, a video with the poker player and right-wing figure Dan Bilzerian, and the reason it showed up on my timeline is because it was retweeted by the lefty grifter Sean King. So this slide from right-wing rhetoric into the left—Ben, you actually wrote a piece for us about that.

BL: Yeah. So this isn’t new, right? For centuries (in Christian Europe, primarily), the Christian power structure was fabricating quotes from the Talmud or selectively taking them out of context to basically make polemics against Jews for being clannish, or being diabolical, or being supremacist—being this hostile fifth column arrayed against the Christian world. I’ve seen these quotes circulated in far-right spaces in relation to Israel/Palestine for a long time because there is a segment of the far right that actually is anti-Zionist. And that can be counterintuitive for us on the left, who are used to thinking about it as only a left-wing thing. But on the right, on the radical right especially, they essentially see Zionism in Israel as a front for the global Jewish conspiracy. So they will have, often, polemics against Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, but they’ll also combine it with accusations that Israel has stabbed the US in the back, or they’re also combining it with accusations of quote, unquote, “Zionists” as being pedophiles, or being behind pornography, or being behind immigration. So essentially, for them, it’s all part of an antisemitic conspiracy. And then you have other segments of the right that might not be as directly conspiratorial in an obviously antisemitic way but still might think that the US shouldn’t fund Israel but instead should use that money for, quote, unquote, “Our own people.”

AA: Kind of an America First argument.

BL: Yeah. And they often will still view the US as, in a sense, occupied by a Zionist cabal in the State Department. That’s essentially what paleocon writer Pat Buchanan said a couple of decades ago. So they still have conspiracy theories in there, but that ideology has been circulating on the right since October 7 and gaining some ground. We’ve seen folks like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, and even at least one House representative, Thomas Massey, has really been pushing it. So, I think we need to recognize that this stuff circulates, and it also circulates among far-right influencers online, especially in the manosphere and among white nationalists.

AA: And, I mean, part of the reason that you wrote about it for Jewish Currents is because of the ways in which it seemed like it was starting to make some inroads, right?

BL: Yeah.

AA: I mean, if I recall correctly, the idea of, for example, the term Zionist-Occupied Government, the ZOG, that Max Blumenthal of Grey Zone—which is a very conspiratorial left-wing site run by Max Blumenthal (who is in fact, Jewish)—kicked off this debate about whether this kind of terminology can be used. Certainly, we know that there are Zionists like that. Joe Biden is a self-identified Zionist, and in order to become influential in the State Department, you have to have, on some level, Zionist politics, because if you did not, they would leech you out. And this fact has been used as a justification for the terminology.

SB: Yeah. So when Max Blumenthal said it, I think he gets to part of the way that this seeped into left discourse, which—he said it to be transgressive. He said it to be offensive, to make his point in the loudest and most obtuse way possible. That’s how Blumenthal typically works. But what he was identifying was particularly AIPAC’s role in defeating some progressive Democrat—Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush—and saying, “Okay, that’s just evidence that the Zionists really do run our politics.” And again, as we intimate, this gets this relationship backwards, or it preferences Zionism above all other forms of colonialism or imperial power. The US has a vested interest in controlling things in the Middle East, and that is where their relationship with Israel develops. There’s a long history—as, for example, Israel radicalized further and further to the right—of seeing increased US support, particularly for the expansion of the occupation. So again, this intentionally, or sometimes unintentionally, mistakes that power relationship.

SB: But I think part of what ends up happening here is that people also don’t want to close down the coalition. And I think there are certain people and at certain moments of real crisis, that they see people echoing any kind of anti-Israel talking point and say, “Well, this might be of some good. These people might get details wrong, or I might disagree with certain things, but at least we’re getting a version of bipartisan consensus, right? We’re getting some of the left, and maybe some folks are on the right, but they’re coming together and doing this.” But again, this mistakes how anti-Zionism actually works on the left. It comes from this place of universal liberation—at least it should—and a global vision about how to confront power. That is explicitly not how the right deals with it, and in that terminology, Zionism is just a term for Jewish power. And so you’ll see the term Zionist-Occupied Government, in its original incarnation, was never just to talk about Israel. It was actually created during the Farm crisis to talk about Jewish control over finance, or how it was affecting middle America. It was always an America First and specifically white nationalist phenomenon. And you see it popularized in open neo-Nazi circles, which, again, don’t have a connection to a left-oriented anti-imperialist movement that we understand as anti-Zionism.

BL: One thing I think about a lot when we see this stuff kind of spill over into the left a little bit online is that we’re in a mass radicalization moment post-October 7. Many people are coming across these issues for the first time. We’re all on the internet. A lot of us get most of our political analysis from social media these days, and I think people are grasping for how they can understand not only the unfolding genocide but almost a century of settler-colonialism in Palestine,

AA: Not to mention the domestic repression and the amount of power and forces arrayed against people who are trying to speak out for Palestine.

BL: Exactly. So, we need a critical, in-depth analysis of these things, and that’s sometimes in short supply. And it’s not only about Israel/Palestine. I mean, we often just have a conspiratorial understanding of power. I certainly don’t know the ins and outs of the global finance system, and it can be a lot easier for me to think that there’s some dark room with 12 men in suits who are controlling everything. So, I think these folk analyses of power are just a part of the world we live in, especially in moments of crisis and widespread discontent, especially when this is unfolding every day on our social media screens. So in a way, I want to normalize that there is some conspiratorial thinking—that’s part of every movement—but we do have a responsibility to work on it, and confront it, and sharpen our analysis.

AA: Yeah. So we’ve talked about the way that these Talmudic conspiracies locate the problem outside of a systemic process, in a religious process. We’ve talked about the way that using terms like ZOG does a similar thing by assuming that Israel—and Zionism in particular—is kind of like the center or the seat of global power—as opposed to, for example, the United States, which is the far superior Western superpower. And we’ve talked about how that kind of tail-wagging-the-dog analysis, where Zionism becomes the name for colonialism writ large as opposed to just a form of colonialism, makes it more difficult for us to see these patterns across history and applied in other moments. And I would say also, (and I’ve said this before on the podcast), the ways in which Jewish people were victims of colonialism turned inward during the Holocaust—I think those things become obscured by making Zionism the center. Now, that is not to say that Zionism is not perpetrating a genocide currently, and that is the name for the ideology that is fueling that, and that we should ease off on our condemnation of both those actions and that ideology. But it is to say that we need to be clear-eyed about the role that this ideology plays in a larger system and to also recognize that the reason that our governments or these universities or our power structures are protective of Zionism is because they’re protective of US imperialism and not the other way around.

SB: Yeah. And I think, again, we have to get back to: Why is the US basically funding a genocide in Palestine? It’s not because of some deeply-laid Zionist-specific ideology. It’s that there’s actual material interests at play here. I think tracing that back, looking at the effect that weapons companies are having: Why have they had massive profit increases since October? Those are the conversations we need to have because it actually gets back to strategy and tactics. If we are looking not just at the ideologies of random figures but instead at social systems, large corporations, and what they have to gain, then I think we actually shift how we think about winning demands on this. I think where we are right now, things are too dire to make that mistake or to redirect all our energy towards some kind of random vocal figure instead of looking at where can you actually affect and interfere with this process?

AA: My question for you guys is: We just brought up a bunch of things that I’ve seen circulating mostly online, but it’s not like they only live online. And Ben, in the book, you recount an experience that you had where you were in—I think it was a conference where there was a speaker talking about BDS, talking about the deadly exchange where American police train in Israel, which we know is a real phenomenon. And then suddenly, the speech kind of veers into conspiracy, talking about how you can tell by what’s written on the side of an American police car which units have trained with the IDF (when that wasn’t true), and conspiracies about Martin Luther King Jr. being assassinated through some kind of Zionist plot, and how, essentially, the Jews in the room sort of swallowed it. And the reason why they swallowed it is because there was a sense of, “Well, this is wrong, but I’m not in danger in this room.” And I think Sean McGee writes in his book about the ways in which antisemitism in the United States is not structural. We don’t have, like, redlining. We don’t have vast incarceration. It doesn’t look like, for example, anti-Black racism, where the system itself is attacking us, and in fact, we’ve been embraced by power structures. We’ve been able to advance economically, educationally. The quotas that used to exist for Jews in the academy no longer exist. There’s no restrictions at hotels. The kind of American antisemitism that was active maybe until the 1960s doesn’t really hold. So, what does it mean? Do we think about these kinds of flare-ups that happen online (and maybe in a speech here and there) as being important? How do we right-size the impact of these things?

SB: I think the way that we talk about structural antisemitism is trying to answer the question of why these ideas continue to return. And we go back to a lot of analysis and scholarship that looks at the ways that some of these ideas can be embedded in economic systems, the way that we create folk narratives about inequality that kind of bring them back over time—that’s a structure that returns. Certainly, Jews who are orthodox answer this question differently. Those statistics work differently. Jews in the South have, for example, a lot more reporting of discrimination at work and housing, things like that. Jews in prison, it’s much more severe. So, there is that element of being structural, but I don’t want to say that it works the same way as anti-Blackness, because it simply doesn’t.

AA: Right. Or anti-Palestinian racism. I mean, let’s be clear about that. Like, we see the way that that is structurally embedded in our society, the way that speaking about one’s own experience as a Palestinian would involve authorities to mete out punishment just on that alone.

SB: Or even self-description can be called antisemitic and then legislated away in that way.

AA: Right.

SB: We did this project with Jewish Currents where we went through the ADL data for 2023 and found a lot of these problems and what felt like either referencing the wrong sort of details or not getting details. But I think also, when you look at that, there still was a clear rise in street attacks, threats on synagogues—I mean, this was really quite significant. And in particular, the rise of far-right groups, particularly explicitly neo-Nazi groups, basically after October 7 and in the months prior to that. And so those are very real concrete effects. Those are actually threatening. My synagogue’s been attacked, things like that.

AA: I just feel like it’s important when we say these things. Like, your synagogue’s been attacked because of the way that—I mean, we know that, for a lot of people, “my synagogue’s been attacked” has been like the thing in LA where the synagogue was hosting an event to sell real estate in the West Bank or whatever, and then you get this: “My synagogue was attacked.” So I just want to say: When you say that, what do you mean?

SB: Sure, yeah. So windows were broken out, and then the synagogue nearby had “Juden” written on it.

AA: Very straightforward.

SB: I think what’s important to know about this is that the person who did that also tried to set fire to a mosque. But I think the other thing that’s important when we’re talking about this is the way that antisemitism, or the kind of conspiracism we associate with antisemitism, motivates other forms of oppression or far-right movements in general. So if we look at, for example, the massive attack on trans healthcare right now—if you look at the ways a lot of the far-right movements (Gays Against Groomers and others) are talking about it, they employ antisemitic conspiracy theories to hold it together. Jews are not the primary target of those movements necessarily, but that helps them bind those movements together. And you see that across the far right, and that has actually grown as a constituent of it. It’s how they piece together the ideology. It’s how they hold it together and give it a certain amount of coherence. So you end up having—when you have these antisemitic narratives, as they increase, they end up having causal harm across the spectrum, not even just to Jewish communities, and not even just intimately threatening.

BL: Also, I think since October 7, we’ve seen some far-right figures move from implicit conspiracies to explicit. Charlie Kirk, who has Turning Point USA, said in November, as donors like Bill Ackman were pulling funds out of institutions like Harvard, he went on a long rant about how, you know, Jews have been funding most of these “Cultural Marxist” ideas. Or in November, Elon Musk, the richest person on the planet, boosts a tweet saying Jews are engaging in dialectical hatred against whites. They’ll talk about George Soros or will often use implicit conspiracies, or conspiracies that take the shape of antisemitism—even if they don’t name or mean Jews. You know, “globalists.” But I think we are seeing that move. And so I think it’s worth also naming—you know, antisemitism was not structural in the early 20th century in Europe until it was, right? So, without getting into the cyclical discourse or anything like that, I do think it’s worth naming that it’s not always necessarily going to stay in the purely ideological realm.

AA: I mean, I would trouble the story that you told a little bit because Jews were only just given emancipation in Europe. Structural antisemitism was the foundation of Europe even up until that point. And though it was receding for decades before the Holocaust, I think it would be a very different situation considering where Jews live right now in the US. And still, I think we have to ask ourselves: What does it mean to deal with the fear on our own end? We’re about to see a lot of punishment of students on campus and a lot of new restrictive policies around speech and around political speech on campuses and probably in local governments and whatnot, based on the feelings of Jews who have been taught through their Jewish education and through their families and through their inherited legacy that they should be afraid. You guys talk in your book a lot about how we meet people where they’re at, and I think that that question has become a lot more fraught since October 7.

BL: Yeah, it’s important to recognize the historical contingency, which I think was my point in bringing up the early 20th century—not to say there’s an equivalence, but to recognize the future is indeterminate, but also not lapse into the fear-mongering that, as you’re saying, inevitably gets channeled into weaponization, into ADL fundraising. We even debated whether to call the book Safety Through Solidarity. Like, does the word safety trigger fear? I think tackling it head-on, being very consistent and clear in opposing the weaponization, in asserting our own solidarity with the Palestinian struggle and basically saying: If you’re a little afraid, welcome to the club—we’re living in an oppressive society, there’s a lot of fear and not letting it be weaponized.

SB: Yeah. I don’t want to be Pollyanna about it, but I do think that fear operates like a lot of forms of alienation. The antidote to that is organizing your community, to have bonds and solutions. So a lot of what happens when the Jewish Federation pumps these fear narratives is that they give people no outlet to do anything about it. It creates immediate suspicion in their neighbors, anybody outside a very insular community. And the way that you end up dealing with that is to heighten, and the fear only grows over time. But if we have solutions to it—say, okay, we acknowledge fear, there’s some roots for that fear. There’s some historical legacy; maybe you have some experiences. But what would it take to actually feel safe again? Would it take getting to know your neighbors? Would it be a shared project?

SB: So, for example, I just mentioned the synagogues that had their windows busted out and were vandalized, and then a mosque just down the street, the same person tried to set fire to it. Well, what if we had built a relationship between the synagogue and the mosque? And what if there was a shared project, and they talked about different fears they had, and maybe they collaborated on safety solutions? These embryonic ideas are how you can break down those boundaries of fear. Now you have an actual solution and you’re participating in it. You’re actually active in it. I think giving people that empowerment is a really meaningful thing. Organizing is not just about the effects of it, but it has effects on the people participating in it. I’d much rather see people who are experiencing that fear say: Okay, how do I create cross-communal networks? How do I deal with other people that have, maybe it’s not the identical fear, but have fears themselves, and you create a shared solution. Antifascist movements do this, mutual aid movements do this. I think putting it back into that direction, giving people an outlet for it rather than just sort of suppressing it and saying, “Hey, that fear is illegitimate,” or refusing to acknowledge it. I think giving people a pathway to take action; that’s one of global solidarity rather than just a Judeo-pessimistic, internal-facing vision.

BL: Yeah, I think the one thing I want to add is that often, the fear motivates people to just kind of run away and leave leftist movements if they think there’s antisemitism there. I think that Jews are far from the first group to look around and realize that: Hey, my comrades have some bigoted ideas here. This kind of oppression has gone unaddressed. But we’re not going to leave. We’re going to work on it together. We’re going to do political education. We’re going to have those one-on-one conversations, and we’re not going to burn those bridges. In fact, we’re going to double down. We interview some organizers in the book who talk about just beginning to do these antisemitism trainings with their partner groups and encountering a lot of real antisemitism in the Q & A. And of course, it freaked them out. It’s never a fun experience, but also that they really knew that people wanted to learn and wanted to grow. I think most people on the left—the overwhelming majority—do want to learn, do want to grow, even given the intense weaponization and manipulation of Jewish traumas. So I think that’s another antidote.

AA: I want to shift tracks for a moment. I want to ask, first, the question of reasons why there might be resistance to this. I mean, you’re saying most people want to grow, but I also just want to name that there is a way in which—and I see this come up frequently—the majority of Jews at this point, I would say at least 75%, maybe 80% of Jews actively identify as Zionists and support this genocide. They don’t identify it as a genocide; they identify it as a war. And many of them identify it as an existential war, but they still are in support of it, and they are in support of punitive measures.

AA: At the Zionist event that I went to, the questions were all like: Why can’t we just put these students in jail? Why can’t we involve the police? This was the tenor of the room. So the question of what Jews are responsible for and what Jews are responsible for, quote-unquote, “as Jews,” becomes a big question. Actually, even over the weekend, you had a prominent Black Jewish activist and academic saying: Don’t say Jewish when you mean Zionist—you’re doing the work of the right for them. And you had Mohammed el-Kurd, who’s a Palestinian activist and poet from Sheikh Jara in Jerusalem, saying, basically: I’ve had enough of this—day after day, our people are incinerated, our children are packed into plastic bags by a self-proclaimed Jewish army. We’re a year into the genocide, and this is all you care about? Do these people think the world revolves around them? And he linked to an article that he wrote, actually in September 2023, entitled “Jewish Settlers stole my house. It’s not my fault they’re Jewish.”

AA: I’ll just read some of it because I think it’s worth us responding to directly. So the question is about how he has always learned to basically say Zionist when he meant Jewish, and be specific, and kind of learn the tropes and the shapes of antisemitism. And he says: “What a burdensome impulse. Not only do we live in fear of displacement at the hands of a colonialism that professes itself as Jewish, not only are our people bombarded by an army that marches under what it claims is the Jewish flag, and not only do Israeli politicians overenunciate the Jewishness of their operations—we are told to disregard the Star of David soaring on their flag, the Star of David they carve into our skin.” This is after a particular moment where I think the border police or the IDF actually did carve a Star of David into a Palestinian’s face. And he goes on to say: “The Palestinian people have consistently made it crystal clear that our enemy is the colonialist and racist ideology of Zionism, not Jews. Our capacity to produce such distinction is admirable and impressive considering the heavy-handedness with which Zionism attempts to synonymize itself with Judaism. However, this distinction isn’t our responsibility, and personally, it isn’t my priority. A Palestinian’s perceived resentment doesn’t have the backing of a Knesset to codify it into law. Tropes aren’t drones, nor can one convert conspiracy theories into nuclear weapons. We are past the early 1900s. Things are different. Power is shifted. Words are not murder. There’s no escaping being accused.” This is from the end of the piece: “There’s no escaping being accused of antisemitism. It’s a losing battle and, more importantly, a glaring red herring. And it’s time we reevaluate this tactic. There are better things to do. We have coffins to carry. We have kin in Israeli mortuary chambers that we must bury.”

AA: So, I just wanted to hear from you guys about what is coming up when you hear those words, and particularly with this stance that it’s not worth having a discussion right now—about whether we talk about Jews or Zionists, for example—in this kind of context. And I just want to be clear, that it’s clear that he makes this distinction but that his argument is that to spend time policing this distinction, given the givens, feels like not the right thing.

BL: Yeah. So when I first read that, I was definitely challenged by it, and I also had a lot of appreciation for it. I think we say in the book that it’s not the responsibility of Palestinians to be first in line to grapple with Jewish trauma or to engage in the nuances of Jewish identity politics. I’m not going to go to Gaza or the West Bank and interrogate whether Palestinians are using the word yehud, right? Like, as long as they’re being bombed by planes with Stars of David on them, that’s not their priority, and that’s totally understandable. At the end of the day, I actually don’t want the fight against antisemitism to be an identitarian thing. I want to resist turning this into an argument over whether everyone cares enough about Jewish feelings. I think it’s a structural issue. For example, I think a lot about a comrade of mine who’s in the migrant justice movement. He said, to me: When I think about fighting antisemitism, it’s not primarily about showing up for Jews. Obviously, I want to show up for Jews. That’s important. But it’s also about me winning on my issues. I know that fighting Soros conspiracy theories is essential to winning migrant justice. So, for all issues, I want to move away from a politics of allyship and to sort of co-resistance and joint struggle. That’s something I think about a lot.

SB: Yeah, I think there’s like an open question about whether some of this rhetoric, in a Palestinian context, would even fit the metric of antisemitism. Like the image of the Jew in antisemitic rhetoric is necessarily diasporic and cosmopolitan—it just really fits a different experience than those whose experience of folks they understand as Jewish are Israeli, particularly IDF soldiers. I mean, that’s just a fundamentally different experience. I think there’s also a question here, though, about what it means to not make those distinctions. I very much understand this constantly having to prove yourself when it’s not actually the thing that’s saving lives, it’s not the thing that’s most important. But are we actually developing a cross-national narrative that understands the crisis and that is a bid towards solidarity? I think one of the potential problems with not working on those distinctions or not making that clear is that it can break down some of that international solidarity again. It becomes ammo used against it. People feel like they’re not seen in it. I think there’s an element in which people join an international solidarity movement because they actually see it as a two-way road. They see that they actually benefit, in a way, from participating in this project of liberation. And when the narrative of that project then starts making them feel disaffected, I think there’s a question about: Wait, is this actually the project I was a part of? I don’t think that’s his problem in particular, but it’s something I think about when I’m discussing that.

AA: No, but it does come up. I read a piece—it might have been in Hammer & Hope—with a member of the Palestinian Youth Movement, where they were talking about, basically: We respect the lane that Jewish anti-Zionists are in, but they really need to stop talking about what they’re doing in terms of, like, saving the Jewish soul or whatever. They need to stop thinking about it in terms of how it affects Jews. I think that that’s a frustrating critique because I don’t understand why it would be wrong to think about what our stake in this fight is, and also just thinking about, if we’re actually talking to Jews, how do we get them to understand that their liberation is bound up in the liberation of Palestinians? That it’s going to be difficult for them to be Jews in the way that they want to be Jews while this injustice becomes synonymous with Judaism and is perpetuated within the structure of our Jewish institutions, and also within the structure of a Jewish state supported by those institutions. Sometimes, I feel like there’s a way in which we’re being asked to do Jewish politics but to do them the way the Palestinians would do them. And in that case, we’re no longer doing Jewish politics. Like, there’s a reason why Jews can do these politics in a different kind of way than Palestinians. And so that becomes difficult, I think.

AA: I want to go back to something that you said, Ben. You do say in the book, and I’ll just read from it: “As long as Israel’s oppression continues to intensify, it would be unrealistic, even problematic, to demand historical empathy and compassion from Palestinians as a precondition for peace and justice, especially absent even the slightest parallel gesture from their oppressors. But for most non-Palestinians, a refusal to seriously grapple with Jewish attachment to Zionism represents a colossal blind spot, undermining the left’s aspirations to meet marginalized communities where they’re at.” I think that that’s a really good and generative and generous distinction to make. Like, we’re not asking Palestinians to do this first and foremost, but other people in the movement do have more of a responsibility to be aware of it. But in a movement that is Palestinian-led, especially in this moment, it’s very, very hard to ask other people in the movement to behave differently or to take a different kind of approach to this stuff than Palestinians, because that is where the affective and analytical cues are coming from. And so how do we, in real life—when the rubber meets the road, what does this mean?

BL: I don’t want to reduce Palestinians to a monolith. I think there are many different Palestinian perspectives on this, and some do want to include an intersectional analysis of antisemitism and a commitment to fighting it alongside a vision of Palestinian liberation. I think this reveals the limits of a purely allyship-based model of politics. I’ve never been thrilled about the idea that you need to follow the leadership of any group in a simple way like that. I think if we apply that to Jewish politics, the same questions come up: Which Jews? At the end of the day, I think it’s important for the Palestine Solidarity Movement to incorporate an analysis of antisemitism because we need that to win. If we go down a rabbit hole of ZOG conspiracy theories, we aren’t going to have a clear analysis of the real systems and structures that are undergirding apartheid and genocide. And we aren’t going to have the principled coalition politics to know which targets to pick to build strong coalitions (and to win). So that’s what it comes back to for me. I do think I understand why Mohammed would feel that way, but if that viewpoint becomes the default in the Palestine solidarity movement as a whole, I do think it’s counterproductive.

SB: Yeah, I think to build a movement on that kind of simplistic understanding of allyship ends up severing real commitment from people in it. If they don’t see themselves in it, if they don’t see it as part of their struggle, they simply will not participate in any really meaningful way. And so, when I’m thinking about anti-Zionist politics, I think about what it would look like to attack the systems of empire that make people unequal. I even think about: How would this change the lives of Israeli Jews living there? Is there a better arrangement? Is there a system that we can start to create that actually benefits people and raises all ships? And that is always the foundation of how I think about that. And so, any sort of attack on that, I think, ultimately does exactly the work of shrinking the coalition. But also, it ends up creating two camps fighting for different visions. There’s no collaborative, jointly understood liberatory vision.

AA: Before we close, I want to talk about something that comes up on this show a lot, which is the question of ostracization of Zionists as Zionists. We’re coming off like two weeks of a media blitz after Joshua Leifer, who was a contributing editor at Jewish Currents, had his book talk canceled at the last moment because he was in conversation with Rabbi Andy Bachman, who—I think what the employee had found about Bachmann was about the way that he moderated an Israelism event to sort of shut down both the speakers and the Q & A and—you know, Bachmann is sort of like your average liberal Zionist, now calling for a ceasefire, critical of the Israeli right, but still identifies as a Zionist. I think that most Jews see this and feel threatened by it on some level, especially because most Jews are Zionists. I would say that I also feel not amazing about what happened. I think once they took the event, they probably should have just kept on with it and that the person created a media cycle that is just a grievance fest. But I also think there are other questions about how we think about blame, and how we think about accountability in these environments. Is Rabbi Andy Bachman, who’s just kind of like a random liberal Zionist, the same thing as, like, Michael Oren or Dani Dayan, these representatives of the Israeli state? I think also, moving that into the campus context: Are these 18-year-old kids who really don’t have an analysis and have just come out of intensive Jewish environments that have pumped them full of misinformation on this kind of thing—what does it do? What does it mean? And most importantly, is there any basis for talking about this in terms of antisemitism? Usually, on this podcast, when we talk about this kind of ostracism, we talk about it as political ostracism, but that is not the way that most Jews experience that (and also outside of Jews, like liberals, American white liberals). So how do we parse these kinds of incidents?

SB: Yeah, I think this is really tough. In general, litmus testing Jews on Israel is always going to be a bad idea. I don’t like seeing that as being this precondition of participation. Bachman is not, like, a leading supporter of Likud, and at least now is arguing for a ceasefire. That makes me uncomfortable a bit, but I think just right now, people are trying to figure out what the useful rules of the road for dealing with this are. We’re in a genocide right now; the rules are different. The way I would have approached liberal-Zionist bases or progressive-Zionist bases: It’s different now. Ben and I, when we were planning book events, at one point, we were going to hold an event at a very liberal or left-leaning Jewish community center and ended up deciding not to because of their relationship with larger federation-funded organizations. It wasn’t necessarily a violation of PACBI, but people had vocalized and said: We’re uncomfortable with this. And at first, I was personally really uncomfortable with people’s feedback on that, but we decided: Okay, maybe now is not the time with that. And we’ve had some of our events sponsored by liberal synagogues, and then folks associated with the synagogues flyer the event to sort of push the synagogue on their positions, to make them be more upfront, to be more publicly anti-Zionist. So they’re being contested spaces, right? I think it’s really real that people aren’t actually sure what reasonable expectations there are and how we should handle that. And also what terms like non-normalization or refusing to normalize Zionism actually mean. Historically, when I was organizing on campuses, that was specifically about agents of the Israeli state and not about liberal science institutions in the US. But I think that’s actually changed for people.

AA: Well, I just want to pause on that for a second, because I think it’s important to note that the BDS movement and PACBI are actually not asking for non-normalization with American liberal Zionists. And while there are these soft boycotts going on, that is explicitly not a BDS ask—which is also like a question about, like: What does the movement unite around, and how do we navigate this kind of thing?

SB: I think there’s also a question about what’s more useful: Walking away from every one of those institutions or using them as sites of struggle and organizing within them? I’m not talking about center or center-right institutions. I’m talking about the kind of leftward edge of institutional Jewish life. But I think that one of the points that Joshua is making is a very real one; that if you hold the line that they held—that someone like Bachman is not allowed to speak—that you actually are cutting out the majority of Jewish life. And I think people should be really clear-eyed about what that decision is. That’s the decision to cut off the majority of Jews and Jewish organizations. And I think that’s a more complicated question.

AA: It just is really hard because I’m just thinking about Jewish Currents. For me, the powerHouse Books thing is very clear-cut. Like, what happened to Josh is very clear-cut. If they weren’t comfortable with Bachman coming, they should have never booked this event in the first place. The idea of canceling it at the last moment does a lot of harm. They could have pushed for a different moderator, and that actually would have been well within their rights. It just seems very clear-cut in that regard. My difficulty is that, for example, as Jewish Currents, there’s a lot of people that we’re not going to platform here, and there are litmus tests that I feel like I’m applying. When I am in Jewish spaces at this point, I really want to know who is where and who my allies are. And I’m not doing that necessarily in non-Jewish spaces because it’s not as live of an issue and because those political positions are not necessarily as deeply felt or as personal. And so, I feel like I can have a different kind of conversation, even among a white liberal with, like, a kind of tacit Zionism—as opposed to Jewish people for whom it feels existential. And so, the question of the way I see myself behaving—and the difficulty in terms of figuring out when and how to navigate a relationship and on what terms—I would say a lot of Jews are cut out of, for example, a certain kind of engagement with Jewish Currents unless it’s very much on our terms.

BL: That makes a lot of sense. And I think it’s a different layer into the question: On the one hand, thinking about what voices should an organization platform versus how should we interact with people on an individual basis; if it’s different for us as Jews versus for non-Jews? You know, there’s no one easy answer here. I think it’s always going to be on a case-by-case basis to decide: Is this an appropriate kind of political litmus test, or is it antisemitic? Or is it, you know, not antisemitic but just unprincipled? There are other litmus tests. For example, if I’m at an event with a lot of second-wave feminists, I might wonder who might be a TERF.

BL: But in general, I really appreciated a point Peter Beinart made last week when he was talking about the Joshua Leifer incident. He cited the work of a political scientist, Mira Sucharov, who did a survey of American Jewish Zionists and basically found—I think the number was like, 60% of American Jews said “Yes, I’m a Zionist.” But when they were pressed on what that meant—and she eventually asked the follow-up question: Do you support a Zionism where Jews get preferential rights over non-Jews? Only 10% said yes. Most said no. So, I think that when our movements have this oversimplified conception of the word Zionism, there’s a lot of slippage there. Does it mean support for an ethnostate in Palestine? Or, for many American Jews, it might mean this broad, inchoate feeling of Jewish pride. I think our movements do a disservice to not wrestling with that complexity. Just to say one quick story from a book event: During the Q & A, someone in the audience said, “I’m offended that you define yourself as anti-Zionist, because to me, being a Zionist means I want full equality between Jews and Palestinians in Israel/Palestine.” So I said, “Okay, great. For me, being an anti-Zionist, it means I want full equality. So maybe let’s stop arguing over the Zionism word and actually start to fight for full equalities.”

AA: Yeah, I hear what you’re saying completely. But I also recognize—I’ve been in so many of these arguments where, basically, what people say to me is: If what you’re saying about what Israel is doing to Palestinians is true, then I don’t support it, but it’s not true. And there is a way in which people can kind of persist in this state. And actually, that is the state of liberal Zionism on some level, persisting in this idea that—like with the Sucharov poll that Peter often likes to cite—I think that it’s absolutely true that a lot of people are not experiencing themselves as invested in a genocidal ethnostate, an apartheid state. And yet, at the same time, there is a complete unwillingness and a complete digging in on the fact that that’s not actually what’s happening and that these lines are perpetually (even as things are getting worse) never crossed. And so that’s, I think, where it gets more difficult.

AA: Now, I agree that there may be better ways of bringing people along. I also agree that it’s not entirely clear where the line is, and that certain times, I hear about certain kinds of ostracism and certain ways of refusing the conversation that feel totally legitimate. I also worry that a bunch of 18-year-old kids really don’t even know what they’re espousing. They don’t even have a full understanding of what they’re espousing. I keep coming back to something that I read in Naomi Klein’s book, that we have to be tough on systems and soft on people. Like, how do we continue to indict the establishment that creates these thought patterns and creates this structure of knowledge and this subjective experience without being punitive to, particularly, young people who have not extricated themselves from it?

BL: Yeah, I do agree about being tough on systems and soft on people; when we over-fixate on identity and personal affiliation and labels in this way, we overlook the systems. I think our energy would be a lot better spent going after Boeing and Raytheon or our political leaders than worrying too hard about how a lot of liberal Jews might define their Zionism.

AA: Thank you so much to both of you for this very long conversation. I know it’s a difficult one and one that you’re having a lot.

BL: Yeah, thank you for having us. It was great talking so in-depth about this with you.

SB: Yeah. Always happy to come.

AA: I think that’s it for this week of On the Nose. Thank you to our producer, Jesse Brennaman. Please rate, subscribe, like this episode. Please subscribe to Jewish Currents, JewishCurrents.org. And also, we are in the middle of selling tickets for a big in-person New York City event September 15; we’re calling it JC Live. You can find information about that on our website. Thanks a lot. Until next time.