Transcript:

Nathan Goldman: Welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents Podcast. I’m Nathan Goldman, the managing editor of Jewish Currents. Today’s episode is a recording of a recent online event in which editor in chief Arielle Angel spoke with author Naomi Klein and writer and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan about the place of emotions and affect in the movement for Palestinian liberation. They discuss the role of grief and rage, how movements can accommodate affective diversity, and what it means to channel feelings politically. Just a note: this conversation was recorded a few days before the presidential election, so while it’s profoundly relevant for the post-election moment, it doesn’t speak to that directly. If you become a sustaining member of Jewish Currents, you’ll get free real-time access to events like this one, along with a print and digital subscription and much more. You can sign up now at jewishcurrents.org/membership. And with that, here’s the episode.

Arielle Angel: I am extremely excited to have Hala Alyan and Naomi Klein with me today to talk about affect in politics, emotions in politics. This has been a concept that has really obsessed me over the last year, and I could not dream of a better group to discuss it with. So, thank you so much for being with me today. Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses and the Arsonist City, as well as five highly acclaimed collections of poetry including The 29th Year and The Moon that Turns You Back. She lives in Brooklyn with her family where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University. Naomi Klein is the bestselling author of nine books, including No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything, No Is Not Enough, On Fire, and Doppelgänger: A Trip into the Mirror World. She’s a columnist for The Guardian, an honorary professor of Media and Climate at Rutgers University, and an associate professor in Geography at the University of British Columbia, where she is founding co-director of UBC’s Center for Climate Justice. Thank you so much for being here, Hala and Naomi

Naomi Klein: Thanks for having us.

Hala Alyan: Yes, thank you so much.

AA: So I think I want to start with a story. This is something that happened with the Jewish Currents staff after October 7th of last year. I’ve talked publicly about how we’ve had ideological disagreement on the staff, and it was making it really hard for us to work. And we had a retreat and we did this exercise where somebody makes a statement, and people have to arrange themselves with their bodies in the room, as if it was a spectrum, agree or disagree with a statement. And so someone offered a statement about October 7—not important right now what it is. Let’s not relive all of that—but immediately, we basically polarized. And the facilitator ran through a few related statements, and people were generally holding their ground. And when the facilitator asked people on one side of the room to explain why they were standing where they were standing, inevitably, someone on the other side of the room would be like: But I agree with that. That’s not why I’m standing over here. And the facilitator wisely said: What are the feelings on this side of the room as opposed to this side?

AA: And for me, that was, a really interesting moment where the conversation opened up, and it became clear that on one side of the room, there was sorrow, and on another side of the room, there was rage. And maybe another way of putting it is that the polarization that was on display was between an affect of mourning and an affect of militancy. I’ve thought a lot about that exercise, maybe almost every single day since then, as the left continues to struggle with questions of sorrow, and rage, and mourning and militancy, and their place in our politics and in the movement landscape. And I think that one of the things that this exercise tells me is that emotion (or affect) and politics are interrelated but that they’re not exactly the same thing. They don’t totally overlap. They don’t always correspond to political strategy or ideology. People in Jewish Currents were telling their colleagues, “I agree with you,” but they were very much divided by affect.

AA: So I’m going to start, admittedly, with a very broad question, and I want to see if we could tease this out a little bit. In the context of the contemporary movement for Palestine, are our emotions, private and public, and our politics separable? And should they be? And where do you guys see them overlapping, and where should we be trying to tease them apart? Naomi, maybe I’ll start with you since you’re smiling.

NK: Oh, I’m just smiling out of dread. I think political movements generally aren’t great at feelings. I feel like the political movements that I’ve been a part of have tended to prescribe a really narrow spectrum of emotional responses. And I think we often mislabel feelings because of that. So, I teach about the climate crisis, and I found that people who were researching climate and organizing around climate were so emotionally illiterate (and I would include myself in this), but it was such a desperate situation that I designed a course called Ecological Affect for graduate students so that they would have a space to talk about the emotional side of studying extinction and studying the disappearance of glaciers, just because there’s no space for that.

NK: And what was interesting is, when I would talk about this, people assumed that it was only going to be about grief or anxiety. And in fact, most of us have a huge range— dread, solace, rage, fear—and so it would be great if we just had more spaciousness for emotions and also if we were a little bit more conscious about how we channel them, right? Because emotions are also very powerful for organizing. Ahead of this, I was thinking about grief in the context of the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina or Act Up die-ins. Like, I don’t think we can choose whether or not we have an emotion, but I do feel like we have some agency over how we channel our emotions, and what sort of political project we put them into. But these debates over which emotions are correct, I just feel at a loss over. Because I don’t know about you, but I don’t really have a ton of control over whether I’m going to have an emotion or not. And generally, as a repressed person, I struggle to have more emotions rather than less.

HA: I mean, I had a similar sort of knee-jerk reaction to this militancy/mourning/sorrow/rage split. Because I think—even from a psychological perspective, I’m sure people have heard this before—our discourse around rage and anger can very rarely be had with nuance without talking about sorrow, without talking about sadness. Like, there’s almost always an element of grief when there’s rage and anger. And so it’s interesting that it was dichotomized in that way, which I think speaks less to the clean-cut nature of those emotions in this time, and probably more about what we’re taught about what we can feel, and how we have to keep it clean.

HA: Like, I’m not here as a spokesperson for all Palestinian people, right? But I can speak to, anecdotally, within my community and the people that I have these conversations with, this idea of: Can our emotions and can our politics be separable? It’s difficult because it’s like, well, I mean, politics are inextricable from the state of existence right now for a lot of Palestinians. Your existence is political because it’s made political. And that did not begin on October 7th, right? So my existence being considered a political one is not something that I wrote upon my body or upon my being. It’s something that has been projected upon me since, really, my time on this Earth. And so there’s a way in which emotions play in these really complex ways. One thing that comes to mind is concepts of tone policing—I do the tone policing on myself. And I think one of the things that happened when I moved here, because I lived in the Arab world when I was up until 4, moved here during the Saddam invasion, lived here until I was 12, moved back to the Arab world, and came back for grad school. And so, when I came back for grad school, what had happened is I had spent these really formative years, 12 to 22, in Arab countries, in countries where people might have had all sorts of feelings about Palestinians within a particular country, but the concept of their existence was not one that was ever debated.

HA: And so I was never in a position of defensiveness during my adolescence and my early adulthood. And so by the time I came to this country, I didn’t even engage in those interactions when they would appear. I would just be like: Okay, that seems like a you problem, that you think that. This doesn’t—know what I mean? Like, I don’t know that we need to have a back-and-forth about it. All of this is to say: One of the things that ended up happening is, while I would not engage in debates, what I did learn pretty quickly is that I needed to be mindful of how I had conversations about Palestine. Because, oftentimes, it was an issue of safety. Rarely an issue of physical safety, but it was oftentimes an issue of emotional safety. It was an issue of whether I would be able to be in certain institutional spaces or not, how I would be looked upon, what I would be opening up, et cetera. And so I then spent, I would say, a good 12, 13, 14, 15 years really learning how to steady my voice, and how to be precise with language. And I do not think that is unique to me, as a Palestinian. I think that is likely something that’s shared by many people that belong to different marginalized communities. But there was a way in which I spent over a decade learning that if I were going to have these conversations or be in spaces where these conversations were going to happen, there was something I was going to have to do to my emotional register and the tone with which I spoke about things in order for it to be legible. That’s not fair. I’m not prescribing that. I’m not saying that’s how it should be, But I’m saying that that’s part of the lived experience that I had.

AA: Naomi, I want to talk to you about the article that you recently published in The Guardian about the way that the Israeli government has weaponized trauma and grief since October 7th in support of Israeli actions in Gaza. I mean, as you said, there’s this question of—we can’t control the feelings, but we can control how we direct them. And so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about this double-edge of mourning in the Jewish community, and also whether there is a way to ethically mourn within this framework of weaponization.

NK: I think we have to make a distinction between people whose lives were impacted very directly by October 7th—then maybe they were mourning somebody in their family, somebody who they knew well—and this generalized claiming of mourning. In the piece you’re referring to, I talk about trauma transference and all of these mechanisms to take somebody’s feeling—like the loss of a sister on kibbutz, or a son at the Noble Music Festival—and transfer that feeling to somebody who didn’t know anybody there, but who has an identification, and a connection through Judaism, through the idea of the kibbutz, say. And obviously, that piece was very controversial. I’m still getting hate mail about it. But I really make a distinction early on that gets ignored by pro-Israel critics of the piece, who claim that I’m saying that Israelis don’t have a right to mourn, that Jews don’t have a right to mourn, when in fact, at the beginning of the piece, it begins with the fact that the people who have the most to mourn, the families who lost loved ones, are the ones who are most vocally rejecting this top-down re-traumatization industry.

NK: Now, that might not be true for everyone, but the piece begins with the fact that there was the intention, on the one-year mark, of the Netanyahu government to have this huge public commemoration that was supposed to be in front of a live audience of 7,000 people. And they ended up having to cancel that because, one by one, the most affected communities pulled out. They were afraid of protests, so they had to do it in a hermetically-sealed sound stage—because the people who were mourning most were disgusted by the way the grief was being weaponized.

NK: So I’ve been interested for a long time, well before October 7th, in the way trauma gets transferred—in particular Holocaust trauma—through the generations, and how it gets weaponized and instrumentalized for statecraft, and that this thing that we call commemoration actually isn’t commemoration. It isn’t about honoring the victims; it is about creating an emotional response in people for whom this is not their trauma. And the reason why this is being done, whether it’s the Holocaust or October 7th, is because there is a state project that needs that trauma, and needs it to be spread far and wide, and needs for people to feel as if something that didn’t happen to them, happened to them. This is something that, as Jewish kids, we all took for granted: that we would have this education that would try to create in us an embodied traumatic experience. Unlike you, Arielle, I don’t come from Holocaust survivors, but I had this feeling. Marianne Hirsch talks about post-memory, and she’s talking about the post-memory that she has as a Holocaust survivor. But then there’s like, post-memory once removed, which is more like prosthetic memory—it’s really appropriating somebody else’s memory as your own. But it’s not like we just did this on our own. There is a structure that calls itself education (that I think is more like indoctrination) that wants us to feel extremely vulnerable and victimized because that creates the rationale for a fortress ethnostate. And now all of those grooves that were put in place through this Holocaust re-traumatization industry—and I don’t even like the term re-traumatization anymore, even though I use it, I’m now interrogating it. Because, as Marianne Hirsch said to me, re-traumatization assumes that you were traumatized in the first place. This is a trauma implanting, right? But my question for you, Hala, about this is: Isn’t this the opposite of what good therapists do for people who’ve experienced trauma? Like, don’t you try to say: Hey you are not in that place, you’re here. You’re being triggered. It’s different.

HA: Yeah. I mean, the thing about trauma is that it’s like an eternal reoccurrence. What trauma does, essentially, and what it does to the brain, is it makes us believe that what has happened is happening. That if I walk by a particular grocery store, if I hear a particular name, if I hear a ringtone that I haven’t heard in a while—if you were to do a body scan, there is no way, in that split second, that I can tell you for certain I am not back in the moment when a traumatic thing happened. Your brain stops being able to distinguish between whether you’re still in danger or not. And the thing about the brain is that it is very clever. And it’s good at keeping you safe. And so when you have presented it with information of lack of safety and insecurity, like a lack of, physical, emotional, whatever, security, then one of the things that’s going to happen is it’s going to hear that and earmark that as: My job is to prevent this thing from ever happening again. So I am going to cue you into a state of hypervigilance, and anytime anything reminds me of that, I’m going to remind you that: unsafe, unsafe, unsafe, this could be happening again, et cetera.

HA: And yes, a good therapist would not say: Let’s have a seat, and let’s just really keep on living it, and these are the following things that need to be done in order to prevent anything even approaching that feeling of lack of safety ever encroaching in your life or your psyche. What you would actually do is, oftentimes, some sort of exposure. You would usually have some degree of exposing the person to the thing that they’re afraid of—which, there’s plenty of situations where that’s not responsible. But you would do some imaginal or just like, emotional exposure. And then you would have people just experiment with different things in life and learn that they’re having different outcomes than they thought they were going to have.

HA: Now, the disclaimer here is that we’re talking about it from a very Western perspective and understanding of trauma. Dr. Samah Jabr, a Palestinian psychologist, talks about this really beautifully: This concept of the PTSD model is not one that really works in a lot of communities, including Palestinian ones, because, really, to heal, you need a lull in the grief or the trauma or the devastation in order to get a sense of what has been lost. And so if the loss is relentless, I mean, we’re watching this right now. There’s no time to even count bodies. Even if the bombardment were to stop tomorrow, we don’t even know how long it would take to even get a sense of what is gone.

AA: I have been really fascinated by this. Palestinian writer, Abdaljawad Omar, who mostly writes in Mondoweiss, but he wrote this piece that I really admired in Rusted Radishes called “Can the Palestinian Mourn?” talking specifically about this and kind of pushing back on these, like, universalist calls for shared mourning after October 7 and saying exactly what you just said: How could we mourn when Palestinians exist in a, quote, “collective state, a perpetual deferral of mourning, and there’s no time when this is over”? And I think it’s a really complex essay because I feel like he both acknowledges the way that an inability to mourn has all of these adverse effects—like that it can curdle into this melancholy in the Freudian sense, where you become attached to the loss, you gorge yourself on the loss, and healing is foreclosed; and he also writes, quote, “Palestinian mourning within the horizon of erasure may entail political self-annihilation.” In other words, healing before the political resolution might be a kind of giving up. Like, instead of grief in this moment, you actually need grievance. This tool to resist with that becomes a political engine. And I think that this is super compelling. And also, Hala, I feel like I’ve seen you do so much public grieving of the genocide that we are witnessing in Gaza over the last year and helping people process their grief through your own writing. And I’m just wondering: How do you think about the role of mourning in the Palestinian communal landscape, and how do you balance the inability to mourn with the necessity to mourn?

HA: Yeah, I think it’s interesting because I think about the concept of grief and how often, really, central to grief is this idea of acceptance and radical acceptance of circumstances, and how (to play off of the quote that you read), if grief implies a certain acceptance, then grief in a situation like this implies an acceptance of the loss and destruction and devastation, that it can feel like it’s not an option. There’s also something sometimes in the language of grieving—which is rarely the intention, but it can sometimes come across this way—it almost reminds me a little bit of implying an inevitability. Like, to grieve a thing implies that the thing is going to happen and will keep happening. And there are times where my ears prick up and I’m just like, oh, that reminds me of political double-speak, or spokespeople speak around the way that the framing of Palestinian death is this really, oftentimes, contextless, perpetratorless thing that is—it’s like it’s an act of God. It’s really such a pity. It’s really—my heart goes out. If only there were a thing that we could do. Anyway, no more questions. See you later.

HA: And it makes me think of—my friend Lara Atallah was talking about this earlier today—about this idea of what it means to be in solidarity with Palestine and Palestinians within the context of grief, and how to be mindful that we’re not just being in solidarity with the Palestinian corpse and not the Palestinian life. And I think she was paraphrasing or quoting Rasha Abdulhadi, I’m not sure, but just this idea that to be mindful that we’re not perpetually in solidarity and in community with the dead, and what would it be to be in solidarity and community with the living? And I think it’s worth saying here that the potential for the mourning to curdle into melancholy isn’t an accident, right? It’s by design. And I write about this a lot, I think about this a lot. This idea of relentlessness as political strategy and how it leads to psychic numbing and how it leads people to really just ultimately sink into their senses of hopelessness. So in that sense, asking if the emotion is one of activation, if the emotion is one of action—and I don’t mean action like you are doing something observable, but action toward a value system—or if it’s one of stagnation. And I really am constantly asking myself: Who benefits from emotions of stagnation?

AA: I love that reframe around emotions of stagnation, because any of these emotions could be emotions of stagnation, right?

HA: You can get stuck in rage. You can get stuck in the emotions that feel like they technically should be the most activating of all because that fire can turn inward and burn you up. You can get stuck anywhere. And so really thinking about: If I’m in a place of stagnation right now, to what end? Right? So who ultimately benefits? And where is this, to this idea earlier that you were talking about, with implantation, implanting an idea? Where is this idea of the helplessness, or the hopelessness, or the inability to be able to do anything? Where is it coming from? And sometimes, that’s going to be internal and sometimes—listen, we are not made to know what bodies look like after being bulldozed because bodies are not made to be bulldozed. There are things I know a year out now, and have seen and have heard that I had never before in my life. And I think that’s true for a lot of people. That’s to say nothing of the reality on the ground.

HA: So there are times where I am 100% in that state of stagnation. And the best way for me to not then sink even deeper into it is actually to like, really try to resist individualistic ideas of heroic archetypes or the idea that a cause or a movement is depending on me, individually, to get up every morning and do a thing or write an opinion. It’s not. It’s not. It’s to believe that I can take the pauses I need to take. Whether we’re calling that ritual, we’re calling that grieving, we’re calling it mourning, we’re calling that rage, we’re calling it whatever. It doesn’t matter. That I’m able to do that because there is a cause and there’s a collective that is going to continue. And when it’s time for me to enter it, I will enter it and there will be other people that need to tap out. Like, I think there’s something in that communal thinking that is really different to how a lot of us, I think, were raised.

NK: Yeah. I do feel like we sometimes have this feeling about certain emotions—that if we give ourselves over to them, it’ll be permanent. Like, we’ll never get out. And I think that that’s dangerous because if we’re so afraid, then we won’t go somewhere that we need to go, and we won’t believe what I think is true, and what you said, Hala—there can be a period where we are out and down, and it doesn’t mean that we don’t ever refind that activation. That also is collective, because I think that we will let ourselves feel it if we know there are people there who will catch us, people there that will tag in, that the whole thing won’t fall apart. It’s that falling together idea.

HA: And how to play with relentlessness. Like, I think about this a lot now, this idea of: You must meet relentlessness with relentlessness. So how do you sit with these dialectically opposite ideas, right? Of, sometimes you’re going to fall apart, fall apart. And also what is needed, on a collective level, is to really be even more relentless than the strategy that is being put forward. Like, you must be even more relentless than the machine. And I think there’s something in that, that for me, reframes things—where I’m just like, yeah, so therefore, the most ethically and politically responsible thing for me to do is to keep ascribing to this concept of return. And the idea of return—to return implies a drifting from something, right? Or it implies having to move away from something, for ideally, a brief period of time, but that you are committed to the coming back of it.

NK: Yeah. And I think that’s important because I think if we don’t assert that, if we don’t tell stories about people who leave and come back, then we will be less likely to come back. We’ll think that: Okay, now we’ve given up. I mean, I also just want to name that it is really troubling—we have a huge amount, most of us, of self-consciousness about discussing Jewish emotions and feelings in a time of Palestinian genocide. And a big part of what I feel like I’m doing in my personal and political life is trying to understand a derangement in my own communities. And it’s very hard to understand on an interpersonal level. Like I’ve talked before, people who I know to be gentle, caring healthcare providers who can justify bombing neonatal ICUs. Like, I don’t know how to make sense of who I thought people were and who they have become. I don’t know how to make sense of it. So I know that this can read as navel-gazing, but I don’t think we can understand Zionism without psychoanalytic tools and without an understanding of how you can mass-produce this feeling of victimization, and vulnerability, and being in a state of peril when you’re not, and how that then becomes just like the most dangerous weapon in the world.

AA: This is part of the reason that I want to have this conversation, is to try to understand, basically, how movements metabolize feelings. Because we can’t repress feelings, right? They’re just going to come out all over the place. And so I think sometimes when I feel uncomfortable, is when there’s like a sense that there is only one allowed emotion, or only one allowed expression of emotion in the movement. And I think sometimes, that gets attributed to a Jewish subjectivity, like Jews are trying to mourn Israelis or something. This is, like, the very common way of putting it. But I also think we have to just recognize that all movements, if they are going to be successful, will contain people who have different subjectivities, positionalities. Hala, you were talking about what it was like growing up in the Arab world and coming back, and how that created an entire internal world, an emotional world. And there are groups of people who share those experiences. And the movement itself has to figure out how to metabolize diversity within the movement. And I am against affect policing, I guess, as an equal opportunity thing.

NK: But we can choose what we do with the emotion. And there are amazing examples of this. Like, after September 11th, there was a huge organizing cry in the United States. “Our grief is not a cry for war.” Like, that was the banner under which people—unsuccessfully, but—tried to stop wars. But it was not saying we don’t feel grief. It was saying, we feel it, and we’re not going to let you manipulate it, and we’re going to hold it with each other. There’s actually a lesser known but more positive example of this that I wrote about many years ago in 2004, when there was a really horrific terror attack in Madrid, in the train stations, where I think close to 200 people were killed, almost 2,000 people were injured. Downtown Madrid, just commuters. And immediately, it was exploited by Spain’s right-wing government at the time to rationalize Spain’s participation in the invasion of Iraq. And there were huge marches in Madrid. I think the banner was like: No to terrorism, No to war. They were very conscious that this was being manipulated for a political purpose. It was named. They didn’t reject the fact that people were feeling a lot of anger. I had a fantasy after October 7th that Israelis could do that if they chose. That was a possible outcome and JVP and IfNotNow, tried to do some of that from here, but really, it was Israelis who needed to do it. And there were a few lone voices, but that was possible. Like, I want to name that it was possible to grieve and say, “And you are not going to use it for genocide,” by the people who felt it most.

AA: I mean, I just want to really dig in on this because this is, I think, where the politics and the affect become layered, and where there’s an ascription, or perhaps a real way, in which affect and politics have become merged in the mind. So I just want to bring in, for example, on the anniversary of October 7th, Palestinian Youth Movement published a communique in The New York War Crimes that speaks directly to this question of like: Can we route the mourning in a different way? And they write, quote, “The man who mourns the settler mourns only the end of his normalcy. Allow us instead to believe the dispossessed on their own terms. They do not mourn. They cannot. Those who mourn for all people are above them.” And I’m focusing specifically on this last line because, I mean, we can talk about what we think about this on its own terms, but I’m more interested, in a way, of this question of like: Do we need to share a public emotional register in order to be pulling in the same direction politically? And do we have to perform feelings in the same way, or do we just have to act the same way? That’s one question. And then also: Are public feelings a kind of action that makes it impossible to act together, otherwise? Because sometimes the performance of the affect is the action. Sometimes in the Arendtian sense, speech itself is the action. Then it gets tricky. Right?

HA: Yes. You know, Naomi, I hear in what you were saying. The wish and the desire for awakening of—I mean, this is in Isabella Hammad’s book, Recognizing the Stranger, recognizing the other, being able to grieve the other, grieve in this way within that society. I don’t necessarily know how to do it. I just read—I mean, I just quoted her book just a second ago, but Isabella Hammad’s book—and in it, she quotes Omar Barghouti. And the line is something like: How many Palestinian children (or how many Palestinians) have to die for a soldier to have an epiphany? And so I think that, sometimes, concepts of mourning can feel fraught because of that; because what needs to happen for the mourning to be bidirectional often involves unimaginable amounts of destruction and slaughter.

HA: What I would say, is that people don’t choose what they mourn. They don’t choose the impulse to mourn. They don’t choose what instinctively they feel mourning toward. But what a person instinctively mourns can be revealing. And so what do we do with that instinctive mourning, with that thing that we’re pulled toward? And do we find ourselves more ready to mourn certain things than others because we have been cued to? Maybe the way through some of these conversations is to just pay attention to what feels mournable to us, what automatically feels readily and excessively mournable to us, and then to think about those things within the space of the larger movement and the larger liberatory practices in general, and liberatory movements in general.

HA: So do I think somebody can feel something different than another person in a cause and still be marching toward the same thing? I do, as long as we’re doing that internal work, as long as we are, again, paying attention to, like: What’s easier for me to mourn, what’s more difficult? And can I be honest with myself? Can I sit with myself and say: This kind of life, this kind of thing, this kind of situation is easier for me to feel that grief for; this one I have had to train myself for, and what am I going to do about it? And how am I going to be able to continue to sit in spaces of authenticity around those discourses? As long as everybody is committed to that truth, that really just happens intrapsychically.

AA: Thank you for that. We had a lot of conversations about this internally after October 7th because there was a range of things that were happening. Like, some people are more connected to people on the ground in Israel, and some people are not. And so, the idea of mourning was totally abstract, and to some people, it was less abstract. And the question of for whom, and how direct, how much of that was learned, how much of that is natural, how much of that has to do with shared history and peoplehood, whatever. We were definitely dissecting these questions. And also, there’s the question of strategy. Like, if you’re doing Jewish politics, and we see this with JVP and IfNotNow, in the way that they’ve done this, there was a way that performing mourning in that moment allowed them to retain a certain credibility in the Jewish world that they’re still trying to organize within. And do we respect that as strategy? Like, this is a situation, too, where I think many people were performing mourning as political strategy, and that gets so complicated.

NK: I do think that there was a demand that was being placed on Palestinians and Arab people generally—Muslim people generally—to perform condemnation, mourning. And I quote a really excellent essay by Ghassan Hage about this, where he talked about why it was hard to deliver. And it wasn’t because he didn’t feel it. It was because it was what he called “a supremacist form of mourning.” It was a concession that these kids matter more than Palestinian kids, that it was still within that calculus of supremacist worldview.

NK: In terms of the movement conversation that we’re having, I think a few things are getting conflated. Like, a conversation about mourning is not really the way I experience it. I know people who grieved people, who had very personal relationships. But for me, personally, it was more about my own ethics around violence. And I think there are real political disagreements about revolutionary violence that are now being couched in a discussion around grief and mourning. There’s a lot of slippage that’s happening.

AA: I hear what you’re saying, trying to assert that there are real ideological disagreements underneath all of these things. And also, there’s a lot of feelings on top of all of this.

NK: But maybe we’re hiding behind feelings a little bit instead of having some ideological conversations we should have.

HA: I’m curious, Arielle, the example you gave at the top. That the differences that came up within Jewish Currents staff and whatever: Was finding, even just in that exercise, people on different sides of the room—was that surprising for you?

AA: I think it was surprising for everyone how much everyone was feeling, and how those feelings were spilling out. Like, the way that people were processing feelings were being ascribed political or ideological meaning that I’m still trying to sort out whether that was real or not.

HA: The flip question was what Naomi’s point was: Was it then easier to have the proxy conversation of feeling, or do you feel like it wasn’t?

AA: I think it was useful to identify that there were feelings at play underneath. And also it was useful to identify, as I said at the top, that those feelings moved in and out of ideological agreement. And that we can’t assume that because somebody had an initial feeling, that that feeling, when you took it apart, had a certain ideology underneath it.

AA: I feel like we’ve talked a little bit about the double edge of mourning, but I do want to talk in the same way about rage. I feel like, on the one hand, we’ve talked about the way that rage is like an engine for greater political militancy, the way it can get channeled into a grievance that becomes what action is, at its basic form. And on the other hand, and I think we’re seeing this right now, in the same way, you have mourning and melancholy—the stagnation feeling, as you called it—there’s also the way that rage can tip into nihilism, or curdle into nihilism. I’m battling this feeling a lot. It’s coming up right now with the election. Like, literally, why not burn it all down? Like, the Democrats deserve whatever the fuck they get, and we deserve it. That’s the feeling that I have. And I really can’t tell the difference here between my feelings of anger and a right political action. And I also worry because I feel like sometimes, I see this manifesting on the left in a hostility to concession to strategy, or attempts to build in an environment where there’s like a burn it all down feeling. I also think nihilism can be helpful, and I literally just wrote something on October 7th about Nietzschean nihilism, where you like, move through and you build on the rubble, and—

NK: The only way out is through.

AA: The only way out is through. And you go through the nihilism to really understand what you’re about; like, I’m not anti-nihilism either, just to say, but some of these dynamics can get pretty bad. And so this question is for both of you: How do we identify this nihilism in our politics? How do we distinguish it from a healthier form of militancy?

HA: I think to even be talking about what is a healthier form of militancy is a nod toward a certain value system, right? Or a nod toward a certain ideal. And it’s a really interesting question because I don’t know what a healthier form of militancy would look like right now. I don’t know what health looks like in a system of disease, and sickness, and rot. I don’t know what that looks like. I guess it could be like a clear-eyed, cogent understanding of the reality of what we’re in. Being able to look it in the eye, being able to say that there are powers that be that have decided that this slaughter is going to happen until they decide the slaughter is going to stop. And, potentially, an understanding or a comprehension or an awareness that these are the strategies that have been employed.

HA: There might need to be new strategies that need to be employed. I don’t know, I mean, I think to quote Hammad again—and she was paraphrasing someone else, I can’t remember who was—this idea of pessoptimism, pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. This idea that like: I’m going to keep showing up, even if I’m just like, fuck all of us, burn it all down, et cetera. Like, keep showing up, and keep showing up, and keep showing up. There’s something in that, that like, is that potentially a form of health in the system that we’re in right now? Is that a form of adapting? I mean health is really generally—when we talk about health, we talk mental health, it’s like we’re talking about psychological flexibility, we’re talking about ideas of integration, right? Being able to integrate different things at once. So from that perspective, nihilism makes sense. That is an integration of the data points you are being given by the larger system, which is saying that: You marched, you called your representatives, you donated, you showed up, some people flew all the way to Cairo, and flew to Rafah and helped in these different ways. You did the things, you watched, you bore witness, you wrote, you wept, you—whatever. Like, you’ve done the things that one can do in this capacity diasporically, or from an ally perspective, or whatever. And we’re here.

AA: You’re very much paraphrasing what I wrote on October 7, but I appreciate it.

HA: Well because I think we’re probably paraphrasing what everyone’s feeling, right? So there’s a realism to that, and I think a way to hold that, and to provide a container for each other and for ourselves with that. And that doesn’t mean we throw up our hands and we give up. But there can be a moment of just being like: Fuck, this feeling that I’m feeling is, actually, 1000% the accurate feeling. It is the accurate emotional register for all of these different pieces of information that I’m being offered about what life is worth what. And what does it mean to have governments that are voted in and that do not represent the will of their constituents? And what does it mean to live in democracies that are named in a certain way and behave in a certain way? Like there’s something truthful about that feeling.

NK: I want to just respect the massive effort that you’ve just described. So many people have worked impossibly hard and found new levers of power and pulled them, and the exhaustion is real. I’m not arguing with any of that, and I think we all have a right to like feel one thing one minute and feel the opposite thing the next minute. But I do believe that there’s also something that can happen, where there can be a moment that is prime for a breakthrough, and there can be a mismatch with where a movement is at emotionally (seeing as how we’re talking about feelings), and even just stamina-wise and energy-wise, where there can be a moment where there actually can be, just in terms of public opinion and what might be possible, and that can hit at a time when people have been working so hard and are so exhausted that they’re not even able to walk through in that moment. Like, I’ve seen that in different contexts. And so, even if we just look at polling, right, and the huge shifts in public opinion in these months: Have we been able to create movements that have been able to capture the shift in public opinion? I don’t know. And that is not a commentary on how hard people have worked. And it’s hard to even say that because it sounds like a criticism. I’ve spent three decades in social movements of different kinds, including anti-war movements, and I actually have never witnessed what I will call strategy-shaming in the way that I have in recent months. And I think that this intersects with social media, and people’s experiences of being called out, and what you even dare float after that’s happened a few times.

NK: So I think there are strategic questions that we have to always be able to ask. And I know that people aren’t asking them because they’re afraid that talking about strategy in the middle of a genocide feels compromised, in some way. And I could be wrong. I often feel that we are in the wreckage of our losses. And here, I’m not just talking about Palestine. I’m talking about the losses, about money in politics, and the Supreme Court, and a rigged electoral system, corporate power, oligarchy, militarism. I mean, we’ve fought and lost a lot of battles, and they accumulate. Walter Benjamin was right, these are not distinct struggles. There’s a tower of rubble. And so maybe there is a moment at which you just say: It’s just too much. There are too many losses.

NK: But parallel to that, there are these huge shifts in people’s understanding that this system is irredeemably rigged, violent. And this is like all the work that I do around conspiracy theories related to it because people are going into conspiracy land, because they so understand how broken the system is. There have been decades that we on the left have been trying to say: It’s rigged, it’s rigged. And at the moment when so many people are seeing it, we’re losing them to conspiracy land, because we don’t know how to capture that. And we aren’t organized. And yes, people are acting, but we haven’t built the institutional structures that are able to be strategic—in the way that, if you have really robust left structures, you’re able to have multiple priorities at the same time, deploy multiple strategies at the same time. And I just want to be honest that the left is in tatters. So I don’t believe that we actually have totally earned the ability to say: We can’t change the system. Because I think that until we actually have a really robust, functional left, I don’t know that we can say that we really were able to confront this system.

AA: Well, I mean, this is one of the places where the affective dimension comes up, because one of the questions is about how we talked to people who are not already with us. I’m not talking about active opposition. Like, I don’t think that anybody thinks that we should waste time with people who are real, active opposition. But there’s a lot of people who don’t know and particularly like—we’re looking at a campus context, Naomi and I have talked about this before—there’s a lot of people who are just out of their parents’ homes for the first time. They’re young Jewish kids on campus. They’re not the most important target, but I think, as a case study, they’re not the worst. And I think that this is one of the places where it’s like, on an emotional level: Do I want to speak to that person? No, I don’t. And on a political level, the movement should allow someone to talk to those people. And Hala, I want to end with you, because you wrote in Time magazine just about, like, changing your mind. You say, “As a psychologist, I think one of the most tactical approaches is to meet people where they’re at.” And so what does it mean to be people where they’re at? And is this a good use of the movement’s time, or like, some of the movement’s time, or how do we think about this in this moment?

HA: I mean, I’m a multi-pronged approach kind of person. I think, to your point, someone needs to be having these conversations. There are people that I would not be asking to have those conversations. And there are certain people, at certain stages of change (or lack thereof), especially early stages, where it would probably not be great for my psychological sanity to be trying to like, have back-and-forth discourses with folks. And people have asked to meet up, people have asked to get coffee. Usually, the answer is like: I’m not gonna be able to do that. But boy, do I have some good recommendations for you. Boy, is this someone you should be following. Boy, is this a book that you should be checking out, et cetera. That is sometimes a good tack, I think, for people to just start to like, absorb new things, think about things, unlearn things, et cetera.

HA: So, yeah, I mean, I think this is another version of that sort of emotional honesty, is for people to be honest about where they’re at, and for you to be honest about where people are at. I might be doing more pushing away if I’m trying to come at people from this level and they’re still at this level, because people A): don’t like to be talked down to, don’t like to be shouted into agreement, oftentimes cannot handle overstimulation of information if they are barely able to even start accessing curiosity. Part of this—to your point, Naomi—yeah, I mean like really thinking about the ways to be strategic from different perspectives, different people can do different things. Again, we’re all marching in the same direction, from a liberatory practice perspective. Great! Different people can take on different tasks and different kinds of labor. So let’s be tactical about how we do it. I think that’s a really crucial part of this. You said earlier about like college students, something about like, not that that’s necessarily the most important demographic. I mean, it’s not not—you know, young people who are starting to really think about what they’ve been told.

NK: There was a question in the chat about this from Yael, describing themselves in exactly these terms: feeling like they are needing some unprogramming from this type of retraumatization and realizing that you’re brought up on lies. But where do you unpack that? And this is the thing about organizing within structures that can assign different people different tasks. I’m thinking about second-wave feminist consciousness-raising, people unlearning patriarchy in small groups, and not everybody needs to be subjected to it. But I think it is really important, and I think that the importance of it is reflected in the fact that there is a very real war on post-secondary education going on, and a new McCarthyism underway where people are afraid that they will lose their jobs if they even talk about this openly. So I think it must matter because a lot of very powerful people are deciding that it matters a great deal. So maybe that’s a hint.

AA: Well, I think we are going to have to leave it there, because we’re out of time, although I really could have more of this conversation with both of you. Thank you both so much for joining us.

HA: Thank you all.

NK: Thank you.

NG: That’s our show today. Thanks to our producer, Jesse Brenneman. Please rate, review, and subscribe to On the Nose. And don’t forget that if you become a sustaining member of Jewish Currents, you’ll get free real-time access to conversations like the one you just heard. Sign up now at jewishcurrents.org/membership. Thanks for listening. See you next time.