Transcript

Alex Kane 00:00

Hello and welcome to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I’m Alex Kane, the Senior Reporter with Jewish Currents. You’re about to hear a conversation that first appeared on The Beinart Notebook on Substack. It features Jewish Currents Editor-at-large Peter Beinart interviewing the philosopher, activist, author, and educator Angela Davis. In a wide-ranging conversation, they discuss how Jews shaped Davis’s formative years, analyze the Jewish role in the civil rights movement, compare the campus activism of the 1960s to today’s college protests, and explore why Palestine is so central to the global left. So, here’s Peter Beinart’s conversation with Angela Davis. I hope you enjoy.

Peter Beinart 01:05

Welcome to everybody. I am truly honored to be joined by our guest: Angela Davis, the renowned philosopher, activist, educator. I think this is one instance in which a lengthy biography is really, really not necessary. You really have to have been living under a rock in the United States for decades and decades without being familiar with the work of Angela Davis. Professor Davis, thank you so, so much for doing this.

Angela Davis 01:30

Well, thank you so much for inviting me. I’ve followed your work for a long time, so I’m really quite happy and quite honored to join you this morning.

PB 01:40

Thank you so much. We were chatting just before we started, and you had mentioned your history of relationships with Jews going back to your childhood in Alabama and the influence of those relationships, and I would love for you just to start by talking about that.

AD 01:56

Yeah, well, I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, which, at the time, was the most segregated city in the country. And, actually, the very first white people I ever encountered were Jewish people. And then, my mother was an activist, had been involved in social justice struggles for a very long time. And therefore, the people she knew in Birmingham who were supporting Black struggle. The white people she knew were Jewish people, and so, I grew up with this sense of closeness to Jewish traditions of social justice and of empathy and activism. Later, I went to Elizabeth Irwin High School. The vast majority of my friends and the students there were Jewish. And I went to Brandeis University. So, I can say that during my formative years, Jewish traditions of social justice played a very important role in my education and in my sense of the importance of generating solidarity. I should also say that I was a communist. I was a member of the Communist Party. So, I do think it’s important to emphasize the historical role that Jewish activists have played in working-class struggles in the development of socialism, communism. You know, I think about the Rosenbergs. I went to high school with the children of the Rosenbergs, and I’ve been involved with the Rosenberg Foundation for many decades. So, I still feel very close to those traditions and have been involved with Jewish Voice for Peace for a very long time.

PB 03:52

What do you think is the right way for us to think about the Jewish role in the civil rights movement without painting too rosy or Disneyfied a picture? Recognizing the power dynamics that were involved, recognizing that, of course, not all Jews in Birmingham were sympathetic to civil rights, and then, of course, tensions that emerged as the ’60s went on—how do you think we should think about this while recognizing that there was something valuable and important there? While recognizing the fact that Jews and Blacks in the United States, of course, are very, very differently situated as it relates to American society, and were back then?

AD 04:29

You know, we always live with contradictions, and I don’t think it is helpful to try to find a way out of those contradictions. But we try to make them productive. We try to recognize that we can’t think in these universal terms about anything, and I would say the same thing about Black people: that not all Black people are anti-racist in the way that I would like to see. I mean, that’s the way the world unfolds. We use concepts that enable us to think, but at the same time, we have to recognize that those concepts never fully grasp the contradictions that constitute our social realities.

PB 05:18

Yes, yes. And even if a group has certain common historical experiences, those can be interpreted in radically different ways. I would love to hear about when it was that you first encountered Palestinians and became aware of the Palestinian experience and the Palestinian struggle.

AD 05:34

You know, I’ve thought about this, of course, given the horrendous situation we’re confronted with today, in terms of the genocide directed against Palestinian people. And I think it was probably when I was a college student at Brandeis University. My roommate during my first year, who was Jewish (as were the vast majority of students at Brandeis)—I’m so thankful to her. She introduced me to the struggle of the Palestinians. And so, I actually began to recognize, early on, that what I had heard about as the progressive state of Israel—because as a socialist, of course, I knew all about the kibbutzim, I had friends who had traveled to Israel and participated, and then there was that whole socialist representation of the possibilities that were indicated by the founding of the state of Israel. But my roommate told me about the ways in which Palestinian people were being treated, and the evictions, and the violence inflicted upon them. So, I think that was my first recognition that there was something not quite right, because in the very early days, Israel was embraced as a beacon of socialism.

PB 07:00

Yes, I would love to ask you about that. Because Israel really was, in those early decades, even into the ’60s and ’70s, in some ways, a cause of the left. I’m curious if you can talk about the internal debates that you were part of on the left about Israel and Palestine in that period, coming out of college and then into your later education and activism.

AD 07:21

Well, I graduated from Brandeis in 1965, and I think that I became aware of the importance of recognizing the settler-colonial character of the state of Israel when I was a graduate student in Germany. I spent several years studying in Germany, and I was there in 1967 during the ’67 War. I think it was my involvement with the socialist student organization in Frankfurt that allowed me to develop a more complex awareness of what was happening. I had associated myself with Palestinian solidarity, but this was the first time in which I had the opportunity to, as an activist, try to better understand how important Palestine solidarity was to global social justice. And I’ve always considered myself an internationalist. From the time I was in high school, I’ve felt these impulses to find larger causes within which to develop my own political social identity. And it really hurts me to think about how people are brought up to think in such small terms that they cannot see beyond their own community, that they could not embrace what is happening in other parts of the world. And so, the cause of Palestine has been, perhaps, one of the most formative causes that I have embraced.

PB 09:09

I’m curious if you could talk a little bit about debates about Israel and Palestine within the Black freedom struggle in the 1960s. You know, it seems to me, as someone who’s not particularly learned about this, that the Black Panthers associated with the Palestinian cause, Malcolm X did, but there were other people—Bayard Rustin, for instance—who I think became quite a champion of Israel. So, I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the debates that you saw happening among people who were fighting for civil rights, for Black freedom in the United States, and how they thought about the connections (and also the risks) of speaking out about Israel and Palestine.

AD 09:44

Well, of course, there were powerful Zionist influences within the civil rights movement. Bayard Rustin, for example, was very much influenced by Zionism. I think that I was fortunate to have as mentors people like James Forman. In 1967, when I returned from Europe and became involved with Black movements in Southern California, I had the opportunity to spend time with Forman, who was the international affairs secretary of SNCC at the time. And as a matter of fact, all over the country, people who were involved in SNCC were urged by the organization to educate themselves about the situation in Israel/Palestine. If you go back and look at the SNCC newspaper, you’ll see lesson plans for political education about the assault on the Palestinian people and the evictions. So, it’s all very complicated, of course. There’s so many contradictions. Because at the time, of course, people in the Black movement, including the Black Panther Party, with which I was also associated, were assuming that it was possible to achieve Black liberation through the same means and methods as were occurring in other parts of the world. And, therefore, the Palestinian struggle was one of those movements that drew Black Americans and that encouraged the notion that we had to be engaged in a war of liberation in the US. And that, as a matter of fact, we could learn how to engage in that war of liberation by associating ourselves with the Palestinian struggle for freedom.

AD 11:47

So this brings the question of violence. That’s a very complicated question, because, of course, the Black Panther Party is associated historically with picking up the gun to resist the police occupation of Black communities. And as a matter of fact, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale and others patrolled the city of Oakland, where I live at this very moment, with a gun in one hand and a law book in the other hand. I always like to point out that this was not necessarily the call to arms that people assume that it was. The very fact that they carried a gun in public and a law book means that there was some symbolic meaning of the weapon. We should remember that the original name of the Black Panther Party was the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. And as someone who has observed the use of and impact of violence in many contexts over the years, I can say that I do embrace self-defense. I remember, as a child, in my Black neighborhood that was oftentimes attacked by the Ku Klux Klan, the male family members would often patrol the community with weapons. I can see, now, my father’s gun in his drawer. But I never imagined that as the key element of the struggle: It was in order to protect us and to guarantee that we had the space to continue to assert our desires to build a better future.

PB 13:34

I think this is really so important. How do you think about the line between self-defense and actions by oppressed people that take the lives of others, particularly civilians? Obviously, in the wake of October 7th, this has been a huge, huge question, but even in the period you’re talking about, in which Palestinian groups—with 1972 at the Munich Olympics for instance, or hijacking airplanes, where there were attacks that killed Israeli civilians—how do you think about the ethical questions about self-defense, on the one hand, versus something that is not ethically defensible?

AD 14:11

Well, there is the question of attempting to understand why people would engage in action such as that. And then, there’s the other question of advocacy. I think, too often, we conflate the two. I see images of Palestinian children throwing rocks at the IDF, and it’s clear that they are not involved in what we would call violence, but they’re acting out of desperation. It is the only thing they know to do to safeguard their humanity. And then there’s, on the other hand, the development of a theory of change in which one might argue that change is not possible without violence. I’m thinking about Fanon, for example, and the way he looks at violence as a cleansing force for those who have been colonized. So, I would like to say that, in all of the more than eight decades that I have lived on this Earth, I’ve learned how terrible violence can be. And that, if we center the question of violence in struggles for liberation, we’re bound to move in the wrong direction, I think. Which is not to say that we can’t defend ourselves. Which is not to say that we don’t understand why people who have been so brutally assaulted all of their lives would resort to violence.

AD 15:59

And there’s also the question of how we imagine revolution. I have a very different idea of revolution than I had when I was a young person. During those days of the 1960s, the latter ’60s especially, there were so many of us who assumed that the revolution was on the horizon, and the revolution involved the overthrow of bad governments. And, as a person who’s lived and struggled for so many decades since that period, I recognize that it’s not so simple. Change doesn’t happen instantaneously as a result of anything. Change has to be cultivated. Many of the changes that we imagine would happen as a consequence of getting rid of a government had actually been in the process of unfolding over decades. And then, there are ways in which we never could have imagined the extent to which sustained struggle—and the understandings that accompany that struggle—lead us to recognize how our concepts did not even begin to cover the breadth and the capaciousness of what it is we call freedom.

AD 17:22

I think, in the course of fighting for freedom, we begin to recognize how much we are not aware of what it is we need to be fighting for. You know, in the beginning, Black freedom was pretty much a masculinist project. It was always only about the freedom of the Black man. But so many of the activists—and in many instances, the majority of them—were women. The majority of the members of the Black Panther Party were women, but it took a very long time for us to incorporate gender liberation into the concept of Black liberation.

PB 18:08

So, when you think back to movements that you have been part of and that you’ve observed in the United States that have made some change—the movement to end the war in Vietnam, the movement for Black freedom (or civil rights, depending on how one frames it), the struggle to end American complicity with apartheid in South Africa—what lessons do you see for this growing struggle for Palestinian liberation?

AD 18:31

I think that we should acknowledge the continuum. Of course, we learned a great deal from being involved in the struggle for a free South Africa, the struggle to bring down the apartheid regime. But we also learned that simply bringing down the apartheid regime did not produce the new world that we were fighting for. The assumption for many of us was that a free South Africa would mean that we would have advanced the cause of freedom for everyone. Now, that is true to a certain extent, but simply, the overturning of a particular regime is not going to usher in the freedom we assumed that it would. We celebrated when Nelson Mandela was elected, but we didn’t see the need to continue to generate solidarity so that South Africa could deal with the very complicated economic situation in the world—the World Bank, and the impact of capitalism. And, of course, many people have not been involved in the ongoing effort in South Africa to create economic, social, gender freedom, and all the other dimensions of freedom that would be required.

AD 20:00

So, what we’ve learned is that it’s so much more complicated than we ever could have imagined. Those who think that the civil rights movement triumphed, and therefore, there is nothing left for people who have experienced the oppression of racism to struggle for in the US, are absolutely wrong. And during this moment, we see Palestine as, in many ways, the center of the world. The struggle to free Palestine represents that determination to fight for freedom until the very end. But there is no end, and I think that is what we have learned: There is no foreseeable conclusion. We have to continue to fight. So even if, by some stretch of the imagination, Palestine emerges from the ashes of Gaza as a free territory, that would not be the end of the struggle. And as a matter of fact, I suppose I should say something about my suspicion regarding states as the representative of humans who have learned how, to a certain extent, to live together and to fight against each other at the same time. James Baldwin once said about the state of Israel: You can’t imagine that a state, a nation-state, can be the hallmark of freedom under any circumstances. And I think we forget that the nation-state is a creation and that it’s very much connected to the development of capitalism. And we don’t think about other ways of human beings living and learning and loving together. And I should not only say human beings, because as humans, we are not the only inhabitants of this planet. We have to think in more capacious terms.

AD 22:03

So, I guess I would say that we have to be open. We don’t want closures. Closures are devastating. And in a sense, Palestine has been helpful because there is no state, so to speak, in Palestine. So, I’d actually look to the ways in which the Palestinian struggle has unfolded outside of the framework of a nation-state as being very instructive for those of us who might think beyond borders.

PB 22:36

I wanted to go back to your point that you made earlier, about why it is that Israel and Palestine and the Palestinian cause have so much resonance around the world when there are other places where people are being oppressed and suffering terribly. I’m curious if you can talk a little bit about: What do you think it is about the particular dynamics of the Palestinian experience and of Israel/Palestine that has made it such a magnet for so many people?

AD 23:00

That’s a really good question. Because those of us who have been involved for a very long time can remember when it was not even conceivable that such vast numbers of people would identify with the struggle for Palestinian liberation. As a matter of fact, in recent years (I would say in the last 10, 15 years), the campaign with which I’ve associated has been to bring Palestine into the framework of social justice movements, because it was always outside. As someone who’s been involved for such a long time, I think of this as, on the one hand, of course, one of the most horrendous historical periods that I’ve experienced, given the devastating genocide in Gaza. But at the same time, I’ve never experienced a moment where more people, in this country and in the world, have expressed solidarity with Palestine. So, it’s a very strange feeling because on the one hand, you want to cry for all of the suffering, and the violence, and the children. But then, on the other hand, you celebrate because it seems that people have finally seen the light. I should say that in this country, it has been largely thanks to the work of progressive Jewish organizations. I don’t think that we would be where we are today had it not been for the fact that Jewish Voice for Peace and other progressive Jewish organizations stood up immediately and have been giving leadership to the struggle.

AD 24:48

So, yeah, it makes me feel happy that I have lived this long—to be able to witness the fact that one can do intense social justice work and not see the consequences for decades and decades. It makes us recognize that even now, when we feel as if the work that we’re doing is not having the impact that it should be having, that it may indeed have that impact decades from now. It gives us a sense of how we need to enlarge our sense of who we are and how we cannot judge what is happening in the world in terms of the longevity of one human life—that it goes far beyond that. I think that is also a part of the progressive Jewish tradition: to develop that awareness of self that is not confined to a kind of narcissistic attitude and not recognize the flow of history.

AD 25:58

So I think there’s just so many lessons that we can learn. And it’s not about Palestine being the only place in the world. Attention should be focused. You know, what’s so remarkable about Palestinians is that they have refused to give up. And in a sense, I see that as reflecting, also, the Black struggle and a refusal to give up over centuries and centuries. And a struggle that began in the 1600s is still unfolding today. That is why I like to say that, at this moment, Palestine is the center of the world because it teaches us that determination. And these are the reasons why we should be in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. Not that there are not other places in the world where genocide is unfolding, where we should be engaged in solidarity activism, but in a sense, it helps us to understand why we should do that work in other places as well.

PB 27:04

Yeah. You know, your point really reminds me of an irony that often strikes me, which is that when I hear some people in the Jewish community talk about how Palestinians will give up on the desire to return, or that you can basically send them out into the Arab world and they will give up, they will forget their history and forget their identity, I think: But surely we, of all people, understand the tenacity of memory, and the tenacity of preserving oneself by never forgetting your history and by preserving that tradition. And so it seems to me there’s something deeply naive (and also deeply awful) about thinking that other people wouldn’t have that same passion and the same tenacity to remember who they are, to preserve themselves as a people, and, indeed, to be able to return to the place they’re from. I wanted to ask you about the role of universities. When you watch the encampments, the protests all across American universities, I’m curious what similarities and differences you noticed between the activism that you saw and that you were part of at American universities in the 1960s.

AD 28:08

Well, of course, it recalls those periods of great activism against the war in Vietnam, for example. But I like to think of historical lessons that oftentimes, people who are the historical actors are not necessarily aware that they’ve learned. During the movement against the war in Vietnam on the campuses, for example, there were those of us who were constantly attempting to make connections between the war in Vietnam and the war that was occurring within the US—the fact that there was police violence beyond the imagination of many people today. And there were those of us who were trying to bring those issues together, explore the connections, and to a certain extent, we were successful, but in the larger context, we were not, because people did not have the capacity, it seems to me, to think productively beyond particular issues, single issues.

AD 29:20

What we see today is a far more developed political imaginary that has occurred as a consequence of those struggles. As I was saying before, the Black struggle was a very narrow struggle for a very long time. I don’t know whether people then could have even understood the fact that eventually, it would come to have not only an international framework but to embrace issues such as queer liberation, being opposed to the oppression of trans people, for example. So I think it’s always important in the moment for us to recognize that there are ways of thinking beyond our current imagination that will emerge out of these struggles. We have to recognize that the students who have so amazingly developed encampments and teach-ins and done the work of the last several years since the outbreak of the war on Gaza and the horrible events of October 7th—we could not have imagined that response, except in the context of a historical continuum.

AD 30:48

I think that the student activism has revealed a lot about the nature of universities—that universities are not only for educating students. And of course, I am someone who spent virtually all of my life on campuses, and I embrace the university as a space of learning, but I also know that it is beholden to capitalist interests. I also know that it is beholden to the ideologies of the state, and what we are witnessing right now is a struggle for the heart and soul of the university. Students are the ones who are supposed to produce that heart and soul. I mean, that’s the purpose of having these places of intense learning—where you go, and for four years, you spend all of your time reading, and writing, and thinking, and engaging. I mean, this is what I tell my students all the time: You know, you’ll look back on this period, and this will be the most important period of your life, where you’re able to explore ideas in a way that you probably will never again do. But of course, during this period of—I mean, I haven’t used the word fascism yet, but we’re in a fascist moment, where everything is instrumentalized, where universities are instrumentalized in order to carry out the plans of the state. Students are fighting against this. Many faculty, workers on the campuses. I know that we’re in the middle of this struggle right now, but I am convinced that we’re going to win. I think it’s so important not to be so ensconced in all of the difficulties of the moment that we don’t have the vision that allows us to recognize that we are on the right side of history.

PB 32:54

I would love to ask you more about that: where this optimism or this hope comes from. Given—I think a little bit about the writing of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the sense that others might see this moment as a reversion to the norm in the United States, right? That this is a country deeply, deeply based on white supremacy and other forms of supremacy, and that many people have said in recent decades that: Oh, yes, there was this moment of reconstruction, and it was destroyed; it was a civil rights moment in a period, and now, this is like we’re entering back into the equivalent of the late 19th century. But you seem not to see it that way. I’d love to know why.

AD 33:32

Some people call me an inveterate optimist, but I think that hope is not something that one simply pulls out of the air. Hope has to be generated, and one of the major tasks of social justice movement is precisely to generate that hope, to create that hope. As Mariame Kaba says: Hope is a discipline. Without hope, there’s nothing else. And so, we have to find reasons for hope. We have to struggle for hope. And when I look at the situation in the US today, I can confidently say that the vast majority of people who live in this country are not following the fascist line. Even many of those who voted for the current government are recognizing how wrong they were. So, I think it’s misleading to assume that those who are in power represent the hegemony of political ideas. Increasing numbers of people are aware of the fact that we have to find our way out of this morass. And the majority of young people recognize that capitalism has a great deal to do with that. And there’s a new resurgence of interest in Marxism and socialism. And so, we have to find reasons for hope. Because without hope, we will not do the work that’s necessary in order to guarantee that we make our way out of this situation.

AD 35:14

Of course, there are problems with the Democratic Party. Since I was a young person, a very young person, I’ve been saying that we have to find our way out of this two-party system. The Democrats are just as beholden to capitalist interests as the Republicans. And so, whether it’s a new party, transformations within the Democratic Party—I mean, I think all of that’s necessary, but we should not succumb to the assumption that those in power represent the future. And so, I think there’s reason for hope. And those of us who are older have to recognize that it’s the young people who are now giving the leadership, because they are the ones who are closer to the future. They are the ones whose present will be our future, right? And we have to generate a kind of excitement as well, for the possibilities of the future. So this means that artists and writers, people whose imagination will allow them to develop a sense of where we might also go in the future—it does not have to be a future of fascism. We can never accede to that notion of what the future is going to bring in this country and in the world.

PB 36:41

Given that there is this renewed interest in Marxism and socialism, given your experience, what advice would you give to people who are interested in these anti-capitalist alternatives to capitalism? Especially given that in the 20th century, there were communist regimes that committed terrible, terrible human rights abuses in the name of creating an alternative to capitalism. What do you think people who want to think about these alternatives to capitalism in the 21st century might learn from the experience of the 20th century?

AD 37:10

I think there’s a great deal to learn, and I don’t think that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and argue that there’s nothing to be retained or nothing to be learned from socialist or communist experiments. If we assume that we want a new world that’s going to come completely packaged and perfect, then I don’t think we’ll ever get there. There will always be struggles. I still say that in Cuba, for example, which is 90 miles from the US, we should invest energy in understanding what is happening in Cuba today and to recognize where there may be many mistakes, but there’s also something really inspiring about such a small country that has been able to create one of the best medical systems in the world, to the extent that doctors and medical workers in Cuba were trying to make it to New Orleans so that they could assist those who had suffered the ravages of Katrina. Yet most people in this country have no idea what is going on in Cuba today.

AD 38:29

But we learn from history, and let’s not assume that what we want to create is something that replicates something that had existed in the past. There will always be mistakes, and we will always have to engage in experiments over and over and over again. So, yeah, there are extremely problematic aspects of the former socialist experiments. But that isn’t to say that we should not keep struggling for a way out of a global situation where the billionaires are able to think of a future in which the planet is devastated, and then they will colonize Mars, or they will find a new planet. That’s absolutely ridiculous. And so, I thank young people for teaching us so much today, especially in the climate movement. You know, Greta Thunberg, she is just so amazing. I really embrace her. Those of us who have a few more years on us, you have to recognize that we need to support the young energy because they’re the ones who are going to lead us to a more habitable future.

PB 39:46

Well, we’ve learned so much from you, and I think it’s extraordinary to be able to listen to you with the breadth of knowledge and experience that you have to put this moment in historical perspective. I’m so grateful to you for doing this.

AD 40:00

Well, thank you so much for inviting me. I’d like to thank everyone who’s participated in this event, because it’s always a collective process. That is the way we’re going to find our way to a better future.

PB 40:14

Absolutely. Thank you, Angela, so, so much. And thank you, everybody.

AK 40:22

Thank you for listening to another episode of On the Nose. And thanks to our editor, Jesse Brenneman. As always, subscribe to the magazine, visit our website at JewishCurrents.org to see more of our work, and rate and review our podcast. We’ll see you next time.