Hello and welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I'm Arielle Angel, editor in chief of Jewish Currents, and I'll be your host for today. Today is actually a mailbag episode. This is the second one of these that we've done. We solicited your questions, and I have Senior Editor Nathan Goldman, Associate Editor Mari Cohen, and Editor-at-large Peter Beinart here to answer them. So, I think we'll just get started.
AA:The first question comes from Ben from Philadelphia, and he writes: I've been following your writings and conversations about Jewish language and cultural revival and the pressing need for new Jewish institutions since the outbreak of the horrors in Gaza. I've spent a lot of time thinking about the vexing problem of developing countervailing left-wing Jewish communities in America. If America is a country that reliably deracinates and denatures immigrant groups’ ancestral culture over the course of a few generations, how can Jews manage to sustain their cultural practices and sense of community? For Zionists, the answer is simple. Be a Zionist. So, for the rest of us with moral convictions that lead us to reject Zionism, how do we manage to live in diaspora while maintaining a close, vibrant, and (most importantly) reproducible community? And if you'll indulge a suggestion of my own, could a robust language education, perhaps including community fluency and communication in modern Hebrew, be a key component to creating strong in-group bonds resistant to the allure of assimilation? My thinking is that instrumentalizing Hebrew for anti-Zionist aims can provide a bridge between diasporic communities. Sort of an inversion of the Zionist logic that undergirded Hebrew revival.
AA:It's a big question. I mean, I think there's two questions here. One is about: How do we actually resist a certain kind of assimilation that has been key to the American immigrant experience and the expectation of immigrants to America? And then the second question is specifically whether the reclamation of modern Hebrew is possible and/or something we would want to do in that project.
Nathan Goldman:Yeah, I guess regarding the first question—I think it's a really hard question. I think it is sort of the question, and I think it's what, in something like your piece, Arielle (about the need for new Jewish institutions), I take part of the thrust of that argument to be: We need a lot of infrastructural investment to even begin to think through this problem. One thing to think about in the mix of things (and this is a question that we have encountered at different times) is the role that religion and textual history, and things like that play in this. I think it seems clear that, for thousands of years before Zionism, that was a central way in which there was a cultural reproduction of Jewishness—was through the infrastructure of Jewish tradition. I think it's a very different problem, obviously, now, after the Enlightenment, and secularism, and assimilation, and all of these things in which—not to say that the question of religion was ever simple, but that it is complicated by those things. And obviously, there are people who are interested in reclaiming those things. There are people who are not interested in reclaiming those things. I guess I would just offer that as one site of the question.
AA:Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely drawn to that. I think, for me, one of the main answers to this question is in the technologies of learning, whether that's in chevruta or the idea of Daf Yomi. For me, it actually doesn't matter what you're learning. You could be studying Marx in the same way, but those technologies of learning, to me, feel like a site for that. I also would say, I'm a little wary of trying too hard to reclaim something. Like the idea of: Should we adopt modern Hebrew? I mean, the fact of the matter is, we're not going to be able to adopt, en masse, a language in the same way that early immigrants had Yiddish or Ladino—on the Lower East Side, in particular. It's just not going to happen. Those were products of particular moments. I do believe that there is a diasporic Hebrew that's possible, and we actually did a great interview that I'll put in the show notes with Tal Hever-Chybowski, who runs a diasporic Hebrew journal called Mikan Ve'eylakh (I'll put that in the show notes). I don't think it's not a worthy project. I think that, just as a Hebrew speaker myself, the ability to make that happen as something that would really authentically set us apart—it just feels impossible. And I don't think that we should be trying too hard to make something happen. I think that what we do when we come together will be sufficiently Jewish, and we just have to allow that space.
Peter Beinart:I mean, when one talks about the need to resist assimilation—for me, this is a personal question and not some moral imperative. Like, if someone wants to assimilate and make meaning and purpose in their lives, and joy, and beauty, and love around all kinds of other axes, who am I to tell them that's wrong, you know? I mean, if you can live a good life and have purpose, go for it. So I think it's like—first of all, I don't think of this as a moral question. But I will say that if one's focus is on having future generations of people for whom being Jewish is kind of a central focus of their lives, I'm pessimistic about Jewishness without Judaism. I always have been pessimistic about that. And I think the thing that is most successful, when I look around, is Torah—that the people who are most engaged with Torah are generally most likely to resist assimilation, if that's what you're focused on. I'm not totally sure I can explain exactly why that is, but sociologically, that's certainly what I notice. Now, if one engages with Torah without the notion that one is commanded by God to follow Torah, is it still effective in resisting assimilation? That I'm not as sure about, to be honest. Is it just the engagement with the texts, and the ideas, and the traditions, or does it require a sense of being commanded to be successful, in terms of resisting assimilation? There, I'm not as sure.
AA:I'm not certain of anything, but I am more sanguine about that ability—for the study of Torah without the practice of Torah—to be a site of real, generative Jewishness that is actually, on some level, reproducible. But I do really appreciate that you said that. I mean, that was one of the first things that I was gonna pull out, specifically about, you know: You don't have to do this. Like, this isn't a moral imperative. And I thought particularly about something that, Nathan, you said many years ago, when we were having a conversation about intermarriage, where you were like: Everything will die, you know? Everything will change and die over time, and I'm not sure that this is the one thing that needs to keep going. That there needs to be some kind of recognition that things are going to shift and change and that this holding so tightly to the idea of reproducibility is itself a kind of hallmark of the Judaism that we are leaving. And that is also why I was stressing, like—maybe we could be a little more chill about it. Mari, I don't know if you want to get in on this.
Mari Cohen:Yeah, it's hard to know exactly what to say because I think this is a real question mark for me, in that I think much of my time doing this work over the past five years at Jewish Currents—and before that on the Jewish left—was trying to think through what this might actually look like. I do sometimes worry about the real, actual ability to maintain a concrete Jewish identity and practice that actually feels meaningful outside of Zionism in this age of assimilation. And I do think, at least for me, this question of doing something when you don't actually necessarily believe that you're commanded to do it is a relevant question. Or when you're not structuring your entire life around Torah. I mean, at least I feel like I'm someone who's very committed to my Jewish practice, in certain ways. And there's like, certain things I always do, you know: fast on Yom Kippur, and go to shul on Rosh Hashanah, and Passover, and things like that. But at the same time, I think there are many times throughout the year in which I have this vague notion of finding more ways to be involved in certain actual elements of Jewish ritual and practice. And honestly, a lot of the time, I don't do it because I have the option not to do it, and I'm focused on other things, and I have other stuff going on.
MC:And also, obviously, right now I’m having trouble separating any kind of Jewish practice from the horror at Gaza. So that's all going on. But I'll just say: I am optimistic about the many institutions that are developing around this, and I really do think this is a moment of real growth for these types of countervailing left Jewish institutions. And also that there's a real flourishing of thinking and debating about this kind of question as well. There's a lot of books that have come out in recent years theorizing the idea of diaspora Judaism, including books by Shaul Magid and Daniel Boyarin about this question. And in particular, I've heard Daniel Boyarin—he talks about diaspora nationalism, but there's this idea of like a double-facing, or a double-sidedness, in that you have part of you that is oriented toward this community, toward this identity of Jewishness, and that you always have a part of you that's facing outwards toward the rest of the world, toward the larger community that you're participating in. And in terms of, again, what that actually looks like in practice, given all the pressures that I've just described, I don't exactly know. But I do find that really compelling, at least as a value to strive for, as opposed to either the fully closed, inward-facing circle of nationalism or the full assimilation into liberal individualism.
MC:So, yeah, that's kind of how I think about it. I mean, the other thing too is that I think it'll be interesting to think about how other diaspora and American immigrant groups are thinking about this question. What are the things that we might learn from other ethnic and racial groups in the United States? I don't want to pretend that what the Jewish community is facing here is similar to what, for example, South Asian or Latino or other groups are, because obviously, being majority white totally changes it and changes this—the idea that if you're not necessarily externally perceived as being part of this identity, that really does change the extent to which it's a relevant factor. And this element of choice is very different. But I do think, even so, there's still real questions that a lot of other groups are facing about what it means to carry on legacies, and what assimilation means, and all of that.
AA:I mean, I think for white Latinos, it's not so dissimilar. All right, I'm going to go to the next question. So this is from Ethan from New York: What is the importance of printing a physical magazine? Is it important? Are there things Jewish Currents can accomplish by printing a physical magazine that would be harder or not possible with an online-only magazine? Conversely, is there anything lost due to the resources, time, labor, expense of putting out a physical magazine?
AA:Wow, Ethan, straight through the heart. I mean, just to say, for Jewish Currents, actually, our first funder, which is the Puffin Foundation, mandated that we stay in print. That was a condition of our funding. So, for the first couple years, we didn't really have a choice. But that said, I really would be very, very heartbroken if we stopped publishing in print. And I could probably make up a lot of reasons why, and I don't actually think that I have a good rational argument for why. But what I do know is that there is something about the physical object that makes it more real to me. And there is also something about the amount of time and effort that goes into it. I mean, I just want to stress—I don't know what Ethan, who wrote this question, knows about the process, but it is so much harder. I mean, it just takes so much more time. There's so many more steps, from the fact checking to the proofing, to the typesetting, to the design process, to the design proofing, to the printer troubleshooting. I mean, it's just really a giant pain in the ass. But I think that what we are committing to when we say that we're going to go through that process is that what is in that magazine is worth that trouble. I mean, especially now with all the AI stuff (which I really don't even want to get into), and the fact that so many online magazines are basically starting to be written by AI on some level, and people think that that's the future of journalism—I mean, I don't know why you would go through the trouble of putting something on paper that was produced that way. And I think that continuing to invest in that medium is a rebuke of that. I also just think that once something is an object, it becomes a totem in a broader sense. I don't discount the value, actually, of people who aren't big readers but who subscribe to the magazine in order to keep it on their coffee table as a measure of who they are and what it means for others to see it there. That may sound superficial, but I actually think that it's significant.
NG:Yeah, I really strongly agree with everything you said, Arielle. I also—the print magazine feels very important to me. It is extremely impractical in a million ways. It is extremely time, labor, and resource-intensive, and I think there's probably a lot of good arguments, fiscal and otherwise, to not do it. But I also feel a great attachment to it that I think, similar to what you're saying, Arielle, is in some sense pre-rational, or visceral, or just like, I just like it. And I also have rational justifications for that, and in some sense, I think those things are all tied up, because of what we're talking about when we talk about—like you said: that totemic quality of the object.
NG:I guess I think it's related to the earlier question, in a way. Not to say that having a print magazine solves the problem of cultural continuity, but I do think that there is something about the tangibility of physical objects in the way in which they live particular kinds of lives that speaks to that question. I think I'm representative in thinking of—you know, a lot of my associations with Jewishness of having to do with physical objects that exist in space around me, and my family home, and communities where I grew up. And you know, the kind of images, like walls of different kinds of Jewish books—so text, specifically. And so I do think, in that way, there is something about just the physicality of the object existing in intimate and communal spaces that feels like a part of that culture-building. It becomes a kind of thing that you interact with in a different way than things that exist digitally, and the ways in which the magazine exists to be read when it arrives. But of course, it can also sit around and go from place to place. It might be discovered years from now, or things like that.
NG:One way I've come to think about this even a little differently, I think, since now having children, having young children—I have twin three-and-a-half-year-olds who interact with the magazine in a particular way now, where it's around and they, as with many of the books that are not age-appropriate for them in the house, they look at them, and mess around with them, and it just becomes that kind of thing in the world, in a certain way. And in a related but different way, I think of the physicality of the magazine as being important in the way that—you know, we stock Jewish Currents at the bookstore that's near my house that we go to a lot, and I like seeing it there, and I like thinking about the ways in which I, especially as a teen, discovered things like that through just being in a bookstore and running into something, and you don't know what it is, and you look at it, or whatever. It just becomes one of these things that seems important to me in not just specifically Jewishness but in general community, political culture-building of things able to be around. I know I say this, I think, as someone who also was of a generation to be raised on physical media at the advent of the internet, but I don't know, some part of it, maybe, is personal idiosyncrasy, or being a Luddite, or having an urge to get more offline. But I think it's important in a lot of those ways.
AA:I'm actually curious, Peter, how you relate to it. I mean, your writing is often almost exclusively online for Jewish Currents, and you come out of some more legacy media publications like The Atlantic, writing for the New York Times. But I feel like you have become kind of like a digital native in some kind of way. You have a Substack now. You know, you're pretty online.
PB:Yeah, I mean, I don't think of myself as someone who's particularly sophisticated about that stuff. I do worry that it's reduced my attention span. I sometimes think back about earlier times of my life and wonder whether I was consuming more information at a higher level than I am now. I don't know. But I do think that, because I'm not online on Shabbat, I do think there are the physical things really, really valuable to me, and that's where I try to detox a little bit. So, I've just been reading the most recent issue, and I really enjoy that experience. I was actually thinking the other day a little bit about the same thing. As you mentioned earlier, Arielle, Daf Yomi, and Daf Yomi has its pleasures. But one of the things which is a bit difficult about it is that—
AA:You have to carry the books.
PB:Yes! I know. And it, like, really increases the weight of my suitcases and my backpacks when I’m traveling. And I was thinking the other day: Wow, maybe this would be better on Kindle or something like that online. But then, it would seem to be a totally different experience. So I think I resonate with a lot of what you're saying.
MC:Yeah. Also I think there's, like, a mentality that comes with reading things on the screen that also imposes this whole online reaction mentality, at least for me, which is that you're reading an article, and then you're immediately thinking about what someone's tweet in response to it is going to say, and then you're immediately wondering what's in the comments. And I do think that, when I read things in print, it's a helpful respite from that immediate mode of reaction. It gives me a better chance to just actually sit with things and appreciate them on their own terms. And then also, just some sense of a type of curation that's not the algorithm. Like, maybe there's something in there that I wouldn't necessarily have thought to click on if I was on the Internet, but because it's the one that I flip to next in the magazine, I end up reading it, and I do think that's really valuable. I also like the opportunity that we actually offer a curated product to people in that way. I do think it just creates an opening that otherwise might not be there.
AA:It is a really nice experience for me when we're putting together a magazine, recognizing the ways that the pieces are bouncing off of each other, sometimes in very intentional ways—especially when we were doing themed issues more. But even when we didn't plan for it, when we start to see those echoes develop, you start to get a sense of the water that we're swimming in. It actually tells us something about what the world is like and what's actually happening, just from the juxtapositions, both planned and unplanned, that happened when we actually put things next to each other in an issue. And that's actually been one of my favorite parts about the whole process over the last couple years.
AA:I'm going to move on to the next question. This question is just explicitly for you, Peter. It's from Sandy, from outside of Philadelphia: “Peter has hesitated or denounced comparing the genocide in Gaza to the German Holocaust of the Jews. I know this is a difficult question to confront, but I would like to hear the reasoning behind this analysis.” Is that accurate, Peter, by the way?
PB:Well, I don't know. I'm not really sure. I mean, I think I have not made that analogy, and I probably said that I think that there are important differences. I'm not sure, necessarily, if that constitutes denouncing. But again, I do say a lot of things. So maybe there's some particular reference that I'm not aware of. I mean, I guess I come at this from a couple of different angles. The first is that I do tend to think a fair amount about how I'm going to be heard in Jewish spaces of people who don't share my point of view. Now, that is a particular orientation that I have. I'm not saying it's better than other people who think more in terms of other audiences. It's just, for whatever reason, more native to me. And so, I do tend to think about things that I might say, at a particular moment in time, that I feel will make people stop listening and mean that I can't make progress with them in trying to get them to confront certain things. And I think this one is pretty high up there.
PB:I guess, when I think about analogies more generally, I think analogies are valuable when you compare two things and explain in what particular way you think they're similar. So I'm not just, in general, a fan of analogies that say “X is like Y.” I could see how someone might say: In these particular ways, what Israel is doing in Gaza resembles things that the Nazis did in these particular ways. I don't think I would have any problems with that. And again, based on the specificity of what was being—you know, the particular way in which you dehumanize people, the particular way in which some particular form of language or tactic or whatever. But I'm generally, I think, resistant to totalizing analogies in general, even if they're about something else, right? So I just don't think that's a particularly valuable way of thinking. So I think the most valuable thing, it seems to me, would be for someone to ask the question—whether it's about Rwanda, whether it's about Algeria, whether it's about the destruction of native peoples in the United States, whether it's about the Nazi Holocaust—to ask the question: In what ways is this similar, and in what ways is this different? I think that's the most valuable way of thinking about any of these analogies.
AA:I agree with that, Peter. I both agree with that and feel strange about it from the other direction. Not because I would be afraid of offending somebody with the comparison, but more because: What does it matter to the people starving now that Jews had this experience of starvation in the Holocaust? I think about a piece that Ben Ratskoff wrote for us a few years ago, during George Floyd, about the way that Jews were finding a way into the conversation about racial justice through a Jewish history of oppression. And he basically wrote this piece against analogy that was sort of like: It's really not about you, in this moment. I also think about Rabea Eghbariah, a Palestinian scholar who's been arguing, basically, within the field of genocide studies that actually, the term is Nakba. What is happening to the Palestinians—you can talk about it as a genocide, but it also has a specificity to it, that there is something unique, also, in the same way that there's something unique in the mechanized German Nazi Holocaust of the Jews. There's also something unique in the long process of cultural genocide and dispossession of Palestinians as it's been practiced over the last 75+ years. So, I do argue for that specificity while I myself am constantly, I think, being confronted with the echoes. And I feel that actually experiencing from afar what is happening in Gaza and the Gaza genocide, watching the starvation campaign in Gaza and seeing the images come out of it, has, in some ways, helped me to understand a little bit differently, or to access a little bit differently, what happened to my grandparents, and what it was like to be the only survivors from their families, and this kind of thing. They had two fridges next to each other, where you would open the door, and the food would just fall out onto you, and there would be food rotting in the back. I mean, it was so intense, watching the way that they related to that. So, yeah, I'm torn on it, and also very loath to speak in public about those kinds of feelings.
PB:It reminds me, actually, of an incredible lecture that Sara Roy, the expert on Gaza at Harvard, who's lost dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of family members in the Holocaust. She gave a lecture in honor of Edward Said, I think in Australia, maybe the University of Adelaide, where she basically talked about how she came to have an understanding of her parents’ or grandparents’ experience by spending time in Gaza (I mean, Gaza decades ago) in a way that she hadn't. So that's exactly the point you're making.
MC:I have some thoughts about this, just from my reporting on genocide studies and Holocaust studies, and I'm also trying to figure out how to talk about it in a way that captures some of this complexity or the sensitivity. I think there's a move to try to counter the use of the Holocaust, or the misappropriation of the Holocaust as a weapon of Israeli propaganda, with the connections between the Holocaust and the Nazis and genocide in Gaza. And I mean, first of all, it's an understandable impulse for that reason. And second of all, obviously, it's genuinely useful just to step outside of your current historical moment and de-exceptionalize by actually historicizing and understanding the ways in which this does have comparisons across time and context. It's not just some unique, otherworldly, evil Hamas thing going on that's different than anything else that has ever happened before. I think obviously, there's uses there, and it also helps us just draw connections to other forms of resistance and other periods in history and other forms of memory. But at the same time, I do think sometimes it relies on this misapprehension—this idea that if we can prove that there's these relationships to the Holocaust, that that's going to do something, that that's going to make something happen in the world, which is, I think, often not true.
AA:Well, it's been disproven again and again.
MC:And it's being disproven right now. And I think something similar kind of goes on with the Holocaust analogies, which is just this idea that you can be like: Well, this is what the Nazis did, and that'll get somebody to stop it, but unfortunately, it won't. And also, I do think that if one of the problems in Holocaust and genocide studies is the way in which the Holocaust has ended up becoming this kind of broader symbol that's, like, the paradigmatic case for genocide (such that genocides that look different aren't always recognized), and also that it's become this dehistoricized symbol of evil rather than recognized for the actual historical event that it was. And rather than recognizing its specificity, in some ways, it can actually exacerbate that problem when we make comparing it to the Holocaust the only standard for how we talk about atrocities. I worry that that just continues to perpetuate the same problems in the historical, scholarly, legal study of genocide.
AA:Yeah. This next question is probably really just for Nathan. This comes from Becca from Seattle: I'm a Jewish public elementary school teacher, a child of a mixed-religion marriage, raised loosely connected to the Reform movement, raising two kids in another mixed religious marriage in Seattle. I've struggled to find a Jewish synagogue community here. However, one thing I have found, or that found us, is this organization called PJ Library that sends a free Jewish children's book monthly to any family who subscribes. I subscribed. I mean, it's free. I have received and read dozens of PJ Library books over the last few years. Most are fictions about kids celebrating Jewish holidays—mostly Ashkenazi, with a little representation of Mizrahi or Sephardi Jewish people and their traditions, as well as Jews of color. What concerns me is that some of the books are set in Israel and never mention Palestinians, including, for example, a retelling of the Tortoise and the Hare, where the animals race across Israel with no labels for Gaza or the West Bank. Many of the books were written by Israeli authors or published in Israel as well. As you can imagine, some of these books are very offensive to me, and I talk with the kids about that, but others help my children learn about some Jewish traditions and folklore. My kids aren't in synagogue education, and so this is one of our only sources of kids’ media with Jewish representation. The PJ Library organization is, like most mainstream Jewish orgs, totally silent about the genocide in Gaza and only sending parenting emails addressing, quote, “antisemitism” and quote, “difficult conversations related to attacks on Israelis.” Is this just indoctrination for the next generation? Is PJ Library a mini-Birthright? What is their agenda? Is it immoral to stay subscribed? Is it worth trying to say anything to move this org? More broadly, how do you all think about what is worth passing on to the next generation of Jewish children?
AA 29:05 We have talked a lot about PJ Library, the parents on the staff, only one of them with small children on this call. So, Nathan, I'm going to let you take that.
NG:Yeah, I think it's a great question. I mean, we do subscribe to PJ Library, so I know exactly what Becca is talking about. When I decided to sign up for it, it was with some sense of these dynamics, and two motives at once, one of which was to get some books in the mail for our kids, and the other was to see what the Israel content was and how ubiquitous it was or not. And I mean, what I have noticed, I think, lines up with what the question asker is saying. I guess I would say that it functions like a lot of Jewish cultural stuff in the world. In some ways, to me, it stands out—especially, I think, in this moment—as less overtly Zionist than so much stuff, I think because (as you documented at the beginning of your institutions piece, Arielle) so much of what didn't seem politicized has become so outwardly Zionist in Jewish culture that it almost seems less so than a lot. Because a lot of the books they send, as the letter writer notes, don't deal with Israel at all. The most recent one I think we got was in this Sammy Spider series, which is about this, I guess, Jewish spider family? They're in the home of a Jewish family, and I guess the implication is that they're Jewish. It was Sammy Spider’s first Yom Kippur. And I feel like there's been two or three since we've subscribed that I have noticed (and have actually given away or thrown out and not given to the kids for this reason) that are the kind of things that I would describe as normalization, as basically just being stuff that seems designed to give kids a sense that Israel is a great thing they should be proud of, and no sense that there's anything complicated about it.
NG:I remember there's one that was like a counting book based on Israel. And I remember one of them was like: One trip up the mountain to Masada or something like this. And in none of it do Palestinians feature at all. It is a question I have asked myself, of: Should we not subscribe to this thing? I think where I have ended up in this moment is that this is a really uncomfortable and shitty feature of the Jewish cultural and resource landscape. And I do feel there's a kind of complicity, or something, to participating in it, and I feel uncomfortable about that, and I wish that this organization were not this way and that there were other options for other kinds of organizations. I also don't feel that opting out of it has a meaning beyond a desire for a kind of moral purity. I think that the question with this kind of thing tends to be about: Well, is there a campaign to do something about it toward some end, that ending your participation in becomes part of that? I do remember that there was, I think in 2024—and I can put it in the show notes—there was a petition to PJ Library that I think just didn't get a lot of traction—it had a few hundred people signing—that had a very eloquent articulation of some of these concerns, I think specifically spurred by some of the emails they sent out in the post-October 7th period, that was calling on PJ Library to say, like: We should be able to opt out of certain kinds of content. We also want you to reframe certain things in this way, or something, and if not, we're going to cancel our subscriptions. I don't know what the end result of that was, but I think there's a good argument for campaigns like that.
NG:I think the question, as with anything, for instance, in the BDS movement, is the question of what organizations are being targeted, and what is the strategy around them, and what is worth putting that investment in. I think this is an interesting kind of case also because I don't send them any money. The whole point is that you get things for free. And so, in that way, there's not support in that way. I think, on the other hand, you could say: Well, by participating in it, I'm sure my kids are added to the ledger of Jewish kids they list as being in it, and I imagine that helps secure funding, or that contributes to this whole ecosystem. So that's not to say there's not an argument for not participating, but yeah, I think it's a good case at the knot of all these things and, again, is just an emblem of the way in which resources in the Jewish community are funneled through Zionism. I think it would be great if there were a non-Zionist version of PJ Library, and maybe someone's making that now. I would not be shocked if someone were. It is an important kind of thing, I think—because I'm not someone in the exact situation this person is, where we do have a synagogue and also other kinds of Jewish community. So I don't think of it as the kind of essential lifeline like this person does, in some sense.
AA:Peter, I want to give you a chance, if you have any thoughts on kids and kids’ books and what it means to give them questionable content that is Jewish since you're the only other parent on this call.
PB:My kids are a lot older, so the damage has been done. I don't know. I mean, I've always been of the view that, for better or for worse, the values that parents live in their own lives have the dominant influence on children. Maybe that's just my own alibi that I've used, but I didn't really worry that much about putting our kids in environments where they would hear a lot of pro-Israel stuff. If I felt that that was necessary because it was the only way that they were going to get to other things in terms of Jewish community or Jewish learning—because I just felt that that was gonna be a lot less impactful than the model that they were seeing with their parents. But again, I can see a critique. I think there's probably a very legitimate critique of that perspective as well.
AA:I mean, look, my mom says all the time: I don't know how you became such a serious Zionist. Like, I learned Arabic, I went to Palestine, and I was in Americans for Peace Now back when that meant something, blah, blah, blah, you got other things at home. And I was kind of like, I don't know. I mean, I think it's different for your kids, Peter, because you're so public. And my mom, in the years after the Second Intifada, turned with the rest of the boomer community, and then also snapped back (in part from conversations with me and listening to you). But my environment was so much stronger than my parents’ values. My dad also happened to be very non-Zionist. Like it just—Israel didn't matter to him at all. And that, I mean, I just absorbed the community I was in, which was a very hardline Zionist community. So, I think especially when you're a kid, the desire is not to stand out, to be part of the community in whatever kind of way that there is.
AA:
But one thing that I will say about what you were saying, Nathan, is that I think that something that Zionists did so well over the last 20 or 30 years is letter-writing campaigns. I remember talking to an editor of a very large magazine who was basically like: For a long time, I didn't want to do any Israel/Palestine coverage because I couldn't deal with the letters. Like, I just couldn't deal with the backlash, basically. And I wonder if we need to bring that back—to just be as annoying as these Zionist writing letter campaigns. Like, if every time PJ Library sent one of those books that has no demarcations on the map, or that's printed in Israel without any question of who the publisher is or who benefits, not mentioning Palestinians in any kind of way in the context of Israel—everyone themselves should be contacting PJ Library and being like: Hey, we hate this. We don't want it. We don't want this product. And, over time, they're not going to want to deal with that. I do think that that shaped a fair amount of media, not just in the Jewish world but in the broader ecosystem, is that they stopped wanting to get the backlash. You know, maybe it wouldn't matter, but maybe it would. And maybe it's not just about a single petition but about a group of people who are committed, every single time they get a book like this, to being like: Hey, we don't want that.
AA:The last question is Finn, writing from Brussels in Belgium: “Among white non-Jewish leftists in Europe and North America, Zionism is sometimes portrayed as the ultimate source of evil. When I hear such statements, I always wonder if they function to absolve the speaker from any role in its history? After all, wasn't it only thanks to British imperialism that Zionism became a serious agent? Didn't the Holocaust wipe out many alternative forms of Jewish politics in Europe? Didn't the West's complete failure to help and resettle Jewish refugees during and after World War II literally push hundreds of thousands into the hands of Zionism? And wasn't Western support for the partition plan an evasion of the responsibility to those displaced Jews at the expense of both them and the Palestinians? All these moments point to Europeans’ and North Americans’ responsibility for Zionism today. From a progressive Jewish perspective, how do you think about the tendency of white Westerners to simply demonize Zionism without addressing their own complicity?” Tough one.
MC:Yeah, good question. Tough one. I agree. Honestly, I think this is real. Figuring out how to actually respond to this materially is a challenge because we do want people from those backgrounds who are white and European and have some, perhaps, historical complicity in oppression of Jews, or failure to take Jewish refugees—we want them to participate in the movement to end the genocide and to free Palestine. It's not totally clear exactly what we might ask for in terms of grappling with that complicity, but I do think that we see rhetorical or just forms of activism or forms of discourse that do center the idea that this is some sort of foreign Zionist agent that has landed on either European or American shores from afar, in a dehistoricized way that the other people here who aren't Jews have no complicity for. And I do think that's bad for a lot of reasons. First of all, it's bad analysis. It's not going to help. You can't have good politics if you don't have a developed political analysis of how we got here and what it might look like to combat it politically. And also, I do think that—we published a piece today by Simone Zimmerman that's about this sort of new phenomenon of liberal Zionist Jews speaking up about Gaza and what it means when people are just suddenly coming in to condemn something without accountability, and how that forecloses the possibility of changing or doing something different materially next time. And obviously, it’s a different situation, but I think the same logic applies, which is that without some sense of historical accountability for how we got here, it becomes much easier just to repeat the situation.
MC:I do think Zionism and the “Question of the Jews” is a real warning for the ways in which things can change, and people who were historically considered victims can become perpetrators if they have access to a certain type of structural power. And this is not some unique thing that is only possible for Jews to do because Jews are evil—I mean, obviously, there are certain ways in which Jews have an unusual historical position, but this is not necessarily unique. This is something that can happen, and this is something that could happen again, in other contexts, with other groups, has happened. And so, if your analysis is based on the idea that this is some unique, foreign, just Jewish thing, then you're not actually going to have a broader anti-genocide or anti-colonial politics. That's me giving kind of the universal response, and the other response is that I do think the worst versions of that thinking can have antisemitic undertones or impacts. So, I think it's bad. It's hard to get people to recognize their own complicity or grapple with that. No one wants to. That's partly why we have so much trouble in our communities fighting Zionism. It's hard to know how to combat these things. It's hard to get people to think really thoughtfully and historically, but as a magazine, that's part of what we want people to do.
NG:Yeah, I guess I would add that one thing that plays into this is the way in which Israel and Zionism have very successfully coded—when it comes to this issue of the idea of “it's complicated” as an alibi—it's a very familiar pro-Israel talking point, especially people begin to become aware, activated around Palestine, which has happened a lot, obviously, in the past two years of the genocide. Just say, like: Well, the history is really complicated, you don't understand, as a way to shut down talking about it, and to say, like: We understand, you don't understand. And then, some of these talking points, like: Where are these Jews supposed to go? Which is—it's a fair point. It's not a fair point to defend genocide or to defend the Nakba, but it is a reality. And I think that it becomes difficult in that discursive landscape, in some way. And it's part of a necessary challenge to be able to, from an anti-Zionist perspective, refuse the logic of what that's doing while also remaining attuned to the historical complexity of the situation and the distribution of responsibility and complicity for where we are now. I guess I will say that I think it's definitely true that this tendency exists, and that it's a problem. I think it's also true—and not to be overly optimistic or something—but that there are a lot of people doing activism and doing writing and thinking about Israel/Palestine now who are sensitive to this historical reality. It's interesting to think about the way that the discourse on settler colonialism is something that is obviously so maligned and itself demonized by Zionists—saying that it's a framework that is doing this demonization of Zionism and of Jews—but at its heart, and in its practice by scholars and people thinking with it, the idea of that framework is to think through these historical junctures, to understand the comparisons between different contexts and also to understand that saying something's a settler-colonial society doesn't mean the colonialists are not also refugees or don't also include refugees.
AA:Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty interested in this question in general. I actually noticed this a lot. My husband is a therapist and is in the therapeutic community, and there's a lot of conversations right now that are about whether people should treat Zionists or be treated by Zionists as therapists. I think the reason that I'm so interested in that question in particular is because this is an environment where, on some level, the question is about breaking beyond a kind of essentialism to talk about who you are as a human being. And in a lot of political contexts, that kind of humanism is much maligned because it's usually used as cover for, essentially, liberal violence, where superpowers, the United States, whatever, have a monopoly on that, and some people have a little bit more humanity than others, or whatever. But in a therapeutic context, where you're really encountering another person—by the way, I know also a lot of horror stories about Zionist therapists actually allowing that to really cloud their ability to treat patients who are in another kind of place—but I specifically get upset when I hear therapists who are, like: I don't think I could treat a Zionist. When I think most therapists think about almost everybody who comes into their office as broken, in some way, bringing with them a lot of wrongheaded ideas, bringing with them a lot of things that they may have done in their past that they're not proud of—hurting people—and having to treat people who hurt people.
AA:I am very concerned about taking even the capacity for evil outside of the human frame. There's something about the way that this conversation progresses, which really speaks to ethical questions about how we're going to conduct ourselves politically. I think what needs to be at the core of our politics is an anti-essentialism on some level, and basically, recognizing also that that means that if you are born into a country, that does not determine who you are, and what your rights are, and your right to life, and freedom, and justice, and all of those things. And that's true for Palestinians, and it's also true for Israelis. Now with Israelis, they are responsible and accountable for their actions and their beliefs and all of these other things, and that is absolutely true. And you have a situation where a large percentage of Israeli society agrees with some of the very worst things that are happening now. And that shouldn't be sublimated in any way, or denied. But there is a way that the category of Israeli becomes untouchable within the leftist debate on some level.
AA:I talked about this in a piece that I wrote about the JVP conference recently, where I went to a session on bridging divides between Israeli anti-Zionists and American Jewish anti-Zionists, and I was just really struck by how eloquently the Israelis in that group were talking about how they saw the way that people were relating to them in this moment as a way of negating their own responsibilities. They talked about, particularly, how there were these wildfires in Israel at the time, and how there were also these wildfires in LA, and there was just like all this outpouring of support for people in LA, and this sense of like: Let the wildfires go in Israel. And they were like: Yeah, but this is like an ecological phenomenon that affects everybody in the region. It affects Israelis, it affects Palestinians, it affects the wildlife, it affects the Earth. We have to recognize on some level that we are connected, and we have to allow for a politics that at least allows for the ability for that to be true and doesn't box anybody in because of the circumstances of their birth. And that should be a baseline of an ethical politics. And what that means, to realize that in a moment where you do have a country in thrall to a fascist ideology, where so many people are part of that, is very, very tricky. And yet, we still can't lose sight of that. It's one of the most important things. I guess it's just like part of our job at Jewish Currents—to insist on that.
MC:Yeah. I think this ties into some of what we were talking about earlier, in terms of the historical approach to the Holocaust and some of the things I was saying about exceptionalization. Some of the things that we see when we look at defenses of Zionism in our communities is this kind of exceptionalization of Jews, or the idea that the Jewish state or Israel could never commit a genocide, could never be a perpetrator in this way, because Jews couldn't do that. And obviously, there's a dehumanizing element to that, just this idea that Jews are not humans who also do very evil things and that are some other type of category. And so, you see that in the defense of Zionism. But then I think in these tendencies that we're talking about, in terms of what the letter writer identified, you see this opposite type of thing, which is again, separating Zionists and Zionist Jews from the rest of people in a different way, by saying: Oh, this is the only group that's going to do this in this way, or: This is the only time that this could happen. I think it just risks repeating the same mistakes that basically set the Holocaust apart from history and failed to integrate it into these larger systems, in this larger history, and understand how it related to other parts of European history. I just think that we risk doing the same thing for the Gaza genocide and having the same poverty of our analysis there if we, again, move toward this exceptionalizing approach.
AA:Well, this has been another episode of On the Nose. Thank you for listening. Thank you to our editor, Jesse Brenneman, and to Mari, and Nathan, and Peter for answering these questions. And to our querents, as well—thank you so much for sending in your questions. If you like this episode, share it, like it, leave us a review, and subscribe to Jewish Currents, JewishCurrents.org. Thanks a lot, everyone. See you next time.