Hello. Welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I'm Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents, and I'll be your host for today. Today, we have, making his debut on the podcast, our new news director, Josh Nathan-Kazis. Hi, Josh.
Josh Nathan-Kazis:Hey. Thanks for having me.
AA:And we have publisher Daniel May and advisory board member Simone Zimmerman returning to the show to talk about the attack on a Michigan synagogue last Thursday. So, just a rundown of what happened: Ayman Ghazali, a 41-year-old naturalized US citizen from Dearborn, Michigan, who was born in Lebanon, drove his car into the front of Temple Israel in Bloomfield Hills and opened fire, engaged in a shootout with security officers, and then eventually turned the gun on himself. One of the security guards was injured. No one else was injured at the scene, thankfully, but this has really freaked out a lot of people in the Jewish community, who are feeling like the war is coming home to their doorstep. It came out after the attack—a few hours after the attack—that Ghazali's two brothers, Ibrahim and Kassim, were killed in an attack in Lebanon by Israel, and so had their children, Fatima and Ali, and other members of his family were injured. And that also feels like a very, very direct representation of the way in which the consequences of the war are showing up in diaspora.
AA:Another thing that I'll raise before we start talking about it is that in the last couple days, there have been other attacks in other cities worldwide, including Toronto, in Trondheim, in Liège, in Amsterdam. So far, no one has been killed, thankfully, but there has been structural damage, arson, bullet holes through doors and walls. So, people are really on edge. I wanted to talk about this with you guys, because it really seems like in this case, some of the subtext of these kinds of attacks is really text, in the sense that this was a very direct result of a very personal grief. This man's family was killed by Israeli violence. It wasn't indirect anger. And also because the synagogue itself, Temple Israel, is a very, very outwardly Zionist synagogue. Even for American synagogues, this was a synagogue that was founded with support for Israel in its founding mandate, and that is reflected in its website and other stuff. And so, the connection here feels really, really strong. So, I wanted to talk to you guys: How are you feeling? What's the first reactions coming up for people after this event?
JNK:It's frightening. I think when you look at the synagogue—I mean, everything you said is correct, Arielle—but also, it just looks like a very normal Reform synagogue. Just up top, I just want to say that I find it very frightening and uncomfortable, and it feels like an attack on a place that feels quite familiar, and familiar to a lot of the people who I know and are in my community.
AA:Definitely. I mean, there were 140 kids at a daycare in this synagogue. And you know, my nephews go to a synagogue like that for daycare. It's really, really scary to think about them as potential targets.
Daniel May 3:44
I'll say personally, that was my first reaction, as somebody who has a three- and a five-year-old who do go to a Jewish preschool. I have a great deal of discomfort, ambivalence with the politics of that institution, but for various reasons, it's one that we still are committed to, and to see an attack like this on an institution that is so similar to the one that my kids go to was obviously extremely concerning. And yet, immediately upon that concern (and simultaneous to it), for me, it's just a number of other emotions: of frustration, rage, annoyance, seeing all of the discourse around it, but also, frankly, annoyance even at my own emotional reaction. 1,300, 1,400 people have been killed in Iran over the last week, including 170 children that were killed in an attack by the United States. Just imagine, for a second, the reaction in this country if that had been an Iranian bomb in one of our cities, on a school. 800,000, I believe, people displaced in Lebanon; 3 million people displaced in Iran. It's just hard to hold together the feelings I have about this particular attack, and how personal it lands, alongside the recognition and the understanding that it is still, to put it mildly, so much safer for any of us involved in any of these issues than people who are living under the bombs that are being dropped by American planes and paid for by my tax dollars. And then, as I said, a feeling of real rage, frankly, that the multi-billion-dollar antisemitism industrial complex that has been funded and developed over the last several decades is completely impotent to deal with the context in which we find ourselves. How feckless and incompetent that entire strategy is revealing itself to be.
Simone Zimmerman:Well, I just wanted to jump in here. I really appreciate you laying all that out, Daniel. It really resonates with me. I think the one thing I would say a little differently than what you just said is, I think a lot of these anti-antisemitism orgs, it's actually a great day for them when these kinds of events happen, and it feels like these kinds of attacks on Jewish community institutions, those are actually incredible opportunities for them to shore up nationalism in the community, to take attention away from all the horrors that you just described, Daniel. It feels like a very close, and personal, and devastating part of the blowback that is kind of inevitable from the political reality that they have set up, and they are very happy to exploit it.
JNK:The day after this attack, the Anti-Defamation League sent a fundraising email. Fundraising off the attack, essentially.
AA:Well, and let's not forget that their entire strategy for combating antisemitism—and particularly the ADL, but not only—has been to say, basically, that if you criticize Israeli war crimes, that's antisemitic because Judaism and Zionism are linked. And so, that becomes the conversation, is that any of these critiques are just anti-Jewish, because Jews are Zionists, and they locate that Zionism not as an ideology that does things and in the things that it does but in the bodies of Jewish people. And so, there's no way out of it at that point. I mean that's been the strategy. And so, the problem is that people now believe them. And they've put so much behind that in terms of firing people and shaking up universities, shaking up newsrooms. The message has gotten through. Now, I want to say I don't think that that's like, what has happened in this particular instance. The Israeli-American Council also sent out something before we knew anything about who Ghazali was, basically saying this is the result of online indoctrination. Obviously, the thing that, as I said, makes this unique is how direct the loss was in the case of this person. But there's no denying that the idea of who the target was is aided by this understanding of Jews and Zionism as one thing.
DM:I think it becomes really hard to even begin to talk about these questions for a couple reasons. So one is—as Simone, I think you very eloquently put it—to even participate in the conversation feels like moving the focus of attention toward this particular incident and thereby feeding the entire media and political apparatus that turns our attention away from what is a criminal war and mass bombardment in the region. So, how do you talk about these issues without contributing to that dynamic? And then second—and maybe even more difficult—is the way in which even naming the obvious point, which is that this synagogue was attacked because it was an institution that was in support of a war in which the attacker's family was killed, even saying that basic fact is interpreted as offering some kind of a justification or putting the responsibility for the attack on the victims of that attack.
AA:I hear that, and nobody is pushing for justification here, but there's an enormous amount of money and energy going into the anti-antisemitism apparatus. And also, this apparatus believes antisemitism to be this transhistorical force that is basically not connected to anything that's really happening because it is the oldest hatred; it always just recurs, no relationship to any material conditions. I think we have to assert that there is some connection between when and how antisemitism occurs, and also what is happening, both in the world and in the Jewish world. It also happens that the existence of the Jewish state as a kind of rogue state doing horrible things on the world stage—destabilizing the region with huge implications for American foreign policy)—that we have to look at what the Jewish state and also diaspora Jews are doing to relate, in some fashion, to what's actually happening. We can't take Jews and their actions out of the picture, and we can't take the state and its actions out of the picture.
DM:Absolutely, I agree 1,000%. I think that it is also the case that we are in an environment where making that point is seen, even by folks who are broadly part of our camp, as putting responsibility for the violence on the victims. I was having coffee the day after this attack, Friday morning, with an editor from another magazine that I really respect, who broadly considers themselves part of the Currents audience—I think they referred to Jewish Currents as their political and cultural home—and they told me that the piece that I had written trying to untangle some of these issues last year, after the attacks in Washington and Colorado, this editor described that essay as “revolting.” What she said was that it was the same way that Islamophobic writers talk about Muslims, in the sense that individual practitioners of a faith are considered to be representative of the worst aspects of the governments that speak in the name of Islam. I mounted a defense of my argument, but just the fact that that was how that was read by somebody who I saw as broadly aligned with my own politics was just another indication of how hard it is to make the distinction between explanation (or attempt at understanding) and justification.
AA:I mean, yeah, that would make sense if the vast majority of American mosques were flying ISIS flags or whatever. Let's not even jump to ISIS; let's say even like political groups like Hamas or Hezbollah. If the warriors from those forces were doing tours through those mosques, or if children from those mosques were going to fight for those forces, and if the parents were doing mission trips to their army bases, and if those mosques organized mission trips to DC to lobby on behalf of those forces, and if that lobbying was successful, and the US government was funding those forces to the tune of billions a year, I think we'd be having a different conversation about what we might be able to say or not say about the Muslim community in America and what they support.
SZ:Look, there's no question that this attack is abhorrent, is against the politics that all of us espouse and are working toward. I don't blame the individual shul members for this attack, full stop. I think it's understandably terrifying and rattling for every single Jewish community that goes through these things. No question. I think the place where things start to get really sticky (and anybody who isn't willing to have this conversation is completely deluding themselves about the political environment that we live in) is: You cannot also have this conversation without reckoning with what the people who run that institution, that actual synagogue, what they are saying and doing in public, and what every political leader that they are associating with is saying about it, and what the discourse shapers on the anti-antisemitism conversation are all having to say about it.
SZ:I was just thinking about the shooting that happened in Colorado last year. What happens at that memorial ceremony? The consulate, the ADL, and a whole slew of representatives of both American and Israeli Zionism take over the stage and make it a pro-Israel rally. That is a phenomenon that we see happen time and again outside of these things. I mean, Deborah Lipstadt seems to be really spinning out on this right now, doing a ton of smearing and misinformation, frankly. Bret Stephens is doing it in his op-eds, right? There's this echo chamber that they're doing, of like: This is what happens when you say free Palestine from the river to the sea. This is why the pro-Palestine people are a danger to the Jewish community. While, at the same time, continuing to talk out of both sides of their mouths while they're doing this. So, on the one hand, they say it's antisemitic to target Jews because of Israel, and then, at the same time, they then host a rally and say: This is why you should support our Israel advocacy. This is why this community has to come together. They invite the consulate, etc. And for me, the question is: How do I show solidarity and care to the people who are victims of it? Because it's very hard to do that in an environment where the experience of the community gets immediately co-opted into reinforcing support for Zionism in America.
AA:Well, another way of maybe saying that is: What is the responsibility of a synagogue that houses a preschool? What does it mean for them to also be a pro-Israel organization? What does it mean for them to advance a politic of a country that's doing war crimes and then attach those children to it? I mean, I don't know. That's another question. Because obviously, we wouldn't say that Jewish institutions shouldn't be political if they have children present or something, and that the children shouldn't be responsible is a given. But on a certain level, we've gotten to a point where there's a real question about what it means to have kids in a building that has a dual function like that.
JNK:I was going to say, in light of what you're saying, it's important—I mean, I'm sure most of our listeners know this—but there is virtually no democracy in American Jewish life. In general, the synagogue member, the parent who sends their kid to the nursery school at the local JCC, has virtually no say in the governance or the policies of the institution unless they are a major donor and they get to sit on the board. I mean that is the structure. And so, when we're thinking about these questions of responsibility or whatever, the vast majority of the people who are affiliated with Jewish institutions have effectively no way to express their opinions about the institution's policies. Those of us who have been inside these institutions at various points and have raised our objections have felt and experienced that these institutions don't really care.
AA:Well, the choice that you have is to not go and not send your kids there.
JNK:Absolutely, and it's a very difficult decision. I mean, the institutions of the Jewish establishment, by and large, are what it means to live a Jewish life in this country. That's how most non-orthodox American Jews experience Jewishness in America. And so, the choice to not do that is a choice a lot of people have made, but it's not an easy choice.
AA:I want to move us into talking about specifically this: There was a clip that circulated from this British news network, GBN, where basically, a reporter named Angela McCahey says: This was an Israeli temple; it was aligned with Israel. And the anchor, Stephen Kent, basically issues this very stern correction:
Stephen Kent:A Jewish temple, a Jewish synagogue, is not an Israeli Temple.
Angela McCahey:It's called the Real Israel Temple.
Stephen Kent:They're not Israeli; they're Jewish,
Angela McCahey:So, they're called the Real Israeli Temple, yes? And they do align with Israel and their beliefs.
AA:I think it's a pretty interesting exchange for us to talk about as it relates to perception and reality, and looking at this particular synagogue. Because when I heard that clip, my feeling was anger at this journalist. Doesn't she know? Just because it's called Temple Israel—Israel is the name of the people and of Jews, and the fact that the Israeli state appropriated that name is not our fault and doesn't mean—you know. And then, I went on the website of the synagogue itself, and the logo is the name of the synagogue with an Israeli flag over it. And then, you scroll down, and there's a whole Israel program. There's a dozen funds for Israel engagement, Israel education. There's an entire page of Hasbara—not made by the synagogue but republished by the synagogue—from various other third-party Hasbara organizations, featuring Dershowitz, and Bari Weiss, and Chloé Valdary—all the greatest hits—anti-BDS, anti-using the term apartheid, why Jews and Zionism are the same, and why it's antisemitic to say that it's not. I mean, if you're a reporter and you're trying to figure out the relationship between this synagogue called Temple Israel with the state of Israel, what are you supposed to think? I mean, yes, we can basically parse responsibility and complicity, and we can even say that no level of complicity means that an attack on civilians and on children is okay, but I don't think, after seeing that website, I can say, as the anchor said to this woman (who I think was really ignorant but is actually hitting on something real), that this is not a synagogue, quote, “aligned with Israel.” It is a synagogue aligned with Israel.
DM:And all that you just described, Arielle, to the extent that it's a difference with the vast majority of American Jewish institutions, it's a difference of degree and not kind.
AA:Yes.
SZ:It feels, to me, profoundly nihilistic that these institutions basically think—it's the eternal theory of antisemitism. It's in the water; it's the virus everywhere. It's always spreading. There's nothing we can do to stop it, so we might as well just hold our heads high, keep the flag outside, send the kids to school, and this is just a sad part of life. We ask for more police funding, we'll increase all the security presences at our synagogues, and that's just the life we have to live. I think there's something profoundly nihilist about that. But I think the other thing that it is actually a reflection of extreme impunity, which is that this is also a community that's institutions are not actually facing any real accountability for their ongoing support of the genocide. And they are just digging their heels in deeper and deeper, saying: This is what our community is, and this is what our community's all about. I think for the people who actually really care about the well-being of the community, I think that a lot of them are in profound denial about the ways that they are really endangering members of their own communities. But I think it's also a reflection of a real arrogance, of like: We can just keep doing this. We don't have to rethink the flags outside of our buildings and the signs that we put on our lawns, because we're right, and because we have a system of resources and institutional power and political power that is making us feel like we are right, and we don't have to actually rethink this.
JNK:It's also maybe like: What else is there? This is emblematic of a Jewish community that has really turned over much of its theology to support for Israel; that's replaced much of the content of non-orthodox Jewishness since the time when this synagogue was founded in the early 1940s. I wonder, for communities like this, what the content of Judaism is without Zionism. So, there's really no alternative. Once you've built a theology around political Zionism, it becomes hard to imagine what could come after. So, I think there's just some fear there.
AA:The thing that frustrates me the most about this event is the way in which it's probably illegible, on a certain level, to American Zionist Jews, to your mainstream American Zionist Jew. And I think, on a certain level, to American Jews, Zionism isn't real. It's like a security blanket for them. It's a fantasy for them about what their identity is, what their religion is—as you said, Josh—what their theology is, but it doesn't root itself in what it actually means for its victims, ever. It isn't looking at what it means for people in Gaza, what it means for people in the West Bank. It doesn't look at what it means for people in Lebanon, what it means for people in Syria, what it means for the people of Iran. And so, on a certain level, you have this clash, in this moment, between someone who experiences, directly, the reality of Zionism through the deaths of his family, and this institution that is totally built on what they consider to be an innocuous dream. And so, how can American Jewish institutions actually move forward from that? They would have to shift to a completely different conception of what Zionism is and what it means. They are not in reality, currently. And again, it makes it impossible for them to read this correctly.
AA:What I'm afraid of is that the way that it does get read is just that the world is scary, everybody hates them, and therefore, it's going to be harder to bring them around to the kind of accountability that I think you're talking about, Simone. It also scares me, even, about our ability—on the left, I think people have been moving organically based on what Israel has been doing, but I do think that attacks like this will create some retrenchment as people get more and more afraid. I'm not sure what we do about that. I mean, we can keep pointing out that this is profoundly connected to support for the defense of the indefensible, and enforcement of defense of the indefensible in communities, not just in our own communities, but also politically. But I think that may sound a little bit like a retreat to people—that actually, what we're really asking for is for these synagogues to hide who they are or something, as opposed to reckon with what it is they've been supporting.
SZ:I mean, I want to quote Jewish Currents contributor Ben Lorber here, who's regularly saying that much of what the anti-Zionist Jewish left is doing in trying to break the conflation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is an anti-antisemitism strategy.
AA:I mean, it is an anti-antisemitism strategy to do what we're doing. At the same time, I don't see how we do that work fast enough to actually make that cleavage real in the popular imagination, in the Jewish community. And so, what I'm worried about is what happens in the interim period, where we can't win the debate, but the attacks keep coming. I don't think we have a choice, but I'm still worried about how it plays out.
SZ:I think the point is that what the Jewish left is doing is offering a different vision for actual safety for American Jews, and by offering them off-ramps out of Zionism and out of complicity with Zionist institutions, there are very material ways that we think Jews in America and around the world will be safer (and Jews in Israel, frankly, because we also think that Zionism is not making Israeli Jews safer, obviously). I was thinking, Josh, about the incredibly fascinating report you did, earlier this week or late last week, about this new polling data that is being cooked up by these institutions to paint American Jews as monolithically supportive of the war with Iran. I think we should be saying, very clearly, to the average American Jewish listener who's tuning into this right now, that you need to understand that not only is there incredible diversity in this community; that it's far more contested than every single one of the institutions and mouthpieces of the community wants you to believe. What that tells us is that there is room for us to be leaving these institutions and for us to be building elsewhere. That doesn't give an immediate solution to the people who are trying to figure out: Well, if I want to send my kids to a Jewish day school and give them a Jewish education, where do I go right now? But I do think we have to be extremely adamant about insisting that there are far more horizons out there, and that there's a far greater constituency that is invested in moving toward that horizon, than any American Jewish organization wants them to think.
JNK:Well, that's the challenge. The polling where a finger is not put on the scale does confirm what you're saying. But on the other hand, the institutions don't exist. I mean, as Arielle wrote about last summer, they're just not there yet. And, again, as Arielle wrote, it's extremely challenging to imagine building them—to get them to the level where they can replace the things that one loses by leaving the institutions of the establishment, which have had, since the 1920s, really, to build up extraordinary resources with which they provide a lot of services to many people.
SZ:But maybe, also part of what I'm trying to say on this point (that I know is a little bit of a tangent) is that one of the attacks that we often get on the Jewish left, from the Jewish right, is that the thing the Jewish left is doing is we're trying to be the good Jews, the pick-me Jews, for Palestinians, for the left, for whatever. Part of what they're insinuating in that attack is that we are this small, unrepresentative, inauthentic group. And what we know from all of the data available to us is that, actually, the politics that we're espousing have far greater buy-in among a much wider swath of the community than anyone wants us to believe, and this is actually quite an authentic Jewishness that we are putting out, and Jews who don't want to be associated with Israel should feel confident, not just in the morality of saying, “I do not want to be associated with this violent, rogue, genocidal state,” but also the confidence that there is strength in numbers.
SZ:I know that there are a lot of people who feel really frustrated and despairing. Basically, the thing that we hear a lot of these people say is: All of these institutions have supported the genocide in big or small ways; all of these institutions support Israel. Stop asking me to make these distinctions; stop asking me to parse nuances that these institutions themselves refuse to parse, that their leaders refuse to parse; stop asking me to make these distinctions. I really understand the inclination and the fatigue that a lot of people feel, but I think we have to maintain how important it is to maintain these distinctions because the politics that that leads people toward are politics that are fascist, and are dangerous, and threatening in all of these other ways. I think this is part of the same logic that is leading a lot of people to applaud the likes of a Tucker Carlson or even a Candace Owens, just because they're saying things that they like about Palestine. And that is part of, I would say, the same phenomenon of a lazy or nihilist thinking, where they're like: We can't do anything about this phenomenon; we might as well support the people who are saying the thing that we agree with on this issue.
AA:Yeah, I think what you're talking about here, Simone, is resisting the essentializing of Jewish people, especially at this moment when the community's views are so in flux, even despite the fact that our institutions are not. I think the reason why we have to do this is not actually so specific to Jews. I'm thinking of this video that Nick Fuentes recently put out, where he's actually making this broad appeal to unity. You know, like white, black, Republican, Democrat, Christian, and Muslim, to come together to fight the real threat.
Nick Fuentes:Our sons and daughters, the bravest and best among them, that volunteer and take up arms, are being sent to kill and die, to take life and give up their own lives for the agenda of this hostile occupying force. Call it what you want: Israel, world Jewry, organized Jewry, a Jewish Fifth Column. That is what is happening.
AA:And honestly, we just don't want that to be what our coalition looks like. If we can start to essentialize a whole group of people, write them off completely, and make them the problem, we've lost the plot. And again, that's not just about Jews. That's about anyone. It obviously also speaks to a faulty analysis. I understand why it's tempting, particularly in a moment where our government is straight up telling us that we went to war for Israel, to adopt that framing wholesale and then apply it to the people identified with Israel in the United States. But what is being continually left out of this equation is the history of American imperialism, and it's being replaced with American innocence. Obviously, not so much on the left, mostly on the right, but the extent to which that framing is being propagated is coming to the fore right now through the popularity of figures like Carlson. It's starting to seep in. I mean, I saw a prominent figure in left media the other day tweet something like: It's a stain on our country that we're associated with these monsters (meaning Israelis). And that kind of chilled me, because yeah, it's a bad partnership, but this country is the stain on this country. It has its own history of settler colonialism, and slavery, and its extreme murderousness abroad. I think Peter's conversation with Aslı Bâli from a few weeks ago is really good at laying that out. And when you forget that, you're left with a story about American history that blames its behavior on outsiders, on perceived foreign elements like Jews. For the right, that's also deeply connected to their anti-immigrant views and to their xenophobia—we really can't give quarter to that on the left.
DM:But also, frankly, I think it's obvious when you listen to somebody like Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens, why the entire multi-billion-dollar anti-antisemitism industry is impotent in dealing with this phenomenon. Because the whole project of the ADL, and the Conference of Presidents, and AJC, and all these institutions, when they claim that something is antisemitic, what they are saying is that that attack or that criticism or that podcast—whatever that person is saying, whatever that person is doing—it has nothing to do with what Jews are actually doing in the world. That's just antisemitism; that's a racist view, that is a description of characteristics that are simply a figment of the imagination of that antisemite. That's what antisemitism is: It's a fiction, it's a myth. And that claim is patently implausible when it comes to this current moment. You listen to Tucker Carlson (which I have done far more than I would like to ever do again in my life over the last week), and he is constantly playing clips of all kinds of figures, from primarily the Israeli political scene, who are saying crazy things about the reconstruction of the Third Temple, about the massacre that they're inviting on Arab nations, and you simply cannot dismiss what he is claiming by saying that it has no connection to reality. Because it has a very clear connection to reality, and the connection to reality is evident when you have Marco Rubio saying that we got into this war because we knew that Israel was going to attack, and we felt like we had no choice.
SZ:Just to put an extra point on that, it's the fact that the Jewish establishment is doing all of these things and then attacking anybody who makes even the most reasonable and coherent critique of this politics that they're putting out. The repression and the silencing that they enforce means you don't have any room for a normal critique on, like, CNN saying the things that we're saying: Not all Jews support Israel; actually, it's really problematic, but we have this corrupt establishment that is trying to enforce this conformity, blah, blah, blah, whatever. All the things that we say, none of that is in the mainstream news. So, somebody who's actually looking for someone to help them make sense of this, they wind up listening to these voices that are putting out really conspiratorial, fascist politics. I mean, hopefully, also, they're listening to On the Nose by Jewish Currents, but you know, unfortunately, our reach is still limited.
AA:Well, I feel like we ended the podcast with Naomi Klein in the same way. But I do think that this is going to happen as long as there isn't accountability. There has to be some measure of accountability within the Jewish community and of the state of Israel. Part of our job is not just to fight for that accountability within our communities, but also fight with that leadership, fight these Zionist institutions, and fight the state in order to get that accountability. I don't think that there's going to be any substitute for that, and that's what's hard, because it doesn't seem like it's forthcoming, and that just means that we're going to see more of this.
SZ:And in the meantime, what we have to say is, like, it is the responsibility of every person who cares about the well-being of Jews to be trying to organize them outside of these institutions, and to organize them into other strategies of genuine safety and community well-being that is not through these institutions.
AA:Well, this has been another episode of On the Nose. If you liked it, share it, leave us a review, and subscribe to Jewish Currents: JewishCurrents.org. Hang in there, everyone.