Violent Majorities 2.1: Peter Beinart on Long-Distance Israeli Ethnonationalism (LA, AS)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to Recall This Book, where we assemble scholars and writers from different disciplines to make sense of contemporary issues, problems, and events. Usually, Recall This Book is hosted by Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz, but today the podcast has two guest hosts.

I'm Ajanta Subramanian, an anthropologist who works on caste and democracy in India and the United States. And joining me is Lori Allen, also an anthropologist who works on liberalism and international law in Palestine and Israel.

This is the first episode of a three-part series on long-distance nationalisms. Today's episode is on Zionism in Israel and the United States. The second will be on Hindu nationalism in India, Britain, and the United States. And the third and final episode will be a conversation between the two of us and John Plotz, in which we reflect on the two cases comparatively. Our guest for the first part of the series is Peter Baynard.

a columnist, journalist, and political commentator. Peter has been a vocal critic of the state of Israel and most recently of its genocidal war on Gaza. His recently published book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, A Reckoning, is an incisive, heartfelt call to conscience and action and the focus of our conversation today. So welcome, Peter. We're so happy to have you here. Thank you so much for having me.

Peter, so by the time this episode airs, your latest book will just be out. But we wanted to focus this conversation a little bit differently on the ways that Israeli, Jewish and American nationalism and notions of peoplehood have interacted transnationally. And we're interested in the mechanisms that have really kept those versions of nationhood and peoplehood linked.

And we're curious about how you think they can be prized apart and how their goals can maybe be redefined.

But first, we'd like you to tell us about your book and about yourself. Folks who are familiar with your writing as a commentator and now as a podcast host have seen you make a real journey from maybe liberal Zionist to being a critic of Israel. At one point, the New Yorker described you as the most influential liberal Zionist of your generation.

and now you've publicly argued for the Palestinians right of return, right? So could you start by telling us about what has enabled this political journey for you? I grew up in a family in which

The existence of a Jewish state was very important. I was affected as a kid, I think, partly by how important it was for my grandmother, who had lived a very kind of transient life, a life in which she had been born in Egypt and then moved to the Belgian Congo and then to Cape Town, South Africa, kind of unusual Jewish journey, but one that left her with a sense of that.

and her family were then before that from the Isle of Rhodes and, and originally then from Spain. And, and there's a sense of this dislocation. And, and I always remember that she would always say that essentially, you know, Israel was the one place you could count on. It gave her the sense of psychological stability that I think had an impact on me as a kid because she had a big impact on me, a kid. And I also, when I, when I saw how my, both my maternal grandfather and my father were really, you know,

just really loved being in Israel. I just saw how much being part of a, in a kind of Jewish civilization awoke something in them, made them feel a kind of, even though they never really considered Aliyah, they just had a real delight in it. And I began to feel that as well when I started to go there as, you know, as a little bit as a teenager and then as a young adult. But I also had this sense that

Props from the First Intifada that made me have some realization that there was some problem with controlling all of these Palestinians who lacked citizenship, lacked the right to run under military law. And I think the way I thought about it was, well, a Jewish state is non-negotiable, but Israel doesn't have to rule over the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. And after all,

itself, it always seemed to me was very much about this tension between our obligations to all of humanity and our obligations to ourselves, this tension between universalism and particularism, which I think, I guess is there in all religious traditions, but I think especially in Judaism, because it's a religion with a universal message, but it's also the story of a family that becomes a people or a nation in, um,

In Genesis, it's a family, and then in Exodus, it becomes a kind of a people or a nation. So that balance seemed to me naturally to fit with the idea of partition and a two-state solution. Jews would have our state to keep us safe, to have this sense of fulfillment, and then Palestinians would have their own state. And I held that view for a really, really long time, but I gradually over time—

I had to start questioning it, partly because of just events on the ground were making partition less and less likely. And so actually it was a Palestinian friend in particular who said to me at some point, Peter, you can't go around saying the two-state solution is perpetually on the edge of dying. At some point you have to accept it's dead and you have to be willing to think about alternatives. And I wasn't willing to say it was dead because I couldn't overthink

open my mind and my heart up to alternatives. But I think that that was a very slow journey, probably maybe slower than it should have been. It probably was influenced by, you know, very late in life, you know, really only in my early 30s, going and spending time with Palestinians in the West Bank and realizing that this, the level of brutality and was just much, much greater than I had really realized. And also being forced to encounter my own

kind of dehumanization of Palestinians, even though I thought of myself as a liberal, because I was always thinking about Palestinians in a kind of abstract way. I think that I was carrying around a lot of dehumanization that I wasn't really aware of, because I began to believe that actually, Palestinians could have their full rights, meaning full equality and

all of the land between uh in in all of palestine and israel including the right of return in a way that actually did not require jews to be endangered or indeed the end of a flourishing jewish culture i actually began to find a lot of this was through reading palestinian writing because i found it was particularly palestinians not only palestinians who were doing this imaginative work and i was very very moved and my mind and heart were kind of opened by

The vision that I felt like I was reading from Palestinian writers as the child of South Africans, because my parents are South African immigrants in the United States. I was also aware that this discourse of certain death, if you essentially if you if you get rid of a supremacist political system,

that I had seen that play itself out. And it was very clear to me that South Africa was a much safer place for white South Africans, including for my own family, because black South Africans had a voice in government. And so when I started reading political science literature, which suggested that divided societies are more peaceful for everybody when everybody has a voice in government, I began to imagine that as a future for Palestine and Israel as well. But I wanted to ask you about...

the target audience of your book and the way the book is framed. So, you know, it's written very much for a Jewish audience, right? For an American Jewish audience. So I guess two questions. One is, can you tell us a little bit about the story about Jewish history, victimhood, power that you're trying to tell in the book? And

Why have you framed the book in the way that you have? So and how do you position yourself with it? So you refer a lot to the Hebrew Bible. You refer to Jewish rituals. You also refer to yourself as a Jewish loyalist. And, you know, given this kind of tension between particularism and universalism that you that you referred to, why is the book framed in this way?

I think it's just an expression of who I am. My greatest fear, one of my greatest fears has always been that

by being a very sharp critic of Israeli policy and now indeed of the idea of Jewish statehood, that I would exile myself from the Jewish communities that sustain my life. The most important thing in my life outside of my family is my synagogue community, the Jewish community that structures my every day and my every week and throughout the year and many of my closest, closest relationships that are

most sustaining to me. I can't necessarily, if you ask me why I need to live that way, I don't necessarily know I could give you an answer. All I could tell you is that my grandmother was never happier than when she was sitting in shul and my mother the same way. And then that kicked in for me at some way. And it's, and these are traditional Jewish communities. They're not communities on the left. And so I,

I deeply, deeply admire and love the people that in those communities. And, and yet the, and so the book is written for those people because they

It's so hard for me to reconcile the decency and the thoughtfulness and the kindness of those people with this ability to what seems to me to kind of filter out the horrors that's being done with American money, with American weapons and in the name of the Jewish people. And I felt like...

That was, you know, that was for me the thing that was on my mind just day in and day out because it was part of my life. So and because I, you know, in my own flawed way, I try to live a life that is structured by Jewish religious law and by Jewish observance. Those texts are also very important to me. So I think that I and I thought I was trying to think a lot about what is what are the stories that we are telling ourselves today?

sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, that act as this filter that basically prevents things that to me seem so glaringly obvious. I mean, you could just barely turn on the news or even in America where the news is pretty sanitized or social media and see horrifying things day after day after day. And so the book is really about the stories and the notion of what it means to be Jewish in the world that I think act,

act as this kind of as this filter, which which allows people to kind of segregate, sequester off their best selves and and not bring those parts of themselves to this question, which is so morally urgent, which is our responsibility for the oppression and destruction of Palestinian life.

So you said the book is written for this community, for these people. And I'm wondering if these people also include secular Jews who perhaps don't partake to the same degree in that sense of religious community. So you could have made secular humanist arguments, right? For Jewish responsibility and a Jewish ethics. And I just wonder why.

What about that? So I didn't make those arguments so much as many other people do. And I admire them. They just perhaps are not as native to me in terms of the idioms that are most moving to me. But I think that, look, I think that some of these, I talk in the beginning of the first chapter about the way that in a popular American Jewish culture, and I think in slightly different ways in Israeli Jewish culture or in other diaspora communities, people narrate the stories of certain people

important Jewish holidays. And so even Jews who are quite secular, I think, are very influenced by these popular narratives that exist. And so I think that there will be, I think that there, that, that

The stories that I think kind of govern the way many American Jews and indeed the way many Jews around the world think about what it means to be Jewish, I think are still very present for most secular Jews as well, in addition to Jews who are more religiously observant. Just one final question. And this is about South Africa. Yeah.

So throughout the book, you bring up your childhood in South Africa. I mean, it's a kind of touchstone at certain critical junctures in the book. And you do so as a way of drawing lessons from another context of apartheid.

where the transition to legal equality and coexistence was possible, right? And you refer to your own family as part of a white minority, right? But you don't actually say anything about South African Jews who took a stand against apartheid as communists or as members of the ANC. And of course, this is another...

in some ways, a Jewish internationalist tradition, right? Left internationalism is another Jewish tradition. I should put it that way. And I just wonder about...

whether people like Joe Slovo or Ruth First, whether they gave you lessons about the relationship between tribalism and universalism that were important to you. Yes. So these people were heroes for me, you know, as you say, Joe Slovo's wife, Ruth First, Albie Sachs, Dennis Goldberg, Rusty Bernstein, many, many of these people. And yet,

as you say a lot for many many of them it was communism which was their root in to um to the black south african freedom struggle um and and in some ways although they for me are very inspiring figures this the story of south african jewry is also a very troubling story for me precisely because in general it was the people who were most

separate from the organized Jewish community and the most separate from Jewish religious observance, and often the most just openly dismissive of it, who actually met that test

the most, met that moral test the most, you know, were past that moral test when so many others failed. And so that's always something that has kind of haunted me as someone who wanted to believe that there was in Jewish religious tradition, the material that actually could lead people to respond in these kind of moments of moral crucible. I've always been kind of haunted by, I don't think I've read about in the book, but not only

But by the Rivonia trial, because while all the white defendants were Jews, they were all people who were very distant from Jewish observance, whereas the prosecutor, Percy Uttar, the attorney general of the Transvaal, was the president of an Orthodox synagogue in Johannesburg. And so I guess for me, part of when I think about this question and I think about the fact that both in Israel and in the United States, religiously observant Jews tend to be

very nationalistic. I mean, there are exceptions, of course, among ultra-Orthodox Jews, but on the whole tend to be more nationalistic, tend to be even further away from a kind of sense of solidarity with Palestinians. That, to me, is a real crisis, something that worries me a lot, and that was also in the background of me writing this book. That's really...

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So we want to shift to a different geography of linkages and talk about how you see nationalism in Israel, the US and Europe. I mean, long distance nationalism really has been baked into the Zionist project and, you know, became cemented, especially after 1967.

And this was a turning point when the commitment of American Jews to Israel became so intense that, as you pointed out, supporting Israel came to be seen as being an inherent part of being a Jew in the United States.

But of course Zionism is also effective beyond the US and we've seen this in the weaponization of the IHRA problematic definition, redefinition of anti-Semitism that includes in its examples criticism of Israel as being anti-Semitic by definition, right? And we see it seems like there's an attempt to try to redefine who is a good and an acceptable Jew. We see

that the weaponization is coming down as much on the heads of Jewish protesters and Jewish critics of Israel as much as anyone else, right?

Jews are being excommunicated from their communities for speaking critically, something you talk about. So we're seeing that this unflinching support for Israel is really fracturing the very community that Israel claims to be standing up for, right, or standing for. So how do you think, how can this contradiction continue to hold, or where do you see this heading?

Yeah, I mean, you're right. There's a really awful, terrible irony here in the sense that so much of this is being done in the name of Jewish safety. But when you say that essentially Zionism is inherent in Judaism, what you are also saying, whether you say it explicitly or not, is that Jews who oppose Zionism or oppose Jewish statehood are really not really Jews, right? And so then I mentioned this in the book, you have this

bizarre dynamic where when Columbia suspends Jewish Voice for Peace, I mean, it's the first word in the name of the group, Jewish Voice for Peace, right? On campus, right? The Anti-Defamation League thanks the president for keeping Jewish students safe. Well, not those Jewish students, right? But the implication is that they're not really Jewish, right? And I think that, look, in Israel, where there is an overwhelming consensus in support of the idea of

the necessity of a Jewish state. And among older American Jews, where that consensus remains still relatively robust, and I think even to a greater extent in the other smaller diaspora Jewish communities, where there is a stronger Zionist consensus than there is even in the United States, this is not as much of a sociological crisis. But among American Jews under the age of 40, it is a sociological crisis, because there you have

It's not that there you have a real division among younger American Jews. It's not that there is it. It's not that all American Jews or even most American Jews under the age of 40 oppose Jewish statehood. But there are enough of them. There's a significant enough group that if you try to basically say these folks are not really Jewish, they can't be part of our community. You're cutting yourself off from society.

a very, very significant number of people, including many people, some of the people who actually might be the most, some of the most important people in basically building a vibrant, especially outside the Orthodox community, a vibrant Jewish life in the future. If you just look at the people who are going through the non-Orthodox rabbinical schools, right? Maybe not be that a majority of them are anti-Zionist, but a significant minority of them are anti-Zionist or at least almost.

open to that possibility. It's at least an open question for them, right? And so this kind of line in the sand, I think is just not really tenable.

I think you're already starting to see in the reconstructionist movement among younger people that you can't hold to this line. And I'm not sure you're going to be able to hold to this line in the reform movement. One of the ways you can do it now is a kind of don't ask, don't tell, in which there's a lot of secrecy and people keep their ideas quiet. But I think over time, if you try to hold to this line, the consequences are going to be, I think, maybe people will move to create their own

institutions. There'll be this kind of fracturing, right? We'll see more anti-Zionist or non-Zionist synagogues, maybe even eventually schools, Jewish camps, these kind of infrastructure. But the tragedy there is that there's a lot of talent there. And there are a lot of, there's a lot of people who really want to think in really important, interesting ways about how to reconcile Jewish commitment with solidarity, with Palestinian freedom and Palestinian dignity. But the

If the organized American Jewish community treats those people as pariahs, then they tend to be starved for resources, basically, right? Because they're a trait, because they're unacceptable, they have very, very few resources to operate it. And we need those people very much. When I see Jewish students on college campuses,

And it's been amazing to see the kind of the vibrancy of of these students trying to basically build out Jewish ritual, create opportunities for Jewish community in communities that are in solidarity with Palestinians. One of the things that I say to them is.

You have to build these institutions for so the next generation of American Jews will have something because we gave you nothing. Right. Which is why there are these stories of such deep alienation from for so many of these kids. And we have to build these institutions so the next generation doesn't have this sense of alienation and betrayal from the Jew, from the organized Jewish community and sometimes indeed from Judaism itself. Right.

We had a really interesting conversation on this podcast with Natasha Roth Roland, who you might know about transnational Jewish far-right linkages between the U.S. and Israel. Yes.

And given that there is this material framework that's so strong, do you think that the current landscape of Jewish institutions, educational, philanthropic, political, can they be repurposed for what is, in your view, a properly universal or ethical Judaism?

I don't know. I hope some of them can be repurposed, some of them. And in other cases, they'll have to be just alternatives that are created through schisms that will be painful, but will be necessary. And in terms of the material part, look, I mean, I think that the

The movement for Palestinian freedom has the potential to be one of the great moral movements of the last of this of not just of this era, but of the last century of human history. Right. It has the potential to bring people from every different background and walk of life who see some potential.

have some basic instinct that human dignity is being crushed and that there must be a struggle for equality. And I think that American Jews or Jews around the world will play one particular role in that. So I don't think it's likely ever that

that those Jews in the United States or in other communities who want to end Israel's impunity will ever have the dominant power within our community. I think we will probably always have less power than people who support essentially unconditional support for Israel because those people are much better resourced. But I do think that

We don't need to actually we don't need to have more power within the Jewish community. We simply need to have enough, enough influence to be able to work with other people to because the whole point, right, of fighting against Jewish supremacy and ethno nationalism is you do it as part

of a movement that is not based on people having to be from any background. One of the things I find, it's so upsetting to me when I see oftentimes in the Jewish community, people saying, well, why are these people then, why are these people who have no personal connection to Palestine and Israel involved in this struggle? It must be just 'cause they're doing 'cause they hate Jews. And like, no,

Every movement requires, you think that Vietnam, that we could have gotten America out of Vietnam with only people who had a personal connection to Vietnam, right? Or the anti-apartheid movement. It's precisely those people in some ways who are the most admirable, who have no personal connection, but have a kind of moral instinct that's universal. But Jews can play a very, very important role as allies to them. And of course, as allies to Palestinians who play a very, very central role. And so I think that's what the potential is for me. Mm-hmm.

I mean, not to be a downer, but just as the struggle for human dignity with Palestine at its center has to be multi-pronged and involve...

across kind of ethnic populations, what we're seeing is that, you know, the consolidation of authoritarian state power is also multi-pronged and involves, right? And so, you know, you talk in your book about

these like perverse alignments between Israel and other ethno-nationalists. And you say that for Israeli leaders like Netanyahu, it's more important to ally with ethno-nationalists who support the state of Israel, even if they're obviously anti-Semites as well, right? So supporting Israel is a more important...

litmus test, right, for a strategic alliance than a stand against anti-Semitism, right? And you're seeing, you know, Jewish leaders, not just political leaders, but other leaders across Europe and the U.S., also actively disregarding not just the hypocrisy, but the pragmatic risks involved. You know, minority population endorsing majoritarian parties and movements, right? And these are, and you also say, I don't think this was in the book, but in a

in a different kind of, I think it was a tweet, you sort of mention a piece that was written by Aparna Gopalan in Jewish Currents, right? Where she says that Israel has become an inspiration for other long-distance nationalisms, right? Absolutely. He talks about how Hindu nationalists in the U.S. are using Zionist talking points to counter criticisms of

India's right-wing government. So in effect, in shielding Israel, you've got its defenders writing a playbook for ethno-nationalists across the globe. And there is something so deeply tragic about the use of Jewish safety to consolidate authoritarian state power. And given that this is an ascendant

that this is an ascendant phenomenon. I just wonder, like, what are the kinds of, I mean, you've already talked about the kinds of solidarities that it would take, but. This is, no, it's such an important point you're making. And look, there is a wing of supporters of Israel in Israel, especially in Israel, but also in the United States who are explicitly ethno-nationalists, right? Who support Trump, who basically are fine with

white Christian supremacy, or they might call it white Judeo-Christian supremacy in the United States, love Viktor Orban in Hungary, think Modi is great to the degree that they're kind of aware of what he's doing and are on board, right? And I think that's where the, that's the direction that support for Israel in America is heading. Is going. Right.

One of the groups of people I want to speak to in this book is that there's still a very, very large number of American Jews who find the idea of ethno-nationalism in the United States or in Hungary or in France or in India, to the degree that they think about it. Horrifying. Right. Who very much believe when it comes to these other places in the principle of equality under the law, they've just carved out an exception for Israel because Israel.

You know, because of Jewish history, because of the Holocaust, because Jews are such a small group, you know, if you kind of press them on it, they would say, well, listen, we can't apply this principle to us because it's in the Middle East and we're so vulnerable. And part of the point that you're making that I also try to make is that

If you make an exception for this principle for Israel, right, that exception does not stay in Israel. In Israel. And Netanyahu in particular. And he is kind of like, in some ways, the senior figure in this growing and more and more powerful constellation of leaders around the world who look to Israel as a model for a technologically dynamic, economically successful, you know, ethno-nationalist supremacist state. And that is a very powerful alternative to

all across, not just the West, but beyond the West, right? So one of the leaders who came out, if you look at which leader, which countries are now basically condemned the ICC, right? It's Hungary, it's the Czech Republic, and now it's this lunatic in Argentina, right? And so this is a, this EU, it's very naive, not to mention morally, I think,

deeply problematic to think that, you know, if your basic vision is that every country should be dominated by one tribe, that you get one country and that your tribe is in charge and everyone there are guests, right, in your country. Well, you know what? Then the tribe that runs America is not our tribe, right? So you are basically accepting the idea that Americans, that Jews are going to be guests in the United States. And you're hoping that Donald Trump and those people will, you know, will decide to be nice to Jews because, well,

where we can be on their side vis-a-vis the Muslims and the immigrants and the blacks or whatever. This is kind of with Percy Utah's kind of relationship with Afrikaners, right? And you say you're offering a playbook, as Aparna brilliantly details in that piece, you're offering a playbook for other communities in the United States like Hindu Americans who want to do that. And I think the consequences for the world are terrifying.

Yeah. Yeah. So I just want to add in there among the lunatics condemning the ICC, that there's also the United States government. Right. Absolutely. Right. In both in both parties. Right. And this is this is the fundamental one of the fundamental problems in the Democratic Party. Right. Is that the Democratic Party. And I think it's part of the reason that the Gaza war is so debilitating for the Democratic Party.

You're running a campaign which is explicitly against the idea of ethno-nationalism as it was expressed in the Republican Party. And you're also saying you're deeply committed to that ethno-nationalist project in Israel. And more and more people in the Democratic Party itself, in the base of the Democratic Party, can see that these things just do not go together. You're undermining your own case.

The ability of the Palestine exception to allow people these internal contradictions, it's truly astonishing. I mean, it's an incredible testament to the success of a certain kind of Zionism. But as you say, I mean, if there is a growing recognition that Israel has gone from being the exception,

to being a model for ethno-nationalisms the world over, and that that is going to rebound on Jewish minorities in places outside Israel in a potentially extremely violent way. I mean, hopefully that recognition sort of has teeth, right?

Right. I mean, it should look. Look, I mean, look at look at the at the Pittsburgh shooting of the Tree of Light shooting in 2018. Right. That this guy was radicalized by all of this Fox News insanity about a migrant invasion. And then he moved from there to Jews because he decided that Jews were behind it, because this is an old idea trope that basically the black and brown people can't organize themselves as a threat without the Jews needing to be behind it.

You saw this in the civil rights movement. You saw this in South Africa where the Afrikaners would say that Joe Slovo was the real, really in charge of the ANC because he didn't believe that black people could actually run a liberation movement. And so, yeah, if you understand that these movements

These can tens of these kinds of bigotries, these conspiracy theories, these that tend to run together, that then you can see the foolishness of thinking you're going to make a separate piece with a group of white Christian nationalist bigots basically want to threaten Muslim people and, you know, and Hispanic people and trans people. And it's not going to it's not going to come for the Jews because these things so are deeply intertwined. And also because, you

a large number of Jews are actually going to oppose these efforts, right? And therefore they're going to mark themselves as enemies, right, of this project. And Donald Trump says this all the time, basically. He says, listen, you can be a good Jew, i.e. you support Israel and you support me, and then, you know, we're great, right? And he's got lots of people like that around him. But if you're going to be a bad Jew, which means you don't support Israel and you don't support me, then, you know, you might be on the chopping block with all of these other people.

Yeah. We wanted to ask you a question about higher education, because this is this has become a super important site of contestation. And and maybe one way to get at it is is is just to kind of mark what you do in your book is kind of this profound shift in.

that we see in the realignment of Jewish institutions with majoritarian politics. Like what a profound shift that is from the civil rights era when American Jews were part of the struggle for minority rights, right? And this kind of alignment between mainstream Jewish institutions and the far right

is not just a departure from the civil rights era, it's actively working to dismantle the gains of that era, right? And higher education is a key site in which that is happening. So you've got these right-wing activists like Christopher Ruffo who are weaponizing the charge of anti-Semitism to attack efforts to protect minority groups and advance minority perspectives on universities.

So, you know, courses on race and colonialism are being scrutinized for criticism of Israel. Title VI offices have become weapons of Title VI discrimination because they're being used to target

predominantly non-white faculty and students who espouse Palestinian liberation. DEI offices, diversity, inclusion and equity offices are being dismantled because they're seen as excluding Jews. Right. So there are all these ways that the gains of the civil rights era are being systematically undone.

And these university campuses, and we've already touched upon this in lots of countries, so not just the United States, but in Hungary, in India, in Turkey, right? Like, there's similar efforts underway to restrict academic freedom, to undercut, you know, free speech, etc. So, you know, you're at a university, you know, given the centrality of higher education to these ideological and culture wars that are currently raging, right?

And you've talked about younger generations of Jewish students and how you see a kind of promise in them, right? What role do you see for students in this battle for securing democratic rights, not just in the US, but, you know, elsewhere as well?

Yeah, I mean, I think, first of all, you're entirely right that what what's happened, I think, is that it's somewhat difficult for Republican politicians and other conservatives and donors to say that they hate DEI because they feel like it's anti-white. Sometimes they say that, but it's easier to say you hate it because it's anti-Jewish. And this idea that basically that, you know, and this plays into other.

a whole kind of narrative that basically this Jewish golden age has passed, that the percentage of Jews in these elite campuses is going down. And then that gets attributed to the fact that there's kind of this woke anti-Semitism, right? Whereas the truth is that, yes, the percentage of Jewish students at some of these elite universities is going down, but it really has much to do, I think, much more to do with a kind of a

a kind of predictable cycle, frankly, in which as you move further from the immigrant experience, right? People tend to sometimes not have as much of the academic hunger that sometimes allows them to overperform in these institutions. It's not really surprising.

It's normal and even quite, you know, that you would have many children of more recent immigration who sometimes maybe are academically performing better and basically going, you know, not that these are purely meritocratic institutions, of course, but I'm saying like, but this gets turned into a kind of a discourse about woke anti-Semitism. I think that there is, again, I don't want to suggest that Jewish students on campus are a monolith at all. I think Jewish students are very deeply divided. There are many, many Jewish students

who come to campus and are alienated and frightened by the kind of pro-Palestine activism. And sometimes they have experiences with those activists that are very, very unpleasant and sometimes even do cross into anti-Semitism. I think that there is a way sometimes in which

because Jewish and Zionist symbolism are so intertwined that you, I hear, I do hear this from students. So someone says, you know, don't be friends with that guy. He's a Zionist. And someone says, well, how do you know we were Zionists? Well, I saw you wearing a kippah, you know, down on the campus, right? So part of what I argue in the book is that actually

Both people who are opponents of Israel and supporters of Israel both have an obligation to work hard to keep Judaism and Zionism separate. Right. And the mainstream Jewish institutions don't do that. Right. And sometimes the anti-Zionist activists don't do it either. But what I do see the promise is that I think that.

younger American Jews are more likely to have more interactions with Palestinians and Palestinian experiences. They're more likely to meet Palestinians on campus. They're more likely because of social media to be hearing Palestinian voices. And oftentimes they have the experience that allows them to start to question and challenge the kind of dehumanization that they may have been raised with in a way that older generations didn't. And even though Palestinians are still

Even though it's still remarkably rare to have Palestinians have the kind of permission to narrate that Edward Said kind of famously wrote about, even there, there has been some progress compared to where we were before.

a decade or two. And I think that has an impact on younger American Jews and allows them often to make a, to often you find a transformation of their views that happened in college very, very quickly, often in kind of astonishingly fast ways. And I think there's a lot, there's a lot of encouragement to take from that. Yeah. I think part of what your book, it seems to us is, is trying to do is help people,

readers, your particular audience, kind of have those moments of recognition, perhaps if they don't have the chance of having Palestinian friends or experiences. And your book is really pitched, it seems, at supporting kind of individual epiphanies of the kind that maybe you read Isabella Hamad's recent book on recognition scenes. You're trying to sort of create a condition for that. But how do you think...

What do you think is the movement necessary for bringing people from these individual moments of recognition and epiphanies, which are individual and interpersonal level, but what comes after the recognition scenes? How do we get from individual conscience or consciousness raising to collective action? Yeah. Well, I think building

Building communities is really important. I think it's very hard for people to make these journeys unless they feel like they have a community. I think people often feel very, very afraid. Sometimes they feel materially afraid, you know, that they will lose their jobs or they won't have opportunities. I mean, I've had Jewish students who said, listen, you know, I want to go and become a rabbi.

but I really worry that, or I want to go work in the Jewish community. So I really worry that if I, if I say something now, I'll be blackballed, you know, for my entire career. So I think part of it is that, and that's kind of building people, building institutional spaces where you don't have to kind of sacrifice your, your conscience. But I think it's also just about actually having a shared community with people that people, you can, you can imagine that the,

that reinforce your sense of having. And I think this is something that is starting to happen in an organic way. I think you see it with groups like more well-established groups like Jewish Voice of Peace and newer groups like If Not Now, and then even newer groups which are a little more niche like the Halakhic Left, which kind of caters to kind of left-wing, more observant Jews. And then a lot of these kind of Jews for ceasefire groups. I mean, I remember being on one campus and they,

They told me they were very, very proud that they were saying that we are getting more students at our Kabbalat Shabbat, our Friday evening services for Jews for ceasefire than they are getting at Hillel. And so you could just see the importance of this sense of community. And I think once people have that sense of community, then they then then they feel empowered to kind of continue on this journey and take that activism and not be as worried about the costs. It's great. Yeah.

But all of the sort of examples of community that you've given are Jewish-specific, right? And again, you know, there seems to be a kind of, for you, a sort of definition of community that is quite particularistic, and then an understanding of politics as something that has to move well beyond that particularism, right? So...

So I'm still wondering, you know, how you see the relationship between the two. And I wanted to ask you this question. So when I was reading your book, one of the texts that I thought of, which is like one of my favorite texts of all time, is Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham jail. Yeah. And, you know, what I love about that text, what I find so powerful is that

you know, is his demand to fellow Christians who believe in a higher moral authority to defy unjust, racist, immoral laws, right? And, you know, there are other people of faith like Oscar Romero, you know, who've similarly espoused these liberationist theologies, you know, and the point is to mobilize religion and their co-religionists against authoritarianism, right? And

you know, throughout the book, you contrast this conception of Jewish ethics with what you call a political theology of statehood. And I really loved that tension that you're playing out in the book. So I'm curious if you actually, if you draw inspiration from these other liberationist traditions, but to go back to kind of where I started this, how do you see us moving from... Yeah.

a renewed sense of community to a sense of interconnectedness. Because the other thing that King says, right, is that the point is to convince people that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And that

that we're caught in an inescapable link of mutuality. And that sense of mutuality cannot rest within the bounds of religious community or any other kind of community, right? I think, in fact, that people desperately need to create a sense of community with people who share a certain moral instinct with them from all different backgrounds. And that's part of what I think this project

movement has the possibility to do. And I think it's what also you saw at some of these encampments, these, you know, just like beautiful scenes of people

of Jews praying, but also praying alongside Muslims who are praying and being together and learning from one another and spending time together. I think those things are really, really crucial. You know, maybe I emphasize the importance of specifically Jewish community more just because it's important to me and maybe there may well and it's totally fine for other people for whom that's not as important, right? That for them, a moral community may be enough. I think that there are many people for whom, though, who need both.

and need to be interconnected, interwoven with one another. And yeah, and I think that we don't have the Jewish religious leaders today

that could make those kind of... that could call other Jews in the way that you're talking about with King or Romero. But I think my hope is that maybe in the coming years, we will start to have some of those people. And I kind of...

I yearn for the day when we have prominent American Jewish religious leaders, not just American Jewish religious leaders from around the world, Jewish leaders who will basically who will say that about what's happening in Gaza, what's happening in the West Bank, what's happening in Lebanon and beyond.

But, you know, beyond these sorts of religious and moral impulses and instincts, as you call them, from whatever community, we also have to see our connections, including among secular people,

are political connectedness. And you say at the end of your book, Gaza is a symbol, right? And the thuggery that has led to the destruction of Gaza is the thuggery that's coming after democracy everywhere, right? So I guess, I don't know, I'm

I guess maybe because I'm not a religious person, it's I keep coming back to these questions, these more material questions of how do we make sure people understand that we are all politically vulnerable to similar forces? Yes, I think. Right. And I think that both of you have asked your questions, exactly the questions that we have to keep

putting front and center, which is to say not to not to kind of sequester off the conversation about Israel and Palestine as it so often does, as if it's kind of some highly specialized question that you kind of need some that you need to have been studying your whole life or that somehow has a different set of rules than everything else. Right. I think this, again, I think is part of the power of what Ta-Nehisi Coates has been doing is basically people's

People should come into this question just as they did Vietnam or or South Africa or any other question or Soviet domination of Eastern Europe with a basic with their basic set of moral principles about how they think human beings should should should should be treated and about basic principles that should govern govern our country and then have the self-confidence to apply those, recognizing that that.

That when you violate them in one place, you weaken those norms all around the world. We're seeing this now with the International Criminal Court. We're at a hinge moment. Is this court potentially going to be something that actually could be bigger than just the tool of Western hegemony that actually could have a role in

in holding, you know, America and its allies potentially accountable? That's really extraordinary. You can see why that's so threatening, right? Why it's threatening to the American government. Or basically, will the institution now having kind of

and the International Court of Justice too, now having basically challenged this Western domination, just be crushed, be destroyed, right? That basically the Trump administration is going to basically put sanctions on those Western countries or other countries that are basically willing to abide by the ICC and basically just destroy the whole project. Huge amount, you know, rests on that, right? I mean, I'm...

How many leaders around the world are looking at what Israel is doing in Gaza and thinks about their own inconvenient populations that they would really much rather not have around and thinks that if Israel can do this, then we now have a whole new menu of opportunity, of options for ourselves. And I think that's what's so terrifying to me about the potential world that Gaza is helping to create.

As we mentioned earlier, Peter, at Recall This Book, we like to wrap things up with a section called Recallable Books. And we'd like to ask you if there is a special other book that you think our listeners might appreciate.

Yeah. So I mentioned earlier this the Israeli philosopher and Orthodox Jew, Yeshayahu Leibovitz, who was a very, very fierce critic of Israeli nationalism and indeed argued that it was idolatrous that to invest the state, any state as having some as anything more than just an instrument to protect Christians.

human life and flourishing was idolatrous. And that was a very his writing on idolatry was really influential for me. And so I would recommend a book that he wrote called Accepting the Yoke of Heaven, which is actually a series of his commentaries on the weekly Torah portion. And because I think the way in which he engages with Jewish texts, with this particular kind of, you could say, anti-nationalist prism,

is something that I think people might find valuable. Beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you for taking your time. Thank you so much. Thanks. I really enjoyed it. Bye, Peter. Bye. Bye.

Recall this book is the creation of John Plotz and Elizabeth Ferry. Sound editing is by Kamiya Bagla and music comes from a song by Eric Chaslow and Barbara Cassidy. We gratefully acknowledge support from Brandeis University and its Mandel Center for the Humanities. We always want to hear from you with your comments, criticisms, or suggestions for future episodes. Finally, if you enjoyed today's show, please forward it to five people or write a review and rate us wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.