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- [00:00]
Daniel Goodman
Foreign.
- [00:04]
Sarah Hurwitz
You are listening to an art media podcast.
- [00:10]
Daniel Goodman
Hi. For heaven's sake. Listeners, while Daniil and Yossi are away this week, we're bringing you a special episode recorded live in the Beit Midrash of our Jerusalem campus on June 29, 2026, during our community Leadership Program. In this episode, Yossi Klein Halevi sits down with Sarah Hurwitz, author and speechwriter, to Discuss the post 10-7-Jewish experience and how we can reclaim Jewish peoplehood. You may notice that the audio from this recording is a little rougher than usual due to the live nature of this program. But our editor did a heroic job of cleaning up what he could, and we think this is a conversation that you won't want to miss. Here's Yossi Klein Halevi and Sarah Hurwitz from Jerusalem.
- [00:52]
Yossi Klein Halevi
We went from the lowest point in Jewish history the day after the Shoah, to what I regard still as the peak moment in Jewish history in terms of Jewish power. And suddenly we're back center stage.
- [01:08]
Sarah Hurwitz
October 7th happens. And that was a moment that the story shattered. That was the moment that we really saw the budding of a full scale attack on this Jewish story of the last 80 years.
- [01:18]
Yossi Klein Halevi
The stakes right now are everything. 4,000 years are on the scales.
- [01:37]
Sarah Hurwitz
We're here today to talk about the post October 7th Jew. And I really want to start by highlighting something that you've been saying for the past few years, which is actually the subject of a book that you're now working on, and which you've been saying that particularly in the aftermath of October 7, the Jewish story itself is under attack, specifically the Jewish story of the last 80 years. So, you know, today I want to focus on what is this story? How exactly is it under attack and how do we reclaim it? So, you know, just to start, give us an overview. What is the Jewish story of the past 80 years? Like what? What would you say it is?
- [02:15]
Yossi Klein Halevi
So good morning, everyone. You know, we talk about the miracle of Jewish survival, 4,000 years, et cetera. And there's a Mark Twain quote, which I'm sure many of you know, about how the great empires of the ancient world have turned to stardust, and the Jew is still here, and how is that possible? And Mark Twain wrote that in the late 19th century. For me, growing up in the immediate post Holocaust years, the most extraordinary story of Jewish persistence was what I was seeing around me. I grew up in a survivor neighborhood. Some of you may have heard of it, Borough Park. And it's worth a trip to the 19th century to go there and I've long since wondered what Mark Twain would have made of the mid to late 20th century Jewish story when we went from the lowest point in Jewish history, which was the day after the Shoah, to what I regard still as the peak moment in Jewish history in terms of Jewish power, Jewish ability to defend ourselves, to project ourselves on the world stage for better and for worse, but nevertheless, the centrality of the Jews today in history, and again, that has a dark side. But for 2,000 years, we were relevant basically only to ourselves. And suddenly we're back center stage where we always believed we belong. And the 2,000 years were just a fluke. And now that we're there, we realize what a mixed blessing it is, and we're not quite sure what to do with it. But if you step back and you look at the sweep of the Jewish story, this, I think, is the most extraordinary moment since Sinai, since the Exodus, to be a Jew. And I say that because we are a generation that is living after. We live after the great nightmares and the great dreams of the Jews have, to one extent or another, been fulfilled. You know, the great nightmare was that one day the host nations among whom we were wandering would lose their patience and go for a final solution. And the great dreams that the Jews carried were there were really two. But, well, aside from the Messiah, there were two, let's say, operative dreams. One is that the Jews would return home, and the other is that in the absence of any immediate return home, we would find a genuinely safe and welcoming refuge. And those two dreams simultaneously happened immediately after the fulfillment of our greatest nightmare. And we still understandably don't know how to process that. We haven't begun to process that. So, you know, when I meet the anti Zionist Jews that you meet all the time on campus, and they say, well, you know, you grew up with 1967 and 73, and we grew up with Netanyahu. I said, fair enough. But in the span of Jewish memory, we haven't begun yet to figure out 1945 to 1948, we haven't begun to unpack that. What does it mean? We've dealt with it politically, more successfully, less successfully. We haven't begun to deal with it spiritually. What does this story mean? What does it tell us about ourselves? And we all know it's a complicated story. Well, so is the Tanakh. The Torah is a very complicated story. And the chief protagonist of the Tanakh, which is us, were very complicated heroes of that story. We're basically. We're failures. And yet the last line of the Tanakh, look it up. I did recently, I have to admit, I didn't know the last line is about King Cyrus letting the Jews return. And so it's a story constantly of failure, but of second chance, third chance. And we've been given by Jewish history what I regard as a final chance. Because if we blow this story, then there's no coming back. We waited 2,000 years. This sustained us. And if it turned out that this story is just one more Jewish disaster, then how do you recover? And so I think that the stakes right now are everything. 4000 years are on the scales. And so the Jews who walk away from this story. And I understand, you know, I. And you and I have talked about this endlessly. The Jews who walk away from this
- [07:32]
Daniel Goodman
story,
- [07:35]
Yossi Klein Halevi
I have no. Really have no complaints. Jews have walked away from this story for thousands of years. It's a really hard story to carry. And we didn't realize it so much in the last generation, but we realize it today. But what I don't understand and cannot accept are Jews who walk away from this part of the story and claim that they're still loyal to the story because everything is at stake here. And I need them as critics, but I need them as critics within the tent. I need them as critics who are also defending the story.
- [08:11]
Sarah Hurwitz
And I want to dive into the nature of this story. Like, what is it, do you think, that allowed us to go from 1945 to the golden age to today, to Israel, to America, to the return home and the development of some diaspora, especially America, where we actually were thriving and safe? Like, what. What are the lessons of that? What do you think are the kind of pillars of that story?
- [08:34]
Yossi Klein Halevi
So I think that there are two elements that I'd like to address. The first is the displaced persons camps. Between 1945 and roughly 1950 in Germany and Austria, 300,000 Jews living in these camps. And it's almost a forgotten story. The families, of course, remember these stories, the children, grandchildren, but the Jewish people who kind of, let's say, displaced the displaced camps. And it's understandable because there are so many dramatic stories between 1945 and 48. But it's really worth looking at the societies that these kids. And they were kids, they were teenagers, in their 20s. Most of the survivors were very young. And the nature of the Jewish societies that they created. And what's interesting as well about the DP camps is that, you see, this is where the post Holocaust Jewish consciousness, Jewish identity, even commemorations, begins. The rest of the Jewish world doesn't know what to do with this. And it's the survivors who are beginning to create the language among themselves, and no one else is paying attention. But this is what's happening there. This is the incubator. And there are several elements that you see there. First of all, a deep faith, which is extraordinary for people who mostly lost their faith after the war. My father was a survivor. He completely lost his faith. And yet there they are going through the rituals, through the motions, at least the public rituals, because that's part of Jewish identity. That's what their martyr parents would have wanted them to do. And so when they marry, they're married under a chuppah, usually a chuppah made of an Israeli flag at that time, the Zionist flag, which is a point I'll get to in a moment. And so the first element is a connection to faith, even if they don't believe. And I'll use my father again as the example. When my parents were going to be married, my mother said to him, my mother was the daughter of a rabbi and a good Jewish girl.
- [10:51]
Sarah Hurwitz
And.
- [10:51]
Yossi Klein Halevi
And she said to him, I don't care what you believe, but here's what we're going to do, and we are going to be a proper Jewish family, as she put it. And my father, out of love for my mother, not out of love for Judaism, became an strictly Orthodox Jew. And it's true for many survivors. And I'm speaking about Borough Park, I'm speaking about Satmar Hasidim, many of whom did this for the children. Some of them did it for business interests. But there was really the sense of, we are responsible for this story, and this is a part of the story. But I also think there really was faith, and you see it so strongly in the language of the DP camp, which was faith in what they called Mezach Yisrael, the eternity of Israel. They didn't necessarily mean God at that point. Many of them later did, including my father, who became a believer in his later years. And that was very. I think that was typical of many survivors. It started out as lip service and then became fake. You're going to have to stop me at some point, Sarah. This is chapter one of my book. We're getting to chapter two in a moment. So there was this sense of Mezach Yisrael. What they meant was the eternity of the Jewish people. But as soon as you start speaking about the eternity of the Jewish people, you're bringing in a mystical element, you're bringing in an element of faith. And This I remember from my father, even in his non believing faith, he would say to me, there's something about this little people that doesn't make sense now that is an opening to a religious consciousness.
- [12:40]
Sarah Hurwitz
I mean it's a, it's a faith infused peoplehood. It's like a, it's, it's very, it's not peoplehood, it's not a secular kind of people to say, and it's a faith in the peoplehood or faith fueling the peoplehood. That, that.
- [12:50]
Yossi Klein Halevi
Exactly. And so this is why, you know, I feel, I have tremendous gratitude to secular Zionism. Secular Zionism saved the Jewish people. It saved us psychologically, spiritually. But secular Zionism can't carry the story. It is fundamentally a religious story. Whatever we make of that. And you see it in the DP camps, the beginnings of faith. The other element, unconditional solidarity with one condition. And I'll unpack that. The unconditional solidarity in the DP camps in included the Haredim, included every stream of Zionism. And bear in mind that in the mid to late 40s here in the Yishuv, right wing and left wing Zionism were on the verge of civil war. Not so in the DP camps. They tried to form, the survivors tried to form one unified Zionist movement. And the emissaries who came there from here broke it up. They wanted their political divisions. So the stories are, it's fantastic. And you see what the survivors were trying to tell us is that there is a survivor consciousness that the Jewish people needs to adopt. So there's this story that's playing out. The one exception to this unconditional solidarity, interestingly, was left wing anti Zionism. The communists were thrown out of the DP camps. The Bundists who were having a little bit of a resurrection in Park Slope. The Bundists in the DP camps were allowed to remain on condition that they were not espousing the old Bundist ideology. And the Bund was defied. The Bund. There was no bund after 1945. There were a few Bundists and they were divided. Some actively participated in the protests of the DP camp against British immigration policy, but insisted that Jews should have the right to choose wherever they want to go, which is, I think a very reasonable position. There were a few die hard Buddhists who were thrown out of the camps. And so there's a model here for today of, of who belongs under the tent and who doesn't. Interestingly, the Haredim who were not Zionists, accepted the Zionist agenda The political agenda. Haredim in the DP camps wrote an open letter to the Haredi leadership in America and in the Yishuv demanding that they cooperate with the secular Zionists. So this is what's playing now. So that's one story of what allowed us. And I think the survivors infused American Jewry. And I saw it happen initially. The survivors and those of you of survivor families will know this, were completely ignored, sidelined, and gradually became more and more the heroes of the American Jewish community, especially after 67.
- [16:02]
Sarah Hurwitz
So this is really a peoplehood. This is giving a pretty fulsome definition to peoplehood, which is both solidarity and something more, a faith in the future, maybe God, maybe not. There's, there's something kind of mystical, faith infused and there's a limit to the peoplehood. Those who are seen as actively, perhaps working against the survival of the peoplehood, they're out. So peoplehood, there's another element that I
- [16:24]
Yossi Klein Halevi
know you've switched just one last thing about, about what you just said. It's certainly a belief in the future, but if you're a Jew in 1945 and you believe in the future, that's a mystical statement. That's a quasi religious statement.
- [16:37]
Sarah Hurwitz
Absolutely.
- [16:38]
Yossi Klein Halevi
And so it's not just a belief in the future, it's a belief that this 4000 year story has a purpose. Now, as soon as you say it has a purpose, you're opening the door, however slightly to a being that infuses us with purpose, who we may call God.
- [17:00]
Sarah Hurwitz
It's like they lost their faith in God, but maybe kind of got their back around the back door in some way.
- [17:06]
Yossi Klein Halevi
Through the Jewish people.
- [17:07]
Sarah Hurwitz
Yeah, through the Jewish culture. And there's another element to the story that I know you've, you've spoken about the post, you know, post Holocaust survivor story, which is power, which is an embrace of power. Talk about that. Because I think that this kind of deep peoplehood, another pillar here is power, which I know today is contested, uncomfortable, yucky. It feels yucky. But what you think you argue was really key.
- [17:29]
Yossi Klein Halevi
So the two flags on the bema of what I hope is still of most of your synagogues, and here I'm speaking to American Jews. But not only it's the Canadian flag and the Israeli flag, it's the Australian flag and whatever countries you have in South America, forgive me, I've never been. So this idea that the Jews after the Holocaust grounded their process of recovery in those two flags and the message of those two flags was that the only way out of the abyss of 1945 was through power, the empowerment represented by those through flags. And there were two strategies that the Jewish people developed. And I'm leaving the Haredim out for now because that really is a separate strategy and it deserves to be unpacked. But the mainstream strategy of the Jewish people and the alliance that the mainstream Diaspora forged with Israel was really based on the notion that there are two strategies for re empowerment of the Jews. The first is sovereignty and hard military power here. And the second is soft power in the Diaspora. Political lobbying, philanthropy, coalition building with other minorities. And more deeply, the strategy here was the survival of the Jewish people would be a national path. And in the Diaspora it was a liberal path, it was a minority that would be part of liberal tolerant society. And these were the two extremely successful strategies until October 7th is the dividing line. And we need to really examine these strategies. But that's really what was being played out for the two generations after the Shoah.
- [19:41]
Sarah Hurwitz
So it was an embrace of this deep solidarity, faith fueled peoplehood, an embrace of power, Both the hard military power and the kind of influence status in America.
- [19:51]
Yossi Klein Halevi
Power is what makes it possible for the reconstruction of the Jewish people, the reemergence of some kind of Jewish faith. It's grounded in power.
- [20:03]
Sarah Hurwitz
Right, okay, so we gotta do this. October 7th happens and this is obviously something that's brewing well before October 7th. And you really argue that October 7th particular. But again, its roots were beforehand. That was a moment that the story shattered. That was the moment that we really saw the budding of a full scale attack on this Jewish story of the last 80 years. So tell me about that. What is the nature of this attack?
- [20:29]
Yossi Klein Halevi
So it's obvious in retrospect that the ground has been prepared for decades. And we can go back to the 1970s. And in some places it's more obvious than others. In England, for example, in the mid-70s, Jewish students on campus were fighting against being expelled from the General Student association because of the UN Zionism racism resolution. That did not happen in America, but it was beginning to happen in Western Europe. And certainly the ground for the delegitimization of the post Holocaust Jewish story. And I really insist on framing it that way rather than saying the delegitimization of Israel, it's the delegitimization of the Jewish recovery after the Holocaust. That's what's under assault. And the ground was prepared in at least two places in academia and journalism. And I was working as a journalist for many years. And I saw it up front. I saw it in the attitude of journalists who would come here and look for their Israeli colleagues for help, for interviews. And it was very clear that something monstrous was developing. And I think that the assault on the post Holocaust Jewish recovery is in its way, I'm going to say a really provocative statement that I think I believe, but I'm going to put it out there as a test case and if it survives this audience, and I'll put it in my book, and that is that the assault on the Jewish recovery from the Holocaust is in its way as monstrous as the Shoah itself. Yeah. And that's why when I'm feeling really angry, I'm sure that that's true. And lately I'm feeling really angry most of the time. And I think that's one of the things that brought us together. Yeah.
- [22:37]
Sarah Hurwitz
Okay. So you know what's interesting to me is that like I actually think the roots of this attack on solidarity, peoplehood and power, these are thousands of years old. I mean these are the two pillars of very old Jew hatred. Right. Solidarity, it's interpreted as chauvinism. As, you know, look, we're Christians, we don't have Greeks and Jews. It's, you know, we're all united in Christ. But these Jews, they're so clannish. They're chauvinistic, they reject Jesus and power. That's, that's literally the architecture of anti Semitism is Jews are wielding supernatural preternatural power that they're using against us. Good, helpless, weak and like, you know, vulnerable people. So I think these, you know, this attack, it was sort of jumping. You know, it's not that hard to push somewhere into a canyon. You know, it's like this, this canyon sized neural groove that has one run through the Western world's imagination. It's not that hard to shove millions of people into that. And you know, I want to kind of dig more into this. You know, I, I understand you have a sense that there are both external and internal threats to our story. And I want, can you kind of unpack that a little bit being.
- [23:34]
Yossi Klein Halevi
Yeah, I would like to just go back to what you said couples ago, which I like very much of defining two elements, classical but ancient elements to antipathy to Jews or Judaism. One is the idea of the Jews as clannish, as separatists, which of course plays into anti Zionism. Zionism is nationalism and the second is power and conspiracy theories. But I think there's a third really crucial element here which is turning the Jew into the symbol of whatever a society regards as its most Loathsome qualities. And that is the, I would call it the anti Semitism of symbols. And if you go back all the way to pagan Thomas, you see that the symbolization of the Jew is playing out. And so what was the argument of the pagans? You read the pagan philosophers. The Hanukkah story, which we celebrate as religious freedom, fight for religious freedom, in fact was perceived in the pagan world in exactly the opposite way. It's the Jews who are being intolerant. And we pagans are pluralists. What are we asking of the Jews? Throw in another God into the mix, that's all. We have no problem with your God. You want to keep your temple. They weren't violating the temple. They were expanding the borders of the sacred. Bring our gods in. And paganism was pluralism. I mean, we're sitting in a pluralistic institute. Here's the fly and the ointment. You know, Jews, pluralists. Yeah. The Hanukkah story is not a celebration of pluralism and pagans. The pagan philosophers really resented the Jews who are these uppity people. And we represented what was most antithetical to the pagan sensibility, which was religious intolerance. That's a story they did not tell us in yeshiva. But that's really, that's the story. And so then you of course, play it out. What's the worst possible thing to be in a Christian dominated society in the year 1000? It's Christ killer. You killed the Messiah, you killed our hope. And in Islam, the Jews were called the killers of prophets. That was the little handy kind of term that was used to describe Jews, the killers or prophets. Now if you're a religion that venerates the prophet as the center point of your devotion, there's nothing worse than being killer of prophets. And on and on you play it out until we come to today, when we live in a society. What are the worst sins in today's liberal environment? Well, we could all name them. It's white settler colonialism. It is ethnic cleansing. That's 1948. It's apartheid and it's genocide. We've come now to the ultimate, to the last stop. And so that's the external assault, people, is to take every stage of the Zionist story, the Jewish people's return home, and to attach to it one of the worst sins of this time. The founding of Zionism, 19th century Europe, White settler colonialism. The founding of the state is ethnic cleansing. The society that Israel created, apartheid, the wars that Israel fights, genocide. There's no way out of that. And so we are. I know you didn't ask this, but I just have to say, you know, we're still speaking and Daniil speaks about this all the time. We're speaking an old language where we tried to explain Israel or defend Israel. And so we say, yeah, but look at October 7th. They started. No, they didn't start. You started by creating yourself, by existing. You are a white settler state, which means you have no right to exist, which means you have no right to defend yourself. Because a country that has no right to exist has no right to self defense. We haven't internalized that. The ground rules of change. So that's the external. And internally, at this moment, when we are in the worst crisis that we've been well, in 80 years, at just this moment, we, the Jewish people, have decided in the ancient wisdom of Jewish survival to tear ourselves to pieces. And the assault is coming from at least three directions, or maybe four. I'll start with Israel. The assault that's happening here against the reconstituting of Jewish people, boat against Jewish power. The Haredim, who when The Haredim were 2% of Israeli society, 3%, they could be cute. It was kind of folklorish. And it was in the early years of the state, there was something sweet, a little bit sweet about me. As long as you dress properly. And 14%, 15% and growing exponentially. This is an immediate threat to the viability of, of this society. There's only so much that mainstream Israelis are going to take before they start leaving. The haredim become 25%. I heard one Haredi leader, Gafni, say recently his vision for Israel of the future. Half the population will be learning and half will be defending the learners. That is the end of the state of Israel. So there's the threat of the success of the post Holocaust Haredi renewal, and I hate to put it that way, because part of me has enormous respect for the Haredi resurrection. And I saw it. I grew up all around it. You know, growing up in Borough park in the 1960s, I thought that what I was seeing was the last gasp of that world. So I didn't take it seriously. And I enjoyed it. I used to, you know, I, I grew up in it. We were at the Haredi family, but we were Haredi. Jason. Certainly it didn't have any feeling of threat in those years. If anything, you felt a little tender and protective toward it. But today their extraordinary survival story is a threat to our survival. And that's one of the tragedies I should write that Down.
- [30:32]
Sarah Hurwitz
This is something I love that Yossi does. We'll be in conversation, he'll be like, stop, wait, I gotta write that down. Just wait a second.
- [30:39]
Yossi Klein Halevi
My wife Sarah hates this.
- [30:43]
Sarah Hurwitz
I actually really get it. So I, no judgment. I do this at the gym a lot and I email them to myself. And I one day got a lovely email from this Canadian Jewish woman named Sarah Hurwitz who said, I don't think you meant this for me, but I've actually been re exploring my Jewish identity and I really torture
- [31:01]
Yossi Klein Halevi
Sarah. That's what we would call meant.
- [31:05]
Sarah Hurwitz
So I want to talk about Jewish anti Zionism because I think that's very important. But before we get there, I just want to spend one more minute on the Holocaust and how I think in some ways it's being weaponized against us. And in some ways what breaks my heart so deeply is I think like a bet that we made is coming back to haunt us. Where we made this bet in the 80s and 90s, which was a great bet back then, where most of the anti Semitism we were seeing was Neo Nazism. And so we thought if we educate young people about Nazis, they will then not become neo Nazis. Perfectly reasonable. And so the majority of young people in America, they learn that anti Semitism is Nazi racial anti. Semitism. That's what it is. Got it. Message received. They get to campus and there are no Nazis. What they're seeing on campus is a mixture of Soviet anti Zionism and of Islamist theological Jew hatred. That is kind of the stew that they're in. And they're so confused. Like the Jewish kids are just so confused. Whereas I think if they spent, you know, hours in school learning about how for decades the Soviets brutally oppressed Jews but didn't call them Jews. God forbid. No, no, they didn't hate Jews. The problem was Zionism. They were just fighting Zionists. God forbid they love the Jews. But. But under this guise of stamping out Zionism, they also brutally murdered many Jews, expelled them, did terrible things to them. And I think that if kids got to campus with that education, when they heard their classmates talking about how it's not the Jews, it's the Zionists, I don't think they'd be so charmed. So I think that's we're dealing with the heartbreaking fruits of our well intentioned efforts to educate young people after the Holocaust. And I know you have other thoughts on how the Holocaust has been weaponized against us.
- [32:42]
Yossi Klein Halevi
Well, this is, it's such an important insight. And even educating young Americans not to be neo Nazis. It's kind of a mixed success story there.
- [32:50]
Sarah Hurwitz
It is.
- [32:51]
Yossi Klein Halevi
But you're certainly right about the message to young progressives and certainly young Jews, most of whom are not drawn to neo Nazism. Really the threat here is I think it's a failure. And I'm part of this failure, which is the failure of those of us who were involved in the Soviet Jewry protest movement to figure out how to teach what was the most successful political cause in the Diaspora and one of the most successful human rights causes of the modern era. How to translate that into an educational lesson. What is it that we need to pass on about what happened to the diaspora? And it was a diaspora led movement. Many of you, I'm sure, were involved in Soviet Jewry. And then we won and we all went home. But there was something there that we needed to explain about that experience that we didn't. And one of the things we needed to explain is exactly what you've just said is that in the 20th century, the there were two totalitarian assaults on the Jews. One was explicitly Jewish and racialist and the other was anti Zionist. And that story we have not told at all. And as it turns out, that story is actually the more relevant to us today. The Holocaust is less relevant. And in fact the Holocaust is being used, as we all know, against us. A group of us went to Yad Vashem yesterday and we engaged with someone there from their education department. And it was very frustrating conversation for me and I think for many people who were there. And one of the reasons was this failure to internalize exactly what we're talking about. And so I said to him, is there any thinking going on in the Holocaust education community about how The Holocaust post October 7th has become the greatest weapon or one of the greatest weapons used against us? We're now the Nazis. We are the carriers of genocide. And he said, well, Gaza is not about the Holocaust. There's an argument about genocide and that needs to be discussed. Is it genocide isn't genocide. And I'm thinking, you know, the Holocaust education community doesn't understand the fruits, the poison fruits of its own success, which is when any young person today in the west hears the word genocide, until Gaza, they thought Holocaust because we were so successful. They don't think Rwanda, they think the Holocaust. And so if we're doing genocide now, how ironic. How ironic. And that's the takeaway. And if at Yah for Shem they're not trying to figure this out, then who is right?
- [36:02]
Sarah Hurwitz
And this is, I Mean something kind of heartbreaking about Holocaust education to kind of build on that is what you learn when you're very young is that the Holocaust was about big powerful Nazis hurting helpless, weak Jews. And that's what antisemitism is. It's powerful people hurting weak people. And then you look around America and you're like, these Jews look pretty, they don't look weak, they look pretty powerful. But actually the Nazis were not saying, oh, we powerful Germans are going to harm these helpless little Jews. They were saying, we helpless, weak Germans are being dominated by these Jews who are destroying our economy, losing our wars. We have to defend ourselves. We have to punch up. So, you know, it's a great insight. This is the problem.
- [36:41]
Yossi Klein Halevi
And the Soviet Union was saying the same.
- [36:43]
Sarah Hurwitz
Exactly, exactly right. The architecture of anti Semitism is we are punching up against these powerful, threatening Jews. But Holocaust education teaches you no, powerful people hurt weak Jews. I'm looking around, Jews look pretty strong in both Israel and the U.S. doesn't, doesn't add up.
- [36:57]
Yossi Klein Halevi
What does that in 1945 was that. And this is certainly unconscious, but if you look back, you really, you really feel it is that they accused us of controlling the world and we couldn't even protect the Warsaw Ghetto. And they said we control the world. And so after this, we actually are now going for as much control as we can have. And Jews decided to do that individually as immigrants, post immigrants in Western societies. And we decided to do it collectively. And the question today for the Jewish people is did the Jews make a mistake in going for power after the Holocaust or not? That's the question that we're arguing among ourselves and that the anti Zionists and these, the upper class Bundists are presenting to us.
- [37:51]
Sarah Hurwitz
So, okay, we are going to talk about that. Before we do that, just one thing that I need to sort of be conscious of when I'm speaking about this is I'm very upset about left wing antisemitism because it's my people, it's my, my side of the world. I don't expect much from the other side. But I do want to say that, you know, you're framing the brilliant framing of whatever it is, that's the good thing. Jews are destroying it. Right. Whatever that. Sorry. Whatever it is, that's a bad thing is what Jews are. I think on the right today, you see that the bad thing is immigrants, it's people of color coming into America. That is what, you know, this is Tucker Carlson's bread and butter. And who's bringing them in? According to the right, it is globalists who are bringing in black and brown immigrants to take the place of good white Christian Americans. That is the great replacement conspiracy that Tucker Carlson is, you know, bleeding from the hilltops. And that is very, you know, I think many of us, because we travel in circles where we see anti Semitism on the left institutionalized at these very prestigious institutions, universities, hospitals, nonprofits, we kind of right wing anti Semitism isn't as visible to people, many people in this room, but it is there. And I think it is happening not so much in big prestigious institutions, but it's kind of going directly to people via Tucker Carlson and others, to their phones, Corby being told, these globalists are bringing in immigrants to take your job. These Jews are polluting white Christian civilization. So I think it, you know, making sure we kind of also indicate that this is a problem on the right key. But I want to go back to the left because this is actually physical
- [39:17]
Yossi Klein Halevi
about that, which you're right, it's the evil twin of the left wing perception of Jews as embodiments of privilege.
- [39:26]
Sarah Hurwitz
Exactly.
- [39:27]
Yossi Klein Halevi
Of white privilege.
- [39:28]
Sarah Hurwitz
Exactly.
- [39:28]
Yossi Klein Halevi
And so the Jews once again are on both ends of this is, you
- [39:33]
Sarah Hurwitz
know, and this is where Tucker Carlson intersects with America First.
- [39:36]
Yossi Klein Halevi
Right.
- [39:36]
Sarah Hurwitz
The idea of America first, it's like, oh, these neocons are using your money to fight these foreign wars. We know what we're talking about, right? These are Jews who used your money to fight foreign wars. Okay. Rise of Jewish anti Zionism. I know this is something that we are both particularly exercised about, actually defines our friendship. It really does. We don't see each other for like six months and I'm like, can you believe we don't even see, say hello, we just start talking. So I'd love to hear, you know, what happens, what the hell happened? This feels like it's all happened very fast. Obviously it didn't just come out of nowhere. As you pointed out, the roots were there, but man, were many of us a little caught off guard after October 7th.
- [40:17]
Yossi Klein Halevi
I feel very strongly that in the end this is going to be decided within the Jewish people. If we can succeed in figuring out how to tell our story to the next generation of Jews, then I think that you, in the Diaspora, you'll be able to hold the line. But if anti Zionism starts becoming mainstream and this, again, this, I think we're really specifically speaking about the American Jewish community because when we speak about a diaspora Israel crisis, it's really a misnomer. There is unease in the whole Diaspora about What's been happening here. But the real crisis of alienation of young Jews moving toward anti Zionism is happening on a much bigger scale in America than anywhere else. And I know you have very annoying little groups of anti Zionist Jews that get outsized media attention in Australia and Canada. In England, maybe it's a little bit more. But still the real problem, I think is in American Jewry, which is a very interesting question about why what went wrong in America and in American Jewry specifically, with all the things that we know that went right for American Jewry, something obviously also went wrong. And what went wrong here is what's playing out in this growing flirtation with anti Zionism. And so that's where the struggle has to happen. And it really depends on telling our story. Can we share what you and I have just been through this last audience?
- [42:04]
Sarah Hurwitz
I just want to dig a little bit more into the why. And maybe you don't have theories. I do, but I'm curious as to
- [42:08]
Yossi Klein Halevi
what you'd like to hear yours.
- [42:10]
Sarah Hurwitz
So, I mean, look, there are a million different reasons for this rise of left wing anti Zionism.
- [42:15]
Yossi Klein Halevi
You're not talking specifically about Jewish anti Zionism.
- [42:17]
Sarah Hurwitz
No, I'm talking. Good question. I'm talking about it in general. But I think this actually applies to Jews as well. In fact, to Jews particularly. I actually think, and this is theory I've been working with, hold it lightly. You know, I think what we saw in 2020, 2021 was the rise of this ideology. We're all familiar with the idea of a powerful, powerless, oppressors oppressed. It had been around in the air beforehand, but I think it really kind of took off and it was being applied to race relations in the US where, you know, I think there's a lot to be said for this. I think there's some real truth behind this. But it is also a pretty crude and kind of clumsy way of dividing up the world. I think when the pendulum kind of started to swing back against that movement was right when October 7th happened. And I kind of think that Jews got slotted into the position of white and, you know, Palestinians became of color and everyone who was not Jewish was kind of of color. And I think what the way I kind of hear, it's very, it's very painful to me. But the way I, I often hear people, you know, especially young Jews on the left speaking, it's this language I actually find to be a really insidious form of white supremacy where when they talk about Israel, it's like the Jews did this and the Jews did that and Israelis do this and Israelis did that and Israel this and Israel that. I'm just listening and I'm listening and I'm like, you do know there are other people in this region, right? You, you are aware of other people who are smart, who have moral agency, cognitive capacity, who are often very well educated and sophisticated, who have strategies and ideologies, and who are making decisions both good and bad, like Jews. Like a good anti racist exercise might be to imagine that everyone in the Middle east is white and to treat them accordingly, you know, which is a harsh thing to say. But I see this disappearance of people deemed not Jew or not white. It's almost like they don't have agency, they don't matter, they don't have any responsibility. And it is, it's very painful to see this because I think it's racist and I think it's quite condescending. And it's hard to have the same conversation with someone who's going to disappear a significant number of people involved in the conflict. You can only have, it's like it's a conversation about one group and not the many other groups involved, all of whom have agency, all of whom are screwing up and doing some things right. And I think that is making the conversation hard.
- [44:26]
Yossi Klein Halevi
Yeah, look, I really appreciate the two insights here. The first was that Israel October 7th came at just the right moment for the crisis of the progressive world. The woke moment was passing and I forget who was. Somebody just wrote a terrific piece. I don't remember who or where I read it, but it was something about woke is dead and what's coming is worse and we know that we're actually what came. And so there's that. I also think, Sarah, that we are the Jewish people is the, quote, victim of its own success in not being victims. If you had told survivors in 1945 that, you know, in about 50 years, which is not that much time, in about 50 years, the main problem the Jews are going to be facing is that they're being considered to be too powerful, that they're going to be hated for being aggressors rather than despised for being weaklies. This is something that would have been really hard conceptually, you know, for my father to, you know, what do you do with that? And we made the decision in 1945. I think one of the greatest decisions the Jewish people ever made is that the identity of victim is untenable and we're paying the price for that. We were too successful in America. We're too successful in other places in the Diaspora, and we're certainly too successful here. It's interesting you could look at October 7th and October 8th as a microcosm of this process, because on October 7th, there we are back. We're flat out. We're victims again. We were completely defenseless. The army disappeared. The government, never mind the government. There was no government. And maybe we were better off. Would there not be a government at all? But October 7th was a kind of a pre enactment of what the destruction of Israel would look like. No border, no army, citizens left to fend for themselves. On October 8, virtually the entirety of Jewish Israel, from left, even Meretz, left to right, made the decision that we cannot remain in October 7th and bask in the world's sympathy. And we went immediately from there into a mode in which it was obvious to all of us here that we are about to switch roles in world consciousness with Hamas, we're about to become the bad guy. And we did it. We did it. Now, it's interesting because when the Jewish people opted for power in 1945, there wasn't the awareness that then of the cost of power because they were so innocent. We understood with our experience of power that giving up the role of victim of October 7th is going to have very serious consequences. And we did it anyway. We all did. Yair Golan. We all signed up for this war. And for better or for worse, we're all implicated. And when I'd be interviewed by foreign journalists and they would speak about Netanyahu's war, and I would say, I'm sorry, I say, I have a very long accounting with this Prime Minister, but this war is actually not part of that, because this is not this war. This is my war. This is all of us. There were no demonstrations, virtually no demonstrations against the war per se. There were many demonstrations to prioritize the hostages over bringing down Hamas. That's not the same. That's not what American Jews were going through. For better or for worse, we did not have that conversation. Maybe we should have had more of it. But there was near unanimity. And the justness of this war, whether you agree with every aspect of the war or not and hold that question,
- [48:58]
Sarah Hurwitz
you know, something that you said that I think just so resonates with what I've seen on the 35 college campuses I visited, is the yearning for purity. It's the yearning for innocence, for blamelessness. Like, you know, victims and oppressed, they are held up to the highest possible. I mean, there's almost something A little bit. I don't know if it's like, Christian, but there's some idea of, like, this is what you want to be the blameless, the innocent, the oppressed. And, you know, once you have power, you're bad. And I see it kind of playing out on campus today in more subtle ways where, okay, you don't necessarily have the big screaming encampments and people think we've moved on, it's better. But I think that Jewish students who refuse to disavow Israel, who refuse to give up their Zionism, they remind me of my gay friends in the early 90s, right? Like it wasn't the 1950s, right? You weren't going to be kicked off campus for being gay or diagnosed for having disease, but you were real careful in the early 90s. You told some people, but not others. You found maybe that one sympathetic professor who was kind of progressive, and you maybe came out there, but you engaged in a constant daily act of self policing, of code switching, of being very, very careful. You scrubbed your resume. You didn't put the gay alliance on your resume because you just. And these are the things I see young people doing on college campuses. It's a very elaborate act of closeting, which takes a tremendous amount of emotional labor to. And hiding. And so I think we sort of feel like we've moved on and maybe it's okay, but it's actually buried deeper in some ways. It's actually become more insidious.
- [50:27]
Yossi Klein Halevi
Well, Sarah, you've just said two really important points. I want to start with the second, about the impact of anti Zionism on young Jews, which is the return of conditional acceptance to the American Jewish experience. I grew up in the generation that was the transition from conditional acceptance of Jews in America to unconditional acceptance. And I saw it happen. I saw it happen in the 70s. I experienced it as a student on campus in the 70s. I went to a school that 10 years earlier had had a quota on Jews. And in my journalism school, there were 40% Jews. And the acceptance was really unconditional. And anti Zionism has brought back conditionality to acceptance. We will accept you. You can come to the ten cat. You can wear a kippah with a little watermelon on it. That's fine, that's fine. But you have to be abject. You have to be apologetic. You have to atone. There's a part of your identity that you have to atone for. And as soon as you introduce that into a young person's identity, you are not just introducing Conditionality as a social situation, there's an internalization of there's something wrong with Jewishness and maybe there's other things that are wrong. Maybe I shouldn't be, you know, so that's one of the crimes of anti Zionism and those Jews who are collaborating, and I use that word very deliberately collaborating with the anti Zionist assault, not only on the Jewish story which we spoke about earlier, but on the actual well being of Diaspora Jews. Those Jews are collaborating in the return of the Diaspora unease, the return of the, I would say the pre Holocaust condition of diaspora conditionality. But there's something else that I wanted to respond to which was you framed this in the context of Judaism. And if I could just say a little bit about that because I think it's so important for us to understand how anti Zionism and Jewish anti Zionism, which claims to be speaking tradition of the prophet Tikkun Olam is profoundly misreading what the Judaic move is. Judaism is not about, we all know this. It's not about withdrawing from the material world, it's about sanctifying the material. You engage with the material. The Kabbalistic term is to raise the sparks where you engage with the material. Because everything material contains within it something of the divine. And so in principle, almost nothing is forbidden. Well, really nothing is forbidden. Killing isn't forbidden either. Here we're coming to power. There are laws for killing, there are ways of regulating war. You know, you can enjoy your food, you can enjoy sex, but don't go there, don't go there. There are limits. Judaism is about permitting and restricting. It's a kind of a dance in relationship to the material. And that's true for the individual Jew in our relationship with the material world. And it is even more true for the Jewish people as a collective. Judaism is the only religion that is people based and that plays out in history and sees its history as a sacred story. And so the collective story of the Jews is the expression, and I hope I'm being clear, I'm just working this out. I'm literally at that chapter right now. So help me out here if I'm not being clear. It is the analog to the individual engagement with the material is the collective engagement with, with history. When we were in exile, and think of what that word means, exile means you are in exile not only from a land, you're actually in some sense in exile from yourself. Judaism was an exile. Judaism is meant to be played out in a specific place under conditions of sovereignty, that is the natural condition Exile was an unnatural condition. Exile was punishment. And I'm making a distinction, or I should make a distinction with Diaspora, we could play that out. And so exile is the enforced condition not only of separation from the land, also of separation from self determination, from power, from the ability to be yourself as a collective and engage with the world. Now, to go back to the story of the Torah, the story of the Torah is the story of our failure as a collective to engage as a holy people or a people that was intended to carry the sacred and to bring the sacred into its collective story. That's what the Book of Kings is all about, that. And so the story is failure, the punishment was exiled, and now we're back. And what does that mean, that we're back? It means we're being given one more chance to get the real story right. Now, if we're failing, and there's an argument that can be made that we've started to fail here, that imposes on me the responsibility of redoubling my connection to the story to try to make sure that it doesn't fail again and again. What I believe would be the final failure of this story, this is the second round of the Tabak, it's not going to be a third. Am I making? So the anti Zionists are trying to take away what Judaism commands us to do, which is to test the premises of Judaism in the real world, in the material world, in our own lives, to try to live decent and where possible, even sacred lives in our relationship with the material. That's the stuff of our daily lives. And as a people, in our relationship with history, with power, with sovereignty, the tests that we go through. And again, the fact that we may be failing these tests is not an excuse for withdrawal, but quite the opposite.
- [57:20]
Sarah Hurwitz
So I want to add to that, actually, and this is a much stupider point, but it is. You know, that was very sophisticated what you said. I think in just a much more basic level, when I hear Diaspora Jews speak, they say, you know, a state is bad because for years we lived in Diaspora and it was beautiful. We created these thriving, diverse, rich communities. And I'm like, we did. That's all true. I don't want to take that away. And we were slaughtered by the millions. And so what's your answer to that? And their answer is generally a shrug. And that's a problem because Jews have bodies and we actually value those bodies. We actually do not regard them as meat, as degraded meat, envelopes for our precious souls. The bodies themselves are sacred, are holy. You know, we do not think like, oh, forget the body, it's really the soul. It's not a Jewish idea. And so they're just utter dismissal of the existence of the Jewish body. I'm like, I don't know what that is. I don't know whether it's Christian or something. It is not a Jewish sensibility. Right? Like, it's very strange to me.
- [58:16]
Yossi Klein Halevi
The anti Zionists I know are very happy with their own particular bodies.
- [58:20]
Sarah Hurwitz
Look, you're in America, you're on your couch, it's great. I don't want to, you know, it is a particular privilege of American Jews. So I want to now go to the final part of our conversation which is reclaiming the Jewish stories. So look, you know, you've argued that ensuring the Jewish future means reclaiming our stories. So how, how do we do it? And we have a very, we have a sort of different take, although I agree with your take. So you, you say yours first.
- [58:43]
Yossi Klein Halevi
I don't know my take. I want to hear your take and then I'll remember what my take is.
- [58:48]
Sarah Hurwitz
I just think we locate the, the main problem at different points in history. Like you're locating this in post Holocaust, right? That's sort of the, the pivot point for you. And I think the pivot point for me, because I'm an American Jew and very American centric, is early 1800s Western Europe, because the vast majority of Americans have European roots, which, you know, many Jews do not, but most Americans do. And I think that decision that we made as we transitioned to modernity, we made a category error which was a very, in many ways heroic, necessary. We wanted to be citizens, right? We didn't want to be Jews who were in a fr. In France. We wanted to be French people of the Jewish faith, right? We actually didn't want to be. I'm sorry, we had to be in order to take advantage of modernity to go to universities to get jobs. If we were just Jews, a separate nation, people, tribe, then we're not Germans, we're not Frenchmen. And so what we did is we said, no, no, God forbid, we're not a tribe, a family, a nation. No, no, no, no. We are a religion. We're just, we're actually kind of a Protestant shaped religion, interestingly enough. Like, you have a church, we have a Jew church. It even looks like your church. You worship God, we worship God. You of the Old Testament, we wrote the Old Testament. As for the 2500 years of biblical texts afterwards that are the beating heart of our tradition. You Guys don't like them. Neither do we. J K L. I'll dismiss them. And you know I'm way overstating this, right? That's. This is not fair. This is a very crass assessment but we did kind of jam a Protestant shaped cookie cutter into Jewish tradition and thank God.
- [60:18]
Yossi Klein Halevi
And Mamdani by the way is trying to revive.
- [60:20]
Sarah Hurwitz
Exactly.
- [60:21]
Yossi Klein Halevi
No, no, by, you know, it was a Napoleonic formulation of saying for Jews as individuals, everything and for Jews as a people, people nothing.
- [60:28]
Sarah Hurwitz
Nothing. And, and the problem is once you become a Protestant style religion, then why on earth would I care about those 8 million Jews in Israel? They're merely my co religious. No Christian in America is going to get really upset about things happening in Brazil because it's a mainly Christian country. They share an ideology, but I share solidarity with Jews in Israel. Our bodies are connected in my mind. Right. We are a tribe, we are a civilization, we're a nation. It's not our ideologies that are connected much like in a family. It's like our bodies, our fates are connected. But I think if you buy into that category error and you think, you know, Judaism is a religion of prophetic morality and tikkun olam. Well, most of those Jews in Israel don't seem to be practicing my religion of Judaism, so forget it. They're not your coreligionists, they're your mom. That category error I think is really coming back to haunt us.
- [61:17]
Yossi Klein Halevi
Yeah. Wow. It's great.
- [61:19]
Daniel Goodman
Yeah.
- [61:19]
Sarah Hurwitz
I don't know if that deserved applause, but thank you.
- [61:22]
Yossi Klein Halevi
So in 1943 an organization was created in America called the American Council for Judaism. We have the ajc, this was the ACJ and the American Council for Judaism were the last holdouts in the Reform movement of classical anti Zionism. Really it was high church Reform and that was how the services were conducted. And the idea was we're not a people. It was going way back. We're not a people. We certainly don't have a Zion. Zion is here. Bear in mind the year. It's 1943 and the American Jewish community, especially the Reform movement, overwhelmingly not just repudiated them, but treated them the way I would like to see Jewish Voice for Peace treated today. They were complete outcasts, worse than Jews for Jesus. And it was led by the Reform movement. The Reform movement. At that time, the most prominent leaders of the Reform movement, Stephen Wise and Abba Hillel Silver were also the leaders, the most prominent leaders of, of American Zionism. And so the HCJ was seen as the worst heretics in the American Jewish community. Fast forward a year or two ago, some young graduate of HUC Rabbinical program has resurrected the acj. You can look them up, they're online. And this is a footnote of a footnote, but it's a metaphor for this moment. Because that sensibility, which seemingly was fatally discredited by the events of the 1940s, the Shoah and then the creation of Israel and then the two flags on the Bema, the temptation of that ideology is back. And it's back partly because of our failures here. We did not live up to the promise of the two flags on the Bema. And those two flags not only represented power, they also represented decency, they represented democracy. And that's on us. So we're not blameless by any means. And I sometimes think that the anti Zionist Jews are the punishment for our sins here. So there's something about this moment that I so much appreciate the historical framing because that's exactly what's being played out. You know, among the Jews, old ideas, even like really bad ideas never completely die out. I'll give you an example. And this is my favorite comparison with the Bund. And yes, I am obsessed with the Bund. There was a sect of Jewish Muslims called the Dongmeh who were the followers of Sabbatai Zvi, the failed Messiah of the 17th century.
- [64:45]
Sarah Hurwitz
It was just one sentence, just in case anyone doesn't know.
- [64:48]
Yossi Klein Halevi
Sabbatait Zvi galvanized the Jewish world from the east to the West. Jews sold their worldly possessions. They were about to all go back to Israel. He was the Messiah. And then the Turkish Sultan imprisoned him and said, you either convert to Islam or die. The third option would have been reveal yourself as the Messiah. But he chose door number one and converted. The Jewish world went into a prolonged crisis. And Gershom Sholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, attributes the rise of Hasidism, which is a kind of a popularization of Kabbalah, and then the Reform movement and finally Zionism, and that these were all in some ways rebellions against the established Talmudic based Judaism. He connects all of them to the failure of Sabbathism. It's fantastic. But that's not what this lecture is about. And the. So I know all these byways, but the Donme. The Donme were those small but persistent groups of Jews around the Diaspora who continued to believe that Shapdai's V was the hidden Messiah. And there's this drama going on where he seems to have converted to Islam and we are going to be pretend Muslims like him, but secret Sabbathians. I'm mentioning this because as recently as the late 20th century there were Donme sightings in Turkey. I don't know if they still exist. Late 20th century, the Donme still existed in some form. And so big surprise that the Bund is back. You know, it's like the worst ideas and the best ideas. We are a very loyal people and I mean that. And look, you know, I remember Jews in Brooklyn in the 60s who were still die hard Stalinists. I had two cousins, the Fuchs brothers, to really who were die hard communists. And this is an Orthodox family and so Stalinists, not just communists.
- [67:06]
Sarah Hurwitz
The project of reclamation, like my project of reclamation would be, you know, I would love to have this time machine where we could go back to 1800 and before all the denominations, which in a way all the modern denominations were responses to persecution in some way. You know, reform was a response and the orthodoxy was a response to reform which went the other way. I mean conservative, you know, these are responses to modernity and they also have a lot of great substance. They've been very powerful and successful for 250 years. So I'm certainly not anti denomination. But I don't think if we were to be able to go back before all these denominations with who we are and what we know and with our souls and hearts today, would we create Reform conservative Orthodox Judaism? I don't think we necessarily would. I think if you were to just to look honestly at our tradition and to say what today can we use? I think that's kind of the project.
- [67:55]
Yossi Klein Halevi
Yeah, look, I couldn't agree more. I think that there are more of us than we know. And I think I'm including you in this, Sarah, but stop me if I'm wrong, that really are post denominational Jews and are looking for the heart of the story. I mean the devotional heart of the story, the religious heart of the story and are not finding it in any of the existing communities. And obviously there are wonderful communities and there's a lot of vitality there. But I personally have, I don't think ever really found my place. If I think back even when I was young, I don't think I ever found a place there. And also when I look back, I realize that I actually always believed that there was God, which is really strange growing up in a survivor family with a father who actually didn't. But I really think that I always did. And I think again that there are many of us who know that the last century has been so momentous that any of the existing religious forms that were created before somehow can't quite hold the intensity. And I'm speaking religiously now, and I certainly feel that. And, you know, when people ask me where I place myself, I say without any irony that I belong to a denomination that doesn't exist yet.
- [69:32]
Sarah Hurwitz
I actually feel the same way.
- [69:34]
Yossi Klein Halevi
But I do feel the stirring. There are elements of that, and especially here in Israel, I feel the stirring.
- [69:40]
Sarah Hurwitz
And by the way, I actually have a lot of respect for the current denominations and for the work they're doing. And I think, you know, even when I talk to the leaders and rabbis in these denominations, they're engaged in a lot of innovation. They're engaged in actually this exact project that I named where they're saying, like, okay, look, we made some decisions a couple hundred years ago, and now we're grappling with them. Right. I don't think that this is necessarily going to lead to the downfall of denominations, but just the revitalization, the innovation, which I think is very exciting. But I have a question for you about the word Zionism. Big debate in the Jewish community in America about whether we should just lose that word or use it. I understand the arguments. They're very compelling arguments. One is, this is a terrible brand. The brand is awful. It pulls terribly. Another argument is, this is an intellectually incoherent word. No one says they're an abolitionist or a suffragist like Zionism has succeeded. To call oneself a Zionist is to imply that it hasn't succeeded. It's actually act as if the question is open and it is not. And I understand that. But I don't think this is either a brand management question or a kind of intellectual question. I think this is really a spiritual question. And I take. I'm so inspired by the LGBTQ movement and the reclamation of the word queer. I think that is one of the most breathtaking acts of defiance and joy that any group of people has ever engaged in. And I actually looked into this, and this happened in, like, the late 80s and early 90s. I guarantee you that word pulled terribly. And also, it was intellectually not quite right. Like they're trying. Like this was a moment where people are trying to get the same rates as everyone else to say, oh, we're really different than everyone else. Intellectually, that wasn't quite on brand. But again, it wasn't a brand management or intellectual question. It was a spiritual question. And they were saying, oh, you are using this word to say that we are bad. We are going to use this word to say we are good. Zionism is our word. It's the word for the most spectacular help movement that I think our people has ever engaged in. And you know, I think it is a spiritual question of reclaiming that word and almost just digging into it. Like I don't, I actually feel strongly about using that word. Although if the Jewish community decided against it, I go along. I'm not, you know, I want to be respectful, but I just, I don't, I don't think it's like whatever word we come up with next, they're going to destroy that brand too. I don't think we're escaping the brand problem here.
- [71:54]
Yossi Klein Halevi
No, I think you really put it beautifully. And the once one starts giving in to the other side, there's no end to it.
- [72:03]
Sarah Hurwitz
Pound of flesh theory and so yeah,
- [72:06]
Yossi Klein Halevi
in the 90s there was a short lived movement in Israel among some historians and intellectuals was called Post Zionism, some of you may remember it. And Post Zionism was actually an umbrella term for all kinds of ideas ranging from Zionists who said exactly what you had just said earlier. We won, we succeeded, and now we're Israeli patriots, we don't need to be suffragettes. All the way to post Zionism as a euphemism for anti Zionism. Ilan Pape and some of the other anti Zionist historians who clustered under this umbrella, I was briefly tempted by the Zionist ring of post Zionism that you know, really we weren't. And also this was the 90s Soviet Jewry movement was over a million immigrants from the former Soviet Union. And the gathering and you know, what was Zionism? It was, you know, the Jewish Agency was the World Zionist Organization which to this day you wouldn't want to touch. And so you know, what was Zionism? It was askaming, say that bureaucrats. And then Durban happened in 2000 and the assault, which actually the contemporary assault begins with Durban and I felt what some Jews in 19th and early 20th century Western Europe fell, assimilated Jews. And there was someone who said as long as there is one anti Semite left in the world, I will be a Jew. That kind of Dafka. I said, yeah, you know what? Anti Zionists, you're still around, there's still going to be Zionists. And so that was just this kind of Israeli thing. And I think that that has its place. But I think there are deeper layers here for why we should hold on to Zionism. One is gratitude, simple gratitude. Zionism saved the Jewish people in 1945 and you see it again when you go back to the DP camps. What held the camps together spiritually was actually not Judaism, it was Zionism. Zionism was a substitute faith and they related to it that way. That's why I mentioned earlier that when survivors would get married, it would be under a chuppah of a Zionist flag. The symbols were Zionist. When they would observe the Seder, it was next year in Jerusalem as the literal center point of the Seder. And so this is. We have a debt of gratitude to those stubborn, pigheaded, arrogant Labor Zionists. You know, you just think of those people, just insufferable. They deserve to lose when they lost. But we really have a debt of gratitude to them. And defending the integrity of the term Zionism is crucial. There's one more final piece of this for me, which is that I think that Zionism does have a crucial relevance to 21st century Jewish life. If we redefine Zionism, if Zionism means a Jewish state, I have no use for that term. We won. And I hate to have to argue for our right to exist. I met with a group of German journalists and one of them said to me, in Germany, we're very pro Israel, we support your right to exist. And I said, in Israel, we're very pro German, we support your right to exist too. And they laughed a little nervously because they have to start that it didn't sound so good a juror. So what I think that Zionism does mean for us today is it is the ideology of Jewish peoplehood. And in the 19th century, European Jews started to break down the definition of Jewishness. What is Jewishness? The Haredim said it's a religion. The Reform said it's a religion, different kind of religion than the Faradiman. The Bund basically were saying, we're a class, we're a Yiddish speaking class, which didn't leave too much room for, let's say middle class Jews in Tunisia, but nevertheless the Bundegat, sorry. And so Zionism comes along and comes up with this radical definition of the Jews, which is very modern and also ancient, which is the Jews are the Jews. Whatever we are, we're a people. The noun is Jew. The adjective is revolutionary Orthodox Reform. And that was the Zionist contribution to this debate. And we kind of didn't get the full significance of that because we were understandably focused on the Zionist program for statehood, the practical program. But Zionism is also medialogy. It's a theology of peoplehood. Now if we're looking at a 21st century definition of Zionism as peoplehood, it needs to change. For me, the definition of 21st century Zionism is that we are a people with a homeland at the center and a vibrant diaspora, because that's we've always been that. We've been that since the days of Abraham and Sarah when they came here and then left. You know, it's built in. This movement back and forth is built in to the Jewish experience. And so a 21st century Zionism is the ideology of peoplehood. And that's what Mamdaniism is threatening. And he says it, he always speaks about the Jews very warmly as a faith. Well, you know, I know a lot of Jews whose faith is not that strong and yet they are Jews in reasonably good standing. And so we get to define who we are and not Mamdani. You should have applauded for that.
- [78:23]
Sarah Hurwitz
Jesse. Thank you so much.
- [78:29]
Daniel Goodman
For heaven's sake. As a product of the Shalom Hartman Institute and ARC Media, it is produced by me, Daniel Goodman, with help from Miriam Jacobs, Adar Taylor Schechter and Aviva Katmanaur, and studio support from Go Live Media. Our episode was edited by Seth Stein. Natal Friedman is our executive producer and our music was composed by Yuval Sama. Past episodes can be found@arcmedia.org where you can explore more of Arc Media's podcast. You can watch the video versions of our episodes on our YouTube channel. Follow the YouTube link in the show Notes. Also, to receive updates on new episodes, please follow the link to arcmedia.org and subscribe to Arc Media's weekly newsletter. For more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute, visit our website@shalomhartman.org.