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- [00:00]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Rabbi I'm rabbi ami hirsch of the stephen wise free synagogue in new york, and you're listening to in these times.
- [00:11]
Host of In These Times
In the wake of October 7, many Jews, especially young Jews, have found themselves navigating a world that feels suddenly hostile, confusing, and morally upside down. Anti Zionism is no longer fringe. It is increasingly mainstream, often presented not as an argument, but, but as a moral certainty. So what is driving this shift and how should we respond? My guest today has watched this conflict play out up close. Adam Lewis Klein is a writer, anthropologist, and the founder of the movement against Anti Zionism. He studied philosophy at Yale and is completing his PhD at McGill, where his work focuses on Jewish peoplehood and the ideas shaping contemporary anti Jewish hate. Foreign. Welcome to in these Times.
- [01:04]
Adam Lewis Klein
Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here.
- [01:07]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I've seen you online quite frequently and you're one of our great Jewish young. I don't know if you, if you like the term influencer or not, but it does influence people because you're an academic as well. What brought you into this highly charged conflict of ideas on social media?
- [01:30]
Adam Lewis Klein
Well, you know, October 7th was a transformative moment for me like it was for so many. But I also had a unique experience that I've talked about in other places. But I was in the Amazon doing fieldwork, anthropological fieldwork for my PhD with indigenous people. And I'd been living in a indigenous village without any phone or computer for three months. Every day I would work, walk over from the little health post where they put all the foreigners when, where I was staying, to the central pavilion in this village. And I would meet with the elders of this tribe and I would learn about their sacred stories, their traditions and history that they were trying to maintain in the present in the face of assimilation and, you know, domination from a, you know, more powerful majoritarian society in Colombia. And then I got back to a local town, town, it's still in the Amazon on October 9th. And I opened my computer for the first time in three months. And the first thing I saw was the Nova Music Festival. And the second thing I saw was all of my friends and colleagues in my left wing academic space turning on Israel, bashing Israel. And pretty soon, just through speaking up against this movement, I was purged from academia. And so I had to really come to a reckoning, really about my identity as a Jew and also my identity as an academic, as someone who was in these intellectual spaces. And what I saw was a kind of pseudoscience that had emerged behind my back. I hadn't been paying too much Attention to the Israel discourse actually prior to October 7th. But there was a whole new pseudoscience of Jews as these alien white colonizers who kind of invented the notion that we come from Israel and that any of our objections to Jew hate against us was kind of fake. It was part of this conspiracy to claim we have a right in this land that we actually have no right to, to belong to. So I needed to find a way to speak back to that and to use actually my academic training, my understanding of indigeneity and the critique of colonialism to speak back to what this new pseudoscience was doing.
- [03:35]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
So you mentioned that you were purged from academia immediately after October 7th. What did you mean by that?
- [03:41]
Adam Lewis Klein
Well, I immediately started getting hate mail from people in my circles. People say, would say, oh, I followed your work, I really enjoyed it, but I just realized, you know, you're nothing but a filthy Zionist. And I had a journal that I had created with a friend of mine that was picking up some steam. We had some major academics who were backing the academic journal we created. And one by one, each member of the academic journal said, you know, we found out that Adam is an evil, racist Zionist, and so we no longer want to work with him. My intellectual hero, Eduardo Viveros de Castro, who's a Brazilian anthropologist. He's one of the reasons I became interested in Amazonian anthropology. He publicly disowned me in front of his 10,000 followers and said, you know, Adam is stupid, Adam is evil. And of course, his own Twitter feed and his own behavior is, is radically anti Zionist and hateful. It's basically just a live stream of anti Zionist libels and, and hate for Israelis. It was extremely disturbing for me to see my intellectual hero in that light.
- [04:48]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
And all this began immediately after October 7th. You almost immediately, I think you said, October 9th is when you actually had an opportunity. So two days after October 7th, you had an opportunity to go online and did you post something that prompted this?
- [05:08]
Adam Lewis Klein
So I think I just posted positive things about Israel, like I stand with Israel or Am Yisrael Chai or something like that. And, and I immediately started getting hate. Like I just. People started posting pictures of people burning Israeli flags under my posts. I would have this thing where they would obsessively laugh, react to my posts. I've written about it as a kind of stereotypical anti Zionist behavior. They'll come on a Jew's post or someone they view as Zionist and they will sort of obsessively laugh, react everything that person says. So people would go on my wall and then people would do this who were PhD students, you know, these were PhD students at other elite universities who suddenly were behaving in this way. So they'd just been suddenly taken over by. By a total pathology. But another thing I found that was important is that at the time I called it antisemitism because I hadn't really experienced that much anti Semitism in my life. I went to a Northeastern prep school, like a kind of old school Northeastern boarding school for high school. And I did have a few altercations with some people with like kind of classical anti Semitism, old boy antisemitism. But what I experienced after October 7th just felt on another level, right? The visceral hatred that was directed at me. And then also the fact that these people kept saying they weren't anti Semitic, right. And I found that the more I told them they were anti Semitic because that was the word I reached for, right? I felt that I was being hated for my identity as a Jew. I felt that viscerally. But the more I said they were anti Semitic, the worse it went for me. Because, you know, many people who cut me off, they said, I hate how you're using antisemitism to justify Israel's atrocities. So even when I didn't even really talk about Israel, there was a period where I tried. I tried sort of having a reasonable conversation about Israel and Palestine. But even when I wasn't, they. They just hated that I was so called accusing them of anti Semitism. And that was part of what led me to realize that one has to take anti Zionism directly. And our current language around anti Zionism, our methods of talking about when anti Zionism comes, anti Semitism just doesn't work.
- [07:23]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Well, I want to talk to you more about that, but just to circle back. So you're speaking as if this took you by surprise, but this kind of vehemence that you're describing and the depth of the emotional response doesn't materialize out of nowhere. It was obviously there before. Do you agree with that and you just simply didn't pay enough attention to it? Or was there something new about all of this that was triggered by October 7th?
- [07:54]
Adam Lewis Klein
So the intellectual infrastructure was entirely there before they'd already reconstructed the academy entirely around what Zinab Ribo calls Third Worldism. Basically the notion that every single thing we study should be fit into this moralizing framework of Western oppressive evil of white people harming victimized brown and indigenous people. So that intellectual infrastructure was already there. And Zionism you knew it was there.
- [08:23]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Right. That wasn't surprising to you. You spent your entire academic career was in these great institutions.
- [08:29]
Adam Lewis Klein
I participated in it, I would say, for a long time. I think I had sort of third world views. I sort of viewed the whole world as kind of one Western colonial evil. I can't really overemphasize how much the critical academies just teaches you to see the world that way. I mean, you're sort of encouraged and rewarded for finding new ways to condemn the west as evil and finding new ways to describing a kind of great problem with the world as such in terms of Western history, civilization, metaphysics. Right. You can go to Heidegger and say, well, it all started with Plato and that was the problem. Problem. Right. Or you can go even further back and say that pre Socratics were the problem or the Iron Age or whatever. There's always just a way of kind of saying, where did the problem start? Because this whole world is evil. It's a kind of gnostic relationship to the world. And I definitely bought into it for a while. My experience in the Amazon really changed how I thought about it. I realized that I had fallen into the same romanticizing tendencies of indigenous people. Even though I knew it was a problem, I knew it was a danger. Right. But I think the stark reality of, you know, the people in the Amazon that I work with, they were not leftists. They were opposed to the farc who were radical Maoist guerrillas who would kidnap indigenous children and commit atrocities in the Amazon. They were not necessarily opposed to all missionaries.
- [09:56]
Host of In These Times
Right.
- [09:56]
Adam Lewis Klein
Whereas a lot of what you're taught in the academy, in anthropology is that missionaries are evil. They try and destroy indigenous cultures. You should stand with indigenous against missionaries. I learned that the indigenous relationship to Christianity is far more complex. So I saw that these moralized types of indigenous and colonizer were stereotypes that concealed a more interesting reality. And when I saw that being applied to Jews in something I knew was false. Right. Jews are just white colonizers who don't come from Israel. Well, I knew that was just ignorant. I realized that that whole framework had to be kind of permuted and changed. Not destroying it as a whole, but has to be reconfigured.
- [10:40]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Is it fair to characterize Your answers as October 7th really impacted on you in a profound way and altered your trajectory 100%?
- [10:51]
Adam Lewis Klein
I have. I couldn't really imagine that, you know, before October 7th that I'd be doing what I'm doing now.
- [10:58]
Host of In These Times
Right.
- [10:58]
Adam Lewis Klein
But. But it really just forced anyone who was Jewish in The academy, I think into a set of choices, right? You could either be silent and hope it passes and not want to ruin your reputation in your career by speaking out against anti Zionism, by showing any association or affiliation with Israel, or you can become an anti Zionist Jew. You can tokenize yourself, you can absorb it, you can assimilate to the Jew hatred around you, which has obviously become a more and more prominent position. Or you can speak out against it and risk your career in order to speak the truth and stand by your values. I was lucky. I chose three. And also I'm still somehow still a PhD student. They haven't managed to get rid of me. And people have also taken an interest in. In what I'm saying.
- [11:48]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
You were back online on October 9th. Presumably you posted some posts expressing solidarity with Israel and immediately this wave crashes over you. If you look back at October 9th, this was before Israel even began to launch a counteroffensive. They were still fighting off terrorists in their streets and towns. And two days later, the dimensions of the massacre were becoming apparent, including at the Nova Festival. What was the intellectual grounding of these vicious attacks against Israel? Accusing Israel of all kinds of immorality, even genocide? The genocide accusations began before Israel even began to respond. What triggered that? The mass savagery inflicted on, I mean, first and foremost, human beings and with respect to Jews, the worst mass casualty event since the Holocaust. And it triggers this response that completely ignores Israeli suffering, in fact, kind of glorifies in Israeli suffering and uses it to leverage, you know, Third Worldism and various anti Zionist perspectives. Again, how do you explain that? And are you able to penetrate these very highly intelligent, highly educated people with reason, if within two days they were accusing Israel of this kind of vicious behavior before Israel even responded?
- [13:23]
Adam Lewis Klein
It's precisely that dynamic. And what I saw within the academy, which I call the belly of the beast because it's where all the anti Zionism comes from and it's where it's at its most intense, is precisely because of what I saw then that I was able to see in the years that followed as this anti Zionism academy basically was just mainstreamed. It flowed into the mainstream media. I mean, it was already in the NGOs, but they amplified their accusations. They produced new reports from Albanese, you know, with the genocide libel. She has two different reports. They had the commission from the UN to accuse Israel of genocide. I saw this escalation, I saw this mainstreaming until it was in the New York Times. And then I said, wow, what I saw in my tiny little world of radical left wing intellectuals is now in the New York Times as if this is obvious. And that allowed me also to see through it all, because I was there, right? Not physically, but I was watching it in those social networks on October 9th. And the genocide libel, as you know, as you've just described, was already present on October 7th. They were already accusing genocide against Israel on October 7th. Now that's in itself is extremely delegitimizing, right? I mean, if you have a movement, you know, prosaically. Right. People who support genocide, right. They were cheering on October 7th aren't exactly the most credible actors, you know, to make then a claim about genocide against the people they're. They're committing genocide against. But more broadly, you also see this pattern in other genocides. It's called accusation in a mirror, something that Susan Benesh, who's a legal scholar, Kenneth Marcus as well, have developed. It originally comes from the Rwandan genocide. And I saw more and more that essentially this was just the pattern and the structure of the genocide libel. But as you say, the genocide libel is really just a standing accusation of anti Zionist ideology. It goes back years. And the content of the claim is unrelated to Israel's actions. They actually use a theoretical framework called settler colonial theory, according to which Israel is a protracted genocide. So its existence is just a genocide over decades, and it's inherently genocidal. The way Israel is set up as a kind of ethno state where you need to preserve a Jewish majority state and it's supposedly stealing land that's inherently Palestinian or Arab requires genocide. And you actually hear anti Zionists talk in this way all the time. They have a kind of metaphysics of Israel. It's essentially evil. Now I think that delegitimizes the genocide libel in itself. And I also think it shouldn't be acceptable. We've always talked about, when does anti Zionism become anti Semitism? Are people secretly anti Semitic? And that's motivating their attacks on Israel, which otherwise would be okay because you could attack a state who cares if it's a state? I actually don't think so. I think saying that a Jewish state is inherently evil shouldn't be an acceptable opinion. It's essentializing. And actually you're not allowed to destroy Israelis as a national identity, even without anything to do with anti Semitism. Right. The Genocide convention says that genocide is intent to annihilate a protected group. And that includes ethnic, racial, religious and national. In the original formulation, that includes national groups.
- [16:48]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Right.
- [16:48]
Adam Lewis Klein
You actually can't Even really argue for a one state solution. I don't think many people have noticed this, but if you say that, oh, I'm not against killing Israelis or killing Jews, I want a different kind of administrative political structure. I don't want an Israel or a Jewish majority state. Well, you're actually saying you don't think there should be Israelis because if there's no Israel, there's no Israelis. And that intent is actually genocidal. Right. If you try and carry that out through mass murdering people, it's a genocide. If you try and carry it out through other ways, it could be forms of cultural genocide which aren't part of the legal definition but which are worth considering. So I really don't think that anti Zionism even on its own, is legitimate.
- [17:34]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Did you receive any support from faculty in general and in particular Jewish faculty?
- [17:42]
Adam Lewis Klein
I received virtually no support within McGill. No one sort of publicly stood up for me in any way. And at the university, what I saw is anti Zionist complaints. Students who were being discriminated against by anti Zionists were never ever treated, and they still aren't to this day. According to my knowledge, any student who has an encounter with an anti Zionist, they feel discriminated or harassed. It's never treated because the university and the administration only has a concept of classical antisemitism. And I think this is what we're seeing across the United States as well, especially the patchy legal record. We've had some victories, like in UC Berkeley that the Brandeis center brought, showing that anti Zionists were discriminating against Jewish students. But in others, like the stand with us versus mit, we lost very badly. And the judges said, well, anti Zionism, you can't ever know. If it's anti Semitism, we'll assume it's legitimate. And I think this patchy record comes from the fact that the public discourse only recognizes classical antisemitism. And then when there's anti Zionism, since anti Zionism is different from classical anti Semitism, it assumes its criticism of Israel. But like I was saying before, anti Zionism isn't criticism of Israel. It's actually just a hatred of a country and its people. Both anti Zionists hate the state like they think it's inherently evil, right? Not as a rational critique. They just think it's a kind of metaphysical demonic entity. And they hate the people and the culture. They hate Israelis, as you recently saw. There's that Lespresso Italian magazine that had this racist depiction of this Israeli soldier whose teeth were kind of bared and they made the soldier look kind of animalistic and it was a clearly racist depiction. All of the anti Zionists were parading around this picture and saying, look how evil and terrible and ugly this person is. And of course they then found the video of the soldier from when the picture was taken. And there's no evidence the soldier has committed any crime. So I think this is a perfect example. That was racism, but it wasn't necessary Classical anti Semitism because it didn't necessarily have anti Semitic tropes. It was really anti Zionist. It was the figure of the so called white IDF settler soldier that they really hated and they couldn't find that he committed any crime. So they are racists like definitionally because they hated him just because he was Israeli. But we've had trouble actually showing people that this exists because sometimes we don't want to talk about it because we want to make it all about whether it's anti Semitism, but anti Zionism in itself is a hate movement. It's a hate against Israel and its people. And it's not criticism of Israel.
- [20:26]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I've read some of your articles where you make a distinction between anti Zionism with a capital zone and anti Zionism with a small Z. By which I think you mean all of those discussions pre state within the Jewish community where the debate was whether it's a good idea to create and establish a state was anti Zionism with a capital Z. But anti ZIONISM now after 78 years, after the state was created is a whole different animal. You touched on that in your previous answer, but could you just encapsulated in particular? I'm always worried about younger Jews. So it's a specific reason why I was so excited to have you with us today.
- [21:09]
Adam Lewis Klein
Yeah, I mean, it's one of the great lies. Right. Of the current discourse. It's a kind of polycemic fallacy, a linguistic trick to say that these two anti Zionisms are the same thing because they share the same word. Right. And so we of course know about the phenomenon of token Jews, of course, that they're anti Zionist Jews who legitimize an anti Zionist hate movement movement. And they claim they're doing it from their Jewish identity. And now with this, they make a historical claim. Anti Zionism is something Jewish. There were these Jewish anti Zionist traditions like the Haredim, the ultra Orthodox anti Zionism that said you can't go back to Israel until the Messiah comes, or Reform Judaism before it switched to Zionism, which was the claim that Jews are no longer a nation, we should reform our Judaism, so it's more like a religion so we can successfully assimilate as equal citizens into Western nation states. Now of course they did not say that Jews don't come from Israel and that Jews are just white colonizers. They said Jews were a nation that comes from Israel. But now we're going to be something else. And then of course there were Bundists and Marxists, right? Bundists were cultural nationalists who wanted basically to have autonomy in multi ethnic states based on Yiddish language and culture. And then there were Marxists who basically thought that Jews should dissolve into a kind of working class revolution. And what happened with after the creation of the Soviet Union was the Bund was largely absorbed into the Marxist camp. The obsexia was created to dismantle Jewish life in the Soviet union. And in 1929 I believe Stalin basically then executed them all. Right, so that's the happy history of the Bund. But in any case, what I have found from researching anti Zionism without the hyphen with the little Z is that you can trace all of it to Nazi Islamist kind of alliances and propaganda and particularly to Soviet and Arab propaganda. For example, someone like Fayez Sayag who's an Arab nationalist propagandist, I mean he was a propagandist like, like he worked in the US at the Arab League's radio station. And he also created the Palestine Research center which was propaganda. It was part of the PLO's official kind of messaging that they produced in English. And we know also that the PLO was created in collaboration with the Soviets and we know about the Soviet anti Zionist propaganda campaign. So if you look at anti Zionism, that's where it comes from. Its central claims about Jews being a colonial presence in Eretz Yisrael of Israel being inherently racist and apartheid claim they made. SAAG made this claim in 1965 before there was even an occupation in the west bank or it being based on genocide. All of these claims are a coherent ideological structure and they don't have anything to do with pre 1948 Jewish anti Zionism either. The Haredi form which was saying let's stay in the ghetto and wait till the Messiah or the pro assimilationist forms amongst Reformed Judaism and Marxism where anti Zionists have managed to tokenize these pre1948 Jewish anti Zionisms and is on the assimilation point. Right, so it's true that both anti Zionisms want to assimilate Jews into other nations. Of course the reason is quite different. The reformed Jews wanted equal rights Right. Marxists had some utopian idea of universal liberation. Anti Zionists want to forcibly assimilate Jews. They want to destroy a nation state that exists and force Jews to be minorities again in other nation states.
- [24:47]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
You believe very strongly. Tell me if I'm mischaracterizing your views. You believe very strongly that fundamentally anti Zionism today, which is not criticism of this or that policy of any Israeli government, but undermines the legitimacy of the right of the Jews to sovereignty in its ancient homeland. Every form of anti Zionism today is an expression of antisemitism. In your view?
- [25:15]
Adam Lewis Klein
In some sense, but I find that formulation to be potentially ambiguous and can create confusion. So do I think anti Zionism is Jew hatred? Yes. Do I think it's the same as classical anti Semitism, European antisemitism of the 19th and 20th century that says Jews are racial infiltrators into our nation, states that they're managing a financial conspiracy run by the Rothschilds? No, I don't think so. I think that anti Zionism actually often inverts those stereotypes and creates completely new stereotypes. So its stereotypes are the white colonizer, the sadistic IDF soldier, the Israeli messianic settler. These are actually ways in which everyone who's marked as a Zionist is constructed. And it is really focused on Israel. Right. It's not like when an anti Zionist hates Israel, they secretly dislike, you know, the Jews around the corner. And that's why you have some Jews who I would say they are Jews, they are Diaspora Jews. I'm not going to deny that to them. And if they want to create a Judaism that is opposed to the kind of Judaism being produced in Israel, I totally understand that. But that's not a bigotry. Anti Zionism is a bigotry against Israel and Israelis. It's someone who actually doesn't like Israelis because they're Israelis. And I think that that Israel centered element sometimes gets lost when we just say it is antisemitism. I prefer to allow the term anti Semitism to kind of retake its specific meaning in classical anti Semitism and then let anti Zionism and antisemitism appear as parallel bigotries, related but distinct?
- [26:53]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
So do you think that this contemporary anti Zionism has elements of a whole new dimension of antisemitism, of Jew hatred? Or does it draw its energy from centuries old expressions of anti Semitism or Jew hatred?
- [27:12]
Adam Lewis Klein
I think it draws energy. I think often you do see some recycling of medieval anti Judaic kind of deicide themes. They recently were circulating this image of An IDF soldier who destroyed a Jesus statue in, in Lebanon. And, and, and apparently the photo is real. It was some guy. But they were very excited about this, right? Including secular anti Zionists. So that symbolic resonance of Jews killing Jesus immediately clicked for them. So there's a lot of anti Judaic resonances. And you sometimes also see even on the left, some conspiratorial antisemitism. They were circulating, saying about $7,000 a post. So they assumed that any sort of person who was marked as a Zionist was being paid enormous amounts of money to talk about Israel. So there was this financial conspiracy element. But I think that has enough of its own concepts and imagery and stereotypes that it really is its own thing and it's fitted to a different politics. Right. It emerges from the left and it's fitted to that internationalist politics. So right wing antisemitism is usually nationalist. It's based on the idea that Jews are foreign infiltrators messing up your national culture. Anti Zionism is internationalist. It's based on the notion that there's a global order of human rights and Israel is this rogue state, this evil state that's messing up the order of human rights. So anti Semitism is based on Jews can't be a minority in our nation state. Anti Zionism is based on Jews can't be a majority in their own nation state.
- [28:44]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
But is there something Jewish that is rooted in age old animosity towards Jews? Why the Jews? I mean, there's so many other worse offenders, even from their perspective.
- [28:59]
Host of In These Times
So why, why this obsession?
- [29:02]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
What looks to us like an obsession with the Jews?
- [29:05]
Adam Lewis Klein
So it's 100% Jew hatred at that level. Right. I'm not going to deny that this hate movement against Israel is because it's a Jewish state. I mean, I think that's obvious. But it's hating the Jew under a new figure, right? A new image or imaginary of who the Jew is. And I think that's the key point. The way Jews are being imagined today is different from classical anti Semitism and that's why it keeps passing by the radar, right? It's not being picked up because people can't see it that when people hate Jews as evil, white, Israeli militarized fascists, that's not a political critique just because it's not hating Jews as Rothschild bankers. So I think that's, that's the key, right? So it's, it's a little paradoxical. But I think if you want to help people see that anti Zionism is Jew hatred it's helpful first to concede that it's not classical antisemitism.
- [30:05]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
So I want to go back about, about this perception. Circle back to what I asked you before about any kind of support you got from Jewish faculty members and what's going on with respect to Jewish students. And you're a young millennial, but you're very close to the Gen Z generation American Jews. Do you think they perceive this, what you're talking about? And what kind of response would we expect or do we want to generate
- [30:33]
Host of In These Times
within the young Jewish community?
- [30:36]
Adam Lewis Klein
So we have a lot of people who've absorbed anti Zionism and so they themselves think Israel has committed some cosmic crime. You know, Israel may have done many things like any other state, but they sort of have absorbed the overall narrative and its kind of symbolic meaning. Right. That the post October 7th moment is not really about the October 7th genocide or the anti Zionist militias like Hezbollah or anti Zionist regime like Iran trying to commit genocide and murdering their own people and the anti Zionist hate movement lynching Jews. It's kind of about this moment where the world wakes up to that Israel is actually really bad. That narrative, I think, is something that many Jews have internalized. Unfortunately, there hasn't been a lot of clarity about anti Zionism and teaching about anti Zionism and its history. There are other methods which say we should just keep being pro Israel and supporting Zionism, but aren't necessarily dealing with anti Zionism and what it's about. So I think the young Jews are entering that space and they feel torn. Right. If the question is just about how do you view Israel? It seems polarizing. There are people who are just saying become more and more Zionist. And then there are people who are saying Israel is the most evil thing ever. And even as Jews we should think that. I think if we can build a discourse around anti Zionism and understand the problem with anti Zionism, I think it'll create a lot of clarity and free up the space. Because the interesting question to me is not how good or how bad is Israel? Like, you see this in the conversation today with these recent polls that showed that Democrats under 50, basically the vast majority dislike Israel. People are saying, you know, well, how much of it is due to what Israel did and how much of it is due to anti Semitism, just some kind of dislike of Jews. It doesn't get at what's interesting, which is the anti Zionist hate movement in the wake of October 7, which is an interesting phenomenon. Right. If there was a KKK movement, you know, and then someone Said to me, well come on like black people do commit some crimes, right? Like let's think about the role that black people committing crimes has played. I would be like no, actually the interesting phenomenon to me is not that some black people commit crimes. The interesting phenomenon to me is why there's a KKK hate movement against black people. When people commit crimes in every single group and I see that as the same thing. Every state commits crimes or doesn't or I don't even know. It's not even that interesting to me. There are many states in the world that are moving in a right wing direction. There are many states that are becoming religious fundamentalists. There's extremism problems in most states and countries today. What's interesting to me is the anti Zionist hate movement.
- [33:17]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Since October 7th especially, I've looked back and tried to. We're a big congregation here. We're doing all kinds of not only local but national programs that are centered around curricula. And what did we learn post 10-7- And I spent a lot of time on reflection and self criticism. What we did well, but also where we thought we might have been doing well and it wasn't post October 7th behavior of some of our alumni, some of our graduates was evidence that we failed in what we were trying to accomplish. Where do you think we went wrong with let's call it Gen Z. But as you say, I mean it's, it extends beyond Gen Z into basically support for Israel has collapsed with respect to younger liberal people generally. Americans generally say under the age of 50. The question was asked, do you sympathize more with Palestinians which is a reversal of previous polls for many years. What did we do wrong? You said about yourself that you were one of those who fundamentally, broadly speaking, bought into this more left wing perspective on sociology and on geopolitics. And I asked that question what did we do wrong in your sense? In order to try and figure out what we can do better moving forward?
- [34:48]
Adam Lewis Klein
I think we really ignored anti Zionism and we, we took it at face value. We were too good faith with it. Right when the anti Zionists started emerging in the academy and they said they were doing criticism of Israel, we spent a lot of time being like yes, you can criticize Israel like we're in it with you. Just don't cross the line into anti Semitism. We were not strong enough on anti Zionism because we were afraid of seeming like we sort of so called supported Israeli policies or we were uncritical. But that's actually not really the issue if you're able to develop a discourse around anti Zionism and see, and the reason this is right is like many Jews are left of center. So when we saw anti Zionism emerging on the left, it was harder for us to see that it was wrong. Right? So there's still many Jews who see anti Zionism as a criticism of Israel, even if they disagree with it. Right? So, but anti Zionism is just, it's just the other version. So there are right wing forms of anti Zionism emerging right, but anti Zionism comes from the left. It's rooted in the left's instincts, whereas antisemitism is rooted in the right's instincts. Right. Now the whole issue of political criticism versus bigotry, right? It's actually not unique to anti Zionism. We act as if this is a problem for anti Zionism. When is it bigotry, when is it critique and anti Semitism? Though we all know anti Semitism is wrong. But actually, you know, if we look at both versions, a right wing person has political criticisms of foreign immigration, of foreign influence, of how to preserve the national culture of a place. Those can be framed as policy critiques. A right wing person could be against immigration or foreign influence as a policy critique. That's right wing politics. Within the space of right wing politics, a form of Jew hatred exists that constructs Jews as the negative right. It says Jews are the foreign influence, Jews are the foreign people, replacing our national culture. Left wing politics is about critiquing state power, abuse of state power, excessive nationalism, how a state treats its minorities. That's the thing that left wing people do. But within that there is a form of Jew hatred. It's a form of Jew hatred that makes it so that a Jewish state is inherently evil and is a kind of exaggerated form of oppression of other people.
- [37:09]
Host of In These Times
Right?
- [37:10]
Adam Lewis Klein
And so I think Jews on the left had trouble seeing this as Jew hatred just because it was framed in terms of left wing politics.
- [37:18]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Do you think some Jews are legitimizing anti Zionism? Do you think they're being used by some of these forces you talk about? And are they doing it willingly or are they useful idiots?
- [37:32]
Adam Lewis Klein
I think the lack of a concept of anti Zionism and a discourse of anti Zionism in the public genuinely does make this conflation somewhat easy to fall into. And people are also internalizing the narrative. So like, let's look at the geopolitical situation. It itself is structured by anti Zionism. The anti Zionist militias like Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, etc. The anti Zionist governments like Qatar and Iran, they are the regional context. They are aggressors against Israel. Israel is an oppressed state. It's a small minority enclave within a larger region of a very violent region with tons of extremism and fundamentalism groups that commit genocide against marginalized minorities like the Yazidis or the Druze or the Alawites, etc. And the anti Zionist narrative says, look, we're only going to see Israel, right? It structures perception only on Israel and says, well, you don't like Netanyahu, Ben GVIR and Smote Rich. Definitely not your politics, right? So when all these people hate Israel, oh maybe there's something to it, right? I'm a liberal Jew, I don't like Benjamin Netanyahu. But of course it's that way of seeing, right, that actually obscures the real problem. If you can see anti Zionism, you can see that has nothing to do with whether you agree with Netanyahu or Ben gvir, has to do with whether you think it's legitimate for these anti Zionist forces to try and genocide and eliminate a people. And if it's legitimate for an anti Zionist hate movement to exist. And then as a left wing person, when I see it that way, I say, why oppose anti Zionism? Anti Zionism is discriminatory, Anti Zionism is violent, Anti Zionism is genocidal. I should oppose anti Zionism. It's like Stalinism or the Khmer Rouge. These were left wing movements that were oppressive and committed atrocities. And left wing people eventually had to realize they were wrong, just like right wing people had to realize that Nazism was wrong. And I think that's the step that everyone needs to make right now. The public needs to make this step. It needs to recognize anti Zionism and that something went really wrong in how Israel was being understood post October 7th. And it's really not about whether you agree with everything the Israeli government does or where it's going, etc, and how
- [39:51]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
optimistic are you that there will be some success? The trends seem to be going exactly the opposite, especially in under 50 year olds.
- [40:03]
Adam Lewis Klein
You know, I think it could turn around quickly. I mean it radically turned around post October 7th. The narrative the anti Zionists had constructed spread so quickly and just infused so many minds. Right? I think it could really turn around, but I think we need all hands on deck. Like I try and encourage the Jewish legacy organizations to launch a mass campaign on anti Zionism and to educate people about anti Zionism, to remove the hyphen and anti Zionism so people can't commun conflate anti Zionism with pre1948 Jewish debates about Zionism. I think these changes in language and this framework and just committing to having anti Zionism be part of the conversation and something that you're willing to condemn on its own could really make a huge difference.
- [40:51]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Are you worried about the strong opposition of American public opinion to this war and the connection that they've drawn between Israel dragging the United States into this war and anti Semitism? And in particular, are you worried about that if the war goes bad?
- [41:11]
Adam Lewis Klein
It's very worrying because if you look in the past, kind of anti Jewish violence often occurs during wartime. You know, the Ukrainian pogroms during the Russian Civil War is one example. There are many others. The farhood in Iraq, of course, during World War II that was incited by the Mufti of Jerusalem. And also you see that narratives about Jews causing wars, right? These are kind of classically anti Semitic. It's protocols. The Elders of Zion says the Jews cause all wars. The Nazis had the stab in the back myth, right? That it was the Jews who caused the Nazis to lose in World War I. And to the Jews were kind of blamed for one's own national humiliations. And if you look at Tucker Carlson, I think his way of thinking is very similar to this. So he says the Jews dragged us into Iraq war. This was this great humiliation for America, for America standing on the national stage, right? So he feels kind of humiliated in his American identity and then blames it on Jews. And I would argue that there's a lot of white people, young white Americans, who feel humiliated in their white identity as well because they've been told that whiteness is evil. And so they themselves blame it on Jews too by saying Jews are the ultimate white colonizers. So yeah, this is quite a dangerous moment. It goes back to that issue of perception, like how are we seeing the Middle East? The way the narrative is constructed is so that the anti Zionist actors recede from view. So the American public no longer seems to know or care that the Iranian regime is an evil state. The Iranian regime wants to annihilate America, that the Iranian regime wants to annihilate Israel. And that's not okay. Then. The American public has become so wary of war in any context. Many people are moving to this isolationist stance and are just not really grasping the larger civilizational problems and what's going on in the Middle East.
- [43:03]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
My last question to you is just looking, say in the time horizon of the next 10 years, you optimistic about the position of the American Jewish community and frankly of the United States in general in the West.
- [43:17]
Adam Lewis Klein
I really think it could go either way. I mean, we could be moving towards an absolute disaster and apocalypse, or we could turn things around. But we really need a new language and framework and we need to offer a new cultural narrative around Israel and around anti Zionism. I really think that could change the game completely.
- [43:39]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
And do you think synagogues and Jewish day schools have a role to play, or are you looking at universities and beyond?
- [43:48]
Adam Lewis Klein
Well, I definitely think Jewish day schools have a role to play. I think Jews need to understand what anti Zionism is so they're ready to confront it. And of course, I do think the connection to Israel needs to still be taught and understood that Jews are a people and that Jews are connected to the land of Israel, that Jews are responsible for one another. And there's millions of millions of Jews in Israel. So I do think that layer is still important for Jews, for young Jews who are growing up.
- [44:13]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
When do you finish your PhD?
- [44:16]
Adam Lewis Klein
I'm hoping to finish by the end of the year, but we'll see.
- [44:19]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Good luck on that. And I'd be really fascinated to hear about the indigenous tribes and especially what we can learn about our lives today and how it might relate to the Jewish conditions. So keep up the good work. Keep up the excellent writing that you're doing. We look to you to help. Not only inform us, but enlighten us. So thank you for all that you do and all that you will do in the years to come.
- [44:57]
Host of In These Times
I am instinctively drawn to courageous people. I'm natural drawn to proud Jews. I am intuitively drawn to deep thinkers. And if all these qualities exist in young people, I go out of my way to platform them. Hence, I have followed Adam Lewis Klein for a long time and am delighted to give increased exposure to his views. I wish more people were like him. To all young millennials and Gen Z who are listening, I worry about you. I hope that you don't find that condescending. And even if you do, I can't help myself. It's my job to worry about you. You are of course free to reject everything I believe or say. I have heard from many of you, especially when you disagree with me. It's okay because first, I am aware that not all wisdom resides in me. I take into account that I may be wrong. But second, my calculation is that if I can reach at least some young American Jews, an impact on them them,
- [45:55]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
it's worth riling up many others.
- [45:58]
Host of In These Times
I want to say to you younger Colleagues. The normalization of anti Zionism that is spreading like wildfire throughout our land normalizes antisemitism. It's not criticism of Israel that's a red herring. No Jew considers criticism of the Israeli government to be ipso facto antisemitic. Jews themselves are Israel's harshest critics. To be a critic is a good thing. It's the basis of democratic self governing. This is not what most anti Zionists who you will confront mean. What they seek is the destruction of Israel, the delegitimization of collective Jewish self determination and dignity. And this leads to the delegitimization of Judaism and Jewish values. Anti Israel hate feeds an atmosphere of anti Jewish hate. It fuels the absurd gaslighting from people who are themselves not even Jewish, who deign to teach us what constitutes authentic Judaism liberties they would never take with any other minority or religion. They lecture us that Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism and that the State of Israel has nothing to do with the land of Israel or the people of Israel. Come on now, don't fall for that, whether from peers or your teachers or university professors. I've spent a few years studying Judaism myself. More than most enemies of Israel. Don't be naive or useful idiots to those who do not mean what you mean. What they mean is October 7th. Their anti Zionism is that of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. Don't give oxygen to the blood libel of genocide. That is a moral inversion. The actual genocidal intentions are those of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. They don't even deny it. They say so openly. And if you consider yourself a liberal, as I see myself, know that anti Zionism is deeply illiberal. Support for Hamas is obscenely illiberal. It is the antithesis of liberalism. Hamas is opposed to all of the
- [48:04]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
rights that liberals support. Gay rights, civil rights, women rights, minority
- [48:08]
Host of In These Times
rights, free press, free expression, you name it. It's not liberal to support these forces. It is a sabotage of liberalism. My plea to you is to double down and recommit to Judaism and to your Jewish identity. We will be fine if your Jewish identity is fine. We will have Jewish continuity no matter what our enemies wish to do to us. And if you want the Jews to continue, you must learn about Judaism and live Jewish lives. Don't just stand from afar and observe Judaism. To observe a thing is not the thing itself. Live Judaism, love Judaism, cherish Judaism, do Judaism and read the work of Adam Lewis Klein. Follow him online.
- [48:56]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
You will learn a lot.
- [48:59]
Host of In These Times
Until next time. This is in these Times SA.