Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, a pulpit rabbi, author of The Empty Wagon: Zionism's Journey From Identity Crisis to Identity Theft (2020), and host of the Committing High Reason podcast, discusses Zionism and its relationship to current conflicts the state of Israel. Covering the birth of Zionism that responded to European’s stereotype of the “the Jew as bad,” “disgusting” and “retrogade,” Zionism offered up “the opposite of a Jew…in personality and character” where this stereotype, attempting to remodel Jewish identity that was based, created quite paradoxically, an anti-Semitic Jewish identity. Noting the anti-Jewish notes of Zionism, Shapiro highlights how religious Jews—orthodox and non-orthodox Jews alike—early on disassociated entirely from Zionists. Shapiro elaborates Theodor Herzl’s work in fomenting an ideology that politicised Jewish identity, while observing how Zionism was never a movement of self-determination of the Jewish people, but was a movement that critically attempted to nationalise the religion. Noting how Herzl effectively “gaslit the Jews” by politicising the “Holy Land” while conflating it with Judaism, Shapiro analyses how Zionism has created the current political crisis in Gaza today where horrors are effected in the name of an ideology that has absolutely nothing to do with Judaism whatsoever. Depsite the media and political machinery that attempts to push the fiction of Zionism in buttressing the creation of Israel as “the Jewish state” while conterminously demanding that all Jews be loyal to Israel, lest they be guilty of anti-Semitism as well, Shapiro criticises how Zionism has been curated in a way that falsely assumes that there is only one way to be Jewish or worse, that if you are against Zionism, you are necessarily an anti-Semite. Shapiro vituperates this position and inverts the polemic: “Instead of [asking] when does anti-Zionism cross the line into anti-Semitism, we need to start asking the queiston the other way: When does Zionism cross the line into anti-Semitism?”

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Yaakov Shapiro

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