This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate for Senate in Michigan, whose Democratic primary has become the most hotly contested in the nation. El-Sayed has been attacked for saying that both Israel and Hamas have acted in evil ways, for campaigning with Hasan Piker and for calling Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal. He recently declared that “AIPAC and Israel are not the same as Judaism and the Jewish people” and that “The most dangerous thing they’ve tried to do is extend the definition of antisemitism to include a foreign government.” We’ll talk about US policy towards Israel, about antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism, about the mood of voters in Michigan and about the state of the Democratic Party. (If El-Sayed’s opponents want to do an interview as well, they’re welcome to be in touch). This conversation will be co-sponsored by Jewish Currents. Join us.

This week I’m also hosting a conversation between Professor Omer Bartov, author of the newly released, Israel: What Went Wrong, and columnist Gideon Levy, who in a recent column criticized an interview about the book that Bartov conducted with Haaretz. Unlike our Friday interviews, that conversation won’t include a live audience. We’ll distribute the video to subscribers this week.

After this Friday’s call, we’ll take a week off and resume on Friday, May 29.

Cited in Today’s Video

Tucker Carlson’s interview with Tyler Oliveira.

Naftuli Moster, a long-time activist for reforming the ultra-Orthodox school system, condemns Tyler Oliveira.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with).

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Josh Nathan-Kazis writes about how J Street is responding to the turn in public opinion against Israel.

Gilbert Achcar, Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, analyzes the reasons for America and Israel’s war against Iran.

Shaul Magid on the fracturing of American Jewish “peoplehood.”

I talked about Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza with the Real News Network.

Appearances

On May 11, I’ll be speaking at the New Millennium Church in Little Rock, Arkansas.

On May 18, I’ll be speaking to Town Hall Seattle and Third Place Books in Seattle, Washington.

Reader Comment

Daniel Brumberg, associate professor of government at Georgetown, writes:

I only watched ten minutes of your interview with Molly Crabgrass, but I have watched enough similar interviews with Molly Crabapple to appreciate how she has abused and misrepresented the history of the Bund to advance her own ideological project.

I say this as the son and grandson of Bundists; my grandfather was co-director of the Bund’s Medem Sanatorium, and my father was a leading scholar of the Bund who spoke fluent Yiddish and Polish, maintained lifelong friendships with Bundists, and never disowned his own Bundism, having grown up in Poland. Both of them would have been deeply offended by the propaganda campaign that Crabapple has launched, which is misplaced, misdirected, and misinformed. She doesn’t grapple in a clear and honest way with the meaning of the Bund before World War II, and after the Holocaust.

Instead, she implies that the Bund’s critique of Zionism had the same meaning during both eras. This is nonsense. Apart from decimating the Bund’s leaders and followers, the Holocaust decimated its central premise, even if the warnings of its leaders about the dangers of chauvinism were correct. Many Bundists moved to Israel because they concluded that, after the Holocaust, the basic idea that Jews needed a state of their own seemed compelling. I might add that a lot of folks came to Israel looking for a safe haven, not because of some deep embrace of “Zionism.” Their motive was not unlike the motive of many Muslims who supported the creation of Pakistan--a home of refuge for Muslims.

My father was born in Tel Aviv: his parents fled there in 1926 after the Soviet secret police issued a warrant for my grandfather’s arrest. Palestine was the only country on the planet where they could get a visa (that path was closed in 1930). They returned to Warsaw in 1930, and my grandfather began his work at the Medem Sanatorium. They fled Warsaw on September 5, 1939, and were almost killed by Nazi planes. The 350 or so children who remained at the sanatorium were all gassed at Treblinka. My father’s Bundism endured, but he was never “anti-Zionist,” whatever that means. We went to Israel together and met with many Bundists.

The world is a complicated place, and when we let our own ideological priorities drive our analyses, we get Crabapple’s ahistorical abuse of a complex story, one that does an injustice to the Bund.

Molly Crabapple responds:

It is a sad but common phenomenon that descendants are unable to accept the actual views of their ancestors. During his four years in Tel Aviv, the writer’s grandfather Yoysef Brumberg was the Palestine correspondent for the Bund’s newspaper Naye Folkstsaytung. In this capacity, he reported on the brutal Zionist evictions, racism and deliberate impoverishment of Palestinian farmers, writing “where Zionism speaks, socialism is silent.” (see Yoysef Brumberg, Naye folkstsaytung, March 22nd, 1929, translated by Eyshe Beirich). I hope that the writer will read the trailblazing book of Bundist anti-Zionist writings that Beirich and Nathan Tankus are publishing with Haymarket in 2027. It might enlighten him.

The writer’s misrepresentation of Yoysef Brumberg’s legacy is sadly in line with other attempts to conceal the Bund’s principled internationalism. Built by socialists who believed in human equality, the Bund was an anti-Zionist organization throughout its entire pre-Holocaust history and maintained this view afterwards. I will quote one of the many articles condemning Zionism written in the Bund’s postwar Bulletin, written in 1948. “What a bitter irony that after the utter destruction brought upon the Jewish people by Fascism, the latter’s methods of terror are now triumphant in Jewish life. . . . It is as if the slaughterer had infected his victims with his germs during the slaughter.”

This is by Shloyme Mendelson, a great Bundist pedagogue who was a comrade of the writer’s grandfather.

Finally, despite how he addressed me, my name is Molly Crabapple. He should learn it.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

I want to talk about a video that Tucker Carlson just put out yesterday because I think in the whole question now about who is Tucker Carlson, and what he believes today, I think it’s a kind of a smoking gun. Now, some people might say, well, why are you talking about Tucker Carlson? You’ve been talking about Tucker Carlson already. You wrote a New York Times column about it.

Most of what I tend to focus on in these videos are the human rights abuses committed by the state of Israel, and also the arguments, which I consider unconvincing, to justify those human rights abuses and the war that Israel and the United States are now in in Iran. I do that not only because, you know, not because Israel is, of course, the only country committing terrible human rights abuses in the world, but because I feel special obligation to be in that conversation as a Jew, and also as an American taxpayer whose money goes to fund these crimes.

And the reason I’m focusing on Tucker Carlson, the reason I think it’s important, is also because I feel a special obligation to talk about Tucker Carlson in this moment, because he’s enormously influential in the United States, and in the future struggle of whether America will move towards being a multiracial democracy, or move towards being a white Christian supremacist nation, but also especially because I’m on the left, because I’m a progressive. And so, I feel a special obligation to speak out when I see progressives normalizing someone who I believe is trafficking in bigotry, as I believe that Tucker Carlson is.

And I think we are at a da...