Noam
Hey everyone, welcome to Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam. And I’m Noam and this podcast is our way of trying to unpack those really big questions being asked in the world today about Israel, about Judaism and about the Jewish experience.
Mijal
I’m Mijal.
Mijal
This episode is sponsored in memory of Leo Bernstein. So, Noam, we’ve spent a couple of episodes in this series that we’re having talking about the topic of antisemitism. A topic that I know we both feel is not, we wish we didn’t have to talk about so much. Sorry. I mean, it’s the fault of the antisemites, okay? That’s all I will say on this. But today’s episode is actually gonna try to tease out.
Noam
Yeah, don’t want to talk about it so much.
Hehehe.
Mijal
some people it’s a strain of anti-Semitism and for some people it’s something that is almost like a different related hate movement. We’re going to talk a bit more about anti-Zionism. We began unpacking this in our conversation with Isabella Taborovsky who really spoke about the Soviet roots of much of the anti-Zionism that Jews on campus see today. Today we asked Adam Lewis Klein to join us to talk about this a little bit more.
I think it’s going to be an exciting and provocative conversation for our listeners because Adam has really emerged as a new but important voice in this fight who’s speaking from within academia, but also giving tools for regular people. We’re to have a conversation with him. We’ll ask him to define the ways thinking about anti-Zionism, to describe his theory of change, to describe why he thinks it’s so different than anti-Semitism.
You can read more about him and his work in the show notes. We’re going to include some of his articles. So Adam, welcome to Wondering Jews.
Adam Louis-Klein
Thank you so much. I’m really excited to be here.
Mijal
I’ll just say we haven’t met, but we have a lot of friends in common and I’ve been following you on Facebook for some time. And if it’s okay, Adam, I’ll just say also that as someone who studied sociology, I was in an anthropology department, but I have a special appreciation for your project. Just seeing the tools of academia and thinking.
about how they are used vis-a-vis the Jewish people.
Noam
I just want to just echo what Michal said. I have a…
You and I actually met a few months ago and after you and I met, I think it was Javiv Gore who reached out to me and said, no, you really got to meet this guy, Adam. He’s really interesting. He’s really compelling. And, you know, we have a big media reach in the Jewish world because of Unpack’s YouTube channel and the different podcasts that we have, et cetera. And then I started also just really observing you. Sorry for being an anthropologist of the anthropologist, but I was like…
I was observing you. That’s what I found myself doing and really interested by, and I don’t comment on Facebook. I’m more of like, I’m a lurker. I’m absolutely a lurker. And I’m like, what is Adam doing? I’m actually asking Michal sometimes. like, what is he trying to accomplish? What is he interested in? He’s this new guy on the block. Like what’s going on? What does he care about? What’s bothering him? Why is he saying these things and not those things?
Mijal
Lurker, a lurker. Me too.
Noam
What’s really going on? So Michal and I were like, well, actually, let’s have Adam on our pod and bring him into the conversation so we can actually ask him directly all of the questions that me, this weird lurker is lurking on Facebook and seeing what you’re saying and some of your provocative statements, some of your sarcastic statements, some of your clarifying statements. And this podcast is going to be our way of actually, instead of observing, probing and asking. So that’s what we’re excited to do with you.
Mijal
Yeah. So let me just start by asking Adam, I think a lot of people heard some of like your origin story of how you came to start speaking up and really fighting anti-Zionism. You’ve written and spoken about studying in the Amazon for your doctorate that you didn’t hear about October 7th, about two days until two days later. And then just facing a lot of backlash from your colleagues and peers in academia.
once you posted in support of Israel. Could you take us inside the moment when you decided that fighting anti-Zionism was going to become a major piece of your life and your work?
Adam Louis-Klein
Yeah, I mean, it happened almost instantaneously. I mean, it was really kind of a rupture. Andrew Pessin, I think, said this on Nia Lect’s podcast, actually. He called it the Herzl moment. It’s that moment that Herzl had when he was in France and he witnessed the Dreyfus affair for the first time. He saw those crowds rioting about Albert Dreyfus, right, as a traitor to France, as a Jew, as an agent of this Jewish conspiracy. And at that moment, he just knew.
He just knew that something was off, right? That something was different in the way people were behaving. And that really is what’s so strange about Jew hatred, right? It just clicks into place. And that’s what I saw when I got back on October 9th to a local town and opened my computer, because it wasn’t sympathy with Israelis, right? It was immediate people posting pictures of people burning Israeli flags.
hatred against Zionists, people talking about how Israel was evil and illegitimate. And it was such an almost kind of instantaneous shift. And I saw it being justified with the tools of the academy I’d learned from within the intellectual environment that I’d absorbed. And I felt that I had no choice but to develop a kind of intellectual response and use those tools against anti-Zionism itself, because that was the only way I could really talk back to these people, because it was so baked.
into the premises of their discourse, they couldn’t really conceive of the Jewish point of view. Right? Like if you were going to say to someone who’s saying Jews are white colonizers committing genocide of Palestinians, no, Jews are indigenous to the land. Jews are returning to the land. This is an integral part of our story of exile and return. Even though all of that is both factual and just entirely obvious to Jews, to these people, it’s actually unintelligible.
Right? They’ve been taught that Jews are alien white colonizers as if it’s an obvious fact. Right? Like as if the sky is blue. So I realized I couldn’t really refute what they were saying in a debate. I could only start talking about anti-Zionism itself and describing how it functioned. And in reality, anti-Zionism was an oppressive system. It is a way of discriminating. It’s persecution. It’s not based on equality. It’s based on treating Jews as not equal.
Adam Louis-Klein
to non-Jews, and so the tools of critical academia were actually applicable even though they were being inverted in this way. And so it was really the only response I could come up with.
Mijal
Right.
Adam Louis-Klein
Jews are a people with our own distinct, valuable civilization in the face of erasure. It just made no sense to me that I was not allowed to say that and that that was being erased. And so I just had to speak back against that. It comes from a fidelity also to my own field work and to the Desana people as much as to my own people.
Mijal
So Adam, want you and I want to try to do this in a way that tries, and Naomi is going to help us, tries as much as possible to say this for non-academics. Can you help give, you’ve written very powerfully, you’ve given definitions of anti-Zionism, which are very clear. I also want to recommend to everybody your recent essay in Sapir, we’ll put it in the show notes in which you really write this out. But can you help define anti-Zionism for people who do not use academic jargon?
Adam Louis-Klein
Yeah, I I think the most simple definition, right, and it’s almost too simple because it’s just on the nose, right? Anti-Zionism is the hatred of Israel. Anti-Zionism is a hate movement against this country called Israel. And the reason that almost sounds kind of underwhelming at first is because we’re so invested in saying that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, therefore it’s legitimate, right?
we don’t actually just look at anti-Zionism as what it is, right? And also see that it’s illegitimate in what it is, right? Because to have a global hate movement against a single country is wrong, right? To spread libel’s about a single country is wrong. To advocate for genocide, eliminating this country through mass killing of civilians is clearly wrong. But there’s a kind of complex around anti-Zionism where people are like, well, if it’s not anti-Semitic, then it passes, right?
But when we want to call it anti-Semitic, what often happens is that we demand that it looks like classical anti-Semitism. We demand that it looks like right-wing skinheads and Nazis who are talking about Jewish conspiracies and not people on campuses and professors and activists wearing kofias and talking about colonialism.
Mijal
And I’ve appreciated, how you’ve described the way that it stands on, I believe you point to three labels and you’re reminding us that they’re unfalsifiable. And you’ve also written about how they are based on like old anti-Jewish kind of like, am I correct in saying that?
Noam
What are the three libels?
Adam Louis-Klein
So the three libels I identify across all of anti-Zionism, and I understand that it’s a kind of a totalizing claim, but I believe it’s because this is an actual phenomenon. It is an actual object, and you can find across the history of anti-Zionism that the colonizer, apartheid, and genocide libels always co-occur.
together and these three units construct a kind of story. The story is the Jews are far into the land of Israel. They arrived in Israel with a racist and malevolent intent where they thought they could subjugate Palestinians for their own projects, right? And in order to truly subjugate Palestinians and steal their land, eventually they had to eliminate and commit genocide against the Palestinians.
So the narrative has a kind of sequence that moves from one libel to the next. You start with the colonizer libel. Jews are foreign, white, alien. Then the racism apartheid libel. They’re white and European, so they’re racist and they are subjugating. They think the native population is inferior. And then the genocide libel. They have to get rid of the population altogether. the story sort of escalates through the libels and it’s built out of these…
units.
Mijal
And it’s funny, I’m just thinking like, if we were medieval Jews, how do you fight against the unfalsifiable libel that just take blood and put it in their methods for Passover, which has, you know what I mean? It’s so illogical, but once a population gets drunk on a certain idea or orthodoxy, it’s hard to refute it. Adam, let me ask you a question. You’ve made the case over and over again.
that it is really important to distinguish between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. One reason that you’ve given, which I find very compelling, is that the way that we think about antisemitism has been shaped by what I would describe as racial antisemitism, kind of from the Nazi regime that culminated in the Holocaust. And what we’re seeing today in terms of antisemitism is very different, in some ways similar to what…
Some scholars will call it anti-Judaism, being based on labels, being an anti-Israel hate group. But I am curious, there are some people who have been pushing back. What would you say is the most generous version of those who disagree with you and who say that the fight against anti-Zionism should be interlinked or folded within the fight against anti-Semitism?
Adam Louis-Klein
Okay, so first one clarification and then I’ll give you my strong version of my critics claim. One clarification is that I think that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are linked, right, and they often overlap, definitely, but they’re still sort of polarized and that they have different stereotypes, right? What’s the stereotype of the Jew according to an anti-Semite, right? They’re controlling the banks, they’re controlling the government and the media, they have big noses, they’re…
Mijal
Mm-hmm.
Adam Louis-Klein
have too much influence on your society, they’re infiltrators into your society and they’re usually non-white and non-European, right? That’s actually a completely different stereotype than the stereotype of the anti-Zionist, right? The anti-Zionist stereotypes, the Jews, they’re a messianic settler Israeli, right? They’re not in your own country, they’re all the way over there in international space.
colonizing and stealing Palestinian land as a religious fundamentalist who thinks they have a right to take Palestinian land from brown Palestinians. So you have this infiltrating kind of foreigner in the anti-Semitic case, and then in the anti-Zionist case you have this kind of colonizing over there sort of version.
of yourself, right, the white colonists, because it’s in these kind of white, so-called settler colonial countries that most identify with Israel being a settler colonial state. So they’re kind of polarized, but of course they can overlap, right? So when people say, know, anti-Semitism is about power, it’s about oppression, it’s about Jews are privileged, right? I think it’s true that both anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism develop that notion.
In antisemitism, the Jews are kind of controlling your society. In anti-Zionism, Israelis are constructed as malevolent, dominating oppressors. And there’s conspiratorial elements to both. So the Jews in antisemitism is like a collective of people running things behind the scenes. The Zionists also form a kind of evil collective for anti-Zionists. They think the Zionists, they’re the group of sort of Israel supporters that defend
Israel’s atrocities, they have their dishonest hasbara to lie about Israel’s evil actions. And so that leads me, I think, to the strong version of my critics claim, which is that this conspiratorial element, which has been strongly associated with classical antisemitism, also sort of appears in anti-Zionism. So if you want to say that both anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are conspiracies of power, I think that’s true. And also, if you look at the lineage of anti-Zionism,
Adam Louis-Klein
you see that conspiratorial antisemitism played a role. So in a lot of anti-Zionist texts, you do see that sort of the Zionists or the World Zionist Organization were sort of scheming behind the scenes to take Palestine. They were lying about their true intentions. You’ll often find these sort of selective quotes in these texts where it kind of prefaces the quote like, well, even Heim Weizmann admitted at this moment that this is what he really wanted to do.
Right, so the Zionists have this evil plan all along, and then they’re sort of lying about their intentions. I think that’s the strongest claim of my critics, but my response is really that anti-Zionism still constructs its own specific stereotypes.
Mijal
Yeah, it’s interesting. A different thing that I find a little bit compelling, even as I appreciate the need to distinguish, but a different way that I’ve heard folks pose it is like, it’s also like a branding question. Sorry to sound a bit shallow, but in certain American spaces, people will find more legible to fight against anti-Semitism than anti-Zionism. So I think, to me it’s a machlokat l’sham shamayim, which is a disagreement for the sake of heaven.
I’ll be cynical and say that we don’t know yet where the winds are going politically. And I can see either movement kind of like expanding. Both are very bad. Yes, we have neither. But I’ll say, Adam, one of the things that I found useful, and I just want to share with our audience, is that you make an important distinction between what you coined like anti-Zionism with a hyphen.
Noam
Both are bad. Both are bad.
Mijal
one without a hyphen. I want to say back to you and you can tell me if I got it right. Anti-Zionism without a hyphen is what you’ve been describing right now, this global movement against Israel. I will add there against Zionists outside of Israel, this global hate movement built on unforesifiable labels that can have disastrous consequences. And you distinguish that between anti-Zionism with a hyphen, which have been historical Jewish
forms or critiques of Zionism. And you described the liberal anti-Zionism, the Haredi or ultra-orthodox anti-Zionism. And I forgot the third one, so you can remind me of it. Marxist anti-Zionism. So I found that really useful. And I’m just curious if you had any conversations with Jewish anti-Zionists that were fruitful as a way of saying,
Adam Louis-Klein
Marxist.
Mijal
Well, you might see yourself, let’s say, as a descendant of, know, Satmar anti-Zionism, but this is very different than this global hate movement. And actually it leads to different things. So I know it’s been clarifying for me, but I’m curious if it’s been fruitful as a way to engage with Jewish anti-Zionists.
Adam Louis-Klein
So that’s kind of the hope of the Sapir piece that I wrote, The Defeat of Anti-Zionism. The hope is that by explaining to Jewish intellectuals this distinction and setting the record straight, right, that the history of anti-Zionism, the genealogy of the anti-Zionism today just doesn’t come from Haredim or the Reform Movement. It comes from Marxism, but just because it comes from the Soviet Union, not because it comes from a specifically Jewish.
form of Marxism, let’s say. The hope is that we can establish those facts and then the debate can move on to a new stage, right? Because the reason the debate has kind of stuck, right, is when you have anti-Zionism with the hyphen, it’s just like, well, this is opposition to Zionism, right? You’re not really saying anything about a coherent ideology. You’re just saying someone’s opposed to Zionism. So yeah, there are lots of people who might have been opposed to Zionism, you know, for all sorts of reasons. To say that’s the same thing is today’s ideology is a bit of a sleight of hand. It’s a little bit like saying Nasser, who’s the president of Egypt, one of the main Arab nationalist leaders in the 50s and 60s, et cetera, since he opposed a Palestinian state, and Ben Gavir opposes a Palestinian state, well, they actually share the same anti-Palestinian ideology. Now, that would be kind of absurd.
To say that Ben Gavir and Nasser share the same ideology. And now I think it’s equally absurd to say that Hamas shares the same ideology as Martin Buber, or even to say that a…
Mijal
Just tell our audience who Martin Buber is.
Adam Louis-Klein
Martin Buber was a 20th century Jewish philosopher who believed in binationalism. He was critical of political Zionism in establishing a Jewish state. I think it’s kind of absurd to say that Hamas has the same ideology as Martin Buber, or even closer to home, that a professor of anthropology who believes Israel is a settler colonial state has the same ideology as Martin Buber. Actually, Martin Buber wrote a letter to Gandhi in which he explicitly rejects the colonizer libel. He says, we are not colonizers here. We come from this land. Right? So my challenge to Jewish anti-Zionists, and I hope they can take it up, but to be honest, I’m not sure they can, right? Because I think it’s just a question of running against historical fact, is can they find in these Jewish anti-Zionist texts that they laud so much actual precursors of the colonizer apartheid and genocide libels that people
are screaming at Jewish students on campus, right? And I don’t think they can. And if they can’t, I think it’s worth acknowledging that what’s going on on campus is not the same thing as the pre-1948 Jewish anti-Zionism. And one really can’t use that as a means to justify that discriminatory behavior, that harassment, as if it’s just some kind of opposition to Zionism as a political ideology.
Mijal
Yeah. And I would say, by the way, Adam, that it’s also an old story in which people try to say anti-Zionism is legitimate, but it’s not anti-Semitic. even like in my study, for example, of Jews in Syria, there were many decades in which Jews in Syria were not allowed to leave the country because they were accused that if they would leave Syria, they would become Zionist spies. So they were basically coded as potential Zionists.
You I could spend so much time on this as no one knows. I can get excited and just talk about Jews from the Arab world and what happened and how they bring up new narratives. But I want to ask something else, Adam. And I want to say this as somebody who really agrees in a fundamental level with
what you’re proposing and also is admiring that you’re building a movement against anti-Zionism. But I want to actually just offer two concerns slash critiques of the theory of change that I’m seeing from the movement and from what you’re writing to give you the chance to explain it to us better. So the first concern or critique would be a question as to whether
whether the movement and you are employing some tools that have a certain kind of like moral purity to them. Let me explain what I mean. On Facebook and other places, you’ve engaged in critiques of a lot of like establishment Jewish organizations, legacy Jewish organizations. Lately you, and I’m not just saying this because he’s my colleague at Sapir and my monitors, you know, critiquing Brett Stevens’ speech at the 92nd Street Y.
and, and, know, we as Jews believe in conversation and disagreement and all of that is good. but I’m, I’m often concerned that sometimes we might end up kind of like going against people who should be our allies and we already have so many enemies. and that we would be better served by basically saying, okay, maybe we disagree on X and Y, but we still agree on fighting for Israel and the Jewish people.
Mijal
And so we’re going to work together, support each other as opposed to critique each other, especially publicly. So I’m curious what you would say about that. And it’s something that I know that I’ve thought a lot about in my own work and that I would love to hear your perspective.
Noam
And Michal, but just before you answer, Adam, I think we have to understand a little bit what Brett Stevens said at 92nd Street, why that Adam is critiquing that you’re referring to.
Mijal
Sure. So I’m happy to say, Adam, can tell me if you heard this differently, but Brett gave a speech at the Y in which he spoke kind of like about the futility of the fight against anti-Semitism. And basically, I’m not quoting him exactly, but basically said there’s like a neurosis behind anti-Semitism. So some of the ways that we’ve been fighting, it just like don’t work.
So instead we should focus inwardly and build like, you know, a stronger Jewish future. Now, I don’t want to speak for Brett, who I have a lot of respect and admiration for my read of that. And, you know, he of course will explain that in different mediums. My read of that is that he was really speaking against the efforts to change hearts and minds. You know, I didn’t read it as like an extension of like stop every single effort we have.
against anti-Semitism but maybe stop there to try to be liked so much. But you felt very strongly against it, Adam. So, yeah.
Adam Louis-Klein
Hmm.
Adam Louis-Klein
Yeah, well, I actually really agree with Brett’s point about not trying to be liked, right? Because I actually think this is central to kind of some of the problems we have found with fighting anti-Semitism and with fighting anti-Zionism, right? So when anti-Zionists spread libel and accusations about Israel, they mark people as Zionists, as genociders, whatever, right? Jews sometimes have a tendency to take these claims in good faith as if there is a rational discourse when there isn’t.
and defend ourselves and say, well no, we’re actually not white colonists, right, you know, 50 % of Israel descends from Jews from the Middle East, right, we kind of try and justify ourselves, we give them a prettier picture of Israel. We say, you know, it’s not an apartheid, know, 20 % of the population are Arabs, they have equal rights, they’re Arabs in the Supreme Court, et cetera, and that is kind of a way in which we’re saying, you know,
you know, I think you’ve just gotten this wrong. Let me show you a better picture of Israel. And I agree that that is fundamentally a failed strategy. And that’s actually part of why we failed in fighting anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, because we try and convince people that the libel’s aren’t true. Right? And so it’s like, if you’re fighting racism, right, is it about making African-Americans look good for racists? Or is it about making racists look bad?
And I think it’s really the latter. So I agree with him that it hasn’t worked to try and make ourselves be liked. I think what we should do is try to get people to not like anti-Zionism.
Mijal
So you’re saying it’s almost like don’t engage with them in their, you as though you wouldn’t dignify their arguments, just stigmatize that position.
Adam Louis-Klein
Yeah, think so. So anti-Semitism, as a term, right, was actually not the term for Jew hatred for most of history, of course. It emerged when, you know, the anti-Semites, they called themselves that, emerged. Like Wilhelm Marr in 1879, he wrote his book on anti-Semitism, coined the term, and then he created this group, the League of Anti-Semites. So they were a political club and an organization at the time. Anti-Semitism was seen as a legitimate…
political opinion. You know, it was an opinion about Jewish immigration, about the presence of Jews as a nation, as a people or a race, which was just the language of speaking about peoples at the time. And you know, whether that had a positive or a negative effect on, you know, Germany or other countries, right? It was a political opinion. And it was only over time that the term anti-Semitism became stigmatized. So when the ADL was founded in 1915 after the Leo Frank libel and lynching, they didn’t use the term anti-Semitism.
They said they were against the defamation of the Jewish people. It was only in 1937 that the AJC basically launched a campaign to stigmatize the term anti-Semitism and call anti-Semitism prejudice and hate. So they took directly the term that these anti-Semites who called themselves that were using, and they didn’t call it something else. They didn’t make up a term, you’re not actually against Semitism.
You’re really doing this. No, they just say, okay, call yourselves antisemitic. Well, antisemitism is hate, antisemitism is bad. I think we need to do the same thing today for anti-Zionism. So we don’t need to make up another term for it. We don’t need to say anti-Zionism is really something else. It’s hiding it being something else. We just say, okay, you’re anti-Zionist. Well, I oppose anti-Zionism because I think anti-Zionism is racist. I think anti-Zionism is prejudiced.
So it’s that work of stigmatizing the term anti-Zionism that I think is really important.
Mijal
I really appreciate that. And let me ask you maybe a follow up to that, because that actually had to do with my second concern that I wanted to reflect on. some way what you’re saying really resonates with me. It’s like, know, stigmatize the racist, put the focus there. I also know you’ve written about like engaging in meme warfare. I hope I’m pronouncing that right. But kind of like using those tools to help stigmatize this. I’m curious.
If you think, I don’t know how you’re approaching kind of like this. If you think this is going to like reform academia, I guess what I’m trying to ask is like this. If so many parts of academia, especially in the humanities have fallen so enthralled to these ideologies and orthodoxies, is your goal to stigmatize them from the outside or is your goal to make change within academia? Because I’m not sure. I guess my
question slash concern is I’m not sure if these tactics can help bring reform from within. So I would just love to understand your theory of change, of how this posture can end up influencing, I don’t know if that’s the hope, some of the rot that we’re seeing in academia.
Adam Louis-Klein
Yes, I think what we what we try to do at mass is provide people with tools, right? We want Jews to have a language to fight back against anti Zionists because
You know, we see this in social media as like the perfect testing grounds. Not the only place where this happens. It happens in workplaces. It happens in classrooms. It happens on campus screens. It happens in harassing emails and death threats that people get. Right? But we see this kind of staging on social media happens all the time. So a Jewish person or an Israeli will post something associated with Israel, supported of Israel, or just proud of their Jewish identity. And you see an anti-Zionist come along and they start harassing that person with libel.
Israel is a genocidal colonial state, you’re a Nazi. What does that person do? We see then the person responds often and they’re very taken aback because it’s a traumatic experience to be harassed. And they say, well, that’s anti-Semitic. Israel is actually a good place. It doesn’t work. They’ll laugh react to you. They’ll call you a Nazi again. They’ll say you’re lying. They’ll say you’re a fake victim. They’ll say you’re crying victim when you’re actually an evil oppressor. So we want to give Jews tools. We want to give Jews
confidence because trying to defend ourselves, turning out our pockets doesn’t work. Having memes that educate people about anti-Zionism that spread rapidly, especially because we’re a demographic minority, right? So social media really benefits the anti-Zionists. They work as a kind of mob. They virally circulate their anti-Zionist libels, their obsessive anti-Zionist gaze. We need a way
Mijal
Right.
Adam Louis-Klein
to have kind of an outward communication back to them that sets a boundary and says, no, this is wrong. And here’s what anti-Zionism is. So instead of Israel is actually good, well, here’s anti-Zionism. It’s based on the colonizer libel apartheid libel genocide libel, it’s racist, and it’s over. So we really think that Jews need to have those tools. Now, constructing an academic discourse is a separate.
strategy, but it’s also related, right? Because any social movement actually needs a theoretical basis in order to make change amongst, you know, a mass of people, right? Ordinary Jews. We also need to have a strong understanding of what anti-Zionism is, how it functions, where it comes from. And so we do the work of education, right? Like we try teach people about anti-Zionism and we try to do it in a popular and accessible way
Noam
Adam, I’m going to ask you the question that, you know, it’s been on my mind for a long time since following your work and it’s on the mind of I know a lot of people. Some of what we do or what I do is teach the history of Israel Zionism, the good, the bad, the complicated, all the different aspects of it. Another aspect of it is we work with a lot of Jewish schools and non-Jewish schools. And there are a lot of Jewish schools who are committed Zionist schools who want to understand when it’s and I just came back from a school right now.
The students wanted to know from them, it was their questions. Love Israel, love Zionism, we’re there. But there are things that we have as critiques of Israel. We really struggle with a few aspects of Israel. So they wanted to know, for example, is if you say that Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank undermines the possibility of a two-state solution and that should stop. Is what you’re suggesting that these sorts of conversations in a Jewish ecosystem and maybe even a non-Jewish ecosystem, that they shouldn’t be happening because really what people are doing are internalizing libels to even have these conversations? Or are you open to the fact that there are many Jewish people
who are exploring these ideas and when they see different aspects of Israeli society that they do not agree with, they want to challenge it, not to erase it and not to demean it, but to make it better because they believe in the Jewish state and they believe the Jewish state should continue to be better. So how do you fit all of that into your construction of anti-Zionism is, know, where does that fit into it all?
Adam Louis-Klein
So this comes back to the point about anti-Zionism being a phenomenon. So I think of anti-Zionism, it’s like an apple. It’s an object, you see it in front of you, and you see the outline of its boundaries. So what I try to do is get people to see anti-Zionism, what it is. I don’t try and get people to see what it’s not, because once you see what it is, you’ll see what it’s not. So that comes from lived experience. So I have the lived experience alongside many Jews.
especially who’ve been in kind of left-wing activist or academic spaces, right, of being harassed by anti-Zionists, of trying to talk to anti-Zionists, trying to have a rational conversation like you’re trying to talk about, or trying to say, you know, I don’t necessarily support everything about Bibi, but please don’t call me a white genocidal, colonizing Nazi who’s lying about being a fake victim while he sadistically enjoys the death of Palestinian children.
It doesn’t really work, right, to say, let’s have a rational conversation because you’re dealing with irrational people, right? You’re dealing with a phenomenon. Yeah.
Noam
I’m talking about internally though, Adam. I’m talking about internally, internally in the Jewish world, not externally. I’m talking about, you’re describing something that’s happening externally in the university. I’m talking about internal to the Jewish world. So I’m asking you, in your articulation of the apple,
Adam Louis-Klein
Yeah, but I think it’s I think it still matters, right, because we we have to teach Jews as well to see anti-Zionism so that they know the difference between, what’s a good faith conversation, because once you see anti-Zionism, it’s very specific, right? Like, it’s not a specific critique of this or that policy, right? It’s really like a very, you know, it’s a symbolic construction of Israel’s inherently evil because it has these specific qualities as this white European Western state.
and that’s bad, and that’s oppressive, of brown Palestinians and brown people are always victims, right? That’s a really specific complex and people just questioning their relationship to this or that policy, or even what’s kind of happening in the West Bank, or thinking about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the different decisions that could have been made at different times, you know, the different explanations for why this went wrong and why we’re in this mess today.
That’s a completely different conversation. That’s the conversation I wanted to have with people post October 7th and realize that I couldn’t. I couldn’t have a conversation about, know, what if the Palestinian leadership had chosen this path during the Oslo Accords and I agree that the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, you know, was a turning point, right? That’s not the kind of conversation that anyone could really have. And that’s why, like, when I also see on campuses today,
you know, administrations and people who trying to deal with this problem saying, know, we need to find a way to have these kind of balanced debates between pro-Israel and pro-Palestine Zionism and anti-Zionism. I almost don’t see that as something that’s even possible because I think anti-Zionism has already kind of destroyed and made toxic that whole space. And it won’t be until society, know, Jews and non-Jews can recognize anti-Zionism and talk about it and stigmatize it that they’ll even be a space
to have those kind of good faith, curious, rational conversations.
Mijal
Well, this is a heavy conversation and we could go on for quite a long time in so many directions, whether it’s Israel education, whether it’s my favorite Mizrahi Jews, Sephardic Jews, and how we disturb all the narratives and fix the world. Just kidding. But there’s a lot to tease out here. I want to just recommend to our listeners if you want to follow Adam’s work on X or on Facebook or just check out the
Ma’az Organization, the movement against anti-Zionism. Adam, I am rooting for you and for all of us that we’re able to put up a strong fight in this moment in history and hopefully bring some more truth and Jewish dignity back to the conversation. So thank you so much for joining us here. Yeah, it’s been a pleasure.
Adam Louis-Klein
Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.