Episode 11 - Joe Grim Feinberg

Researcher Joe Grim Feinberg joins us to talk about bagels, doykeit, and ecstatic Jewish performance. The conversation moves from the Midwest of the U.S. to New York City to Prague as Joe explores what might count as Jewish values in the face of Zionism. Throughout, Joe speaks with compassion and clarity about the possibilities of diaspora.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to Another Education is Possible, a podcast about education's radical potential.

(00:06):
I'm your host, Jordan Corson.
If there's one thing that this season focuses on, the theme of this season, it's certainly
a question of how Jewish unlearning, the political education of Jewish folks, or even just Jewish
study in general, might be of service to the Palestinian liberation movement.

(00:27):
In the process, I hope there's also been a lot of learning about Judaism itself.
Jürgen Feinberg and I sat down to talk about his work recently, including an amazing collaborative
project called The Declaration of Independence of the Diaspora.
Joe is a researcher and scholar based in Prague, and after re-listening to our conversation,

(00:50):
I felt like I learned a lot about Judaism.
We discussed Yiddish history, we talked about building Judaism, we even talked about New
York bagels for a good long while.
While I learned a lot, and while I hope listeners learn a lot about Judaism in this episode,
I'm left more with questions than anything else.

(01:14):
What are Jewish values?
For that matter, what even is Jewishness?
What does it look like?
Where is Jewishness?
How do we make it where we are in the diaspora?
I'm not sure that Joe teaches us that with any kind of finality.
He's careful to open up possibility and leave space for movement.

(01:37):
He does though, show examples of another kind of Jewishness that exists in wild performance,
in history, beyond nation states, and against borders.
This is an episode that asks more than it tells.
It wanders with knowledge, learning, and stories to ask how Jewishness moves and sits in places.

(02:00):
Here's Jo Grimm Feinberg.

(02:24):
Jo Grimm Feinberg, welcome to another Education is Possible.
Thanks for being here.
I thought we would just start in the most basic sense, telling us a little bit about
your upbringing.
What did it look like growing up Jewish in Ohio?
I mean, for me, it was kind of like growing up, not very Jewish, just kind of how I thought

(02:52):
of it.
Long later, I met people who were in Cleveland suburbs where there were large Jewish communities
and they went to schools where everyone was Jewish.
For me, it was like my father's side of the family is Jewish and we had visited his family,

(03:14):
mostly his mom and his brother, who lived in New York in the city, well, in Queens.
We'd go probably once, at least once sometimes twice a year.
Those were the times when I think, although I didn't really think about it as Jewish,
non-Jewish, thinking back, I realized that that was when I was kind of entering a much

(03:39):
more typically Jewish environment.
That's where I got to know bagels and always brought back lots of bags of bagels to small
town Ohio.
We celebrated Hanukkah and I had some vague sense that we had this, that that part of

(04:05):
my family had a Jewish background, but I can't say that I was actively part of a Jewish community.
What did your knowledge of Israel look like at this time as you were maybe not in community,
but being exposed to Jewish life?
Were there conversations about Israel?

(04:26):
Was Israel coming up in other places?
Did you have any affinity towards it as a nation state?
Not really, so it's been really interesting for me to listen to some of the other episodes
on this podcast because for me it was much more like, of course I'd heard of Israel like
all Americans have and I had heard that Israel claimed to be a Jewish state, but I made no

(04:52):
real connection between the Jewishness of Israel and the Jewishness that my family lived
in New York.
It was kind of like completely separate things.
And I didn't pay much attention to Israel until, I think it was around the time I entered
college when I started becoming more aware of the situation in Israel and Palestine.

(05:19):
And so it was much more like some of the other people who've been on the show have been gone
through this experience of having identified with Israel and being shocked to learn that
situation there is much more problematic and even horrifying than they realized.
For me it was like, in some sense the opposite direction, not really, first not thinking

(05:44):
about it at all and then thinking, well, this is just so completely different from what
I understand Jewishness to be.
For me, like Jewishness is all this, the kind of the New York intellectuals, the bagels,
the kind of nerdy kids with glasses who are the couple of Jews in the small town, University

(06:10):
town, Kent, Ohio.
And then to find out that there was this state that not just vaguely called itself a Jewish
state, but it actually had some claim to be connected with me.
That came as kind of a shock.
You're claiming that this has something to do with me.

(06:31):
And it took me a while to figure out what's the make of that claim.
Can you take us a little bit more specifically to that?
So if other folks learned Zionism and then through different forms of exposure unlearned
it, what did it look like for you to kind of have kind of this absence, this, I don't

(06:55):
want to say non-Zionism because I feel like that's a specific position that people take
up, but more like a non-existent understanding.
But when you started to learn what did that look like, maybe show us a bit, describe a
bit of what it looked like in college as you were first being exposed to these issues.

(07:16):
I mean, it was actually, it was, it was very much a shock for me to see that that could
be, that a state that claims to be a Jewish state and, and claim some kind of connection
to the Holocaust would do the kinds of things it did.
You know, most of what I knew about Judaism came from, from like school and learning about

(07:42):
the Holocaust in school, because I, you know, I didn't have a separate special Jewish education.
And so I had this like general American sense of like, these are the terrible things that
happened to Jews over in Europe.
And this stuff shouldn't happen to anyone.
That's what I took from it.

(08:02):
You know, we had a unit in school called man's in humanity to man.
And we all, we learned about South Africa and about the Holocaust and, and we even went
to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC as a school trip.
And maybe I, you know, I had some sense that like, okay, this touches me more closely than

(08:22):
other people, because I know a little bit about this, this background.
I know my family, you know, they, all my close family left Europe before the Holocaust.
But I, you know, there was this connection.
But so to me, then to see like the very first things I learned about practical situation

(08:44):
in Israel is that it's doing the kind of thing that reminded me of what we learned about
in school about Germany in the 1930s.
So that to me, it just seemed crazy.
Like how could anyone, how could anyone, how could you get to that position?
And so to me, like it started with this like total shock and rejection.

(09:04):
And if anything, I had to make an effort to try to, to try to understand how things got
there.
So yeah, I mean, my education was not, you know, not getting to the point where I would
sympathize with the state of Israel, but, but I think it was important for me to try
to understand how people could get to where they were.

(09:27):
And maybe to be able to sympathize with Israelis in a way that at first I just had no comprehension
of how they could live in that state in that way.
Understanding doesn't mean accepting the situation, but, but I did feel like, yeah, it was a long
process for me to sort of accept that Israel actually has something to do with me.

(09:50):
And that, that maybe means I have more responsibility to address what it's doing than initially
in my, like my gut reaction was, says nothing to do with me.
And what did those first moments look like?
Was it a bit more of, was it things you were reading, professors, you said this was happening

(10:14):
in college, is that right?
How, how were you, how were you learning at this point?
How are you, how are you being exposed to these ideas that maybe Israel was doing the
very things that you were reading about?
Yeah, well, so there was, there was a movement like a student group that was for just this

(10:36):
in Palestine and I, I sometimes would, would go to the events they organized.
So that was, I probably learned more from them than from, from classes.
I didn't take any specific classes on, on Middle East or Jewish history.
I, you know, came up in political theory and anthropology, I majored in anthropology.

(10:59):
One interesting thing was that there was a professor there who was at least partially
of Ethiopian Jewish Israeli background.
And her son was also going to the same college.
And I didn't know either of them very well, but it was, but they had very strong, but

(11:21):
this was the first time in my life where I had met people who thought of themselves and
presented themselves as leftists and as Zionists.
Because up to then I knew evangelical Christians who always supported Israel.
And but that, you know, they, I didn't think that had anything to do with me, obviously.

(11:41):
So the fact that someone might be leftist, like we talked about postmodern theory identity
was a big thing already at that time and colleges, of course, and, and, you know, talk about
race and anti-racism Ethiopians in, in Israel.

(12:03):
And at the same time being able to defend Israel's policies as necessary.
That was, yeah, so that was one moment of still this kind of like disconnect, trying
to figure out this parent contradiction.
And another moment that I remember really distinctly was how there was there was some

(12:26):
specific act, a mass killing in Palestinian village by, by Israeli armed forces.
And since then I haven't been able to figure out which which event it specifically was.
But I just remember going to the some event of probably the Shabbos dinner that like the

(12:53):
next Friday and talking to other people.
And there, you know, this was a very progressive Jewish group where we'd have like social justice
satyrs and, and didn't talk about Israel and Zionism very much.
But it was striking to me how much they felt.
They felt really worried about the fact about whether this would be considered a massacre

(13:18):
or not.
They were clearly against Palestinians being killed.
So it wasn't that, but it was this kind of, I was kind of shocked by the level of identification
with with Israel.
Like these are our people.
We kind of feel personally, personally, like under under threat somehow, if we are implicated

(13:44):
in them having committed a massacre by some definition versus if it was just an accidental
mass killing, then it's, it's still bad that Palestinians die, but it's somehow less bad
for us.
Or it wasn't even, I should be clear, it wasn't even about it being an accidental mass killing,

(14:07):
but some some level of premeditatedness was involved in the definition that that really
struck me.
And there's a question that it never like, to me, the question is, is this state doing
something bad or not?
Not?
How does this state relate to me?
So I'd be interested to hear where, where this took you, but I'm also wondering, did

(14:32):
this then as, as your ideas are emerging and kind of a positioning as, as a Jew in relationship
to Israel?
Did you take that back to your family?
Well, so with my immediate family, I'm, I mean, both of my parents are leftists.

(14:54):
So grew up in the 60s and 70s became, you know, they, they, so anti-imperialism was
kind of a part of their worldview.
And, and my dad just didn't care that much about Jewish communal life or identity.
Yeah, we cared enough to, it's like, if people are celebrating Christmas, then let's celebrate

(15:18):
Hanukkah, kind of make it equal.
But I think he understood Judaism as a religion primarily and he's an atheist.
There wasn't that much to, to, to deal with it.
Not that he completely rejected the heritage, but, but it wasn't that interesting to him,
I think.

(15:41):
And I kind of regret that I didn't talk about this more with my grandma because only after
she died, I learned that she'd been going to a humanist synagogue in, in New York, which
would have been really interesting for me to learn about, you know, as kind of an answer
to people who say, how can you be an atheist and be interested in this stuff?

(16:02):
And it's like, well, there's this whole tradition of Jewish, Jewish atheism.
But it was really with a cousin of my dad's who was really close to us.
Kind of, we're a family that, there aren't a lot of children in the family, let's say.
So like, we're not a, it's not a huge family and we're pretty close to people who, genealogically,

(16:28):
are not that obviously close.
And so he's, he's like an uncle to me.
And he, he was really the only, the only family member who really, who like was close to me
and really wanted to talk about Israel and, and say that the Zionist legacy, I think for

(16:52):
him also was kind of something that he came to a bit later in life.
So he, he really wanted to reconnect with Israel at some point.
And he invited me to go with him and his wife to, on a trip to Israel, where, where he made

(17:13):
it pretty, I mean, he said, one of the reasons was he wants to, he wants to kind of introduce
me to this country that, to make me understand it a bit better.
And he, you know, recommended me reading, reading about it.
He didn't want to just like, it wasn't a brainwashing effort, but it was, it was an attempt to make
me understand what maybe he already suspected, you know, going to a lefty college would not

(17:38):
be my, my first impression of Israel from abroad.
So did you, you went?
So I was curious enough and I went and, and I mean, it was a fascinating trip.
I learned, well, I learned the kind of thing that you don't learn reading about place because
I learned to, I learned to sympathize with the people in a way, not with their arguments

(18:05):
and their political positions, which actually struck me as even more shocking from up close.
When you actually see like how, when you actually walk through the empty Palestinian houses
of Jaffa and or to see how they're, they're filled with art galleries and you know, you

(18:25):
walk in, you see what's happening right next to places that have been where there's, right
next to the wall and you see, you see all the contradictions come out much more tangibly
when you're actually in Israel.
But, but yeah, I think there was this sense of like, but it was, it was, it wasn't the

(18:52):
sense of like me feeling at home here.
It was really this uncanny sense of like, why, why is this place that's so foreign to me
claiming to be related to me?
Like one of my things was like, Israelis look nothing like Jews.
Like my stereotype stereotypical Jew was completely different.

(19:14):
And I mean, so it's, you know, that go to bed, like Jews of all, all colors, skin colors,
that's, that was, you know, amazing thing to see in Israel.
But you know, and to see like burly muscular Jews, it wasn't a kind of, you know, it wasn't
a society that I identified with, but it was fascinating in its way.

(19:38):
But, but it was like a foreign country, you know, a fascinating foreign country.
Yeah.
Did you, did you encounter any of the apartheid state?
Was that, I mean, it sounds like at least evidence of ethnic cleansing were there, but
did you see kind of what has become very visible?
You know, I think recording this, I don't know, two weeks after the Tana Hasi Coates

(20:01):
book came out, which is just everywhere in the U.S. right now.
Seems like every, every time I open social media, it's a new interview, a new discussion,
a new quote from the book, and it's about going to a nation state called Israel and
seeing the occupied territories up close.

(20:24):
And I know that's often people's entry point educationally for breaking with Zionism.
Yeah.
I mean, like for me, it was, I had seen maps of Israel and the occupied territories and
the maps of how, you know, the shrinking territory before, but I never realized until I was there

(20:45):
just how, how much of the occupied territories really isn't Palestinian controlled at all.
So it was, you know, it was both seeing the apartheid and, and not seeing it.
Some of what was most shocking was how much you can avoid seeing, like you can, how you
can drive from Jerusalem through the West Bank to the Galilee.

(21:15):
And you don't leave it.
If you're just sitting in that car, you don't have any awareness of leaving Israel.
You're just on the highway.
And it's only if you get off the highway and want to go to Palestinian village and you
have Palestinian license plates that you feel the apartheid directly.
And you can kind of live without seeing it if you don't want to see it, which I think

(21:38):
in the case of Israelis, they all know it's there and they train or get used to not seeing
it, say to a certain extent.
Whereas, you know, I think Americans, Europeans can, can simply not see it because we, we
aren't actually driving through that highway where you look and you see like there's Palestinian
shepherd with sheep who crosses the highway.

(22:03):
But if that Palestinian shepherd wants to go to the city of Jericho, you know, it would
be more, more complicated for him to get there.
Or if he wants to drive a car on this highway, he wouldn't have the same ability to drive
a car there.
And, and I, you know, I kind of sympathized also with this.
With, you know, in my attempts to like it was obvious to me what Palestinians, what

(22:30):
their perspective should be.
Like the oppression was so clear to me.
But I, you know, kind of also tried to sympathize with the, this desire on the part of Israelis
just to, just to live like an ordinary country, you know, this is kind of what Zionism had
to claim.

(22:50):
And promise them in the beginning, we'll find it, found a state that'll be just like other
states will, will, you know, the other states also ethnically cleansed their populations.
It's, you know, Zionism doesn't usually so explicitly say it, but you know, some of the
earlier, early Zionists did more or less say, you know, well, you're going to do the same
thing that these other states did.

(23:10):
And then, then we'll be done.
The question will be resolved and we can just live like without thinking about these problems
anymore.
And I saw a lot of people, they don't want to, they don't want to hurt Palestinians,
but they don't want to have to think about it.
And so there's this kind of whole structure set up that enables people to say that it's

(23:33):
not, you know, to dis, to displace the problem or say, we'll deal with it later or it's not,
you know, why should I have to deal with it?
It's not, I didn't cause it.
All these ways that people can avoid forcing their, their states to change its policies.
Yeah.

(23:53):
So I know that it's probably not as direct as you went to Israel and then things start
to dramatically change or you spent some time in college learning from SJP and, and your
ideas started to collapse.
And I also know that in your work more broadly is very much intertwined with all of this.

(24:17):
But at the same time, you're a, I believe you use the term philosophical ethnographer
or you do philosophical ethnography, which I'm going to try to hold off on getting too
far into that because as somebody, my, my work is at the intersections of education, anthropology
and theory.
But I don't want to just make this a conversation about philosophy and anthropology.

(24:40):
But I'm wondering, yeah, but, but I do wonder where this, where this led.
Cause I know grad school research was, was all in the mix.
I know a lot of your work is in Europe, but it seems like the question of, of Israel and

(25:03):
Palestine was still very much present in, in your work in other ways.
So what, what happened post college, post Israel, post trip to Israel?
Yeah, I think one thing that happened was one thing that happened was that I once, I

(25:29):
think part of what reading about Israeli and Zionist history did to me was show me that
this completely alien product that the state of Israel seems to be nevertheless really
did have a genealogy that it shared with, with the socialist Yiddishist kind of genealogy

(25:54):
that I saw as being something that I already kind of identified with, you know, gradually
as I learned about it.
Also this was another learning process where I didn't grow up with people speaking Yiddish
or, or talking about the bond, but I, but I, at some point I learned like, oh, my name

(26:14):
isn't, it's not German.
My last name is in German.
It's actually Yiddish.
What does that mean?
What, what is this language?
Oh, I realized that, you know, my grandparents spoke Yiddish and now part, some of them spoke
Yiddish and not, and then that language has been lost to us.
So what, what was this Yiddish world in New York City?

(26:36):
So that was one of one thing that I tried to learn about and felt kind of like I was
coming closer to it, though it was also a complicated process because it also felt,
you know, it, it was also foreign to me in that there's these generations had come in
between where the tradition was cut off and I felt like, how can I kind of go back to

(26:59):
what claim can I make on this, this tradition?
And then there's this, but at least that was a tradition that I felt some attraction to
and this other tradition, Zionist tradition was really repulsive to me.
No, I think that, that makes sense.
I would imagine maybe beyond the scope of this podcast, but grad school and your, your

(27:22):
broader research agenda helped guide you to, to Europe, but there's something compelling
you in Prague to, to start joining and building Jewish community.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is part of, part of it was kind of a coalescence of a few people who initially,

(27:48):
it wasn't initiated by me, a few people got together, started some initiatives to kind
of express this criticism of Israeli policy from a Jewish perspective.
I got involved in that, but at the same time this was happening.
I also went to, to Israel on that trip.

(28:12):
I also was starting to learn about modern Yiddish culture in Europe.
And it also helped me feel like understand the place of an outsider in Eastern Europe,
which I, there was kind of, I felt some, well, the nation state that, the nation state that

(28:37):
Zionists wanted to create is modeled on the nation states that were created in the region
where I now live.
So I'm, you know, the consequences were different because of a lot of different factors, but
the Czech Republic is a nation state for checks.

(28:59):
And if you're not Czech, there's a, you know, you're not, there aren't checkpoints for
nonchecks.
I'm not gonna, like, you know, not claim that there's some equivalency in the result, but
there certainly is a feeling that this isn't, this isn't your state.
So part of my getting interested in Jewishness was getting interested in this principle of

(29:24):
struggling against the nation state and finding a way of being, being somewhere without it
being your state or without needing, needing to be the nation of the state.
Which I think is this where, and maybe you could even maybe for folks who aren't aware,
could you talk a little bit about what doikite is and is this where this is kind of starting

(29:48):
to emerge for you as a concept with which you're grappling?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So yeah, I guess it hasn't come up as much, so much on the earlier episodes of the podcast,
but won't presume that everyone's listened to them anyway.
But so the, the boond, or general Jewish.

(30:12):
Sorry to interrupt.
Maybe we should even, I am making an assumption that folks are enmeshed in Jewish labor history.
Maybe you could, I could put the labor on you to actually describe what, what the boond
was and is because there's a reemergence of, of Jewish labor boonds as a way of getting

(30:33):
into talking about doikite.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, so I think, well, like one thing to say is that there was a real vast array of positions
in Jewish politics in Eastern Europe around the end of the 19th and early 20th century.
And it's kind of been remembered as Zionists versus boondists for good and bad reasons,

(30:59):
like some of the other perspectives.
Well, it's very complicated if you look at all of them, but the Zionists were a pretty
small minority at that in this early period.
And then you had, you know, Orthodox, more conservative positions.
And you had a few positions that tried to articulate some kind of Jewish identity or
Jewish understanding, Jewish cultural heritage without, without, without demanding that people

(31:29):
go to their own nation state somewhere, which, and it's kind of actually ironic that the
boond became the primary carrier of this position of autonomous Jewish nationality in Eastern
Europe because it started out as a social democratic party that was, it wanted to be

(31:53):
like other social democratic parties in the region, just that it was organizing workers
who mostly spoke Yiddish.
In the beginning, they didn't deal a lot with nationality questions, but, but they were
faced with this really practical issue of like, you know, what, what do we do if our,

(32:13):
if the people we represent belong to a certain like, say, cultural milieu, and we don't think
that it's in their interest to force them to speak Russian or to force them to speak
Polish or to tell them to leave and go to Palestine, then maybe part of defending workers'
interests also means defending workers' culture right in the place where they were.

(32:37):
And so, yeah, in Yiddish, do means here, and doikite means here-ness, and they, they developed
this position of descending, sending your right to be here where you are both on the
cultural level and, and politically in the state and economically in the workplace.

(33:00):
Which I think is a really interesting concept that, you know, I don't want to create some
romantic vision of, of, you know, colonial Palestine of the 19th century or early 20th
century once the British are here.
But there, there was often cooperation, cohabitation, collaboration already happening.

(33:28):
And I mean, I would argue that, that like you said, there were, there, it wasn't everybody,
but it was explicitly a settler colonialist project from the start, but that there could
have been some, some alternative world of, of doikite for Jews in Palestine.

(33:48):
And, but maybe I should, well, off in that.
So I'm kind of glossing over things, but I'm, I'm, I'm wondering if this is a, this is a
time when you're, you're building Jewish community in Prague and as well as thinking about these,
these big questions.

(34:11):
And that leads you to, I have a few of your pieces up as well as a specific quote, kind
of writing about Jewish identity, Jewish values, Jewish life as it relates to, to these questions.
So I'd like to just quickly quote your recent piece in Mondoweis.

(34:36):
So you're, where you're engaging kind of in a conversation with Anna Rocha Gopal, who,
who has a, has a separate piece of Mondoweis, but I'm in just read, sorry, spoiler alert,
but like the, the last part of your essay.
And maybe you could talk about the piece overall and kind of what you were, what you were hoping

(35:00):
for with us, but you say, I'm quoting, pro-Palestinian statements are too easily
ignored or written off when uttered by non-Jews.
That unfortunate fact makes it tempting and occasionally necessary to simply reiterate
those statements with the added authority that we stand behind them to, and we are Jews.

(35:21):
But we can also move beyond this kind of activism, which relies on the authority of Jewish identity.
And instead we can do the hard work of locating solidarity in Jewish tradition.
I think that Anna Rocha Gopal made some really important points in her article where she
basically, I have to simplify it, but basically is arguing that, you know, the main, the most

(35:48):
important thing is Palestinian freedom.
And we don't need to be always talking about Jewish values and using Jewish values to justify
the struggle for Palestinian freedom.
And there's one level in which I think she's completely right.
Palestinian freedom doesn't need Jewish values.
I mean, it should be absolute.

(36:10):
It should be based, you know, it needs itself.
But I also feel like there is a problem that that doesn't address, which is exactly when
people who are identified as Jews are either addressed directly, say, what do you think

(36:31):
about this as a Jew, or something is done in their name.
Israel says we do this on behalf of Jews.
We need to protect Jews.
The world is becoming dangerous for Jews.
This is our way of protecting you.
And then I don't think it's enough to just to just say that we are to just reiterate Palestinian

(36:57):
freedom is is the most important thing.
It is the most important thing in this in this question here.
But we also should respond to this, to this kind of challenge that's being posed to us.
Okay, if people if we're being addressed as Jews, then what what is our answer as Jews?

(37:18):
And well, and my my answer is that I don't I'm uncomfortable with this idea of Jewish
identity as an identity.
I mean, I've been using the term sometimes, like, we as a placeholder that I identify
with this Jewish tradition, but I also am alienated from it in some ways.

(37:41):
And I, well, the this is also a very personal, like, way of dealing with the problem for
me, maybe isn't an issue for people who grown up completely immersed in the Jewish community
and have never felt any alienation from it.
For me, this, I felt like my my path to to Jewish legacy is had to go through some kind

(38:10):
of non identity and this understanding of the Jewish Jewish tradition as being partly
about the ability to differentiate from one another from majoritarian society from homogeneity.
And that this is kind of this, this is part of what the Jewish intellectual heritage can

(38:33):
be and what this is the tradition that I want to be a part of this is tradition of of non
identity, not entirely identifying with with one thing.
And so, so yeah, so when you know, I, I respect it when people demonstrate and they say, as
a Jew, I also believe Palestinians should be free, that's wonderful.

(38:58):
For me, myself, I don't, I feel like I don't know enough.
I feel like I, I'm not confident enough in my being a Jew and this identity being kind
of totally firm and unquestioned that that I want to say that instead what I want to
look at is how this how we can look back at the Jewish traditions that that I think and

(39:21):
maybe we collectively think are worth developing and not just not just speak with the authority
of our identity, but speak from the perspective of developing these traditions that maybe
are in contradiction to other Jewish equally Jewish traditions, there are these emancipatory

(39:43):
traditions that we can hold up and there are traditions of of nation state and ethnic cleansing
that you know, go back to the Bible, both emancipation from slavery and and reclaiming
the land and kicking other people out of the land, both are a part of the tradition and
and I think working through that is part of the challenge that that we're being faced

(40:08):
with.
Yeah, I do wonder, I could imagine a critique of that emerging that it's it doesn't just
become this floating signifier.
You know, I wonder that actually I wonder about that about this podcast, I'm like, hey,
education, but education is learning here, it's unlearning here and study with us, it

(40:29):
takes place with family, it takes place in everyday life and at some point you're like,
well, aren't we just talking about politics and people's lives and structures like so
what you know, for me what counts as education but also what does count as a Jewish value
if there are these tensions and as you point out like the central question is Palestinian

(40:52):
liberation, but at what point do we say there there might be some strategic there might
there might be a tactic of using our Judaism but at what point is it just Jewish values
are so contentious and debated and I think you do take this up in the in the essay but
yeah, all that to say what what what is the Jewish value, what is not a Jewish value?

(41:18):
Yeah, well, I also am, I think it's a completely legitimate position if somebody individually
says, I don't care about Jewishness, I'm just going to advocate for Palestinian rights
and freedom and and that that I wouldn't push anyone to go beyond that but but if we're

(41:43):
going to be if we're going to be in this position where we start invoking Jewishness, then then
I do think that there is something more to be said and I think that well, stories are

(42:04):
always a little bit more than an empty signifier and basically when we talk about a national
tradition or an ethnic tradition or or religious tradition, to me what we're talking about
are a set of stories and those stories can help us to to work through contradictory problems.

(42:28):
I mean, this is what stories work through contradictions, whereas, you know, sometimes
in scholarship, we can just say this is this is this is fact number one, this is fact number
two, this is the logical conclusion. But when when we're talking about values, I'm interested

(42:50):
in values that emerge from these contradictions and yeah, so I don't see this as like Jewishness
is not just an empty signifier, it's a signifier that emerges in the course of these contradictory
stories that people tell. And so the next story that people will tell depends on what

(43:10):
people tell now and some stories can be more coherent than others. Like I think the Israeli
story of itself is completely incoherent, it's become a terrible story. But I also recognize
that you know, if I if I tell the story of emancipatory Jewish socialist struggles that

(43:31):
are that take the Jewish position as an impulse to universal emancipation based on the experience
of having been excluded, struggling against other forms of exclusion. I think it's a better
story, but I have to also recognize that it's it's not an absolute truth that that's not

(43:52):
the only part of Judaism, I can't say that this is the only Jewish value. It's it's the
one that I think I want to make other people part of. Yeah, I really see that I would maybe
add in in addition to story, the idea of connection. That was that's one area where your work

(44:15):
really excited me that I there have been times that I've really actively tried to untether
myself from my own Judaism. And yet, when I hear there are plenty of people who critique
nation states and nationalism. But when I started hearing you talk about a world beyond
nations, and which we'll get into in a little bit, and I hear about Jewish anarchists and

(44:38):
history, and not just hear their stories, but hear like, these people are writing through
their Judaism. And coming up with these ideas, there's a deep connection to that to that
history and excitement for it. And I just want to before you go on, I really like that

(45:00):
idea. These are stories that are told by many people, and they tell them back and forth
to each other. So it's, it's, it can never be just the process of one person inventing
something. Yeah, I think that's a great place to maybe turn to some of the work that you're
doing now, which is impossible to convey in a podcast, because performance sits at the

(45:27):
center of it. I love you are on another podcast that I listened to the Jewish diaspora where
you actually read some of your work. But even that doesn't convey what is visible online,
which is these, these big enactments that performance has a has a huge role in your

(45:50):
work. But maybe could you talk a little bit about, I don't know even where to go. I, I
think I found some saders that had all this going on and, and certainly the declaration
that you recently released. I would love to hear a little bit more about, about that and

(46:14):
the role that performance plays within that.
Yeah, it's funny because I, I've never been much of a performer, at least I haven't thought
of myself as, you know, I'm, I think I'm a pretty quiet, shy person in general, but
I, but I'm always drawn to this kind of engagement with, with the public in some way and using,

(46:35):
using text with an audience and, and all of these things that you just mentioned, they,
they came up kind of by chance because I, you know, had some idea that something needs
to be done and then, and then it sort of happened. But so like, like the, I guess the first of
it, these things that we did in Prague was, well, for years I had this sense. I remembered

(46:58):
the social justice saders that, that I attended in college and no one was doing anything like
this in Prague. So I just sat down and with a, you know, group of a few friends and fellow
activists decided we should put together our own Seder and, and I realized that like the
Seder is an amazing genre of creative art in Jewish tradition because unlike, unlike

(47:27):
a lot of other rituals that come out of a religious tradition, this one really requires
each group to recreate it in its own way. I mean, you can have a certain script and you,
but everyone rewrites the script in some way. And I love the fact that the primary theme of

(47:47):
Passover is, is liberation. So it really lends itself to be to, to writing what's essentially
the script of a ritual celebrating liberation in which anyone can, can find their own way of
celebrating it and in a very bodily way because it involves food and, and, and gathering people

(48:12):
together. So that's been fun. And, and, and it's unfortunately been maybe, well, fortunately,
it's been a group of friends who's, who's done it. I feel like it's kind of, it'd be great to
make it bigger. But it's been, let's say a small, small scale participatory event rather than a

(48:34):
public performance. And, but then, then I started getting interested in the idea of the, the Purim
Spiel, this, for those who don't know the tradition of putting on carnival-esque plays for the holiday
of Purim, which is usually in March or February, and, which retells the story of Esther in the Bible.

(49:00):
And it's another one of these things where the theme, the original material,
insofar as the Bible is original, is kind of, it lends itself to an emancipatory interpretation,
which is also kind of covered over in the way the Bible presents it. So, like, you know, it's,

(49:22):
this is a story where two of the most important characters, the main character is a woman and
also another character, Vashti, the previous queen who's not Jewish, who was kicked out for being,
kicked out of the palace for being an insubordinate. And so it really lends itself to this

(49:45):
feminist reinterpretation. And, and the carnival-esque aspect of it is, makes it, makes it a fun
thing to do in public. So we, again, we started off just with this idea that we're going to,
none of us, well, we got first, the first, a small group, none of us were actors. Then we invited
someone who was a scene designer and someone else who was a skilled actress. And, but we still thought

(50:13):
it was just going to be our friends who show up. And then, then we made an announcement that we'll
do this publicly and 50 people came, which without a lot of publicity, you know, in a freezing
synagogue without heat in March, former synagogue that's now, now is used as a cultural space.

(50:35):
So, and I also like it was, I mean, it wasn't a directly political statement, but it was the
kind of thing that it brought people together who maybe wouldn't always be, wouldn't always see eye
to eye on specific political questions. But there's a chance for them opening up discussions.

(51:01):
I mean, I think, you know, I tried to make the message pretty clear that this is about
universal emancipation. And, but people could attend without already, say, being
boondests and anti Zionists. So, so that's that we've done a couple of years in a row now.

(51:23):
And it's, it's also been fun. I just quickly, I think that that triggers
something for me thinking back to your notion of Jewish values, that there's something happening.
There's been so much happening on US campuses right now, but we're recording this during
Sukkot. And there have been, you know, Sukkot is maybe not my favorite holiday, but I just,

(51:48):
I have so many joyous, mischievous, fun memories of being in a Sukkah and loving it. And for years now,
I look at a Sukkah and I'm repulsed because it's always the Chabad. It's always the,
like you said, going past the temple and seeing a star of David. But there are the,

(52:12):
this week there have been campuses across the US, these Gaza Solidarity Sukkos going up. And
they're beautiful. And then you see what the campus police are doing. But it, I think that deeply
relates to what you're talking about, about putting on a poem in a, I mean, if we had another

(52:33):
three hours, I'd love to hear the history of a synagogue that's no longer used in Prague,
or is used as a cultural space, but something that is about performance and about liberation,
but takes on the holiday form. But you were about to say something else about these events.

(52:56):
Well, just you mentioned the decoration too. So.
Yes. So I have some quotes pulled out and I have so much to say about this. But if you could talk
about the Declaration of Independence of the diaspora. This is another thing that I didn't intend
to, as a performance originally, but it kind of then felt like this, well, I guess declarations

(53:23):
of independence, generally speaking, are performative acts. And I realized that in the course of
creating this, but back when our group was really just starting to get together,
maybe 2019 or so, I already felt like one of the reasons that we need to do this
is precisely that, especially in the Czech Jewish context, everything we do is connected to Israel.

(53:50):
We can't say anything without first, without first saying, you know, expressing some,
something about Israel, connecting ourselves or then disconnecting ourselves. And
came out of a discussion I had with a guy who, when I, you know, that's a kind of public event

(54:12):
discussing Israeli politics. He questions the Jewishness of some people who had signed this
petition about criticizing state of Israel from a Jewish perspective. He said, who are the
people who signed this? I don't even recognize most of them. And I go to all the Jewish events

(54:32):
here at the official Jewish community. I just said to him, well, maybe it's because those are people
who don't feel comfortable going to the official Jewish community because it's so connected to
Israeli politics. And his response was, well, Jewishness has been about, Judaism has been about

(54:54):
Israel for 2000 years. So maybe you should learn a little bit more. And that got me thinking,
you know, maybe this is, we need to make this statement to say like, no, the first, first and
foremost, diaspora has its own position, it can say and speak on its own. And then it can take

(55:16):
positions about Israel and about Palestine. But that idea was really just simmering in my head
for a few years. And it wasn't until the after October 7th, when I, when it became felt like
something really urgent that we have to really make this statement, like it's gotten,

(55:37):
we can't go, we can't, we can't stand this, we can't take it any longer of being of living
kind of under this domination of Israel. I said, I used kind of creatively use the
language of declarations of independence to undermine it a little bit. So when I, you know,

(55:58):
diaspora is not dominated by Israel the way Palestine is dominated by Israel. That's just
one example of declaration of independence of Palestine has a different sounds to it. But
but yeah, it was, but I wrote this text, then shared it with other people, we were rewrote it

(56:23):
together. And then we had a couple of public events where we, we played the recording of, well,
first of all, we recorded a sort of, you know, masked separatist group reading this declaration
of independence. Was this on the stairs, the one that was filmed? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then,

(56:45):
and then, and one of the events had like a question and answer period with a, with the minister of
foreign affairs of the of diaspora played by me and where we, we announced ahead of time that
people could ask questions in any language. But their answer might not be in the same language

(57:06):
that they asked the question. And people took that seriously. So the whole tower of Babel
started emerging in this, in the room. And, and I felt like it both, to me anyway, it felt like
we, we, we made some important political points. But also with a bit of laughter and a bit of this

(57:27):
feeling of liberation from some of these structures that, that state politics, state nationality
politics get us involved in. And maybe I was also hoping that it would break down some of the barriers
between really entrenched positions, which in the case of the Palestinian positions, I feel that

(57:50):
they're almost always correct. You know, there are sometimes I would criticize things that are said,
but you know, fundamentally, the Palestinian positions are usually legitimate and correct
positions. And the Israeli ones, I don't consider to be usually very legitimate. But the fact that

(58:10):
they're so entrenched and can't speak to each other was already a problem to me. And I also was
hoping that by shifting the discourse, at least in least for this moment, we could open up some
new areas of conversation. I mean, I don't know who, who needs to be convinced, who we can convince.

(58:32):
And I'm not speaking to a far right in Israel at this moment. But, but there, but there, yeah,
I feel like we need all these different, we need people shouting and yelling and demonstrations.
But maybe we also need to kind of focus on discourse at another level and, and creatively,

(58:54):
performatively create an independent space that we call diaspora. It's not dependent on being
not in Israel. Yeah. And I think there's something, you know, I've kind of let the
fundamental aspect of education that's driving this podcast go. But I think there's something

(59:15):
deeply pedagogical about turning this to performance. I love the, you know, I used to observe students,
some of my work during grad schools being a student teacher supervisor, and I would look at
high school social studies teachers all over New York City. And every single one, you gotta,

(59:36):
you gotta do the Declaration of Independence. And I always wonder like, what would, you know,
this is such an answer to what would almost an anti declaration of independence look like,
what would a anti nationalist declaration look like, and how would we teach it? I'd love to,

(59:58):
you know, I know you have read this in many spaces, but I have just a couple of quotes.
Maybe I'll at least share one, because I'm most interested, personally, in kind of borders and
movement. And I think those borders are often dictating. In a lot of my classes, I show Israeli

(01:00:21):
checkpoints as and the militarization and the surveillance. And then the implication of, well,
who's also paying for these guns that are, I don't know what you would call them,
automated guns that are being held up at checkpoints and all of this. But

(01:00:46):
anyway, let me, let me just quickly read one, one little selection. The borders of diaspora
are everywhere and nowhere and be cross and can be crossed at any moment.
And I think that's such an interesting place of who gets to beware, who gets to know what and

(01:01:11):
how things like knowledge and education itself move. I'd be interested in kind of,
if you had any kind of pedagogical aims with us. Yeah, I mean, I, one thing I love about the
podcast is how you, I think the fact that we're not always talking directly about education makes,
at least for me, it makes me think about education in new ways, because it's really

(01:01:35):
bringing it out of the classroom into, into other areas. And, and I think, yeah, I think part of
education happens in these moments of engagement and agitation, let's say. I also, well, my,
my girlfriend was an artist created, inspired by the fact that declarations of independence

(01:01:58):
often become beautiful or they become a set to assess. What's the word? Esthetized?
A sthetized? There's an equality that's rendered onto that. Yeah. Physical objects.
And so this is then something that we have, and we can give the paper away and make someone

(01:02:23):
question what they think and what they, what they've learned. It's, education is always
situated in some context. And so, you know, for people who grew up in United States schools,
they're, what they think of as the Declaration of Independence of the United States. And this is,

(01:02:46):
you know, this certainly, since that's also the declaration I grew up with as a model. So it was
definitely a response to that. You know, why we, why we want to create, why we want to think about
creating a space that's not a new state, but a stateless space, but is still real. I mean,
it's a fiction, but every Declaration of Independence begins as a fiction, and it's made

(01:03:09):
real by the practice that comes after it, if it's successful. But, but also the declaration is,
in some ways, parodying the Israeli Declaration. Parody, maybe it sounds like it's just a joke,
but I mean, it takes up, it took up some of the language there that's used in the Israeli Declaration

(01:03:31):
of Independence to kind of say, well, like, if you take some of these ideas seriously, then
if you really are reaching out your, the Declaration says we reached our hands out to the Arab
population to join us in the upbuilding of the state of Israel. So, well, if you're really serious
about reaching out your hands to the other nations, then think of a space where they would actually

(01:03:55):
be equals in this, in this process. So, I guess, yeah, I guess this, this kind of, I'm interested
in this kind of education that you can, how you can reach people in unexpected places. Of course,
sometimes I teach and I'm interested in teaching people in the classroom, but on these, I think

(01:04:17):
sometimes these big political issues, you can raise questions in the classroom, but
you know, a lot of what you can do is you can reach different people and kind of
try to break down barriers to thought that I think come up when people feel like they're
putting in the defensive, which, which I see a lot now, especially since October 7th, even more than

(01:04:41):
before, is people who, people who have some identity, identification with Israel,
I sense this need to defend themselves, not even, they think of it as they're under attack. And the
worst, the worst that Israel becomes, the more entrenched they have to be, even when they know

(01:05:04):
it's doing something bad, but because they're kind of, they've already sort of taken this step to
identify with it, and they feel attacked when Israel is criticized. And we need, we need to
and we need, we need, insofar as those people can be brought out of that position, I think,

(01:05:28):
I think that's only a good thing if we can break down those walls. I mean, I still think the most
important thing is for Palestinians to organize and the global, public to organize. But I don't think,
I don't think people who defend Israel are lost causes either.

(01:05:49):
I, this is something I'm grappling with myself. You know, I want to make no, personally, I want
to make no space for Zionists. And I hope that anybody who's kind of in that world can challenge
it, like you said, but I just, I don't know what to do with this feeling of I have, I have Zionists

(01:06:15):
in my life that I do have to deal with in some way, but it's, I think one, one thing this is where
some of the just in preparing for this interview, reviewing some of your performances really helped
that I think the, the one that I mentioned earlier, while, while you all are reading the
declaration and for folks just listening to our podcast will certainly share the, these videos

(01:06:42):
on our social media, but it's so striking that there's somebody wearing a keffiye as a mask,
there's somebody with giant flower, I'm not going to say main, and you're standing on these public
stairs and it's just, it's kind of an offering, right? You can't, you can't control what people

(01:07:05):
learn, what people get from it because it's, it's something very public, but also you see
people walking by in the video like, what, what is happening here? And kind of, you know, that's,
I think the best part of what public pedagogy does is it forces you to just reckon with something,
but it guarantees nothing, right? I would love to say I will engage with Zionists to basically

(01:07:27):
tell them you're wrong and think this way as much as I want to be open, inquiry based, always guided
by uncertainty and questions. I'm like, no, you need to break with Zionism. That's where we,
that's once, once you do that, we can start talking, but, but at the same time, you, you have these very

(01:07:49):
open public offerings that you don't know where it will lead.
Yeah. Yeah, I guess, I guess I tried to start at the point like,
do you think that tens of thousands of Palestinians should be dying? Yes or no? If someone says yes,
then, you know, maybe there's no point in having more of a conversation, but, but

(01:08:14):
if they say no, and then they hedge their bets and say, well, but I don't know what else,
then I feel like at least there's some kind of in and you can try to, you can try to move from
there. I'm also torn because I, you know, when I see someone come and just defend Israel without

(01:08:36):
not just defend Israel as such, but defend specific policies that they know are leading to tens of
thousands of, and maybe hundreds of thousands of Palestinian deaths. And when they don't even talk
about that, yeah, I mean, definitely there's a part of me that thinks this is just beyond the pale,
but, but I really do. Yeah, I try to think that there's still, I try to look for ways that

(01:09:05):
conversations can move in a positive direction. Today's episode was produced by Yardana Mron

(01:09:26):
and Samantha Haley. If you liked our episode, please review us wherever you listen to podcasts.
We'll share some of Joe's work on our Instagram page. We're also continuing to share places where
folks can support Gaza Mutual Aid projects. As we've mentioned in our last few episodes,
even after ceasefire, the fight for Palestinian liberation continues. Thank you so much for

(01:09:50):
listening. We'll be back soon with a new episode of Another Education is Possible.