November 4, 2024 • 59 mins
In this episode, Josh and Shoshana discuss growing up Jewish in Toronto and their different pathways to becoming anti-Zionist Jews. They also explore what it's like being anti-Zionist Jews in Germany, a nation-state whose stated purpose for existing is to provide unwavering support to Israel. Josh and Shoshana bring intensity, care, and amazing sibling banter to this wide-ranging discussion.
Shoshana Schwebel is a PhD candidate in German Studies at the University of British Columbia.
Josh Schwebel is an artist whose artistic practice stems from a deep need to understand the world through applied questions, coupled with an uninhibited allergy to authority. He does exhibit and publish his work internationally and within Canada with a variety of non-commercial structures, but these engagements are not the benchmarks of his practice. He sustains his relationship with art through a concern for the world as it could be, and in conversation with the work of others who need to engage with their world in similar ways.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Another Education is Possible.
(00:02):
I'm your host, Jordan Corson.
Over the summer, this really powerful article came out.
It's by two scholars in Germany, and it explores how Germany's Stott-Roson, the reason for the German state to exist, is unconditional solidarity with Israel as a state.
(00:23):
The article Erasing Palestine and Germany's Educational System shows how this reason of state plays out in schools and universities.
The way it plays out is, completely unsurprisingly, the systematic erasure of Palestine.
The violence of the Stott-Roson is also visible when scrolling social media and watching German police violently attack and suppress protesters.
(00:51):
Amidst all of this, it's striking to see German police attacking anti-Zionist Jews in these demonstrations.
And then there's also this flip side of that coin, where I've been hearing on social media this kind of icky fetishizing where Jews in Germany are treated as these special exceptional creatures.
(01:17):
And all of that is just to say that I wanted to talk to Shoshana Schwebel, a German studies scholar and vocal anti-Zionist Jew, about what was happening in Germany.
And as Shoshana and I started chatting about her coming on and doing an episode, she said, oh, well, you should definitely talk to my brother Josh.
Josh is an artist and has lived in Berlin and been organizing and working there for about 10 years.
(01:43):
And so while this episode is very much about Germany and German policy and what is happening in Germany right now as it relates to Israel,
it ultimately became an episode about the joys and complexities of family education.
So Shoshana and Josh are siblings and they're our guests for today.
(02:08):
Josh is a Canadian artist currently living in Berlin.
His work takes the form of installations, interventions, redistributive transactions and publications critical of the complicity between financial capitalism and art.
And Shoshana is a PhD candidate in German studies at the University of British Columbia.
Before we start, we want to do a bit of promotion.
(02:33):
We've asked our guests to identify a place to donate or a way to support Gaza mutual aid projects.
Shoshana and Josh suggested Ahmed Ashur and his family, his wife and their two newborn children, Yazan and Ahmed.
There's a GoFundMe that we're going to promote on our Instagram and we'll share in the outro to this episode more information about how to give and support them.
(03:02):
So without further ado, let's jump in with Josh and Shoshana Schwebel.
(03:33):
Joshua and Shoshana Schwebel, welcome to Another Education Is Possible.
Let's just start by asking, how do you two know each other?
We're siblings. Josh is my older brother. He is 11 years older than me.
We didn't like completely grow up together at all times because of that age gap and divorce.
(03:57):
And so we've kind of become friends more as adults.
With like the 10 year age gap, I sort of did a lot of babysitting of Shoshana when she was quite, quite new.
And then when our parents separated, we didn't really have...
I'm pausing because it's like there's words that are not details that can't be, again, accordioned out to the length of detail that needs to be said to pack in what we are set when we were separated means.
(04:26):
But basically, yeah, there was a period of time when we didn't really have much contact.
And then, I don't know, there were just points at which when we did see each other, it was good.
And I sort of understood or could offer some kind of understanding for what Shoshana was going through.
Yeah. When I like, especially when I left for university and ever since then, we've become really close.
(04:51):
But when I was a child and a teenager, we were not living in the same city or the same house.
So I think we'll very much talk about the idea of family as educators today.
But let's jump back and start kind of in a more formalized place.
It sounds like the two of you had a bit of different experiences in terms of upbringing.
(05:14):
What about in terms of schooling?
What did schooling look like growing up as it relates to Israel, Zionism, Judaism, questions of Palestine?
We also had very different schooling upbringings.
I think that's called education.
Education, yes. I'm the youngest and Josh is the oldest. So I kind of got...
(05:43):
I'll jump in here if that's OK. So like my parents, our parents had six kids.
The first four of them were daughters, including myself.
I'm trans. And this is important in terms of Judaism because my parents didn't really consider daughters to be that necessary for carrying on the tradition.
And so we didn't get like a very strong Jewish education.
(06:06):
We were sent to after school, night school and Sunday's paper school.
And then my parents finally had a son, their fifth child, our brother, and he needed to get a proper Jewish education.
So he went to paper day school immersion.
And then because Shoshana was the youngest and my parents were burnt out, she just got sort of like trained on at the caboose to the intense Jewish education that the rest of us didn't get.
(06:35):
I didn't really know about any of that context.
I just know that I had no choice in being sent to like a secular Jewish Zionist elementary school and high school.
Every single part of my world from grade one until the end of high school was Jewish Zionist.
Well, to varying degrees was in that bubble.
(06:58):
I was the only one in my family to have gone to like Hebrew Zionist elementary school and high school.
So I really got like the full Hebrew school education.
And just to contextualize since you said grade six, to clarify, this is in Canada.
Right.
You have grade six in the US, though, don't you?
Yeah, we say sixth grade.
(07:21):
Oh, how foreign.
It's the only thing that's strange about the United States and its formal education system.
Otherwise, it's totally functional.
Any examples of what Zionism looked like in your school?
Or I mean, it's probably hard to distill one or two, but anything that jumps out?
(07:45):
Well, that's it.
Like it was everything.
It was completely baked into the curriculum at every single level, like from the most granular to the most overt.
I think it probably affected all of the other subjects as well.
So, for example, like my high school, we had a double curriculum.
So we actually were in school for several hours longer than other kids who went to other schools because we were taught like all of the Hebrew courses in addition to all of the English courses.
(08:15):
So we had to stay several hours later.
So I remember in elementary school being taught Canadian history.
Looking back on that now, I'm sure that Canadian history in all Canadian elementary schools is so colonial and so completely omits the perspective of Indigenous people.
(08:37):
But it's just so clear to me looking back how colonialism was just like baked into the curriculum, both Zionist colonialism and Canadian colonialism.
And it was just like, this is good. This is history. This is what we do.
But I think it just is important to note that like Zionism, I think I have no other schooling to compare it to really.
(09:03):
But that Zionism was baked into how they taught Canadian history in addition to how they taught Jewish history, in addition to how they taught Israeli, you know, Israeli history, quote unquote.
There were a lot of examples of anti-Palestinian racism coming from my teachers.
I think that parallel is so interesting to explore that the manner of teaching history is to teach an uncritical history of settler colonialism.
(09:35):
But given your schooling experience, it's this dual history. It's not just teaching Canadian history. It's teaching a simultaneous settler colonial project.
And was there something different happening for the two of you, maybe something warmer and more welcoming in terms of family education?
(09:59):
Hell no.
Oh, that's not entirely true.
I think I do have pretty vivid memories of my dad offering an alternative as I got a bit older.
Not that he didn't offer it when I was younger, just that I don't remember it.
And I like I didn't grow up immediately with my dad because of the divorce.
(10:22):
Like I lived with my mom and my brother immediately older than me, who also went to Hebrew school until grade six slash sixth grade.
And then I would see my dad kind of more occasionally. But when I was finishing high school, I lived with my dad for that last year of high school.
And that last year of high school is when my Hebrew school really amped up the join the Israeli army propaganda stage of things.
(10:47):
So like we had assemblies regularly at school where recruiters from the army would come and offer us like special scholarships.
If we joined straight out of high school, like it was really like gung ho on the join the Israeli army or make Aliya moved, which means like move to Israel.
You know, start your Jewish family here.
(11:09):
Like that's when things were really amping up that side of the propaganda.
And I remember my dad being extremely against that.
And I remember having conversations with my dad about that.
So it's not entirely true that there was no alternative offered within our family.
Like my dad was in my memory, countering some of that propaganda and expressing his anger at that propaganda being even like taught to us, taught to me.
(11:39):
And I think I should add also that like I didn't go to university right out of high school.
And so maybe that might have been like one of the reasons that mom and dad were so worried, or at least dad was worried.
Because like I got out of high school, I got accepted into a pre-med school, which was when I was like doing what I believe that my parents wanted me to do following the prescribed future that would be to please our parents.
(12:07):
And then I came out.
And then I just like had this kind of like divorce from the family, divorce from Judaism, divorce from everything.
Like I was expelled or I expelled myself.
Either way, there was like this intolerable moment of sort of like needing to survive.
(12:30):
And I'm leaving everything behind because I couldn't really tell yet at 19 what I could keep and what I couldn't and what would be safe and what wasn't.
And so I took four years before I ended up in university and I think that was not, that made my parents really insecure.
And this was all entangled with you coming out to your family.
(12:54):
And like I said, I had to kind of break up with my parents expectations for what I would be, which would be like a girl and heterosexual and promising and that became suspect and I had to run away from that in order to figure out who I was and what I wanted.
And separate that out from what my parents wanted for me.
(13:16):
All of that was extremely wrapped up in Judaism.
So much of this sort of like cruelty that I sustained as a kid being super weird and super like out of it was, it came from Jews.
I mean, I didn't just feel like it. I was told that I was ashamed to my family.
I no longer existed in a familiar relationship to them.
(13:39):
We should certainly, to the extent that you're willing, talk more about that but I'm interested also in what that was like for you Shoshana.
I think to confirm everything that Josh is saying from my perspective.
That's how it was all narrated to us younger siblings was that, well particularly from my mom I didn't really get it so much from my dad.
(14:03):
But yeah, like a source of shame to my mom that she wanted to kind of keep secret.
I was really upset as a kid that I wasn't allowed to talk to Josh because I wasn't such a kid. I was like a teenager at that point. And it was something that made me really dislike and disrespect my mom at the time.
That she didn't, yeah, that she didn't want me to have a relationship with Josh for reasons that didn't make any sense to me.
(14:31):
And from my side I wasn't allowed to, I mean my mom wouldn't talk to me, but also I didn't, I wasn't allowed to see my siblings because I would corrupt them with my perversions.
Yeah, that's literally how it was phrased was like perversion, corruption, house of sin.
But yeah, Josh kind of became the like projected source of our family breaking, which was not at all true, but I think was like an easy target.
(14:59):
I want to linger just on one more question of I think since this is a story of or an episode of family, I'm interested in the role that Israel played for the two of you versus possibly your parents.
Because I think there's something about generations here.
(15:22):
I remember that my parents had been to Israel when they were younger, either for their honeymoon, no, for their honeymoon they went to Greece. I think they went to Israel because our uncle got married in Israel.
I think my parents were there and I remember them just saying it was loud, it was smoky, so they didn't really like it.
Our mother's father was a very active member of the Jewish community in Toronto and was quite well respected.
(15:47):
The goal was to be Jewish in Toronto, the goal wasn't to be Jewish in Israel.
So I think like for my mom being Jewish was very, very much related much more to the lost home of Europe, the lost home of Poland, the lost home of Yiddish kite, than it did to a future Zionism in Israel.
(16:10):
Like it had no central role for us, it was just kind of like this, for me growing up it was just like this country where people lived that had not much to do with our lives but occasionally would be invoked.
That's a very familiar reaction to me of, it wasn't a, I've studied, I've experienced and seen the apartheid, it was, I don't really like the smoking.
(16:38):
It was, this person was mean to me, it wasn't a political anti-Zionism.
But it sounds like there was, especially particularly in your schooling experience Shoshana, the idea of Israel and Jewish survival were fundamental.
I don't know that it was ever framed exactly in that way.
(16:59):
Certainly it was like future oriented, but I don't know that they framed it as like Jewish survival. I don't know that they made the link between Jewish survival and Jewish futures super explicit until much later.
Like that link became extremely explicit when I was in my last two years of high school, because I went on a propaganda trip.
(17:24):
I went on the March of the Living, which is a propaganda trip that goes to Poland for one week to do like a tour of sort of Holocaust sites and then it goes to Israel for one week.
And basically it's another recruiting breeding ground. It's like basically like a theme park ride where you land in the IDF.
(17:45):
Like as you exit, the gift shop is the IDF. But on that trip, that's when that trajectory, that's when like that script of past to future became so explicit to me.
And I started to really question it and I was really disgusted by it.
That was my first and only time going to Israel and I was really grossed out by the violent script that they tried to recruit us into of like, this is what they did to us in Europe.
(18:18):
And this is what we have to essentially do to others to make sure it never happens to us again.
And that was the line of that trip. And I was really not okay with that. And that's when things kind of like crystallized for me.
But until then, I don't think that trajectory of like survival to future was super clear to me.
(18:41):
I just want to like, were you grossed out because the script was being delivered in a ham handed or unsophisticated way? Were you grossed out because your friends were a group of critical people?
Like what was the sort of reason that you saw through it whereas others were totally wrapped into it?
(19:06):
Okay, I think another piece of the puzzle is that I went to a summer camp that billed itself as left wing and I believe was left wing in many ways.
I don't entirely know the ins and outs of its Zionism because I think it differed for many of the people there.
I don't think there was one like uniform Zionism that I could say represented my summer camp.
(19:28):
But it was like it billed itself as sort of this socialist left wing that was like anti occupation. But I don't think it was like burn the whole state of Israel down, which is where I've been for several years now.
But it was very much like critical of mainstream Zionism. And so I think having gone to that summer camp at that point for several years, I already was primed to be very critical of like a militarized Judaism.
(19:53):
I think what grossed me out the most, the best way that I can put it, is like really seeing violence in the examples of what we saw in Poland and then in Israel being asked to kind of repeat that violence against another group.
It was just me and my boyfriend at the time and we were the only people who marked ourselves as being like against the IDF in that group that we did not want to immediately join the IDF.
(20:25):
Obviously, we're talking about really weighty things that particularly for the two of you deal with not just your history, but your history together and your entire family's history.
That does bring up a question. There's often this moment of rupture when just the vileness of occupation becomes visible or the this happened to us, as you said, Shoshana, so we need to do this to them.
(20:56):
But I'm wondering if the whole idea of another education as possible becomes more difficult if the propaganda is a more effective education.
And I'm wondering if you think that would have been different for the two of you if say for you, Josh, there were more comfortable chairs and the teachers were more interesting or maybe
(21:22):
you were recording this during the DNC and I saw protesters outside the DNC reading the names of Palestinian babies who had been killed.
And some of the folks entering the DNC covered their ears and some of them had pride flags.
And I'm wondering if there had been a Zionism that was affirming of trans life and had been pedagogically interesting.
(21:48):
Or for you Shoshana, if you had gone to Israel and it was this vibrant welcoming of look how awesome it is to be Jewish here.
Would it have been more difficult to challenge the world into which you had been educated?
That's a really good question. Yeah, that's a very difficult hypothetical.
It is of course hypothetical because the education is deeply propagandistic, if that's a word, but the propaganda is to me at least something I can't unsee.
(22:18):
But if it were, if the education was more inclusive and more effective, God forbid somebody from the IOF ever listens to this and gets ideas.
But yeah, what do you think?
My rejection and repulsion and complete refusal of the legitimacy of the state of Israel is deeply enmeshed in the education I've had as a queer person.
(22:44):
It comes from my experience of marginalization and understanding that forms of oppression are linked.
That they're systemic and that there's a structural connection between the colonialism that's perpetrated in Canada and the colonialism that's taking place in the land now called Israel.
And so I feel like there would need to be like a level of neutralization of my own oppression.
(23:11):
It would need to just be normal.
Compared to the people I went to school with, I really felt a class difference and I was so ashamed.
And so I always felt like an outsider for that reason.
But my summer camp was a socialist summer camp.
Again, kind of I'm murky on the Zionism aspect of it because different people there were on different points of the Zionism spectrum, but they were certainly not right wing conservative Zionism.
(23:42):
Like nobody there was like right wing or conservative.
Everyone kind of came from this like hodgepodge.
So it was this hypothetical accepting version of Judaism where like it was left wing from what I could see.
But like I felt like I belonged there.
And maybe because of that feeling of belonging in this alternative Jewish space, yeah, I could explore the left wing politics of my identity a bit more safely because it was expected and encouraged at that summer camp.
(24:17):
And yet even with this vision of a utopian idea of possibly Zionist Judaism, you ended up becoming anti-Zionist.
And I'd be interested in turning to that process for both of you.
You've both already shared kind of where these mini breakages started happening.
(24:39):
But let's get into what that actually looked like.
So Josh, for you, it was part of the process of coming out and having breakage with your family.
And Shoshana, for you, is this propaganda trip to Poland and Israel.
What did it look like after you first started asking these questions, bringing up these critiques, having this rupture with your early educational life?
(25:05):
I should clarify. I don't think it was a clean rupture.
Like I did have elements of anti-Zionism that came through from my socialist summer camp, even though they weren't explicitly anti-Zionist.
And then even after going on that propaganda trip, like I think I still imagined that there were some elements of Israel that weren't that bad.
(25:28):
So it wasn't for me like a super clean rupture. And I also don't think before that trip, I would have ever in my life identified as like a Zionist.
I think I was just kind of a relatively lefty teenager who didn't think that much about it because it didn't always have immediate relevance.
(25:50):
The critique wasn't as much there, right? The thinking about Palestinian liberation was not a central question for either of you, or was it?
Yeah, I agree that that question did not take center stage until I was already well into adulthood.
As I started to meet other queer people, I also met other queer Jews, and they had strong critiques of Israel.
(26:18):
In becoming queer, there was this turning away from all of these things that had defined what was normal and right.
And a kind of reflection on questioning and trying out of all the things that had been positioned is terribly bad for me growing up.
And so there was this huge relearning that took place. And part of that relearning was a political education that included learning about colonialism and how Israel is also colonial.
(26:44):
And it was just sort of part and parcel of the politics that one has as a queer person.
It's not saying that all queer people have these politics, but certainly the people who I was attracted to or drawn to or who I connected with who were critical, intelligent, political people had these views.
And I think because I liked them or because I wanted them to like me, and also because I was in this period of intensely questioning and rejecting everything I'd grown up with,
(27:11):
a critique of Israel seemed like the least of things that would be, it was just like, sure.
But of course, as I learned more about colonialism and as I learned more, as I gained not just anti-Zionist Jewish community, but also Palestinian friends,
I understood even more deeply what the project of Israel is doing and how terribly bad it is.
(27:35):
And I think there's a second stage to this, which isn't just like I came out and became an anti-Zionist, boom, and became political.
No, I came out, I had an anti-Zionist viewpoint. It didn't really matter. So long as I lived in Canada, I positioned myself against Israel, but I didn't do anything about it.
And I think that that changed when I moved to Germany, when all the left-wing people in Germany are like super pro-Israel.
(27:58):
And I was just like, what the fuck is this? Which is a whole other subject that we can or don't have to talk about. But that kind of radicalized me more than being in Canada,
where it's sort of just like most people on the left are pretty anti-Zionist, it's not a thing. But being an anti-Zionist in Germany is like, it's a thing.
It's like, you know, being Jewish in Germany is a thing, but being an anti-Zionist Jew in Germany is like a thing.
(28:21):
And then, of course, since October 7, when this has become so much more globally present and globally horrifying,
yeah, there's just been sort of like all of my politics have been cast into relief around this issue.
And so where this issue was sort of an issue among many issues that I took a position on, this has become such a painful, grievous issue for me now.
(28:47):
It sounds like it was happening through basically being in conversation with others. It wasn't just sitting down. Do you have any memories of specific texts or events or...?
No, I have memories of people. I have memories of people who had good polemics. And I just realized how deeply unsexy it was to be pro-Israeli.
(29:11):
Was it similar for you, Shoshana?
No. I think the point of similarity for me is the German element.
Completely by coincidence, Josh and I both have some geographical connection right now to Germany.
I went into German studies when I started university and still in German studies like 15 or 16 years later,
(29:35):
mostly because as a 17-year-old, I was like, I like Kafka. I like Freud. I like Nietzsche. I'll go into German studies. What could go wrong?
Everything can go wrong, dear reader. I didn't really think much about it. I just was like, I like German literature and philosophy.
They seem to be really interested in questions of trauma and psychoanalysis and things that I was really interested in as well.
(29:59):
But once I went into German studies, I started being perceived a very specific way.
And that really shook me because I had previously been in this bubble of Toronto Jews and mostly lefty Toronto Jews.
I didn't like the non-lefty Toronto Jews. I didn't like a lot of the lefty Toronto Jews either.
(30:23):
But going and suddenly being in German studies, people would just like assume that I was Zion.
People would assume I was Israeli because of my name, because I have a big family.
They would just assume that I was like a religious Jew fresh off the boat from Israel.
And I had to kind of like constantly correct this misperception of myself.
My politics around Israel slowly, slowly started crystallizing because of that,
(30:48):
because I had to constantly like correct German people in German studies who just kind of like assumed that I had this very intimate relationship to Israel.
And so like finding myself just kind of constantly correcting their misperceptions of Israel very gradually crystallized my own politics.
That wasn't the only thing, obviously, but that was certainly an element that helped me articulate my anti-Zionism.
(31:14):
I think the slow crystallization that I was mentioning earlier really, really took a sharp turn in 2021 with the Sheikh Jarrah violent settlers,
because that I was on Twitter a lot during that time. I'm still on Twitter a lot.
But I remember being so confused why people in German studies weren't against this.
I should have understood by that point. But like for some reason, I still didn't completely understand.
(31:40):
I was like Germans are anti-genocide, like Germans talk all this talk about learning from the past, all this stuff.
So I was like, why is no one in German studies talking about this? I was a really, really timid leader back then.
I didn't have many followers. Most of the people who followed me were like my professors or like my classmates, maybe like 50 people.
And I remember like I would angrily tweet things like why is no one in German studies tweeting about what's happening right now?
(32:05):
Like, why are we not having this conversation in German studies about the violence of Israel?
And then I would like delete my tweets 20 minutes later because I was like, I don't want to like rock the boat.
But like seeing the German studies silence in 2021, like really lit the flame under me.
Like Shoshana said, like most of my community in Toronto were left-wing Jews.
(32:27):
Most of my community in Montreal were also left-wing queer Jews. And it wasn't a big deal. It was just so normal.
In Germany, it's a thing. It's like you should put that you're Jewish on your application because that's a minority.
And that's not just that you're a foreigner, but that you're like a special category of person.
Or like all of these ways that kept getting reflected back to me that being Jewish was something significant.
(32:52):
And I always pushed against that because I was just like I didn't experience anti-Semitism growing up.
It's just like one more way of being white in Canada.
I would say that I experienced lots of other forms of bullying around class, around gender, around ability, around like I was bullied, but not around being Jewish.
And so like as soon as I came to Germany and people were like, oh, yes, you must have experienced anti-Semitism.
(33:16):
And I'm like, other than this interaction, like, fuck no.
And so there's this very, very weird fantasy in Germany around like obsession with anti-Semitism.
And that's certainly like exponentially multiplied in the last 10 months that really sort of counterdefined me as Jewish in ways that I never wanted to or saw myself as and also that I really resent.
(33:42):
So it's almost like you were specialized and held up in this very different way, but only within a thinkable discourse.
It's like a differentiating discourse, but it's also fucking obnoxious because at the same time, like I'd be working and I'd find out, oh, one of my left wing German colleagues lived in a collective house called Chutzpah house.
(34:03):
And I was like, are any of you Jewish?
And he's like, oh, no, we're working on that.
I'm like, then don't call your house Chutzpah house.
Like, fuck off.
That's disgusting.
You know, and there's no discourse of cultural appropriation whatsoever around Judaism.
It's just like Jews equals good, like being pro-Jewish is being good, being a good left wing German.
(34:24):
And then at the same time, if I'm working alongside this person and complaining, he would say to me, oh, you're being so negative.
It's, you know, and I was like, hey, have you ever met a living Jew before?
That's how we are.
And I've had exactly the same experiences every time. Like what Josh is just saying, like every single German person I've ever interacted with has repeated those experiences to some degree where they like fetishize Jewishness in a way that's so uncomfortable.
(34:53):
But then they clearly never interacted with actual living Jewish people because they find us unbearable in person.
Like we're so off putting to them in person because we're like to use their language, like not polite, not respectable enough, not engaging in the right kinds of like civil debate with them.
I'm not speaking for all Jewish people, obviously, but like at least like the etiquette or lack of etiquette that Josh and I were raised with is to be kind of like brash.
(35:21):
And yeah.
So yes, I can confirm that like those are my experiences with German people too is to like fetishize this mythical version of Judaism that they have complete control over what that entails.
And that does not allow for an anti Zionism at all.
And so like being anti Zionist is also in some ways exactly exemplary of us not conforming to their fantasy of what the Jewish good should be. My anti Zionism irritates Germans and they feel the need to correct that.
(35:56):
Where should the Jews be safe? Where should the Jews go if not Israel? And I'm like, not our problem. Why did the Jews need to go anywhere?
I don't want to make you to the arbiters and the educators of all this, but let's let's get into it. Like what is happening in Germany?
I go through waves of being up to date and not being up to date because my ability to sort of like absorb and maintain outrage is flagging.
(36:23):
Also, like I'm going to sort of generalize in ways that should be fact checked. However, a resolution from the Bundestag has been leaked that they're probably going to launch on October 7th, just, you know, for the full pop and circumstance of it.
The resolution is neviterist yet, meaning never again is now. It's a resolution to protect Jewish life in Germany, which basically criminalize anti Zionism to criminalize any kind of Palestinian existence.
(36:52):
I mean, it's a resolution. It's not law, but it's a statement that all the parties of the government are soon to agree upon.
Foreigners are a source of anti-Semitism that need to be disciplined into a correct order. All forms of culture and academia are seen as a source of anti-Semitism in Germany.
And so they're going to inspect people who receive any public funding or anti-Zionist positions or pro BDS positions.
(37:18):
Germany has declared its Statsgazan, meaning like the reason for it to exist as a state as being to support the state of Israel.
It has no use for Jews anymore because it now has full control and identification with what is and is not anti-Semitic.
And that kind of overrides our ability to discern anti-Semitism as a form of prejudice because it's kind of just fused anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism and fused Jews with the nation state of Israel.
(37:45):
It's very frustrating here because the Zionist propaganda is also the state propaganda coming out of Germany.
And Germany is more than comfortable to sort of like criminalize and throw the police force behind it in ways that are really brutal.
And so, you know, I appreciate that phrase of Germany has no more use for anti-Zionist Jews.
(38:07):
And I think, you know, not in educational terms, I would argue that the two of you are continuing to be a problem or leaning into that uselessness.
But I'm wondering to bring education into the mix.
What are you, how are you enacting pedagogies?
How are you studying against this?
How are you perhaps learning together to challenge this?
And maybe it doesn't even have to be held to Germany because I think Shoshana, when I first started seeing your work, it was through tweets.
(38:32):
I know one has been shared many, many times right after October 7th.
I found very powerful.
I don't have it up, but it's something along the lines of may every birthright bus be empty and goes on to challenge all of the deep,
educative propaganda that is used to hold up Zionism.
(38:54):
Yeah, it's interesting that you also kind of started that by saying we lean into our uselessness a bit because I certainly do position myself now when I'm talking to like German Zionists
right from the get go as like an anti-Zionist Jew.
And I never used to, I never used to do that because I didn't want to give them what Josh was saying, how they really like fetishize Jewishness.
(39:17):
And I didn't want to like ever give them a foothold into fetishizing me.
But now it's become extremely important to kind of lead with that.
There's so many things that I want to say here.
It's going to be hard to kind of organize my thoughts.
But one thing that I just want to pick up on from what Josh was saying a bit about Germany is like, it's so clear that because Israel exists,
(39:41):
Germany doesn't have to do any real work like that.
Their memory culture can be a charade, it can be such a successful PR charade because Israel exists to kind of legitimize their PR.
So what I mean by this is the only victims of genocide that Germany will recognize are Jewish victims of genocide.
(40:04):
And there are so many other victims of German genocide that they do not formally recognize because Israel gives them a formal path to say that they have come to terms.
Because Israel exists, they can be like, well, we've done the work.
Jews are safe. We've done the work. We can exit the equation now.
But it's like, what about every single other victim of your violence that you do not recognize because they do not have this formal state that you can send weapons to?
(40:33):
So I think that like Israel kind of conceptually in the German imagination does so much work to clear Germany's guilt.
It kind of launders their guilt for them into this like happy ending, which is what Emily de Shevekker has said in an interview and which I think is such an amazing phrase because it is.
It's their silver lining. It's their happy ending. It kind of washes away their sins.
(40:58):
Josh, what do you think?
There's like a whole spectrum of German defenses in Israel from and this is where it gets so complicated as well because I'm talking about the German, not just like German right, but the German left.
The German left is intensely Zionist and for the German left, the enemy against which they're organizing is German fascism.
(41:21):
Which still exists and still is anti-Semitic and is extremely scary and is growing in organizing and power.
But the thing about this sort of policy is that it's focusing on pro-Palestinian organizing and it's not focusing on German fascists.
Juxioposition that came out of Instagram this past weekend, the police running up behind protesters and running up and fully throwing their weight into their back.
(41:47):
And you see this woman's body kind of flying forwards as this fully riot gear clad cop comes up behind her and shoves her.
And she was countered on the same weekend with a good 700 necklace Germans in the Hauptbahnhof of Leipzig chanting Ausländer raus, Germany for Germans, as a demonstration against the Pride Day that was taking place.
(42:10):
And the police are letting them for freedom of speech, letting this happen.
They are cared about anti-Semitism and it's the same in the States and it's the same in Canada and it's the same in all of these frickin Western colonizing countries. But they use anti-Semitism as a very nice convenient cover for their racism and for their Islamophobia.
And for their colonization and for their land grab and for their oil and for their real estate.
(42:34):
And they pretend that they have this moral high ground because they pretend to care about anti-Semitism and it's very obvious that they are frothing at the mouth to do state sanctioned racism and Islamophobia again, as always.
No, I mean like what I was saying about there being actual Nazis in Germany is that the left wing and the German left wing believes that if they were to criticize Israel, they would be on the side of the Nazis.
(42:57):
They are really uncomfortable. Get over your discomfort. There's a genocide going on.
Either you're for or against genocide. You're not anti-Semitic if you criticize the state of Israel. You can criticize the state of Israel. You can be anti-imperialist. You can be anti-colonialism. You can be anti-racist.
All of those are necessary poles of your politics. And if those are not as important to you as anti-Semitism in this sort of bohemian theory of anti-Semitism as being something that pro-Palestinian protesters are embodying, I don't feel unsafe from pro-Palestinian and from Palestinian people.
(43:36):
And yet it's being billed as Jew hate. That's how it's being reported on in the media as these Jew hate riots.
Yeah, like literally like there are signs in the metro in Germany saying like, Judenhaus Kongress, like Jew hate conferences being held. And it's like, literally Palestinians existing are Jew haters.
(43:58):
There was like a song that came out that made the rounds back in like early November or something. Like that Hamas were the descendants of Jew gassers or something.
And it's like this complete dissonance where Palestinians have subsumed the inheritance of Nazism.
And it makes no sense to people looking in from outside because we're like, you know, that's you guys still, right?
(44:25):
Like you're the literal descendants. But like they've somehow just completely projected this fantasy onto Palestinians and Muslim people generally, Arab people generally,
of our past problem that in our minds we have, you know, overcome and mastered is your problem.
And this is something that's written about so wonderfully in Esra Ozurek's book, The Subcontractors of Guilt, which Josh and I are in a reading group for.
(44:51):
And it's just such an incredible book that talks about this exact phenomenon of like the displacement of German guilt onto people from Muslim countries or in the case of Palestine, multi-religious.
But imagined as a Muslim monolith.
I do not see the pro-Palestinian movement as a source of anti-Semitism.
I see the German far right as a source of anti-Semitism and as a source of racism.
(45:16):
But then I'm told that I don't understand or I can't understand because I didn't receive a German education.
I think that talking to Germans, I need to dose that out. I can't just do that all the time because it really goes nowhere.
One of the groups that I'm part of is directly pedagogical in nature.
We formed a co-op of Germanists for Palestine that's part of a larger group.
(45:40):
We decided to fold ourselves into a larger group called Diversity Decolonization in the German Curriculum.
So that is directly kind of confronting German studies and trying to offer kind of alternative decolonial pathways within German studies.
And so the co-op that I'm part of does have that pedagogical element to it.
(46:03):
And one thing that we're working on is I've been working on a workshop with one of my comrades from that group on how to address Zionist propaganda when you're in a situation where you can't just leave.
So like obviously the best way to address Zionist propaganda is to just not give it any space, not give it any air because you don't want to legitimize that as a debate.
(46:25):
But there are some situations, specifically collegial pedagogical situations, like if you're in a classroom and you can't just walk away and not give it any.
Like there are some situations where you have to kind of like enter into these quote unquote debates where obviously you don't want to debate the undebatable things.
Like anything that dehumanizes Palestinians and is blatantly racist, you don't want to debate at all.
(46:49):
But there are some things that liberals will kind of bring up and what they think are well-meaning ways.
And we're working on a workshop of like how to kind of engage with the seemingly well-meaning people who repeat these Zionist talking points.
German studies at its core still reiterate so much racism.
(47:10):
And it's been really disgusting being in German studies in some ways.
And then in other ways, there are a lot of people who are pro-Palestine and are just like penalized for showing even the slightest sign of that.
So kind of finding those people and trying to work with them.
But the fact that I wrote a couple of emails responding to like white Christian German ladies being like Hamas is anti-feminist.
(47:38):
Therefore, you know, as feminists, we should all be like supporting Israel or whatever.
It's just the most like vomit takes that you can possibly come up with because it's like women in Palestine are having C-sections without anesthesia.
Women in Palestine don't have clean water for their children and not just women, obviously parents.
Like this is the most feminist issue you can imagine.
(48:00):
This is an everything issue. This is an everything issue.
People are being murdered daily in the most grotesque, evil ways that nobody could even imagine.
It's completely unfathomable, the evil that we're witnessing. And I it's so disgusting.
There was like one thing I wanted to say that Shash said that I wanted to springboard off, which is like burning bridges has been very, very real for me as well.
(48:24):
And that I have no respect and no patience and no interest in working with or forming relationships with people who are not clear about this issue.
This is a black and white issue.
If you're not against this genocide and against genocide in general, but I think this genocide is the one that people are like, I'm not sure I want to call it a genocide.
Like we are diametrically on opposite positions politically and I don't give a shit about you or your institution.
(48:50):
But at the same time, this has been a space where I have found so much community because it did take quite a bit of bravery at the beginning in Germany, especially to step out on this issue.
And so I really had this kind of emergence into a community that I didn't have before. And that's a process in which I'm also learning so much.
To add to that, I think that the one thing we have is I know Zionists try and chip away at this, but Jewish people are relatively so immune to the accusation of anti-Semitism that is like the cornerstone of Zionist propaganda.
(49:25):
When it works so well on liberals, one of the texts that I read pretty early on in this last 10 months was Kwame Tours' pitfalls of liberalism.
And like it just was so illuminating because liberals, one of the things that he says, one of the pitfalls is that liberals are so afraid of offending someone.
And so like one of the Zionist propaganda points being like, don't you dare criticize Israel because that's anti-Semitic.
(49:48):
Liberals are like terrified to be anti-Semitic because they might offend someone. And so like where I think Jews, like our role in this has to be to just like call bullshit on that accusation constantly and kind of like absorb those accusations on behalf of people for whom that would really be Korea.
(50:09):
And, you know, and there are so many people who have been fired and I don't want to take focus away from what Palestinian people are dealing with and going through. And I don't want to make myself, I don't want to put myself into any kind of central node.
But that being said, I think Jewish people have such a huge responsibility to call out the bullshit of Zionist propaganda. And I think we are very well positioned to do so because we don't face as many professional repercussions when we do that.
(50:39):
Sure. And I think to illuminate some of the educative processes, right, it helps you to learn about your school, for instance, really shows how Zionism both emerges and how it continues, how it's maintained, which is hopefully not to center our voices, but to support and be of use in challenging what is happening.
(51:02):
Yeah, and I think it's so important right now to act in solidarity with Palestinians, not to upstage them or to center ourselves in this more than ever in Germany.
It's very frustrating that there's this constant pressure being put on Jews to write letters and to sign things because it also sort of like reinforces this Jewish exceptionalism that's so problematic here.
(51:26):
And there's a responsibility certainly to act in solidarity with Palestinians. But like here, the counter voice is Jewish, and there's no Palestinian voices that are centered on the media or an event.
What is the center of focus is the genocide. What is the center of focus is abolishing the state of Israel. What is the center of focus is how to dismantle these structural forms of violence.
(51:49):
And it's so easy to just get distracted with these like Shoshana said, like Zionist talking points, these accusations of anti-Semitism. Oh, we need Jews to do this, we need Jews to do that.
Like, where are the Jews? And it's like, you killed them all, Germany.
It's so humbling to enter a lot of these groups and spaces because like in German studies, like Joshua's saying, you know, I'm kind of being handed this authority. I mean, oftentimes it's completely the opposite where they're like, no, no, we know what's best for you.
(52:20):
But, you know, for better or worse, they will for the most part pretend to at least acknowledge like that. Within German studies, there is some authority that you have as a Jewish person, whereas like, you know, because they at least pretend to listen to Jewish people, anti-Zionist or Zionist.
Sometimes not all the time, but going to the rallies, going to the encampments, going to spaces that really, really are led by Palestinian people, it is really a space where you shut up and listen.
(52:55):
It's also a space of, like, it's not just a space of like, shut up and listen.
That's not anything violent. Like, I am telling myself to shut up and listen. Nobody is telling me that. Like, it's an extremely welcoming space of solidarity. But that has been crucial for my education as well, just to genuinely truly be in spaces led by Palestinian people.
(53:19):
Because there aren't many spaces like that in German studies. There aren't any spaces like that, to my knowledge, in German studies. So to be involved, like to attend the, you know, the rallies and to just be one of the crowd of people listening to Palestinian people narrate their own demands, their own situation has also been very informative.
(53:41):
And that should be what everyone is doing. That should be what we're all doing.
One question about how all of this factors into family life, into family education, which is where we started. You two mentioned being part of a study group together.
You know, are you unlearning together? Are you challenging each other? What does study together, what does unlearning together look like as siblings and as family members?
(54:09):
We talk often, and I really feel like Shoshana understands me. There have been periods of time when this situation, like the levels of disinformation and gaslighting combined with grief and just the horror of what we're seeing, like all of that, like going through it together has made a big difference.
And I think there are things that I feel that I don't understand what they mean. What comes out of this relationship for me is that I understand things better.
(54:40):
Yeah, I agree. And I think like we're always kind of sharing articles and stuff back and forth. Josh mostly shares articles with me. And then nine times out of 10, I'm like, oh yeah, I saw it this morning already.
But that's just because I'm chronically online. But I think one of the things also is that like it's really, and I think this is true for a lot of people who have been in this kind of witness position in the last 10 months of just seeing the footage every day.
(55:11):
I think it's really clarified the structures of the world, like the institutions of the world as being, or at least of the Western world that I live in.
I have somewhat of a career in Germany. You have a career in German studies. The choice to become an outspoken anti-Zionist is a choice to sort of burn your career.
(55:34):
The idea that anyone could care about that is unfathomable to me. Like I've met so many people over the months in my field who whisper to me that they're on the same side, that they find it disgusting.
This was early November. They were like, I can't believe it. It's so disgusting. Of course I'm pro-Palestine, but they would never say it out loud.
(55:55):
Maybe I would feel differently if I had a job, because I'm a grad student still. So I'm not bound to an institution in the way that like a tenured professor is, but I really can't wrap my head around that.
And I think Josh and I are similar in that like we cannot wrap our head around allegiance to an institution over and above actual just nonstop daily abject horror of seeing corpses.
(56:23):
And knowing that like there are some people in the world who are like completely okay with that.
I mean, like I can't imagine attaching myself to an institution that is not actively opposing this.
And that institution was silent and that institution called the cops on its students when they said anything.
(56:44):
And that institution is obviously invested heavily in weapons manufacturing and you name it. But like all institutions are.
But there is a consequence and many people have faced the consequence of for you it's refusing that. I'm a tenured track professor.
(57:05):
There's some aspects they're very comfortable, right? And to say I think there's just something really powerful in that refusal.
This has been such a turning point in my relationship to academia, which I guess is relevant for the theme of education.
But like this has really just made me so so disgusted by like it's just pulled the wool from my eyes with regard to like academia as just another institution that is founded on violence and complicit in violence and silent in the face of violence.
(57:38):
And that surely this is how it was during the Holocaust, too. And we know that that's a historical fact.
But like I'm at the very, very tail end of my Ph.D. And so I am forging forward with job applications.
But for several months, I had the attitude of like, I'm going to burn it all down because I don't care if I like if I don't get any jobs because of this, if it doesn't pan out all the better because I have completely lost faith in in academia as a as like an alternate universe of like like minded people.
(58:12):
That's kind of how I thought it was for so many years.
It's not to throw out education as like a horizon, but it certainly is to throw out institutionalized education.
That is literally investing in weapons that are sliced children in half.
(58:36):
Thanks so much for listening.
Please follow us on Instagram at another as possible.
We're also kind of on Twitter there.
You'll be able to find more information about our guests and their work as it relates to Palestinian solidarity.
If you have a few minutes to spare, please take a moment to leave us a review to help our podcast reach new listeners.
(58:57):
Today's episode was produced by Yardin Amran and Samantha Haley.
The article mentioned in the introduction is called Erasing Palestine in Germany's Educational System, the Racial Frontiers of Liberal Freedom.
It's by Anna Younis and Hannah Al-Tahir.
It appeared in Middle East Critique.
As always, once more, we are encouraging our listeners to donate to Gaza Mutual Aid Funds.
(59:22):
Thank you so much for listening.
We'll be back soon with another episode of Another Education as Possible.
Welcome to Another Education is Possible.
(00:02):
I'm your host, Jordan Corson.
Over the summer, this really powerful article came out.
It's by two scholars in Germany, and it explores how Germany's Stott-Roson, the reason for the German state to exist, is unconditional solidarity with Israel as a state.
(00:23):
The article Erasing Palestine and Germany's Educational System shows how this reason of state plays out in schools and universities.
The way it plays out is, completely unsurprisingly, the systematic erasure of Palestine.
The violence of the Stott-Roson is also visible when scrolling social media and watching German police violently attack and suppress protesters.
(00:51):
Amidst all of this, it's striking to see German police attacking anti-Zionist Jews in these demonstrations.
And then there's also this flip side of that coin, where I've been hearing on social media this kind of icky fetishizing where Jews in Germany are treated as these special exceptional creatures.
(01:17):
And all of that is just to say that I wanted to talk to Shoshana Schwebel, a German studies scholar and vocal anti-Zionist Jew, about what was happening in Germany.
And as Shoshana and I started chatting about her coming on and doing an episode, she said, oh, well, you should definitely talk to my brother Josh.
Josh is an artist and has lived in Berlin and been organizing and working there for about 10 years.
(01:43):
And so while this episode is very much about Germany and German policy and what is happening in Germany right now as it relates to Israel,
it ultimately became an episode about the joys and complexities of family education.
So Shoshana and Josh are siblings and they're our guests for today.
(02:08):
Josh is a Canadian artist currently living in Berlin.
His work takes the form of installations, interventions, redistributive transactions and publications critical of the complicity between financial capitalism and art.
And Shoshana is a PhD candidate in German studies at the University of British Columbia.
Before we start, we want to do a bit of promotion.
(02:33):
We've asked our guests to identify a place to donate or a way to support Gaza mutual aid projects.
Shoshana and Josh suggested Ahmed Ashur and his family, his wife and their two newborn children, Yazan and Ahmed.
There's a GoFundMe that we're going to promote on our Instagram and we'll share in the outro to this episode more information about how to give and support them.
(03:02):
So without further ado, let's jump in with Josh and Shoshana Schwebel.
(03:33):
Joshua and Shoshana Schwebel, welcome to Another Education Is Possible.
Let's just start by asking, how do you two know each other?
We're siblings. Josh is my older brother. He is 11 years older than me.
We didn't like completely grow up together at all times because of that age gap and divorce.
(03:57):
And so we've kind of become friends more as adults.
With like the 10 year age gap, I sort of did a lot of babysitting of Shoshana when she was quite, quite new.
And then when our parents separated, we didn't really have...
I'm pausing because it's like there's words that are not details that can't be, again, accordioned out to the length of detail that needs to be said to pack in what we are set when we were separated means.
(04:26):
But basically, yeah, there was a period of time when we didn't really have much contact.
And then, I don't know, there were just points at which when we did see each other, it was good.
And I sort of understood or could offer some kind of understanding for what Shoshana was going through.
Yeah. When I like, especially when I left for university and ever since then, we've become really close.
(04:51):
But when I was a child and a teenager, we were not living in the same city or the same house.
So I think we'll very much talk about the idea of family as educators today.
But let's jump back and start kind of in a more formalized place.
It sounds like the two of you had a bit of different experiences in terms of upbringing.
(05:14):
What about in terms of schooling?
What did schooling look like growing up as it relates to Israel, Zionism, Judaism, questions of Palestine?
We also had very different schooling upbringings.
I think that's called education.
Education, yes. I'm the youngest and Josh is the oldest. So I kind of got...
(05:43):
I'll jump in here if that's OK. So like my parents, our parents had six kids.
The first four of them were daughters, including myself.
I'm trans. And this is important in terms of Judaism because my parents didn't really consider daughters to be that necessary for carrying on the tradition.
And so we didn't get like a very strong Jewish education.
(06:06):
We were sent to after school, night school and Sunday's paper school.
And then my parents finally had a son, their fifth child, our brother, and he needed to get a proper Jewish education.
So he went to paper day school immersion.
And then because Shoshana was the youngest and my parents were burnt out, she just got sort of like trained on at the caboose to the intense Jewish education that the rest of us didn't get.
(06:35):
I didn't really know about any of that context.
I just know that I had no choice in being sent to like a secular Jewish Zionist elementary school and high school.
Every single part of my world from grade one until the end of high school was Jewish Zionist.
Well, to varying degrees was in that bubble.
(06:58):
I was the only one in my family to have gone to like Hebrew Zionist elementary school and high school.
So I really got like the full Hebrew school education.
And just to contextualize since you said grade six, to clarify, this is in Canada.
Right.
You have grade six in the US, though, don't you?
Yeah, we say sixth grade.
(07:21):
Oh, how foreign.
It's the only thing that's strange about the United States and its formal education system.
Otherwise, it's totally functional.
Any examples of what Zionism looked like in your school?
Or I mean, it's probably hard to distill one or two, but anything that jumps out?
(07:45):
Well, that's it.
Like it was everything.
It was completely baked into the curriculum at every single level, like from the most granular to the most overt.
I think it probably affected all of the other subjects as well.
So, for example, like my high school, we had a double curriculum.
So we actually were in school for several hours longer than other kids who went to other schools because we were taught like all of the Hebrew courses in addition to all of the English courses.
(08:15):
So we had to stay several hours later.
So I remember in elementary school being taught Canadian history.
Looking back on that now, I'm sure that Canadian history in all Canadian elementary schools is so colonial and so completely omits the perspective of Indigenous people.
(08:37):
But it's just so clear to me looking back how colonialism was just like baked into the curriculum, both Zionist colonialism and Canadian colonialism.
And it was just like, this is good. This is history. This is what we do.
But I think it just is important to note that like Zionism, I think I have no other schooling to compare it to really.
(09:03):
But that Zionism was baked into how they taught Canadian history in addition to how they taught Jewish history, in addition to how they taught Israeli, you know, Israeli history, quote unquote.
There were a lot of examples of anti-Palestinian racism coming from my teachers.
I think that parallel is so interesting to explore that the manner of teaching history is to teach an uncritical history of settler colonialism.
(09:35):
But given your schooling experience, it's this dual history. It's not just teaching Canadian history. It's teaching a simultaneous settler colonial project.
And was there something different happening for the two of you, maybe something warmer and more welcoming in terms of family education?
(09:59):
Hell no.
Oh, that's not entirely true.
I think I do have pretty vivid memories of my dad offering an alternative as I got a bit older.
Not that he didn't offer it when I was younger, just that I don't remember it.
And I like I didn't grow up immediately with my dad because of the divorce.
(10:22):
Like I lived with my mom and my brother immediately older than me, who also went to Hebrew school until grade six slash sixth grade.
And then I would see my dad kind of more occasionally. But when I was finishing high school, I lived with my dad for that last year of high school.
And that last year of high school is when my Hebrew school really amped up the join the Israeli army propaganda stage of things.
(10:47):
So like we had assemblies regularly at school where recruiters from the army would come and offer us like special scholarships.
If we joined straight out of high school, like it was really like gung ho on the join the Israeli army or make Aliya moved, which means like move to Israel.
You know, start your Jewish family here.
(11:09):
Like that's when things were really amping up that side of the propaganda.
And I remember my dad being extremely against that.
And I remember having conversations with my dad about that.
So it's not entirely true that there was no alternative offered within our family.
Like my dad was in my memory, countering some of that propaganda and expressing his anger at that propaganda being even like taught to us, taught to me.
(11:39):
And I think I should add also that like I didn't go to university right out of high school.
And so maybe that might have been like one of the reasons that mom and dad were so worried, or at least dad was worried.
Because like I got out of high school, I got accepted into a pre-med school, which was when I was like doing what I believe that my parents wanted me to do following the prescribed future that would be to please our parents.
(12:07):
And then I came out.
And then I just like had this kind of like divorce from the family, divorce from Judaism, divorce from everything.
Like I was expelled or I expelled myself.
Either way, there was like this intolerable moment of sort of like needing to survive.
(12:30):
And I'm leaving everything behind because I couldn't really tell yet at 19 what I could keep and what I couldn't and what would be safe and what wasn't.
And so I took four years before I ended up in university and I think that was not, that made my parents really insecure.
And this was all entangled with you coming out to your family.
(12:54):
And like I said, I had to kind of break up with my parents expectations for what I would be, which would be like a girl and heterosexual and promising and that became suspect and I had to run away from that in order to figure out who I was and what I wanted.
And separate that out from what my parents wanted for me.
(13:16):
All of that was extremely wrapped up in Judaism.
So much of this sort of like cruelty that I sustained as a kid being super weird and super like out of it was, it came from Jews.
I mean, I didn't just feel like it. I was told that I was ashamed to my family.
I no longer existed in a familiar relationship to them.
(13:39):
We should certainly, to the extent that you're willing, talk more about that but I'm interested also in what that was like for you Shoshana.
I think to confirm everything that Josh is saying from my perspective.
That's how it was all narrated to us younger siblings was that, well particularly from my mom I didn't really get it so much from my dad.
(14:03):
But yeah, like a source of shame to my mom that she wanted to kind of keep secret.
I was really upset as a kid that I wasn't allowed to talk to Josh because I wasn't such a kid. I was like a teenager at that point. And it was something that made me really dislike and disrespect my mom at the time.
That she didn't, yeah, that she didn't want me to have a relationship with Josh for reasons that didn't make any sense to me.
(14:31):
And from my side I wasn't allowed to, I mean my mom wouldn't talk to me, but also I didn't, I wasn't allowed to see my siblings because I would corrupt them with my perversions.
Yeah, that's literally how it was phrased was like perversion, corruption, house of sin.
But yeah, Josh kind of became the like projected source of our family breaking, which was not at all true, but I think was like an easy target.
(14:59):
I want to linger just on one more question of I think since this is a story of or an episode of family, I'm interested in the role that Israel played for the two of you versus possibly your parents.
Because I think there's something about generations here.
(15:22):
I remember that my parents had been to Israel when they were younger, either for their honeymoon, no, for their honeymoon they went to Greece. I think they went to Israel because our uncle got married in Israel.
I think my parents were there and I remember them just saying it was loud, it was smoky, so they didn't really like it.
Our mother's father was a very active member of the Jewish community in Toronto and was quite well respected.
(15:47):
The goal was to be Jewish in Toronto, the goal wasn't to be Jewish in Israel.
So I think like for my mom being Jewish was very, very much related much more to the lost home of Europe, the lost home of Poland, the lost home of Yiddish kite, than it did to a future Zionism in Israel.
(16:10):
Like it had no central role for us, it was just kind of like this, for me growing up it was just like this country where people lived that had not much to do with our lives but occasionally would be invoked.
That's a very familiar reaction to me of, it wasn't a, I've studied, I've experienced and seen the apartheid, it was, I don't really like the smoking.
(16:38):
It was, this person was mean to me, it wasn't a political anti-Zionism.
But it sounds like there was, especially particularly in your schooling experience Shoshana, the idea of Israel and Jewish survival were fundamental.
I don't know that it was ever framed exactly in that way.
(16:59):
Certainly it was like future oriented, but I don't know that they framed it as like Jewish survival. I don't know that they made the link between Jewish survival and Jewish futures super explicit until much later.
Like that link became extremely explicit when I was in my last two years of high school, because I went on a propaganda trip.
(17:24):
I went on the March of the Living, which is a propaganda trip that goes to Poland for one week to do like a tour of sort of Holocaust sites and then it goes to Israel for one week.
And basically it's another recruiting breeding ground. It's like basically like a theme park ride where you land in the IDF.
(17:45):
Like as you exit, the gift shop is the IDF. But on that trip, that's when that trajectory, that's when like that script of past to future became so explicit to me.
And I started to really question it and I was really disgusted by it.
That was my first and only time going to Israel and I was really grossed out by the violent script that they tried to recruit us into of like, this is what they did to us in Europe.
(18:18):
And this is what we have to essentially do to others to make sure it never happens to us again.
And that was the line of that trip. And I was really not okay with that. And that's when things kind of like crystallized for me.
But until then, I don't think that trajectory of like survival to future was super clear to me.
(18:41):
I just want to like, were you grossed out because the script was being delivered in a ham handed or unsophisticated way? Were you grossed out because your friends were a group of critical people?
Like what was the sort of reason that you saw through it whereas others were totally wrapped into it?
(19:06):
Okay, I think another piece of the puzzle is that I went to a summer camp that billed itself as left wing and I believe was left wing in many ways.
I don't entirely know the ins and outs of its Zionism because I think it differed for many of the people there.
I don't think there was one like uniform Zionism that I could say represented my summer camp.
(19:28):
But it was like it billed itself as sort of this socialist left wing that was like anti occupation. But I don't think it was like burn the whole state of Israel down, which is where I've been for several years now.
But it was very much like critical of mainstream Zionism. And so I think having gone to that summer camp at that point for several years, I already was primed to be very critical of like a militarized Judaism.
(19:53):
I think what grossed me out the most, the best way that I can put it, is like really seeing violence in the examples of what we saw in Poland and then in Israel being asked to kind of repeat that violence against another group.
It was just me and my boyfriend at the time and we were the only people who marked ourselves as being like against the IDF in that group that we did not want to immediately join the IDF.
(20:25):
Obviously, we're talking about really weighty things that particularly for the two of you deal with not just your history, but your history together and your entire family's history.
That does bring up a question. There's often this moment of rupture when just the vileness of occupation becomes visible or the this happened to us, as you said, Shoshana, so we need to do this to them.
(20:56):
But I'm wondering if the whole idea of another education as possible becomes more difficult if the propaganda is a more effective education.
And I'm wondering if you think that would have been different for the two of you if say for you, Josh, there were more comfortable chairs and the teachers were more interesting or maybe
(21:22):
you were recording this during the DNC and I saw protesters outside the DNC reading the names of Palestinian babies who had been killed.
And some of the folks entering the DNC covered their ears and some of them had pride flags.
And I'm wondering if there had been a Zionism that was affirming of trans life and had been pedagogically interesting.
(21:48):
Or for you Shoshana, if you had gone to Israel and it was this vibrant welcoming of look how awesome it is to be Jewish here.
Would it have been more difficult to challenge the world into which you had been educated?
That's a really good question. Yeah, that's a very difficult hypothetical.
It is of course hypothetical because the education is deeply propagandistic, if that's a word, but the propaganda is to me at least something I can't unsee.
(22:18):
But if it were, if the education was more inclusive and more effective, God forbid somebody from the IOF ever listens to this and gets ideas.
But yeah, what do you think?
My rejection and repulsion and complete refusal of the legitimacy of the state of Israel is deeply enmeshed in the education I've had as a queer person.
(22:44):
It comes from my experience of marginalization and understanding that forms of oppression are linked.
That they're systemic and that there's a structural connection between the colonialism that's perpetrated in Canada and the colonialism that's taking place in the land now called Israel.
And so I feel like there would need to be like a level of neutralization of my own oppression.
(23:11):
It would need to just be normal.
Compared to the people I went to school with, I really felt a class difference and I was so ashamed.
And so I always felt like an outsider for that reason.
But my summer camp was a socialist summer camp.
Again, kind of I'm murky on the Zionism aspect of it because different people there were on different points of the Zionism spectrum, but they were certainly not right wing conservative Zionism.
(23:42):
Like nobody there was like right wing or conservative.
Everyone kind of came from this like hodgepodge.
So it was this hypothetical accepting version of Judaism where like it was left wing from what I could see.
But like I felt like I belonged there.
And maybe because of that feeling of belonging in this alternative Jewish space, yeah, I could explore the left wing politics of my identity a bit more safely because it was expected and encouraged at that summer camp.
(24:17):
And yet even with this vision of a utopian idea of possibly Zionist Judaism, you ended up becoming anti-Zionist.
And I'd be interested in turning to that process for both of you.
You've both already shared kind of where these mini breakages started happening.
(24:39):
But let's get into what that actually looked like.
So Josh, for you, it was part of the process of coming out and having breakage with your family.
And Shoshana, for you, is this propaganda trip to Poland and Israel.
What did it look like after you first started asking these questions, bringing up these critiques, having this rupture with your early educational life?
(25:05):
I should clarify. I don't think it was a clean rupture.
Like I did have elements of anti-Zionism that came through from my socialist summer camp, even though they weren't explicitly anti-Zionist.
And then even after going on that propaganda trip, like I think I still imagined that there were some elements of Israel that weren't that bad.
(25:28):
So it wasn't for me like a super clean rupture. And I also don't think before that trip, I would have ever in my life identified as like a Zionist.
I think I was just kind of a relatively lefty teenager who didn't think that much about it because it didn't always have immediate relevance.
(25:50):
The critique wasn't as much there, right? The thinking about Palestinian liberation was not a central question for either of you, or was it?
Yeah, I agree that that question did not take center stage until I was already well into adulthood.
As I started to meet other queer people, I also met other queer Jews, and they had strong critiques of Israel.
(26:18):
In becoming queer, there was this turning away from all of these things that had defined what was normal and right.
And a kind of reflection on questioning and trying out of all the things that had been positioned is terribly bad for me growing up.
And so there was this huge relearning that took place. And part of that relearning was a political education that included learning about colonialism and how Israel is also colonial.
(26:44):
And it was just sort of part and parcel of the politics that one has as a queer person.
It's not saying that all queer people have these politics, but certainly the people who I was attracted to or drawn to or who I connected with who were critical, intelligent, political people had these views.
And I think because I liked them or because I wanted them to like me, and also because I was in this period of intensely questioning and rejecting everything I'd grown up with,
(27:11):
a critique of Israel seemed like the least of things that would be, it was just like, sure.
But of course, as I learned more about colonialism and as I learned more, as I gained not just anti-Zionist Jewish community, but also Palestinian friends,
I understood even more deeply what the project of Israel is doing and how terribly bad it is.
(27:35):
And I think there's a second stage to this, which isn't just like I came out and became an anti-Zionist, boom, and became political.
No, I came out, I had an anti-Zionist viewpoint. It didn't really matter. So long as I lived in Canada, I positioned myself against Israel, but I didn't do anything about it.
And I think that that changed when I moved to Germany, when all the left-wing people in Germany are like super pro-Israel.
(27:58):
And I was just like, what the fuck is this? Which is a whole other subject that we can or don't have to talk about. But that kind of radicalized me more than being in Canada,
where it's sort of just like most people on the left are pretty anti-Zionist, it's not a thing. But being an anti-Zionist in Germany is like, it's a thing.
It's like, you know, being Jewish in Germany is a thing, but being an anti-Zionist Jew in Germany is like a thing.
(28:21):
And then, of course, since October 7, when this has become so much more globally present and globally horrifying,
yeah, there's just been sort of like all of my politics have been cast into relief around this issue.
And so where this issue was sort of an issue among many issues that I took a position on, this has become such a painful, grievous issue for me now.
(28:47):
It sounds like it was happening through basically being in conversation with others. It wasn't just sitting down. Do you have any memories of specific texts or events or...?
No, I have memories of people. I have memories of people who had good polemics. And I just realized how deeply unsexy it was to be pro-Israeli.
(29:11):
Was it similar for you, Shoshana?
No. I think the point of similarity for me is the German element.
Completely by coincidence, Josh and I both have some geographical connection right now to Germany.
I went into German studies when I started university and still in German studies like 15 or 16 years later,
(29:35):
mostly because as a 17-year-old, I was like, I like Kafka. I like Freud. I like Nietzsche. I'll go into German studies. What could go wrong?
Everything can go wrong, dear reader. I didn't really think much about it. I just was like, I like German literature and philosophy.
They seem to be really interested in questions of trauma and psychoanalysis and things that I was really interested in as well.
(29:59):
But once I went into German studies, I started being perceived a very specific way.
And that really shook me because I had previously been in this bubble of Toronto Jews and mostly lefty Toronto Jews.
I didn't like the non-lefty Toronto Jews. I didn't like a lot of the lefty Toronto Jews either.
(30:23):
But going and suddenly being in German studies, people would just like assume that I was Zion.
People would assume I was Israeli because of my name, because I have a big family.
They would just assume that I was like a religious Jew fresh off the boat from Israel.
And I had to kind of like constantly correct this misperception of myself.
My politics around Israel slowly, slowly started crystallizing because of that,
(30:48):
because I had to constantly like correct German people in German studies who just kind of like assumed that I had this very intimate relationship to Israel.
And so like finding myself just kind of constantly correcting their misperceptions of Israel very gradually crystallized my own politics.
That wasn't the only thing, obviously, but that was certainly an element that helped me articulate my anti-Zionism.
(31:14):
I think the slow crystallization that I was mentioning earlier really, really took a sharp turn in 2021 with the Sheikh Jarrah violent settlers,
because that I was on Twitter a lot during that time. I'm still on Twitter a lot.
But I remember being so confused why people in German studies weren't against this.
I should have understood by that point. But like for some reason, I still didn't completely understand.
(31:40):
I was like Germans are anti-genocide, like Germans talk all this talk about learning from the past, all this stuff.
So I was like, why is no one in German studies talking about this? I was a really, really timid leader back then.
I didn't have many followers. Most of the people who followed me were like my professors or like my classmates, maybe like 50 people.
And I remember like I would angrily tweet things like why is no one in German studies tweeting about what's happening right now?
(32:05):
Like, why are we not having this conversation in German studies about the violence of Israel?
And then I would like delete my tweets 20 minutes later because I was like, I don't want to like rock the boat.
But like seeing the German studies silence in 2021, like really lit the flame under me.
Like Shoshana said, like most of my community in Toronto were left-wing Jews.
(32:27):
Most of my community in Montreal were also left-wing queer Jews. And it wasn't a big deal. It was just so normal.
In Germany, it's a thing. It's like you should put that you're Jewish on your application because that's a minority.
And that's not just that you're a foreigner, but that you're like a special category of person.
Or like all of these ways that kept getting reflected back to me that being Jewish was something significant.
(32:52):
And I always pushed against that because I was just like I didn't experience anti-Semitism growing up.
It's just like one more way of being white in Canada.
I would say that I experienced lots of other forms of bullying around class, around gender, around ability, around like I was bullied, but not around being Jewish.
And so like as soon as I came to Germany and people were like, oh, yes, you must have experienced anti-Semitism.
(33:16):
And I'm like, other than this interaction, like, fuck no.
And so there's this very, very weird fantasy in Germany around like obsession with anti-Semitism.
And that's certainly like exponentially multiplied in the last 10 months that really sort of counterdefined me as Jewish in ways that I never wanted to or saw myself as and also that I really resent.
(33:42):
So it's almost like you were specialized and held up in this very different way, but only within a thinkable discourse.
It's like a differentiating discourse, but it's also fucking obnoxious because at the same time, like I'd be working and I'd find out, oh, one of my left wing German colleagues lived in a collective house called Chutzpah house.
(34:03):
And I was like, are any of you Jewish?
And he's like, oh, no, we're working on that.
I'm like, then don't call your house Chutzpah house.
Like, fuck off.
That's disgusting.
You know, and there's no discourse of cultural appropriation whatsoever around Judaism.
It's just like Jews equals good, like being pro-Jewish is being good, being a good left wing German.
(34:24):
And then at the same time, if I'm working alongside this person and complaining, he would say to me, oh, you're being so negative.
It's, you know, and I was like, hey, have you ever met a living Jew before?
That's how we are.
And I've had exactly the same experiences every time. Like what Josh is just saying, like every single German person I've ever interacted with has repeated those experiences to some degree where they like fetishize Jewishness in a way that's so uncomfortable.
(34:53):
But then they clearly never interacted with actual living Jewish people because they find us unbearable in person.
Like we're so off putting to them in person because we're like to use their language, like not polite, not respectable enough, not engaging in the right kinds of like civil debate with them.
I'm not speaking for all Jewish people, obviously, but like at least like the etiquette or lack of etiquette that Josh and I were raised with is to be kind of like brash.
(35:21):
And yeah.
So yes, I can confirm that like those are my experiences with German people too is to like fetishize this mythical version of Judaism that they have complete control over what that entails.
And that does not allow for an anti Zionism at all.
And so like being anti Zionist is also in some ways exactly exemplary of us not conforming to their fantasy of what the Jewish good should be. My anti Zionism irritates Germans and they feel the need to correct that.
(35:56):
Where should the Jews be safe? Where should the Jews go if not Israel? And I'm like, not our problem. Why did the Jews need to go anywhere?
I don't want to make you to the arbiters and the educators of all this, but let's let's get into it. Like what is happening in Germany?
I go through waves of being up to date and not being up to date because my ability to sort of like absorb and maintain outrage is flagging.
(36:23):
Also, like I'm going to sort of generalize in ways that should be fact checked. However, a resolution from the Bundestag has been leaked that they're probably going to launch on October 7th, just, you know, for the full pop and circumstance of it.
The resolution is neviterist yet, meaning never again is now. It's a resolution to protect Jewish life in Germany, which basically criminalize anti Zionism to criminalize any kind of Palestinian existence.
(36:52):
I mean, it's a resolution. It's not law, but it's a statement that all the parties of the government are soon to agree upon.
Foreigners are a source of anti-Semitism that need to be disciplined into a correct order. All forms of culture and academia are seen as a source of anti-Semitism in Germany.
And so they're going to inspect people who receive any public funding or anti-Zionist positions or pro BDS positions.
(37:18):
Germany has declared its Statsgazan, meaning like the reason for it to exist as a state as being to support the state of Israel.
It has no use for Jews anymore because it now has full control and identification with what is and is not anti-Semitic.
And that kind of overrides our ability to discern anti-Semitism as a form of prejudice because it's kind of just fused anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism and fused Jews with the nation state of Israel.
(37:45):
It's very frustrating here because the Zionist propaganda is also the state propaganda coming out of Germany.
And Germany is more than comfortable to sort of like criminalize and throw the police force behind it in ways that are really brutal.
And so, you know, I appreciate that phrase of Germany has no more use for anti-Zionist Jews.
(38:07):
And I think, you know, not in educational terms, I would argue that the two of you are continuing to be a problem or leaning into that uselessness.
But I'm wondering to bring education into the mix.
What are you, how are you enacting pedagogies?
How are you studying against this?
How are you perhaps learning together to challenge this?
And maybe it doesn't even have to be held to Germany because I think Shoshana, when I first started seeing your work, it was through tweets.
(38:32):
I know one has been shared many, many times right after October 7th.
I found very powerful.
I don't have it up, but it's something along the lines of may every birthright bus be empty and goes on to challenge all of the deep,
educative propaganda that is used to hold up Zionism.
(38:54):
Yeah, it's interesting that you also kind of started that by saying we lean into our uselessness a bit because I certainly do position myself now when I'm talking to like German Zionists
right from the get go as like an anti-Zionist Jew.
And I never used to, I never used to do that because I didn't want to give them what Josh was saying, how they really like fetishize Jewishness.
(39:17):
And I didn't want to like ever give them a foothold into fetishizing me.
But now it's become extremely important to kind of lead with that.
There's so many things that I want to say here.
It's going to be hard to kind of organize my thoughts.
But one thing that I just want to pick up on from what Josh was saying a bit about Germany is like, it's so clear that because Israel exists,
(39:41):
Germany doesn't have to do any real work like that.
Their memory culture can be a charade, it can be such a successful PR charade because Israel exists to kind of legitimize their PR.
So what I mean by this is the only victims of genocide that Germany will recognize are Jewish victims of genocide.
(40:04):
And there are so many other victims of German genocide that they do not formally recognize because Israel gives them a formal path to say that they have come to terms.
Because Israel exists, they can be like, well, we've done the work.
Jews are safe. We've done the work. We can exit the equation now.
But it's like, what about every single other victim of your violence that you do not recognize because they do not have this formal state that you can send weapons to?
(40:33):
So I think that like Israel kind of conceptually in the German imagination does so much work to clear Germany's guilt.
It kind of launders their guilt for them into this like happy ending, which is what Emily de Shevekker has said in an interview and which I think is such an amazing phrase because it is.
It's their silver lining. It's their happy ending. It kind of washes away their sins.
(40:58):
Josh, what do you think?
There's like a whole spectrum of German defenses in Israel from and this is where it gets so complicated as well because I'm talking about the German, not just like German right, but the German left.
The German left is intensely Zionist and for the German left, the enemy against which they're organizing is German fascism.
(41:21):
Which still exists and still is anti-Semitic and is extremely scary and is growing in organizing and power.
But the thing about this sort of policy is that it's focusing on pro-Palestinian organizing and it's not focusing on German fascists.
Juxioposition that came out of Instagram this past weekend, the police running up behind protesters and running up and fully throwing their weight into their back.
(41:47):
And you see this woman's body kind of flying forwards as this fully riot gear clad cop comes up behind her and shoves her.
And she was countered on the same weekend with a good 700 necklace Germans in the Hauptbahnhof of Leipzig chanting Ausländer raus, Germany for Germans, as a demonstration against the Pride Day that was taking place.
(42:10):
And the police are letting them for freedom of speech, letting this happen.
They are cared about anti-Semitism and it's the same in the States and it's the same in Canada and it's the same in all of these frickin Western colonizing countries. But they use anti-Semitism as a very nice convenient cover for their racism and for their Islamophobia.
And for their colonization and for their land grab and for their oil and for their real estate.
(42:34):
And they pretend that they have this moral high ground because they pretend to care about anti-Semitism and it's very obvious that they are frothing at the mouth to do state sanctioned racism and Islamophobia again, as always.
No, I mean like what I was saying about there being actual Nazis in Germany is that the left wing and the German left wing believes that if they were to criticize Israel, they would be on the side of the Nazis.
(42:57):
They are really uncomfortable. Get over your discomfort. There's a genocide going on.
Either you're for or against genocide. You're not anti-Semitic if you criticize the state of Israel. You can criticize the state of Israel. You can be anti-imperialist. You can be anti-colonialism. You can be anti-racist.
All of those are necessary poles of your politics. And if those are not as important to you as anti-Semitism in this sort of bohemian theory of anti-Semitism as being something that pro-Palestinian protesters are embodying, I don't feel unsafe from pro-Palestinian and from Palestinian people.
(43:36):
And yet it's being billed as Jew hate. That's how it's being reported on in the media as these Jew hate riots.
Yeah, like literally like there are signs in the metro in Germany saying like, Judenhaus Kongress, like Jew hate conferences being held. And it's like, literally Palestinians existing are Jew haters.
(43:58):
There was like a song that came out that made the rounds back in like early November or something. Like that Hamas were the descendants of Jew gassers or something.
And it's like this complete dissonance where Palestinians have subsumed the inheritance of Nazism.
And it makes no sense to people looking in from outside because we're like, you know, that's you guys still, right?
(44:25):
Like you're the literal descendants. But like they've somehow just completely projected this fantasy onto Palestinians and Muslim people generally, Arab people generally,
of our past problem that in our minds we have, you know, overcome and mastered is your problem.
And this is something that's written about so wonderfully in Esra Ozurek's book, The Subcontractors of Guilt, which Josh and I are in a reading group for.
(44:51):
And it's just such an incredible book that talks about this exact phenomenon of like the displacement of German guilt onto people from Muslim countries or in the case of Palestine, multi-religious.
But imagined as a Muslim monolith.
I do not see the pro-Palestinian movement as a source of anti-Semitism.
I see the German far right as a source of anti-Semitism and as a source of racism.
(45:16):
But then I'm told that I don't understand or I can't understand because I didn't receive a German education.
I think that talking to Germans, I need to dose that out. I can't just do that all the time because it really goes nowhere.
One of the groups that I'm part of is directly pedagogical in nature.
We formed a co-op of Germanists for Palestine that's part of a larger group.
(45:40):
We decided to fold ourselves into a larger group called Diversity Decolonization in the German Curriculum.
So that is directly kind of confronting German studies and trying to offer kind of alternative decolonial pathways within German studies.
And so the co-op that I'm part of does have that pedagogical element to it.
(46:03):
And one thing that we're working on is I've been working on a workshop with one of my comrades from that group on how to address Zionist propaganda when you're in a situation where you can't just leave.
So like obviously the best way to address Zionist propaganda is to just not give it any space, not give it any air because you don't want to legitimize that as a debate.
(46:25):
But there are some situations, specifically collegial pedagogical situations, like if you're in a classroom and you can't just walk away and not give it any.
Like there are some situations where you have to kind of like enter into these quote unquote debates where obviously you don't want to debate the undebatable things.
Like anything that dehumanizes Palestinians and is blatantly racist, you don't want to debate at all.
(46:49):
But there are some things that liberals will kind of bring up and what they think are well-meaning ways.
And we're working on a workshop of like how to kind of engage with the seemingly well-meaning people who repeat these Zionist talking points.
German studies at its core still reiterate so much racism.
(47:10):
And it's been really disgusting being in German studies in some ways.
And then in other ways, there are a lot of people who are pro-Palestine and are just like penalized for showing even the slightest sign of that.
So kind of finding those people and trying to work with them.
But the fact that I wrote a couple of emails responding to like white Christian German ladies being like Hamas is anti-feminist.
(47:38):
Therefore, you know, as feminists, we should all be like supporting Israel or whatever.
It's just the most like vomit takes that you can possibly come up with because it's like women in Palestine are having C-sections without anesthesia.
Women in Palestine don't have clean water for their children and not just women, obviously parents.
Like this is the most feminist issue you can imagine.
(48:00):
This is an everything issue. This is an everything issue.
People are being murdered daily in the most grotesque, evil ways that nobody could even imagine.
It's completely unfathomable, the evil that we're witnessing. And I it's so disgusting.
There was like one thing I wanted to say that Shash said that I wanted to springboard off, which is like burning bridges has been very, very real for me as well.
(48:24):
And that I have no respect and no patience and no interest in working with or forming relationships with people who are not clear about this issue.
This is a black and white issue.
If you're not against this genocide and against genocide in general, but I think this genocide is the one that people are like, I'm not sure I want to call it a genocide.
Like we are diametrically on opposite positions politically and I don't give a shit about you or your institution.
(48:50):
But at the same time, this has been a space where I have found so much community because it did take quite a bit of bravery at the beginning in Germany, especially to step out on this issue.
And so I really had this kind of emergence into a community that I didn't have before. And that's a process in which I'm also learning so much.
To add to that, I think that the one thing we have is I know Zionists try and chip away at this, but Jewish people are relatively so immune to the accusation of anti-Semitism that is like the cornerstone of Zionist propaganda.
(49:25):
When it works so well on liberals, one of the texts that I read pretty early on in this last 10 months was Kwame Tours' pitfalls of liberalism.
And like it just was so illuminating because liberals, one of the things that he says, one of the pitfalls is that liberals are so afraid of offending someone.
And so like one of the Zionist propaganda points being like, don't you dare criticize Israel because that's anti-Semitic.
(49:48):
Liberals are like terrified to be anti-Semitic because they might offend someone. And so like where I think Jews, like our role in this has to be to just like call bullshit on that accusation constantly and kind of like absorb those accusations on behalf of people for whom that would really be Korea.
(50:09):
And, you know, and there are so many people who have been fired and I don't want to take focus away from what Palestinian people are dealing with and going through. And I don't want to make myself, I don't want to put myself into any kind of central node.
But that being said, I think Jewish people have such a huge responsibility to call out the bullshit of Zionist propaganda. And I think we are very well positioned to do so because we don't face as many professional repercussions when we do that.
(50:39):
Sure. And I think to illuminate some of the educative processes, right, it helps you to learn about your school, for instance, really shows how Zionism both emerges and how it continues, how it's maintained, which is hopefully not to center our voices, but to support and be of use in challenging what is happening.
(51:02):
Yeah, and I think it's so important right now to act in solidarity with Palestinians, not to upstage them or to center ourselves in this more than ever in Germany.
It's very frustrating that there's this constant pressure being put on Jews to write letters and to sign things because it also sort of like reinforces this Jewish exceptionalism that's so problematic here.
(51:26):
And there's a responsibility certainly to act in solidarity with Palestinians. But like here, the counter voice is Jewish, and there's no Palestinian voices that are centered on the media or an event.
What is the center of focus is the genocide. What is the center of focus is abolishing the state of Israel. What is the center of focus is how to dismantle these structural forms of violence.
(51:49):
And it's so easy to just get distracted with these like Shoshana said, like Zionist talking points, these accusations of anti-Semitism. Oh, we need Jews to do this, we need Jews to do that.
Like, where are the Jews? And it's like, you killed them all, Germany.
It's so humbling to enter a lot of these groups and spaces because like in German studies, like Joshua's saying, you know, I'm kind of being handed this authority. I mean, oftentimes it's completely the opposite where they're like, no, no, we know what's best for you.
(52:20):
But, you know, for better or worse, they will for the most part pretend to at least acknowledge like that. Within German studies, there is some authority that you have as a Jewish person, whereas like, you know, because they at least pretend to listen to Jewish people, anti-Zionist or Zionist.
Sometimes not all the time, but going to the rallies, going to the encampments, going to spaces that really, really are led by Palestinian people, it is really a space where you shut up and listen.
(52:55):
It's also a space of, like, it's not just a space of like, shut up and listen.
That's not anything violent. Like, I am telling myself to shut up and listen. Nobody is telling me that. Like, it's an extremely welcoming space of solidarity. But that has been crucial for my education as well, just to genuinely truly be in spaces led by Palestinian people.
(53:19):
Because there aren't many spaces like that in German studies. There aren't any spaces like that, to my knowledge, in German studies. So to be involved, like to attend the, you know, the rallies and to just be one of the crowd of people listening to Palestinian people narrate their own demands, their own situation has also been very informative.
(53:41):
And that should be what everyone is doing. That should be what we're all doing.
One question about how all of this factors into family life, into family education, which is where we started. You two mentioned being part of a study group together.
You know, are you unlearning together? Are you challenging each other? What does study together, what does unlearning together look like as siblings and as family members?
(54:09):
We talk often, and I really feel like Shoshana understands me. There have been periods of time when this situation, like the levels of disinformation and gaslighting combined with grief and just the horror of what we're seeing, like all of that, like going through it together has made a big difference.
And I think there are things that I feel that I don't understand what they mean. What comes out of this relationship for me is that I understand things better.
(54:40):
Yeah, I agree. And I think like we're always kind of sharing articles and stuff back and forth. Josh mostly shares articles with me. And then nine times out of 10, I'm like, oh yeah, I saw it this morning already.
But that's just because I'm chronically online. But I think one of the things also is that like it's really, and I think this is true for a lot of people who have been in this kind of witness position in the last 10 months of just seeing the footage every day.
(55:11):
I think it's really clarified the structures of the world, like the institutions of the world as being, or at least of the Western world that I live in.
I have somewhat of a career in Germany. You have a career in German studies. The choice to become an outspoken anti-Zionist is a choice to sort of burn your career.
(55:34):
The idea that anyone could care about that is unfathomable to me. Like I've met so many people over the months in my field who whisper to me that they're on the same side, that they find it disgusting.
This was early November. They were like, I can't believe it. It's so disgusting. Of course I'm pro-Palestine, but they would never say it out loud.
(55:55):
Maybe I would feel differently if I had a job, because I'm a grad student still. So I'm not bound to an institution in the way that like a tenured professor is, but I really can't wrap my head around that.
And I think Josh and I are similar in that like we cannot wrap our head around allegiance to an institution over and above actual just nonstop daily abject horror of seeing corpses.
(56:23):
And knowing that like there are some people in the world who are like completely okay with that.
I mean, like I can't imagine attaching myself to an institution that is not actively opposing this.
And that institution was silent and that institution called the cops on its students when they said anything.
(56:44):
And that institution is obviously invested heavily in weapons manufacturing and you name it. But like all institutions are.
But there is a consequence and many people have faced the consequence of for you it's refusing that. I'm a tenured track professor.
(57:05):
There's some aspects they're very comfortable, right? And to say I think there's just something really powerful in that refusal.
This has been such a turning point in my relationship to academia, which I guess is relevant for the theme of education.
But like this has really just made me so so disgusted by like it's just pulled the wool from my eyes with regard to like academia as just another institution that is founded on violence and complicit in violence and silent in the face of violence.
(57:38):
And that surely this is how it was during the Holocaust, too. And we know that that's a historical fact.
But like I'm at the very, very tail end of my Ph.D. And so I am forging forward with job applications.
But for several months, I had the attitude of like, I'm going to burn it all down because I don't care if I like if I don't get any jobs because of this, if it doesn't pan out all the better because I have completely lost faith in in academia as a as like an alternate universe of like like minded people.
(58:12):
That's kind of how I thought it was for so many years.
It's not to throw out education as like a horizon, but it certainly is to throw out institutionalized education.
That is literally investing in weapons that are sliced children in half.
(58:36):
Thanks so much for listening.
Please follow us on Instagram at another as possible.
We're also kind of on Twitter there.
You'll be able to find more information about our guests and their work as it relates to Palestinian solidarity.
If you have a few minutes to spare, please take a moment to leave us a review to help our podcast reach new listeners.
(58:57):
Today's episode was produced by Yardin Amran and Samantha Haley.
The article mentioned in the introduction is called Erasing Palestine in Germany's Educational System, the Racial Frontiers of Liberal Freedom.
It's by Anna Younis and Hannah Al-Tahir.
It appeared in Middle East Critique.
As always, once more, we are encouraging our listeners to donate to Gaza Mutual Aid Funds.
(59:22):
Thank you so much for listening.
We'll be back soon with another episode of Another Education as Possible.
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