Episode 9 - Haiven Family (Judy, Larry, Omri, and Max)

Anti-Zionist education doesn't just mean unlearning Zionism. Many Jews, including today's guests, have undertaken educational projects where anti-Zionism is a starting point. In our conversation, the Haiven family take us through community building and ostracization from the Jewish community in Canada, learning and practicing their own version of Jewish traditions, and the sustaining power of rage. The whole episode is like listening in on an everyday conversation around a radical dinner table.

Episode Transcript

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

(00:06):
I'm your host, Jordan Corson.
The dominant structure for this podcast follows my own educational trajectory.
It started with the making of a Zionist world.
After that, there was an ongoing process of unmaking that world through unlearning.
Then, finally, there's the building of educational worlds as part of the Palestine Solidarity

(00:28):
Movement.
This is a partial view of anti-Zionist education, and Jews are certainly only one part of the
movement.
And, many Jews have always been anti-Zionist.
That's the case for today's guest, the Haven family.
Larry and Judy Haven, professors and two of the co-founders of Independent Jewish Voices

(00:50):
Canada, raised their children, Max and Omri, as anti-Zionist Jews.
Max and Omri are now researchers and activists engaged in the movement for a free Palestine.
At the same time, though, anti-Zionism is not some kind of end point.
Education is never a settled matter.
The Haven family, together and in their own ways, are part of a movement that is always

(01:13):
learning, always studying, relentlessly changing.
And the Haven family, for their part, take up pedagogies that animate their work and
think towards another world.
So let's listen in to our conversation with the Haven family.

(01:50):
Haven family, welcome to another Education is Possible.
How are you all doing?
It is wonderful to see you.
Shana Tova, we're recording this on Yom Kippur.
So I just want to start off by quickly hearing who you all are.
So maybe we could start with Max and work to the left, whoever one is in the room.

(02:11):
My name is Max Haven.
I work as a professor at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Canada, but I spend a lot
of time in Berlin and London and in other places.
A lot of my research is on the radical imagination and social movements and cultural studies.
And I've been active in a lot of different social movements throughout my life, including

(02:35):
student movements and anti-capitalist movements and anti-colonial movements and creative movements
as well.
Hi, I'm Omri Haven, go by he, him.
I am based out of Vancouver in British Columbia.
And I am a researcher and a teaching assistant at Simon Fraser University, specializing in

(03:01):
communications of agrivoltaics, which is a type of renewable energy technology that has
to do with agriculture as well.
And my background is mostly around food sovereignty.
And I do work with independent Jewish voices as well as other groups to oppose what Israel

(03:21):
is doing right now.
Hi, I'm Larry Haven and I live here in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
And I'm a professor emeritus in the Department of Management at St. Mary's University.
I was a professor of industrial labor relations for years.

(03:48):
And before that, a union organizer also involved in many social movements.
I come from a Jewish family.
My father was a Holocaust survivor, a survivor of Auschwitz.
My mother came to Canada in 1927, escaping before the Holocaust.

(04:14):
And I'm a founding member of Independent Jewish Voices, but both Judy and I have been involved
in non-Zionist and anti-Zionist movements from even before that.
And IJV was founded in 2008, that's 16 years ago.

(04:36):
I'm Judy Haven.
I live here in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
We've lived across the country and both Larry and I went to university in Britain.
I too am a retired professor of industrial relations, the same university, St. Mary's
University here in Halifax, where I taught industrial relations and labor law and human

(04:59):
resource management till I retired.
And since then, I've been very active in struggles for justice in Palestine through Independent
Jewish Voices.
I too am one of the six founding members of an organization now that has thousands of
members across Canada.
And both Larry and I do a lot of work, voluntary work, with IJV to make sure the organization

(05:26):
thrives as much as we can.
I'm also involved in something called Equity Watch.
Larry and I and another person co-founded an organization in this province that fights
against discrimination and bullying and harassment in the workplace.
We often take cases before the Human Rights Commission and other venues.

(05:51):
But most of the time, we do educational work for workers that want to fight back.
So that's something else that I do.
Larry and Judy, I want to start with the two of you.
One reason that I'm so excited for this conversation is that you all are going to break the rules
that we've created for ourselves.

(06:13):
A lot of this podcast is conceived through the idea that by and large, Jewish folks are
raised in Zionist worlds and we're interested in how folks unlearn and disrupt the education
that they're given.
But that's not, as we'll discuss today, that's not fully your story.

(06:35):
But I'm wondering if the two of you had different experiences growing up, that you had to unlearn
some form of Zionism that was with you in your upbringing.
Well, I think that there's people who grew up either in the 1960s or came of age at a
certain point.
But my parents were considered liberal Jews.

(06:58):
They were professionals and they were liberal Jews in Toronto, liberal minded.
And the issue of Zionism and the issue of Israel was a rather moot point until I'd say
1967 and 1973.
And so we were spared.
I mean, I was spared, though I had a religious education.

(07:18):
I was spared on the mumbo jumbo, frankly, about Israel quite a lot of the time.
My parents had virtually no interest in Israel, very little anyway.
And they weren't very interested in organized religion either, though we went to religious
school.
I mean, they weren't particularly religious, nor were they believers.
They were skeptics.

(07:40):
So I would say that somehow we didn't, I mean, the real issue is, do you want to have relatives?
Do you want to have friends in the mainstream Jewish community?
Those people have all fallen by the wayside.
Because even if they were born when I was born or they grew up, they've all signed on

(08:03):
to Zionism pretty well.
Yeah, I would say I grew up in a home that I would call residually Zionist.
It's like asking anybody who grew up the time I did.
It's like a fish in water.
You don't even notice it.

(08:24):
Most Jews supported Israel.
But as Peter Novick in his book, The Holocaust in American Life, points out that before 1967
and Judy said 1973, Jews didn't talk much about the Holocaust and they didn't actually

(08:45):
talk much about Israel.
I mean, you know, my parents supported Israel whenever there was an occasion, like a wedding
or bar mitzvah.
They would bring greetings from relatives in Israel and there would be a bracha for

(09:07):
the state of Israel.
But other than that, it wasn't a major, and this is an important point for Judy and I
growing up, very different than our children's generation and the ones after that.
And that is when I went to Hebrew school and I went to after public school in the afternoons,

(09:30):
I would go to Hebrew school.
Israel wasn't talked about very much.
It wasn't taught.
I happened to have an Israeli teacher and that's where I learned a lot about Israel.
But for the most part, the teachers were not Israeli and Israel was not a big thing.
That all changed after 67.

(09:51):
Well, starting with the Eichmann trial in 63, I believe, and then the war in 67 and
the war in 73.
And then by that decade, after that decade was over, everything had changed.
And my sort of anti-Zionism, if you can call it that, began, I think, during the Six-Day

(10:15):
War in 1967, where I had an argument with my father.
He of course, as a Holocaust survivor, he was very interested and was glued to the television
of reports from the Middle East.
And I remember remarking to him why he was cheering the death of not only Palestinians,

(10:41):
but Jordanians, Egyptians, all of those Arab combatants in that war.
I said, well, what did they ever do to you?
They didn't put you in a concentration camp.
It was the Germans.
And he got extremely angry with me and part of it was intergenerational conflict, I guess.

(11:04):
But that was kind of my aha moment, thinking, whoa, why did I blurt that out?
And maybe I'm right.
And then it was the path took off after that.
I certainly agree.
There's well-documented shift in formalized curriculum in the US and Canada after 1967.

(11:28):
And that's also post-1967 is when Omri and Max, you're being raised.
And I'm wondering, sticking with you, Larry, what was the experience of raising kids for

(11:50):
the two of you as anti-Zionists in a very Zionist world?
Of course, communities differ and everything is situated, but the water around you, the
atmosphere is deeply Zionist at that time.
So I wonder what were the challenges?

(12:12):
What were the experiences trying to raise and teach children in that world kind of against
the grain?
By the time we had kids, Judy and I were secular Jews.
I mean, I grew up a lot with my grandparents who were deeply religious and observant.

(12:38):
And I had a Jewish Hebrew education until the year after my Bar Mitzvah where I dropped
it and since then I've been very secular.
So when we had kids, we kind of brought them up in a secular household.

(13:00):
But I do remember some anecdotes.
I remember when Max was four years old, we had moved to the UK and I was doing my PhD
there and there was a chaplain at the university that I came to, a Jewish chaplain, and he

(13:21):
invited us to a Passover Seder.
And we had to explain to Max where we were going.
We had never talked about religion at all and we had to explain what a Passover Seder
was.
We even had to explain to a four-year-old what Jews meant.

(13:45):
And this was a big sort of blow, I don't know, a big experience for him.
I remember his little brain going a mile a minute trying to figure this all out.
And I believe that was at the time.
Once we told him, well, you know, we're Jewish and this is what it means and we're going

(14:06):
to go to the Seder and they have kids and, you know, they're going to talk about Passover
so you should know a bit and he's going, okay, okay.
And then a little while later, I see him out on the lawn in front of our house and he's
doing some strange kind of movements.

(14:28):
So I went out and I said, what are you doing?
And he said, I am doing the dance of the Jewish people.
It was so cute, you know.
And then we went to this Seder and these were the, you know, the chaplain was a rabbi and
these were kids brought up on Judaism and they made Max's life at the Seder miserable

(14:54):
because they laughed at him and ridiculed him for not knowing about Passover and, you
know, how kids are.
I think they were a little older than him.
So that's how we introduced Max to Judaism.
And then I remember when Max was getting, he was about 12 or 11 years old and his grandmother,

(15:22):
Judy's mother, said to us, you're having a bar mitzvah, aren't you?
And we thought about it and we thought, no, we don't think so.
And then she insisted and we thought, okay, we'll have a bar mitzvah for him, but we'll
do it our own way.
And I remember going to, and so we decided that we would have a course of study over

(15:47):
an entire year in which Max would learn about Judaism and Israel and whatever it is he needed
to learn, the cultural aspects, the religious aspects.
And I remember going to Max and saying, this is what we're proposing to do.
And Max, again, with his brain going a mile a minute said, wait a minute, you've just

(16:13):
spent 11 years trying to convince me that all people are the same and now you're telling
me that we're different.
And you know, from the mouths of kids.
And we said, yeah, well, this is important.
Not only are all people supposed to be equal, but you need to know where you came from.

(16:37):
You need to know who your people are, what they're doing.
And Judy, I'm also wondering, you have a wonderful piece on your blog about formalized education
and the role of private schooling versus public schooling and the way that Jewish folks trust
or don't trust.
So I'm wondering if that might factor into your response as well.

(16:57):
Well, I think one of the things that Larry may not have made clear is the only thing
that saved us was not our brains or the fact that we got PhDs or the fact that we were
ill-educated or anything.
The only thing, in my view, that saved us was moving across the country and moving to
England and then coming back to Canada, to small town Canada and doing whatever the hell

(17:21):
we wanted.
Had we stayed in Toronto, which has 219,000, which means it's about 60% of the Jewish population
of Canada is in Toronto alone.
Had we gone back to Canada from which we came, I think that our lives would have been on
rather different trajectories.
I'm not saying I would have been a Zionist or we would have done Zionist things, but

(17:43):
certainly the level of independence that we've had, the level of ability to start organizations,
to grow with different groups here and there, whether it's in Saskatoon or Edmonton or any
of the places we've lived across Canada, would have been rather different.
The fact that we're outsiders has made a huge difference in a positive way, in my view,

(18:05):
in terms of what we've been able to accomplish.
It may not be great for people who are listening and don't agree with us, but it's if there
were such a person.
Max says no, no, no, there's no such person.
But that's why we've been able to do this.
And so my looking at the Hebrew day schools, for instance, the Jewish day schools in Toronto

(18:27):
has been something that Larry's been asking me to do for a long time because I've done
some preliminary analyses.
There's been a few, very few Canadians who've written about it in a very distant kind of
way.
But what we're seeing now is what we never saw before, which is I would say 40 to 50%
of all Jews in Canada, and there's maybe 360,000 Jews in Canada, to give you some idea.

(18:53):
Population 37 million Canadians.
But the fact is that with us, the Hebrew day schools, it turns out that 40 to 50% of Canadian
Jews have gone to Hebrew day schools.
That means their parents have paid $25,000 more every single year for them to go to private,

(19:17):
non-funded Hebrew day schools in places like Ottawa, Toronto, and there's maybe four in
Montreal, and that's about it.
Well, there's one in Winnipeg and one here and there, but it's negligible compared to
what there is in Toronto.
Maybe I could just quickly fill in a piece of the puzzle that I sort of remember or recollect
also from stories about growing up in the 80s with my parents.

(19:40):
So as they mentioned, in the mid-80s, the three of us, because Omri wasn't born yet,
went to England for them to pursue graduate school.
And I think to a large extent, I was just talking to my students about this because
I'm teaching a class right now on media and activism and art.
I remember growing up in Emilia, supporting the miners' strikes, going to endless benefit

(20:05):
concerts to free Nelson Mandela, also about the situation in Northern Ireland, such that
all of those issues kind of merged in my imagination, but also with the Palestinian sort of movements
for Palestinian human rights, movements against what Israel was doing.
So it was all also part of a broader radical milieu of international solidarity.

(20:28):
And the other thing that's made me noteworthy is Judy was, before becoming an academic independent
investigative journalist, and had, I think in the 90s, you went to Israel to investigate
the settlements in Hebron.
This was after the massacre by Baruch Goldstein in the cave of the patriarchs in Hebron.

(20:53):
And this was published in a major Canadian News Weekly, and it led to complete ostracization
from the Canadian Jewish community.
So as I was growing up, there was sort of the mark of Cain on all of us.
We were clearly not welcome in any of the Jewish communities, especially in the small
cities where we lived.

(21:14):
And so that really led to us, I think all of us, having to invent or rekindle different
aspects of the Jewish tradition.
So for instance, the kind of alternative bar mitzvahs that we organized, or something we
might talk about later, which is doing annual Passover events that bring together the kind
of communities of wherever we are, not just of Jews, but of other people struggling for

(21:37):
different forms of international solidarity and collective liberation.
So yeah, but we were, I think, complete, I would say it would not be an exaggeration
to say completely ostracized from the Jewish community.
There was never an option to participate.
I'm wondering if you could say a bit more, Max and Omri, about what it was like to learn

(21:59):
and grow up within that world of this deep connection among different movements.
But I also, this is a bit reductive, but I'm wondering too, if there's some of that
rebellion of like, you're being brought up to be anti-Zionist, to fight for the end to

(22:20):
apartheid in South Africa, and you're like, yeah, screw you, mom and dad, I'm going to
be a Zionist now, and I'm going to be a fascist.
I don't want to hear your liberatory politics.
So just generally the experience for the two of you, what it was like to learn and how
you navigated this upbringing.

(22:41):
I think I became more interested in Trotskyism as a result of their Maoism.
That was probably my form of rebellion.
That is such a leftist rebellion.
Yeah, it was relatively safe.
But actually, if you are aware of the different dynamics in leftist politics, that's a real
stake to the heart.

(23:03):
So I grew up in mostly Halifax, Nova Scotia, which is not known for its Jewish population.
It was a complete solitude for me, I think, in terms of Jewish community here.
And I think we were all very proud of the sort of world that had been created through

(23:25):
my parents and Max and my, I guess, the bubble that we had built.
That I would go to events where my parents and others had organized it, and later I would
organize it, or Max would be involved, and we'd be denounced and yelled at by Zionists,

(23:50):
by the people who were in charge of the Atlantic Jewish Council, acting like children.
And I think that was an interesting moment for me, where I think I realized that what
we were doing was actually transgressive, and what was being done was transgressive,

(24:11):
even though the speakers we were bringing in, very prominent speakers from Palestine,
both Israelis and Palestinians, made complete sense to me as someone who was between the
ages of 10 and 15.
So that contradiction, I think, further entrenched my beliefs that have existed till today, and

(24:36):
then my own taking on of that ideology has felt very natural, like a very natural progression.
But of course, I think, like most people involved in this struggle or in this movement right
now, I was a bit lost, I'd say, from 2014 to 2019, in terms of my place within the movement.

(25:10):
Because of course, that was a period for everyone, including Palestinians living in Palestine,
where there wasn't that much hope for what could happen.
There were all these agreements being signed between Israel and its neighbors.
The Palestinian movement didn't seem like it was making that much progress in terms of

(25:30):
being recognized at the UN.
There was a further entrenchment of Zionism with Obama's style of Zionism.
And I think for a lot of us who had been part of the movement, and I'll let other people
speak to this too, there wasn't a sense of how we could participate.

(25:53):
And I knew that this was something that was important for me as a matter of my identity.
In order to fully express myself, I needed to be in solidarity with Palestinians and
to be counter to the Jewish establishment or the hegemony of the Zionist ideology amongst

(26:18):
Jews in Canada.
But to find my place within that was more difficult.
And I think since that time, since 2019, it's been a lot easier for me.
And then of course, within the past year, everything is much more stark.
I guess I've sometimes thought about it in terms of growing up in a double diaspora,

(26:41):
like we are diaspora Jews, and we were also in a kind of weird diaspora from other Jews.
And that, yeah, there was something really interesting about that.
And I think I learned a lot from it.
I mean, I learned a lot from the example of my parents about how to stand up and fight

(27:02):
for things if it makes you very unpopular, which I really appreciate and I value to this
day.
And even if it means you're going to be ostracized by your community, and also what it means
to move in the world not expecting to ever be welcomed home anywhere, which I think is
one of the best lessons of the diaspora generally politically.

(27:23):
It's what I value, it's what I fight for generally in my work, a real cosmopolitan world without
borders and these sorts of things.
Lots and lots of Jews around the world, especially in the diaspora, have come to embrace that,
that radical diaspora in history that is anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist and cosmopolitan and all

(27:48):
of that.
So those are two beautiful lessons I think you took away.
I just wanted to ask Max and Omri, because you were talking about being called home and
finding home.
We actually went on a trip, the four of us, to Israel and Palestine in 2008.

(28:11):
And before I hand the mic back to Max and Omri, I just want to say that one of them
asked, why are we going to Israel?
Or maybe people just asked us, why are you going to Israel with the kids?
And I remember my answer was, because I know that all young people look for their heritage

(28:36):
and their home and their origins.
If we don't take them to Israel and Palestine and show them what's going on there, they
might turn into crazy settlers in order to rediscover their roots.
So we took them almost as inoculation, but also to learn a lot.

(29:00):
As a Jew, you can be even anti-Zionist.
But you can't understand the situation in Palestine and Israel as fully as when you
go there.
So I'll hand it back to Max and Omri.
I think you folks, you guys should talk about the trip.
Yeah, so to clarify, we went on a trip that was organized, I think it was by the United

(29:22):
Jewish People's Order, which is an anti-Zionist organization, non-Zionist organization, that's
quite old and has headquarters, I think, in Toronto.
And it was a solidarity tour with solidarity activists based in Israel and Palestine.
So we weren't going to sit on a beach or something like that.
We were actually traveling throughout Palestine and talking with different activists, which

(29:47):
was very, very enlightening.
And I think the thing I valued about that tour was, on the one hand, of course, seeing
the occupation firsthand.
I think this was around the time of Operation Cast Lead, so we couldn't go to Gaza, but
we went throughout the West Bank.
And seeing the apartheid wall and seeing the situation, seeing the settlers, seeing what

(30:07):
that looks like.
I, at the time, was doing quite a bit of indigenous solidarity activism, and I was really struck
by the confluence between settler colonialism in Palestine and settler colonialism in Canada.
But I think the other thing that I valued about that trip, it was maybe the first time
when I understood, though I was also repulsed by the romance of Israel for Jews.

(30:33):
I think I'd understood it intellectually, like I'd read a lot about why so many Jews
in the diaspora are attracted to the ideal of Israel as a place for Jews, as a place
where Jews could operate in many different roles, as a homeland, as this kind of romance
of return and the settler colonial fantasy.
But I think seeing it on the ground enabled me to understand a little bit better why Zionism

(30:59):
is such an attractive ideology.
Not just because, I mean, like all ideologies, and especially all reactionary ideologies,
it is incoherent.
It doesn't make sense, but it is suffused with feeling, and it's suffused with a feeling
of a longing for some sort of belonging and some sort of home that I think that I could

(31:20):
understand only upon visiting why that would be so attractive to people, even though I
myself was and continue to be quite repulsed by it.
So almost like through this liberation work, you get kind of a peek into the classroom,
maybe like look at the curriculum a little bit, like, oh, I understand how this works,
how it operates affectively, and simultaneously you're repulsed and it affirms your commitments

(31:48):
by getting a little look at the lesson plan here, saying, oh yeah, definitely, definitely.
The thing that struck me the most as I guess I would have been 16 or 17 was Samud, like
my first encounter with that steadfastness, that ability for people to make life in this

(32:10):
jail that had been constructed for them, because even at that point, the Cantonization and
the sort of Bantustan situation in the West Bank was so apparent, but that every man that
we met had been to jail, and almost everyone who we met had perfect English and was highly

(32:34):
articulate and university educated.
And when we asked them where they went to university or how they learned such great
English, and it was almost universally in the prisons, in the administrative detention
system that Israel has.
And for me, that was a real clear moment of understanding what Samud was, what revolutionary

(33:00):
idealism was.
I think most directly, I've for the last, oh my goodness, probably for the last 20 years,
I have been organizing almost every year, large anti-Zionist international solidarity
Passover satyrs.

(33:21):
And this was, and I feel like that's the most direct moment when I'm doing sort of anti-Zionist
pedagogy, and anti-nationalist pedagogy, anti-fascist pedagogy, and socialist pedagogy, which I
think are all the same on some level.
I took this tradition that we had started in the family because I think my parents wanted

(33:46):
us to have some tether to Jewish tradition, but of course, we were not welcome to go to
the synagogue, and we wouldn't have gone if we, even if we were welcome.
And so we gathered with a few Jewish and a lot of non-Jewish friends, even when I was
a child, and would find these Passover Haggadahs from other anti-Zionists that were circulating

(34:09):
on the early internet, as early as the late, I guess this would have been in the 90s even.
And when I moved away and went to graduate school, I was at the time raising a family
myself, and I also wanted to, I was in grad school with a lot of different people from

(34:30):
around the world who were all coming from different sorts of struggles.
Many of us at that time were very much engaged with international solidarity struggles with
migrant workers, with indigenous militants in Canada.
And I felt as an organizer that we also needed, let's say a spiritual space, and I mean, I'm
an atheist, but a kind of atheist spirituality.

(34:52):
We needed a space to step away from the struggle and reflect on what makes us quote unquote
human with all of the discussions we could have about the problematicness of humanity
as a concept.
And so starting, I think in 2003 for the first time, I wrote my own Haggadah and started

(35:16):
developing this practice.
And it's really one of the most rewarding things I feel I do in all of my work as an
activist and educator, because I feel it gives expression to my whole person.
The artistic side, because we bring songs and music and art, the side that craves some
sort of connection to what's larger than us, what's larger than the sum of our parts, which

(35:42):
some people I suppose would call spirituality.
It's a place to bring together friends and comrades, and it's a place to for a moment,
really, I mean, to be a little romantic, to really experience that another world is actually
possible.
If we're going to fight for that diasporic world without borders where all worlds fit,

(36:04):
then for one night we can occupy this tradition that is built around the story of a successful
slave rebellion and use it as to sort of pry open reality.
And so I feel for myself, that's one of the most rewarding things I do as an anti-Zionist,

(36:25):
but also as an educator, because it creates this atmosphere where education really is
like profoundly transformative.
And for the last three years, I've done it in Berlin, where I've been living, and that
I can speak about a little bit more.
I mean, as your listeners probably know, Germany is, to use the technical term, absolutely
fucking bonkers.
It is a really, really weird place to be a Jew, and especially a weird place to be an

(36:49):
anti-Zionist Jew these days.
Yeah, speaking personally about education, one of the main things Independent Jewish
Voices Canada does, as many of our counterparts around the world do, and that is education
on anti-Semitism.

(37:10):
We developed a friend, and I'm a fellow member of IJV.
She's much more of a specialist in racial theory and Judaism.
But we developed this course or workshop on anti-Semitism, which we've offered for the

(37:33):
last six years, mainly to allies, but occasionally to broader school boards and unions and student
unions.
And that's been a wonderful experience, developing that workshop, giving it, and getting feedback.

(38:01):
And we don't tread lightly.
We tread quite heavily on the history of anti-Semitism in the world.
But I've learned a lot from my partner, Cheryl Nestle, who is the other person who developed
the course with me, about different views, different historiographic interpretations

(38:24):
of anti-Semitism, and the sort of the Zionist narrative of anti-Semitism, or the pro-Zionist
narrative of anti-Semitism, and ours.
And it's interesting to see the way the workshop has developed.

(38:44):
I think there's a moment right now where there's a lot...
For a long time, we sort of pictured it as the coming generations of Jews, the millennials
and the Gen Z, they were not comfortable with Zionism or the orthodoxy that they'd been indoctrinated

(39:06):
in for so long, but they weren't willing to do anything about it, because that would be
like having the carpet ripped out from under you.
Well the carpet got ripped out from under us last year.
And we're sort of at this point where in terms of pedagogy, we have to think about what is
authentic to our own experience as people who have basically been given all the privileges

(39:32):
of whiteness, but are yet a minority and are yet in danger of discrimination on a worldwide
level and are yet in danger of being retaliated against because of this state that purports
to protect us.
And so there's a real, I guess, storm of different conceptions of how to be a Jew in the world

(40:02):
right now and how to wear your anti-Zionism or your non-Zionism.
And I see a lot of people turning towards orthodoxy of another type and towards an intolerance
of another type that doesn't necessarily help build a movement.

(40:23):
It is more geared towards this sort of neoliberal identity formation that I think has overtaken
a lot of justice-seeking communities.
And so I worry just individually about our capacity as younger Jewish people to tap into

(40:44):
those, you know, that really rich history that we have that my parents are part of,
of resisting the Jewish establishment in a way that actually has a strong backbone.
That isn't simply resistance for its own sake or to appear as the best ally, but from a

(41:08):
rich place of knowing yourself.
And so I guess in terms of pedagogy, we're always walking this line of both knowing who
we are but also in those moments where the sort of clouds pass over and we're not able
to fully articulate who we are, just relying on the instinct of justice, which I think

(41:30):
in some ways we can claim as being part of the Jewish tradition, although it's arguable.
Judy, do you want to add anything?
I'm wondering in particular, as somebody who also works in, all of you work in areas far
outside of this, but certainly intersecting, I'm wondering if this kind of work comes into
what you're doing with, say, Equity Watch.

(41:52):
Well, I made a note because there's something that you need to know about the four of us
that actually put us on this trajectory more than anything else.
And of course, we always have the views that you've heard everybody say.
We've always been outsiders.
We've always had problems with trying to fit in and all this.
But back in something like, and I'm just saying 1990 or something like that, Max came home

(42:17):
from school, elementary school in those years in Saskatoon, which is in Saskatchewan, which
is a completely prairie place with very few Jews.
Max came home to tell us that Christian prayer was being said in the school.
His regular public school is just like a regular school near us.

(42:38):
And Christian prayer was being said and that everybody had to participate.
So I remember going to see the principal and explaining who we were.
And he said he was a born again Christian, which is very common on the prairies, actually.
And I've written a book, actually, many years ago about born again Christianity and the
right.
So I knew exactly what he was talking about.

(43:01):
So he was telling me about this and that everybody should know that Christian prayer was part
of the Saskatoon public school brand.
And I should just accept it or he could be excluded as we were when we were children
and stand in the corridor because we weren't allowed.
There was no participation.
There was a line that was crossed.
So when I talked to Larry and Max, but Max was maybe only I'm just saying 10 at that

(43:26):
point or nine or something.
At that point, Larry decided, and I think with Max's say so, that they should go to
the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission and make a case.
And the case is there should be no prayer in the schools.
We're Christian, nor this nor that any no prayer.

(43:47):
There should be religion free environment in Saskatchewan public schools.
Larry put together a committee of people who are atheists and a couple of them were Hindu
and one was Muslim from my memory.
And these parents went to the Human Rights Commission and made an official complaint.
It took more than nine years.
And Max was one of the people who testified in 1999 or 2000, along with other young people

(44:12):
about prayer in the school and the harm it's done.
Ultimately, our side won.
Our side, it was a huge victory.
It went across Canada in the news that in Saskatoon, there would be no more prayer in
the school.
There'd be no more of the Christmas nonsense, you know, where the nativity, the Christmas

(44:34):
nonsense, prayers would be taken out of the school, Christian prayer, and that would be
it.
And that also put us in the crosshairs of evangelical Christians who are quite strong
in the prairie, as I've said, and also the regular Christians, Catholics and all the
rest of them in Saskatoon, who didn't like the fact that people were raising the question
of not having prayer in the schools.

(44:56):
And this meant that all of us, even Omri and his daycare center in those years, we were
all tarred with the brush of being outsiders, creating trouble, fighting against prayer
in the school, which frankly had not been done in Canada in 50 years.
There were no prayer in the school events till, frankly, Larry took it on.

(45:19):
And what we found was that the Jewish community, of course, the tiny one in Saskatoon and on
the prairies, they didn't want to help us one bit.
They didn't want to do a damn thing because their whole thing was we teach the children
and the synagogue.
We don't really care what happens in the public school.
But what we saw was in the very last day of our hearing at the Human Rights Commission,

(45:40):
a decade almost after Max came home and told us this, finally there was a hearing.
What we saw was the Jewish community, of course, came in like bulldozers and claimed it was
their victory and that they'd fought this.
And we, Larry and I, of course, as grownups, saw it all coming.
And I mean, there were some funny stories to talk about as well that are kind of humorous.

(46:03):
But what I'd say is that that was the turning point for Max.
That victory that happened 10 years later that showed if you fight, you often win.
I think, as Max pointed out earlier, this notion of multi-diasporic or the layered diaspora,

(46:26):
however you put it.
I think that these ideas of when we fight, we win and the kind of positioning within
different communities is maybe a good point to turn to recording this under a week after
the October 7th anniversary.

(46:46):
So thinking about what, as a family, as activists, what the last year has looked like.
I have a couple of specific questions, but I think it could also just be as broad as
what has the last year looked like.
Maybe I'll start with asking, you all have been long time anti-Zionists, but the hope

(47:13):
of this podcast is that no matter where you're coming from, education is many things.
Education can be genocidal.
Education can certainly be reproductive and maintain the order of things.
But also, hopefully education moves you.
So even as your commitments remain the same, how has education moved you in the last year?

(47:37):
Or how have you moved your educational work in the last year?
The way that we gain momentum is through organizations that can house these big ideas or these incomplete
ideas.
Even if we know that all we can do right now is oppose and raise our voices to not be counted

(48:00):
in favor of Israel as Jews.
There's sort of an act that we take when we join an organization that allows for us to
surpass the type of atomization that has so far allowed Israel carte blanche to do what

(48:22):
it's doing on behalf of Jewish people.
Yeah, that feels very important.
I think I would definitely agree with Omri that I think something that has been revealed
to us as not only the genocide going on in Gaza, but also the ecological crisis that
we're facing and the fascism crisis we're facing is that, yes, it's important to educate,

(48:48):
and we also need to organize.
And we need to educate ourselves to organize.
One of the things I've been doing the last year is starting a new initiative with my
friend called Sense and Solidarity, where we basically draw on the latest social psychology
and cognitive sciences, as well as my research on the radical imagination and social movements,

(49:10):
to do workshops for social movements on how to organize better and how to also change
hearts and minds more effectively.
Because there's actually lots of really interesting research that can help us not bang our heads
against the wall and prioritize and strategize.
So I've been focusing on that in the last year quite a bit and trying to build that
as an infrastructure, but also part of the infrastructure of our movements.

(49:34):
As I was mentioning, I just spent the last year in Germany, which is a very particular
context.
And I've been thinking a lot about education there as well, partly because Berlin is not
like the rest of Germany.
Berlin is incredibly cosmopolitan.
There's lots of people from diasporas from all around the world who come to Berlin for

(49:55):
all sorts of reasons, mostly cheap rent and it's a cool, fun city.
But that means there's a lot of young people and a lot of young radical people.
And it's an amazing place to organize educational events and conversations that are hopefully
going to have an impact into future generations all around the world.
I mean, I really think Berlin now is like London was in the 20th century or Paris was

(50:20):
in the 19th century.
It's a space where revolutionary and radical leaders are coming as young people.
And if you plant seeds there, they might grow into something interesting.
You can't know.
I mean, that's always the case with education.
So I've been organizing a lot there to try and do those kinds of workshops.
I guess what I would say more generally is maybe taking up that metaphor of planting

(50:45):
seeds is like, I think these guys who've been doing anti-Zionist organizing now for like
50 years, that felt like wandering in the wilderness most of the time.
And unfortunately, on one level, all of us who've been working on that, we lost big time.
Israel turned into our nightmare.

(51:05):
This is exactly what we feared and have been warning people about for as long as I've been
an activist and much longer for my parents.
And we as Jews have become our own nightmare.
And there's something utterly sublimely horrifying about that, to live through that and witness
it.
And I think everyone's struggling with the toll of that on our souls and on our minds.

(51:29):
So we have to be honest and say, we fought and we didn't win.
The nightmare came true.
I don't know how it could actually be worse to have the Netanyahu fascists in charge in
a moment like this with basically complete carte blanche by the Imperial Center to murder
people in the most horrific ways and expand their war throughout the entire...

(51:56):
I mean, it's just, it is absolutely horrifying.
And it's hard to imagine a worse scenario, a worse outcome.
On the other hand, I think as both the Zionist organizers and anti-Zionist organizers have
pointed out, we've won a whole generation.
In the diaspora, there's not a lot of young Jews except the complete fanatics who are

(52:19):
still Zionists.
They are fleeing that dream.
And that is, I think, because of the steadfastness of the work of anti-Zionist Jews of previous
generations who've opened the door for that to happen.
And now we're seeing many more educational initiatives, podcasts like your own that are
offering people alternatives and off ramps and different ways of thinking through being

(52:42):
Jewish.
It's a small solace in some way because at what cost and who benefits ultimately.
But I think it also demonstrates that it's really important to do that educational work,
to build that educational infrastructure and to build organizations so that in these moments

(53:04):
of crisis, certain things can turn and certain things can pivot.
But one of the things that I appreciate about this family is I grew up in these struggles.
One of my first memories actually is us talking about Nelson Mandela being freed.

(53:25):
And I remember growing up wearing a free Nelson Mandela shirt and being very impressed, I
think, at the time that nobody thought it would happen.
And then everyone in, I think we were in the UK at the time or it was the apartheid regime
was falling at that time.
Everyone was like, what is, how did that change?
Because before the fall of the apartheid regime, it was at its most vicious, at its most deranged.

(53:48):
And everyone, I think in the anti-apartheid struggle, you guys can confirm this because
I was a child, was completely demoralized.
There were boycotts, there were constant demonstrations at the South African house in London at the
embassy.
Nothing seemed to be working.
And then all of a sudden something broke.
But it was because of the education, it was because of the organization, it was because

(54:10):
of the steadfastness.
And I guess one of the things that I appreciate about growing up in this family is that I
just compared to a lot of my comrades and friends who became activists as adults, they
expect things will change soon.
I've never had any expectation that anything's working on unless you're willing to put 10
years into it.
And I don't think most things are going to change in my lifetime.

(54:32):
And I'm OK with that.
And I feel like I'm built to keep fighting my whole life.
I really appreciate that.
I think it's really important.
And it's one thing that I think I got from this family.
And yet, I think what you just said points to, I imagine you probably get a question
all the time of, what do you mean by your job is that you run radical imagination?

(54:57):
And I think you just perfectly articulated something about that.
It feels like such a dark and hopeless time.
And it's such an overused and often misused quote, but that Ursula Le Guin quote about
how it's almost impossible to imagine.
The end of capitalism is unimaginable.

(55:20):
And yet, there was a time when I even forget how it goes.
Capitalism's role seems unchallengeable, so too did the rule of kings or something like
that.
But to keep that imagination open even amidst genocide, and that's not to wash over, as

(55:40):
you said, the complete horror of what's been happening, but just how imagination plays
a very real position.
It plays a very real role in keeping this work alive.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Just let me briefly put on my hat as a writer and scholar, which is to say that the work
I've done on the radical imagination with my friend and colleague, Alex Gisnabish, our

(56:04):
argument is that, of course, the radical imagination is vitally important, but it's not something
that you just sit in a room and imagine a better future.
Your radical imagination comes from your daily experience of other values, of what it's like
to work with people in unalienated ways, in what it would mean to relate outside of the
structures of capitalism, colonialism, racism, patriarchy, etc.

(56:29):
The radical imagination emerges from the experience of being together otherwise.
And I would say to maybe tie it to this, my experience in this family is where I get my
radical imagination from, if I could be said to have one.
It's because I know something else is possible because we're doing it.
That's been my life here.
I wanted to turn to something else before this is over because I think it's extremely

(56:52):
important.
Judy and I have enough experience now of living in diaspora communities in Canada and in many
ways similar to the United States.
And you know, there's a lot of complaints by institutional Jewish organizations that
anti-Semitism is rampant.

(57:15):
It's absolutely like a dumpster fire burning out of control.
Everybody hates the Jews.
And that's not our experience.
In fact, our experience, and it's something to rely on, is that it's the exact opposite.
That by and large, people that I call it the romance of Jews and America, and I include

(57:43):
Canada and the United States.
The romance of Jews for America and the romance of America with Jews.
We have been blessed.
We are, despite the recent polling in Canada, and I'm sure it's similar in the States,
that many of those surveys have severe criticisms of Israel, but still, by and large, respect

(58:13):
and love Jews.
Maybe too much.
I don't know.
But they know the difference.
Most people know the difference between Israel and Jews.
But what we found over 50 years, and this is not when we declare ourselves to be anti-Zionist
Jews.
That's not why people love us as Jews.

(58:33):
It's when we tell them we're Jews, almost invariably, there is this enthusiastic, friendly
response.
I'll give you a couple of examples.
Both kids, when we had these community bar mitzvahs, I used to joke if we sold tickets,

(58:56):
we'd have made a lot of money.
People were clamoring to get in.
They loved the idea of a bar mitzvah and being invited and learning more about Jews.
There's something actually creepy about it, which is a scientific word.
It's just kind of...
Philosemitism?
Philosemitism.

(59:16):
It really is a thing.
That's one example.
Every Hanukkah, Judy and I put our menorah in the front window in a non-Jewish area.
Very few Jews do that because I guess they're afraid they're going to be attacked and have
rotten fruit thrown at their windows.

(59:37):
We've had nothing but people...no bad reactions to it.
When we identified publicly as Jews and not on the question of Israel, again, we're treated
with nothing but respect and love, almost to the point of creepiness.
Max once quipped that loving Jews is your get out of racism free card.

(01:00:04):
I don't know if he still agrees with that, but I think it's absolutely true that Jews
are the model minority.
Loving Jews and wanting to defend Jews is a way of announcing that you're really a good
person and that you're open to loving all people and you'd bear no ill will towards

(01:00:29):
any racial group because you love the Jews.
We're kind of a stand in, a safe stand in because we're mostly white and we have white
privilege.
I just wanted to say that because it is really a thing that very, very few people talk about.
The Jewish community, certainly in North America, has absolutely convinced itself that they

(01:00:52):
are hated and despised and spat on.
If you look at the surveys, especially of Jewish students, you ask, do you sense that
Jews are hated or there's discrimination?
Oh yes.
Have you ever experienced an incident of anti-Semitism?

(01:01:14):
No.
Which is very strange, but so definitely I agree that Jews feel that they're disliked,
but they're not by and large, except from some elements of the right.
Just like all sorts of bigotry, it is growing.
White supremacism is growing, but anti-Semitism is rising commensurate with other forms of

(01:01:43):
bigotry.
I think what I would just say about the anti-Semitism thing is I think there's two really important
pieces here.
One of them is, I mean, I am a cultural theorist.
I'm trained as a cultural theorist.
I've been teaching cultural theory for 20 years, including critical race theory.
I teach a lot about the double-sided coin of infatuation and resentment, which is you

(01:02:06):
can be infatuated with the other.
In Canada, I think we see a lot of infatuation of Canadians with indigenous people, but the
flip side of that coin is always resentment when the other doesn't do what you expect
of them, when they don't obey your script from the dominant society.
I've taught that for many years, and the first time I really experienced it as a person was
living in Germany, where people would be like, I tell them I was Jewish, and they would sort

(01:02:32):
of, Germans would become tongue-tied and verklemped.
They didn't know what to say, and they became extremely romantic.
And then they would want to talk to me about Israel and their support for Israel.
I'm like, well, actually, I'm an anti-Zionist and blah, blah, blah, blah.
As my friend Orly points out, in that moment, you realize there's a ghost in the room with
you, and the ghost is more important than you are.

(01:02:55):
For you all, there's collectively over a century of anti-Zionist commitments.
I've been playing with this, not to age anybody, just long.
You are the folks who set the conditions and allowed for this broad base of resistance
to emerge after October 7th and all of this.

(01:03:18):
But I've been playing with this idea outside of this work of educational exhaustion.
The idea of you teach a lesson plan, and it seems like something's not working, and you
reteach it, and kids still aren't getting it, and you're like, let me reframe it.
You get to this maddening point of, I don't know how else to do this.

(01:03:43):
That's on top of and intersecting with the work of being a public school teacher and
fighting for public education more broadly.
I'd been thinking of this, and then that came up again.
Larry is reading your piece about why we should chant from the river to the sea.

(01:04:03):
It's a great piece, but I also... I've been an anti-Zionist for about 15 years.
I've really been in this work for about three years, and really only as a daily commitment
for about a year.
Even within that short time, the number of times that I am in a group chat, I'm like,
I understand that from the river to the sea makes you uncomfortable, but we've gone over

(01:04:26):
this.
Does the labor... Of course, this is nothing compared to what Palestinians are surviving
and working through every single day.
I think that reaffirms the commitment.
I'm just wondering with the long... I don't want this to have to end on a hopeful note.

(01:04:46):
I think Judy, you offered something beautiful and to say, well, how do you keep going would
be this move to innocence that is so rightly critiqued.
But I do wonder where you find this desire to keep going, this motivation to constantly
reaffirm your commitment and keep pushing even if, as Max said, you're not expecting

(01:05:14):
to win in your lifetime.
Capitalism will outlive us all, even those of us who might be in Gen Z or whatever the
lines of that are.
And yet, we fight for liberation.
Well, what I just say is that as I think... I can't remember if it was Max or Larry said

(01:05:35):
this earlier.
The fact is no one wants us.
So the truth is that when I go to the YMCA, and you probably read my article in the blog
that got thousands of hits, the one about wearing a kaffir to my... I have an at home
exercise class and one at the Y, and when I go to the Y, the Jews don't talk to me.

(01:05:57):
We know who the Jews are.
Of course we do, because there are so few of them.
And these are wealthy people who've lived here their whole lives, who went to university
here and became doctors and lawyers, little quiet church mice of people.
And these people don't even want to know that we exist.
So when you think about it, we have no choice but to go down the path we've already started.

(01:06:19):
There's no way of ingratiating myself.
What am I going to do?
Say I was all wrong?
Or say, you know, I really want a recipe because I really value family dinners?
No, I don't at all.
And so, I mean, when you think about it, we are on a track where we have no choice but
to keep going.

(01:06:40):
I also wanted to say, you know, when everybody who has kids pretty much gets joy, nachas,
as we say, from their children, very often if I'm down, I think about my kids and I smile.

(01:07:01):
One does.
But then I doubly smile when I think of what my kids are doing, you know, that they're
involved in this struggle as well as others.
But I mean, for years, both of them were involved in other struggles, you know, struggle for
indigenous, you know, truth and reconciliation and anti racism and environmentalism, everything

(01:07:29):
but Israel, Palestine.
And it was frustrating for us for a while because they were into so many other things.
So it brings me a little joy to see them as they get older, too.
I think there's a thing about age is they're coming home to this struggle.
Of course, October the seventh helped everybody get in the mood for, you know, for this struggle.

(01:07:58):
But that that helps me from from day to day, you know, you know, I hate to praise the nuclear
family.
And maybe it's just a congregation of love.
But that is very comforting and keeps keeps you going.

(01:08:18):
Max, you're gonna say rage.
I was gonna say that.
I think there is something to like the blue flame of rage that is that much more efficient
than the yellow and orange flame of sanctimonious kind of parsimonious.

(01:08:39):
No, no, no, not on you, but like internet trolling.
So I think there's that which is just like you also just it's it's living very brightly.
And I think that it's the question more broadly of what do you do in non-revolutionary times

(01:09:00):
when you're a revolutionary.
And I think that we like Max was saying, like we have no or like what's been said before,
we have no idea what's to come.
And so we just need to kind of like do our best and have the humbleness to not think
that every single thing that we're going to do is going to be totally on the money, but

(01:09:21):
realize that there's a skill set that we're all building that is extremely useful and
that we have self-worth through our role and the movements that we're part of and shifting
from project to project, depending on what's feeding us in any current moment, because
I think a lot of mistakes that people make in organizing is just sticking to one particular

(01:09:45):
through line one particular social group that you're organizing with.
And if something goes wrong, then you throw up your hands and you're able to sort of tell
yourself that you've burnt out.
But I think burnout is a crisis of meaning more than anything.
And one of the great things that I've learned from my parents and from Max and more broadly

(01:10:09):
being part of this movement is that there's so much richness to this work and to different
types of meaning making that come with being part of a struggle and living sort of this
three dimensional existence.
No, Amr is right.
I was going to say rage or anger.

(01:10:31):
I think that, you know, in the in the culture we live in, that there's not a lot of space
for that.
It's like positive vibes only.
And I actually think that there's like a huge amount of strength that we have as people
and that past generations who've struggled have had based on just refusal, just saying
no.

(01:10:52):
And actually, there's a joy in saying no and being like, absolutely not.
We're just not accepting this.
We don't know what we want, but not this.
And I actually think cultivating that is more important than cultivating the thing that
people tend to call hope.
I guess I never really understood what hope meant.
It was one of those words that I always felt was quite weirdly alienating to me.

(01:11:15):
So I don't really expect it.
And people have written really smart stuff about this.
I just think, I mean, Noam Chomsky says this all the time, and I think it's a really important
point that like other people have struggled in circumstances that were objectively worse
and with fewer resources and fewer reasons to hope.
So like, kind of like, who are we not to on some level?

(01:11:43):
And in terms of educational fatigue, I totally hear that.
I think it goes back to that strange metaphor of like planting seeds and seeing you don't
know when they're going to come up.
You don't know when the season is going to be right, right?
You can't anticipate when the strange, sublime metaphysics of the earth are going to decide

(01:12:04):
that a seed ought to grow.
There are, as we know in natural ecosystems, seeds that lie dormant for thousands, tens
of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years before the circumstances are right for them
to come back.
And those circumstances are not simply changes in the climate, but they're actually changes
that are created by other living organisms around them.

(01:12:26):
And so one has to have some faith that if you are determined in your principles and
your principles are just and good, and you act on them and you are reflective about it
and strategize and work with others, that, you know, they might have an outcome at some

(01:12:46):
point.
But I think as Omri points out, we have to have steadfastness and humility in the face
of this.
That like, we don't know when that's going to happen.
You know, I sometimes joke, because I spend a lot of time with Marxist theorists, that
there's sort of three types of Marxists in the world.
There's Marxists who want to be smart.
There's Marxists who want to be effective.
And there's Marxists who want to be surprised.

(01:13:08):
And I always pick the third.
And I think that's also true for activists as well.
I think to Omri's point, we should probably start titling our episodes beyond Episode
Seven, Haven Family.
But I love the idea of an episode about family as educator.
And as Larry said, disrupting, you know, it's the four of you, but you've brought in so

(01:13:33):
many other people that can count as community, count as family.
But a family as educator, thinking about a title of like under that umbrella, it's of
love and rage, I think.
Literally my partner's email signature, such a beautiful concept and something that might
guide families with these political commitments.

(01:13:54):
I was struck by that sort of holding of each other accountable in your own sort of, you
know, family as a way of sort of continuing forward of finding new kinds of spaces of
energy.
And I'm thinking about right now just how much contradiction sort of the irrationality,

(01:14:18):
as I think someone put it earlier, of Zionism that is so clear and in some ways at least
to me and I think to us right now and the contradictions that are really out there.
And one that I'm wondering about that is, I think, relevant to all of you is in academia

(01:14:38):
and to the show around the ways that speech is newly being policed.
And to me, it's not that this is the most, there's no hierarchy here, but it just seems
like such, especially for liberal institutions to go after and make these new sort of hate

(01:15:03):
speech policies around Zionism.
It seems in some ways like how could this be tangible?
How could this actually last?
And so I'm wondering if some of you can speak to, you know, as educators, as academics,
how you understand this new development and where you think it's going and maybe that

(01:15:27):
there is actually a way that it could totally work within the framework of the liberal university
or not.
And I think they tried to get you guys fired a few times.
Oh, yeah.
Lots.
Lots.
Yeah.
And when they didn't get us fired, they tried to make sure I never got a promotion, which
I did anyway, but this has been rather nasty, the whole thing.

(01:15:53):
I wouldn't hold up that much hope for universities.
Maybe.
Well, we look at what's going on in the States and what's going on in this country and we
read all the time about people who find they're being discriminated against because they're
pro-Palestinian or they are Palestinian or they won't identify with Israel or they won't
support Israel.
These people are getting fired right, left and center.

(01:16:14):
They're getting fired.
They're getting demoted.
All kinds of bad things are happening to them in the US and in Canada in these universities
and frankly, even in Britain.
We're seeing it all over the place now because I'm keeping tabs on it for something else
I'm writing right now.
But I think that, well, maybe I'll let somebody else comment.

(01:16:35):
I don't hold a lot of hope for the university sector, to be honest.
I find it shocking how little they seem to care.
I think the university is a place for despair, but also some hope because we had an encampment

(01:16:55):
at one of our... Halifax is a big university city.
There's four, maybe even five universities.
At one of them, Dalhousie, the largest university, they had a graduation exercise where at the
last moment they had to call in a sociologist because somebody didn't show up as a guest

(01:17:18):
speaker and he gave this marvelous speech.
I think it's the end of the university as we know it, but that's been coming for a while.
I think the university that finds itself now at the mercy of the Zionist lobby and the
governments who are bowing down to it are universities that have already been eviscerated

(01:17:44):
by 40 years of neoliberal cutbacks and frankly, 40 years of the complicity and complete ineffectiveness
of the professoriate at defending their institution.
In a certain way, we're getting exactly what we deserved.
It's because the professoriate never decided to make common cause with the rest of the
working class and fight back against neoliberal capitalism.

(01:18:07):
Now we have institutions that are completely dependent on funders or completely susceptible
to government pressures and a public who couldn't care less about the universities except as
kind of things to attract vitriol.
Like, oh, these students are doing bad things.

(01:18:29):
The university has become a kind of stage on which these reactionary passions get played
out by the right-wing media and sensationalist media as well.
So I'm not very optimistic.
I don't think the university is going to survive.
I think that in fact, under the guise of this bullshit version of anti-Semitism or any criticism

(01:18:51):
of Israel is labeled anti-Semitic, that is going to be the spearhead with which basically
the lethal blow will be driven into what remained of the liberal university.
They will use it to destroy what little tenure protections we have left.
They'll use it to eviscerate and evict all dissidents that they can unless we can build

(01:19:11):
spaces of common self-defense.
And I think what we're going to end up with is if a country like Hungary isn't a liberal
democracy, we're going to end up with the liberal universities, which are basically
spaces where students go vastly into debt in order to train themselves to work for industries
of death.
And I don't think there's much of a space for the liberal arts there except as really

(01:19:34):
like a sort of luxury afforded to very wealthy people.
So I'm quite skeptical of what's going to happen.
At the same time, we're sort of winning on the university campuses.
I mean, many, many university campuses across North America and around the world, there
are student occupations.

(01:19:55):
Student unions are overwhelmingly voting by plebiscite or through their elected representatives
to support Gaza.
The professoriate is very uncomfortable and disturbed by the actions of the administration
and the boards of governors and the funders.
There are rebellions brewing.
I'm not sure those rebellions would be well served by trying to fight for the university

(01:20:19):
as we imagine it might have once existed.
I think that what's really interesting that's happening in those encampments is you have
a whole generation of students who are basically being threatened that if they continue with
their protests in support of Gaza and Palestinian human rights, they will have their futures
canceled.
And this is most explicit at like elite universities like Columbia and Harvard, where the Zionist

(01:20:42):
lobby has literally taken out ads in the newspaper outing Palestinian advocates.
And what we're seeing is a whole generation of students who are like cancel my future.
I don't want to live in the future you're creating.
I don't want to live in the future that you're training me for.
What's the point of becoming a lawyer or a doctor or anything else in a world where basically
like a rogue state is allowed to murder 40,000 people directly in plain sight or 300,000

(01:21:08):
people in a year and nobody does anything?
What kind of future is that?
And so I think there's something that's brewing on the university campuses in spite of the
university among young people and their allies that is creating another space of education
in the most profound sense where people are inventing another world.
They're inventing it in the way that they build the encampments and the way they care

(01:21:30):
for each other and the way that they build an alternative community and struggle.
But they're also saying like this is an institution that is made up of us and we're going to take
it back as a space in ways that really defy the traditional understanding of the university.
I usually think about, I mean today is Yom Kippur so it's the day of atonement and how

(01:21:52):
much can you actually be thinking about atonement when you support a genocide?
How deeply are you actually examining yourself and your actions if you're claiming to have
atoned and self-flagellated over 10 days of awe without recognizing that?
But I think it's worth mentioning this analogy that I keep on turning back to which is Israel

(01:22:17):
as the West's golem, as especially the Jewish West's golem of this creature that we've cobbled
together out of our both privilege and fear and it's now running amok in the world and
we're not sure if it's going to cause us more harm than good but for those 400,000 Jews

(01:22:42):
in Canada, 200,000 Jews in Toronto, whatever it is, Israel is our golem and it's been sent
to rid us of antisemitism and we don't really want to look that much further than that.
I guess maybe I just want to answer this briefly to come to your question about like does it

(01:23:07):
feel like there are more people now who are anti-Zionists and doesn't feel so lonely to
have the so-called mark of Cain on us?
I think yeah it's amazing.
I mean and this is the point if there is if I believe in anything about hope it's about
like looking at something like that and being like wow that that's amazing that that's happening
and that's because people did a lot of work to set the ground for that and I think what's

(01:23:29):
interesting is now anti-Zionist Jews or non-Zionist Jews as a political group is getting large
enough that we can start fighting and I think it's really interesting to see where the fights
are starting to emerge and I want to go back to something that Omri was saying earlier
which is that I think now is the time for that group even though we are really in the

(01:23:50):
streets and struggling to also take stock of what we want this next way of being Jewish
in the world to look like and I think to echo Omri there's a real risk especially for those
of us in North America which is a very puritanical culture where we opt to try and take on an
ever more righteous stance trying to you know perfect ourselves to you know to purify our

(01:24:19):
politics and to not be messy and weird and to be you know the best allies and you know
etc etc to really try and aspire to meet some impossible standard of comradeship that but
this to me this is like a very Protestant idea it's a very like frankly a very Christian
idea about you know finding the most victimized person and turning them into the perfect the

(01:24:42):
perfect victim and then throwing yourself selflessly in their service I think there's
something much more interesting in the Jewish tradition about being fucking weirdos and
being impure and being just like like contradictory that's one of the things I like the most about
the Jewish tradition if there can be said to be one it's just like so weird so like

(01:25:04):
odd so many odd iconoclastic imperfect wacky people and it leads to makes it very hard
to organize but I actually think that there's some really difficult choices to be made now
and some good fights to be had and I just hope I hope we can do it in more productive
ways just total maniacs

(01:25:41):
thank you so much for listening today's episode was produced by your DNA run and Samantha
Haley if you like our podcast please follow us on social media rate us wherever you listen
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yet slow work of on making Zionism and while we say that each week these are particularly

(01:26:05):
urgent times so we're going to share several mutual aid campaigns as we always do but we
are really encouraging listeners to contribute in any way they can to ending the genocide
and continuing to fight the Zionist entity and any and always thank you as always for
listening we'll be back soon with another episode of another education is possible