July 7, 2025 • 50 mins
In the aftermath of October 7, Zionism and 'Zionists' have been attacked on university campuses and within progressive circles around the world – sometimes with violent consequences. In this episode, Tami and Dash speak with Adam Kirsch, whose essay in The Jewish Quarterly argues that the Jewish people do not need to defend the term – they need to reclaim it.
Adam Kirsch is an American poet and literary critic. He is on the seminar faculty of Columbia University's Center for American Studies, and has taught at YIVO.
Adam's essay: The Z Word: Reclaiming Zionism
https://jewishquarterly.com/essay/2025/05/the-z-word
Articles discussed in this episode:
https://thejewishindependent.com.au/the-z-word-reclaiming-zionism
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Are you interested in nuanced Jewish perspectives on
Zionism today, and I mean notwhat others want Jews to believe
, but what thoughtful Jews areactually grappling with?
If you answered yes, thenyou've come to the right place.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
I'm Dash Lawrence from the Jewish Independent and
the next two episodes.
We'll be diving into this hottopic by speaking with two
people who are thinking aboutwhat Zionism means in this
post-October seventh age.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
And in this episode we're joined by Jewish-American
poet, literary critic and editor, adam Kirsch.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Adam's recent essay, the Z-Word Reclaiming Zionism,
published in the JewishQuarterly, has sparked plenty of
conversations around the world,as well as some respectful
debates on the JewishIndependent website, and that's
exactly the kind of dialogue wewelcome.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Adam doing God's work .
Who knows if he'll be ashamedto admit anything.
It's season three of this TJIpodcast and we seem to be
dropping our shame.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Some of us more than others, Tammy.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Join us as we have a go at cutting through this
exceptionally chewy and dewytopic.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Welcome to this week's episode of A Shame to
Admit.
Hello everyone, welcome to AShame to Admit.
I'm Melbourne's dewest, non-dewDashiel Lawrence, and I'm
(01:45):
Sydney's chewiest juju TammySussman.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
What makes you so chewy, tammy Dash?
What can I say?
I love to chew.
I love to chew the fat.
I love to nosh Loves a noshLoves a fresh.
Doesn't love a fast.
On the spectrum of fast tofresh, I'm deep in the fresh
section.
You don't get more, fresher ormessier than me, dash.
(02:06):
I know you love a bit of trivia.
Do you know how many Jewishfasts there are?
Can you have a guess?
Would you reckon you got thisbecause you got a PhD in being
Jew?
Speaker 2 (02:18):
I can only think of one, two.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Okay, which ones are you thinking of?
The most famous one?
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Well, obviously, the fast you have on the holiest day
of the Jewish calendar.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
On Yom Kippur.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
And the other one If you choose to partake, of course
.
And then the other one is theone that you have in the days
leading up to Shavuot, so thatyou've got more room in your
stomach for cheesecake.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
That one seems like one that you've implemented
personally.
That's the Dash Lawrence fast.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Totally.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Okay.
So there's six or seven, andone of them is coming up this
Sunday, 13th of July, for thoseloyal listeners who listen to
these episodes the day they drop, or at least the week that
they're published.
So on the 17th of Tammuzthere's a fast, and this fast
marks the breach of the walls ofJerusalem before the
(03:20):
destruction of the Second Templeand it begins the three weeks
of mourning leading to TishaB'Av.
And there's so many.
There's the fast of Gedaliah.
There's the fast on the 10th ofTevet, which marks the
beginning of the Babyloniansiege of Jerusalem.
There's the fast of Esther,which is on the 13th of Adar,
(03:45):
the day before Purim.
It commemorates the fasting ofthe Jews in the Purim story.
There's also the fast of thefirstborn I'd never heard of
this one the 14th of Nisan, themorning before Passover.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Stop it.
I'm starving already, Tammy.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
I'm curious to know because you're a well-versed guy
you do well in Triv Justwondered if you had an idea of
the religion with the most daysof fasting.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
Well, there's certainly a pretty serious fast
in Islam.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Yes, Ramadan.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Yes, Ramadan is quite a period of fasting.
It doesn't go day on day.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
It's morning to evening, that's right.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
I always wonder about the Muslims that live in the
Arctic Circle and what they haveto do during Ramadan because
the sun doesn't set right.
So if you live in the far northof Norway, as I think there are
some Muslims, what do they dowhen the sun doesn't set?
When do they actually get toeat?
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Okay, if you're a Muslim listening to this show
from Norway, please reach outand let us know what you do
during Ramadan.
Do you want me to give you theanswer?
Put you out of your misery.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Please do.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
It's Jainism.
Jain monks and some lay peoplefast for entire days, multiple
days, even weeks Sometimes.
Not only do they have toabstain from food or water, but
they have to refrain from speechor movement as well.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Ooh, that'd be good for you, Tammy.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Would it be good for me or would it be good for you?
Speaker 2 (05:26):
The speech for you, the movement for me.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Would it be good for you if I had to abstain from
talking?
Speaker 2 (05:36):
No, not for me.
Just, I think, you know,sometimes less is more,
sometimes less is more.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
I think it would be good for you to get out of
parenting duties.
You'd be like sorry Susie, Ican't help with toilet training
this weekend, because not onlyam I abstaining from food or
water, I also can't talk or movefrom this couch.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah, I think just about every parent with children
under five years of age wouldlove a long fast like that.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Yeah, they would All right.
So you're probably thinking wow, tammy, where is this going?
How is she going to create asegue from fasting to Zionism?
You ready?
There is no segue.
I'm just stalling becausetalking about Zionism makes me
(06:30):
so anxious.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Right.
Look, it seems like an unusualtime for us to be taking a
two-episode deep dive intoZionism.
Like Israel has just come outof a war with Iran, it's still
deeply engaged in a militaryconflict in Gaza.
But, as you'll learn in today'sconversation and as you'll
(06:55):
learn in our conversation nextweek, now is actually the right
time.
Now is the time that Jews inthe diaspora should be grappling
with the meaning of Zionism andrethinking not just its
relevancy but its application.
Let's get to it, tammy.
Today's conversation with poet,literary critic and editor,
(07:19):
adam Kirsch.
Adam Kirsch, welcome to A Shameto Admit.
Thanks, I'm glad to be here,adam.
I'd like to begin with yourpersonal relationship with
(07:43):
Zionism.
Did you have one growing up?
Did you and your family thinkof yourselves as Zionists?
Speaker 3 (07:50):
Yes, definitely.
I grew up in Los Angeles in afamily going to a conservative
synagogue and in my sort ofworld being a Zionist was a
normal and positive thing, andin fact my father's family has
some connection to the earlyZionist movement.
My great-grandfather was partof the wave of immigrants that
(08:12):
went from the Russian Empire towhat was then the Ottoman Empire
, to Palestine before World WarI, and he served in a unit
called the Zion Mule Corps,which was a British army unit
that was Jews who enlisted inPalestine to fight for the
British army in World War I.
He lived there.
Then he ended up moving to NewYork and settling in New York,
which is how my family sort ofcame to America, or at least
(08:35):
that part of it.
So I did grow up hearing aboutthese stories and hearing a lot
about the history of Israel, andthen as an adult I've sort of
learned more about the past butalso closely observed it, and so
I think that over the last 18months, as the term Zionism has
been weaponized in a lot of ways, at least in certain
(08:57):
environments where it's sort ofself-evident that someone who's
a Zionist is in the wrong orevil or demonic, that I found
very troubling, as I think a lotof Jews have, and I think it's
an important sort of moment tothink about.
Why is it important that we beable to call ourselves Zionists?
What does Zionism mean,especially for Jews outside of
(09:18):
Israel, like the three of us?
Speaker 1 (09:20):
You are a poet and a literary critic.
Your credits include Slate, theNew Yorker, the Times Literary
Supplement, the New York TimesBook Review and Poetry.
So what's drawn you intowriting about Zionism in the
post-October 7 age?
And can we use the word pivot?
Can we say you've pivoted frompoetry?
Speaker 3 (09:44):
It's a bit of a pivot .
I do write poetry.
I've also written a lot ofliterary criticism and reviews,
and often about Jewish history,Jewish literature.
I wrote for a long time for thewebsite Tablet, which is an
American Jewish magazine, soI've written a lot about Jewish
history, Jewish identity.
So it's not that big of a pivotfor me, but definitely since
(10:07):
October 7th I've written a lotmore about Zionism and the way
that Israel is thought about inWestern intellectual literary
circles, more than I did in thepast.
And I'm not by any means anexpert on Israel and I don't
want to hold myself out as one.
There are lots of people whoknow a great deal about
contemporary Israel and I'm notone of them, but what I do sort
(10:28):
of write about is the role ofZionism in Jewish identity and
Jewish history and in particular, how it looks from my vantage
point as an American living inNew York, how the sort of debate
over Zionism has changed theway that Jews in America and I
think elsewhere as well thinkabout Israel and think about
themselves in relation to it.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Adam, your essay starts by outlining the litany
of violent incidents that havetaken place around the world
since October 7th, directed toJewish people.
In almost all cases, thetargets of this violence, though
, haven't been Jews, but I'mgoing to use the quote-unquote
(11:14):
Zionists.
It's Zionists that have beenthe target of violence.
In the opening to this essay,in fact, you talk about a
particular incident on a Newarksubway car, in which a group of
pro-Palestinian protesters werecalling out where are the
Zionists?
(11:34):
Are there any Zionists on board?
Zionists get out of a newcategory of legitimate hatred, a
new category of legitimatetargeting, where you can say
things about Zionists that youcould never say before about
Jewish people.
How and when did that happen?
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Yeah, I think that's definitely true and in fact this
essay in the Jewish Quarterlywhich came out last month, I
wrote, finished writing in Marchor April, and since then there
were two assassinations in theUnited States of Jews.
There was a case where a Jewishcouple were shot to death at a
Jewish museum in Washington DC.
(12:18):
The man, I think, was Israeliand the woman was American.
They were engaged, remarriedand they were killed by a
pro-Palestinian activist.
And then there was anotherincident not long after that in
Colorado, where Jews were in amarch, a demonstration of
concern for the hostages in Gaza, were attacked and one was
killed by an angry anti-Zionistthere, anti-zionist there.
(12:46):
So I think that the phenomenonthat I was writing about in the
essay has only gotten worse andmore explicitly violent.
Before it was rhetoricallyviolent and now it is becoming
actually violent.
And I think that October 7thwas, of course, the turning
point for that.
It wasn't the beginning, but itwas.
Maybe it lit the fuse.
The fuse, the explosive, hadbeen prepared before, I think,
for a couple of decades.
The idea that Zionism is anillegitimate and sort of wicked
(13:09):
idea or political position hasbecome very common on a lot of
the left, a lot of Americanacademia.
Certainly it has always been inthe Arab world and that sort of
came out into the open afterOctober 7th.
I think that you could see thatfrom the very first night when
the news about what had happenedin Israel started to come to
(13:31):
America.
Before the Israeli response,the invasion of Gaza there were
sort of celebrations on a lot ofcollege campuses, a lot of
progressive groups in the USissued statements supporting the
attack.
There were professors at veryprestigious universities who
talked about how they found itenergizing and exhilarating that
1,200 people, mostly civilians,had been massacred in Israel.
(13:54):
And I think that was a sort ofa wake-up moment for me and for
a lot of Jews around the worldwas a moment when you realize
that there are a lot of peoplewho are willing to say and do
things against Jews as Zioniststhat we had thought had become
taboo.
They wouldn't necessarily dodirected against Jews as Jews,
(14:15):
but against Jews as Zionists.
It's become legitimized.
There are a lot of examples inthe essay.
That incident on the New Yorksubway car felt very primal to
me because the idea that a bunchof thugs basically would
intimidate a subway car full ofpeople and say, basically, if
you're a Jew, get off the subwaycar before something bad
happens to you.
That's a kind of primal scenefrom Jewish history.
(14:36):
It's the kind of thing that'shappened throughout all the
times and places the Jews havelived, but it's never happened
in New York City in the lastcentury, or at least since World
War II, and it's neversomething that I've experienced
or thought that I wouldexperience.
So I do think that there's thisquestion that a lot of us have
been asking and wrestling withis it anti-Semitism that's
(14:57):
motivating this?
Do we call something like thatanti-Semitism or is it better to
think of it in some other way?
And one of the arguments thatI'm making in the essay is that
if people are being attacked asZionists, that they have to
defend themselves as Zionists.
In other words, you can't saywhen someone attacks me as a
Zionist, that really whatthey're doing is anti-Semitism
(15:19):
and it should be sort of legallyand morally considered an act
of anti-Semitism.
That may be true, but it alsois a political statement.
It's a political attempt to saythat Zionism should not be
allowed in public space.
Anyone who's a Zionist is sortof a legitimate target, and I
think that to counter that kindof attack, we need to make a
positive case for what Zionismis and why it's important.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Mm, yeah, now it's a really interesting reference you
make to Hannah Arendt, theGerman philosopher, who herself
had a fairly complicated andsomewhat, we'd say, ambiguous
relationship with Zionism.
In the first chapter you citethe incident of the Zio 600
WhatsApp group.
(16:01):
This is a WhatsApp group herein Australia of Jewish creatives
, artists, academics who foundthemselves in a WhatsApp group
post-October 7th talking aboutthe discrimination, the fear,
the insecurity that they werehaving in the wake of the sort
of turn against Jewish creatives, artists and academics
post-October 7th.
(16:22):
Now, some of the people in thatgroup I know them personally
and in fact I was in that groupmyself, so I have some
understanding of this theywouldn't have identified
themselves as Zionist, theywouldn't regard themselves as
anti-Zionist, may not even haveregarded themselves as Zonzi,
they just would regardthemselves as Jewish.
(16:42):
But you're suggesting thatactually it's important for
folks in that situation toreclaim the word and to lean
into it rather than to scurryaway from it.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Yeah, I think so.
I think that if we allow theidea of Zionism to become so
toxic that there's a presumptionthat anyone Jewish has to sort
of actively disavow Zionismbefore they're going to be
allowed into respectable societyand I think that that's become
a sort of fact in a lot ofplaces, a lot of intellectual,
academic, literary, professionalspaces there's this sort of
(17:18):
assumption that if you ofintellectual, academic, literary
, professional spaces, there'sthis sort of assumption that if
you're Jewish, there is thisburden on you to actively
disavow Israel, zionism, or elseyou are sort of not going to be
allowed in, you're not going tobe talked to.
There's a presumption that youare sort of an evil person.
That I think is very dangerouspolitically.
I think that it is necessary tosort of answer back to that.
(17:40):
The thing you're talking aboutfrom kind of Arendt that you
referred to.
Arendt was a Zionist activist inthe 1930s.
After she fled Nazi Germany,she spent the next seven years
in France working for a Zionistorganization that helped to get
young people out of Europe toPalestine, and then, after the
fall of France, she went to NewYork and in that period 1940,
(18:01):
1941, she wrote this essay in aGerman language newspaper in New
York in which she said thatwhat Jews needed was an army, a
Jewish army, to fight Hitler,that there should be a sort of
Jewish army, fighting under aJewish flag that Jews could
enlist in.
And she says in that essay thething I quote if someone attacks
you as a Jew and you respond asa British citizen or a French
(18:24):
citizen, they're only going toconclude that you're not
defending yourself.
And I think that the same thingis true of Zionism.
If you're attacked as a Zionistand you defend yourself as a
Jew or you defend yourselfagainst anti-Semitism, that
sends a signal that Zionism issomething that you can't defend.
Of course, the difficult part ofall this is what is the
connection between Zionism andthe actions of the Israeli
(18:46):
government, of the Israelimilitary?
Does being a Zionist mean thatyou have to defend everything
Israel does and I don't thinkthat it does, and I talk about
that in the essay as well, onegood reason being that a lot of
people in Israel are veryunhappy with the things that
Israeli government and militaryare doing.
But sort of even before you getto that point, I think Zionism
(19:06):
is the idea that there needs tobe and should be a Jewish state
that it's important for thesurvival and the well-being of
the Jewish people everywhere,including in America and
Australia and everywhere else,that Israel exists as a Jewish
state.
It's important for our physicalsafety, it's important for our
political existence and ourlong-term well-being, and it's
(19:29):
important culturally andspiritually, and that that's
something that we should feelgood about asserting and
defending and not have toapologize for.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
So you spoke about leaders like Herzl Nordau.
Is that how you pronounce,Nordau?
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Nordau.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
Nordau.
I'm ashamed to admit that thatis not a name that I remember
from high school Jewish studies.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
No, that's a very he's a pretty minor guy.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Why is he a minor guy ?
Speaker 3 (19:56):
He was an important figure in the early Zionist
movement and wrote someinteresting books, but he's not
very well remembered.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Okay, so Herzl got all the attention because of his
dapper suit.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
Exactly.
Herzl was definitely the mostfamous one of those early
Zionists, the sort of prehistoryof the State of Israel.
The story begins in the 1880s.
In the 1880s in Eastern EuropeJews started to move to what was
then the Ottoman Empire, toPalestine and, of course,
throughout Jewish history therehave always been a few Jews at
(20:27):
least living in Israel, in theland of Israel, and there's
always been a very strongreligious connection to the land
of Israel.
Obviously, in the Torah, in theBible, in prayer service in the
holidays, a lot of Judaism isabout connection to the land of
Israel and that had always beenthe case, and traditionally
since ancient times, when Jewswere expelled from the land of
(20:49):
Israel in their first centuriesof the Common Era, a lot of
Jewish thought, theology, prayerdeveloped around the idea of
when would we return from exile,that we were living in exile,
we were not in the place we weresupposed to be and that this
was a sort of punishment, thatGod had allowed this to happen
as punishment.
And so the traditionalreligious idea in Judaism was
(21:10):
that when the Messiah came, whenGod sent the Messiah, the Jews
would all be gathered back tothe land of Israel and the
Jewish kingdom would sort of bereborn, the temple would be
rebuilt and that that wouldhappen in a miraculous fashion.
And in the 1880s, for the firsttime, jews in Europe started to
say we're going to make thishappen, not in a miraculous
fashion, but in a secular,political fashion.
(21:32):
We're actually going to takeconcrete steps to create a
Jewish state in the land ofIsrael, in Palestine.
And Theodor Herzl, who was anAustrian journalist, a Viennese
journalist and really veryassimilated person, not
religious, not particularlyJewish conscious.
For most of his early life hewas a playwright and journalist
(21:52):
he had a sort of moment ofawakening in the 1890s and he
said anti-Semitism in Europe ispermanent.
He said Jews have been thinkingfor generations that there's
going to come a time when wewill belong here and
anti-Semitism will go away andwe're going to be accepted as
members of our societies.
And actually that's an illusion, it's never going to happen.
And the only way that we cansort of save ourselves and in
(22:14):
particular save our dignitybecause a lot of what early
Zionism was about was aboutdignity and the sense of being
able to stand up for yourselfwas to create a Jewish state.
And so in the 1890s Herzlcreated this Zionist movement
with an organization and acongress and institutional
structures, and that was thesort of beginning of the
(22:34):
movement towards creating aJewish state.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
When you speak about Herzl and Nordau not Nordau you
emphasise how Zionist leaderssaw themselves as pursuing
normalisation, but Dash and Iwere wondering if there's a
generational disconnect hereabout what normal means.
So for younger people today theidea that every people needs
(22:58):
its own state or thatnationalism is the path to
equality it might seem a littlebit old fashioned or dangerous,
because we've grown up in an eraof multiculturalism.
So, you know, when young peoplemight hear Zionist arguments
about Jewish normality, they maybe rejecting something that
made sense in 1890 for Herzl andthe other guy.
(23:23):
That doesn't.
Maybe in 2025, or do you thinkthey're missing something
essential about whatstatelessness means?
Speaker 3 (23:31):
Right.
Well, it's a very good pointand it points to a big division
in the way that Jews in Israeland outside of Israel have sort
of experienced the world.
I think In America and as inAustralia, we as Jews are a very
small minority in amulticultural society, and so
our sort of existence in theseplaces depends on the idea of
(23:52):
multiculturalism, tolerance fordifference, and in the United
States Joseph historicallysupported those things and been
liberal politically and sawthose things as going together.
If you go back to Europe in thelate 19th, early 20th century,
the idea that every people needsits own country, that there
should be a nation state forevery people, was considered a
(24:16):
progressive idea because it wasagainst the backdrop of
multinational empires,especially in Central and
Eastern Europe.
So before World War I you had asituation where most of the
peoples of Eastern Europe wereruled by Russia or Germany or
Austria, and so people like thePoles, the Hungarians, the
Czechs, the Serbs, all who nowhave countries of their own, All
(24:40):
those people thought if we canescape these empires and sort of
rule ourselves, make our owndestiny, that will be a better
future for us.
We will achieve equality andfreedom in ways that we can't do
under these foreign rulers.
And Zionism has a lot in commonwith those movements.
It emerged in that time andplace and some of the early
(25:01):
theorists of it sort of saidexplicitly all these other
countries Italy is creating acountry, Germany is creating a
country we as Jews need acountry also.
And that's what they meant whenthey talked about being a
normal people.
They said the normal conditionfor a people is to have its own
country.
And as long as we are sort ofthe one people in Europe that
doesn't have a country, thatwe're living in other people's
(25:22):
countries and we don't have acountry of our own, we are in an
abnormal situation that's badfor the Jews in all kinds of
ways.
And a lot of early Zionism wasvery critical of the way
religion had shaped Jewishculture and the way that
economics.
There was a strand of earlyZionism called labor Zionism
that said Jews needed to befarmers, they needed to work the
(25:45):
land rather than working asmerchants as they traditionally
had in Eastern Europe.
So there were all kinds ofissues being debated.
But I think that there is a sortof big contrast between I'll
just focus on the United Statesbecause that's what I know the
United States is a country builton immigration, that's always
(26:06):
been multi-ethnic andincreasingly so as time goes on.
But that's not true of almostany other country in the world.
Most countries in the worldhave been nation states of one
kind or another, and the Jewishnation state is one of the most
recently created.
It was created in 1948.
But if you look at, say,Britain or France or Italy, the
idea that these are nations thathave's an ethno-nationalist
state because it's based onFrenchness or French identity.
(26:41):
But people do say that aboutIsrael a lot.
They say that it's anethno-state.
That's sort of a code word foreverything that's bad is an
ethno-state.
And I think that there's a bigdifference between an
ethno-state in the sense of aracist, repressive regime and an
ethno-state in the sense of anation state, like almost every
country in the world, where themajority belongs to one nation.
(27:02):
That doesn't mean that theminority should be oppressed, it
just means that there needs tobe one country in the world
where Jews are a majority.
That was sort of the keyobjective of Zionism was to
create one country in the worldwhere Jews are the majority.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Do you think people are critical of Israel
specifically because it's notjust about a language or a
people, but it's also religious?
They see it as like religiousextremism in a sense.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
There's definitely some part of it, is that?
Yes, but I think it's not onlyabout religion, because religion
I mean officially Israel is nota religious country.
It's a secular country.
The laws, the government areall secular.
They're not based in the Bibleor in the Torah.
They're based on modern codesof law, modern constitutional
ideas, representative governmentand democracy and all of those
(27:51):
things that we are used toaround the world.
So it's not that Israel is areligious country, although it's
true that religion is moreimportant in Israel and in its
politics now than it was when itwas first created.
People have become morereligious and the religious part
of the population has grown alot bigger, but I don't think
that even religion isnecessarily at the heart of it.
(28:14):
There's a very clear message inthat history, which is that if
there's not a country that is aJewish country, then when Jews
encounter persecution, disaster,holocaust in other parts of the
world, there's no place to go.
That was sort of the situationin the 1930s.
You had the beginnings of aJewish state.
You had the sort of settlements, what was called the Yishuv,
(28:37):
which was the Jewish settlementin Palestine before the state of
Israel was created, but it wascontrolled by Britain, and so
when the Nazis came to power andwhen the Second World War began
, instead of being able to fleeEurope to a Jewish country,
britain said we're putting downa very limited quota.
I think 10 or 15,000 people ayear could immigrate over the
next five years, and so itslammed the gates to the
(29:00):
refugees who needed to comethere, and one of the results
was the destruction of 6 millionpeople, and that was something
that was very clear to Zionistsat the time, and people talked
about it.
They said if we had nationalself-determination, if we had
our own country, we would beable to provide a refuge for
these people, and I think thateven just that alone is a
sufficient argument for whythere needs to be a peace,
absolutely.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
That was the message that was drilled into me growing
up, but then, of course, peopleof my generation thought that
our parents and grandparentswere just being over the top and
neurotic, and we got a rudeawakening after October 7.
Dash.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
I'm interested in where you chart the modern
manifestation of anti-Zionism,because you've also written in
recent times on settlercolonialism, the emergence of a
theory within the academy, andis a confluence of settler
(29:56):
colonialism or the critique ofsupposed settler colonialism,
matched up with a sort of 21stcentury brand of Arab
nationalism.
Where do you see the tip of thespear, if you will, of modern
anti-Zionism?
Speaker 1 (30:11):
And what's the academy that you just referenced
, because I'm assuming it's notthe ones that are in control of
the Oscars.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
Right, exactly.
No, I think just in the senseof academia in general or
universities in general, thatkind of thing.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Well, in fact you cite an Australian academic
who's been very influential inthis space, patrick Wolfe.
So tell us a little bit abouthim and a little bit about, as
you say, the theory of settlercolonialism.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
Right Well, so I became interested in this after
October 7th, when I notice thatthe people who were most
approving of the Hamas attackand in the public statements
that I mentioned earlier thatthey made in response to it,
they almost all used the termsettler colonial to describe
Israel.
They said Israel is a settlercolonial state.
(30:59):
Israel is an attack on settlercolonialism.
Some people said Israelisaren't civilians, they're
settlers, and that puts them ina different category.
It's not killing civilians isbad, but killing settlers is
legitimate.
And I think that all of thisshowed that the ideas behind
settler colonialism, the idea ofsettler colonialism, has really
(31:19):
shaped the way a lot of peoplethink about Israel and Zionism,
and I did write this sort ofshort book about it, but the
sort of brief answer is settlercolonialism is the idea that
people who are out of the placewhere they belong,
geographically sort of, cannever become the true owners of
their land.
And that applies to Australiaand the United States and Canada
(31:42):
and also to Israel, althoughthe history of Israel is quite
different from the history ofthose countries, also to Israel,
although the history of Israelis quite different from the
history of those countries.
But I think the idea was reallyfirst developed in Australia by
Patrick Wolfe and others, inthe context of looking at
Australian history and saying,as Patrick Wolfe said, invasion
is a structure, not an event, bywhich he meant that the
(32:02):
colonization of Australiastarting in the 1780s is not
something that happened in thepast and is over.
It's something that is ongoingfor as long as Australia exists
as a country, and so everythingthat happens in the present is
sort of not just the result ofthe past, but it's a
continuation of genocide, ofcolonialism, of the theft of
(32:23):
land.
All of these things are sort ofongoing processes and
structures.
They're not part of the past.
And that idea can be applied tothe history of the United
States and Canada as well, andhas been by a number of
theorists and writers.
And Zionism, I think, is oftenunderstood as a kind of settler
colonialism.
In other words, it's seen aswhite Europeans come to the land
(32:46):
occupied by an indigenous,non-white people and take it
from them and create a countryon top of them and potentially
annihilate them through genocide, and that is a sort of very
simple, simplified way ofthinking about the history of
Australia or the United Statesor Canada.
But you can see how it makessense or how it arises from the
(33:06):
facts in those places, but itdoesn't suit the history of
Zionism or Israel really at all.
It's a very different storythere and I think that applying
the settler, colonial frameworkto Israel and Palestine actually
guarantees continued conflict,because the essence of the idea
is that Jews are settlers anddon't belong in Israel.
They came and took someoneelse's land.
(33:27):
They should never have beenthere in the first place and
they should ideally leave.
People can frame this indifferent ways.
Some people would say Israelshould not be a Jewish state,
but the Jews living there canstay there, just in a state
that's not a Jewish state.
And other people say theyshouldn't be there at all and
should go back to Europe or goback to where they came from.
But that is a zero-sum framingof the Israeli-Palestinian
(33:50):
conflict.
It basically says to IsraeliJews and Jews around the world
this is a conflict designed todestroy your country and drive
you out, and until that happenswe won't stop fighting.
And that is absolutely a recipefor continued conflict forever
into the future and for verybloody conflict, because people
fight very desperately if theyhave no place else to go.
So I think that a lot of peoplewho have adopted the
(34:13):
anti-Zionist ideology.
The idea of settler colonialismhas helped drive them to it or
helped shape the way they thinkabout it, and I think it is a
quite destructive intellectualinfluence.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
So this Patrick Guy not a friend foe?
Speaker 3 (34:28):
He originally was writing about Australia, but he
also pretty soon turned toIsrael and Zionism, and he has
an influential essay somethingthat a lot of people who study
this will have read calledSettler Colonialism and the
Elimination of the Native, whichwas written in 2003.
The idea is that a settlercolonial country is based on
(34:48):
eliminating the Nativepopulation, so that, in order to
create America, britishsettlers had to eliminate Native
Americans, and one of thethings he says in that essay is
that the Jewish Israelis areplanning to eliminate
Palestinians in ways that hecompares to the Holocaust.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
He said that in 2003.
Speaker 3 (35:06):
In 2003.
And he implies that there's alooming Holocaust coming for
Palestinians and that is a sortof way of applying the history
of these other places to thehistory of Israel in a way that
doesn't fit the facts.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Adam, you're Harvard educated, right?
I assume you use that as abadge of honor.
Are you now ashamed to admitthat you went to Harvard?
Speaker 3 (35:31):
No, I'm not.
And I think that a lot ofAmerican universities have a
real problem on this issue.
I think that's definitely true.
I think that there are a lot ofpeople in universities, a lot
of departments, whereanti-Zionism is seen as the sort
of minimum human commitment.
In other words, if you don'tsay you're an anti-Zionist, we
(35:52):
don't want to have anything todo with you, You're not part of
our group.
It's sort of like saying, andin a lot of these places they
would explicitly say thatZionism is like Nazism, that
it's a sort of destructive,genocidal, racist ideology.
And so if you think of Zionismas the equivalent of Nazism, it
makes sense why you would saywell, we don't want to have
(36:12):
anything to do with Nazis.
Therefore, why should we wantto have anything to do with
Zionists?
And there are a lot of peoplewho think that in, I'm sure, at
Harvard and other places as wellnot necessarily the majority
and not necessarily theinstitution itself, but I do
think that it's a common ideaand it's one that needs to be
argued with.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
In the essay you discuss the curious case, if you
like, of Jewish anti-Zioniststoday.
And, as Tammy just mentioned,you're Harvard educated.
You're a public intellectual.
Educated, you're a publicintellectual adam.
(36:51):
You've taught at columbiauniversity, again another hotbed
of anti-zionism and jewishanti-zionism.
Why is it that the academyappears to be such a fertile
place for jewish people toreject ideas of Jewish
sovereignty and, as you talkabout in the essay, almost
(37:11):
romanticize Jewish powerlessness?
What are those people seeingthat?
The vast majority of Jewsaround the world who don't read
Judith Butler or Daniel Boyaran,what is it that they're seeing?
Speaker 3 (37:29):
Well, so I do talk about this a bit in the essay,
about some of the people youmentioned.
There are some people prominentprofessors or journalists and
writers, who are Jews, whocriticize Zionism and say that
Zionism has been sort of bad forJews or that at the very least,
the time for Zionism has passedand that Israel should not be a
(37:49):
Jewish state, should not be aJewish country, and that Jews
should not want it, that all ofthose things were sort of a
wrong turning in Jewish history.
And I think that they'remotivated at heart by the same
thing that a lot of studentprotesters and other critics of
Israel are motivated by, whichis indignation against injustice
, against the terrible sufferingof Palestinians in Gaza,
(38:12):
against repression ofPalestinians in the West Bank.
All of those things areabsolutely real.
And there are Jews who areangry and don't want themselves
as Jews, don't want Judaism,don't want Jewishness to be
responsible for those things,don't want to be associated with
those things.
I think that is obviously notjust understandable, but of
course no one would want to beassociated with those things or
(38:34):
want those things to happen.
No one should want those thingsto happen.
That is sort of a basic.
If you have a conscience.
You don't want those things tohappen.
The real question is why docertain people think that
abolishing the Jewish statewould lead to a better future a
better future for Jews or abetter future in general and I
think that it's a reallyunrealistic political view.
(38:55):
It's not based on a realassessment of what's happening
in the real world.
It's more about discussionswithin your own mind about what
does being Jewish mean, and Ithink that traditionally, for a
lot of people, being Jewishmeans not being guilty of any of
the crimes that power can beguilty of, because traditionally
, jews have been powerless.
(39:16):
For 2000 years there was noJewish state military,
government, police, any of theagencies that can be used to
exert force on people and thereare a lot of Jewish writers and
thinkers who are proud of thattradition and see that as one of
the good things about Judaism.
Isaac Bischoff, a singer, forexample, when he won the Nobel
Prize for literature in the 70s,he gave a speech in which he
(39:40):
talked about the Yiddishlanguage, which was the language
that Jews spoke in Europe, inCentral and Eastern Europe, and
it was a language that he spokeand wrote in, and he said that
he loved Yiddish because inYiddish there was no word for
policeman or soldier or militarytactics, and what he was
contrasting with implicitly wasHebrew, because in modern Hebrew
you do have those words,because it's the language spoken
(40:02):
in a country that has thosethings.
But I think that if the choiceis between power and
powerlessness, I think that it'sinsane to say that you would
rather choose powerlessness,defenselessness and
victimization, victimhood ratherthan the responsibility of
power, of exercising powerjustly.
I don't think the state ofIsrael, or any country, always
(40:23):
exercises power justly, and Ithink there's very good reason
to be troubled by the conduct ofthe war in Gaza, for example.
A lot of the people who I talkabout in the essay or who I
quote in the essay who areanti-Zionists are people who
used to be Zionists or who usedto be Israelis who left the
country, or Americans who wentand moved to Israel because they
were pursuing a Zionist idea,and when they served in the army
(40:46):
or when they saw things in theoccupied territories, they were
disillusioned and they turnedagainst Zionism.
So I don't think being aZionist means saying everything
that Israel does is right.
I think it means saying we wantIsrael to exist as a Jewish
country, and it's a particularlytricky subject for us to
address as Jews who are notIsraeli, because the fact is
(41:06):
that we don't have any realstake or control in what the
Israeli state does.
So in a way, we have publicresponsibility for it.
People hold us accountable forit, but we don't vote in the
elections, we don't pay taxes,we don't serve in the military,
so we don't have any realresponsibility.
We don't have any real controlover what happens there, and
that is a position that I thinka lot of Jews don't want to be
(41:28):
in.
It makes them veryuncomfortable, it's
contradictory, and so theyexpress that by saying well, I'm
not a Zionist, I'm Jewish, butI'm not a Zionist.
Especially, I think, foryounger people who have grown up
in a time when Israel hasalways been the powerful one has
always been sort of morepowerful than its enemies, the
idea that Israel is powerful anduses power unjustly feels very
(41:50):
easy to accept.
But I think again, if you lookat the sort of history of Israel
and Zionism, you've got adifferent view.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
Let me push back for a moment, if I can, adam.
It would be remiss of me not topoint out something that I think
might be on the minds of somereaders of this essay and maybe
some people that might behearing this interview.
This may not be how you mean it, but I think some will believe
(42:19):
that you are reducing Zionismdown to a unified concept.
But of course, as we know andas you in fact mentioned earlier
, there have always beendifferent versions of Zionism.
You talked earlier about theLabor Zionists.
There are, of course, thereligious Zionists, jabotinsky's
(42:40):
revisionist Zionist movement.
When we look today at Israel,the settlement enterprise, the
rhetoric of ministers such asSmosh, rick and Ben Gavir, when
we look at Netanyahu's politicalevolution, I wonder, adam, if
(43:00):
we're seeing the triumph of themaximalist, the
ethno-nationalist, the mostchauvinistic expression of
Zionism, over the universalistone, and some, I think, believe
that the wrong Zionism won.
If you're a progressive Zionist, watching Israeli ministers
(43:23):
talk about resettling Gaza,about resettling Gaza, it's hard
to see that as the fulfillmentof the emancipatory vision that
drew so many Jews to Zionism inthe first place.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
Yeah, absolutely I know what you mean.
I think that this relates towhat I was just saying about the
frustration of feeling tied toor linked to a country where you
don't have any realparticipation in the politics.
Right, the truth is that in ourown countries, where we
actually are citizens and voteand pay taxes, it's very
possible to feel that our owngovernments are not the
governments we want to berepresented by, that we don't
(43:58):
like the policies that they'repursuing, that they are
committing injustices, sometimesgoing to war, hurting people.
I think that, as an American,that's definitely something that
I felt over the course of mylife.
So I think that there's adifference between saying the
government is acting unwisely orunjustly and the country should
not exist, and I think thatthat is the line that all of us
(44:21):
can sort of hold.
When you talk about diversitywithin Zionism and different
traditions, absolutely therehave been many different
understandings of what Zionismis, what its goal should be.
I think that the sort ofminimum definition of it is a
Jewish state and other than that, people have argued about how
religious or secular it shouldbe.
In the beginning they evenargued about where it should be.
(44:43):
Does it have to be in thebiblical land of Israel?
Could it be somewhere else?
There was a moment when itlooked like maybe it would be in
Africa.
There were all kinds of debates, and there are debates today,
about where the borders of thecountry should be, what its
policy should be.
All of those things, I think,are legitimate subjects for
debate.
(45:07):
Demand is to say that thiscountry should cease to exist,
that the seven and a halfmillion Jews who live there
should be driven out of it orlose their citizenship and
reduced to a minority in acountry where Hamas is part of
the government, for example,which is what a binational state
could look like.
I don't think that that's areasonable demand to make on any
people.
So again, dissent, criticism,absolutely.
That's part of democracy andit's part of the way everyone
(45:29):
thinks about their country, andmany Israelis certainly think
that about Netanyahu.
One of the things that havebeen happening over the last you
know, even since, even beforethe war started is huge
demonstrations against Netanyahuin Tel Aviv and other places by
people who want to get rid ofhim.
But that doesn't translate intothinking that the state has
forfeited its right to exist.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
Near the end of the essay, you say that anti-Zionism
wants us to be ashamed that thestate of Israel has too much
power and afraid that any Jewanywhere might be punished for
it.
One of the central themes ofthis podcast, adam, is about
Jewish shame, so I'm interestedin your invoking of shame in
(46:11):
this context.
Speaker 3 (46:13):
Definitely.
I think that there was atraditional Jewish sort of
experience of, as I said earlier, of powerlessness, of shame, of
not being able to stand up foryourself, and Judaism sort of
developed strategies for livingin that condition for many
centuries in many differentplaces.
And I feel personally that, asan American and living in a time
(46:34):
when the state of Israel exists, that when I read about that
past, when I read about thathistory, I feel very lucky not
to have that kind of show, notto have been raised with it and
not to have to live in a worldwhere I feel powerless,
defenseless, that being a Jew issomething that I need to escape
from, or that it's sort of anillegitimate identity and that I
should look for some otheridentity that's more legitimate,
(46:56):
which is something that Jewshave often felt in the modern
world.
And I think that not havingthat shame is something that we
should value, and maybe only ifwe know how common it was in
Jewish history do we realise howvaluable it is to live in a
time when we don't have it, andthat's something that I think is
worth defending.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
I think that's something that's really
important for our Australianlisteners to hear as well,
because, unlike our Americancousins, we do have a big, tall
poppy syndrome issue here inAustralia.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
And a very vibrant Zionist infrastructure,
including an incredibly longhistory of Zionist youth
movements, and I often wonderabout how young Australian Jews
who are members of those Zionistyouth movements today feel
about that association with theword Zionism.
Adam, what would you say toyoung Australian Jews who might
(47:52):
be feeling that sense of shameabout their affiliation or
attachment to Zionism and theirZionist youth movements?
Speaker 3 (48:00):
I guess maybe what I would say is that Zionism is a
sort of affirmation of Jewishidentity.
It's saying that a Jewishidentity, jewish political
identity, is something thatshould exist and deserves to
exist, it's not somethingillegitimate, it's not something
to be ashamed of, and that thatkind of Zionism is very
important for Jewish well-being.
(48:21):
Whether you're in Israel or not, it doesn't necessarily mean
that one is going to move toIsrael.
It doesn't mean that the onlyvalid Jewish existence is in
Israel, because I don't thinkthat's true and that's one of
those other debates that'salways going on within Zionism.
Does Zionism mean that all Jewsshould live in the Jewish
country?
That's never been the case inJewish history, in the ancient
world or in the modern world.
(48:43):
So I don't think that itnecessarily means that, but I do
think it means saying it's notsomething to apologize for, it's
not something that one shouldhave to be on the defensive
about, and I think that it'simportant to be able to say I am
not responsible for, I'm not incontrol of the actions of a
government that is not mygovernment, or even of my own
(49:03):
government a lot of the time.
One shouldn't be forced toapologize for, or agree with or
held responsible for things thatone isn't responsible for.
But saying that Rosias doesn'tor shouldn't mean that it means
that one believes in theimportance of a Jewish country,
of a Jewish political identity,and that is something that I
(49:24):
think everyone can take pride in, and that is something that I
think everyone can take pride in.
Speaker 2 (49:29):
That was Adam Kirsch.
You can read his full recentessay, the Z-Word Reclaiming
Zionism, published in the JewishQuarterly, or you can read an
excerpt of Adam's essay onlineat thejewishindependentcomau.
Speaker 1 (49:45):
And that's it for this week.
You've been listening to AShame to Admit with me Tammy
Sussman.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
And me, Dash Lawrence .
Speaker 1 (49:53):
This episode was mixed and edited by Nick King,
with theme music by DonovanJenks.
Speaker 2 (49:59):
If you like the podcast, forward it to a mate.
Tell them it's even moreenjoyable that a post passed
press.
And don't forget to subscribeto the Jewish Independent to get
your bi-weekly newsletter inyour inbox twice a week, on a
Tuesday and a Thursday.
Speaker 1 (50:16):
As always, thanks for your support and look out for
us next week.
Speaker 2 (50:21):
Bye-bye, thank you.
Are you interested in nuanced Jewish perspectives on
Zionism today, and I mean notwhat others want Jews to believe
, but what thoughtful Jews areactually grappling with?
If you answered yes, thenyou've come to the right place.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
I'm Dash Lawrence from the Jewish Independent and
the next two episodes.
We'll be diving into this hottopic by speaking with two
people who are thinking aboutwhat Zionism means in this
post-October seventh age.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
And in this episode we're joined by Jewish-American
poet, literary critic and editor, adam Kirsch.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Adam's recent essay, the Z-Word Reclaiming Zionism,
published in the JewishQuarterly, has sparked plenty of
conversations around the world,as well as some respectful
debates on the JewishIndependent website, and that's
exactly the kind of dialogue wewelcome.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Adam doing God's work .
Who knows if he'll be ashamedto admit anything.
It's season three of this TJIpodcast and we seem to be
dropping our shame.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Some of us more than others, Tammy.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Join us as we have a go at cutting through this
exceptionally chewy and dewytopic.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Welcome to this week's episode of A Shame to
Admit.
Hello everyone, welcome to AShame to Admit.
I'm Melbourne's dewest, non-dewDashiel Lawrence, and I'm
(01:45):
Sydney's chewiest juju TammySussman.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
What makes you so chewy, tammy Dash?
What can I say?
I love to chew.
I love to chew the fat.
I love to nosh Loves a noshLoves a fresh.
Doesn't love a fast.
On the spectrum of fast tofresh, I'm deep in the fresh
section.
You don't get more, fresher ormessier than me, dash.
(02:06):
I know you love a bit of trivia.
Do you know how many Jewishfasts there are?
Can you have a guess?
Would you reckon you got thisbecause you got a PhD in being
Jew?
Speaker 2 (02:18):
I can only think of one, two.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Okay, which ones are you thinking of?
The most famous one?
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Well, obviously, the fast you have on the holiest day
of the Jewish calendar.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
On Yom Kippur.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
And the other one If you choose to partake, of course
.
And then the other one is theone that you have in the days
leading up to Shavuot, so thatyou've got more room in your
stomach for cheesecake.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
That one seems like one that you've implemented
personally.
That's the Dash Lawrence fast.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Totally.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Okay.
So there's six or seven, andone of them is coming up this
Sunday, 13th of July, for thoseloyal listeners who listen to
these episodes the day they drop, or at least the week that
they're published.
So on the 17th of Tammuzthere's a fast, and this fast
marks the breach of the walls ofJerusalem before the
(03:20):
destruction of the Second Templeand it begins the three weeks
of mourning leading to TishaB'Av.
And there's so many.
There's the fast of Gedaliah.
There's the fast on the 10th ofTevet, which marks the
beginning of the Babyloniansiege of Jerusalem.
There's the fast of Esther,which is on the 13th of Adar,
(03:45):
the day before Purim.
It commemorates the fasting ofthe Jews in the Purim story.
There's also the fast of thefirstborn I'd never heard of
this one the 14th of Nisan, themorning before Passover.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Stop it.
I'm starving already, Tammy.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
I'm curious to know because you're a well-versed guy
you do well in Triv Justwondered if you had an idea of
the religion with the most daysof fasting.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
Well, there's certainly a pretty serious fast
in Islam.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Yes, Ramadan.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Yes, Ramadan is quite a period of fasting.
It doesn't go day on day.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
It's morning to evening, that's right.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
I always wonder about the Muslims that live in the
Arctic Circle and what they haveto do during Ramadan because
the sun doesn't set right.
So if you live in the far northof Norway, as I think there are
some Muslims, what do they dowhen the sun doesn't set?
When do they actually get toeat?
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Okay, if you're a Muslim listening to this show
from Norway, please reach outand let us know what you do
during Ramadan.
Do you want me to give you theanswer?
Put you out of your misery.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Please do.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
It's Jainism.
Jain monks and some lay peoplefast for entire days, multiple
days, even weeks Sometimes.
Not only do they have toabstain from food or water, but
they have to refrain from speechor movement as well.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Ooh, that'd be good for you, Tammy.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Would it be good for me or would it be good for you?
Speaker 2 (05:26):
The speech for you, the movement for me.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Would it be good for you if I had to abstain from
talking?
Speaker 2 (05:36):
No, not for me.
Just, I think, you know,sometimes less is more,
sometimes less is more.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
I think it would be good for you to get out of
parenting duties.
You'd be like sorry Susie, Ican't help with toilet training
this weekend, because not onlyam I abstaining from food or
water, I also can't talk or movefrom this couch.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah, I think just about every parent with children
under five years of age wouldlove a long fast like that.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Yeah, they would All right.
So you're probably thinking wow, tammy, where is this going?
How is she going to create asegue from fasting to Zionism?
You ready?
There is no segue.
I'm just stalling becausetalking about Zionism makes me
(06:30):
so anxious.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Right.
Look, it seems like an unusualtime for us to be taking a
two-episode deep dive intoZionism.
Like Israel has just come outof a war with Iran, it's still
deeply engaged in a militaryconflict in Gaza.
But, as you'll learn in today'sconversation and as you'll
(06:55):
learn in our conversation nextweek, now is actually the right
time.
Now is the time that Jews inthe diaspora should be grappling
with the meaning of Zionism andrethinking not just its
relevancy but its application.
Let's get to it, tammy.
Today's conversation with poet,literary critic and editor,
(07:19):
adam Kirsch.
Adam Kirsch, welcome to A Shameto Admit.
Thanks, I'm glad to be here,adam.
I'd like to begin with yourpersonal relationship with
(07:43):
Zionism.
Did you have one growing up?
Did you and your family thinkof yourselves as Zionists?
Speaker 3 (07:50):
Yes, definitely.
I grew up in Los Angeles in afamily going to a conservative
synagogue and in my sort ofworld being a Zionist was a
normal and positive thing, andin fact my father's family has
some connection to the earlyZionist movement.
My great-grandfather was partof the wave of immigrants that
(08:12):
went from the Russian Empire towhat was then the Ottoman Empire
, to Palestine before World WarI, and he served in a unit
called the Zion Mule Corps,which was a British army unit
that was Jews who enlisted inPalestine to fight for the
British army in World War I.
He lived there.
Then he ended up moving to NewYork and settling in New York,
which is how my family sort ofcame to America, or at least
(08:35):
that part of it.
So I did grow up hearing aboutthese stories and hearing a lot
about the history of Israel, andthen as an adult I've sort of
learned more about the past butalso closely observed it, and so
I think that over the last 18months, as the term Zionism has
been weaponized in a lot of ways, at least in certain
(08:57):
environments where it's sort ofself-evident that someone who's
a Zionist is in the wrong orevil or demonic, that I found
very troubling, as I think a lotof Jews have, and I think it's
an important sort of moment tothink about.
Why is it important that we beable to call ourselves Zionists?
What does Zionism mean,especially for Jews outside of
(09:18):
Israel, like the three of us?
Speaker 1 (09:20):
You are a poet and a literary critic.
Your credits include Slate, theNew Yorker, the Times Literary
Supplement, the New York TimesBook Review and Poetry.
So what's drawn you intowriting about Zionism in the
post-October 7 age?
And can we use the word pivot?
Can we say you've pivoted frompoetry?
Speaker 3 (09:44):
It's a bit of a pivot .
I do write poetry.
I've also written a lot ofliterary criticism and reviews,
and often about Jewish history,Jewish literature.
I wrote for a long time for thewebsite Tablet, which is an
American Jewish magazine, soI've written a lot about Jewish
history, Jewish identity.
So it's not that big of a pivotfor me, but definitely since
(10:07):
October 7th I've written a lotmore about Zionism and the way
that Israel is thought about inWestern intellectual literary
circles, more than I did in thepast.
And I'm not by any means anexpert on Israel and I don't
want to hold myself out as one.
There are lots of people whoknow a great deal about
contemporary Israel and I'm notone of them, but what I do sort
(10:28):
of write about is the role ofZionism in Jewish identity and
Jewish history and in particular, how it looks from my vantage
point as an American living inNew York, how the sort of debate
over Zionism has changed theway that Jews in America and I
think elsewhere as well thinkabout Israel and think about
themselves in relation to it.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Adam, your essay starts by outlining the litany
of violent incidents that havetaken place around the world
since October 7th, directed toJewish people.
In almost all cases, thetargets of this violence, though
, haven't been Jews, but I'mgoing to use the quote-unquote
(11:14):
Zionists.
It's Zionists that have beenthe target of violence.
In the opening to this essay,in fact, you talk about a
particular incident on a Newarksubway car, in which a group of
pro-Palestinian protesters werecalling out where are the
Zionists?
(11:34):
Are there any Zionists on board?
Zionists get out of a newcategory of legitimate hatred, a
new category of legitimatetargeting, where you can say
things about Zionists that youcould never say before about
Jewish people.
How and when did that happen?
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Yeah, I think that's definitely true and in fact this
essay in the Jewish Quarterlywhich came out last month, I
wrote, finished writing in Marchor April, and since then there
were two assassinations in theUnited States of Jews.
There was a case where a Jewishcouple were shot to death at a
Jewish museum in Washington DC.
(12:18):
The man, I think, was Israeliand the woman was American.
They were engaged, remarriedand they were killed by a
pro-Palestinian activist.
And then there was anotherincident not long after that in
Colorado, where Jews were in amarch, a demonstration of
concern for the hostages in Gaza, were attacked and one was
killed by an angry anti-Zionistthere, anti-zionist there.
(12:46):
So I think that the phenomenonthat I was writing about in the
essay has only gotten worse andmore explicitly violent.
Before it was rhetoricallyviolent and now it is becoming
actually violent.
And I think that October 7thwas, of course, the turning
point for that.
It wasn't the beginning, but itwas.
Maybe it lit the fuse.
The fuse, the explosive, hadbeen prepared before, I think,
for a couple of decades.
The idea that Zionism is anillegitimate and sort of wicked
(13:09):
idea or political position hasbecome very common on a lot of
the left, a lot of Americanacademia.
Certainly it has always been inthe Arab world and that sort of
came out into the open afterOctober 7th.
I think that you could see thatfrom the very first night when
the news about what had happenedin Israel started to come to
(13:31):
America.
Before the Israeli response,the invasion of Gaza there were
sort of celebrations on a lot ofcollege campuses, a lot of
progressive groups in the USissued statements supporting the
attack.
There were professors at veryprestigious universities who
talked about how they found itenergizing and exhilarating that
1,200 people, mostly civilians,had been massacred in Israel.
(13:54):
And I think that was a sort ofa wake-up moment for me and for
a lot of Jews around the worldwas a moment when you realize
that there are a lot of peoplewho are willing to say and do
things against Jews as Zioniststhat we had thought had become
taboo.
They wouldn't necessarily dodirected against Jews as Jews,
(14:15):
but against Jews as Zionists.
It's become legitimized.
There are a lot of examples inthe essay.
That incident on the New Yorksubway car felt very primal to
me because the idea that a bunchof thugs basically would
intimidate a subway car full ofpeople and say, basically, if
you're a Jew, get off the subwaycar before something bad
happens to you.
That's a kind of primal scenefrom Jewish history.
(14:36):
It's the kind of thing that'shappened throughout all the
times and places the Jews havelived, but it's never happened
in New York City in the lastcentury, or at least since World
War II, and it's neversomething that I've experienced
or thought that I wouldexperience.
So I do think that there's thisquestion that a lot of us have
been asking and wrestling withis it anti-Semitism that's
(14:57):
motivating this?
Do we call something like thatanti-Semitism or is it better to
think of it in some other way?
And one of the arguments thatI'm making in the essay is that
if people are being attacked asZionists, that they have to
defend themselves as Zionists.
In other words, you can't saywhen someone attacks me as a
Zionist, that really whatthey're doing is anti-Semitism
(15:19):
and it should be sort of legallyand morally considered an act
of anti-Semitism.
That may be true, but it alsois a political statement.
It's a political attempt to saythat Zionism should not be
allowed in public space.
Anyone who's a Zionist is sortof a legitimate target, and I
think that to counter that kindof attack, we need to make a
positive case for what Zionismis and why it's important.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Mm, yeah, now it's a really interesting reference you
make to Hannah Arendt, theGerman philosopher, who herself
had a fairly complicated andsomewhat, we'd say, ambiguous
relationship with Zionism.
In the first chapter you citethe incident of the Zio 600
WhatsApp group.
(16:01):
This is a WhatsApp group herein Australia of Jewish creatives
, artists, academics who foundthemselves in a WhatsApp group
post-October 7th talking aboutthe discrimination, the fear,
the insecurity that they werehaving in the wake of the sort
of turn against Jewish creatives, artists and academics
post-October 7th.
(16:22):
Now, some of the people in thatgroup I know them personally
and in fact I was in that groupmyself, so I have some
understanding of this theywouldn't have identified
themselves as Zionist, theywouldn't regard themselves as
anti-Zionist, may not even haveregarded themselves as Zonzi,
they just would regardthemselves as Jewish.
(16:42):
But you're suggesting thatactually it's important for
folks in that situation toreclaim the word and to lean
into it rather than to scurryaway from it.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Yeah, I think so.
I think that if we allow theidea of Zionism to become so
toxic that there's a presumptionthat anyone Jewish has to sort
of actively disavow Zionismbefore they're going to be
allowed into respectable societyand I think that that's become
a sort of fact in a lot ofplaces, a lot of intellectual,
academic, literary, professionalspaces there's this sort of
(17:18):
assumption that if you ofintellectual, academic, literary
, professional spaces, there'sthis sort of assumption that if
you're Jewish, there is thisburden on you to actively
disavow Israel, zionism, or elseyou are sort of not going to be
allowed in, you're not going tobe talked to.
There's a presumption that youare sort of an evil person.
That I think is very dangerouspolitically.
I think that it is necessary tosort of answer back to that.
(17:40):
The thing you're talking aboutfrom kind of Arendt that you
referred to.
Arendt was a Zionist activist inthe 1930s.
After she fled Nazi Germany,she spent the next seven years
in France working for a Zionistorganization that helped to get
young people out of Europe toPalestine, and then, after the
fall of France, she went to NewYork and in that period 1940,
(18:01):
1941, she wrote this essay in aGerman language newspaper in New
York in which she said thatwhat Jews needed was an army, a
Jewish army, to fight Hitler,that there should be a sort of
Jewish army, fighting under aJewish flag that Jews could
enlist in.
And she says in that essay thething I quote if someone attacks
you as a Jew and you respond asa British citizen or a French
(18:24):
citizen, they're only going toconclude that you're not
defending yourself.
And I think that the same thingis true of Zionism.
If you're attacked as a Zionistand you defend yourself as a
Jew or you defend yourselfagainst anti-Semitism, that
sends a signal that Zionism issomething that you can't defend.
Of course, the difficult part ofall this is what is the
connection between Zionism andthe actions of the Israeli
(18:46):
government, of the Israelimilitary?
Does being a Zionist mean thatyou have to defend everything
Israel does and I don't thinkthat it does, and I talk about
that in the essay as well, onegood reason being that a lot of
people in Israel are veryunhappy with the things that
Israeli government and militaryare doing.
But sort of even before you getto that point, I think Zionism
(19:06):
is the idea that there needs tobe and should be a Jewish state
that it's important for thesurvival and the well-being of
the Jewish people everywhere,including in America and
Australia and everywhere else,that Israel exists as a Jewish
state.
It's important for our physicalsafety, it's important for our
political existence and ourlong-term well-being, and it's
(19:29):
important culturally andspiritually, and that that's
something that we should feelgood about asserting and
defending and not have toapologize for.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
So you spoke about leaders like Herzl Nordau.
Is that how you pronounce,Nordau?
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Nordau.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
Nordau.
I'm ashamed to admit that thatis not a name that I remember
from high school Jewish studies.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
No, that's a very he's a pretty minor guy.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Why is he a minor guy ?
Speaker 3 (19:56):
He was an important figure in the early Zionist
movement and wrote someinteresting books, but he's not
very well remembered.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Okay, so Herzl got all the attention because of his
dapper suit.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
Exactly.
Herzl was definitely the mostfamous one of those early
Zionists, the sort of prehistoryof the State of Israel.
The story begins in the 1880s.
In the 1880s in Eastern EuropeJews started to move to what was
then the Ottoman Empire, toPalestine and, of course,
throughout Jewish history therehave always been a few Jews at
(20:27):
least living in Israel, in theland of Israel, and there's
always been a very strongreligious connection to the land
of Israel.
Obviously, in the Torah, in theBible, in prayer service in the
holidays, a lot of Judaism isabout connection to the land of
Israel and that had always beenthe case, and traditionally
since ancient times, when Jewswere expelled from the land of
(20:49):
Israel in their first centuriesof the Common Era, a lot of
Jewish thought, theology, prayerdeveloped around the idea of
when would we return from exile,that we were living in exile,
we were not in the place we weresupposed to be and that this
was a sort of punishment, thatGod had allowed this to happen
as punishment.
And so the traditionalreligious idea in Judaism was
(21:10):
that when the Messiah came, whenGod sent the Messiah, the Jews
would all be gathered back tothe land of Israel and the
Jewish kingdom would sort of bereborn, the temple would be
rebuilt and that that wouldhappen in a miraculous fashion.
And in the 1880s, for the firsttime, jews in Europe started to
say we're going to make thishappen, not in a miraculous
fashion, but in a secular,political fashion.
(21:32):
We're actually going to takeconcrete steps to create a
Jewish state in the land ofIsrael, in Palestine.
And Theodor Herzl, who was anAustrian journalist, a Viennese
journalist and really veryassimilated person, not
religious, not particularlyJewish conscious.
For most of his early life hewas a playwright and journalist
(21:52):
he had a sort of moment ofawakening in the 1890s and he
said anti-Semitism in Europe ispermanent.
He said Jews have been thinkingfor generations that there's
going to come a time when wewill belong here and
anti-Semitism will go away andwe're going to be accepted as
members of our societies.
And actually that's an illusion, it's never going to happen.
And the only way that we cansort of save ourselves and in
(22:14):
particular save our dignitybecause a lot of what early
Zionism was about was aboutdignity and the sense of being
able to stand up for yourselfwas to create a Jewish state.
And so in the 1890s Herzlcreated this Zionist movement
with an organization and acongress and institutional
structures, and that was thesort of beginning of the
(22:34):
movement towards creating aJewish state.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
When you speak about Herzl and Nordau not Nordau you
emphasise how Zionist leaderssaw themselves as pursuing
normalisation, but Dash and Iwere wondering if there's a
generational disconnect hereabout what normal means.
So for younger people today theidea that every people needs
(22:58):
its own state or thatnationalism is the path to
equality it might seem a littlebit old fashioned or dangerous,
because we've grown up in an eraof multiculturalism.
So, you know, when young peoplemight hear Zionist arguments
about Jewish normality, they maybe rejecting something that
made sense in 1890 for Herzl andthe other guy.
(23:23):
That doesn't.
Maybe in 2025, or do you thinkthey're missing something
essential about whatstatelessness means?
Speaker 3 (23:31):
Right.
Well, it's a very good pointand it points to a big division
in the way that Jews in Israeland outside of Israel have sort
of experienced the world.
I think In America and as inAustralia, we as Jews are a very
small minority in amulticultural society, and so
our sort of existence in theseplaces depends on the idea of
(23:52):
multiculturalism, tolerance fordifference, and in the United
States Joseph historicallysupported those things and been
liberal politically and sawthose things as going together.
If you go back to Europe in thelate 19th, early 20th century,
the idea that every people needsits own country, that there
should be a nation state forevery people, was considered a
(24:16):
progressive idea because it wasagainst the backdrop of
multinational empires,especially in Central and
Eastern Europe.
So before World War I you had asituation where most of the
peoples of Eastern Europe wereruled by Russia or Germany or
Austria, and so people like thePoles, the Hungarians, the
Czechs, the Serbs, all who nowhave countries of their own, All
(24:40):
those people thought if we canescape these empires and sort of
rule ourselves, make our owndestiny, that will be a better
future for us.
We will achieve equality andfreedom in ways that we can't do
under these foreign rulers.
And Zionism has a lot in commonwith those movements.
It emerged in that time andplace and some of the early
(25:01):
theorists of it sort of saidexplicitly all these other
countries Italy is creating acountry, Germany is creating a
country we as Jews need acountry also.
And that's what they meant whenthey talked about being a
normal people.
They said the normal conditionfor a people is to have its own
country.
And as long as we are sort ofthe one people in Europe that
doesn't have a country, thatwe're living in other people's
(25:22):
countries and we don't have acountry of our own, we are in an
abnormal situation that's badfor the Jews in all kinds of
ways.
And a lot of early Zionism wasvery critical of the way
religion had shaped Jewishculture and the way that
economics.
There was a strand of earlyZionism called labor Zionism
that said Jews needed to befarmers, they needed to work the
(25:45):
land rather than working asmerchants as they traditionally
had in Eastern Europe.
So there were all kinds ofissues being debated.
But I think that there is a sortof big contrast between I'll
just focus on the United Statesbecause that's what I know the
United States is a country builton immigration, that's always
(26:06):
been multi-ethnic andincreasingly so as time goes on.
But that's not true of almostany other country in the world.
Most countries in the worldhave been nation states of one
kind or another, and the Jewishnation state is one of the most
recently created.
It was created in 1948.
But if you look at, say,Britain or France or Italy, the
idea that these are nations thathave's an ethno-nationalist
state because it's based onFrenchness or French identity.
(26:41):
But people do say that aboutIsrael a lot.
They say that it's anethno-state.
That's sort of a code word foreverything that's bad is an
ethno-state.
And I think that there's a bigdifference between an
ethno-state in the sense of aracist, repressive regime and an
ethno-state in the sense of anation state, like almost every
country in the world, where themajority belongs to one nation.
(27:02):
That doesn't mean that theminority should be oppressed, it
just means that there needs tobe one country in the world
where Jews are a majority.
That was sort of the keyobjective of Zionism was to
create one country in the worldwhere Jews are the majority.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Do you think people are critical of Israel
specifically because it's notjust about a language or a
people, but it's also religious?
They see it as like religiousextremism in a sense.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
There's definitely some part of it, is that?
Yes, but I think it's not onlyabout religion, because religion
I mean officially Israel is nota religious country.
It's a secular country.
The laws, the government areall secular.
They're not based in the Bibleor in the Torah.
They're based on modern codesof law, modern constitutional
ideas, representative governmentand democracy and all of those
(27:51):
things that we are used toaround the world.
So it's not that Israel is areligious country, although it's
true that religion is moreimportant in Israel and in its
politics now than it was when itwas first created.
People have become morereligious and the religious part
of the population has grown alot bigger, but I don't think
that even religion isnecessarily at the heart of it.
(28:14):
There's a very clear message inthat history, which is that if
there's not a country that is aJewish country, then when Jews
encounter persecution, disaster,holocaust in other parts of the
world, there's no place to go.
That was sort of the situationin the 1930s.
You had the beginnings of aJewish state.
You had the sort of settlements, what was called the Yishuv,
(28:37):
which was the Jewish settlementin Palestine before the state of
Israel was created, but it wascontrolled by Britain, and so
when the Nazis came to power andwhen the Second World War began
, instead of being able to fleeEurope to a Jewish country,
britain said we're putting downa very limited quota.
I think 10 or 15,000 people ayear could immigrate over the
next five years, and so itslammed the gates to the
(29:00):
refugees who needed to comethere, and one of the results
was the destruction of 6 millionpeople, and that was something
that was very clear to Zionistsat the time, and people talked
about it.
They said if we had nationalself-determination, if we had
our own country, we would beable to provide a refuge for
these people, and I think thateven just that alone is a
sufficient argument for whythere needs to be a peace,
absolutely.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
That was the message that was drilled into me growing
up, but then, of course, peopleof my generation thought that
our parents and grandparentswere just being over the top and
neurotic, and we got a rudeawakening after October 7.
Dash.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
I'm interested in where you chart the modern
manifestation of anti-Zionism,because you've also written in
recent times on settlercolonialism, the emergence of a
theory within the academy, andis a confluence of settler
(29:56):
colonialism or the critique ofsupposed settler colonialism,
matched up with a sort of 21stcentury brand of Arab
nationalism.
Where do you see the tip of thespear, if you will, of modern
anti-Zionism?
Speaker 1 (30:11):
And what's the academy that you just referenced
, because I'm assuming it's notthe ones that are in control of
the Oscars.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
Right, exactly.
No, I think just in the senseof academia in general or
universities in general, thatkind of thing.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Well, in fact you cite an Australian academic
who's been very influential inthis space, patrick Wolfe.
So tell us a little bit abouthim and a little bit about, as
you say, the theory of settlercolonialism.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
Right Well, so I became interested in this after
October 7th, when I notice thatthe people who were most
approving of the Hamas attackand in the public statements
that I mentioned earlier thatthey made in response to it,
they almost all used the termsettler colonial to describe
Israel.
They said Israel is a settlercolonial state.
(30:59):
Israel is an attack on settlercolonialism.
Some people said Israelisaren't civilians, they're
settlers, and that puts them ina different category.
It's not killing civilians isbad, but killing settlers is
legitimate.
And I think that all of thisshowed that the ideas behind
settler colonialism, the idea ofsettler colonialism, has really
(31:19):
shaped the way a lot of peoplethink about Israel and Zionism,
and I did write this sort ofshort book about it, but the
sort of brief answer is settlercolonialism is the idea that
people who are out of the placewhere they belong,
geographically sort of, cannever become the true owners of
their land.
And that applies to Australiaand the United States and Canada
(31:42):
and also to Israel, althoughthe history of Israel is quite
different from the history ofthose countries, also to Israel,
although the history of Israelis quite different from the
history of those countries.
But I think the idea was reallyfirst developed in Australia by
Patrick Wolfe and others, inthe context of looking at
Australian history and saying,as Patrick Wolfe said, invasion
is a structure, not an event, bywhich he meant that the
(32:02):
colonization of Australiastarting in the 1780s is not
something that happened in thepast and is over.
It's something that is ongoingfor as long as Australia exists
as a country, and so everythingthat happens in the present is
sort of not just the result ofthe past, but it's a
continuation of genocide, ofcolonialism, of the theft of
(32:23):
land.
All of these things are sort ofongoing processes and
structures.
They're not part of the past.
And that idea can be applied tothe history of the United
States and Canada as well, andhas been by a number of
theorists and writers.
And Zionism, I think, is oftenunderstood as a kind of settler
colonialism.
In other words, it's seen aswhite Europeans come to the land
(32:46):
occupied by an indigenous,non-white people and take it
from them and create a countryon top of them and potentially
annihilate them through genocide, and that is a sort of very
simple, simplified way ofthinking about the history of
Australia or the United Statesor Canada.
But you can see how it makessense or how it arises from the
(33:06):
facts in those places, but itdoesn't suit the history of
Zionism or Israel really at all.
It's a very different storythere and I think that applying
the settler, colonial frameworkto Israel and Palestine actually
guarantees continued conflict,because the essence of the idea
is that Jews are settlers anddon't belong in Israel.
They came and took someoneelse's land.
(33:27):
They should never have beenthere in the first place and
they should ideally leave.
People can frame this indifferent ways.
Some people would say Israelshould not be a Jewish state,
but the Jews living there canstay there, just in a state
that's not a Jewish state.
And other people say theyshouldn't be there at all and
should go back to Europe or goback to where they came from.
But that is a zero-sum framingof the Israeli-Palestinian
(33:50):
conflict.
It basically says to IsraeliJews and Jews around the world
this is a conflict designed todestroy your country and drive
you out, and until that happenswe won't stop fighting.
And that is absolutely a recipefor continued conflict forever
into the future and for verybloody conflict, because people
fight very desperately if theyhave no place else to go.
So I think that a lot of peoplewho have adopted the
(34:13):
anti-Zionist ideology.
The idea of settler colonialismhas helped drive them to it or
helped shape the way they thinkabout it, and I think it is a
quite destructive intellectualinfluence.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
So this Patrick Guy not a friend foe?
Speaker 3 (34:28):
He originally was writing about Australia, but he
also pretty soon turned toIsrael and Zionism, and he has
an influential essay somethingthat a lot of people who study
this will have read calledSettler Colonialism and the
Elimination of the Native, whichwas written in 2003.
The idea is that a settlercolonial country is based on
(34:48):
eliminating the Nativepopulation, so that, in order to
create America, britishsettlers had to eliminate Native
Americans, and one of thethings he says in that essay is
that the Jewish Israelis areplanning to eliminate
Palestinians in ways that hecompares to the Holocaust.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
He said that in 2003.
Speaker 3 (35:06):
In 2003.
And he implies that there's alooming Holocaust coming for
Palestinians and that is a sortof way of applying the history
of these other places to thehistory of Israel in a way that
doesn't fit the facts.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Adam, you're Harvard educated, right?
I assume you use that as abadge of honor.
Are you now ashamed to admitthat you went to Harvard?
Speaker 3 (35:31):
No, I'm not.
And I think that a lot ofAmerican universities have a
real problem on this issue.
I think that's definitely true.
I think that there are a lot ofpeople in universities, a lot
of departments, whereanti-Zionism is seen as the sort
of minimum human commitment.
In other words, if you don'tsay you're an anti-Zionist, we
(35:52):
don't want to have anything todo with you, You're not part of
our group.
It's sort of like saying, andin a lot of these places they
would explicitly say thatZionism is like Nazism, that
it's a sort of destructive,genocidal, racist ideology.
And so if you think of Zionismas the equivalent of Nazism, it
makes sense why you would saywell, we don't want to have
(36:12):
anything to do with Nazis.
Therefore, why should we wantto have anything to do with
Zionists?
And there are a lot of peoplewho think that in, I'm sure, at
Harvard and other places as wellnot necessarily the majority
and not necessarily theinstitution itself, but I do
think that it's a common ideaand it's one that needs to be
argued with.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
In the essay you discuss the curious case, if you
like, of Jewish anti-Zioniststoday.
And, as Tammy just mentioned,you're Harvard educated.
You're a public intellectual.
Educated, you're a publicintellectual adam.
(36:51):
You've taught at columbiauniversity, again another hotbed
of anti-zionism and jewishanti-zionism.
Why is it that the academyappears to be such a fertile
place for jewish people toreject ideas of Jewish
sovereignty and, as you talkabout in the essay, almost
(37:11):
romanticize Jewish powerlessness?
What are those people seeingthat?
The vast majority of Jewsaround the world who don't read
Judith Butler or Daniel Boyaran,what is it that they're seeing?
Speaker 3 (37:29):
Well, so I do talk about this a bit in the essay,
about some of the people youmentioned.
There are some people prominentprofessors or journalists and
writers, who are Jews, whocriticize Zionism and say that
Zionism has been sort of bad forJews or that at the very least,
the time for Zionism has passedand that Israel should not be a
(37:49):
Jewish state, should not be aJewish country, and that Jews
should not want it, that all ofthose things were sort of a
wrong turning in Jewish history.
And I think that they'remotivated at heart by the same
thing that a lot of studentprotesters and other critics of
Israel are motivated by, whichis indignation against injustice
, against the terrible sufferingof Palestinians in Gaza,
(38:12):
against repression ofPalestinians in the West Bank.
All of those things areabsolutely real.
And there are Jews who areangry and don't want themselves
as Jews, don't want Judaism,don't want Jewishness to be
responsible for those things,don't want to be associated with
those things.
I think that is obviously notjust understandable, but of
course no one would want to beassociated with those things or
(38:34):
want those things to happen.
No one should want those thingsto happen.
That is sort of a basic.
If you have a conscience.
You don't want those things tohappen.
The real question is why docertain people think that
abolishing the Jewish statewould lead to a better future a
better future for Jews or abetter future in general and I
think that it's a reallyunrealistic political view.
(38:55):
It's not based on a realassessment of what's happening
in the real world.
It's more about discussionswithin your own mind about what
does being Jewish mean, and Ithink that traditionally, for a
lot of people, being Jewishmeans not being guilty of any of
the crimes that power can beguilty of, because traditionally
, jews have been powerless.
(39:16):
For 2000 years there was noJewish state military,
government, police, any of theagencies that can be used to
exert force on people and thereare a lot of Jewish writers and
thinkers who are proud of thattradition and see that as one of
the good things about Judaism.
Isaac Bischoff, a singer, forexample, when he won the Nobel
Prize for literature in the 70s,he gave a speech in which he
(39:40):
talked about the Yiddishlanguage, which was the language
that Jews spoke in Europe, inCentral and Eastern Europe, and
it was a language that he spokeand wrote in, and he said that
he loved Yiddish because inYiddish there was no word for
policeman or soldier or militarytactics, and what he was
contrasting with implicitly wasHebrew, because in modern Hebrew
you do have those words,because it's the language spoken
(40:02):
in a country that has thosethings.
But I think that if the choiceis between power and
powerlessness, I think that it'sinsane to say that you would
rather choose powerlessness,defenselessness and
victimization, victimhood ratherthan the responsibility of
power, of exercising powerjustly.
I don't think the state ofIsrael, or any country, always
(40:23):
exercises power justly, and Ithink there's very good reason
to be troubled by the conduct ofthe war in Gaza, for example.
A lot of the people who I talkabout in the essay or who I
quote in the essay who areanti-Zionists are people who
used to be Zionists or who usedto be Israelis who left the
country, or Americans who wentand moved to Israel because they
were pursuing a Zionist idea,and when they served in the army
(40:46):
or when they saw things in theoccupied territories, they were
disillusioned and they turnedagainst Zionism.
So I don't think being aZionist means saying everything
that Israel does is right.
I think it means saying we wantIsrael to exist as a Jewish
country, and it's a particularlytricky subject for us to
address as Jews who are notIsraeli, because the fact is
(41:06):
that we don't have any realstake or control in what the
Israeli state does.
So in a way, we have publicresponsibility for it.
People hold us accountable forit, but we don't vote in the
elections, we don't pay taxes,we don't serve in the military,
so we don't have any realresponsibility.
We don't have any real controlover what happens there, and
that is a position that I thinka lot of Jews don't want to be
(41:28):
in.
It makes them veryuncomfortable, it's
contradictory, and so theyexpress that by saying well, I'm
not a Zionist, I'm Jewish, butI'm not a Zionist.
Especially, I think, foryounger people who have grown up
in a time when Israel hasalways been the powerful one has
always been sort of morepowerful than its enemies, the
idea that Israel is powerful anduses power unjustly feels very
(41:50):
easy to accept.
But I think again, if you lookat the sort of history of Israel
and Zionism, you've got adifferent view.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
Let me push back for a moment, if I can, adam.
It would be remiss of me not topoint out something that I think
might be on the minds of somereaders of this essay and maybe
some people that might behearing this interview.
This may not be how you mean it, but I think some will believe
(42:19):
that you are reducing Zionismdown to a unified concept.
But of course, as we know andas you in fact mentioned earlier
, there have always beendifferent versions of Zionism.
You talked earlier about theLabor Zionists.
There are, of course, thereligious Zionists, jabotinsky's
(42:40):
revisionist Zionist movement.
When we look today at Israel,the settlement enterprise, the
rhetoric of ministers such asSmosh, rick and Ben Gavir, when
we look at Netanyahu's politicalevolution, I wonder, adam, if
(43:00):
we're seeing the triumph of themaximalist, the
ethno-nationalist, the mostchauvinistic expression of
Zionism, over the universalistone, and some, I think, believe
that the wrong Zionism won.
If you're a progressive Zionist, watching Israeli ministers
(43:23):
talk about resettling Gaza,about resettling Gaza, it's hard
to see that as the fulfillmentof the emancipatory vision that
drew so many Jews to Zionism inthe first place.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
Yeah, absolutely I know what you mean.
I think that this relates towhat I was just saying about the
frustration of feeling tied toor linked to a country where you
don't have any realparticipation in the politics.
Right, the truth is that in ourown countries, where we
actually are citizens and voteand pay taxes, it's very
possible to feel that our owngovernments are not the
governments we want to berepresented by, that we don't
(43:58):
like the policies that they'repursuing, that they are
committing injustices, sometimesgoing to war, hurting people.
I think that, as an American,that's definitely something that
I felt over the course of mylife.
So I think that there's adifference between saying the
government is acting unwisely orunjustly and the country should
not exist, and I think thatthat is the line that all of us
(44:21):
can sort of hold.
When you talk about diversitywithin Zionism and different
traditions, absolutely therehave been many different
understandings of what Zionismis, what its goal should be.
I think that the sort ofminimum definition of it is a
Jewish state and other than that, people have argued about how
religious or secular it shouldbe.
In the beginning they evenargued about where it should be.
(44:43):
Does it have to be in thebiblical land of Israel?
Could it be somewhere else?
There was a moment when itlooked like maybe it would be in
Africa.
There were all kinds of debates, and there are debates today,
about where the borders of thecountry should be, what its
policy should be.
All of those things, I think,are legitimate subjects for
debate.
(45:07):
Demand is to say that thiscountry should cease to exist,
that the seven and a halfmillion Jews who live there
should be driven out of it orlose their citizenship and
reduced to a minority in acountry where Hamas is part of
the government, for example,which is what a binational state
could look like.
I don't think that that's areasonable demand to make on any
people.
So again, dissent, criticism,absolutely.
That's part of democracy andit's part of the way everyone
(45:29):
thinks about their country, andmany Israelis certainly think
that about Netanyahu.
One of the things that havebeen happening over the last you
know, even since, even beforethe war started is huge
demonstrations against Netanyahuin Tel Aviv and other places by
people who want to get rid ofhim.
But that doesn't translate intothinking that the state has
forfeited its right to exist.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
Near the end of the essay, you say that anti-Zionism
wants us to be ashamed that thestate of Israel has too much
power and afraid that any Jewanywhere might be punished for
it.
One of the central themes ofthis podcast, adam, is about
Jewish shame, so I'm interestedin your invoking of shame in
(46:11):
this context.
Speaker 3 (46:13):
Definitely.
I think that there was atraditional Jewish sort of
experience of, as I said earlier, of powerlessness, of shame, of
not being able to stand up foryourself, and Judaism sort of
developed strategies for livingin that condition for many
centuries in many differentplaces.
And I feel personally that, asan American and living in a time
(46:34):
when the state of Israel exists, that when I read about that
past, when I read about thathistory, I feel very lucky not
to have that kind of show, notto have been raised with it and
not to have to live in a worldwhere I feel powerless,
defenseless, that being a Jew issomething that I need to escape
from, or that it's sort of anillegitimate identity and that I
should look for some otheridentity that's more legitimate,
(46:56):
which is something that Jewshave often felt in the modern
world.
And I think that not havingthat shame is something that we
should value, and maybe only ifwe know how common it was in
Jewish history do we realise howvaluable it is to live in a
time when we don't have it, andthat's something that I think is
worth defending.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
I think that's something that's really
important for our Australianlisteners to hear as well,
because, unlike our Americancousins, we do have a big, tall
poppy syndrome issue here inAustralia.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
And a very vibrant Zionist infrastructure,
including an incredibly longhistory of Zionist youth
movements, and I often wonderabout how young Australian Jews
who are members of those Zionistyouth movements today feel
about that association with theword Zionism.
Adam, what would you say toyoung Australian Jews who might
(47:52):
be feeling that sense of shameabout their affiliation or
attachment to Zionism and theirZionist youth movements?
Speaker 3 (48:00):
I guess maybe what I would say is that Zionism is a
sort of affirmation of Jewishidentity.
It's saying that a Jewishidentity, jewish political
identity, is something thatshould exist and deserves to
exist, it's not somethingillegitimate, it's not something
to be ashamed of, and that thatkind of Zionism is very
important for Jewish well-being.
(48:21):
Whether you're in Israel or not, it doesn't necessarily mean
that one is going to move toIsrael.
It doesn't mean that the onlyvalid Jewish existence is in
Israel, because I don't thinkthat's true and that's one of
those other debates that'salways going on within Zionism.
Does Zionism mean that all Jewsshould live in the Jewish
country?
That's never been the case inJewish history, in the ancient
world or in the modern world.
(48:43):
So I don't think that itnecessarily means that, but I do
think it means saying it's notsomething to apologize for, it's
not something that one shouldhave to be on the defensive
about, and I think that it'simportant to be able to say I am
not responsible for, I'm not incontrol of the actions of a
government that is not mygovernment, or even of my own
(49:03):
government a lot of the time.
One shouldn't be forced toapologize for, or agree with or
held responsible for things thatone isn't responsible for.
But saying that Rosias doesn'tor shouldn't mean that it means
that one believes in theimportance of a Jewish country,
of a Jewish political identity,and that is something that I
(49:24):
think everyone can take pride in, and that is something that I
think everyone can take pride in.
Speaker 2 (49:29):
That was Adam Kirsch.
You can read his full recentessay, the Z-Word Reclaiming
Zionism, published in the JewishQuarterly, or you can read an
excerpt of Adam's essay onlineat thejewishindependentcomau.
Speaker 1 (49:45):
And that's it for this week.
You've been listening to AShame to Admit with me Tammy
Sussman.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
And me, Dash Lawrence .
Speaker 1 (49:53):
This episode was mixed and edited by Nick King,
with theme music by DonovanJenks.
Speaker 2 (49:59):
If you like the podcast, forward it to a mate.
Tell them it's even moreenjoyable that a post passed
press.
And don't forget to subscribeto the Jewish Independent to get
your bi-weekly newsletter inyour inbox twice a week, on a
Tuesday and a Thursday.
Speaker 1 (50:16):
As always, thanks for your support and look out for
us next week.
Speaker 2 (50:21):
Bye-bye, thank you.
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