[SPEAKER_02]: I'm Rabbi Yami Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York, and you're listening to in these times.
[SPEAKER_02]: In the wake of October 7, many Jews, especially young Jews, have found themselves navigating a world that feels suddenly hostile, confusing, and morally upside down.
[SPEAKER_02]: Antisionism is no longer fringe, it is increasingly mainstream, often presented not as an argument, but as a moral certainty.
[SPEAKER_02]: So what is driving this shift?
[SPEAKER_02]: And how should we respond?
[SPEAKER_02]: My guest today has watched this conflict play out up close.
[SPEAKER_02]: Adam Lewis Klein is a writer, anthropologist, and the founder of the Movement Against Anti-Zionism.
[SPEAKER_02]: He studied philosophy at Yale, and is completing his PhD at McGill where his work focuses on Jewish peoplehood, and the ideas shaping contemporary anti-Jewish hate.
[SPEAKER_02]: Adam, welcome to in these times.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much, pleasure to be here.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've seen you online quite frequently and you're one of our great Jewish young.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know if you if you like the term influencer or not but it doesn't influence people because you're an academic as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: What brought you into this highly charged conflict of ideas on social media?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you know, October 7th was a transformative moment for me like it was for so many, but I also had a unique experience that I've talked about in other places, but I was in the Amazon doing field work anthropological field work for my PhD with an indigenous people and I've been living in a indigenous village without any phone or computer.
[SPEAKER_01]: for three months every day I would walk over from the little health post where they put all the foreigners when where I was staying to the central pavilion in this village and I would meet with the elders of this tribe and I would learn about their sacred stories, their traditions, and history that they were trying to maintain in the present.
[SPEAKER_01]: in the face of the simulation and, you know, domination from a, you know, more powerful, majoritarian society in Columbia.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I got back to a local town.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's still on the Amazon on October 9th.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I opened my computer for the first time in three months.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the first thing I saw was the note of a music.
[SPEAKER_01]: festival.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the second thing I saw was all of my friends and colleagues in my luxury academic space, turning on Israel, bashing Israel, and pretty soon just through speaking up against this movement.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was perched for academia.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I
[SPEAKER_01]: I had to really come to a reckoning really about my identity as a Jew, and also my identity as an academic, as someone who was in these intellectual spaces.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what I saw was a kind of pseudoscience that had emerged behind my back.
[SPEAKER_01]: I hadn't been paying too much attention to the Israel discourse actually prior to October 7th, but there was a whole new pseudoscience of Jews as these alien white colonizers
[SPEAKER_01]: kind of invented the notion that we come from Israel and that any of our objections to Jew-Hate against us was kind of fake.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was part of this conspiracy to claim we have a right in this land that we actually have no right to belong to.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I needed to find a way to speak back to that and to use actually my academic training, my understanding of indigeneity and the critique of colonialism, to speak back to what this new pseudoscience was doing.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you mentioned that you were purged from academia immediately after October 7th.
[SPEAKER_02]: What did you mean by that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I immediately started getting hate mail from people in my circles.
[SPEAKER_01]: People say, oh, I followed your work.
[SPEAKER_01]: I really enjoyed it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just realized, you know, you're nothing but a filthy Zionist.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I had a journal that I had created with a friend of mine that was picking up some steam.
[SPEAKER_01]: We had some major academics who were backing the academic journal.
[SPEAKER_01]: We created, and one by one, each member of the academic journal said,
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we no longer want to work with him.
[SPEAKER_01]: My intellectual hero at Wardo Vareste Castro, who's Brazilian anthropologist, he's one of the reasons I became interested in Amazonian anthropology.
[SPEAKER_01]: He publicly disowned me in front of his 10,000 followers and said, you know, Adam is stupid.
[SPEAKER_01]: Adam is evil.
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course his own Twitter feed and his own behavior is radically antisionist and hateful.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's basically just a live stream of antisionist liables and hate for his railways.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was extremely disturbing for me to see my intellectual hero in that light.
[SPEAKER_02]: And all this began immediately after October 7th.
[SPEAKER_02]: You almost immediately, I think you said October 9th.
[SPEAKER_02]: is when you actually had an opportunity.
[SPEAKER_02]: So two days after October 7th, you had an opportunity to go online.
[SPEAKER_02]: And did you post something that prompted this?
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think my supposed to positive things about Israel, like I stand with Israel or Amisrael High or something like that, and I immediately started getting hate.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I just people started posting pictures that people burning Israeli flags under my posts.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I would have this thing where they would obsessively laugh react to my posts.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've written about it as a kind of stereotypical and designist behavior that come on a juice post or someone they view as Zionists and they will sort of obsessively laugh react everything that person says so people would go on my wall and and then people would do this who were PhD students.
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, these were PhD students and other elite universities who suddenly were behaving in this way.
[SPEAKER_01]: So they just been suddenly taken over by by a total pathology.
[SPEAKER_01]: But another thing I found that that was important is at the time I called it antisemitism because
[SPEAKER_01]: So I hadn't really experienced that much at D7's in my life.
[SPEAKER_01]: I went to a Northeastern prep school, like a kind of old school, Northeastern boarding school for high school, and I did have a few altercations with some people with kind of classical antisemitism, Protestant, old-boy antisemitism.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what I experienced after October 7th,
[SPEAKER_01]: just felt on another level, the visceral hatred that was directed at me and then also the fact that these people kept saying they weren't anti-Semitic, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I found that the more I told them they were anti-Semitic because that was the word I reached for, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: I felt that I was being hated for my identity as a Jew.
[SPEAKER_01]: I felt that viscerally.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the more I said they were anti-Semitic, the worse it went for me, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because many people who cut me off,
[SPEAKER_01]: They said, I hate how you're using antisemitism to justify Israel's atrocities.
[SPEAKER_01]: So even when I didn't even really talk about Israel, there was a period where I tried.
[SPEAKER_01]: I tried, so having a reasonable conversation about Israel and Palestine.
[SPEAKER_01]: But even when I wasn't, they just hated that I was so called accusing them of anti-Semitism.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was part of what led me to realize that what has to take on anti-signism directly in our current language around anti-signism, our methods of talking about when anti-signism comes anti-Semitism just doesn't work.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I want to talk to you more about that, but just to circle back.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you're speaking as if this took you
[SPEAKER_02]: But this kind of vehemence that you're describing and the depth of the emotional response doesn't materialize out of nowhere.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was obviously there before.
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you agree with that?
[SPEAKER_02]: And you just simply didn't pay enough attention to it or was there something new about all of this that was triggered by October 7th?
[SPEAKER_01]: So the intellectual infrastructure was entirely there before they'd already reconstructed the academy entirely,
[SPEAKER_01]: around what Zinreb River calls third-worldism, basically, the notion that every single thing we study should be fit into this moralizing framework of Western, oppressive evil, white people harming victimized brown and indigenous people.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that intellectual infrastructure was already there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Zion is... You knew it was there, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: That wasn't surprising to you.
[SPEAKER_02]: You spent your entire
[SPEAKER_01]: I participated in it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would say, for a long time, I think I had sort of third-worldist views.
[SPEAKER_01]: I sort of view the whole world as kind of one Western colonial evil.
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't really over-emphasize how much the critical academies just teaches you to see the world that way.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you're sort of encouraged and rewarded for finding new ways to condemn the West as evil
[SPEAKER_01]: problem with the world as such in terms of Western history, civilization, metaphysics, right, you can go to Heidegger and say, well, it's all started with Plato and that was the problem, right, or you can go even further back and say, the pre-secretics with the problem or the iron age, or whatever, there's always just a way of kind of saying,
[SPEAKER_01]: Where did the problem start because this whole world is evil?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a kind of nostic relationship to the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I definitely bought into it for a while.
[SPEAKER_01]: My experience in the Amazon really changed how I thought about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I realized that I had fallen into the same romanticizing tendencies of indigenous people.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even though I knew it was a problem, I knew it was a danger, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think the stark reality of, you know, the people in the Amazon that I work with, they,
[SPEAKER_01]: were not leftists.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were opposed to the FARC, who were a radical Maoist guerrillas who would kidnap indigenous children and commit atrocities in the Amazon.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were not necessarily opposed to all missionaries, right, whereas a lot of what you're taught in the academy in anthropology is that missionaries are evil.
[SPEAKER_01]: They try and destroy indigenous cultures.
[SPEAKER_01]: You should stay within indigenous people against missionaries.
[SPEAKER_01]: I learned that the indigenous relationship to
[SPEAKER_01]: So I saw that these marginalized types of indigenous and colonizer were stereotypes that concealed a more interesting reality.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when I saw that being applied to Jews, in something I knew was false, where Jews are just white colonizers don't come from Israel.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I knew that was just ignorant.
[SPEAKER_01]: I realized that that whole framework had to be kind of promoted and changed, not destroying it as a whole, but it has to be reconfigured.
[SPEAKER_02]: is a fair to characterize your answers as October 7th really impacted on you in a profound way and altered your trajectory.
[SPEAKER_01]: 100% I couldn't really imagine that before October 7th that I'd be doing what I'm doing now, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: But it really just forced anyone who was Jewish in the economy.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think into a set of choices, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: You could either be silent,
[SPEAKER_01]: and hope it passes and not want to ruin your reputation in your career by speaking out against anti-zionism, by showing any association or affiliation with Israel, or you can become an anti-zionist Jew.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can tokenize yourself, you can absorb it, you can assimilate to the Jew hatred around you, which has obviously become a more and more prominent position.
[SPEAKER_01]: or you can speak out against it and risk your career in order to speak the truth and stand by your values.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was lucky.
[SPEAKER_01]: I chose three and also I'm still somehow still a PhD student.
[SPEAKER_01]: They haven't managed to get rid of me and people have also taken an interest in what I'm saying.
[SPEAKER_02]: You were back online on October 9th.
[SPEAKER_02]: Presumably you posted some posts expressing solidarity with
[SPEAKER_02]: If you look back at October 9, this was before Israel even began to launch a counter offensive.
[SPEAKER_02]: They were still fighting off terrorists in their streets and towns.
[SPEAKER_02]: And two days later, the dimensions of the massacre were becoming apparent, including at the Nova Festival.
[SPEAKER_02]: What was the intellectual grounding?
[SPEAKER_02]: of these vicious attacks against Israel, accusing Israel of all kinds of immorality, even genocide, the genocide accusations began before Israel even began to respond.
[SPEAKER_02]: What triggered that?
[SPEAKER_02]: The mass savagery inflicted on, I mean, first and foremost human beings, and with respect to Jews, the worst, mass casualty event, since the Holocaust,
[SPEAKER_02]: response that completely ignores Israeli suffering.
[SPEAKER_02]: In fact, kind of glorifies in Israeli suffering and uses it to leverage third-worldism and various anti-signist perspectives.
[SPEAKER_02]: Again, how do you explain that?
[SPEAKER_02]: And are you able to penetrate these very highly intelligent, highly educated people with reason, if within two days that we're accusing Israel of this kind of vicious behavior before Israel even responded?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's precisely that dynamic and what I saw within the Academy, which I call the belly of the beast, because it's where all the anti-zionism comes from, and it's where it's at its most intense.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's precisely because of what I saw then, that I was able to see in the years that followed
[SPEAKER_01]: As this anti-zine is in the academy, basically was just mainstreamed.
[SPEAKER_01]: It flowed into the mainstream media.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it was already in the NGOs, but they amplified their accusations.
[SPEAKER_01]: They produced new reports from Albany's, you know, with the genocide libelish.
[SPEAKER_01]: She has two different reports.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had the commission from the U.N. to accuse Israel of genocide.
[SPEAKER_01]: I saw this escalation.
[SPEAKER_01]: I saw this main streaming until it was in the New York Times.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I said, wow, what I saw in my tiny little world of radical left-wing intellectuals is now in the New York Times as if this is obvious.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that allowed me also to see through it all because I was there, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: We're not physically, but I was watching it, you know, in those social networks, right, on October 9th, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And the genocide libel, as you know, as you've just described, was already present on October 7th.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were already accusing genocide against Israel on October 7th.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, that's
[SPEAKER_01]: in itself is extremely delegitimizing, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, if you have a movement, you know, prosaically, right, people who support genocide, right, they were cheering on October 7th, aren't exactly the most credible actors, you know, to make event a claim about genocide against the people there, they're committing genocide against.
[SPEAKER_01]: But more broadly, you also see this pattern in other genocides.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's called accusation in a mirror, something that Susan Benesch, who's a legal scholar, Kenneth Marcus, as well, have developed.
[SPEAKER_01]: It originally comes from the Roendon genocides.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I saw more and more that essentially this was just the pattern and the structure of the genocide libel.
[SPEAKER_01]: But as you say, the genocide libel is really just a standing accusation of anti-zionist ideology.
[SPEAKER_01]: It goes back years.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the content of the claim is unrelated to Israel's actions.
[SPEAKER_01]: They actually use the theoretical framework called settler colonial theory, according to which Israel is a protracted genocide.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's existence is just a genocide over the decades.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's inherently genocide.
[SPEAKER_01]: The way Israel set up as a kind of ethno state where you need to preserve a Jewish majority state.
[SPEAKER_01]: and it's supposedly stealing land that's inherently Palestinian or Arab requires genocide.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you actually hear a design is talking this way all the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have a kind of metaphysics of Israel.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's essentially evil.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I think that delegitimizes the genocide liable in itself, and I also think it shouldn't be acceptable.
[SPEAKER_01]: We've always talked about when does antisynism become antisemitism or people secretly antisemitic and that's motivating their attacks on Israel, which otherwise would be okay because you could attack a state who cares if it's a state.
[SPEAKER_01]: I actually don't think so.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think saying that a Jewish state is inherently evil shouldn't be an acceptable opinion.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's essentializing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And actually, you're not allowed to destroy Israelis as a national identity, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Even without anything to do with anti-Semitism, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: The genocide convention says that genocide is intent to annihilate a protected group, and that includes ethnic, racial, religious, and national, and the original formulation.
[SPEAKER_01]: That includes national groups.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, you actually can't even really argue for a one-state solution.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think many people would notice this.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you say that, oh, I'm not against killing Israelis or killing Jews, I want a different kind of administrative political structure.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, don't want an Israel or Jewish majority state.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what you're actually saying,
[SPEAKER_01]: you don't think there should be as railies, because if there's no Israel, there's no as railies.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that intent is actually genocidal, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: If you try and carry that out through mass murdering people, it's a genocide.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you try and carry it out through other ways, it could be forms of cultural genocide, which aren't part of the legal definition, but which are worth considering.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I really don't think the anti-Zionism even on its own is legitimate.
[SPEAKER_02]: Did you receive any support from faculty in general and in particular Jewish faculty?
[SPEAKER_01]: I received virtually no support within McGill, no one sort of publicly stood up for me in any way.
[SPEAKER_01]: And at the university, what I saw as an anti-zionist, complaints students who were being discriminated against by anti-zionists were never ever treated.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they still are to the stake, according to my knowledge.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, any student has an encounter with an anti-zionist.
[SPEAKER_01]: They feel discriminated or harassed.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's never treated, because the university and the administration only has a concept of
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think this is what we're seeing across the United States as well, especially the patchy legal record.
[SPEAKER_01]: We've had some victories, like in UC Berkeley, that the Brandeis Center brought, showing that Antisignus were discriminating against Jewish students, but in others like the Stan with us versus MIT, we lost very badly in the judges said, well, Antisignus, you can't ever know if Antisemitism will assume it's legitimate.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think this patchy record comes from the fact that the public discourse only recognizes classical antisemitism.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then when there's antisemitism, antisemitism is different from classical antisemitism.
[SPEAKER_01]: It assumes its criticism of Israel.
[SPEAKER_01]: But like I was saying before, antisemitism isn't criticism of Israel.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's actually just a hatred of a country and its people.
[SPEAKER_01]: both.
[SPEAKER_01]: Antisigns hate the state, like they think it's inherently evil, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Not as a rational critique.
[SPEAKER_01]: They just think it's a kind of metaphysical demonic entity, and they hate the people in the culture.
[SPEAKER_01]: They hate Israelis.
[SPEAKER_01]: As you recently saw, there was that less preso, Italian magazine that had this racist depiction of this Israeli soldier,
[SPEAKER_01]: whose teeth were kind of buried and they made the soldier look kind of animolistic.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was a clearly racist depiction.
[SPEAKER_01]: All of the anti-zynists were parading around this picture and saying, look how evil and terrible and ugly this person is.
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, they then found the video of the soldier from when the picture is taken.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's no evidence the soldier has committed any crime.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think this is a perfect example.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was racism, but it wasn't
[SPEAKER_01]: Because it didn't necessarily have anti-Semitic tropes.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was really anti-Zionist.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the figure of the so-called white IDF, Satellar Soldier, that they really hated.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they couldn't find that he committed any crime.
[SPEAKER_01]: So they are racists, like definitionally, because they hated him just because he was Israeli.
[SPEAKER_01]: But we've had trouble actually showing people that this exists, because sometimes we don't want to talk about it, because we want to make it all about whether it's anti-Semitism.
[SPEAKER_01]: But anti-Zionism in itself is a hate movement.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a hate against Israel, it's people, and it's not criticism of Israel.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've read some of your articles where you make a distinction between anti-Zionism with a capital Z and anti-Zionism with a small Z by which I think you mean all of those discussions pre-state
[SPEAKER_02]: within the Jewish community where the debate was, whether it's a good idea to create and establish a state was anti-zionism with a capital Z, but anti-zionism now after 78 years after the state was created is a whole different animal.
[SPEAKER_02]: You touched on that in your previous answer, but could you just encapsulate it?
[SPEAKER_02]: In particular, I'm always worried about younger Jews, so it's a specific reason why I was so excited to have you with us today.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, it's one of the great lies of the current discourse.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a kind of polysemic fallacy, a linguistic trick to say that these two anti-zionisms are the same thing because they share the same word.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we, of course, know about the phenomenon of token Jews, of course, that they're anti-zionists, Jews who legitimize an anti-zionist hate movement, and they claim they're doing it from their Jewish identity.
[SPEAKER_01]: And now with this, they make a historical claim.
[SPEAKER_01]: anti-zionism is something Jewish.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were these Jewish anti-zionist traditions, like the Herodine, the ultra-Orthodox anti-zionism that said, you can't go back to Israel until the Messiah comes, or reform Judaism before it switched to Zionism, which was the claim that Jews are no longer a nation.
[SPEAKER_01]: We should reform our Judaism so it's more like a religion so we can successfully assimilate as equal citizens into Western nation states.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, of course, they did not say that Jews don't come from Israel and that Jews are just white colonizers.
[SPEAKER_01]: They said Jews were a nation that comes from Israel, but now we're going to be something else.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, of course, there were boondists and Marxists, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Boondists were cultural nationalists who wanted basically to have autonomy in multi-ethnic.
[SPEAKER_01]: states based on Yiddish language and culture, and then the remarks that's who basically thought that Jews should dissolve into a kind of working class revolution.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what happened after the creation of the Soviet Union was the fund was largely absorbed into the Marxist.
[SPEAKER_01]: Camp, the of Sexy, it was created to dismantle Jewish life in the Soviet Union and in 1929, I believe, Stalin basically then executed them all.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's the happy history of the Bund.
[SPEAKER_01]: But in any case, what I have found from researching anti-Zionism without the Heifin, with the Little Z, is that you can trace all of it to Nazi Islamists kind of alliances in propaganda and particularly to Soviet and Arab propaganda, for example, someone like Faiz Saieg was an Arab nationalist propagandist.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, he was a propagandist, like he worked in the US at the Arab League's radio station.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he also created the Palestine Research Center, which was propaganda.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was part of the PLO's official kind of messaging with it they produced in English.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we know also that the PLO was created in collaboration with the Soviets.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we know about the Soviet Antisynist propaganda campaign.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you look at Antisynism, that's where it comes from.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's central claims about Jews being colonial presence in Erick's Israel, of Israel being inherently racist and apartheid.
[SPEAKER_01]: Claim they made this claim in 1965 before there was an even an occupation in the West Bank, or it being based on genocide.
[SPEAKER_01]: All of these claims are a coherent ideological structure, and they don't have anything to do with pre-1948.
[SPEAKER_01]: Jewish anti-Zionism, either the herediform, which was saying, let's stay in the ghetto and wait till the Messiah or the pro-acimulationist forms amongst reform Judaism and Marxism, where anti-Zionists have managed to tokenize these pre-1948 Jewish anti-Zionisms is on the assimilation point.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, so it's true that both antisynisms want to assimilate Jews into other nations.
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, the reason is quite different.
[SPEAKER_01]: They reform Jews, wanted equal rights.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, Marxists had some utopian idea of universal liberation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Antisynists want to forcibly assimilate Jews.
[SPEAKER_01]: They want to destroy a nation state that exists and force Jews to be minorities again in other nation states.
[SPEAKER_02]: You believe very strongly.
[SPEAKER_02]: Tell me if I'm mischaracterizing your views.
[SPEAKER_02]: You believe very strongly that fundamentally anti-Zionism today, which is not criticism of this or that policy of any Israeli government, but undermines the legitimacy of the right of the Jews to sovereignty in its ancient homeland.
[SPEAKER_02]: Every form of anti-Zionism today is an expression of anti-Semitism in your view.
[SPEAKER_01]: in some sense, but I find that formulation to be potentially ambiguous and can create confusion.
[SPEAKER_01]: So do I think anti-Zionism is due hatred?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, do I think it's the same as classical anti-Semitism, European anti-Semitism, the 19th and 20th century that says Jews are racial infiltrators into our nation states that they're managing a financial conspiracy run by the Rothschilds?
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I don't think so.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the anti-zionism actually often inverts those stereotypes and creates completely new stereotypes.
[SPEAKER_01]: So its stereotypes are the white colonizer, the sadistic IDF soldier that is Rayleigh Messianic Satellar.
[SPEAKER_01]: These are actually ways in which everyone who's marked as a Zionist is constructed.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it is really focused on Israel, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not like when an anti-zionist hates Israel,
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, the Jews around the corner.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's why you have some Jews who I would say, they are Jews.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are diaspora Jews.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not going to deny that to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if they want to create a Judaism that is opposed to the kind of Judaism being produced in Israel, I totally understand that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But that's not a bigotry.
[SPEAKER_01]: Antisynism is a bigotry against Israel and Israelis.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's someone who actually doesn't like Israelis because they're Israelis.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that that Israel centered element sometimes gets lost when we just say, it is anti-Semitism.
[SPEAKER_01]: I prefer to allow the term anti-Semitism to kind of retake its specific meaning in classical anti-Semitism and then let anti-Semitism appear as parallel bigotries related but distinct.
[SPEAKER_02]: So do you think that this contemporary anti-Semitism has elements of a whole new
[SPEAKER_02]: Dimension of anti-Semitism of Jew hatred or does it draw its energy from centuries old expressions of anti-Semitism or Jew hatred?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it draws energy.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think often you do see some recycling of medieval anti-Judeck, kind of deicide themes.
[SPEAKER_01]: They recently were circulating this image of an idea of soldier who destroyed a...
[SPEAKER_01]: Jesus statue in Lebanon, and apparently the photo is real with some guy, but they were very excited about this, including secular anti Zionists.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that symbolic resonance of Jews killing Jesus immediately clicked for them.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's a lot of anti-Jude egg.
[SPEAKER_01]: resonances and you sometimes also see even on the left some conspiratorial antisemitism.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were circulating about $7,000 a post so they assumed that any sort of person who is marked as a Zionist was being paid enormous amounts of money to talk about Israel.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there was this
[SPEAKER_01]: financial conspiracy element, but I think that has enough of its own concepts and imagery and stereotypes that it really is its own thing, and it's fitted to a different politics, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: It emerges from the left, and it's fitted to that internationalist.
[SPEAKER_01]: politics.
[SPEAKER_01]: So right wing antisemitism is usually nationalist.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's based on the idea that Jews are far and infiltrators messing up your national culture.
[SPEAKER_01]: Antisynism is internationalist.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's based on the notion that there's a global order of human rights and Israel is this rogue state, this evil state that's messing up the order of human rights.
[SPEAKER_01]: So antisemitism is based on Jews can't be a minority in our nation state.
[SPEAKER_01]: Antisynism is based on Jews can't be a majority in
[SPEAKER_02]: But is there something Jewish that is rooted in age-old animosity towards Jews?
[SPEAKER_02]: Why the Jews?
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there's so many other worse offenders, even from their perspective.
[SPEAKER_02]: So why this obsession, what looks to us like an obsession with the Jews?
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's 100% Jew hatred at that level, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not going to deny that this hate movement against Israel is because it's a Jewish state.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I think that's obvious, but it's hating the Jew under a new figure, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: A new image or imaginary of who the Jew is.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's the key point.
[SPEAKER_01]: The way Jews are being imagined today is different from classical antisemitism, and that's why it keeps passing by the radar, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not being picked up, because people can't see it that when people hate Jews as...
[SPEAKER_01]: evil white Israeli militarized fascists, that's not a political critique just because it's not hating Jews as Rothschild bankers.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think that's the key, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's it's a little paradox but I think if you want to help people see the anti-Zionism is due hatred, it's helpful first to concede that it's not classical anti-Semitism.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I want to go back about this perception circle back to what I asked you before about any kind of support you got from Jewish faculty members and what's going on with respect to Jewish students and you're a young millennial but you're very close to the Gen Z generation American Jews do you think they perceive this what you're talking about and what kind of response would we expect or do we want to generate within the young Jewish community.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we have a lot of people who absorb anti-Zionism, and so they themselves think Israel has committed some cosmic crime, you know, Israel may have done many things like any other state, but they sort of absorb the overall narrative and it's kind of symbolic.
[SPEAKER_01]: meaning that the post-October 7th moment is not really about the October 7th genocide or the anti-Zionist militias like Hezbollah or anti-Zionist regime like Iran trying to commit genocide and murdering their home people and that the Zionist hate movement lynching Jews that's kind of about this moment where the world wakes up to the Israel's actually really bad.
[SPEAKER_01]: That narrative, I think, is something that many Jews have internalized.
[SPEAKER_01]: Unfortunately, there hasn't been a lot of clarity about anti-Zionism and teaching about anti-Zionism and its history.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are other methods which say we should just keep being pro-Israel and supporting Zionism, but aren't necessarily doing anti-Zionism and what it's about.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think the young Jews are entering the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: that space and they feel torn, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: If the question is just about how do you view Israel, it seems polarizing.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are people who are just saying become more and more Zionist, and then there are people who are saying Israel is the most evil thing ever, and even as Jews, we should think that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think if we can build the discourse around anti-Zionism, and understand the problem with anti-Zionism, I think it will create a lot of clarity and free up the space because the interesting question to me is not how good or how bad is Israel.
[SPEAKER_01]: like you see this in the conversation today with these recent polls that showed that Democrats under 50 basically the vast majority dislike Israel people are saying you know well how much of it is due to what Israel did and how much of it is due to antisemitism just some kind of dislike of Jews.
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't get at what's interesting, which is the anti-Zionist hate movement in the wake of October 7, which is an interesting phenomenon.
[SPEAKER_01]: If there was a KKK movement, and then someone said to me, well, come on, black people do commit some crimes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's think about the role that black people committing crimes has played.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would be like, no, actually, the interesting phenomenon to me is not that some black people commit crimes.
[SPEAKER_01]: The interesting phenomenon to me is why there's a KKK hate movement against black people when people commit crimes in every single group.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I see that as the same thing, every state.
[SPEAKER_01]: commits crimes or doesn't, or I don't even know, it's not even that interesting to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are many states in the world that are moving in a right-wing direction.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are many states that are becoming religious fundamentalist.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's extremism problems in most states and countries today.
[SPEAKER_01]: What's interesting to me is the anti-Zionist hate movement.
[SPEAKER_02]: Since October 7th, especially I've looked back and tried to where a big congregation here, we're doing all kinds of not only local but national programs that are centered around curricula and what did we learn post-October 7.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I spent a lot of time on reflection and self-criticism.
[SPEAKER_02]: what we did well, but also where we thought we might have been doing well, and it wasn't post-October 7th behavior of some of our alumni, some of our graduates, or it was evidence that we failed in what we were trying to accomplish.
[SPEAKER_02]: Where do you think we went wrong with, let's call it, Gen Z, but as you say, I mean, it extends
[SPEAKER_02]: Support for Israel has collapsed with respect to younger liberal people generally Americans generally say under the age of 50.
[SPEAKER_02]: The question was asked do you sympathize more with Palestinians, which is a reversal of previous polls for many years?
[SPEAKER_02]: What did we do wrong?
[SPEAKER_02]: You said about yourself that you were one of those who fundamentally broadly speaking bought into this more left-wing perspective on sociology and on geopolitics.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I asked that question, what did we do wrong in your sense in order to try and figure out what we can do better moving forward?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think we really ignored anti-zionism and we took it at face value.
[SPEAKER_01]: We were too good faith with it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, when the anti-zionists started emerging in the academy, and they said they were doing criticism of Israel, we spent a lot of timing like, yes, you can criticize Israel.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, well, we're in it with you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just don't cross the line into anti-Semitism.
[SPEAKER_01]: We were not strong enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: on anti-zionism because we were afraid of seeming like we sort of so-called supported Israeli policies or we were uncritical, but that's actually not really the issue if you're able to develop a discourse around anti-zionism and the reason this is right is like many Jews are left of center.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when we saw anti-zionism emerging on the left, it was harder for us to see that it was wrong.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's still many Jews who see anti-zionism
[SPEAKER_01]: as a criticism of Israel, even if they disagree with it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So, but anti-Zionism is just the other version.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there are right wing forms of anti-Zionism emerging, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: But anti-Zionism comes from the laughter rooted in the left instincts.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whereas anti-Semitism is rooted in the rights.
[SPEAKER_01]: instincts.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right now, the whole issue of political criticism versus bigotry, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's actually not unique to anti-zionism.
[SPEAKER_01]: We act as if this is a problem for anti-zionism.
[SPEAKER_01]: When is it bigotry, when is it critique?
[SPEAKER_01]: And anti-semitism, though, we all know anti-semitism is wrong.
[SPEAKER_01]: But actually, you know, if we look at both versions,
[SPEAKER_01]: A wrigh-wing person has political criticisms of foreign immigration, of foreign influence, of how to preserve the national culture of the place, those can be framed as policy critiques.
[SPEAKER_01]: A wrigh-wing person can be against immigration or foreign influence as a policy critique.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's right when politics.
[SPEAKER_01]: Within the space of right when politics, a form of due hatred exists that constructs Jews as the negative, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: It says Jews are the foreign influence, Jews are the foreign people replacing our national culture.
[SPEAKER_01]: Left-wing politics.
[SPEAKER_01]: is about critiquing state power, abuse of state power, excessive nationalism, how a state treats its minorities.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the thing that left wing people do.
[SPEAKER_01]: But within that, there is a former Jew hatred.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a form of Jew hatred that makes it so that a Jewish state is inherently evil and is a kind of exaggerated form of oppression of other people.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think Jews on the left had trouble seeing this as Jew hatred just because it was framed in terms of left wing politics.
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you think some Jews are legitimizing antisynism?
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you think they're being used by some of these forces you talk about?
[SPEAKER_02]: And are they doing it willingly or are they useful idiots?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the lack of a concept of anti-Zionism, and a discourse of anti-Zionism in the public, genuinely does make this conflation somewhat easy to fall into, and people are also internalizing the narrative.
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's look at the geopolitical situation, it itself is structured by anti-Zionism.
[SPEAKER_01]: The anti-Zionist militias, like Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, et cetera, the anti-Zionist governments, like Qatar, and Iran, they are the regional context,
[SPEAKER_01]: Israel's an oppressed state.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a small minority on clay within a larger region of a very violent region with tons of extremism and fundamentalism of groups that commit genocide against marginalized minorities like the Yazidis.
[SPEAKER_01]: or the Jews, or the Alloites, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the Antisynus narrative says, look, we're only going to see Israel.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
[SPEAKER_01]: It structures perception only on Israel.
[SPEAKER_01]: It says, well, you don't like Netanyahu, Ben Gavir, and Smoke Rich.
[SPEAKER_01]: Definitely not your politics, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So when all these people hate Israel, maybe there's something to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I'm a liberal Jew, I don't like Benjamin Netanyahu, but of course, it's that way of seeing, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: That actually obscures the real problem.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you can see anti-zionism, you can see that has nothing to do with whether you agree with Netanyahu or Ben Gavier.
[SPEAKER_01]: How to do with whether you think it's legitimate for these anti-zionists forces to try and genocide and eliminate a people.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if it's legitimate for an anti-zionist hate movement,
[SPEAKER_01]: to exist.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then as a left-wing person, when I see it that way, I say, why oppose anti-zionism?
[SPEAKER_01]: Anti-zionism's discriminatory and designism is violent.
[SPEAKER_01]: And designism is genocidal.
[SPEAKER_01]: I should oppose anti-zionism.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like Stalinism or the Khmer Rouge.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
[SPEAKER_01]: These were left-wing movements that were oppressive and committed atrocities.
[SPEAKER_01]: And left-wing people eventually had to realize they were wrong, just like right-wing people had to realize that
[SPEAKER_01]: that Naziism was wrong.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's the step that everyone needs to make right now.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like the public needs to make this step.
[SPEAKER_01]: It needs to recognize anti-zionism and that something went really wrong in how Israel was being understood post-Augtobre Sabbath and it's really not about whether you agree with everything the Israeli government does or where it's going, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_02]: and how optimistic are you that there will be some success.
[SPEAKER_02]: The trends seem to be going exactly the opposite, especially in under 50 year olds.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I think it could turn around quickly.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, erratically turned around post October 7th, the narrative that Antisynis had constructed spread so quickly and just infused so many minds, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it could really turn around, but I think we need, we need all hands on deck.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I try and encourage the Jewish legacy organizations to launch a mask campaign on Antisynis.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm into educate people.
[SPEAKER_01]: anti-zionism with Korean 1948 Jewish debates about Zionism, I think these changes in language and this framework and just committing to having anti-zionism be part of the conversation and something that you're willing to condemn on its own could really make a huge difference.
[SPEAKER_02]: Are you worried about the strong opposition of American public opinion?
[SPEAKER_02]: to this war and the connection that they've drawn between Israel dragging the United States into this war and anti-Semitism and in particular are you worried about that if the war goes bad.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's very worrying because if you look in the past kind of anti-Jewish violence often occurs during wartime, you know, the Ukrainian pogroms during the Russian Civil War is one example.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are many others, the farhood in Iraq, of course, during World War II.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was incited by the Mufdi of Jerusalem.
[SPEAKER_01]: And also, you see that narratives about Jews causing wars, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: These are kind of classically anti-Semitic.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a protocol as the others of Zion says that Jews cause all wars.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Nazis had the stab in the back myth, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: That it was the Jews who caused the Nazis to lose in World War I.
[SPEAKER_01]: And to the Jews were kind of blamed for one's own national humiliations.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you look at Tucker Carlson, I think his way of thinking is very similar to this.
[SPEAKER_01]: So he says, the Jews dragged us into Iraq war.
[SPEAKER_01]: This was this great humiliation for America, for America standing on the national stage.
[SPEAKER_01]: So he feels kind of humiliated in his American identity and then blames it on Jews.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I would argue that there's a lot of white people.
[SPEAKER_01]: young white Americans who feel humiliated in their white identity as well because they've been told the whiteness is evil.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they, they themselves blame it on Jews too by saying Jews the ultimate white colonizers.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, this is quite a dangerous moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: It goes back to that issue of perception, like how are we seeing them at least?
[SPEAKER_01]: The way the narrative is constructed is so that the anti Zionist actors receive from view.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the American public no longer seems to know or care that the Iranian regime is an evil state, like that the Iranian regime wants to annihilate America, right, that the Iranian regime wants to annihilate Israel, and that's not okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then the American public has become so wary of war in any context, many people are moving to this isolationist stance and are just not really grasping the larger civilizational problems and what's going on in the Middle East.
[SPEAKER_02]: My last question to you is just looking, say, in the time horizon of the next 10 years, you optimistic about the position of the American Jewish community and frankly of the United States in general in the West.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd really think it could go either way.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, we could be moving towards the maps, the disaster and apocalypse, or we could turn things around, but we really need a new language and framework and we need to offer a new cultural narrative around Israel and around anti-Zionism.
[SPEAKER_01]: I really think that could change the game completely.
[SPEAKER_02]: And do you think Senagogs and Jewish Day schools have a role to play or are you looking at universities
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I definitely think Jewish Day Schools have a role to play.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think Jews needs to understand what Antisignism is, so they're ready to confront it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, I do think the connection to Israel needs to still be taught and understood that Jews are a people, and that Jews are connected to the land of Israel, that Jews are responsible for one another, and there's millions of Jews in Israel.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I do think that layer is still important for Jews for young Jews who are growing up.
[SPEAKER_02]: When do you finish your PhD?
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm hoping to finish by the end of the year,
[SPEAKER_02]: good luck on that, and I'd be really fascinated to hear about the indigenous tribes and especially what we can learn about our lives today and how it might relate to the Jewish condition.
[SPEAKER_02]: So keep up the good work, keep up the excellent writing that you're doing.
[SPEAKER_02]: We look to you to help not only inform us, but enlighten us, so thank you for all that you do and all that you will do in the years to come.
[SPEAKER_02]: I am instinctively drawn to courageous people.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm naturally drawn to proud Jews.
[SPEAKER_02]: I am intuitively drawn to deep thinkers.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if all these qualities exist in young people, I go out of my way to platform them.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hence, I have followed Adam Lewis Klein for a long time, and I'm delighted to give increased exposure to his views.
[SPEAKER_02]: I wish more people were like him.
[SPEAKER_02]: to all young millennials and Gen Z, who are listening?
[SPEAKER_02]: I worry about you.
[SPEAKER_02]: I hope that you don't find that condescending.
[SPEAKER_02]: And even if you do, I can't help myself.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's my job to worry about you.
[SPEAKER_02]: You are, of course, free to reject everything I believe or say.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've heard from many of you, especially when you disagree with me.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because first, I'm aware that not all wisdom resides in me.
[SPEAKER_02]: I take into account that I may be wrong.
[SPEAKER_02]: My calculation is that if I can reach at least some young American Jews and impact on them, it's worth riling up many others.
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to say to you, younger colleagues, the normalization of anti-zionism that is spreading like wildfire throughout our land, normalizes anti-Semitism.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not criticism of Israel, that's a red herring.
[SPEAKER_02]: No Jew considers criticism of the Israeli government to be
[SPEAKER_02]: Jews themselves are Israel's harshest critics.
[SPEAKER_02]: To be a critic is a good thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the basis of democratic self-governing.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is not what most anti-Zionists who you will confront mean.
[SPEAKER_02]: What they seek is the destruction of Israel.
[SPEAKER_02]: The delegitimization of collective Jewish self-determination and dignity.
[SPEAKER_02]: and this leads to the delegitimization of Judaism and Jewish values.
[SPEAKER_02]: Anti-Israel hate feeds an atmosphere of anti-Jewish hate.
[SPEAKER_02]: It fuels the absurd gaslighting from people who are themselves not even Jewish, who daint to teach us what constitutes authentic Judaism, liberties they would never take with any other minority or religion.
[SPEAKER_02]: They lecture us that Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism and that the state of Israel has nothing to do with the land of Israel or the people of Israel.
[SPEAKER_02]: Don't fall for that, whether from peers or your teachers or university professors.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've spent a few years studying Judaism myself, more than most enemies of Israel.
[SPEAKER_02]: Don't be naive or useful idiots to those who do not mean what you mean.
[SPEAKER_02]: What they mean is October 7th.
[SPEAKER_02]: Their anti-Zionism is that of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.
[SPEAKER_02]: That is a moral inversion.
[SPEAKER_02]: The actual genocidal intentions are those of Hamas, Kezbala, and Iran.
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't even deny it.
[SPEAKER_02]: They say so openly.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you consider yourself a liberal, as I see myself, know that anti-Zionism is deeply a liberal.
[SPEAKER_02]: Support for Hamas is obscenely a liberal.
[SPEAKER_02]: It is the antithesis of liberalism.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hamas is opposed to all of the rights that liberals support gay rights civil rights, women rights, minority rights, free press, free expression, you name it.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not liberal to support these forces.
[SPEAKER_02]: It is a sabotage of liberalism.
[SPEAKER_02]: My plea to you is to double down and recommit to Judaism into your Jewish identity.
[SPEAKER_02]: We will be fine if your Jewish identity is fine.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you want to choose to continue, you must learn about Judaism and live Jewish lives.
[SPEAKER_02]: Don't just stand from afar and observe Judaism.
[SPEAKER_02]: To observe a thing is not the thing itself.
[SPEAKER_02]: Live Judaism.
[SPEAKER_02]: Love Judaism.
[SPEAKER_02]: Cherish Judaism.
[SPEAKER_02]: Do Judaism.
[SPEAKER_02]: And read the work of Adam Lewis Klein.
[SPEAKER_02]: Follow him online.
[SPEAKER_02]: You will learn a lot.
[SPEAKER_02]: Until next time, it says, in these times.