Unholy alliance: Zionism, Philosemitism, and Imperialism w/ Nora Barrows-Friedman and Adam Horowitz

Speaker 1: Okay. We are back. We are back. We had a little bit of a bumpy ride because this is East is a podcast and I am your host, but we got here. We got to the promised land. Speaking of promised land, we have two people here with us who are experts in In that place. No, I'm just kidding. This is an episode. I was just being stupid. I was trying to segue into introducing this episode, but it's really dumb. And I'm just going to say what it is. I am bugging Adam and Nora for a while now to talk about philo-Semitism. Now, if you don't know what that word means, it just means it's a kind of catch-all term for a love or fascination with Jews and Jewishness. And so I've been thinking about this issue for a while and I've been like texting with you guys and I brought in my council of Jews. No, I'm just kidding.

Nora Barrows-Friedman: We're even matching today, me and Adam.

Speaker 1: no but this is so this is something that's also like i thought about a lot because it's also affected my own like life and as a scholar like i i one of my i mentioned before part of my dissertation involves studying a text that sort of concerns itself with the shoah with a you know somebody who was on the kinder transport so i went to archives i like you know did a I did this research trip to a concentration camp, a sort of famous one, not the one that's kind of on the off the beaten track, the Theresienstadt, you know, the one that's in Prague. It was like kind of a fake city. So anyways, I did all of this and I met, I had a lot of colleagues, you know, I went to conferences and stuff, but it was always something in the back of my mind that said, you know, this immense fascination we have like in the academic sphere specifically, but also in the broader cultural sphere, you can extend it to. With Jews and Jewishness, like what is it rooted in? Like, where does it, like, explain it to me? Like, is it like, because we're talking about a relatively small population, right? Like the numbers of Jews in the world, is it many? It's 12 million, 15 or something. Most of them live in two countries, you know, like that's it. And like most of them speak English fluently. and are kind of Anglo whatever. And I mean, I guess there is, I guess another question about the Slavification of everything, but that's a different thing. But I guess in the meantime, like where I wanted to sort of begin this conversation is, do you think there is a particularly strong sort of strain of philo-Semitism to our culture specifically because this is where like the majority of Jews reside? I don't know who wants to start with that. It's a big mess of a question.

Nora Barrows-Friedman: Yeah, I mean, there's so many different ways to analyze where we are right now in this moment in time in terms of how Judaism is expressed, how it is seen, how it is weaponized, how it is articulated. Because of the last hundred or so years of Zionism as a political ideology, and the subsequent weaponization of Judaism in order to establish and maintain a Western settler colonial experiment of imperialism in Western Asia. There is a level of the way in which Western power and the Western power elite has absolutely become enraptured with Jewish people because it has, and Zionism has, conflated Judaism and this political ideology of Zionism. And so, you know, you see like, you know, the good Jews who are in power in, you know, the halls of government here in the U.S., you know, very influential in the cultural sphere, you know, who are very much assets of the western power elite in furthering you know the the the this this western imperialist hegemon you know whereas like a lot of orthodox jewish yiddish-speaking communities in let's say upstate new york for example who are inherently anti-zionist You see them marching. They're also in Toronto. You see communities of Orthodox Jews marching in solidarity with Palestinians, getting beaten up by Zionists. They are absolutely invisibilized by Western media, by the Western power structure itself. As well as, you know, anti-Zionist, non-religious or, you know, not Orthodox Jews such as myself and Adam and many, many, many others in this country and around the world. who are also smeared by Zionists and by people who are in power as, you know, I mean, I'm sure you get this too a lot, Adam, but like pretty much every day I get called a traitor, a capo, other words, you know, very kind of vitriolic hatred toward people. Jews who don't ascribe to the political ideology of Zionism, don't support the Israeli state at all, don't support the U.S. state for that matter as well. And we're being... know also uh subjected to censorship and silencing and arrest and my jewishness doesn't you know afford me any privilege in that power dynamic because i'm not a supporter of the israeli state and of zionism and of the western hegemon so there's this absolute, like also, you know, I mean, a fetishization of Jewishness and Judaism and, you know, this sort of like very convenient, that has been built in order to codify Zionism as a twinned identity with Judaism and to use the trauma, generational trauma of violence against Jews, exclusively by Europe, pretty much, and its European acolytes to, it's a very European concept to otherize people who are not white and Christian, obviously. And for a long, long time, way before Zionism, Jews in Europe were otherized. And then when Zionism came along and the Israeli state was founded and it became, you know, really a rampart for Western imperial interests in the region, then Jews as a category was subdivided. Western imperialist interests will coddle and protect and embolden any fraction of a certain community when it is supporting the interests of the imperialists i think and so that's i think we're

Speaker 1: Which is the lesson of Ukraine. Everybody suddenly became like the blue and yellow fanatic. And most liberals probably hadn't thought about Ukraine in 15 years. Right.

Nora Barrows-Friedman: People didn't even know what it was. Yeah, yeah. I think it's important to look at it historically. And, you know, obviously, like we can't divorce its context from political fact and reality. But yeah, that's where I'm going. Yeah.

Adam Horowitz: I mean, I agree with everything that Nora said. And in a way, so I am 50 years old. I was born in 1973. And I think in many ways, this process, what we're talking about today has been like the story of my lifetime. I think before the late 60s and 70s, and when you're talking about the role of philo-Semitism on the campus or anything, I think that all looked very different. a generation or two ago. Like, it's sort of been, like, my lifetime, maybe our lifetime, you know, where this shift has happened. And, I mean, I don't want to say everything Nora just said again, but, like, you know, it's really been this process of Jews assimilating into whiteness, by which I really mean assimilating into the power establishment of the West, of the United States, where this... You know, it was it was making that agreement to do that, which engendered this philo-Semitism. And so that clearly Zionism has a very large part of it. It's broader than that, though, too. And like, I'm going to be interested when we get into this conversation about Judaism and Zionism, because. I think in some ways there's a very simple answer to this, and in other ways there's a much more complicated answer. And this kind of chicken and the eggness where that yolk is pretty mixed at this point and what that means. But it all, like for those who ascribe to these beliefs, it is a ticket into... whiteness into power and into then being on the receiving end of this, like, philo-Semitism, of this very specific view of what Judaism looks like, what being Jewish looks like. The examples that Nora shared of the people who are extremely Jewish but fall outside that definition are very clear. But yeah, it's been one of the things that I feel lucky at in my time with Mondo Weiss is Philip Weiss founded the website. He is a generation older than I am. And hearing him narrate this process, it's been so clarifying to me and explaining my own experience and what I saw happening before my own eyes. So yeah, it's been the story of our generation.

Speaker 1: No, I appreciate both of those. And I know it was kind of like a, because we, I had a much better opening salvo before I started recording than actually when I started recording, because like twisting all of this apart, you get, and I think this is partly the reason why like the history, like philo-Semitism has been integrated so intensely with academic studies, because once you twist apart, like say, let's call it the Jewish question, which now unfortunately for history has become the Jewish Zionist question, like amended, like the European question of Judaism, so-called the Jewish question, which for people who don't know, wasn't just about Jews, was about the condition of minorities, right? Like other people. This was like Jews were the litmus test and understanding their position or potential positions in something called Europe, right? Right. Was a sort of dilemma. Right. And so famously Marx in his version of answering that question was like, just stop being Jewish, bro. Like assimilate and stop being like your backwards, you know, like peasant self. Like this is how he spoke. And. And so I think part of the issue here is that once we twist it apart is that, yeah, we have a bunch of different interlocking, overlapping histories of imperialism working simultaneously. Because on the one hand, Jews share a common history with other European minorities in a sense or other European, let's say, ethnicities. And we can't equalize those things because in Italian history, You know, when you talk about Italians in 19th century Europe, whatever, that's also made up as just as much as we say, you know, like a Jew in 19th century Europe is that these are diverse people. These are living across different cultures there. Some of them are Romanian. Some of them are English. Some of them are, you know, whatever. Right. And so like we it's such a it's part of I think one of the real tools that has sort of trapped us in thinking is that first you make this monolithic body, this non-monolithic body into a monolith. You call them like, oh, the Jews of Europe. right and you start then debating oh what is the question what is the answer blah blah blah so you have this like like um like almost like a hermeneutical problem like like ontological but also like philosophical problem of artificially separating out a portion of a population and unifying them under this like ages but okay whatever putting that aside for now there's the other thing of like Yeah. Then over time, that interaction with European imperialism, like Italians, like Greeks, like a lot of other other people in Europe, is that their participation in the great land grab in the new world rendered them equal. And like we call that assimilation. but really it was a kind of class solidarity that was extended to the so-called racial minorities, right? Like we didn't talk in these terms in 19th century, we didn't talk like this. This is us also like pushing back our like lexicon that we've developed over these centuries. But like the process of racialization of Jews of Europe as Jews itself unfolds in this weird uneven history because they became white people in the new world, but they stayed Jews in Europe. They were slave owners in Jamaica and the New World, but in Europe, a ton of them stayed like the unwanted masses. And their questions still lingered to the point where millions of Germans and Germanic speaking people and their European allies were like, all right, let's just get rid of these people. We're tired of... And that was into the 40s. And so the Jewish question wasn't solved simply by going to the colonies. and doing as the whites did, right, is that it lingered on. And this is always something, and I feel that in some ways Zionism squared the circle of European Jewry. They said, oh yeah, we can do what you guys do. We can colonize. We can like get together and make a bunch of like angry fascist gangs. We can like, you know, use our racial supremacy, like an idea of racial supremacy to tie together a bunch of disparate fucking cultures who have, nothing to do with each other, by the way. An English middle-class dude who migrates to Tel Aviv to drink beer and live in a warm place has nothing in common with a dude from your rural Ukraine who pretended to be Jewish so he could migrate. These people have nothing in common. Except Zionism says, yes, you do. You have the supremacy of your race. Right. Over this other people who are non-U. And so it's like it's a crazy like this is what bugs me. Like this is philo-semitism. And I feel like is it like a is it an extension of this? Is it part of like a are you now allowed to be professionally Jewish? in a way that you weren't, say, 60 years ago, when whites would spit on Jewish people and keep them out of their food dining clubs. Edward Said was more accepted at Princeton than his Jewish peers. Think about that for a second. In his memoir, he talks about how Jews were excluded from the dining clubs at Princeton in the 50s. That was the 50s. And he was more accepted because he was a Christian Lebanese, like Arab, like Palestinian Arab, like Levantine, you know. So it's all of this is so mind boggling, the scale. And now you have all these chuds and you fast forward today, right wing chuds who are like as American as anything, any garbage who like who Israel gives them a reason to exist. know like israel gives them a reason to fly a flag you know and it's like wow like all of this just like you think about it i know that wasn't even a question that was just like a big blurting of all these different but like this is this is the mess of all of this separating all of this

Adam Horowitz: Yeah, we saw it this weekend. And I don't know the names and the details here. I don't know if you know, Nora. But there was a Jewish anti-Zionist activist who was shot in Boston by a non-Jew who was shooting this Jewish person supposedly out of trying to fight anti-Semitism. Right. So, like, in terms of, like, the knot that this ties your brain into, we're seeing this all over the place. And especially in these last 11 months of all these, you know, Zionist pro-Israel supporters who hate Jews. Who are opposing genocide, you know, so. Yeah, it's all over.

Nora Barrows-Friedman: Yeah. While you have, you know, the Israel supporters, the Zionists saying, you know, this is the latest in the long, you know, sordid history of crimes against Jews because we're Jews. Again, conflating goes full circle. There are many, many people who believe that the prison break on October 7th was because Palestinians have this inherent savage hatred toward Jewish people. You know, it's really like, I mean, the worldview is completely upside down. And so then they could say, you know, see, they hate us. They hate us because they're, because we're Jewish and we have to, you know, we have to stand together and we, you know, and so all these, you know, celebrities are saying, I stand with Jewish people. when it has nothing to do with Judaism, except the weaponization of Judaism to further the settler colonial project with which Palestinians are trying to liberate themselves from. And, you know, so it makes you feel like you're constantly, you know, going crazy. I mean, really, like, you know, because I don't know, to me growing up, I was, I don't know if I've, I think I talked about this maybe before on like a podcast a long time ago, but with you, but like I was obsessed with Holocaust, like nonfiction narratives, especially written by or about children who were in places like Theresienstadt and Auschwitz and Birkenau. And yeah, I was obsessed with these stories of like, how could this have happened? And like, what was the effect on children primarily? And how can the country that you called home for generations and generations suddenly turn on you and send you to a death camp? And like, how evil can humans be it was kind of one of those you know some kids are into like horror movies and i was into holocaust narrative non-fiction um and luckily i was born into a jewish family that um didn't immediately say you know which a lot of Zionists do say, is the Jews who were slaughtered in the Holocaust were weak and they didn't fight back. And that's why we need Israel, because now we get to transform this paradigm of the weak Jew versus the strong, powerful, nuclear, addled, israeli state jew um and i mean yeah i i think i think that that's one of many ways in which zionism has really um hijacked judaism as as a you know as a mechanism to exert power and and militarism um but like You know, it also kind of I mean, I was talking to a friend the other day who is she's in her 70s and she she's Jewish. She grew up in Brooklyn and and she was like she was saying, like, we can't ever talk about the Holocaust anymore. You know, the Nazi Holocaust. She's like, we've lost we've lost that ability to to to to call on people's sympathies and empathies about what happened in the Holocaust, because look what happened. Israel is doing to Palestinians in this genocide. And doing it, many of them doing it under the umbrella of this is the ultimate feat of strength for Jewish people, that we can do this to another people, while still claiming victimhood historically. Yeah, so it's interesting to see how people are kind of processing this. And I'm also very encouraged to see people really having a hard time with wrapping their heads in the Jewish community, wrapping their heads around, you know, this generational story of, you know, of fighting to survive as, you know, Jewish people, especially in Europe. And then and then, you know, that being channeled into some sort of impulse to support a genocidal apartheid state. And people are wrestling with that, and that's good. That's very long overdue. But, you know, I mean, Ilan Pape talks about this. Joseph Massad talks about this. This is, you know, Zionism is crumbling before our eyes. The Israeli state has an expiration date, you know, in terms of its viability. And, yeah, I mean, it... What's going to happen before that happens is it's going to get a lot worse, I think, before it gets better. But this is how settler colonies eventually implode. And ideologically, it can't survive.

Adam Horowitz: So one question I have, and it's sort of like, I agree with what you were just saying, Nora, and I've like, definitely experience all these dynamics and all these kinds of questions within the Jewish community and stuff. And I honestly am a lot less interested in them as I am in this process outside the Jewish community. And it's kind of the flip side of this philo-Semitism question is like, what has this last year done to that understanding? So there are the arch imperialists and we could talk about them, for their reasons. I'm sure they've quadrupled down in this last year. But then there are the other people who feel because it was like a liberal impulse because we are against oppression. We are against discrimination. We are against anti-Semitism. And for that reason, we're going to stand with Jewish people. And I'm being told that standing with Jewish people is supporting this place. And so, yeah, I don't really think about it a whole lot. My church supports this place. And then over this last 11 months, they've watched this genocide and they've come to question a lot of that stuff. I don't know nearly as much about this as I do about some of this wrestling within, say, the Jewish community and this polling and X percent of Jews now support an arms embargo. It's all great. But... you know nora and i have talked about in other settings which we might get to here i don't know it might be a but just sort of like you know whatever the kind of the role of jews in the palestine movement and things like that ultimately like the movement is not shouldn't be and is not made up of jews or led by jews you know so it's really bringing in these other masses of perhaps previously phylo-semitic people and not to say that they hate jews now But they have moved to be much more critical about Zionism and about, you know, the Israeli state. That is sort of one of the stories I'm really interested in, in trying to understand from this past year. And I say this past year, like it's things are over, nothing's over. But as we talk about philo-Semitism, I'm also interested to talk about how it's unraveling, hopefully.

Speaker 1: So I guess I think a follow up question is that then is that this this phylo-Semitic sort of strain of particularly sort of like Anglo culture, like I don't think I mean, I think Germans have it, obviously, but there's not that many Jews in Germany. Like they they so it's it's it's done by it's a weird kind of philo-semitism by proxy almost like over there. And I mean, that's what I remember by my life in Germany was sure a short. But, you know, it's like that. Whereas here it's that it's the Jews and also prominent Zionists. Right. Who have Zionism has, you know, we talked about this earlier. Like this is this is a this is a dominant thing. force in, if you could say, the Jewish community, which is something that I, you know, let's just say Jewish communities, that's easier, is that Zionism is a dominant and a predominant force in the sense that above the sort of anti-Zionist view, And so like you guys, I mean, it's fair to say, it's obvious to say that you guys represent a minority in your communities, right? A political faction that's a minority. And I wonder in the long term, and I guess also in the short term too, is that this wholesale adoption of a violent, racist community, imperialist and ultimately like a project underwritten by the greatest anti-Semites to ever exist. And they're the ones who help authorize and midwife this so-called Jewish state. Right. Like like this is to think to think in those in the in that scale. And then you think about like all of these Zionists right now who are just like flexing like proudly in their genocidal state and say, oh, and as you said, you're like, well, we're not going to be sheeps to the slaughter anymore. All those documentaries, like all those documentaries about the show, all those sad people, it's not going to be like us. We're not going to do that. Their own frothing at the mouth need to make up for that or something animates so much support for Zionism to the point where you're like, oh, so if you don't have killing other people that you deem to be enemies as your central goal, what do you have? Right. Like and so you wonder that like this project. Right. Which doesn't has which doesn't like other nationalisms have other things that motivate them. Right. Like Jewish nationalism and Zionist nationalism has taken this Zionist form. Right. And unfortunately, it has nothing underneath it other than that supremacist impulse. I'm sorry. Like it's just it doesn't have any cultural basis. Like they had to resurrect Hebrew. Right. You know, like that's that's all like, you know what I mean? Like that's that's something because otherwise it's disparate populations who have nothing in common. Like that's something I want to really, really want to stress to like say out loud. And we have to because like like when was the last time you had like lower cuisine? Like it doesn't exist anymore. So you then you have to ask that parallel question. What's what's this going to do long term to Jewishness? Right. Like like and this is a question I asked Morgan, friend of the show a while back. And she said she was like, oh, we've been around forever. We'll we'll we'll make our way through this, you know, to the effect. I mean, go listen to the episode. But like there is a cost to your like to your community, to your people, to history. I know these are all humanistic terms. I'm sorry. I should be a good Marxist and not employ these things. But really, it's a religious belief that when you. like burn your religious symbol into the skin of your defenseless enemy like because it gives you a hard-on and when you rape them to death like in prisons because they made you mad because they exist like and then you do that under the ages of jewishness like that violence will bleed into the symbols There's no undoing that. I'm not Jewish, so these are not my symbols to really discuss, but as an observer to this, it really thinks that these scenes will be etched into history.

Adam Horowitz: yeah like you know i had a you know a prediction coming into this that you that seen that you were going to come off as like the most jewish person in this conversation so it might already be but i i will just say i mean of course i agree with everything you said and one of the things that like i've had conversations i've been thinking about i mean so i shared my age earlier like the jewish community is going to be unpacking and processing what it has supported in this last year and for these last 75 years for the rest of my life.

Nora Barrows-Friedman: Yeah.

Adam Horowitz: It's going to be a generational issue and struggle. And one of the things that has kind of... Think of myself as someone who's somewhat savvy, and I know that I'm incredibly naive. But I've been shocked. As much as I think about all this stuff, I have still been shocked to the degree to which it is not discussed. It is not allowed to be discussed in any way. Jewish communal setting. If you are Jewish, if you're in a Jewish organization and you in any way consider yourself under the large communal tent of the Jewish community in, I would say, the United States, this question has not been begun to be broached in any way whatsoever in this last year, in a year where the quote-unquote Jewish state has been carrying out genocide. It's insane. It's insane. And it's like, I mean, everything that you just described in terms of, you know, the impacts and the stain that it will leave on the community is exactly true. I mean, I will also say this is going to be a generational issue and project, and maybe I'll feel differently at some other point. It's honestly not work I'm really that invested in. I mean, I'll be honest. I mean, I think the Jewish community and pushing the Jewish community on this question is going to be the last domino. It's the last train car in this train. The Jewish community... One of the ironies here is the Jewish community, and this would be true even on the left of progressives, of anti-Zionist Jews, think that they are leading this. They are pulling up the far rear on this question. And the process that Nora described earlier of Zionism and Israel falling apart will happen and be long over before the Jewish community starts moving. really coming to grips with what this has meant and what has, it's not even to say what has happened in our name, yes, but what has happened with our direct material support and political, this has been the communal project

Speaker 1: auctioning off stolen land in a synagogue and then crying about it when people protest. I mean, that's like, you did a crime to your religion, bro. It's twisted. I'm not the one doing a crime to your religion. You're the one doing a crime to your religion. At the root of all this, these are anti-Semitic people because they use symbols that are for something bigger, that seemingly have a meaning to a community of people, of human beings, normal human beings. And then these people use it as like an axe to smash children to bits. Like, like they paint, you know, I mean, it's not the first imperialist to do this too. Okay, fine. Like, this is not new for imperialists, but I just, I returned to that statistical problem. There's just not that many Jews on the planet. And the fact that all of the institutions or the vast majority of them, the material and religious and political institutions, the parties, the whatever, newspapers, whatever, have been dominated to the point where this fascist project is now like its treasured little baby more than anything else. You would think it's the most pressing issue in the entire world. There's no community things. There's nothing else going on. Like, you know, six million Jews in North America, other than this Zionism thing, a country half a world away, that more than likely just sees them as like a cash cow than anything else. I mean, it's like, yeah, it just, I don't know.

Nora Barrows-Friedman: Yeah, no, I completely agree with what Adam said. And it will take, it will be the last time step in defeating Zionism. That is when progressive, self-described liberal American Jews finally come to grips with what Zionism has been and the effect that it has had on the people in Palestine for so long. that is going to take a long time. And like you said, Adam, way after Israel itself is gone. But yeah, I mean, I don't have, you know, there's a lot of really fantastic Jewish people working inside their communities and their synagogues and their community centers and on the streets and working to educate their communities about Zionism and trying to divorce it from being Jewish and Judaism as a religion and a culture. And that's great. And yeah, like you said, Adam, I have no interest in doing that work. I just, like more power to you if you want to do that. I am busy.

Speaker 1: I'm busy with other things. Is that desire to sort of like unpack the Jewishness of Zionism, like itself a philo-Semitic thing? Or is it a natural consequence of the fact that Zionists do use like these symbols and these like texts and, you know, these institutions to sort of like cover up and to like, you know, kosherize their violence?

Nora Barrows-Friedman: I mean, I don't know. Like I have such a... uh disdain for um you know like i don't know that judaism uh in in my daily life like i just i don't i'm not disdained but like i just don't think about it You know, like I can't be bothered. I'm not, I'm not, you know, when people describe me as like a Jewish American, you know, journal, I'm like, no, I'm not. I'm, I'm just a journal. Like you'd not, you wouldn't say that about like, you know, a Christian journalist. So like I, I.

Speaker 1: She's a tanky American.

Nora Barrows-Friedman: I'm a tanky American. And, and the work that I do on Palestine has nothing to do with, my being Jewish and trying to atone for anything. And sometimes I think that, and I get it, like people who are working inside the Jewish community to try and divorce it from Zionism, like there's this way in which, you know, I don't know. I'm probably going to piss a lot of people off by saying this, but like, you know, like celebrating the tenets of Judaism and doing the like cultural things and the traditional songs and the dances and like lighting the candles and saying, you know, Zionism is not Judaism and, and, and kind of lifting up, you know, the beauty of Judaism and all of our traditions and all of this and saying, you know, I'm trying to bring like some sort of ritual into it and make it like a religious thing without Zion. I, I get it. And I, I'm not, I'm, you can't make me like, I'm, I'm not going to, It's just not interesting. It's had so little effect and it kind of bolsters, I don't know, it kind of bolsters this thing of like, we are a separate community that needs protection and attention. Talking about assimilation, my grandparents were born in the tenements in New York City. They only spoke Yiddish until they were school age. they were restricted from so many jobs, right, in the 1920s and 30s. And they really, I mean, they were Jewish, they only lived around other Jewish people, because that was their community, but they wanted to be white so badly. They wanted to assimilate. They, you know- Like a lot of immigrants- A lot of immigrants, exactly, exactly. And like, I understand that assimilation, you know, from a historical context perspective. And I don't, I mean, I kind of also, I'm like, I don't know. I don't know that like de-assimilating and in the context of trying to fight Zionism. And once again, kind of emphasizing Jewishness as a part of the struggle for Palestinian liberation. I don't see that as particularly helpful personally. You know, again, like, you know, as we were talking about earlier, Adam, like, yeah, there are a lot of really fantastic activists, you know, Jewish American activists who are who have or assume roles in the Palestine Solidarity Movement. And yeah, I don't I have a lot of conflicting feelings about about that.

Adam Horowitz: Yeah, I mean, to talk some to that dynamic that you were describing around and, you know, I've been involved in this work for a while and I've been involved in all sorts of different parts of it. So like doing that kind of the anti-Zionist twist on the holiday kind of like ultimately when it comes down to it, I am not going to I'm not seeking to yuck anybody's yum when it comes to this. And like what you do in your home, what makes you feel better about your heritage and where you come from? I think that's wonderful for you. There is this element, though, in where, you know, and so say something like and this is somewhat academic, but not just like this sort of concept of like post-Zionism in terms of like. you know, which is primarily this kind of Jewish movement to be like, actually, you know, like the way I have figured this out and how I could still be happy about being who I am is like, it's just over. Like we don't even have to deal with this anymore because Zionism is over. And we could just go back to like just pretending like we're Jewish without this. So like, you know, that has impacts in the world that are actively obfuscating the realities of Zionism and what's happening in Palestine. And it happens, you know, some of these lines between public and private are vague at this point. But, you know, we referenced earlier there was this tweet on Twitter, I guess, talking about how Zionism is not actually this is just white supremacy. This is like this has nothing to do with Jewish people. Actually, Jewish people are victims of Zionism and of white supremacists. There is a way to squint and make this make sense. I get that. But at the end of the day, Zionism, it's not only, I will say, it's not only a Jewish project, but it's a Jewish project. This has been a project generated out of the Jewish community and has gotten support from lots of other horrible imperialist forces throughout history, yes. But there's accountability that belongs in the Jewish community up until this very afternoon of what our role is and trying to over intellectualize or trying to pretend a way that this doesn't exist. Yeah, it's not helpful. Yeah.

Speaker 1: I guess there's a wider question here that I want to ask, but it's also like a specific thing to like kind of the Angloid world that we live in, which is minority as a condition of identity making. Right. And how liberals and like this neoliberal era has like has, you know, forced, let's say, or encouraged people. us many people to make careers out of the thing they call identity. So like, look at me, I'm a gay writer. Like, look at me, I'm an Iranian, like youth organizer. Like people do that because it's like a market niche thing. It's like same way with jobs, like academic jobs. Like you had to add, you had to have like a sexy combination of like adjectives and like adverbs and whatever. And like, so like make it sound different, right? And like alterity is something that sells. So like this, this weird thing that's happened, which is this contradictory thing, which is on the one hand. Yeah. Like Jews, Jews became white. Jews got absorbed into whiteness. And that's like a historical fact. It's like a straight up fact. And like, and if anything, like part of like this, the difference between how, say your grandparents, Nora lived right in what used to be called like ethnic ghettos. what are still called ethnic ghettos today. But that's also a story of your historical relation to the class ordering of the society you live in, right? Because that's part of the story of assimilation, and let's say the de-racialization of Jews in the West has been that they were folded into whiteness in a similar, not identical way, like I mentioned earlier, Italians, Greeks, whatever. White Jews, I mean, yeah, yeah. That's another part of this, too, is that, yeah. African Jews and Arab Jews. And even it works the other way, too, to Zionism's benefit, so that they use their Oriental Zionists as poster children of their own to obfuscate, obviously, the racial supremacist nature of, like, this, like, you know, like, How many Ashkenazis are there versus Sephardim up there in the decision-making? We know there's a racial ordering of Zionist society and we know who stands at the bottom of it and when they're not Palestinians, obviously, this is within the Jewish thing. Their own contradictions of the Zionist project come out. like this is something that like has made me wonder that like the role of holocaust culture holocaust remembrance culture in all of this right because you brought it up earlier and i wanted to bring it up i was like oh she brought it up but that's like but that the idea of oh we now muscular jews my advisor todd presner writes about this uh the we muscular jews We know better now. We know that we have to smash our enemies and not let them talk shit about us. Right. And so you wonder, like, has has the is the entire project of Holocaust remembrance, irredeemably implicated in the Zionist genocide machine. Now, I know that their social media accounts certainly are, right? I know that these horrible, have been captured by all kinds of the worst right-wing you know, Zionist, but like, I wonder, like, this is an awkward question for me too, because this isn't also, this is also not my, my, my personal history. And like my family's history is not wrapped up in the Shoah. So who am I to say that? Oh yeah. That thing of yours commemorating a really terrible, like active imperialism and genocide perpetrated against your people with the help of the people who are now helping Israel, by the way. It's not for you to celebrate. It's for you to shut down those institutions because they failed my political litmus test. I'm in a weird position here, but at the same time, though, it makes you wonder. It's like, oh, when they said never again, they meant never again to certain people, which is actually worse.

Adam Horowitz: And it's not even, it's sort of even worse than that. Because, and I'm not an expert on this, and I'm curious, I know you brought it up, Nora, I'm just going to say something brief, and then I'm curious what you think about this. But like, I... I would just say, this is something I'm not an expert on. And I didn't, I grew up in a household where obviously we talked about the Holocaust. I learned about the Holocaust, but I did not have family in it. This was not an obsessive focus for me or my family growing up. So I kind of took it in as a Jewish person, but more or less through the popular culture. And two of the sort of elements that I remember, which kind of, I think are indicative of the way the Holocaust is used, would both be the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem and the movie Schindler's List, which was another one of these kind of major Holocaust moments. And both the museum and the movie end very similarly. Like you go through the museum. I don't know if either of you have been to the museum, but you kind of wind your way through the horrors of the Holocaust. But then you get to the happy ending, which the happy ending of the museum and the happy ending, according to it, of the Holocaust was the creation of the state of Israel. Right. And that's how the movie Schindler's List ends as well. And so In terms of what you just described, the answer is right in front of our face. Holocaust education is not a monolith necessarily, and I'm sure there are great progressive versions of it that are used to paint other lessons, but the overwhelming establishment narrative and lesson, it's not just the the information, but like what you're supposed to take away from is clearly Zionism was the answer to this event that happened, even though it had been in play for, you know, generations before that. But I'm curious.

Speaker 1: And Zionist leaders were out, were like working with them. Yeah. Like, yeah.

Nora Barrows-Friedman: Yeah. I mean, I think again, that's going to have to be something that, you know, Western Jews are going to have to figure out. You know, I mean, I can sympathize with, you know, people, I mean, my grandparents are all gone now, but, you know, people who are their age, um, who did survive, uh, you know, either the pogroms or the Holocaust. And of course, you know, wanting, wanting a safe place. Um, and unfortunately, you know, Zionism and Europe colluded and said, well, your safe place isn't going back to Warsaw or going back to Berlin or going back to Paris. Your safe place is now going to be in Europe. Tel Aviv or Jerusalem or Haifa. This was something that Abdul Jawad Omar said months ago on a podcast he did on EI in a discussion with Tamara. He was talking about how Europe And the U.S. really let Germany off the hook after the Nazi Holocaust, where, you know, they they were made to pay a nominal amount of reparations to victims who survived. But they never carved out a physical like geographical safe space for Jews who came from Europe. They solved their Jewish problem by pushing them into Palestine, by equipping them with all sorts of military weapons and tools, by turning West Asia into, like I said, a rampart of Western imperialism. And they never actually had to accept responsibility for Jewish people that they kicked out, expelled, or killed in any geographical, political way. And I think about that a lot. I'm like, what if What if the next generation or two generations down the line, when it's very, very clear that Israel has never been and will never be a so-called safe place for Jews who aren't from there indigenously. What if people, instead of going on birthright propaganda trips to so-called Israel, instead went to see villages in Lithuania or Hungary? I've always wanted to do that. I've always wanted to go to Eastern Europe and see where my family actually came from and where they were pushed out of and what's left of that community, that history. I think that there's going to have to be some reclamation of learning about who we are as Jewish people and as Westerners in whatever country we happen to now live in. That is both separate from Zionism completely and separate from the crimes of European leaders. I don't know. I think there's going to have to be a lot of generational responsibility and accountability taken. I don't know. But if we start to imagine and plan for Judaism without Israel, Judaism without Zionism, I think that's a good start.

Adam Horowitz: Yeah. And to pick up on one thing that Nora said, which I think also brings us back to the the theme of our discussion today in ways that Nazi Germany, and I don't know if Avdo Jawad talked about this, but the ways Nazi Germany was also led off the hook was that their ideology was never fully interrogated, which is really, I say their ideology, it's the ideology of the West. And so, you know, and a lot of writers have talked about this, you know, Mahmoud Mamdani, you know, has written about how this kind of like perfect circle of how, you know, Nazi Germany learned from the U.S. and South Africa learned from Nazi Germany and then Israel learned from, you know. And so to talk about philo-Semitism, it's really this kind of circle of ideology that then Jews and Israel, because we are the emblem of of what the West stands for. And so if you support us, you support the West. I mean, we all sort of scoff at this shared values thing, but it's actually completely right. Like, yes, between Israel, Zionism, West, Western supremacy, white supremacy. And so,

Speaker 1: that is not to say we could have answered this really quickly at the beginning of this podcast but that's kind of that's kind of the answer i don't i think that's i think i i think i nailed it no i think you totally nailed it no it's because it's also part of part of this weird scam that's been pulled over our like our eyes and also this eyes of the boomers is is drawing up the nazis as some exceptional force of european savages excuse me they were one of many There was many genocides, and in fact, and this is part of the issue that I didn't bring up in my previous question, is that the reality is that, yes, the Shoah has enjoyed, or benefits from, or whatever, or is a product of, an exceptional position in the kind of museum industrial historical complex. that we live in here, right? Is that it's this one genocide out of a history of settler colonial genocides that make up the fabric of the countries we both live in respectively, right? This one genocide that took place in Europe receives an inordinate amount of attention compared to the other genocides that are constitutive, right? And so this is one of these issues where that's the philo-Semitism problem. And Steven Spielberg is actually a great example, right? Because the guy he does this, you know, like for all intents and purposes, extremely schmaltzy and like very, like very over the top extra, like extra is a word that defines Schindler's list. And yeah, it's extremely extra film and whatever, like it's an aesthetic text or whatever, but ultimately he turns that movie into, into a Zionist institutional force because he plugs it in. He's the Shoah Foundation, which he helps fund, and people around him help fund, has its home where? In Israel. The guy later does Munich, which is a whitewashed job on Zionist terror force. And here's the funny story. Zionists were mad at him for not being Zionist enough in that movie. And they gave him shit and he got mad at the Zionists who were like pushing him to do it because he wasn't pro-Zionist enough in that movie. Whitewashing like a Mossad death crew. Right. Like like this is and like these twin gestures, you know, and then you think of like the Fableman's right. He's like quasi he's like quasi like biographical kind of autobiographical thing. It's like this is a story of philo-Semitism. This is about like this little group of American culture, which are not like the only minority, which are not even by far the largest minority. It's that this group has either produced or been on the receiving end of production of an immense amount of fascination and discussion and words and images and videos and music and concern to the point where our politicians fall over themselves saying, oh God, protect Jewish kids. Except when, of course, when Jewish fascists smash them on the head with boards like they did at UCLA. then they don't really care about Jewish kids, right? Like then the cops just like stand there.

Nora Barrows-Friedman: Like that's like, this is the right Jewish kids versus the wrong Jewish kids.

Speaker 1: Yes. Yeah. Like we like them. We like them. And, and like, I don't know, it just feels like this, this Faustian pact that like some Ashkenazi Jews, like, you know, like wealthy upper-class Ashkenazi Jews in like Europe in the 20th century, like began to make, and in the 19th century began to make with like the scum of the earth imperialists. Like this will, I don't know, this will have a framing moment, I think, for you know for a long long time in terms of like whatever we call jewish history like it will be looked back and be like yeah we made a faustian pact with the literal devil yeah and we decided to like be do their dirty work and it helped us temporarily sure and it gave us a sense of a feeling of home and it gave our kids something to like it's that i'm thinking of like woody allen's movie radio days where they're like collecting money for whatever, like for Israel, it's like, yeah, somewhere over in Egypt. Like, like they didn't like, no, like why would, why would we give money to Palestine somewhere over in Egypt? Like, that's what they said. It's like, and it was like a, just a cultural thing, but like, that's, I think American life is ultimately very hollow and American power will fade very quickly. And with it, a lot of philo-Semitism will go too. I think that's my thesis is, is that this wave of philo-Semitism, decades long at this point, that we're all a product, that we're all been ingrained with more so than probably other generations. I think you're right, Adam. I think it will crumble with Zionism because a lot of it was just flunky kids making career for themselves in these spheres that without them, material backing of American Uber wealth won't exist.

Adam Horowitz: The fact that you've seen both the Fablemans and Radio Days shows that philo-semitism is truly out of control.

Speaker 1: I'm obsessed with Jews, guys. I'm obsessed. It's like philo-semitism runs so profoundly in me. I'm more obsessed with Jews, probably, than I am with Iranians. And I'm Iranian. So what's that?

Nora Barrows-Friedman: The Shaws of Sunset is definitely your favorite show.

Speaker 1: yeah are they jews i think yeah a few of them i think that's horrible iranian jews oh no i didn't realize i had never watched it don't i just thought they were like it's terrible it's a shonda that's terrible do they do they make their jewishness like a point of the show oh yeah oh no don't ask me how i know breaking news here you've heard i've heard yeah

Nora Barrows-Friedman: but they're Zionists, you know, because they are rich and powerful and they want to be in the elite echelon of,

Speaker 1: that community um you know it's yeah you look at those dopey kids and you think you think these guys are going to get through get you through the future like you think like these mopeds like sentient moped losers like they're gonna get you to to like they're gonna defend against hezbollah like these guys like i don't know i don't think i don't have much faith in like american zionism

Nora Barrows-Friedman: I mean, it's built on a pile of toothpicks, right?

Speaker 1: Yeah, there's ultimately still Americans. Yeah, that's it. It's like they're Americans first. And we know American power is so fragile and so hollow. And just to think how stupid you are. I mean, I guess what choice did Zionists have? But they leased their entire sovereignty. to these, like, goonish neocons. Like, this entire thing of theirs, they put in their basket, in the basket of, like, these imperialist core, and you just think, like, this was what you bet on? Like, I mean, I guess there was going to be nothing better than, like, George Bush and his ilk. But... i don't know here we are yeah yeah that's true yeah i don't know uh yeah thank you guys this was a lot of fun i think we've we've probably tapped this one out uh it's it's a hard so much more to talk about yeah there really is like it is I feel like I feel like I mean, I've always had this kind of informal, like running thing of like, you know, the Jewish question and Zionism of my podcast and kind of running through the show. And occasionally I'll kind of like open that. But it is it's a less it's it's like it's a it's a case study in what imperialism will do to you. Like as a people, as a group, as like what a dance with like this settler colonial beast of European settler colonialism. Like, I don't know. It's like, I guess maybe I'm guilty of what that guy Yoav was doing in that tweet of like pushing it on ultimate authorship of Zionism to non-Jews. Maybe I'm guilty of that right there. Yeah.

Adam Horowitz: One thing that makes me think about too, I don't know if you, if you both are familiar with, there's a Jewish theologian named Mark Ellis. Like he had written for Mondoise for a while. He sadly passed away a couple of months ago, but I remember when he was writing for us often, um, he and i would sort of debate all the time about stuff because he cared a lot more about jewish things than i do but we would i forget even how this came up one day we were kind of talking about the work of mondewise and he told me he's like you know what you're doing what your work is at mondewise is you are documenting the end of jewish ethical history that's what he said um and Again, that's never how I have thought about our work, but I never have forgotten that. And I think there is clearly a grain of truth to that. It's not what animates me, and I think it's a byproduct of what we're doing. But the fact that that's how he understood the documentation of Zionism, and hopefully the end of Zionism, has always been meaningful to me. So I think that is one of the stories of our time as well.

Nora Barrows-Friedman: That's beautifully said. Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 1: Thank you, guys. This was really edifying. We're going to keep this conversation going.

Adam Horowitz: Yeah. Oh, joy. I have one other thing to say after the recording's over.

Speaker 1: Okay, okay. We'll save that. I'm going to press stop. Yeah, you people won't know what Adam's going to say. You're all a bunch of rubes.

Adam Horowitz: It's for Jews only.

Speaker 1: No, I'm sorry. No, please give me Patreon money. I love you guys. Bye.

Speaker 5: . . . Thank you. Thank you. . . .