Ashamed to Admit
Are you ashamed to admit you're not across the big issues and events affecting Jews in Australia, Israel and around the Jewish world?
In this new podcast from online publication The Jewish Independent, Your Third Cousin Tami Sussman and TJI's Dashiel Lawrence tackle the week's 'Chewiest and Jewiest' topics.
Ashamed to Admit
Why Jewish People Must Reclaim Zionism, with Adam Kirsch
In the aftermath of October 7, Zionism and 'Zionists' have been attacked on university campuses and within progressive circles around the world – sometimes with violent consequences. In this episode, Tami and Dash speak with Adam Kirsch, whose essay in The Jewish Quarterly argues that the Jewish people do not need to defend the term – they need to reclaim it.
Adam Kirsch is an American poet and literary critic. He is on the seminar faculty of Columbia University's Center for American Studies, and has taught at YIVO.
Adam's essay: The Z Word: Reclaiming Zionism
https://jewishquarterly.com/essay/2025/05/the-z-word
Articles discussed in this episode:
https://thejewishindependent.com.au/the-z-word-reclaiming-zionism
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Are you interested in nuanced Jewish perspectives on Zionism today, and I mean not what others want Jews to believe, but what thoughtful Jews are actually grappling with? If you answered yes, then you've come to the right place.
Speaker 2:I'm Dash Lawrence from the Jewish Independent and the next two episodes. We'll be diving into this hot topic by speaking with two people who are thinking about what Zionism means in this post-October seventh age.
Speaker 1:And in this episode we're joined by Jewish-American poet, literary critic and editor, adam Kirsch.
Speaker 2:Adam's recent essay, the Z-Word Reclaiming Zionism, published in the Jewish Quarterly, has sparked plenty of conversations around the world, as well as some respectful debates on the Jewish Independent website, and that's exactly the kind of dialogue we welcome.
Speaker 1:Adam doing God's work. Who knows if he'll be ashamed to admit anything. It's season three of this TJI podcast and we seem to be dropping our shame.
Speaker 2:Some of us more than others, Tammy.
Speaker 1:Join us as we have a go at cutting through this exceptionally chewy and dewy topic.
Speaker 2:Welcome to this week's episode of A Shame to Admit. Hello everyone, welcome to A Shame to Admit. I'm Melbourne's dewest, non-dew Dashiel Lawrence, and I'm Sydney's chewiest juju Tammy Sussman.
Speaker 1:What makes you so chewy, tammy Dash? What can I say? I love to chew. I love to chew the fat. I love to nosh Loves a nosh Loves a fresh. Doesn't love a fast. On the spectrum of fast to fresh, I'm deep in the fresh section. You don't get more, fresher or messier than me, dash. I know you love a bit of trivia. Do you know how many Jewish fasts there are? Can you have a guess? Would you reckon you got this because you got a PhD in being Jew?
Speaker 2:I can only think of one, two.
Speaker 1:Okay, which ones are you thinking of? The most famous one?
Speaker 2:Well, obviously, the fast you have on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.
Speaker 1:On Yom Kippur.
Speaker 2:And the other one If you choose to partake, of course. And then the other one is the one that you have in the days leading up to Shavuot, so that you've got more room in your stomach for cheesecake.
Speaker 1:That one seems like one that you've implemented personally. That's the Dash Lawrence fast.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:Okay. So there's six or seven, and one of them is coming up this Sunday, 13th of July, for those loyal listeners who listen to these episodes the day they drop, or at least the week that they're published. So on the 17th of Tammuz there's a fast, and this fast marks the breach of the walls of Jerusalem before the destruction of the Second Temple and it begins the three weeks of mourning leading to Tisha B'Av. And there's so many. There's the fast of Gedaliah. There's the fast on the 10th of Tevet, which marks the beginning of the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem. There's the fast of Esther, which is on the 13th of Adar, the day before Purim. It commemorates the fasting of the Jews in the Purim story. There's also the fast of the firstborn I'd never heard of this one the 14th of Nisan, the morning before Passover.
Speaker 2:Stop it. I'm starving already, Tammy.
Speaker 1:I'm curious to know because you're a well-versed guy you do well in Triv Just wondered if you had an idea of the religion with the most days of fasting.
Speaker 2:Well, there's certainly a pretty serious fast in Islam.
Speaker 1:Yes, Ramadan.
Speaker 2:Yes, Ramadan is quite a period of fasting. It doesn't go day on day.
Speaker 1:It's morning to evening, that's right.
Speaker 2:I always wonder about the Muslims that live in the Arctic Circle and what they have to do during Ramadan because the sun doesn't set right. So if you live in the far north of Norway, as I think there are some Muslims, what do they do when the sun doesn't set? When do they actually get to eat?
Speaker 1:Okay, if you're a Muslim listening to this show from Norway, please reach out and let us know what you do during Ramadan. Do you want me to give you the answer? Put you out of your misery.
Speaker 2:Please do.
Speaker 1:It's Jainism. Jain monks and some lay people fast for entire days, multiple days, even weeks Sometimes. Not only do they have to abstain from food or water, but they have to refrain from speech or movement as well.
Speaker 2:Ooh, that'd be good for you, Tammy.
Speaker 1:Would it be good for me or would it be good for you?
Speaker 2:The speech for you, the movement for me.
Speaker 1:Would it be good for you if I had to abstain from talking?
Speaker 2:No, not for me. Just, I think, you know, sometimes less is more, sometimes less is more.
Speaker 1:I think it would be good for you to get out of parenting duties. You'd be like sorry Susie, I can't help with toilet training this weekend, because not only am I abstaining from food or water, I also can't talk or move from this couch.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think just about every parent with children under five years of age would love a long fast like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they would All right. So you're probably thinking wow, tammy, where is this going? How is she going to create a segue from fasting to Zionism? You ready? There is no segue. I'm just stalling because talking about Zionism makes me so anxious.
Speaker 2:Right. Look, it seems like an unusual time for us to be taking a two-episode deep dive into Zionism. Like Israel has just come out of a war with Iran, it's still deeply engaged in a military conflict in Gaza. But, as you'll learn in today's conversation and as you'll learn in our conversation next week, now is actually the right time. Now is the time that Jews in the diaspora should be grappling with the meaning of Zionism and rethinking not just its relevancy but its application. Let's get to it, tammy. Today's conversation with poet, literary critic and editor, adam Kirsch. Adam Kirsch, welcome to A Shame to Admit. Thanks, I'm glad to be here, adam. I'd like to begin with your personal relationship with Zionism. Did you have one growing up? Did you and your family think of yourselves as Zionists?
Speaker 3:Yes, definitely. I grew up in Los Angeles in a family going to a conservative synagogue and in my sort of world being a Zionist was a normal and positive thing, and in fact my father's family has some connection to the early Zionist movement. My great-grandfather was part of the wave of immigrants that went from the Russian Empire to what was then the Ottoman Empire, to Palestine before World War I, and he served in a unit called the Zion Mule Corps, which was a British army unit that was Jews who enlisted in Palestine to fight for the British army in World War I. He lived there. Then he ended up moving to New York and settling in New York, which is how my family sort of came to America, or at least that part of it.
Speaker 3:So I did grow up hearing about these stories and hearing a lot about the history of Israel, and then as an adult I've sort of learned more about the past but also closely observed it, and so I think that over the last 18 months, as the term Zionism has been weaponized in a lot of ways, at least in certain environments where it's sort of self-evident that someone who's a Zionist is in the wrong or evil or demonic, that I found very troubling, as I think a lot of Jews have, and I think it's an important sort of moment to think about. Why is it important that we be able to call ourselves Zionists? What does Zionism mean, especially for Jews outside of Israel, like the three of us?
Speaker 1:You are a poet and a literary critic. Your credits include Slate, the New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times Book Review and Poetry. So what's drawn you into writing about Zionism in the post-October 7 age? And can we use the word pivot? Can we say you've pivoted from poetry?
Speaker 3:It's a bit of a pivot.
Speaker 3:I do write poetry. I've also written a lot of literary criticism and reviews, and often about Jewish history, Jewish literature. I wrote for a long time for the website Tablet, which is an American Jewish magazine, so I've written a lot about Jewish history, Jewish identity. So it's not that big of a pivot for me, but definitely since October 7th I've written a lot more about Zionism and the way that Israel is thought about in Western intellectual literary circles, more than I did in the past. And I'm not by any means an expert on Israel and I don't want to hold myself out as one. There are lots of people who know a great deal about contemporary Israel and I'm not one of them, but what I do sort of write about is the role of Zionism in Jewish identity and Jewish history and in particular, how it looks from my vantage point as an American living in New York, how the sort of debate over Zionism has changed the way that Jews in America and I think elsewhere as well think about Israel and think about themselves in relation to it.
Speaker 2:Adam, your essay starts by outlining the litany of violent incidents that have taken place around the world since October 7th, directed to Jewish people. In almost all cases, the targets of this violence, though, haven't been Jews, but I'm going to use the quote-unquote Zionists. It's Zionists that have been the target of violence. In the opening to this essay, in fact, you talk about a particular incident on a Newark subway car, in which a group of pro-Palestinian protesters were calling out where are the Zionists? Are there any Zionists on board? Zionists get out of a new category of legitimate hatred, a new category of legitimate targeting, where you can say things about Zionists that you could never say before about Jewish people. How and when did that happen?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that's definitely true and in fact this essay in the Jewish Quarterly which came out last month, I wrote, finished writing in March or April, and since then there were two assassinations in the United States of Jews. There was a case where a Jewish couple were shot to death at a Jewish museum in Washington DC. The man, I think, was Israeli and the woman was American. They were engaged, remarried and they were killed by a pro-Palestinian activist. And then there was another incident not long after that in Colorado, where Jews were in a march, a demonstration of concern for the hostages in Gaza, were attacked and one was killed by an angry anti-Zionist there, anti-zionist there. So I think that the phenomenon that I was writing about in the essay has only gotten worse and more explicitly violent. Before it was rhetorically violent and now it is becoming actually violent. And I think that October 7th was, of course, the turning point for that. It wasn't the beginning, but it was. Maybe it lit the fuse. The fuse, the explosive, had been prepared before, I think, for a couple of decades.
Speaker 3:The idea that Zionism is an illegitimate and sort of wicked idea or political position has become very common on a lot of the left, a lot of American academia. Certainly it has always been in the Arab world and that sort of came out into the open after October 7th. I think that you could see that from the very first night when the news about what had happened in Israel started to come to America. Before the Israeli response, the invasion of Gaza there were sort of celebrations on a lot of college campuses, a lot of progressive groups in the US issued statements supporting the attack. There were professors at very prestigious universities who talked about how they found it energizing and exhilarating that 1,200 people, mostly civilians, had been massacred in Israel. And I think that was a sort of a wake-up moment for me and for a lot of Jews around the world was a moment when you realize that there are a lot of people who are willing to say and do things against Jews as Zionists that we had thought had become taboo. They wouldn't necessarily do directed against Jews as Jews, but against Jews as Zionists. It's become legitimized.
Speaker 3:There are a lot of examples in the essay. That incident on the New York subway car felt very primal to me because the idea that a bunch of thugs basically would intimidate a subway car full of people and say, basically, if you're a Jew, get off the subway car before something bad happens to you. That's a kind of primal scene from Jewish history. It's the kind of thing that's happened throughout all the times and places the Jews have lived, but it's never happened in New York City in the last century, or at least since World War II, and it's never something that I've experienced or thought that I would experience.
Speaker 3:So I do think that there's this question that a lot of us have been asking and wrestling with is it anti-Semitism that's motivating this? Do we call something like that anti-Semitism or is it better to think of it in some other way? And one of the arguments that I'm making in the essay is that if people are being attacked as Zionists, that they have to defend themselves as Zionists. In other words, you can't say when someone attacks me as a Zionist, that really what they're doing is anti-Semitism and it should be sort of legally and morally considered an act of anti-Semitism. That may be true, but it also is a political statement. It's a political attempt to say that Zionism should not be allowed in public space. Anyone who's a Zionist is sort of a legitimate target, and I think that to counter that kind of attack, we need to make a positive case for what Zionism is and why it's important.
Speaker 2:Mm, yeah, now it's a really interesting reference you make to Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher, who herself had a fairly complicated and somewhat, we'd say, ambiguous relationship with Zionism. In the first chapter you cite the incident of the Zio 600 WhatsApp group. This is a WhatsApp group here in Australia of Jewish creatives, artists, academics who found themselves in a WhatsApp group post-October 7th talking about the discrimination, the fear, the insecurity that they were having in the wake of the sort of turn against Jewish creatives, artists and academics post-October 7th. Now, some of the people in that group I know them personally and in fact I was in that group myself, so I have some understanding of this they wouldn't have identified themselves as Zionist, they wouldn't regard themselves as anti-Zionist, may not even have regarded themselves as Zonzi, they just would regard themselves as Jewish. But you're suggesting that actually it's important for folks in that situation to reclaim the word and to lean into it rather than to scurry away from it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think so. I think that if we allow the idea of Zionism to become so toxic that there's a presumption that anyone Jewish has to sort of actively disavow Zionism before they're going to be allowed into respectable society and I think that that's become a sort of fact in a lot of places, a lot of intellectual, academic, literary, professional spaces there's this sort of assumption that if you of intellectual, academic, literary, professional spaces, there's this sort of assumption that if you're Jewish, there is this burden on you to actively disavow Israel, zionism, or else you are sort of not going to be allowed in, you're not going to be talked to. There's a presumption that you are sort of an evil person. That I think is very dangerous politically. I think that it is necessary to sort of answer back to that. The thing you're talking about from kind of Arendt that you referred to.
Speaker 3:Arendt was a Zionist activist in the 1930s. After she fled Nazi Germany, she spent the next seven years in France working for a Zionist organization that helped to get young people out of Europe to Palestine, and then, after the fall of France, she went to New York and in that period 1940, 1941, she wrote this essay in a German language newspaper in New York in which she said that what Jews needed was an army, a Jewish army, to fight Hitler, that there should be a sort of Jewish army, fighting under a Jewish flag that Jews could enlist in. And she says in that essay the thing I quote if someone attacks you as a Jew and you respond as a British citizen or a French citizen, they're only going to conclude that you're not defending yourself. And I think that the same thing is true of Zionism. If you're attacked as a Zionist and you defend yourself as a Jew or you defend yourself against anti-Semitism, that sends a signal that Zionism is something that you can't defend.
Speaker 3:Of course, the difficult part of all this is what is the connection between Zionism and the actions of the Israeli government, of the Israeli military? Does being a Zionist mean that you have to defend everything Israel does and I don't think that it does, and I talk about that in the essay as well, one good reason being that a lot of people in Israel are very unhappy with the things that Israeli government and military are doing. But sort of even before you get to that point, I think Zionism is the idea that there needs to be and should be a Jewish state that it's important for the survival and the well-being of the Jewish people everywhere, including in America and Australia and everywhere else, that Israel exists as a Jewish state. It's important for our physical safety, it's important for our political existence and our long-term well-being, and it's important culturally and spiritually, and that that's something that we should feel good about asserting and defending and not have to apologize for.
Speaker 1:So you spoke about leaders like Herzl Nordau. Is that how you pronounce, Nordau?
Speaker 3:Nordau.
Speaker 1:Nordau. I'm ashamed to admit that that is not a name that I remember from high school Jewish studies.
Speaker 3:No, that's a very he's a pretty minor guy.
Speaker 1:Why is he a minor guy?
Speaker 3:He was an important figure in the early Zionist movement and wrote some interesting books, but he's not very well remembered.
Speaker 1:Okay, so Herzl got all the attention because of his dapper suit.
Speaker 3:Exactly. Herzl was definitely the most famous one of those early Zionists, the sort of prehistory of the State of Israel. The story begins in the 1880s. In the 1880s in Eastern Europe Jews started to move to what was then the Ottoman Empire, to Palestine and, of course, throughout Jewish history there have always been a few Jews at least living in Israel, in the land of Israel, and there's always been a very strong religious connection to the land of Israel. Obviously, in the Torah, in the Bible, in prayer service in the holidays, a lot of Judaism is about connection to the land of Israel and that had always been the case, and traditionally since ancient times, when Jews were expelled from the land of Israel in their first centuries of the Common Era, a lot of Jewish thought, theology, prayer developed around the idea of when would we return from exile, that we were living in exile, we were not in the place we were supposed to be and that this was a sort of punishment, that God had allowed this to happen as punishment. And so the traditional religious idea in Judaism was that when the Messiah came, when God sent the Messiah, the Jews would all be gathered back to the land of Israel and the Jewish kingdom would sort of be reborn, the temple would be rebuilt and that that would happen in a miraculous fashion. And in the 1880s, for the first time, jews in Europe started to say we're going to make this happen, not in a miraculous fashion, but in a secular, political fashion. We're actually going to take concrete steps to create a Jewish state in the land of Israel, in Palestine.
Speaker 3:And Theodor Herzl, who was an Austrian journalist, a Viennese journalist and really very assimilated person, not religious, not particularly Jewish conscious. For most of his early life he was a playwright and journalist he had a sort of moment of awakening in the 1890s and he said anti-Semitism in Europe is permanent. He said Jews have been thinking for generations that there's going to come a time when we will belong here and anti-Semitism will go away and we're going to be accepted as members of our societies. And actually that's an illusion, it's never going to happen. And the only way that we can sort of save ourselves and in particular save our dignity because a lot of what early Zionism was about was about dignity and the sense of being able to stand up for yourself was to create a Jewish state. And so in the 1890s Herzl created this Zionist movement with an organization and a congress and institutional structures, and that was the sort of beginning of the movement towards creating a Jewish state.
Speaker 1:When you speak about Herzl and Nordau not Nordau you emphasise how Zionist leaders saw themselves as pursuing normalisation, but Dash and I were wondering if there's a generational disconnect here about what normal means. So for younger people today the idea that every people needs its own state or that nationalism is the path to equality it might seem a little bit old fashioned or dangerous, because we've grown up in an era of multiculturalism. So, you know, when young people might hear Zionist arguments about Jewish normality, they may be rejecting something that made sense in 1890 for Herzl and the other guy. That doesn't. Maybe in 2025, or do you think they're missing something essential about what statelessness means?
Speaker 3:Right. Well, it's a very good point and it points to a big division in the way that Jews in Israel and outside of Israel have sort of experienced the world. I think In America and as in Australia, we as Jews are a very small minority in a multicultural society, and so our sort of existence in these places depends on the idea of multiculturalism, tolerance for difference, and in the United States Joseph historically supported those things and been liberal politically and saw those things as going together. If you go back to Europe in the late 19th, early 20th century, the idea that every people needs its own country, that there should be a nation state for every people, was considered a progressive idea because it was against the backdrop of multinational empires, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. So before World War I you had a situation where most of the peoples of Eastern Europe were ruled by Russia or Germany or Austria, and so people like the Poles, the Hungarians, the Czechs, the Serbs, all who now have countries of their own, All those people thought if we can escape these empires and sort of rule ourselves, make our own destiny, that will be a better future for us. We will achieve equality and freedom in ways that we can't do under these foreign rulers.
Speaker 3:And Zionism has a lot in common with those movements. It emerged in that time and place and some of the early theorists of it sort of said explicitly all these other countries Italy is creating a country, Germany is creating a country we as Jews need a country also. And that's what they meant when they talked about being a normal people. They said the normal condition for a people is to have its own country. And as long as we are sort of the one people in Europe that doesn't have a country, that we're living in other people's countries and we don't have a country of our own, we are in an abnormal situation that's bad for the Jews in all kinds of ways. And a lot of early Zionism was very critical of the way religion had shaped Jewish culture and the way that economics. There was a strand of early Zionism called labor Zionism that said Jews needed to be farmers, they needed to work the land rather than working as merchants as they traditionally had in Eastern Europe. So there were all kinds of issues being debated.
Speaker 3:But I think that there is a sort of big contrast between I'll just focus on the United States because that's what I know the United States is a country built on immigration, that's always been multi-ethnic and increasingly so as time goes on. But that's not true of almost any other country in the world. Most countries in the world have been nation states of one kind or another, and the Jewish nation state is one of the most recently created. It was created in 1948. But if you look at, say, Britain or France or Italy, the idea that these are nations that have's an ethno-nationalist state because it's based on Frenchness or French identity.
Speaker 3:But people do say that about Israel a lot. They say that it's an ethno-state. That's sort of a code word for everything that's bad is an ethno-state. And I think that there's a big difference between an ethno-state in the sense of a racist, repressive regime and an ethno-state in the sense of a nation state, like almost every country in the world, where the majority belongs to one nation. That doesn't mean that the minority should be oppressed, it just means that there needs to be one country in the world where Jews are a majority. That was sort of the key objective of Zionism was to create one country in the world where Jews are the majority.
Speaker 1:Do you think people are critical of Israel specifically because it's not just about a language or a people, but it's also religious? They see it as like religious extremism in a sense.
Speaker 3:There's definitely some part of it, is that? Yes, but I think it's not only about religion, because religion I mean officially Israel is not a religious country. It's a secular country. The laws, the government are all secular. They're not based in the Bible or in the Torah. They're based on modern codes of law, modern constitutional ideas, representative government and democracy and all of those things that we are used to around the world. So it's not that Israel is a religious country, although it's true that religion is more important in Israel and in its politics now than it was when it was first created. People have become more religious and the religious part of the population has grown a lot bigger, but I don't think that even religion is necessarily at the heart of it.
Speaker 3:There's a very clear message in that history, which is that if there's not a country that is a Jewish country, then when Jews encounter persecution, disaster, holocaust in other parts of the world, there's no place to go.
Speaker 3:That was sort of the situation in the 1930s. You had the beginnings of a Jewish state. You had the sort of settlements, what was called the Yishuv, which was the Jewish settlement in Palestine before the state of Israel was created, but it was controlled by Britain, and so when the Nazis came to power and when the Second World War began, instead of being able to flee Europe to a Jewish country, britain said we're putting down a very limited quota. I think 10 or 15,000 people a year could immigrate over the next five years, and so it slammed the gates to the refugees who needed to come there, and one of the results was the destruction of 6 million people, and that was something that was very clear to Zionists at the time, and people talked about it. They said if we had national self-determination, if we had our own country, we would be able to provide a refuge for these people, and I think that even just that alone is a sufficient argument for why there needs to be a peace, absolutely.
Speaker 1:That was the message that was drilled into me growing up, but then, of course, people of my generation thought that our parents and grandparents were just being over the top and neurotic, and we got a rude awakening after October 7. Dash.
Speaker 2:I'm interested in where you chart the modern manifestation of anti-Zionism, because you've also written in recent times on settler colonialism, the emergence of a theory within the academy, and is a confluence of settler colonialism or the critique of supposed settler colonialism, matched up with a sort of 21st century brand of Arab nationalism. Where do you see the tip of the spear, if you will, of modern anti-Zionism?
Speaker 1:And what's the academy that you just referenced, because I'm assuming it's not the ones that are in control of the Oscars.
Speaker 3:Right, exactly. No, I think just in the sense of academia in general or universities in general, that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Well, in fact you cite an Australian academic who's been very influential in this space, patrick Wolfe. So tell us a little bit about him and a little bit about, as you say, the theory of settler colonialism.
Speaker 3:Right Well, so I became interested in this after October 7th, when I notice that the people who were most approving of the Hamas attack and in the public statements that I mentioned earlier that they made in response to it, they almost all used the term settler colonial to describe Israel. They said Israel is a settler colonial state. Israel is an attack on settler colonialism. Some people said Israelis aren't civilians, they're settlers, and that puts them in a different category. It's not killing civilians is bad, but killing settlers is legitimate. And I think that all of this showed that the ideas behind settler colonialism, the idea of settler colonialism, has really shaped the way a lot of people think about Israel and Zionism, and I did write this sort of short book about it, but the sort of brief answer is settler colonialism is the idea that people who are out of the place where they belong, geographically sort of, can never become the true owners of their land. And that applies to Australia and the United States and Canada and also to Israel, although the history of Israel is quite different from the history of those countries, also to Israel, although the history of Israel is quite different from the history of those countries. But I think the idea was really first developed in Australia by Patrick Wolfe and others, in the context of looking at Australian history and saying, as Patrick Wolfe said, invasion is a structure, not an event, by which he meant that the colonization of Australia starting in the 1780s is not something that happened in the past and is over. It's something that is ongoing for as long as Australia exists as a country, and so everything that happens in the present is sort of not just the result of the past, but it's a continuation of genocide, of colonialism, of the theft of land. All of these things are sort of ongoing processes and structures. They're not part of the past. And that idea can be applied to the history of the United States and Canada as well, and has been by a number of theorists and writers.
Speaker 3:And Zionism, I think, is often understood as a kind of settler colonialism. In other words, it's seen as white Europeans come to the land occupied by an indigenous, non-white people and take it from them and create a country on top of them and potentially annihilate them through genocide, and that is a sort of very simple, simplified way of thinking about the history of Australia or the United States or Canada. But you can see how it makes sense or how it arises from the facts in those places, but it doesn't suit the history of Zionism or Israel really at all. It's a very different story there and I think that applying the settler, colonial framework to Israel and Palestine actually guarantees continued conflict, because the essence of the idea is that Jews are settlers and don't belong in Israel.
Speaker 3:They came and took someone else's land. They should never have been there in the first place and they should ideally leave. People can frame this in different ways. Some people would say Israel should not be a Jewish state, but the Jews living there can stay there, just in a state that's not a Jewish state. And other people say they shouldn't be there at all and should go back to Europe or go back to where they came from. But that is a zero-sum framing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It basically says to Israeli Jews and Jews around the world this is a conflict designed to destroy your country and drive you out, and until that happens we won't stop fighting. And that is absolutely a recipe for continued conflict forever into the future and for very bloody conflict, because people fight very desperately if they have no place else to go. So I think that a lot of people who have adopted the anti-Zionist ideology. The idea of settler colonialism has helped drive them to it or helped shape the way they think about it, and I think it is a quite destructive intellectual influence.
Speaker 1:So this Patrick Guy not a friend foe?
Speaker 3:He originally was writing about Australia, but he also pretty soon turned to Israel and Zionism, and he has an influential essay something that a lot of people who study this will have read called Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native, which was written in 2003. The idea is that a settler colonial country is based on eliminating the Native population, so that, in order to create America, british settlers had to eliminate Native Americans, and one of the things he says in that essay is that the Jewish Israelis are planning to eliminate Palestinians in ways that he compares to the Holocaust.
Speaker 1:He said that in 2003.
Speaker 3:In 2003. And he implies that there's a looming Holocaust coming for Palestinians and that is a sort of way of applying the history of these other places to the history of Israel in a way that doesn't fit the facts.
Speaker 1:Adam, you're Harvard educated, right? I assume you use that as a badge of honor. Are you now ashamed to admit that you went to Harvard?
Speaker 3:No, I'm not. And I think that a lot of American universities have a real problem on this issue. I think that's definitely true. I think that there are a lot of people in universities, a lot of departments, where anti-Zionism is seen as the sort of minimum human commitment. In other words, if you don't say you're an anti-Zionist, we don't want to have anything to do with you, You're not part of our group. It's sort of like saying, and in a lot of these places they would explicitly say that Zionism is like Nazism, that it's a sort of destructive, genocidal, racist ideology. And so if you think of Zionism as the equivalent of Nazism, it makes sense why you would say well, we don't want to have anything to do with Nazis. Therefore, why should we want to have anything to do with Zionists? And there are a lot of people who think that in, I'm sure, at Harvard and other places as well not necessarily the majority and not necessarily the institution itself, but I do think that it's a common idea and it's one that needs to be argued with.
Speaker 2:In the essay you discuss the curious case, if you like, of Jewish anti-Zionists today. And, as Tammy just mentioned, you're Harvard educated. You're a public intellectual. Educated, you're a public intellectual adam. You've taught at columbia university, again another hotbed of anti-zionism and jewish anti-zionism. Why is it that the academy appears to be such a fertile place for jewish people to reject ideas of Jewish sovereignty and, as you talk about in the essay, almost romanticize Jewish powerlessness? What are those people seeing that? The vast majority of Jews around the world who don't read Judith Butler or Daniel Boyaran, what is it that they're seeing?
Speaker 3:Well, so I do talk about this a bit in the essay, about some of the people you mentioned. There are some people prominent professors or journalists and writers, who are Jews, who criticize Zionism and say that Zionism has been sort of bad for Jews or that at the very least, the time for Zionism has passed and that Israel should not be a Jewish state, should not be a Jewish country, and that Jews should not want it, that all of those things were sort of a wrong turning in Jewish history. And I think that they're motivated at heart by the same thing that a lot of student protesters and other critics of Israel are motivated by, which is indignation against injustice, against the terrible suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, against repression of Palestinians in the West Bank. All of those things are absolutely real. And there are Jews who are angry and don't want themselves as Jews, don't want Judaism, don't want Jewishness to be responsible for those things, don't want to be associated with those things. I think that is obviously not just understandable, but of course no one would want to be associated with those things or want those things to happen. No one should want those things to happen. That is sort of a basic. If you have a conscience. You don't want those things to happen.
Speaker 3:The real question is why do certain people think that abolishing the Jewish state would lead to a better future a better future for Jews or a better future in general and I think that it's a really unrealistic political view. It's not based on a real assessment of what's happening in the real world. It's more about discussions within your own mind about what does being Jewish mean, and I think that traditionally, for a lot of people, being Jewish means not being guilty of any of the crimes that power can be guilty of, because traditionally, jews have been powerless. For 2000 years there was no Jewish state military, government, police, any of the agencies that can be used to exert force on people and there are a lot of Jewish writers and thinkers who are proud of that tradition and see that as one of the good things about Judaism. Isaac Bischoff, a singer, for example, when he won the Nobel Prize for literature in the 70s, he gave a speech in which he talked about the Yiddish language, which was the language that Jews spoke in Europe, in Central and Eastern Europe, and it was a language that he spoke and wrote in, and he said that he loved Yiddish because in Yiddish there was no word for policeman or soldier or military tactics, and what he was contrasting with implicitly was Hebrew, because in modern Hebrew you do have those words, because it's the language spoken in a country that has those things.
Speaker 3:But I think that if the choice is between power and powerlessness, I think that it's insane to say that you would rather choose powerlessness, defenselessness and victimization, victimhood rather than the responsibility of power, of exercising power justly. I don't think the state of Israel, or any country, always exercises power justly, and I think there's very good reason to be troubled by the conduct of the war in Gaza, for example. A lot of the people who I talk about in the essay or who I quote in the essay who are anti-Zionists are people who used to be Zionists or who used to be Israelis who left the country, or Americans who went and moved to Israel because they were pursuing a Zionist idea, and when they served in the army or when they saw things in the occupied territories, they were disillusioned and they turned against Zionism. So I don't think being a Zionist means saying everything that Israel does is right.
Speaker 3:I think it means saying we want Israel to exist as a Jewish country, and it's a particularly tricky subject for us to address as Jews who are not Israeli, because the fact is that we don't have any real stake or control in what the Israeli state does.
Speaker 3:So in a way, we have public responsibility for it. People hold us accountable for it, but we don't vote in the elections, we don't pay taxes, we don't serve in the military, so we don't have any real responsibility. We don't have any real control over what happens there, and that is a position that I think a lot of Jews don't want to be in. It makes them very uncomfortable, it's contradictory, and so they express that by saying well, I'm not a Zionist, I'm Jewish, but I'm not a Zionist. Especially, I think, for younger people who have grown up in a time when Israel has always been the powerful one has always been sort of more powerful than its enemies, the idea that Israel is powerful and uses power unjustly feels very easy to accept. But I think again, if you look at the sort of history of Israel and Zionism, you've got a different view.
Speaker 2:Let me push back for a moment, if I can, adam.
Speaker 2:It would be remiss of me not to point out something that I think might be on the minds of some readers of this essay and maybe some people that might be hearing this interview. This may not be how you mean it, but I think some will believe that you are reducing Zionism down to a unified concept. But of course, as we know and as you in fact mentioned earlier, there have always been different versions of Zionism. You talked earlier about the Labor Zionists. There are, of course, the religious Zionists, jabotinsky's revisionist Zionist movement. When we look today at Israel, the settlement enterprise, the rhetoric of ministers such as Smosh, rick and Ben Gavir, when we look at Netanyahu's political evolution, I wonder, adam, if we're seeing the triumph of the maximalist, the ethno-nationalist, the most chauvinistic expression of Zionism, over the universalist one, and some, I think, believe that the wrong Zionism won. If you're a progressive Zionist, watching Israeli ministers talk about resettling Gaza, about resettling Gaza, it's hard to see that as the fulfillment of the emancipatory vision that drew so many Jews to Zionism in the first place.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely I know what you mean. I think that this relates to what I was just saying about the frustration of feeling tied to or linked to a country where you don't have any real participation in the politics. Right, the truth is that in our own countries, where we actually are citizens and vote and pay taxes, it's very possible to feel that our own governments are not the governments we want to be represented by, that we don't like the policies that they're pursuing, that they are committing injustices, sometimes going to war, hurting people. I think that, as an American, that's definitely something that I felt over the course of my life. So I think that there's a difference between saying the government is acting unwisely or unjustly and the country should not exist, and I think that that is the line that all of us can sort of hold.
Speaker 3:When you talk about diversity within Zionism and different traditions, absolutely there have been many different understandings of what Zionism is, what its goal should be. I think that the sort of minimum definition of it is a Jewish state and other than that, people have argued about how religious or secular it should be. In the beginning they even argued about where it should be. Does it have to be in the biblical land of Israel? Could it be somewhere else? There was a moment when it looked like maybe it would be in Africa. There were all kinds of debates, and there are debates today, about where the borders of the country should be, what its policy should be. All of those things, I think, are legitimate subjects for debate.
Speaker 3:Demand is to say that this country should cease to exist, that the seven and a half million Jews who live there should be driven out of it or lose their citizenship and reduced to a minority in a country where Hamas is part of the government, for example, which is what a binational state could look like. I don't think that that's a reasonable demand to make on any people. So again, dissent, criticism, absolutely. That's part of democracy and it's part of the way everyone thinks about their country, and many Israelis certainly think that about Netanyahu. One of the things that have been happening over the last you know, even since, even before the war started is huge demonstrations against Netanyahu in Tel Aviv and other places by people who want to get rid of him. But that doesn't translate into thinking that the state has forfeited its right to exist.
Speaker 2:Near the end of the essay, you say that anti-Zionism wants us to be ashamed that the state of Israel has too much power and afraid that any Jew anywhere might be punished for it. One of the central themes of this podcast, adam, is about Jewish shame, so I'm interested in your invoking of shame in this context.
Speaker 3:Definitely.
Speaker 3:I think that there was a traditional Jewish sort of experience of, as I said earlier, of powerlessness, of shame, of not being able to stand up for yourself, and Judaism sort of developed strategies for living in that condition for many centuries in many different places.
Speaker 3:And I feel personally that, as an American and living in a time when the state of Israel exists, that when I read about that past, when I read about that history, I feel very lucky not to have that kind of show, not to have been raised with it and not to have to live in a world where I feel powerless, defenseless, that being a Jew is something that I need to escape from, or that it's sort of an illegitimate identity and that I should look for some other identity that's more legitimate, which is something that Jews have often felt in the modern world. And I think that not having that shame is something that we should value, and maybe only if we know how common it was in Jewish history do we realise how valuable it is to live in a time when we don't have it, and that's something that I think is worth defending.
Speaker 1:I think that's something that's really important for our Australian listeners to hear as well, because, unlike our American cousins, we do have a big, tall poppy syndrome issue here in Australia.
Speaker 2:And a very vibrant Zionist infrastructure, including an incredibly long history of Zionist youth movements, and I often wonder about how young Australian Jews who are members of those Zionist youth movements today feel about that association with the word Zionism. Adam, what would you say to young Australian Jews who might be feeling that sense of shame about their affiliation or attachment to Zionism and their Zionist youth movements?
Speaker 3:I guess maybe what I would say is that Zionism is a sort of affirmation of Jewish identity. It's saying that a Jewish identity, jewish political identity, is something that should exist and deserves to exist, it's not something illegitimate, it's not something to be ashamed of, and that that kind of Zionism is very important for Jewish well-being. Whether you're in Israel or not, it doesn't necessarily mean that one is going to move to Israel. It doesn't mean that the only valid Jewish existence is in Israel, because I don't think that's true and that's one of those other debates that's always going on within Zionism.
Speaker 3:Does Zionism mean that all Jews should live in the Jewish country? That's never been the case in Jewish history, in the ancient world or in the modern world. So I don't think that it necessarily means that, but I do think it means saying it's not something to apologize for, it's not something that one should have to be on the defensive about, and I think that it's important to be able to say I am not responsible for, I'm not in control of the actions of a government that is not my government, or even of my own government a lot of the time. One shouldn't be forced to apologize for, or agree with or held responsible for things that one isn't responsible for. But saying that Rosias doesn't or shouldn't mean that it means that one believes in the importance of a Jewish country, of a Jewish political identity, and that is something that I think everyone can take pride in, and that is something that I think everyone can take pride in.
Speaker 2:That was Adam Kirsch. You can read his full recent essay, the Z-Word Reclaiming Zionism, published in the Jewish Quarterly, or you can read an excerpt of Adam's essay online at thejewishindependentcomau.
Speaker 1:And that's it for this week. You've been listening to A Shame to Admit with me Tammy Sussman.
Speaker 2:And me, Dash Lawrence.
Speaker 1:This episode was mixed and edited by Nick King, with theme music by Donovan Jenks.
Speaker 2:If you like the podcast, forward it to a mate. Tell them it's even more enjoyable that a post passed press. And don't forget to subscribe to the Jewish Independent to get your bi-weekly newsletter in your inbox twice a week, on a Tuesday and a Thursday.
Speaker 1:As always, thanks for your support and look out for us next week.
Speaker 2:Bye-bye, thank you.