I’ll be on book tour for Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza for the next few months. You’ll find a list of book-related events and reviews below.
I’m happy people are reading my book. But I know that many talented Palestinian authors don’t get the same attention. So, I hope people who buy my book also buy one by a Palestinian author. For instance, Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture, edited by Mahmoud Muha and Matthew Teller with Juliette Touma and Jayyab Abusafia.
I hope readers also donate to people in Gaza. For instance, Hossam and Mariam Alzweidi, who were severely injured along with their four children by Israeli bombs and have been displaced ten times since October 7th. They’re trying to raise the money to seek medical care in Egypt. Their GoFundMe page is here.
Here is a message about Hossam’s condition from his sister, Abir:
“Hossam reached out to the passport office to inquire about the resumption of services. In a glimmer of hope, he learned that officials are anticipating the start of the second phase of the armistice agreement, which could lead to the reopening of travel offices and border crossings as early as the beginning of March. This news brings a sense of relief to many who have been waiting for this opportunity.
However, Hossam is also facing another daunting task. He is diligently working to recover the medical reports that were tragically lost during the raid on the displacement camp, which was completely devastated. These documents are crucial for their medical journey to Egypt.
Through all of this, Hossam and his family are holding on to the hope that your kindness has instilled in them. Your support means the world to them and plays an essential role in their journey toward healing.”
Friday Zoom Call
This Friday’s zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern on Friday, our regular time. Our guests will be two important progressive American rabbis who disagree on some fundamental questions regarding Palestine and Israel. Rabbi Alissa Wise, Lead Organizer of Rabbis for Ceasefire, former Co-Deputy Director at Jewish Voice for Peace and co-author of Solidarity is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing, is anti-Zionist. Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, supports partitioning Israel-Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states. Despite these differences, they both signed a recent letter in The New York Times titled “Jewish People Say No to Ethnic Cleansing.” We’ll talk about the ideological differences that separate “anti-Zionist” and “progressive Zionist” Jews—I’m using quotation marks because even the terms are contested— and whether, despite them, there are opportunities for cooperation in the age of Netanyahu and Trump.
Friday’s zoom call is for paid subscribers.
Book Tour
(We’ll update this every week.)
On Monday, February 24, I’ll be speaking with Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC.
On Monday, March 3, I’ll be speaking with Professor Atalia Omer at Notre Dame University.
On Monday, March 10 and Tuesday, March 11, I’ll be giving four talks in Michigan. On March 10 at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and at St David’s Episcopal Church, and on March 11 at St. Matthew’s & St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church and at T’chiyah synagogue.
On Monday, March 17, I’ll be speaking at Mishkan Shalom synagogue in Philadelphia.
On Tuesday, March 18, I’ll be debating an old classmate, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, on the proposition “The oppression of Palestinians in non-democratic Israel has been systematic and profound” at the Soho Forum in New York.
On Monday, March 24, I’ll be speaking at the University of Vermont.
On Tuesday, March 25, I’ll be speaking at Middlebury College.
On Wednesday, April 9, I’ll be speaking at United Parish in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Book Interviews
Last week, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza was reviewed critically from the right in Quillette and from the left in Middle East Eye and Religion Dispatches.
Here’s a video of my discussion last week at San Diego State University with Professors Jonathan Graubart and Manal Swarjo and in Los Angeles with Professor David Myers.
NPR chose Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza as its book of the day.
Sources Cited in this Week’s Video
Muhammad Shehada on Hamas’ treatment of the Bibas family.
Khalil Sayegh on Hamas’ treatment of the Bibas family and other Israeli hostages.
Khalil Sayegh on his late father.
“Don’t call for revenge-call for peace,” retweeted by We Are All Hostages.
Commentary editor John Podhoretz on the people of Gaza (27 minutes in).
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on Parshat Mishpatim.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Nora Caplan-Bricker reviews Rachel Kushner’s No Exit.
Matt Duss and Jeffrey Sachs debate Ukraine.
For the Foundation of Middle East Peace, I interviewed Palestine Legal’s Dima Khalidi about repression in the Trump era.
Check out Liz Shulman’s new book, Good Jewish Girl: A Jerusalem Love Story Gone Bad.
Reader Responses
In response to my interview with Educational Bookshop co-owner Mahmoud Muna, subscriber Therese Mughannam wrote:
“I was born in the hospital in the Russian Compound in 1947, (now a prison Mahmoud was taken to) months before the partition of Palestine. I’ve tried to visit the compound during past trips, but the courtyard was as far as I once was allowed ‘for security reasons’ and only for ‘5 minutes and no pictures!’ Unfortunately, my American passport revealed to them that I was born in Jerusalem. But once in there, sitting on a cold stone bench, time stood still for me and I prayed for them all, Israeli soldiers, Palestinian prisoners, the whole lot of them. Sigh. ‘How long O, Lord…’”
See you on Friday, February 28,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, as I’ve been on my book tour now, people sometimes ask me, you know, is it hard to be a Jew, particularly maybe an observant Jew who’s critical of Israel? And I always feel embarrassed a bit by the question because the truth is my life is so privileged and safe compared to Palestinians in Gaza, or Palestinians in the West Bank and other places, and even compared to Israeli Jews who are dying, or suffering, or whose family members are at risk or injured. And so, my problems are just minuscule. It is true that I have lost some friends, as I document in the book, but I still have a beautiful place to daven, to pray, with people who are willing to study Jewish texts with me despite our political differences.
And if I’ve lost some members, people in the Jewish community who are not interested in being my friends anymore, I also feel like I’ve gained a kind of a moral community that I could not have imagined, which includes many, many Palestinians and people from all different backgrounds. And what I mean by a moral community is people who simply believe in the preciousness of all life—all Palestinian life, all Israeli Jewish life—and refuse to be drawn into a politics of inhumanity, a politics of cruelty regardless of what happens and regardless of what is done to their side. And those people are my heroes. And I feel like that’s what I think of as my moral community.
I want to give a couple of examples of that. In the last few days, in the wake of the terrible news about the Bibas family there, the terrible way in which they were returned kind of paraded around, and the news that the person who was initially said to be their mother, Shiri Bibas, was not her. And the first person I want to quote is my friend Muhammad Shehada, who wrote after that, ‘our principles,’ he’s talking about the Palestinian freedom struggle. He says, ‘our principles should never be contingent on the behavior of our oppressor.’ This is from Muhammad, someone who, as I document in my book, lost his best friend in a terrible, terrible way during this war, who has lost so many relatives, whose family has suffered so much in Gaza. And yet, he condemns what Hamas has done. He’s done it consistently. He did it again in terms of their treatment of the Bibas family and the dead Bibas children because he says that the Palestinian struggle must hold itself to a higher moral standard.
The second is my friend Khalil Sayegh, also from Gaza. Khalil wrote about the way the Bibas family’s dead children and family were paraded. He wrote, ‘I opened my Facebook account where my friends who live in Gaza are and found many condemning Hamas’s parade of kids’ coffins. Most of these friends have endured the horror of the genocide and lost family members. I turned to X and find warriors from the West doing whataboutism.’ So, Khalil is himself from Gaza and he has it within him, despite everything, to condemn Hamas even though some leftists in the West who haven’t suffered in that personal way at all are making excuses for what Hamas has done.
And just to understand the significance of what Khalil is able to say here. It’s not only others in Gaza who have lost their closest family members, but himself as well. His father, Jeries Sayegh, died because of medical neglect and lack of access to medicine and hospital when the Holy Family Catholic Church, where he was taking refuge, was besieged. And I want to quote what Khalil wrote after his father’s death, about his father, Jeries Sayegh. He wrote, ‘my father always taught me to love everyone, forgive, and never give desire for revenge space in my life. He always looked up to Christ as his model and told me I should too. As hard and painful as it is, I promise you, Dad, to stay true to those principles.’ That’s what I mean by sharing a moral community. And this was also, by the way, a sentiment reflected by the group We Are All Hostages, the hostage group in its Twitter account, which tweeted out in response after this a quote from a tweet from a Palestinian who wrote named Ehad Hassan, who wrote, ‘Don’t call for revenge-call for peace.’
And it’s really striking to me that this came on the same week as Parshat Mishpatim. You know, Khalil is a devout Christian. I try, as best as I can, to be an observant Jew. And in this week’s Parshat, in this week’s Torah portion, Mishpatim, there is this line, which says, ‘if you see an enemy’s donkey sagging under its burden, you shall not pass by. You shall surely release it with him.’ And Jonathan Sachs notes that the Aramaic translation, which is called the Targum, has a very interesting different translation of this phrase. On the phrase, ‘you shall surely release it,’ it interprets this phrase as not, you shall surely release ‘it’ referring to the donkey, that you shall release the donkey from the burden it’s facing, but you shall let go of your own burden. You shall release the hatred in you. That by acting to do something, an act of humanity towards your enemy, you are releasing the hatred inside of you. That’s what it means by you shall surely release ‘it.’
Maimonides goes on to write as a general principle, ‘you shall blot any offenses against you out of your mind and not bear a grudge. For as long as one nurses a grievance and keeps it in mind, one may come to take vengeance. The Torah therefore emphatically warns us not to bear a grudge, so that the impression of the wrong should be completely obliterated and no longer remembered. This is the right principle. It alone makes civilized life and social interaction possible.’ This is such a precious and important and fragile message now with the possibility that Israel seems poised to not go further to a second round of a hostage deal, despite the fact that that’s what the hostage organizations want, but to launch a more aggressive war, a war that is more explicitly aimed at the mass expulsion of Palestinians in Gaza. And it has filled me with horror to see the way in which people with great prestige and credibility in Israel and the United States—people who are not associated with the far marginal right, but people in the center of our community, people who can walk into Jewish institutions and be respected and dignified—have in recent weeks jumped on board this idea of mass expulsion.
And I want to just quote one. I usually don’t quote people by name, but I just want to quote this. And you can think about this in contrast to Khalil Sayegh and Muhammad Shehada. This is from John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary Magazine, one of the most venerable Jewish magazines for many, many decades, the editor. And he’s talking about the way the Israeli public is now responding with fury to what they’ve seen of the Bibas family being paraded, but he’s also endorsing this view. This is what he says. This is what he says. This is from the Commentary podcast, and I’ll link to it. ‘The hell with Gaza. To hell with everybody who lives in Gaza. The hell with it. We don’t care. Stop talking to me about humanitarian aid. Stop talking to me about the suffering Gazan people.’
The message of Mishpatim is a profound rejection of this kind of inhumanity. Khalil Sayegh’s life, Muhammad Shehada’s life, even though they have endured, and their families have endured, a thousand, a million times more than what John Podhoretz has living on the Upper West Side of New York. They can bring themselves to reject cruelty, to recognize that all human beings, all Israeli Jews, all Palestinians, the Bibas family, Khalil Sayegh’s father, they’re all created in the image of God. Their lives are infinitely precious. It’s people who believe that who are my moral community. That’s the moral community that I take faith in that will bring us to a better place.
Share this post