I’ll be on book tour for Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza for a few more weeks. You’ll find a list of book-related events 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 Palestine Lives and Culture, edited by Mahmoud Muna 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.
Friday Zoom Call
This Friday’s zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern, our regular time. Our guest will be the novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad, author of the new book about Israel’s destruction of Gaza, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. He’ll talk about what it’s like to live as an Arab-American in a moment in which the US—and the West more generally— are destroying any pretense of believing in the moral principles they claim to hold dear.
Book Tour
(We’ll update this every week.)
On Monday, May 6, I’ll be speaking at Stanford University.
On Monday, May 12, I’ll be speaking at Parkdale Hall in Toronto.
On Tuesday, May 13, I’ll be speaking at the Woodstock Jewish Congregation.
On Sunday, May 25, I’ll be speaking with Debbie Whitmont at the Sydney Writers Festival in Sydney, Australia.
On Tuesday, May 27, I’ll be speaking at the Wheeler Center in Melbourne, Australia.
Sources Cited in this Week’s Video
Tommy Lapid and Yeshayahu Leibowitz on “Judeo-Nazis.”
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!), Sheetal Chabria offers a leftist guide to tariffs.
In The New York Times, I wrote about how Trump and establishment Jewish organizations are redefining Jewishness to silence protest against Israel.
On Seven Minute expert, I talked (or tried to talk) with Columbia University Professor Shai Davidai about Israel and antisemitism.
Ben Rhodes and Tommy Vietor on how American politicians can support the horror in Gaza.
Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza was reviewed in the magazine ARC and I discussed with Barnett Rubin.
Check out Ben Barber’s book, No Way But Forward: Life Stories of Three Families in the Gaza Strip.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, the Antisemitism Awareness Act is currently being debated in the US Senate. It’s passed the House. And it’s now in committee in the Senate. And if it passes through the committee, it will go on to the Senate floor. And this would kind of be Congressional instruction to the Department of Education to use this particular definition when it evaluates alleged antisemitism on college campuses.
And so, it’s just worth, I think, saying something about one particular element of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition, IHRA definition of antisemitism, to show how I think perverse it is and how in a certain kind of very strange way. It’s very dehumanizing of Jews, this definition of antisemitism. It’s dehumanizing of Jews because it suggests that it is antisemitic to imagine that Jews could act the way in which other human beings act, right?
And so, in particular, one of the examples of the IHRA definition of antisemitism is that it could be an example of antisemitism if you draw comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis. And now, obviously, there are many analogies between Israel and the Nazis that will be very, very stupid and incorrect, and potentially even offensive analogies, right? Benjamin Netanyahu, for all his sins, is not Adolf Hitler. Israel, despite the horrors that it’s committing in Gaza and the West Bank, has not established death camps in the West Bank. So, obviously, those would be very incorrect, and I think problematic analogies.
But the Nazis did many, many other things besides creating death camps, right? The Nazis took power in 1933. There was a whole system of kind of discourse and processes that the Nazis put in place—some of which was consistent with other fascist movements—that eroded liberal democracy, that ultimately eroded the rule of law and the rights of various different people. And we understand that implicitly, right, because the United States media is filled with comparisons of the Trump administration to the Nazis, right? And the vast majority of these comparisons are not suggesting that that Donald Trump has set up death camps in the United States, right, but they’re looking to this historical parallel to try to understand and analyze the dangers and also the rhetorical formulations, the relationship between a fascist movement and big corporations, the language of dehumanization, many, many, many things, which are kind of natural things for people to do when you’re looking at a system of oppression—and as Donald Trump is trying to create in the United States and authoritarianism and Israel has been doing as well, right? And remember, just to state the obvious, Israel is the country that controls millions and millions of people who live under the control of the Israeli state but cannot become citizens of that state. And now it is engaged in Gaza in a military assault that has been called genocide by Human Rights Watch and by people like Omer Bartov, right?
So, what does it mean to suggest that one can talk about Donald Trump and the Republican Party in the language of Nazis or talk about Marine Le Pen, or talk about the AFD, or talk about Viktor Orban, or Narendra Modi, or Jair Bolsonaro, or many, many, many kind of right-wing authoritarian movements around the world? But it is antisemitic to deploy any of these analogies when it comes to the state of Israel. What that in effect does is it suggests—this is what I mean by dehumanization—it suggests that in some strange way, if you’re in a Jewish state, you’re no longer fully human because you cannot have the full range of human capacities, right, some of which are very good, some of which are very terrible. And if people suggest you do, if people suggest that there’s anything you do that might have reminiscences of this horrible Nazi regime, that’s antisemitic because it is bigoted against Jews to suggest that Jews in a Jewish state could be acting in the way that we plainly recognize, that people all over the world and political movements all over the world have the capacity to act.
I think I may have mentioned before once this really extraordinary video of a conversation on Israeli television between Tommy Lapid, the father of Yair Lapid—Tommy Lapid was himself an Israeli politician, and also a Holocaust survivor—and, you know, one of my heroes, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the Orthodox Israeli social critic. And Tommy Lapid is enraged that Yeshayahu Leibowitz has used the term Judeo-Nazis to describe certain things that he’s seeing that are happening in the state of Israel, right? Yeshayahu Leibowitz in using that term could very well be found to be violating the IHRA definition of antisemitism, despite the fact that he was an eminent Jewish scholar and social critic, right?
But Tommy Lapid is enraged by the analogy, and he’s yelling at Leibowitz. Again and again, he’s saying, ‘have we put them in death camps? Have we put them in death camps? Have we put them in death camps?’ And there’s this long pause. And then Leibowitz says at the end, ‘that is your prophecy.’ That is your prophecy. And what I interpret Leibowitz is saying is of course not that Israel has put Palestinians in death camps. It hasn’t back then. It still hasn’t, even despite what it’s doing in Gaza. But to say, don’t foreclose the possibility that Jews could be capable of anything that any other human beings are capable of, right, because Jews are at the end of the day just another group of human beings not endowed with any particular special qualities.
And what is so disturbing to me about this really frankly insane definition of antisemitism, which has emerged in the United States, is it is having the effect of suggesting that it is now an act of bigotry to treat and analyze Jews as if they are other human beings. And that in a bizarre way is also othering of Jews. It’s also in a very strange way, in the language of protecting Jews, it has the effect of suggesting that Jews are something other than ordinary human beings. And that’s what frightens me about the Antisemitism Awareness Act and about the way this discourse has gone in the United States, especially in the Trump era.
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