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 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, Fida Jiryis’ beautiful memoir, Stranger in My Own Land.
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.
Even Palestinians from Gaza who have made it to the United States can use assistance. For instance, Salah El Sadi, who is looking for help finding work in his field. He writes:
“I am originally from Gaza, Palestine. I arrived in the United States as a Fulbright Scholar in mid-September 2023 to participate in a professional training program. However, due to the outbreak of war in Gaza, I have been unable to return home and currently find myself in a challenging situation. My wife and two children were evacuated to Oman, while many of my relatives remain in Gaza under extremely difficult conditions. Despite these challenges, I remain committed to my professional journey and contributing my expertise in meaningful ways. I have a strong background in environmental sustainability, water purification, chemistry, laboratory management, and climate resilience. I am currently seeking job opportunities, research collaborations, or consulting roles where I can contribute my expertise in environmental sustainability, chemistry, laboratory science, or climate innovation.”
If you can help Salah, his resume and contact information are here.
Friday Zoom Call
This Friday’s zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern on Friday, our regular time. This Friday is the holiday of Purim, in which Jews read the Book of Esther, a fascinating and troubling text whose themes of political intrigue, imperial power and catastrophic violence are deeply relevant to contemporary Jewish discourse about the destruction of Gaza. Our guest will be Rabbi Lexie Botzum, a faculty member at Yashrut, who last year authored this provocative essay about Purim, “Discarding Haman’s Garb: Refusing the Roles of Empire.”
Friday’s zoom call is for paid subscribers.
Book Tour
(We’ll update this every week.)
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 Tuesday, March 25, I’ll be speaking at Middlebury College.
On Monday, April 7, I’ll be speaking at the Harvard Divinity School.
On Wednesday, April 9, I’ll be speaking at United Parish in Brookline, Massachusetts.
On Tuesday, April 29, I’ll be speaking twice in Washington, DC: at Noon at Georgetown University and at 6 PM with Mehdi Hasan at Busboys and Poets.
Book Interviews
I talked with the Haaretz and Wisdom of Crowds podcasts about Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.
Sources Cited in this Week’s Video
The Trump administration’s attack on Columbia University.
The University of Chicago’s 2024 study on campus antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
Professor Eitan Hersh and Laura Royden’s 2021 study of antisemitism and political ideology in the US.
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.)
On the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast, Alex Kane talks to Tariq Kenney-Shawa and Mouin Rabbani about Trump’s fantasy of expelling Palestinians from Gaza.
Raef Zreik, Monica Marks and 972Mag on the Palestinian Campaign for the Cultural and Academic Boycott (PACBI)’s claim that the Oscar-winning film, No Other Land, violates the BDS movement’s guidelines on “normalization.”
For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s “Occupied Thoughts” podcast, I talked with Palestinian analyst Mouin Rabbani about Israel’s plans for Gaza and Syria, and the film No Other Land.
Cartoonists Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco on Gaza.
Fewer than half as many Democrats hold a favorable opinion of Israel as did four years ago.
See you on Friday, March 14,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, the Trump administration is making an example of Columbia University. They’re saying they’re going to cut $400 million in federal aid to Columbia University, thus throwing the university into financial turmoil because of the claim that Columbia University has permitted a culture of antisemitism. And this is part of a broader assault on American universities, throwing many of them into financial turmoil, based on this claim that these universities have become hotbeds of antisemitism.
Now, there is antisemitism on college campuses. Of course, there’s other forms of bigotry that exist on college campuses, of course. But to understand how Orwellian the Trump administration’s move is, you have to understand that the best data we have about antisemitism, first of all, shows that college students are less antisemitic than Americans as a whole. And secondly, that the Americans who tend to have the highest and the most antisemitic attitudes tend to be exactly the kinds of Americans who are part of Trump’s political coalition. So, the Trump administration, which is claiming that it’s acting to protect Jewish students against antisemitism, the best evidence we have suggests that the Trump coalition is much, much more antisemitic itself than are the college students that they are claiming are these hotbeds of antisemitism.
I want to look at a couple of data points that I think illustrate this. The first is a University of Chicago study from last March. And the University of Chicago study did something important. It asked college students, and Americans as a whole, about their attitudes towards Zionism and also their attitudes towards Jews. It asks them these questions separately. Now, groups like the Anti-Defamation League don’t ask these questions separately because they’re deeply invested in suggesting that the two are one and the same, right. Again, they again and again say that essentially to be Jewish is to be Zionist, and therefore, that anti-Zionist attitudes for them are inherently antisemitic.
But, in fact, it’s simply not true empirically, because when you ask people about their attitudes towards Israel or Zionism on the one hand, and their attitudes towards Jews on the other, you find that the opinions about the two actually radically diverge, right. So, the University of Chicago found that college students were indeed far more anti-Zionist than Americans as a whole, which reflects the kind of age breakdown that we’re seeing more generally, that they were three times as likely to be anti-Zionist. But college students were less likely—less likely—to express anti-Jewish attitudes than were Americans as a whole.
So, when the University of Chicago asked questions like, do the Jews have too much power? Do Jews care about anyone but themselves? When Jews are violently attacked, do they deserve it? They found that college students were significantly less likely to give antisemitic answers to those questions even though they were more likely to be anti-Zionist than Americans as a whole. And when you look at Americans as a whole, and you say, which are the group of Americans who have the highest degree of antisemitic attitudes, you find that those Americans who express the most antisemitic attitudes are not on the anti-Israel left. They are on the pro-Trump right.
The best study we have of this is from a 2021 study by Tuft University’s Eitan Hersch, who’s done a lot of really, really interesting work on this, and Laura Royden from Harvard University. And they ask people to say yes or no to these questions: ‘Jews are more loyal to Israel than to America’; ‘it is appropriate for opponents of Israel’s policies and actions to boycott Jewish American-owned businesses in their communities’; and ‘Jews in the United States have too much power.’ They find in response to this, I’m going to quote, that they say, ‘for overt measures, we find antisemitic attitudes are rare on the ideological left, but common on the ideological right.’
So, just like the University of Chicago studied their finding that even though Jews on the left are more critical of Israel and Zionism, they’re less likely to answer these questions about Jewish power and Jewish loyalty in an antisemitic way than are Americans on the right. And Hersch and Royden note that, even on the question of whether Jews should be boycotted because they support Israel, people on the left are less likely to say they should than people on the right. Which, again, shows the same thing that the University of Chicago study is showing, which is that actually Americans on the left are quite able to distinguish between their negative attitudes towards Israel and Zionism on one hand, and their attitudes towards Jews on the other. Even though American Jewish established groups like the Anti-Defamation League are constantly insisting that basically, if you’re anti-Zionist, you are also anti-Jewish.
So, we have this completely Orwellian situation in which a Trump administration whose political base consists of the most antisemitic people in the country, right, and a president who, let’s not forget, in the closing days of the 2016 campaign ran almost certainly the most antisemitic ad ever run by a major party political candidate in modern American history, right, when he ran an ad showing pictures of Lloyd Blankfein, Janet Yellen, and George Soros—three high-profile Jews— and basically said they were responsible for wrecking the global economy and as immiserating ordinary Americans, right.
That president and that political coalition are now—we’re supposed to believe that their assault on these universities is because they’re so concerned about Jewish students, and they’re so concerned about antisemitism. In fact, what they’re doing is using Jews as a pretext for an attack on universities that they hate because these universities are outside of their control and because these universities, as universities have been in America for a long time, are centers of progressive dissent against right-wing authoritarian and kind of more generally establishment or kind of capitalist politics, right. They’re a set of entities that are outside of the control of the Republican Party, outside of the control of the Trump administration.
And if you’re trying to create an authoritarian state, you’re going to crack down on all of the institutions inside the government and then beyond the government, like in the media, universities, etc. that are outside of your control so you can centralize control, right, so you can destroy and cripple any institution that might be areas that could breed resistance to your power. That’s what’s happening. And in a kind of transparently false way, Jewish safety is being used as the excuse for this. And what makes it all the more infuriating and tragic is that mainstream Jewish organizations like the ADL are essentially going along with this, right, because they see universities as places that are incubating opposition to Israel, criticism of Israel, and a desire to change US policy. And they have put the interest of defending the Israeli state above the interests of what’s actually an interest of most American Jews, and indeed above the interest of protecting American liberal democracy.
There’s something just astonishing about watching the American Jewish establishment be complicit in an attack on American universities when American universities have been so central to American Jewish success and flourishing. And yet, in an effort to prevent these universities from producing political resistance to the state of Israel, groups like the ADL and other establishment American Jewish organizations are willing to be complicit in an assault on these universities, which is also an assault on American liberal democracy.
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