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.
Ask Me Anything
Our next Ask Me Anything session, for premium subscribers, will be this Tuesday, March 18, from 1-2 PM. Between Trump’s attack on academic freedom, and the potential return to war in Gaza, there’s a lot to discuss. The Zoom link for that will be sent in a separate email later today.
Conversation with Jeffrey Lax
Last week, I recorded a zoom conversation with my CUNY colleague, Professor Jeffrey Lax, Founder and Chairman of S.A.F.E. Campus, “a nonprofit organization dedicated to combating antisemitism in academic environments.” We differ radically in our definition of antisemitism, and how to combat it on campus. But despite our dismay at the other’s views, we managed to keep the conversation respectful. And I’m grateful to Jeffrey for taking part.
We’ll send the video to paid subscribers later this week.
Friday Zoom Call
This Friday’s zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern on Friday, our regular time. We’ll continue our discussion of the assault on academic freedom, especially for pro-Palestinian activists, with Columbia University’s Nadia Abu El-Haj. She is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies. She just published an essay in The New York Review of Books entitled, “Mahmoud is Not Safe,” about the detention of Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil.
Friday’s zoom call is for all paid subscribers.
Book Tour
(We’ll update this every week.)
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 Monday, April 7, I’ll be speaking at the Harvard Divinity School.
On Tuesday, April 8, I’ll be speaking at First Parish in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the human rights activist, Issa Amro.
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.
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.
Book Interviews and Reviews
I talked about my book with Ralph Nader and on London Review of Books podcast with Rachel Shabi and Adam Shatz. The book was reviewed by Professor Yaakov Rabkin in the Times of Israel.
Sources Cited in this Week’s Video
Donald Trump’s claim that Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer is “not Jewish anymore.”
The Jewish students expelled or indicted at Columbia, the University of Michigan and Vanderbilt.
When the ADL congratulated Columbia for suspending an organization of Jewish students and Dartmouth for calling in police who assaulted the former chair of its Jewish studies program.
Last year’s Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs poll, which showed that one-third of American Jews think Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
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, Arielle Angel, Mari Cohen and Alex Kane discuss the American Jewish establishment’s response to the detention of Mahmoud Khalil.
In an essay in The Guardian, I drew from Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza to discuss the relationship between establishment Jewish discourse about the Gaza’s destruction, and about the holiday of Purim.
A press conference at Columbia to protest Mahmoud Khalil’s detention.
An upcoming conference at Princeton on “The Anti-Zionist Idea.”
Apology
In last week’s newsletter, I misspelled the name of Columbia Professor Joseph Howley.
See you on Tuesday, March 18 for the Ask Me Anything and Friday, March 21 for the Zoom call,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
We are witnessing one of the greatest attacks on the rights and safety of American Jews, particularly American Jewish students, in modern American history, perhaps since the Red Scare of the early 1950s. Let me say that again, because what I said may strike some people as strange. We are witnessing one of the greatest attacks on the rights and safety of American Jews, particularly Jewish students, in modern history. Now, that may sound strange because the Trump administration’s attack on American universities, which is being applauded by some establishment American Jewish organizations, is being justified in the name of protecting the safety and rights of Jewish students.
But, to really understand what’s going on here, you have to understand that the way the Trump administration is using the term Jew, and the way that groups like the Anti-Defamation League are using the term Jew is actually a radical redefinition of the word. They’re using the term Jew as synonymous with Zionist or pro-Israel, which allows them to justify these actions in the name of Jewish rights and safety, even though an astonishingly large number of the students who are getting suspended, expelled, convicted, having their careers and lives ruined in the name of Jewish rights and safety are Jews, are Jews, right.
And you can see this redefinition most nakedly in Donald Trump’s own words, right. Because Donald Trump always says everything in its kind of crudest form, right. So, Donald Trump said last week about Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, he said, ‘Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I’m concerned. He’s become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore. He’s a Palestinian.’ So, now what does Trump mean by this? What Trump means is you are Jewish if you support Israel. You support Israel as much as Donald Trump thinks you should support Israel. Because Schumer now—in Trump’s mind—doesn’t support Israel, Schumer ceases to be a Jew.
But this is not unique to Donald Trump. This is actually in practice the way that many establishment American Jewish organizations have redefined what it means to be a Jew. So, if you look, for instance, at the Anti-Defamation League, right, one of the things that the Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League, and other establishment Jewish leaders, say again and again is supporting Israel, being a Zionist, is inherent in being Jewish—inherent, right. And so, the flip side of that is that if you don’t support Israel, if you’re not a Zionist, then you’re not actually a Jew.
And this is actually the way that groups like the ADL actually function, right, when they look at events on campus, right. So, a while after the October 7th massacre, Columbia University suspended the student group Jewish Voice for Peace. Let’s remember: the first adjective in the group’s name is Jewish. And how did the ADL respond? The ADL responded by thanking Columbia’s then-president for acting to ‘protect Jewish students.’ Colombia’s president had just suspended a group of Jewish students, and the ADL thanked her for protecting Jewish students because they do not define the Jewish students in Jewish Voice for Peace as Jews because they’re anti-Zionist.
Similarly, when Dartmouth’s president called in the New Hampshire police and those police zip-tied a former chair of the Jewish studies program at Dartmouth and threw her to the ground when she was filming them arresting students at the college’s pro-Palestinian encampment, the ADL thanked the president of Dartmouth, right. Now that lady who was the former head of the chair of the Jewish studies program, she wasn’t really particularly safe, right, when the police zip tied her and threw her to the ground. But the ADL thanked Dartmouth because they were not defining her as a Jew.
Now, of course, there are many Jewish students who strongly support Israel, strongly identify with being a Zionist. And of course, their rights and safety should be protected as well, obviously, right. And some of them have experienced harassment, intimidation, even physical violence. That’s entirely wrong. So, I’m not upset that Jewish organizations or anybody would be concerned about their welfare and safety. What is deeply troubling, though, is that in the name of protecting their safety, they’re defined as the only students on campus who are actually Jews, right, and, therefore, the safety and rights of Jewish students who have a different political view is actually severely compromised.
And the Jewish organizations—and for that matter the Trump administration—will never want to acknowledge this. But the truth is, if you actually go and look carefully at the students who are being expelled, suspended, having their careers ruined, yes, many of them are Palestinians. Palestinians are always going to suffer the most, and foreign students and students of color in general. But, shockingly, a shocking number of these students are actually Jewish because Jewish students are significantly, disproportionately involved in this kind of pro-Palestinian activism on campus.
So, Columbia, just a couple of days ago, expelled a Jewish graduate student who had been part of the student coalition calling on Columbia to divest. He was also a leader of the student workers union. At the University of Michigan, where I think seven students face felony conviction charges for resisting arrest when the police broke up the University of Michigan’s encampment, I was told when I was in Michigan that several of those students facing felony convictions for resisting arrest are Jewish. I know for sure at least one is Jewish. And they’re facing this felony conviction because there was political pressure on the Attorney General to make an example of these students in the name of protecting Jewish safety, again even though some of the students are Jewish.
At Vanderbilt, when students were expelled for occupying the president’s office, one of the students who was expelled was studying Jewish studies and had spent his year before coming to Vanderbilt in Israel on a gap year, right. Another Jewish kid—now, you will never hear this in establishment Jewish discourse because they are deeply invested in the notion of suggesting that there is an overwhelming consensus in support of Israel among American Jews because that’s the way they can maintain this conflation of being Jewish and being pro-Israel, right. That’s what sustains their effort to redefine the term Jew to make it synonymous with Zionist or pro-Israel.
But if you actually look at the data we have, it’s simply not the case, right. There was a poll that came out last year by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs. Now, that is not a left-wing organization, actually quite a right-wing organization. But they did a poll. They asked American Jews, what percentage of American Jews think that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza? What percentage of American Jews think Israel is committing genocide in Gaza? One third of American Jews said yes. One third, right. Remember, we know that there’s a very, very dramatic generational divide among American Jews. So, although they didn’t break it up by generation, I think it’s a pretty good guess that if one third of American Jews as a whole said they thought Israel was committing genocide, the percentage among American Jews who are college age would be significantly higher than a third, right?
So, once you understand that it’s really not that surprising that you see what I saw again and again when I went to college campuses when I’ve been traveling around during the period of the encampments, which was that everybody said that among the people in these encampments, a disproportionate number of them were Jews. But because they’re not defined as Jews, this crackdown, which is being pushed by groups like the ADL and being pushed and being implemented by the Trump administration, is disproportionately ruining their academic careers and potentially having grave implications for their entire lives, and in some cases actually threatening their physical safety and potentially leading them to be jailed.
So, when I talk in my book—this is maybe the central point of my book—about the idea of idolatry, about the idea that Israel is being treated as a God, right, and it is being made the central definition of what makes you a Jew in good standing is not any traditional definition that exists in Jewish law. But your relationship to the state, your willingness to virtually unconditionally support this state, these are the ramifications in the United States. That because of this idolatry, because of this de facto redefinition of what it means to be a Jew, we can have this assault on the rights and safety of Jewish students that is justified in the name of Jewish safety and rights because that discourse of Jewish safety and rights is using Jews in a deeply perverse and, I would say, idolatrous way. It is redefining the term Jew to mean supporter of the state of Israel.
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