Shaul Kelner
Anti-Zionism has become a badge of belonging—and a tool of exclusion.
On this episode of Identity/Crisis, Yehuda Kurtzer speaks with Shaul Kelner, professor of Jewish Studies and Sociology at Vanderbilt University, about how anti-Zionism operates not only as an argument but as a movement culture—shaping who belongs on the American left, what counts as “moral,” and why Jewish communities are struggling to name what’s happening. Together, they explore what it would mean to respond with clarity without collapsing every critique of Israel into the same category.
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Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Yehuda: Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute, creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording on Wednesday, January 21st, 2026.
So four years ago in January, 2022—this is well before the war and all the ways it has wrecked havoc on Jewish politics here—our organization was embroiled in a bit of a controversy. We had been speaking at the time to a branding and marketing company that did and still does a lot of work for various Jewish organizations when something strange began to materialize in the conversations between us. It became clear that they did not want to do any work for us because we here at Hartman North America, were linked to the Hartman Institute in Israel. I made a decision at the time to contact a reporter and tell them what had happened in those conversations.
I did so because I felt that while this company was entitled, legally and otherwise, to use these kind of anti-Zionist litmus tests to choose their clients, that decision should be transparent to the field. Certainly should have been known to other Jewish organizations who were working with them, who were not aware that this was the case. It was an uncharacteristic decision to litigate the issue in the press. We were called out on it by some valued Jewish communal colleagues, especially after the Jewish community came down hard, predictably, both on the marketing firm, but also unfairly on some of those other clients who had not known about this firm’s approach to working with organizations like ours.
I had some valuable but tough conversations with the firm’s leadership after they initially botched their own PR efforts by effectively confirming what had happened. In the end, they admitted and put out a statement that although they did not support the movement to boycott Israel and claimed that they were not committed to using litmus tests on Israel, they had feared that we would not wanna work with them because they had staff with wildly divergent views on Israel. They apologized for what transpired, and ultimately the story died down.
I suspect they lost some clients as a result. I also imagine that the process forced them into a useful values clarification process. I don’t know where they and their staff stand on Israel these days, or on working with explicitly Zionist organizations. I’m quite sure it left a bad taste in their mouth.
I thought a lot over the years about the question of whether if we were put in the same situation, we would handle it the same way. We took an aggressive approach, and there are those who would argue that our institute’s educational mandate, our commitment to staying in relationship across difference and to trying to manage complex situations with care should have inclined us to act differently then.
I did go back and reread the statements that we put out. I think they were very well written. By me. And I think we handled ourselves well and there were important reasons at the time for why we did what we did. But in general, the question doesn’t really hold water. There’s no such thing as being in the same situation again, because the passage of time and the shifting of the political climate means that the surrounding environment is so fundamentally different. It means something very different right now, four years later, for a Brooklyn-based workers cooperative to refuse business with a Zionist organization, especially with the tide having shifted so dramatically on Israel over these past two years across the political left.
The consideration of whether to go public today is driven by totally different variables. Would doing so—going public—reinforce and possibly embolden those biases right now, gain the company more support from their peers in standing up to the Jewish community’s Zionist commitments? Or, on the other hand, is it more urgent now than ever before for Zionist organizations to go on the attack against those who question our legitimacy and who refuse to work for us?
In other words—and we all know this—in the span of the four years between our big duck story, and now we have witnessed just a dramatic shifting of the Overton window, the plausibility on anti-Zionist ideas and their political expression in our community. And I think it’s okay to feel a little stunned about how quickly that happened and a little confused about how we’re meant to respond.
It seems to me that there are two prevailing strategies these days for Jewish communities and leaders who are trying to sort out the rapid change on the normalization of anti-Zionism, both in Jewish communities and also in American politics. Whether it shows up as intergenerational tensions within families, or the changing norms of electability in democratic districts.
These are recurring options for Jewish leaders whenever we face this kind of destabilizing change. But the energy is specifically on this issue of anti-Zionism. And one approach is what we might call negotiative. This would mean trying to understand the boundaries of anti-Zionism, trying to understand its roots, trying to differentiate between the forms of anti-Zionism that are threats and the forms that are tolerable, trying to make it work in sustaining a big tent of Jewish life, even if it means renegotiating the boundaries of the tent.
The second emerging school is confrontational. It entails defining anti-Zionism as a movement that’s bad on its own terms, whether or not it’s antisemitic, drawing clear lines of acceptability, playing defense and playing offense.
I’m not sure, to be honest, where I sit. In general, I do seek to understand things before reflexively opposing them, and I definitely believe in drawing distinctions as opposed to painting complex phenomena with a single brush.
My current thinking is that our community should differentiate between expressions of anti-Zionism that are prima facie immoral—those that tolerate the death of Jews or the inevitability of dead Jews; those that erase Jewish rights to self-determination—but we should differentiate that from those that don’t cross those moral thresholds, but that we should still try to defeat politically and intellectually through democratic means.
And maybe there’s even a third lane, less reasoned and more emotional, the anti-Zionism, that maybe we just think is to use the term of art, pas nisht, just not good for the Jews, not things that Jews should believe. In other words, my instinct is to look for a scalpel rather than an ax.
But I want to take seriously the ax thesis. One of its wielder is my guest today, Professor Shaul Kelner, a professor of Jewish studies and sociology at Vanderbilt. Based on his facial expressions, I’m not sure he likes the ax language. We’ll get to that in a second. His research in general focuses on transnational Jewish solidarity—I think it’s very material for what we’re talking about today—the intersection of culture and politics in Jewish life.
His first book, Tours That Bind: Diaspora Pilgrimage and Israeli Birthright Tourism is a great book. I love that book. I teach with it. His newest book from 2024: A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized to Free Soviet Jews. He’s an award-winning teacher, a beloved mentor to many professional Jewish leaders and scholars.
And I’m speaking of today in response to an essay he published in our most recent issue of sources entitled “American Antizionism.” It’s a widely circulated essay, one of the most successful we published in the journal, and in the essay he proposes that we define anti-Zionism as a hate movement and fight it on those terms, even including repunctuating the word that we use to describe it.
Shaul, welcome to the podcast. Tell me what I got wrong.
Shaul: Hi, Yehuda. Thanks for having me.
Yehuda: Of course.
Shaul: Oh wow. Okay. So I don’t think I used the word hate at all in the piece.
Yehuda: Oh, is that right?
Shaul: And I was deliberate about that because as a sociologist, I really am resistant to psychologizing this movement. This is a political phenomenon. I see anti-Zionism, like antisemitism as essentially a politics about Jews that has certain assumptions that Jews don’t have and shouldn’t have the same rights as others, and antisemitism is a conversation about Jewish civic and political rights on the individual level. Anti-Zionism is a conversation and practice about Jewish collective rights on the national level, self-determination. And you don’t have to have hate in your heart to be parts of these movements.
And so one of the things that was very, very clear to me in interacting with students who didn’t know the history of anti-Zionism, they had no qualms in saying, I’m not antisemitic, I’m just anti-Zionist, without understanding the history of anti-Zionism. And by thinking about antisemitism as hate and anti-Zionism as not hate, it’s essentially created a space in American politics for a treatment of Jews that we have never experienced in our lifetimes. So I don’t think about it as a hate movement. It’s a politics. It’s politics, and that’s it. And as for an ax, I’m in too much physical therapy to lift up anything heavy like that, okay? So thank you.
Yehuda: Oh yes. Well, your pen is as mighty as a sword.
That’s interesting. By the way, when I was doing research on memory a number of years ago, one of the most remarkable things that I read was by a physician who had studied some of the neurobiology of memory, and he did this exercise with people—you’ll get why I’m sharing this anecdote in a second—he did this exercise with people where he would recite to them a series of words like sugar, honey, sticky, so on and so forth.
And then he’d ask them to recite the words back and everybody, when they had to list the words back, said the word “sweet,” and he never put the word “sweet” in. And he demonstrated that actually the way our brains work is that they translate words into meanings, nouns into adjectives, ’cause that’s how we kind of associate words together, and they translate, but that work of translation actually renders something else.
So there—it’s interesting, you are a hundred percent right in reassessing your own work. But it nevertheless felt to me like it was angry and maybe in my own head I was processing that as like the manifestation of what would make for a kind of angry response to the production of anti-Zionism, to its proliferation, and your demand that we should fight it maybe inclined me to think about it as actually a hate movement that you were proposing on the other end.
And I wonder if you could talk about the emotional register of this. Then we can get into the analytical and intellectual. You are prescriptive here. You say, I’m not a pastor, in the piece, and you’re not a politician; you’re a scholar. But your piece does kind of go on the offensive, and I’m curious if you can disentangle a little bit both the kind of analytical and the emotional that runs through an argument like this.
Shaul: Yeah, sure. Okay. Let’s give it a try. I mean, part of it is that in revisions, I was asked, okay, so what should we do about it? So now, now, there’s a whole conclusion that that originally was not there. I was originally trying to just analyze it. I have been observing a situation for a long time now, being in academia, being in sociology, where we have certain values and standards of discourse and practice, ways that we’ll talk about people, values that we uphold, that I’m seeing are getting suspended when we’re talking about Israel, and I’ve seen this happen for years.
And I think in the emotional sense, the notion that there’s a double standard about Jews that goes unrecognized, I find frustrating. So this, you know, is an attempt to use my own disciplinary lenses to say, this is what I’m seeing, even in my own discipline. You know, but even looking around me. So if it has a combative edge, I think, you know, part of it is frustration with double standards and a denialism.
And I think that part of the way in which Zionism has become a legitimate form of politics is by denying the ways in which it is marginalizing Jews and hiding behind the double meanings of words. “Intifada,” that’s not a call for violence, it’s a call for resistance, you know? And in other instances when we would have language that’s coded and that has double meanings, we would be very, very careful. I say “we,” I’m talking about it in the academy. In the academy and on the left. We would be really careful to say, look, it doesn’t matter that the word has a range of meanings. One of the very prominent meanings here is violence, and don’t use the nonviolent meanings to obfuscate that.
And so I think being immersed in that type of a situation for years, this is, this is the career I’ve chosen. Even in the 1990s when I was deciding to go into social science and Jewish studies, I was warned against going into anthropology, because it would, as a discipline, then, it would’ve been hostile. I was told pretty clearly by a number of mentors that I would not be able to build a career studying Israel in any positive way if I were in the field of anthropology. And that’s one of the reasons I chose to go into sociology and still use a lot of anthropological literature.
So this is not new stuff for me. And so maybe that’s some of the stuff that’s coming out
Yehuda: The nineties. I mean, it’s like hard to fathom.
Shaul: Different millennium.
Yehuda: Yeah, I made an argument about this, about six months ago in the podcast with an extended essay about the genocide allegations, and my argument was methodological more than anything else, like if you study history and including recent history, here’s how you would go about drawing the kind of clear conclusions that something that has happened is a thing. Here’s how you would name it, and that there’s no methodological evidence that that’s taking place around the genocide. Allegations among scholars who have no direct access to the material, the testimony, critical theory, critical analysis, et cetera.
And you know, obviously I’m taking that position. I don’t wanna hide the football. I’m taking that position because I think there’s incredible danger in applying the terminology of genocide to this case. I’m making this case in part because as I argue, as many have argued before. The genocide allegation is decades old and it was kind of waiting for a hook to attach itself onto and to argue that what looks like an academic analysis is actually just a power play around language, which is meant to delegitimize Israel.
Help me understand how this got to be the case in social science research, ’cause I think your argument in the piece is that this is an ideological and political movement, although you, and we’ll get back to this, you say that like, for most people, they’re not actually connected that much to the ideological history. But let’s start with the ideological history. How did that take root as a kind of orthodoxy to the point where it’s basically a monoculture within academia?
Shaul: Yeah. Look, this reflects larger problems in academia overall. It’s not just about Zionism. It’s not just about Israel. It’s not just about Jews. And I think some of it is, we’ve had several generations of more and more ideologically homogenous group of faculty training graduate students, and then they get hired, become the next group of faculty who are hiring, just like running something through a still multiple times.
So originally, you know, you go back, 1960s, 1970s, you had much more political diversity in the academy, but as you’re filtering it a little bit more narrow each generation, now, 50, 60 years later, it’s very, very difficult to have a broad conversation ideologically, from far-left to far-right. You know, there’s a very constrained. The farthest right that will go is probably center-right somewhere. And it’s not that much. It’s mostly center or mostly, you know, conservative Democrats probably, even. I think that’s part of the issue.
And then the second thing is that there has been really effective mobilization by activists and activists, both scholar activists and non-scholar activists who have looked at the universities as fertile ground and as a place where for decades, if you focus efforts in mobilizing there, you can make things happen. It’s a very, very slow march. It’s a long game, and I think it’s borne fruit for them.
You know, you compare, for example, like why has there been silence from the academy on Iran? And what’s been happening there? Well, it’s a pretty simple answer. You know, there’s no one mobilizing for Iran. There’s no one who’s been mobilizing for Iran and making this an academic issue for decades. So when a moment like this happens, there’s no activists to call people out to mobilize. But the activists and the anti-Zionist movement have been doing this for decades, and so now we’re seeing this moment when things are really bearing fruit for them.
Yehuda: I wanna skip to a different question then come back to this line of thought, but—just because it’s in my head now—how do we differentiate between what I would consider to be like a fair play movement, which is a movement for Palestine, versus a movement that is around anti-Zionism? Because I find that some of the arguments about, like, the movement building on the left for this cause. They live very comfortably within my moral universe as like, yes, there’s a movement for Palestinian rights and self-determination, and yes, the Palestinians live under occupation in the West Bank, they live inside the state of Israel with dejure rights, but de facto significant persecution.
There’s nothing wrong—not only is nothing wrong, but actually even I would say as a liberal Zionist, the same rights of self-determination that I afford to myself, I pray for and push for for Palestinians.
But these kind of get blurred together when you characterize, like, a movement for Palestine as manifesting as a movement for anti-Zionism. How do you think about the relationship between those two?
Shaul: Yeah, well, part of it is the choice by activists to frame their movement as anti-Zionist, and to use the term Zionism as a signifier of various evils. That was an activist choice. They didn’t have to make that decision. You know, if there were, and I’m sure there are pro-Palestinian movements, movements that are framed as the “pro” and not the “anti,” that would say the same thing that you just said, you know, about recognizing the right of Jewish people to self-determination, you know, and in this case, not praying for it, but giving thanks that they’ve received it and now we demand the same.
I think that a movement that fundamentally recognizes the right of Jews to self-determination is a movement that can advocate for and enter the occupation for a Palestinian state and the like without devolving into a movement that’s centered on othering Jews and saying that they don’t have rights that we’re claiming for other people.
Yehuda: Yeah, and one of the examples that you provide in your article is the poetics of the phrase, “free, free Palestine,” the way that that kind of works as a mantra, You use it as kind of an example of a movement building strategy of way that, that those are like the… I don’t know what the sound version of semiotics is. It’s like how it’s a, there’s a sound system of how this operates.
Shaul: Soundiotics, I don’t know.
Yehuda: Soundiotics. That’s good.
Shaul: And just to be clear, it’s the “free, free Palestine,” not with, with two frees, not just one.
Yehuda: Yeah. I wanna understand—this is a sharper version of my previous question—I get the ways in which “globalize the Intifada” is a slam dunk as a hate doctrine, and it’s mind boggling to me when people try to do the apologetics for it, and it’s usually people who are like not even in the movement doing the apologetics for it. The people who are actually leading that movement, they know exactly what globalize the Intifada is. It’s like other people who are like, no, no.
It’s like in The Simpsons. My all time favorite line in the Simpson is when, you know, they expose that Sideshow Bob has a tattoo on his chest that says, “Die, Bart, die.” And he says, no, no, it’s German for “Die Bart, die.” Right? That’s to me what globalize the Intifada—it’s so like, no, no. It’s just as peace movement.
So I, I’m with you on like, that slogan is so transparently about violence against the system. Why is “free free Palestine”? And that’s where my scalpel comes in. Why can’t we think of that as being an expression of advocacy for Free Palestine, which I support?
Shaul: Yeah, yeah. I’m looking at how the slogan is being used and what’s been used. To be clear, in the piece, I was arguing that that slogan is a way that the anti-Zionist movement is building their own movement culture to unite them and the like.
Yehuda: Got it. Okay.
Shaul: And so the shooter who came into the Capitol Jewish Museum, and murdered the Israeli embassy staffers there when he killed them. And then he is being arrested. He shouts “free, free Palestine.” He doesn’t say “free Palestine.” He gives the movement slogan. So the way that the slogan is being used, it’s now the, I mean, I understand if you’re in a group, you’re marching, it scans better than “free Palestine.” It’s easier to chant, it’s more melodious. But when you murder people and you’re shouting that, I see that as an indicator that the movement has successfully built a movement culture. That’s just one piece of it. He knew who he wanted to target, and why, and when he did, he expressed his reasons by using a slogan that’s part of the anti-Zionist repertoire.
So you know the fact that the words themselves don’t have any inherent anti-Jewish meaning, in practice the way that they were used in that moment, or if they’re painted on synagogues, when synagogues are being defaced, it’s in the use of that. It could be, “Die Bart, die,” you know when it’s being scrawled on synagogue walls or shouted when people are being murdered, then it takes on the meaning that’s behind the act.
Yehuda: Good. So we started talking a little bit about the story within the academy, and we could probably spend our whole time talking about this, and it’s something that I feel I have a lens on as you do, because we’re not an academic institution, we’re an academic-adjacent institution. We work with scholars in the academy. We’re just watching this trajectory unfold. We’re watching as more and more scholars are turning literally to the Hartman Institute and saying, I need a home, because it’s not in anthropology, sociology, history departments anymore. I feel like I can’t be who I’m supposed to be.
You do allude to this in your article as a piece of this story, but you also make clear that the movement building around anti-Zionism… It’s not really about anti-Zionist professors. And I think that what felt actually very provocative about that is in many quarters in the Jewish community, the assumption is that’s how this got normalized. The universities were the factory of these ideas. They point to, you know, Qatari influence as having bought out the universities and doing all of this work, and then they paint a kind of direct line between the universities and the producers of this movement.
You argue that’s a classist way to think about this, that they’re actually not the same. Can you unpack that argument?
Shaul: Yeah. There is a rising race-based antisemitic movement on the political right, and people don’t give it the time of day intellectually. Certainly the people who are involved with it think that their ideas are motivated or, you know, they, they have their ideas, they’re motivated by their ideas, but we’re not really taking them seriously.
We’re looking at what they’re doing and we’re essentially calling it as we see it. But because anti-Zionism has its base in our class, like the professional knowledge class, we tend to focus more on the ideas than on what people are doing.
So if you go and look at what actually happened on the campuses during the encampments, when you had students who were confronting Jewish students in ways that if it were not defined as anti-Zionism and you didn’t know what was going on, and you just saw the behaviors, you would say, well, wait a second, this looks like mob behavior, it looks like crowd behavior, but the fact that it’s happening at a university makes us pause and say, no, no, no, but there must be ideas behind it. It must have an intellectual rationale, and that’s what will make it justified.
So I’m saying, let’s look away from that for a moment and just look at what people are doing in the name of anti-Zionism and the actions, which on the extreme includes serious violence. Most of it does not, but it will treat Jews differently, and lesser, in a whole bunch of ways, and as you said, make people feel like they cannot express their full selves, right? That’s a set of practices.
Professors do play a role, and the ideas do play a role. I think that one of the key roles that they’re playing is that they’re providing intellectual legitimacy so that instead of talking about what is being done in the name of anti-Zionism, we’re debating, we’re having the conversation about Israel and Zionism itself, rather than having a conversation about anti-Zionism and anti-Zionists and what they’re doing.
This is me as a sociologist of social movements and trying to wrestle with the question of what gets people out to protest and how do people understand what they’re doing? And when I was studying activism to free Soviet Jews, one of the things that was really clear is that lots of people were turning out to these rallies for Soviet Jewry, not necessarily because they were deeply invested in the cause. It could be that that was an outcome of protesting. They might have been going ’cause their friends were going, you know?
So I, for a long time, have been thinking about activism in terms of “ma’aseh ve-nishma,” we will do and we will understand,” and the understanding comes from the doing. So most of the students who are in these encampments have not read Edward Said’s Orientalism. They may know the name, they haven’t read through it. Okay. Their anti-Zionism is a lived anti-Zionism that’s shaped by the experience of standing, you know, arm in arm and saying, there are Zionists in the encampment. We must keep them out. And then marching forward to keep them out.
Yehuda: I’ll quote you back to you, ’cause I think this is how you express it in the article: “The antizionism that actually exists out there in American streets is a phenomenon, sui generis. It is a political mass movement defined not by abstract ideas, but by lived praxis. There is a loose connection between what antizionist professors in the classrooms write and what antizionist students in encampments do, but the behaviors create a lived anti-Zionism that outstrips systematized ideologies formulated by intellectuals.”
Great. But now as intellectuals, let me stay on the intellectuals for a second.
Shaul: I still think that’s right, but okay.
Yehuda: Yeah, I, I, I get it. I think it’s a very, very provocative argument, especially because I think what you’re trying to signal to readers of this who are not in the academy is that if you keep paying attention to the discursive movement about ideas, you are actually granting a whole bunch of legitimacy to a movement that doesn’t even seek to justify its claims on the basis of those arguments, right? I think that’s what’s taking place here.
Shaul: Exactly. Thank you. Exactly. Yes.
Yehuda: So I want to ask, at the same time, there have to be some ways in which the intellectual history of the emergence of these ideas in the academy also help illuminate what is now showing up in the world, right?
So it may not be for sure, I understand, I don’t want to kind of sanitize like vandalism against Hamilton Hall at Columbia and against Jewish students by saying, oh yes, there’s a, you know, Martin Buber was talking about it bi-national state also. I get that. But like, how does some of the intellectual history of anti-Zionism actually helps to illuminate what these mass movements are about. And I’m particularly curious in terms of where I think, I’m sure some of your scholarly expertise helped you get to there, was studying Soviet Jewry and the movement of resistance of Soviet Jewry against Soviet anti-Zionism. So how can that also help us, even if I don’t wanna kind of take my eye off the ball, but it’s not always an intellectual movement?
Shaul: Right. Let me preface this by saying I approach this as a sociologist. And most Jewish studies is being done in the humanities, and I think the reason that I’m looking at it differently and more through this lens of practice and praxis rather than intellectual histories and great thinkers and the like, is a disciplinary difference that people who are trained, you know, under spending their careers focusing on the thought of Edward Said, the thought of Martin Buber, the thought of Hannah Arednt, for example, are going to look at this movement in terms of a history of ideas.
As a sociologist, I am trained to look at what people are doing to look at collective behavior. And so that’s why I’m bringing the perspective that I’m bringing. And it’s probably why for people who are saying, oh, this is new to me, that they’re feeling that it’s new, because most of the conversation that’s out there is not coming from sociologists. It’s coming from people who are focusing more on the intellectual history. So that’s just by way of background.
I think that we have political language that is used to justify behaviors. And I studied the Soviet Union. I studied the treatment of Jews there. When I studied the treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union, which was not good, I referred to it as “Soviet antisemitism,” and I was wrong for doing that because the Soviet government was pretty clear that it did not understand what it was doing as racism, as rooted in the politics of the right. They were anti-Nazi. You know, thank God for the Soviet Union that really defeated Hitler, you know, but they needed a language that would justify the way that they were treating Jews, and they found that language in two ways.
One was the language of, “We’re not antisemitic. We are fighting Zionists. We’re fighting Zionism.” And the other was we are against “rootless cosmopolitans.” And nowadays that like, that language is jumped over to the right, it’s the language of globalists. Okay, so, but the language of not antisemitic, just anti-Zionist was a political move in the Soviet Union to enable treatment of Jews—it was, no one was treated well. Happy Soviets were all alike. Unhappy Soviets were each unhappy in their own way.
You know, so the Jews weren’t deported like the Crimean Tatars and the like. They weren’t starved to death, like the Soviets starved the Ukrainians. But the Jews were discriminated against in particular ways. And to say that this was not based in racism, the Soviet said this is part of the fight against American imperialism, Zionist colonialism, the ally of the American capitalist Empire, and they built an entire politics and they exported it as well.
Okay. But that is ancient history. And even during the years of the Soviet Dream Movement in the States, we didn’t say, this is Soviet antizionism. We insisted on saying, yeah, this is antisemitism. We know that. We know that they say that it’s anti-Zionism, but really we know that it’s antisemitism. And I think that in hindsight, you know, we probably would’ve been better to say, okay, you wanna call this anti-Zionism. These are all the things that you’re doing in the name of anti-Zionism. This is what anti-Zionism is.
And had we done that and then continued to teach about that, then we might have found ourselves in a situation where when that same rhetoric was appearing in the states, we wouldn’t have been so discombobulated.
Yehuda: So you make, then, two… kind of language methodology moves. One of them is to say, stop trying to define anti-Zionism as antisemitism, because it’s a distraction. It becomes very easy for somebody to say, but I’m not antisemitic. And since that’s the intolerably deviant category, if somebody’s saying they’re not that, I mean. I have a lot of Jewish friends, right? I have all that stuff. It distracts us and it makes us incapable of seeing something for what it is.
When we interviewed Jesse Brown a few weeks ago on the podcast about what’s taken place in Canada, he makes a similar argument. He’s like, I don’t have to call it antisemitic, but anti-Zionism has become a violent movement against Jews in Canada. So let me just fight it on its own terms.
You also make a more provocative claim that we should take the hyphen out of anti-Zionism. The way that what happened to antisemitism, which is stop thinking about, is the inverse of Semitism. Start talking about it as its own thing. You wanna do the same thing to anti-Zionism. What’s that about? What is this language move about?
Shaul: Yes, and here is where we are, the egghead intellectuals. Where you think, and I agree that it is a provocative move to take out a hyphen.
Yehuda: Oh, you know. I also have strong feelings about the Oxford comma, but go ahead.
Shaul: Oh, oh. I’m not the first person to have said that. A lot of others have said it before. I think David Hirsh and others, and I’m not exactly sure when and where it started. I came to it not through academic study of anti-Zionism. It’s known in Jewish studies that we spell antisemitism without the hyphen, for a specific reason—that it ain’t about Semites or Semitism. This was a political movement and we have to— it was a political movement that talked about Jews, and we have to understand it, you know, by switching the lens so that we’re not standing with the antisemites, focusing on the enemy that they’re defining, but on the people who are constructing the enemy.
Okay, so if that’s the case, why are we not doing that with anti-Zionism? The quote unquote “Zionism” that you know, that people are railing against in the streets and on the encampments is unfamiliar to me. You know, I mean, for me, I’m able to speak and read in the Hebrew language because of Zionism. Had that not existed here, growing up in New Jersey, that would never have happened. Okay? So their version of Zionism, you know, is something that certainly makes sense to them, but it ain’t talking about the Zionism that is my Zionism as a Jew. So if that’s the case, let’s just look at what they’re doing, their ideologies, and de-center Jews in that conversation to focus on the people who are doing the actions rather than the enemy that they’re pointing at and talking about.
I mean, it seemed to me self-evident, so I, I don’t know if it’s provocative or controversial. If we’re gonna talk about antisemitism this way, why aren’t we talking about anti-Zionism in this way? Right.
Yehuda: So, and then ultimately at near the end of your piece, you say, very clearly: “Jews should stop indulging the definitional debate, “Is antizionism antisemitism?” When it is forced upon them, let them simply respond, “Antisemitism is the Othering of Jews from the American right. Antizionism is the Othering of Jews from the American left.”
And here’s the real problem, Shaul, which is—
Shaul: “All the rest is commentary.”
Yehuda: All the rest is commentary.
Shaul: “Now go and fight both.
Yehuda: I got it, I got it. I got the Hillel the Elder reference, but here’s the basic challenge that I think underlies a lot of this. I don’t know Jews who hang around antisemites to give the antisemitism legitimacy. I certainly know Jews who I think are hanging around antisemites, but they think that they’re either immune from it or that they have not come to the conclusion, as some Jews now on the right are realizing that they’re consorting with antisemitism and enabling them.
But I know a lot of Jews who are hanging around with anti-Zionists who are part of the intellectual fabric of that movement, who are, in part, part of the political leadership of that movement, who are in many cases the children and grandchildren of actively engaged Zionist Jews. And they would not accept the description that is being foisted on them, that they are engaged in “othering Jews from the American left.” They actually think of themselves as being a part of that left, in some cases guiding that left.
To the extent that they’re “othering” Jews, they’re “othering” Jews as a consequence of those people’s moral failure, as opposed to an intent, which is the intent of antisemitism. That’s where that parallelism really begins to break down for me.
And how does this approach towards anti-Zionism, this kind of naming it as a political movement that others Jews wrestle with the deep, textural ways that Jews are intertwined with anti-Zionism in America?
Shaul: I think that part of this, if you think about it in terms of—let’s not put Jews in the center. The anti-Zionist movement in the States has an asset that antisemitism as a political movement in the States does not have, and that is the involvement of Jews. So anyone who is not Jewish who is engaged in the anti-Zionist movement can basically say, I am not doing anything bad to Jews because there are Jews in this movement.
Okay? That is, from a mobilization perspective, that’s a great asset to have, and it’s one of the reasons that I think that anti-Zionist politics in the states at present are more dangerous than antisemitic politics. Antisemitic politics are dangerous for a different reason, but—you said the Overton window shifted, and Jews around the country are facing the consequences of that, whether or not Jews have, other Jews have been involved in helping to shift the Overton window. You know the Overton window has shifted and anti-Zionists have basically enjoyed having Jews engaged in the movement and running blockage.
You were talking about how you wanna take a scalpel, you know, to dissect which type is okay and which is not, right? We would not say that about which, what type of antisemitism is okay and what type, and you know, we’re not taking a scalpel to that. And I think just even though Jews happen to be involved in anti-Zionist activism, the way that anti-Zionist activism is creating a mass politics that is marginalizing Jews, boycotting Jews, not just Israelis, right, but we’re not gonna work with Hartman Institute, okay? With American Jewish Institutions, okay?
It doesn’t matter what the background of the people who are involved in it are, and if you want to step back further, any system of oppression, sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, you name it, will create incentives for members of the marginalized group to participate in their own oppression. And I think that this is no different.
Yehuda: Hmm. I, I think the painful thing about that characterization for me is like the hostile phrase that’s oftentimes used to characterize what you just said is, and I don’t, I know you don’t use these phrases, but you know that people do use these phrases that those people are “useful idiots,” right. They are being used by the regime even though they don’t think that they’re being used.
But what I feel that takes away from is—there has to be room for the sincerity of deeply held beliefs that have been reinforced over the past two years and over the past 20 years by a right wing authoritarian Israeli government, by the persistence of occupation, by genocidal phrases uttered by members of the Israeli cabinet, that provide enough of a plausibility structure that a person could say, I come at my convictions about the immorality of the state of Israel honestly. I have enough room in my heart to be able to say that that person is not a tool of the system, as a member of the marginalized class.
Now, you might say that’s nice, Yehuda, but it doesn’t matter. But I feel that to not do some measure of that is to irreparably change the boundaries of Jewish identity itself and to be also participating in narrowing what Jewish political community looks like. And I’m very scared of it.
Shaul: Okay. I think that the major work that needs to be done given what’s happened here in the States among Jews and in terms of Jewish politics, is for anti-Zionist Jews to seriously grapple with the history of anti-Zionism, the history of persecution of Jews in the name of anti-Zionism, the practices that are happening against Jews today in the name of anti-Zionism, and for all of people’s, you know, feelings of upset, anger, moral frustration with the Israeli government, with Israel, with things over there, there is still a movement, a political movement here in the States that is premised on the notion that Jews don’t have the same rights as others. So if anger against Israel is translating into joining that movement, there’s a moral responsibility to wrestle with it.
Yehuda: I guess there’s one other, maybe more proximate fear that I have. Which is, you know, it’s one of these things where once you identify a category or a framework with which to see the world, it becomes the totalizing framework. And I’ll give you the most recent example. The one in the news cycle this week, which actually thought was a super interesting story, was the Josh Shapiro-Kamala Harris Feud, where in the context of getting vetted to be vice President of the United States and to get the highest level security clearance imaginable, the Harris campaign seems to have asked some version of a question of, were you a foreign agent for the state of Israel? And Shapiro is indignant—this is classical antisemitism.
And I don’t know. Part of it was like, what? You never went through a security clearance before? Like it turns out Tim Walz was asked the same question because he had made multiple trips, I think to China, right? Yeah. And Shapiro had done like Gadna, in Israel, sort of like… but the impulse to say these kinds of associations with the state of Israel being asked about in American political context, and by the way, I think most of this is a power struggle between Team Kamala and Team Shapiro, including his decision to release it publicly.
I worry a little bit that the clarity with which we place around anti-Zionism as an un-hyphenated political movement meant to ostracize Jews is going to obscure our capacity to see that some of this stuff is just more complicated than it appears.
I just was not convinced that, oh my God, the Democratic Party writ large, including Kamala Harris, has now turned against the state of Israel. I think there’s real reasons to fear that that is happening in the Democratic party in other places, but I actually think a lot of the people who are most promoting the story in the Jewish community are in the Republican party and are trying to use this as a lever in that story. So I feel a fear that this story actually becomes pouring fuel on the flame rather than trying to help us understand it and fight it.
Shaul: Yeah, this is one politician writing about another politician. They’re not trying to help anyone understand anything. It’s politics. And my question is, was this asked by the security vetting team or the political vetting team? And so how to interpret it really will depend on which team was asking it.
Yeah, but I think you’re right in that we have really strong tribalism in America right now. You know, you got the Democratic tribe and you have the Republican tribe. And for Jews who are trying to say, wait a second, like, we have our original tribe, and that’s the one that we’re trying to stand for.
We used to be in a much better political position where we could find a comfortable home in both political parties. The extremes in both political parties were largely held in check, you know, so now you’re facing populists on the right, Democratic socialists on the left, antisemites in the populist camp, anti-Zionists in the Democratic socialist camp, you know, and for American Jews we’re very, very comfortable politically in a stable America that was able to work with bipartisan consensus on lots of issues.
You know, now in this polarized situation, the competition across parties for the loyalty of Jews is a really, really dangerous position to be in. Because if the question of Jews becomes something that one party is pro and the other party is anti, the governments are gonna change. And you know, our safety and security here was really built on political status of Jews as not a political issue, and the support for the state of Israel as Jewish self-determination. It was so not a political issue that there was wide bipartisan support for that. Well, that bipartisan era has crumbled and we’re now facing a moment of growing political extremes, and we’re not really working to shore up the Jewish presence in the center of both parties. We’re having moves to try to like poach and it’s really, really dangerous.
Yehuda: Last question. So you’ve alluded to what has to happen in terms of recognizing anti-Zionism as a political movement, separating that from the intellectual movement. At the end of your essay, you make a plea to an educational strategy that emerges out of this. You allude to the fact that the public schools may be a little bit of a lost cause. I’m increasingly inclined to agree with that. I’m quite worried about it. But you do have a kind of plea for what could change in the context of Jewish education and what do you think that prescription looks like?
Shaul: Yeah. The prescription is that we teach, not just about Holocaust education that we teach in the big history of the political “othering” of Jews. There were two major anti-Jewish movements in the 20th century that really shaped that century.
One was political antisemitism. It was on the right. It was essentially what the Nazis embraced and then murdered Jews in the name of. And then there was political anti-Zionism, which was embraced by the Soviet government. And there it was essentially a slow squelching of Jewish life over generations.
And if we’re only teaching that anti-Jewish politics has a home on the right, it creates an ignorance so that when young Jews are experiencing an anti-Jewish politics that traces its lineage to the left, they don’t recognize it and it’s very easy for them to say, yeah, no, no, we’re not antisemitic, clearly. We’re just anti-Zionists. But if you don’t know the history of anti-Zionism and what was done to Jews in the name of anti-Zionism, I think that’s also part of what has led a number of Jews into that movement.
So I think what we need to do is we have to stop with a sample of one. We need to teach about anti-Jewish in its many different flavors. People have a visceral revulsion at the notion of antisemitism because of what has been done in the name of antisemitism. That same revulsion in anti-Zionism in the name of what’s been done in the name of Anti Zionism doesn’t exist because we don’t teach about it and no one knows. So I’m saying in this piece that we really should be expanding how we’re teaching about anti-Jewish politics across the political spectrum. And not just focus on the right side of the political spectrum.
Yehuda: Thanks for coming on the show, Shaul. This is a hard conversation, but it was a delight to have it with you anyway.
Shaul: Thank you.
