Power Meets Prejudice: The End of Jewish Innocence Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Daniel: Hi, I’m Daniel Goodman, producer of For Heaven’s Sake. While Donniel and Yossi are away this week, we’re bringing you a special episode recorded live from the courtyard of our Jerusalem campus, on July 16th, after some of our summer programming was cancelled due to the Israel-Iran War.

In this episode, Yossi Klein Halevi sits down with Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield, CEO of the Shalom Hartman Institute, to discuss the end of the post-Holocaust era following October 7th. They explore questions around the complex realities of antisemitism, the crisis for Jewish students unfolding on college campuses, generational divides over Israel and Zionism, and how we can reclaim Jewish storytelling.

You may notice that the audio from this live recording is a little rougher than usual due to the live nature of the program, but our editor did a heroic job of cleaning up what he could, and we think this is a conversation that you won’t want to miss. Here’s Yossi Klein Halevi, and Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield from Jerusalem.

Rachel: It is a total privilege, delight, and joy to be here with my friend and colleague Yossi Klinalevi. He needs no introduction, so I’m going to introduce him very little other than to say that he is a story journalist and author of many incredible works, including Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, most recently, although that was a few years ago now, and I would say the most, or one of the most famous voices in Jewish podcasts, right? The For Heaven’s Sake podcast continues to be up in the top echelons of listenership for Jewish podcasts.

I’m Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield. I’m the CEO of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. And as I said, it’s truly an honor to be here with you. So I want to dive right in.

Yossi: Well, Rachel, I just want to say first of all, good evening, everyone. It’s wonderful to be with you all. And there’s nobody I would rather talk about anything with than you, even anti-Semitism.

Rachel: Wow. That’s high praise. Okay. So your writing and speaking and teaching since October 7th has been unflinching, has been bold, and has been deeply resonant. That doesn’t mean that I’m not going to challenge you tonight though. We will.

Yossi: Doesn’t mean it’s been right.

Rachel: Doesn’t mean it’s been right.

Rachel: Across your essays, your public appearances, the conversations you’ve had, you have articulated what I find to be a very bold, but also painful idea, which is that October 7th, and the aftermath, but October 7th specifically, not only traumatized the Israeli psyche, it kind of broke Jewish history, broke post-Holocaust Jewish history.

Today, I want to explore that idea. And I particularly want to look at it in light of the rise of what’s been to many of us in the West, a shockingly virulent and violent anti-Semitism. But I also want to explore it in light of what we can learn about our own stories, both as a Jewish people globally and as a people in the state of Israel, given that we’re committed both to our own physical safety, but also to our moral imagination and to our aspirations.

So given that starting place, would you describe this breach, this break, this rupture of history as you understand it for us? How would you name it? How would you characterize it?

Yossi: So when a historical era is playing out, it’s hard to fully appreciate what it is. Because you’re in it, it hasn’t been formed yet. It’s really only when it ends that you can begin to assess retroactively. And so I think that what ended on October 7th was a very clear period of Jewish history that began the day after the Holocaust and ended on October 7th. And it was not a smooth trajectory. It was not an unbroken trajectory, but the general trajectory of the experience of the two centers of Jewish life post-Holocaust, Israel and America, was generally increasingly optimistic.

In the United States, I mean, I experienced it, I moved to Israel in the early eighties, but I already began to experience the transition from an insecure American Jewry, the community that I knew as a kid. And I remember my parents and their friends when they would say anything Jewish, they would say the word “Jew” in public, they would lower their voices. I called it the “American Jewish Whisper.” And I saw gradually through the sixties and seventies and the eighties, American Jews gradually losing, shedding the whisper. And that was a consequence of the gradual unconditional acceptance of American Jews. America always accepted the Jews. There was always a place for the Jews, but the acceptance was never unconditional.

Rachel: Yeah. I want to just add to that for a second. I think we did more than shed the whisper. I think we boldly and loudly embraced what being Jewish meant to us. And we started to create Jewish organizations and Jewish institutions, for example, in the realm of social justice in the eighties that were meant to typify and to express Jewish commitments to, to liberal values, what we may not even call progressive values nowadays, right? But that was very much part of our Jewish life.

Yossi: And you can only do that, Rachel, when you feel secure enough that you’re not having to defend your own community’s needs. And so there was this generosity of spirit and Tikkun Olam emerging really as an 11th commandment or maybe further down than 11, maybe, maybe the first or the second, Tikkun Olam really animating a large part of American Jewry, because it was a community that already felt welcome, that felt safe and at home.

And in Israel, it was expressed that same sense of permanence and of total acceptance was expressed in the nature of our wars. 1973 was the last conventional war that Israel fought between armies. 1982, the Lebanon war was already an asymmetrical war and you don’t lose asymmetrical wars. You don’t necessarily win them, but asymmetrical wars are not existential threats. 1973 was the last existential threat to Israel. And you could even see that the progression in the number of fronts that we were fighting. 1948, we fought seven fronts. In 1967, three, 1973, we fought two fronts. 1982 was already one front and every war after that.

And then we come to this war. And in this war, we’re fighting seven fronts again back to 1948. And that’s an expression, in some way, of the return of existential fear. And what we experienced on October 7th here was a kind of a glimpse into what, God forbid, the destruction of Israel would look like. No borders, no army, no functioning government. Citizens are left on their own. And in the United States, it’s the return of an insecurity that I don’t think American Jews have felt since the 1930s. And I don’t mean the 1930s in Europe, I mean the 1930s in America, which was bad enough.

And so if we had to describe what the post-Holocaust era was, it was this feeling that the Holocaust was the worst. And once you hit rock bottom, there’s only going up. And there were fluctuations. But the general sense was that we won. We defeated the existential condition. And now it’s back in different ways.

And the way we described it here at the Machon in the iEngage seminar, just a couple of years ago, we developed a curriculum called From No Home to Two Homes. And I believe that these two homes are still vibrant. And I believe that basically these two homes are still holding. But we’re a lot less self-confident about our at-homeness in either place than we were before October 7.

Rachel: So the characterization of this new moment in history is one of From Two Homes to No Safe Homes, From Two Homes to… How would you say it?

Yossi: From a feeling of total security, we’ll have to come up with a slogan like From No Home to Two Homes is a great little… It’s a nifty slogan. But the condition of From Two Secure Homes to Two Homes that are with big question marks over them.

Rachel: That certainly mirrors my experience growing up in that time period you described the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, and some places people are calling this, you know, in the Atlantic, for example, the Golden Age of American Jewry, in this sense. And I was really raised on this, the notion that the kind of anti-Semitism that we saw in Europe in the 1930s and 40s was of Europe. And in America, things were different. It was different soil. And that that was the past, and we learned the lessons of the Shoah as humankind and it would never happen again. It was both our responsibilities to make sure it would never happen again to anyone, and it could never happen again to us.

And I feel really shaken, as I think many people do, people in our congregations, people in our school settings, by the notion that this is back in some way, this kind of virulent anti-Semitism back in some ways. Help us understand this. You’ve talked about anti-Semitism as kind of two parts. You’ve characterized it as symbolization. So the Jew being characterized as a symbol of the worst thing that any society can imagine. Or the worst thing in a society at any given moment. And also, I think you call it denialism, right? The fact that our story is being wrested from us, that our story of a return to an indigenous homeland, for example, has been superseded by another story of European colonialism. So will you, am I getting it right? Will you flesh it out? Will you help us understand?

Yossi: You define what I said better than what I actually said. But that is what I meant. And the two elements…

Rachel: I read way too much of what you’ve written.

Yossi: Really, the two elements of… Let’s leave aside for a moment the term anti-Semitism and let’s look at threats to Jewish well-being. And I think that that’s an important distinction because in the era of Jewish power, not all threats are necessarily motivated by classical anti-Semitism.

Rachel: Can you explain that?

Yossi: So anti-Zionism, I think, has any number of roots. And I personally don’t care if anti-Zionism is motivated by anti-Semitism or not, because the goal of anti-Zionism is to restore the Jewish people to the pre-Holocaust condition of powerlessness, to take away our sovereignty and power. And what that means is that even if the motive isn’t anti-Semitic, the consequence for the Jewish people is so horrific that it doesn’t matter what the motive is.

And in the era of Jewish power, the whole question of the accusation against Jews shifts. So, for example, in the past, when we were accused of being Christ-killers or of using the blood of Christian children for matzah, we knew that the accusations were ludicrous and therefore could only be motivated by pure hatred of Jews. Today, when we’re accused of being baby killers—which is a classic anti-Semitic trope—it’s true. There are thousands of dead children in Gaza and we killed them.

Now, I personally believe that this is a war that we had no choice but to fight and we can get into that or not and may not be our topic, because really the question of whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism or hatred of Israel is motivated by anti-Semitism is for me to some extent irrelevant. And the accusations against us are not totally baseless.

Now, again, I think we have on the whole credible answers for these accusations. But in the era of Jewish power, the dynamic has shifted. And what that means is when you have power and you use power in the way that we’re using it now—and again, I believe that we have to use our power more or less in the way that we have—but the consequences of that is that you’re not innocent anymore. And anti-Semitism presumes innocence. If you are being attacked by anti-Semitism, you are by definition innocent. This is unmotivated hatred. And so we’re in a very strange time where I think that much of the animus against us is motivated by anti-Semitism, but not all.

And on bottom for me, it doesn’t really matter because the threat, again, the threat of anti-Zionism is so inimical to the most basic interests of the Jewish people that the motive really doesn’t matter.

But having said that, I do believe that the onus of proving that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, is not on us, it’s on the anti-Zionists. The reason that I say that is because there’s enough uncomfortable overlap between traditional anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism to raise serious questions. So for example, you mentioned symbolization. For me, classical anti-Semitism is the symbolization of the Jew. It’s turning the Jew into whatever a society or civilization regards as its most loathsome qualities.

And you can play that out. Under Christianity, there’s nothing worse than being a Christ killer. Under Islam, nothing worse than being the murderer of prophets, which is how Jews were known in Muslim societies. Under Marxism, the ultimate capitalist, under Nazism, the ultimate race polluter. And now, the Jewish state becomes the symbol for everything that an enlightened progressive West regards as its worst qualities. 70 or 100 years ago, colonialism was seen as a good. Now colonialism is one of the worst evils, and so Israel represents colonialism. So in that sense, anti-Zionism uncomfortably fits an old pattern. So that’s one piece of it.

The other piece is what I mentioned earlier, which is the fact that power has deprived us of innocence. That’s the price of power. And I understand when some Jews have the need to label anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism, because that in a way returns us to the condition of innocence. If our enemies are anti-Semites, then of course we’re innocent.

But if it’s more complicated, and I think that that’s what the end of the post-Holocaust era is all about—I mean, Jewish life, it hasn’t been uncomplicated these last decades, but I think we have entered into a new dimension of complexity, which requires a kind of Jewish personality that we haven’t developed as a people. And that is multi-dimensional Jews, Jews who can hold conflicting truths at the same time. Yes, we’re not innocent anymore. Yes, anti-Zionism is an existential threat. We need to begin holding these contradictions.

Rachel: Right, and it’s too easy just to paint things as anti-Semitism. A whole cloth is what you’re saying.

Yossi: Even though a lot of it is. And again, I understand the need to paint it as anti-Semitism, but I think we need a different kind of conversation.

Rachel: It’s a desire for innocence.

Yossi: It’s a desire, ot’s a longing for innocence. And in a way, it’s a longing to be freed of power.

Rachel: Okay, so while we’re talking about uses, and perhaps misuses of anti-Semitism, I want to talk about universities in North America and the ways in which this administration has withdrawn hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding or threatened to withdraw that funding from medical research and whatnot in the name of protecting the safety of Jewish students.

There are many Jewish organizations, including the organized Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist movements that got together and claimed that the federal actions actually threatened the safety of Jews on campus. I’m quoting here: “These actions do not make Jews or any community safer. Rather, they only make us less safe.”

So how can we navigate these complexities of understanding and protecting Jewish safety on campus? And also, what do you make of this use of anti-Semitism, as I would call it a bludgeon, to punish universities that have been deemed too liberal or too progressive by this administration?

Yossi: About a year ago, I did a campus tour. I started at Columbia and ended at Berkeley and points in between. And what I found there was, and this is no surprise, but that the Jewish students who felt in any way connected to Israel were traumatized. And many of the Jewish students were huddling. It was a kind of a re-ghettoization. And they felt that they were losing their non-Jewish friends. They didn’t trust anyone outside their circles.

And this, for me, was really a throwback to the old American Jewish community. And I think there are parts of the American Jewish community that did not fully internalize what happened to Jews on campus in the last year and a half, because it didn’t happen to all Jews. It didn’t even happen to most Jews. You could get by on campus as long as you weren’t visibly identified with Israel, or if you were prepared to repudiate Israel among your friends.

And that’s the return of conditionality, by the way, of conditional acceptance. The crime of what the progressives have done to American Jewry is restore conditional acceptance. We will accept you in our spaces, provided that you repudiate this problematic part of Jewish identity, which is Israel. You can join the tent camps. You can have a Seder at the tent camps. And we know there were Jews who did. They had sederim at the tent camps. But the entry into progressive America is conditional.

Rachel: Eitan Hersh, the professor, sociologist at Tufts, he documented the social penalty that Jewish students play on campus when they’re in progressive spaces, and they assert any kind of connection to Israel or to Jewish commitments around Zionism.

Yossi: And so I sense that part of liberal Jewish America, certainly progressive Jewish America, is in denial of the assault that your kids experienced in this last year and a half. And so Trump comes along. And the analogy that came to mind for me of this moment for American Jewry was very strange. It was something out of medieval Jewish history. And I never imagined comparing the condition of American Jews to the condition of Jews in medieval times. But in this one respect, in relation to Trump, I think American Jews find themselves in an uncomfortably medieval moment, which is that in medieval times, Jews would often find themselves seeking the protection of the Baron from the mob. And sometimes the Baron would extend protection. Sometimes he would extend protection and then rescind it. Sometimes he wouldn’t grant protection at all. But very often the Jews didn’t have a choice because the mob was at the gate.

And the analogy here for me is that American Jewish students were abandoned by progressive and liberal America to the mob. The mobs were progressives and the liberals abandoned Jewish students to the progressive mob. That’s what I saw and experienced on campus. And that’s what I was told, campus after campus. And so Trump comes along and there’s always a price to pay for the protection of the Baron. Either you have to pay the Baron directly or you pay the price with the peasants who say, ah, the Jews are in cahoots with the Baron.

And so this is a moment, and what I hear from those Jews were saying, you know, we were abandoned by liberal America, Trump is coming along, and look at these hearings. I was watching them today, actually, not in preparation for this.

Rachel: The hearings before Congress of the CUNY schools.

Yossi: Yeah, it’s kind of a perverse hobby of mine. And I’m riveted to these hearings. I’m riveted, first of all, to the fact that I’m cheering these Republican members of Congress who I know I would despise if they were in Israeli politics. I would regard them as an enemy of the well-being of my country. So I understand that. But I’m watching them and saying, finally, somebody is forcing these university presidents to squirm. And boy, are they squirming. You have to see these hearings. It’s extraordinary. Really, you appointed someone who identified with October 7th and said that if he were there, he would have done the same thing? You appointed this person the chair of Middle Eastern Studies in your university? Finally, somebody is calling them out on this. But the bad news is it’s the Baron.

Rachel: Yeah, I mean, that never worked out well for us, honestly, I have to say.

Yossi: It never worked out well.

Rachel: It might have worked out well short term, but it certainly didn’t work out long term. And this isn’t medieval times. It’s the longest thriving democracy. It’s a place where Jews have had, as you know, I don’t need to tell you, you’re a student of Jewish history, this has been our golden age, and Jewish safety and Jewish success have very much been tied to the university. That was kind of the first place that led us in.

Yossi: And that’s the trauma. That’s exactly the trauma.

Rachel: That’s the trauma. So it just feels to me that using anti-Semitism as a way to punish medical research, for example, might be a short term gain for tremendous long term loss of the way that Jews are understood. And see, it’s not an educational move.

Yossi: Part of me agrees with you. Another part of me thinks of the old Jewish joke, which is two Jews are standing before a firing squad. And one of the Jews says to the other, don’t we get it to make a last request? And the first Jew says, be quiet, you’ll just make things worse. And I feel that that question, which is a very valid question. And it’s an important question. But it also comes from a place that isn’t fully coming to terms with the breakdown of the Jewish covenant with America, the Jewish covenant, especially with liberal America, the Jewish covenant, even more especially with a liberal university. And that’s what broke down.

And a large part of American Jews have not internalized that we’re not in the same place anymore. The universities are not the same, and the trust has been broken. And I understand those American Jews who say, yeah, you know, Trump, of course, he’s a cynic, he doesn’t care about this issue. And none of these members of Congress care about this issue. And they’re using a sledgehammer. And yes, they’re bringing in all kinds of other issues. And really what concerns them is to defeat the liberal or the woke university, which I think that defeating woke university is a very important goal for the future of American democracy. Not this way, I agree.

But this is the only way that it’s been done. And if it would have been left to liberal America, it would have gone on and on, uncontested. And so I don’t know what the answer is, but I think it’s important to understand the complexity of this challenge.

Rachel: So really, let’s talk. So we’re on universities, let’s talk for a minute about our students. A lot of us are parents of young people, are grandparents of young people, we have young people in our congregations, in our classrooms. And it is true that young Jews are caught in a vice grip right now. You described it before, choosing between their Jewish commitments and maybe some of their liberal progressive commitments.

So I want to talk about two groups of young Jews. And I know these aren’t the only two groups, but I want to speak with you as an educator, you as an educator, about how we can help or how we can educate these two groups of young Jews.

The first group are those who are trying to hold those progressive commitments and their love for Israel together. And as I said, are paying a social penalty for trying to do that, maybe in both spaces, but certainly in the progressive cause spaces. That’s the first group.

The second group are Jewish anti-Zionists, young people who care desperately about their Jewish identities, but who see Zionism or at least the manifestation of Zionism that they have witnessed over their young adult lives as antithetical to and a betrayal of their Jewish values.

So what do you see in each of these groups and what responsibility do we have towards them as their rabbis, educators, parents?

Yossi: Yeah, so let’s start really with the anti-Zionist group. I think your emphasis on their Jewish identity and them seeing anti-Zionism as a fulfillment of their Jewish identity as they understand it is a very important point that’s often lost, certainly on the right wing of the Jewish community.

Rachel: They just want to dismiss them.

Yossi: And they want, you know, Sharansky wrote a piece a few years ago in Tablet called “The UnJews.” And they’re not un-Jews. That part of the problem is that they’re not un-Jews. If they were un-Jews, they would just go away. But they’re challenging us and saying, we actually are the real Jews.

Rachel: In fact, they’re building really vibrant, independent, minyanim on campus. They’re building a vibrant Jewish life and they’re saying, “Come, come. If you don’t like that Israel stuff, you don’t have to deal with it at all. Come here. Be Jewish.”

Yossi: Yeah, you know, we’re the real Jews. We’re the true Jews. That language, and you hear it, you know, that language reminds me of going back a generation to Jews for Jesus, we’re the real Jews, and the rest of you have gotten it wrong.

So I think that the phenomenon of Jewish anti-Zionism, I’m not speaking now about Jewish anti-Zionists, speaking about the phenomenon of Jewish anti-Zionism, for me is a greater threat than Jews for Jesus was. And should be treated as an organized, the organized expression of Jewish anti-Zionism should be treated as beyond the pale. This is outside of anything legitimate that the Jewish community can hold.

And I would apply that to the anti-Zionist organizations. I would apply it to a publication like Jewish Currents, four or five of whose editors signed a letter after October 7th that was signed by journalists and writers and cultural figures celebrating October 7th, saying that October 7th was an expression of resistance. So when you have a Jewish, supposedly Jewish publication, where a group of their editors signs that kind of statement, that’s not a Jewish publication anymore.

And there I would agree with Sharansky that in practice, it is an expression of being outside of Jewish identity. The problem is that lots of young Jews are so horrified and it’s a genuine expression, and it is an expression of what they were taught, certainly in the liberal Jewish community. And so now they’re coming back and say, “Well, you taught us this. You know, you can’t raise me on Tikkun Olam and then expect me to swallow Gaza.” And so, we have to deal with that. We have to treat that seriously. And whatever one’s ideas on Zionism or Israel are, for me, that doesn’t disqualify you as part of the Jewish community.

Satmar is part of the Jewish community, but I make a distinction between Satmar and Neturei Karta. And they both share the same theology, the same roots, the same theologians. The Satmar Rebbe is a theologian of both groups, but Satmar doesn’t make a common cause with Israel’s enemies, and Neturei Karta does. Neturei Karta, for me, is outside the Jewish people. I would not join in a minyan with Neturei Karta. I would with Satmar. Maybe they wouldn’t with me, but I would with Satmar. And that goes for individual anti-Zionists on the left. That’s, for me, you’re part of my symbolic minyan.

Rachel: So, you’re distinguishing between the ones who are leading this charge and the young people who may be following. And you’re saying the people who are leading this charge are not part of your minyan, but the young people still are.

Yossi: Yes, absolutely. So, there are two distinctions. The first distinction is the Satmar-Neturei Karta measure, and the second is, are you actively joining with our enemies? And even if you’re a 20-year-old kid and you join a tent camp, I’m not going to throw you out of the Jewish people, as if anyone’s asking me. But I wish they would. I have a long list. But certainly the leadership and the organizations are beyond the pale.

Rachel: Okay, so one of the ways, I’m just going to draw from that, one of the ways you’re suggesting we help these young people is by reminding them that they’re part of our minion. Meaning not pushing them away or lecturing them, but maybe being in conversation with them, maybe praying with them.

Yossi: And taking their moral concerns seriously, even if I reached different conclusions than I do, but I need their conversation. I need their moral passion as part of the Jewish conversation. I think it’s being taken to very destructive directions. But, you know, Rav Kook had this wonderful little essay called “The Souls of Chaos.” And he was writing about the Jews who were being drawn to communism or the anti-religious Zionist movements. And he said that these are very pure souls. And he had an expression called “Holy Atheists,” that the Holy Atheists are souls that love God so much that they can’t bear to see what religion has done to God. And so they turn against religion.

And so there’s something in that approach that I think we need, that generosity and also humility, because we’ve screwed up. We’ve brought the Jewish people and the state of Israel to a point. And this is a story going on for 50 years. There’s a story here. And I believe we’re right to fight this war. And we have no choice to fight it. But we also owe our kids an accounting.

Rachel: So to the point about story, I mean, one of the things that you say, and this is part of this super sessionist story, but this also reflects on us, is that Jews have forfeited the right to our own stories. And that’s a really haunting thing to hear. And then what you do in that same essay, I think this was from last December, December, 2024, you call on rabbis and educators and leaders to reclaim our narrative, to reclaim our narrative.

So what should that story sound like right now? And I’m thinking about these young Jews we were just talking about, where do you see this story already being told? And what’s the story we want to tell if we want to reclaim a sense of purposeful Jewish future, and as I said, at the beginning, moral imagination?

Yossi: So first of all, just to say a word about this thread of denialism, that the other piece of classical antisemitism, certainly Christian antisemitism or anti-Judaism, was what used to be called super sessionism, the notion that we have forfeited our story, our story has passed on to the church. We’re not even the real Israel anymore. And we don’t belong in our story. And for the church, we were no longer in the Tanakh. The Tanakh was their story now. We didn’t understand the Tanakh, we misread it. They were the only ones who understood our story because it wasn’t our story anymore.

And a similar dynamic is happening today, where this land is not the land of Israel. It doesn’t belong to us. It’s all a lie. And now we’re at the point where the Holocaust doesn’t belong to us either anymore. The Holocaust belongs to the Palestinians. And so no part of the modern Jewish story, the story that we call from destruction to renewal, that story has been erased. That’s what the anti-Zionist assault owes, however unconsciously, to classical Christian anti-Judaism.

In terms of the story that we need to tell to our kids, in 2018, I published this book, Letters to my Palestinian Neighbor. And I initially intended to write a second book called, Letters to a Young American Jew. And fortunately, I didn’t do it. Nobody would have read a book with that title. And I realized that I didn’t have to write that book because what I was trying to say to my Palestinian neighbor is very similar to what I would have said to a young diaspora Jew, which is to try to explain the complexity of Jewish identity and the pieces. How do we put the pieces together of Judaism as a religion, as a people? What does it mean that there’s a component of a nation in this story? What is ethnicity? How does that fit in? All of these moving pieces that we don’t understand. Most Jews don’t really understand how these pieces fit and what it really means. And so we have to start telling a much more complicated story.

I also think we need to start telling a more frankly religious story about Israel as well. And I’m on very thin ground here because I haven’t really begun to think in any kind of formal way about this. But I feel that the story that we have told ourselves for the last 70 plus years is more or less reaching its conclusion and that the secular story of Israel is running out of Jews. And there’s something in the strangeness of the Jewish story that we need to reclaim. We’ve been telling a very rational story of the Jews.

And to bring this full circle, we’ve been treating Israel as a political story and anti-Semitism as a political story. And yes, it is that there are political consequences to anti-Semitism that we need to deal with. But anti-Semitism raises some very powerful theological questions, which is why? Why the Jews?

And there are two miracles of Jewish survival. The first is that we survived all these thousands of years and then survived the Holocaust and not only survived, but thrived after the Holocaust.

The second miracle, or anti-miracle, is the survival of anti-Semitism, along with the Jews through every period of Jewish history. And anti-Semitism has not only survived Auschwitz, it’s doing better than ever. Anti-Semitism is now global, partly because of social media and other factors. But anti-Semitism is global in a way that it never was before.

And so the Jews have never done better. We’ve never been more powerful coming after Auschwitz. That’s the first miracle. And the anti-miracle is that anti-Semitism has never done better. And we’re only asking political questions about anti-Semitism.

Rabbis, you need to start asking questions about—what does the Jewish story mean? What is the meaning of a people that lost its land, that never relinquished its claim to the land, that centralized the memory of its land in its daily religious life and its prayers and its aspirations, and carried this, frankly, ludicrous fantasy that one day the most powerless people in the world is going to figure out how to gather itself from a hundred exiles and actually come back here and recreate Jewish sovereignty. That’s a crazy story. And we only deal with that story in a political context. That’s a really strange, surreal story. And religion is another way of saying it’s surreal, because religion is surreal. We need to reclaim something of the strangeness of the Jewish story and anti-Semitism.

Who could have imagined the Zionists, the founders of Zionism? Their motive was to cure the Jews from abnormality. The whole idea was they would return us to the land so that we would be returned to the international community. That was Herzl’s dream. This was a means to an end. The end was normalizing the Jews. And then this, the last desperate attempt of the Jews to normalize, turns out to be our most abnormal move. And so what’s that all about?

These are not just or even primarily political questions. They are theological questions. We don’t even have a language anymore for asking theological questions. We have been so necessarily politicized that our response to the Holocaust was to develop the political means to protect ourselves, the military and political means. And we had to do that. But we’ve lost our religious imagination.

This is a religious moment, what’s happening now. The return of hatred for the Jews and the criminalization of the Jewish state is a religious question. And so that’s the story. And it’s not a story that we can start telling. It’s a story we need to start asking because we don’t know what that story means. I mean, look, if you’re Charedi or religious Zionists, I think you know what that story means. But if you’re not in those two camps, what language do we have? And that’s what we need to start asking ourselves.

Rachel: Thank you, Yossi. Thank you so much.