Reincarnation In Jewish 21st Century Mystical Thought

 

 

Reincarnation In Jewish 21st Century Mystical Thought – OpEd

 August 8, 2023 

By Rabbi Allen S. Maller

Every human on earth has 8 great grandparents and 16 great great grandparents. Each of these 24 individuals contributes an equal amount of genetic material to their descendants. Nevertheless, siblings who share the same 24 ancestors do not have identical genomes. Even if they are identical twins their physical, mental and personality traits always differ, sometimes greatly, from their siblings who share almost the same physical genetic heritage. 

This difference is the result of both the unique physical combination of genes that occurs at conception; and the unique human soul that enters the body during the first or second trimester according to Jewish tradition.

Every year many hundreds of people find out that one or two of their 24 ancestors might have been Jewish. For most of them this discovery is an interesting fact of little significance. For many of them it might be an embarrassment to be ignored. 

But for some of them it becomes a life changing discovery. They feel drawn to Jewish people and seek to learn about Jewish music, food, literature, culture and religion. They feel more and more attached in some mysterious way to the Holocaust and the struggle of Israel to live in peace in the Middle East. 

Many of these people eventually are led to become Jewish either by formal conversion or by informal reversion within Reform Progressive synagogues.

These people provide a rather unusual form of evidence for reincarnation that comes from the Jewish mystical tradition; the Kabbalah. Unlike Buddhism and Hinduism, Kabbalah does not teach that reincarnation (gilgul) occurs over the course of hundreds of millions of years to millions of different sentient species. 

According to Kabbalah, only the souls of self conscious moral creatures like human beings reincarnate; and they reincarnate only when they have not fulfilled the purpose of their creation in their current lifetime. These esoteric Kabbalistic concepts from the 12th to 17th centuries; were popularized and spread throughout Eastern Europe, especially in Poland and Ukraine, by the Hasidic movement in the last half of the 18th and 19th century.

Since Judaism is an optimistic religion, most Kabbalists teach that most people can accomplish their life’s purpose in one or two lifetimes. A few souls may take 3-5 lifetimes or more. The bright souls of great religious figures like Abraham and Moses or Sarah and Miriam can turn into dozens of individual sparks that can reincarnate several times over many centuries. 

The tragic souls of Jews whose children have been cut off from the Jewish people, either through persecution or forced conversion to another religion, will reincarnate as one of their own, no longer Jewish, descendants. These non-Jewish descendant souls will then seek to return to the Jewish people. 

A majority of people who end up converting (or reverting) to Judaism and the Jewish people have Jewish souls from one of their own ancestors. Thus, the Jewish mystical tradition, claims that the souls of most converts to Judaism are the reincarnated souls of Jews in previous generations who were cut off from the Jewish people either voluntarily or involuntarily. Through conversion to Judaism they feel they are coming home. 

Sometimes these souls are descendants of Jews who were part of whole communities that were cut off, like the Marranos of Spain and Portugal, or European Jews in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust and then the decades of Communist oppression. Other times they are descendants of individual Jews who married non-Jews and did not raise their children to be faithful Jews. 

An example of the latter from England is recounted by Rabbi Barbara Borts: “One of the most touching conversions I ever did was a young girl of 11, brought to me by her mother, to discuss Judaism. The mother was a widow, living back at home with her mother and her father, who was a minister. This girl had done some research on Hanukkah for her school class, and in the process both loved what she learned and discovered that her late father’s grandfather was a German Jew. 

I asked her mother why she would support this. Her response was that her two daughters were no longer going to church, and she was delighted that one of them had found a religious home.  When I said that I could not imagine doing what she was doing if the positions were reversed, she said, “It’s different for Jews, after the Holocaust and all.”

So, the girl started Hebrew school classes, and attended services. I moved a couple of years later, and bequeathed her to the next rabbi. Some years later, we met up again when she was in University. She had converted, changed her name permanently, was an active member of a Jewish student organization, and planned to become a Rabbi; she may even now be in rabbinical school.”

Most of the time people who become Jewish do not find out that they have a Jewish ancestor until years after their conversion. According to a mystical 14th century Kabbalistic teaching found in Sefer HaPliyah, those non-Jews who do feel this powerful attraction to Jewish things and Jewish people, have Jewish souls that are reincarnations (gilgulim) of one of their own Jewish ancestors from 3-7 generations in the past.

That explains why they react to the discovery of some Jewish heritage in such a unusual way. It also explains why many people who do not even know that they have Jewish ancestors follow a similar path; and only discover a Jewish ancestor years after they have returned to the Jewish people.

The Hebrew word for reincarnation is gilgul which means recycling. Many people are born with new souls who are here for the first time. Others have a soul that has lived on this planet before. Most people do not reincarnate after their life on this earth is over. 

Most people who end up becoming Jewish, especially now, after the Jewish people have experienced several generations of assimilation, marriage to non-Jews, hiding from anti-semitism and outright genocide, are descendants of people whose children, in one way or another, have been cut off from the Jewish People. Among their non-Jewish descendants a few will inherit a Jewish soul (gilgul) that will seek to return to the Jewish people (Sefer HaPliyah). 

Take as an example Kadin Henningsen, who grew up female and Methodist in the Midwest. As a preteen she was inexplicably drawn to Judaism, empathizing with Jewish characters in Holocaust documentaries on TV.

Then in junior high, Henningsen had a revelation while reading Chaim Potok’s “The Chosen”: “I remember thinking I was supposed to grow up to be a Jewish man.”

Less than two decades later, the premonition came true. At 30, Henningsen transitioned genders and converted to Judaism, all within the span of a single summer. “It was a circular process,” he said. “The more entrenched I became in Jewish knowledge, the more comfortable I started to feel with my masculine identity.”

Henningsen’s conversion certificates were the first documents that referred to him with male pronouns. Today he is an active member of Temple Beth Chayim Chadashim, a Reform congregation in Los Angeles. According to Naomi Zeveloff”s article in the Jewish Daily Forward (8/16/13) Henningsen is not alone in his trajectory. Transgender converts constitute a growing minority within the small community of LGBT Jews. 

For some transgender converts conversion was intrinsically linked to gender transition; the process of soul-searching unearthed one insight after another. 

For others, Judaism was a lifeline during a time of immense vulnerability and isolation. When friends and family members grew distant, transgender individuals found community at the Hillel House or at a local synagogue.

Some transgender converts to Judaism came from strong Christian backgrounds and wanted to supplant their childhood religion with one that would be more accepting of their new gender identity. Others came to Judaism from a nonreligious background.

“In one way it is a search for personal authenticity,” said Rabbi Jane Litman, a congregational consultant with the Reconstructionist movement who has converted close to two dozen transgender  Jews. “People who are transitioning in terms of gender are looking for a way to feel most authentically themselves.”

Jesse Krikorian, a 24-year-old engineer, began exploring Judaism as a senior at Swarthmore College, shortly after she began her gender transition. 

Unhappy with her decision to take hormones, her parents threatened to withdraw their financial support. “I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, and there was a lot of chaos and uncertainty,” he later recounted. “I found that I really needed community and ritual and all those good things.”

Though he was raised Methodist, Krikorian was always interested in the Old Testament. A visit to the campus Hillel confirmed that Judaism might provide him with the community he was seeking: The Hillel director at the time, Jacob Lieberman, was also a transgender man. “I didn’t have any questions of whether I could be transgender and Jewish,” Krikorian said. “It was really clear that the combination could work.”

Krikorian attended Friday night services at Hillel each week and began to recite a prayer about transformation each time he bound his chest to appear more masculine. After graduating from college, he moved to Philadelphia. There he joined Kol Tzedek, a Reconstructionist synagogue. He converted and hopes to go to rabbinical school.

Thus the Gilgul process, especially due to the large amount of geographic and social mobility in modern times, often leads to transformations that lead Non-Jews to become Jewish.

According to Kabbalah, only the souls of self conscious moral creatures like human beings reincarnate; and they reincarnate only when they have not fulfilled the purpose of their creation in their present incarnation. 

Since Judaism is an optimistic religion, Kabbalists teach that most people can accomplish their life’s purpose in one or two lifetimes. A few souls may need as many as 3-7 lifetimes. 

The bright souls of great religious figures like Moses or Miriam can turn into a dozen or more sparks that may each reincarnate several times. 

The tragic souls of Jews whose children or grandchildren have been cut off from the Jewish people, either through persecution or conversion to another religion, will reincarnate as one of their no longer Jewish descendants. 

These souls will seek to return to the Jewish people, and a majority of people who end up converting (or reverting) to Judaism and the Jewish people have Jewish souls from one of their ancestors. Thus it is possible to see this form of reincarnation occurring in the world today in the experience of thousands of non-Jews who become Jewish.

Abrahamic Religions Each Share Their Own Decalogue – OpEd

 July 31, 2023

By Rabbi Allen S. Maller

People who simply want to put the Ten Commandments on the walls of our schools and our courtrooms often find themselves blocked by disagreements over which Ten Commandments to use. 

The Decalogue, a central text of Judaism, appears in the Torah in Exodus and again in Deuteronomy, with wording that is not the same in the two books. The rabbis say that the two versions of the ten commandments correspond to the two sets of two stone tablets. 

The version in Exodus was what was written on the first set of two tablets, which were broken by Prophet Moses after some Jews sinned with the Golden Calf. Deuteronomy repeats what was written on the second set of two tablets that God gave Moses.

Professor J. Cornelis de Vos points out, in an article that appeared on July 28, 2023, that Jewish Greek philosophy, the New Testament, Christian theology, Rabbinic Judaism, and the Church Fathers, all shaped and interpreted the Decalogue to meet the needs of their own community. 

The Hebrew text in the Torah is fairly clear. “These words YHWH (God’s special name used by Jews) spoke with a loud voice to your whole assembly at the mountain, out of the fire, the cloud, the thick darkness, and he added no more. He (God) wrote them on two stone tablets and gave them to me (Prophet Moses) “.  (Deuteronomy 5:22 )

Professor J. Cornelis de Vos adds that Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish Bible commentator and philosopher (20 B.C.E. – 50 C.E.), uses the Decalogue as headings under which he subsumes almost all of the commandments of the Torah. In a discussion of other examples of the number ten in biblical narrative, he writes: “But why note such examples as these, when the holy and divine law is summed up by Moses in precepts which are ten in all, statutes which are the general heads, embracing the vast multitude of particular laws, the roots, the sources, the perennial fountains of ordinances containing commandments positive and prohibitive for the profit of those who follow them?”

Philo was also the first to divide the Decalogue into two parts, reflecting piety and justice, respectively, which he considered to be the main virtues in ancient Judaism: “Further, the ten words on them, divine ordinances in the proper sense of the word, are divided equally into two sets of five, the former comprising duties to God, and the other duties to men.

“Philo (who was somewhat of a mystic) further claimed that the Decalogue, with its ten commandments, comprises the whole visible (space/time) world. He reasons that the world consists of (four dimensions) points, lines, surfaces, and solids, forms with 1, 2, 3, and 4 sides, respectively, and then notes that the sum of 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 is 10. 

Four centuries later, Augustine of Hippo (354–430 C.E.) Christianized the Decalogue. Instead of dividing its contents equally across the two tablets, he argued the first tablet contained three commandments: 1. not to worship other gods or make idols; 2. not to misuse God’s name; and 3. to observe the Sabbath. These commandments symbolized the threefold nature of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 

The remaining seven commandments on the second tablet related to human behavior towards fellow humans, with the prohibitions against coveting divided into two parts. This became the standard way that the commandments were enumerated in the Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches; but most Protestant Churches have a somewhat different division of the Decalogue which makes the Catholic single commandment not to worship other gods or make idols, into two separate commandments.   

In the rare cases where the New Testament quotes specific laws from the Torah, it almost always quotes the Decalogue. For example, several parallel accounts depict Prophet Jesus citing the Decalogue in response to a question about what a person must do to gain eternal life in the next world. 

Thus, when the question is posed by “a certain ruler,” Prophet Jesus replies (with only the human behavior tablet): “You know the commandments: ‘You shall not commit adultery. You shall not murder. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness. Honor your father and mother.'” (Luke 18:20)

Exodus tells us to “remember the Sabbath” while Deuteronomy tells us to “observe” it. More significantly, the purpose given in Exodus tells us to add holiness to God’s creation of the physical world; while Deuteronomy’s reason is grounded in social justice – to benefit all members of human society, including our own slaves.

Finally, emphasis is placed on these commandments in the Islamic faith: two sets of verses in the Quran, speak of them. The Quran speaks of them in chapter 6:151-153 and chapter 17:23-39 which is like a commentary on the commandments listed in 6:151-3. Some scholars call them the “verses of the ten commandments” simply because they speak of ten significant commandments to be observed by a Muslim. The Quran does not state that these are the same Ten Commandments that were given to Prophet Moses.

Detail of Guido Reni's "Moses with the Tables of the Law." Credit: Wikipedia Commons

Rabbi Allen S. Maller

Allen Maller retired in 2006 after 39 years as Rabbi of Temple Akiba in Culver City, Calif. He is the author of an introduction to Jewish mysticism. God. Sex and Kabbalah and editor of the Tikun series of High Holy Day prayerbooks.

The Death of Liberal Zionism

Rabbi Shaul Magid on Israel’s descent into genocidal fanaticism.

By Shaul Magid, Chris Hedges 

February 24, 2024Z 

Source: The Real News Network

Liberal Zionism, the notion that Israel’s existence can be compatible with liberal values, has run its course. As Israel’s genocide in Gaza continues despite the outcry of the world and the International Court of Justice, it is clear that any hopes of earlier generations to build a humanistic society in Israel have failed.

Israel has long legitimized itself by purporting to be necessary for the protection of Jewish people from antisemitism. But Judaism and Jewish identity are far older than Zionism, and far more diverse than Zionism’s narrow claims to monopolize the meaning of faith and ancestry. Rabbi Shaul Magid joins The Chris Hedges Report for a discussion on how religious fanaticism has come to dominate Israeli politics, and how a Jewish identity that rejects Zionism can be constructed from the rich and profound history of the Jewish faith and people.

TRANSCRIPT

Chris Hedges: Has Zionism, especially liberal Zionism, exhausted itself? The humanistic constructs of liberal Zionism are always in conflict with itself because of its refusal to grant Palestinians equal civil and political rights and has led many Israelis to embrace a far more chauvinistic and fanatic religious Zionism. What does this mean for Israel? And as important, what does this mean for Judaism? The Zionist movement which became a dominating force with the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948, has sought to shut out Jewish critics of Zionism. It not only maligned Jews who did not embrace Zionism but labels them “anti-Jews,” “self-hating Jews,” or “counter-Jews.” This war within Judaism, between those who put Israel at the center of Jewish identity and those who do not, has ripped apart the Jewish collective. As Rabbi Shaul Magid writes, “The Talmudic sages teach that the heretic is actually worse than the idolater. In their estimation, unlike the idolater, the heretic subverts Judaism from the inside.”

Rabbi Magid goes on to argue that the demand for the full Zionization of American Jewry is an attempt to brand all who do not give their primary loyalty to the state of Israel as heretics or apostates. This battle within Zionism raises crucial questions: What role does exile play in Jewish belief? What role does the state of Israel play in Jewish belief? Is Zionism the only true refuge for Jews? Are Jews who reject Zionism and Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians, who embrace lives outside of Israel, upholding or defying Jewish tradition? Is the nation’s state the best or the healthiest collective structure for Jews? Is a Jewish homeland, known by Jews as the land of Israel, connected to sovereignty? Judaism existed long before the concept of sovereignty and the land of Israel has been the homeland of the Jews for millennia without sovereignty. Is the concept of homeland dependent on statehood or even residents in Israel? Or is this concept, in its origins, a theological concept? Joining me to discuss Zionism and its relationship to Jewish belief is Rabbi Shaul Magid, professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and senior fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University, as well as the author of The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance.

I read your book and loved it. As you know, I went to Harvard Divinity School and came out of a Presbyterian household. One of the things that I watched and have some sense you’re reacting to as well, is especially during crises like the Vietnam War, what a large percentage of Christian clergy were willing to sanctify war, and sanctify the American state. My father was in the anti-war movement; Those who challenged the sanctification of state power were rapidly marginalized, not only within the society but often within the institutional church as well. Are you writing about much the same phenomena?

Join thousands of others who rely on our journalism to navigate complex issues, uncover hidden truths, and challenge the status quo with our free newsletter, delivered straight to your inbox twice a week:

Shaul Magid: First of all, thanks for having me. I appreciate it and it’s an honor for me to be here. To some degree, there is an intersection between religion and politics that emerges through Zionism that hadn’t existed for Jews for a very long time before that. Navigating those very, very complicated waters of politics, especially when you’re dealing with – As politics almost always does – Ruling over other people, religion often comes in to challenge the political and then is sometimes used to confirm the political. That’s part of what the relationship between Zionism and Judaism is today. What role does the political play within the history of Judaism in exile? The assumption that I begin with is that the Jews still live in a state of exile, whether they live in the land of Israel or whether they live in the diaspora. The distinction between diaspora and exile is an important one, it’s an important part of the book.

Chris Hedges: Explain that concept.

Shaul Magid: Diaspora is a descriptive term, it means dispersion. It was created by the Greeks, maybe to refer to the Jews or maybe not. But in any event, it’s something that doesn’t have much value to it; It’s simply the existence of people who are living outside of a homeland. Whereas exile is a theological term. It’s not a descriptive term, it’s an existential term. The idea is that somehow the covenant as it exists is not in a state of fulfillment but in a process of becoming. And that is not something that is only part of Judaism. I argue that exile is at the very center of Judaism. Judaism as we know it today is born in exile and is, in many ways, a response to it.

Chris Hedges: And flesh that out, the idea that you could live in the Jewish homeland, as it’s called, and yet be in a state of exile.

Shaul Magid: Exile simply means – Certainly from the traditional perspective – A state of becoming; It means a state of not yet, it means a state of existing outside of the fulfillment of the covenantal promise that’s made by the prophets. So in a way, the end of exile merely is in the prophetic imagination. The end of exile is simply the coming of the Messiah and since Jews don’t believe that the Messiah has come, they’re living in a state of exile. Zionism, to some degree, challenges that by making the claim that one could end exile without its messianic fulfillment. That’s part of what Zionism sought to accomplish in establishing a sovereign Jewish nation-state.

Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about Zionism as a movement – At its inception a very marginal movement, but now a very powerful movement. You write in the book that liberal Zionism hasn’t had a new idea in almost 40 years. But let’s talk about Zionism and its interplay now within Judaism.

Shaul Magid: Zionism emerged in the late 19th century in Europe as a response to what became known as the “Jewish question” which was the new antisemitism that emerged after the emancipation of the Jews and the unwillingness or resistance of European society to fully integrate the Jews and question whether Jews could be integrated into European society. It goes back to Marx’s famous essay on that question, and Herzl then wrote another essay in 1897, which asks the question again. So Zionism emerged as a Jewish movement of liberation based on Western European nationalism, as a way to solve the Jewish question. To say that since there’s no solution to the Jewish question in Europe, the only solution is for the Jews to become a normal nation that is with a land, a language, and a country.

The way to do that was to establish a Jewish nation-state. Whether it was going to happen in the historic land of Israel or not was another question but that seemed to be the obvious place. Although it contains certain deep problems that we’re still facing in 2024, which is what do you do with the fact that there are other people living there? In any event, Zionism as a solution to a European Jewish problem – And it was a European Jewish problem – Was made more powerful by the collapse of Europe by the 1880s, 1890s, and certainly by the 1930s, when it became impossible or extremely dangerous for Jews to continue to live in Europe. Zionism became the alternative. There were many other alternatives at the time. That was the most reasonable, although certainly not the easiest alternative.

Chris Hedges: You write that Zionism buttresses antisemitism. Explain that idea.

Shaul Magid: Buttresses or there’s a complicated relationship between Zionism and antisemitism. Herzl knew that and said in a diary entry that the antisemites could be some of our best advocates. In a way, what Herzl was saying to the antisemites is, I have a solution to the Jews: I’ll take them out of Europe and put them in a nation-state somewhere far away in the Middle East. And for a lot of European antisemites, that was a perfectly fine solution, especially given colonialism. So one of the big questions that is asked these days is, is Israel a settler-colonial project or a colonial project? That’s something that can be debated, but it can’t be debated that Zionism benefited from colonialism.

The idea that we can establish a Jewish nation-state of mostly European Jews, although Jews from the Arab land certainly came at the establishment of the state, in a part of the world that was being colonized by Europe, in a certain way made perfect sense. In a way, Zionism was able to be as successful as it was for a number of reasons: First of all, it focused on the land of Israel which spoke to the historical and theological aspirations of Jews. Second of all, Europe began to crumble and it became necessary; almost like an emergency situation. But there were problems that were inherent in Zionism from the beginning that we’re still living with and we’re seeing the fruits of today.

Chris Hedges: You talk about Zionism as… One of the core manifestations of the ideology is that it posits that Israel or the Jewish state makes you safe, you’ll never be safe in the diaspora. You break down antisemitism into three parts. I can’t remember whether you got that from Hannah Arendt or whether that’s your own formulation, but explain. And the levels of danger from antisemitism are determined by those three different forms or expressions of antisemitism.

Shaul Magid: Yeah, I borrow it from Arendt, but Arendt uses it in her essay, Reflections on Little Rock, about racism. There are three forms of racism, what she calls the individual, the social, and the political. She makes the claim that… I don’t want to get into the Little Rock article about racism but what I’m saying is that there are various forms of antisemitism. There are people who don’t like Jews for whatever reason, but their dislike of Jews remains very much within their private sphere; She calls it private, social, and political. Then there’s social antisemitism which extends out of the private sphere into the social sphere, for example, like summer camps and country clubs and all things like that. Then there’s political antisemitism that becomes part of the political culture, and for Arendt on the racism question, it’s only when racism becomes political that it becomes dangerous.

I was trying to bring that to the question of antisemitism to show that the difference between European antisemitism before the war and antisemitism that exists in the US today, is that in the US, antisemitism rarely reaches the level of the political. It stays much more in the individual and social sphere, which is not to say that’s not a problem but it doesn’t necessarily curtail the ability for Jews to live as Jews in the US. Which is why I say in the book that I don’t feel like Jews in America are oppressed.

Chris Hedges: Arendt also, when she writes about antisemitism, talks about the difference between vice and crime. She writes in Origins of Totalitarianism that Marcel Proust perhaps explicated the nature of antisemitism better than anyone else in France at the turn of the century. Of course, Jews before the Dreyfus affair are invited into the salon as exotic figures, Swan being an example after Dreyfus. This is Alfred Dreyfus the officer who was falsely accused of – He’s Jewish – Selling secrets to the Germans, you see Jews shunned. But she says that for a crime to be explicated, you can serve time or you can be punished. Whereas when you’re infected with the vice of “Jewishness” or whatever, racism, that can never be washed away. That it’s always there. Can you talk a little bit about that idea of antisemitism?

Shaul Magid: Yeah. In a certain way, she’s getting that a little bit perhaps from Max Nordau who calls antisemitism a disease. It’s the same basic idea. She uses this category of what she calls “eternal antisemitism” which she uses critically because she doesn’t feel like antisemitism could be understood if it’s understood as an eternal hatred. Although a lot of scholars of antisemitism make that argument. What I tried to do in that chapter on antisemitism, is play off Arendt’s long, unfinished article that she wrote on antisemitism and also the part of her totalitarianism on The Origins of Totalitarianism and Antisemitism, is that we have to understand it within a particular historical context, and we can’t call everything the same thing. We can’t use this umbrella term to define how Jews were thought about in Christian Europe, how Jews were thought about in Muslim lands, how Jews were thought about in America, or how Jews were thought about by Palestinians in Israel.

If you’re going to use the term antisemitism as a catch-all for hatred of the Jew or Yudin, as it was called in Germany, she feels like we’re not understanding the phenomena. We’re weaponizing it. So she took antisemitism very seriously, as we all do. She felt like not understanding it and by not only not understanding it but attempting to claim that it’s everywhere and always, whether there are Jews or whether there are no Jews, is a problem in terms of understanding the phenomena.

Chris Hedges: I want to talk about your own experiences in Israel. You grew up in a counterculture environment and you ended up in Yeshiva Meah Shearim, which is this Orthodox religious section of Jerusalem, where you served in the IDF – These were formative experiences in terms of your understanding both of Israel and Judaism. Can you explain?

Shaul Magid: Yeah. I was a wandering Jew, so to speak; Someone who grew up in a middle-class, counter-cultural environment, went to Israel, and was completely taken in by the country and also by the religion. So I sought out the most extreme form of the religion of Judaism and ended up in the ultra-Orthodox world of Meah Shearim, which was very anti-Zionist but that didn’t concern me at that point. I was looking to live some alternative lifestyle, I suppose. And I found, in ultra-Orthodoxy, a great way to exist and be part of a parallel world. I became disenchanted with it over the course of time because my liberal or even progressive proclivities started to bump up against a very deep sense of, for lack of a better term, misogyny, and racism.

I felt like ultra-Orthodoxy was trying to maintain or retain the past. What originally drew me to settler Zionism or the Zionism of Rabbi’s Kook is that it was a Judaism that was looking toward the future. That’s how I understood my own experience: living in a society that was trying to preserve the past versus a society that was trying to create a future. I became very drawn into that future-looking society until I began to see its underside in terms of how it understood the other people that were living there and the fact that the Arabs and the Palestinians were not considered part of that future vision.

Chris Hedges: You call it “a holy land fantasy.” What do you mean?

Shaul Magid: Yeah. It was a holy land fantasy. In the days when I was there in the 1980s, it was a fantasy, the way it isn’t now. For example, you were able to drive to the beach in Gaza, you were able to go to Ramallah or go to Nablus, and go to the marketplace. You were footloose in the land of Israel. There were people there who did not like you and maybe wished you harm, but at that time there were very few who were willing to do that. That changed after the first Intifada in 1989. But before that, there was a sense of someone coming from the US living in some kind of a fantasy.

Chris Hedges: I’m going to read this passage and then you can talk about the IDF. “I did not lose my Zionism in left-wing protests, I lost my Zionism in the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force. It was there that I witnessed the depths and intractability of ethno-national chauvinism. It was there that I understood what longtime leader of the Jewish National Fund and lifelong Zionist, Yosef Weiss, said long ago in his diary popularized in the 2021 film Blue Box, ‘The Arabs will never forgive us for what we have done to them.’” Talk about the IDF and that experience.

Shaul Magid: Not everybody, but a lot of people, in the IDF, are confronted with the realities of what it means to dominate another society in ways that Israelis who are not serving in the IDF don’t experience. Many serve in the IDF, and what I came to realize is that when you are walking through a Palestinian village fully armed with a loaded gun, and you see the hatred in the eyes of the children towards you, you start to understand it. You are dominating their lives, you are humiliating their father, you’re arresting their brother – There’s a sense of hatred that is palpable and not only palpable but from my perspective, fully understandable. And if I would’ve been in their situation, I would’ve felt the same way.

I came out of that experience even with all of the rationalizations that we were taught: this is necessary for security and so on and so forth. That may be true, but it doesn’t mean that the domination is any more excusable and that the hatred is any more unreasonable. So that’s where the fantasy cracked: When I realized for me to live the fantasy of life in the land of Israel, means that I have to control the movement of other people. And that suddenly seemed to me inexcusable.

Chris Hedges: You write in the book about how the Holocaust is taught in Jewish education. You said it’s instilled a sense of permanent existential crisis. What political scientist, Ian Lustick calls “Holocaustia,” creating a perpetual state of Israeli exceptionalism and giving rise to a parliamentary perspective in which antisemitism has all but become Israel’s foreign policy. Explain that and explain how Zionism uses the Holocaust.

Shaul Magid: It’s very interesting because people like David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, were quite against using the Holocaust as a justification for Zionism. But what’s come to be, and this is Lustick’s Holocaustia, is that the Holocaust has become the re-instantiation of trauma to legitimize and necessitate the existence of a sovereign Jewish state. So taking sixth graders from Israel to Auschwitz and having that very traumatic experience… Even for the Jews not of European descent, for the Jews from Morocco or from Algeria or Yemen, to take them to Poland to experience the remnants of the Holocaust is used to instill a sense of patriotism in the need for the state of Israel, as if there is the state of Israel or the Holocaust. Those were the two options.

Given those two options, who wouldn’t choose the former? We find it elsewhere in statements made by Yitzhak Shamir and even Netanyahu that the borders of Israel are like the borders of Auschwitz. I would even enter to say the way in which there are analogies between what happened on October 7 and the Holocaust. There’s a way in which the Holocaust becomes, I wouldn’t say a weapon, it becomes the perennial justification for the need of a Jewish state. You can make that argument and we can debate that argument in a number of different ways but educationally what it does is almost like re-traumatizing the Jews again and again and again. And I can’t see that healthy people will emerge from that.

Chris Hedges: Publicly, Netanyahu has called the Palestinians Nazis.

Shaul Magid: Yes. Right, of course.

Chris Hedges: The irony is the Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust.

Shaul Magid: Not only that, I would say that if you are going to make some comparison between those Kibbutzim in the Gaza envelope that were savagely destroyed and the Warsaw ghetto, then Zionism hasn’t accomplished anything. The analogy undermines that which it’s trying to prove. The book was written before October 7, it came out after October 7. Jews feel traumatized by October 7 understandably so, but I don’t think that working, as Lustick said in another article after October 7 “Vengeance is not a national policy.” And that’s what Israelis and Jews worldwide are trying to grapple with at this point.

Chris Hedges: Talk about the interplay between Judaism and the Israeli state. When I lived in Israel, I assume it’s even worse now, but reformed rabbis had no religious legitimacy. Even then the Orthodox had complete control. David Hartman was running the Hartman Institute but he was very marginalized. This was liberal Judaism. But talk about that relationship between the state and Judaism.

Shaul Magid: There’s something very ironic about that because Israel is found as a secular Jewish state. Zionism was a secular movement and the religious sector of the early Zionist movement was quite small. Gurion, when he was in the process of creating a coalition, wanted to invite the religious parties into the project. The religious parties were quite resistant because many of those religious Jews who were part of those religious parties, even though they were sympathetic to Zionism because Zionism allowed them to live in the land of Israel, they understood what they considered to be the head of heretical nature of secular Zionism. So Ben-Gurion made a deal that he called The Status-Quo Agreement in which he gave the religious parties jurisdiction, over a number of things. One of them was marriage, another was divorce, another was conversion, and another was burial rights.

As opposed to America which has a separation of church and state, Israel doesn’t have a separation of church and state in that way. The Israeli rabbinate is a government agency and they have jurisdiction over those particular areas. So when people say, is Judaism the official religion of Israel? The answer is no. The official religion of Israel is Orthodox Judaism. And they were able to nullify or not accept any conversions that were being done by non-Orthodox Jews. By the way, there’s no civil marriage in Israel either so a representative of the Israeli rabbinate has to be present at a Jewish wedding for the wedding to be sanctioned by the state. This is changing and there’s some loosening up of some of those strictures.

Probably at some point in time, there will be some form of civil marriage. And non-Orthodox rabbis, while they’re not officially recognized, are given a little bit more authority than they were in the past as well as non-Orthodox Jewish institutions. But the Jewish religion, not Islam or Christianity, in Israel is run by Orthodox Judaism.

Chris Hedges: And Orthodox Judaism is expanding. It’s certainly grown quite a bit since I lived in Israel.

Shaul Magid: Tremendously. Not only among the ultra-Orthodox communities but among the national religious Orthodox communities. One of the things that Ben-Gurion did by making a deal with the ultra-Orthodox parties or the Orthodox parties in The Status Quo is he thought that most of the ultra-Orthodox Jews would leave. Either they would leave because why would they want to live in a secular Jewish state or the next generation would secularize. And that did not happen. In fact, the opposite happened. So with very, very large families; ultra-Orthodox Jews with five or six children on average; national Zionist and Orthodox Jews with maybe a little bit less, and the secular Jewish population ha probably around two-two point something children per family. So over the course of time, it’s expanding tremendously. Among Jews in the diaspora who immigrated to Israel, something like 70% of them are Orthodox. So Israel is becoming a more religious country, it’s becoming a less liberal country, and we’re seeing the effects of that in a number of different ways.

Chris Hedges: Talk about the relationship between the settler movement and the fanatic or right-wing Zionism of the settlers. They are now not only within the Netanyahu government, but they are within the IDF. The chief-of-staff comes out of the settler movement. This is something that, 20 years ago when I lived in Israel, settlers or people who embrace that chauvinistic Zionism like Meir Kahane – I was in Israel, you wrote a book on Kahane, but I knew him and was there – His party was outlawed in 1994, Kahane, and he was later assassinated. He wasn’t allowed to run. That’s all changed. And many of these people are heirs to Kahane. That’s a new phenomenon.

Shaul Magid: Yeah. Part of the ideology of the settler movement is something called “greater Israel” and greater Israel is an ideology that all of the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea is Jewish land. So the idea of the West Bank or the Gaza Strip as being Palestinian land or Palestinians having rights to that land is subverted and undermined by that notion of greater Israel. It’s arguably the case that the government is advocating a greater Israel ideology, which governments previously had rejected. 1977 Menachem Begin is elected as prime minister from the Likud Party, a right-wing party.

He was nominally religious but he adhered to a particular greater Israel ideology. What’s happened is with the expansion of the settlements, you have an entire culture – I wouldn’t even call it a subculture anymore – Of Israelis who are raised with a particular religious, messianic ideology whereby all of the land has to remain in Jewish hands, that only Jews should have the legal rights, and that Palestinians who want to live there, live there as second class citizens. This is something in the 1980s when Kahane was around, was considered to be so extreme that even the right wing rejected him. But now it’s become normative or normal, not only among the extreme right-wing settlers but some of the more center-right members of the Israeli Parliament.

Chris Hedges: Liberal Zionism – We’ll go back to that quote I read. What’s happening? Is it withering away? Is it being replaced by religious Zionism? Is it finding a new identity? What’s going on with it?

Shaul Magid: It’s a good question. Liberal Zionism, first of all, is something that only existed in the US. There was an Israeli left but the Israeli left was not liberal Zionism. The Israeli left in many ways was far to the left of liberal Zionism. So liberal Zionism in some way begins with Louis Brandeis – Back in the teens of the 20th century – Who made that famous speech. It was 1915 where he said to be a good American is to be a Zionist and to be a Zionist is to be a good American. The liberal values that Brandeis espoused were the liberal values of Zionism. This is obviously long before a state. To some degree, liberal Zionism was able to survive the establishment of the state and even up until the 1970s.

But liberal Zionism is in a defensive mode at this point. Because you have a group of people who consider themselves liberal Zionists, who are committed to liberal ideas, who are committed to equality, who are committed to justice, and they’re supporting a state that’s not committed to those values and not committed to those ideas. So the question is, what value does it have for a liberal movement to support an illiberal state? Now, we can argue about the nature of the state but one of the things that is the underside of democracy is that the people that are living in the state choose the state. It’s not that Netanyahu won in a fluke election; Netanyahu has been winning for a long time. The Israeli left not only is now in the opposition, but the Israeli left didn’t make enough votes to be in the government at all. So we’re in a situation where, my perspective is that liberal Zionism doesn’t have any new ideas, partly because the country that it supports has chosen a different path.

Chris Hedges: I want to talk about BDS: The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction movement. You, along with two other great scholars I admire; Noam Chomsky, and Norman Finkelstein, do not support BDS. I’m a strong supporter of BDS but I want you to lay out why you don’t support BDS.

Shaul Magid: It’s a very good question and I don’t have a very good answer. I would say it in another way: I don’t have a rational answer, I have an emotional answer. I can’t think of a good reason why not to support a nonviolent movement that’s seeking to end the occupation. Now, some people in BDS are seeking to eradicate the state completely. Others in BDS simply are trying to eradicate the occupation. For me, two things: I don’t feel like it will have the impact that the anti-Apartheid movement had, for example, of forcing South Africa to end apartheid. I don’t think it has that power. I don’t think it has the teeth to do that. It also becomes so mixed up with a particular left community that simply doesn’t acknowledge the viability of the existence of the state, which I don’t support. I do think that the state has a right to exist like any states have a right to exist. Or I don’t know if any states have a right to exist.

Chris Hedges: Well, you argue in the book that you can’t use that term.

Shaul Magid: Yeah. I don’t like to use the term “right to exist.” I would say it differently – Israel as a state, exists. The question that interests me is what kind of a state it’s going to be and that’s where my energy is. I don’t think that my energy is well spent if I sign onto the BDS movement.

Chris Hedges: For those of us who abhor violence… And I knew two of the leaders of Hamas and was quite upfront. This was during the suicide bombing attacks in Jerusalem which I had to cover. And I argue both in the home of Abdelaziz Runtisi, one of the co-founders of Hamas and then after he was assassinated, Nizar Ryan that by carrying out indiscriminate suicide bombing attacks against Israeli civilians, they were essentially abrogating or taking from themselves the moral high ground they had. Not to mention the fact that it was a war crime. But among Palestinian friends without being a strong supporter of BDS, I don’t know how I can counter this call to resist the violence.

Shaul Magid: I hear you. That’s a very serious critique. And again, I don’t have an answer for it. What happens from within the circles that I live in, signing on to BDS puts you outside the conversation, and at this point, I prefer to be inside that conversation. I can understand BDS, if it’s a movement that’s seeking to end the occupation and create justice and equality for Palestinians, from everybody that lives from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, I can support that as a non-violent movement because I agree with those goals. Do I think that those goals can be achieved with or without BDS? The argument in my book is, not as long as Zionism is the ideology that dominates the state.

Chris Hedges: I want to ask you about Jeremy Corbyn. That was another… Now there’s very strong evidence that antisemitism was weaponized to bring down Corbyn and his supporters, many of whom were Jewish. But you say that he may be an antisemite. I am curious what your perspective is now on the whole campaign against Corbyn.

Shaul Magid: Yeah, it’s a good question. It was a bit of a throwaway line that maybe on second thought, I probably [laughs] … I honestly don’t feel like I know enough about the ins and outs of British parliamentary politics. I would say all I know about Corbyn is what he said, and there were a lot of things that he said that I agreed with and there were things he said that I didn’t agree with. Determining whether somebody is an antisemite is a much more complicated process in terms of what’s the intention of what they said and from the distance that I have, I wasn’t able to ascertain that.

I do think though that the weaponization of antisemitism… And it’s not being used against people like Jeremy Corbyn. Just yesterday it was used against a colleague of mine who’s a historian of Zionism, Derek Penslar, who was appointed to be the co-director of the task force on antisemitism at Harvard University, who is a Zionist. So it’s become a term that’s been used and here I fault the ADL and Jonathan Greenblatt so extensively and so sloppily that it doesn’t mean anything anymore. Somebody who’s a Zionist and spent his entire adult life teaching Jewish history and Jewish students, for that person to be called an antisemite because he criticizes Israel, the term loses all of its meaning.

Chris Hedges: You begin one chapter with these three quotes, and I want to ask you to respond to them. The first is from David Ben-Gurion, “The Bible is our mandate.” The second from Pat Boone, that horrible singer, the theme song to the film Exodus “This land is mine. God gave this land to me.” And then Danny Danon, “This is our deed to our land” holding up a copy of the Bible before the UN Security Council in 2019. Talk about that appropriation of a divine mandate to justify a colonial-settler project.

Shaul Magid: This is one of the deep-seated problems of the political ideology of Zionism, not only of religious Zionism. I don’t know Danny Danon’s religious life, but David Ben-Gurion certainly was not a religious Jew. And yet the idea that the notion of what Chaim Gantz calls “proprietary Zionism” which begins with the assumption the land of Israel belongs to the Jews, and we will do with it what we want, and maybe we will give a piece of it to other people under conditions that we determine, is something that is embedded in the entire Zionist project. That’s why we keep hitting our heads against the wall. We have to get outside of this notion of proprietary Zionism that somehow it’s our land because God gave it to us very innocuously.

I was raised on the movie Exodus and a whole generation of people were raised on the movie Exodus; We must have heard that line being sung by Pat Boone hundreds of times and no one’s ever thought about it. But wait, that’s a strangely chauvinistic thing to say. Zionism is a modern national movement. I don’t know that its relationship to Jewish theology, Jewish history, and Jewish messianism is that productive but I don’t think that’s only being espoused by the religious sector. It’s being espoused by everyone from David Ben-Gurion to Danny Danon, to whoever wrote the lyrics to that bad theme song.

Chris Hedges: You have had these prescient critics – Yeshayahu Leibowitz is pretty amazing, he foresaw the dark places Israel would go if it continued to occupy the Palestinians, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt. You quote Isaac Bashevis Singer, a writer I love, and he wrote that exile was necessary to perpetuate a longing that produces Jewish genius. And for Singer, Yiddish was the language of exile.

Shaul Magid: It’s a fascinating essay that I discovered pretty late in writing the book and then decided that he needed to be included because Singer considered himself a Zionist, yet he understood that the greatness of Judaism, the genius of Judaism, was that which was produced in exile. Not only in exile – I think this is Singer’s point – But because of exile. There’s something about that experience, whether it’s an experience of marginalization, an experience of disempowerment, an experience of being apolitical or non-political, that enabled Judaism to form and develop in ways that created an entirely distinctive, robust, and ethical tradition to some degree with all of the caveats. There’s a line that I also quote from Gershom Scholem in his interview with the Mukit Soor from the ’70s where he said, “Zionism sought to end exile and it was those that were opposed to it that understood it more than those that were in favor.”

That’s what I’m trying to get at in the book, is to say that if we think about exile as something that’s not negative, that’s not about punishment, but that’s about the cultivation of an ethical, moral, humane society and push away the idea that this is the footsteps of the coming of the Messiah and just try to live exile fully, we have a better chance of creating the society that a lot of Jews like me can be proud of.

Chris Hedges: Well, you quote James Cone in the book, The Great Theologian, that’s not accidental. His writing dovetails very much with where you’re coming from and this notion that by being in exile, one doesn’t identify as religious with centers of power but centers of marginalization. Let’s make a list of the great writers of European fascism. I would off the top of my head say 80% of them are probably Jewish. Let’s make a list of the great writers of racism in America and W.E.B Du Bois, Cone, and others, are Black. And that’s because you’re marrying the power of religious convictions and tremendous intellect with a closeness to a marginalized or oppressed community. That is what gives all great religious writing – Christian, Jewish, whatever – Its power and you’re raising that as an idea.

Shaul Magid: Yeah. And Du Bois is someone who’s very important to me. Cones, his last book, The Cross in the Lynching Tree, was very, very powerful. One of the things I’m working on now is a book on critical race theory and antisemitism because some of these writers, the two that you mentioned and others as well, do speak to what it means to be outside of the orbit of the political. But if one could say as an elevator pitch, Zionism was a movement that was started by Jews who got tired of being in exile, they got tired of being marginalized, and they got tired of being disempowered. They felt that their lives were in danger. As Scholem said, “Power is a very dangerous thing and nationalism is a very dangerous thing.”

Even though it might’ve been necessary, part of the hazards of Zionism is that it almost happened too quickly. And not any fault of its own. It began to gain steam and then Europe fell apart and it became an emergency situation. All of the problems that Martin Buber, Leibovich, and many other people noticed, suddenly got pushed away because it became about saving Jewish bodies and those problems continue to exist into 2024. Those problems created conditions that made October 7 possible. Not to say that it was the fault of Israelis but the conditions of a culture of domination, and that’s what Israel has become. The military experts would say that’s necessary. Maybe that’s true but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t create very dangerous situations and that it doesn’t deteriorate from my perspective, the beauty and the genius of Judaism.

Chris Hedges: Great. That was Rabbi Shaul Magid, professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com


Shaul Magid  is a professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College and a rabbi at Fire Island Synagogue in Fire Island, New York. His latest book is The Necessity of Exile: Essays From a Distance.

As Jews, We Must Demand Justice for Shireen Abu Akleh

The current situation is appalling not only to Palestinians; it also marks the Jewish community worldwide

Sasha Ghosh-Siminoff   

May 27, 2022

Mezuzah / Getty Images

Growing up in a Jewish household means engaging in a lot of political discourse: discussions about oppression, death, injustice, guilt. In some Jewish households, we discuss social justice, the need to fight for the rights of the oppressed, taking a lesson from the pain of our own history as a “homeless” and shunned people, ensuring that the destructive authoritarianism and hatred that led to the Holocaust are not repeated anywhere in the world again.

The Jewish-American community maintains a strange position within American society. We are largely an affluent and educated community that can “pass” for white and are therefore seen as not subject to the kind of racism and prejudice experienced by other American communities of color. At the same time, we are not considered part of the predominantly Christian, Anglo-Saxon power structure that has held most of the political power in the United States since its founding, and antisemitism has always been present in the United States, which has only worsened in the past six years: Three quarters of Jewish Americans polled by the Pew Research Center said there is more antisemitism in the U.S. today than there was five years ago. Because of this hybrid place we inhabit within American society, we live with the fear that no matter what our economic and social position, we can become the next German Jews — that is, a highly acculturated group that was sent to the death camps during World War II — should right-wing forces prevail to take control of the federal government.

Overall, the Jewish-American community remains a progressive ideological voting bloc, with seven in 10 Jewish adults identifying with, or leaning toward, the Democratic Party and half describing their political views as liberal. It is these considerations that give rise to a complex and conflicting set of feelings regarding the kind of relationship the Jewish-American community should have with Israel. As an example, the same Pew study found that “58% say they are very or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel.” The numbers regarding Jewish-American feelings toward Israel, especially about emotional attachment, vary by denomination. However, ‌there is no broad consensus within the Jewish-American community about our relationship with Israel.

During Passover in our family, discussions about social justice come to the forefront. Our Seder and Haggadah (the text used to guide the Seder) lean heavily on the story of Passover as an example of why the fight against oppression and for justice is of immense consequence — a never-ending quest. The lessons I learned growing up reading our Haggadah remind me that our history as a people make us sensitive to changes in societies or governments that might signal a slide toward the type of authoritarianism or ethnonationalism that preceded the Holocaust in Europe. It is, therefore, unsurprising that Jewish Americans are often highly progressive and work on social justice issues.

But like all communities that have experienced severe trauma, memories of which are passed down from generation to generation, we have blind spots. In particular, a sizable portion of Jewish Americans still have a blind spot for the increasingly authoritarian and undemocratic actions of the Israeli government.

I am 35 years old and have watched my family’s viewpoints change from cautious but largely uncritical support for Israel to disillusionment and anger with the way the powers in Israel have become anti-democratic and unwilling to engage in any substantive form of negotiations to end the conflict with the Palestinian people. The ‌discriminatory acts by the Israeli state against Palestinians, such as illegal seizure of land and homes, the indefinite jailing (known as administrative detention) of Palestinians and the consistent use of lethal force by Israeli security forces when confronting Palestinian protesters, show the Israeli state’s disregard for Palestinian lives. Most Jewish Americans would oppose these same policies if they were implemented in the United States. So I often ask: At what moment will we address this blind spot? How do we reconcile these structural injustices with our own fight against extremism, disinformation and efforts to silence journalists here at home? There is no straightforward answer, but there must be a conversation. Our values as a community may be at stake if we do not.

The killing of the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh on May 11 — with mounting evidence that the Israel Defense Forces are culpable — is just the latest example in a string of destructive moments in Israel-Palestine history that should push the Jewish-American community and the Jewish diaspora to contemplate their relationship with Israel. The Jewish-American community in particular — arguably the most influential Jewish community outside Israel — must process some uncomfortable facts: Are Israeli’s policies toward the Palestinian people in sync with our values as Jewish Americans? How can we support the continued dispossession of Palestinians to provide settlements for Jewish Israelis? How has the historic trauma of Jews — especially the Holocaust — distorted the justification for a Jewish-only state that is built on inherently undemocratic values and oppresses portions of the Jewish community in Israel, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and Palestinians living in the occupied territories? Is the cost of building “Fortress Israel” at the expense of our community values worth it, just to say that we might have a safe haven for Jews to escape to if the worst were to happen in our home countries?

I feel especially heartbroken for the eldest generation of Jewish Americans, who have lived through so much pain and heartbreak over the past century and, in their waning years, now see a modern Israel that seems completely at odds with many of the core values of the community and those at Israel’s founding. It occurred to me, while reading the story of Moses and the freeing of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt with my 97-year-old grandmother at Passover last month, that the current Israeli government’s treatment of the Palestinian people (and the Israelis who support Palestinian rights) has more in common with Pharaoh and his harsh rule than it does with Moses and his righteous quest to free the Jewish people.

I immediately felt a pang of guilt for having this thought. My grandmother experienced discrimination as a Jew in the United States, lived through World War II and experienced the death of family in Europe. Her parents fled tsarist Russia to escape persecution. Prejudice and antisemitism followed Jews to their new homeland in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. Out of the ashes of the Holocaust, the modern Israeli state was born. The birth of Israel was complex and helped sow the seeds of the modern-day Israeli-Palestinian conflict. My grandmother bore witness to this history, and I can only imagine the effect it has had on her views about her community, Israel and the need for a Jewish state as a bulwark against Jewish victimization.

The Jewish diaspora is split in terms of how it internalizes the lessons learned from our history. The first perspective is the “protector”: Under no conditions can we allow Jews to be victimized again, even if it means supporting policies that seem unjust. According to this viewpoint, Israel is the ultimate protector against unending antisemitism. The second is the “empathizer” perspective: As part of a community that has experienced mass societal trauma and persecution, it is the duty of all Jews to ensure that the circumstances that led to the repression of Jews are never replicated for any group.

I think there is a sizable portion of the Jewish community who fall somewhere in between these two major perspectives. These individuals are generally empathetic when they see injustice and repression, whether at home or abroad, but simultaneously worry that the Jewish community is unique in terms of its historic repression and therefore requires special protection. Both outlooks make sense given what the Jewish community has experienced, but the protector viewpoint presents many pitfalls and risks turning Jews from the oppressed into the oppressor. The line between protecting one’s community and committing acts or policies that are ‌unjust is difficult to traverse.

Yet how can we not see parallels between the Israeli state’s actions against the Palestinian people today and the status of the Jews in Egypt under the rule of Pharaoh before our emancipation? I told my grandmother about the shame I feel to see part of the Jewish community participating in the repression of another group of people who struggle with many obstacles, including chronic statelessness. My grandmother is at a loss ‌why Israel has become so politically right wing and why the Israeli government seems incapable of doing the bare minimum to find a peaceful settlement with the Palestinian people.

“If there was any hope or optimism for what Israel could have been … I do not know what will happen to Israel in the future,” she said to me. “The right wing in Israel is terrible, and Jews should know better than to lean toward this ideology. … I have yet to see anyone in Israel who has provided a serious path for peace between the Jews and the Arabs. … The killing is terrible and needs to stop if everyone is to live in peace.”

Like many in the Jewish-American community, her feelings toward Israel are complicated. Over time these attitudes have grown only more complex as the situation on the ground has worsened. While my grandmother considers herself a passive supporter of Israel, she pointed out that her brother was a staunch enthusiast in the early days of its creation. Our family understood the need for a haven for Jews, especially after the Holocaust.

But the subsequent decades of violence have been detrimental. Israel’s ideological change toward a predominantly right-wing polity is at odds with not only our own values but also the broader political leanings of the Jewish-American community. In this way, we see the gap widening‌ between Israel and the Jewish-American community.

When conducting research for my master’s thesis in 2010 on Israeli national identity, I interviewed a range of Israelis — liberals and conservatives, religious and secular, those who live behind the Green Line that demarcated the nation’s more limited boundaries before 1967 as well as those who live in settlements that breach that line and have exploded in number since then.

There was much dispute about the nature of these identities and whether there was such a thing as a singular national identity that incorporated all Jewish citizens within Israel. It was clear from speaking with Palestinians who had Israeli citizenship that they were excluded from that national identity. Ethnically Arab and mostly of Palestinian descent, one-fifth of Israel’s population are nonentities within their own country. And while the Israelis I spoke with could not agree on a cohesive national identity, the subject of victimhood and the specter of being a persecuted community permeated many discussions. Over and over, Jewish Israelis explained that the politics of their country are complex, and although people’s views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict varied depending on ideology or religious leanings, all grew up in the Holocaust’s shadow.

There has been a radical shift in the politics of both Israel and the United States over the past six years. The long reign of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saw the unrestrained expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and an increasingly authoritarian bias toward Israelis who protest corruption or demand the expansion of rights. The animosity between Jews and Arabs has inevitably increased under the crushing weight of hardline, right-wing rhetoric and policies. Concurrently in the U.S., the advent of the Trump administration was accompanied by a huge jump in antisemitism. According to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents in the U.S. “surged more than one-third in 2016 and jumped 86 percent in the first quarter of 2017.”

During the Trump years, I remember having numerous conversations with my family about this rise in antisemitism and what it said about American society ‌and the future of Jewish Americans: Would we as a community be safe in the United States in the long term? The generational trauma passed down within the Jewish community contributes to a particular feeling of being not quite safe. There is a tendency to scan society and government for any signs of betrayal or victimization as has happened in the past.

While these anxieties are difficult to live with, I hold the empathizer perspective. I firmly believe that the risks and travails of the Jewish people do not mean we can or should give Israel a pass for its horrendous conduct toward the Palestinian people. We can and must demand justice for the Palestinian people and advocate for their human rights. Just as the Holocaust left an indelible mark on our community’s history and psyche, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians will do the same to us. It is important to affirm that while not all Israelis are Jews and not all Jews are Israelis, most of the political and military power vested in the Israeli state is wielded by Israeli citizens who are Jewish. This ties the wider Jewish community to the actions of the State of Israel and affects our relationship with the rest of the world.

Just as important, numerous Israeli politicians over the years have worked hard to create this nationalist myth that Israel speaks on behalf of the entire Jewish people, even though there is no consensus within the diaspora about whether that is the case. Because of these ties, Israel’s continued path could create an irreconcilable schism within the Jewish community in which Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people overshadows the progressive Jewish values I and others have learned from our families. On the one hand, the Israeli government wants the support of the diaspora — especially the Jewish-American community — but it shows no interest in listening to critiques from this group. This one-sided relationship between Israel and the Jewish-American community is unsustainable, and it helps neither in the long term.

A peaceful settlement with the Palestinian people is necessary not only for Palestinians. The current situation marks the entire Jewish community and undercuts all its achievements. For us, as Jews, to be at peace with ourselves and our values, it is long past time to look in the mirror and ask the hard questions. We can begin by demanding a full investigation into Shireen Abu Akleh’s killing and ensure that those responsible are brought to justice.

Sasha Ghosh-Siminoff is a non-resident fellow at the New Lines Institute

 New Lines Magazine

A Tribute to Shireen Abu Akleh, a Journalistic Role Model

The murdered reporter was superbly professional, possessed a rare modesty and unshackled cultural restraints on Arab women

Rasha Al Aqeedi 

https://newlinesmag.com/

A vigil held for Shireen Abu Akleh outside the Church of the Nativity in the West Bank 

/ Hazem Bader / AFP via Getty Images


Where do girls in closed societies draw inspiration from when television, cinema, literature and culture are state-controlled and role models are carefully crafted? The few who are approved by what I like to call the thought gulag are then subjected to rigorous examination by social norms. The women who pass are often replicas of the women surrounding these little girls: They look, speak and live like their mothers, aunts and sisters. From an early age this drew the boundaries for us girls and young women; at least that was my experience in Mosul in the 1990s. Our destinies and ambitions were chosen for us, and we dared not object. After all, who was there to follow? Then there was Shireen Abu Akleh. Along with her colleague Givara Budeiri, Shireen made her way through the cruel filtering of state and society in Iraq. The Baath regime, like many other dictatorships, adopted the Palestinian cause, and whenever confrontations in the Palestinian territories occurred, they became our main news story during prime-time TV, when the state technicians received orders to briefly bootleg Al Jazeera’s coverage and show it to the people. This is not to say that Iraqis needed Saddam Hussein’s approval to stand in solidarity with Palestinians; all Iraqis sympathized with the Palestinians, but the Baathist regime’s adoption of their suffering as a national cause meant it allowed messaging related to that adopted cause and filtered out other things. The question had long been part of Iraq’s collective consciousness regardless of authoritarian messaging.

To us, Shireen was not a stranger. She looked and sounded as we did, and it didn’t matter that we were not even privy to her religious identity, which we learned after her death when we watched in horror as her coffin made its way to the church despite Israeli soldiers’ beating Shireen’s pallbearers with batons.

Unlike most of the other women on our screens, Shireen had no hidden agenda to corrupt young Iraqi girls, according to our patriarchal society. Her profession was miraculously overlooked. In the late ’90s, female war reporters might have been the subject of movies, but we never saw them in real life. An Arab woman wearing a “Press” vest and helmet — dodging bullets while reporting live — was new, and we were all in awe. In my family, Shireen was particularly loved for another reason: She bore an uncanny resemblance to one of my paternal cousins. My father would proudly announce “Zeena is on TV again!” adding to our sense of Shireen’s familiarity. To say she was a “household name” is an understatement. She was indeed one of us, and she was doing extraordinary things that we could only dream about.

The second intifada and the killing of Muhammad al-Durrah were the talk of school and town for weeks. Hour by hour Shireen again guided viewers through events, her signature sentence etched in our memory: “We will provide more details once we get confirmation.” Though I don’t recall hearing any young Iraqi woman explicitly saying that she wanted to be a war correspondent, the way in which we looked up to Shireen and trusted her words said so much more. Even in a patriarchy like Iraq’s, Shireen commanded respect and acknowledgment for accomplishments beyond society’s restrictive role for women. She empowered us back then in ways we would only realize decades later. I cannot begin to fathom what effect Shireen must have had on young Palestinian girls who lived through the stories that she told to the world.

As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continued, Shireen’s reporting continued with it. After 2003, I stopped following her coverage as religiously as I used to, not because my admiration for the first female war correspondent to grace the screen of my living room TV had ceased but because our own woes and injustices in Iraq began to consume us. Also, female war reporters became the norm as we finally got to see the world through satellite news channels. Al Jazeera remained center stage, but the unraveling effects of the Iraq war, Israel’s war on Lebanon, the Arab Spring and the war in Syria created rifts and divisions among audiences, many of whom began to eschew the channel itself.

While many of Al Jazeera’s prominent reporters and presenters resorted to sensationalism to express and embrace the causes closest to their hearts, Shireen refrained from the circus. Her focus remained solely on reporting on the struggle and people — her people — of Palestine. Her social media presence was modest and never provocative. She stood with the people in their fight for justice wherever they were, unconditionally.

Her professionalism endured decades of ideological shifts and trends in the media. Yet despite being a pioneer, perhaps the pioneer, of female reporting, Shireen never made her work about herself. She did not endorse the media’s cult-of-personality culture or aspire to be part of it. I do not recall seeing her in a designer dress being honored with media awards at fancy galas, though she would have been most deserving of the recognition. I cannot speak on her behalf either, but the Shireen whom we believe to know was uninterested in vanity. She may have represented Al Jazeera, but she became a reference in her own right.

I saw the news of her murder when I was with another Iraqi friend. It was around midnight, and we were watching Eurovision. We gasped in shock and horror. Though neither of us immediately cried, sadness took over. My friend had spent her teenage years in Libya and held the same fondness and admiration for Shireen. Another friend, a 30-year-old doctor in Kirkuk, recalled to me a few hours later how her mother awakened her with the grave news: “Wake up … wake up. … They killed Shireen.” My immediate reaction was to text one of my dearest friends, a renowned war reporter who happened to be in Palestine at the time. I asked her to be safe that day. It was when she replied that I began crying. War reporting is one of the most dangerous professions in the world, and I salute those killed in the line of duty for their resolve and commitment to telling the story. But the context of how Shireen was killed in cold blood and the unlikelihood of accountability for her murderers only adds sorrow to the pain of losing a reporter who has long graced our homes and felt like family.

The day Shireen was taken to her final resting place in the land where she and her ancestors were born was testament to this woman’s legacy. Thousands of Palestinians accompanied her coffin, which was draped in the Palestinian flag and her press vest. Tens of millions across the Middle East watched the grand funeral procession live on Al Jazeera, and many more millions streamed it on social media. Rarely has a media figure been so unifying in both life and death. Her work, professionalism and prose commanded respect from all sides of the political and ideological spectrum.

The unfortunate confrontation that happened toward the end of the procession, when Israeli police attacked the pallbearers, was a real-life metaphor for the Palestinian struggle. There were clear indications who the aggressor was, though calls for restraint were addressed to both sides, including the one just trying to make it through. Stories of what caused the skirmish varied and changed, and different analyses reflected different biases, all while Palestinians continued to fall victim. Shireen’s coffin did not collapse, because the men carrying her endured the kicking and beatings by Israeli soldiers in riot gear without losing their grip.

How to commemorate such a legacy? The only sentences I felt worthy of Shireen were parts of a prayer that Muslims say before the gravesite of the Prophet Muhammad. It roughly translates to “I bear witness that you have conveyed the message and delivered on the mission you were entrusted with.”

We bear witness that you conveyed the message of journalism and delivered on the trust of your people. Farewell, Shireen.

Rasha Al Aqeedi is the Middle East deputy editor

May 19, 2022

SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for Shireen Abu Akleh