I don’t know if you’ve heard about Elon Musk’s raging antisemitism but it’s causing Xitter to lose massive numbers of advertisers and even more people are leaving the platform because of it. Here’s the basic outline of what happened:
That’s about as antisemitic as it gets and in a week in which the front runner for the GOP nomination for president calls his enemies vermin, that’s saying something. Elon Musk has 160 million followers on twitter.
But then it got weirder. Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-defamation League posted this:
Evidently, objecting to “decolonization” is a heroic act but disseminating the grossest of conspiracy theories about the Jews is no big deal? What? Has everyone lost their minds?
Anyway, again, this is social media becoming an even worse sewer which was already awful. But the tensions that we’re all feeling over the crisis in Israel and Gaza are very real. That’s why I found this Ezra Klein interview with Rabbi Sharon Brous so edifying. She is a very wise woman.
Everything I’m about to talk about is hard to talk about. It is hard to talk about because it’s personal to me. It’s hard to talk about because it’s happening in the midst of an active hellacious war. And it’s hard to talk about because even when there is not a war, this is just hard to talk about.
Maybe I’ll start here. I think something we’re seeing in the politics in America around Israel right now, I think it reflects three generations with very different lived experiences of what Israel is. You have older Americans, say, Joe Biden, who saw Israel as the haven for the Jews and who also saw Israel when it was weak and small, when it really could have been wiped off the map by its neighbors.
They have a lived sense of Israel’s impossibility and its vulnerability and the dangers of the neighborhood in which it is in. Their views of Israel formed around the Israel of the Six-Day War in 1967, when its neighbors massed to try and strangle Israel when it was young, or the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when they surprise attacked Israel 50 years ago.
Then there is the next generation, my generation, I think. And I think of us as this straddle generation. We only ever knew a strong Israel, an Israel that was undoubtedly the strongest country in the region, a nuclear Israel, an Israel backed by America’s unwavering military and political support. That wasn’t always true, at least not to the extent now. In his great book, “The Much Too Promised Land,” Aaron David Miller points out that before the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Israel ranked 24th in foreign aid from the US, 24th. Within a few years of that war, it ranked first, as it typically has since.
We also knew an Israel that was an occupying force, a country that could and did impose its will on Palestinians, and I don’t want to be euphemistic about this, an Israel in which Palestinians were an oppressed class, where their lives and their security and their freedom were worth less. But we also knew an Israel that had a strong peace movement, where the moral horror of that occupation was widely recognized. We knew an Israel where the leaders were trying imperfectly, but seriously and continuously, to become something better, to become something different, to become in the eyes of the world what Israel was in its own eyes, a Jewish state, but a humane and moral one.
And then, as Yossi Klein Halevi described on the show recently, that peace movement collapsed. The why of this is no mystery. The Second Intifada, the endless suicide bombings were a trauma Israel still has not recovered from. And they posed a horrible question, to which the left, both in Israel and in America, had no real answer then or now. If your story of all this is simplistic, if it is just that Israel wanted this, it is wrong.
But what happened then is Israel moved right and further right and further right. Extremists once on the margin of Israeli politics and society became cabinet ministers and coalition members. The settlers in the West Bank ran wild, functionally annexing more and more territory, sometimes violently, territory that was meant to be returned to Palestinians, and doing so with the backing of the Israeli state, doing so in a way that made a two-state solution look less and less possible.
Israel withdrew from Gaza, and when Hamas took control, they blockaded Gaza, leaving Gazans to misery, to poverty. Israel stopped trying to become something other than an occupier nation. It became deeply illiberal. It settled into a strategy of security through subjugation. And many in its government openly desired expansion through expulsion. And so now you have this generation, the one coming of age now, the one that has only known this Israel, Netanyahu’s Israel, Ben-Gvir’s Israel.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the panic in the Jewish community, about what gets short-handed as antisemitism on campus. And there is antisemitism on campus and on the left and on the right — always has been. But to read only the most anti-Semitic signs in a rally, to hear only the anti-Semitic chants, can also obscure what else is happening there. If it’s just antisemitism, then at least it is simple. They just hate the Jews. They hate us. They always have. They always will.
But a lot of what is happening at these rallies is not just antisemitism. A lot of it is a generation that has only known Israel as a strong nation oppressing a weak people. They never knew a weak Israel. They never knew an Israel whose leaders sought peace, showed up to negotiate deals, who wanted something better.
And I am not unsympathetic to the Israeli narrative here. I believe large parts of it. We have an episode coming soon on the many failures of the peace process. And the Israelis who say they did not have a partner, they are right. But that does not justify what Israel became, and there are consequences to what it has become.
There is this Pew survey in 2022 that I find really telling. It found that 69 percent of Americans over age 65 had a favorable view of Israel, but among Americans between ages 18 and 29, young Americans, 56 percent had an unfavorable view. As it happens, American politics right now is dominated by people over 65, but it won’t be forever.
And there are many of us who warned of this exact thing happening, who said, if you lose moral legitimacy, you will not have the world’s good will when you need it most, who said it is a problem for the Jewish state to not be seen, to not be a moral state. That it is a problem geopolitically, and it is a problem spiritually because for Jewish-Americans — and I am one — Israel isn’t simply a question of politics, it is the Jewish state. So what does what Israel is say about Judaism? What does Judaism say about it?
This has been an almost exquisitely uncomfortable space. To believe Israel had become something indefensible on 10/6. To know that it needed defenders on 10/7, to know that antisemitism is real and every century seems to have its era of butchering the Jews. To believe deeply that Jewishness is about how we treat the stranger, is defined by the lessons of exile, and to see the Jewish state inflicting exile on so many. To value all lives and see so many of our one-time allies devaluing our own.
Throughout these last few months, I’ve been extremely moved by the sermons of Rabbi Sharon Brous of Los Angeles’s IKAR synagogue. She has a book coming out called “The Amen Effect,” which you can and you should pre-order. I’ve read some of it.
But I got to know her through these sermons, which did something very few people have been able to do, at least for me, which is to find a prophetic voice rooted in the Jewish tradition that can hold this complexity, these questions of Israel, both in critique and defense, of Jewishness, of liberalism, of antisemitism, of identity. And so I asked her to come on the show to try to talk through topics. And to be honest, I’m not all that comfortable talking about it all. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
The interview is here. She is a truly remarkable person and I highly recommend you listen to the whole thing at the following:
