When did Judaism & Jewishness become intertwined with Zionism? Meet your hosts, Nava EtShalom and Tallie Ben Daniel, as we start to unpack how we get attached.
Nava and Tallie start off the episode chatting about how Zionism got tangled up with Judaism and Jewishness. At [6:10], we hear from four JVP organizers about what Zionism meant to them growing up. We'd like to thank Rabbi Alissa Wise, Samantha Brotman, Alana Krivo-Kaufman, and Maya Edery for sharing your stories with us.
Our theme music is "For Our Stories" by Decibelists, off the album Decibelists (we mistakenly say that the album is called "Galapagos" in the episode!). Diaspora podcast is produced by Tallie Ben Daniel. It’s written and hosted by Tallie Ben Daniel and Nava EtShalom, and edited by Jenny Asarnow.
[music]
Tallie: 00:06
Welcome to the Diaspora Podcast. This is a project of Jewish Voice for Peace, which is a grassroots organization that fights for the equality and dignity of all people in Israel and Palestine. I'll be one of your hosts, I'm Tallie Ben Daniel. I'm a political educator, an Iraqi Jew, and I live in Oakland.
Nava: 00:24
Hi. I'm your other host. I'm Nava Etshalom. I'm a scholar and a poet. I'm a white Jew who's been involved in the Palestine solidarity movement since 2000. I live in Philly.
Tallie: 00:37
This podcast is going to do two things: First, try to explain what Zionism is, and second, explore how it got so entangled in Jewish life, and what it would mean to untangle it. For this first episode, we wanted to start with just how normal Zionism is in Jewish life in the US.
Nava: 01:00
We're going to start with a conversation that the two of us had, and then we're going to get into some really great interviews that Tallie’s been getting with JVP organizers. So Tallie, a while back, you and I were on the phone as we often are--
Tallie: 01:13
Now we're recording.
Tallie: 01:15
Yay [laughter]!
Nava: 01:16
And we talked about why we wanted to do a podcast about Judaism and Zionism.
Tallie: 01:21
--recording it for the-- I'm just going to close my window and move to the--
Nava: 01:25
And when we were on the phone, you were talking about how you wanted to find out how American Jews got attached to Zionism in the first place.
Tallie: 01:32
Like, for me, my family's Israeli. They moved there in the early 1950s. So it was very obvious to me why I had a relationship to Israel, because I had family there. And that's why I had a relationship. But as I grew up, I grew up in the United States, I was born here, I came across a lot of Jewish people who had never been to Israel, but still had these very strong connections to it, like sometimes stronger than I did. And I wanted to know what that was about. So, I wanted to start with, how do we get attached?
Nava: 01:58
Tallie, when you and I first talked about this podcast, to me, one of the things that felt really exciting about it is that we kind of need more primers. We often miss an opportunity just to say like, "What is it? What is Zionism? What is it doing?" And I think we also talked about how that could help us think about like, "Who wants to listen to us? like what, who is this podcast for? Who is going to be on live when we're talking?" And partly that feels like people who grew up with Zionism and are trying to figure out - how do I unlearn this? Or how did I learn it in the first place? And they want a deeper dive.
Tallie: 02:36
I mean, my dream is to have people listen to this who kind of just sense that something's not right. Like they're people who genuinely care about human rights, generally care about progressive ideals, are so disgusted by our current government and the direction that it's going in. And are confused by the Israel-US relationship. Like, what does this mean, that the really right-wing set of governments are in alliance with each other? And we are committed to fighting antisemitism and valuing Jewish life? And I just think it'll make our fight for a better future more possible if we can get a little bit of clarity around those questions.
And not every Jewish person in the US has the same story. We're a really big, diverse group of people who have different relationships with Zionism. So we're not trying to assume that you have a relationship to this just because you're Jewish. But I do think it's a significant Jewish experience. So that's why we're choosing to explore it.
Nava: 03:40
I wonder-- this is something, Tallie, that I have always struggled with in doing this kind of work. And this is like, a totally genuine question that Tallie and I haven't talked about yet [laughter] and is not going to be like wrapped up tidyly. But I struggle a lot with if one of our goals is to try to like, push back against Zionism for Jews were raised with it. Is that just because we think we're right and we want to convince them? Is that because we have some sort of like tribal feeling about Jews should be better than they are en masse and we have some sort of responsibility to make Jews ethical? or we think there's political strategy built into there and do we think it's important in terms of the liberation of Palestine for American Jews to continue to move further left and become more and more alienated from Zionism? And I really struggle with that question because I don't know that that's the most important shift.
Tallie: 04:36
I mean, I have been thinking about that question a lot. I think it comes up every day in the work at JVP, to be honest, like, what are we doing and Is this the right thing to be doing and should we be doing something else-- all of those questions. And I think a couple things that I try to remind myself, one is-- this is gonna sound really cheesy, but I mean it so earnestly [crosstalk]--
Nava: 04:56
Do it.
Tallie: 04:58
--which is that I just think we owe it to our ancestors. I just think that if-- I told you it was cheesy. I just think that it's--
Nava: 05:04
[crosstalk] like, i'm laughing at you but I'm also going to cry, so please continue.
Tallie: 05:10
I mean, Jewish people have survived a lot. And it's an old religion and an old culture and many things. It's not just one thing. And I think that there's something really intense about the fact that now it's becoming-- it feels like it's just becoming Zionism. It feels like that's just what it means to be a Jewish person. And if you're not Zionist, you're not Jewish, and that hurts my heart and I feel like we owe it to each other and to our people to figure out a different alternative.
Nava: 05:47
I really hear that.
Tallie: 05:52
Okay, so for this first episode, I really wanted to talk about how deep Zionism is in our Jewish lives. I interviewed some people and I want to play some of those interviews now so that we can listen to some of the ways that people learned about Zionism as kids growing up.
[music]
Sam: 06:10
Well, my name is Sam. I grew up near Seattle in a suburb of Seattle called Mercer Island.
Maya: 06:16
Hi, my name is Maya and I'm the campus coordinator at Jewish Voice for Peace. I grew up in Huntington Woods, Michigan. It's a small suburb outside of Detroit with about 6,000 people.
Alana: 06:28
So I grew up in Columbus, Ohio. For anyone familiar, in a neighborhood called Clintonville.
Alissa: 06:35
I was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, which is famous for being the birthplace of the reform movement of Judaism in the US, but I was actually raised going to a modern orthodox synagogue and to a Jewish day school.
Sam: 06:51
Yeah, I grew up in a very Jewish community. Most of my friends were Jewish. I went to Jewish preschool at the Jewish community center and then in the home we were somewhere between secular and reform. I mean, we celebrated Hanukkah. We went to synagogue on the High Holidays. I was bat mitzvahed. We would do Passover every year. That was a very big deal. But we weren't a kosher home, certainly didn't keep Shomer Shabbat or anything like that.
Maya: 07:17
I went to a reformed temple called Temple Emanuel that was pretty close to my house. And I went for Sunday school, and then like Tuesday night Hebrew school to prepare for my bat mitzvah.
Alissa: 07:30
So my education at the Jewish Day School was primarily Israel and the Holocaust. The story was: we almost were annihilated as a people and Israel is our safe haven in the world.
Sam: 07:44
One of my strongest memories of the Jewish community center that I would go to every day is that there was a gigantic Israeli flag flying outside of the main entrance.
Maya: 07:56
So I remember at Hebrew school, we would always learn about Israel from Israeli teachers who loved Israel. And it was the homeland of the Jewish people. And I related to that because I'm like, "Yeah, I'm Israeli. I used to go in the summers when I was a kid. And that's where my savta and saba live. And my cousins live there and they all speak Hebrew, of course, it's the Jewish land" because I didn't know anything else. And we also would raise money. We would collect tzedakah at Hebrew school to plant a tree in Israel, as if it was this empty land that just needed us to bring greenery. That was sort of the message I got.
Sam: 08:30
So it seemed very much like a natural part of my Jewish identity. The symbols of Israel were right alongside the symbols of traditional Jewish life. We would sing the Hatikvah as a camp song.
Tallie: 08:46
Just for the folks who don't know, what's the Hatikvah?
Sam: 08:49
The Israeli national anthem.
Alissa: 08:52
I recently found out-- or a couple years ago, found a letter I wrote back from camp to my mom that was like, "We played Arab/Israeli war today at camp." Which first of all, how is that a game [laughter]? And second of all, I was like, "I had to be an Arab. Sad face. But luckily, we lost."
Maya: 09:12
I guess growing up, Israel was both the place my dad is from and I saw myself as half Israeli and half American, whatever that means. I think also, people would make comments about how I was tan or how I was darker than everybody else or, "Oh, your last name, where is that from?" And my answer to all of these kind of exoticizing questions were always, "Oh, I'm Israeli." And to me, that was sort of the answer for everybody's curiosity about why I was not as white as all the other Jews around us. And later in my life, I started to understand that Israeli is not the same as being Mizrahi and Moroccan. And that's why I look the way I do and have a Moroccan last name. But growing up, to me, Israel was just the stand-in for all of those things because Israel kind of has erased all different Mizrahi cultures to create this singular Israeli identity.
Sam: 10:10
In the summertime, we would have Israeli soldiers come and be camp counselors. One of the lines was, "From Zion came the white and blue. We hold these colors bold and true. We wave our flag on high." And so you just imagine this room full of hundreds of rambunctious teenage girls who really just want to go out and keep flirting with the other kids, they're singing about Israel. We didn't even really, consciously accept that, I think, at the time.
Alana: 10:38
I wish this was visual so I could show you my Bat Mitzvah book. There are these professional pictures and there's one of me with the Torah, reading the Torah, standing at the podium. And then there's a shot of me at the podium with the American flag and there's shot of me at the podium with the Israeli flag. Which is just-- I was baffled to find those photos because I can never imagine-- and I should go ask my parents-- but I could never imagine them asking for a photo in front of either flag. Like, we didn't have American flags. We thought the people who did were Republicans. It was just like because you were there and you were doing the things, there ended up being a photo of you with an Israeli flag and an American flag, not because, necessarily, those were your family's values or because anyone asked for that to happen, but just because that was what was at the front of the room.
Sam: 11:38
Shortly after 9/11, I was feeling incredibly unsafe, as were most Americans. For some reason, ya know, based on what I was seeing in the news and hearing from people around me, I felt particularly unsafe as a Jew. I thought Al-Qaeda was going to try to kill all the Jews. And so I wanted to do something that felt like I was proclaiming my pride in my Judaism, and so I asked my dad if I could hang an Israeli flag outside of our house after 9/11.
And my dad looked at me and said, "No. Are you kidding me? Why would you do that? What does this have to do with Israel? What do you care about Israel? You've never been to Israel. I've never been to Israel. What are you thinking?" And that was the first time that I had ever even-- I think that might have been the first time I had talked to my parents about it, frankly. And it certainly was shocking to me that my dad did not associate Israel with his Jewish identity in the same way I did. And that really forced me to ask the question "Why Israel? Why not some other symbol of my faith?" Nevermind the fact that I felt unsafe as a white, Jewish kid in the suburbs of Seattle.
Alissa: 12:51
So I think my growing up had a lot of that. It was very emotional, very visceral, and a lot of messages of like, "If you care about the Jewish people and being Jewish, this is how you show your solidarity is through supporting Israel and making sure the Jewish people continue." And I remember "giving Hitler a posthumous victory" was a big phrase. So, in high school, for example, I did a speaking tour around the Midwest about the important relationship between the US and Israel and not giving Hitler a posthumous victory by turning our backs on Israel.
You know, it was always very confusing to me why we didn't live there. I always had a little bit of "If we're so into it, why are we living in Cincinnati? Why don't we go move to Jerusalem?" On my mom's side, a lot of the family died in the Holocaust, and there was a lot of inherited trauma in our family about that, that led to this idea of Jews are alone in the world.
Maya: 13:54
It just sort of was the air we would breathe as a Jewish community. It just was inherit that, growing up, you visit and love Israel, that we defend and protect Israel from the "antisemitic Arab neighbors that hate us." I don't think I knew I was a Zionist because I wasn't even told what that meant or that there was any other way to be Jewish. I actually remember, late in high school, learning about Palestinians and their displacement, and I only learned a little bit. And I remember thinking like, "Okay, well, I don't believe in G-d anymore, and now I don't think I believe in Israel anymore, so am I even Jewish? Like, If you don't believe in G-d or Israel, what are you?" because I think that's what I had thought being Jewish was, not so much the G-d part. I think you could take or leave G-d, but you could not take or leave Israel is what I was taught.
Nava: 14:51
Tallie, listening to that, I thought about the moment when I first realized that there were American Jews who hadn't grown up around Zionism. Like, my friends who were red diaper babies and had grown up in secular communist Jewish communities, where Israel was both an irrelevant and an imperialist distraction, and I'm just so jealous of the cultural work they haven't had to do to figure out what it means to both be Jewish and to reject Zionism. And I guess, listening, I wondered if we're in a time when even people with those kind of stories might, from within those communities, be able to imagine a different way of being Jewish that doesn't mean they have to believe in Israel.
Tallie: 15:36
One thing I noticed when I was listening was how much people were defining themselves against Arab people. So even one of the people who I interview is Morrocan. Even she saw herself in opposition to Arab people. One of the people I interviewed talked about 9/11 as being this moment of both trying to affiliate more deeply with Israel but also questioning that affiliation, so just something about the way both the US and Israel define what it means to be an American, what it means to be an Israeli person, as in opposition to Arab and Muslim people.
Nava: 16:16
Yeah. I feel like that is just a grim and disturbing thread in everybody describing what Zionism has done to how they understand themselves and each other. And then also, I can't remember who it was that said the thing about describing themselves as Israeli as an explanation for being darker than the white people around them and thinking about how what Zionism does is both repudiate anything Arab, and defines Jewishness as against Arabness, and then also - absorbs and steals at the same time. I'm glad that that's come up at the very beginning.
Tallie: 16:56
So we're going to end it here and continue having conversations about all of these different contradictions and complexities throughout our time together. Thank you all so much for listening.
[music]
Tallie: 17:16
Thank you for listening to Diaspora. You can follow us on twitter @diasporapodcast, or reach us on email at podcast@jvp.org It's produced by me, Tallie Ben Daniel and Nava EtShalom and Jenny Asarnow. Our theme music is the song, For Our Stories by The Decebilists off of the album Galapagos. I'd like to thank Samantha Brotman, Rabbi Alissa Wise, Alana Krivo-Kaufman, and Maya Edery for sharing their stores with us. If you like this podcast, please spread the word, and rate and review us on iTunes. Thanks so much!
Music: 17:40
I'm coming back. I'm coming back for my people, for our stories. I'm coming back. I'm coming back for our people, for our stories.