I have not heard from my friend Yael (not her real name) for a year now. The silence has been deafening.

 We had been at graduate school together, where she would always call me out when I was peddling bullshit in seminar (which was often enough) and she would make deep and meaningful arguments, punctuated by the wheeling glow of the embers of her omnipresent cigarette standing outside during break. I visited Yael in London when I happened to be in the UK for a conference eight years ago; our conversational stroll through Epping Forest that day was the highlight of that trip.

It isn’t like we agreed on much – we didn’t, except on the point that disagreements could be and should be productive – but I enjoyed the thrust and parry of our conversations, and the way that they would force me to reevaluate my thinking. One area, in fact, where our sparring proved productive was on the subject of the State of Israel.

Yael is Israeli. She and her family emigrated from the Soviet Union when she was eleven or twelve, and I confronted those facts of her life every time I expressed an opinion on her adopted homeland. I would not call my politics anti-Israeli, any more than they are anti-American, or anti-French but, we were bound to clash. For Yael, the State of Israel was the country that took her and her family in as the Soviet Union began to topple and antisemitism emerged again as the new Russia’s guiding philosophy. For me, it was an artificial society not even worth considering in the breadth of Jewish history. What is important to me is the here and now in the Diaspora – doykayt.

I could tell that my friend was frustrated with how I dismissed Israeli culture as manufactured kitsch over the years. (“You don’t even have decent bagels!”) And, to be honest, I actually sympathized with her frustration; I knew that, in my rhetorical position, I was not giving Israeli culture the respect it deserved for its complexity, breadth, and depth. I regret that now because we haven’t communicated in over year.

7 October 2023 changed everything.

Many of my Israeli friends just disappeared on or just after that day. The Hamas attack on the State of Israel was brutal, bloody, and shocking. More than 1,100 Israelis died horrifically in that attack, a wound that was felt deeply in a very small country. Every Israeli who I know, regardless of their politics, or how they feel about Palestinian autonomy and human rights, suffered a violent punch to the solar plexus.

I was horrified, too (and I will never accept the edgy-hipster-left characterization of Hamas as a heroic national liberation movement). My first instinct was to grieve for the dead at the Nova Music Festival and elsewhere but then, as the Israeli government used the tragedy of 7 October as a pretext to destroy Gaza, I tried to find a way to mourn for the Israeli victims of terrorism while weeping for the Palestinian dead. The one did not, indeed could not, cancel out the other. Right?

And it was then that Yael went silent. My guess is that she put me on a restricted list on Facebook, so I would only see her public posts (of which there have been six in the last twelve months), and unfollowed me, so that she would not have to read what I was posting. It is very likely that she did this with a number of her social media friends, many of whom are academics of a distinctly leftish bent. Significantly, Yael has neither blocked nor unfriended me.

I will not presume to attempt to read her mind – I do not claim any telepathic powers – but I can imagine that it was all too much for her. Never an admirer of Benjamin Netanyahu, Yael’s political positions had always been firmly on the progressive left; yet so much of the commentary crossing her feed, including my own posts, were deeply critical of the State of Israel. Even if she believed that the criticism was warranted, and she might have, it must have been extraordinarily difficult to read it over and over.

This was the country that had sheltered her family in the 1980s, where her family and friends live to this day, even if she has emigrated to the UK. The 7 October attack was a bloody personal wound that she did not even have the time to mourn and, in its wake, I can only imagine that everything and everyone she knows back home seemed to be in immediate, existential peril. Whatever her feelings about the war itself, and about Netanyahu, and the Israeli right’s dreams of conquest, I can understand that she had to shut off the noise. And I lost contact with a friend.

I think of Yael often, and I wonder how she is doing. Being both Israeli and Russian, she must be navigating some very difficult feelings and ideas. I would like to send a message or an email, just to connect again, and to let her know that I am thinking of her, not as an Israeli or a Russian, but as a human being for whom I care great deal. But I don’t know how such a gesture would be received. She is a cypher.

As I think about my friend – as a human being – I find myself pondering all of those other Israelis whose thoughts I can’t read; not the Bezalel Smotriches, Itamar Ben Gvir, and all those gun-and-violence worshipping Yahoos who make no secret of how they feel about the war. I wonder about the ones who have been injured by a country that they love, who worry about their friends and families back home. Do they feel betrayed? Do they feel that they betray their kin and people by grieving for the dead of Gaza?

Even if we assume, as survey after survey has shown, that most Israelis support the war, what about the minority who do not but do not have the ability, for fear of family and friends, to say so openly… And who just do not have the energy to explain themselves to self-righteous advocates like me? If there is going to be peace, and if the future holds any hope for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, then these silent Israelis are the key to it.

I wish Yael would speak to me, if only to give me hope.

20 October 2024

***

David Palumbo-Liu and I have a number of mutuals (82, in fact) and consequently his posts cross my feed from time to time, as this one did. I do not know Dr. Palumbo-Liu personally, or even his academic work (since it is well outside of my discipline), so I do not know whether he is an antisemite – I doubt it, to be honest, he seems to be more of an edgy-hipster-provocateur intellectual – although he has, in the past, skated very close to the edge of antisemitism (perhaps unwittingly) without ever quite going over.

But this meme demands critique, and we should all take the time to think about it. Not only does it stretch the definition of Zionism to the point of absurdity (and I suspect that is, partly, Dr. Palumbo-Liu’s point – at least, to redefine and instrumentalize Zionism for his rhetorical purposes) but it also subtly promotes the canard of the international Jewish conspiracy. Dr. Palumbo-Liu is an important, well-respected public intellectual and scholar (certainly far more than I am), and he has the social capital to help normalize this myth.

He is saying here that we should accept as obvious, and therefore true, the fact that “all universities are Zionist institutions.” I had to wonder what definition Dr. Palumbo-Liu was using to make this statement, certainly not the Zionist movement’s Jerusalem statement, which is generally regarded as the Zionism’s self-definition. While it comes as no surprise that he would arrogate the Zionist movement’s right to represent itself, it is worth noting that it is difficult to argue that the world’s, or even just the United States’ universities are promoting, or even advocating for the Jerusalem Program.

(I do not endorse the Jerusalem program, as I am not a Zionist, but I would exhort anyone who uses the word “Zionism” to go to the WZO website and actually read it. I do not believe that Dr. Palumbo-Liu has.)

In fairness, Dr. Palumbo-Liu’s expansive definition might mean something like “all (American) universities are institutions whose policies are favorable to the interests of the State of Israel.” This certainly is an argument that can be made, but I do not believe that it is a particularly strong argument, but it is not the argument that Dr. Palumbo-Liu is actually making with his rhetoric.

The argument that he is making is that universities are institutions whose primary functions include advancing the interests of the State of Israel. One of an educational institution’s primary functions is education; one of a political institution’s primary functions is politics. It follows, then, that a Zionist institution’s primary function is the advancement of the Zionist project (however he imagines it) and advocacy of the State of Israel. It is, he is saying, no less important a function of the university as education, research, and providing comfortable sinecures to salaried intellectuals. It exists as an agent of Zionism and the State of Israel.

I don’t know; maybe Dr. Palumbo-Liu actually believes this, or that he is merely expressing his frustration at Stanford University’s policies using a vast and dramatic rhetorical hyperbole. In that case, he is merely being irresponsible and more than a little ignorant. But I doubt it; he knows what he is doing, and he’s been here before. More importantly, it is virtually beyond the realm of possibility that he is unaware a persistent canard of the international Jewish conspiracy theory: that The Jews not only control world finance and pull the strings of our government, but those crafty, clever Y!ds have also taken control of higher education (and the media) to work their evil ways.

I mean… He’s not stupid; he has to know this, right?

Indeed, it is almost impossible to imagine that Dr. Palumbo-Liu does not intend to have his meme read through that lens. After all, the question it begs is if universities are Zionist institutions, then by what (occulted) force did this occur? How were they corrupted, infected, and subverted?

One reason why I ask this question is that Dr. Palumbo-Liu, the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, seems to be positioning himself not only exterior to the Zionist institution of the university, but as a victim of it. The poor man has to slave in the salt mines for his Zionist masters! (Yes… there’s some more implicit international Jewish conspiracy content right there.) What is to be done!

This is a common play of the tenured intellectual who wants to promote a myth of their Byronic, heroic independence. Sure, Stanford pays Dr. Palumbo-Liu more than $237,000 per year (the average salary of a full Stanford professor but, with a named chair, he is almost certainly earning far more than that), a lifetime sinecure that it guarantees with his tenure; sure, he is entitled to leaves and sabbaticals, and a cushy health plan… He is the university’s victim, not its beneficiary!

What’s more, one of the things that Dr. Palumbo-Liu fails to acknowledge is that, far from being external to the university, the tenured professor is its core and beating heart. They might promote the myth that, institutionally, the modern university is composed solely by its (soulless) administrators, but not only are tenured faculty like Dr. Palumbo-Liu the institution’s aristocracy, not only is it impossible, even today, to exist without them, but a tenured appointment is the only direct path to higher administration. You don’t get to be a university chancellor, rector, or president without be a tenured professor… Preferably one with a named chair.

The higher administration and the professoriat are one and the same; together, they comprise the constituent parts of the university which, Dr. Palumbo-Liu tells us, is a Zionist institution. I have to wonder, then, if he is saying that he – and a part of the university – is, in fact, a Zionist. Is this some kind of a confession?

I doubt it. More likely, he is denying his complicity and claiming the mantle of the romantic hero, chained to a rock by the gods for granting knowledge to the mortals. He will take his sinecure and benefits from the Zionists because he, clearly is no Zionist. And that, one must conclude, is because he is not a Jew.

18 October 2024

***

I have been thinking about something that I call “virtuous antisemitism,” the antisemitism characteristic of the American left. Antisemitism is deeply ingrained in Euro-American culture, always uninterrogated, and often repressed. The right does not have to repress its antisemitism, or to justify and apologize for it; if they want to rant about George Soros, globalists, and space lasers, they do, and always have. This has never been possible for the left, however. They have had to keep it on the D/L not only because the American left has always relied on its alliance with Jewish activists and intellectual labor (so has the right, BTW), but because the antisemitism that has always been there in the palimpsest of Euro-American culture would seem to contradict the left’s universalist rhetoric. The gift that Benjamin Netanyahu and the State of Israel has bequeathed them is the identification of the State of Israel with all Jews. This has allowed the left’s long-repressed antisemitism, which is shared by all Americans, to burst forth as a principled position. And, as always with the return of the repressed, it has returned with neurotic intensity.

15 October 2024