News sites reported from the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 8 that “Jewish American film director Sarah Friedland used her acceptance speech … to strongly criticize Israel’s ongoing military actions in Gaza, calling them as genocide.” Yet another young Jew has exposed herself as a modern anti-Zionist.
Friedland, to be exact, has declared: “As a Jewish American, I’m accepting this award on the 336th day of Israel’s genocide … and 76th year of occupation. I believe it is our responsibility as filmmakers to use the institutional platforms through which we work to redress Israel’s impunity on the global stage. I stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine and their struggle for liberation,” echoing Howard Jacobson’s 2010 novel, The Finkler Question, wherein he coined the term “Ashamed Jew.” David Aronovitch shortened it to “Asajew.”
Her mother, as it happens, is sculptress Harriet Feigenbaum, who in 1988 designed an Auschwitz Camp memorial for the Appellate Division Courthouse of New York State. Jewish history cannot be assumed to have been lacking in her life, even if that memorial is titled “Memorial to Victims of the Injustice of the Holocaust,” thus advancing a more all-inclusive membership of those who were victims of a “Holocaust.”
Yet something was missing, it appears. She told an interviewer in 2018 that “growing up … the history of the Nakba was completely missing from her education regarding the founding of the State of Israel.” Friedland is a member of Jewish Voice for Peace and a director of Lyd in Exile, which makes her statement, if not understandable, unsurprising.
This claim of “you never told us about the Nakba” is a frequent one coming from Jewish anti-Zionists. As Donna Nevel, a founding member of the Facing the Nakba project, Jews Say No! and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, has written, “Like many Jews, I had an extensive Jewish education and learned about Israel without ever learning about the Nakba … [since then] I have listened to and learned from the stories and experiences of Palestinians who had been expelled from their homeland.” In truth, all she learned was the false, misinformed and biased narrative of Palestine Mandate Arabs, and subsequently, settled in a new radical and exciting ideology, and refused to learn the truth.
Moreover, I cannot believe that all these turncoats could not pick up a few history books and read a little. There are even books by non-Jews, like that by Conor Cruise O’Brien, if they were too sensitive to Jewish writers.
It is not a lack of education that is their problem but a profound underlying inability to feel comfortable and even proud of being authentically Jewish.
In a recent Instagram post, IfNotNow had this message under a poster reading “Together we rise”: “You’re joining a powerful movement committed to organizing the U.S. Jewish community to end U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid system … a community rooted in Jewish values and ritual that serves as a political, spiritual, and cultural home to resist the oppression of Palestinians…through solidarity and togetherness. You’re building the Jewish future.”They joined the anti-AIPAC campaign, labeling it pro-war, skirting into antisemitic territory.
As with other anti-Zionist groups, Jewish liberation has become invidiously predicated on ending a conflict the Arabs initiated by a solution that depends on what they term as a complete Israeli decolonization and the formation of a state of Palestine. T’ruah is busy mobilizing rabbis to pressure the United Jewish Appeal to intervene on behalf of a ceasefire deal by pressuring Israel. Hamas, which refuses a deal, gets a free pass for its ongoing recalcitrance.
In the past, the majority of Jews who rejected Zionism expressed themselves in ways that would not compromise their Judaism. They adopted a universalist ideology, championed tikkun olam, rejected nationalism and bemoaned actions of Israel they viewed as negative to Judaism. On the other hand, today’s crop of anti-Zionists, in addition to negating Jewish national identity, labor to find new ways literally to hate Israel’s existence and to cause non-Jews to hate it, too.
What we are witnessing is not opposition to Israeli policies and actions but rather the negation of Israel. IfNotNow’s mentor, Peter Beinart, summed up their ant-Zionism as a misrepresented throwback to Ahad Ha’Am, writing in The New York Times: “A Jewish state has become the dominant form of Zionism. But it is not the essence of Zionism. The essence of Zionism is a Jewish home in the land of Israel, a thriving Jewish society.” How that society could survive, as if depending on Arab-Muslim goodwill, is indicative of the irrationality of this goal. One of their poster girls even admits on Instagram that she was “confused.”
These are Jews with unsettled souls and a recent New Yorker piece on Jewish Currents provides insight. How difficult is it to grasp that the declared aim of Arabs referring to themselves as Palestinians and their supporters is the disappearance of Israel? That they wish to denude Israel of its defenses? That at this time, Jews who support them, who assist them, who attack Israel and other Jews and their institutions for being Zionist ultimately share that goal. They are profoundly lost, caught up in a vortex of irrationality and psychological inferiority.
They should reflect on Michael Gawenda, a former political reporter, senior editor at Time magazine and editor-in-chief of Australia’s The Age who was “determined not to be a Jewish journalist,” as he admits in his memoir. A former anti-Zionist Bundist and leftist, he now knows that “Jews like me no longer feel welcome on the left” and he knows the reason: Today’s anti-Zionists are “fundamentally in favor of the elimination of the State of Israel as a Jewish state—whether that is by force or by some pie in the sky idea that, in the end, Israelis will be convinced that their future is in some sort of Palestinian state where Jews are a minority.”
As the commentator Rabbi David Kimchi noted in Isaiah 49:17, “Your destroyers and they that made you waste shall go forth from you.” Not “from you.” But from within you, from among you.
