(RNS) — You know how people have their happy places?
For some people, it’s the corner saloon, the cigar bar or the golf course.
Me? It’s a bookstore — especially an independent bookstore.
I love them — the books, the ideas that hang thick in the air, the people. The people who work in those bookstores are, themselves, readers. You meet interesting people in those bookstores; I am happy to say that some of my sweetest and most enduring friendships have started, and have been sustained, in those sacred places.
So, you can only imagine my dismay when I discovered that a bookstore had become an unwitting site of antisemitism.
Yes — antisemitism — the antisemitism of the cool, the chic, the cultured, the beautiful people.
It happened at the Powerhouse bookstore in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood. The store, which is also an independent publishing house, had scheduled an event marking the publication of Joshua Leifer’s new book, “Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life.” The moderator for the book talk was to have been Rabbi Andy Bachman, interviewing Joshua about his book.
And then, a bookstore employee canceled Rabbi Bachman. Why? To quote the employee: “The moderator that your publishing team sourced is a Zionist, and we don’t want a Zionist onstage.” No Rabbi Bachman, and no book event. It, too, was canceled.
In the wake of this fiasco, the employee was dismissed from her job and the bookstore wants to reschedule the event.
Let’s just drill down on what happened here.
First, the author, Joshua Leifer. He is certainly on the left side of the Jewish political and Zionist spectrum, calling himself an “anti-occupation Jew.”
Then, Rabbi Bachman.
His Zionism also leans fairly left. To quote what he told The New York Times: “I’m not a territorial maximalist. My Zionism demands that we also recognize Palestinian claims on a national homeland. I believe in sharing the land. Full stop. Period.”
Rabbi Bachman’s version of Zionism should have been acceptable in most leftist enclaves in America.
But, no. As Rabbi Bachman himself noted: “The only acceptable Jew in this movement is the Jew who does not believe that Israel should exist.”
Rabbi Bachman got that right. As a matter of fact, the overwhelming majority of our rabbinical colleagues are Zionists, and/or hold Bachman-like opinions about Israel.
Ergo, no rabbi would have been permissible to speak at that bookstore. And by extension, the vast majority of American Jews, who support Israel, would have been unwelcome speakers as well.
QED.
That is why this incident is antisemitic. People get to say that certain Jews are acceptable, and certain Jews are not — that certain kinds of Judaism are acceptable and certain kinds of Judaism are not. Zionism, no matter what its flavor, is in the unacceptable column.
Flashback: social antisemitism in America, circa 1950s. Who can buy the house in certain leafy suburbs? Who gains admission to that restricted country club? Those who were not Jewish — or who were not, as the phrase goes, “too Jewish.”
Now, Jews want to move into a different restricted neighborhood and to gain admission into a different restricted club — the imagined cultured elite. The ticket? Don’t be “too Jewish.” Deny your connection to Israel.
It doesn’t work.
The problem is larger than a bookstore. It is now becoming a problem in the entire book publishing industry.
Ever since Oct. 7, Erika Dreifus has been paying attention to
… sites that are vilifying the Jewish state, or Jewish writers since the Hamas-led terror onslaught that saw 1,200 people butchered in southern Israel and 253 abducted to the Gaza Strip. … Even before Israel went into Gaza, literary sites and magazines began putting out statements that were so egregious, so bigoted, so anti-Semitic.
This is what she writes in “Writers, Beware.”
Sadly, too often within our literary and literary-adjacent communities, expressions of concern for the welfare of innocent Palestinians — concern that I, as well as the vast majority of Jewish and Israeli writers of my acquaintance, share — are compromised by both distortions of the historical record and ongoing demonization of the state of Israel, Israelis, and/or the vast majority of Diaspora Jews who are not anti-Zionists. Too frequently, such expressions cross the line and traffic in misinformation, disinformation, and outright antisemitic rhetoric and tropes. Elsewhere, a pointed absence of concern for Israeli/Jewish welfare — discernible in complete erasure of Israeli/Jewish experience — is equally problematic. All of this is upsetting and dangerous when it happens in any environment; it’s particularly painful for those of us who inhabit writing and publishing-focused spaces where we esteem prevailing values of both allyship and, importantly, accuracy.
Should Jews be worried? Of course.
For two reasons.
First, let’s be clear. Liberal Zionists like Rabbi Bachman want a better Israel. They want an Israel that is moral and democratic and pluralistic — that lives up to the vision enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence. That is my Zionism, as well.
But anti-Zionists want no Israel. Worse: American supporters of Hamas applaud those who would bring a violent, bloody end to the Jewish state.
Second, history has shown that when anyone tries to slice and dice Jewish identity — saying that certain kinds of Jews are acceptable, certain kinds of Judaism are acceptable, that “they only hate certain kinds of Jews” — this turns out to be a monumental act of self-deception.
Ask the Jews of Germany, who thought antisemitism would limit itself to those who were visibly Jewish, the Eastern European Jews, the Orthodox.
I am thinking of the scene in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” when the mob seeks the conspirators in the assassination of Caesar.
They are seeking a conspirator whose name is Cinna. They find a man named Cinna but he is not one of the conspirators. This Cinna is a poet.
“Truly, my name is Cinna.”
“Tear him to pieces, he’s a conspirator.”
“I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet!”
“Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses!”
Update:
I am not a right wing settler type of Zionist. I am not a Zionist. I am only a Jew. In fact, I don’t even go to synagogue.
Ban him. Cancel him.
I am glad the bookstore will reschedule the event with Joshua Leifer and Rabbi Bachman.
But many Jews need to relisten to Buffalo Springfield’s song “For What It’s Worth”: “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear… ”
It is becoming clear.
You might think this is about Israeli policies, or about Israel, or about Zionism.
It has become about the Jews.
To quote Buffalo Springfield: “Everybody look what’s going down.”
This is what’s going down.
It is not pretty.
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