Hey, beloved tribe.
Quick update about the Never Alone Book Club:
I created a Facebook page so that those of you who haven’t joined the book club don’t need to see constant updates about the goings-on in that group.
But housing the club there is turning out to have some issues.
The first and most obvious one is that not everyone here (including many of my own family members and several of my own friends) has a Facebook account. And no one who has made an intentional decision not to be on the site should need to come onto it just for a book club.
Another important drawback is that the feature which would generally allow me to pin a notice or important update to the top of the feed is apparently broken and has been for months. So many people are posting on the site daily that I have no hope of having vital info for the club in a prominent and prioritized place. It gets buried within minutes.
The good news is that substack has the potential to do so much more than I initially realized, and a very kind staff member is helping me learn how to create different offerings under one umbrella here and serve those subsets individually without any imposition on the community’s other members.
So please: in the very near future, when I will bring my book club over here, please just join it again even if you already joined the Facebook group. I will be transferring all the activity here in the immediate future — and because all content here is free and support is totally optional, hopefully no one will mind switching sites.
But in the meantime, our first meeting is tomorrow night at 5:30 PDT / 8:30 EDT!
We will be joined by author Nellie Bowles to discuss her book Morning After The Revolution: Dispatches From The Wrong Side Of History.
THE ZOOM LINK IS HERE.
Finally, so I can get an accurate count in order to know whether to up the size of my Zoom package purchase, if you’re not on Facebook, please choose an option below:
I really hope to see a lot of you there tomorrow evening. It will be great fun.
*
So I was listening to the most recent episode of Call Me Back, my favorite podcast hosted by Dan Senor, who was in conversation with Dr. Micah Goodman: author, Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, and host of his own podcast, the most popular Hebrew-speaking podcast in Israel, Mifleget Hamachshavot.
Dr. Micah Goodman
And Dr. Goodman’s commentary was so illuminating for me. It both offered me a way to understand myself better and provided a real insight into the disconnect between Israel and America in a way I hadn’t precisely articulated to myself before.
Dr. Goodman posited that Israeli society is divided into three rough categories:
a minority of extreme nationalists who have no use for liberalism;
a minority of extreme liberals who have no use for nationalism;
the vast majority of Israelis, who are perhaps unique in all the world for the hybrid political sensibilities they embody. The vast majority of Israelis are both nationalistic and liberal.
The false dichotomy between the two that prevails in almost every other country is not recognized in Israel.
I was listening to the podcast in my car and as Dr. Goodman said this, my whole body started to tingle. It explains so much.
Here in the U.S., “nationalist” is a filthy word in leftist circles. We routinely characterize the Trumpian right as Christian nationalists. We see America First as a very distasteful phrase. I count myself among those who feel this way.
Zionists are accused of ethnonationalism, which is inaccurate in any case, since Jews span all ethnic groups and the Jewish family considers the convert with zero Jewish DNA as Jewish as a frum-from-birth Satmar Hasid.
So “nationalism” is the only true part of that misnomer, but that’s considered nearly as damning even without the prefix of ethno-.
Because the only image America has for nationalism is that of white Christian supremacy or hopelessly misguided world-police aspirations that have led to fiascos like the Vietnam War.
This superimposition of a western lens onto Israel is what leads to this enduring disconnect. This is wildly ironic, since western-centrism is a cardinal sin in progressive circles — and yet nearly all of them insist on applying a western-centric framework to the Israel / Islamist conflict.*
*(It literally just occurred to me that the conflict Israel is engaged in is not best framed as the Israel / Palestine conflict or even the Israel / Hamas conflict but the Israel / Islamist or Israel / jihadist conflict. I think I’ll go with jihadist, and from this moment forward, replace the phrase “I/P conlict” with “I/j conflict”.)
This is one of the reasons for the claim that you can’t be both progressive and Zionist. In the western liberal ideological framework, Zionism is Jewish nationalism, and nationalism is bad.
Here’s something they don’t realize (and I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again):
White Nationalism is about white supremacy and world domination.
Jewish Nationalism is about Jewish survival.
And the difference between these two entities is the difference between a whites-only college and an HBCU. One is hateful and exclusionary, the other is protective and necessary.
One point of real tension between Zionists and western liberals is that the latter are in no existential danger and they have the luxury of scolding and judging from their safety on high.
But if you can look at this map of the middle east and say with a straight face that Jews don’t need primacy within their vanishingly tiny, nearly invisible, surrounded-by-mortal-enemies sliver of this earth, then I have some oceanfront property in South Dakota to sell you.
We are nationalistic, and that does not negate our liberalism.
Most of us realize that we must insist on Jewish primacy within our little hangnail sliver of territory. That doesn’t make us Jewish supremacists; it makes us Jewish survivors.
And they can call us anything they want, but I believe we should never equivocate on this point, nor apologize for it.
I’ve been haunted ever since my trip to Seattle a couple of weeks ago, by something that Rudy Rochman said the evening I heard him speak at Temple de Hirsch Sinai.
He said that, as bad as things are for diaspora Jews right now, the problem is not what anti-Semites are doing, but what the Jewish community isn’t doing. Too many of us aren’t pushing back against it, hard and with conviction.
We need to organize and recognize our time and place here in the diaspora as another front of the same war.
The book club I’m starting is my piece of this fight. I’m building this group as a direct response to the way Jews are being marginalized and ostracized in the literary community. I’m building it not just so that we can support the hell out of each other but so that we can band together and take on the industry in all kinds of ways — and prevail mightily.
If you’re willing to join for that reason alone, please know you are always more than welcome.
I’ll be back with you on Friday, but I really hope to see many of you tomorrow evening as well! Please come to the event!
Am Yisrael Chai.
I LOVE Micah Goodman, and have heard him speak to this hybrid idea before. And I had the same response that you did. Kind of a tingly Ah Ha.