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Sam talks with Dr. Susan Neiman, Director of the Einstein Forum in Germany. Her latest book is Left Is Not Woke. Her first work of fiction, Nine Stories: A Berlin Novel, will be published in 2024. She has written two recent thought provoking essays for the The New York Review of Books:
Historical Reckoning Gone Haywire
Germans’ efforts to confront their country’s criminal history and to root out antisemitism have shifted from vigilance to a philosemitic McCarthyism that threatens their rich cultural life. (Published October 19)
In recent weeks, Germany’s reflexive defenses of Israel and suppression of its critics have assumed a fevered pitch. (Published November 3)
More recently she authored The universalist tradition has been forgotten, the Enlightenment betrayed
The Hamas attack has devastated progressive Jews who are not prepared to celebrate the carnage as an act of liberation. (Published by The Newstatesman on November 29)
Mentioned in this episode:
A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending. by Robert Kagen
‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza by Yuval Abraham
“The Only Democracy in the Middle East” Is a Fascist State by Paul Street
What the “Pause” in the Fighting in Gaza Has Not Paused: The Ongoing U.S.-Backed Palestinian Genocide by Israel from Revcom.us
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Music for this episode: Penny the Snitch by Ikebe Shakedown
Susan Neiman on Universalism Against Nationalism
Refuse Fascism Episode 180
Uploaded December 3
Sam Goldman 00:56
Welcome to Episode 180 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes, and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in the United States. In today’s episode, we’re sharing an interview with Dr. Susan Neiman. She’s a philosopher, author and Director of the Einstein Forum.
On our show, we are so proud to bring you a wide array of guests that we select for their expertise and knowledge on a topic, sometimes their activism. We do not necessarily share the same analysis on all topics as our guests; just as my opinions are my own, likewise for our guests.
Thanks to everyone who goes the extra step and rates and reviews the show on Apple podcast, shares and comments on social media or YouTube. It really helps us reach more listeners, and we of course read every one. After listening to today’s show, please help us reach more people who want to refuse fascism by writing a review and dropping five stars wherever you listen to your pods. Tell the good people out there in Podcast Land, why you listen and they should too. Encourage your friends and family who listen to do the same. Subscribe/follow so you never miss an episode. And of course continue all that sharing and commenting on social media.
Special thanks to our patrons! Shout out to those who joined Coco, Paul and myself for our Patrons/Sustainers-Only Ask Us Anything Zoom Chat on November 29. It was so great to be with you and help field your thoughtful questions and comments. We’ll be airing some excerpts of that chat soon. And if you want to join us for future virtual events, sign up to support the pod for as little as $2 a month over at patreon.com/RefuseFascism.
Before we get into the interview, we have to talk about where we are right now in relation to the fascist threat. We aren’t going to tell you about how much of a failure DeSantis was at his debate with Newsom, or talk about how Haley got money from the Koch Network, because on this show, we ground ourselves in reality, and the overwhelming — yes, frightening, yes, reality — is Trump’s the GOP nominee, pending something absolutely major happening. And he has a real shot at getting back into power. If you want to be fed delusions, listen elsewhere. The fascist movement is working to get Trump back in power, by hook or by crook, no means off limits. Just listen to Trump at a rally yesterday preparing his troops echoing what he said in 2020.
Donald Trump 03:37
You know, the one thing they don’t want to talk about is the election. They don’t wanna, because they’re guilty as hell. They cheated like hell. They know it, and you’ll never find out all the ways, but we don’t need all the ways, because you know, it was, I think 22,000 votes separated it, and we have millions and millions of votes. It’s a very sad thing. So the most important part of what’s coming up is to guard the vote. And you should go into Detroit and you should go into Philadelphia, and you should go into some of these places, Atlanta, and you should go into some of these places and we gotta watch those votes when they come in. When they’re being, you know, shoved around in wheelbarrows and dumped on the floor and everyone’s saying what’s going on? It’s like a Third World nation, a Third World nation, and we can’t let it happen.
Sam Goldman 04:25
Let’s be perfectly clear, he is telling his armed-to-the-teeth, rabid Nazi base, which last time attempted a coup and stormed the Capitol, to go armed to swing states to stop Black folks from voting, and who the fascist GOP and Trump himself do not see as full human beings. To stop people from voting, yes, that is what he is advocating. He is showing you — and so too, is the Republi-fascist party — that they will suppress votes, that they are preparing in advance to call legal voting “fraud,” that they are mobilizing now, months in advance, to unleash fascist thugs, to intimidate and attack people who oppose Trump.
On a side note, we want to let folks know that we will be covering the gutting of what is left of the Voting Rights Act — see the recent decision from the Eighth Circuit, which will likely be appealed to the Supreme Court — we’ll be covering that in future episodes, so stay tuned.
So how is it that we are sleepwalking toward fascist takeover? Mass normalization, especially by the mainstream media, but also by the Democratic Party, especially as it relates to the wholesale dismissal that someone under dozens of indictments would try to win back office so he could direct the Department of Justice to dismiss charges against him. Except, isn’t that totally what a fascist would do?
Let’s look at Trump’s general legal strategy on these cases — the myriad of cases if you will: First, to claim immunity from any post presidential accountability for his actions as president, and the next one, this one’s key: to delay the proceedings until he wins the election and then dismiss the cases. Yes, this is their plan. And not only do the Democrats continue to refuse to call out this as thoroughly fascist — Trump as a fascist, the Republican Party as fascist, and oppose that fascism on that basis — but more importantly, right now, the only solution they are advocating for is for folks to vote, as if this will be some regular election where normal rules apply.
After a Trump term, after a coup that only continues, the Democratic Party is hell bent on relying on mechanisms and institutions that the Republi-fascist Party has either taken over, made void or doesn’t give two fucks about abiding to. To get into this landscape more, I’m going to quote heavily from an op ed titled, A Trump Dictatorship is Increasingly Inevitable, We Should Stop Pretending, which was published November 30 in The Washington Post. It’s by their Editor-at-large, neocon Robert Kagan. The op ed has many assumptions that are laughable, along with gross anti-communism, and the piece poses real questions on what solution Kagan is advocating for, but the basic thesis of the piece — that we need to stop pretending that a Trump return can’t happen, that it’s a real threat — is spot on. I’ll likely be talking about this op-ed in future episodes, but I want to share some quotes from it today, and folks can go read it and share with me their thoughts later.
“Such hopeful speculation has allowed us to drift along passively, conducting business as usual, taking no dramatic action to change course, in the hope and expectation that something will happen. Like people on a river boat, we have long known there’s a waterfall ahead, but assume we will somehow find our way to shore before we go over the edge. But now the actions required to get us to shore are looking harder and harder, if not downright impossible.” Kagan goes on to say, “Barring some miracle, Trump will soon be the presumptive Republican nominee for president. When that happens, there will be a swift and dramatic shift in the political power dynamic in his favor.”
In reference to the litany of indictments, Kagan points out, “Trump intends to use the trial to boost his candidacy and discredit the American justice system as corrupt, and the media outlets serving their own interests will help him do it.” He goes further to analyze this situation, “Trump will not be contained by the courts or the rule of law. On the contrary, he is going to use the trials to display his power. That’s why he wants them televised. Trump’s power comes from his following, not from the institutions of American government, and his devoted voters love him precisely because he crosses lines and ignores the old boundaries. They feel empowered by it. And that in turn empowers him. Even before the trials begin, he is toying with the judges, forcing them to try to muzzle him, defying their orders. He is a bit like King Kong, testing the chains on his arms, sensing that he can break free whenever he chooses,” and he adds importantly, “A court system that could not control Trump as a private individual is not going to control him better when he is president of the United States and appointing his own attorney general and all the other top officials at the Justice Department. Think of the power of a man who gets himself elected president despite indictments, courtroom appearances and perhaps even conviction, would he even obey a directive of the Supreme Court? Or would he instead ask how many armored divisions the Chief Justice has?”
While the ruling powers in this country, the Democrats and Republicans, are bitterly divided on many things, there is something that they’re fully in unity on, and it’s the topic of today’s episode: aggressively and forcefully backing Israel. We just recently learned that they had sent 2,000 bunker buster bombs which are ground penetration munitions, along with other types of bombs and artillery shells. This is on top of billions in aid. This furthers the hollowness of their claim to limit civilian casualties.
I’ve said it before, there is no neutral to ethnic cleansing, to genocide. And so my interview with Professor Neiman is really worth listening to, no matter what your thoughts right now are on this topic. This interview took place during the week Israel “paused” its genocidal assault against the Palestinian people in Gaza. This pause, which I need to note, did result in the return of some of the hostages, did not as Revcom.us wrote, “change the horror of the conditions in Gaza.” It didn’t stop that ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, where Hamas doesn’t hold power. It didn’t undo almost two months of the people of Gaza going without basic needs like water, food, medicine, fuel. It didn’t change the fact that dozens of hospitals have been destroyed; those that are left are incapable of caring for people properly. It did not bring back the approximately 6,150 children who have been slaughtered by the Israeli military. And it certainly did not stop the billions in military aid from the US.
It is in the name of humanity that we not turn a blind eye to the thousands of women and children whose bodies continue to pile up, that we not be silent as our Palestinian siblings face the onslaught of the world’s fourth strongest military; a military which possesses 200 nuclear weapons. It is our responsibility to speak out as Israel, enabled by the United States, carries out the slaughter of as many Palestinians as possible and eliminates any dissent so that it can further lock down the open air concentration camp that is Gaza.
Speaking personally, not on behalf of Refuse Fascism, Israel is a colonial settler state imposed on the region. The cause of so much suffering for the people of Palestine, and the people of the region more broadly, is only possible because of imperialism. And it acts not only in its own interests, but as an instrument for US imperialism. But even if you don’t hold that understanding, just look at the soul-crushing nightmare that is the destruction and death ravaging Gaza, fueled by the U.S.
This genocidal slaughter right now highlights our special role, indeed our responsibility as people living in this country, to oppose the crimes of our own rulers. More has come out that Israel was aware of the mass attack plan a year before Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis — this, reported by The New York Times. This is on top of evidence that top Israeli commanders diminished the warnings of such a plot and the real public outcry in Israel at Netanyahu for failing to prevent this attack, which appears again to have been preceded by numerous warning signs.
And before we get to the interview, I wanted to recommend reading two things that are linked in the show notes. One is a piece by Paul Street, member of our editorial board titled The only Democracy in the Middle East is a Fascist State.. And if you only have time to read one thing after listening to this interview, I hope that you’ll read the +972 magazine piece by Yuval Abraham titled A Mass Assassination Factory: Inside Israel’s Calculated Bombing of Gaza. It details how permissive airstrikes on non–military targets and the use of an artificial intelligence system have enabled the Israeli army to carry out its deadliest war on Gaza. It’s an investigation by +972 and Local Call when you read it, it’s almost as if the Israeli government looked at what specifically would be a war crime and said: Yeah, let’s do that.
With that, here is my conversation with Dr. Neiman.
As of today, when we are recording November 30. The temporary pause is holding hopefully, however, thousands of people, including literally thousands of children are dead. In the wake of the Israeli rampage through Gaza, a battle of ideas is playing out against the backdrop of this unprecedented massacre. Ideas like who will be recognized as human, and who draws the line of what kind of thought and speech are tolerable. Those who condemn the slaughter of Palestinian children — or who call for a ceasefire, who question how the bombing of a hospital could possibly be justified, who believe that “Never Again” is not a statement of vengeance, but a pledge to protect all people, everywhere, from genocide, especially if done in the name of protecting the Jewish people — all have faced vicious repression, censorship, or even cancellation.
That hammer came down hard, came down fast, particularly in places that are known as models of democracy and free inquiry, including the United States, Germany, and Israel itself. As Israel continues to escalate in Gaza, and unleashes terror and murder in the West Bank as well, courageous voices of protest by Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel are under ferocious assault by both authorities and lynch mobs. This has come into focus, especially earlier this month when Israel’s Supreme Court, promoted and reified as an institutional pillar of their bastion of enlightenment, sent a chilling and ominous message upholding bans against protests in Israel.
To delve into this, I am honored to welcome back on the show Susan Neiman. Susan is the director of the Einstein Forum in Germany. Her latest book is Left is not Woke. Her first work of fiction, which I’m really excited to read, Nine Stories: A Berlin Novel, will be published soon, next year. She has written two thought provoking essays recently for the New York Review of Books. One is Germany on Edge, and that gets into how in recent weeks, Germany’s reflexive defense of Israel and suppression of critics have assumed a fever pitch. And Historical Reckoning Gone Haywire, on Germans’ effort to confront their country’s criminal history and to root out anti-semitism, have shifted from vigilance to philosemitic McCarthyism that threatens their rich cultural life.
I just got a chance to read Susan’s new essay that’s up on New Statesman The Universalist tradition has been forgotten, the Enlightenment betrayed, on the Hamas attack devastating progressive Jews who are not prepared to celebrate the carnage as an act of liberation. Welcome. I’m so glad to be talking with you again, Susan. Thank you for coming on.
Susan Neiman 17:01
Thanks so much, Sam. You mentioned two pieces in the New York Review. I wrote the piece, which they call Historical Reckoning Gone Haywire, which is directly quoted from my piece — I wrote that before the war, but it takes time to publish things — I was trying to describe the general situation in Germany, and also talk about the fact that my own book, Learning from the Germans, is in certain ways outdated, because what’s been happening in Germany for the last three years — also in the US, differently, but in Germany — has very much changed my perspective. And I still get letters from people all the time, you know: I loved your book, Learning from the Germans, Can I come to Berlin to work with you? And I have to say: On the condition that you understand that the facts have changed and I’ve changed my views as well.
So I wrote that first piece at the end of the summer, and then of course, it took time to publish, and by the time it came out, the war had already started, so then they asked me if I would write a follow up, and I did. So that’s the order in which they should be read if anybody’s interested in reading them; whoever doesn’t get the Review can find them on my website. Unfortunately, things have gotten even worse, since I wrote a follow up piece, Germany on the Edge. Germany is quite specific.
I mean, I know that there is cancellation going on from both sides in various parts of the world, but Germany, they even call Israel the “German raison d’etre.” That was a statement that Angela Merkel made at The Knesset, in 2008. I was just at a group meeting last night where people were talking about: who knows how that expression and which speech writer, and who knew that it was going to become, you know, this kind of state’s doctrine, because no one knows what it means. It’s a statement of identity and there’s a sense in which — this is what I was talking about, in my book, Learning from the Germans — no other country has ever put its historical crime in the middle of its national narrative. And there’s something that I respect about that. I mean, given that, you know, Spain, for example, has yet to, first of all, acknowledge its fascism, but also the bloodiest colonial regime in history. One has to respect that impulse, but at the same time, what’s been happening here in the last few years, and then particularly in the last few weeks, is to use the focus on the German past, to allow people to ignore what’s going on in the Israeli and Palestinian present, and that’s not the way to do foreign policy. That’s where we are right now.
Sam Goldman 20:00
Is there anything in particular that you think people need to be aware of in terms of what it looks like from where you live in Germany, but with many ties to Israel, on how things have shifted even more so within the last, let’s say, two months?
Susan Neiman 20:17
Well, everything’s shifted. I mean, for all of us. I’m an Israeli citizen, also. I mean, I have three citizenships. I was born in the States, I made aliyah, after the Oslo Accords, when it seemed like having left wing Jews — I mean, people actually said this — if left wing American Jews want to actually support the peace process, they should move. And it’s not the only reason why I did that, but it’s one of the reasons that I did.
I think everybody listening to this will know what kinds of hopes we had even after Rabin was assassinated. There was a very strong feeling in the country, I was there at the time, you know: Okay, we’re doing this for Yitzhak; we’re going to carry on the peace process, precisely because he was assassinated and this is sort of, we’re going to carry out his legacy. So that was quite strong. And it meant that when Netanyahu was first elected, because everyone in Israel hated Shimon Peres — he had a very good reputation abroad, but I’ve never met an Israeli who had anything good to say about Peres. So he was vice president, so he automatically became president when Rabin was assassinated, but the next election, he lost.
Netanyahu was elected with his very interesting slogan, “Shalom b’tuach” that’s a way of saying peace, for sure, but it also plays on the word security. And that was his whole thing: I’m going to bring you peace with security. Now, in the meantime, almost no one in Israeli politics even uses the word peace. But at the time, the wave was so strong, that this is what we want, that he at least had to say that he was in favor of security. You don’t need me to rehearse the ways in which the Israeli government has gone far to the right, so that, certainly two of the parties in the government — but honestly, also, Netanyahu himself — deserve the name fascist. I mean, that’s perfectly clear, I assume to most listeners of this podcast.
At the same time, Germany has felt, sometimes genuinely: Yeah, we sort of see what’s going on with the government, but our loyalty is not to the government, it’s to the people of Israel, because of our horrendous past, The Jews were our victims, and we were the perpetrators, and now we need to stand by them, whatever. It’s actually a position that’s way less critical than anything that Biden has done, and then what you can read in The New York Times. I never thought I would be afraid to quote Tom Friedman, okay, [laughs] but he’s undergone a transformation, and what he’s written in the last weeks has been excellent. And I realized that some of the things he was saying — because I’ve been giving a lot of talks and interviews in Germany — would cross the line into what’s acceptable today. A lot of things are not acceptable.
I heard last week from the State Department here, the word “apartheid” is not acceptable; you cannot use the word apartheid. You also cannot invite people who use the word apartheid. And of course, I usually say what I think, and I said, these international human rights organizations B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organizations, will you give me an argument why they’re wrong? No, it’s a red line. It’s just taboo, we don’t want to talk about arguments, we don’t talk about other red lines. So part of the problem is, this was the Foreign Office meeting with representatives of various cultural organizations, including quite a number of Muslims, all of us who are worried about what’s sayable without getting all of our funding canceled.
And, actually, we were all interested in hearing what are the red lines? And they gave us this one example, but refused to discuss reasons for it. Anybody who’s spent five minutes in the West Bank knows, you see that this is a legal term, and it simply means two different systems of law for two different peoples and this is very clear. But we don’t know what the other red lines are.
Therefore, I found myself refraining from quoting Tom Friedman — you know, the centrist neoliberal of all times. But interestingly enough, this happened today, when Henry Kissinger died, I read it in The New York Times first. That was the most hostile obituary I’ve ever read in my whole life — rightly so. I haven’t had time to read everything that’s been said, but it sounds to me like the tenor of a lot of American publications is good riddance. But der Spiegel called him a figure of light. Well, part of what was going on there is that they know that Kissinger was a Jew. So it’s not just to criticize an American foreign policy maker, but criticizing a Jew who had that kind of status, clearly not something that they want to do.
Huge difference in even mainstream media, in the US. And in Germany, people are being canceled. If you’re in public intellectual life, which I am very intensely in at the moment, in Germany, you want to walk a line, that means you’ll still get heard. So I gave a speech right after this meeting with a foreign office — actually, I wasn’t planning to use the word apartheid anyway, because I was talking about other stuff, but I didn’t use it — if that’s a red flag, which will cause people not to listen to the rest of what I have to say, I can make other formulations.
But nevertheless, the two newspapers that reported what I said, which is very carefully written, and I checked it out with several people — interestingly enough, a Palestinian politician here, a Palestinian German politician, looked at the speech, he said: Put more emotion in it. You have to show more that you’re upset about Hamas. [chuckles] I said: Okay. Or they won’t hear, you’re being too analytic. Talk about your children. So, that’s from a Palestinian politician — Social Democratic politician, because I was speaking to a large gathering of Social Democratic politicians and members, I thought: Okay, I want a basic message to get across — and so one is careful.
Everybody’s careful right now here, and people have been canceled. The work of a South African, big exhibit of a South African Jewish artist was just canceled. A prize given to a Black British German writer was just withdrawn because she once signed a letter in support of Palestine; not in support of Hamas, you know, but in support of Palestine. Everything is, right now, being extremely carefully watched. Whether it’s actually private or public funding — most things in most cultural and intellectual institutions in Germany receive public funding, but even things that are privately funded, or partly privately funded, are basically being watched to see that they don’t cross red lines.
There’s a new bill in Parliament that the right wing party introduced on, I believe it was the seventh of November — the ninth of November, the anniversary of Kristallnacht is always commemorated in the German parliament, and they wanted to rush it through Parliament, I don’t know, as a gift to Jews for the anniversary of Kristallnacht It had 51 points of things that should be done, and it had the sinisterly brilliant title: the Resolution for the Protection of Jewish Life in Germany. As one person said to me: How can I be against anything that’s called that? I can’t, as a German, be against anything that’s called that. So there were 51 points. Only one of them talked about right-wing antisemitism, of which there’s a lot.
There have been murders by far right groups. There was an attempted coup last year by a far right group that took 3,000 police officers to arrest and stop. That was dismissed as a bunch of crazies, and it’s true that some of them do seem to support Q-Anon. But we saw what happened to the U.S. on January 6th, and these people were better armed and seem to have had better planning than the people on January 6th. But, what’s being discussed is not those people, but the right is using it to say: Yes, well, antisemitism comes from Muslim immigrants who we let in and we need to keep them out now. Let me just be clear about where I stand: I know that there is antisemitism among Muslims. And it’s not just anti-Zionism or sympathy for Palestinians, it really does often shade over into antisemitism.
I don’t take most of post colonial theory — well, I take it seriously, but — I don’t agree with a great deal of it. But many people have managed to confuse post–colonial theory with anti-colonialism. So the suggestion is: If you don’t buy into post colonial theory, then you’re an imperialist and you think colonization was a good thing. That’s a mistake. The really early anti-colonial movements who succeeded in liberating themselves, were not tribalist. I mean, Frantz Fanon today is read as a tribalist. He wasn’t. If you go back and look at his texts, he wasn’t a global south nationalist. He believed in human emancipation. He was basically a Marxist. And today people like him or Paul Robeson are read as Black or global south nationalists because, and this is an interesting fact about today’s progressives, using the word socialist, not to mention communist, is really seen as much more politically problematic, dangerous and taboo than appealing to a certain kind of tribalism.
I happen to have done quite a lot of work on Paul Robeson who’s one of my heroes, and I know that, for example, the museum — it was his last House in Philadelphia — does not use words like socialism and communism. The newer literature on Robeson — there’s not so much of it yet, I hope there will be, and I hope there will be better stuff — sort of excuses — I mean, they acknowledge that he was — you can’t know anything about him without knowing — that he was at least a fellow traveler and a strong supporter of the Soviet Union, but they excuse that by saying things like: Well, the Communist Party was the only party to support the Scottsboro Boys. W.E.B. Dubois’s NAACP did not support the Scottsboro Boys initially, they thought that was too dangerous, but guess what? Paul Robeson wasn’t politicized during the case of the Scottsboro boys. His political awakening happened in London when he came across a group of striking Welsh miners. That’s what got him to be politically active, was a universalist impulse and not a tribalist one. But this is not something we talk about today. I feel like for all of the United States has been going through a racial reckoning, we have yet to do anything like a historical reckoning. What that means is I think we’re even more McCarthyist than we were in the 50s and 60s, when almost anybody knew a communist, or at least a socialist, and didn’t have this sort of immediate association: communist, evil, gulag.
Sam Goldman 33:15
Exactly, yeah. I appreciate all of that. On this show, as you know, we’re digging into what fascism is, precisely in order to stop it. Some people argue it doesn’t matter what label you use, far right, authoritarian, etc. And to a certain extent, that’s true, we should cooperate with each other to mobilize and stop these forces regardless of our particular understanding of their worldview and agenda as long as we agree it’s “bad” but I think what is happening in Gaza is a perfect example of the importance of actually understanding what fascism is. As another previous guest of the show, Dr. Jason Stanley recently wrote, “Some Palestinians have genocidal ambitions against the Jewish inhabitants of Israel as the actions and words of Hamas and its supporters have made vivid to the world, but this hardly constitutes a justification for Israel’s mass killing of innocents. To justify mass killing by self protection, like the claim that its targets pose an existential threat, is the classical justification for genocide.”
Meanwhile, you have Neftali Bennett, the former Prime Minister pointing at Gaza and claiming, “They’re literally Nazis,” while dropping more bombs in a few weeks on this captive civilian population than Russia has dropped on Ukraine over the course of a couple years. So, this label is being thrown around and I wanted to know how you understand the use of the term fascist in this context? And how does it relate to antisemitism?
Susan Neiman 34:46
Well we start at one point, basically because of Cold War thinking, which has dominated our times, many, many people in the world think that fascism is reducible to antisemitism. I know Jason Stanley doesn’t and a number of other thoughtful people, but in the media, as long as you say you’re not antisemitic, you are therefore not fascist.
I think it’s very important to remember that Nazi ideology had at least two pillars. One was antisemitism, of course, but the other was anti-communism. That was at least as strong and as important to getting members getting support as anything else, okay. If you look at the war propaganda, yes, we’ve all seen the caricatures of Jews with hooked noses, but there’s more of Soviet troops painted, or just Soviet people, painted as these kind of looming monsters who are coming to, you know, take your wives and children, take you away and ruin your life. We have to start by remembering that. And, of course, the problem with being anti-communist, communism, for all of its perversions, and all the ways in which it was betrayed in many countries, was a universalist and not a tribalist movement, and it strove for universal human rights, and including social rights, not just political rights.
In fact, social rights were more important than political rights. Of course, it instrumentalized that rhetoric, sometimes, we all know about that. But basically, what you had was a universalist, anti-racist movement — officially, not always in practice — and that was the target of fascism; any form of claims about universal human rights and dignity being the same for every people on earth.
Omer Bartov, who’s perhaps the most famous historian of genocide in the world now, I’ll stick to his determination, which he wrote both in The New York Times and in Der Speigel in Germany: These are genocidal tendencies on the part of the Israeli army. It’s not yet a genocide, but these are the ways in which genocide starts. There’s another friend of mine — who you ought to interview, but I’ll tell you about that later — on this subject says: You know, if we wait until they build concentration camps to use the word fascism, it’s already too late to avoid it. I think that’s absolutely right. I’ve been quoting him for a while. It’s not just that Bennett called Palestinians Nazis, it’s that Netanyahu has been making references to Amalek, as of course his ministers are.
That’s why I wrote that little piece for the New Statesman. It asked a bunch of people, what does it mean to be a leftist Jew today, and I wrote that there are two very different strains in the Jewish tradition that go back to the Bible. One is a universalist tradition that says: We were strangers in Egypt, therefore, we have an obligation to take care of the stranger. That happens 36 times in the Bible, which is interesting. Three times in the Bible, there’s a mention of this tribe Amalek. The tribe Amalek, as we were wandering through the desert — I always say we, this is comes from childhood, you know, seders, you feel bound to say we and not they, as we were wandering through the desert — and weak, this tribe Amalek came and tried to kill all of us, including the women and children, therefore, this tribe should be wiped out down to the last child. When the Israeli head of state says that, it’s pretty scary.
So basically, I’m agreeing with Jason Stanley, there’s genocidal intent, not just behavior, but genocidal intent on both sides. And it seems to me that the only decent thing that any Jewish leftist, or any leftist at all, can do today is to say we need to be able to keep two things in our heads at the same time, and not try to weigh them, and not try to say: You know, this was worse than that, or this started there — Oh, no, it started back then. Not the point right now. They’re two different forms of evil, and one of them was committed on October 7, and the other is happening right now. Well, right now, as you said, there’s a pause, but I don’t know anybody who thinks it’s gonna hold.
People in Gaza are saying, you know, finally I can go to sleep at night without being afraid of being killed.
Sam Goldman 39:48
I don’t want to diminish that but I also don’t want people to have any illusions that this is a lasting peace, if you will.
Susan Neiman 39:54
Of course it’s not. And there is never going to be a lasting peace with this government, and that is now the dilemma.
Sam Goldman 40:02
I then asked Susan to comment on resistance in Germany and universalism versus tribalism, two key themes in her recent essays.
Susan Neiman 40:09
I started to say we have a bill right now in front of Parliament that was brought by the right — in the form that it was brought, fortunately, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be passed — wiser heads prevailed. I was in Parliament yesterday with a small delegation of friends I’ve been working with, Jewish and non Jewish, in Germany, to try and explain our problems with the resolution. First of all, because it conflicts with the Constitution and freedom of speech. I was actually asked last week by a journalist, he said: When you invite people, the Einstein Forum, do you google the name + “BDS”? Because a lot of people are doing that.
I said: No, but I wouldn’t invite anybody who conflicted with the values of Albert Einstein. Interestingly enough, most people don’t know what those values were. He was a very committed Social Democrat, anti-racist civil rights worker, even before he came to the United States, and an opponent of McCarthyism until he died. And when I say opponent, I don’t mean he just said this, I mean, he spent more of the second half of his life, being a public intellectual, giving money, raising money, telling people during the McCarthy period they should not appear before the HUAC, even if it cost them their jobs, but then helped them find jobs. He was right on that.
But even for quoting Einstein, last week, I got in trouble because it was something very sharp that he said about, if the Jews can’t come to a fair understanding with the Arabs, then we haven’t learned anything from our 2000 year history of suffering. Then he said: And we shouldn’t be surprised at whatever comes to us. And that, of course, was taken by a newspaper, as I was saying Israel deserved Hamas. I was not saying that, of course, okay, and I should say right here that one of my daughters had been planning to go to Israel. She is still very tied to the place, speaks perfect Hebrew, but for different reasons, she decided to postpone her trip, but it took me till about October 9 to realize if she had been there, she would have been at the Rave. If if she’d been in the country — she likes raves, she goes to Burning Man, you know. I called her and said — yeah. She said: Of course, that’s a world famous rave. Of course, I’ve always wanted to go there. It did not actually hit me directly, but it could have.
So I don’t see any way of justifying what Hamas did. But at the same time, we need to be able to hold two truths in our head at once. Not only is the current policy atrocious, and committing war crimes in Gaza, but it’s not doing anything for Israel’s security. That is, if you read H’aaretz or something similar, you see that what people think was also destroyed on October 7 was the whole security policy that Netanyahu has built up over the past 20 years. So we’ve been trying to convince Parliament, a number of people — you know, there’s lobbying going on, I don’t think the worst form of the censorship, which would have required everyone in German public cultural life to commit to the IHRA definition of antisemitism. I don’t think that’s going to pass, but I’m not even sure about at this moment; it’s scary. What was the second question again?
Sam Goldman 42:52
The second question was about the theme that you had gotten into in your piece about Jewish universalism being the answer to Jewish nationalism, and that universalism means as many people are asking what it would take to ensure the safety of Jews in a time when Israel is carrying out these atrocities.
Susan Neiman 44:12
One of the biggest problems about Israel is not just the atrocities against the Palestinians, it’s they have allied with all the wrong people for about 20 years, and there’s fury at the state of Israel internationally because of that. And one doesn’t dare say it, but I will say to the American audience — because Tony Judd said it to my late friend, who died much too early, he got death threats for this. He said: Look, antisemitism is rising because of Israeli policies. It’s just true. And while we all know it’s false to identify every Jew with the state of Israel, that’s what Israel does.
What we have is a conception of Judaism that has been, not just more and more tribalist or nationalist, but also more and more so called realpolitik — more and more so called: Yeah, we’re just going to pay attention to our interests, and we’re not gonna think about values or rights or ethics or anything. And that’s been the way that things have been going. And by the way, tribalism — this is what I wrote in my book Left Is Not Woke, tribalism and the idea that really all you need to pay attention to are interests and power, those things go together. If you’re a universalist, you care about everybody’s human rights.
We have this great Jewish tradition that starts in the book of Exodus about, because we were strangers, we need to be on the side of people who are discriminated against, people who are strangers, people who are enslaved. The funny thing is — I know, everybody thinks I grew up on the Upper West Side, I did not — I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and there was a lot of antisemitism. The last Jew was lynched long before I was born, but it was in living memory; it affected everybody. Jews were certainly treated better than African Americans, but it was always sort of iffy. For that reason, most of the Jewish community was very scared to put itself on the side of the civil rights movement.
Northern Jews came down during the civil rights movement, but the southern Jewish community was quite scared. The synagogue, called the Temple, was bombed in 1958 because the rabbi put himself on the side of Martin Luther King way before King was famous and had a Nobel Prize or anything like that. It was clearly a warning saying: Stay in your lane don’t get involved in the civil rights stuff. We know what happened at the Tree of Life Synagogue. It’s the synagogues that actually are universalist, that stand up for other people’s rights, and that the right quite correctly sees is a threat to the nationalism that they want.
Maybe I’ll end [with this], because this is something that does give me hope. On January 6, I was in Berlin, and I had seen, I think, Jon Ossof won first and Raphael Warnock the next day, and I called up an American friend, and I said, hey, I bought champagne in November, but I didn’t want to drink it until I saw whether the Democrats hold the Senate, but I just put it in the fridge you want to come over and celebrate? Because I knew that Trump voters were prepared for violence. I didn’t know — nobody did — to what extent that had been planned. That actually didn’t surprise me. What surprised me as somebody coming from Georgia was that a Jewish man and a Black man could actually win Georgia for the Senate and thereby save the Senate.
Now, the interesting thing is Jon Ossof, swore his oath to the Senate on the Bible of this Rabbi Jacob Rothschild, who was close to Dr. King, and of course, Raphael, Warnock comes from Ebenezer Baptist Church, which was King’s church, and the two communities have had this connection since those days. They fought together. They fought for the civil rights movement together, but Ossof and Warnock fought together. They ran a joint race for the Senate. I just think that’s the kind of universalism that could save us from tribalism, and occasionally does win some victories. Then, of course, as I was drinking champagne with my friend, people started texting me: Susan, turn on the television, do you know what’s happening here? And I said, you know, I don’t care — in a way. Of course, I care, but I guess I think we need to celebrate every step forward that we can.
And there are people in Jewish and Muslim communities in Israel in the U.S., and even beginning in Germany, at least in Berlin, who are saying — which is the largest Palestinian diaspora community in Europe — we need to stand together. We need to show them that there is a universalist ethos. Of course it’s compatible with cultural differences. No problem with that. Universalism doesn’t mean that everybody is the same, and there’s only one culture, or that culture belongs to particular people. But we need to show people that this can work. We need to protect each other. It’s very fragile. People are still very raw. And I understand it, because I heard last night before the pause, there was a rate of one child in Gaza being killed every 10 minutes. So it’s very urgent, it’s very fragile, but there are people across tribes who are working together and that’s where I get my inspiration.
Sam Goldman 49:46
In the show notes, we’re going to link to your website along with your recent works on this topic along with your most recent book. I just want to thank you so much for taking the time to share your expertise, your perspective and your time with us.
Susan Neiman 50:03
Pleasure to talk to you, Sam.
Sam Goldman 50:04
Thank you so much. Cheers to all who are in the streets to say stop the U.S. backed Israeli genocidal war against Palestine and love to all the artists, musicians, authors, academics, students and others working to stop the repression, censorship, and blacklisting of pro Palestinian voices. Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism.
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