Jewish Journeys from Zionism (anon) (4)

Our series continues with this moving story from a “young man”, 29 years old who wishes to remain anonymous.  Kitty Warnock has again been able to bring out a great deal of heartfelt recollections and reflections.  Among the many points on which he reflects is the difficulty of discussing the issue within his own family and ways of being Jewish.  These issues and much more here are things to which many of us can relate, not least the value of finding a Jewish community where you can be heard and welcomed.  For this young man and many others Na’amod has created that space.

Family background

My mother’s family are catholic, and my father’s side are Ashkenazi Jews – his mother’s family from Ukraine, his father’s from Poland. They immigrated to the UK in the early 1900s. My father is the least religious of three siblings. His brother and his sister both married Jewish partners, and it was a big deal for the family when he married out. My parents have a newspaper clipping from when they married, about inter-faith couples. My grandmother told me that their rabbi very much disliked the marriage, but they didn’t agree with him so they changed to a different synagogue. Because Judaism as a religion is matrilineal, I didn’t have a religious upbringing. I’m an atheist, but I subscribe voluntarily to Jewishness, not Judaism, as an ethnic or cultural identity. I’m doing a PhD about the holocaust – that’s another part of my identity.

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My grandma, born around 1930, was a very proud Zionist.  I don’t have any close relatives directly impacted by the Holocaust, but I think the Holocaust had a vicarious traumatic impact on my grandma, in the way that it has for a lot of Jewish people. I’m sure that was part of her Zionism. My father’s not religious, he doesn’t eat Kosher,  observe Shabbos, or anything like that, but at the same time he’s proud to be Jewish. He definitely has a sense of a Jewish identity, and a lot of that is to do with Israel. His Zionism is a cultural nationalist Zionism: to do with the holocaust and then how the Jews built this land out of nothing, out of the desert, the plucky little state of Israel.  That’s a powerful narrative.

I was always quite close to my father’s side of the family. We only talked about Israel and Zionism once or twice. I didn’t see it at the time but later I realised that those conversations were sort of taboo.  With my dad or grandma, if I said my actual opinion about what was going on in Israel and Palestine, it was absolutely explosive – very emotionally charged, and everyone got very upset very quickly. My family are Zionists, like many Jews who live in the diaspora. My dad and uncle’s generation – they visited a kibbutz when they were young, and grew up with the ‘67 war and its consequences. They have a certain perspective which I don’t have. Whenever my uncle talks about the holocaust he talks about Israel, and when he talks about Israel he talks about the holocaust. And he talks about the nuclear threat from Iran. It’s always at the forefront of his mind, the idea of Jews facing an existential threat. Because it’s so emotional you can’t have a rational conversation about it. I learned to compartmentalise it. I have friends I can talk about it with, but I don’t want to have those conversations with my family.

I’ve been living with my parents recently. Since October 7^th, my father has wanted to talk about what’s going on in Israel and Palestine, and in those conversations I just smile and nod. They probably think I’m a lot more Zionist than I am. I was living with my uncle in the weeks immediately after October 7^th, and everything felt really seismic and charged. He is very, very pro Israel, a big Zionist. That was tremendously difficult. He would have the radio on 24/7, because he wanted to be switched on to the news. It was very intense, being in that environment and constantly surrounded by his take on events, and you just have to smile and nod.

My father is not so engaged with the daily news cycle, and he wouldn’t read a book about the history of Israel.  We were talking about the ICJ ruling, and he said, “Isn’t it offensive that people are accusing Israel of genocide.” I said, “It either is or isn’t genocide, it’s an objective legal investigation. Whether it’s offensive or not doesn’t matter.” You learn how to negotiate these things. I think his perspective is that Israel is fighting a war of self-defence. It’s quite callous and horrible if you dig down into what he thinks about it. Israel is in a defensive war, and in any war you have collateral damage.

I think my mum is an anti-Zionist. We’ve never talked about it, but I get that impression. My father often says, “Now that we’re retiring we should go on a trip, we should go to Israel,” and I notice that when he says that my mum goes very quiet. She’s like me, she doesn’t say what she really thinks, it’s such a sensitive topic, she chooses not to engage with it.

My Zionism and anti-ZIonism

I have ebbs and flows. When I was 16 or 17, I was politically active in a Trotskyist group called the Socialist Party of England and Wales (which used to be Militant). I didn’t have much knowledge or consciousness of Israel and Palestine, but I think I would have transplanted my awareness and ideas about colonialism to what was going on. But three or four years ago, when I started my PhD about holocaust memory in film, I did consider myself a Zionist, for a while. It was the first time I had really read much about Nazism and the holocaust; I joined some dots and thought that Zionism and the state of Israel are the natural and necessary conclusion of that hard history. I remember hearing an older Israeli lady say, in a documentary, “If the state of Israel had existed in the 1930s the holocaust wouldn’t have happened.” That idea and that statement stayed in my head a long time, it took me a long, long time to dislodge them. I thought, “I can’t argue with that, that makes sense.” So I was Zionist in the sense that it seemed self-evident that Jewish people who’ve had diaspora for thousands of years should have national self-determination, irrespective of any of the problems with that. In fact, I don’t think my position on that has changed much. But October 7^th changed the way you think about things, and I sometimes categorise myself as a non-Zionist and sometime as an anti-Zionist. I’d probably say anti-Zionist.

Zionism is not homogenous as an ideology. For example, Martin Buber was a Zionist who was a bi-nationalist. If Zionism could be like that, it doesn’t seem difficult to call yourself a Zionist. But it depends on what you think about settler colonialism, violence, displacement and ethnic cleansing, whether you think they are inherent in Zionism. You      look at what’s going on in Gaza and the West bank now, at how life is unliveable for Palestinian people, the ethnic cleansing, mass destruction of infrastructure, and famine, and think, ‘If that’s  Zionism, I don’t want anything to do with it.’

If you’re an anti-Zionist you have to think about what the practical solution might be. Millions of Jewish people have lived there for generations now. Are you going to get rid of the state of Israel altogether? In conversations about colonialism since October 7^th, people give the example of Algeria: it was settled by the French but after Algerian independence the French just left. I don’t think that’s comparable – because of the numbers, and because of the religiously and emotionally grounded ties Jewish Israelis feel with the land of Israel.

Choosing my PhD topic

Through my undergraduate and MA courses, in film studies, I knew I wanted to do a PhD, but it took me a while to settle on a topic. Then I saw an experimental film about the holocaust – by Daniel Eisenberg, I think – and I remember being very offended by it. It was abstract and arty, and I thought it was offensive to make such an abstract film about something so – real. That sparked something in me. Sometimes you open up a topic and that’s all you want to think about. The films I’m studying for the PhD involve the holocaust and the memory of it coming into dialogue with memories of other genocides or historical events. The holocaust is sort of a paradigm for genocide. When people talk about other events of historical violence they often turn to the holocaust, as a paradigm, as a comparator.

Ways of being Jewish

A lot of the way I think about Zionism and anti-Zionism is through thinking about Jewish identity, both in the diaspora and in Israel, and how those things are connected to Jewish history, culture and language. One key moment was when I was researching my family tree, and I looked at my great-grandfather’s naturalisation documents for becoming a British citizen. I learned that his mother tongue was Yiddish. He died long before I was born, but I asked my grandmother, “Did your father ever talk Yiddish to you?” and she said “No, not all.”  I think a lot of Ashkenazy Jews in Britain grow up with a little bit of Yiddish, it’s part of your vocabulary, but it’s interesting that he just wrote off his mother tongue. This diasporic language got very much cut out. He’d moved to England and he wanted to assimilate, or perhaps because of antisemitism. Then my grandma took a Modern Hebrew course at university. She used to say she was one of the first people in the UK, or perhaps one of the first women, to do that, in 1947 or so. When I told her I was learning Yiddish, she said, “O no, you should learn German, that’s a much more pure language”. But for me, Yiddish represents another possible kind of diasporic (Ashkenazy) Jewish identity that doesn’t have anything to do with Israel or Zionism.

The relationship between Zionism and Yiddish: Theodor Herzl wrote about diaspora Jews being weak and effeminate, so the idea of rejecting the diaspora goes back over 100 years. There’s a Hebrew term for it, “Galut”, which means “exile”. To me, there’s something troubling implied by the idea of “exile” – the idea that Jewish people are culturally or spiritually incomplete without a nation-state.     The diaspora Jew is compared with the idea of the New Jew, and the “muscle Jew”, an Israeli archetype of a strong muscular man. Yiddish is often referred to as “Mame-loshn” – mother tongue.  It’s a masculine/feminine coding of Hebrew Israel and Yiddish diaspora. Thinking about all these things set me thinking about what is Jewish identity,      of what place Israel has in Jewish identity in the diaspora. Most secular Jews in the latter half of the 20th century grew up with Zionism –– after the holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel – and part of that story is the supersession of Yiddish by Hebrew as the language of Jews. Of course people’s Zionism is reinforced by the history, very emotional, of the holocaust. Israel, Zionism and the Holocaust are the dominant parts of Jewish identity for a lot of secular Jews living in Europe and North America. I find it sad that Yiddish is not the vernacular diasporic language or source of identity for Jewish people anymore. Not just the language but the culture, and that’s a tremendously sad story. I find it very sad that my great-grandfather chose not to speak Yiddish to his children – I feel emotional talking about it now.

There was a big Yiddish film industry. There was Jewish mass popular culture in Europe before the holocaust – activism, journalism, poetry, literature, all in Yiddish. In 1939 there were perhaps 10-12 million fluent Yiddish speakers and now there are one million, the majority of them Haredi. It’s not a vernacular language for secular Jews. The 1930s was the golden age for  Yiddish cinema:  there were about 200 films made in Yiddish before 1945. I would like to do some post-doc study on it.

After October 7^th, now that – let’s call it genocide – is happening in Gaza, and it’s so obvious, and so intense, I thought that might precipitate a change of perspective in my dad or my uncle, but if anything it’s entrenched their views. But the other side of the coin is that I’ve joined Na’amod. I was searching for something like that. Na’amod does outwardly-oriented things, collective action, but there’s also the inward role of providing a space for like-minded left-wing Jews to hang out together during this very turbulent time. For a while there was a weekly group chat on a Sunday, a sort of emotional support space, almost like group counselling, for people who were finding it really difficult in their social lives. I was very grateful to have that space when I was living with my uncle after October 7^th.

Since October 7^th, divisions within the Jewish community here have become even more fractious, at least from my perspective, with hostility from Jews who are more supportive of Israel – in online discussions, in demonstrations, in Jewish journalism. People get called Kapo, self-hating Jews, all those nasty things. It’s the mainstream Jewish institutions. They discuss ‘Who has the right to call themselves Jewish?’ They want to keep Jewishness associated with Zionism. For instance, the European Union of Jewish Students put out a statement a week or so ago saying anti-Zionist Jews don’t represent Jewishness. In this context, I feel imposter syndrome sometimes. Because I don’t have a religious practice, and because Judaism is matrilineal, my Jewishness feels a bit fragile. But in Na’amod and left-wing groups, no one is ever asking, Who is a real Jew? If you have a disagreement with someone it’s purely political, you don’t attack their identity.

During the antisemitism rows around Corbyn, newspapers used phrases like “the Jewish community” – a single community, all Jews think the same, homogenous. It’s important to promote the idea that like any community it’s not homogenous. In general there is a Zionist consensus, and it feels strange being a fringe group in a community you think you’re part of. But in the marches for Gaza, I think we once had about 3000 people in the Jewish Bloc. That was a massive turnout for us, though I think it’s probably around 1% or less of Jewish people in the UK.

What’s the future for Israel?

I don’t think support for Zionism is shrinking. You want to be optimistic and think that an event like October 7^th and Israel’s subsequent bombing of Gaza would precipitate some change in perspective, but sadly I think it has entrenched things. The ultra-right wing and settler movements in Israeli society seem to be even more emboldened and divisions among Jews in Britain seem to be even more stark.  But perhaps it’s partly a generational thing: people who grew up with the idea of Israel the plucky little state are proud to be connected with it, but many people my age don’t have the same association with Israel at all. We see it as a settler colonial society that denies the rights of Palestinians to lead a normal life. Maybe the ICJ ruling might change things. It certainly gives more legitimacy to things we can do, holding our governments to account, things like BDS.

I’d like to believe in an optimistic vision for the future of Israel – a one-state binational solution where Jews and Palestinians can live with equality. But it almost seems offensive to say that at the moment, we are so far off it. I don’t feel hopeful.

Index of all the personal stories