How a Magazine for the Jewish Left Navigated Grief & Anti-Zionism After Oct 7

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, as we just mentioned, those reports of President Biden’s private opinion of the Israeli prime minister come as Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is in the Middle East pushing for peace amid that escalating war. Our next guest describes this moment in the region as a humanitarian dark night of the soul. Arielle Angel is editor-in-chief of the Jewish Currents magazine. It was founded 80 years ago and has established itself as a voice and a space for progressives looking to examine Jewish identity and issues outside what they call a Zionist framework. Since October 7th last year, the magazine has doubled its subscribers. Arielle Angel speaks to Michel Martin about its mission at this difficult time.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Arielle Angel, thank you so much for talking with us.

ARIELLE ANGEL, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, JEWISH CURRENTS: Thank you for having me.

MARTIN: It’s not easy to talk about it, but October 7th was a shock. I think to everybody. If I could just ask you to take me back to a year ago, what were the conversations within the magazine about where the magazine should stand? Like how you should deal with these events?

ANGEL: I mean, first of all, just say that like October 7th was a lot of things and very, very difficult, but I can’t say for sure that it was a shock, because we were watching events very, very closely. Their warning signs were flashing that we were ripe for an attack like this, that support for armed resistance within Palestinian communities was rising because of the complete collapse of any diplomatic solution and the way that the Abraham Accords in particular signaled to the Palestinians that there was no chance of them gaining their freedom. And so, in fact, we were talking about exactly this within Jewish currents, because we were listening to the Palestinian commentators and analysts that were speaking to us, we knew that this was coming.

MARTIN: So, hold on a second. You’re not saying that this is what the benefit of hindsight. What you’re telling me is those were active conversations then, before October 7th.

ANGEL: Absolutely. I mean, I think anybody who’s been watching the situation carefully can see that there was going to be an increase or explosion of violence. I don’t think anybody expected it to — I don’t think anybody expected the Israeli defenses to crumble quite as much as they did, and that was really a surprise. And of course, you know, the horror of the attacks is a shock to the system no matter what. But in terms of the existence of an attack like this, we, in fact, were reading texts together that would try to help us prepare for such a situation. And we knew also that there was really no way for us to prepare, that it was going to shatter our communities and that it was going to shatter our organizing communities that many people in the Jewish communities that we — you know, that read Jewish currents were going to have a slightly different emotional response to this event or profoundly different than many of our Palestinian partners or readers. And we struggled with this.

MARTIN: You’re a magazine, you’re going to publish, you have thoughts. What were some of the conversations about what you should say?

ANGEL: It took us about five days to publish. And that was intentional because I felt like we really needed to slow down and not just be reactive, but really think about what our responsibility was in this moment and how we were going to respond. The first thing that we did was we collected questions from our readership about what they felt confused about. And we tried to systematically answer those questions. But then there was also sort of more emotional work. How do I talk to my family? You know, how do I recommit to Palestinian liberation in this moment, even if I know someone who was killed in the October 7th attacks, you know, parsing Zionism, non-Zionism and anti-Zionism, dealing with people’s rifts within their own families, severe, severe rifts that may never be repaired. We started — we had a number of in-person gatherings. The question of grief was really a hot button issue, particularly because many Jewish people were feeling grief, especially because there are real connections, familial and otherwise, between American Jews and Jews living in Israel. And — but we didn’t want that grief to be weaponized on behalf of a militant response from the Israeli government. We really leaned into reporting because we really felt like there was a lot of information that needed to get out. We did a number of dispatches from the West Bank and Gaza, what people were actually experiencing, but also alongside their political aspirations in the moment. We did reporting on hostage families, because in the United States there’s a sense that bringing home the hostages means more military action when, of course, in Israel, the hostage families have been very, very clear that what they want is a deal and exchange of prisoners and hostages on the Palestinian side. So, we tried to really root in the questions that we were asking ourselves and the misconceptions that were circulating in the narrative.

MARTIN: I have to assume what I think it is a fact that contributors to Jewish Currents have been affected directly. I think one of your contributors has a family member held hostage. And I think —

ANGEL: Yes. And —

MARTIN: — you have other contributors who have people — well, you also have contributors, I believe, who have lost family members in Gaza. I mean, it would be hard not to, right?

ANGEL: Not only that, I mean, look, we’ve published dispatches from people in Gaza only for them to be killed the next week. You know, the carnage is unimaginable.

MARTIN: What do you think is your job right now? Because as I read it, it seems like what you’re trying to do is hold space for a lot of thoughts that a lot of people don’t want to hold together. But the grief, the intense grief of watching this massacre on October 7th take place in real-time, and we were meant to see it in real-time. I mean, the perpetrators filmed it, they live streamed it, they wanted us to see it, OK? And then, the carnage in Gaza. Some of us, as news organizations, still have people there who are still reporting. We are seeing that. And then, a world that’s increasingly critical of Israel, but also rising incidents of anti-Semitism.

ANGEL: It’s a good question. I think that — well, first of all, let me just say that 30 percent of the Jewish community generally holds views that are consistent with non or anti-Zionism. And that number rises to 40 percent under 44 — under the age of 44. So, our job, in some way, is to hold this 40 percent of a younger generation, 30 percent of the community overall to allow them a way to be Jewish and claim their Jewishness in the context of — or in the framework of justice and liberation for Palestinians and also to fight for that from their particular positionality, particularly as their positionality is being weaponized through accusations of anti-Semitism. We know that anti-Semitism rises as — like it directly correlates to the number of Palestinians that the Israeli government kills. Brown University just put out a study that says that the death toll in Gaza may actually be closer to 100,000, if not more. And so, yes, like I think when you have an Israeli government that is claiming to speak for Jews across the world, there is going to be rising anti-Semitism. At the same time, the conflation of anti-Zionism and anti- Semitism is muddying the water such that it becomes very, very difficult to actually address that anti-Semitism in a way that has real credibility and that addresses the real pieces of it.

MARTIN: So, can you talk about that for a minute? When you say Zionism, what do you mean? And when you say anti-Zionism, what do you mean? Because as you’ve just alluded to, there are people who argue that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, and there are other people who argue that closely related to that, that anti-Zionism is a proxy for anti-Semitism. So, it doesn’t matter if they’re different because they’re experienced in the real world the same way.

ANGEL: Zionism is an ideology that was founded in the late 19th century by Theodor Herzl, we know this. Judaism is a religion and culture of thousands of years. So, you know, Zionism was never hegemonic within Jewish communities and became hegemonic over the 20th century. But there was a Judaism before Zionism, and there will be one after on some levels. So, just as we would criticize any other state, and particularly a state that meets the legal definition of apartheid, as many human rights organizations have asserted, meaning that there are different — there’s a different set of laws and a different experience of people of one group and people of another, we can criticize that state. Now, there are ways that people have parsed this saying, you know, we think it’s OK to criticize Israel, but there are various ways that criticizing Israel crosses into anti-Semitism. That’s, you know, true. There is anti- Semitism in our movements, just as there is sexism and racism and homophobia and ableism, and we have to work to root those out. But that’s part of the culture. That’s not part of our movements, and that’s not inherent in anti-Zionism.

MARTIN: What is anti-Zionism to you?

ANGEL: I was raised Zionist, in a Zionist community, in a Zionist home. For me, what that meant was hazy. It just meant that I belonged to this community on some level. I didn’t really know. And so, when I started to do activist work for Palestine, I actually didn’t call myself an anti-Zionist, I didn’t even think about Zionism because I didn’t — I barely knew what it was. And I think that that’s fairly common within the Jewish community. It’s a marker of belonging without a very firm definition. And essentially, what anti-Zionism means for me now is twofold. One, it means that I recognize what Palestinians have experienced as Zionism as the primary way of understanding what Zionism means, because it has meant a different set of — different standards on equality, the — not having freedom of movement being tried in different courts, according to different laws, not having the right to vote for the government that controls their lives. All of these factors are what Zionism means for Palestinians. It means, in many cases, being killed or massacred at will. And certainly, what we’re seeing in Gaza is that it has meant essentially ethnic cleansing and mass murder. And so, I see that. And I also — I have a diasporic interpretation of Judaism, which many ultra-Orthodox people across the across the world share, but also, I think, many cultural Jews share, that there is something about being Jewish for me that is about understanding the stranger in a certain sense and that nationalism and particularly ethnonationalism conflicts with that vision for me.

MARTIN: There’s a well-known African American writer, I spoke to him on this program, named Ta-Nehisi Coates, who’s written this book, you know, “The Message,” where he talks about a lot of these things. And people basically called him a terrorist for saying these things or saying he’s — he sympathizes with terrorism. When you say these things, do people call you a terrorist?

ANGEL: Absolutely. We also get called capos, like meaning the Jews who were, you know, put in by the — put in charge in concentration camps by the Nazis of other Jews and who oversaw their killing in many cases. I mean, we get called very, very nasty things within the Jewish community. And without palpating Jew, un-Jews, ex-Jews, all kinds — as the Jews, the list goes on. And what is maddening about it is that what we’re really trying to say, at its very basic level, is that Palestinians deserve basic human rights and equality and dignity and reparations for the plunder of their homes and the right to return to those homes under international law. These are international laws, first of all, that were created after the Holocaust to stop something like it from happening again. And precisely because there’s a perception of Israel as kind of like the inheritors of the Holocaust and Holocaust trauma, it’s very, very hard to break through that and just allow people to see the basics of what is actually happening.

MARTIN: It must be particularly galling to you and to others with whom you work, because as I understand it, your father’s family were survivors of the Holocaust. Your mother’s family were Arab Jews from Haifa and what was formerly known as Palestine. And I’m just thinking that to come from a heritage of survival and then to be called some of these names must be —

ANGEL: It’s enormously painful. I mean, my dad’s parents are survivor — were survivors from Salonika of Auschwitz. But frankly, it’s really not about me. I mean, we’re doing this work because of the images that we are seeing right now, just specifically coming out of Gaza, people being burned alive, people being carried — their remains being carried in plastic bags. I mean, we have to respond to this, not just as Jews, but as Americans as, global citizens. A world that allows this to go on is the same world that allowed these things to happen in — you know, in the 1940s, allowed my grandparents, you know, to be in concentration camps. And I understand now in a visceral way how that was allowed to happen.

MARTIN: How do you answer the question of those who argue that if Israel were to become a multiethnic, multiracial democracy as the United States strives to be that sort of the tables would turn again and that Jewish people would be subsumed in this, particularly given that land is surrounded in the Middle East by people who do not share this — the same religion and who have been hostile to Israel for generations? How do you answer that?

ANGEL: I would basically ask whether Israelis are safe right now. You know, there has been — there have been attacks almost every day — or not every day, but there was one attack, I think, on the highway that killed a number of people. There were some attacks at a bus stop. We saw an enormous number of people killed on October 7th. That’s — you know, is that safety? And the Arab states directly around Israel have basically said that they would accept 67 borders, even Hamas has said that. And actually, what you have is an Israeli government that has been saying, no, we want all of it. There’s no two states, there’s no negotiation, and we are going to slug this out with force. I think that if you saw a shift towards Palestinian equality and freedom, Jews would be safer.

MARTIN: To the question, though, this is the question that constantly comes up is, do you question Israel’s right to exist? How do you answer that question?

ANGEL: That’s a difficult question because I do not question the right for Jews to live in safety where they live, anywhere that they live. But the right to an ethnostate or state that privileges the rights of one group of people over another group of people, I don’t believe that you can countenance that. The question of rights who exist has become one of those questions that obscures rather than illuminates what’s actually happening. The fact of the matter is, is that you have 15 million people living between the river and the sea, half are Jews, half are Palestinians. And in order to create a demographic majority, the right to for a Jewish State, you will need to do one of two things, ethnic cleansing and mass murder. Many, many human rights experts and experts in international law are calling a genocide. So, I — is that what we mean by the right to a state?

MARTIN: Do you feel as well? I’ll ask it this way. Is there anything giving you hope in this moment?

ANGEL: This is a very dark moment. I don’t know what to say. This is like a dark night of the soul. I think that the only thing giving me hope is that it’s so dark that maybe it’s the dark before the dawn, that maybe, you know, people will be able to see what is happening and build something new on top of, you know, the ashes of the old, out of the ashes of the old. You know, maybe this is the kind of old world struggling to die and the new one struggling to be born. But that does mean that now is the time of monsters that they say — as they say. And I do think that — personally for me, I do this work not because I have hope of because I believe that it’s the right thing to do and that we can’t — that we owe it to the people who are suffering not to stop doing it.

MARTIN: Arielle Angel, thank you for speaking with us.

ANGEL: Thanks so much for having me.