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A history of Mel Brooks as a ‘disobedient Jew’
(JTA) — Jeremy Dauber subtitles his new biography of Mel Brooks “Disobedient Jew.” It’s a phrase that captures two indivisible aspects of the 96-year-old director, actor, producer and songwriter.
The “Jew” is obvious. Born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, Brooks channeled the Yiddish accents and Jewish sensibilities of his old neighborhoods into characters like the 2000 Year Old Man — a comedy routine he worked up with his friend, the writer and director Carl Reiner. He worked Jewish obsessions into films like 1967’s “The Producers,” which features two scheming Jewish characters who stage a sympathetic Broadway musical about Hitler in order to bilk their investors.
Brooks’ signature move is to inject Jews into every aspect of human history and culture, which can be seen in the forthcoming Hulu series “History of the World, Part II.” A sequel to his 1981 film, “History of the World, Part I,” it parodies historical episodes in a style he honed as a writer on 1950s television programs such as “Your Show of Shows,” whose writers’ rooms were stocked with a galaxy of striving Jewish comedy writers just like him.
The “Disobedient” part describes Brooks’ relationship to a movie industry that he conquered starting in the early 1970s. In a series of parodies of classic movie genres — the Western in “Blazing Saddles,” the horror movie in “Young Frankenstein,” Alfred Hitchcock in “High Anxiety — he would gently, sometimes crudely and always lovingly bite the hand that was feeding him quite nicely: In 1976, he was fifth on the list of top 10 box office attractions, just behind Clint Eastwood.
Dauber describes the parody Brooks mastered as “nothing less than the essential statement of American Jewish tension between them and us, culturally speaking; between affection for the mainstream and alienation from it.”
Dauber is professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, whose previous books include “Jewish Comedy” and “American Comics: A History.” “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” is part of the Jewish Lives series of brief interpretative biographies from Yale University Press.
Dauber and I spoke about why America fell for a self-described “spectacular Jew” from Brooklyn, Brooks’ lifelong engagement with the Holocaust, and why “Young Frankenstein” may be Brooks’ most Jewish movie.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “History of the World, Part II” comes out March 6. “History of the World, Part I” may not be in the top tier of Brooks films, but it seems to touch on so many aspects of his career that you trace in your book: the parody of classic movie forms, the musical comedy, injecting Jews into every aspect of human civilization, and the anything-for-a-laugh sensibility.
Jeremy Dauber: I agree. There’s the one thing that really brings it home, and it’s probably the most famous or infamous scene from the film. That’s the Spanish Inquisition scene. You have Brooks sort of probing the limits of bad taste. He had done that most famously in “The Producers” with its Nazi kickline, but here he takes the same idea — that one of the ways that you attack antisemitism is through ridicule — and turns the persecution of the Jews into a big musical number. It’s his love of music and dance. But the thing that’s almost the most interesting about this is that he takes on the role of the Torquemada character.
As his henchman sing and dance and the Jews face torture, the Brooklyn-born Jew plays the Catholic friar who tormented the Jews.
That’s right. And what’s the crime that he accuses the Jews of? “Don‘t be boring! Don‘t be dull!” That’s the worst thing that you can be. It’s his way of saying, “If I have a religion, you know, it is show business.”
His fascination with showbiz seems inseparable from his Jewishness, as if being a showbiz Jew is a denomination in its own right.
One of my favorite lines of his is when he marries [actress] Anne Bancroft, who of course is not Jewish. And he says, “She doesn’t have to convert: She’s a star.” If you’re a star, if you’re a celebrity, you’re kind of in your own firmament faith-wise, and so it’s okay. Showbiz is this faith. But it is very Jewish, because show business is a way to acceptance. It’s a way that America can love him as a Jew, as Mel Brooks, as a kid from the outer boroughs who can grow up to marry Anne Bancroft.
Jeremy Dauber is the author of “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” (Yale University Press)
You write early on that “Mel Brooks, more than any other single figure, symbolizes the Jewish perspective on and contribution to American mass entertainment.” On one foot, can you expand on that?
Jews understand that there’s a path to success and that being embraced by a culture means learning about it, immersing yourself in it, being so deeply involved in it that you understand it and master it. But simultaneously, you’re doing that as a kind of outsider. You’re always not quite in it, even though you’re of it in some deep way. In some ways, it’s the apotheosis of what Brooks does, which is being a parodist. In order to be the kind of parodist that Mel Brooks is, you have to be acutely attuned to every aspect of the cultural medium that you’re parodying. You have to know it inside and outside and backwards and forwards. And Brooks certainly does, but at the same time you have to be able to sort of step outside of it and say, you know, “Well, I’m watching a Western, but come on, what’s going on with these guys? Like why doesn’t anyone ever, you know, pass gas after eating so many beans?”
You have this great phrase, that to be an American Jew is to be part of the “loyal opposition.”
That’s right. Brooks at his best is always kind of poking and prodding at convention, but loyally. He’s not like the countercultural figures of his day. He’s a studio guy. He’s really within the system, but is poking at the system as well.
You wrote in that vein about his 1963 short film, “The Critic,” which won him an Oscar. Brooks plays an old Jewish man making fun of an art film.
On the one hand, he’s doing it in the voice of one of his older Jewish relatives, the Jewish generation with an Eastern European accent, to make fun of these kinds of intellectuals. He’s trying to channel the everyman’s response to high art. “What is this I’m watching? I don’t understand this at all.” On the other hand, Brooks is much more intellectual than he’s often given credit for.
For me the paradox of Brooks’ career is conveyed in a phrase that appears a couple of times in the book: “too Jewish.” The irony is that the more he leaned into his Jewishness, the more successful he got, starting with the “2000 Year Old Man” character, in which he channels Yiddish dialect in a series of wildly successful comedy albums with his friend Carl Reiner. How do you explain America’s embrace of these extremely ethnic tropes?
Brooks’ great motion pictures of the late 1960s and 1970s sort of track with America’s embrace of Jewishness. You have “The Graduate,” which came out at around the same time as “The Producers,” and which showed that someone like Dustin Hoffman can be a leading man. It doesn’t have to be a Robert Redford. You have Allan Sherman and all these popular Jewish comedians. You have “Fiddler on the Roof” becoming one of Broadway’s biggest hits. That gives Brooks license to kind of jump in with both feet. In the 1950s, writing on “The Show of Shows” for Sid Caesar, the Jewishness was there but in a very kind of hidden way. Whereas, it’s very hard to watch the 2000 Year Old Man and say, well, that’s not a Jewish product.
What he also avoided — and here I will contrast him with the novelist Philip Roth — were accusations that he was “bad for the Jews.” Philip Roth was told that his negative portrayals of Jewish characters was embarrassing the Jews in front of the gentiles, but for some reason, I don’t remember anyone complaining even though the Max Bialystock character in “The Producers” can be fairly described as a conniving Jew. What made Brooks’ ethnic comedy more palatable to other Jews?
“The Producers” had a lot of pushback, but for a lot of other reasons.
I guess people had enough to deal with when he staged a musical comedy about Hitler.
Exactly. But the other part is that his biggest films are not as explicitly Jewish as something like Roth’s novel “Portnoy’s Complaint.” I actually think “Young Frankenstein” is one of the most Jewish movies that Mel Brooks ever made, but you’re not going to watch “Young Frankenstein” and say, wow, there are Jews all over the place here.
What about “Young Frankenstein,” a parody of classic horror movies, seems quintessentially Jewish?
The script, which is a lot of Gene Wilder and not just Mel Brooks, is really about someone saying, “You know, I don’t have this heritage — I’m trying to fit in with everybody else. My name is Dr. FRAHNK-en-shteen.” And then people say, “No, this is your heritage. You are Dr. Frankenstein.” [Wilder’s character realizes] “it is my heritage, and I’m embracing it. And I’m Frankenstein. And you may find that monstrous but that’s your business.” It’s about assimilation and embracing who you are.
And of course, Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein is unmistakably Jewish, even when he plays a cowboy in “Blazing Saddles.”
Right. Again, by the mid-’70s, you know, you have Gene Wilder and Elliot Gould and Dustin Hoffman, all Jews, in leading roles. “Young Frankenstein” ends up being a movie about coming home and embracing identity, which is playing itself out a lot in American Jewish culture in the 1970s.
I guess I have to go back and watch it for the 14th time with a different point of view.
That’s the fun part of my job.
You talk about what’s happening at the same time as Brooks’ huge success, which is, although he’s a little younger, the emergence of Woody Allen. You describe Brooks and Woody Allen as the voice of American Jewish comedy, but in very different ways. What are the major differences?
Gene Wilder, who worked with both of them, says that working with Allen is like lighting these tiny little candles, and with Brooks, you’re making big atom bombs. The critical knock against Brooks was that he was much more interested in the joke than the story. And I think with the exception maybe of “Young Frankenstein” there’s a lot of truth to that. The jokes are phenomenal, so that’s fine. Allen pretty quickly moved towards a much more narrative kind of film, and so began to be seen as this incredibly intellectual figure. In real life, Allen always claimed that he wasn’t nearly as intellectual as everyone thought, while Brooks had many more kinds of intellectual ambitions than the movie career that he had. There is a counterfactual world in which “The 12 Chairs,” his 1970 movie based on a novel by two Russian Jewish novelists and which nobody talks about, makes a ton of money.
Instead, it bombs, and he makes “Blazing Saddles,” which works out very well for everybody.
Although he does create Brooksfilms, and produces more narrative, serious-minded films like “The Elephant Man” and “84 Charing Cross Road.”
Right, and decides that if he puts his name on these as a director, they’re going to be rejected out of hand. There is a shelf of scholarship on Woody Allen, but if you look at who had influence on America in terms of box office and popularity, it’s Brooks winning in a walk.
You also mention Brooks and Steven Spielberg in the same sentence. Why do they belong together?
Partly because they had huge popular success in the mid-’70s. Brooks is a generation older, but they are hitting their cinematic success at the same time. And they are both movie fans.
Which comes out in their work — Brooks in his film parodies and Spielberg in the films that echo the films he loved as kid.
Until maybe his remake of “West Side Story,” Spielberg is not really a theater guy in the way that Brooks is, when success meant to make it on Broadway. When Brooks was winning all those Tonys in 2001 for the Broadway musical version of “The Producers,” it may have been almost more meaningful for his 5-year-old, or 7- or 8-year-old self than making his incredibly popular pictures.
You also write about Brooks being a small “c” conservative, a bit of a square. Which I think will surprise people who think about the fart jokes and the peepee jokes and all that stuff. And by square, I mean, kind of old showbizzy, even a little prudish sometimes.
I think that’s right. There’s a great moment that I quote at the end of the book where they are trying out the musical version of “The Producers,” and they want to put the word “f–k” in and Brooks is like, “I don’t know if we can do that on Broadway,” and Nathan Lane is like, “Have we met? You’re Mel Brooks!” He’s a 1950s guy.
Another place where this kind of conservatism comes in is when you compare him to other comedians of the 1950s and ’60s — the so-called “sick comics” like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl who were pushing the envelope in terms of subject matter and politics. He wasn’t part of that. He was part of Hollywood. He was trying to make it in network television.
There is an interview in that era when he complained that people who are writing for television are not “dangerous.” Meanwhile, he himself was writing for television. But I think it’s fair to say that “The Producers” was really something different. You didn’t have to be Jewish to be offended by “The Producers.” But as we were saying before, he is more of the loyal opposition, rather than sort of truly out there. He’s not making “Easy Rider.”
An exhibit space at the Museum of Broadway evokes the scenery from the Mel Brooks musical “The Producers.” (NYJW)
“The Producers” is part of Brooks’ lifelong gambit of mocking the Nazis, I think starting when he would sing anti-Hitler songs as a GI in Europe at the tail end of World War II. Later he would remake Jack Benny’s World War II-era anti-Nazi comedy, “To Be or Not to Be.” And then there is the quick “Hitler on Ice” gag in “History of the World, Part I.” Brooks always maintains that mocking Nazis is the ultimate revenge on them, while you note that Woody Allen in “Manhattan” makes almost the opposite argument: that the way to fight white supremacists is with bricks and baseball bats. Did you come down on one side or the other?
To add just a twinge of complication is the fact that Brooks actually fought Nazis, and also had a brother who was shot down in combat. So for me to sit in moral judgment on anybody who fought in World War II is not a place that I want to be. What’s interesting is that Brooks makes a lot of these statements over the course of a career in which Nazism is done, in the past, defeated. Tragically, the events of the last number of years made white supremacy and neo-Nazism a live question again. When “The Producers” was staged as a musical in the early 21st century, people could say, “Okay, Nazism’s time has passed.” It’s not clear to me that we would restage “The Producers” now as a musical on Broadway, when just last week you had actual neo-Nazis handing out their literature outside a Broadway show. It would certainly be a lot more laden than it was in 2001.
Time also caught up with Brooks in his depiction of LGBT characters. Gay characters are the punchlines in “The Producers” and “Blazing Saddles” in ways that have not aged well. But you also note how both movies are about two men who love each other, to the exclusion of women.
There’s an emotive component to him about these male relationships. Bialystok and Bloom [the protagonists in “The Producers”] is a kind of love story. One of the interesting things is that as it became comparatively more comfortable for gay men to live their truth in society and in Hollywood, there was an evolution. In that remake of “To Be or Not to Be,” there is a much more sympathetic gay character who’s not stereotypical.
What other aspects of Brooks’ Jewishness have we not touched upon? For instance, he’s not particularly interested in Judaism as a religion, and ritual and theology rarely come up in his films, even to be mocked.
It’s not something that he’s particularly interested in. To him, being Jewish is a voice and a language. From the beginning of his career the voice is there. What he’s saying in these accents is that this is Jewish history working through me. It is, admittedly, a very narrow slice of Jewish history.
The first- and second-generation children of Jewish immigrants growing up in Brooklyn neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly Jewish.
It was a Jewishness that was aspirational. It was intellectual. It was a musical Jewishness. It was not in the way we use this phrase now, but it was a cultural Jewishness. It was not a synagogue Jewishness or a theological Jewishness. But of course he is Jewish, deeply Jewish. He couldn’t be anything else. And so he didn’t, and thank God for that.
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A new book explores the vibrancy of pre-war Warsaw
The Last Woman of Warsaw
Judy Batalion
Dutton, 336 pages, $30
Don’t be misled by the title of this debut novel by Judy Batalion, nor by her previous book, The Light of Days, about the role of Polish-Jewish women in the anti-Nazi resistance.
Though the specter of the Holocaust looms over The Last Woman of Warsaw, the novel is not really Holocaust fiction. It does not portray a final female survivor of that embattled city. Its subject is instead the odd-couple friendship of two young Jewish women embroiled in the artistic and political ferment of pre-World War II Warsaw.
For Batalion, recreating the atmosphere and quotidian life of this cosmopolitan city, which once elicited comparisons to Paris, was a major aim. “In our contemporary minds, historical Warsaw conjures images of gray and death,” she writes in a lengthy author’s note. But that shouldn’t negate its more vibrant past. “Long before Vegas,” Batalion writes, “Warsaw was the capital of neons, its night skyline dotted with glittering cocktail glasses and chefs carrying platters of roasts. Much of this artistic production was Jewish.”
Even this brief excerpt shows that Batalion isn’t much of a prose stylist. But awkward locutions and diction mistakes aside — including the repeated use of “cache” when she means “cachet” — Batalion generally succeeds in immersing readers in Warsaw’s lively urban bustle and heated street politics. Here, skating on the edge of catastrophe, Polish Jews of varying ideologies and backgrounds face off against antisemitic persecution and violence.
Batalion’s handling of the historical backdrop is defter than her fledgling fictional technique. The narrative of The Last Woman of Warsaw is a plodding and repetitive affair that ultimately turns on an improbable coincidence.
The plot involves the sudden disappearance of a photography professor with communist ties and the halting efforts of the novel’s two protagonists to find and free her. The pair, whose initial antagonism mellows into friendship, are Fanny Zelshinsky, an upper-middle-class Warsaw University student, and Zosia Dror, who hails from a religious shtetl family. Her adopted surname references the Labor Zionist group that now claims her loyalty. Despite their differences, the two women have in common a desire to shake off the past and forge new lives. They also share an attraction to a single man, Abram, who can’t seem to decide between them.
When the story begins, Fanny is engaged to the perfectly nice, highly suitable Simon Brodasz, whom she’s known since her teenage years. Her mother is pushing the match. But Fanny is not in love and dreads the loss of freedom marriage entails. Her true passion is photography – in particular, fashion photography, to which she brings an idiosyncratic, modernist flair.
Zosia’s passion is political activism, and she aspires to a more prominent leadership role in Dror. Like Fanny, she is at odds with her mother, who is urging her to return to the shtetl for the festivities preceding her sister’s wedding.
What brings these women together is the arrest of the famous photographer Wanda Petrovsky, to whom both are connected. Wanda is one of Fanny’s professors, and Fanny needs her help to enter a potentially career-making exhibition. Wanda also happens to be a political activist, a leader of Zosia’s Zionist group, and Zosia hopes she’ll provide her with a visa for Palestine.
As Batalion’s narrative alternates between their perspectives, the antisemitic fervor in Warsaw mounts. Polish right-wing groups have started terrorizing Jews. Police invade clubs where Jewish comedians are mocking antisemitism. At Warsaw University, where Jewish students already have been subject to admissions quotas, the humiliation of being consigned to a “Jew bench” in class comes as a humiliating shock to Fanny.
Zosia, by contrast, has seen far worse. She and her family were victims of one of the murderous pogroms that periodically roiled the Polish countryside. She has been traumatized by the burning of her home, her father’s injuries and the refusal of her neighbors to offer refuge from the catastrophe.
In late 1930s Warsaw, Polish Jews are fighting back – with protests, hunger strikes and more. But what will any of this accomplish? Will Wanda attain her freedom, with or without the help of her protegees? Will Zosia and Fanny successfully defy their families and find meaningful lives? Which woman will Abram ultimately choose? And will any of this matter as both Poland and Polish Jewry hover on the brink of destruction?
Batalion answers these questions in an epilogue describing the fate of both women and of Fanny’s photographs, which eventually take a political turn, and in her author’s note. In the note, she reveals that all four of her own grandparents “spent their young adulthoods in interwar Warsaw.” That heritage helps account for her own passion: “to memorialize Warsaw’s golden age of creativity and the Jewish art and culture that, along with six million lives, was also decimated in the Holocaust.” A worthy endeavor, however clumsily executed.
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Mahmoud Khalil’s anti-Zionist case to Jews shows the case for skepticism
Mahmoud Khalil wants to reassure the Jewish community. In an extensive new interview with the Forward, the pro-Palestinian protest leader recognized “a Jewish connection” to Israel, and promised that a free Palestine would include safety and security for Jewish residents.
And yet I read the interview and felt a sense of alarm.
Not because Khalil seems insincere. I believe he means much of what he says. But rather because his attempts to instill confidence fall short in ways that illuminate exactly why so many Jews remain afraid and skeptical of the anti-Zionist movement.
Serious causes for serious concerns
Khalil describes himself as a pragmatist. In his activism, however, he envisions a utopia.
He is adamant that a two-state solution preserving a Jewish majority in Israel is a nonstarter. He argues, instead, for a democratic country — or multiple countries — across Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, with equal rights for all and the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
“I know it might sound like a very ideal utopia,” he told the Forward‘s Arno Rosenfeld, “but this is what we should aspire for.”
Khalil is concerned that Jewish fear is an obstacle to Palestinian liberation, and suggests that this fear is misplaced. “People think that we want to drive all Jews to the sea,” he said. “We don’t believe that.”
But history has long shown that Jewish safety without Jewish autonomy often proves conditional. In the ideal that Khalil advances, Israel would lose the self-determination that leads so many Jews to view it as a safe haven. My late grandfather, who was deported to a Siberian gulag by the Soviets from Lithuania — where about 90% of his fellow Jews were murdered by the Nazis — put it simply: Israel was a place where he felt his fate was in his own hands.
Nor is apprehension of anti-Zionism misplaced. Report after report has cataloged persistent harassment of Jews, threats of violence against Zionists, and invocations of antisemitic tropes within anti-Zionist movements. Yes, there are moderates, many of whom are driven by a commitment to a better future for Palestinians. But there are also extremists, and scenes on campuses and city streets around the world have shown that their tactics often prevail.
Adding to Jews’ sense of alarm are decades of violence within Israel — including the Second Intifada and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack — and globally, including recent violence against American Jewish institutions. Jews are not scared because we misunderstand the aims of the anti-Zionist movement. We are scared for good reason.
Political abstractions
A genuine effort at reassurance would engage with that truth. Instead, Khalil dances around it, suggesting that the thing we’re worried about doesn’t actually exist. He says, for example, that the pro-Palestinian campus movement did a good job of keeping antisemitism at bay. It did not.
Even when it comes to the well-established facts of Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre, he demurs: “I wouldn’t rule out that Hamas targeted civilians,” he said, “but I wouldn’t confirm it either.”
When referencing the excesses of pro-Palestinian campus protests, Khalil retreated into vague language. “There were maybe some bad actors,” he said. His denunciations of antisemitism remained safely generic: “some anti-Zionist actions may touch on antisemitism that we absolutely oppose.”
Who, exactly, is “we” here?
Political movements are not abstractions. They consist of real people doing real things. When excesses are common enough, they become characteristic. This is something I’ve long argued about the Israeli right as well. We cannot dismiss settler violence or anti-Palestinian abuses as fringe when they keep escalating and enjoy support from those in power.
It’s easy to say you oppose antisemitism or suffering by Palestinians, or that a utopian future is possible if we all look past our fear. It’s much harder to look within your political coalition and call out the specific negative acts your allies have committed — or acknowledge their very real consequences.
Denial and Oct. 7
Circle back to Khalil’s alarming equivocation about Oct. 7.
He frames the killings as civilians being “caught up” in violence, not targeted by it. Notice the evasive grammar: Khalil says “there were crimes committed” and Hamas has “a responsibility,” rather than “Hamas committed crimes.”
Khalil does explicitly say that he thinks Hamas is “not up to the Palestinian aspiration for liberation” and that he “doesn’t believe in political Islam.” But for someone so attuned to the language of liberation and justice, he is remarkably comfortable with passive voice when it comes to Hamas carrying out horrific murders on Oct. 7.
As I’ve previously written, the evidentiary record is overwhelming. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, organizations critical of Israel, independently concluded that Hamas deliberately and systematically targeted civilians. In one intercepted call, a Hamas terrorist bragged to his parents, “Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!”
Neutrality on established facts is no different than denialism. If you are trying to reassure Jews but can’t acknowledge that Hamas killed Jews as such, any reassurance you have to offer will ring hollow.
A practical peace
Khalil says he is opposed to any violence against civilians but cannot dictate what Palestinians who experience Israeli human rights abuses should do. He says he understands why Palestinians turn to resistance, even violence, in the face of oppression.
But if you say you understand why decades of oppression push Palestinians toward resistance, then you should also understand why decades of terrorism push Israelis toward aggressive security measures, including ones that harm Palestinian civilians. If every act is merely a justified reaction to a prior act, we will end up in a world in which it’s too easy to argue that all violence is legitimate, rather than none of it.
The deep culture of mutual suspicion that this painful history has bred may be the biggest obstacle to Khalil’s utopian vision.
I share Khalil’s aspirations for peace. But Israelis, even most liberals, leftists and the millions who have protested the right-wing government, say they won’t accept a one-state solution. One 2025 poll by The Institute for National Security Studies, an independent think tank affiliated with Tel Aviv University, found that only 4% of all Israelis, and 1% of Israeli Jews, prefer a one-state solution with equal rights. Palestinians, too, are skeptical of a single state with equal rights.
At the same time, many Israelis oppose a two-state solution. So do many Palestinians. The people who live in the region hold complicated and often contradictory ideas of the path forward, and Khalil does not necessarily speak on their behalf.
Any anti-Zionist looking to reassure Jews needs to, at minimum, acknowledge that Hamas killed civilians deliberately, because they were Jews; condemn specific instances of antisemitism rather than just the concept in the abstract; and ask why Jews are scared right now, rather than telling us we shouldn’t be.
Yet Khalil’s reticence to be honest about his own movement’s flaws is a mirror of our own. Supporters of Israel have long been reluctant to name the failures of the Israeli right and to reckon with how settlements and the occupation harm Palestinians.
Khalil recounts being born in the Palestinian refugee camp Khan Eshieh in Syria, and raised on stories of his grandparents’ expulsion from a village near Tiberias. He was shot by an Israeli soldier when he was just 16. His effort to nevertheless engage with Israeli perspectives, like by reading Ari Shavit, is admirable. Jews should similarly listen to Palestinian perspectives and sit with Palestinian stories, including Khalil’s and those of Palestinians living today in the West Bank and Gaza.
The only way for any of us to build a durable political movement is to be exactingly honest about the ways in which we have, so far, failed, and to ask others with open ears: Why are you so scared?
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Mahmoud Khalil’s reassurances are bad for Jews but even worse for Palestinians
In his recent interview with the Forward, prominent Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil attempted to address claims that he’s an antisemite, that he supports Hamas, and that as a leader of Columbia’s anti-Israel encampments he helped foster hostility towards Jewish students and Jews generally.
Khalil says he’s offended by such claims, but by refusing to say whether Hamas deliberately targeted civilians on Oct. 7, confirmed by both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, how is he not providing coverage for Hamas?
The Forward attempts to present Khalil as a pragmatic moderate. But someone who can’t confirm what human rights investigators documented about the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is not offering any real reassurances. Instead, he is only offering a performance.
An even deeper problem with Khalil is not what it means for Jews, but what it does to Palestinians. I say this as someone who has spent time in places where the gap between rhetoric and reality gets people killed.
In 2004, I was a young Marine officer building one of the first successful Iraqi military units in Iraq’s restive Al Anbar Province. My soldiers were mostly Shia, and many bore marks of torture from Saddam Hussein’s prisons, including scars and missing fingers.
One evening, I was watching the news with my Iraqi officers. We watched reports of Israeli tanks pushing into Gaza. I braced for anger and protests and was shocked when they started cheering for the Israelis. One of them quickly explained to me that Saddam had used the Palestinian cause to distract from his own atrocities at home. His support and alliance with Yasser Arafat and other Palestinian leaders was not out of solidarity, but rather as a tool of domestic control. My Iraqi soldiers had paid the price.
After leaving the Marines I visited Lebanon and Jordan, while working to help many of our translators we had left behind. During these visits, I walked through Sabra and Shatila, where Lebanese militias massacred hundreds, possibly thousands, of Palestinian civilians in 1982. I visited refugee camps in Jordan, not tents but cities, brick and mortar, generations deep, people suspended in political amber while the leaders who claimed to speak for them extracted whatever use they could.
During these visits, it was hard not to conclude that Palestinian suffering had been prolonged not only by Israel, but by a regional order that finds Palestinian statelessness useful. Khalil’s vision fits that order perfectly. It offers Palestinians justice in theory, but in reality only guaranteeing them decades of more suffering and tragedy. The people who benefit are not Palestinians in Gaza, but those who have built careers on book deals, speaking fees and endowed chairs on a cause they have no interest in resolving.
The brutal, tragic, and awful reality is that there is not a nation-state on Earth, maybe other than Iceland, that was not created through conflict and displacement. Throughout the Americas, it was the catastrophe that befell indigenous peoples, swept aside by European settlers over centuries of conquest and disease. Most of Western Europe’s borders hardened through revolution and the violent suppression of regional identities. Poland was erased from the map for a hundred years, then reconstituted after two world wars through mass population transfers that uprooted millions. The partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 displaced 15 million people and killed up to two million more. China’s borders were drawn through civil war, revolution, and the subjugation of non-Han peoples.
Every post-Ottoman Arab state, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, was created by European colonial powers drawing lines through tribal and sectarian areas with indifference to the consequences that are still felt today. The entire modern state system is built on this foundation: land taken, people moved, suffering endured, and eventually, when both sides accepted finality, a durable peace.
Either Khalil believes every nation-state on Earth should be dismantled, or he is applying a standard that exists for Jews and Jews alone. The entire Arab world spans 13 million square kilometers and nearly half a billion people. Israel barely covers 22,000 square kilometers and is home to only 7 million Jews. Khalil doesn’t call for the dissolution of Jordan, doesn’t demand China answer for Tibet, or push for the right of return for millions of Hindus and Muslims displaced by the partition of India and Pakistan. He saves that demand for the one Jewish state on Earth, a nation smaller than New Jersey, surrounded by a region that has tried to destroy its people repeatedly. This is antisemitism through the vocabulary of liberation.
Look at where peace has actually come from. Northern Ireland’s Troubles killed thousands over 30 years, a conflict soaked in ancient grievance, religious identity, and competing claims to land and sovereignty that each side considered non-negotiable. It ended not when one side achieved its maximal demands, but when the Good Friday Agreement gave both communities something short of victory and something better than war. Unionists did not get the permanent British Ulster they wanted. Republicans did not get the unified Ireland they had fought and died for. They got a future. In the Balkans, a decade of wars that produced ethnic cleansing, mass atrocity, and the worst European violence since World War II finally yielded to exhaustion and the hard work of partition and negotiated borders. The map that emerged was not just. It was livable. That distinction, between justice as an absolute and peace as a possibility, is the one Khalil refuses to make.
Khalil’s vision has been tried, in different forms and different names, for 70 years. It has not produced peace. It has produced more of exactly what he says he wants to end.
The only path forward is the one he refuses: two peoples, two states, a future neither side fully wants, but both can live with. Everything else is a jobs program for people who profit from the conflict, paid for in Palestinian lives.
His reassurances are hollow to Jews. They are fatal to Palestinians.
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