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Jewish teens, led by Ezra Beinart, are gathering on Zoom to meet prominent Palestinians
(JTA) — When Rep. Rashida Tlaib joined a Zoom with 40 teenagers, she soon found herself talking about the kinds of topics — academic and otherwise — that tend to take up their days.
There was discussion of the stress of AP exams, embarrassing dads and social media memes. She showed them pictures on Instagram of her dog at the U.S. Capitol. Everyone was on a first-name basis.
“My son is a [high school] junior,” she said, responding to a message in the Zoom chat from one of the teen participants. “Oh my God, the SAT — I was stressed out. I’m stressed because he’s stressed. He had to take all his AP exams and stuff.”
Tlaib got personal too — talking about her grandmother, with whom she last spoke on the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr.
But the conversation also turned to a question many of the teens had encountered at high school, camp, youth groups or elsewhere in their lives: Is anti-Zionism antisemitism?
As the only Palestinian-American in Congress — and perhaps the chamber’s most prominent anti-Zionist — Tlaib was in a unique position to answer. And the students on the call had a particular interest in the question as well: They were all Jewish.
The teens are all participants in a new initiative, launched last year, to expose young American Jews to Palestinian voices through video chats. Founded by Ezra Beinart, a junior at a Jewish day school in New York City, the project’s goal is to bring Palestinian perspectives to a demographic that, he says, sorely lacks them.
“I live in a very Jewish community and most of the people around me are very educated on the Israeli perspective, but not as knowledgeable about the Palestinian side,” Beinart said in an interview. “And that’s why I decided to create the group to inform young Jews about the other side of the story, which I don’t think most Jewish students know much about.”
In her response to the question about antisemitism and anti-Zionism, Tlaib again turned to her grandmother, Muftieh, whom she refers to with the Arabic term “Sity” and whom she has portrayed as the face of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. She said people were “weaponizing antisemitism” in order to chill criticism of Israel.
“My grandmother, literally solely based on the fact that she was born Palestinian, she just doesn’t have equality,” Tlaib told the teens. “Her life would be completely different if that wasn’t the case. And so, you know, for me criticizing that, if anything, is more chipping away at this form of government that does that to my Sity.”
Michigan House Rep. Rashida Tlaib speaks on stage at a concert in Detroit, July 16, 2022. (Aaron J. Thornton/Getty Images)
Beinart said he wants to increase opportunities for Jewish-Palestinian interaction. So he said he has reached out to “very Jewish” communities around the country, through chat groups and progressive synagogues, to get the word out. He started out with just a handful of teens, but his numbers are growing: His session with Tlaib drew 40 viewers.
Such interest comes at a time of political flux in Israel, and as young Jewish adults in the United States view the country less favorably than their elders. A 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center found that Jews aged 18-30 were less emotionally attached to Israel than older generations, more skeptical of its efforts toward peace and likelier to support efforts to boycott it. In recent years, activist groups founded by young Jews have pushed institutions such as campus Hillels and the Conservative movement’s Camp Ramah network to be more inclusive of Palestinian or anti-Zionist perspectives.
The initiative’s format has speakers introduce themselves for five minutes or so and then take questions, which Beinart selects, for another 30 minutes. It has held about half a dozen sessions with speakers like Ayman Mohyeldin, a journalist at MSNBC, and Amahl Bishara, a professor at Tufts University. Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, is its most prominent guest so far. (Her office did not respond to multiple requests for an interview or for comment.)
Beinart wanted his peers to have their minds opened, as he said his was when he interned last summer at the Jerusalem Fund, a pro-Palestinian think tank and advocacy organization in Washington D.C. He noticed that a friend of his who worked there used “Palestine” as readily as he used “Israel,” and described to him how fraught traveling to the region was for her, whereas he took his ability to enter the country for granted.
“It made it much more tangible to have friends explain how Israel’s actions affect them in everyday life,” he said. “It’s different from just reading about it or seeing a video.”
If Beinart’s name is familiar, it’s because his father is Peter Beinart, the writer who was once an outspoken advocate for an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, and now is a prominent Jewish voice supporting a single, binational Israeli-Palestinian state. The elder Beinart declined to comment for this article, as the initiative is his son’s project rather than his. But for a decade, Peter Beinart has been making the case that American Jews need to spend more time listening to Palestinian voices.
Resistance to hearing from Palestinians, the elder Beinart wrote in 2013 in the New York Review of Books, “make[s] the organized American Jewish community a closed intellectual space, isolated from the experiences and perspectives of roughly half the people under Israeli control. And the result is that American Jewish leaders, even those who harbor no animosity toward Palestinians, know little about the reality of their lives.”
Ezra acknowledges his father’s influence, albeit reluctantly. The first speaker in the series was Issa Amro, a Palestinian activist Ezra met when he accompanied Peter on a West Bank tour.
“Yeah, obviously, but I’m going my own way with it,” Ezra Beinart said, asked about his father’s influence. “I’m connecting Israel-Palestine to what I see going on with my peers, my friends.”
In the Zoom session, Tlaib intuited Ezra’s ambivalence about bringing his father into the conversation, so she trod carefully when she quoted the elder Beinart to make a point.
“Ezra, your dad said something once — I know you don’t want me to mention your dad, you’re like my son,” she said. But she then brought up a quote by Peter Beinart to explain why she had chosen, despite considerable backlash, to host an event in the U.S. Capitol commemorating the Nakba, the word meaning “catastrophe” which Palestinians use to describe their displacement during and after Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.
Peter Beinart’s quote was, “When you tell a people to forget its past, you are not proposing peace, you are proposing extinction.”
Tlaib said, “I used [Beinart’s quote] today when I got interviewed because I love this, but when Peter says it, it’s like okay, look at this is, this is a Jewish American man speaking up about the importance of understanding history.”
After the meeting, Ezra Beinart told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he chose questions that reflected the narrative Jewish youth were exposed to in their communities. In addition to discussing anti-Zionism and antisemitism, one question was, “What is your response to those who believe that using the word ‘occupation’ is harmful?” (Avoiding accurate terminology inhibits the advance of peace and human rights, Tlaib said.)
“Jewish people, when they think about Palestinians, they think of terror, most of them,” Beinart said. “So that’s something they should hear about from Palestinians.”
Teaneck, the northern New Jersey suburb that would qualify as a “very Jewish” community by nearly any standard, is where one of the participants, Liora Pelavin, 15, lives. Her mother, who is a rabbi, saw a post about Beinart’s Zoom meetings on Facebook and thought her daughter might be interested.
“Hearing from Palestinians really humanizes them,” Pelavin, who attended a Jewish day school through eighth grade and now goes to a public high school, said in an interview. “It makes me learn and also realize that they all have different opinions, too.”
Yehuda Kurtzer, the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, an organization whose programs include facilitating dialogue between American Jews, Israelis and Palestinians, said any interaction would be welcome.
However, he was concerned that most of the Palestinians Ezra Beinart had selected were political or advocacy leaders, instead of ordinary Palestinians who might be better suited to explain everyday realities to high school students.
“There’s probably a version of a way to do this like Encounter,” a long-running program that brings American Jews to the West Bank for dialogue with Palestinians, “where you are hearing from people and learn their stories, and you are free to come to the political conclusions you want,” Kurtzer said. “But you humanize their experience. That’s one way of doing any of this work. There’s another way to do this work, which is, ‘I want to influence the politics of your own community.’”
Jonathan Kessler — a former senior official at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who now leads Heart of a Nation, a group that facilitates dialogue among Jewish American, Palestinian and Israeli teens — said he was aware of Beinart’s initiative, and that it is an example of how Gen Z may be better able to break down barriers than their elders.
“A generation that does not think of gender and sexuality in binary terms is uniquely well positioned to approach a conflict, which has for too long been defined in a binary way,” Kessler said.
Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian political scientist who has spoken to Beinart’s group, said it was particularly important for Palestinian speakers to reach Jewish teens.
“Within the Jewish community, particularly in the organized Jewish community, there may be a lot of pro-Israel perspectives represented and not a whole lot of Palestinian perspectives represented,” he said. “I’m always inspired when I speak to younger people about this issue who have an interest in learning more.”
For Tlaib, it was also a forum where she had expressed views that she hasn’t otherwise voiced publicly — saying that she felt conflicted about evacuating Israeli settlers because they had lived in the West Bank for so long.
“Just the idea around taking families that — that’s been their home — it’s just completely uprooting, forcibly displacing,” Tlaib said. “It’s something I struggle with because, like, we’re doing it all over again, right? This happened during the Nakba.”
Beinart said he and others on the call, including Pelavin, were moved by her sentiments.
“A lot of the Jewish community thinks like, ‘Palestinians hate us, and don’t think we’re people too,’” Pelavin said. “I think that’s so wrong, and being on these calls has just confirmed that for me.”
Ezra Beinart favors a single binational state — Tlaib is the only elected lawmaker who also takes that position — and Pelavin said her views on Israel trended left. But while much of the organized American Jewish community has historically bristled at criticism of Israel, neither teen said that they were made to feel like a pariah in their Jewish milieus.
“They think it’s cool that I do these types of things, but I think a lot of their goal is to just stay away from this topic around me, because they don’t really want to get into an argument about it,” Pelavin said of her peers.
And Beinart said holding a minority viewpoint hasn’t been a problem for him, either. “The kids in my school know who I am,” Ezra Beinart said. “No one’s mean to me. There are kids who share my views — a few, but not many.”
Despite the weighty subject matter, the conversation had an informal, friendly feel. Tlaib also wanted to learn more about the participants, but when she asked what colleges they were planning to attend, no one spoke up — until she noticed answers to her question piling up in the Zoom chat.
“Oh look there — you guys looove the chat!” she said. She then attempted to get her dog to hop on screen, but settled for showing the teens photos.
Ezra Beinart said he was fine with Tlaib’s cooing and kvelling about the college plans.
“I’m not going to pretend that this is a group of well-educated adults,” he said. “This is a group of kids who don’t know about this stuff as well. And that’s why that’s why I’m doing it — it’s not supposed to be for people who are experts, right?”
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The post Jewish teens, led by Ezra Beinart, are gathering on Zoom to meet prominent Palestinians appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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She was elected the first Jewish president of the Catholic Biblical Association. Then came the hate.
When Amy-Jill Levine was elected president of the Catholic Biblical Association earlier this month, she faced vicious backlash.
Those who opposed her election couldn’t exactly point to a lack of qualifications. Levine has written dozens of books on the New Testament, taught a New Testament course at the prestigious Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, served on the editorial board of Catholic Biblical Quarterly and spoken privately with Pope Francis three times.
Instead, her critics fixated on one trait they apparently consider disqualifying: She’s Jewish.
“Your Zionist ass doesn’t belong in our religion. Keep yourself to the Talmud and keep eating babies. STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM CHRISTIANITY,” someone wrote in an email to Levine, which she shared with the Forward.
Levine’s Facebook page was bombarded with so much hate that she asked her daughter to moderate the comments. Online critics called Levine “anti-Christian,” denounced her as “Zionist,” and attacked her efforts to push back against antisemitic interpretations of the Bible.
On its face, a Jew at the helm of a professional association devoted to the study of Christian scripture might seem odd. After all, the Catholic Bible Association, unlike some other academic associations for the study of scripture, promotes study of the Bible “within a context of faith,” and most of the association’s presidents in its 90-year history have been priests. Levine attends an Orthodox Jewish synagogue.
Some more even-keeled critics of Levine’s presidency focused on this argument. “At some point, we have to ask: what is the word ‘Catholic’ actually doing?” Mark Lambert, co-host of the podcast Catholic Unscripted, posted to X.
Levine, meanwhile, argues that the Catholic Biblical Association is a professional society, not a church. People of all faiths are eligible for membership, as long as they hold an advanced degree in biblical studies.
“An academic society, like a hospital, museum or university, is not the same thing as being a member of the clergy,” Levine wrote in an email to the Forward.
In fact, while Levine is the first Jewish president of the Catholic Biblical Association, she is not the first non-Catholic. Several Protestants have served in the role, according to chair of the executive board Gregory Sterling.
Levine was nominated by a committee and then ran unopposed for the presidency, Sterling said. It is an unpaid, one-year position.
“She was not elected because she is Jewish, but because she is an exceptional scholar and has played a very important role in Catholic-Jewish dialogue,” Sterling and the association’s executive director, Archie Wright, wrote in a joint statement. “The vitriol of some of the comments only reinforces the need to address the problem of Anti-Semitism.”
Several Catholic clergy also wrote letters of support for Levine amid the pushback.
Levine, for her part, said she has “no interest in undermining the Church.” The 70-year-old grew up in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, in a predominantly Portuguese Roman Catholic neighborhood, where she would occasionally go to Mass with her friends.
She preferred Mass to synagogue because “there were snacks, except you got the snacks in the church during the service, and you got the snacks in synagogue after the service,” she joked in an August interview on Nashville Public Radio.
Levine recalled that when she was 7 years old, a classmate told her she had killed Jesus — an accusation the elementary schooler had picked up from her priest. Levine, confused, went to her mother, who assured her that “God was doing just fine.”
That incident inspired Levine to attend Catholic catechism classes as a child, in addition to Hebrew School.
She went on to get a PhD in religion from Duke University and teach at Vanderbilt University as a professor of both the New Testament and Jewish Studies. Much of her scholarly work revolves around the Jewish context of Jesus and dispelling what she sees as antisemitic misinterpretations of the Bible.
“We do not need to make Judaism look bad in order to make Jesus look good,” Levine posted on Facebook after she was elected.
Catholic-Jewish relations
Sixty years ago, Levine’s election “would have been an astonishing thought,” said Philip Cunningham, director of the Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.
Though the Catholic church has a long history of antisemitism— including violent conversion efforts and teaching the theological belief that Jews were condemned by God — that has all changed in recent decades.
In the 1960s, Pope John XXIII took on the task of modernizing the Church, convening the Second Vatican Council to produce a theological document reconsidering many teachings and practices. The resulting document, often referred to as Vatican II, is perhaps most famous for allowing priests to host Mass in the local vernacular language of their parish instead of Latin. But it also changed Catholicism’s teachings about Jews.
Nostra Aetate, the section of Vatican II most famously concerned with Jews, shifted Catholic teachings about other religions enormously; while still maintaining that the Catholic Church is the “one true religion,” it also affirmed that other religions contain a “ray of truth,” a massive theological shift from the belief that any non-Catholic religion was false or even harmful.
Nostra Aetate spends significant time on Jews, specifically, including rejecting the belief that Jews should be held collectively responsible for killing Jesus. The document calls out antisemitism both theologically and politically.
“What happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today,” it reads. “The Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.”
Since Vatican II, popes have continued to advance dialogue with Jews, and with members of other religions. And the Church has forcefully rejected antisemitism, continuing to change its teachings on Judaism and Jewishness. That includes removing the term “perfidious Jews” from a Good Friday prayer, updating Catholic school classes on Judaism and even releasing statements acknowledging the legitimacy of Judaism alongside Christianity, placing Jews into a special and elevated relationship with the Church.
“The council set in motion a process of rapprochement between Jews and Catholics that took root particularly effectively in the United States, because the world’s largest Jewish diaspora community lives here and frequently alongside Catholics in cities and suburbs,” Cunningham said.
Levine, too, highlighted the importance of Nostra Aetate to her career, writing in an email that the document’s acceptance of Jews “opened the door for me to work in New Testament studies.”
But not all Catholics embraced the teachings of Vatican II. A diffuse movement often referred to as traditionalist Catholics, or tradcaths, felt that the efforts toward modernization had gone too far. Some tradcath groups simply sought to preserve the rituals of Latin Mass.
Others, however, including the recently excommunicated Society of Saint Pius X, or SSPX, take issue with the council’s teachings, believing that acknowledging the freedom and legitimacy of other religions takes away from the centrality of the Catholic Church’s teachings. In short, if the Catholic Church’s teachings are true, they argue, then no other religion can be legitimate.
The French-language account of SPPX posted to X, calling Levine an “objectively scandalous choice” and denouncing her “relativist interpretation of the texts condemning homosexuality,” as well as the fact that “a person who refuses to recognize Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is placed at the head of an institution that claims to be Catholic.”
Despite the newer Catholic teachings about Judaism, some tradcath groups, as well as individual Catholic influencers such as Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens and Carrie Prejean Boller, have been endorsing antisemitic beliefs including supersessionism and deicide, as well as conspiracy theories about Jewish devil worship or government control. Though the Vatican has chastised these figures and repudiated their stances, they have continued to spread antisemitic dogma, including the belief that Jews hate and seek to oppress Christians and that Kabbalah endorses pedophilia. Many also endorse Christian nationalism, which the Vatican opposes.
This antisemitic subgroup within Catholicism is relatively small, but extremely visible thanks to influencers like Fuentes and Owens with millions of followers, and their understanding of Catholicism spreads to people both inside and outside the church. Their antisemitic version of Catholic ideology, as well as the conspiracy theories they spread, can be seen in some of the hate emails Levine received, such as references to eating babies, a version of the age-old blood libel that Jews used Christian children’s blood to make matzo.
Still, while the antisemitic fringe of the Catholic church is loud, the institutions are stalwart in their support for Vatican II’s acceptance of Judaism.
Levine’s election is an indication “that the changes that Vatican II sought to inspire have been happening,” Cunningham said. “That does not mean that all the issues between Jews and Catholics have been resolved — but at least amongst the much of the leadership in the Catholic community, the old stereotypes and caricatures are recognized for what they are.”
The post She was elected the first Jewish president of the Catholic Biblical Association. Then came the hate. appeared first on The Forward.
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Northeast Philadelphia says goodbye to its last Jewish deli
(JTA) — PHILADELPHIA — After running the family deli for several decades, Steve Stein says his 83-year-old legs were telling him it was time to call it quits. But it wasn’t only that.
The neighborhood has totally changed since his dad, Mike, first took over the business more than 60 years ago. Back then Northeast Philadelphia was an epicenter of Jewish life, packed with synagogues and other Jewish establishments. Most of them are gone. And now — with the close of Steve Stein’s Famous Deli and Restaurant — the area just lost its last Jewish deli.
But only after an outpouring of affection from longtime customers, who flocked to the place once news spread in the last few weeks. “It’s overwhelming,” Stein said. “The amount of people that came in here in the last 10 days, two weeks. Their comments are very touching. I knew I was liked. I didn’t know I was loved.”
To be sure, several customers told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that they’ll miss Stein, but they also bemoaned the fact there aren’t many Jewish food options left. Certainly none with prices as low as Famous.
“I’ve been going there my whole life, “ said Rebecca Asheuer, who grew up a few miles away from Famous’ current location — its third since the Steins took over the business. “I feel surprise and sadness, because it’s the last one in the Northeast.
“I think the Jewish people are moving out of the city and also the businesses used to be passed down in families. Now with the economy and other stuff, people don’t want to take over the family business anymore,” she said.
Another longtime customer mourned the closing of the deli, but also the disappearance of Jewish life in the area.
“I kind of expected it to go sooner or later,” said Aileen Owens, who remembered going to Famous when the Auspitz family ran over six decades ago. “There’s nobody around. Synagogues and all that stuff, it’s all fading out. They went to the suburbs.”
According to Steve’s account, his father Mike Stein, his brother Arnold and cousin Jack began running the produce concession at the Famous Deli in Philly’s Castor Gardens neighborhood in the late 1950s. Around 1960, they bought the deli from the Auspitz family, which had operated a chain of Philadelphia delis dating to the 1920s.
Steve and his brother Arnie eventually ran the deli together. As Jewish families moved farther into Northeast Philadelphia, the deli moved as well — first to Krewstown Road in the mid-1970s, eventually having two locations there, and then about 14 years ago to its final location at 1619 Grant Ave.
If all goes right, Steve’s 57-year-old son Lee hopes to continue the migration and resurrect the family business in the suburbs. Sort of.
“I’m looking to have a place of my own,” said Lee, who started off as an eight-year-old taking out the trash, but would occasionally try to cut the lox when no one was looking. “I have a lot of experience in this business.
“I call myself multi-talented, not just in the deli business, but in cooking and baking, I would probably downsize and not do fruit and produce like we do here. It’s just not worth, you know, the space for what you’re paying. I would do a similar situation to here. Deli, prepared foods, a little bit of bakery, a small sit down. But what I’ve told the people that come in here, ‘You’ll never, ever see some of this product again. And you’ll probably never, ever see these prices ever again.’”
Still, he wants his new venture to be affordable.
“My father always liked being a people-pleaser,” the younger Stein said. “So he tries to please people with a price. But that price affects you eventually.”
As for Steve, he wishes his son well, but knows it won’t be the same. “Lee wants to try something, but not here,” Stein said.
He added that some remaining establishments in the wider region – “they do 90% restaurant and 10% deli, I do 90% deli and 10% restaurant” – will “benefit from me not being here.”
One former competitor isn’t so sure. “I’m upset another Jewish deli has closed and he’s been in business a long time and certainly has his whole clientele,” said Michael Young, longtime owner of Ben & Irv’s, a deli restaurant in Huntingdon Valley, a suburb about 20 minutes northwest of Famous. “But it’s a different world today; a different area. So I don’t know if it will help us.”
Lee Stein said he actually tried to stay put, but needed a little help.“The real problem is the landlord never took care of the building,” said Lee, who wishes his dad had been more assertive on that front. “I tried to make it work here with them, figuring this would be an easy fix. I asked them for some renovations; to put a new roof on. The roof has several holes in it. When it rains outside, it pours in here. So, I tried to negotiate with them first before I did anything else, but that wasn’t going anywhere.”
JTA’s attempts to reach the landlord for comment were unsuccessful. Regardless, Steve Stein, who was forced to close the deli for a short while last year due to health code issues, says he is ready to turn the page.
The first thing he’ll do once things settle down is get therapy on his aching legs. And he’s excited to have more time to devote to his wife of 61 years, Sheila, along with his children, Lee and Mindy, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. “But I’ll miss my customers. They’re like family.”
Already he’s feeling the difference “It’s devastating,” he said on Aug. 24, the day after the store officially closed, amid a final “blowout sale” to get rid of what little was left. “I’m usually the first one in the store.
“It’s going to be very much missed by me.”
He’s not the only one.
“Nothing lasts forever,” said one customer before heading into Famous one last time. “But it’s very sad.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Northeast Philadelphia says goodbye to its last Jewish deli appeared first on The Forward.
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For graphic novelist Joann Sfar, drawing after Oct. 7 was a way to put stones on Jewish graves
For many Jews, the morning of Oct. 7 remains seared into memory. In Joann Sfar’s case, it was also the day of his birthday party, which included “as many Muslims as Jews,” he told me. Amidst tragedy, Sfar felt a profound gratitude for life, which seemed especially precious. It was a day of fear and uncertainty, followed by many more over the following months. For Sfar, drawing was the only way out.
To Life is Sfar’s illustrated journal of his experience after Oct. 7, a reflection of his fierce peace advocacy coupled with a profound connection to Israel. It follows several previous books by Sfar, who is a French Jewish graphic novelist best known for The Rabbi’s Cat. His works touch on his Sephardic heritage, highlighting a history of friendship and brotherhood between Arabs and Jews.
To Life is the English translation of Nous Vivrons, which was published in June 2024 as the first of a three-part series. It was followed by Que Faire Des Juifs? (What To Do with the Jews?), a nearly 600-page graphic novel that chronicles the history of the Jewish people. Sfar concluded the series with Terre de Sang: Le Temps du Désespoir (Land of Blood: The Time of Despair), which shares Palestinian voices and which Sfar describes as the “saddest” volume of the trilogy.
I spoke with Sfar in July after reading To Life, which will be officially released on September 8. At present, the translations of the second and third volumes are not yet scheduled to be published. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Now that you’re expanding To Life’s audience to English speakers, what do you expect non-French audiences to learn? What do you hope that they take from your piece?
What I would really love is a new vision on the Middle East. I’m really surprised how New York has made the Middle East American, using it in the Trump and Mamdani debate, which I have to say has very little interest from Europe. What I would love is for people to see real lives from the Middle East to see how similar people are. I come from a part Ukrainian and part Algerian Jewish family. When I went to Palestinian cities, I was surprised how many Palestinian seniors look like my father, and how many Moroccan Jews from Israel look Palestinian.
These are people who are very similar and who are trapped in a conflict which is older than them. I really would love readers to dig into personal experience, rather than abstractions. I think embracing this region is really putting hope into individuals, because if you start to put faith into narrative, you’re lost.
In your work, you make an interesting distinction between individuals denying each other’s peoplehood on both sides — Israelis saying there was never a Palestine, anti-Zionists saying Israel never existed — and your emphasis on interviews in your piece. Why was it important for you to have such a connection to real humans throughout the process?
It’s a very strange thing to say because there was real tragedy, but it made me happy because I love these people. I’ve been lucky enough to spend a lot of time in Palestinian and Israeli cities. If you take it from an individual level, I believe in them and I have a hope for them. Something beautiful is that even if they don’t want it, they are interconnected. Their economies are interconnected; no one is going to exterminate anyone. They’ll be there still.
In this region, no one ever talks to me about Zionism. People deal with their everyday issues; they have no idea what’s going to occur in two months. I know people who are smarter than me have a big political essay about this region, but that’s not my job. My job is to do what I love, like an adventure novel, where you go to the place, you meet the people, and you bring back a story.
Were there any illustrations in the book that you found particularly interesting or meaningful?
There are some photographs that are so shocking you cannot see them in the news, and making a drawing makes it more acceptable. One picture that blew me away is the burial of a father who was killed during October 7. His kid is crying on the grave, and there are the small stones you put on Jewish Ashkenazi tombs. This kid is a Jew, but he could be an Arab, and he mourns his father with a stone. I did a very simple drawing, and somehow that’s what war is about. War is not about heroism, it’s not about glory, it’s not about victory, it’s about kids who are going to mourn their fathers or mothers or family.
This reminds me of a quote from the book where you say that your writing “is like putting little rocks on top of Jewish graves.” Are there any moments in the book that you feel are the most important to hear and remember?
In some fields of France today, and especially among artists, it’s almost forbidden to recall October 7 because of the mass murder of Gaza. But my feeling is you need to be able to cry for both. October 7 was the worst murdering of Jews after WWII, and the mass massacre in Gaza is something we shall remember in 100 years. We should be able not only to cry for both, but also to consider the situation as a whole and to say, okay, what’s next? Are we waiting for the next slaughter or can we do better than this?
As an American, I know about the Jewish experience in the U.S. over the past few years, but I didn’t know exactly what was going on in France and the antisemitism there that you described in your book. Can you tell me more about your experience?
I’m more worried about America because for French Jews, we never let people harass us without responding. We still have a very strong connection to the Arab world, so when people try to oppose Jews and Arabs in France, it somehow doesn’t work. I would love to say that in an optimistic way, but there’s also a lot of violence and harassment. The minute a Jewish artist starts to work, there’s a threat of boycott and everyone starts to treat him like a ‘genocidal Zionist.’
I’ve been talking of Palestine for 30 years, doing reporting in Palestinian towns for two years, but somehow it’s not enough. But we really fight back, because violence here is very often. I had a performance in Marseille, and people gathered at the front to prevent me from drawing on stage. Luckily, many people showed up to defend me, because they knew my show was humane, about peace. At some point, it’s because I’m a Jew that pisses them off. But we know it’s a fight, and we’re ready for it.
What were people’s reactions to your book when it first came out in France? I’m especially curious about the non-Jewish and anti-Zionist population, and whether they read your work.
Everything online is hell. In bookstores, it’s heaven. For To Life, it’s been two years of performing in huge bookstores. I also went to all the universities in France which were blocked by the pro-Gaza crowd, like Columbia, but in France I went to talk in front of them and they were very nice talks. The book sold more than 60,000 copies in France, which is huge. It has a very mainstream audience, not just a Jewish audience. When you go to bookstores, people are very okay to talk, and especially when you go to my meetings, it’s okay to disagree. At my meetings, you can be pro-Palestine — you’re welcome. You can be pro-Israel — you’re welcome, and you can know nothing and you’re welcome also.
I’ve been dealing with Arab and Jewish topics for more than 30 years, and I have a huge amount of readers in France. The Arabs and Jews of my age know what they lost, in the real brotherhood and friendship we had fighting against the extreme right party. We have political history together, and many people remember that. I have a lot of hope, but we need to stay vocal.
Since the book was written in 2023, are there any moments that feel surprising or strange for you to read today?
One thing which is really surprising is that October 7 is less than three years ago, and it’s almost as if everyone forgot. Somehow, people have made political use of this slaughter by any means. The historical moment is almost forgotten. If my book is worth something, it is as an immediate report on the immediate aftermath of October 7 on site. I was in the south of Israel, I was with kibbutzniks, I was with the military, I was with Arab people. One thing we risk is to forget what occurred on October 7, and then forget what occurred during the Shoah, because in France today all the memory sites for WWII are being attacked as pro-Israel. So, we need to keep our memory. Without memory, there’ll be no peace.
One moment in your book that I found very powerful was when you parallel a famous image of Jews being shot in the Holocaust to one of two teenagers being killed on October 7. I’d love to hear more about your thoughts connecting October 7 to previous tragedies, especially with how you refer to the events as a pogrom.
In France, most of the people don’t know about the Jewish oppression in the Arab world, how many of us had to leave the Arab countries after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. When October 7 occurred, in many Sephardic families and Jewish families from Israel, it recalled what occurred in many oriental countries. There’s a history of killing Jews in the Arab world, and it’s as if people awake to that. We have memories — nothing is the same — but we have a history. Amongst the things that really terrify me today is the dislocation of the link between Israeli Jews, American Jews, and European Jews. I was sad to see how many young American Jewish readers have no connection at all to Israel. You can criticize Israel, it’s okay, but pretending you have no connection to Israel is a lie to the face of your family.
In your opinion, why do you feel like this is the case for so many American Jews? Is there a way that you feel like this changes?
I would say Israel is also to blame because Israel has taught the diaspora Jews that it should be a constant exchange. You cannot raise a child making him guilty about not being pro-Israel enough. I’m not asking anyone to be pro-Israel — it’s a very dysfunctional country with an extreme right government. But the connection exists through your parents, your grandparents, their history. Pretending there is no connection is a lie. In the Jewish story, every moment a Jew tries to pretend he’s not part of the Jewry is going to be the first to be slaughtered. I’m not an Israeli, but I’m part of this history and I’m really proud to be part of this history.
Throughout the book, you imagine many conversations with your late grandfather, and I was interested in why this was something that felt so connected to you at this time. Why did you want to include this dialogue in your book?
He really raised me, and everything I do or say is considering what my grandfather would have said. He did not believe in any narrative. He was not a nationalist; he would not believe in all the right wing crap about pride, country, anything. It was only about survival. Regarding Europe, he was very pessimistic. He was saying that we’ll have some decades of peace after Auschwitz, and then it’s going to go back to normal Jew hatred. I’m afraid to say he was right.
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