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A scholar sees a common root for antisemitism and racism: ‘Christian supremacy’
(JTA) — Magda Teter’s new book, “Christian Supremacy,” begins in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 11, 2017. Hundreds of white nationalist neo-Nazis who ostensibly gathered to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a local park broke into a chant: “Jews will not replace us.”
Other writers and scholars would note how antisemitism shaped white nationalism. But Teter, professor of history and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University, saw something else: how centuries of Christian thought and practice fed the twin evils of antisemitism and racism.
“The ideology espoused by white supremacists in the US and in Europe is rooted in Christian ideas of social and religious hierarchy,” she writes. “These ideas developed, gradually, first in the Mediterranean and Europe in respect to Jews and then in respect to people of color in European colonies and in the US, before returning transformed back to Europe.”
In the book, subtitled “Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism,” she traces this idea from the writings of the early church fathers like Paul the Apostle, though centuries of Catholic and Protestant debates over the status of Jews in Europe, to the hardening of racist attitudes with the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Antisemitic laws and theology, she argues, developed within Christianity a “mental habit” of exclusion and dominance that would eventually be applied to people of color up to and including modern times.
Teter is careful to acknowledge the different forms antisemitism and racism have taken, distinguishing between the Jews’ experience of social and legal exclusion and near annihilation, and the enslavement, displacement and ongoing persecution of Black people. And yet, she writes, “that story began with Christianity’s theological relation with Jews and Judaism.”
Teter is previously the author of “Blood Libel: On The Trail of an Antisemitic Myth,” winner of the 2020 National Jewish Book Award. At Fordham, the Catholic university in the Bronx, she is helping assemble what may be the largest repository of artifacts and literature dedicated to the Jewish history of the borough.
We spoke Thursday about how groups like the Proud Boys embrace centuries-old notions of Christian superiority, how “whiteness” became a thing and how she, as a non-Jew raised in Poland, became a Jewish studies scholar.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Your book was conceived and written during the COVID lockdown. Where did the idea for the book come from?
It’s an accidental project. I’ve been teaching the history of antisemitism for years, and I live in Harlem so questions of race and racism are very stark in my daily life. And since I grew up in Poland, and American history was not something we were taught or studied, I’ve never been satisfied with the various explanations for the strength of antisemitism and history of racism. And as I mentioned in my prologue, I watched the Raoul Peck documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro,” which has a clip with James Baldwin saying that white people have to figure out why they invented the idea of the N-word and must “embrace this stranger that they have maligned so long.” You could also say that the European Christians created the idea of “the Jew” and that sort of caricature had absolutely nothing to do with flesh and blood Jews. I kept noticing these parallels, as an outsider, reading American and African-American history.
I was also thinking about this idea of servitude that was attached to Jews in Christian theology, and then in law.
You write in your book that “Over time, white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” What do you mean by servitude in this context?
In Christian theology, from the earliest Christian texts, the idea of servitude and slavery is attached to the concept of Jews and Judaism. Paul does it in his Epistles. He uses this quote from the book of Genesis that “the elder shall serve the younger,” which becomes really embedded in Christian theology. It is the Jews, the elder people, who should serve the Christians, the younger people. Later on in medieval theology and canon law, Jews are in a servile position, consigned for their sin of rejecting Jesus to perpetual servitude. So even though Jews were free people and could live mostly where they wanted to live, marry whoever they wanted to marry — nobody was sold and some even had slaves — that idea of Jews as confined to perpetual servitude to Christians created a habit of thinking of Jews as having an inferior social status.
That language became secularized in modern times, and we see the development of the [antisemitic] trope of Jewish power: that they are in places where they shouldn’t be. I worked on fleshing out the parallels between the idea and then legal status of Jewish servitude and the conceptual perception of Black people in servile and inferior positions.
Magda Teter’s new book explores how “white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” (Chuck Fishman)
What other kinds of parallels did you find between racism and antisemitism?
In the Christian theology, Black people, like Jews, will be seen as cursed by God. Jews were [portrayed as] lazy because they didn’t work physically — they made money and exploited Christians. Black people were [portrayed as] lazy because they were trying to avoid physical labor at the expense of white men. Both people were seen as carnal, both as sexually dangerous, and so on.
I was struck by the fact that the racist turn of Christian supremacy — justifying the enslavement of Black people on theological grounds — is a fairly late development, taking hold in the early modern period when Europeans established slaveholding empires.
That’s right. In the summer of 2020, the summer of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, we were all thinking about these issues of race and racism and America. And as I was in the middle of writing the article that became the book, I felt that there was a deeper history that needed to be told, and that slavery is not bound by color until the enslavement of Black Africans by Europeans during the colonial expansion of Europe.
After the French Revolution, when Jews were offered “emancipation” in much of Europe, there were deep debates about whether they could be citizens and be entitled to the same rights and protections as Christian citizens of France and England and other countries. How was that debate informed by Christianity?
In pre-modern Europe, there was obviously both a religious and legal framework under which Jews existed. They had their place in a social hierarchy. After the French Revolution, people are creating a new political reality. The idea of equality obviously challenged the social hierarchies that existed, including the idea that Christians were the superior religion. And that begins to play a role on two levels. One is the level of, well, “how can you be equal and be our judges and make decisions about us?” It’s fear of power — political power and political equality. That challenges the habit of thinking that sees Jews as inferior, in servitude and otherwise insolent and arrogant.
The other level comes from Enlightenment scholars who begin to place Jews in the Middle East and in the Holy Land, in Palestine. Jews are no longer seen as European. They are seen as “Oriental,” and they are compared to the non-European religions and practices that these Enlightenment scholars have been studying. Their differences are now also racialized. “They are not like us, they can’t assimilate. They can never be Frenchmen, they can never be Germans.”
And I guess it’s a short step from that to regarding people with dark skin as inferior and subordinate.
That’s right. Enlightenment scholars are also trying to to understand why it is justified to enslave Black Africans and they do it through “scientific” and other means. They classify Africans as inferior intellectually and they create this idea of race.
I began to think about these European politicians and intellectuals in terms of creating their identities, and what I ended up arguing is what we saw in Charlottesville, what we’re seeing in Europe. It’s not necessarily just about hate, but it’s about exclusion and rejection of Jews and people of color from equality, from citizenship.
And the common thread here is that whiteness and Christianity become inseparable. You write that “freedom and liberty now came to be linked not only to Christianity, but to whiteness, and servitude and enslavement to blackness.”
That’s right. White Christian “liberty” becomes embedded and embodied in law.
Did you see any pitfalls in drawing parallels between the Black and Jewish experiences? I am thinking of those in either community who might say, “How dare you compare our suffering to theirs!”
Yes, I was tempered. I think what some call “comparative victimhood” has paralyzed conversations about this subject, and I kept it in my mind all the time. What I hope comes through is that there’s incredible value in a comparative approach. Coming from Jewish studies as my primary field, the comparison with the Black experience gave me clarity on the nature of antisemitism as well as on the nature of the Jewish experience, and vice versa: The Jewish experience can also give clarity to some of the aspects of anti-Black racism.
What’s an example?
So, for instance, questions like, “Are Jews white? Are they not white? When did they become white?” That’s a whole genre of scholarship. And when you look at it through the lens of law and ideology, you begin to see that from a legal perspective, Jews were considered white in the United States because they could immigrate and they could be naturalized according to law. They did not have to go to court to become American. Their rights to vote were not challenged. There was discrimination, they couldn’t stay in hotels and in some places they couldn’t find employment, but by law, they were considered citizens. The debate about the whiteness of Jews is creating a fog of misunderstanding.
Black Americans were targeted by specific legal statutes from the very beginning in the Constitution and then in naturalization law and so on. And then there was the backlash even after the Civil War to the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments [aimed at establishing political equality for Americans of all races].
Statues at the Strasbourg Cathedral depict Ecclesia and Synagoga, representing the triumph of the church, at left, and the servitude of Judaism, which is represented by a blindfolded figure, drooping and carrying a broken lance. (Edelseider/Wikimedia Commons)
How much do modern-day white supremacists, like the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys, see themselves as Christian? Or is this a kind of white supremacy that doesn’t name itself Christian but doesn’t even realize how many of its ideas are based in theology?
I think they might not be conscious of this legacy, but neo-Nazis take from the legacy of the Nazis who themselves were not thinking of themselves as Christian necessarily. But what I argue in the book is that white Christian supremacy becomes white supremacy. It never discards the Christian sense of domination and superiority that emerges from its early relationship with Jews and Judaism.
In the United States, Black people serve as contrast figures to whiteness, in the law and in the culture. You cannot have whiteness without Blackness. For Christians, Jews serve as that contrast figure. Consciously or unconsciously, the Proud Boys are embracing that. They talk of “God-given” freedoms for white people. That is the Christian legacy.
You said that the Nazis didn’t necessarily see themselves as a Christian movement. But I must ask, even though it is not the scope of your book, was the Holocaust a culmination of white Christian supremacy? Because I think many Christian theologians would want to say that Nazism was godless, and a perversion of the true faith.
I’ll say that when exclusionary ideology is coupled with the power of the state, that’s where it can lead.
In the years since the Holocaust especially, there have been many efforts by Christian leaders to address the ideological failings of the past. You write about Nostra Aetate, the 1965 declaration by the Catholic Church absolving Jews of collective guilt in the death of Jesus and some Protestant documents of contrition. But I got the feeling you were disappointed that many denominations haven’t gone far enough in reckoning with the past.
There was a sort of a moral sense that something needs to be addressed after the Holocaust. But then it is not fully addressed. I don’t think anybody has addressed the issue of power — the roots of hate, yes, but not the dynamics of power. We’ll see where the book goes, but maybe theologians will begin to grapple with this legacy of superiority and domination, and the way hierarchical habits of thinking have been developed through theology and through religious culture.
What other impact do you hope the book may have?
White supremacy is very much in the air. We need to speak up against it, and make connections and allyships. I hope that maybe because the book deals with law and power, it may create bridges among people who care about “We the People” as a vision of people who are diverse, respectful and equal, and not the exclusionary vision offered by white and Christian supremacy.
A cross burns at a Ku Klux Klan rally on Aug. 8, 1925. (National Photo Company Collection)
I’d love to talk about your background. You’re not Jewish but you are chair of Jewish Studies at Fordham, a Catholic university. What drew you to the study of Judaism and the Jews?
I grew up in Poland with a father who from the time I was a little girl would point out to me that there had been Jews in Poland. We would drive through the countryside, and he’d say, “This used to be a Jewish town and there used to be a synagogue and there was the Jewish cemetery.” I grew up being very conscious of the past’s presence and this kind of stark absence of Jews in Poland, where in the 1970s when I grew up Jewish history was taboo.
As soon as Jewish books on Jewish subjects began to be published, including those that dealt with antisemitism, we would read it together. We would talk about it. He wouldn’t just shift the destruction and murder of Jews in Poland on to the Nazis.
There was no Jewish studies program in Poland when I was applying to universities, so I studied Hebrew in Israel, and then studied Yiddish in New York at YIVO. I came to Columbia University to get my PhD in Jewish history and my career went in the direction it did. I was a professor of history and director of the Jewish and Israel studies program at Wesleyan University. I came to Fordham eight years ago and created a program in Jewish studies.
Your previous book was about the blood libel, the historic canard that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood. This one’s about antisemitism. I don’t want to presume, but is your interest in these subjects in any way an act of contrition?
I grew up in a very secular household. I did not grow up Catholic. But I think growing up in Poland made me very, very aware of antisemitism and the history of antisemitism. I got my PhD from Columbia University in Jewish history, which did not emphasize Jewish suffering, but Jewish life, and I have studied Jewish life and teach about Jewish life — not just about Jewish suffering.
However, in the last few years, antisemitism has certainly been on the minds of many of us. I also am committed to the idea of shared history, and therefore all my scholarship, as much as it is about Jews, it is also about the church and Poland and the law. Jews are an integral part of that history and culture. And, as such, I’m committed to that, to teaching about the vibrancy of Jewish life as much as the dynamics of what made that life difficult over the centuries.
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The post A scholar sees a common root for antisemitism and racism: ‘Christian supremacy’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Anne Carson — a poet of spirituality and ‘small things’ — has won the Nobel Prize
Anne Carson, today awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, can be a difficult poet. Much of her work is erudite, complex and genre-defying; it is poetry and prose and criticism and translation and, occasionally, a kind of theology. But Carson’s work is also profoundly spiritual and richly rewarding, especially for those of us prone to introspection, intellection, melancholy, and, as Carson once described the task of a writer, “noticing small things.”
There are many facets of Carson’s work, and many lenses through which one might relate to it. Born in 1950, Carson was trained as a classicist, and spent much of her career teaching Ancient Greek; in addition to her translations of Sophocles, Sappho, and others, her own poems are often saturated with classical references. Her essays on a wide variety of subjects are similarly erudite and rich. Many have written on these aspects of her work.
Personally, though, as a contemplatively-inclined Jewish reader, I have found her to be a literary as well as spiritual role model. I use the word ‘spiritual’ with hesitation. I doubt Carson would like it much, and what I mean by it is not the cultivation of certain warm feelings but the choice to pay attention, in a certain way, to both the surfaces and the depths of things; to refuse the pat dichotomy between the head and the heart; to dwell in the interiority of experience that, paradoxically, arises from “noticing small things.”
When Carson does turn explicitly to religious and spiritual subjects (she was raised Catholic), she excels, perhaps more than any other writer I have read, in avoiding the clichés that make writing about ‘spirituality’ so challenging. Her long poem from 1992, “The Truth About God” begins:
My religion makes no sense
and does not help me
therefore I pursue it.When we see
how simple it would have been
we will thrash ourselves
Carson isn’t speaking conventionally here, I don’t think — this isn’t quite the Israelites saying, in Sinai, Na’aseh v’Nishmah, we will do and [then] we will understand. But it is a contemplative version of it; a devotional attitude toward the particular. In another section of the poem, entitled “God’s Justice,” she writes:
In the beginning there were days set aside for various tasks.
On the day He was to create justice
God got involved in making a dragonflyand lost track of time.
It was about two inches long
with turquoise dots all down its back like Lauren Bacall.
So this is why there is no justice in the world, or why we must always pursue it anyway: because God was so busy with beauty. The poet, too, gets distracted; the rest of the poem is about the dragonfly. (Like Mary Oliver, Carson is a sublime poet of nature.) As indeed is true in our world — alongside all the evils and injustices of the last few years, the shimmering of tree branches in the breeze, the light refracting into my study, remain as resonant as ever.
When I heard the news about Carson’s Nobel, I came across a post by Florida State University Professor Martin Kavka, whom I’ve known for many years and who, it turns out, is also a Carson fan. Like me, Kavka was elated to hear the news, and we chatted for a while. “Sometimes we think of poetry as something that expresses the way the world is, that pierces the mystery of the world and gives us True Knowledge,” Kavka told me. “But for me, Carson’s poetry, in its odd recombination of words, expresses how we so often feel askew when relating to the world, as if it will always be mysterious, as if its mystery were just there to taunt us.”
“We all know that when we feel askew,” Kavka continued, “authority figures make us feel that it’s our fault. This is true of religious authority figures — and Jewish texts, given that Deuteronomy suggests that we are at fault when we are not thriving — but also of political and educational authorities. Carson gives us all armor for those moments… And for so many of us who are (over)educated, we value assembly too much and beauty not enough. I feel recalibrated whenever I read her, as if I’ve just visited some sort of emotional chiropractor. “
I love that insight. Carson is definitely, in some ways, a nerdy writer. Her work is intellectual, dense, and sometimes opaque. (I find myself reaching again for the word ‘erudite.’) But that is not at the expense of emotional depth. A recent essay, for example, describes Carson’s heartbreaking loss, due to Parkinson’s Disease, of her ability to write legibly — but along the way discusses the Roman poet Catullus, the painter Cy Twombly, composer David Lang, psychiatrist Norman Doidge, as well as Roland Barthes, John Keats, John Cage, Gertrude Stein, and attending a boxing class for people with Parkinson’s. In it, she writes:
Let’s start with life, your life. There it is before you — possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map — let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor, a pirate, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up and you’re seventy. Looking ahead you see a black doorway. You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you look at it or not. Most moments contain it, most moments have a sort of sediment of black doorway at the bottom of the glass. You wonder if other people are seeing it too. You ask them. They say no. You ask why. No one can tell you.
A minute ago you were 25. Then you went ahead getting the life you want. One day you glanced over from 25 to now and there it is, the doorway, black, waiting.
Similarly, Kavka’s favorite Carson poem, “Merry Christmas from Hegel,” begins with the poet “wretchedly lonely with all my family dead”:
It was the year my brother died, I lived up north and had few friends or they all went away. Christmas Day I was sitting in my armchair, reading something about Hegel.
Yet she doesn’t stay in the armchair. She is “overjoyed” at Hegel’s language, at “this notion of a philosophic space where words drift in gentle mutual redefinition of one another,” and she goes outside to stand in the snow:
I went to the middle of a woods. Fir trees, the teachers of this, all around. Minus twenty degrees in the wind but inside the trees is no wind. The world subtracts itself in layers. Outer sounds like traffic and shoveling vanish. Inner sounds become audible, cracks, sighs, caresses, twigs, bird breath, toenails of squirrel. The fir trees move hugely. The white is perfectly curved, stunned with itself. Puffs of ice fog and some gold things float up. Shadows rake their motionlessness across the snow with a vibration of other shadows moving crosswise on them, shadow on shadow, in precise velocities. It is very cold; then that, too, begins to subtract itself, the body chills on its surface but the core is hot and it is possible to disconnect the surface, to withdraw to the core, where a ravishing peace flows in, so ravishing that I am unembarrassed to use the word *ravishing*, and it is not a peace of separation from the senses, but the washing-through peace of looking, listening, feeling, at the very core of snow, at the very core of the care of snow.
This is the consolation of the intellectual life, in the best sense: the abstruse philosophical language of Hegel liberates the poet from her melancholy, sends her out into the woods where she has an encounter with the numinous, rendered in perfect, concrete prose without a single platitude of religious or spiritual writing.
Said Kavka of this work, “I learned how to be a widower — how to relate to the world so that death does not govern my existence — from her.”
I am delighted that Carson has won the Nobel, not only for the recognition (and money!) that she deserves, but because it might win her some new readers, including those of us in the Jewish spirituality world for whom Carson’s “noticing” is at the center of our religious lives. I’ll give her the last words, once again taken from the poem “The Truth About God”:
God’s Work
Moonlight in the kitchen is a sign of God.
The kind of sadness that is a black suction pipe extracting you
from your own navel and which the Buddhists call“no mindcover” is a sign of God.
The blind alleys that run alongside human conversation
like lashes are a sign of God.God’s own calmness is a sign of God.
The surprisingly cold smell of potatoes or money.
Solid pieces of silence.From these diverse signs you can see
how much work remains to do.
Put away your sadness, it is a mantle of work.
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Ford was the most pro-Israel president in US history, and we need his playbook now
If you ask historians to name the most pro-Israel president in U.S. history, you’ll generally hear variations of the same responses. Harry Truman recognized the Jewish state; Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden defended Zionism; George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump have all, at various points, been dubbed “the first Jewish president.”
Gerald Ford almost never makes the list. He is usually lumped in with Dwight D. Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush as a president who was hostile to Israel. I would argue, contrary to the popular perception, he belongs at the very top. In Israel’s hour of need, Ford provided what only a true friend can offer: tough love.
After the 1973 Yom Kippur War shattered Israel’s self-confidence, Ford perceived what many in Israel could not: Militarism as a substitute for diplomacy is self-destructive.
Much like today, the wars of 1967 and 1973 involved remarkable technical feats on the part of Israel; they also nearly triggered global nuclear conflict. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara described the U.S. and Soviet Union as being a “hair’s breadth” away from war in 1967. In 1973, with Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev drinking heavily, the CIA reported that the Soviets had moved nuclear weapons to Alexandria, Egypt; the U.S. subsequently went to DEFCON III. What made 1973 so deeply troubling was that Egypt’s Anwar Sadat had secretly attempted to avert war and pursue peace. Still more troubling is the fact that King Hussein of Jordan had personally flown to Israel to warn of the imminence of an Arab attack.
Even after Ford took office, Israel’s government did not take Sadat seriously. But Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, a Holocaust refugee and a friend of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, did. If Nixon and Kissinger brought out the worst in each other — from supporting the coup in Chile to prolonging the Vietnam war — Ford and Kissinger brought out the best in each other, at least when it came to Middle East diplomacy.
In March 1975, after Israel continued to resist compromises with Egypt, Kissinger advised Ford to take a tougher line with Rabin. On March 21, Ford wrote one of the harshest letters in the history of the U.S.-Israel relationship, indicating that he had ordered “an immediate reassessment of U.S. policy in the area, including our relations with Israel.” Ford subsequently suspended or deferred new arms deliveries, including F-15 fighter jets. These were extremely risky political moves with very little domestic upside. But Ford was not simply another politician looking to the next election; he was a statesman looking to the next generation.
More importantly, Ford was acting as a true ally. Friends do not let friends squander a fleeting chance for peace with a mortal enemy. The Sinai II agreement was signed in 1975, committing Israel and Egypt to resolve their differences through diplomacy rather than warfare, laying the groundwork for the 1979 Camp David Accords. Jimmy Carter rightly gets credit for finishing the job with the former Irgun leader Menachem Begin as Israeli prime minister; but it was Ford who enabled the breakthrough. Six years after Sinai II, Sadat became a martyr for peace; two decades after the agreement (and two years after the first Oslo Accord), Rabin met the same fate.
For nearly half a century, that peace has served as the cornerstone of American and Israeli security in the region. It has survived wars, revolution, and terrorism. Peace with Egypt broke the taboo on Arab-Israeli pacts, demonstrating that coexistence was indeed possible; it paved the way for a treaty with Jordan and, ultimately, the Abraham Accords. To this day, Egypt remains one of Israel’s most vital intelligence partners.
What Ford can teach today’s leaders
Israel’s current leaders appear oblivious to this history. Highly credible reports have indicated that Israel was warned of war by Egyptian and other officials prior to the Oct. 7 attacks, which were themselves strikingly reminiscent of 1973. Remarkably, Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel is even said to have flown to Israel days before the slaughter to warn Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s claim that he only learned of these warnings from the media raises profound questions.
Oct. 7 and what followed have demonstrated the absolute bankruptcy of the “escalate to deescalate” doctrine and also the centrality of the Middle East conflict to regional and global security. So, in this world-historic moment, what can we learn from Gerald Ford?
First, like Ford, we must be realistic about the severity and trajectory of the crisis. It is clear that one or more players are inching closer toward the deployment of an unconventional weapon, ground forces, and/or a major conventional attack that would destroy critical infrastructure. Any such action would certainly be reciprocated, taking the global economy off a cliff.
Second, we must insist on known solutions. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert confirmed to me that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas never said no to the map he proposed in 2008. This is because the two men were essentially in agreement. Instead of sending Israel 40,000 one-ton bombs, Trump should do what Ford did. Freeze weapons shipments until Netanyahu negotiates with Abbas in good faith to conclude an agreement along the lines of the Olmert parameters. As its name suggests, the “Axis of Resistance” would be severely undermined by peace with the Palestinians.
Third, we are faced with a simple truth: military escalation in the Persian Gulf cannot achieve what global diplomacy can. We must ask ourselves why China and Russia both supported the first Iran deal. While both countries would love to see the U.S. weakened in the region, does anyone really believe either power desires Iranian nuclear weapons in the Strait of Hormuz any more than the U.S. would desire them in Venezuela’s oil fields or the Panama Canal? History and economics suggest otherwise: Russia, once dubbed the “lesser Satan” by Iran, attempted to dismember the country after World War II, and China currently purchases roughly 90% of Iran’s exported oil. Ford, who used diplomacy with Egypt to weaken the USSR in the Middle East, would recognize these underlying frictions and use them to turn China and Russia against Iran. Today, we have accomplished the exact opposite.
Ford paid a profound political price for his courage, but he did the right thing anyway. When he took the oath of office, his hand rested on the wisdom of Solomon: “Lean not unto thine own understanding.” Many of our leaders today lean on little else.
The most pro-Israel thing an American president can do today is exactly what Ford did: Get some good advice and then administer tough love.
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She left Russia as a Jewish refugee — she returned to tell the stories of a new group of undesirables
Julia Loktev left the Soviet Union with her family in 1979, when she was 9, during a brief window when Jews were allowed to emigrate.
The pretext, in this time of refuseniks, was to go to Israel and practice their religion: only her family had no intention of going to Israel, and the last person in her family who went to temple was her great-grandmother.
“My mom sort of did it on a whim,” Loktev, 56, the film director, recalled in a Zoom interview from her home in New York. “She said ‘We have friends who applied for many, many years and were being rejected,’ and they said, ‘Oh, why don’t you try applying?’” When she did, the answer came back almost immediately: “Get out.”
“We left not knowing what country we were going to,” Loktev said. They were, effectively, refugees.
They spent time in Vienna, then a suburb of Rome before ultimately arriving, with sponsorship from HIAS, in Loveland, Colorado. Loktev’s experience of immigration, and of her own Jewishness, was bound up with state-sanctioned antisemitism.
“It was in my passport, it was in my school papers, it was on my face,” she said. “My parents couldn’t go to certain universities. They couldn’t get certain jobs, like literally, it was a state policy.”
Decades later, in 2021, she flew to Moscow to document a new policy for undesirables. The Russian government declared a number of journalists “foreign agents,” and they were forced by law to disclose themselves as such. She filmed the fallout, not knowing it was just the start of a larger story of displacement.
“When you were named a foreign agent, you had to put a paragraph-long disclaimer that had to be in a type larger than anything else, like larger than the headline, saying in very legalistic terms, ‘This was brought to you by a foreign agent,’” Loktev said. “This had to go on everything: on all your articles, on your podcast, your TV shows. It had to go on your Instagram puppy pictures. It had to go on your comments on a friend’s baby on Facebook — anywhere you were in public, even if you walked into a court of law, if you were in a parents’ chat, you had to present yourself as a foreign agent.”
The plight of these foreign agents, documented in her 2024 film My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow, had glaring historical parallels of past regimes that made citizens identify themselves as “other.” In early 2022, the situation of her characters began to mirror her own journey as a refugee.
One week into Russia’s war in Ukraine, the young reporters at TV Rain, one of the last bastions of the free press under Russian president Vladimir Putin, were tipped off that their studio was about to be raided. Loktev filmed the moment. From there they left the country within a few hours, booking tickets on whichever plane had seats to whichever countries didn’t require visas.
My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile starts with this mass exodus and ends a few months before the film debuted at Venice in September. To follow her characters, Loktev travelled light and racked up passport stamps, filming on her iPhone in Istanbul, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, Riga and New York. Situated in new countries, the journalists regrouped in ad hoc offices to continue reporting on the motherland from a distance. Their work became even more vital, providing their fellow Russians an alternative to state media that only ever referred to a war of aggression as a “special military operation.”
The film grew even more personal for Loktev in part two, but she’s quick to distinguish her subjects’ experience of exile from her immigration.
“When I was 9, I was told ‘Say goodbye to your grandparents, say goodbye to your aunts,’” said Loktev. “But that was part of the deal. I grew up in a closed world of the Iron Curtain where going to America was going to Mars. There was no return flight.”
Loktev’s characters, the youngest of whom are in their early 20s at the start of the film, had grown up with the internet and Zara and H&M down the street. They were unaccustomed to the scale of repression with the outbreak of Putin’s war: tellingly, they liken their predicaments not to life under Stalin or his successors, but to the totalitarian campaigns of villains from Harry Potter.
“None of these people chose to leave,” Loktev said. “They literally had to be put in a situation where they were like, ‘I can go to jail, where I won’t be very useful. I can shut up, or I have to leave the country.’ And at that moment, they chose leaving the country.”
Many — a number have prison sentences waiting for them — don’t anticipate returning anytime soon. If there’s a part three, she and her subjects have pledged, it will likely arrive only after the death of Putin.
My Undesirable Friends is a sprawling portrait of reporters weathering the whims of foreign governments and the aggression of their own abroad. (One writer, Elena Kostyuchenko, known for her longform work, was poisoned over the course of filming.)
Loktev’s film had its U.S. premiere at New York Film Festival last month. Among her festivalmates were Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, whose documentary NAZA, alleging war crimes by the Israeli Defense Force, has led Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to threaten to revoke Abraham and Szor’s citizenships.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Rachel and Yuval, whom I don’t know personally, but who are now very much in a similar position as my characters, where they have been targeted by the government, targeted by hateful, angry mobs and are now facing the possibility of being in exile,” said Loktev, who recalled an interview where Abraham said he had “nothing to do abroad.”
She thinks Abraham, himself a journalist, must find it difficult to be “cut off” from his home, in no small part due to his desire to report on the ground. But she still distinguishes between the “flavors of the threats” in Israel and Russia.
“With Russia most of the threats are somehow government-related,” Loktev said. “You are able to print some things in Israel without going directly to jail. Haaretz still operates. Like in Russia that would be shut down in a hot second.
“What Russia doesn’t have, I suppose, which is what I fear most, I think, in the case of Rachel and Yuval, is the messianic mobs.”
Loktev sees events in Russia, Israel and America all trending toward a reality where those in power won’t countenance any story critical of their country. While Trump tries to ban news outlets from the White House briefing room and Putin cracks down on demonstrations, the war in Ukraine no longer makes headlines.
Within Russia, she describes a climate of fear and paranoia. She mentions a friend who used to go back to film events like Navalny’s funeral on the street but says it’s no longer possible. “She said ‘everyone is so suspicious. People are just terrified.’” At the same time, the war in Ukraine shows no sign of stopping. Much of the media has its eyes elsewhere, though she believes Russia will intensify its offensive this winter.
Apathy and numbness are not feelings Loktev’s characters can afford, though they naturally have their share of fear.
Dispersed among countries with no extradition agreement with Russia — a surprisingly limited club — they continue to try and speak the truth to their viewers in Russia relying on workarounds like VPNs. The fatigue of an unchanging story is real, but Loktev says the reality must not be normalized.
Lately, Loktev’s heard that potential audiences are tired of stories about freedom of the press and authoritarianism. To this, she has a ready response: “It’s not tired of you.”
The post She left Russia as a Jewish refugee — she returned to tell the stories of a new group of undesirables appeared first on The Forward.
