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Why a liberal Zionist rabbi isn’t taking to the streets over Israel’s judicial reform plan
(JTA) — Israel’s 75th anniversary was supposed to be a blowout birthday party for its supporters, but that was before the country was convulsed by street protests over the right-wing government’s proposal to overhaul its judiciary. Critics call it an unprecedented threat to Israel’s democracy, and supporters of Israel found themselves conflicted. In synagogues across North America, rabbis found themselves giving “yes, but” sermons: Yes, Israel’s existence is a miracle, but its democracy is fragile and in danger.
One of those sermons was given a week ago Saturday by Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of Manhattan’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, expressing his “dismay” over the government’s actions. Hirsch is the former head of ARZA, the Reform movement’s Zionist organization, and the founder of a new organization, Amplify Israel, meant to promote Zionism among Reform Jews. He is often quoted as an example of a mainstream non-Orthodox rabbi who not only criticizes anti-Zionism on the far left but who insists that his liberal colleagues are not doing enough to defend the Jewish state from its critics.
Many on the Jewish left, meanwhile, say Jewish establishment figures, even liberals like Hirsch, have been too reluctant to call out Israel on, for example, its treatment of the Palestinians — thereby enabling the country’s extremists.
In March, however, he warned that the “Israeli government is tearing Israeli society apart and bringing world Jewry along for the dangerous ride.” That is uncharacteristically strong language from a rabbi whose forthcoming book, “The Lilac Tree: A Rabbi’s Reflections on Love, Courage, and History,” includes a number of essays on the limits of criticizing Israel. When does such criticism give “comfort to left-wing hatred of Israel,” as he writes in his book, and when does failure to criticize Israel appear to condone extremism?
Although the book includes essays on God, Torah, history and antisemitism, in a recent interview we focused on the Israel-Diaspora divide, the role of Israel in the lives of Diaspora Jews and why the synagogue remains the “central Jewish institution.”
The interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: You gave a sermon earlier this month about the 75th anniversary of Israel’s founding, which is usually a time of celebration in American synagogues, but you also said you were “dismayed” by the “political extremism” and “religious fundamentalism” of the current government. Was that difficult as a pulpit rabbi?
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: The approach is more difficult now with the election of the new government than it has been in all the years of the past. Because we can’t sanitize supremacism, elitism, extremism, fundamentalism, and we’re not going to. Israel is in what’s probably the most serious domestic crisis in the 75-year history of the state. And what happens in Israel affects American Jewry directly. It’s Israeli citizens who elect their representatives, but that’s not the end of the discussion neither for Israelis or for American Jews. At the insistence of both parties, both parties say the relationship is fundamental and critical and it not only entitles but requires Israelis and world Jews to be involved in each other’s affairs.
For American Jewry, in its relationship with Israel, our broadest objective is to sustain that relationship, deepen that relationship, and encourage people to be involved in the affairs in Israel and to go to Israel, spend time in Israel and so forth, and that’s a difficult thing to do and at the same time be critical.
American Jews have been demonstrating here in solidarity with the Israelis who have been protesting the recent judicial overhaul proposals in Israel. Is that a place for liberal American Jews to make their voices heard on what happens in Israel?
I would like to believe that if I were living in Israel, I would be at every single one of those demonstrations on Saturday night, but I don’t participate in demonstrations here because the context of our world and how we operate is different from in Israel when an Israeli citizen goes out and marches on Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv. It’s presumed that they’re Zionists and they’re speaking to their own government. I’m not critical of other people who reach a different perspective in the United States, but for me, our context is different. Even if we say the identical words in Tel Aviv or on West 68th Street, they’re perceived in a different way and they operate in a different context.
What then is the appropriate way for American Jews to express themselves if they are critical of an action by the Israeli government?
My strongest guidance is don’t disengage, don’t turn your back, double down, be more supportive of those who support your worldview and are fighting for it in Israel. Polls seem to suggest that the large majority of Israelis are opposed to these reforms being proposed. Double down on those who are supportive of our worldview.
You lament in your book that the connections to Israel are weakening among world Jewry, especially among Jewish liberals.
The liberal part of the Jewish world is where I am and where the people I serve are by and large, and where at least 80% of American Jewry resides. It’s a difficult process because we’re operating here in a context of weakening relationship: a rapidly increasing emphasis on universal values, what we sometimes call tikkun olam [social justice], and not as a reflection of Jewish particularism, but often at the expense of Jewish particularism.
There is a counter-argument, however, which you describe in your book: “some left-wing Jewish activists contend that alienation from Israel, especially among the younger generations, is a result of the failures of the American Jewish establishment” — that is, by not doing more to express their concerns about the dangers of Jewish settlement in the West Bank, for example, the establishment alienated young liberal Jews. You’re skeptical of that argument. Tell me why.
Fundamentally I believe that identification with Israel is a reflection of identity. If you have a strong Jewish identity, the tendency is to have a strong connection with the state of Israel and to believe that the Jewish state is an important component of your Jewish identity. I think that surveys bear that out. No doubt the Palestinian question will have an impact on the relationship between American Jews in Israel as long as it’s not resolved, it will be an outstanding irritant because it raises moral dilemmas that should disturb every thinking and caring Jew. And I’ve been active in trying to oppose ultra-Orthodox coercion in Israel. But fundamentally, while these certainly are components putting pressure on the relationship between Israel and Diaspora Jewry, in particular among the elites of the American Jewish leadership, for the majority of American Jews, the relationship with Israel is a reflection of their relationship with Judaism. And if that relationship is weak and weakening, as day follows night, the relationship with Israel will weaken as well.
But what about the criticism that has come from, let’s say, deep within the tent? I am thinking of the American rabbinical students who in 2021 issued a public letter accusing Israel of apartheid and calling on American Jewish communities to hold Israel accountable for the “violent suppression of human rights.” They were certainly engaged Jews, and they might say that they were warning the establishment about the kinds of right-wing tendencies in Israel that you and others in the establishment are criticizing now.
Almost every time I speak about Israel and those who are critical of Israel, I hold that the concept of criticism is central to Jewish tradition. Judaism unfolds through an ongoing process of disputation, disagreement, argumentation, and debate. I’m a pluralist, both politically as well as intellectually.
In response to your question, I would say two things. First of all, I distinguish between those who are Zionist, pro-Israel, active Jews with a strong Jewish identity who criticize this or that policy of the Israeli government, and between those who are anti-Zionists, because anti-Zionism asserts that the Jewish people has no right to a Jewish state, at least in that part of the world. And that inevitably leads to anti-Jewish feelings and very often to antisemitism.
When it came to the students, I didn’t respond at all because I was a student once too, and there are views that I hold today that I didn’t hold when I was a student. Their original article was published in the Forward, if I’m not mistaken, and it generated some debate in all the liberal seminaries. I didn’t respond at all until it became a huge, multi-thousand word piece in The New York Times. Once it left the internal Jewish scene, it seemed to me that I had an obligation to respond. Not that I believe that they’re anti-Zionist — I do not. I didn’t put them in the BDS camp [of those who support the boycott of Israel]. I just simply criticized them.
Hundreds of Jews protest the proposed Israeli court reform outside the Israeli consulate in New York City on Feb. 21, 2023. (Gili Getz)
You signed a letter with other rabbis noting that the students’ petition came during Israel’s war with Hamas that May, writing that “those who aspire to be future leaders of the Jewish people must possess and model empathy for their brothers and sisters in Israel, especially when they are attacked by a terrorist organization whose stated goal is to kill Jews and destroy the Jewish State.”
My main point was that the essence of the Jewish condition is that all Jews feel responsible one for the another — Kol yisrael arevim zeh bazeh. And that relationship starts with emotions. It starts with a feeling of belongingness to the Jewish people, and a feeling of concern for our people who are attacked in the Jewish state. My criticism was based, in the middle of a war, on expressing compassion, support for our people who are under indiscriminate and terrorist assault. I uphold that and even especially in retrospect two years later, why anyone would consider that to be offensive in any way is still beyond me.
You were executive director of ARZA, the Reform Zionist organization, and you write in your book that Israel “is the primary source of our people’s collective energy — the engine for the recreation and restoration of the national home and the national spirit of the Jewish people.” A number of your essays put Israel at the center of the present-day Jewish story. You are a rabbi in New York City. So what’s the role or function of the Diaspora?
Our existence in the Diaspora needs no justification. For practically all of the last 2,000 years, Jewish life has existed in the Diaspora. It’s only for the last 75 years and if you count the beginning of the Zionist movement, the last 125 years or so that Jews have begun en masse to live in the land of Israel. Much of the values of what we call now Judaism was developed in the Diaspora. Moreover, the American Jewish community is the strongest, most influential, most glorious of all the Jewish Diasporas in Jewish history.
And yet, the only place in the Jewish world where the Jewish community is growing is in Israel. More Jewish children now live in Israel than all the other places in the world combined. The central value that powers the sustainability, viability and continuity of the Jewish people is peoplehood. It’s not the values that have sustained the Jewish people in the Diaspora and over the last 2,000 years, which was Torah or God, what we would call religion. I’m a rabbi. I believe in the centrality of God, Torah and religion to sustain Jewish identity. But in the 21st century, Israel is the most eloquent concept of the value of Jewish peoplehood. And therefore, I do not believe that there is enough energy, enough power, enough sustainability in the classical concept of Judaism to sustain continuity in the Diaspora. The concept of Jewish peoplehood is the most powerful way that we can sustain Jewish continuity in the 21st century.
But doesn’t that negate the importance of American Jewry?
In my view, it augments the sustainability of American Jewry. If American Jews disengage from Israel, and from the concept of Jewish peoplehood, and also don’t consider religion to be at the center of their existence, then what’s left? Now there’s a lot of activity, for example, on tikkun olam, which is a part of Jewish tradition. But tikkun olam in Judaism always was a blend between Jewish particularism and universalism — concern for humanity at large but rooted in the concept of Jewish peoplehood. But very often now, tikkun olam in the Diaspora is practiced not as a part of the concept of Jewish particularism but, as I said before, at the expense of Jewish particularism. That will not be enough to sustain Jewish communities going into the 21st century.
I want to ask about the health of the American synagogue as an institution. Considering your concern about the waning centrality of Torah and God in people’s lives — especially among the non-Orthodox — do you feel optimistic about it as an institution? Does it have to change?
I’ve believed since the beginning of my career that there’s no substitute in the Diaspora for the synagogue as the central Jewish institution. We harm ourselves when we underemphasize the central role of the synagogue. Any issue that is being done by one of the hundreds of Jewish agencies that we’ve created rests on our ability as a community to produce Jews into the next generation. And what are those institutions that produce that are most responsible for the production of Jewish continuity? Synagogues, day schools and summer camps, and of the three synagogues are by far the most important for the following reasons: First, we’re the only institution that defines ourselves as and whose purpose is what we call cradle to grave. Second, for most American Jews, if they end up in any institution at all it will be a synagogue. Far fewer American Jews will receive a day school education and or go to Jewish summer camps. That should have ramifications across the board for American Jewish policy, including how we budget Jewish institutions. We should be focusing many, many more resources on these three institutions, and at the core of that is the institution of the synagogue.
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Mamdani joins Theo Von’s podcast. They find common ground in criticizing Netanyahu.
(JTA) — New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani appeared for an interview with “manosphere” podcaster Theo Von, during which he called for the United States to join the International Criminal Court and enforce its arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“If I had my say, the U.S. government would have joined the ICC, honored every single warrant that they issued,” Mamdani said near the end of the 75-minute interview that was posted on Thursday.
“F–k yeah,” Von replied.
The interview came one week after Netanyahu visited the United Nations and delivered a speech during which he called Mamdani an “antisemite” and a supporter of Hamas. (Mamdani has condemned Hamas as a terrorist organization.)
Von, meanwhile, is part of a growing ecosystem of everyman “manosphere” podcasters who host sprawling conversations with a wide array of famous guests — he has hosted Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, JD Vance and Mark Zuckerberg — and increasingly are seen as representing a crucial sector of the electorate. He drew an invite to Trump’s inauguration in 2025 after hosting him on the campaign trail the year before.
Since then, Von has become increasingly critical of Israel and pressed the case in his Vance interview that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The International Court of Justice, which is separate from the ICC, is adjudicating charges Israel committed genocide — which the country rejects — but has not issued a ruling. Von has also hosted guests who have spread conspiracy theories about Israel and Jews.
At the end of his interview with Mamdani, Von thanked the New York mayor for “talking a little bit about the genocide” during their podcast, noting that “a lot of people are afraid to speak about it in politics.”
“One thing I would just say is, your curiosity is a beautiful thing,” Mamdani told Von.
The chummy conversation was notable, arising as it did out of a meeting between an icon of the libertarian-leaning “manosphere” and a self-declared socialist.
Mamdani decried Israel’s campaign in Gaza during their conversation.
“People talk about a ceasefire — just last week, the Israeli military killed an 11-year-old boy, Palestinian boy in Gaza, in a section that’s considered to be a safe zone,” he said. “This is continuing.”
He also recalled hosting Palestinian families at Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence, where they told him about “the ways that their lives have been shattered.”
Von asked Mamdani how he keeps people “from misdirecting energy that’s against Israel towards their Jewish friends,” especially as the mayor of the country’s most Jewish city.
Part of that, Mamdani said, is being clear that “no Jewish person in New York City is responsible for the actions of the State of Israel. And if you want to hold anybody accountable, it’s the people who are making those decisions — the prime minister, the State of Israel, also our complicity as American taxpayers knowing how many billions of dollars we have sent in bombs and continue to send.”
Mamdani also pointed to his administration’s official strategy to combat antisemitism, which it released earlier this week, as an effort to both condemn and prevent antisemitism. Some groups said the strategy “failed to address” anti-Israel rhetoric and links between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, while applauding aspects like security funding boosts and Holocaust education expansion.
Finally, he added, it takes “being very clear that critique of the State of Israel, the policy actions, the genocide — that in and of itself is not being antisemitic.”
“Yeah, I agree, speak up about it,” Von said.
Von, who has nearly 700 podcast episodes and more than 4.7 million YouTube subscribers, has interviewed or spoken positively about multiple controversial figures who have spread conspiracy theories about Israel and Jews, including former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, streamer and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and commentator Candace Owens.
During an episode from this past January with comedian Dave Smith, Von called Fuentes “fascinating” and said, “He’s f–ing brave, dude.”
Von hosted Carlson on his show in December 2025. The two men spoke at length about Israel and Von criticized what he said was a lack of transparency in the control that Israel and corporate interests have over American politics.
“If they would just say, ‘Hey, America is a country that’s owned by Israel,’ or that it’s always been this outpost or this LLC of Israel — or maybe not even of Israel, it could just be of corporate entities, I’m not really sure exactly — but if they would just tell us, you can operate from a place of knowing what’s going on,” Von said.
Pro-Israel lobbies have repeatedly defended their role as no different than any other interest group seeking influence, citing the successes over the years of pro-choice and anti-abortion groups, environmental groups and gun owner groups, among others.
During that interview, Von also played a clip of CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss calling Carlson anti-American and anti-Jewish, which elicited laughter from both Von and Carlson. Von then read out an AI-generated overview that described Weiss as “a vocal supporter of Israel.”
“If her allegiance isn’t to America first, how is she the head of an American network?” Von said.
“Well that’s of course an entirely fair question, that you’re not allowed to ask,” Carlson replied.
Von’s conversation with Mamdani this week covered a number of topics including socialism, the achievability of the American Dream and their preferred fish.
When asked about Netanyahu’s U.N. speech, Mamdani explained that he’d been meeting with the prime minister of the Netherlands about an LGBTQ center and the community’s history in New York.
“Then I get back from that meeting and it’s like, ‘Oh by the way, here’s what he was saying at the U.N.’,” Mamdani said.
“It’s so bizarre. Did it feel personal then?” Von asked.
Mamdani replied that “all of this is an attempt to distract from responsibility, name as many people as possible, try and make it into a back and forth.”
He added, “It’s not about me and him. It’s about the fact that he’s the architect of a genocide.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Mamdani joins Theo Von’s podcast. They find common ground in criticizing Netanyahu. appeared first on The Forward.
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A Jewish journalist recorded pro-Palestinian protesters outside services. He was reportedly suspended from his job
(JTA) — TORONTO – A number of Canadian groups are demanding answers in the wake of media reports that the country’s national broadcaster suspended a Jewish reporter after he posted a video of pro-Palestinian protesters outside Yom Kippur services and wrote about his pained reaction.
The reported suspension came after Neil Herland shared footage of protesters gathered outside the Meridian Arts Centre in north Toronto, which on Sept. 20 was hosting Yom Kippur services for The Song Shul.
Herland, who has worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for nearly 30 years, began his post on X, “On Yom Kippur I went to a synagogue service in Toronto and was met by protesters trying to taunt and intimidate me from entering the building.”
A man can be heard yelling “Zionist alert!” through a megaphone, while another masked protester approaches the camera and screams, “You’re going to hell.”
A pro-Palestinian group, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, filed a complaint against Herland with the CBC, saying he had mischaracterized the protest.
“It is clear to CJPME that Mr. Herland was aiding the pro-Israel side of these demonstrations defending Mark Regev’s presence, while smearing these pro-Palestine protesters as antisemitic for their criticisms of Regev’s awful record on Palestinian human rights,” their complaint said, referring to the presence of a former Israeli diplomat at the event.
The Toronto Sun reported the suspension on Sept. 24. CBC declined to confirm the suspension and said reporting had mischaracterized what had happened.
“We don’t comment on internal matters,” a spokesperson said. “That said, we are aware of reporting on this matter which has errors and mischaracterizations but we can’t get into the specifics given the confidentiality of the situation.”
Reached by JTA, Herland declined a request for comment.
A press freedom group decried the reported suspension, however.
“Recording events in a public place and reporting them to the public is not misconduct,” Sheila Gunn Reid, president of the Independent Press Gallery — a non-profit advocating for independent and nongovernmental journalist organizations — said. “It is journalism. It is not the role of a public broadcaster to punish its journalists for doing their jobs to appease activist groups. Its role is to defend their right to report.”
In a thread under his tweet about the protest, Herland noted that “The guest speaker at the Toronto synagogue tonight was an Australian-born university teacher who lives in Israel and once served as Israeli ambassador to the UK. His speech was about making peace in the Middle East. Let’s hope that happens this year.”
He was referring to Regev, formerly the Israeli ambassador to Britain, who gave a talk during Yom Kippur services. Online defenders of the protesters chided Herland for not personally naming the prominent media defender of Israel’s war in Gaza in his post.
Commenters also scored Herland for describing the venue as a synagogue even though the service was held in a public events space.
However, Jewish groups who reviewed the video or otherwise tracked the protest said that Regev’s presence did not seem germane to the protesters’ chants, and noted that synagogues often move to event venues for the High Holidays because of the volume of congregants attending.
“The protesters claimed to have been demonstrating against the speaker, but I don’t recall seeing anything that particularly said they were targeting [Regev],” Rochelle Direnfeld, senior criminal counsel for the Alliance of Canadians Combatting Antisemitism, said in an interview. “It seemed to be much more general against Jews and supporters of Israel.”
Criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic, Direnfeld said, but the protesters’ apparent targeting of worshipers was worrying. “It’s not okay to blame Canadian Jews for what’s going on in the Middle East,” Direnfeld said. “Given what [the protesters] were saying to the people trying to enter the building for services, that’s what they were doing.”
Simon Wolle, CEO of B’nai Brith Canada, said the protests on Judaism’s holiest day amounted to intimidation. “It is deplorable that members of the Jewish community are subject to these incessant acts of hatred and intimidation,” he said. “It is especially alarming when these protesters target members of the community as they enter their houses of worship, in this instance on Kol Nidre, the holiest night of the year.”
Wolle said the CBC needed to explain its reported disciplinary measures. “Neil Herland had every right to document his lived experience, and the very idea that he would face disciplinary action for that is deeply concerning,” he said. “As Canada’s public broadcaster, the CBC owes the public an explanation for its inexplicable treatment of Mr. Herland.”
Vivian Bercovici, a lawyer as well as former ambassador of Canada to Israel and a CBC board member, said the alleged discipline Herland has faced is cause for concern.
“Herland didn’t say anything derogatory, rude or inappropriate,” said Bercovici. “He told us what was happening in a very clear and factual way, and so I think that the CBC owes us an explanation as to why that post was so egregious.”
Herland’s tweet thread also included a post noting that his late father was an Austrian Jew who survived the Holocaust in Romania, and that he “came to Canada as a refugee. This year I got an Austrian passport, in case Canada becomes unsafe for me as a Jew. I fear that moment is approaching, here in Canada and elsewhere.”
Herland’s expression of his own distress at the alleged harassment is not usual practice for reporters, but it is also not unheard of.
His comments echo those of many Canadian Jews, who increasingly are saying they do not feel safe in the country and even considering taking up potential offers to move to the United States as refugees.
Direnfeld said the incident reflected what is becoming a pervasive complaint among Canadian Jews that the authorities are not doing enough to decrease tensions. The police practice of deescalation was failing, she said.
“De-escalation can quickly turn into capitulation, which only serves to embolden these protesters to continue,” she said. “We’re now seeing the fruits of that capitulation in conduct such as what happened in Belleville,” she continued, referring to a gunman who tried to attack the Sons of Jacob synagogue on Yom Kippur but was killed in a shootout with police.
Bercovici said the protest was no less distressing because the Meridian Arts Centre is an events space.
“A synagogue can be anywhere, and there are a lot of religious groups that rent space over specific holidays because they don’t have their own building,” she said. “That’s just a fatuous, ridiculous argument.”
Herland has posted only once to X since his reported suspension: A photo of Shabbat candles on Friday, Sept. 25.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post A Jewish journalist recorded pro-Palestinian protesters outside services. He was reportedly suspended from his job appeared first on The Forward.
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A great Jewish intellectual understood the Kafkaesque horror of Tennessee’s botched execution
Two days ago, the state of Tennessee tried to kill Christa Pike, the Death Row prisoner who, in 1995, was found guilty of the torture and murder of her classmate Colleen Slemmer. After spending more than 30 years on death row, Pike was strapped to a prison gurney and, as journalists watched through a window, an execution team cycled through at least a half-dozen syringes before finding a vein suitable for the injection of pentobarbital.
Or so they thought.
After Pike herself tried to help the team find a vein, they injected her with a supposedly lethal dose of the barbiturate. Though it caused an intense burning sensation in Pike’s arm, the dose failed to do its job, leading the executioners to empty a second dose into what they thought was a vein but turned out to be the surrounding tissue. Shortly thereafter, a curtain was drawn across the window and, for an hour, the journalists heard Pike continue to breathe and snore. Pike’s legal team eventually learned that their client, barely but still stubbornly alive, had been rushed to the emergency room of a nearby hospital.
While Pike’s physical prognosis is uncertain, there is nothing uncertain about the ethical diagnosis of this event. At least this would be the case for two earlier journalists who wrote at length on the death penalty: Arthur Koestler and Albert Camus. Long after they both became celebrated novelists and intellectuals, the two men each wrote essays on state-sanctioned killing, which were combined and published in France with the title Réflexions sur la peine capitale, or Reflections on the Death Penalty.
These reflections are as relevant in our own age of drug-induced executions as in Koestler and Camus’ era of where the delivery system of death was a noose or the guillotine.
Born into a secular Jewish family in Budapest, Koestler was, as the phrase goes, a child of his century, one convulsed by catastrophic wars, murderous ideologies, and multiple genocides. Described by his friend George Orwell as an “outstanding figure” of his time, Koestler, like Orwell, fought in and reported on the Spanish Civil War. As a member of the Spanish republican forces, he was captured by Franco’s intelligence service and sentenced to death — a fate Koestler escaped when, after several months of imprisonment, he was released in a prisoner exchange.
Yet this experience deeply marked him. In the mid-1950s, he rallied to the campaign to end capital punishment in Great Britain, penning the essay “Reflections on Hanging.” Serialized in two newspapers, the essay galvanized public opinion and played a pivotal role in the parliamentary vote that, while not entirely abolishing the death penalty, severely limited it. Given the clarity and ferocity of Koestler’s writing — which, Rebecca West observed, was as historically misleading as it was rhetorically moving — this sea change in the public’s attitude and parliament’s position is not surprising.
One passage seems especially relevant for the recent events in Tennessee. “There is indeed a Kafkaesque horror attached to an execution,” Koestler writes, “which goes beyond the mere fear of death or pain or indignity. It is connected not with the brutality but with the macabre, cold-blooded politeness of the ceremony, in which the person whose neck is going to be broken is supposed to collaborate in a nice, sensible manner, as if it were a matter of a minor surgical operation…it is present in the delinquent’s knowledge that in the embarrassed stares of the officials he is already mirrored as a dead man with a blue face and ruptured vertebrae; and that what for him is the final, violent termination of life is for them merely an unpleasant duty, followed by a sigh of relief and a plate of bacon and eggs.”
Did the unnamed doctor, I wonder, stare with embarrassment as he repeatedly tried but failed at killing the — perhaps this is not the best word — patient? How, I also wonder, should readers respond to the description of Pike’s attempted execution? (With embarrassment, I admit while I was revulsed, I also continued sipping from a mug of coffee as I read the New York Times’ account.)
We can guess how Lucien Camus might have responded. His son, Albert Camus, told and retold the story in his writings of his father who, having witnessed a public execution by guillotine, returned to the house, vomited in the sink, and never spoke about the experience. In the essay “Reflections on the Guillotine,” which accompanied Koestler’s, Camus suggested that rather than telling the condemned man or woman that they will pay the ultimate price or their debt to society for their crime, they instead be told the truth. “If you kill you will be imprisoned for months and years, torn between impossible death and constantly renewed terror, we shall slip into your cell…tie your hands behind your back [and] bind your arms with a strap to that you are forced to stoop [and] then carry you through the corridors [and] seize you by the seat of your pants and throw you on a board [then] let fall from a height of seven feet a 120 pound blade that will slice off your head like a razor.”
What, then, did the judge overseeing the 1995 trial tell Christa Pike when the sentence was rendered? The delivery system for death then was the electric chair and, to the judge’s credit, she did inform Pike that she would be subjected to a degree of electroshock sufficient to kill her. I do not know when the agent of death shifted from electroshock to pentobarbital nor do I know if a judge explained to Pike how the drug would act on her brain and organs to bring about her death. But I am pretty certain that none of the judges informed Pike of one legal scholar’s assessment of this form of death: “It is not the most humane, it is the most humane-looking.” I am even more certain they did not inform her, in case she survived another botched execution by the state of Tennessee, which boasts a history of such botches, that her brain would be irreversibly damaged.
Finally, I am most certain that, whether strangled by a tightened noose, decapitated by a sharpened blade, or injected by what was possibly an expired dose of pentobarbital, the sheer barbarism exercised by officials wearing white coats remains constant.
The post A great Jewish intellectual understood the Kafkaesque horror of Tennessee’s botched execution appeared first on The Forward.
