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Why Walter Benjamin was all things to all people
Walter Benjamin’s life, to use the kind of metaphor he was so fond of, was not unlike the Parisian arcades, those covered retail passages that he loved so much.
He was born into a world with the finer things on display. He marveled at his mother’s jewelry, the cut-glass champagne glasses and carafe stoppers in the shape of animals and gnomes in their Berlin home. But his passage through life as an adult was seldom easy, and existed in tension with those glittering objects in their vitrines.
An omnivore par excellence, as a young man Benjamin announced his intent to be the “foremost critic of German literature,” but ended up spending much time translating works from French to German, musing on Marxist concepts and generally resisting any easy classification in ideology or literary genre.
“Adhering to any doctrine awakened in him some kind of allergy,” said Peter E. Gordon, the Amabel B. James Professor of History at Harvard. “I think it’s at those moments that his real originality shines through.”
Gordon’s illuminating new book for the Jewish Lives series, Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver, is a portrait of a thinker who couldn’t conform. In keeping with his subject’s unconventional spirit, and his unique sense of cyclical time in which tragedies repeat, Gordon begins at the end.
As Benjamin navigated the Pyrenees, escaping from Vichy France and into Spain, he took a lethal dose of morphine. Gordon winds back the clock from that moment, and ends the narrative right on the cusp of his journey through the mountains.
“I thought on Benjamin’s idea that history should not be written by the victors,” Gordon said in a phone interview. “And that means not permitting the fascists to have the last word, as if his death were the end of his influence.”
Indeed, one could say Benjamin’s death was only the beginning of the legacy.
I spoke with Gordon about Benjamin’s life, work and why he may not be an entirely appropriate fit for the Jewish Lives series. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
PJ Grisar: You have a little uncertainty about whether Benjamin fits comfortably into a series like this. How does he fit the bill and in what ways do you think he might fall short of it?
Peter E. Gordon: He escapes almost any traditional categories that are available to us. People have trouble figuring out, was he a critic primarily? Was he a philosopher? Was he a Marxist? Was he an historian? Moving away from academic disciplines, he exhibits the same resistance to being placed within any distinctive tradition. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so difficult to directly answer the question of whether he belongs to some kind of canon of Jewish thought or Jewish philosophy.
He’s always operating at the margins or just outside the boundaries of any settled doctrine or tradition. Bertolt Brecht couldn’t figure out if Benjamin was really a Marxist and had some suspicions that Benjamin’s Judaism was distorting his Marxist insights. And then on the other hand, people like [Benjamin’s close friend, Kabbalist scholar] Gershom Scholem vigorously argued that Benjamin’s best insights were, in fact, ones that belong to Jewish tradition, but he warned Benjamin that he was distorting those Jewish insights because of his Marxism.
So Benjamin was being pulled and pushed in various directions by the people who were closest to him intellectually. But they all saw, I think, that he couldn’t easily be corralled fully within their fold.
It does seem like he did have a tendency, depending on who he’s associating with, to adopt some of those ideas. As you said, he buys into them to a point before making it his own. What do you think of that impulse?
There might be a temptation to see him almost as a chameleon who adapted to the interests of the friends who were near him, but he also frustrated those friends because of his own instincts, and some of those instincts he once described as nihilistic. There was a fierce debate over Benjamin’s legacy, going back to the first edition of his correspondence and writing, published cooperatively by Adorno and Scholem after Benjamin’s death. The more militant Marxists at the time were furious and felt that Scholem and Adorno had falsified Benjamin’s legacy and weren’t honoring its true Marxist credentials. I rather doubt it had true Marxist credentials.
One of the things I say at the end of the book is that there’s a key principle in Marxism that Benjamin’s own Jewish themes seem to contradict. Benjamin describes an intrusion into history from a place that comes from the outside, and he calls that the Messianic. Any moment in history could be the gateway through which the Messiah might enter. And Marxism has a commitment that whatever changes might occur in history, those changes emerge from the immanent contradictions in history itself, not from a place outside history.
So Benjamin’s allusion to a Messiah who enters into history through some kind of gate, as if from the outside, is very hard to square with Marxism. And so there you find him operating with what you could call a syncretism of Judaism and Marxism. But even those two might not be really sufficient to capture everything that’s going on. He was really fascinated by Christian theology as well.
I didn’t know that he struggled so much in his lifetime that he didn’t have a professorship. He had to scrape by to make a living. Because the way the book is structured, we leave him in the Pyrenees so we don’t really see his afterlife. How did he become a well-known thinker? Was it the efforts of Adorno and Arendt after he died?
The peripatetic quality of his thinking, that it crossed so many boundaries has made him available for a great many people with different sorts of commitments, and also for the great community of humanists who share with him a sense of boundary-crossing in their disciplines. The rise of cultural studies in the Anglophone world since 1945 owes a great deal to Benjamin, and perhaps to Benjamin more than anyone else.
That practice of cultural studies is all about drawing the unlikely connection, say, between literature and economics, between history and theology and so forth. And that’s a risky but very original practice. Benjamin’s one of the great avatars for people who wish to pursue that practice. His study of the Parisian arcades is maybe the best example of that, because he’s trying to figure out, how does 19th century Paris contain all of these conflicting energies that are evident in architecture, like the passage itself, but also in its social movements, and in its poetry and he tries to bring all these together in what he called constellations of culture and society.
I saw your recent piece in the New York Review of Books, writing about historical analogies and how it’s an imperative to invoke the memory of Jewish persecution when discussing ICE raids or Gaza. Because Benjamin was a refugee, and he insisted that historical crises recurred as a rule, I’m wondering if he was on your mind when you were writing that?
I’ve been very close to immigrants in my life. My own family were immigrants and refugees to the United States from Nazi Germany on one side and from pogroms on the other side. That experience is always very much on my mind. I would hope it would be on everybody’s mind, regardless of identity or history.
Benjamin says “the amazement that things like this are still happening is not philosophical.” And I very much agree with that. I know no polity is blessed with immunity from the worst things. Benjamin himself was a victim of fascism. He died in a moment of despair, thinking that there was no way for him to survive, and taking his own life which he thought was better than the alternative. Tragically, he was mistaken, but it was an entirely plausible inference, given the situation that he saw around him.
And the U.S. at the time beckoned as a refuge for many people fleeing fascism, whether on account of their ethno-religious origins or their politics. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’re that country anymore.
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Israeli-Arab influencer behind ‘Nas Daily’: Anti-Zionism is antisemitism
(JTA) — DENVER – Israeli-Arab social media entrepreneur Nuseir Yassin, of the viral vlog “Nas Daily,” said he believes “anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism” and stressed his commitment to overturning “misguided hate” against Jews, at a conference devoted to the subject this week.
Yassin, 34, was speaking with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on the sidelines of the conference, hosted by the David Merage Foundation for Confronting Antisemitism. A self-described “village boy” from the Lower Galilee town of Arraba in Israel, he achieved massive success through viral short-form videos that attracted viewers from all over the world. Today he boasts more than 68 million followers across numerous social networks.
Yassin is a Muslim of Palestinian origin, although he said he is not religious. Asked why it was important for a non-Jewish person to participate in a conference about combatting antisemitism, Yassin equated this battle to fighting for his family, noting that “the success of Israel and the Jewish people is also my success as an Israeli citizen.”
“I’m not a fan of the Israeli government, and I’m not here to defend it, just like I’m not a fan of many governments,” Yassin noted, but he asserted that the reaction to the government “is absolutely fueled by antisemitism.”
“I do believe anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism,” he added.
He said he views Zionism as “the most vanilla thing in the world – a group of people wanting a place to live,” and has therefore concluded that Israel’s detractors “just really don’t like Jews.”
Yassin, who first broke through in 2016, has become increasingly outspoken in recent years about his combined Israeli and Palestinian identity. During the conference, he recalled that he grew up labeling himself Arab-Israeli. After the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, he started listing Israeli first and Palestinian second.
“I could not relate to the extremism that I saw, and I wanted to distance myself from it without erasing my identity connected to it,” Yassin said. “I’m not just Israeli because I think it removes a little bit of spice, but I’m also not just Palestinian anymore.”
“A lot of Israeli culture is inside me,” he continued. “I never agree with people. I’m always disagreeable. That’s Israeli. I speak up.”
Yassin noted that he was “the first guy to go study in the United States out of my entire lineage,” graduating from Harvard University in 2014 with a degree in economics and a minor in computer science. Despite having grown up in Israel, Yassin said that Harvard was the place where he made his first Jewish friend.
After working as a software developer for Venmo in New York, Yassin left his job in 2016 to travel and document his journeys. Ultimately, he launched a Facebook page called Nas Daily – using the word for “people” in Arabic – where he posted one-minute videos for 1,000 days, telling the stories of communities around the world.
What was once a personal brand has since expanded into the parent Nas Company, which offers platforms for solo entrepreneurs to build and monetize their online businesses.
Yassin earned an honorary degree from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2025 in recognition of his advocacy work for Israeli and Palestinian coexistence. This past August, he also joined the advisory board for the Genesis Prize Foundation, which each year celebrates inspiring Jewish individuals for their achievements.
“I do not relate to hundreds of men on the street shouting ‘Allahu Akbar,’” Yassin told JTA, adding that there needed to be more women and fewer religious fanatics participating in the Israeli-Palestinian conversation.
Yassin argued that he’s “not a weird Arab for saying this” and that “the entire country of the UAE says the same thing,” referring to one of the Gulf countries that signed onto the Abraham Accords normalizing relations with Israel. He also challenged “Free Palestine” activists to envision a concrete future for Palestinians rather than fixating on Israel’s transgressions.
“We should all be ‘Free Palestine’ – but from what?” Yassin asked. “We disagree on the solution, not on the problem. We don’t want suffering. Nobody wants suffering.”
“I’m a free-Palestine-from-Hamas guy,” he continued. “Just free Palestine,” he said, ”is not an answer. I’m free-Palestine-from-extremism.”
Yassin affirmed that there is room for criticism of Israel’s government, noting, for example, that he would like to see an Israeli-Arab presence in the government.
But he marveled at the notion that an alien visiting Earth would likely guess that the most hated country in the United Nations is North Korea, when in fact “It’s not – It’s Israel.”
That struck him as absurd because “the Israel-Palestine conflict is not a big deal when you compare it to everything else that’s happening on planet Earth. The only thing that makes it a big deal is that we, as Palestinians, have the perfect enemy.”
That enemy, he continued, is “the most hated type of enemy, which is the Jews.”
As part of his appearance at the conference, Yassin presented a recap of a fellowship he launched this past spring in partnership with the David Merage Foundation to help 50 content creators – 25 Jewish and 25 Muslim – produce meaningful material.
Participants received $1,000 and spent a month learning from the Nas Daily team about viral and impactful storytelling during the fellowship, named for Yassin’s first Jewish friend, Zaki Djemal, who recently died of a sudden heart attack.
To Laura Merage, the Iranian-born Jewish co-founder of the foundation, Yassin was a natural partner for this bridge-building effort. Given his social media following and “infectious personality,” Merage said she felt “that’s what we need more of in the world.”
At the conference on Tuesday, Yassin announced two winners of the fellowship’s influencer competition: recent McGill University graduate Raihaana Adira, a Canadian Muslim, and Grace, a Jewish-American digital content creator who preferred to use only her first name for privacy reasons. Grace tells stories about unique public figures, such as the first Arab “Miss Israel.” Adira, meanwhile, began posting about antisemitism and Muslim-Jewish relations after witnessing anti-Zionist protests at McGill.
“When I see a Jewish person being attacked on campus or online, it feels like I’m watching someone from my own community hurt,” Adira told JTA, noting that she started posting because no one believed her when she talked about incidents on campus.
“I wanted the protests and the graffiti on the walls that said ‘Death to the IDF’ to be seen,” she continued. “I am a Canadian, I am a Muslim, and when people at school on the streets say, ‘Death to Canada, We are Hamas, Hamas is heroic’ – that is not me.”
Adira said she received many death threats when she first started posting. While acknowledging how difficult that was, she also emphasized an influx of support that has helped “drown out the hate.”
Yassin offered a similar perspective, noting that at the beginning of his career, he “used to amplify the blowback and talk a lot about it,” referring to the criticisms he’d receive for promoting coexistence and calling out antisemitism. But after realizing that this deterred others from speaking out, he deemed the threats insignificant, calling them “the smallest price to pay for the largest outcome you can possibly imagine.”
During his travels around the world, Yassin said he has witnessed how flawed people’s perceptions of Jews can be and that he feels “a responsibility to set the record straight.” He also noted that he is dating a Jewish woman, author and influencer Aija Mayrock, whom he is marrying next year and with whom he expects to have children.
“They’re going to be Jewish, so that’s my family – literally, my family,” Yassin said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israeli-Arab influencer behind ‘Nas Daily’: Anti-Zionism is antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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Four Seats or No Seats? Why Israel’s Final Polls Disagree Over Amcha Yisrael
Conflicting projections for Ofer Winter’s party illustrate the uncertainty of measuring public support near an electoral threshold.
A Channel 12 poll gives Ofer Winter’s Amcha Yisrael four parliamentary seats.
An i24NEWS survey reaches the same seat total.
Other final polls find that the party does not qualify for representation.
How can surveys conducted close to the same election produce such different results?
The answer lies partly in the difference between measuring a vote share and converting it into parliamentary seats.
A Statistical Boundary
Israel’s electoral threshold is 3.25 percent.
For a party receiving substantially more than that percentage, modest sampling fluctuations may change its expected number of seats without calling its parliamentary presence into question.
For a party whose support lies near 3.25 percent, the same type of fluctuation may change its projected representation from several seats to zero.
This does not necessarily mean the polls are measuring completely different political realities.
They may be producing estimates close to the same threshold but on opposite sides of it.
Sample Size Is Only One Factor
The i24NEWS survey conducted on October 22 included 5,124 adult respondents and reported a sampling error of plus or minus 1.4 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.
That is a substantial sample by conventional political polling standards.
But a larger sample does not eliminate every source of uncertainty.
Different pollsters may employ different recruitment methods, weighting systems and procedures for estimating turnout.
They may also differ in how they handle respondents who are undecided or reluctant to state their preferences.
These choices can matter particularly for smaller parties.
The Problem of Turnout
Opinion polls generally estimate voting preferences before actual voting takes place.
Election results reflect the ballots cast by people who participate.
Differences between intended and actual turnout can affect parties in different ways.
Analysts must therefore consider not only how many respondents express support for a party, but also whether the poll’s turnout model accurately reflects the eventual electorate.
Without transparent, comparable information about the methods used by each polling organization, it is difficult to identify which methodological difference is responsible for a particular disagreement.
Reading the Final Surveys
The appropriate interpretation of Amcha Yisrael’s polling is neither that its parliamentary representation is guaranteed nor that exclusion is certain.
The available surveys demonstrate uncertainty around a legally decisive boundary.
The four-seat projections reported by Channel 12 and i24NEWS are meaningful observations.
So are the below-threshold findings published by Channel 13, Maariv and Zman Yisrael.
Each survey is a measurement of electoral intentions under a particular methodology, not a count of actual votes.
For readers following Israel’s election, this makes Amcha Yisrael an instructive case study in how polling uncertainty interacts with electoral law.
The final result will provide the definitive seat allocation. The polls explain why the outcome was difficult to measure in advance.
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As Trump betrays Ukraine, it’s beginning to feel a lot like Munich
In Munich on Sept. 30, 1938, the leaders of Britain and France signed an agreement with Adolf Hitler that caved to the Nazi leader’s demand that Germany be given a chunk of Czechoslovakia. Five months later, Hitler ordered the German military to forcibly take the remainder of the neighboring country.
On Oct. 9, 2026, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin struck a deal allowing Russia to sell diesel fuel to global markets, most importantly to the US. Then Trump waived a package of sanctions on Russia that had been passed by Congress. By replenishing Russia’s war coffers, it is likely more Ukrainians will die because of these twin gifts from America’s president to the warmongering Russian autocrat.
Why is Trump doing this? He seems to be hoping the diesel deal will help him avert disaster in the upcoming midterms. Or maybe there’s more to it than that. Perhaps Trump seriously thinks that this will get him the Nobel Peace Prize by ending the war in Ukraine through helping Putin win it. Perhaps it’s one more scheme to further enrich himself and his family. Or maybe Putin really does have something on Trump.
In any event, it feels like Munich all over again.
There are some remarkable parallels between Czechoslovakia’s predicament in 1938 and Ukraine’s nine decades later: separatists in two vulnerable Central European democracies were encouraged and supported by a neighboring authoritarian regime that sought to seize adjacent territory under the pretext of protecting a minority from oppression.
And at the center of both narratives is betrayal: of Czechoslovakia by Britain and France, and Ukraine by Trump.
In the spring and summer of 1938, Konrad Henlein, leader of the Nazi-allied Sudeten German Party in Czechoslovakia, held secret meetings with Hitler and other Nazi officials. They concocted a plan: Cause so much disorder in the Sudetenland that the Czech government would declare martial law, thus creating an excuse for German troops to march in to protect the ethnic German minority.
Tensions that had long existed along the Czech frontier erupted into gunfire and death in the Sudeten town of Habersbirk on the morning of Sept. 13, 1938. A mob of German separatists hung a swastika banner from a church tower, stormed the police station, kidnapped the wife of a cop, and engaged in gunfights with police officers that lasted hours. Four Czech police officers and four insurgents died. Outbreaks of violence, terror and torture raged along the border for days, backed by Freikorps paramilitary troops who crossed from Germany and by SA and SS men who took part in cross-border sabotage and armed attacks.
The uprising had the desired impact. Just 17 days later — on Sept. 30, 1938 — Britain, France, Italy and Nazi Germany signed the Munich Agreement, yielding to Hitler’s demand that the Sudetenland be ceded to him. After landing at an airport outside London, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waved a document in his hand and jubilantly proclaimed:
“The settlement of the Czechoslovak problem which has now been achieved is, in my view, only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace.”
“I believe it is peace for our time,” Chamberlain said later that day.
But it didn’t take long for Hitler to show he could not be trusted. Hitler’s army marched into Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. Germany’s invasion of Poland followed less than six months later, and by 1942 German forces controlled territory spanning from the Atlantic Ocean to deep inside the Soviet Union.
Ethnic Germans’ uprising in Czechoslovakia in 1938 found an echo nine decades later in Ukraine’s Donbas region, where unrest that began with pro-Russia protests in 2014 evolved into the war Russia has been waging on its neighbor for nearly five years.
In the spring of 2014, paramilitary units led by Russian intelligence officers stormed government office buildings in several towns and cities in Donbas, seizing weapons and clashing with police. In a scene reminiscent of the Habersbirk siege of 1938, on April 14, 2014, pro-Russian militants seized the police station in Horlivka, beat up the police chief, and murdered a member of the city council, whose body was found in a river. Similar clashes occurred throughout Donbas.
Two Kremlin-backed pseudo-states soon emerged: the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. Russia funneled tanks, artillery, air defense systems and fighters into Donbas, fueling a war between separatists and Ukrainian forces that dragged on for years.
Like Hitler in the Sudetenland, Russia’s de facto occupation of Donbas was not enough for Vladimir Putin. His eyes were on all of Ukraine, and he spent years manufacturing pretexts for the full-scale invasion that began on Feb. 24, 2022.
Trump has been buttering up Putin for more than a decade, starting with his 2015 campaign for president, when he effusively praised the ruthless Russian autocrat’s leadership style. Putin is a “strong leader,” is “far more respected than our president,” meaning the immensely popular Barack Obama, and was someone he “would get along with very well,” Trump said back then.
Trump’s admiration for Putin took on ominous tones after becoming president. During a press conference after the two leaders’ 2018 Helsinki summit, Trump questioned intelligence findings on Russian election interference and said he believed Putin’s denial. “I don’t see any reason it would be Russia,” Trump told reporters, with the Russian strongman standing at his side.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, during Biden’s presidency, Trump called it “a pretty smart move,” praised Putin as a “genius,” and also said it wouldn’t have happened if Trump was still president, remarks that were amplified by Russian state media.
During Trump’s second term, his buddy-buddy relationship with Putin has turned into a virtual strategic alliance, as the American president repeatedly makes moves and statements that seem designed to please the Russian autocrat. There are Trump’s threats to abandon NATO, his humiliation of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky during a February 2025 meeting inside the Oval Office, and most recently Trump’s demand that Ukraine cease its drone attacks on Russian oil refineries, his call for Zelensky’s ouster, and envoy Steve Witkoff thanking Putin for being a “humanitarian.”
Putin has proposed a summit between himself, Trump, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to discuss ending the war in Ukraine. It’s notable that Ukraine has not been invited. This is also what happened in Munich nine decades ago, when Czech delegates were excluded from the room, and others decided Czechoslovakia’s fate.
Last October, aboard Air Force One, Trump told reporters the Donbas region should be “cut up,” leaving most of it in Russian hands.
“Let it be cut the way it is,” he said. “They can negotiate something later on down the line.”
It seems the fate Trump envisions for Ukraine is similar to the one Hitler envisioned for Czechoslovakia. It would be naïve to think that Putin’s expansionist ambitions would stop there.
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