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This is a guest essay written by Andy Bachman of Water Over Rocks.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
I am still thinking about what it means that in a Jewish town like New York City, in a Jewish borough like Brooklyn, and in a bookstore (a place that is a touchstone of culture for Jews) a talk between two Jews can get canceled because one of them — yours truly! — is a Zionist.
Alas these are the times we live in and such is the price we are paying for dangerous divisions, hateful and unhinged ignorance, and an atomized popular culture of self-aggrandizing social media feeds that create deafening echoes of saturated sameness.
The Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war has deepened this already horrendous divide in new and dangerous ways.
God forbid one should show up at a bookstore (or a library or a college classroom) and be challenged to expand their mind in a civil, constructive way (which is what the author Joshua Leifer and I had intended to do last Tuesday night to discuss his brilliant new book, “Tablets Shattered,” at Powerhouse Arena in Dumbo, Brooklyn.)
Dumbo of all places!
Though the bookstore had my bio for weeks, and had it posted on their website for some time, apparently one of the employees decided to Google me, discovered that I was a Zionist, and summarily canceled the talk because Zionists ought not to appear on stage at Powerhouse Arena.
This bigoted and self-righteous idiocy, of course, hid in plain sight behind the false premise of “unforeseen circumstances” leading to the events cancelation.
For half a day the ownership of Powerhouse Arena hid behind the false story that the author’s publicist had canceled the event until a recording surfaced proving that the store’s employee had taken it upon herself to ban Zionist Jews from the store. She subsequently lost her job and, to the owner’s credit, a public apology was issued.
After being canceled, we all stood on the sidewalk for a few minutes, getting our wits about us. Josh and his family and friends went to a bar for a discussion and drinks; I headed up the hill from Dumbo and sat with my friend Joni Kletter as she tweeted the news out to the world.
Within minutes, she received sympathetic messages from former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, City Comptroller Brad Lander, and Congressmen Ritchie Torres and Dan Goldman (among many other friends, colleagues, and Jewish professionals). A staffer from Dan Goldman’s team actually called me from the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to express his shock and support, which was pretty cool.
Over the next 48 hours I received texts, emails, and social media messages from colleagues, friends, and strangers from all over the world and across the political spectrum. Censoring a conversation in a bookstore in New York City in 2024? The store employee’s action hit a nerve for everyone — especially anyone who has ever had the experience of learning and expanding one’s heart, mind, and soul by reading a book.
A foundational pillar of civil society had been violated. Period. Countless emails and messages included the words, “We may not agree on everything, Andy, but…” Nothing more needed to be said.
In those blessed 48 hours I was reminded of many important lessons. One is that there is the greatest strength in difference, not sameness; that there is more learning done in disagreement than there is in the staid uniformity of sloganeering; and that without being made to traverse the rocky terrain of civil discourse, we lose strength, atrophy, and weaken as a society.
I learned again that friends matter. I learned again that, when you work in a community for 33 years (as I have in Brooklyn), you build up the muscle of relationships forged in good times and bad.
I learned again I am so proud to be a Jew, to be a member of a most resilient people, who have persistently modeled to the world that argument is sacred, that argument is, in religious terms, for the Sake of Heaven. If there is purpose to the structure of our lives, in other words, if God demands of us that we find meaning in learning from books, ideas, argument and disagreement — holy and secular — then our learning is better, sharper, and deeper when we create sparks of conflict.
I actually feel bad for the bookstore censor. What an intellectually flat world she must live in. What a diminishment of the mind’s potential. It just cannot be very fun to be that way.
There is a story that social and cultural historian George Mosse’s students used to tell about the 1960s anti-Vietnam War protests in Madison, Wisconsin. A number of Mosse’s students were on the “New Left” and they were angry with him that he — a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany — was not taking more forceful public stands against the war.
Protesting in front of his house one morning and chanting that he was supporting a fascist regime, Mosse stood out on his driveway in bathrobe and pajamas engaging with his students over precisely which kind of fascism was he being accused of supporting. Liberal or conservative? German or Italian or French or Soviet or Spanish? Words and the movements they represent matter.
“This course is designed to rid you of your slogans,” George famously taught us.
The driveway seminar became legend.
Oh to have the chance to engage this bookstore censor over which particular Zionism she was objecting to. Cultural? Socialist? Liberal? Revisionist? Religious? How much richer our night would have been.
I will save for another time the question of what this less-than-twenty-four-hour-censorship means in the context of this horrific war between Israel, Hamas, and Hezbollah. Without question there is a hideous antisemitism at play in general in the “anti-war” movement.
And there is a hideous and fundamentally immoral othering of Jews who do not subscribe to the cult-like demand that any Zionism be disavowed in order to exist in the company of the self-proclaimed exemplars of justice, commonality, and peace. Some just want us gone.
But I was most deeply impressed with and moved by how quickly people came together from such diverse backgrounds; how vociferously ownership eventually condemned this censorship; and how people buying Josh’s book — to read, debate, and argue — became the best response of all.
I was at an event for Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry in the 70's. At it they had an unusual presentation - a Soviet produced documentary of the murders at Babi Yar. It was unusual in that it actual gave a historical account of the Jews being singled out for extermination. This was unusual because for the decades following WWII, the official Soviet history was that all Soviet citizens, regardless of ethnicity, were victims of fascism nothing special about the Jews.
However, at the end of the documentary, narrated in English, the narrator called for an end to "fascism, anti-Semitism, racism, Zionism, and all discriminatory ideologies."
The idea of Zionism being racist is old Soviet propaganda (as, indeed, is the idea of a unique Palestinian nation). It was swallowed hook, line, and sinker by the left wing students of the day. These students have now grown up and , long after the disappearance of the Soviet Union, are teaching these Soviet ideologies - for some perverse reason labeled "progressive" - to a new generation of students, from grade school to graduate school. It is this non-critical indoctrination that Zionism is racism is what leads to this knee-jerk reaction to those of us who proudly identify as Zionists and who understand what Zionism (in its many forms) is.
I seriously doubt the bookstore employee could even produce an accurate definition of “Zionist” or “Zionism” For the hardcore haters, facts and history don’t matter, but for the gullible useful idiots who mistakenly think they are identifying, exposing, and isolating “bad guys,” facts and history can still make a difference. Should we have to keep explaining and defending ourselves? No, we shouldn’t, but we need to—even to some of our fellow Jews. There is nothing racist, oppressive, or wrong about defending one’s right to live free in one’s own indigenous homeland and to defend ourselves against those who come for our blood. The haters have turned our true history upside down. We must be relentless at exposing their false narrative and the centuries of ingrained religious and ideological hate they have for us and with which they are trying desperately to infect others.