Young Jewish Americans are playing an outsized role in the movement for Palestine—but not without facing consequences. In a recent article for In These Times, Shane Burley investigates the ways anti-Zionist Jews are facing persecution from community institutions they once called home. Burley joins The Marc Steiner Show for a discussion on the growing divide over Zionism in Jewish communities, and the role of youth in this process. Studio Production: David HebdenPost-Production: Alina Nehlich Transcript Marc Steiner:  Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s good to have you with us. And this is another show in our series Not in Our Name. Once again, we’re going to talk to Shane Burley, who’s joined us before. He’s an activist and is co-author of numerous books: Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism; Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse; and Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It. His work has appeared in NBC, Al Jazeera, The Baffler, Daily Beast, In These Times, Jacobin, Jewish Currents, MSNBC, YES!, and many more places. And his recent article in In These Times, “US Jewish Institutions Are Purging Their Staffs of Anti-Zionists”, was an amazing article, really powerful. And he joins us now. Shane, good to see you again. Shane Burley:  Hey, thanks for having me back, Marc. Marc Steiner:  Always. It’s always good to talk to you. We find ourselves in a really strange time, especially in the Jewish world, it seems to me. There’s this gigantic split, which you really focused on in your piece here, that’s taking place. It’s generational, but it’s also political. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the divide inside the Jewish world to be so deep and so profound as it is at this moment. Shane Burley:  Yeah, I mean, this is about as difficult… It’s certainly as difficult as it’s been in my lifetime. I can’t think of a moment of Israeli aggression that really split people this profoundly. [Inaudible] led in 2009, there’s really no other moment. And frankly, it’s because it’s so severe, as we have a sort of consensus that what’s happening in Gaza is a genocide and the unwillingness of a lot of mainstream Jewish institutions to even say that word or acknowledge the reality. This is something that’s going to break apart communities. And as I talked about in the article, oftentimes it’s breaking apart progressive Jewish communities where young people and folks who are involved in Israel-Palestine solidarity organizing simply can’t sit by while their leadership either ignores or actively aids Israel’s project. Marc Steiner:  So what you covered in this piece literally was major Jewish institutions and the number of people being pushed out of those institutions because of their activities against the war in Gaza, because of their activities around Zionism or not being Zionists. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before where people… I mean, I go back a long way, so I remember in the ’60s the Jewish institutions were at the forefront of civil rights. The majority of white civil rights workers in the South were Jews. And there’s a contradiction that has erupted that this article really touches on deeply, about the divide inside the Jewish world. Talk a bit about what you discovered in that realm in terms of what you wrote here. Shane Burley:  Yeah, so I think these lines existed around Zionism for a while, and I talk about that a bit in the book. For example, the Hillel standards of partnership created during the Second Intifada became the standard for most Jewish organizations. And those standards of partnership included you cannot partner with an anti-Zionist organization. And they define it in a little bit more verbose language, but that’s essentially what it’s saying, and that’s become more ubiquitous. The difference, I think, now is how serious they are about this, how uncompromising they’ll end up being and how deep they go into people’s personal lives. It’s not just like, for example, if you work at Hillel you can’t just partner with Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist Jewish organization, in your job, you may not be able to do it in your personal life either. And so it’s essentially drawing these hard lines. And it’s also part of, I think, how a lot of Jewish organizations are reunderstanding anti-Zionism as beyond the pale, basically that an anti-Zionist or a non-Zionist position is actively hostile to Jewish lives, which I don’t think is always how it has been framed. It is in certain parts of the Jewish right, but now that seems to be where a lot of these mainstream institutions are going to draw their lines and they’re going to cut out large portions of the Jewish left. Because we’re not just talking about people who are engaging in BDS organizing and stuff, we’re talking about really, in a critical voice, it feels like their position in these communities or in these jobs is now becoming vulnerable. Marc Steiner:  There’s an interesting line here I want to explore with you. You wrote that the interviews you collected with Jewish professionals and other reporting information collected by In These Times illustrates what appears to be a radical rightward turn in mainstream Jewish organizational life over the past year. Talk a bit about that. You literally put it down to this past year. Talk about that right wing turn, why you see it developing, and what it has meant. Shane Burley:  I mean, there’s a number of reasons for this. There is the conservatization of these large Jewish organizations which has happened over decades, Israel playing a main role in it, but also just their entrenchment in US politics and how they build their economic base from wealthy donors, things like that. Kind of like what we’ve seen in a lot of nonprofit spaces that become more conservative over time. But also the Jewish electorate, still leaning way to the left, also has gotten more conservative over that time. It’s where we get the phrase, “Progressive except for Palestine,” Where there might be progressive positions across the Jewish world except when it comes to Palestine, which, oftentimes, you take a much, much more right-wing turn. But what’s happening here, I think, is that the left is now seen as actively hostile in a lot of these mainstream Jewish organizations because they didn’t just line up in support of Israel after Oct. 7. So a lot of organizations that straddle the line, maybe they were leftist Jewish organizations but they still had a good relationship with the larger federations or Jewish organization network, now they are starting to be treated the way Jewish Voice for Peace was or other openly anti-Zionist organizations were in the past. So we’re seeing that in basically every one of these relationships. We’re seeing people get kicked out of their local Jewish council. Some congregants and donors are leaving or being kicked out of other places. It’s basically a shift that’s happening. And it’s not just in civic organizations, it’s not just in synagogues, it’s not just in day schools. It’s happening across all of them, as the politics of Israel-Palestine become more entrenched, and more defining, and also slowly shift to the right. So much so that all of what Israel’s done in the last year has been reduced simply to whether or not you support Israel’s right to exist in the shadow of Oct. 7. So I think that is now becoming the defining point. And so in that way, dissent is not just seen as part of the various constellations of Jewish thought, it’s seen as undermining the very basis of Jewish identity and safety. And so I don’t know that that is going to shift back. This is a really profound change, and it’s defining out huge portions of the young Jewish community. Marc Steiner:  So I’m going to read this one other piece from your article here and just explore it a bit more. This is Lizzie Burdock, which is a pseudonym, correct? Shane Burley:  It’s a pseudonym, yeah. Marc Steiner:  Which I want to talk about that too, the fear that this person had to have not to use their own name. And what this person said to you was, “We are all working in the Jewish community because of how much we care about the Jewish people,” Lizzie Burdock, a former school director at a synagogue in New England who asked to use a pseudonym. Then says, “This is one of the key issues that our generation is navigating, and one that keeps so many Jews away from Judaism and out of the shul.” So I mean, the fact that this woman had to use a pseudonym, was frightened to use our own name, says a great deal. And this shift is profound. If you look at the polling even, the growing numbers of younger Jews in this country who just, whether they call themselves non-Zionist or anti-Zionist, but oppose what Israel is doing with the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Let me ask you this, as you’re an observer of all this: how profound is the shift? How deep does it go? What does it portend for the future? Shane Burley:  This is a situation when the rank and file and the leadership of organizations are going in exact opposite directions. So when you talk about someone like the person you mentioned, this is a working Jewish professional who got into participating in Jewish professional life, they became a Jewish professional directly because they care so profoundly about this. They want to be a part of the next generation of Jewish life. And that commitment also comes from their politics too, like the reclamation of ancestral traditions, fighting against assimilation, really creating a multicultural society by maintaining Jewish traditions and customs. So in doing so, they’ve really invested their whole life in this and now find themselves basically at odds with the political ideas that are happening at the top or from certain congregants, things like that. And so now the question is, is this committed person, well-educated, really invested in the community, are they now not allowed to be here because they were litmus tested about this one political issue that frankly, doesn’t actually play out in their position all that often? And this is happening across the Jewish world at the same time that there’s a leadership vacuum, or people are retiring from these jobs and they can’t get them refilled. It’s harder to hire rabbis, less people are becoming rabbis. It’s harder to hire Jewish educators. It’s harder to hire these people. And so at the same time as they’re having trouble reproducing these organizations, they’re kicking out the people that are often the most tied in, the people that are most involved in it. And when you look at the polling, like you mentioned, where an increasing number of young Jews are either non-Zionist or anti-Zionist or just very critical of the status quo in Israel, those are exactly the people that they need to take over these organizations. So kicking out this educated and committed class of folks is one that creates this really dialectical problem in the organizations. And I don’t know how they’re going to start filling those roles if they make this the new standard. Marc Steiner:  One of the things I was thinking about as I was reading your piece for In These Times was, historically, how these contradictions have been created and what they mean for the future of the Jewish people, but for the future beyond that. Because what’s happening in Israel-Palestine at the moment affects the entire globe. It’s very explosive, obviously. We’ve seen now well over 50,000 Palestinians have been killed. The attack on those two kibbutzim near the Gaza Strip were actually, as a point of digression, was where my family lives. Part of my family lives on those kibbutzim. And they were left-wing kibbutzim. That’s part of the contradiction. Some of these people who were attacked in those kibbutzim were people who were working for Israeli-Palestinian peace, and those are the places that were attacked as well. This is loaded with contradictions from the very beginning. And you’re seeing, I think, a paranoia inside the Jewish world of people hating Jews, that plays a role in this. But also the oppression that’s been created by the right wing in Israel has heightened those contradictions. I think we’re in a very dangerous and complex moment. Shane Burley:  The image of Israel as a national home that everyone can take pride in, that has not just eroded, but it’s completely unfamiliar, I think, to young generations of folks. We’ve had right-wing entrenchment in Israel that’s only gotten more severe in the last 40 years. Marc Steiner:  Yeah, yes. Shane Burley:  We’re talking about a state that is so overwhelmingly to the right. When you compare, for example, the number of far-right parties in Israel to Europe, Israel is much larger, but also that doesn’t even factor in Likud, which has become this sort of radical far-right ethno-nationalist party itself. And so you’re looking at, basically, this large right-wing base there that’s so much further to the right than you’re actually going to encounter in most countries. So what connection do people have to that? Can they actually see themselves in that? Is this a force for Jewish protection and safety? And I don’t think that intuitively makes sense to young folks. Sometimes with older folks that maybe had a different image of growing up, maybe it’s harder to lose that image. But young folks never really started with that perception. Marc Steiner:  Right. Shane Burley:  Particularly if they come from the left. So we end up with a situation where the protection of Israel feels so far from their normal sense of how you would create safety or how you create political progress, things like that. But one thing I think that’s also important is that a lot of these people also talked about their politics in Israel-Palestine, where it’s also about caring about Jewish safety and Israeli Jewish safety. The situation is untenable for Israeli Jews, like you’re talking about. You have the kibbutzim with left-wing Israelis, they get attacked by Hamas Oct. 7. This is coming from a long, long history of the dispossession of Palestinians, it’s creating a volatile, violent situation. I don’t look at Israel and think to myself, oh, what a tremendously safe place for Jews. And so if that was the part of your concern, this is obviously not working out the way that you thought it would. So all these people are coming in with these complex ideas because of their feelings about Jewish safety, because of their commitment to the continuation of the Jewish people. Those are the motivating issues. And so they’re getting litmus tested on these politics, but not really understanding that their values actually are there. They’re coming in because they care about those things that these organizations claim to care about as well. Marc Steiner:  So what did you learn from all these younger Jews who have been kicked out of organizations for merely saying something that’s anti-Zionist, for merely standing up for Palestinian people? Literally being thrown out of these organizations in huge confrontations. What happens to them, and what do you think that portends for the future? Shane Burley:  Well, one of the things, I think, that was really important is that, particularly if people went to school specifically to do this kind of work, say they became a rabbi or something, this is really frightening. Because if you have, let’s say, hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans, which sometimes people will to become a rabbi, a five, six year graduate program, and then all of a sudden you’re fired because of these commitments you’ve had and maybe public statements you’ve made, or maybe even the organizations are public about it, that could mean that that degree or that history is now null and void and your employment. And that’s really frightening to people. People invested lots of their lives, sometimes their whole career in this. And if all of a sudden 95% of the places you’re going to work won’t have you, that puts you into a really crisis situation. I think also for folks who have what are, frankly, really common left-wing politics on Israel-Palestine, you often have to build your own organizations, and that is not financially stable enough to actually pay a career salary. You can’t really pay the bills creating a small synagogue where you’re the anti-Zionist rabbi, it’s really tough. So all of the economic factors are against you speaking out on Israel-Palestine. It’s really, really a high cost here. That’s part of what I learned about it. Another thing too is that a lot of people felt like they had good relationships with the people at work, and that sometimes those people knew about their politics, and it was fine until Oct. 7. Sometimes they did the didn’t ask, didn’t tell. But it was really frightening to people how quickly that relationship dissolved when their opinions about what Israel’s doing in Gaza became public. And that was something I think some people would’ve guessed, but other people were really surprised that that’s what ended up happening. I think also the low level of offense that a lot of these situations happen. So for example, one person fired from a Hillel chapter for, ultimately, liking Instagram posts from Jewish Voice for Peace. They weren’t accused of being a member, they weren’t really accused of even public activism. Liking the posts. And those posts were then printed out and handed to them when they’re being terminated. So we’re not talking about people being disciplined for going above and beyond, doing something really profound or loud. It’s often very quiet things. I think another thing is that a number of these people aren’t going to go back. They don’t want to work in Jewish life anymore. And that’s really sad. And it’s sad for them because this was such an important part of their lives and it provides a lot of meaning. And I think also a lot of these people liked the organizations they worked with. A number of people talked about, hey, I really liked this place. There’s things about it that were really fantastic, congregants are great, students are great, whatever it is. And so that’s being taken away from them too, even though it was so symbiotic, they worked so well with those people. Marc Steiner:  Maybe the example you just brought up was Atlas Kluse? Klus, Kluse? Shane Burley:  Yeah, Atlas Klus. Marc Steiner:  Who’s a social justice fellow at Chicago Hillel. And then in the article about him, it said that Klus shared with you that he received a document that he must agree to not to be any of these three things: a Nazi, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and part of an anti-Zionist group or effort. When I read that, it was like, what? What? How do you put those things together? How do you say, if you’re supporting Palestinian life, you’re somehow allied or like a Ku Klux Klanner. What? That blew me away. Shane Burley:  Yes. Yes. So this is part of their hiring process, and something they were reminded of several times is that they couldn’t be a member of these various organizations understood to be threats to Jews. So a Nazi, a Klansman, and then anything that supports this organized anti-Zionist movement, or even a movement that’s critical of Israel, say BDS, something like that. Those are sort of assumed to be, by this phrasing, it’s assumed to have some relationship to one another. And this gets back to how a lot of large organizations like the Anti-Defamation League define things like antisemitism and threats to Jews. They assume that there’s a shared understanding of Jewish flourishing we all have; of course, it’s Israel. Whether or not Jews are safe and successful depends on how successful and safe Israel is. And so anything that’s a threat to that is a threat to Jews and therefore de facto antisemitism. So they’re operating on this framework that when you see this language in support of Palestinian liberation, it must be understood as a continuity of threat to Jewish safety. It can only be understood in that framework. And so that ends up being this line that, in this era of such Jewish unsafety, anything that comes even close to that now becomes verboten. It’s too much. And so when they look at this connection, they see something where it was specifically about a ceasefire resolution in Chicago from the mayor’s office, it was like Jewish Voice for Peace celebrating that and Atlas Klus liking that, that was seen then thrown into this larger continuity of the increase of antisemitism, the threatening fear of Jewish students, all these things that feel to us so bizarrely different, but they’re always relegated down to this: anything that’s a threat to Israel is a de facto threat to Jews. Marc Steiner:  When you raised Chicago in the article, if I remember correctly from the article, the vote to call for a ceasefire in Chicago was a 24-24 split down the middle, and then the mayor was the deciding vote? Shane Burley:  Yeah, something like that, yeah. And this is something that the local federation and JUF and large organizations played a big role in pushing back on that. They understood a lot of these statements as antisemitic if they were too supportive of Palestine in it, and they played a political role in trying to push on these ceasefire resolutions. That’s part of what ends up happening here, is that a lot of these organizations are political organizations, they have a political agenda. So speaking out in favor of a ceasefire resolution may be speaking out against the political orientation of the people employing you. Marc Steiner:  This whole situation that we’re facing right now with the slaughtering of Palestinians in Gaza, the utter destruction of everything in Gaza, leveling it, people being killed in the West Bank as well, the deepening divide inside the Jewish community as well as America. I think I said this earlier, but it makes me think of the biblical story of Masada, where we as Jews committed suicide because we were under attack and we destroyed ourselves. And we seem to be doing it again in this divide around Israel-Palestine. And plus, I do think it allows antisemitism to erupt, at the same time the struggle is correct to fight for the rights of Palestinians. There’s so many contradictions in this. Shane Burley:  I think history is very clear that Jewish life flourishes when Jewish diversity and Jewish freedom of conscience flourishes as well. And also in a cosmopolitan, multicultural society where difference is respected and all communities are protected. Historically, Jewish communities are often safest when partnering with other communities who have been threatened by the far right or by the state or things like that. So we’re undermining exactly that history with this very isolationist, nationalist narrative. And we’re cutting out the very forces, activists, community organizers, anti-fascists, that have protected us in the past. So we’re breaking that continuity really distinctly. And then shifting us into this basically understanding our protection only in this ethnocratic model, and one that sees itself very far away from other communities, that has a political agenda alone that focuses on insularity. All of those elements do not have a history of keeping Jews safe, and instead far-right movements, wherever they happen, tend to have antisemitic areas, which is, for example, all across Europe the same parties that Likud are partnering with in a lot of cases often holds huge numbers of antisemitic activists. So this is not exactly a very safe way of dealing with the problem of antisemitism. Marc Steiner:  Yes. Shane Burley:  And like you said, antisemitism has increased really dramatically in the last year. There’s no other way to understand that. It’s just not happening on college campuses, really. It’s happening across the returning growth of the neo-Nazi movement. It’s happening in the GOP, where antisemitic conspiracy theories have become so endemic that it’s part of how they actually speak to the working class now. It’s like part of how they take their working-class anxieties and give it a narrative that’s friendly to them. All of these things are true. And then we have this crisis in Israel-Palestine, the genocide in Gaza, that increases tensions even more and gives people a lot of ammo when you have these antisemitic actors trying to pull people or recruits over. None of this is helpful. None of this is actually a helpful situation for Jewish safety. And entrenching these ideas further, kicking people out, creating more division only weakens our hand on this. Marc Steiner:  I think we’re at a very critical juncture on a number of levels here, whether it’s how this affects this election in the United States where the neofascist right could seize power in America completely. And you mentioned earlier, just for our people listening, Likud, which is the right-wing political party in Israel that has now taken over with all its allies in that country and in Israel. So I mean, when you see the masses of young Jews who are in the streets saying, no, not in our name, when you see this huge split, I think, both in terms of domestic politics and what’s happening in Israel-Palestine at the moment, I think we’re at a fundamentally deep contradiction, a fundamental deep contradiction that could really explode, and it could hurt Jews, it could hurt the entire world. I’m not explaining as well as I want to. What I’m saying is I think what’s happening at this moment in Israel-Palestine, and the movements in this country backing Palestinian liberation and freedom go way beyond Jews, go way beyond Israel-Palestine. I think we’re seeing a massive contradiction coming to the fore here, and it could spill over into many directions beyond just that one struggle. That’s what I’m saying. Shane Burley:  I think, obviously, the international solidarity movement with Palestine is probably the biggest social movement of the last year. It is overwhelmingly numerically, but also the level of participation on campuses, things like that. So it actually puts us in relationship with Black Lives Matter, anti-fascist movements, the Occupy movement, basically movements of the last 15 years that had a really big groundswell that were bigger than the organizations that were involved in organizing them. It’s a mass participation. And all of those movements also signify a break between young people and status quo establishment politics, whether it’s the politics of the right or the Democratic Party, whatever it is. But these are revolutionary movements. They have a revolutionary core to them. And so this is true here as well. And you have Jewish communities, young Jewish communities participating at a much, much higher rate than the general public. And there’s a certain element where they’re saying, yeah, these Israel politics have actually been… They’re not just status quo of the country, but they’re status quo of my home, of my synagogue, of the places I was educated. So there’s a revolutionary sort of rebellion happening there, and I don’t think it’s just about Israel-Palestine. I think a revolutionary movement, whether they focus on one topic or another, there’s a whole complex of ideas that are underneath that. Because I think people’s experiences fighting against police violence or fighting against the effects of colonialism in other places, all that influences why they’re here now. This is not happening in isolation. As much as a lot of organizations like the ADL try to paint Palestine organizing as being sort of in isolation, people don’t know what they’re talking about, they’re doing it because it’s trendy, that’s actually not really true. It is very, very connected to other social movements. So all of this, I think, shows a big generational shift on these politics. I think, at the same time, that what only will make that more intense is this dialectic of them becoming more repressive on the organizational side. The more right-leaning these organizations become, the more rebellious the young, revolutionary spirit will likewise respond as. And then that creates the real break. I think it’s also important though to note that this is not actually particularly new. It’s particularly severe in this situation, but it’s not new in Jewish life. The Jewish new left of the ’60s, ’70s rebelled specifically against these established organizations. Sometimes it was on Israel, sometimes it was not funding Jewish education or prioritizing rich Jewish communities, but they went after them the same way. The Jewish Renewal movement, in a lot of ways, was the rebellion against that. And you have earlier generations, Bundist, socialist, Communist Party — Marc Steiner:  Bundists versus the Zionists. Exactly. Shane Burley:  Right, yeah. So there were always the rebellious elements that come around generationally, where young Jews are basically looking at the leadership and saying, hey, you betrayed what I understand to be the mission of the Jewish people. So that’s a pretty standard part of it. I think the question now is whether or not that young group of people will take over these organizations and move them in that direction, or they will abandon them. And I think what’s happening is that they’re actually not given the choice because they’re being abandoned by the leadership. Marc Steiner:  Well, I think that the voices that you allowed us to hear in your article are the voices that need to be heard. Shane Burley:  Oh, absolutely. Marc Steiner:  Because their stories are important for the world to hear. And I really do look forward to more conversations with you, but also with some of the folks that you interviewed in your article that we can do together to bring their voices out because they need to be heard. They’re the ones who were attacked. They’re the ones who are fighting for their beliefs. They’re the ones who are going to be the engine that pushes the revolution of change inside the Jewish world, I think. Shane Burley:  Yeah, I think them speaking out and having their perspectives heard is part of what will shift this. By other people hearing, okay, I’m hearing a critical voice from a rabbi or from a Jewish communal leader that’s been fired, I share that with them, that makes it easier for somebody else to speak out. And when you have the density of folks — And this is actually part of how I got plugged into the article, is that people were connecting people who had been fired or had been pushed out or being threatened to be fired because they needed that solidarity because it was happening in isolation. But when people speak out like this, you end up basically echoing that solidarity across the entire country or across the world because more people are able to see that there are strong voices speaking out. They hear stuff that reflects their values, that kind of thing. So I think the more that we can highlight that it actually makes folks safer when these things happen. And it also signifies the size of the critical community, whether they’re anti-Zionist or non-Zionist or however they define it. The size of it then makes the case that we need organizations of our own or that we’re actually a sizable constituency of these organizations. It counters the idea coming from these major organizations that these are marginal and threatening voices. Marc Steiner:  Shane Burley, A, I want to thank you for doing this conversation with us today and for the work that you do. And remind people listening today to check the link below and read the article, “US Jewish Institutions Are Purging Their Staffs of Anti-Zionists”. It’s a month-long investigation, found even the smallest sense of dissent is often met with unemployment. It’s well worth the read, really wrestle with and look at, and we’ll be examining this a great deal more in the coming weeks together. And Shane, once again I want to thank you so much for the work you do and for always being willing to come on and talk. Always good to see you. Shane Burley:  Yeah, I’m always glad to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Marc Steiner:  Once again, let me thank Shane Burley for joining us today. And we’ll link to his article from In These Times, “US Jewish Institutions Are Purging Their Staffs of Anti-Zionists”. Well worth the read. And thanks to David Hebden for running the program today, and audio editor Alina Nehlich for working her magic, Rosette Sewali for producing The Marc Steiner Show, and the tireless Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making the show possible. Let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at [email protected], and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to Shane Burley for joining us today. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.