My guest on the show today is David Sugarman, writer, Arc magazine editor, podcast producer of this very show, and agonizing, ambivalent American Jew.
It's in this last capacity that he's joining me today to discuss his essay in the new issue of The Point magazine titled “Goodbye West Orange: Two Paths for the American Jew.”
I want to note, before I say anything more about the essay or our conversation about it, that over the course of the three-plus years that I've been doing this Substack and podcast, there are two issue constellations that I have been especially gun-shy about confronting. One is the various issues surrounding trans people and policies in America, and the other, of course, is Israel-Palestine.
As to why I've been so gun-shy, it should almost go without saying. There is no winning when you wade into these topics. They seem to devour people's capacity to contain nuance or complexity. They also seem to just devour people. You think you're just dipping in a toe, and then suddenly you're neck deep. Then you are underwater, completely defined by the issue, captured by the emotions around it, forever stigmatized or lionized as a hero or villain of the debate, and I have not wanted that fate for myself. I thought and continue to think that it is honorable to abstain from public comment when no one is waiting around breathlessly to hear your opinion, when you don't know that much, and when you don't feel like you have anything particularly interesting or useful to say. So that is why I've stayed away.
As to why I'm breaking with that policy, both with this episode with David and with my upcoming episode with sociologist Rogers Brubaker, whose new book, Gender Identity: The Career of a Category, is very much in the space of the trans issue, I'm not wholly sure. It may be that I have a touch of a bad conscience for opting out to this point, notwithstanding my protestations of honorability around abstention. Or maybe, and this isn't mutually exclusive, I've just started to glimpse a narrow opening, where I didn’t before, for the having of complicated conversations about these immensely complicated topics. And maybe I have been waiting, without realizing I’m waiting, to run across texts that dignify my desire have a different kind of conversation, and then I found them.
David's essay, "Goodbye West Orange: Two Paths for the American Jew," is about two Jews, Moshe and Tova. It's about them both as themselves in their human complexity and about them as avatars of rival sides of the increasingly stark divide in American Jewry between what we might call (and David and I get into our discomfort about just reducing it to this) the Zionists and the anti-Zionists. It's also about David's own lived experience, if you will, as a former member in good standing of both camps, and about his current disaffection with both. It's also about why language itself has become such a battlefield in this intra-American contest, and it's about what comes next for all of us.
To give you a taste, here's David writing in the piece:
Each side demanded, Moshe’s and Tova’s, that I disavow the other: the antisemitic left, the genocidal right; progressive secularism with all its dangerous bedfellows, Zionism in all forms. The logics were nearly identical: look at this community you belong to, this failed project you’ve supported; look at what it’s doing in the world and at the rot at its core: What would you need to see to finally understand its immorality?
Moshe and his community monopolized the pull of peoplehood, and of historical trauma, and of a rising sense of insecurity that has only deepened, as Jews have been murdered in D.C., in Manchester, in Melbourne. Moshe, I’d assume, has both an explanation and solution: antisemitism; Zionism.
Tova, too: empire; revolution. Such an explanation frames Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza, or the state-sanctioned settler violence in the West Bank, or the war against Iran and Lebanon, as parts of a coherent colonial project that should be resisted by any means necessary—even the violent means deployed by Hezbollah and Hamas.
…How can anti-authoritarians be so forgiving of some forms of authoritarianism? I wonder about this as I drive from Moshe’s house to Tova’s, a ground-level unit in a quiet complex surrounded by woods. It’s a matter of language, I conclude—that our words can’t really travel with us, even from one side of West Orange to another. To talk about Zionism or anti-Zionism with Moshe is entirely different from talking about Zionism or anti-Zionism with Tova, the words hollowed out by conflicting interpretations. Into that vacuum rush politicians, university professors, the media, the synagogue, the family, all working to impose their own definitions. When I say Zionist or anti-Zionist, I do so against the background of what those words have been made to mean, and by whom.
Which is not to say that these coalitions don’t hold real appeal. To live in a community like Moshe’s, as I once did, is to know its deep cohesion and spiritual intensity. To have left it and joined a secular and progressive community like Tova’s is to know its powerful sense of justice. And to have been a part of either is to know their shortcomings. The dogmatism and conformity, the us/them thinking. It is also to know the blind spots: sometimes there really are colonizers in the synagogues; sometimes it really is a Hamas supporter on the front lawn.
So that's just a taste. It's a really good piece. You should read it maybe before listening to the rest of this podcast, or if not then after.
Eminent Americans is produced in collaboration with David's employer, the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, and distributed through its publication, Arc, of which David is deputy editor. You can find all of Arc's podcasts and much more at arcmag.org.
I hope you enjoy this conversation. I know I did. You can email me with thoughts, comments, hate, love at djopps@gmail.com.
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