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(upbeat music) - Hi everyone, Steve Adubato for the entire program, we welcome compelling commentator, author, a big thinker, if you will, about a very important topic.

He's Peter Beinhart, author of the very powerful book, "Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, A Reckoning."

Peter, great to have you with us.

- Thanks for having me.

- Peter, the title of the book first, please explain.

- Well, I think that a lot of the way in which we in the Jewish world tend to think about being Jewish has to do with reckoning, with the destruction that has been done to us, thousands of years of persecution culminating in the Holocaust, in genocide and much of Jewish culture, theology, politics, is in response to that, figuring out how we make, how we continue as a people, how we think about our relationship with God in the wake of these things.

And I wanted to suggest that in the wake of what is now widely considered a genocide committed by a Jewish state in the name of the Jewish people, that we need to reckon with what it means to be Jewish now in the wake, not of a catastrophe that has befallen us, but a catastrophe that has been committed in our name against another people.

- Peter, you're Jewish.

Your Jewish faith is important to you, your Jewish culture important to you, your religion important to you, your family, important to you.

What I was struck by is right in the beginning of the book, you write a letter to a quote, former friend, explain who this friend was is, and the message in that letter, which I found incredibly candid, and it had to be painful for you to write, please.

- Thank you.

You know, in Jewish tradition, in Jewish text, the metaphor of Jews as a family looms very large.

We call ourself B'nai Israel, the children of Israel.

Israel is the name that Jacob is given after he wrestles with the angel.

So there is this metaphor of Jews as a kind of a quasi extended family.

And the notion of Jews is having solidarity with one another, being for there for one another in times of pain is very, very important.

The rabbis say "Kol Yisrael arevim zeh la-zeh".

All Jews are responsible for one another.

And I know that for people close to me, people who I really cherish, my public opposition to Israel's behavior in Gaza and indeed to the very notion of a state that gives Jews legal supremacy over Palestinians is considered a breach of that solidarity, which creates a lot of anger and a lot of pain in those relationships.

And so I didn't wanna just write a book for people who already agreed with me.

I wanted to try to write a book to those people who believe that my views are a threat to them, that my views are a breach of Jewish solidarity, and to try to mic my case.

But whether I convinced them or not, trying to show that this is a book written out of Jewish solidarity and love.

- You've lost friends.

- Certainly I have.

Again, it's important to say that losing friends is nothing compared to what people in Gaza have lost, often entire families, and is nothing compared to what Israeli Jews lost on October 7th.

So I live a very safe and privileged life, but in many, many Jewish families in the United States today, this has an incredibly divisive and painful issue.

- Peter, you mentioned October, 7th.

Try for us in the book does a very effective job, if you will, at least from my perspective, in trying to provide some context, which is an odd word when you're talking about pain and destruction, and death, and starvation and the horrors of October 7th, as well as what Peter writes about in terms of the destruction of Gaza.

Put October 7th, the horrific, barbaric, disgusting, unimaginable actions of Hamas, the taking of the hostages, the keeping of the hostages for two years.

We're taping this in the middle of November, 2025.

And and for those who say it was October the 7th, that caused us to see the world the way we do, and to do what was done in Gaza, you say?

- I would say there's a really important distinction between understanding and justifying.

What Hamas did on October 7th, targeting civilians for murder and for kidnapping.

These are war crimes in under international law.

No matter what you have suffered, you do not have the right to kill and and abduct civilians, period.

And I make very clear in the book, I think that I have no sympathy for people who justify those things, but if we wanna prevent horrible days like October 7th, one of the worst days of my life from ever happening again, we have to understand the context so we can respond to it in a way that makes people safer.

And so I tried in the book to say some things that I think in Jewish spaces are often difficult to say about the conditions of Palestinians in Gaza.

The first thing that's really important to understand is that most people who live in Gaza, their families are not from Gaza.

They're from families of people who were expelled from Israel, Israel's creation in 1948 75, 80% of the population of Gaza are refugees.

Many of them can actually see the lands from which their families were expelled.

Since 1967, they've been under Israeli occupation, which means they're under the control of the Israeli state, but they can't become citizens of that state.

The state that has life and death power over them is totally unaccountable to them.

And then starting in the early 1990s, and intensifying after 2007, when Hamas took power, Israel instituted this blockade where it controls everything that goes in and out of Gaza, which is why human rights watch called it an open air prison.

Most people in Gaza growing up in Gaza, which is the size of an American city, had never been able to leave Gaza.

My friend, Mohamed Shahad, who grew up there, said that every person he knew in Gaza contemplated suicide because there were barely any jobs, not very much water and electricity.

None of this justifies what Hamas did.

But I'm gonna use an analogy again, which is gonna be controversial, but maybe helpful for Americans.

Think about what we did to Native Americans in the 19th century.

We pushed these people off their land into smaller and smaller enclaves, and sometimes Native Americans broke out of those enclaves, those reservations and committed terrible massacres.

Men, women and children, things that one cannot morally excuse.

But if we say that they did it just because they're barbarians, because they're savages, then you simply lay, then you simply lay the foundation for even more horrifying violence.

You have to understand the context and the fundamental denial of people's human rights if you're gonna make everyone safer.

- Peter, you grew up in South Africa, - Partly, partly.

- You understand apartheid better than most.

Would you say that Israel on some level isn't apartheid state?

- Yes, again, I know these are painful words for many Jews to hear.

Apartheid is an Afrikaans term, but under international law, it's been defined as kind of domination by one racial group, racial meaning in this context, also religious or ethnic over another so that America in the South would've been classified as an apartheid state under Jim Crow.

In the West Bank let's for instance, Israeli Jews enjoy citizenship.

They have the right to vote for the government that controls them.

They have free movement, they have due process.

Palestinians have none of those things.

There are two separate legal systems in which Jews enjoy legal supremacy and Palestinians are legal inferiors.

This is why even Israel's leading human rights organization, Bensalem, has said that Israel is practicing apartheid as well as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty.

And most of the leaders of post apartheid South Africa say this.

So yes, this is painful, but this is a good description of the legal regime that exists.

- So, by the way, by way of background, Peter Beinhart has been a very visible commentator and writer and journalist for a long time.

He is also a professor of journalism, political science at CUNY, editor at large of the online magazine Jewish Currents.

And Substack, people can find what there, Peter?

- The Beinhart Notebook on Substack.

- And by the way, I encourage everyone to get the book, read the book and decide for yourself.

So I'm gonna disclose something here, and I'll leave the particulars out of it to protect certain people.

So we're connected to public broadcasting.

We're our own production company.

We do our programming.

We try to have different perspectives of people.

A while back, we had a Palestinian, a professor from a major university who happened to be Palestinian, who argued a certain point of view.

And we challenged her on October the 7th.

We challenged her, it was early on in the war, if you will, and soon after a major foundation that had been funding us for 20 years, a major Jewish foundation.

And they'll never acknowledge this, ended their funding to us.

It was communicated to us clearly that they were disappointed in our programming.

We tried to communicate that we have different points of view.

And the argument was, it was an irresponsible thing to do to have her on.

Here's the question.

Is it irresponsible in your view, as a journalist, as someone who's Jewish, as someone who cares deeply about what's happening, not just in Israel, excuse me, but obviously in Gaza, given the book, is it irresponsible to have different people with different points of view, A and B?

What happens when those in power and those with money use those resources to make it clear that it's not acceptable?

I know it's a loaded question.

- Yeah.

- But I know we're not the only ones who face that.

- Yeah, I have to say from my point of view, trying to shut down an open and vigorous debate is about the most non-Jewish thing you can do.

- Because.

- The Talmud, which is the compendium of Jewish law, which is itself a series of rollicking and fierce debates over centuries between rabbis says, in a section called Pirkei Avot, it says, it asks who is wise, and the answer it gives, is the one who learns from all people.

It seems to me it's, we gain wisdom by listening to a wide array of people of different points of view.

And it's especially important to listen to Palestinians because they've often been the ones who have been not given a platform as the great Palestinian literary critic.

Edward Said said, Palestinians have not had permission to narrate their own experience.

50% of the people in Israel Palestine more even are Palestinian.

How could one ever understand what's really going on?

Just as one could never really understand without listening to Israeli Jews, one could never can really understand without listening to Palestinians.

You don't have to agree with everything, but you need to listen.

And so to me, I frankly, I'm not that surprised by the story you're telling, but I think it suggests or reflects a fear of open debate.

And if you're confident about the positions in which you believe, you shouldn't fear open debate, you should welcome it.

- Last question before we take a quick break.

You have argued that, that the Jewish community needs to come up with a, no.

I shouldn't say come up with that trivializes.

It needs a new, quote, narrative that goes beyond the Holocaust.

What does that mean?

- It means that to recognize that we as Jews are fully human, is to recognize that we are capable of anything that any other group of people are capable of.

We are capable of being victims, and we are capable of being victimizers.

That's what it means to be human.

- Hold on.

Excuse me.

Sorry for interrupting, Peter, victims and victimizers.

- Yes.

- You have argued that the narrative has been largely as victims.

- Yes.

- You believe that needs to change?

- Yes.

To me, to put, always see Jews as only in the role of victims.

To suggest that we are in some kind of permanent replaying of the same story in which Jews are always in the position of the we're in the, in the Czarist Russia, or in the Nazi Holocaust, is in a way to deny us our full humanity.

We are capable of being victims and we are capable of being victimizers.

And when one looks at the reality in Israel-Palestine, a reality in which Jews enjoy legal supremacy.

All Jews have citizenship and the right to vote and free movement and due process, and most Palestinians under Israeli control control don't have any of those rights.

We need to recognize that this is a situation not of Jewish legal inferiority, but of Jewish legal supremacy.

And we have to look at what our own texts, our own traditions have to say about the moral responsibilities of that kind of power.

And I fear that the discourse of focusing of on us always as victims, relieves us of those responsibilities, those moral responsibilities.

- Peter Beinhart is with us.

He's the author of, "Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, A Reckoning."

We'll continue the conversation right after this.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] To watch more one-on-one with Steve Adubato.

Find us online and follow us on social media.

- Welcome back, we're talking to Peter Beinhart, the author of, "Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza A Reckoning."

Peter, what do you hope happens because of the book or that the book influences the conversation moving forward?

- I hope that there may be a rethinking in the organized American Jewish community of this demand that America have kind of unconditional support for Israel.

To me, we as American Jews have benefited tremendously from America's move towards the principle of equality under the law.

A country in which everyone is treated equally under the law, irrespective of their religion, their ethnicity, or race.

We have benefited so much from America's move in that direction, and I believe that we should support the same principle in Israel Palestine, the principle that Israeli is in Israeli Jews and Palestinians should live equally under the law.

But instead, what we find is the most powerful American Jewish institutions essentially very powerfully defend a system that violates the principle of equality under the law, which to me violates the core principle of Judaism that all human beings are created equal in the image of God and should be treated equally by their government.

- Peter, you acknowledge that there is a significant rise in antisemitism, correct?

- Yes.

- But you have concerns about how antisemitism is potentially being used, or, I'm not sure you used the word weaponized.

- Yes.

- But there are concerns about, explain that because there's clearly a rise, - Right.

- And so then how isn't that a contradiction to be concerned about how it's talked about or used while there's a rise, a clear rise in antisemitism?

- I don't think so.

I think antisemitism is rising for the same reasons that Islamophobia and anti-black racism, anti LGBT sentiment, that as liberal democracy fails, as the principle of equality under the law is threatened in the United States.

And we have a powerful movement that wants to make America into a kind of white Christian supremacist nation.

Every group that that is an outsider group is gonna be subject to more discrimination and bigotry.

And I think we need to fight against that in a common front by defending all of our rights to be treated equally.

The problem that I have with the way that groups like the Anti-Defamation League talk about antisemitism is they say that if you oppose the idea of Israel as a Jewish state, a state that gives Jews legal preferences over Palestinians, that is anti-Semitism.

To me, this doesn't make sense.

If I don't like the political system of China, don't wish it weren't run by the Communist Party, but wish it had a more equal political system.

It doesn't make me a bigot against Chinese people.

If I don't like the political system of Iran or Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, it doesn't make me an anti-Muslim bigot.

Indeed, if you oppose Jewish supremacy because you believe in the principle of equality under the law, that's not anti-Jewish bigotry.

The fight for equality is the antithesis of bigotry.

This is the problem with I have, the way I think some Jewish organizations talk about antisemitism.

- Okay, so let's college campus protests.

How the heck in your view can we move forward allowing, and in fact promoting the right of people who have strong things to say like the following, while at the same time protecting people on campus who potentially are victims.

And I'm, and you know the quote, the quote is, it's been out there for a long time and you argue that it could be seen differently, quote "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free".

So if a group of Palestinian protestors are chanting that, the response that I've heard as a journalist and you've heard many more times is, well that's obvious what that means.

It clearly means the destruction of, the devastation of, the elimination of, the state of Israel.

You say not so fast.

- It was actually a very interesting study done by the University of Chicago where they asked both Jewish and Muslim students what they thought the term meant, and particularly did it mean the expulsion of Jews.

And two thirds of the Jewish students said, yes, we interpret this as meaning the expulsion of Jews, but only 14% of Muslim students did.

So what does that suggest?

It seems me that I think what universities should do when people have this chant is actually have a conversation about it, bring people together to talk.

This is what universities are supposed to do.

They're supposed to educate right.

Students at universities, including Jewish students, have the right to be safe from violence and intimidation and harassment.

- Hold on one second, Peter.

Stay right there.

- Yes.

- Is there a distinction?

I'm sorry for interrupting.

- No problem.

- Is there a distinction in your mind between feeling unsafe for a Jewish student with Palestinian students chanting this and other related things about the situation in Gaza in the Middle East, unsafe versus uncomfortable.

What's the difference?

- Yeah, I think this is the absolutely crucial distinction, right?

Students, Jewish students, all students on campus have the right to be safe, but they don't have the right to be protected from being uncomfortable.

You go to university to be made intellectually uncomfortable.

There may be a Jewish student who comes from a very pro-Israel family and they hear people saying very critical things about Israel.

There may be a Christian kid from a very anti-abortion family who comes to a school and hears people saying things about abortion that are very challenging.

There may be a Palestinian kid who comes and sees people defending what Israel's doing in Gaza, and finds that very intellectually uncomfortable.

But this is what university is supposed to do to challenge the views that you were raised with so that you can think more deeply about those views.

If you try to protect students from that kind of open and vibrant and sometimes difficult debate, you are actually denying them an education.

- So Peter, one of the last questions I have for you involves the connection between the message in your book and American politics, as we do this program there's a new mayor of New York City.

Mamdani is someone who has been outspoken on a range of issues you're talking about.

He has changed some of those positions.

He has also said that he is been misinterpreted and on some of them, but he's the first Muslim elected Mayor of New York City, and American politics, including what goes on in Congress, Washington across the nation, is influenced by the discussion we're having right now.

What do you believe the discussion should sound like, and be all about as it relates to American politicians, as opposed to, are you with Israel or not?

Because that's often the way it's framed.

- The thing that a lot of American Jewish organizations and politicians don't wanna admit about Zohran Mamdani is that his views on Israel, which indeed are radical compared to the- - Are they dangerous?

Are they dangerous?

- No, I don't think they're dangerous because what Mamdani believes it is the principle of equality under the law.

To me, this is not a dangerous principle.

This is actually the best way to keep people safe.

The best way to create a safe America is to treat people equally.

The base best way to keep Israeli Jews and Palestinians safe is to give them legal equality.

Because when people have the right to be represented by their government to have a nonviolent mechanism of getting the government to listen to them by having the to vote, their likelihood of using violence goes down.

So I think the principle that Mamdani believes in is the right principle.

It's also a principle that's shared by a growing number of younger Jews.

Mamdani won at least a third of the Jewish vote, and I'm sure that among younger American Jew, younger Jews in New York, it was considerably higher than a third, because many younger Jews themselves are coming to realize that Jewish supremacy, which is often aligned around the world with forms of Christian and other supremacy, these are not principles that are good for us.

That our safety is bound up with the safety of other people, and we are all safe when we're treated equally under the law.

- Peter, when I asked you this in the beginning of the program, you, you kind of blew it off.

It was when I was asking you about the impact, the book, writing the book, having those in your family and friends and people you grew up around who are Jewish.

You said, listen, I'm comfortable, my life is fine, but I wanna end on this note.

What impact has this, writing this book, and the response that you've gotten, which is not unilateral.

It's not only one response, but the negative backlash.

The pushback, you're not really as Jewish as you say you are because you're not quote with us.

How has that impacted you at all?

- No, it has impacted me.

And there have been, you know, there have been painful moments there are loss of friendships that are really precious to me.

- How about family?

How about family?

- There are divisions in my family as well, but you know, you mentioned earlier my parents grew up in apartheid South Africa.

My parents opposed apartheid, that... My father of blessed memory died five years ago.

That, for me is his moral legacy.

And for me, I feel very grateful to be able to have a voice to continue that legacy, which I feel like was passed down to me.

Which is, to me, it fits very deeply with my understanding of being Jewish.

Torah does not start with Jews.

It doesn't start with the Jewish story.

It starts in our tradition, Adam, Eve, Noah, the people of the Tower of Babel, Cain and Abel.

These are universal human beings.

And the rabbis take from this the idea that all human beings are created equal in the image of God.

That to me is absolutely central to what it means to be a Jew.

And it's the legacy that was passed down to me by my parents.

And I feel it's a great honor for me to be able, in a very, very small way, to try to maintain that legacy.

- And to pass it on, you have children?

- And to pass it on to my children.

Yes.

- Your children are college age.

- College age.

Yes.

And I'm really proud of the way that they have navigated sometimes with difficulty in Jewish spaces that are very pro-Israel.

And they, I think have had to learn how to listen to people of different points of view, but also to hold fast to what they believe in.

- Peter Beinhart, author of, "Being Jewish After the Destruction, the Destruction of Gaza, A Reckoning."

Peter, I cannot thank you enough for joining us and most importantly, wish you and your family all the best.

- Thank you.

Steve, I really enjoyed this.

- Same here.

I'm Steve Adubato, that's Peter Beinhart.

We'll see you next time.

- [Narrator] One-On-One with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The Fund for New Jersey.

The Turrell Fund, a foundation serving children.

The New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

Community FoodBank of New Jersey.

New Jersey Public Charter Schools Association Delta Dental of New Jersey.

Rutgers University Newark.

And by New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities.

Promotional support provided by ROI-NJ.

And by NJ.Com.

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