But how do you explain why that has

been with Jews? No, I remember that film, My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

I don't know if you saw that.

Yes.

But the dad was saying, like, everybody's Greek.

Every word comes from Greek.

And there's a moment where they say, well, what about sayonara? And he thinks about it and he comes up with this fake Greek etymology for that.

can't

Yeah

... you know, you know the accent from the northeast.

And I thought it was just so funny that they were like these two...

Like, it's like almost like a translation of the same book, you know? They were the same book basically.

And I felt very at home with these people.

And I also really liked, um...

In this book, I really wanted to get away from the pretty stereotypical European American Ashkenazic reform perspective that a lot of Jewish history is told from, and try to talk about how this was a question that different people answered in, in different, uh, in different places and in different times.

Somehow he's become the anti-Semitic super spreader.

Well,

we're already in the middle of it.

And I think that Zionism has always relied on what Hannah Arendt calls speech rules.

So things you're not allowed to say.

So for us Jews, we are often called self-haters.

We're called anti-Semites.

We're called even Hannah Arendt was called a Nazi and Golden who's at the end of my book was called a capo.

How about leadership? Is there any hope there or are they lockstep with the Zionists?

Right.

And so when I write about anti-Zionist Jews, I'm writing about a tradition that goes back further among Jews than Zionism.

Uh, it was about the end of the world and, and the second coming of Christ, and all this kind of fantasy that, that Christian evangelicals had in the 18th and 19th century.

Modern Jewish Zionism really begins with Theodor Herzl in 1896 when he publishes this pamphlet called The Jewish State, and I had never read this book.

Uh, my grandfather brought a copy of it out of Nazi Germany when he escaped in 1938, and I was very moved by it.

It seemed like a sort of nice idea, sort of what you are citing in that definition.

Um, I thought Israel was sort of a nice thing.

So do you ever envisage a two-state solution then?

And you talk about if you can, I mean, I was blown away, pun intended, by your discussion about what happened to the Baghdadi Jews, that community of over 100,000 people.

The oldest in the world.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, the thing about it is that the Jews are both an ethnicity and a religious group.

So, you know, in some parts of the world, like, and I'm sitting here in Brooklyn, New York, and believe me, I'm white.

You know what I mean? Like, nobody's like, if I was living in Poland in the 19th century, well, then no, right? Like, the Jews are seen as this separate thing.

They have a separate language.

Have you been to Israel?

Mm.

Um, they both grew up in the Jim Crow South, so they knew what racism was.

They knew who supported racism, and I grew up being taught to hate anything that smacked of racism.

And so they were sort of vaguely proud, quote-unquote proud of Israel in the way that a lot of Americans were, and I'm sure Canadians as well.

They thought Israel had a lot of problems.

Um, they wished it would get better, but I think it's important to say about my upbringing is I lived in a time, I was brought up in a time when we thought that things were getting better.

So I'm 13 when the Berlin Wall falls.

Wow.

But it's like

that.

It is like that.

But like you realize like how deeply like the Jews were just thinking about the Jews.

And then he gets to Jerusalem and he's excited to come.

He prays at the Western Wall and he has this kind of, he's very religious as well.

He's Orthodox.

unless you have a clever soul accountant.

Right.

Well, so Herzl says – because, again, Herzl says all this stuff.

You know, that's what's so weird and kind of bizarre about him.

He says the anti-Semites will be our closest friends and our best allies.

Wow.

And they appeal – to this day, they appeal to that.

You know, even here in the U.S.

And also, because how dare either of them say something good about the Arabs?

Right.

We didn't have that.

I would've totally gone on Birthright if I had had a chance.

I loved a free trip, you know.

I was, I would've been, if someone said, "You wanna go to Israel for free this summer?" I would've said, "Hell yeah," you know, but I didn't.

Um, and we still had this idea that was extremely sanitized.

I was talking to an older friend the other day about when he first learned the word Nakba, and he said, "Oh, I must have been in my 50s." Like, we just, this vocabulary just wasn't presented to us.

Uh, uh, uh, tell us about him.

Britain?

Well, yeah.

Well, that's George Washington.

Well, are you glad that we have the Declaration of Independence that says life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Are you glad that we have the First Amendment? Are you glad we, you know, freedom of religion and freedom of speech? And, you know, so people, I think that you can have both of those ideas in your head.

Like we are a flawed society, definitely nobody's going to, I mean, God knows not today, nobody's going to think everything's great.

But, you know, you can look at it from a reformist view, like a liberal view where you think, okay, well, yeah, like I wish Roe versus Wade would come back.

But that's not the same thing as thinking the whole country is bad.

So can you talk about your inclusion of Arendt? It's such an interesting chapter because it felt like a foreshadow for a lot of the tactics we see today.

Can you just tell me who he was and why he was opposed

to it? So I knew very vaguely that my grandparents had left Beth Israel, which is the oldest synagogue in Texas.

It dates back to the Republic of Texas.

And it was the biggest synagogue in the entire South.

It was a big deal.

And in 1943, the synagogue splits in two, one of which becomes Emmanuel, which is on Sunset Boulevard right across from Rice University, which is the synagogue I grew up in, and one of which is Beth Israel, which still exists.

And I knew that my grandparents had left because they were Zionists, but I didn't know much more than that.

What does that cost him? What happens in his congregation? What happens in Houston in the wake of that?

know,

um, And they go in and they discover something completely by accident that's, you know, usually it's the origin of his fortune or it's the story of what happened to his first wife or, you know, some kind of.

And so that's the Ibsen plot.

And I was fascinated by that.

And when I read Herzl, I thought, this is it.

I expected, again, as I said, like about Susan Sondheim, like Susan Sondheim was a pretty well-known, nightmare in certain ways you know she was rude to the waiter and she was she had all these broken relationships and all this kind of stuff but like everyone kind of knew that you know like i'm like a new york person like i know the stories and there's a lot of divas walking around the city you know it's not like it's not like she was the only one but like But Herzl really, but she doesn't seem crazy.

You know, she seems just like kind of, she gets in a bad mood and she kind of growls at people.

yeah.

Kewpie, the original Japanese mayonnaise.

And throughout the 19th century, the Jews do pretty well in Europe, actually.

And they are allowed to integrate, and they're allowed to go to universities, they're allowed to enter professions, they're allowed to live in other neighborhoods.

That ends, but at the same time, there is a distance.

I mean, there's a difference between views that some people, like the rabbi at the beginning of the book, he says, we're not trying to be like other people.

which is what people say is assimilation.

We're not trying to be exactly like other people.

Have you been to Israel?

Could you talk about him, maybe, and any others that you would like to give our audience as examples of people who not only spoke in these terms very bravely, but did so knowing that it could very well cost them their lives?

De Haan is an absolutely fascinating figure.

And he's actually the first chapter I wrote in the book.

I've lived in the Netherlands for a long time.

And he's somebody who, if you know about Dutch literature and Dutch culture, you know him.

I mean, it's not exactly a household name, but, you know, he was very famous because he was the author of the first gay book.

novel in Dutch, which he published in 1901, which is a fascinating novel because it's also, it feels like it's Brooklyn in 98.

So I want to give you as much space and time as you want to unpack whatever you want about the Hannah Arendt chapter, but I would really appreciate it if you talked precisely about this idea of which Jews got to go where and which Jews were not allowed, right?