Marc Steiner
The movement in
solidarity with Palestine has a sizable presence of progressive Jewish
Americans. As an anti-Zionist rabbi, Brant Rosen has made it his life’s work to
build religious and cultural community for other likeminded Jews whose
solidarity with Palestine runs deep. The Marc Steiner Show returns with another
edition of ‘Not in Our Name.’
Demonstrators from Jewish Voice For Peace protest the war in Gaza
at the Canon House Building on July 23, 2024 in Washington, DC. Photo by
Tierney L. Cross/Getty Images
Studio
Production: Cameron Granadino
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed
transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available
as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to the
Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s good to have
you all with us as always. And this is another part of our episode of our
series, Not in Our Name. We’re talking to the rabbi, Brant Rosen. He’s a rabbi
at Tzedek Chicago, a consciously anti-Zionist congregation, founded in 2015.
He’s a former president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association,
co-founder and co-chair of Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council. He’s
written in many journals. His newest book is Wrestling in the Daylight, a
Rabbi’s Path to Palestinian Solidarity, and we’ll be linking some of his
articles in Tikkun and Truthout and the Jewish Forward that you’ll see on this
site and can read for yourself. Brant, welcome. Good to have you with us.
Brant Rosen:
Thank you so
much. Thanks for having me.
Marc Steiner:
When I read the
pieces you’ve written, one of the things that really came out to me is the pain
of what you write about. It’s not like, oh me, oh woe is me. The kind of pain
I’m talking about is the pain of watching Israel do what it’s doing at this
moment in terms of the occupation of the war and the slaughter of Palestinians
in Gaza and the West Bank. I think that that’s something that many people don’t
really get when it comes to especially Jews who say, no, not in our name.
Brant Rosen:
Yeah, I would
say that the pain, there’s primary pain and secondary pain I suppose. I think
the primary pain is the pain that I feel for the Palestinian people and what
they’re going through and what is being inflicted on them with and has been for
decades, but I think in the past year plus now, just to unbearable, genocidal
levels. I follow the news very, very carefully and I read every day about mass
murder that’s going on in Gaza, in the West Bank, now in Lebanon, and that is a
deep source of pain just as a human being, as a human being of conscience. I’m
sure there are many who feel the same way, probably not enough, but there is a
growth of solidarity of Palestinians around the world.
I think
secondarily as a Jew, not just as a human being, but as a Jew, I feel pain
because a spiritual tradition that I cherish very deeply is being used as the
pretense for this genocide and for this oppression and has been for many, many
decades. And I mourn what is being done in my name as you put it, and also what
is being done to a centuries-old, very venerable spiritual tradition that
stands for ethical behavior and for promoting justice.
Marc Steiner:
I was going to
wait until later to ask this, but since you said what you said, I’m going to
talk about this now. A long time ago, in 1971, I wrote a poem called Growing Up
Jewish. And in that poem there was a line that I wrote that said, how does the
oppressed become the oppressor? And it’s something I’ve been wrestling with a
long time, given kind of the very nationalistic and racist attitudes within my
own family, other people I know, Israelis, other people in the Holy Land
itself. And I’m just curious reflecting on that because it goes beyond just
being Jews. It can be for any culture and how the oppressed end up being an
oppressor as we have become in the Holy Land.
Brant Rosen:
Yeah, I mean, I
think there are many ways to understand this. I think we know that on an
individual level, people who suffer abuse will often become abusers themselves.
That’s certainly true on the interpersonal level. And I think on some level, I
think it works in the collective as well, a community that has gone through the
trauma of oppression, especially the Jewish community that has lived through
centuries of anti-Semitic oppression and violence, primarily in Europe at the
hands of Christendom, and then later culminating in the Nazi’s genocide against
them during World War II. I think you can understand that one mindset that can
emerge from this experience is a never again to us, that we must do whatever we
can to survive because we were almost wiped out, and that is a recipe for
oppression.
This attitude I
think stems from trauma and is handed down generationally, generational trauma
is something that’s very real, can turn people who have a legacy, a historical
experience of oppression into oppressors themselves, especially when state
violence becomes part of the mix. Right? Jews were a stateless people for most
of our history, and once we had a nation and an army and the support of the
international community behind us, much of that trauma, unfortunately
tragically can be kind of metabolized into the kinds of things that were done
to us we now do to others, namely the Palestinian people.
Marc Steiner:
I didn’t ask
that question obviously, and you didn’t respond to the question that way either
as an excuse or as a justification.
Brant Rosen:
No, it’s an
explanation.
Marc Steiner:
Yes, an
explanation of what we’re facing and why. And so I wonder, as a leader of part
of the Jewish community, what you think we can do? How do you change hearts and
minds, not just in Israel, but in the Jewish community about this war? I mean,
on Yom Kippur, I spoke at a synagogue about what we’re talking about now.
Response was mixed to say the least. But when you see the masses of younger
Jews saying, no, this is not right. This is not who we are, not in our name. We
can’t tolerate this. How does that organize and take place inside the Jewish
community, and how is it approached to begin to change hearts and minds and the
understanding in our own country?
Brant Rosen:
I’m not in the
changing hearts and minds business. I’m not interested, I mean, I know that
sounds harsh, I’m not interested in changing hearts and minds. I think it’s
fruitless in my experience, and I’ve been doing this a long time on this
particular issue, especially in the Jewish community. If we’re talking about
changing individual hearts and minds, people are not ready to change until
they’re ready to change, and nothing, I can continue to do what I do and others
like the young people who you were referring to who are mobilizing in
increasing numbers and massive numbers as part of the Palestine Solidarity
movement. I think all of us are exemplars. We’re not doing this to change
hearts and minds in the Jewish community, but we’re well aware that the Jewish
community is watching us, and often they’re watching us in fury. They’re
sickened by us. But I think in other cases it’s planting a little bit of a
seed.
They know we
exist. They know what our message is. Maybe they might pay attention to parts
of that message and park it away for the time being. But actively trying to
change people’s minds who aren’t prepared to be changed I think is fruitless
and a waste of energy and a waste of time and a waste of resources. I think we
need to build a movement. We need to participate in the up building of the
Palestine Solidarity movement and be a real Jewish presence in that movement,
which we are doing. And that’s really the first order of business. If and when
others in the Jewish community are ready to join us, hem muzmanim le’ashot et
ze, as my grandfather used to say, they’re welcome to do it. But in the
meantime, I’m not going to spend my time trying to convince parts and minds to
think a way that they’re not prepared to think. They have to do it in their own
time if they’re going to do it at all. But in the meantime, we can provide role
models for them for a different Jewish way.
Marc Steiner:
So one more
question in that realm. As somebody who’s spent a lot of time in his life as an
organizer, community, union organizing, issue organizing over the years, does
that have a role in organizing something within to say no about what’s going on
in Palestine Israel?
Brant Rosen:
I think it’s a
little different than union organizing. I think when we talk about building
movements for, mass movements for communal justice, I mean I would compare it
more to the Civil Rights movement perhaps, or the anti-Apartheid movement. In
those cases, they weren’t going individual by individual as you would if you’re
doing union organizing where you’re really building individual relationships
through one-on-one. Let’s look at Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights
movement. If you read Letter From a Birmingham Jail, he was responding to
liberal clergy in the South who were doing that kind of engagement. Those
liberal clergy were trying to change hearts and minds in the South. These were
white liberal clergy, and they had written a public letter and said, we are
trying to address this through relationship building and engagement with these
white supremacists, and please don’t come to Birmingham. We don’t need any
outside agitators. We’ve got this. That’s who he was addressing in his letter.
King had a
different approach to organizing, and I think rightly so. He was saying that
when it comes to transformative change, societal change, it’s not about trying
to change individual hearts and minds. It’s about creating tension. It’s about
going in the streets and saying, no, this is wrong. And that power, as Douglas
said, power concedes nothing without a demand, and King said something similar
in the letter. I think the kind of organizing we’re talking about, about
building mass movement for transformative change in a real way is just a
different model of organizing. I just don’t think it’s going to happen if we
try to convince one person at a time.
Marc Steiner:
As somebody who
is in the middle of all that, and demonstrations are taking place by Jews and
others in this country against what’s happening at this moment to stop the
slaughter, in terms of the work you’re doing in similar work, how do you see it
taking effect in whole? How do you see it grabbing not just hearts and minds,
but also for serious political change that turns this around, that stops the
ability of the United States from continuing to arm Israel and allow them to
destroy the Palestinian people? How do you think that happens?
Brant Rosen:
Well,
historically it’s happened. It’s not happening the way we would hope it would
happen right now after over a year of protest. But historically, I’m going to
use another example, use the anti-Apartheid movement against the South African
apartheid. That was a similar kind of popular grassroots movement that was very
much a coalition of forces, and there was a palpable Jewish presence in that
coalition. It was just the constant application of pressure and to build
popular support until politically, the political elites could not ignore it,
and it became a liability to continue that political support until that tipping
point is reached, and that tipping point was reached. I remember it well, I’m
sure you do too, that the United States was a strong ally of apartheid South
Africa, and then the Black Congressional Caucus under the Reagan Administration
introduced an anti-apartheid bill and Reagan vetoed it, and they overrode the
veto, and then dominoes began to fall.
It wasn’t only
United States. United States was a prominent ally, but political support began
to fall all around the world as a result of the boycotts, the protests, the
economic pressure, the popular pressure. And that is, I think, the same
playbook that we are hoping for this time around. I think it’s just a much,
it’s been a much harder prospect. We have the popular support. I mean, if you
look around the world, popular support for the Palestinian people is rising
rapidly, and it’s happening in the international community too. Countries like
Ireland and other European countries, certainly countries that you expect to
support Israel, but now some of the Western countries as well. But the popular
support is not really translating into that political tipping point. The United
States support for Israel is still rock solid. Republican, Democrat, it doesn’t
seem to matter. I think a lot of this has to do with commercial interests. I
think the weapons industries are supporting the Democratic Party as much as the
Republican Party.
Lockheed,
Northrop Grumman, Boeing, they’re basically funding this genocide, but
profiting from it, I should say rather. United States is funding it. So it’s a
daunting, daunting foe to be going up against and after over a year of doing
this, we’re no closer to a ceasefire. In fact, we seem to be more closer to a
larger regional war. So it’s been, I think it’s, within the movement, it’s
raised lots of questions about tactics and about strategy and about why isn’t
what we’ve been doing working and how do we need to shift. But in terms of
raising awareness and popular support, I think Israel is about as isolated in
the world as it’s ever been.
Marc Steiner:
You spent time
going back and forth to Israel, and there’s always been, and it was different
20 years ago, 30 years ago, but there’s always been a movement within Israel
against the occupation and the persecution and oppression of Palestinians. It’s
always been there. Where do you see the state of that now? When you look at, I
remember in some of the articles I’ve been reading that you wrote and also
articles you refer to that I read, Israel has gone so far right. The kind of
neo-fascist parties in Israel have gained so much strength, and what is it,
almost 2 million Israelis, many of whom were on the left, have left Israel.
They’re gone. So you’re left with this vacuum and this power of the right. So
I’m curious, from your journeys inside, how do you think a movement develops
that changes that from the inside?
Brant Rosen:
I don’t think
the movement can change itself from the inside. I think it can only change
because of external pressure applied from the outside. Israel is not going to
save itself. I think right now, the left in Israel is a shambles.
Marc Steiner:
Yeah.
Brant Rosen:
What left there
is is basically protesting for the return of the hostages, but not really
actively protesting the genocide that Israel is committing. I think these are
still Zionists. In other words, they consider themselves left liberal, but
they’re still promoting a Jewish apartheid regime, a democracy for Jews, but
not for non-Jews. The number of Israelis who are genuinely standing in
solidarity with Palestinians is very, very minuscule. I know many of them well,
in fact, and they are, what they’re up against is just hard to even fathom.
Many of them are just indefatigable. They’re constantly going out to the West
Bank to do productive presence in villages when settlers are attacking. They’re
forming deep important relationships with Palestinians and Palestinian
movements. But their numbers are just so minuscule and they’re up against it in
a major way.
As you say, many
of them are leaving the country, and that’s increasing the rightward, the far
rightward trend. But there are others who aren’t. I have a good friend, a very
dear friend who is an Israeli member of the Palestine Solidarity movement, and
she says, I don’t have a second passport. I can’t go anywhere. This is my home.
And what they’re stuck with is really, is very, very hard. It doesn’t look
good. Their crackdown on them is fierce.
Marc Steiner:
What do you
mean? Talk a bit about that crackdown when you say it’s fierce.
Brant Rosen:
Well when they
protest, the police come down hard on them violently. Many of them are jailed.
I mean, look, I need to put it in perspective. It’s nothing compared to what
Israel is doing to Palestinians, and it’s also nothing compared to what Israel
is doing to Palestinian citizens of Israel either. There are examples that have
been documented of Palestinian citizens of Israel just being jailed
indefinitely for posting a Facebook post. So I want to keep perspective here
that Israelis, while they are being violently treated by the authorities,
whether it’s by the police or the border police or the Secret Service of
Israel, it’s nothing like what they’re doing to Palestinians. But it means
taking their physical safety in their own hands whenever they go out to protest
or when they go out to work in protected presence in the West Bank. I know many
of them who have broken bones and they’ve been knocked out and shot at. It’s
not easy to be a Palestine Solidarity activist within Israel these days if it
ever was.
Marc Steiner:
As the leader of
an anti-Zionist synagogue, as someone who’s deeply involved in the movement, a
huge part of your existence is inside that movement. So I’m curious where you
think this movement goes in this country? Where does it go and what
strategically can be done and are people doing to end the support of this kind
of apartheid regime in Israel and its oppression of Palestinians, and where do
you see it going?
Brant Rosen:
So are you
referring to the Jewish movement specifically or the movement writ large?
Marc Steiner:
Well, the entire
movement, yeah. Yeah.
Brant Rosen:
I hesitate to
speak too much for the movement itself because I think Palestinians really need
to speak for themselves, the ones who are leading the movement. I think there’s
a sizable Jewish part of this coalition, Jewish Voice for Peace, of which I’m a
member and very active as a part of that, but it’s ultimately not up to me to
dictate or to prognosticate what the tactics and the strategies should be for
the movement going forward. That’s really for the Palestinian leaders
themselves. As I said before, I think there is probably some reassessment going
on given that so much effort has been put into protests, both the outside game
and the inside game, I should say. I think what happened to the DNC and the
inside game and the undecided movement being shut out of the DNC, I think was a
huge wake-up call that many people who were working the inside game just had
doors slammed in their face in a way that was something of a rude awakening.
I don’t think we
should stop trying to change things politically within the Democratic Party,
but I think there may be some strategizing about how to work politically to
recruit new candidates in different kinds of ways. I am not the best person to
ask. There are other people like Beth Miller, who’s the political director of
Jewish Voice for Peace, who might have more to say on that particular subject.
But something needs to shift and something needs to change, and I think much of
it will be continuing to hammer our message home that we can’t stop and we
can’t let up if for any other reason, but for the moral importance of it, that
we’re living in a time of genocide. In a time of genocide you don’t stay
silent. If there’s anything that we know as Jews and as people of conscience is
that you don’t stay silent. When history judges us, we don’t want to be judged
as ones who didn’t speak out when this happened.
Marc Steiner:
I agree
completely. I mean, that is an important statement to make towards the end of
the conversation together, at least this one today, because we do have to stand
up. I’ve been inside the anti-occupation movement since 1968 and after trying
to enlist in the Israeli army, and I didn’t get in there, thank God. Then you
meet Palestinians and left-wing Israelis and the world shifted. But it seems in
many ways that we are at a critical juncture more than I’ve ever seen before,
just in terms of this war. The outright oppression of Palestinians on the West
Bank being shot and put in prison. The 50,000 plus people who have been killed,
maybe more, because of the ones who are stuck under the rubble, who aren’t
being counted, and this very right-wing, Israeli government that’s also deeply
imbued with the fundamentalist leadership, religiously fundamentalist
leadership.
It’s as if Jerry
Falwell took over the United States of America. We are at a very critical
place, and as someone who is really helping lead some of this, running a
congregation in the middle of this movement, it seems to me, when I said
organizing earlier, I was talking about how you take it beyond Palestinian
Americans or Jewish Americans and get a larger population to understand what is
being faced, what it’s doing to the Holy Land, what it’s doing to us. This has
to be a much kind of larger movement to say, no, this has to stop.
Brant Rosen:
Yeah, I think
that’s another piece of it too, I agree with this, what you’re saying, and I
think another piece of it too is that the way people get their news, and thus
the way they construct their narratives is very limited, especially around
Israel. If you look at the mainstream media narrative on Israel, it’s just
unbelievable to me that when I read the New York Times and the Washington Post
and Watch, which I try not to do that often, but enough just to know what’s
being said and the major networks, it’s the Israeli narrative right down the
line. Just every single day there has been an article on the front page of the
New York Times about the assassination of Sinwar from Hamas, but nothing about
the fact that Israel has been massacring Palestinians in North Gaza and
literally starving them to death according to a plan that was made public by
the Israeli press.
The killing of
this one Palestinian person, but nothing about the mass murder that Israel is
carrying out every single day. We need to lift that narrative up. We need to do
a better job of letting people know what is going on because that media does
exist. It exists on social media. All you have to do is listen to Democracy Now
every morning. It will ruin your day. But I think we need to help people shift
the narrative, or at least round out the very, very tiny, narrow narrative,
corporate narrative that they’re being given through the mainstream media and
that’s up to us.
Marc Steiner:
That is up to
us. And I think in many ways, it’s up to people in the Jewish community like
you, like me, like others, to lead that, to be at the forefront saying no, and
putting it out there in the media, putting it out there in massive forums so
people, because it could also be very easy for this movement to fall into
anti-Semitism, which is always lurking below the surface of humanity. It
doesn’t take much for it to bubble up. And that’s why even though we could be
attacked as Judean Rats or whatever other people want to call us, that it’s
time for us to be able to build something that really stands in the way.
Brant Rosen:
Yeah, and I
think anti-Semitism is already starting to bubble up, but it’s not the
anti-Semitism that Israel advocates and the state of Israel would have us
believe. It’s not people standing in solidarity with the Palestinians. It’s
MAGA anti-Semitism, it’s fascist anti-Semitism, it’s white supremacist
anti-Semitism, and we’re seeing evidence of it all over the place. I mean, it’s
coming right out of Trump’s mouth directly. That should also be a impetus for
us to start to create real coalitions because there are lots of people who are
being targeted by fascism in this MAGA moment, and we need to stand with one
another. We need one another more than ever, and by being able to identify who
is the common enemy and who is not is going to be really, really critical.
Marc Steiner:
No, we have to
wind down. But that’s the point where I think that when we spoke earlier about
organizing, that kind of organizing has to take place internally in the United
States to pull that together, to pull people at that together, to show that
there’s this movement that says, we’re not naive. We know what’s happening, and
it has to stop.
Brant Rosen:
Yeah,
absolutely.
Marc Steiner:
Well, I tell
you, I do really look forward to staying in touch and putting together many
more programs with you and really getting this to the fore because it has to
come out there. We have to really, this is, as I said, after all these 50 plus
years of fighting against the occupation, this is the direst moment I’ve ever
seen.
Brant Rosen:
Yeah, I would
agree. I would agree. What we’re reading about is just utterly horrific. I will
tell you, it’s resembling the Holocaust more and more, and I don’t say that
lightly, but what’s going on in North Gaza right now is we need to shine the
brightest light possible on what Israel is doing.
Marc Steiner:
It does. I’ll
just say that when we say, when we make the Holocaust comparison, I always add,
I’m not talking about the camps. I’m talking about 1933, 1935, this is how it
begins.
Brant Rosen:
Right, and also
to remind people that when we talk about genocide, the Holocaust is not the
only model for genocide. There are many different forms of genocide. If you
look at international law, it happens in many different ways through many
different categories. And so just because something does not identically
resemble the Holocaust does not mean it’s not a genocide, and it doesn’t mean
it doesn’t share certain aspects with the Holocaust, mainly the dehumanization
of another people and the attempt to rid one society of them because they’re
seen as less than human.
Marc Steiner:
Well, let me
say, I really appreciate you taking the time, and I do look forward to staying
in touch. Thank you for taking the time with us today, Rabbi Brant Rosen. This
has really been important, and I look forward to other conversations and
building this conversation out and bringing more people in to see where we can
take it across the country and across the globe. So thank you so much for the
work you do. I appreciate it.
Brant Rosen:
Thank you, Marc.
No, it’s my pleasure and my honor.
Marc Steiner:
Once again,
thank you to Rabbi Brant Rosen for joining us today. Thanks to Cameron Grandino
for running the program and our audio editor, Alina Nelich and producer Rosette
Suwali for making it all work behind the scenes and everyone here at The Real
News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about
what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Ideas, we’d love to hear
them. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com, and I’ll get right back to you.
Once again, thank you to Rabbi Brant Rosen for joining us today and for the
work that he does. And we’ll be bringing you more people like Brant Rosen and
others together on this program to talk about what we can do collectively to
stop the slaughter in Gaza. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc
Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.
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