Show Notes
On April 29th in London, an attacker stabbed a Muslim acquaintance before traveling to the largely Jewish neighborhood of Golders Green and stabbing two Jewish men at random. This was only the latest in a string of attacks on Jews, synagogues, or other communal infrastructure in the UK since mid-March; other instances have included arson attacks on three synagogues as well as Hatzola ambulances. The British Jewish community—already on edge since the Yom Kippur attack on a Manchester synagogue that killed two and injured three—is in a state of rising alarm. Predictably, Jewish communal leaders, politicians, and the police have baselessly sought to tie the attacks to the Palestine solidarity movement, justifying crackdowns in civil liberties and proposing increased police budgets. The backdrop to these attacks is a local election cycle in which the two major parties, Conservative and Labour, lost substantial ground to tertiary parties on their wings: Reform on the right, and the Green Party on the left. Though newly elected members of the Reform Party include avowed racists and Holocaust deniers, much of the media attention has been on candidates whom the Green Party has removed from contention because of charges of antisemitism. There is particular focus on the head of the Green Party, 43-year-old Zack Polanski, whose Jewish identity and pro-Palestine stance has shattered some of the received wisdom about who British Jews are, announcing a new era in UK Jewish left politics. To discuss the London attacks and their political fallout, Arielle Angel speaks with Brendan McGeever, co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at the University of London, and Em Hilton, co-founder of Na’amod, an organization of British Jews opposing Israeli occupation and apartheid. They parse what we do and don’t know about these attacks, and critique the government’s response, which casts Jews as special wards of the state at the expense of civil liberties and the safety of other minority groups. Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for editing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”
Articles Mentioned and Further Reading Brendan McGeever in the Jewish Currents newsletter Jewish Policy Research survey on UK Jews’ feelings about antisemitism, UK Jewish voters voting Green, and UK Jewish identification with Zionism “The present crisis,” editors of Vashti “Good Jews, Bad Jews,” Barnaby Raine interviewed by Gavin Jacobson, Equator “The difficult truth about antisemitism in the UK,” Brendan McGeever, Ben Gidley, David Feldman, Prospect “Anti-terrorist programme Prevent ‘outdated and inadequately prepared’, report finds,” Rajeev Syal, The Guardian David Cameron’s 2015 speech at the Community Security Trust Keir Starmer echoing Enoch Powell “U.K. Vows Crackdown on Pro-Palestinian Protests After Latest Antisemitic Attack,” David Luhnow, Wall Street Journal “Five members of biggest British Jewish body suspended after Israel criticisms,” Harriet Sherwood, The Guardian “Processing the Attack at Bondi Beach,” On the Nose, Jewish Currents Ashok Kumar on Julia Hartley-Brewer “Over 2,000 U.K. Jews Sign Petition Against Nigel Farage Attending Antisemitism Rally,” Hagar Shezaf, Haaretz “How Palestine Action put the justice system on trial,” Rikki Blue, Declassified UK “Zack Polanski’s Jewish identity is being erased because he is leftwing,” Owen Jones, The Guardian Zack Polanski on Sky News “Green Party candidate arrested over antisemitic social media posts,” Athena...
More from On the Nose
Seasons of Fury, a new book by the journalist Rozina Ali, tells a sweeping history of American Islamophobia through narrative reporting on four American Muslim families with varied backgrounds. The book reveals that American Zionism is integral to the story of anti-Muslim bias in the US. The legal structures for surveilling and criminalizing Muslims originated in US officials’ preoccupation with Palestinian militants in the 20th century, and Zionist organizations have been key participants in a broad civil society ecosystem pushing Islamophobia in the American mainstream. In this episode of On the Nose, senior politics editor Mari Cohen guest hosts to interview Ali about the book and her findings. They discuss how the targeting of Arab activists morphed into anti-Muslim sentiment; how the definition of terrorism changed in the 20th century and came to be associated with Islam; how the Anti-Defamation League has abetted Islamophobia; and how antisemitism and Islamophobia are pitted against each other in American politics. Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for editing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”
On July 9th, PEN America published an article called “A Silent Moratorium,” which asserts that Jewish and Israeli writers face “blatant hostility, discrimination, and hate” and attempts to chart the “impact on their freedom of expression.” The PEN article affirms a narrative advanced across Jewish media and mainstream press alike that—as the headline of a piece by James Kirchick in The New York Times put it—“a chill has fallen over Jews in publishing” amid the war on Gaza. The article has since been joined by other attempts to quantify the damage to Jewish letters: An article by the writer Meg Keene attempted to provide data to support the claim of a precipitous dropoff in Jewish books since 2023. The ADL recently added another report to the pile. Last week, we published a report written by Josh Lambert, director of Jewish studies at Wellesley College, and Dan Sinykin, director of graduate studies at Emory University—both researchers of publishing history, with expertise between them in contemporary Jewish literature and quantitative literary studies. The piece took on the claims of the PEN America article, about which they wrote, “Digging into its anecdotal reports of abandonment by agents and missing book deals, online harassment and review-bombing, we found that many of the claims were too vague to qualify as evidence, and that many accounts . . . turn out to be imprecise at best and entirely false at worst.” They also examined Keene’s data and ran some of their own; it turns out the picture of the number of Jewish titles being published looks very different with a more solid methodology. On this episode of On the Nose, Arielle Angel speaks with Lambert and Sinykin about what these accounts of anti-Jewish sentiment in publishing got wrong, and what it means about the current market for both Zionist and anti-Zionist books. Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for editing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”
Naza, a film by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, features interviews with 24 members of elite intelligence units in the Israeli military describing the mechanics of carrying out remote, indiscriminate mass killing in Gaza. Since news spread of a 25-minute standing ovation for the film at the Venice Film Festival, it has provoked intense debate, with some Palestinians expressing criticism of the way that Israelis’ confessions have made the genocide more “real” in the West than Palestinians’ own testimony. Meanwhile, in Israel, the film has elicited disturbing incitement against the filmmakers (who currently remain abroad), and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to revoke the filmmakers’ citizenship. What is the unique function of cinema focused on the perpetrators of genocide? How do we understand the concept of “evil” in listening to the voices of the murderers? And can these testimonies provoke a reckoning within global Jewry? To discuss these questions, Arielle Angel speaks with two filmmakers: Rami Younis, Palestinian journalist and co-director of the film Lyd, about the city in historic Palestine, now in the south of Israel; and Joshua Oppenheimer, director of the Oscar-nominated films The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, about the Indonesian genocide. Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for editing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”
Slam Frank—the satirical play about a Latina “Anita Franco” stuck in the attic with a colorblind cast (à la Hamilton) of daft identitarians—reopened last week Off-Broadway at the Orpheum Theatre in Manhattan. While some audience members have reportedly been shocked by its irreverent take on a child hero of the Holocaust, some viewers on both the left and the right are convinced that the play reflects their sensibilities and political leanings. The play’s author, Andrew Fox, has declined to say anything about his personal politics, but touchstone books of Jewish reactionary grievance like David Baddiel’s Jews Don’t Count and Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews are part of the show’s dramaturgy. On this episode of On the Nose, Arielle Angel talks to theater critic Alisa Solomon and New York Times columnist M. Gessen about their differing interpretations of the play. The three argue about what the play actually intends to say about the contemporary left, whether the playwright’s own political leanings matter to the read of the play itself, and whether the proliferation of interpretations is a feat or a liability. Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for editing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”
As we make our way through the Days of Awe, On the Nose is turning over our feed to an episode of Ways of Awe, an exploration of the high holiday liturgy written by artist and educator Maia Brown and writer and organizer Shelby Handler, and based on translations originally shared with the Kadima Reconstructionist Community in Seattle, WA. This episode explores the “Kol Nidre” prayer recited on Erev Yom Kippur, in which all vows from the year before are nullified. In this episode, the hosts spoke with Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg and Rabbi Xava De Cordova. This episode was edited by Maia Brown, with audio engineering by Daniel Guenther. Thank you to Ross Kirshenbaum of Levoneh for composing our show music and to Peter Lippman and Jimmy Austin for playing on the track, and to Jenny Asarnow for their field recordings. Thank you to the Jack Straw Cultural Center Artist Support Program, the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture Smart Ventures Program, and Signal Fire Coop. Thank you to Hannah Epstein for design. Thank you to all those who lent their prayer-voices to the Kol Nidre episode including: Noraa Kaplan, Sharone Sayegh, Moyshe Oysher. Thank you to Jeannie Wells-Yablonsky from the Seattle Symphony for her rendition of Kol Nidre. An excerpt from “Kol Nidre,” performed by Sharone Sayegh in the Iraqi Sephardic tradition, was produced by Reboot in partnership with Hillel International for Higher Holidays 2020 and is reproduced here with permission.