Bad Hasbara - The World's Most Moral Podcast - Bad Hasbara 71: No Relation, with Maura Finkelstein

Episode Date: December 19, 2024

Matt and Daniel are joined by former Muhlenberg College tenured professor of anthropology Maura Finkelstein to discuss her dismissal over pro-Palestine speech, who owns the phrase “never again,” and whether she is a left-nepo baby.Please donate to Doctors Without Borders: https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/Buy Professor Finkelstein’s book “The Archive of Loss”: https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-archive-of-lossVisit https://www.workshops4gaza.com/All things Maura Finkelstein are available at https://www.maurafinkelstein.com/Subscribe to the Patreon https://www.patreon.com/badhasbaraSubscribe/listen to Bad Hasbara wherever you get your podcasts.Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/5RDvo87OzNLA78UH82MI55Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bad-hasbara-the-worlds-most-moral-podcast/id1721813926Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/bad-hasbara/donationsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Moshwam hot bitch, A ribbon polka toast We invented the terry tomato And weighs USB drives and behind a dough Israeli salad, oozy stents and jopas orange crows Micro chips is us iPhone cameras us Taco salads us

Pothamos us Olive Garden us White foster us Zabrahamas Asvaras Us Everybody, and welcome to Bad Hasbara. The World's Most Moral Podcast.

Thank you so much. My name is Matt Lieb. I am your World's Most Moral co-hosts. And I'm Daniel Matte, and I'm the mirror image of that. The other most moral co-host, how you doing, Matt? I'm doing good. I'm, you know, I'm excited. It's the holidays.

Everything is filled with cheer. there's one thing that the holidays are known for it's that magical magical cheer yeah everyone's happy everyone's happy no one's unhappy except for all of the children who are crying at all times wanting toys that they can't get because papa can't afford everything you know papa can only afford so many things daniel why are you even assuming papa's around why what if it's mama who can't afford it. Oh, yeah. Sometimes mom's children are crying for Papa.

That's true. My child specifically cries for me. I mean, when it comes to the toy buying thing, and I can't do it. I can't do it all the time. You know, here's the thing about Santa. He's not real. He doesn't have elves. If he did, that is slave labor.

And I would immediately start a campaign to get him arrested by the ICJ. You know what I mean? I'm now imagining, like, Orlando Blumen. as Legolas. At Legolas, at Legoland. The elf, the elf, Legoland, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Tolkien Elf. You're imagining him putting toys together?

Yeah. Yeah. It's very beneath him. Yeah, no, this dude should, you know, you should be, you know, in Rivendale with all of his other elf homie's trying to fight off, you know, Sauron so they can destroy the ring of power. He's not here to make toys for you, Karina, just because you're little and cute. these guys have magic they live forever they can go at any point to the undying lands but they choose not to

because they want to fight for middle earth do you like lord of the rings i i remember liking uh about one and a half of the three movies mm okay a lot uh yeah i never saw the hobbit trilogy it's totally unnecessary yeah it didn't need to be a trilogy um anyway shout out to uh to tulking good stuff Hope you keep writing more. Also shout out to producer Adam Levin out here on the ones and twos, writing things down, displaying them on screen, having them read by us. Please subscribe on YouTube and all of the podcast apps and give us, you know, all the stars and reviews and everything. YouTube.com slash at Bad Hasbara or, you know, just go to YouTube, type in Bad Hasbara. Well, whatever way you subscribe, please do it.

And you can also subscribe on those podcast apps. It will automatically download the episode every time it comes out. And that way you don't even have to, like, search for it. It just shows up. Today's episode is brought to you by Doctors Without Borders. Doctors Without Borders teams provide specialized medical services in Gaza, including comprehensive care for burns and traumatic injury, surgery, physiotherapy, psychological support, occupational therapy, and health education.

Just today, 12 team members and their families were surrounded by bombing and heavy shooting, as were 30 others at the Doctors Without Borders offices, causing a hospital closure in Al-Mawasi. And so, you know, this is a much more worthy cause. They're much more worthy of your money than our Patreon. So please, before you subscribe to the Patreon, consider going to Doctors Without Borders.org and donating some money. They do need it. Subscribing to our Patreon is your dessert. Exactly.

Have your protein first. You can't have your pudding without donating some meat. Please donate your meat to... And don't go to country without borders.org. That's just Israel's website. Yeah, exactly. Please also join the Patreon If you can

Patreon.com slash bad has barra You can join for You know $5 and you can get all of the episodes The bonus episodes that we do And you get everything early Or you can subscribe for free And you don't really get anything

But you do get occasional updates And you get told about episodes That are coming out that you might be interested In you know listening to and maybe you will someday choose to subscribe, but you don't have to. You get to like come into the front lobby of the clubhouse.

You can't come into the actual meeting room, but you can hang out in the mud room where everyone leaves their shoes and like, let's put your ear at the door and try to listen to what's going on there for all the members. But what did happen last week on Patreon? I actually missed the Patreon episode. Oh, yes. I was busy with an event, but you had our friend Rafael Shimonov on.

That's right. We were on, you know, the Patreon feed, and we talked about Luigi, you know, Luigi, what's his last name? Luigi's Mancioni. Mancioni. We talked about Richie Torres, and also we talked about this ad that some people have been getting for the UJA Federation of New York. They've been getting it on our feed. Yes, they've been getting it on our feed. We've been getting a bunch of messages. going like, hey, I don't know if you guys know this, but like when you take a commercial break from your anti-Hasbara podcast, a commercial for the UJA comes on. And I don't know if you know this, but maybe you should talk to your hosting website about this. And I thought about doing that. I thought about like, you know, contacting our podcast hosts and being like, how do we, you know, how do we stop this? But then I was like, you know, it's funnier.

is to just do an episode about them. Yeah, and so... And really hope that the ad gets placed on that episode. I saw an ad on our Rashid Khalidi episode because I never remember what the hell we talk about. So sometimes I like to go back and actually watch the episodes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Apparently, that was a spicy one.

They got a lot of people talking about it. We'll talk about that sometimes. But I was watching it on my girlfriend's laptop and she doesn't have a YouTube subscription. So ads kept popping up in the middle of the conversation. And this one ad that kept playing, I had to watch it twice to make sure I wasn't hearing things, was a masterclass, like one of these masterclasses with three former CIA spooks teaching you like management and team building secrets gleaned from years in the CIA, which is really funny given that we were talking about Syria and the overthrow of the Assad regime. I love that. One of the big points of contention in that whole discourse is, to what extent do we credit the CIA was involved?

The CIA involvement in the dirty war in ruining the country in the past 50 years. Anyway, I thought that was some real chutzpah on the CIA's part to like get in there. It's also amazing to me that what the CIA seems to be teaching in that master class is like how to succeed in business. It's like Team building tactics I learned from killing Patrice Lamombo as producer Adam Yeah

That is so funny The CIA is just You know It's like we got this Masterclass by a prince named Machiavelli He's gonna teach you how to succeed in business While really trying

But looking like you're not trying You really want to be listening closely really listen to what people are saying here's how to tap their phone with a recording device oh that's great but yeah so that was a really fun episode you know Raff was great

and you know we were able to kind of get to the bottom of what exactly UJA is and yeah so if you want to listen to that go do patreon.com slash beauty that hasbarah Daniel, can you inform me what the spin is?

Well, I'll certainly do my best, man. You might see behind me I've got some pink crates. Yeah. My moving company this derived today because I'm moving. This is going to be one of my last episodes in this location. Oh, no. I'm moving up to bigger and better things. This place has served me well.

But I've got an album here by Brownie McGee and Sunny Terry, blues duo, legendary. And they have a song called Packing Up, Getting Ready to Go, which is what I'm doing. Um, I've got, uh, to Pimp a Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar. Oh, beautiful. Because ever since that Rashid Khalidi episode, uh, was released and people started clipping it. And like, serious scholars started, like posting it and debating him and debating, like Arab, like Arab on Arab discourse, basically, have happening in really, really smart ways on Twitter, like way beyond me.

People talking about, you know, what I've had in my head is Syria is complicated. Syria is complicated. Sirius complicated. That's amazing. That's what's been in my head. And speaking of that, the Beatles' white album, which has one version of their song, their sort of ambivalent revolution song. You know, you say you want a revolution.

I'm not telling anyone how to feel about this one, but Israel sure knows how it feels about the overthrow of the Assad government. They've been going to town. Yeah. and destroying that town over and over again. And it is certainly complicated. And we appreciate it. A lot of thoughts about it.

A lot of thoughts about it. And we have a lot of space between our ears. Yes. Where thoughts should be. And then finally, I got this album by Brooklyn Underground Hip-Hop Legend LP of Rubber Jules fame. Yes. The album Cancer for Cure, which has a song called Drones Over Brooklyn. Well, close enough.

It's drones over Jersey this week. Yeah, that's right. LP, the former guest of Pod Yourself a Gun, the world's only Sopranos podcast. LP came on Pod Yourself a Gun, you lucky motherfucker. Yeah, that was our biggest. That's got to be by far our biggest guest. It was the funniest thing ever to be in a room. We, like, went to him and recorded an episode about some, you know, episode of The Sopranos.

I think I was so nervous the whole time. don't even remember what was said and uh i bet it's not one of our most popular episodes in terms of content because i probably was just like do you like the sopranos over and over again i i do too let's be friends i love he is easily in my top two or three rapper producers of all time oh he's incredible and and super nice guy super uh super funny guy and um yeah you know hey dude if lp if you're listening i i do this podcast too and he's my age And he got huge, like, in his 40s, like, with Run the Jewels. Like, you know, it's a story of sticking true to your stuff, even when you're underground for a long, long time.

Age ain't nothing but a number, sort of. Let me pretend I never said that. That's right. Yeah, so those, so that's what the spin is. And, Daniel, I'd like to spend one more thing before we move on, because we have a lot of content. We have a lot of content. I mean, just so much. No, I got what you're doing.

We're going to spend something that you made because, I don't know if people know this, but Israel and Ireland, they're no longer best friends. Like, you know, they never were. Just one too many Thai hikki men on, men on street playing different country videos, huh? Yeah. I just couldn't take it anywhere. Hope you're happy, Tyg. Yeah, Tyg, you really, listen, I understand that you're like into politics and stuff,

but you have ruined the relationship between Israel and Ireland, two of the oldest friends, you know, in the world. These two countries have been besties since the beginning of time, and now you have gone and destroyed the relationship. It's like watching my parents break up, you know. In the Leave family home, it is Ireland versus Israel. Israel. And now I have to sit there and go, there's no, there's no more, you know, Israel office. What do you call that? Embassy. So they were sad because they're right next to each other

in the, in the alphabet of countries, too. I know, alphabet of countries. You can't say one without the other, I think, probably. But just let me read this, this tweet real quick, kind of explaining what happened from, what is it, Gideon Sarr? Sa'ar? All right. Today I have instructed the closure of Israel's embassy in Ireland. The actions, double standards, and anti-Semitic rhetoric of the Irish government against Israel are rooted in efforts to delegitimize and demonize the Jewish state. The Irish government recognized a, quote, Palestinian state during attacks on Israel, a move praised by Hamas, attempted to redefine, quote, genocide in international law to support baseless claims.

against Israel at the ICJ, backed politically motivated cases at the ICC, promoted anti-Israel measures within the EU, and fostered hostility toward Israel. Notably, Ireland is one of the few European countries that has not adopted the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. You know, that's the one that makes it so that criticizing Israel is anti-Semitic. That's the one that makes it that the two of us plus our guests are anti-Semites. Yeah, exactly. You know, that fair definition that everyone should adopt. And its government has failed to take effective measures to combat the surge of anti-Semitism within Ireland. Israel will focus its resources on strengthening bilateral relations with countries worldwide, according to priorities that also take into account the

attitudes and actions of these states towards Israel. You know what I heard Ireland was planning to do next. Oh, what? And this is unprecedented. You know how Hanukkah's coming up, right? It sure is. Lackas. Christmas Day. Lackas. Ireland was going to ban potatoes. Oh, my God. Just to get back of the Jews? Just to get back of the Jews. This is just, it's sickening and disgusting. And I have a little something that Daniel, you sung this beautiful song in support.

No lucky charms this for him. Yeah, I did a little ditty. We'll play just a verse of it. This is my imagination of, you know, when I was in Ireland, I actually We saw Taig sing the original version of this song, The Parting Glass, at a pub event in Cork. And it's, you know, many Irish events, pub nights will end with this song. It's sort of this wistful goodbye toast called The Parting Glass. So this is, I just wrote a version of it for the, for the Israelis to sing on their way out.

Yeah. Of all the homes that ere I bombed, I have bombed them out of self-defense. Oh, and all the children that ere I killed, it was alas at my expense. We can never forgive them for making us kill them. I've tried my best to explain myself, but my best efforts were doomed to stall. so close for me my embassy good night, goodbye and feck you all So there's more to that

You can listen to the full version of the song At the end of the episode Beautiful, beautiful rendition Thank you, Ledy I hope that whiskey tasted good It was actually It's like very, very expired wine like a little bit

because I'm moving out and I've got all this old shit in my fridge so I poured some white, a few drops of red to make it look as whiskey like as I could look at this. I don't have any Irish whiskey on hand. Yeah, there's a practical effect. Well, it was beautiful and yeah, listen to that full

song and we're going to have to do a full episode on Ireland v. Israel at some point because once again, I just love. I love the Irish. God bless the beautiful land of Ireland. And without further ado, I want to talk about something and then bring in our guest today. Without further ado, I just want to do a little bit more ado. There's more content before guests, all right?

We're doing our best, guys. We're trying to get this podcast going. No more delays. No more delays. One more delay. Here's a preamble. Yes. So to introduce our guests, we have a nice segue that goes into guests.

And it is a tweet by Shoshana, who's just a random person on Twitter. This segment is called, you know, and you talked about Kendrick Lamar in honor of him. Shoshana don't want to go to school no more, no more. A student over at Columbia tweeted this recently. I considered majoring in Middle East Studies, but nearly all of the prerequisite courses at Columbia are taught by anti-Semites. Every time I register for classes, I cross-reference the course directory with Canary Mission.

It's 2024, not 1939. Jewish students shouldn't have to avoid classes for fear of discrimination. And then she tags at Campus Jew Hate, at Ed Workforce Committee, at, of course, Representative Stefonic at Richie Torres, at Shabas Kay. And so... Her name sounds like...

It sounds made up. Shoshana Auszyn. Yeah, Offscien. It sounds like it's made... It sounds like it's from some, like, Tarantino-style fake 1939. Yeah. I'll find it.

I mean, I'm, I guess it's a real German... I'm sure it is, but it does sound like her name is Shoshana. Judenhaus! And these are... These are the classes, sections that she posted. And it's all, the instructor is Joseph Mossad. Joseph Mossade.

You know, the guy that Barry Weiss tried to cancel? Yes. Barry Weiss in the whole, like, his bar network, you know, of right-wing psychopaths and their supporters in Congress and, you know, in Washington, we're trying, have been trying to get this guy fired and canceled, but instead of that, he is instead getting more classes because he is a professor. He's hot and they are not. He's hot, they're not and they're mad about it.

And these are all, you know, sections for, I think, the same lecture that he teaches. And this is someone who is, you know, being called an anti-Semite because he wrote this article for the Electronic Intifada on October 8th. Just Another Battle or the Palestine War of Liberation, in which he talks about the occupation of Gaza and the 16-year-long siege and, you know, rightfully points out that Hamas is a resistance force and not, you know, just a wily terrorist organization, which is the way they're portrayed by Hasparis and their proxies in the media. And so, of course, he's being attacked, you know, by people, not just like people online, but people with power, which seems to be the thing about academics who are being targeted, is that they are not just targeted the same way, say, you and me are targeted. You know, they are targeted, like, there are hearings in Congress about anti-Semitism in schools. And that brings us to our guest. We have a fantastic guest, so excited for everyone to hear our conversation here with the writer, anti-Zionist,

and recently fired tenured professor at Mullenberg College. Ladies and gentlemen and everyone else, please welcome to the podcast, Mora Finkelstein. Hi, it's so nice to be here. So great to have you. We are excited to speak with you about what's going on. with, first of all, what's going on in colleges in general and what happened with you? Well, can I first tell you a quick story to link to your last story? So I like cut my teeth with campus anti-Zionist organizing 20 years ago when I was a master's student at Columbia because of the attacks on Joseph Mossad.

So this has been going on for a very long time. But I think my introduction to repression on campus was at. Colombia because of a round of attacks that were against Joseph. So Joseph has been being attacked for a long, long time because he speaks about Israel in a way that too closely mirrors the truth about what Israel is. This seems to be, it's interesting because you see a lot of attacks on calls. professors, and I've seen this, you know, for a long time. Does this moment feel different? Does this feel like, you know, maybe 20 years or more of work that has gone into trying to

delegitimize academics who fight for, not even just fight for Palestinian rights, but like correctly put out a narrative of what Israel is and what political Zionism is and they're getting attacked for it? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I, you know, we're talking about. talking a lot about this moment, and I think that that's really important. And the headline around me has been, like, first tenured professor fired over Palestine activism and writing and whatnot. And that's only since October 7th, 2023. So we have Stephen Sleida in 2014. So I think, you know, what we're seeing now is a sort of like massive attack on faculty that in the past has mostly been, I think, targeting Palestinian.

faculty members, Arab and Muslim faculty members, and now, you know, we Jews can also be evil anti-Semites. Well, hell, you're not even the first Finkelstein. If we include people not getting tenure in the first place, you're the first to lose it. But 20 years ago right now, speaking of 20 years ago, at DePaul, there was a certain other Finkelstein who was getting denied tenure because of similar. stuff. First of all, have you considered changing your last name to Finkelstein

No Relation? I mean, and then secondly, like, what is, like, who is the common ancestor here? What was it in the Finkelstein line that, or Finkelstein or Finkelstein, that ended up with so many menches and, uh, yeah, and menchettes when it comes to,

when it comes to being on the right side of this historical divide? Well, I mean, I will say, I've known about Norman Finkelstein for a really long time and felt, you know, proud to be of no relation, but in the struggle with him. But a few months ago, folks on Twitter started referring to me as Nepo Baby, and I was like, what? What's happening?

And then I was like, oh, yeah. They all think you're Norman's daughter or something. That is amazing. But I think it was a really, I've heard a lot of stories, but the one that I think is probably true is that it was a really common. name given to folks at Ellis Island. I think that there was somebody who was like, I like this name. I'm just going to

give it to everyone whose last name I don't actually like. Which sounds right to me. That's crazy that there's literally just generations upon generations of people who just had the name of some, just that some dude

at Ellis Island was just like, I don't know, let's say Lieberman. You look like a Lieberman. I don't know. Just like some guy who's, he got a list of golds, like goldsteins, you know, silversteins. Yeah, just whole generations of people just have fake names. Now the night I'm like, you're Romanian. Let's give you a German name. That's right. Yeah, right. I can't pronounce that. Right. So the night I met you was at an event for Rafat Alarere's book. And he was there as well. Did you have the two of you ever met? We met for the first time that night, actually. What was that like? Yeah. It was really nice to. to finally meet him.

Yeah. Yeah, I don't think we're... He's a bit awkward in person. Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, we don't, we probably don't always have the same politics, but I think it's really important to sort of widen the circle of everyone who's fighting for at the end of the day the right thing. That's been a major theme of this past year, I think, for many of us that, and this podcast

has been a place where people who may have disagreements are coming to occupy the same stage for basically the same cause. Yeah, I mean, there's a common denominator that, you know, that we all talk about here, which is the liberation of Palestine, that allows for us to have diverging opinions, at least on all sorts of other things. As long as you're not, you know, a racist, that's pretty much the one thing. One would think that that would be a low bar, and yet. It used to be. I used to think it would be. But let's get into your story because I'm fascinated by this as someone who doesn't know anything about the world of academia. I mean, I went to UC Santa Cruz, but I don't remember it.

so I don't know like I don't exactly know what tenure is I know that tenure is when you can't get it's a lot harder to fire staff is that right it sounds like something you should get after 10 years

right yeah I'm a 10 year professor yeah exactly I was here for 10 years and so I get tenure and academics have to like keep things not making sense so it's usually seven years And then you have to take a sabbatical.

Exactly. Yeah, if you're lucky. I mean, I think that most, like a lot of universities now are trying to destroy both tenure and sabbaticals. But, you know, that's another thing. But, I mean, tenure is kind of in theory, not always in practice, a way to actually protect academic freedom that you, you know, in theory. In practice, a lot of times tenure is about. rewarding people for, you know, keeping their head down and participating in the status quo because the thing I was always told, before I got tenure was don't be too political, don't

talk about Palestine, don't write about Palestine, don't teach about Palestine until after you get tenure, which of course is like, so you do that for seven years and then you just keep doing the same thing that you're doing. But the idea behind tenure was that we're going to have, let's just say as a, you know, an idea, administrations that maybe don't support the proliferation of ideas. So in order to keep your president from firing you, if you're publishing things that they don't think align with their politics, you have tenure so you can keep doing that work without getting fired. I mean, now we're seeing not only that most faculty are contingent faculty, so they're adjuncts, their lectures, they don't have even the opportunity to come up

for tenure, but they are also on, you know, one to three-year contracts. They can be terminated at any time. And so it's a much more precarious workforce, but for the like 30% I think of college and university faculty who are on the tenure track or are tenured, the idea is that, you know, once you get tenure you can be more provocative you can you know put yourself in leadership roles that might go up against the administration and what we're seeing college and university administrations do is attack faculty outside of the world of faculty governance and instead have these like secret black box procedures in which you have administrators just you know banning faculty faculty from their offices like at NYU or in my case getting fired based on a title six complaint

instead of allowing for faculty governance which is where a panel of our peers determine these things so there's like a total breakdown of what even tenure could be um even in the good old days do you think that that tenure uh that that process of keep your head down and your mouth shut until you get tenure. Do you think that that served a kind of a filtering function of, you know, those who couldn't hack that or filtered out of the system and those who can will eventually get habituated to keeping their mouth shut and get comfy with, you know, I'm thinking of sort of, you know, the Schomsky and propaganda model in media of like, if you had dissenting conventions, you wouldn't be sitting in the seat that you're in once you're a CNN host? So do you think there's

something about that that function as a way to sort of in a kind of soft power kind of way enforce conformity and uh yeah like that yeah i mean i think you know in the good old days it was just like white men and some white women only a few who would even make it to that that level to begin with um so yeah absolutely it's uh it's interesting to me as like you know that my my dad was a high school teacher, a public school teacher, and he was also, he used to be a conservative, and I mean, you know, he still holds some tendencies like that. But then as soon as he got a job with a union, he was just, he was just like, you know what? Unions are really important because they were the only people who supported teachers. It was everyone else was trying to fire teachers for a myriad of reasons, right? But the union was what was keeping teachers. employed and also living with a stable income. Is tenure a function of a union at all, or is it just kind of like something that's been implemented across academia, you know, by actual, you know, like colleges themselves? I think the unions are separate. I mean, tenure, I think, was sort of the

norm at most colleges and universities. I mean, we're seen in Texas that tenure is basically being abolished and that will probably spread to Florida and wherever else. My experience, because I've only ever taught at small private colleges, in which as an adjunct at a college that never doesn't exist anymore, Mills College, we were unionizing contingent faculty. So within these private colleges, tenure track and tenure faculty couldn't be unionized, but adjuncts can unionize. So it's almost like a completely separate monster or animal or what not. But what I've experienced visiting some universities over the past few months is that at schools with especially public universities with a robust union, faculty, regardless of tenure, are much safer because they have the union

advocating for them if the union is willing to take on that work. So there are different models, but, you know, they operate in different ways for different people. Yeah. Well, let's talk about what happened. Because you, you know, the story made headlines because of the fact that you were tenured. It was just, you know, people were shocked. Were you shocked to find out that they were actually going to follow through and terminating you? And let's get into their reasons for doing it.

Yeah, and why? Yeah. You must have typed up and came up with something on your own and posted something really. Did you write a manifesto, like a Nazi manifesto? Is that what he did? If only, it would have made their job. It would have made their job so much easier because I think the thing about this. Did you write on someone's on someone's final paper, you should hang your Jew head in shame? Well, actually, actually, I think one of the worst things that I did was write an essay called. never again means never again for anyone and I know anyone that's rather extreme

mora what does that mean that can mean anything monsters yeah monster I mean and I will say like you know I think what happened to me is going to be more and more common I don't think that this is an anomaly but I think the fact that it happened in the way that it happened is entirely because I worked at a college that has a very, very, very strong and powerful Hillel. And so much of the surveillance and accusations against me were coming from both Hillel staff and students in Hillel leadership. But basically, starting after October 7th, 2023, I teach about Palestine in all of my classes, almost all of my classes.

And so it would have been... You teach anthropology, yes? I do. I'm just going to bookmark. I want to come back to a question about what... What's the connection to all your classes? Yeah. And I can talk about that, especially because, you know,

one of the things that got me in trouble with my teaching is that I don't teach both sides, as though that's a real thing. But I opened up space for my students to actually email me questions they had about the events of October 7th and the historical context that led to that moment because I knew that they would probably be scared and nervous to ask these questions in class. And so I went into my classes and I answered their questions, which was all about, you know, what's the historical context? How do we understand this outside of a vacuum? And a student in both of, who was taking

both of my classes filed a complaint against my teaching that ended up not going anywhere. It never became a formal complaint because there was nothing to, you know, move forward with that. But that just sort of set off a series of events in which the college from about mid-October until December were just sort of like looking for anything they could to, you know, get upset with me about my publication. So particularly this essay in which I said nobody should, you know, be the victim of genocide. Genocide. Which, you know, I thought was like one of the least controversial things that I've ever said.

To, you know, stuff I was posting on social media. You know, I sort of had to defend the fact that, you know, the fact that this is a genocide is not my opinion. Zionist students can have the opinion that it's not genocide, but there's actually, you know, reality and scholarship backing up the claim that this is genocide. And so it was just sort of a series of basically harassment on the part of the administration towards me being fueled by students in Hulel who felt unsafe with me on campus. You're right. And I'm very scary. To be clear, you mentioned there's one student who made a complaint.

Since then, did other students come forward who were actually students in your class or were these generated outside of your class by people either at, you know, the school's halel or even more so outside of the school period? Yeah, both. And I will say that the student who filed the complaint from inside my class also identifies as a proud Zionist and was preparing to move to Israel after graduation. So very clear on that student's political, you know, grounding. And even then that student did not want to continue on with a formal complaint against me. but everything else was, you know, I think 17 students in Hillel who filed complaints, not of whom I had ever met.

And then what happened in January is that a student that I still, to this day, have never met, who was in Hillel leadership, encouraged by the staff at Hillel, filed under Title VI, filed an equal opportunity, non-discrimination policy violation complaint against me. Um, so this is basically the argument that we're seen across our campuses equating Zionism with Judaism and trying to make the argument that Zionist is a protected class under Title VI of, um, right. And this was in reaction to you reposting something that Remy Kanazi, the, uh, the poet, on the unfortunately named public, I don't like, I don't like it when someone's name actually has Nazi in it. spelling wise. It's not convenient for the cause, Remy. As Ashkenazi Jews. Askanazi,

we're Ashkenazi, he's Kanazi. It's not helpful. But solid Palestinian poet voice activists for many, many years, you reposted something he said about don't coddle to Zionists, don't cower to them, don't

accept them in your spaces, don't normalize Zionism. Right, you didn't write this yourself. This was something you reposted. And this was the basis for the Title VI complaint by the student at Hillel. Which, I mean, I will say, is deeply offensive as a writer. Like, charge me with something that I actually wrote. Like, I would love for to actually.

I won't get fired for someone else's shit. It's like you want to, at the very least, if you're getting, you know, fired, you want to be able to plug the book that you got fired for it because, you know, you know, yeah, it's messed up. Yeah. If I was going to get, like, executed, say, over, you know, illicit materials. I wouldn't want it to be something I Xeroxed. I wanted to be something I actually wrote by hand myself. Yeah, exactly.

Getting arrested for a cover song. That's not fair. So I'm still pretty bummed out about that. But the argument of the school was that even though students, the college was not named in the repost, that it was implied that when I was reposting his words about not normalizing Zionism, that I was actually meaning that I was going to shun my students and keep them from coming into my spaces, which, you know, is quite the leap. Yeah. It is an insane leap.

And, you know, I mean, there's multiple leaps happening here. One is that based on your retweet or repost that you are trying to institute, you know, this anti-Zionist apartheid or whatever in your classroom. The other is to the leap of saying this is, you know, anti-Semitic or that this is a discrimination against a group of people based on their, I mean, it's like the identity of Zionist is something that people are now trying to turn into like a discreet, an insular group that they can then, you know, have the same sort of civil rights protections as, you know, being a person of color, being of specific religion, race, gender, creed,

whatever. And it is, yeah, it's just insanely offensive because it is anti-Semitism to equate Zionism with being equal to being the same thing as being a Jew. I mean, that's crazy to me. Absolutely nuts. Yeah, it's really wild. And it's, you know, I think it's scary and upsetting in, you know, a hundred different ways. But it's also incredibly infuriating to be a college professor who like, you know, one of the things that I've been asking a lot is, you know, what are our jobs as college and university professors? We're not allowed to do our jobs right now. What are actually our jobs? But I, If, you know, what I've been told as a person who has taught at two different liberal arts colleges over the past 12 years is that our job is to teach critical thinking skills. And what

the administrations at these colleges are now doing is saying, actually, like, let's not think critically about this whole thing here. Right. Like, this is just, you know, this special, you know, zone in which we can't give any thought to it. So let's just, you know, let's just play the game in which we say this political ideology is is also an is is also an identity because a 20 year old feels like it is right well all political ideologies can become identities to the extent that people emotionally connect with them and identify with them i mean it can feel really elemental to who you are if you really are clinging to something like the fact that things things have a level of emotional things start to feel personal to the extent that you can't imagine yourself

without it and you don't want to have it criticized or but yeah ask any of the people in uh in jonestown guyana or like i identify very closely identified with their particular ideology i identify as an anti-capitalist and i'm deeply offensive by everything about this country. But there's not that much that I can do about it except keep going to work or not and trying to like afford my unaffordable health insurance. So, you know, where's my form to complain? Where's your right to exist? What's interesting about this too is, you know, in terms of what political ideology is protected and what isn't is put loudly on display with this kind of stuff. You know, it's like you can't say, oh, you're getting, like, you're getting

fired for your political ideology because you discriminated against people who had a different political ideology. It's just, you know, it's completely ridiculous. The campus halel that was going after you, they were openly advocating for the IDF. Is that right? Yeah. So, I mean, here's a thing that we probably all know, but I think it needs to be said over and over again. Halel has been, I mean, Hulel was founded in 1923 as a Jewish organization, but beginning in the 1980s, it became an explicitly Zionist organization and has become increasingly more so. And, you know, so if you look at the Hillel International website, if you look at the Milenberg Halel website, they claim, and, you know,

are required to sort of conform to Israel being at the center of their work, which inherently makes it not, you know, a welcoming Jewish organization at all because there are so many Jewish anti-Zionists. But, you know, on the one hand, they have, appropriate to the podcast, something called a Hasbara Fellowship where you can go to Israel during the summer and, like, learn how to be a representative of Israel on campus, which is a whole thing. Or he's a Hasbarraffa.

Or he's a Hasbarafe. Exactly. But yeah, in the shared space right outside of a few classrooms where I was teaching the Hullel students had put up these QR codes for three different Israeli organizations, one of which was the Red Cross, one of which was the IDF. and I can't remember what the third one was. Right cross would have been the Mugendavita Dome, like the... If I remember correctly. Yeah, so it's actually the red Jewish star. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right. Yeah, the other cross. Right, well, because, you know, there's the Red Crescent and Islam. And I was very upset about having myself and my students having to walk past this. It doesn't really set the right. tone for education. But I had actually tried for weeks to get it moved or taken down. And the college was like, students can do whatever they want. And so I said, can I do whatever I want? Can I post about this? Can I write about this? And the provost said, yeah. And so I did. And I think it was

17 Hillel students then filed a complaint against me in which they felt unsafe with me in the building. And I guess an important backstory is that I'm an anthropology professor and our department is the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. And we share a building with Halel and we share classrooms in space. So our department was the first floor and Hillel was the second floor. And so for years, I used to joke that I was like literally holding up the Zionist agenda on campus because they were right upstairs. So I also was very much on their radar just because of proximity in addition to to gene. One thing we know about Zionists is they don't even want to be next to people who disagree

with them. Exactly. So they, that's why they've ethnically cleansed you. Oh, man. So can we talk about, um, anthropology a bit and sociology and what you taught in the class I think people would be interested to know the connections between those things and zooming out even a little further if we can include that in the answer or get to it in the next one where did your opposition design as

in your own development either as a person or a Jewish person or an American or an academic or a scholar, like, how did you find yourself bringing these two things together to the point where to you, they just go hand in hand? Yeah, that's a great question. And, you know, we're always, like, creating our origin stories and, like, editing them. And so I don't know which came first or second, but I'll do the childhood one first, because I think that that has become an origin story that makes sense to me, which is that I was raised in a Jewish community in the 90s in Washington, D.C., and so.

So I was raised within Zionism. But I think as a young person, the Zionism that I was raised within was, and I think this is pretty common, was the complete erasure of Palestinians as existing at all, right? That there was, you know, a land without a people for people without a land. Palestinians were never mentioned, except there were like people that didn't want Israelis on their land, et cetera, et cetera. And I don't even remember hearing about Palestinians when I was like in elementary school and middle school. I remember getting bat mitzvahed when I was 13 and a lot of relatives planted trees in Israel in my honor for my bat mitzvah, which I like feel like I need to do some kind of like reparative work around because it was only years later that I saw the documentary, the village beneath the forest about the Jewish National Forest. fund and the way in which by the way just lost its charitable status in Canada yeah I saw that that's crazy yeah we used to collect for that organization in Hebrew school

yeah my father refused to put money in the in the little Sadaka box that's when I started learning about this stuff so you were getting yeah you were getting about Mitzvud you were learning that Palestinians conveniently don't exist to trouble your how convenient your attachment to this foreign country and at the same time you're interested in peoples and you're interested in... Yeah. But I mean, I think the interesting thing is like I was one of those kids who wouldn't stand for the Pledge of Allegiance in elementary school. I was like, nationalism is dumb and I'm not interested. And so I was like, why should I care about some other country on the other side

of the world that really doesn't seem like a fun place to be? You know, it just wasn't something that was interesting to me. I didn't want to have anything to do with it. I had a Hebrew teacher who had been in the Israeli military and I didn't like her so my first, you know She was in I was like, well, I don't like these people This is coming though

20 years from now American school goes to be standing right I pledge allegiance to the flag of Israel and the settlements for which it stands and the humus and the cherry tomatoes I will say like as an aside I was really I was really

there were so many things that I learned last week with Rashid Khalediz interview, but the one thing that I wanted to say, wait a second, is that Israel does have a metropole. It's the United States. Yes. But I then, you know, Israel was just this like backdrop that I had no interest in. But then when I was 16, I had a history teacher who was teaching a Middle East history class in high school, which is sort of wild, but it was like 1996 or 1997. Everyone was like high off the Oslo Accords. And he did this, like what I now understand is live action role playing, where he organized the whole class and the whole semester around a Mideast peace talk.

And he assigned students to countries or entities based on power. So like 10 students were the United States, eight students were Israel, three students were Egypt. And I was the one student assigned to be passed. Palestine. Oh my God. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That changed your life. It changed my life. It totally changed my life. Mr. Bidrin, rest in power. And it was like, you know, we had just gotten dial-up internet. I like found a copy of Edward Syed's The Question of Palestine. I'm sure I didn't understand 90% of it. But it was like, oh my God, I've been lied to my entire life because there are actually people who were, you know, in Palestine before the settlers.

And it was this moment in which, first of all, education, it can be radical, but also it taught me that depending on where you situate yourself, the story, the history, the perspective looks very, very different. And so, you know, is that what turned me into an anthropologist who goes somewhere, you know, is situated with a community and tells a story from that situatedness with that community, which is not a global perspective. It's not a top-down perspective. It's not a both-sides perspective. It's a sort of situational perspective. I think that that was this really profound moment for me. And was this intentional by the teacher who was doing the Oslo LARPing was, like, what was, you think that teacher would be like proud or would it be like that one, you know, rabbi that we talked about? It was like, we wanted you to be Zionists, you know, the ones. Yeah. Or was it like, I see something in this girl. Right.

She one day will be a fired tenure professor. Yes. I wish I could actually ask him instead of speculate, but I'm pretty sure he was also like a Russian spy. I think he was a communist. He was the first person who assigned me Marx. He also taught this Russian history class where he, you start and like he's the czar and everybody's a serf. And, you know, everybody is to like kiss up with him to become a noble person. And he assigned you to be Lenin? Yeah. So I, you know, I had a very political education at my like. public high school. And I do wonder if Mr. Bidrin knew. There were a lot of Jewish students in that class. And I do wonder what it was like for the students who were assigned Israel. I can't remember who they are. If you're out there, let me know. Assigned Israel at birth. That's God. I think that's all of us. We could really change the way the far right feels about gender if it was assigned Israel at birth. Exactly. Well, we'll continue along this line of questioning, but first we do have to have a quick ad break. I'm sure the UJA has some more things to sell us or whoever our advertisers are going to be this episode. But please stick around. We will be right back.

And we're back. This is Badass Barra. World's Most Moral Podcast. We're here with Mora. Winklestein. And we were talking about how you grew up, you know, in terms of with Zionism, within a Jewish community and how you kind of slowly came to a sort of political consciousness that said, hey, Palestinians exist. And to a, and then eventually to an academic discipline called anthropology that's about peoples and about understanding what makes a people of people and how you so yeah let's get we talk a bit more about how you would then weave you your your consciousness i guess i was going to say your views but it's more your consciousness around palestine into your teaching on anthraith teachings on anthropology yeah thanks um i mean you know i will say there's

a reason why you know israel has been targeting and assassinating what i think it's now 195 Palestinian journalists there's you know we and here in the United States the sort of like larger narratives that you can't touch you can't trust Palestinians right there be writers um you know thinkers artists etc right because they're bias whereas you know who is in control of power whose control of narrative we know because of Hasbara that you know Israel is in control of our narrative here in the United States and so I think you know really realizing that if I'm reading Palestinian writers and they are telling a wildly different story than the one that I'm, you know, being sort of force-fed. And I was a contrary kid. I have memories

of going with a mentor of mine in high school to protest at Lockheed Martin. Cool. And like, yeah, like learning about, you know, global weapons production and just thinking about, I do not trust those with power. I was, like, raised by hippies. And, you know, if the powerful narrative is that there are no Palestinians, and then I'm reading Palestinians who are like, actually let me tell you about, you know, displacement and ethnic cleansing and land theft and murder and genocide, who am I going to believe? In this country, we're taught that, you know, distrust Palestinians. But of course, if you're actually reading their words and listening to Palestinians, it's really hard to make the argument that anything that Israel

is doing is moral or just at all. Yeah. That's why people actively avoid it. I mean, we talked about this tweet, you know, from this student at Columbia, Shoshana, who had to check with Canary Mission before entering a class that, in a subject she wants to major in, like, Middle East studies but you know wants to be protected from having to read something that you know you can only you can only do that kind of denial for so long before you continue just reading and reading and kind of coming around you know so she wants to check with the you know the people who watch out for teachers you know and the canary mission tells you know who you can trust and who you can't it's crazy which is funny because canary mission I think it's really bad

at their job like i'm actually deeply offended that i'm not on canary mission so she would i guess feel that my classes were totally fine yeah yeah yeah i've wanted to be on canary there's just so many lists that just me and daniel are both not on that i'm just like what's wrong with us you know yeah we weren't even in the top 10 anti-semites of the year yeah and we've been doing everything in our power you know to just try and try but they just don't you know they just won't legitimize us Yeah, and there are really like participation awards. Yeah. You're on the list or you're not.

I know. It sucks. Yeah. But go on. Yeah, please. I mean, you know, I'm not a scholar of Palestine. I say that because I haven't, I've been to Palestine, but I haven't done long-term. You know, anthropologists go and they live somewhere for a year or two, if not longer.

And I spent two years in Bombay doing research in India that also was part of a 10-year-year project of being in India a lot. And so that's sort of where my research was. But, you know, when I was learning about Indian history in graduate school in order to have context, if we're, you know, I was reading Indian scholars who were not saying that, you know, we should be legitimizing the British Raj and listening to their version of this story, right? It was like challenging that. And I wrote a book about mill workers in Bombay. I spoke to the mill owner but I wasn't interested in, like, presenting his side as a balance to, you know, worker lives as though he had anything to say to counter the stories that they were saying.

So we see this embedded, the situatedness in all of these different spaces in which nobody's ever come to me and been like, your book would have been a lot better if you had, like, spent half of it thinking about how the mill owner justified, you know, not paying his workers. Right. But Palestine continues to be the state of exception here. Yeah, it's interesting the fair and balanced argument, which used to be almost exclusively a conservative argument, you know, that I feel like a lot of, you know, people of more like liberal sentiments would mock, you know, this idea of like, you know, showing both sides of being fair and balanced. I mean, it was a constant trope making fun of Fox News.

and yet it seems to be the accepted narrative when it comes to Israel-Palestine, you know, to a degree that is ridiculous. I mean, we saw that interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates on CBS this morning in which he said, you know, the interviewer, Doco Pill, I believe, is his name, was saying that his book was anti-Semitic because it didn't point out the other side. of the Israel-Palestine situation, which is completely ridiculous because he just went there writing what he saw. And he said the perspective that you're articulating can be heard on any network at any time all the time.

It's actually hegemonic. If the both sidesers actually meant it, that would be one thing. Yeah. Then they probably have to admit that there aren't just two sides. There's many, many sides thinking intelligently about any issue.

but they never actually want both sides they want to shut down the side that's currently speaking from speaking right which doesn't usually get to speak i have a question that i hope is anthropological in nature um that i never took an anthropology course and it's got to do with when does a people become a people um clearly israel knows that the Palestinians are a people because it's going after the institutions and organs of culture that make that people the people of people and systematically destroying them. That's part of what makes this a genocide, right? The hospitals, the universities, the schools, the cultural institutions, the religious institutions.

When we had Rashid on, Professor Khalid on last week, he made a point that's not very popular among pro-Palestine solidarity activists, I would venture to say, which is that at a certain point you've got to deal with, and he's written about this extensively too. You don't have to like the way Israel came about. You don't have to like Israeli culture. You don't have to like Israelis.

But at a certain point, somewhere along the way, this nationalist project, fused with a settler colonial project, succeeded to the point that a new people, a new nation, has now come into being. Right. One way or another, by hook or by crook, kind of they have been Frankenstein into existence and now you have modern Hebrew and a culture

surrounding it and literature and poetry and people who were born there and cultural memory and a national identity and all this kind of stuff and you're just simply there is no mechanism to erase that there is no you can't press reset you can't press the return button on the on the typewriter just go back to the beginning what's what's your view of of you know there's a book right schlommosand the invention of the jewish people which was very controversial but the notion that we had to invent a peoplehood for ourselves in order to launder and justify this project how do you deal with that when you have on the one hand a people that is being wiped out by another group calling itself a people and that second

people that's doing the wiping out is the product of its own supremacist project came into being by dominating and by settling and by invading. Right. Yeah, I mean, there's so many different ways to answer that question. And I think, you know, Israel's not that old. And Zionism hasn't been around that long. I mean, you know, we're not talking about, you know, these extensive histories. But I, I like to think about Israeli culture through the appropriation of food. So the fact that, you know, 90% I made that up, I don't know, a majority of Israeli food as like an element of culture is actually Palestinian, Lebanese, whatever, food, that Israelis have done such a powerfully and skillfully good job of claiming as their own. I was visiting my family in suburban, Washington, D.C. this weekend and went into a coffee shop to just get a cup of coffee and realized very quickly that it was actually an Israeli cafe in which there was cake, the like round flatbread. And it was described as a Jerusalem bagel. There was Lubna that was like explained as Greek yogurt.

there was hummus and falafel. All of these things being described as Israeli food. And it was so, I mean, I was infuriated. Yeah. But also this, you know, this isn't the sort of like slow development of something new. Through like encounter and through, you know, time and history or whatnot. It's this product of a sort of both settler colonial, space and also this sort of intense assertion of a cultural identity, which, you know, we can make

arguments about the way in which, like, food ways have always been shared. But the sort of like erasure of Palestinians while also stealing, you know, Zatar and claiming it as like an Israeli spice. I think, yeah, exactly. We've seen not making the rounds. What is Atar? The Israeli spice, you will want to sprinkle on everything. This one felt like the most offensive because everyone was like, come on, man. That one started a whole round of people just like posting hot dogs and goes, hot dogs,

the Israeli food, that'll make you go, what is this sandwich? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, come on, Israeli food is borsed. Yes, Israeli food is borshed. and all sorts of different, like, Ashkenazi food. And I feel like, yes, there's, you know, I mean, this is a sidetrack, but, you know, when it comes to Jewish culture and Israeli culture, I feel like there is, I don't know, an almost like open hatred for European Jewish culture, or at least culinary culture, certainly diaspora culture in general when it comes to, you know, the way that diaspora Jews are portrayed and mocked by you ever had an israeli latka oh no i've never had an israeli lotka any good terrible don't even want to talk about it oh wow that's just

they sometimes they sometimes well i mean it's fine it's some kind of fried potato thing they'll put it in a in a pita like in a falafel or or with hummus and things like that like but it ain't that It ain't that thin, crispy, golden-fried. Right. That's why they hide it in, you know, someone else's food. That's right. And, of course, that's not to say that there aren't, you know. Zionism is basically one big game of hide the lanka.

Yeah. I mean, and we said this before, but it's not to say that there isn't, of course, you know, years and years of Middle Eastern Jewish culture, you know, sprinkled throughout the Middle East and, you know, North Africa and whatnot, but it's very the distinct you see in the way, the distinct attempt to make a, it's a concerted effort to appropriate Middle Eastern food and just slap it, you know, Israel in front of it. I mean, it's, it's funny because it's what Israel did to Palestine and, you know, as a microcosm of that. You know, that's why people bring it up so much. Also, because they like to brag that everything is us. That's what the theme song is about.

The worst neighbors ever, like totally fine, just sort of hanging out in Palestine, being, you know, living their lives. And then all of a sudden, what if all of this was ours? Yeah, exactly. It's like that neighbor that asks you for a bowl of sugar. And then, you know, you, and then they're like, are you going to say thank you? And they're like, what do you mean? This is my sugar. This is what that you know. Well, there were, but there were Palestinian Jews who were very nervous about the advent of Zionism too. Oh, 100%. They knew this was going to

mess up the balance, the equilibrium and the whole spirit of the place. I need to establish a buffer zone in your pantry, says, producer Adam. Exactly. Yeah. But continuing on with this question of personhood, I feel like what interests me about it as well is

the fact that like we've got one group of people, you know, Zionists and um who personhood or peoplehood yeah peoplehood uh not personhood good point um and uh you know you've got zionists you know a nationality right and which doesn't exist uh in terms of like israeli is not a nationality apparently it is it is uh jewish is what they have on their um i guess citizenship papers or whatever legal documents they have ID cards yeah Yeah, it's very specific to, you know, Jewish, the Jewish nation. And, you know, there's been talk about people talking, you know, saying that kind of people have been confused by the idea of Jews as a nation, I think, for a long time.

And sometimes that discourse gets pulled into this Palestinian solidarity discourse where people want to deny Jewish peoplehood, the Jewish nation. in general. And it's always been, I think, for me, a sticky subject because I don't actually, I'm not an academic, I don't know anything unless it's like a prestige TV show from 20 years ago. Then I know everything about it. If it's Madman or Sopranos, let's say. But if it's about anthropology, I know nothing. So can you explain what makes a group of people a nation?

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I do think it's interesting that Israel has never actually declared their borders because, you know, borders are such a way in which nationhood is created. Sure. But I do, I do think that... Why limit themselves? Right, yeah. Exactly.

You're just boxing yourself in. We're seeing what that looks like in practice in Syria and Lebanon. And, you know, there are probably anthropologists who will disagree with me. But I think, like, national identity is the sort of... imagination of oneself as having not just a homeland, but a homeland that's like political borders determined in the logic of the nation state. And so, you know, I will say that, you know, I'll preface this by saying, I'm an American. I realize that my, you know, national identity is, you know, imperial, it's racist, it's Zionists, it's all of these things. You know, I'm not out

here pretending like, you mean, I can tell the Zionist who was about to run into the room being like, Does Moira know she's American? I can tell him, it's cool. She knows. Yeah, we know. That one always come. I know. Are you aware?

You're on stolen land? Right. Very aware. But, you know, I think that like Israeli culture and Israeli national identity is a genocidal identity. And I think that that's, you know, not necessarily, I know lots of critical and anti-Zionist Israelis. And, you know, we can talk about identity versus, you know, national identity, et cetera. But I, you know, I think that the idea of an Israeli national identity being something that has to be a theocratic ethno state is pretty telling in how, you know,

this notion of, of Israeli is imagining itself because there is actually a version of future in which everyone is living, you know, I'm actually, you know, I think that the biggest threat to, you know, the world is the nation state and capitalism. So I don't, you know, I don't imagine just futures through a different kind of nation state, but there is a less genocidal version of the nation state, which is an inclusive, you know, democratic, you know, country, which, of course, any Israeli who opposes that is opposing that because of the assumption that they will do to us what we have done to them, which is a genocidal ideology that is not shared by, you know, most Palestinian thinkers and writers and people that I know

and read. Right. So I think that that's telling on itself. Yeah, I mean, it's an inherently racist assumption. And it is telling on yourself, of course, but it's like it's, you know, this idea of Arabs not being able to handle liberty, not being able to act responsibly with their own liberation, and therefore we need to keep the boot on their neck. It's just, I mean, that's been the justification for continuing apartheid, continuing, you know, colonialism. You know, this is just, it's always the justification.

People just act like it's different this time because they can look back at a history of Jews being oppressed throughout Europe and they say like, well, there's precedent for assuming that if we allow ourselves to live within a minority, you know, I live as a minority in our own space that we will be holocausted. And I think it confuses the issue for a lot of people because of this vast history of Jews being oppressed. And as for Israeli identity itself being fundamentally genocidal,

that I think is buttressed by when you listen to anti-Zionist Israelis who have really confronted the consequences of their own identity and they really decide that they're on the side of dismantling the systems of violence and apartheid, they end up kind of not being able to even speak the word Israeli in the same way anymore about themselves whether it's our former guests

Alon Nisan Kohen and Eli Karpas who now introduce their One State Solution or Yala podcast, I think what it's called by saying we are Jewish Palestinians Jews born in Palestine or with Israel on our passports or Jonathan

Pollack, who said in accepting an award in his speech, he said, we don't need to be just be anti-Israel. We need to be anti-Israeli. That my own Israelisiness is an impediment to me being able to stand where I need to stand to do this kind of work. So, I mean, when those people themselves take a look in the mirror and they say, this identity actually can't come with me on this journey towards being pro-justice or pro-humanity. That's pretty telling, I think.

Yeah. And I think we're so limited in our imagination because we learn how to understand identity through these frames of national identity or national belonging or whatnot. And so we circle around these same conversations over and over and over again when actually the job of, you know, teachers and writers. and artists and, you know, all kinds of knowledge producers, which you two are also part of, is to imagine... I know. I know. I know. Hell yeah. Sorry. You're emotionally damaged. It's to imagine a world otherwise. Like, that's what we're supposed to be doing is to actually, like,

step into the work that's often very uncomfortable of interrogating all of the forms of violence that we've accepted as normal reality. Right. And if I think about what... you know how many fingers nails of mine would you have to pull out by force before i relinquished my identity as a canadian or maybe someday if i ever become american would no you can like it would be an adjustment it would definitely be an adjustment because it's just a fact that i was born in a place called canada but emotionally i i don't i don't subscribe in the depth of me in any way that my Canadianness or my America my North American this is very there's very little about me identity wise that goes to the that that that that you'd have to pull up by the

roots by force you know when you're a member of a society like the national identity like Israel it's a much more painful extraction I think to try and get people to give that up because they, maybe because they get a certain amount of power, privilege and the illusion of safety from it. And these are very emotional things. Yeah, I think that that's really real. And, you know, on a lighter note, I think for American Jewish Zionists, it's so confusing for me because it's like, it's hard enough to labor under the weight of one national identity. You want two. you want those two like fraught histories like weighing your shoulders down yeah good point what a choice yeah yeah it is interesting too to see um i think when it comes to american uh jewish

zionists um being put in a position in which like their uh Zionism has been activated you know in the last year i think it's been it's been interesting to watch because you see a lot of people who you see the depths to which they are emotionally tied to you know the to Israel and to Zionism and and how far they're willing to go you know in order to to defend a state that they themselves before October 7th were very critical of and yeah it's it's a complicated thing you know identity and and I think that like when people talk about the Jews being a nation or not being a nation or like the you know i haven't read shlomo san's book but you know the invention of jewish people uh there's there's a lot that can be said and there's a lot that you know needs to be uh looked at carefully and and i think i'm always weary to talk about it because um everyone is so individualistic when it comes to their own personal identity and i'm not trying to deny anyone's you know like lived experience but it's hard to not look at everything through the lens of my

own which is you know I'm an American Jew but I'm a white guy and I don't I don't go around identifying as I'm white you know I don't like walk into a room like white guy here but it it informs you know my you know my view on things and so watching people deny the white part of themselves, the one that actually makes a material difference in order to paint themselves as an oppressed people, you know, American, white American Jews going around being like, would you hide me? It's just, I can't help but mock it because I'm just like, what the fuck are you talking about? This is, you are not, you are not someone who is being actively sought by the state or police.

or dealing with even close to the amount of, like, discrimination as the people that, the very people that you are targeting, you know? And the thing is we all, rights are like this. You have the right to, like, your rights are as uncomplicated as they don't affect the rights of others. Your identity is as your prerogative as it doesn't impinge or place demands upon the material, as you just said, Matt, material realities of others and the question for for all of us is okay well i can feel however i want to feel about myself my group who has to suffer and die or not have their rights ever come to fruition and be kept down by systems of overt and more elongated more invisibleized violence so that i can

keep feeling the way I like to feel about myself who whose reality has to be suppressed so that my my unreality can be maintained as as the only one and and this is where it leads towards the work of academics like you who can think and speak in these terms and help us orient to to the unspoken and unseen things well and the you know I think the interesting thing is that you you know, identity, you know, cultural, ethnic, racial, you know, national, like, these are often very ambivalent spaces of identification because they're, they change over time, right? They're not static. They're, you know, the borders are constantly, you know, being made porous

and remade again. And I think, you know, just thinking out loud, there might be something really seductive about Israeli national identity in that it resolves the ambivalence because you are both the most extreme victim and the most powerful entity at the same time. So you can actually inhabit those two positions at the same time without ever confronting both like the implications of those positions and the impact that they have on the world. And so, you know, I think about how the result of that is just not just the like complete dehumanization of Palestinians to the point in which you know you know they're they're human animals right but also the complete annihilation in order to be both the most powerful and the most victimized right at the same time and you know

if you think about it the most moral equals most powerful plus most victimized yeah right yeah right yeah Critical morality theory. I like that. That's good. Right. But I interrupted you. No, no, no. I just, I think about how, you know, I don't spend a lot of time trying to empathize with those who I feel are, you know, enacting genocide or supporting it or whatnot.

But that must be a very devastating and exhausting position to be inhabiting and to be, like, constantly, like, you know, maintaining those boundaries. And I think trying to empathize with it every now and then is healthy. I think it's healthy for us. But I also think it's intellectually healthy. It keeps your understanding of it from getting too brittle or too rigid. And the satire that we do on this show, whether it's that, you know, that song that played earlier in the songs that Matt's written and stuff, we have to get inside the minds of these characters to try and understand, well, what is that logic? And it's never just an intellectual logic. it's an emotional logic right and and and that's what's driving everything it's not the opinions it's

not the takes it's not the fact it's it's a much more lizard brain thing and yeah um so yeah i i i never make it mandatory that anyone should empathize with anyone right but i recommend if you have the bandwidth yeah to just assume for a second that people are getting something out of their ideological position what is that right what are they getting out of it and i try to to extend that to the monsters of history, too. Yeah. It's also a good way to know people's, you know, vulnerabilities, too, because when you know someone's vulnerabilities,

then you can fight them a little bit easier. And, you know, the big, you know, vulnerability here is, it's important to know why they are able to hold these two beliefs that make absolutely no sense put together, you know. And, you know, that way you can, at least in my case, You can make fun of them because you can hit them where it hurts. At the very least, they can see themselves as as ridiculous as I'd like them to see themselves. And also, I think it helps just in general in terms of like helping you sleep at night a little bit more.

I mean, you know, I think it's been almost therapeutic for me to try to come to some, you know, emotional understanding. even if it's with a total, you know, ghoul, it helps me to sleep at night knowing, you know, that it's not just everyone's evil and, you know, like, pining for blood. There are those people, but I can't think like that or else I wouldn't be able to fucking move. Right. And I think, you know, when Palestine is free and between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is like a free inclusive democratic Palestine, which is not quite liberation, but it's, you know, a step in that direction. And Israelis find that if they are willing to live, you know, in, you know, I'm wary of

the word peace, because I think it's often like a cover for, you know, different forms of inequality. Yes. But live side by side with the people that they have completely, you know, dehumanized and turned into terrorist monsters, the entire Israeli psyche will collapse. And I think that fear is probably a deeper fear than the fear of Palestinians. Oh, yeah. That there's no center to hold. There's no reality to the, you know, cage of identity that is, you know, only possible through the complete destruction and dehumanization of a people. And, you know, I don't think, most people are up for that reality especially if they've built their their identity around this notion of you know us or them well reality has a way of asserting itself fortunately unfortunately

just just inevitably right and it's just not happening fast enough for or it's happening in ways that are brutal along the way the the and that's this podcast exists to entertain people in the meantime and it's a fucking horrible reason to exist yeah yeah we actually don't have as a podcast the right to exist no we don't have the right to exist we we do anyway um but yeah so you know i think that kind of gets me to a point that i i i want to get with more guests which is like especially now that things are getting more and more bleak you know we talk about what's the eventual freeing of Palestine and if there's one thing I've learned over the last year doing this podcast is that it feels like I'm going to have to do this podcast for a lot longer than I

wanted to and but I try to in some way remain optimistic and you don't have to do this for me mora but if you feel like giving me a reason to be optimistic you know Christmas is coming up, which is the Jewish favorite holiday in America. How can we feel optimistic in these dark times? Yeah, that's, I mean, that's a, as you note, that's a really tricky question because I think in terms of Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank and now folks in Lebanon and Syria, I mean, in terms of the horror of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and now what is looking like a quote-unquote regional war. I mean, the numbers of people that we are watching

murdered in the most horrific ways and increasingly. So every day, make it... Sorry, there's a car alarm in New York. Make it so that... That's a hell of a car alarm. Yeah, exactly. It's a truth. It's a truth.

It's a truth to the police. Make it so that I actually, like, I want to sort of bracket my optimism with the acknowledgement that, you know, what I see as, you know, a place to be optimistic has nothing to do with people who are, you know, on the verge of absolute destruction, and I never want to lose sight of that. I think in terms of this country, the place in which I do allow myself a little space of hope is that, you know, I'm middle-aged, I guess, I'm 45, like,

I'm of an older generation that, you know, I think has, like, been complicit in fucking everything up. But when I look at young people, when I look at students, when I think about the student encampments and the things that students are still willing to do and risk now and the way in which attention on Palestine is like I've never seen in my lifetime, I think that if we're, if we're thinking long term and we're willing to sort of bracket the fact that this optimism has no bearing on the folks in Gaza who are just, you know, being slaughtered every day. I think that the sort of like long history of this is that we have a younger generation who is

completely unwilling to go along with the status quo in ways that my generation has been. And I think it's Palestine. I think Palestine has revealed a lot about the way in which the United States operates as a a global power. But it's also about the fact that they're all going to be in incredible amounts of debt. They are never going to like, you know, dig their way out from, you know, student loans. Their, you know, options in terms of careers is very small, the environment, you know, everything that we're seeing in terms of, you know, the cost of health care, the cost of food, the cost of everything. Young people are pissed. And I'm hoping that that anger and that

sort of, you know, connection between the unlivability of being in this country and the unlivability on a global scale is going to connect in a big enough surge that we're going to see some kind of large scale change, which I would love to see as the collapse of the United States and Israel and a sort of like future that is far more just than this contemporary moment. And I think that our young people are showing us what that is, which is why I think teaching is such a gift because it means no matter, you know, I keep getting older, but I'm still able to learn from young people and I'm still trying to find ways to do that, even though I'm not in the classroom. So that gives me a little bit of hope. Well, so speaking of that, and thank you for that. That's a beautiful

answer. What's next for you? And what's the latest in your case? When I saw you a few weeks ago, there was like an appeal hearing happening how did that all go and what are your plans like are you going to go back to teaching anthropology are you going to have to get a job selling furniture at anthropology uh ha ha ha sorry that i just constructed i actually applied for a job at anthropology when i graduated from college and i was like i was an anthropology major and they were like i don't care But the joke was good. A company that doesn't realize how good of a joke that is doesn't deserve you. I know. I was like, and you spelled it wrong. Yeah, so I can't say too much about it, but I'm going through an appeals now. And the thing that I will say is that what we're seeing, whether it be, you know, at

Milenberg College, at NYU with these recent persona non grata. situations, you know, across the country is that the places in which we're seeing the most repression of faculty, staff, and students. But, you know, for my case, faculty is when the administration is acting as the sole adjudicating body and making decisions outside of faculty governance. There's a reason why colleges and universities have some form, even though it's been eroded over the years of faculty governance, because faculty understand the stakes for higher ed in a way that administrators who are at the whims of donors and, you know, other people who are providing the money are not. And so, you know, I think that from my perspective, the thing

that needs to be strengthened across the country is a sort of support and expansion of faculty governance, even as administrators are trying to erode and destroy it. So I have a shred of hope that even if I'm not reinstated, that there's some awareness of what administrators are doing in order to silence dissent on campus in order to not alienate their donors. We should all be very worried about that, which is why we need to bring back robust, federally funded, free public education um in terms of what's going on with me um i'm waiting to hear what's going to happen with my job um i'm trying to write transfer in any way like is there any world in which a sympathetic institution might be like all right she's she was put on waivers we're picking her up off

free agency where we're signing yeah totally and if you are that institution and you have that job call me um yeah If you have tenure, you can apply for a job and go with tenure if the institution is willing to honor that. It doesn't always happen, but it can, and it does, it does sometimes. You don't have to do another tenures. Yeah. So stupid. So stupid.

But yeah, I mean, I don't know, you know, I don't know what's going to, you know, provide me with, you know, a salary and health insurance. But I do know that the work that I've been doing is the work that matters the most. And when I could do it in the classroom with my students, that was a gift. But that is not the only place in which we're doing this work, obviously. And I've gotten, you know, the great, you know, there are no silver linings to genocide ever. And I wish that I didn't have these opportunities because I didn't need them. But I've been able to talk with a lot of faculty and students around the time. country these past few months and it's teaching me and it's helping me think about you know what

i think is important and what you know how i want to be creating alliances and what i want to be thinking about so i've you know had the opportunity to connect with people who are doing really great work and i'm learning from them and that's been nice well and hey we all we all know each other as a function of all this. Yes. Which is a nice thing is the network that has sadly been expanding of, you know, people who are in similar positions and suffered similar consequences. It's nice that we at least can like hang out and talk about how it's all fucking bullshit. And I think it's really, like it's been a really clarifying year in all of these ways, but also a nice reminder.

that there are people who are willing to give up things because the stakes are so high and change doesn't happen if you don't give up things and power never rewards those who resist power. So, you know, being connected with people who are willing to actually act in alignment with their theories and talking points has been a great privilege for me. well it's been a great privilege to talk to you here mora i'm so glad that we got to have you on we are now truly the world's most mora podcast yes um so uh you have um you have a book uh out there called uh the archive of loss um uh what is it the lively ruination in uh millland Mumbai did I and uh we uh we uh so you know uh if anyone's looking to uh

support you and to read something that they're going to love. Please go to our description. You'll see a link for that book in the description of this episode. Can I make a quick plug? I was just about to ask. Yeah. So one of the things that I've I've like encountered a lot over, you know, the past year is that people are, people are waking up. They're learning. They want to be more informed. And there are really incredible resources out there. And one place to learn, to read, to take classes is workshops for Gaza, workshops with a four, and they're doing really incredible work. They have these wonderful, wonderful classes with incredible writers. They have, you know, reading groups, they have workshops, they have lectures, they have all sorts of things around

engaging with liberation work and Palestinian thinkers and writers. And it's entirely fundraisers for mutual aid in Gaza. So they work really. closely with the Samir Project and others. And so if folks want to stay connected, if they want to learn, they want to read, go to workshops for Gaza, sign up for their workshops. Yeah, they're incredible. And all of the money goes directly to folks who are providing food shelter blankets to folks in Gaza. Cool. And we'll also put that link to that in our bio as well. as well as mora finkelstein.com so people can go why not you got a website we're plugging yeah i like to rant and then publish things hell yeah same um mora once again pleasure

having you on thank you so much thank you so much it's an honor and thank you all so much out there for listening and watching or whichever way you're doing it uh patreon.com slash bad hasbara please send us emails at baddestbarra at gmail.com thanks everyone again so much for listening and until next time

from the river to the sea let's find Mara a better university yes hmm of all the homes that ere I bombed I have bombed

them out of self-defense Oh, and all the children that ere I killed, it was alas at my expense. I've tried my best to explain myself, but my best efforts were doomed to stall. So close for me, my embassy, good night, goodbye, and feck you all. Of all the lies that ere I told, my love of Zion made them true, Oh, and all the pushback that ere I got, Tis I'll be, because I be a Jew. Yet all my memes and self-pitying tweets

they've failed to hold you in their thrall. So close for me, my embassy, good night, goodbye, and feck you all. guilt trips that ere I laid, they never seem to land with these. And for all the historical comparison cards that ere I played, I could not gain your sympathies. Well, I have learned with Irish folk, Hasbara is a task to. too tall so close for me my beloved embassie lehittra o't and feck you all you eijit gobshite cute hoars scarlet figure mothers for

having you lehahim shlanta good riddance Thank you.