Mark Oppenheimer: Look, honestly, what you say makes me think of my feeling about people who say they’d leave a shul because they do the prayer for the state of Israel. It’s like, so you love your shul and you love the people and they would bring you meals and they’d come to your shiva.

Arielle Angel: But that’s not a moral injury. But that’s not-

MO: It’s not a moral injury to sit through something you disagree with.

AA: No, no, no. It is a moral injury to feel like your community is supporting a state that’s committing a genocide. It is. It is a moral injury.

MO: I’m Mark Oppenheimer, and this is Arc: The Podcast. We are the premium audio product that goes along with the web magazine, Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera, which is online at arcmag.org. We are produced by the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. And it is March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, as I introduce to you our latest episode. This is a long one, but I think you’ll find that it pays dividends. I mean, you’ll be the judge.You’ll find yourself an hour in and say, “Do I want to go another 40 minutes?” And I suspect that you might. My guest is Arielle Angel. Now, she is not famous famous in the sense that some people are really famous, in the sense that Katy Perry or Donald Trump is famous. And she’s not even famous in the literary world the way that Zadie Smith is famous or George Saunders is famous or Marilynne Robinson is famous or James Patterson is famous.

But in a certain corner of political activism, she is a total rockstar. She has been, for the past few years, the editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents, which is a left-wing magazine of Jewish opinion. She joined Jewish Currents in 2018 and became its editor-in-chief fairly soon thereafter. She has announced that she’s stepping down fairly soon. They’re currently doing a search for her successor. But under her stewardship, Jewish currents has become really the house organ of the Jewish far left, which is to say the anti-Zionist or non-Zionist left, the left that is highly critical of Israel, many of its writers would say that Israel should not be a Jewish state. I think almost all of its writers would say that. Many of them believe that it’s a settler colonial project. They are extremely sympathetic with the Palestinian cause for self-determination and highly, highly critical of the American Jewish establishment, which I think it’s fair to say they see as corrupted by money, by demagoguery, by a kind of reactionary disregard for human rights.

She is highly controversial. A lot of people in the Jewish mainstream or the Jewish right would roll their eyes when her name comes up. But in the Jewish left, and especially I would say in Brooklyn, in New York City, where so much of the Jewish left is concentrated and in kind of small liberal and left wing Jewish worship circles, havurot throughout the country, the name Arielle Angel inspires a kind of reverence. I think she’s a very good magazine editor in that she publishes really punchy pieces that get a lot of attention, that drive traffic, that get the conversation going. She has brought on some fairly high profile writers. My sense is that she’s a pretty good fundraiser, that the magazine has attracted a lot more funding during her tenure, but she’s something more than that. She is seen by many as the moral conscience of a movement.

I don’t know her particularly well and I don’t know her work particularly well. I had to really bone up to do this interview. And after doing a lot of reading, both of her work and work about her, I became pretty convinced that we disagree on a lot, but that she was certainly worth engaging. And the interview is kind of testy at various times. It’s not like the most mellow of interviews, but I think that’s okay. I think that, as she would probably agree, when you throw off a lot of sparks, sometimes you can see stuff by the light of those sparks. Sometimes they burn stuff down. There was a profile of Arielle Angel in The New Yorker by Gideon Lewis-Kraus that some people thought was way too soft on her and Jewish Currents. And I actually agree. I don’t think it’s a terrific profile, but you should go read it and you should also go to the magazine and you should read her pieces if this interview makes you a little bit more curious.

I think a lot of you will have thoughts about this and I welcome your mail. I am at mark.o@wustl.edu, W-U-S-T-L dot E-D-U. Here is my interview with Jewish Currents editor-in-chief, Arielle Angel.

Arielle, thanks for joining me.

AA: Thanks for having me.

MO: All right. I want to start well before you worked for Jewish Currents. I was reading your old essay from Guernica Magazine about your drug usage at an uncomfortably young age for me as a dad, but also you spent a bunch of years … I guess you weren’t a Lubavitcher, but you were Chabad adjacent. You were Chabad curious.

AA: I mean, I don’t know if I would say that. I mean, I will just say that a lot of the kids that I did drugs with when I was younger, after a friend of ours died, became Chabad. And I wasn’t really that adjacent to them while they were in because … I don’t know. I mean, I would go over … I would get invited for shabas, that kind of thing, and I would sometimes go. But they were my old friends. They weren’t my current friends in that moment. But then one of them left. Actually, now two of the three have left at this point. But at the time, one of them left and we started dating, you know, a friend from my youth. And then I became kind of fascinated with the Chabad Chassidus that I was learning through him that he was still kind of carrying and attached to, but even though he wasn’t practicing anymore. So yeah, I started writing a book mostly about his story that outlasted the relationship. And that was my introduction to Chabad, where I ended up sort of researching them for a couple years. Yeah.

MO: I mean, you’ve been to the Ohel more than the average non-Queens residing Jew.

AA: Yeah. I would say so. Yeah.

MO: Do you carry any of that with you in any way? I mean, how does the present you look different if you’d never learned a good bit about Chabad?

AA: Well, I mean, I don’t really know, but I grew up … I went to day school until eighth grade and I actually loved learning Torah. I mean, that was important to me. And I think at a different point in my life where I have more time, I would like to learn Torah again. And I think just being able to study Chabad Chassidus those years … I mean, look, I can’t even really say that I studied it because I studied it alone and through online lectures. I mean, they put a lot of stuff online.

MO: Do they ever?

AA: Do they ever? I mean, that’s their whole gig, but I didn’t ever have a chavruta, so I feel like I didn’t actually study it, and I didn’t really ever have a teacher. But I do enjoy Hasidis quite a lot. And I connected … I mean, as you read about in the essay, I connected a lot of the way that they think about creation with the way that an artist thinks about creation, and there are very big differences, but I sort of became enamored with the poetry of it, I think.

MO: I’m somebody who I think we share a lot of interest in common, but I’m not drawn to mysticism. And I’m not saying that you’re deep, deep … I don’t want to presume that you’re a full-time mystic burning man, the whole nine yards, but you’re curious about it. It’s interesting to you. And I feel like there’s a lot of ways to slice and dice the world, and one of the interesting things I’ve noticed is they’re the people who find mysticism really interesting, and they often do the drugs to match, and the people who don’t. And one of the really interesting things for me as an editor has been … When I edit Lea Leibowitz and edit Jay Michelson, the similarities given that they both are supremely mystically curious, despite the fact they agree on nothing in politics, shine through to me.

Does this make any sense to you? Do you share my sense of the world as the people who are on a mystical wavelength and the people who aren’t?

AA: I do feel myself frequently frustrated with people who don’t have that strain, that they’re missing something. I say that I’m one of the only people who does woo-woo, right? That’s how I feel about myself. A lot of people are surprised to find out some of the weird shit that I get into and am excited about, but I just think it’s not very much fun to close oneself off to that. I mean, considering how little we know. And I think it just keeps me in touch with the idea of mystery. And I feel like mysticism has some of that too. It keeps you in a state of awe and wonder that I think is useful for being alive.

MO: Well, as do I. And I wonder, as I get older, my kids make fun of me because I now do yoga and they say, “Dad, the contempt in which you held the yoga community 10 years ago when you were raising us to hold the yoga community in contempt, now we come back from school and you’re at yoga.” What is this? You’re at yoga instead instead of making us pancakes.

AA: Yoga’s great, but I cannot deal with the language.

MO: The woo. The woo woo.

AA: I don’t want any woo in my yoga.

MO: In your exercise. Okay. Okay. So I’m kind of with you and the studio I go to is not super woo, but it’s funny, I have a good friend who said what you said, I do woo right. I have a good friend who owns a massage studio. She may also be a doula. I mean, she probably is, let’s face it. And she said to me, “I’m woo, but not stupid.” She’s like, “I’m from the small community of non-stupid woo.”

AA: That’s me.

MO: Yeah. So we’re going to segue … Believe it or not, I’ll get this around a Jewish currents and the Jewish left. That must be really interesting because so much of the socialist left and the sort of class-based left was based on, and I say this from family experience of older generations, is very bound up in a secularism that’s also a hard rationalist, anti-mystical, anti-romantic. And well, it’s funny because it’s on the one hand, they certainly have a messianism and a romantic urge, but it culturally won’t let itself feel mystical or fun or curious or in awe. That’s not something they want to seem like they’re doing, even as they can be every bit as messianic as your average chabad person or whatever. It’s like they’re romantic in denial about it. So I mean, do you often find … Are you sometimes the woman at the table at Jewish Currents who’s open to that stuff?

AA: Well, I mean, you’re talking about Jewish Currents 80 years ago or whatever. Those are the people who founded Jewish Currents. Those people are mostly dead.

MO: Is that not still a strain on the … I mean, you know more super hard left 30 year olds. They’re all in for the woo?

AA: I mean, this is generational. I mean, I’m not saying they’re all in for the woo. I’m just saying that it’s actually quite common on the left for people to be asking others astrological signs or whatever. You know what I’m saying? It’s not like for the young left, it’s not the same. And we do … I mean, I don’t come from a left background. My mom’s like a liberal progressive. My dad was pretty apolitical, but he voted for Bernie, but they weren’t from that lineage. It just wasn’t a part of even their frame of reference. And when I came into currents, I became acquainted for the first time with this communist and socialist Jewish lineage and with that concept of secularism, which is still very important to the older readers who preceded this iteration of Jewish currents. And in fact, there’s a great, great episode of the podcast with me and Nathan Goldman, who both work at Currents and older Currents people, Judy Rosenbaum and Mitch Abidor, where we debate secularism.

MO: The New Yorker quotes from that, right? Because Abidor-

AA: I think so, yeah.

MO: … mocks you for is like, what is this Rabbi Ishkabible McGiggenheimer?

AA: Rabbi Ishkabible. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it’s actually an amazing episode and they are two of my favorite people in the entire world, but they were horrified when we introduced Parshah every week in Jewish currents. I mean, this was like … I had someone actually leave our JC council, which is where some of the people who are affiliated with the previous version of Jewish currents because of this. I mean, it was like-

MO: It’s like, look at the old dissent board of advisors. It’s a different era. There are these people who linger who were the shop steward for the printmakers union circa 1963 and somehow ended up on the board and somehow are still on the board. It’s kind of beautiful. But I mean, it’s funny because on the one hand, I hated that hardcore … I don’t mind the sort of religious secularism and rationalism. That’s fine. I don’t mind a good old atheist. It was the kind of contempt for art and romance and love, the idea that everything had to be subordinated to the revolution. It seemed to be a kind of unjoyful way to live.

AA: I don’t really see that either in the older left or at least the ones who have made it this far with currents or-

MO: Well, right. I know that they- Not if they’re 60. The people I’m talking about would be 90.

AA: No, we had the 90-year-olds. I mean, they’ve been dying, but I did meet those people before I …

MO: Yeah.

AA: I did meet those people when I came on. And I think that Currents, because they came out, a lot of the people who were affiliated with Currents before were Yiddishists, so they were Yiddish communists. And so embedded in that meant that they had this extreme value for Yiddish literature, Yiddish culture, Yiddish music. So there was at least some way that culture was vaunted because it was connected to Yiddish was their political language and their identity.

MO: Fair enough.

AA: So we had less of that. Although the second generation of currents, Larry Bush, he really thought of himself as totally … His work was really like a repudiation of some of … His parents were in that generation. He did work with Morris Shappes, the first editor, and felt that their kind of authoritarianism, their joylessness, and also their certainty was an affront. And he really worked to kind of make the magazine even a little bit more silly and folksy and to play a lot more and to bring in spirituality a little bit more, not quite as much as we do, but more.

MO: So I realize I’ve jumped in medias res. This is actually a great place to pull back the angle a little bit for people who are not immersed in, obsessed with, or ancestrally connected to the old hard Jewish socialist left, maybe people who unlike me didn’t go to Camp Kinderland. Let me say a bit about where I see … Let me come in heart and say a little about where I see the Jewish left and Jewish Currents as being now, but really more the Jewish left because I haven’t read every issue of Jewish Currents. And I want-

AA: Be careful because I found in our first conversation your knowledge of the contemporary Jewish left to be a little lacking.

MO: Well-

AA: Or familiarity.

MO: Shockingly Arielle, that’s why I invited you on the podcast, was to learn.

AA: Yeah, that’s great.

MO: Okay?

AA: I’m interested. Let’s hear it.

MO: Okay. And I think we were both in a bad mood. You were in a bad mood when we talked the first time.

AA: I was in a really bad mood. I was in a horrible mood.

MO: Yeah.

AA: I know why I was in a bad mood, which is why I kept apologizing, but you really caught me on a bad day.

MO: Water under the bridge. Water under the bridge.

AA: Yeah. I also do not hold grudges, so I think you’re in good-

MO: Probably useful for your job. Okay. So I’m going to give you a caricatured view of the current Jewish left. I’m not going to try to caricature, but you’ll find it a caricature and you can tell me.

AA: Sure, go ahead.

MO: So there is this old left that didn’t like Zionism precisely because it was a form of ethic particularism, and they were internationalists. And so there’s a lineage for any magazine that’s part of a Jewish left, whether it’s explicitly Jewish like currents or sort of obviously Jewish and like descent, for example, which was not Jewish, but run by so many Jews and appealing to so many Jews. And I would even say spilled over into literary magazines, like more recently, like a partisan review, but more recently in n+one or something, where there’s this tension between particularism and universalism. So there was always this suspicion of Zionism and the state of Israel as a kind of ethnic project, ethnic particularist project in a world that was supposed to be moving beyond those beyond nation state borders. And in fact, in many ways was decolonizing and was moving beyond … Well, it was moving beyond empire, setting up some other nation state borders, but hopefully on the road to a kind of universal brotherhood or of humankind.

And so there are people on the Jewish left who I think are probably still, that’s the hope. They would say that in theory, the utopias won without ethnicities or without nations. Some would say without hard nation national borders, but within those, the one world government or whatever, there could be lots of ethnicities or particularisms or particular enclaves and traditions flourishing. Where that cashes out right now is I see it on the kind of Jewish left in its opposition to Zionism and its discomfort with the state of Israel, for some is a sense that, look, the country needs to just make everyone a citizen and they’ll have elections and it’ll be a democracy and that’s where they have to go. And that’s the goal, right? The goal is, look, there shouldn’t be any laws that distinguish between one race or religion and another that’s illiberal. We all know that.

We were raised to believe that’s illiberal because we’re Americans and that’s the project. And then, and for some, like the way to get there is continued democratic pressure. For others, the way to get there or maybe even get to a kind of Palestinian homeland, a reclamation of the land. For some, it might be a reclamation of houses that Jews now live in. For some, it might not, but the way to get there might involve democracy. For some, it might involve violence and the Hamas project therefore has a kind of legitimacy. And you pointed me toward an article that kind of from, I’m forgetting the name of the author, but on Electronic Intifada-

AA: Abdaljawad Omar, on Mondoweiss.

MO: My apologies. On Mondoweiss. It didn’t endorse violence, but it sort of said, “We’re not at liberty to write Hamas out of the circle. They are the government there. They are the movement. If you’re not dealing with Hamas, you’re not really dealing with liberation.” And so I would say that there’s these tensions between, do you just want to think in terms of democratic norms or do you want to think in terms of some sort of anti-colonial ejection or reclamation? I would then also say-

AA: Could I-

MO: Yeah, I’m almost done. I’m not going to go on forever, but go ahead.

AA: Okay, okay. Well, just you’ve already introduced two major things to talk about and I just want to separate them for a second.

MO: Okay, Go ahead.

AA: Because there’s a lot to say, but the first thing you’re talking about is the question of particularism versus universalism, or internationalism.

And actually, I just want to trouble what you’ve already said about that.

MO: Okay.

AA: I mean, that basically these were internationalists and therefore they were not particularists. And I think that there is, on some level, some truth to the fact that they weren’t able to reproduce directly the kind of Judaism that they were trying to build, like this secular internationalist Judaism. A lot of their children just didn’t take it up because they were sort of more involved in the world in a certain kind of way and it didn’t socially reproduce itself. At the same time, they did not consider themselves … They didn’t see those things in ultimate tension. And I wanted to actually read to you just very briefly something from the mission statement in 1946 of Jewish life, which ultimately-

MO: Became Jewish Currents.

AA: Right. Where they say the best and fundamental interests of the American Jewish national group and the Jewish people as a whole must be recognized as separate from … And even while bound up, I’m like summarizing, even while it’s bound up with the interests of the world’s workers, it must be recognized as separate and the argument for international Jewish interest comes first. And this is 1946, it’s post-war, and obviously there are very good reasons for talking about it that way.

MO: Right.

AA: I mean, the world had just let a mass extermination happen, but you also have to realize that the party, the Communist Party in that moment or within a few years, was going to also become allied with the new Jewish state and so a lot of the people in that … who were communist Jews at the time also almost got permission to become Zionists, and many of them were. And in fact, Jewish Currents took a lot of positions that you would consider to be Zionist positions, even if they were wary of … So just to say like-

MO: It was never that simple.

AA: It was never that simple. And identity is strong and people want it, and especially these Yiddishists. And so it was never a question of like, I don’t know, like throw open the gates, not there’s no reticularity. They were actually quite rooted. And it may have been that the … I mean, I think there’s a lot of reasons why they were not able to reproduce themselves. And a lot of that has to do with oppression. I mean, like McCarthyism just destroyed their community and also the collapse of the party because of Khrushchev’s…

MO: Yeah, I was going to say by 1946, there wasn’t much of a party. So I’m not sure how important what you’re saying is. I mean-

AA: Well, there was. I mean, 1956 is when the magazine … I mean, the magazine still had a very robust readership in 1946.

MO: Was it a communist magazine?

AA: Yeah.

MO: Okay. Yeah. I’m just saying, I’m speaking from honestly, anecdota from my family where my grandparents who were CP members said, after the war, you couldn’t even find a meeting. It was McCarthy destroyed it. The popular front, patriotism, McCarthy all destroyed it. So there were hundreds of people these meetings in 1935, and afterwards you could find a meeting. Outside of New York, Arielle. Outside of New York.

AA: Okay, but this is a New York magazine.

MO: Okay. Okay.

AA: This is the center. I mean, if you’re talking about DSA now, you’re talking about New York. I mean, that’s not …

MO: Yeah. They were in Philadelphia. They weren’t in the sticks, but I hear what you’re saying. Was there something else you wanted to say before?

AA: No. Well, I just wanted to say that I think that there’s a way of … I think what we take from this and also what we come to naturally is that there’s a way of thinking about particularism and identity in a way that actually opens up onto the world as opposed to retreats from it or creates a fortress from it. And that is what we’re trying to do.

MO: So that goes to what I was saying, where I was going with that, which was, so there’s a couple different positions about what has to happen in Israel. And then in America, I see the Jewish left as having factions that are kind of Yiddishist and diasporas, that is to say they’re still culturally attracted to explicitly Jewish things. Some are interested in building religious institutions, continuing the religion. And you’ve written very movingly about that in that piece that I want to talk about, that we need new institutions, we need new Jewish institutions. And then I would say there are people on the Jewish left who, and these certainly exist, and I’m not trying to say they’re a majority, you should tell me how preponderant they are, for whom their witness against injustice feels Jewish to them and they want to show up as Jews, but Judaism per se or Yiddishism or the trappings of Jewishness or Judaism-

AA: By the way, I’m not a Yiddishist.

MO: I understand. Nor I. Are not particularly important. That is to say they’re not spending their time. If those things died out, but Palestine was liberated, they wouldn’t sit around wringing their hands over the laws. What they want is social justice and they’re showing up as Jews because that seems to me for reasons sometimes they can articulate and often that go inarticulated because these things are ineffable and weird for all of us, they’re showing up as Jews. Is that a fair description of the landscape? If not, how would you trouble it?

AA: I think that you’re saying that there are people on the left who are showing up as Jews because there’s political utility on this issue and then others who are showing up as Jews also because it’s part of the fabric of their lives. Is that what you’re saying?

MO: Sure. Yeah, that was much more articulate than what I said. Yeah.

AA: I mean, sure. Inevitably, there are people who … But what I will say is that … I mean, what I will say is two things. One, that what I notice more often is that people who start to show up as Jews in Jewish community or whatever, and are finding and become kind of like party to all the things that go along with that, often find a Jewish home there that was lacking for them elsewhere that embeds them in some kind of different Jewish life. When I was organizing with If Not Now, 10 years ago or whatever, you would get people all the time who are like, “Well, I was never really involved in Jewish community because I never really found a community that felt right to me. I wasn’t raised in this kind of Judaism or whatever. I didn’t go to summer camp or whatever.” And so I just never felt that connected and now I feel like I have a community and it feels very important to me and that becomes like a gateway.

And I see that happen all the time. I mean, you just hear about that. And people actually say the same thing about currents where it’s like, “Well, I didn’t really know there was a Jewish community that I actually wanted to be a part of. ” And as soon as that was offered to me, that became quite attractive. The other thing that I’ll say about it is that this acts as though left Judaism is the only place where a kind of empty Jewish identity marker exists.

And as I’ve-

MO: Au contraire.

AA: Yeah. Au contraire. I mean, the fact of the matter is that Judaism, the meaning of Judaism, is in crisis in the present moment, precisely because we don’t have an immigrant, the identities of our grandparents and some of us, our parents, immigrant identities, a kind of connection to other languages, to other forms of communal life, it’s all gone and it’s been mostly replaced with a connection to Israel and also religiosity. I mean, you really only have 10% of Jews who are practicing in, you know, orthodox practice in the United States.

MO: Well, look, I’ve been saying this for years. I’ve been saying, and initially it was my encounter with Zionist activists at a time when I was very interested in Jewish practice that made me feel like a lot of them were running this con game where they were telling themselves they were interested in Judaism, but really they were interested in donating to Republicans, or some Democrats, who towed some sort of neocon Zionist line, but they didn’t show up for Jewish life at all. So I hardly think this is a left wing or a countercultural phenomenon. One could argue this is a cultural phenomenon, a mainstream cultural phenomenon.

AA: I think it is a mainstream cultural phenomenon, but it’s often dropped at the feet of the left. It’s often identified as a phenomenon on the left as opposed to a symptom of a Jewishness that has been hollowed out across the board, which is what has happened.

MO: So an argument I’ve had with a number of people, my old tablet colleague on a new house who wrote this piece on brokenness that got a lot of attention, assorted people on the far left and the far right, this, I’ll call it a contempt for institutions seems to run through unsurprisingly, since you’re saying these institutions are rotting out on the left and the right, seems to run through a lot of this writing and commentary. And you of course wrote a piece called, “We Need New Jewish Institutions” and I want to quote from it.

AA: I am an institutionalist, I believe in institutions.

MO: So that’s the first interesting thing. We’ll put this in the background is that you actually believe that there should be institutions. And sometimes in your writing, there’s a sort of beautiful thinly veiled contempt for the people who just want to kind of have horizontally-based mass protests and then go home and-

AA: It’s not that thinly veiled, but yes.

MO: It’s not that thinly veiled, which must be interesting. I’m sure that’s a tension between you and some of your peers. We can agree you’re obviously right about that, but I want to read from this piece, you wrote, “Meanwhile, behind the scenes, dozens of anti-Zionist rabbis and other Jewish leaders have begun meeting under the loose auspices of a ‘Jewish diaspora movement.'” You put that in quotes. “Aiming to support existing and emerging alternative communities. The questions to answer are formidable, as nearly every aspect of Jewish life requires rethinking. What forms of liturgy, practice, and theology do we inherit from the hollow husks of the various denominations in which many of us were raised? What is our relationship to Jewish languages, particularly Hebrew, but also the diasporic languages displaced by its modern development? How do we orient around myriad vexed conceptions of peoplehood and the biblical relationship to the land of Israel?”

Okay, et cetera. And given that you and I both have a sympathy and perhaps also just a kind of analytical commitment to institutions as something that are needed, I sort of wondered … The gulf between us is I don’t despair of the current ones as much, and I am curious why you would think that their replacements or next iterations need so much revision and rethinking.

AA: I am shocked that you don’t despair of the current ones.

MO: Well, and we can talk about that. So I guess I would say two things. Number one, in my local federation here in New Haven, there’s a lot of elderly people helped. There are homeless people helped. There are Jews who need stuff and Gentiles that are helped. There’s a good place to the extent they support the JCC. There’s a good swimming pool and summer camps to the extent they support my kids’ day school, they do. And that enables them to helps them get an education to the extent that they’ve been there for various social causes, a lot of which you’d agree with, some of which you wouldn’t. They’re effectual. What I see is … And all of these people are kind of underpaid nonprofit workers. It’s not like these are rapacious capitalists who are in the Epstein files. So I’ll just put that out there that I often-

AA: Some of them are in the Epstein files, including the chairman of the board of the JFNA. So Marc Rowan is all over the Epstein files. So don’t … I think you’re speaking too soon.

MO: I was talking about the ones New Haven. I have some of my buddies in New Haven. Some of whom may be.

AA: Sure, New Haven.

MO: I’m in the Epstein files because he got forwarded a … Are you in the Epstein files? I’m in the Epstein files because … Well, I mean, it’s easy to-

AA: I’m not important enough to be in the Epstein files.

MO: Let me tell you how easy it is to be in the Epstein files. He was forwarded 12 years ago a daily digest of articles of interest, and there were 17 articles there, and one of them was a piece I’d written for the Atlantic, and it was number 14. And so I’m in the Epstein files. There are millions of people-

AA: Yeah, Eli Valley is too. Somebody-

MO: Yeah, we’re all in the Epstein files.

AA: Someone random forwarded him the announcement for Eli Valley’s book.

MO: There you are. There you are. Yeah. Okay. So I’ll just put out there, first of all, that those people, and again, I’m talking about kind of right-wing revolutionaries as well as left-wing revolutionaries, as well as everyone in between, who have a contempt for the institutions. Often, when I sit back and think … I read it, I nod along, and then I sit back and think about the people I know in the institutions who seem to be working hard for not great pay and often doing good work. And it doesn’t square with my experience. I’ll put that out there. But here’s my question. It would seem to me that if you want these institutions to thrive, that instead of saying, “We’re going to have a new liturgy and we’re going to have a new this and a new that,” it would just seem to me that what you’d want to do is retain as much as possible.

You’d want to say you can hear the same liturgy, the Purim carnival will seem the same, you’ll sing the same Ma’oz Tzur for Hanukkah, at our shul the Kaddish for your parents will sound the same, but we won’t-

AA: You won’t do the prayer for the state of Israel. Or the prayer for the U.S. government.

MO: Well, the prayer … Right. Those prayers are often aspirational, I would say. The prayer of the US government isn’t saying the U.S. government’s great. It’s saying we pray for them to have wisdom, which I think we do pray for. But I guess my broader question, Arielle, is just why would we want to change so much? Wouldn’t we want to keep as much the same as possible to give people connection to tradition and what they know and what makes them feel comfortable?

AA: Well, I mean, the question of what is tradition and what is not is also a question. I mean, that assumes that there’s some authentic Judaism that exists somewhere when actually what we know is Judaism is not that old. I mean, there was an attempt … If you would’ve walked into a shul in 1930 or whatever in the United States on the Lower East Side, it wouldn’t look the way that your conservative synagogue looks like in the 1980s, 1990s or whatever. So I think we’re assuming that the idea of tradition is more solid than it is. Now, I’m not trying to change Torah. I’m trying to … I’m very interested actually in … Just as an example, we ran a piece a couple years ago that I think was crucial, arguing just for using the regular haggadah and not using these social justice haggadahs that are just total … Within a few years, you have so many caused du jours piled up on …

MO: So many fruit on the Seder plate.

AA: So many things on the Seder plate.

MO: Kiwis. Kumquats.

AA: Yeah. Yeah. We can trust our ancient technologies to have what they need inside of them, and they usually do. But I also think that we confuse things that … We mistake things that are new for things that are ancient all the time, and also we need to be able to rethink things that are ancient. We need to be able … The point is not to throw out. The point is to be able to make decisions about what is working and what isn’t for a certain kind of moment. And we may overcorrect and then the next generation may find something else and go back to something that feels better for them.

But I mean, I think that … Okay, so you’re talking about your local federation, and maybe your local federation is amazing. I have a feeling that I would not feel as comfortable in your local federation as you do, because I am not a Zionist. And I think that that moral injury for many of us becomes … And also is connected to a lot of other stuff. It’s not just like if it was just about that, it would be one thing, but it also trickles down into everything, into the way that they engage in local politics, the way that they … And they do engage in local politics and the way that they deal with education and certain issues in education and the way that they work with other communities and how and who they work with, it becomes global. And that’s not to discount the work that they do with elderly people and the work that they do with homeless people.

I think that that mutual aid work is crucial. And also, I would like there to be a replacement that can do that work without the Zionism, because I don’t think that we’re going to be able to … I think we could do that work better because we would have more partnerships. We would be more integrated if we weren’t embedded with those politics. Now, you’re talking about your local federation. I’m in New York. I have the Big Kahuna Federation, which has been all manner of that.

MO: And I should say, just for the listeners, I think there’s 170 some odd federations, or at least a couple years ago when, reported in North America.

AA: And some are better than North America. And some are better than others. I’m from Miami, that is a bad federation. I’m sorry. That is one of the worst of the worst, and it reflects the politics of the community, but my cousins in Columbus, Ohio have kind of a nice federation. They vary based on the local community and I’m not broad brushing, but the national JFNA, which is a hugely powerful organization, is using their power in ways that to me is a moral injury and that I cannot be involved with the rest of the … And there are just a lot of people like me.

And let’s put aside the federation because the federation, again, has all of these other functions. What about the ADL? Does anyone think that the ADL is doing a good job? Literally anyone. Is there anyone on any side of anything right now that thinks that this is the way that it should look? Or just whatever, the conservative movement. Is there anyone who’s like, “This is really going well?” I don’t know.

MO: Right. Let me just say, I think I’m in broad agreement with you that there’s a lot of ineptitude at the top and I like a lot of inept people and I think a lot of them are really well-meaning and I think a lot of them do a lot of good work. So it’s the contempt that I always worry about. And again, it’s funny to me to have this conversation with you because it’s usually having it with people on the hard right where I’m saying like, “I don’t know who’s going to do better.” Now, to be fair, your call is for people to do better and to start talking about and explaining how to do better. So I actually want to talk about that a little bit because I am rooting. I mean, I’ve tried to be an objective journalist and I personally am rooting for these institutions to do better, to be more effectual, to be a political to the extent possible and to focus on their mission of helping Jews and other humans in various ways.

AA: They cannot do that. They cannot do that because they are not funded that way. They are not set up to do that. That’s impossible.

MO: You’ve been listening to my interview with Arielle Angel, the outgoing editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents magazine. They are online at jewishcurrents.org. Over at arcmag.org, so much good stuff right now. You may have read last week that Paul Ehrlich, who was the author of the late sixties classic, The Population Bomb, which warned that the world was going to buckle under the weight of too many people has died. He’s an interesting guy to think about right now when so much of the panic is that we aren’t producing enough people. And to think that just half a century ago, the concern was we’re producing way too many people. And we have a wonderful piece, a brilliant piece by Max DuBoff who teaches philosophy and classics at Bowdoin College, comparing Paul Ehrlich’s kind of alarmism to Elon Musk’s kind of alarmism and pointing out what they both got wrong and how to think about population ethics as we go forward.

Also, at our website with the Oscars just behind us and a movie inspired by Thomas Pynchon having won a bunch of awards, you might check out Brian Francis Slattery’s piece. It’s Thomas Pinchins America, also at arcmag.org. You can read my piece about how The Pitt, a terrific TV show on HBO, gets Muslim Jewish relations wrong. And we have an essay by Jacques Berlinerblau about James Talarico, who’s running for Senate in Texas, and why he’s not maybe all he’s cracked up to be.

Finally, Abe Silberstein has a piece about American Jewish liberalism, the center or the center left that he feels is kind of vanishing. It’s actually a great companion piece to this interview with Arielle Angel. So I invite you to go to arcmag.org, check it all out, and now here’s the second half of my interview with Jewish current editor, Arielle Angel.

Okay, so we want to move towards this world that is a safer space for non-Zionists, for people who have critiques, for a kind of broader base of … I’m trying to paraphrase you. And then I read your piece, and one of the things I see, one of the things I see, and I’m not putting this on you, but I’m saying one of the things that when you follow the links out, when you read about these attempts to do diasporas, philanthropy, et cetera, and build new institutions, the kind of nascent structures that you think we have to encourage and support, I’m thinking like the Jewish Liberation Fund, whom I went and read a lot about because you told me to. You look at the photos on these websites and it’s like people at rallies, or maybe it was an encampment holding up defund the NYPD signs and the Black Lives Matter posters, and they’re all wearing masks even though it’s outside, presumably in April, because I think maybe it’s the encampments and it’s Passover, and they’re all 21.

And I’m looking at this thinking, this is the cultural far left is what I’m looking at. I’m not looking at anti-Zionists of all hues, stripes, ages, whatever. I’m looking at the kind of people who you see bicycling down the street half a mile from anyone wearing masks because they think it’s political allyship of some sort. And this is a stereotype and I’m painting with a broad brush, but for 51-year-old normie dad like me, I just think that is so not my movement. What does that have to do with the price of tea in Palestine to be blunt?

AA: What does the encampment have to do with the price of tea in Palestine?

MO: No, no.

AA: What does the encampment movement have to do with Palestine?

MO: No, that’s not fair. Do you not know what I’m asking? I’m asking for all these other movements, that it’s not about everything, that it’s not about disability rights and defunding the police and Black Lives Matter and the environment and–all of which you and I are probably relatively allied on–but when it becomes everything, it actually becomes a vibe or a mojo and not a movement. And that’s a problem on the left. And I guess I’m curious, and I bet you think it’s a problem on the left.

AA: I don’t.

MO: You don’t?

AA: No.

MO: Okay.

AA: I mean, I just think once, look, once you start organizing, actually organizing, you realize very quickly the ways that things are interconnected and also the ways that really showing up coalitionally creates political power. And I mean, it’s not just transactional, but also politics, people misunderstand what solidarity is. Solidarity is about finding shared interest. It’s not about altruism or something. It’s not like I’m helping you because I love you and you need it or whatever. It’s also about recognizing that there’s connections between the work that we’re doing, between the things that we’re fighting for. And you see them. I mean, look, right now in Minneapolis, you have what seems to be by all accounts like an unprecedented communal, and I mean broadly communal, like citywide, not Jewish, effort to care for people who cannot leave their homes and to repel ICE from what seems like essentially terror, like a terror campaign.

I mean, they’re teargassing schools, they’re shooting people dead in the streets. And you have people basically doing protective presence work. I mean, that’s what they’re doing. And then you have people who trained in the West Bank to do protected presence against settlers and the military, training people in Minneapolis to do protective presence work because it’s so similar, because it’s so similar.

MO: I hear you, but what I hear you describing is a world in which pro-Palestinian work is left-wing work. And I guess I’m wondering why that is, right? If in fact it’s the case-

AA: Because the center and the left and the right don’t believe in Palestinian liberation. That’s why.

MO: But well, I mean there’s-

AA: It shouldn’t be left-wing work. I mean, you’re asking me why-

MO: I guess I’m asking you a kind of hypothetical question.

AA: Why does the center and right not believe in healthcare for everyone?

MO: So does that mean-

AA: Yeah, it’s left-wing work.

MO: Okay. So does that mean as a kind of pragmatic prudential thing that the movement you’re describing to liberate Palestine is one that is going to be allied with certain views on immigration, on affirmative action, on gender-affirming care, on all these other things, that lots of people who might look at Israel-Palestine right now and say the Netanyahu government is toxic and the war was fought indecently, et cetera, et cetera, might not share because America, because most Democrats don’t share those views on affirmative action and gender-affirming care right now.

AA: Wait, but also you’re piling a lot of things when there are a lot of different views on … I mean, affirmative action, I think, has people on the left also who feel different ways about it. I mean, it’s very broad brush what you’re saying, or I almost feel like the gender-affirming care I think is more universal-

MO: Non-negotiable. See, that’s interesting because that’s actually, it’s less popular in polls, but that’s … I’m not trying to pin you or anyone down at any one thing. I’m saying, is this a movement that … Because you’re saying you should be able to support, and I would agree with you, you should be able to feel any way you want about Palestine, including being anti-Zionist and ideally have a home in a conservative or Orthodox or reform synagogue, right? There shouldn’t be these litmus tests. I’m asking, is the movement, the institutions you’re calling for, will they have a different set of litmus tests and maybe not prescriptively, maybe just by virtue of who flows into them?

AA: Listen, when I was growing up, we didn’t talk about immigration in my synagogue. We talked about Israel over and over and over again. Let’s be real here. It’s not like the outside world is pushing in all of these other ways. It pushes in, in one way only Israel. That’s it. And not only that, that was what I was taught. I was taught … I mean, literally I was taught to hate and fear Palestinians and Arabs more broadly really directly. I have the sermons. I saved them because they moved me and I find them and I’m horrified, but I never had an education in broader politics through my synagogue and I’m not alone in this. So it’s not like I’m bringing an issue where I’m bringing in all the issues. They bring in this issue.

So that’s one thing. But the other thing is you asked about whether this is just a left-wing issue. Clearly it’s not because the right is turning on Israel hard. And there are people who are basically in the Pat Buchanan lineage, like restrainers, whatever, who share honestly a lot of the same political aims that I do in terms of ending military aid, et cetera, et cetera. Non-interventionism in Venezuela, although some of them are wavering on that, et cetera, no war on Iran, all of these kinds of things. And the question for us I think is like, how much are we working parallel or how much are we working together? And the fact that they think that what’s happening with ICE in this country is amazing and awesome says to me that people in Congress may vote together on a specific bill and they have that opportunity to actually work together in that regard, but the rest of us don’t really have that kind of narrow opportunity for working together.

And so I think it’s cool that that exists on the right because that’s where power is right now. And so it might move something, but I’m not about to go work with Tucker Carlson because also like, look, I think if you don’t see the connection between what just happened in Gaza, what the world allowed, the total destruction of the apparatus of international law, the total impunity with whichever and the connection between what’s happening in the US and what’s likely to happen, I don’t know. I mean, there is impunity right now at every level. And the fact of the matter is, is like that comes back to us, to our democracy, because if everything is okay, then everything is okay.

MO: I really do agree. I think that’s right. It’s also true that the Democrats and the Republicans collectively have not been effective in coming up with fair but enforceable immigration laws that they agree on, that the work that the Barbara Jordan committee did in the late ’70s with other progressives and supported by labor for obvious reasons to try to come up with a expanded number of visas, but also real enforcement is something that the left has sort of observed in the breach. I mean, Obama deported a lot of people, but was not an articulate spokesman for a fair immigration policy. And so now it seems to me like the ideology on the left is open board, any enforcement is fascist, right? And so if any enforcement is fascist, and if those are views that one has to hold to go to the anti-Zionist jewel because it’s going to be talked about that way, it’s a replication of a different set of shibboleths and litmus tests rather than a coalition for the Palestinians.

AA: I think that it’s very unlikely … I’m not trying to create a home for everybody. I’m trying to create a home for me and the community that I represent right now. And as far as I can tell, it’s not a small community. I think that at least 30% of the Jewish community right now is in the ballpark of where I am. And I don’t think that people … I think that there are questions about what a responsible immigration policy looks like, and people can debate those things. I don’t think that in most synagogues, the way that they’re talking about things is like, you have to believe in X, Y, Z set of things. I think that the way that they are talking about it is that you don’t want to pull regular people, working people out of their homes, away from their families, no criminal record, that you don’t want to terrorize whole communities, that you don’t want to take for granted an enforcement agency without any real oversight that has only existed for 20 years as like a mainstay or a fact of our lives.

I think that there are ways that things are being talked about with some nuance and that also reflect where people are and what they’re seeing. I mean, I also think that if you look at what’s happening in Minneapolis in terms of the left liberal split, it’s basically disappeared because they’re under attack and they see the full expression of what these policies actually mean. And so suddenly you have suburban moms who aren’t necessarily distrustful of the police or weren’t before, who are like abolish ICE. It’s our minimum demand. And it’s because they’re experiencing the full expression of what these policies actually mean. And I think you’re going to see this more and more as we slide more and more into open authoritarianism in this country.

MO: I don’t disagree with a lot of what you’re saying. I’m still curious if the anti-Zionist world has to be one that’s hard left and culturally left in all of these ways. And I’m hearing yes. I’m hearing like- Let me finish. They will have a set of positions that will be the left wing set of positions on any number of issues that I realize there’s no body that’s going to enforce them. I’m talking about whether the cultural norms that will be enforced and the expectations in these spaces will be one. Sociologically speaking, you and I are just armchair prognosticators, although you write essays that have wide readerships calling for new institutions. And I guess I’m curious, will they be open to center left normies, center right normies, people with a whole range of views on race, gender, et cetera, but maybe who come together around decentralizing Zionism as intrinsic to Judaism?

AA: Well, so I think you’re going to have different kinds of institutions. You’re going to have non-Zionist institutions where people just don’t want Israel in their synagogue, but aren’t really that … Where there isn’t a strong political valence to that. And you’re going to have synagogues that are more anti-Zionists in the same way that you have synagogues that are like more centrist and more right wing or whatever. I mean, we’re just asking for a place for our politics and the way that it’s existed in other parts of the spectrum for Jews before. And I will say that this idea that you would be an anti-Zionist and be all in on those politics and have that not affect any of your other politics is different. I mean, it’s just hard for me to imagine because I haven’t met that many people who … And not because they’ve been brainwashed or they feel like this is the cost of admission, but because the process that they had to go through to get to become an anti-Zionist has taken them on a path of thinking about colonialism, thinking about imperialism, thinking about militarism, and that path has …

MO: Oh, see, that’s interesting.

AA: Opened the door to a whole bunch of other things.

MO: I’m sure that’s right. Sorry, go ahead.

AA: Well, I just find this person that you’ve created who’s like an anti-Zionist but doesn’t care about these other things, it’s like, well, how did they get to become an anti-Zionist? What are the things that they care about within this that feel really politically salient?

MO: This gets very into the weeds, but I mean, this is interesting and I think it might reflect, and I never want to put words in other people’s mouths. It feels to me like it reflects a sort of different orientation towards movements or towards the sort of integrated, synthetic notion of justice as this kind of all encompassing thing that will lead inevitably to all these different policy positions. I think all the time that there are people who … So for example, I look at the way Israel has behaved sometimes, or I just look at history and it raises all sorts of questions about Palestinians’ rights to be in homes they used to inhabit. I look at defund the police and think only a lunatic could want to defund the police. They’re utterly different in my mind. I don’t think serious people actually want to get rid of the police tomorrow. People who said that are virtue signalers or morons. And I-

AA: Even the people who talk about defund the police are not envisioning a world where tomorrow they’re gone.

MO: A lot are. A lot are. Not all.

AA: I mean, I think people recognize that you need a process and you also need a society that’s going to support other kinds of things. I don’t think that people are like, if they’re gone tomorrow, that’s the right way of doing it without any-

MO: I’m raising a point about how culture works. When I see defund the police signs, especially now, the people have still kept them up, it triggers certain things culturally about who they’re going to be, the masks they’re going to wear even when no one’s within 50 yards, their general views about culture. I feel like you and I know the gestalt I’m talking about and I don’t have to go through the litany. For sure, but I will also say- I had a lot of people I know are allergic to that gestalt who have a whole range of views on Israel. And so-

AA: So I’ll also say that the question of masks in particular is a huge fight on the left. And leftist spaces, I think you can tell a lot about them from spaces that are still-

MO: Oh, tell me more. Explain it to me.

AA: Well, I mean, on the Jewish left right now, at the DSA or whatever, I don’t think anyone’s masking. And the Jewish left, a lot of people, a lot of spaces are not optional masking. I went to a service this year, the Sefardi Mizrahi, egalitarian kehilla. It’s like an anti-Zionist Mizrahi Kehilla, I’m Sefardi Mizrahi. And you had to mask. And the JVP national members meeting, you have to mask. Would most people want to be masking in there? No. And was there a lot of grumbling? Yes, there was. But in that situation, the maskers won the argument in terms of their ability to attend if people were not masking. Now, I don’t want to get into the politics of it, but just to say there are very different opinions about what we should be doing about that. And a lot of people find it really annoying.

And at least one person that I was with who’s kind of a leader in this world was like, “How do we expect to attract regular people to this movement when everyone’s masked in here?” The message of that is so alienating, and that was what they were saying to me. Now for me, I don’t love the masking thing. I wouldn’t do it on my own, but I don’t mind doing it if it means that other people could attend who wouldn’t attend if we weren’t masking. And so I wasn’t like, this is the biggest problem in the world, but there are people who really feel that it’s a huge issue. I would also say that the question of where people fall on international law is a huge question. There’s not a set … The way that people engage with international law, whether this is something that needs to be rehabilitated and we need to lead on it or whether it’s-

MO: Or it’s just a tool of the people who wrote it and the oppressors.

AA: Exactly, exactly. Or it could be both at the same time, but the question is how do we engage with it and how do we talk about it within our work? There are huge … It’s not worth caricaturing the extent to which these things are not discussions within the left.

MO: I understand they’re discussions. I guess I wonder, and look, you’re the boss here. I mean, as you correctly pointed out, I’m right now a complete dabbler. I will tell you that a lot of the people I know on the left who say things like you do … look, it’s not my cup of tea, but I’m happy to defer to these people from its important, have no idea how profoundly weird it looks to most people I know, including most center left liberals. And how destructive it is.

AA: I know how profoundly weird it looks.

MO: I won’t put on a mask to go to a meeting because I feel like the people who will be there will be a little touched.

AA: I totally understand how you feel. And also, I’m willing to bet that you wouldn’t go to that many meetings to begin with. You don’t organize. I know that from … I’m sorry, but I know that from the way that you’ve talked to me about things.

MO: Well, I’m a journalist. I don’t actually think it’s … I think we should try to maintain some objectivity.

AA: I totally hear that. I’m just saying that … So let me give you an example. My mother, my mother is a retired judge, but before she became a judge, she was very involved with reproductive rights. And in the ’70s, she founded the first abortion fund in Florida. And it still exists today. And after she retired, she went back to that abortion fund and started organizing. And she is left liberal, but she’s a boomer. I mean, she finds all this stuff, like the fact that you go to the … I did a podcast actually with her that you might be interested in, but she is going to these repro conferences. She’s the oldest person there. And everybody’s checking in on feelings and holding stress balls and everyone is-

MO: Holding space. A lot of holding space.

AA: Holding space. A holding space and all this kind of thing. And she’s just like, why does everyone use the word y’all? They’re not from the South. I mean, she’s just having this cultural confrontation with this different cultural space that she finds very weird. At the same time, she’s a committed reproductive rights activist. She’s not going to leave that room because that’s happening. Hey. And the more she engages with these people, the more she’s like, they’re amazing organizers. They really know their stuff. They’re politically on point. And okay, they have this different cultural thing that I feel weird about. Now, should the bar be at my mom who’s never going to get out of the organization?

MO: Who’d be organizing from her wheelchair? Yeah.

AA: Yeah, exactly. It shouldn’t be. And I think that there should be an effort to bring people in.

MO: Look, honestly, what you say makes me think of my feeling about people who say they’d leave a shul because they do the prayer for the state of Israel. It’s like, so you love your shul and you love the people and they would bring you meals and they’d come to your shiva.

AA: But that’s not-

MO: It’s not a moral injury to sit through something you disagree with.

AA: No, no, no. It is a moral injury to feel like your community is supporting a state that’s committing a genocide. It is. It is a moral injury. I’m sorry, you can’t. You can’t compare that to feeling weird or dumb because someone’s wearing a mask. That’s not a moral injury.

MO: It’s not how I feel about sitting through the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s not how I feel about sitting through Christian prayers at football games. Look, you can say it’s a moral injury. It’s also a disposition toward the world and towards what implicates one in the world. And so people join communities for different reasons and they have different thresholds for when they leave. And a lot of that I think is personal. I’m really just anthropologically trying to figure out what do these institutions look like? Because look, you have correctly perhaps analyzed me as a kind of terminal normy and I don’t like weirdness and I don’t like performative this and that. And I want to get right to the talkless and I don’t want to sit around waiting for consensus.

AA: Listen, you do a lot of things that are also performative. I mean, the idea that this thing is performative and this thing isn’t. People signal their politics in all kinds of different ways. And that also is that a centrist are doing the same thing. They’re performing-

MO: Rational, civility.

AA: Rational, you know, whatever, but that’s also fucking performative. So whatever. So they’re performing different things. Look, personally, this is not my mode. And obviously there are ways … There are different segments of the left who inhabit different kind of … Mostly, I would say mostly aesthetic preferences. But that’s what they are. They’re aesthetic. And there’s an aesthetics of centrism and there’s an aesthetics of the right in fascism, obviously.

MO: I do ultimately … I mean, I think for me, and this is no doubt a self-serving way to put it, some of it is a desire to get along. I mean, I feel like I want my shul to be a very comfortable space for anti-Zionists and non-Zionists. I think it is. We have some. I would say we have as many non- or anti-Zionists as we do hardcore Likudnik Zionists, and most people are probably in a kind of muddled, I hope, thoughtful middle. I also want the anti-Zionist space to be places that are open to the aesthetics and the points of view of normies. And I would say a kind of broader constituency in a lot of ways. And as a journalist, I sometimes dip into these things and then probably too quickly reflect and sort of divert away saying they seem off in a certain way, or they seem destined to kind of be a niche, a terminal niche.

But look, your magazine grew by a lot.

AA:  Look, maybe you’re right, but I just feel like these positions are no longer marginal. And I think that history has moved forward. There has been a genocide. It will be recognized as such. Even to the extent that it’s not fully recognized right now, it will be. The legal case on this is solid in terms of international law. And also soon … I mean, I don’t know. I’m not so naive as to think that this will make a difference when other things didn’t, but soon there will be journalists, outside journalists led into Gaza. The world is going to see what happened there. And that is going to shift things even more than they’ve already shifted. I mean, you have a generation who grew up with Israel being the way that it is. It’s only going more in that direction. There is continued ethnic cleansing, genocide and displacement, and there’s also a rotting of the culture that goes along with that.

I mean, like a real kind of arrogance, hubris, callousness, stupidity, I mean, ignorance, real qualities that have enabled it or that are a byproduct of having to support this kind of injustice for so long. And we need a divorce from that. I mean, I think that there was a moment … Look, I just read an article in the forward, a really good article about a synagogue … God, I wish I could remember where it was that is growing somewhere in the United States where there’s a female rabbi. It’s totally not political. There’s no dues. There’s like a mechitza but also there’s a third section for people who are gender, just trichitza, whatever. So it’s like trying to do something different and it’s growing.

MO: Although actually wait, different trichitza. The old trichitza was for mixed. It was men, women and mixed. You’re saying men, women, and people who don’t identify as either, which is an interesting innovation.

AA: Yeah.

MO: Okay.

AA: Like non-binary or whatever. And if somebody wants to go to that synagogue and they’re an anti-Zionist, that’s great. I think that’s beautiful. I want there to be more spaces like that. I’m not saying that space is wrong. I’m just saying that we grew up in spaces where other people were being their full Jewish selves, full fascist Jewish selves most of the time, and that’s great, but we want some of our spaces too, and there’s enough of us to sustain it. And I just think why not? I mean, why-

MO: Yeah. I mean, the answer for me and my synagogue would be like, I’d miss a lot of the people among other things. I mean, even if my politics-

AA: I think that’s totally-

MO: Aligned.

AA: I think that’s totally valid and people are making those kinds of decisions.

MO: And once you get outside of about five cities, there just aren’t enough Jews to be supporting a lot of different flavors of worship. So that’s another thing. This is not new.

AA: Yeah. Well, listen, those five cities, first of all, that’s not true because if you have 10 people, you have a minyan and you can … People are starting minyans in their living rooms and that’s sustaining them and that should be celebrated.

MO: Absolutely.

AA: That’s nothing to sneeze at. But also those five cities are where most Jews live. So just getting New York, LA, Chicago-

MO: You’ll never get Miami, as you know.

AA: It will never get Miami. But Miami won’t exist in a few years.

MO: You mean because it’ll be underwater?

AA: It’ll be underwater. So I think it’s okay to let it go.

MO: I will say the one time, not the one time, but a time when I was in Miami to give a talk about something I’d written, I was being driven nicely from a hotel to the convention center and there was a rainstorm and the water started coming up on the street. The tires were underwater. All the time. And I literally thought I was going to die. I was texting my wife and I mean, I thought our car’s going to be swept off into the ocean. It didn’t seem crazy to this boy from New England. No. This was much more unsettling than any blizzard I’ve ever been in or any … And the nice women in the car with me were just continuing to text and whatever. And there was an Uber driver and they were all totally unfazed. This is normal in Miami.

AA: Normal. Totally normal.

MO: The rain just comes up to the top of the tires for a few minutes, then it recedes.

AA: Oh my God. I can’t tell you how many times I got off the school bus and there was water up to my chest and I just waded home in it.

MO: What is this place?

Okay. I have two more questions. So you were pointing out to me there are actually lots of divisions on the Jewish left and they’re not all as visible to a dilatant like me. One of them that I saw a lot when I was reading Jewish currents and that I see elsewhere in other reading I’ve done, I would call a division between what you might call roughly the Maoist impulse that revolution requires us to look violence in the face and sometimes embrace it and what you might call the compassionate impulse. Those probably aren’t the perfect words. So on one side, you would have Dylan Saba’s piece about the Iron Dome. You would have Gabriel Winant saying, “I’m not going to grieve the people killed by Hamas because they all come pre-grieved, so forth and so on. ” And then on the other side, you would have, I think, some of your writing where you say, “Hey, I forgot to check in on my relatives in the bomb shelters.” You would have some stuff Josh Leifer has written.

You would have Camus saying, “Hey, Algerians, my grandma could be on that train. Please don’t blow it up.” Am I right that-

AA: I mean, it’s hard because you’re grouping Gabe with Dylan and me with Josh and neither of those people-

MO: Makes sense.

AA: Neither of those groupings would make sense.

MO: Okay. So I set that up unintentionally provocatively, but maybe you could say something about-

AA: Well, but I think that even that is important to recognize. Do you know what I’m saying? I think actually me and Gabe may not be that far apart. There may be more space between me and Josh at this point, and maybe even Gabe and Dylan or something. Do you know what I mean? I don’t know. I don’t actually … And I could be wrong about that, but I wouldn’t … I don’t see myself reflected in Josh’s politics anymore, and I know he doesn’t see himself reflected in mine. And I also don’t see myself reflected in Dylan’s politics. And so I don’t know.

MO: Fair enough. So my apologies for-

AA: I think that you’re right in terms of the question of how we metabolize violence. I do think that the question of how we metabolize grief is also important, but also on a different axis. I think that what is difficult for me, I’m just going to speak personally because I think that’s easier than trying to diagnose the left as a whole. Maybe somebody else would be able to do that and I just don’t feel like I can. And one of the reasons I don’t feel like I can is because I do feel a little bit like these distinctions are important online, but actually immaterial because of how powerless the left is in general. You can have Maoist politics, but I don’t actually know what the expression of that is in domestic politics right now.

I mean, I know it’s not interested in electoralism or whatever, but I don’t know what it is. And maybe that’s my own ignorance of this other world of left politics that I’m not more in. But also I feel that way about the position that we’re in. We’re just sort of powerless and we’re in … I mean, not entirely, and we just had this win with Zoran or whatever, but it’s like, I don’t feel like we’re at a choice point between Maoism and something else.That’s not the historical moment that we are in. We’re actually in a moment of democratic backsliding where the left liberal coalition, where it’s going to be interesting to see whether liberals actually step up to defend democracy. But anyway, in terms of where I am-

MO: Yeah, go ahead.

AA: In terms of where I am with this, I think that it’s hard to recognize that the violence … I think that there’s always this push to be like, how do we feel about the violence? How do we feel about … How are we going to engage with whether we condemn the violence or whether we support the violence or whatever? And my position on this has always been like, it’s not actually a part of our tangible politics. The violence is happening because of the situation and actually doesn’t … Whether we condemn Hamas or not, Hamas doesn’t care. Hamas is the ones who are in the situation that’s producing the violence and making decisions to produce it, but they’re not consulting campus SJP chapters.

MO: They didn’t call you up.

AA: Yeah, I’m certainly not being consulted. So the fact is that the violence is a fact and the fact of the violence is the fact of the occupation and the genocide and all of those things. It’s also the fact on the other side. We’re always debating the kind of resistance violence. We seem to almost never be debating the violence of the Israeli state, which is the far more salient … I mean, the far more powerful party doing way more killing. And so for me, I’m like, the political questions … The political questions for me are about what it means to build a movement that feels like the reification of that violence is important to do. I don’t understand that impulse at all. I just don’t, because it’s not actually the work that is ahead of us. We don’t have any control over-

MO: Wait, what’s the impulse you don’t understand?

AA: The impulse to make the question of violence of whether we support it or don’t, a primary question in our organizing, because it’s literally irrelevant to us. We literally can’t go pick up arms. Even these people who are for it, they can’t go join Hamas. So what is the organizing axis of this point of view?

MO: So I guess you see yourself as an organizer not … I think my job is to-

AA: I mean, I haven’t organized in 10 years.

MO: I mean, I guess I feel like part of the job when I read a journal of opinion, I’m just sort of like, these are my own commitments and also preconceptions. The job is to say true things, right? If killing people is bad, if taking hostages bad, nobody should have problem running a piece and killing and taking hostages is bad or evil. Obviously the piece would say a little bit more than that. But I mean, the question to me wouldn’t be, is it good for the movement? The question would be, is it true?

AA: Right. But I think the question of whether killing and taking hostages is bad is just the wrong question even intellectually. I mean, we just know that anti-colonial and violence exists and that in some cases it did secure something. And we can’t just deny that that happened. We also can’t deny the fact that people who are being violently oppressed have the right to resist violently. Do they have the right to kill civilians? No. But are civilians killed all the time in this kind of situation? Yes. We just know that. And so it just takes this kind of violence out of the context of all of history. Now, whether it’s wrong or not, yeah, it’s horrible. Obviously to stand in front of an unarmed person and kill them in any situation is wrong.

MO: But that has all sorts of ramifications, right? That the kind of movement that would do that is the kind of movement that can never be allowed to come to power. It’s the kind of movement that rightfully should surrender and give up its arms. There’s all sorts of implications that one could draw from that.

AA: But wait a minute.

MO: I’m not saying you do.

AA: Wait, wait, wait, wait. If that was the case, then we would have no Western governments. We would have no … That just assumes that the people who have been doing violence continuously for hundreds of years are justified and the people who resist that are not. And that’s not a distinction that I feel like I’m qualified to make in this regard.

MO: Right. So I mean, if the point of view is like anyone who’s holding power by force is a terrorist and therefore there’s no distinctions to be made. I mean, that’s a position, I guess. I guess there are people who hold it.

AA: What did the Haganah do? What did the Palmach do?

MO: Right. So my question is, to me, these are interesting questions that a magazine wants-

AA: In my community, that was celebrated. In my community, those actions were celebrated. The Palmach, the Haganah.

MO: Right. The Stern gang. I got it. I understand. I understand that one person’s freedom fighters and others terrorists. I think that’s often really true. I don’t think it’s universally true and therefore there’s no right and wrong, but I think it works reasonably well enough. I was really asking for an analysis of the left. I’m really coming at this as a journalist trying to understand. It seems to me some people think that what Hamas did was great. Certainly there were people who were quite public about thinking was great, thinking it was a sign of liberation, it was people breaking free and so forth and so on. And then it strikes me there’s some people who simply can’t cotton to the idea that fellow Jews or fellow humans being taken hostage, killed, et cetera, while doing nothing violent is great. That strikes me as a really profound cleft. That sounds like-

AA: I certainly don’t think that my concern is as fellow Jews. That isn’t how I would put it.

MO: I said as fellow Jews or as fellow humans.

AA: At this point … Yeah, I’m just saying for me, at this point, I care as much about what happens to Palestinians, not when I was a kid, obviously, but in terms of what has happened in my work and listening to Palestinians and becoming … Having Palestinian people in my life, it matters to me what happens to Palestinians. And that also makes a difference in terms of how I experience October 7th as a Jewish person who knows that October 7th wasn’t the beginning of the history, as people often say. So that does affect things. And I think that the question of whether you think it’s a good thing or whether you don’t, it’s so complicated now anyway. I mean, look, we just talked to people in Gaza and the West Bank who we spoke to since October 7th. We followed up with them to see where they are, what’s going on, that piece will be in our next issue, our spring issue. And these are people who had very different ideas about Hamas, very different ideas about October 7th, some of whom themselves were supportive when it happened from inside just being like, reclaim our land and this is somebody standing up for us and all this kind of thing. And we made sure to publish some of these ideas because it’s important for people to know how people-

MO: People to know what people think.

AA: Yeah.

MO: Totally.

AA: And I would say now to a person, there’s a feeling of it wasn’t worth it. And also a reckoning with what a strategic failure was, which I didn’t expect, by the way. I really didn’t know what we were going to get back. And I didn’t know that this was going to be such a theme across the territory. There is a real sense of hopelessness and a real sense … People say, we still support the idea of resistance and we still think that we have the right to resist, but what Hamas did on October 7th didn’t take into account that it gave an excuse for genocide. And some people even talk about the loss of Israeli life, basically killing civilians. And I did not expect that just because I didn’t know if they would say it to us or how comfortable people would feel, or also that it would be so universally shared.

Now, when I’m reading those testimonies from about 30 people, it’s not like a sample of all of Palestine and then seeing a video from outside of synagogue of like, “We support Hamas here,” I’m like, “What is the disconnect?” That’s a lot of certainty in this moment. I can even understand it on October 8th, but that’s a lot of certainty for two years later.

MO: We support Hamas here?

AA: Yeah, you didn’t see this chant from outside of synagogue protest. Oh, I’m telling you something you don’t know.

MO: Oh, these were American lefties or Palestinian support? Who was chanting it?

AA: I don’t know. I think it was like a protest outside of synagogue to protest like land sales in the West Bank and stuff like that. And then they started a chant. Somebody started a chant.

MO: Okay. So this is my question, and I swear I only have two more questions, and this is the penultimate question, which is, and then we talked about this when we talked before a couple weeks ago, which is, shouldn’t Hamas just have surrendered? I mean, that’s what the Nazis did. That’s what the Emperor of Japan did. They could have saved tens of thousands of Palestinian lives. If you care about Gazan life, shouldn’t they have surrendered?

AA: First of all, if you think that Hamas surrendering and laying down weapons is going to stop the Israeli government from trying to take the entire territory-

MO: I didn’t say that. I said it would’ve saved a lot of lives.

AA: Well, yeah, and what happens later on? When’s the next carpet bombing?Just to say really quickly, the West Bank did not do October 7th, and they’re witnessing the most severe depopulation since 48.

MO: Land theft.

AA: Settler violence, I mean, extreme settler violence, and now they’re talking about annexing A and B. Okay? And this is a totally demilitarized whatever. And so you’re asking why Hamas doesn’t just lay down their weapons and cease to exist.

MO: I was asking in this war, why didn’t a side that was being obliterated surrender because they cared about the lives of the people that they were fighting for? I would ask the same thing of Israel if they were losing really badly at a war like that.

AA: I think some people in Gaza are asking that question.

MO: It’s interesting to me that wasn’t part of the discourse of international left discourse. I’m just saying-

AA: Wait a minute.

MO: Save lives.

AA: Okay, but…

MO: It’s interesting that you think that’s a crazy question. That’s what I would think if I saw any war going on where one side was getting obliterated like that in such a horrific way.

AA: I do think that it’s crazy because there’s never been a situation where the Palestinians basically saying, “Okay, we give up,” has stopped the long-term assault. And I don’t think that for Hamas as a political actor to basically say, now we’re defenseless, now there’s … I mean, do I think that that’s going to work in their favor in the long run? Not really. I mean, you have a literal movement of settlers who are sitting just outside the gate who are trying to get in actively and those people are trying to do to Gaza what they’re doing to the West Bank. And at least in Gaza, there’s a few guns. In the West Bank, there isn’t. And so, I mean, I’m not saying that I think that there should be fighting there. I’m just saying that if this were Jews, if we were talking about Jews, the Warsaw ghetto uprising is this story in our history that we lawed and we talk about and blah, blah. And maybe you’re saying we shouldn’t, but I’m just saying, why should they just be slaughtered? Why should they just say, “Okay, we’re just going to be slaughtered. We’re just going to let them slaughter us.”

MO: I think we would disagree with our sense of what would have happened if they’d surrendered in this war. I understand you’re talking about the long term and that of course this was said, “The Jews want to survive and we’re happy to keep dying for a thousand years if this is what it takes.” I’m paraphrasing. That is a revolutionary attitude is we will keep sending our people to die as many generations to take. And you know what? I think it’ll work. I think it’s deeply immoral. I think it’s deeply profoundly evil.

AA: I’m not in Gaza. I’m not in Gaza. I can’t answer these questions for Hamas, but I do think that the question of why don’t they just surrender, it’ll work, it doesn’t recognize the fact that Gaza is carpet bombed every three or four years and they live in a perpetual state of depletion and death. And I don’t know. And also, you have a group of people that is actively saying, “We want to take over the land.” And those people are in power. They’re not fringe. They are in power. And so the question you’re asking is why don’t they just give up?

MO: Yes. I don’t know. I mean- Just as the Nazis gave up, just as we kind of gave up in Vietnam. I mean, we left without accomplishing any of our ends because we kept getting killed and weren’t winning. And that strikes me as a kind of commonsensical question about warfare. Okay.

AA: But we pulled out of Vietnam. We didn’t dismantle the American military. I mean, that’s what you’re asking for. You’re asking for a dismantlement of what is considered the only line of defense.

MO: Yeah. I mean-

AA: Why would they do that?

MO: Again, because they want to stop the carnage.

AA: They get nothing.

MO: Well, it would’ve stopped to forestall or stop the carnage of their own people in this case, which by the way I’m not-

AA: It puts them into a rock and a hard place, and it also assumes that the Israelis are going to maintain their commitments and they never have. They never have.

MO: It just seemed to be a question. I’m surprised nobody published anything on it. It strikes me as one of the things that happens when one side is losing completely in a war and it’s a different-

AA: Listen, I think one of the questions that you’re asking, and I think it’s an interesting question in an abstract sense, is why don’t the Palestinians give up? Literally, why don’t they just say, “This isn’t working. We’re not going to win this war against the Israelis. We are going to leave.” And that is certainly what the Israeli government is trying to engender. And that is the way that people are feeling. People are leaving Area Sea, people are fleeing Gaza. I think the last poll that I saw, half of Gazans said that if they had the chance to leave, they would leave. And of course, who could blame them? They’re living in literal rubble with no medicine, no hospitals, a little bit more food, but no money to buy it, no jobs. I mean, you’re asking why don’t they give up? And sometimes I ask myself that question, and I’m sure Palestinians ask that question, “Is it worth it?

Is it worth it to try to have this kind of sovereignty and to reclaim the land?” And culturally, there is a emphasis on return and steadfastness that is part of the culture.

MO: Yeah. I mean, I will say from my point of view as a Jew, and I’m not deeply connected to the land of Israel the way some Jews are, so maybe it’s easy for me to say, if that were my lot in Israel, again, it’s not like Gazans can move to my house, and I understand that. But broadly speaking, I’m not committed enough to anything above and beyond my own ability to watch cable TV and hang out with my dog to devote my life to that kind of cause. It is interesting, right? It’s an interesting cultural fact. And in that respect-

AA: Yeah. Absolutely. And I think that Jews have gotten used to the idea of being diasporic and Palestinians have been diasporic for way less time. They were on their land for whatever, thousands of years, and then they’ve been diasporic for whatever, since 1948. And they have not accepted diaspora as a condition. And for Jews, we’ve only been landed for that long.

MO: I mean, I think it gets into very interesting questions about indigeneity and all that. And I think those are … Yeah. We probably don’t see eye to eye on all of that.

AA: No, no, no. Listen, I have an alienation from the way that Palestinians talk about it because I can’t relate to it. I did a podcast last week with Sarah Aziza and Tareq Baconi talking about their new memoirs. And one of the questions I ask them is about, because they both talk about visiting Israel-Palestine and I think they were both in the West Bank and feeling this deep connection to the land. I don’t feel that. I don’t feel that for any land. I mean, I love New York. It would be very painful for me to leave, but I don’t feel a connection to the land. And I find it hard to understand the mystical reverence for land. But a lot of people are feeling that way. And that’s just a difference. That’s just a cultural, spiritual, social difference that exists. And honestly, what am I supposed to say?

Give up? Why should they give up? International law is on their side. Justice is on their side. And it’s their decision to make.

MO: Yeah, I guess. I mean, you’re a sort of more generous spirited partner. I mean, you could say give up because you run a journal of opinion and you can say all sorts of things, Ariel. I mean, you take lots of normative positions. You take lots of normative decisions about how people should behave. And I’m not saying that you should say give up. I’m saying making claims about how Hamas should behave or how Palestine should do this or that is the kind of thing you do with regard to Israel and Jews and American drew all the time. As a fellow human being and an opinion journalist and a smart person, we can say those things. We don’t have to act like we’re all of a sudden speechless.

AA: Listen, I don’t consider myself an opinion journalist. I consider myself a political thinker. And I think that thinking about politics is different than just spewing out your opinions. A lot of people, like the New York Times opinion page, people say things all the time. Do they have political effect? No. Does it matter what the editorial board says? No. Because you have to think politically about who’s going to hear you and what it’s going to mean. And I do think that there’s a lot of value in intellectual exploration for its own sake. And I think that there’s value in the truth. And I don’t want to lie ever. I don’t want to lie to my readership in any way. But I also understand a political role that I play and what it means to … There are certain pieces that I think something should be said, but I also think that there’s the right person to say it who’s going to say it in a way that’s going to be heard and a total disaster way of saying it that’s going to make that viewpoint toxic for people on the left because it’s going to be associated with its worst expression or with-

MO: A person. With person who’s in bad humor.

AA: Or with a person.

MO: So that’s just McCarthyism.

AA: It’s not McCarthyism.

MO: I was just talking to Rusty Reno from first things the other day. We’re going to air that probably before we air this. And I was saying like, Rusty, you run a right-wing Christian journal. You claim to hate antisemitism and you haven’t run enough, let’s say, about J.D. Vance and Tucker Carlson, all that. And he said, “Look, I need to look at who my audience is. I have to look at whom they can hear it from. I have to look at…” He was saying the exact same thing.

AA: Yeah. I totally understand that.

MO: No, the job is to say true things, Rusty. The job is to say true things.

AA: The job is to say true things, but the job isn’t to make true things toxic. Again, you don’t want to counter your cause by saying it in a way that people can’t hear because it’ll destroy that idea. I mean, look, I’m trying to get certain kinds of ideas, certainly not the idea that Palestinians should give up, by the way. That is not something that I was—

MO: Which by the way, wasn’t what I was saying. I was asking why people don’t say it.

AA: It’s not something that I believe, and it’s not something that I think would be worth saying.

MO: That you want to run. I got it.

AA: I think there are plenty of things that are worth saying that are real strategic debates that are important, that I find it very difficult to find people to say, even though they believe them, across identities. Okay? And I’m not sure exactly what to do about that. That isn’t being imposed from my end. My job is to try to get people to feeling brave enough to do that, but also the political moment needs to give them that space. And I sort of recognize, I mean, I beat myself up about it all the time, but I sort of recognize the extent to which if we’re not in a political moment where things can only be said privately and not publicly, I’m not really in a position where I can force it into … Unless I’m the one who has to say all of it myself. And I’m not sure that I’m the person to say all of those things.

MO: You get my discomfort though, right? You get my discomfort with the talk about, well, of course the right person has to say is like, right, because if it’s somebody who’s written for this magazine or has done this, or it’s like, that’s not the way we’re supposed to think if we’re committed to truth and the life of the mind, we shouldn’t think about those things.

AA: But again, it’s not about the person … Put it this way. There’s a lot of things that Peter Beinart would love to say in Currents, but Peter Beinart is not engaged … Peter Beinart is from your generation and has very good relationships with a broad community of Palestinians, but is not actually engaged in left strategic organizing or thought.

And the question that a lot of people who read Currents is like, what does this mean for our organizing relationships? What does this mean strategically? And if you are not engaged in that conversation, you only have half the argument. And you can’t actually say the thing in a way that keeps in mind where people are, actually where they’re sitting and how they’re going to have to bring those conversations to their communities and how they’re going to work, what it’s going to look like in coalition, blah, blah, blah. And so the best version of the piece that we’re talking about, the mythical piece is one that actually allows people to pick up that argument and run with it and that actually accrues credibility to that argument and not the opposite and doesn’t make the people who espouse it into essentially people who are out of touch with the full conversation.

MO: You must worry sometimes that your attention, that keeping one eye on the effects of what you run or on the organizing or on the cause will corrupt your judgment sometimes.

AA: Absolutely. Absolutely.

MO: Why not just give up on that?

AA: No time more than after October 7th, I mean, for real.

MO: So why don’t you just stop worrying about what people make of it and just say, “Is the piece good? Is it well written? Does it seem true? I’m not even going to look at the author.”

AA: I mean, again, good also includes convincing. And again, what I’m trying to say is that oftentimes what you get is a not very convincing argument because the people who are willing to make it are not actually in the situation, the context enough to understand why it’s hard to say. And that’s the paradox of this kind of piece. And listen, we are all poorer for it. Do not get me wrong.

MO: I know.

AA: We are poorer for it. I want those pieces to exist because I think that this kind of healthy debate is essential for the left and part of the reason that we’re not winning. But I also am not getting … It’s not like people are clamoring to write these pieces in the first place.

MO: I hear you. I think you’re obviously … Look, I mean, this is an old, old, old debate. I feel like if you want a free liberal society, the first thing you have to do is be a free acting liberal. You have to say stuff and not care about the consequences. If it’s true, you get to say it.

AA: Again, again-

MO: I don’t know what to say. You have to instantiate the society you want.

AA: I understand. But if you think that a version of this is not happening in the center, you are wrong. I’m sorry, you just are. There are red lines within the center.

MO: I know. I know. I know.

AA: There are ways that people can’t cross those things and to act like this is some kind of free expression that’s happening in the middle and the polls are like fascist or whatever–

MO: I’m not acting like it. Arielle, no, I didn’t say that. Notice I didn’t say that. Every person I talk to, every interview I have, I’m looking for an ally of someone who says, “Yeah, actually audience doesn’t matter. The goal is to say true things.” And this is a mirror image of the conversation I had with right-wing Catholic Rusty Reno last week, which is you have to look for how they’re going to … It has to be the right person saying in the right way. And if not, you’ll set your cause back. It’s like, actually, antisemitism’s pretty clear.

AA: Yeah, because that person is a political thinker. That person is thinking politically.

MO: Yeah, I guess I’m not, I guess.

AA: Right now on the right, okay, if you talk about antisemitism to the younger generation, they are turned off completely. Why?

MO: That’s what Rusty said.

AA: Because it’s a lot of fuckin old people telling them … soyboy, squishy, whatever, where it’s like they think about it as saying you’re being racist, which is everyone is telling them that all the time and they don’t care. So there’s an aesthetics to the way that you talk about antisemitism that if you align it with an older generation that is basically now suddenly not into free speech, not interested in blah, blah, blah. I totally understand what they’re saying. We have the same challenge on the left. We have to find a way to talk about antisemitism as it resurges in a way that-

MO: Oh, right, because you’re not supposed to talk about it because that’s just right wing. It’s coded right to talk about antisemitism. I’m saying-

AA: Well, now we have to because now antisemitism is back in a big way. And now we’re in a position of having said, anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, blah, blah, all this Palestine stuff. And that’s totally true. And that is like most of the antisemitism that anybody cares about now. So we still have to stay on that fight and we have to be able to say, okay, and now there’s also some real antisemitism and a lot of it comes from the genocide, but it’s still not okay. Or like from the Epstein files, still not okay. And so yeah, I think that basically we are in a tough position in terms of how to change some of that conversation. We can’t just pretend that politics isn’t happening. We literally can’t just pretend that- So it’s about what just happened.

MO: It’s a conception of your own role as a writer, I guess. And I’m not trying to … Look, obviously I believe in my role, which is why I try to do the thing I do, and you do the thing you do because you think yours is the right way to do it, but it’s not about pretending politics doesn’t happen. That’s a misprision. It’s about saying like, we don’t actually know how any of this is going to cash out. The one thing we know we can do as writers is try to be witness to whatever the truth is. It’s just very Orwell. It’s like try to see the truth in front of your eyes and then saying it. And if you tie yourself up in knots thinking how will this be received and who will cancel their subscription and which … It’s actually, Arielle, it’s my belief that that’s a losing game. You actually want …

AA: I do not care. I literally do not care about how it affects our subscriptions. I actually also don’t care about the audience. I will just say that. I don’t care about the audience in a lot of different ways. For me, a magazine of our size is a magazine that is made up of the interests of the people who are in it and the politics and intellectual obsessions of the people who are in it. And hopefully we reflect the audience, but I literally, like you’ll never catch me doing … I mean, maybe after I leave, they will, but you’ll never catch me doing an audience survey or something that. I literally don’t care. I don’t think that they’re coherent. I don’t think that they’re going to tell you what they actually want, blah, blah, blah.

MO: Agreed.

AA: But I think that this is a different question about trying to please the audience or appease the audience. This is a question about politics and politics is an intellectual pursuit. The question about how you … What is the most intellectually honest expression? You can say a true thing that is incomplete because it’s not … I mean, look, there’s a version of a piece where you basically say the conditions for this thing that I’m talking about now don’t exist, but it’s important to have somebody say them now so that in a moment where they can be picked up, they are picked up. I think that’s an important kind of piece. I would like to do more of that. But I think the kind of piece that you’re talking about is actually one in which there’s a really hot debate in the community that people are talking about privately, and there’s like a critique to be made from one side or the other, and you’re trying to get the best expression of that critique out there. This is a piece, by the way, that like, so help me God, every time this comes up, I am desperate to get that piece.

And I’m just saying that it’s actually really hard to get it.

MO: I know it’s hard to get those pieces too, but-

AA: People are not standing in line to write it. And it’s not that people are standing in line that aren’t the right people. Every once in a while, every once in a blue moon, you’ll get somebody who wants to do it, who is like patently the wrong person because they want to write it as an outsider. They don’t want to write it as an insider. And for me, the best way to make those critiques is to make those critiques from the inside, because then that is a trustworthy critique. And that has to do with content and form. That’s like something we have to think about as editors. Do the people know enough about this situation and understand the conditions in which this argument is taking place enough to make a convincing argument around it? And that’s a question that is … I’m like, sometimes I feel like I’m chasing a white whale, and I do wish the people would be more courageous just to say, I really wish the people would be more courageous.

I really, really do. But like also I can’t make them do it and I can’t do it all myself.

MO: No, I’d assign the outsider and say they’re going to get certain things wrong, but they’ll serve us as something important because our job is to serve the readers, not the community that we’re writing about. So you get the outsider to do it and they’ll do a 70% good job and you’ll get-

AA: You might be right.

MO: And by the way, it’s hard finding the outsider to do it. It’s hard for them to get sources. God help them if you’re trying to report on the corruption among Hasidic because who speaks Yiddish well enough and who will get anyone to return their calls. I’m not naive about the difficulty of these things, but … Okay. Finally, what are you doing next and is your novel going to be published ever, the one you’ve written about?

AA: No, my novel will never be published.

MO: The novel will never be published.

AA: Very comfortable with that and happy about it.

MO: Because you’ve written about a few places and I’m intrigued. Maybe you’ll show it to me offline sometime.

AA: No, I doubt.

MO: And what are you doing next? You stepped down in a month or two.

AA: Well, I mean, I don’t know. I mean, the short answer is that I’ll still be at currents. I just won’t be in charge. So I’m going to be doing the podcast. They want me to write more and I would love that, but I also don’t know what I’m like as a regular writer. I mean, I don’t have a practice of column writing or something, and I don’t want to be a columnist. So how many big ideas I have in me for big essays, a year is for me to be seen. I’ve never really had the space for that. But I will also be doing some consulting. I’m not going to drop all of my editing loads. So I’m still basically with currents. I’m not going to be looking for another job, but I will have a lot of soul searching to do about what is next for me.

And I haven’t really had the space to think about that while I’ve been in the job. So we’ll see.

MO: All right, Angel, you gave me about twice as much time as I’d asked for. I’m really grateful. I hope it’s been okay.

AA: Yeah.

MO: Yeah.

AA: It’s been better than … I hope it was okay for you.

MO: Well, I like tough conversations, but I have to remember that not everyone- Oh,

AA: This wasn’t so tough.

MO: This wasn’t so tough. Oh, good. All right. All right.

AA: No, no.

MO: Good luck with the next chapter, whatever it may be.

AA: Thanks.

MO: Jewish Currents editor-in-chief, Arielle Angel. Her magazine is at jewishcurrents.org. I’m Mark Oppenheimer, and this has been Arc: The Podcast. Please send us your thoughts and comments at mark.o@wustl.edu. Arc: The Podcast is edited and produced by David Sugarman with the assistance of a terrific team of interns, including Caroline Coffey, Ben Esther, Ezra Ellenbogen, and Sadie Davis-Suskind. At the Danforth Center, we are supported by Debra Kennard, our director, Abram Van Engen, Mark Valeri, Sheri Pena, and many others, and our magazine is at arcmag.org. Thanks for listening.