Curb your antisemitism

Noam: Hey everyone, welcome to Wondering Jews with Mijal and Noam.

Mijal: I’m Mijal.

Noam: And I’m Noam and this podcast is our way of trying to understand the Jewish world. We don’t have it all figured out, so let’s try to figure it out together. And we love emails. So shoot us a note at wonderingjews@Jewishunpacked.com. That’s not wandering Jews, it’s WonderingJews@Jewishunpacked.com. Really wanna hear from you.

So listen, we got a great question from a listener, and her name is Sharon. Simple one, where and when do you do your best work?

Mijal: I’m sorry, t’s an annoying answer to myself because I happen to do my best thinking on Shabbat. I have like my tea and my cookies and reading and that’s when I get all my best ideas and I happen to be Shabbat-observant so I can’t write them down. So it’s both awesome because my brain is buzzing and every week I like turn to my husband and ask him to remember a couple of big ideas. How about you?

Noam: Well, that’s a pretty funny answer because the whole purpose of Shabbat is to desist. And that’s where your answer is you do your best work on the holy day of rest.

Mijal: Yes, that 25 hours without my phone, that’s my best day of thinking. Pretty much. How about you?

Noam: I do my best work super early in the morning. As early as possible in the morning.

Mijal: How early? What is super early?

Noam: I think I’ve gotten lazy over the last couple of years. It started to now lean into the sixes, before people are awake, you’re by yourself, it’s a little bit dark still and nothing is going on in the world around you, I feel like that’s where I do my absolute best work. That hour is worth like three or four hours.

Mijal: Hmm. Yeah, I should try it out. I can’t, uh, usually I can’t do it. Uh, but Noam, why are you wearing, why are you wearing that sweater? Can you, are you trying to give me a message? Can you just tell our listeners? What are you wearing? Yeah, go for it. It is noticeable. What’s written in your sweater?

Noam: You noticed it? You noticed it? I guess it’s quite noticeable, right? Well, the best show of all time is a show called Curb Your Enthusiasm. You know it is the best show of all time, right?

Mijal: Yeah, it’s totally not my sense of humor, but yeah, go for it.

Noam: Why is it not your sense of humor?

Mijal: I’ve tried it, like my husband likes it. I’ve watched a couple of little clips and I don’t find it funny, but that’s for a different conversation, Noam.

Noam: Mijal, we really have to talk about why you don’t find Curb Your Enthusiasm that funny. My, yeah, it doesn’t say Curb Your Enthusiasm. It says curb your antisemitism. My mother-in-law got it for me. Shout out to my mother-in-law. And yeah, it’s nice. We both share…

Mijal: That’s really nice. Was she trying to tell you a message?

Noam: Noam, slow down on your antisemitism. No, I think it just, she knows, we both love the show. It’s a great show. And it’s a light way to deal with an issue that Jewish people are really struggling with right now. And when you walk around town with this shirt, people are like, yeah, I love it, hilarious, great. Or people think it says curb your enthusiasm and then you do a double take, love the show, love the shirt and then like, oh, actually I’m also, yeah, no antisemitism. So it’s a conversation starter.

Mijal: You have gotten no like objections like no, don’t care of your antisemitism kind of thing.

Noam: Right. But I haven’t I haven’t worn this throughout an airport yet. I got to do that. I got to see.

Mijal: That’s really what I was wondering, which airport if you’ve done it.

Noam: By the way, other thought on this shirt, it’s a great hoodie. It’s my podcasting hoodie.

Mijal: That’s great. I need one of those, mother-in-law, if you’re listening. Just kidding. So, I think you were saying it’s a way to talk about something serious that we’re all thinking about. So, let’s get to it.

Last time that we were chatting, we were speaking about Zionism. We brought up different definitions of Zionism… Everybody listen to the last episode if you want to know what I’m talking about. You brought one that had to do with, I think you use the word like a healthy Jewish identity and being back in the world stage. I spoke about just being happy that the state of Israel exists. And today I actually wanna bring those definitions and that question that we started with. And I wanna tie that topic around Zionism to your sweatshirt basically.

Noam: Okay, but before you do that, I gotta say, you did not like my definition of Zionism.

Mijal: Uh, it’s okay. It’s not.

Noam: It’s not, it’s, you could say it’s not my taste.

Mijal: That’s what my kid says, it’s not my taste. I think it’s my taste for when, if I wanna like sit down and really kind of like explore and what does Zionism mean to me individually. In that case, I would enjoy it. I think right now, a lot of people just, they want a one line definition. What is Zionism? What is anti-Zionism?

Noam: You gotta get people what they want. 

Mijal: Not always, but in this case, yes. So that’s what I didn’t find helpful about your answer. I need something simpler. Does that resonate at all?

Noam: I think you’re right, actually. I think your working definition is more helpful than the definition that I was giving because mine is, is too abstract, is too aspirational. And what I’m often trying to do when I’m talking to young Jewish people, I, I’m not okay with them thinking that Zionism is something that happened and therefore their, their job is to now support it. But it has to be something that’s much more ambitious and much more aspirational. And that’s why the definition that I gave is the definition that I want to operate from, but your definition is more helpful, it’s more practical, and it’s something that we should really jump off from this episode on. That’s what I think.

Mijal: So let’s do like this, Noam. I want to quote right now Michael Walzer, who’s an awesome philosopher, has written about left politics and about a lot of questions around society and morality. And I want to just use his definition for Zionism, which I think is close to mine, but he says it more elegantly. So in one of his articles some years ago, we can put it in the show notes, he says, “I take Zionism to mean a belief in the rightful existence of a Jewish state. Nothing more.” OK, so it’s a belief that the fact that a Jewish state exists doesn’t matter the boundaries in this definition, that is a right, that is good. That is a right. There is a rightful existence to it. So can we use that definition?

Noam: So the definition we’ll be working off of is Zionism is the belief in the rightful existence of a Jewish state in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, which is the land of Israel. Nothing more.

Mijal: Yes, the only maybe like if I can quibble a little bit, like I just say like the boundaries don’t really matter to me right now so much with this definition because you can disagree over different questions around, you know, two-state solution, all of those things and you can still be a Zionist.

Noam: Right. Of course, of course.

Mijal: So Zionism means a belief in the rightful existence of Israel as a Jewish state, nothing more.

Noam: Okay, yes, let’s use that. Absolutely.

Mijal: Good. And now that we got this definition out of the way, so anti-Zionism based on this definition is like the not believing in the rightful existence of Israel as a Jewish state, so it’s not like a rightful enterprise, it’s illegitimate. Right? Is anti-Zionism, antisemitism?

Noam: Excellent. So that’s what we’re going to struggle through together today. Is anti-Zionism antisemitism?

Mijal: So now before we get into it, I’m just really curious. Do you have any gut answers? What do you say? Is anti-Zionism, antisemitism.

Noam: Often.

Mijal: Ah, often. Okay. That’s a one word answer. Pretty good.

Noam: Yeah, you asked me for a very quick answer. I would say either often or almost always, or anti-Zionism suffers from an antisemitism problem.

Mijal: I like that one. Anti-Zionism suffers from an antisemitism problem. That’s pretty good. That’s great. And are you happy with your answer?

Noam: Yeah, simple as that. Am I happy with my answer? I’m looking forward to hearing your answer.

Mijal: Well, I’ll tell you the answer that I gave a couple of weeks ago, I said not every anti-Zionist is antisemitic, but the anti-Zionist movement today is undoubtedly antisemitic.

Noam: Got it.

Mijal: So I tried to make a distinction between what I think of as like the movement with its leaders and arguably like its ideologists, and then just people who use that term, which I think you can make a distinction.

Noam: But the thing that confuses me about your answer and maybe about my answer is when they see so many Jewish groups being anti-Zionist, whether it’s Jewish Voices for Peace, or IfNotNow, or the Neturei Karta, who use their garb to appear as deeply pious and religious Jews, but who ultimately are opposing the existence of the Jewish state and confuses people. So are all of those people antisemitic?

Mijal: Great. So the first objection or question that you just raised is, historically, there have been anti-Zionist Jews. We can talk about anti-Zionism as having existed before the existence of the state of Israel, after its existence. We can talk about it coming from a religious place, coming from like a secular place. We can talk about it existing in places where we might agree there is no antisemitism. So that’s like objection or question number one. How come there have been in the past and even in the present, Jews who are anti-Zionist?

Noam: I’m writing that one down, I’m writing that one down.

Mijal: So that’s like objection or question number one. If we say there is a thick relationship, how do we understand the prevalence? Is that a word?

Noam: Prevalence, yeah.

Mijal: The prevalence. I tend to know how to write things, not always have to pronounce them because of the English’s third language situation.

Noam: Oh, stop it, Mijal. you know so many languages look at me.

Mijal: Well, don’t you live in Florida, you’ll be very close to Spanish then.

Noam: Oh yeah, I should, but no, I don’t know any Spanish.

Mijal: Okay. Anyway, so that’s objection or question number one. There’s like a ton of Jews in the past and some even in the present who are anti-Zionist. How do we make sense of that? Okay. Number two. 

So the second problem or question that we should put on the table is that part of what’s really hard about this question, when we talk about anti-Zionism, antisemitism, is that it involves two phenomenons that are deeply contested as to their own definitions and then the relationship between them. What do I mean by this?

Noam: I have no idea. Glad you asked.

Mijal: I’m going to say like this. I’m going to say when we talk about anti-Zionism, we can have four different definitions of what anti-Zionism is. When we talk about antisemitism, we can have four different definitions of what antisemitism is. So if two people start talking about what’s the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, but they’re defining them in different ways, then it’s like, how can you even talk about this?

Noam: The purpose of language is to be able to communicate, and when we don’t have definitions, it becomes impossible to communicate. That’s what’s going on.

Mijal: Right. Correct. That makes this really difficult to talk about this, the fact that we have different definitions.

Noam: Right, I want to add one more definition that’s also, I’m happy to define myself as an anti-Zionist, if Zionism means the negation of Palestinian identity and the negation of Palestinian Arabs living in the land of Israel, which I’ve heard people say that Zionism means the cleansing of Palestinians from the land of Israel, and therefore I’m anti-Zionist, to which I’d say, okay, I’d be anti-Zionist also, but that’s not what it means to be a Zionist.

Mijal: Okay, so I think what you’re saying is that sometimes people define Zionism itself in such horrible ways, that most of us would be like, yeah, if that’s what it meant, I will be an anti-Zionist. If Zionism meant like, genocide, then yeah, I get it.

Noam: Yeah. Exactly.

Mijal: So we spoke about the fact that there’s a ton of Jews who have been or aren’t as Zionists. The fact that its definitions are really complicated, especially when people are shouting or arguing without defining. And the last thing I’ll say is that the last thing that makes this complicated for me, which relates a little bit to the previous one, but I find that in our culture, people tend to use a lot of words and, but they might just use them because they’re cool, but they might not actually agree with some of their meaning, if that makes sense. So do you get what I’m saying? Or am I?

Noam: You’re gonna have to tell me what you mean.

Mijal: Okay. You know what, I’ll give you an example and then I’ll come to this.

Noam: Yes, I love examples. Give me an example.

Mijal: So we’ve spoken about DEI, for example, diversity, equity, and inclusion. I literally met with someone last week. We were talking about DEI, and they were somebody who were proponents of DEI and I said, oh, so what do you mean when you’re advocating for equity, diversity, equity, and inclusion?

They said, we want people to like live better lives or have things that are more fair. And I said, well, but equity is very distinctive from equality. It’s about equality of outcomes, not of opportunities. And they were like, oh, I actually never thought about that. So it was like, we’re all using these words. So I think increasingly people are like, oh, I’m an anti-Zionist, but they’re not necessarily like engaging philosophically, what does this mean? What do people think it means? We are using words in almost like shallow, what team are you on?

Noam: We did this last episode where we said it’s not a sports event. It’s not a basketball game.

Mijal: Right, but for too many people, too many people it is. So, okay, so those were reasons that I think this is like complicated, okay? At the same time, I think it’s really, really important for us to have this conversation, even though it’s complicated. And I would say, Noam, this is becoming a really important question, it’s like, well, I have a friend or I have this or I have that, how do I relate to them? Is this really antisemitism?

Noam: Absolutely, and despite the hoodie, I can’t wait to speak about other topics besides antisemitism, but it’s just been all over the place and people are trying to understand what in the world is going on and how do I make sense of the world. So we gotta talk about it, let’s do it.

Mijal: Okay, so first I’ll just reiterate our two quick answers. I think it’s good to start with that. Your first quick answer was anti-Zionism as an antisemitism problem, which I really like how you put that actually. Haven’t heard that before. The way that I put it was less elegant, but it was that not every person who’s an anti-Zionist, I think, is antisemitic, but the movement as a whole to me is undoubtedly antisemitic.

Noam: Yes.

Mijal: I think they’re kind of similar, what you and I are saying, which gives a little bit of an out for some positions to not be fully antisemitic, but says there’s still a big problem here. Is this fair?

Noam: Agreed, agreed. Yes, yes.

Mijal: Okay, good. So let me give you three ways to think about why I believe that the movement has an antisemitism problem.

Noam: Let’s hear it.

Mijal: So the first approach that I take to explain the relationship is one that I’m going to call consequentialism. Okay. A fancy word. Consequentialism.

What I mean by that is the following. Anti-Zionist rhetoric and belief, which is a negation in the legitimacy of the Jewish state, if taken to the realm of action or reality has consequences that are antisemitic, the basically end up with dead Jews.

Noam: No, no, that was really important to me because the question that I’ve been struggling with throughout this whole episode is, why does it matter if there’s antisemitism? You just answered it. You just answered it. The answer is antisemitism is problematic because it leads to dead Jews.

Mijal: Well, yeah, but let me just sharpen this a little bit. And here I’m almost borrowing a page from critical race theory and the bureaucrats. So I’m actually like using language they would use.

Noam: But what’s critical race theory? What is that?

Mijal: Okay. Two sentences, critical race theory is a body of literature and theories that examines race and how it works specifically in the context of America and how it continues to reproduce inequality almost from its foundations. But for the purpose of our conversation, what many of these theorists have in common is that they don’t care so much about intentions. They care about consequences. Okay.

Noam: Aha, got it. Got it.

Mijal: So they’re not gonna care so much if when I participate in a system, if I’m gonna say, oh, I am racially prejudiced, I believe in a racial hierarchy, they’re gonna instead say, well, let me look at the American legal system and how it ends up like perpetuating certain things. So it’s not the same, I’m not 100% saying the same thing.

But I am inspired by that way of thinking that basically says, dear anti-Zionists, regardless of what you are saying about your intent, if your discourse ends up supporting Hamas who has in its first charter like a call to kill Jews and kills Jews no matter what, then the consequences of your discourse are antisemitic. Okay, what do you think about that?

Noam: It makes perfect sense to me, very clear. It’s saying whether or not what you’re doing technically or your position technically is problematic and antisemitic, the result of it is problematic and antisemitic and you can’t just look at intention. You also have to look at the consequence. I got it. That’s number one. Number two, give me number two.

Mijal: Yeah. Number two. So the first one is consequences. The second one is correlation. And again, I’m almost like getting rid of intent here a little bit on purpose, but by correlation, I mean that you have polls and anecdotal evidence that basically shows that anti-Zionist spaces and movements have a crazy amount of the kind of antisemitism that there’s no questions around. There was like a poll that came out of the UK a couple of years ago that basically looked at people’s attitudes and the same people who had like anti-Zionist, like anti-Israel attitudes also had attitudes in which they just didn’t like Jews, plain. Or you can look at like, If you have like blood libels or conspiracy theories that we can actually locate throughout the ages as being deeply symbolic of antisemitism, and then you can locate like almost the same language in anti-Zionist spaces, the Jews control the media, Jews are trying to do this, Jews are trying to do that. That is basically saying, like anti-Zionism as an antisemitism problem.

Noam: That’s exactly what I was thinking when you were saying this.

Mijal: Right, so like the correlation, it’s almost like, what’s that expression? Like, you know, it’s people are protesting too much that there’s no relationship.

Noam: The Lady Doth Protest Too Much Methinks and it’s a line from Hamlet by none other than Bill Shakespeare.

Mijal: Thank you very much. That’s what I was going for. Anyways, it’s very, very clear to me that in most of these spaces, ideologies, you’re gonna find things that are like 100% antisemitic in terms of what people are saying.

Noam: Okay, exactly. So we have consequences, we have correlation. Both are making sense to me. So we have two Cs. Is the third one with a C?

Mijal: I don’t have a C for this.

Noam: Well, maybe that’ll be my job. That’ll be my job. Okay, what is it?

Mijal: Okay, the third one that I’m going to give is the one that I have the hardest time saying in a succinct and clean way, but it’s the one that I find most compelling. Okay, so there’s a historian called David Nirenberg who wrote a very important book called Anti-Judaism in the Western Tradition. Have you read it, Noam? Okay.

Noam: Yes. Well, let me change that. Not every word I was about to say, not the whole thing, but many, many parts of it throughout my explorations of antisemitism over the years.

Mijal: So he basically makes the following argument. He says, when you look at different civilizations and different countries and different societies, around the world, around across time and across space. So you could be looking at medieval Europe and it could be looking at like ancient Egypt, okay? So when you look at all these different civilizations, you see that Jews and Judaism occupy a really important space in the sense that people tend to refer to the thing that they are opposing or they don’t like as Jewish.

Noam: What you’re saying is something that I’ve been hearing in many different contexts in the modern space and most recently Noah Feldman who wrote the cover story for Time Magazine that just came out. Let me tell you what he wrote and tell me if this is at all similar to what you’re saying. Noah Feldman wrote, “to keep its familiar character while also channeling new fears is what confers its stunning capacity to reinvent itself. In each iteration, antisemitism reflects the ideological preoccupations of the moment in antisemitic discourse. Jews are always made to exemplify what a given group of people considers to be the worst feature of the social order in which they live.”

Mijal: Yes, exactly. That’s pretty much David Nirenberg. So it’s not even related to the actual Jews

Noam: That’s so, that is so interesting.

Mijal: But it’s so depressing. Antisemitism without Jews, you know?

Noam: Right, antisemitism would exist without the Jewish people, meaning you could live in, you know, some far East Asian country, which has very few Jews, and there could still be an antisemitism problem, right?

Mijal: Right, right. So he says that Judaism or anti-Judaism is a set of ideas and attributes with which non-Jews can make sense of and criticize their world. So, okay. So and then…

Noam: Say that again. I need to hear that again. I like a good quote. So David Nirenberg said the following, say it. What is it?

Mijal: Okay, I’ll say Judaism is not only the religion of specific people with specific beliefs, which is the way we tend to think about it, but also a category, a set of ideas and attributes with which non-Jews can make sense of and criticize their world.

But let me let me read to you one more thing he says. He says, we live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the argument that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of Israel.

So what does it mean by this? Like, if in the past you wanted to explain the evil of capitalism or the evil of socialism, and you would just call that like the evil of the Jews or the evil of Judaism, in the present, you wanna talk about the evils of colonialism or racism or globalism, okay, or whatever it is, you’re going to explain it through the Jewish state, through Israel.

So Israel in this way becomes this repository of everything you’re trying to criticize about the world. It becomes, it’s a little bit more than double standards. It’s almost like unique standards. You are the symbol of all that is evil. So going back to the question, is anti-Zionism antisemitism?

When Israel, the one Jewish state, becomes the symbol, is anti-Zionism antisemitism? According to this, anti-Zionism is a form of what Nirenberg would call anti-Judaism, which is that Israel is the symbol of all that is evil. And by the way, in his book, even though he’s tracing an idea, he does show how that idea ends up with dead Jews, you know, in different civilizations. So that’s that. What do you think about the third one?

Noam: I’m struggling with it, only because I don’t know a C for it. Otherwise I like it a lot.

Mijal: Okay. But also, Noam, it’s hard because if I’m engaging like a quick conversation with someone, it’s a harder thing to kind of like explain neatly. Like, like it’s a little bit harder to, to apply.

Noam: So let’s do this. We’re gonna do a scenario. Scenario is, Mijal Bitton is asked to come to speak on a panel at Brown University or at Duke University, and you’re asked to speak about anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Are they the same? Are they not? How are they similar? How are they different? And you’re being told, you have three sentences and you’ve got to explain in a very succinct way, here it is. We all know that there are dangerous consequences to anti-Zionism, which could be dead Jews. We all know that anti-Zionism can often correlate with antisemitism in the sense that it has an antisemitism problem, like we said. And then there’s this third category, and this is the one you want to present. What would you say?

Mijal: I think I would say historically, Jews have been prominent minorities in different societies, and they have functioned very often as a symbol of evil, often in contradictory ways. They have been the evil, they have been the symbols of capitalism and the symbol of socialism, symbol of parochialism and symbol of globalism, and pretty much the symbol of everything you hate in any given society. And that has led to the arguably to the mass murder of Jews by making Israel, the one Jewish state, the symbol of all that is evil in society right now. We are replicated in the same pattern. I would say something like that.

Noam: That’s good.

Mijal: Yeah, I think all three of these approaches would allow for the fact that there has been Jewish anti-Zionism, right?

Noam: Mm, back to that, yeah.

Mijal: Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think we should go back to that. Again, so it’s consequences, correlation, and then, do you have a C for the third one or no?

Noam: Yeah, yeah, here’s my C. You ready for this? This is the ultimate cheat. Symbolization with a C.

Mijal: No, that… I’m not using that.

Noam: Yeah, the S functions as a C, the C functions as an S. It’s a whole weird thing in our language.

Mijal: I’m not. You might do it. I’m going to stick with anti-Judaism. It hurts too much. Yeah.

Noam: Okay, fine. So here are my three C’s. My three C’s are consequences, correlation, and symbolization with a C.

Mijal: Okay, I’ll have two C’s and an S, but we are in agreement. Noam, we’re gonna begin to wrap up, but like, do you have any example of any engagement with an anti-Zionist where you didn’t think that they were antisemitic at all?

Noam: Of course, I’ve had many engagements with anti-Zionists who I think would think that to call them antisemitic, they’d be horrified. All the time. I mean, in many contexts, they don’t even realize that their anti-Zionism is dangerous, problematic, potentially violent. Or they don’t know the history of Zionism. And the second you start going through the history of Zionism, there’s just a lot more to it. For me, I go to the Wall Street Journal article all the time where-

Mijal: Which Wall Street Journal article?

Noam: The Wall Street Journal article from the river to the sea when everyone was chanting from the river to the sea and Ron Hassner, is that his name? Ron Hassner, I think, went to them and said, hey, let me tell you which river and which sea and something like 67% of them said, oh, actually, I don’t think that way anymore. It’s, you know, there’s this identity that we assume and then once we assume that identity, we pay very little attention to the details. And if we are actually able to look at the details and look at the history, and then I think people are willing to change their minds pretty often. I really do.

I think that’s my positive assessment of humanity where people are willing to change their minds more often. If you do a few specific things, you give them permission to change their mind, you demonstrate that you’re willing to change their mind. You allow them to see that their identity is not just consumed with this one opinion, and then all of a sudden they’re willing to say, oh, actually, I could see this a little bit differently.

Mijal: So maybe I’ll disagree with you there a little bit. No, I think that the leaders, leaders I mean like the loud voices, the activists, the agitators of anti-Zionist movements and protests today are not the way you just described at all.

Noam: I’m not talking about those people. I’m not, I’m talking about the regular person in a class with you and you’re both learning together. And I think that that’s actually most people. The loud people are the ones that get all the press, but a lot of people are just like, I don’t even know what to do with all of this.

Mijal: I know, I know. I think my problem, and this is again another conversation to wonder about, I think the problem is that most often those people, the way the profile that you described, lets the loud people almost like control the conversation. Or many of them would feel comfortable joining in the protest of the ideologues who write by any means necessary, which is code word for Hamas go ahead and God forbid murder and you know, pillage.

Noam: Do what you gotta do. Yeah.

Mijal: Yeah. So I think that that’s part of what I’m struggling with in terms of, I have less patience for the kind of ignorance that kind of is okay, allying itself with a movement that is led by people with really harmful and dangerous ideas. That’s a little bit where I am.

Noam: And you’re allowed to be where you are and that lack of patience makes a lot of sense to me. I feel that at times as well. I just wanna continue engaging and just continue educating. We gotta just continue educating. We can’t stop. We can’t take our foot off the pedal. That’s what we gotta do.

Mijal: Yeah, Noam, do we have any takeaways?

Noam: For our episode today, I just wanna say what I learned from you is the three Cs, or the two Cs and an S, depending on how you wanna define it, that anti-Zionism is either a problem because of the consequences of it, that’s C number one. Anti-Zionism is a problem because of the correlation, that it basically often serves as a place where antisemites and anti-Zionists get together very often. Or number three, it’s the symbolization of the Jew as the symbol of whatever the evil of the world is for today, which I’m saying as my third C, symbolization with a C, you’re saying an S, symbolization of the Jew, 

Mijal: Yeah, and in this case, the Jewish state.

Noam: In this case the Jewish state. Excellent. That was awesome. I learned so much.

Mijal: Yeah. All right now. Yeah. Curb your antisemitism.

Noam: Love hanging out with you, love getting together and thinking about these topics together, it’s just, it’s cathartic for me to explore these big ideas together with you. Yeah, it is, I like.

Mijal: Is it cathartic? That’s a third C. Sorry.

Mijal: Yes, exactly. I can’t connect it to symbolization, but, so I love speaking about it with you and we wanna hear from all our listeners. WonderingJews@jewishunpacked.com. Shoot us a note if you have thoughts, reflections.

Noam: Ruminations, whatever, and Mijal and I will explore your question together. So thanks for listening and see you next week.

Mijal: See you next week.