I was 12 when I anxiously confided to my Rabbi that I did not really believe in god. I could not make myself believe in any of the stuff written in the Bible and recited on Friday nights in the synagogue. “That’s not a problem,” he said. “You can still be Jewish.” This was a relief, because… I loved being Jewish—at least what “being Jewish” meant to me growing up.
In my liberal Reform Jewish family, “being Jewish” had little to do with scripture. It wasn’t important what one said in prayers; what mattered was what you did, and how you treated others. Along with this, I was surrounded with the idea that Judaism had centuries-old traditions which valued intellectual inquiry. Like Jews from long ago arguing over interpretations of Jewish laws and practices, we learned it was good to debate, not just to argue about those traditions, but to argue over politics, and to argue about ethics. Most important, I was brought up with the idea that Jews were supposed to fight for justice on the side of the downtrodden and oppressed. Being Jewish included my Rabbi’s sermons about why we were on the side of people fighting for civil rights in the South, or for worker’s rights. It was the Passover story of liberation from slavery, where every year we recited the lesson that because “we were slaves in the Land of Egypt,” we should understand the plight of all people fighting for liberation from enslavement. I loved these holidays and I valued these traditions.
Both sides of my family immigrated to America in the 1910s—away from pogroms (anti-Jewish riots) and persecution of Jews in Czarist Russa. Even though those ancestors and their large extended families had not been victims of the Nazi Holocaust, I grew up keenly aware of this monumental crime. The lesson I took from all of this was because of what was done to Jewish people, we should be among the first to speak out against prejudice. “Never again” should such a genocide happen to anyone.
I was proud when I saw pictures of rabbis at the 1963 March on Washington, marching along with Martin Luther King, Jr. I read about the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner by the KKK during Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1964 and when I saw that two of them were Jewish, I thought to myself, “of course… that’s what Jews do.”
But right along with the civil rights songs I learned from my African-American bohemian guitar teacher, along with learning about Freedom Riders and sit-ins at lunch counters, along with fundraisers for voting rights, and neighborhood canvassing about discrimination in housing—I grew up with something else. This was a story about the new “embattled state of tiny Israel,” where “courageous Jewish partisans, survivors of the concentration camps and desperate Jewish refugees of devastated Europe were against all odds building a place of refuge for Jews.” We learned Israeli folk songs and did Israeli folk dances. We learned about Kibbutzim, “socialist” collective farms where everyone worked and ate together and brought up children together. In Sunday school, we collected donations for Israel and a common gift for a special occasion was a tree planted in Israel in your name.
We had our Harry Belafonte albums where along with calypso from Jamaica, and songs of the struggle of Black people in America, he sang Israeli folk songs like “Hinei Mah Tov u-ma nayim, Shevet achim gam Yachad” (“Behold how good and how pleasant it is for people to dwell together in unity”).
It seemed all one piece—yearning for a just world of peace and brotherhood. To me, being Jewish was part of this. The Palestinian people? It was like they did not exist.
Now fast forward. It’s June 11, 1967 in Los Angeles and 20,000 people fill the Hollywood Bowl for a star-studded evening to “Rally for the Survival of Israel.” I was there under the night sky with my whole family, but I felt dreadful. It was right at the end of “The Six Day War” between Israel and surrounding Arab countries.1
I had a big argument with my parents about going to this rally in the first place, but they insisted. A close family member had spent a year in Israel, was about to go back and I had to go to show support for her. But I was just back home for the summer after my first year of college at SF State… and I had begun to change.
In San Francisco, Berkeley, all over the Bay Area and across the country, the movement to stop the war in Vietnam was on the rise. SF State was roiling with debate about the war. There were teach-ins, peace vigils and protests. One day in January 1967, sitting on my bed in my dorm room, I read “Children of Vietnam,” an article in Ramparts Magazine with photos by journalist William Pepper. Photo after photo showed the effect of the napalm that the U.S. government was massively dropping on the people of Vietnam, including tens of thousands of children. I stared at the disfigured faces and bodies of all these children, and I remember thinking that I could not go on with my “normal” life while this was happening—while this government, our government—was doing this.
I still knew little about the true history of Israel or the struggle of the Palestinian people, but I was more and more alienated from the U.S. government, which I knew was behind Israel. The white-washed history of this country and the myths about America being a force for good in the world were breaking down. So when the President at the time, Lyndon Johnson, talked about the need to stand with Israel, I was skeptical and began to question what I was taught about Israel. At the Hollywood Bowl rally, a featured speaker was the recently elected governor of California, Ronald Reagan. The same Reagan who ran on a platform to “send the welfare bums back to work" and “clean up the mess at Berkeley,” i.e., crack down on the same anti-war movement that I was now part of. As the rally went on, I got more and more upset. At the end, while my parents glared at me, I refused to stand up with the crowd to sing “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem.2
Some years later, I read books like Our Roots Are Still Alive: The Story of the Palestinian People published by United Front Press in 1977, and was exposed to works by Noam Chomsky and Edward Said that I learned the truth. I realized straight up: We were lied to. The romantic story I had been told about Israel was a staggering myth, with as much relation to the truth as if someone thought Gone With The Wind told the truth about slavery! When my close relative, now starting a family in Israel, sent me a re-drawn map which pictured Israel as the entire Sinai Peninsula and all the newly occupied territories, it made me sick and brought to mind how the U.S. began with the genocide of indigenous people, and its borders grew with taking the entire southwest from Mexico.
The more I learned about Palestine and the fight for liberation of the Palestinian people, the more I was on their side.
The more I came to learn about how capitalism-imperialism gave birth to the Zionist movement, the more I stood against Israel. The romantic myth was replaced by the truth: That the Jewish-supremacist apartheid state of Israel was based on the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian people.
All this meant a growing divide between myself and most everyone else in my immediate and extended family. They took a different lesson from the Holocaust. For them, “Never Again” meant that because of what has been done to Jewish people over centuries, and what was done to the Jews in the Holocaust, whatever it took to create Israel and whatever Israel does in the name of “Jewish safety” is justified. This divide was especially sharp with my father whose support for Israel was unwavering.
This was the same person who was in the forefront in fighting for affirmative action on his job. The same person who wrote me to say how proud he was when I went to jail for protesting against the Vietnam War. In the mid-1990s, he volunteered in a project where he would bring Holocaust survivors to speak to high school students across L.A. He described how all these kids—from elite prep schools to inner city schools with mostly poor Black kids—sat transfixed when they listened to the stories of these mostly elderly survivors; stories about what happened in the Nazi concentration camps and the campaign of hatred and lies about Jewish people that went on in Germany in the 1930s that led to this genocide. At the end of each survivor’s presentation, my father would draw a parallel. “Do you see what’s going on here in California with the lies and threats against immigrants?” he would tell them. “If you don’t fight this, this is where that hatred can lead.”
So here’s this terrible irony: My father’s humanity, his certitude about what’s right and wrong and the need to fight against injustice, a morality which he saw connected to his Judaism, all this was twisted and distorted in the ugliest of ways when it came to the question of Israel. When it came to how he saw "Jewish safety," he would not confront reality.
This divide in my family—the immorality, and refusal to deal with what's true—continues to this day, even in the face of the genocide in Gaza, the genocide that is evident to the entire world. It’s now 76 years of occupation, persecution, waves of bombing, Israeli state and settler terrorism, and a genocide which gets worse each day—all supported and aided by the U.S. government. Watch some of the social media spread by IDF soldiers in Gaza and you feel in your gut how correct Bob Avakian is when he said, “Israel has done something truly incredible—Israel has managed to turn Jews into Nazis!”
Up against all this, since October 7, the world has seen something unprecedented: Many, many thousands of Jewish people—in the U.S., throughout Europe and other countries, and even a small number of extremely courageous Jews inside Israel itself—taking to the streets in bold actions to oppose this genocide. Young Jewish students joining in Gaza Solidarity encampments, Jewish government officials resigning in protest, Jewish doctors joining teams of medical workers to go Gaza. All saying we will not let Jewish suffering and the trauma of the Holocaust to be used as justification for such a crime. This is tremendously significant, and much more is needed.
This is the challenge facing all Jewish people—and frankly everyone: How do you understand “Never Again,” and how will you act on that understanding?
There is a place where epistemology and morality meet. There is a place where you have to stand and say: It is not acceptable to refuse to look at something—or to refuse to believe something—because it makes you uncomfortable. And: It is not acceptable to believe something just because it makes you feel comfortable.
—Bob Avakian, BAsics, 5:11
BAsics: from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian