WHAT’S WITH ME?

WHY DOES A PROGRESSIVE, NON-JEWISH, GAY, AGNOSTIC, CANADIAN ACTIVIST STAND WITH ISRAEL AND THE JEWISH PEOPLE? WRONG QUESTION. WHY DOESN’T EVERYONE?

Me this month at the Kotel, the Western Wall, in Jerusalem. (Photo by some rando I accosted.)

It is exactly one year since I posted my first Substack! I’m not good at math or algorithms or measurements of any sort but apparently my Substack registers in a high percentile for growth, subscriptions, readership, open rates, restacks and whatever other measures the platform uses to gauge success.

This — and the private and public messages I’ve received — tell me that there is a hunger for my comparatively narrow niche: That of a progressive, non-Jewish, gay, agnostic, Canadian activist who stands with Israel and the Jewish people.

There seems to be a wide opening for a voice that is so done with letting those who make common cause with the most misogynistic, homophobic, reactionary, hateful and violent forces on earth put Jews and their allies on our back foot. I’ve learned from Israel — and diaspora Jews and their allies could learn this better too — to get off the defensive and take the fight to the enemy.

I deliver snappy smackdowns of antisemitism and anti-Zionism — and my specialty is calling out the hypocrisy, duplicity and treachery of my erstwhile ideological allies in progressive spaces.

And, to be clear: I’m still progressive. The thugs who are spewing blood libels, accusing the targets of genocide of perpetrating genocide, and calling for the annihilation of Jewish self-determination (while coquettishly insisting they are anything but antisemitic) defile the word “progressive.” (Read “Why I won’t leave the left.” Also: “Progressive Except Palestine?” in which I smack down the ludicrous idea that there is anything “progressive” in the “pro-Palestinian” movement as it is currently manifested. For good measure — hell, it’s Saturday, have you got anything better to do that read endless back posts of my Substack? — read “Pro-Palestinians Aren’t,” in case you wonder why I always put the term “pro-Palestinian” in scoff quotes.)

In the past year, I’ve posted more than 150 fresh smackdowns of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. My husband and others have asked if I’m not going to run out of things to write about.

Bahahahahahahaha.

I’ve got a Word document of notes more than 100 pages long with thoughts, reflections, ideas, prompts and irritations. All I need to do is dip the ladle of inspiration into this cauldron of outrage and out comes a steaming bowl of indignation to scald the lips of the hate-Israel hordes and satiate the decent folks hungering for righteous onslaughts against idiocy and to warm the Zionist soul.

But why?

I’ve put off answering this question. It’s taken me a while to get used to writing in the first person. Explicitly writing about myself is another hurdle.

In Israel last week, again I was asked repeatedly why I have thrown myself into this topic, this cause.

The answer is, of course, a question (I’ve been hanging with the Jews a long time): Why hasn’t everyone?

I get it, though. I’m an outlier. I’ve lost (or simply lost trust in and respect for) most of my progressive and/or gay friends and colleagues. In some cases, it’s been ugly as hell — something I certainly don’t need to explain to my Jewish readers, who face this sort of betrayal every day.

I have written that it is simply inconceivable to call yourself “progressive” or to legitimately claim to be an advocate of equality for women, LGBTQ+ people, other minorities, pluralism, democracy or everything and anything else we claim to support as progressives and be anti-Israel.

Even the positive-sounding “pro-Palestinian” is a lie. The people who call themselves that are among the Palestinian people’s worst enemies. It shouldn’t need to be said there is nothing progressive about Palestinianism. (Again: There could be. As I wrote here. But, as it exists today in Palestine and worldwide, Palestinianism is among the most regressive, hateful, violent ideologies on the planet. And progressives worldwide aren’t fixing that little problem. They’re rewarding it.)

But back to me. How did I defy the tsunami of hatred that has swept away my ex-allies on the left?

I’m not sure. I guess I had a sort of inoculation that not every non-Jewish Canadian had.

Perhaps it was when my Grade 5 teacher, Miss Mattison, read us aloud Anne Frank’s diary.

Maybe it was when my Grade 11 history teacher, Ms. Davidson, played us newsreels of the death camps.

Perhaps it was a lightbulb moment in a course at McGill, that the basic truth of the Israeli-Arab/Palestinian conflict has been the history of one people seeking to live in peaceful coexistence with their neighbors and these neighbors exhibiting hostility ranging from frigid peace to repeated attempted genocides. (Read: “The Problem Is: Israel is Not the Problem.”)

A few courses in Jewish history and culture during my undergrad at McGill might have been the end of it had I not returned to Vancouver, obtained a graduate certificate in journalism at Langara College, and begun a career that has mostly involved freelance writing and consulting. I had a developing career in “mainstream” and LGBTQ+ media. As a freelancer always on the lookout for gigs, I began writing for the Jewish Western Bulletin (founded 1930; now the Jewish Independent). I can only describe as happenstance — or basherte — the next 30 years.

I came to know Vancouver’s Jewish community intimately and have covered every imaginable story, from Hadassah luncheons to interviewing top Israeli officials, Jewish academics and experts in every imaginable field, authors, artists and any figure who made their way to Canada’s West Coast.

From this — and not without some compromises to journalistic integrity — I proceeded to consult for and work with countless Jewish organizations, including Canadian Jewish Congress, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Jewish Family Services, Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University and, in one of the rare occasions when I took a 9-to-5 job, spent six years as director of development (and, later, director of programming) for the Jewish university organization Hillel, during which time we completed construction of a $10 million flagship facility at the University of British Columbia. I also helped spearhead some dramatic and successful campus guerrilla marketing and activism campaigns.

Last year, I became founding director of Upstanders Canada, a movement that mobilizes (primarily) non-Jewish Canadians to stand against antisemitism and anti-Zionism. We recently received charitable status from the government of Canada and are ready to catapult into new summits of success in combatting anti-Jewish hate. (My Substack is completely unrelated to Upstanders Canada or any other group. It is my personal blog and reflects my own opinions and not those of anyone or any organization I am associated with. Boilerplate blah blah blah.)

Most certainly, I became who I am today at the time of the Second Intifada, as my colleagues on the left justified jihadi violence when a peaceful negotiated settlement was at hand. This was the moment the Western left went off the rails, siding with the murderers of Jewish civilians instead of with the Jewish civilians. At the same time, I saw my Jewish friends undergo a slow dawning that the Canada they had imagined as a land free from the hatreds of the past was not a certainty.

Unfortunately, the sort of lifelong undergrad education in Jewish studies I have enjoyed is something few non-Jews have been privileged to experience.

Still, it shouldn’t take a life of hanging out with Jews and interviewing hundreds of Jewish thinkers, activists, scholars and others to develop basic human empathy. When it comes to fighting antisemitism today, there is a simple dictum that should suffice for anyone: Just don’t be a dick.

Sadly, this seemingly simple approach has been beyond the capability of most of my friends on the left.

So many of my Jewish friends have told me that it is not even the hostility they have experienced on social media and elsewhere amid this pandemic of anti-Jewish hatred that has been the most painful. It has been the absolute silence of almost all their non-Jewish friends.

The heartbreakingly few simple messages some of them have received — “Even though I can’t know what you are going through, I’m thinking of you,” is really all you need to say — have been life-preservers in many instance amid a roiling sea of emotional abandonment and hopelessness for some of my Jewish friends.

Particularly since October 7, 2023, I have seen the separate universes in which my Jewish and non-Jewish friends exist diverge even further. The nonchalance, absence of empathy and sometimes overt hostility to Jewish people and their concerns from almost every non-Jewish person I know helps me understand the isolation my Jewish friends are experiencing.

People ask why a gay, progressive, non-Jewish, agnostic activist and writer has thrown himself into contesting antisemitism and anti-Zionism, when so many presumed allies have not. That’s not a question for me. It is a question for my former allies.

The choice, when our Jewish friends and neighbors express anxieties about rising antisemitism, is between standing with them or, as has far too often been the case, deflecting with “But what about the Palestinians/Islamophobia/absolutely anything else?”

In a false binary where our choice is to side with a democratic country with rule of law and codified equality for LGBTQ+ people, women and minorities representing every form of diversity, a country that has repeatedly held out an olive branch to its neighbors who, in almost every instance, have thrown grenades that blew off the hand holding the olive branch, or, on the flip side, to ally with some of the world’s most misogynistic, homophobic, violent, authoritarian, intolerant forces, the choice is obvious to me. (If that line about the olive branch got your hackles up, I’m not going to argue with you. Educate yourself. Start here.)

That’s not how progressive people respond to the concerns of any other group but Jews. There’s a reason and a word for that.

I know we are facing a crisis of compassion fatigue. But how come the fuel tank of compassion is always running on fumes at the very moment the vehicle approaches Jews and antisemitism?

(I shouldn’t need to say this, but I probably do. If you want to “free Palestine,” you aren’t doing it by vilifying Israel and Jews. You could advance a free Palestine. I’ve written about this. But “pro-Palestinian” activists generally do nothing but incite division, hatred, and a promote win-lose binary that ensures continued war and death. Nice job freeing Palestine.)

These choices should not be difficult. They should not even be choices. They should be defaults for all decent people — and I shouldn’t have to say this goes double for those who claim the mantle of “progressive, “humanitarian” or “social justice activist.”

The fact that the choice is not obvious to others — that, indeed, it is not an automatic default — is what drives my activism.

The ferocity of my outrage stems from the fact that betrayal does not come from one’s enemies.

*

Thank you for reading my posts for the past year. Happy anniversary to this quirky community we have built together.