June 24, 2024
Whenever I engage another individual in a serious way, the first thing I do is to try to figure out who the person is. This is what I did after reading “Adults in the Room,” Gemma Sack’s extremely harsh response to my May 9 Dissent “open letter” to pro-Palestinian protesters, entitled by the editors “A Makeshift Alliance.”
I discovered that Sack is an Associate Editor for Dissent who has also worked at the Nation and Jacobin; that she graduated with Honors from Brown University in 2021; and that she is a talented writer who published a terrific essay entitled “Utopia Parkway: Judaism, architecture, and memory in Jamaica Estates.” About her grandmother’s home, the essay is also about post-WWII American Judaism, race, ethnicity and real estate. To my surprise, I also learned–from a follow-up New York Magazine profile of the home–that she is the daughter of Lisa Edelstein Sack, who happens to be a former Jamaica High School classmate and a current Facebook friend of mine.
A small world it is, and perhaps worth noting given the strongly “generational” nature of Ms. Sack’s polemic.
I wish that Sack had attempted to find out more about me before reacting so harshly to my piece, because we have many things in common, and there is no good reason why the real differences between us—differences of opinion and perspective that are in part generational though not reducible to chronological age or disposition—ought to generate acrimony.
The Dissent piece to which she responded contained a bio (drafted by me) that ended with these words: “This text is a condensed and revised version of an ‘Open Letter’ that he posted last week in response to the crisis on his own campus, a crisis that is spreading like wildfire across U.S. campuses, which is with few exceptions being met with deplorable administrative repression and police violence.” Sack unfortunately took no time to learn anything about the crisis on my campus—which has been covered by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, and the New York Times—or about my role in it.
Had she done so, she might have observed that the day before I posted my original “Letter,” I published a piece at Common Dreams denouncing the police violence against student protesters and insisting that “For Turning Our Campus Into a Mini-Police State, Indiana University’s President Must Go.” She might have noted that my very public support of the students began months before the encampments, in op ed pieces in the Indianapolis Star that led to my being red-baited on Twitter by far-right Republican Congressman Jim Banks; in two pieces published in the Nation and one in the Chronicle denouncing “The New Campus McCarthyism”; and in a petition drive that I organized in support of my friend and colleague Abdulkader Sinno, an Arab-American who was suspended by Indiana University for his role as faculty advisor to the student Palestine Solidarity Committee. She might also have noted that in February I publicly testified before the Indiana State Senate in support of the student protesters. And that since October 7, 2023, I have published three pieces defending Rashida Tlaib’s pro-Palestinian activism, one in the high profile “left liberal” publication The American Prospect (a member of Tlaib’s staff wrote to tell me that my piece was discussed at a Tlaib staff meeting).
Ignorant of any of this, Sack reduces me to a stereotype, and thus misreads my piece. She writes that “Isaac’s letter to student protesters is representative of a certain swath of left-liberals who, while decrying both Israel’s war in Gaza and universities’ repressive tactics, reserve most of their ire and anguish for the people protesting those very things.” Indeed, having spent over six months and many thousands of words very publicly defending the protesters, on May 1, I published a single piece articulating my disagreements with the students who I have supported at Indiana University, deliberately posted in a very local venue (my own blog). I did not “chafe” at the protesters’ slogans. I raised questions about and expressed disagreement with some of the slogans. At the same time, my support of the students’ rights to protest as they choose was never placed in question.
Sack denounces my appeal to dialogue, insisting that “such dialogue occurs between mutually generous parties, not those whose solidarity is so flimsy that it requires total rhetorical and tactical acquiescence.” But not a single word in my piece– an invitation to further dialogue– calls for, much less “requires” or demands, “total rhetorical and tactical acquiescence.” On the other hand, Sack seems to require precisely this of me, and to consider an honest airing of differences to be a sign of a “flimsy” support that in fact gives aid and comfort to those seeking to quash the protests.
This is unfortunate.
I know that “The students’ central aim, like that of the broader Palestine solidarity movement, is Palestinian freedom,” and that “galvanizing rhetoric” is essential to this effort, as it is to all social movement activity. And while I oppose the Israeli destruction of and killing of Palestinians in Gaza, and support both a cease fire and a just peace, the galvanizing rhetoric of “no two states, we want ‘48” and “globalize the intifada” supported by many of the protesters, apparently including Sack, does not speak for me. As a teacher I unequivocally support the rights of students—and indeed, it was precisely from this privileged subject position of academic “authority” that my faculty colleagues and I could strongly support them. And as a citizen I consider it my responsibility to be honest about what I think, especially about the dangers of sectarianism among many of the student leaders whose rights I defend even as I disagree with some of their political demands. And precisely because they are no less adult than am I, these students, and their supporters, deserve nothing less if they wish to be taken seriously.
Too much is at stake politically—in both the U.S. and Israel/Palestine– for the kind of uncritical “solidarity” that Sack demands, something I tried to indicate in the closing sections of my piece, where I linked Netanyahu and Sinwar—both of whom are being justifiably accused of war crimes– with a range of other dangerous leaders including Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, and Vladimir Putin.
Sack’s understanding of the Israel/Palestine situation is Manichean, and she treats the anti-Zionist views of groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) as if they are the only voices of justice. They are not. I recommend Jon Weiner’s Nation interview with Sally Abed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, recently elected to the Haifa City Council, and one of the leaders of Standing Together—an Israeli peace and justice group that is has absurdly been boycotted by allies of SJP. Or the essays of Palestinian writer Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, whose regular essays in The Forward are relentlessly even-handed in their criticisms of Israel, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and the U.S. government. Or the regular Substack commentaries of Peter Beinart or Micah Sifry. Or board member Joshua Leifer’s “A Historic Junction,” published in the Winter 2024 Dissent, which features Sally Abed and two other Israeli leftists in dialogue about ways to promote a just peace in Israel/Palestine. Leifer is a young post-Zionist writer and activist who can hardly be described as a former New Leftist or as a protege of Michael Walzer, who he has attacked in print. And yet his relentless criticism of the Israeli state has not prevented him from denouncing the October 7 Hamas terrorism and challenging some of the very same rhetoric I question in my piece, even as he also provides valuable and nuanced analysis of Hamas.
There is room for a plurality of voices on these important issues, and I don’t understand why any self-styled progressive would want to imply that voices like these should be drowned out by “galvanizing” slogans and chants. Serious protest movements can accommodate real discussion and debate.
In last week’s Ha’aretz, Ben Samuels’s “AIPAC, AOC, and the Left’s Antisemitism Problem” describes how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been attacked by some as an AIPAC shill. Her crimes: (a) convening a public dialogue about antisemitism with Amy Spitalnick, Jewish Council for Public Affairs CEO, and Stacy Burdett, a former senior adviser at the Anti-Defamation League, and (b) denouncing the recent pro-Palestinian protests, organized by Nerdeen Kiswani and Within Our Lifetime as part of a “day of rage,” of the art exhibit “October 7th 06:29 AM — The Moment Music Stood Still.” Responding to the angry chants and rhetoric of “Long Live October 7” and “The Zionists are [Not] Jews and [Not] Humans,” AOC Tweeted: “The callousness, dehumanization, and targeting of Jews on display at last night’s protest outside the Nova Festival exhibit was atrocious antisemitism – plain and simple. Antisemitism has no place in our city nor any broader movement that centers human dignity and liberation.”
Is AOC—the most effective progressive member of the U.S. Congress, who retains membership in Democratic Socialists of America in spite of efforts by some to excommunicate her– another lame, liberal “adult in the room” intent on subjugating anti-Israeli protesters? In response to her leftist critics, AOC insists that “We can mobilize to end the atrocities in Gaza and combat the rise of antisemitism at the same time. Bigotry in organizing spaces imperils everyone’s work. I work to end the war, protect all my constituents and fight AIPAC. Believe it or not, you can do all three.” Is she not right about this?
This past weekend both Bernie Sanders and AOC attended a rally in support of “Squad” member Jamaal Bowman, who is currently being heavily targeted for defeat by AIPAC in one of the most visible primary battles of this campaign season (the Times: “AIPAC Unleashes a Record $14.5 Million to Defeat a Critic of Israel”). Bowman is a complicated figure, and neither his decisions, nor those of Sanders or AOC, are beyond criticism. But all three are among the most vocal U.S. public officials denouncing the Israeli government, calling for a cease fire, and demanding a just peace. And yet they were greeted by around fifty Within Our Lifetime protesters chanting “AOC you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide” and “AOC your hands are red, 40,000 Palestinians dead,” and carrying signs accusing Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders and Bowman of being “Zionists” and declaring “dump Genocide Joe and the Squad.”
How is this anything other than foolish sectarianism?
Is this what serious progressives ought to be doing or supporting? Is it a sign of a lame “liberalism” to challenge this kind of activism?
As my references to Leifer and others above indicate, I do not believe this is a generational matter. There are many young people on the left—AOC is only 35 years old, for God’s sake!—refusing this kind of politics. At the same time, there is clearly a generational component to this. Sack begins her piece with critical jabs at Dissent founder Irving Howe and his collaborator and successor Michael Walzer before setting her sights on me. Sack seems to consider linking me to them as some kind of insult or proof of my culpability. This is utterly bizarre, for she must know that the magazine for which she works and in which she is writing only exists because Howe started it and spent decades keeping it going, and then Walzer spent decades more using every bit of his energy and earned academic capital to continue Howe’s legacy. I am proud to be associated with Howe—who edited me a few times around 40 years ago—and Walzer, who decades ago brought me into the Dissent fold, and who I consider a friend and role model when I agree with him and when I don’t.
The piece of mine that Sack reviles was not submitted by me to Dissent.
It was shared by me with an email list started by Leo Casey last November, shortly after he organized another open letter, published in The New Republic, signed by 24 former DSA members who could no longer support the organization given its refusal to criticize the October 7 Hamas attacks. Among the signatories of the letter, and participants in the email list, were many longtime Dissent contributors and a handful of Dissent editorial board members, including myself, Casey, Harold Meyerson, and Mark Levinson. It was a member of the list that brought my piece to the attention of Dissent’s current editors, who expressed interest in publishing it, clearly understanding that a great many longtime Dissent supporters had similar views (it is worth noting that other Dissent board members, especially Paul Berman and Susie Linfield, have published critiques of pro-Palestinian activism that are much harsher than my call for dialogue).
Sack, in what appears to be her very first Dissent publication, disparages my piece, and the “left liberalism” with which she associates it, as “a capitulation to the center and the right in the guise of pragmatic leftism,” wondering “why those who find themselves in this position maintain their attachment to a left with which they find themselves continuously at odds and which understandably views them with suspicion.” Confidently declaring that “this left . . . has cohered around a vision of Palestinian liberation that extends far beyond the immediate demand for a ceasefire,” she concludes that “it is up to agonized liberals whether they deign to join it.”
It is tempting to respond in kind, and to note that the people she chastises have been involved in Dissent, and in the left more generally, since long before she graduated college in 2021, and that if the left with which she identifies is as she describes it, then I am happy to say that I am not a member. But such polemics serve no good purpose.
The violence and injustice currently being enacted in Israel-Palestine is awful. It ought to be ended, now, and those protesting it deserve support. But no political cause deserves unconditional support, and efforts to police the boundaries of political criticism in the name of leftist fidelity do a disservice to their protagonists; to the magazine quite deliberately entitled Dissent; and to the values of human dignity, equality, and democracy that are at the heart of any left worth defending. We can do better. If we don’t, things are only going to get much worse, in Israel-Palestine and in many other places, including the U.S., where only a herculean effort to practice coalition politics can prevent another four years of a fully unhinged Trump administration.
Democracy in Dark Times 