Benjamin Moser | Jewish Heretics Podcast 28

David Wall (0:04)

Hello, and welcome to the Jewish Heretics Podcast. This is the official podcast of the United Jewish People's Order. We are a progressive Canadian Jewish organization that's been around since the 1920s. Just a long time. My name is David Wall, and I am the community's cultural director. I'll be your host. For this, the 28th episode of our podcast, I had the honor of speaking to celebrated writer and translator, Benjamin Moser.

Benjamin was born in Houston, Texas. He graduated from Brown University in history where he studied Portuguese. He eventually settled in the Netherlands where he earned his MA and PhDs at Utrecht University.

He's the author of several books, including Why This World, a biography of Clarice LaSpector, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Auto-Imperialismo, a Portuguese language compendium of essays, and Sontag, Her Life and Work, for which Benjamin received a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 He's written for Harper's Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and The Nation. His most recent work, Anti-Zionism, a Jewish History, profiles several historical figures who took and are currently taking brave stances against Zionism, colonialism and anti-Palestinian racism.

Benjamin and I covered a cornucopia of topics during our discussion, including his childhood in Texas, the shocking lunacy of Theodore Herzl, and some of the amazing historical figures copulating his latest book. Here's our conversation. Benjamin Moser, thanks for agreeing to be on the podcast today. How are you doing?

Benjamin Moser (1:58)

I'm great. I'm great. I'm happy to be here.

David Wall (2:00)

Oh, good.

And you're in Utrecht. Is it sunny there?

Benjamin Moser (2:04)

Yep.

It is sunny, but not unseasonably global warming-y, the way it has been a few weeks ago. And everybody's sitting on terraces drinking beer, which is the normal, the Dutch dream.

David Wall (2:20)

So on our podcast, the Jewish Heretics Podcast, we like to delve into people's origin stories, like how did you get your Jewish superpowers? Tell me about your upbringing a bit, Houston.

What were your parents like? And I guess most importantly, did you grow up in a religious and or Zionist home?

Benjamin Moser (2:42)

Well, my family for generations had been on the center left. They were liberal Democrats in the American constellation of having officially two parties, but not actually disagreeing on anything, although my parents did disagree. I mean, my parents were very much liberals, which was not something to take for granted. It wasn't like growing up in Cambridge or Berkeley, or certainly not in progressive parts of Canada. It was a minority position in a lot of ways. So when I say to people that I grew up in a Zionist household, I want to emphasize that that doesn't mean what it means now. I mean, it's almost like speaking a different language. My parents were pro-choice, they were pro-gay, they were pro-union, they were pro-immigrant. They both grew up in the Jim Crow South, so they knew what racism was. They knew who supported racism. And I grew up being taught to hate anything that smacked of racism. And so they were sort of vaguely proud, quote unquote, proud of Israel in the way that a lot of Americans were, and I'm sure Canadians as well. They thought Israel had a lot of problems.

They wished it would get better. But I think it's important to say about my upbringing is, I lived in a time, I was brought up in a time when we thought that things were getting better. So I'm 13 when the Berlin Wall falls. At the same time, we're just shortly thereafter, apartheid ends in South Africa. And then a little bit after that, Northern Ireland, which was one of those impossible situations, which to us was similar to Israel, Palestine or apartheid.

That gets figured out near us in Texas.

We're on the border of Latin America, and a lot of the Latin American dictatorships like Brazil and Argentina and Chile, and Uruguay and Mexico, etc. There was this wave of democracy, and we thought that as I write in the beginning of the book, we thought that Israel had problems, but we thought, well, we've got our people working on this. There's always this two-state solution. And then we had Arafat with Rabin on the White House lawn, and there were these negotiations, and there was this peace process. So we kind of thought that things were, you know, we were very much able to be Zionists while also acknowledging that Zionism had done terrible things. But that didn't make us anti-Zionist. That made us want to sort things out in a peaceful way.

And it didn't, it also meant, I think, that led us to be really naive and really quite stupid ultimately, because we weren't really able to see. And that's what the whole introduction of the book is about. We weren't really able to see that Zionism was different from these other things. And that Zionism, in fact, wasn't something that had problems. Zionism was the problem. So Israel wasn't just another country that had issues. Like every country has issues. But it was a country that really was the issue. It was a state that shouldn't be there. That was a step that I couldn't really take until I was in my 40s.