Antisemitism is a real, violent, and pervasive scourge that spans the globe, but as anti-Zionist Jews like Molly Kraft argue, conflating opposition to Israel with antisemitism will make Jewish people less safe, not more. “Any systematic review of antisemitism must separate antisemitism from the Israeli state’s claims to represent all Jewish people, or more precisely, all Jewish safety,” Kraft writes in The Grind. “This is both because no colonial state can provide safety as it destroys and expels Indigenous populations, but also because Jewish safety will only come through the destruction of all oppressive systems.” In the latest installment of “Not in Our Name,” a Marc Steiner Show series bringing together voices across the Jewish world speaking out against Israel’s Occupation and destruction of Palestine, Marc Steiner speaks with Kraft about the need to accurately identify and fight antisemitism while forcefully rejecting Zionists’ attempts to weaponize antisemitism to perpetuate genocidal violence and justify repressive censorship.
Molly Kraft is a Canadian labor and community organizer, writer, a founding member of the Jews Say No to Genocide Coalition, and co-founder of Standing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) – Toronto.
Producer: Rosette Sewali
Studio Production: Cameron Granadino
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show, here at the Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. And this is another edition of Not in Our name, and today we’re talking to Molly Kraft, who’s in Canada. She’s a union and grassroots organizer over 20 years experience organizing and she is motivated to support movements to win by building collective power to tear down all kinds of oppressive systems of showing up for racial justice. Toronto Jews say No to genocide, their national coalition in Canada of anti-Zionist groups. She’s been works at this intensely. She lives in Toronto, as I said with her partner. They have two children. She fights for justice, that’s her life’s work and also organizes with the nurses union. So she’s a busy woman and takes time out for us today. Welcome. Good to see you, Molly. Good to have you here.
Molly Kraft:
Thanks, Marc. You
Marc Steiner:
Wrote this article that I thought was really, really well done and powerful and it’s called, and we’re going to link to this here so you all can read it yourselves. It’s in a magazine called The Grind To Fight Antisemitism, we need to accurately identify it. Too often we’re failing. So one of the things that really struck me about the piece that you wrote is this, the difficulty of really getting to the heart of both antisemitism, the death of its history for thousands of years, people trying to wipe us off the face of the earth, but then in comes the state of Israel, which intensifies antisemitism while it oppresses Palestinians and forgets our own struggles for survival and fighting for justice. So talk about how you put that together and your theory of all that.
Molly Kraft:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think it’s important to position myself so that people understand why I would make this claim. So I’m the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and they fled and lost their whole families and ended up in displaced persons camps and are highly traumatized from the Holocaust. And even my aunt, so I’m not even really technically a full third generation. My mom’s sister died in a concentration camp. So my mom was lucky enough to be born in the United States. My mom met my dad in Canada, and I grew up with a very clear understanding that it was only because of people who fought for justice, that my grandparents were saved and brought over to the United States by being sponsored by friends of friends coming to Peoria, Illinois and being able to start their life. So my understanding of why oppression is able to lead to the mass murder of people is through the funding by state apparatus that allow those things to happen.
And so when I look at the history and the trajectory of antisemitism, which allowed the killing of my family, I see exactly to your point, the creation of Israel and the massive amount of funding backed by both Britain and then the US and now really global superpowers everywhere. To say that this is a state that is to do absolutely anything that it wants in the name of Jewish safety or fighting antisemitism, that actually that just replicates the kind of violence that we all fled from. And so the connection that I see is that Ashkenazi Jews, specifically in the West we’re able to come into whiteness, be welcomed into whiteness, be closer to power, to get to what they thought was safety, what we thought was safety, right? We’re going to become more like white people. We’re going to become more normal. We’re going to assimilated into American society, and that’s going to be our ticket away from these violent histories.
And Israel is going to be the primary place that makes this happen. We’re going to get away from the vision of that really weak Yiddish Jew, and we’re going to become this masculinized Israeli white like big buff, modern man Jew, and no one’s ever going to do that to us again. And that cozying up to whiteness, that closeness to whiteness, that closeness to empire, to imperial power then allows a state funding of a kind of impunity that we’ve really rarely seen before. And I think it’s important that we actually debunk it, pull it apart, say that this doesn’t actually, most of this doesn’t have to do with antisemitism anymore. It’s an imperial project. And that Jews have to identify the difference between real antisemitism, like you said, that has historical and painful roots, deeply connected to white supremacy and then criticism of the state of Israel and their absolute death cults, destruction of Palestine and the Palestinian people. And so it felt very important to me personally to say I have a stake in that as well because my own history is tied up in that narrative.
Marc Steiner:
Lemme tell you something, Lord, I have mercy. You laid out so much here. I got to figure out how to parse this out.
Molly Kraft:
Yeah, sorry. We’ll just slow
Marc Steiner:
Down. No, no, it’s great. It’s wonderful. It’s great because you gave us a kind of analytical history of why we’re here and who we are.
Molly Kraft:
I
Marc Steiner:
Think it’s really important. Lemme ask you a quick personal question.
Molly Kraft:
Yeah, absolutely.
Marc Steiner:
And then jump into this. So did you know your grandparents with numbers on their arms?
Molly Kraft:
No. So my grandparents were both very lucky. They survived through not being in camps. So they were actually communists and they were imprisoned because they were communist and because they were Polish, Russian polish, as soon as they got out of jail, their communist friends said, you’ve got to get out of here because you’re communist. They’re coming for you. So they left their daughter and one of them went and fought on the eastern front, and he actually survived the war through fighting the Nazis on the other side. So he was a survivor through never being in a camp. My bubba hid and snuck around and made it all the way again to a displaced person’s camp in Stuttgart, Germany. And they were reunited in that displaced person’s camp. So they are lucky enough to have never been in a concentration camp, but they did live for three years in a displaced person’s camp. And that’s where they had my second aunt. But the family members that I grew up with had numbers on their arms. So when I would go to Peac or any other family holiday in Fort Lauderdale, which is where they all ended up after living in New York,
Marc Steiner:
Where else would they go?
Molly Kraft:
Where would they go after living in New York City for many years. So at payback, people would show us these were the numbers on their arms, and it was very strict in our family. There was not going to be any tattoos on any part of our arms. We have tattoos elsewhere. But as Jews who were supposed to be respecting these elders, we were not supposed to do that. And we grew up with stories of this is part of you, it’s part of our blood, it’s part of our very much present in everything we do. It’s a joke, but it isn’t, I’m sure people have said this to you, but which Christian friends going to hide you? What will you do when the day comes that this inevitably returns? What will you do to survive? And that was very much a part of our identity growing up.
Marc Steiner:
That’s a very interesting story in itself. I mean, just growing up in a left Jewish family that survived the war, that could be a movie on its own.
Molly Kraft:
Yes, exactly.
Marc Steiner:
It could. So I really want to explore your thoughts on antisemitism and how that plays into what’s happening now in Israel Palestine, and also how this struggle against Palestinian oppression can also bubble up the antisemitism because of what Israel is doing. Not blaming Jews for antisemitism, but just saying because it’s there. So talk a bit about your analysis that you wrote about that incredible
Molly Kraft:
Article. Yeah, so that’s such a brilliant question, and if we can’t actually have this conversation, I don’t believe that we will ever be able to come to justice because I think that if the left does not have a sharp analysis of antisemitism, we will never be able to bring Jews over from Zionism. And I think what I mean by that is that antisemitism is so prevalent within our societies because we live in Christian dominant societies. Antisemitism is part of Christian dominant societies, just the same way patriarchy is. It’s the soil, it’s the air. So to imagine ourselves on the left as somehow outside of that is an error because it leaves Jews saying, wait a minute, I don’t want to be in this group because they don’t acknowledge it. I actually believe that the primary backlash to DEI comes from, at least in Canada, there’s a huge movement of white Jews who said, wait a minute.
I was forced to go into the white group with all the Christians to caucus and talk about whiteness, but nobody’s talking about antisemitism. And to give them credit where credit is due until the left is able to say antisemitism is a unique and specific form of discrimination that changes. And it is about the being cast out and being brought back in. And so what do we mean by that? Ashkenazi Jews have been sent out othered, and then in times when it’s convenient brought back in, when do we see that close? Clearly Donald Trump, anti-Semitic, literal Nazis in his circles would’ve cast out Jews when it was convenient. And now the bringing back in unquote of Jews, even though actually the neo-Nazis all are still in his inner circles, but using Jews very much as a scapegoat to do his own fascist state repression of free speech on campuses and education policies and funding of universities.
This is how antisemitism operates. That’s different than, for example, anti-black racism. Anti-black racism is a permanent pushing down, a permanent casting out. You are different because of blackness. You are far from whiteness. So we have to have an analysis on the left. That’s the first thing to understand how to have multiracial movements. Because if we don’t know what antisemitism is, we actually can’t include left Jews in these movements. So when we look at things like how we talk about Israel Palestine, what we so often miss is an analysis that says Israel by cozying up to imperial powers, by becoming best friends with the United States, this is not a coincidence. The money to mass murder children in Gaza, the money to occupy the West Bank, the direct movement of Michael from Brooklyn into a house, someone’s Palestinian’s house in the West Bank, these are not accidents. The United States imperial project of overtaking land in a very, very special place in this earth is intended to maintain white colonial power. And the Jews, I actually believe are a bit of a scapegoat in this. Unfortunately, this is a historical and biblical connection for Jews. We can debate how much or how little, that’s a whole other podcast,
But it’s not an accident that the United States is this invested in this genocide or in the displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank. And what happens is we don’t have an analysis of the fact that Christian Zionism, so there are more Christian Zionists in the world than there are Jews there absolutely believe more Christian Zionists even in the United States than there are Jews in the
Marc Steiner:
United States. Correct.
Molly Kraft:
So what we have to be able to say is that confluence of things, it doesn’t make antisemitism go away. It also doesn’t make it the biggest oppression of all time. There are bigger oppressions, especially because most Jews, it’s hard to say exactly how many, but most Jews globally are probably more like Ashkenazi, probably present more like white in societies where whiteness is the norm, that means that they are closer to power, which means that, for example, I do have the ability to not face discrimination all the time because most people probably don’t know that I’m Jewish. Again,
Marc Steiner:
To
Molly Kraft:
Distinguish from anti-black racism, it’s not the same form of discrimination. White Jews coming to America, I’m bouncing around here, but white Jews coming to America and cosing up to whiteness to try to escape those lineages of violence and try to get to safety have traded in saying that we have to fight all oppressions at the same time. And if we believed that we had to fight all oppressions at the same time, then we would’ve never displaced anyone from the West Bank. We would’ve never stolen occupied lands in Israel. Whatever land had been given, we would’ve co occupied because if we believed that all oppressions were interlinked, if we believed that our survival was bound up in the success of the Palestinians that already existed on that land, then we would be fighting that as co-conspirators. And so for me, it’s very obvious that Israel is a settler colonial project with an imperial power backing it.
And what I believe is so important for the left to be able to name is that that settler power backing it is the United States. It is Christian hegemony, it is imperial power that cares about gas and oil. These things matter because otherwise we get into, oh, the Jews in Israel have so much power. Oh, the reason the world is letting this happen is because it’s the Jews. And then you get into global conspiracy theories which are antisemitic in nature. And so as long as we can say Israel doesn’t have more power because of being Jewish, Israel has more power because Christian Zionism is invested in Israeli Jewish Zionism to flourish. That is an important piece of this story,
Marc Steiner:
Right? It is. And preach this to preach.
Molly Kraft:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Marc Steiner:
Right. So two quick questions in the time we have here.
Molly Kraft:
Yeah.
Marc Steiner:
So given the analysis you just laid out in the table for everybody to ponder, how does that affect the ability to organize in the Jewish world? Let’s start there in the Jewish world to move people over. I mean, you can see generationally now that more and more younger Jews, your generation and younger are moving over saying something’s wrong. What Israel is doing is not right. This is not who we are. We can’t be the oppressor. So talk about your experience in that kind of organizing and where you think that’s going.
Molly Kraft:
Yeah, I think it’s such a good point. And even just your own framing of that reminds us why it’s like if you tap into the humanity of most Jewish folks’ story, if you can get a little bit of distance from that trauma. That’s why I believe it is generational. I believe that my mom’s generation, the older generations are a little bit too close and there is a genuine traumatic response that does not tell people to say, I’m looking at other human beings. There is a full transference. I mean, Naomi Klein talks way better about this than I can, but a full transference of Nazis to Palestinians like the Palestinians have become the people that they did nothing to us, but instead we will avenge all of our trauma on them. So that space into this next generation. Exactly. To your point, I think that if you can tap into the humanity of what is happening to say there is absolutely no justification for the mass slaughter of innocent children, men, women, elders, hospitals, community clinics, places where people eat playgrounds.
Like most young Jewish people, if they are not being fed absolute propaganda and lies about their own safety, I think can see that if the reverse, if this was our story and we were talking about fighting Nazis that no one would, there would be no question. And so I think that you go into the place of what safety will come from this, where will you get, we do not end up in a safer place if every single one of these people is slaughtered. We end up in a place where there will be many more people who hate Jews. I personally believe that the rise of actual antisemitism is far worse because of the situation that we find ourselves in. And I believe that the Trump administration is key in this because of scapegoating. Now, Jews, and I’ve been listening to American news in the last couple of days, and I think Jewish Americans are starting to say the repression of Palestinian pro-Palestinian protestors in the states will only lead to more antisemitism because it looks like a Jewish conspiracy. It looks like the Jews in power are saying you don’t talk like that. You don’t get to say that you don’t get funding like global Jewish conspiracy much. It’s very playing into classic antisemitic tropes,
Marc Steiner:
Right?
Molly Kraft:
So I think when we speak to Jews in North America, white Jews about organizing, it has to be collective humanity, our own histories. How is our own liberation tied up in this? And where will you actually find safety in this? You will never, ever get safe through mass murdering children. It’s just not possible. And I think young people know that.
Marc Steiner:
Again, you’ve said so much here, and I think that there is this generational trauma. I mean, I spent a long time in the Zionist movement as a young person, Haman and the Marxist Zionist after, because we all grew up with those stories. I mean, in my family, my bubby, my grandmother who’s also Ashkenazi, and folks who are listening, Ashkenazi means Eastern European Jews. If you don’t know that, we grew up with those stories because there were people in our living room with numbers in their arms growing up. And my grandmother, my bubby, her story was chilling. When the cossacks attacked her, she told the Jewish ghetto she ran from them holding her little sister’s hand, and the cossack rode up next to them and lopped off her little sister’s head while she was holding her hand. So we grew up with these stories, and I think that in some ways what you’re saying is that we have to make other Jews understand other people as well. But other Jews understand that what is being done in our name in Palestine and Israel against Palestinians is no different than what happened to my bubby.
Molly Kraft:
Exactly, exactly.
Marc Steiner:
To bring people over emotionally to see this is not us. This is not who we should be.
Molly Kraft:
Exactly.
Marc Steiner:
And I think that your work and your words are just really profound. I want to tell you that I think they are, because analytically and dialectically kind of put these ideas together both in your article and the way you describe it. So I’m curious where you think as we conclude, we can stay for the next two hours. I know we can’t. Where do you think the struggle goes from here, given everything that’s going on right now with Gaza in Israel, with this rightwing government in the United States with right wing growing across the globe as well? Tell me your own analysis, where you think it goes and where historical goes now, especially when it comes to Israel Palestine.
Molly Kraft:
Well also thank you for sharing that story because I think it’s so telling of why you have the politics that you do, which is that if you really embody what that means to a human being’s life, you carry that. And it means that you look at every Palestinian child and you think of your bubby sister and you know that you are responsible. We always say there’s that amazing quote of, I want you to look at every child like they’re your child.
Marc Steiner:
Yes, my bubby used to wear her little sister’s necklace around her neck until the day she died.
Molly Kraft:
That’s so beautiful. And you carry the hope of fighting for that whoever that new little sister is each day. And we’ve heard too many countless stories of those little sisters in Gaza, and we are not doing enough to save them. So I believe the way we make those connections is through saying that the actual root of all of this is white supremacist colonial violence, and if we cannot tie all of our struggles together, then we’ll get nowhere. So for example, the reason the Democratic party has crashed and burned so hard is because those struggles have been separated. And the working classes of America are saying, actually, you don’t represent me anymore because you’re so fixated on only fighting for the elite, right? We have to say as white Jews that we are invested in fighting anti-black racism, anti Palestinian racism, fighting for indigenous sovereignty. And the reason that must be part of our struggle is because if we don’t make those connections, governments will take over and manipulate our, that is what is happening.
They will manipulate our struggles. So right now, antisemitism is being used to enact some of the most violent state sanctioned policies of fascist repression that we’ve probably seen since the McCarthy era, both in Canada and the United States. If you so much as say that you support Palestine, you have a chance of being deported, losing your job, we’re doxed a lot up here. I’m sure you guys are as well, where our public information is shared online, we’re threatened, our children are threatened, our jobs are threatened. That is happening because actually the people who are in power are white supremacists, neo-Nazis. They’re not invested in my safety. And it’s my job to say I know that because I understand. I have a clear seeing of the whole operation of power. I know that you don’t actually care about the safety of my neighbors, of my black neighbors, of my undocumented neighbors, of my native neighbors, of my disabled neighbors.
We must make cross intersectional analysis for our fights for justice in order to tie our struggles to others. I think that the question for Jews right now is very complicated, and I think it still remains to be seen where we are best positioned at the beginning of all of this. At the beginning of the genocide, it was so powerful to hear us say, not in our name, this will not happen. And now we’re being manipulated in that. And so I think we will have to continue to put our heads together to say, how can we support our Palestinian families across both North America and in Palestine by dismantling empire? And that is a bigger question because I actually think we’ll need our Christians in that, right? This isn’t going to go anywhere until we have mass public pressure saying that your tax dollars, my tax dollars are not going to pay for weapons. I read that ridiculous statistic at the beginning of the genocide, that it was only three days that if America cut off the supply of weapons, there was only a three day weapons supply because that’s how many weapons are using. So
If all taxpayers were invested in saying that needs to end now, maybe that’s our way through. I’m not so sure where Jews fit into that, but I do know that it comes from building coalition. We must build coalition, and we must be clear that these values are not Jewish. These values are not in leftist. They’re not in any tradition of a radical anti-oppressive fighting to say that we allow this kind of behavior and anyone who tells us that is manipulating us and is using Jews, I believe as scapegoat in order to do their bidding.
Marc Steiner:
Monica, I want to thank you so much for being here today. I mean, I just think that your analysis is really sharp and intense with its depth, and I really appreciate you taking the time here for the Marc Steiner show and not in our name. And we’re going to link to your article. People need to read it so well written. You’ll just sit and go through it. And I look forward to other conversations and staying in touch. Thank you so much for your work and putting everything on the line, and I appreciate you joining us today.
Molly Kraft:
Thank you so much, Marc, for having me. It was a real pleasure.
Marc Steiner:
Once again, let me thank Molly Kraft for joining us today with her brilliant and coaching analysis and ideas, and we’ll link to her work and her article from The Grind. It’s called To Fight Antisemitism. We need to accurately identify it. Too often we are failing. It’s brilliantly written, so I encourage you all to go there and read it. And thanks to Cameron Grino for running the program today and audio editor Alina Nek, who working her magic Roset Ali for producing the Marc Steiner show and the titleless Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News for making the show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you Molly Craft for joining us today. It was a great conversation. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Mark Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.
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