Bryan Schwartzman:
From my home studio, welcome to Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations.

Marc Dollinger:
We are supposed to be controversial, it's the whole idea of what it is to be a university or a university academic press. That's why we have tenure, right? We're supposed to be protected to say unpopular things because there needs to be a place in social discourse for that to happen.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I am your host, Bryan Schwartzman. Today we'll be speaking with Marc Dollinger, a historian and public intellectual who studies the history of contemporary Jewry and social justice movements, and we'll be discussing his essay, Anti-Israel, Anti-Zionist, Antisemitic: Reflections on the San Francisco Bay Area and Beyond after October 7th. And okay, I'll admit it. In this interview, I actually didn't ask a ton of questions about the Bay Area specifically, even though that's the title of the essay. We know there's a very specific culture there that's been the engine of so much social change, and it's probably a miss on my part. But I think we covered just about everything else in this essay and beyond. Black-Jewish relations, Jews and white supremacy, anti-Zionism, antisemitism, October 7th, the war in Gaza, strife within the Jewish community, it's all here packed in this interview. We cover a lot of ground, so get ready for some what we hope is groundbreaking conversation. So first off, I wanted to introduce, I've got my friend first and executive producer second, Rabbi Jacob Staub in the recording room with me today. Good morning, Jacob. How are you doing?

Jacob Staub:
Good morning. Thank you. I'm doing well. Good to be here.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Excellent. We heard you had some traffic problems getting back home in time, but we're glad you made it.

Jacob Staub:
Baruch hashem.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So I guess I first wanted to ask how you found Marc Dollinger, what made you reach out to him specifically to write an essay and add to Evolve's content?

Jacob Staub:
Sure, thank you. I'll start with the Bay Area. I have family in the Bay Area. When I go to visit my family in the Bay Area over the last 10 months, they are overwhelmed by what they perceive as antisemitism that has been prompted by the war in Gaza, as they see it. And so I wanted a scholar to talk about what goes on there and why this is happening, if he thought it was happening in the way that it was being perceived. Because I'm of the opinion, in a non-scholarly way, but I'm of the opinion that whatever antisemitism has been generated since October 7th around the world has not been caused by the war, but rather has been fed by the war, that it's latent stuff that becomes blatant. So I really wanted Marc's perspective. I'm glad to say, I'm happy to say that he does a wonderful job sifting through that and sorting it out.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I think so. I think the essay is absolutely worth reading. And the interview goes, the scope is a little bit bigger and we talk a little bit more about some of his larger scholarly-

Jacob Staub:
Well, I could also say, went to him because I love the kind of scholarly work he does. He departs from the consensus in many ways and comes to challenging conclusions that I think are very valuable in a number of fronts.

Bryan Schwartzman:
And he's good at explaining things too. But it's funny, as we're sitting here, I'm thinking a little bit about journalistic unconscious biases. If the essay had been called New York, and like you I'm a former New Yorker or maybe once a New Yorker, always a new Yorker, I'm sure I would've worked in a question there. But because it's an area I've only visited a few times in my life, maybe it was less in the front of my mind. But essay and conversation, definitely worth checking out. I'm glad you commissioned the essay and we invited him on the show. Jacob, since you're here, is there anything else Evolve related coming up we want people to know about? I believe we've got a web conversation and maybe there's another symposium on the way. Fill us in.

Jacob Staub:
Yeah, you're right on target. So yes, on Wednesday, August 7th at 2:00 PM Eastern Time, we're going to have a web conversation with Rabbi Bob Gluck about his essay exploring whether the critique of chosenness that Reconstructionists have applied to are the Jewish people, the chosen people might also apply beyond that to the human species and how our self-identification as the center of the universe, the human beings as the center of the universe, the chosen species might probably affect very deeply the whole environmental climatological crisis that we're in. So there's that. That's on August 7th.

Bryan Schwartzman:
We'll leave a sign up link in our show notes.

Jacob Staub:
Yes, that would be great. Sign up, absolutely. There's no charge for signing up and you get to be a participant in the conversation. You can ask questions and make comments and engage with the guest about the issue, should you want to. And you can sign up on the link in the show notes. And I'm hard at work on a project for September. We're having a symposium centered on Timothy Snyder's wonderful book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. He gives 20 practices that people might have usefully employed in the 20th century that might apply to how we can resist assaults on democracy today in our own time.
And we have 20 different writers, each of them picking one of these 20 practices to explore how they can or have trouble addressing such practices, as be courageous, as you can investigate thoroughly, all those things that really apply to what we all need to do between now and November 5th hopefully, and hopefully not beyond November 5th. So look for it. It'll be highlighted in the monthly newsletter. If you are registered for the newsletter, it will come to you automatically. If you are not, you can register the newsletter on the Evolve site and then you will be getting all of our publicity and notices.

Bryan Schwartzman:
That's evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org. Thanks so much, Jacob. Now let's introduce our guest, Professor Marc Dollinger. He's the Goldman Family endowed chair in Jewish studies and social responsibility at San Francisco State University. He's the author most recently of Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s. He teaches courses in American Jewish history, Jewish social responsibility, and antisemitism. Professor Marc Dollinger, welcome to the podcast. It's really great to have you here.

Marc Dollinger:
Thank you so much. I'm honored to be here and have an opportunity to chat.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Great. There's so much I want to chat with you about so let's dive in. I know you're a historian, you're a public historian, you've written and talked a lot about what historians do, how they do it. And I guess I was wondering, your Evolve contribution is about very current events and developments since October 7th, but bringing a historical lens to that. So I guess I was wondering, as somebody who writes about the past, what and why did you choose to write about basically the present?

Marc Dollinger:
Yeah, thank you. It's an excellent question. So I joke, but it's true, that my academic fields are religion and politics, the two things you're not supposed to talk about in polite conversation. And I specifically write about the history of Jews and social justice. So while I engage a lot with the 1950s and '60s around the civil rights movement, the movement for racial equality, certainly since the racial reckoning here in the United States, and now of course with October 7th, the historical questions on social justice are resonating in such a strong and powerful way in contemporary American Jewish life that I think folks are really yearning to get a better understanding of what came before and how it is, honestly, that we got here. So while my training is in the past and as I like to say it's tough enough to predict the past, I think that these topics really, really resonate in the current scene.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So if I understood your Evolve essay correctly, and I've certainly misread essays before, on the one hand you were pointing out that a lot of the criticism from the left that we've seen of Israel post October 7th really echo themes and lines of argument we've heard starting from the late 1960s. So nothing new and yet something about what we've seen post October 7th feels entirely new. And I think you even said to me before we went on the air that you didn't see it coming at all. So if I've got that right, can you say a little bit more on how these two observations can be true at once?

Marc Dollinger:
Yeah, it's incredible. This is a both/and. It is historic in that nothing is new because I think all of it can be traced back to history. And it's historic because, I've been studying this for 25, 30 years now, I didn't see this thing coming, certainly in its intensity. So we'll start with what's not so new, and that is the relationship of the American left to Israel, to the state of Israel and to the notion of Zionism. From Israel's founding even before, before 1948 until we can at least say the 1967 war for some, Israel was seen as a leftist socialist utopia, the kind of place that the American left envisioned and dreamed about. Socialism is something that maybe works on a more limited scale, but it's really hard to play it out on a national scale.
There's an academy award-winning documentary movie called Berkeley in the Sixties about the social protest movements that you see at Berkeley. There's a scene in that movie in Sproul Plaza where they're having a sit-in demonstration and in the midst of the sit-in demonstration in the mid '60s in Berkeley, they start playing Israeli folk dance music and half the room jump to their feet and begin an impromptu hora dance. Now I'm thinking in the current campus climate and certainly around the encampments, they are not playing Israeli folk music and the leftist protesters are not jumping to their feet and beginning to dance. So we had an era prior to the '60s where there was symmetry.
Then in the mid 1960s, much of the left broke from Zionism, some Jews also broke from Zionism. And certainly after 1967 when the occupation began, there was a profound split. So one argument is that what we see this year on college campuses is actually just the next chapter or the next version of what happened in the mid to late 1960s when Israel went from the socialist utopia to the colonial imperialist nation state. In terms of what's different, the depth of allyship that the Palestinian cause has gained in the United States, in Western Europe and in much of the world is something we haven't seen as much before. And I think that really led to how rapidly it spread from campus to campus, how wide and expansive support was, including a lot of the generation of college-age Jewish students who not anti-Zionists themselves are certainly empathetic to the Palestinian cause and quite critical of Israeli government actions.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I guess when I was in college in the 1990s during Oslo, I mean there was certainly virulent anti-Zionist sentiment, Israel the colonizer, Israel the occupier, there was certainly very strong pro-Israel sentiment. And most of the campus was a total shrug, couldn't care, looking forward to the next college basketball game or anything else. I guess it's hard for me to imagine the full campus culture getting caught up in it.

Marc Dollinger:
Yeah, literally it was the Columbia University encampment and protests. It was quieter before Columbia and then after Columbia is really when campus after campus began to follow what was going on in New York City in solidarity with them. I think generally our college students and young people want to change the world and want to do it for the better. And in their minds they were perceiving the way in which Israel was executing this war to be one that they wanted to fight against and they wanted to make part of their legacy. And as soon as that became internalized, I think we saw the rapid depth and breadth of the protest movement.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Now you've written extensively studied Black-Jewish relations and I was wondering if there've been any paradigm shifts for you since October 7th, or have you seen any interesting developments on that front noteworthy since October 7th?

Marc Dollinger:
Yeah, I would say it's the same and more. So we saw in the mid to late 1960s among some in the African-American community a leftist split. And this is what we're now calling intersectionality. And this is the notion that oppressed people of color across national boundaries are all suffering essentially from the same sort of hardship. And then when you put capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, or at least charges of that to it, you can start to draw lines of connections that are transnational.
So in one sense, this is merely a repeat of what we had 50 and 60 years ago. That said, this is also new. And my biggest surprise, and if you ask what's different now than before, the NAACP came out with a public statement calling for an end of all at least offensive weapon shipments. Although there's a debate about what's considered offensive as in defensive. NAACP has always taken a legalistic approach. They very rarely taken positions on international affairs. And most importantly, I think the NAACP and the organized Jewish community have historically been very, very close since the NAACP's very founding, which included prominent American Jews. So I think when they came out with that statement, it really was a signpost that we are in a new and different era in the relations between white Jews and Blacks than we were before.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Wow. I've seen you, at least a video of you online telling that story of showing up as a freshman at Berkeley and going up to the Black Student Union table and saying, "Hey, I'm here. Let's start a Black Jewish dialogue group," and how that kind of started an interest in this topic that's led throughout your academic career.

Marc Dollinger:
Yeah, I wasn't aware at age 18 that that would end up being really a formative experience for me that would lead to this career. I was coming out of the white suburbs of LA, middle class and sort of raised in a lot of the liberal idealism of Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement. And it was quite natural in my mind for me to approach my classmate from the Black Student Union and ask for dialogue. And as I write in the original preface to the book, he laughed, he just burst out laughing. And of course I was not expecting a laugh. And he quickly sort of recoiled and he said to me what he said was, "Hey, I'm from Harlem."
And literally I understood that he's from New York City, in a historically African-American neighborhood. And I of course knew I was raised in LA but I think he was really communicating to me some deeper truths, which is if you're a Black man raised in Harlem, you got a very different worldview than a white man raised in the suburbs of LA. And I took his response as an invitation to begin to learn how it is that the worldview I was raised in could be in conflict with the person that I naturally thought when I approached him would be somebody who would be an ally. And he was kind. He said, "Look, I'm happy to pitch your idea to the group if you want me to," but he said, "I don't think there's going to be interest." And I said, "No, I appreciate the offer that's okay". And then I went on to do a lot of thinking and writing and teaching sort of about what was going on in that exchange.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I mean, I'm intentionally backing up to talk about your book, Black Power, Jewish Politics, but before I do, this isn't usual, right? Historians don't usually put in stories or anecdotes from their freshman year of college into their histories, right? You do this to be more accessible or to make it more personal or just you think it's more effective? I'm curious. I don't remember reading academic books like that.

Marc Dollinger:
Thank you. This is such a good question. It's a deep question. It's a painful question in certain ways. And I'll just start by saying, first semester graduate school PhD history programs tell you that you should not insert yourself into the narrative, that the job of an academic historian is to go to a time and place different from our own and describe it and explain it. That's ultimately going to be our dissertations as they explained to us in our first year. And they said, if you do a really good job, then you'll write a really good book, you'll get good reviews, you'll get a job. And if you don't, you won't. It's not related to our own personal identities, it's related to our brain and our discipline and how we approach our craft.
So I spent the first 25 years of my career writing and publishing books and articles with this notion that I somehow was detached, apolitical, third person doing as good a job as I could. And then after having finished writing this book and first having a conversation with Ilana Kaufman, the founder and CEO of Jews of Color Initiative about how in her perception as a Black Jewish woman that I as a white Jewish man had missed a whole lot in my story and had gotten a lot of the story wrong as well based upon my identity categories, certainly racial and I think gender as well had me reflecting.
And then I thought to myself, and I was called out as well by an African-American professor colleague of mine at San Francisco State teaching communication studies who reminded me that when he teaches communication, his field is communication of ethnicity and race. Of course your ethnicity and race matters in how you communicate because that's his academic field and that was the course. And I was kind of boasting that in Jewish studies we try to invite non-Jews into the classroom so that we don't have a bifurcated room between Jews and non-Jews and Jewish studies. And he smiled and he sort of put his hand on his face to visualize it and he said, my color is on everything I write and everything I teach. And then he said, "Yours is too, but you don't have to say so."
And between these two bits of feedback, I realized I actually need to own not just that I'm a white man writing about race, that would be the obvious thing, but I need to be responsible every reader before they get to page one of my book to know who's writing this book. And that empowers and informs the reader to be as critical or non-critical as they want to be, but no more pretending. And then with this, of course, I reflected back on graduate training and how racial privilege and gender privilege really was not worked into what they said and that all of us bring all of ourselves to all of what we do. And rather than pretend that we don't, go the opposite direction and embrace it. So yeah, I agree with you. There are not too many academic books that start with embarrassing college stories. And I also had a story about going to Harlem Globetrotters game in elementary school. Because I really think to be the best scholar, we have to own all of that.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So is it possible standing on one foot to give us the thesis of Black Power, Jewish Politics?

Marc Dollinger:
Yeah, yeah. So Black Jewish politics, it's called Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s, argues that the American Jewish ethnic revival and religious revival of the 1970s, for the most part, depending on folks' age they may remember the Soviet Jewry movement. They may remember ba'al teshuvah, when Jewish young people became more traditional than their parents. They may have learned about even the political rightward move of the neoconservatives, the rise of American Zionism after the 1967 war, that, dating myself raised in the 1970s, I was educated and taught that these were honest, wonderful expressions of Jewish ethnic pride, and this was the doing of American Jews. And I got into the archives and I just kept finding mainstream, and I'll just say white male, middle age national Jewish leaders praising the Black Power movement for having inspired them to be more proud of their Jewishness.
And the book tracks each of these 1970s movements backwards to show the way in which Black Power inform them. On the most literal level, that's what the book does. On a deeper level, it challenges what's American Jewish historical memory, which is to say that at least those of us raised an organized Jewish life as I was, were sort of brought up with some mythical concepts of Jewish participation in civil rights. Much of it is true and much of it is invented. So the book really challenges a lot of the conventional thinking. One of the most surprising ones for me was doing research on the Nation of Islam, one of the most anti-Semitic organizations you're going to find. And I found out in the 1950s the Nation of Islam was being defended by national Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, two groups you would never, ever expect to be saying nice things about the Nation of Islam.

Bryan Schwartzman:
And this was from a content standpoint or this was for the rights of one religious group equals the rights of all religious groups? I guess I'm not... What was the context of defending the Nation of Islam?

Marc Dollinger:
Yeah, thank you. There are several. So one example was from the prison system. And there was a prison in Lorton, Virginia where members of the Nation of Islam were being told that they could not wear religious clothing while they prayed in prison because it violated whatever the clothing codes were for the prison. And national Jewish leaders wrote to the warden demanding that religious freedom rights in the United States must give Black Muslims the right to pray and the right to pray in the religious garb that they want. While that is consistent with where the American Jewish leadership has always been on church-state separation, I think it's safe to say that in the 21st century, we're not going to get national Jewish leaders writing to prison wardens demanding that members of the Nation of Islam have the right to pray.

Bryan Schwartzman:
It's fascinating in that the general historical memory that I understand it is that Black Power and the emergence of Black Power is a lot of what drove the historic alliance between Jews and African-Americans apart, that both in context and the idea that white Jews shouldn't be active members of groups pursuing civil rights. But I don't know if you're saying it's not that or it was that and a lot of what the Black Power movement stood for positively impacted and was emulated by American Jews on a national.

Marc Dollinger:
Yeah, thank you. This is a question in historiography. Historiography is the history of historical writing, which is how does each new generation of history professor look at the same event in a different way? The first generation of scholars who looked at the alliance between white Jews and Blacks and the civil rights movement saw two groups that were apart, who then came together in the '50s and '60s and marched arm in arm because these two communities are natural allies. And no matter what book you read, if it was a local history or national or a memoir, all of them essentially told that story. The next generation really alluded to what you described, which is in the mid-nineteen sixties, this alliance fractured with the rise in part of the Black Power movement. And now we had two communities, white Jews and Blacks, coming together for about 10 years from let's say '54 to '64. And then since the mid '60s, we've, well, that second generation said we've been busted apart and we're no longer together.
What Black Power, Jewish Politics argued was that it is true in the mid 1960s the two groups split because the facts bear that out. But what American Jewish leaders did after the split was to emulate the tactics and strategies of Black Power. So Black Power was indirectly and informally permitting American Jews to take more strong activist public stands as Jews something, let's say in the 1950s, most American Jews didn't want to be all that political with their Jewishness in public for fear that it would provoke antisemitism. If Black is beautiful, as the slogan from the '60s went Jewish is beautiful too. So I argue that there is a parallel relationship. They were not side by side and there was a great deal of tension. But I think it would be a huge mistake for American Jews not to understand the debt that's owed to Black Power.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Have you been moved by this conversation? Has that bulb gone off in your head? That feeling when you think of something from a totally new perspective? Have you deepened your Jewish practice from a resource from ritualwell.org? Has your life been impacted by a Reconstructionist rabbi or a community? If the answer is yes to any of these things, consider making a gift to Reconstructing Judaism. The organization brings you this podcast and so much more. We partner with people and communities to help envision the kinds of Jewish communities we all want to be part of and then set out to build them. There's a donate link in our show notes and you can also give at the Evolve homepage and click Support Us. And now back to my conversation with Professor Marc Dollinger.
And this book came out in 2018, correct?

Marc Dollinger:
Yeah.

Bryan Schwartzman:
And 2020, maybe that was your second or third printing of the book?

Marc Dollinger:
That's correct.

Bryan Schwartzman:
And we have the horrific murder of George Floyd and a national racial reckoning, and your academic book actually sells pretty well and almost sells out of copies, and you would think this is a good thing. And yet, can you tell us about the controversy that ensued from this?

Marc Dollinger:
Yeah, so the book sold out three print runs, which is great. Not large print runs because they're academic books, but I was still happy about it.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Sure.

Marc Dollinger:
So quickly, by the time we're ready for the fourth print run, my editors reached out and said, "It's time for a new preface to your book," which in journalistic terms is sort of a puff piece to sort of reflect on how it is that the themes of this history book played out in the national racial reckoning, and specifically on white American liberal Jews, as well as Jews of color, specifically Black Jews, for whom the book resonated in many ways in a positive way and in many ways in a really negative way too. And they said, "Give it a couple of thousand words on how it is that that happened." So I wrote it up and sent it in, and the good news is I got... You always get edits, editors job is to tell you things you should change, but they thought it was strong enough to want to co-publish it and maybe LA Review of Books, they threw that out as a possibility.
I was quite excited. And then the next day I received an email to say that someone they identified as an anonymous peer reviewer was so upset with two parts of the new preface that they were not going to publish it in the fourth printing, that they were so worried that the book would sell out too quickly before I could rewrite a new preface, that they'd already sent it to print. And that was concerning to me because I considered that censorship actually. That led to several months of back and forth to try to figure out some kind of compromise, which is kind of tough since the book was already printed at that point. Eventually it made it to the Forward newspaper and it got national press coverage, open letters back and forth. Nine of my colleagues, my senior colleagues in American Jewish history wrote an open letter expressing their concern, op-eds as well. So with that, I'll hand back to you to go in whatever direction you'd like.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Well, I guess I would be remiss if I didn't ask what were the issues with what you'd written?

Marc Dollinger:
Yeah. So as Ilana Kaufman reflected to me in our meeting before the book was published, I had written 250 pages on Blacks and Jews and not a single page on a Black Jew. I had the answer that every academic gives when someone criticizes them for not writing what the other person wanted them to write. And Ilana came back with an extraordinary reply that really undermined the basic thesis of my book in one sentence, she said, "How much did white racial privilege play as a causal historical agent in each and every one of your chapters? Because you're not talking about race. And when you're not talking about Black Jews and you're not talking about the racial privilege of white Jews, then your book is incomplete."
So what is now the last chapter of the book in its revised edition is really me deconstructing that conversation that I had with Ilana and I felt... I learned about a man named Charles McDew. Chuck McDew. He was the second chair of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the most important civil rights organizations in the '60s. One of his colleagues described him as Black by birth, Jewish by choice and revolutionary by necessity. Only after the book came out did I even realize he existed. The second chair of SNCC was a Black Jew. And Marion Barry was before him, and John Lewis was after him. And I only learned it because one of my Zoom classes I taught was attended by his partner who held up his memoir, he'd sadly passed away too young, and said, "My late partner's memoir is here, you should read it." And of course, I jotted down the title and read it.
So in the new preface, I offered an apology and acknowledgement of that omission and acknowledgement that that was a weakness in the book and an apology for it. And I was told by my editors that I'd gone too far and I didn't need to apologize. I happen to think all of us should be learning and all of us should be accountable and certainly be specific, a white man writing a book on race, learning that I didn't see that because, to get deeper into this, the archives didn't have Chuck McDew in them. And now we can ask a deeper level, why didn't a Black Jewish activist get his story transferred into archives so that scholars can see them later?
And then the second issue is that I used the word white supremacy and they really didn't want me to use that word. Specifically what I said was, "Physically distant from the nation's urban centers, suburban Jews lamented their lack of proximity to communities of color and the ways in which the last few generations of American Jewish social mobility had reinforced elements of white supremacy in their own lived experience." Now what that sentence means is that a generation of Jews were raised in urban America and then they got to go out to the suburbs and buy a house because the anti-Semitic parts of the housing covenants went away. Except the anti-Black restrictive covenant parts didn't go away. So they were joining all white communities. For them it was the achievement of the American dream and they worked hard to get there and it was a sign of American Jewish success.
But this is part of historical memory that we miss. It was also a moment at which white Jews became a part of and complicit in and reinforced, in this case, housing segregation. My research for my first book revealed a 1951 survey by the Anti-Defamation League of Jewish Community Centers that were being built in these new suburbs. Now, half of the JCCs only admitted Jewish people, and we don't know if there were Jews of color who tried to get in, so we don't know what their racial policy would've been. But of the half that admitted, non-Jews, half of those were racially exclusive. So part of the story, at the same moment a disproportionate number of American Jews were indeed supporting the civil rights movement, all of that is true. It's also true that a large overwhelming majority of American Jews in benefiting from the privilege of whiteness were reinforcing the system of white supremacy. And this anonymous peer reviewer decided that they did not want that phrase there and was able to have it censored as a result.

Bryan Schwartzman:
And what did you take from that whole experience? You did eventually find a publisher with the new preface, right?

Marc Dollinger:
Correct. Correct. Yeah.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So what did you draw from that experience?

Marc Dollinger:
I'll start by lifting and honoring Professor Samira Mehta from the University of Colorado. She wrote a piece after all this happened and pointed out my white maleness in the scandal, not even in the book, but essentially if a senior white male scholar, and I have an endowed chair and I'm as protected a scholar as one could be, is not able to apologize for my internalized racism that I didn't understand, who is going to use the word white supremacy, which is a legitimate word in the history of race in America, it's not safe for females, for junior faculty, for faculty of color, for Jews of color. And my decision to go public with it was really rooted in large measure by the idea that if even a senior white male scholar crosses the line, which is acknowledging racism in the American Jewish community, then I'm not even safe.
And I know for all the other more marginalized scholars, graduate students, untenured faculty could never, ever go against an anonymous peer reviewer in public. So that was the first part. The second part is the whole idea of what it is to be a university or a university academic press. We are supposed to be controversial. That's why we have tenure. We're supposed to be protected to say unpopular things because there needs to be a place in social discourse for that to happen. So for someone like me to have something like that censored was deeply troubling. And I'll just send folks to the open letter that my nine colleagues wrote because there they articulated that. And I also was invited by the Journal of Academic Freedom to document this. So if folks go to the website, it's free and it's all online, and they can get all of the nitty-gritty details of that.

Bryan Schwartzman:
And we'll post a link to the open letter in the show notes. And so many directions I could go from there. I guess I'll ask, in those years in 2020, 2021, 2022, what did you make of, maybe on communal organizational level, American Jewish efforts to maybe confront that racial legacy or wrestle with some of the ideas that you put forth in the book?

Marc Dollinger:
Yeah, for this I'll... Very early after the book was published, I was invited on Zoom by the Jewish Community Library of San Francisco, one of my favorite places to research and to write, to present the book talk. And 400 people came on Zoom, which was the largest day that they'd ever had. This was during COVID and stuff, so we weren't meeting in person. And I gave the talk. And then I was sent the evaluations of my talk, you know because they ask everyone to evaluate it. One person wrote, "I can't believe Professor Dollinger was able to keep his composure given what everybody was saying about him in the chat." And my answer to that to myself was, "Well, that's easy to keep your composure if you don't have the chat open when you're teaching." And I did not have the chat open.
And really this was a reflection, as our chief librarian sort of expressed to me afterwards, that the white Jewish community in America was not ready then and is hopefully now a little bit more ready to have these kinds of conversations. That we have internalized, we meaning white Jews, have internalized the concept that our Jewishness insulates ourself from our whiteness. In other words, white Jews can't be racist because we're Jewish. And the research of my book and then everything that's come out since then as we've been talking about it, we can be, and we are, white America's most liberal and progressive ethnic group since 1928 in national polling, and for white Jews who have gone through the Americanization process, we also are a part of those systems of white supremacy. And holding both of those truths I think is really, really hard for a lot of folks.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I mean, there's no question post October 7th, we've seen an alarming rise in antisemitism, in sentiment, in overt acts, and I've certainly read some folks have pointed to efforts at racial reckoning at diversity, equity and inclusion in colleges and university, maybe even within Jewish organizations themselves as a reason, as that efforts to do this have gone so wrong that they've fueled the fire of antisemitism. Does that resonate with you? How have you responded? Because I'm sure you've heard that argued as well.

Marc Dollinger:
I will say that's the first question I always get on every talk about Jews and race, whether I talk about that topic or not.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So I'm late, it's like the 10th question I've asked.

Marc Dollinger:
And there's so much to what you just said and there's so much that's woven into that question. So I'll open with what's sadly not a rhetorical question, do Black lives matter? If Black lives matter, and now I'm specifically referring to white Jews, then they matter. It is an unconditional mattering. If race and racism is a component of so many systems in American society and we as white Jews, and certainly those of us who might see ourselves on the sort of liberal progressive side, then Black lives must matter. If there were going to be political disputes between some white Jews and some folks in communities of color, as is going to be inevitable, as there are political disputes among and between us all in every way, that can be true without an abandonment of our basic commitment to humanity and in this case across racial lines.
So Black lives still matter, and DEI efforts are recognizing the harm done, I'm in the educational field, so to children and to young people because of their racial status. So it saddens me and angers me too that there appear to be sort of opportunistic moments. Now to flip the script, the next line I typically get from that question is that they're not including Jews. Okay. If one wants to make a case about antisemitism being included or excluded from DEI, one can have that conversation without going to the next step, which is, honestly, to be racist about it. I think that there are ways in which, and this is why I love being a Jewish studies scholar and with the field around Jews and race, because white Jews have not been considered white through history. Of course, the Nazis did not consider us white and committed genocide as a consequence. So nobody can look at a Jewish person and make the claim that we have always been white.
On the other hand, especially since World War II, in this country, antisemitism has not been a force which has sociologically prevented us from moving to the highest levels of so many different industries in American society. And even as we suffered in the last five or six years the worst antisemitism had in a century, we are well prepared and well equipped in terms of our positioning in American society to fight against it and to keep it from preventing us as a group from having any kind of mobility.
So I've made a case at my university, successfully, that my course on antisemitism would be an excellent course in sort of the DEI framework because it's really important for folks understanding what's called the social construction of race, the idea that a white Jewish person at a certain time and place in history can be white and a certain time and place not be white, and that we can't have any kind of prejudice against Jews or anyone else. And, this will be a rhetorical question, why don't we all just kind of come together on this and realize that we can all support one another?
And with this I'll point out we have an ever more ethnically and racially diverse American Jewish community, which is up to 20% ethnically and racially diverse depending on how we're going to count it. So when we're having these debates about DEI and antisemitism and anti-racism, it's coming from a white-only Jewish perspective because the moment we recognize how any of these questions you've just asked me are going to land on a Jew of color, then we're going to see the way in which, now to apply what I call the Kaufman test from Ilana Kaufman, the extent to which one's racial status matters. And here I think there's a whole lot of whiteness talking from Jewish objections to DEI. Because if we try to frame it through a lens of a Jew of color, it's an entirely different formulation.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Can you tell us about the book project you're either working on or maybe have finished working on? I'm not sure where you're at.

Marc Dollinger:
Yeah, thank you. Somewhat related to the last one, I'm going from racism to antisemitism. It's a memoir on campus antisemitism. It was finished before October 7th. It's now under anonymous peer review with Indiana University Press, and I hope within a period of months it will be printed. And I've had two campus antisemitism fights in my career, one at a right-wing college and the other at a left-wing university. And I've just found the similarities and differences between those two experiences to be so profound and revealing that I really thought a book, using my personal experiences as an opportunity to sort of reveal deeper truths would be a good project.
And I'll give sort of the opening here to the intro for folks to hopefully whet their appetite if they want to get the book next year. Here in California, there's a town called Kettleman City, and Kettleman City is located in the Central Valley of California, about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco on Interstate 5. Now, anyone who knows Kettleman City knows really it's known for three things, fast food, gasoline, and a bathroom stop. Because when you're making the seven hour drive between the two cities, that's where you stop for those three things. Well, I suppose, and I'm using a little humor on a very difficult topic, that Kettleman City possesses, or at least on one day in my career, possessed amazing transformational powers. Because on my right-wing campus in Los Angeles, I was called a self-hating leftist Jew in an op-ed that the school newspaper published calling for my firing. The campus antisemitism became so severe there were physical threats against me that I actually resigned my tenure, and that's how I ended up at SF State now, which is a left-wing school.
So my wife Marcy and I packed our two young daughters at the time into the car, and we left LA as a self-hating leftist Jew. That night, I'm in my new office at SF State without realizing I'm a right-wing Zionist colonial conspirator. I have not changed at all in that day. And I'm trying to imagine how does a self-hitting leftist Jew become a right-wing Zionist colonial conspirator? And I joke it must've been Kettleman City. Well, it's the nature of antisemitism that it comes from both sides, that Jews are seen in one perspective as too powerful, and then in another one seen as weak and marginalized and outsiders. So I'm really weaving these two experiences together to look at the nature of antisemitism and also to look at DEI, ethnic studies and the way in which, in my case, white Jews are a part of interracial solidarity movements, or the extent to which they're not based upon Zionism, Israel and certainly now October 7th.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I mean, you mentioned the Kaufman test after Ilana Kaufman, have you in all this time come up with a test or kind of a way to tell when anti-Zionism becomes antisemitism? Or is this just the nuance we're going to have to wrestle with forever on a case-by-case basis?

Marc Dollinger:
Thank you for the most impossible question you could possibly ask.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Okay.

Marc Dollinger:
The Jewish studies academic community is hopelessly divided on this question. We have three different definitions out there that are being debated in a scholarly way. When I have university administrators reaching out to me asking me the question that you just did because they're getting pressure from all sides to embrace one or the other, I'm like, "It's really hard when the organized Jewish community can't decide on a definition to start asking university administrators to take sides on that." I take a rather limited, narrow or conservative view just in terms of not being expansive, which is anti-Zionism is not always antisemitism. There's certainly been historical cases of Jewish anti-Zionism from the political right, for example, as well as from the political left. I also believe that Palestinians have a right to be really upset about what's been happening to them for the last few generations. And the expression of that upset is not facto antisemitism.
That said, any introduction of classic anti-Semitic tropes in order to advance whatever the larger upset is clearly would qualify as antisemitism. I think what's going on now since October 7th and the extraordinary scholarship of scholars such as Shaul Magid and Oren Kroll-Zeldin, who have just published books on the topics, is that either Jewish anti-Zionism or counter Zionism, which is professor Magid's word to describe it, are really now opening up new expanses of our understanding on different ways in which we can frame anti-Zionism and antisemitism and see the way in which oftentimes they're weaponized against one another in advance of really more political purposes than scholarly knowledge.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Let's figure out if I can figure out a way to ask this question. Through this experience, which I'm sure was difficult and have a lot of peaks and valleys, how do you keep your core self together when different sides are telling you you can't be all these things, you can't be an academic who's a Zionist who's for Palestinian rights, who sees the humanity in everyone? And how do you both keep your core self of who you are intact while clearly evolving and changing significant parts of what you teach and believe?

Marc Dollinger:
Well, first, I want to thank you for asking a personal question, and I think that is for me reaffirming what I'm learning about my at least racial and gender identities, which is that all of us are human and it has an impact. And on the surface, I don't like getting critique. It just doesn't feel good to have somebody come at you from one particular side or the other.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Sure.

Marc Dollinger:
And I know that that's how I learn and grow. And I know that every time I receive feedback, I'm getting opportunity. All right, I'll be human now, it takes me a few days, sometimes a week, sometimes I get an email, I just close it for a couple weeks and then I can go back and reread it and open it up again when I'm feeling less vulnerable. And what I found, and Ilana Kaufman was really the first one to gift this to me, is the idea that the more open I am and the more I listen, the better my work can be. And since I do work in Jewish social justice, I am interested in having a contemporary impact. And when I'm getting critiqued by nationally recognized social justice leaders, the fact that it's coming from people like that communicates to me that I have something to learn and then it gives me an opportunity that there's a pathway that if I walk down, I can get to a more effective place in doing what it was that I wanted to do.
Specifically when the new preface controversy occurred, I was quite confident that I was on the right side of history. I also understood as a senior white male tenured professor, I had an obligation to be there because I understand so many of my colleagues are there without wanting to be there and they have no defense. So as Professor Mehta argued in her article, I actually was lifted by this controversy. I'll just say most grad students, it takes them like 10 years from the beginning of grad school before they finish their dissertation and get it written to a book and get it published. It takes a long time. Within 24 hours of that news story breaking, four different academic presses sent me unsolicited emails wanting to take the book. And that was extraordinary. And that just doesn't happen.
And as Professor Mehta correctly pointed out, the whole thing was set up really by the fact that I was a white man because a non-tenured Jew of color could not if they wanted to really taken the risk that I was able to take. So all of that really weaves itself in and it gives me a sense of what my place is and what my purpose is. And then just on a human level, I find that really meaningful. And I know that if I've made a mistake, I have an opportunity for teshuvah to make a tikkun which I need to do. And then hopefully I'll get it better the next time and get to be on the Evolve podcast with you.

Bryan Schwartzman:
All right, well, I don't know, you said I asked you the most impossible question. Let me see if I could top that. I mean, post-October 7th, I don't know, at least initially, reports were that the Jewish community was more united than it had been in quite some time, maybe since the end of the Sovereign Jewry movement. But I think months and months war has gone by, we've seen that unity fray and the divisions over Israel have come back and then some, and maybe there's other divisions over how to approach DEI. Do you have any advice from a polity standpoint based on our past, how Jewish communities might move forward?

Marc Dollinger:
Yeah, my snarky answer to all of this is it's tough enough to predict the past, I have no idea how to predict the future. That said, I do get future-oriented political questions, and this is not academic or scholarly, I just have to say that out loud. As an academic, I don't research this, but I do have some thoughts on it. It's hard to be hopeful right now. I'll just say within and among American Jews, the fractures we've had that have been exposed and deepened since October 7th, the number of families, and this largely goes on generational status, that have been split and divided in the consequence of this war, the ongoing issues we have within the American Jewish community of racism, which has all been dropped as a national communal issue since the national racial reckoning has ended. All of those are really pessimistic. All I can hope is that the most profound change cannot happen without the most profound disruption, that this has opened up wounds so deep and so harmful and so painful that maybe, hopefully we can take a look at these issues and begin to address some deep systemic hopeful changes as a result.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Professor Marc Dollinger, thank you for being on the podcast, sharing so much with us, and we certainly look forward to your next book being out in the world, and we hope to have you sit down here again and may it be a better time.

Marc Dollinger:
I appreciate that. I thank you and the whole team at Evolve for all the important work you're doing. It's just been an honor to be here.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Marc Dollinger. And we're hoping to be back with a new episode by the end of this month. Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations is executive produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub, and edited by Sam Wachs. Our theme song, Ilu Finu is by Rabbi Miriam Margles. This show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism. I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman, and I'll see you next time.

MUSIC:
[Hebrew 01:04:18]