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Amid Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza, its illegal annexation of land in the Occupied West Bank, and belligerent warmaking in Iran and Lebanon, antisemitism around the globe is rising—but so is an international chorus of anti-Zionist Jews speaking out against Israel’s crimes. In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with renowned author and commentator Peter Beinart about his new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, and about the “civil war” within the Jewish world over Israel.
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. And once again, we’re joined by Peter Beinart. He’s jumped with an incredible writing recently. He’s the 2026 Pan America Literary Award for nonfiction, his atest book being Jewish after the discussion of Gaza, a reckoning, which I encourage everyone to read and wrestle with. He’s a professor of journalism, political science at the New Mark School of Journalism at University of New York, contributing opinion writer at New York Times, editor at large of the Jewish currents, MSMDC, political commentator and non-resident fellow of the Foundation of the Middle East. And you can see his work at Beinart Notebook on Substack. So without further ado, welcome, Peter. Good to have you with us.
I was thinking many ways how to start this, but this is a very difficult time for Palestinians to survive. It’s also a very difficult time for Jews to stand up saying, “Not in our name.” And you are one of the most prominent people out there saying that and not being anti-Israeli or anti-Jewish about it. So talk a bit about that for a minute, just your whole way of approaching what we face.
Well, Judaism is an ancient tradition, which speaks in many, many voices. But for me, when I think about what it means to be a Jew, and I start with the belief that Torah begins with the creation of human beings who are not of any religion or race or ethnicity. The first human beings that we encounter in Torah are not Jews or proto-Jews or Israelites or proto-Israelites. Adam and Eve and Noah, generation of the Tower of Babel, Cain and Abel, they’re universal human beings. And I think the lesson to that for me is that all human beings have incalculable value and that we must never lose sight of the value of all human life. And so what we see in the discourse in Israel and in many Jewish communities around the world is a support for the state of Israel that essentially trumps the value of the lives of all the people who live within that state.
And that seems to me actually something akin to idolatry. It’s essentially the worship of something human made, the creation of a state, and the elevation of it over the lives of the human beings, human beings created in the image of God who live within that state, 50% of whom are Palestinian. And so to me, I think what’s incumbent upon us as Jews is to recenter the value of all human life, including Palestinian life at the center of how we think about what it means to be Jewish.
So one of the things in what you’ve just said and what you’ve been writing, let me just throw this one thing out and maybe you’ll disagree or maybe you’ll agree, we’ll see. Antisemitism in this world runs very deep and it has for millennia. But what I’ve been talking and writing about recently is that for the first time in the history of the Jewish people, we’re unleashing it. We’re unleashing what’s dormant. We’re unleashing what’s active because of what’s happening in Israel, because of what Israelis are doing in our name to the Palestinians. And it doesn’t take much for hatred of Jews to explode. And I think it’s exploding because of ourprisian and Palestinians. Does that fit at all with you?
I would put it somewhat differently. I mean, I agree with you that antisemitism is rising. I think it’s rising for two different reasons. Okay. The first is it’s rising in the same way that Islamophobia and anti-black racism and anti- LGBT and anti-immigrant. All of these things I think are rising because liberal democracy is faltering because we have these forces in America and you see them also in other parts of the world that basically are ethnonationalists. They basically want their country to be the province, to be dominated by one tribe, and everybody else is subordinate. I mean, what does Trump mean by make America great again? He means that there was a time in America where everybody knew their place, white Christian, straight men were on top and everybody else was below them. And these people want to reassert that America. And that process means devaluing the lives and the rights of everyone who doesn’t fit within that identity.
And Jews are part of that, but we’re only one part of that. And so the people who have white Christian supremacists are going to be likely to be antisemitic and they’re also likely to be anti-black and anti-Muslim, et cetera. The second kind of reason antisemitism is rising, I think, is the one that you’re getting at, which is to say there are a lot of people who are very angry at Israel, often for very, very good reason. The problem is that Israel speaks in the name of the Jewish people and American Jewish and other diaspora Jewish organizations essentially say that to be Jewish means you support Israel, that Judaism and Zionism are essentially inseparable. And I think that is very dangerous because it basically says to people, “If you’re angry at Israel, you should also be angry at Jews.” And we have to fight against that conflation.
