Kreuter 35

Jewish Fiction After October Seventh

By Aaron Kreuter

1. The Mohel

Though it’s been accelerating for some time, October 7th and Israel’s genocidal response broke—along with everything else it shattered, including the illusion of international law, Israel’s sheen of respectable liberalism, Palestinian life and society, and the champagne budgets of weapon manufacturers—the boundary lines between fiction and reality. This is especially true in the Jewish world, where the alternative reality that is Zionism holds tremendous sway.

Read the following scene and ask yourself: is this real life, or is it from the most outrageous, satiric novel you’ve ever read? The scene: A bris in a Toronto condo party room in spring 2024. There’s pizza and salad and fruit and cake. Children run from room to room. A couch piled with jackets. A giftwrapped box the size of a small car (it is, in fact, a small car). A few people are wearing masks; an uncle, who is coughing wet and loud and close, is not. Siblings and cousins step onto the balcony—where it is raining—for vape hoots and whispered gossip. The mood is jovial, celebratory, child-oriented, but there are rivers of tension flowing a floor or two below. Enter the mohel: a venerated pediatric surgeon, a thin middle-aged man with a short grey beard and a kind face, the mohel has circumcised literally thousands of Jewish boys. His place in the Jewish Toronto pantheon is secure. Everybody crowds around the baby. Standing over the newborn, apron over his suit, hands in gloves, tools and instruments on a little tray, the mohel starts to talk about Gaza to his captive audience. About the hideous evil taken root in 2.3 million Palestinians, about the eternal scourge of Jew hatred. About our beloved soldiers, angels of blessed light fighting demons of darkness in the streets and living rooms of hell. The mohel is overcome with emotion. His voice is choked. The baby kicks and gurgles. And the poison is right here, in Toronto, he says. Toronto! We’ve given those people everything—everything!—and this is how they repay us? May our youth in uniform complete their mission, may they excise the evil, may they bring light into the darkness. No one says anything, though the room is still. Some mouths are open in shock. Others—the majority—nod along solemnly. Another baby officially entered into covenant with the Jewish people.

This is, of course, a very real moment from a Jewish diaspora that, in its institutions and elites and narratives, is complicit in the ongoing Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. Hundreds—thousands—of similar moments have occurred in the past two and a half years, moments that together capture the twisted logic, moral decrepitude, and fascist ire of the majority of the Jewish world. The beaches of Tel Aviv are full of American and Canadian Jews drinking and fucking as they wait to be called up to enact revenge, while in East Jerusalem, different Jewish North Americans—far fewer in number but as committed to putting their bodies on the line—are training for how to speak at the checkpoints as they go into the West Bank to protect Palestinian farmers and children from violent settlers. A nine-year-old child in Thornhill—known as one of the “safest” places for Israelis in the entire world—scootering down the street, wearing an IDF t-shirt and dog tags. A Jewish poet from Kentucky reading a poem at a Midwest literature festival about her terrible fear of antisemitism, connecting the events of October 7th with ICE raids, conveniently leaving out any mention of Palestinian death. An eighteen-year-old who went to Israel to join a pre-army program but got kicked out for bad behaviour and is now enrolled in a beginner Hebrew class at the JCC, arrives in a Make America Great Again hat, proudly showing off his tattoo of half a Canadian maple leaf and half an Israeli star of David, newly inked right over his heart. An exterminator seeing your ketubah on the way up the stairs to toss a ring of blue mouse poison into the attic crawl space and asking if you have any problems with “the Palestinians” in the neighbourhood. All these moments bending the border between reality and fiction. Must it not snap eventually?

How did it come to this? How can an entire people, spread all over the world, be so deceived? In a 2022 discussion on the state of Jewish American literature between Joshua Cohen and Nicole Krauss held at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Krauss says she’s grateful to have been born in the Jewish neighbourhood. And so am I. But the neighbourhood is, to put it bluntly, in really bad shape. Half of the neighbourhood is directly oppressing and killing millions of people and pretending they’re not; most of the other half support them in their oppression; pretty much all of the neighbourhood is on stolen land of one settler-colonial vintage or another. The neighbourhood watch is armed to the teeth. The basements, the attics, the streets are full of corpses.

It is painfully obvious to me that Jewish literature, especially Jewish fiction, which I both write and love, has had a major, even outsized role, in cementing Zionism as the central tenet of contemporary Jewish existence. So far Jewish fiction—albeit with exceptions—has failed drastically and horrifically in confronting this legacy. What is also clear is that the narrative the organized Jewish world and its adherents believe—that Israel was created as a safe haven for the hunted and persecuted Jews of the world, that it can do no wrong, that Palestinians are all irrational Jew-haters, that Israeli Jews are always and forever victims—is itself a fiction, an all-too-powerful fiction with unimaginable real-world consequences. The deadly Zionist trick of contorting reality into fiction.

So, then: the twin meaning of the title of this essay. The fiction of Zionism, fabricated whole cloth in order to eradicate a people and rule over their land; the role of literary fiction in helping Zionism launder and dominate. How can antizionist Jewish fiction, then, at this late hour, partake in the necessary work of dismantling the Zionist narrative and state, of bringing true justice to Palestine? And—if it’s too late, if not enough take up the call—what then?

2. An Outburst of Literary Consciousness

In 1977, literary scholar Irving Howe prophesied the end of American Jewish fiction. Thirty-six years later, in 2013, Jewish Canadian author David Bezmozgis revisited the prophesy, and found it still prophetic, even if Howe was off by a major wave of Jewish immigration or two. It’s worth taking a look at what they have to say, to see what it can tell us about the contemporary role and future of Jewish fiction.

Though the oft-cited parts of Howe’s introduction to Jewish American Stories, the anthology of twenty-five stories that he edited, is laser focused on Jewish American literature, the piece actually spends a good portion of its pages talking about minority literatures in America more generally. Howe writes: “Over the decades, by now stretching into centuries, American literature has steadily drawn fresh energies from regions, sub-cultures and ethnic and racial groups which, if taken together, form a pleasing heterogeneity.” These literatures are often thought of as “carriers of subversive ideas,” and, in discussing a wide range of these literatures—ranging from “New England, the ‘old Southwest,’ the Midwest, later the settlements of European immigrants, and then the Jews and the blacks”—Howe mounts a valiant attempt at categorization. However, at least some of Howe’s literary prophesizing and categorizing has proven brazenly myopic. His contention that the regional literature of American Jewish fiction is “Probably…one of the last this country is going to have” is one glaring example, Howe having failed to foresee Indigenous literature, queer literature, trans literature, Latinx literature, and so on.

When Howe does finally get to Jewish American fiction, he describes its themes and preoccupations succinctly and potently: “To feel at some distance from society; to experience, almost as if it were cultural legacy, an ironic relationship to power; to assume, almost by way of birthright, a critical stance toward received dogmas; to recognize oneself as not quite at home in the world and thereby to be ‘assigned’ tasks of social and moral criticism—these assumptions, whether taken with high seriousness or deflated toward the mannerism of absurdity, continue to inform the work of many American-Jewish writers. Nay-sayers, table-pounders, shoulder-shruggers, eyebrow-raisers, they keep some portion of their parents’ and grandparents’ irony, skepticism, sometimes rebelliousness.” An ironic relationship to power, a critical stance toward received dogmas: something that, when it comes to Israel and Zionism, has been lost, discommunicated, killed.

For Howe, this nay-saying and table-pounding is possible because of the particularities of the Jewish immigrant experience. “Their work is regional in that it derives from and deals overwhelmingly with one locale,” he explains, “usually the streets and tenements of the immigrant Jewish neighborhoods or the ‘better’ neighborhoods to which the children of the immigrants have moved [….] and regional in that it comes to us as an outburst of literary consciousness resulting from an encounter between an immigrant group and the host culture of America.” Hinting at the direction the essay is soon going to take—and a page before celebrating “Bellow’s Chicago, Henry Roth’s East Side, Fuchs’s Brooklyn”—Howe writes that “[e]verything in the immigrant Jewish experience, and thereby, it now seems, the writing based upon it, is comparatively brief, transient, a flicker of history.” Having rightly located the source for a particular kind of Jewish fiction, Howe is gearing up to wrongly claim that it is the only kind of Jewish fiction that has the potential of an “outburst of literary consciousness.”

It is in the last two pages of the essay that Howe most vociferously voices his lachrymose vision of the Jewish literary future. “My own view,” he intones, “is that American Jewish fiction has probably moved past its high point.” Howe is declaring the end of Jewish American literature in an intro to an anthology of Jewish American literature. For Howe, the decline of Jewish literature is due expressly to the end of the immigrant experience: “There remains, to be sure, the problem of ‘Jewishness,’ and the rewards and difficulties of definition it may bring us. But this problem, though experienced as an urgent one by at least some people, does not yield a thick enough sediment of felt life to enable a new outburst of writing about American Jews.” Having made his declaration, Howe judiciously leaves some space for doubt: “Others think differently. Younger Jewish writers grow impatient and irritated with the view I have expressed above.” “Perhaps these younger writers are in the right,” he admits: “I hope so, though I doubt it.”

In David Bezmozgis’ updated treatise on the state of Jewish literature, originally a 2018 talk given at University of California Santa Barbara and subsequently published in Tablet, his argument is announced in the piece’s title: “The End of American Jewish Literature, Again.” In an essay that is a combination of a close reading of Howe’s earlier missive alternating with a reading of Bezmozgis’ own oeuvre of short fiction and novels, Bezmozgis basically agrees with Howe, while making space for himself and the Jewish Soviet immigrants he fictionalizes. “[M]y work actually confirmed Howe’s unhappy prediction,” Bezmozgis writes. “If, as Howe says, American Jewish writing is inherently immigrant writing, and predominantly Eastern European, Yiddish inflected, immigrant writing, if it is nourished by this immigrant experience and proximity to that experience, if this is what has conferred upon American Jews their outsider status and hence their particularity, then in this sense my work does not represent an exception but rather further evidence of the rule.” Howe didn’t foresee “another immigration from Eastern Europe in numbers sufficient enough to engender its own literature—really just a new branch sprouting from the old tree,” Bezmozgis contends.

“In other words,” he writes, “like Howe, I also believe that it’s the immigrant experience that is the lifeblood of Jewish American writing. Nothing, so far as I can see, has replaced the immigrant experience as a shared feature of Jewish particularity.” The supposed passing of Yiddish, the lack of “discrimination or exclusion,” the “open, assimilationist society that is today’s America,” all are taken as signs by Bezmozgis that Jewish fiction has run its course. (Bezmozgis, in stating that “I see no great distinction between the American and Canadian Jewish experience,” turns Howe’s American Jewish literature into “North American Jewish literature.” While I see many differences between Canadian and American Jewish experiences, including population size, immigration histories, percentage of Holocaust survivors, political and assimilationist timelines, being a part of the world hegemon versus being in its immediate shadow, I will also mostly focus on Jewish fiction from Turtle Island—the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee name for North America—but with their differences intact.)

About halfway through the essay, we discover what Bezmozgis is really writing about: Zionism and the centrality of Zionism to the contemporary Jewish world. “Any hope of a continuation of a meaningful secular American Jewish life,” he argues, “is dependent, in my view, on Israel.” Why would Bezmozgis say something so inflammatory, you may ask? Because, for Bezmozgis, Israel “is the last remaining place where a vibrant secular Jewish life still exists”; because Israel “is a place where an identifiable Jewish life can exist, as it did once in Europe and America, without any reliance on religious observance”; because “Israel doesn’t need the Diaspora as much as the Diaspora needs Israel.” Having loudly claimed his Zionism—and placed all his eggs in one ethnonationalist basket—Bezmozgis goes on to say that, “However, should Israel become a theocratic and/or totalitarian state, as some people increasingly fear, it would be just as catastrophic for secular American Jews as for their Israeli counterparts.” As is true for most Zionists, this coming totalitarian state, if admitted to as a possibility at all, will always be in the future, eternally delayed, so, for now, why shouldn’t Israel do whatever it wants?

What does Israel’s apotheosis mean for the writing of Jewish fiction, you may ask? Bezmozgis has the answer: “Now, this dilemma might provide a compelling and weighty source of material for literature, but, to be sure, one that is short-lived.” In other words, Bezmozgis wants to write about Israel—which he does, in his novel The Betrayers and its cast of Soviet Israeli Jews, one of whom is a lightly fictionalized Natan Sharansky—but doesn’t think anybody else should. By rhetorically sweeping away the Israeli oppression and dehumanization of the Palestinians, Bezmozgis’s Israel is, as it is for most Jewish people, a fiction. Not one worth writing about, however. (Since October 7th, Bezmozgis has publicized his Zionist beliefs widely, in two opinion pieces in The Globe and Mail and a short story in The New Yorker, demanding that pro-Palestinian activists change their demands from stop killing children to peaceful coexistence, which obviously cannot happen with the Zionist state still intact.)

Needless to say, both Howe and Bezmozgis are Zionists, yet they are Zionists who do not think Israel, its unassailable throne in the Jewish firmament, is worthy of serious, sustained literary exploration (though to be fair to Howe, Israel and Zionism make no intrusion on his thoughts on the end of American Jewish literature). For Howe, the golden age of American Jewish literature was a phenomenon of immigration; for Bezmozgis, it’s the same, if extended a few generations farther than Howe thought possible. Though I don’t agree with the assertion that North American Jewish fiction can only be immigrant fiction, Howe was onto something in his prognostications: assimilation into American power with all its riches and violence, concomitant with a disastrously misplaced belief in Israeli power, has neutered Jewish fiction. This is likely the biggest reason contemporary Jewish literature has lost its energy: it is no longer subversive, no longer on the outside of power.

The fix seems simple enough: to reject power. To reclaim that adversarial attitude towards power, to wake up from the nightmare of ethnonationalism, wherein we kill and kill and kill and call it peace, call it safety, call it necessary. To question how a diasporic, immigrant people turned vehemently chauvinistic. To not look away from the burning bodies, collapsed universities and hospitals, all the mutilated landscapes of Gaza (and now Lebanon and Iran). To write literary fiction that brings us in line with reality, that holds us—that holds everybody accountable—to account. To make a new literature that discards the fictions of Zionism, that takes to task the fiction of our recent forebears, that does not ignore the settler-colonial reality of Turtle Island (as both Howe and Bezmozgis do). If Jewish writers don’t take this call seriously, I fear Howe and Bezmozgis will ironically be right: Jewish fiction will die.

3. Untruths and Half-Truths

Jewish fiction from the North American diaspora has played a major role in installing Zionism as the dominant narrative and worldview in the Jewish world, both through propagandistic novels and a thorough avoidance of the topic during most of the twentieth century. It set the ground for the conditions that led to October 7th and the ensuing genocide: apartheid, mistaking temporal power for safety, brutal dehumanization, dangerous and self-centered mythmaking. Antizionist Jewish fiction not only can, but must, play a role in dismantling the Zionist narrative, in imagining better worlds, in paving the way for (even the possibility of) reparations, responsibility, justice.

Like it or not, the Jewish novel that has had the largest impact on the ethno-political geography of the Jewish world in the past hundred years is, without a doubt, Leon Uris’ Exodus. Published in 1958, after what Uris himself describes as an intensive crash course in Jewish history—including supposedly reading over three hundred books on Judaism and Zionism and travelling over 12,000 miles of the newly formed state of Israel--Exodus, a massive genre novel telling the story of the scrappy Zionists who founded a state against all odds, was an immediate runaway bestseller, selling 399,384 hardcover and 1,675,000 paperback copies by November 1959. As M.M. Silver puts it, in the only book-length study of the novel, Exodus, “more than any other single artifact, set the narrative frames for a sympathetic worldwide understanding of modern Israel’s genesis.” That modern understanding? A cowboys-and-Indians battle of virtuous Jews recently emerged from the horrors of the Shoah versus the evil British and the monstrous Arabs. Disguised as a genre novel, Exodus is literary propaganda at its purest, every single sentence bent towards one purpose: making the case for the justness of and need for the violent ethnic national state of Israel.

Though today many Zionists will shrug off the impact of Exodus, saying it was an outdated tale from a different generation, it’s shocking how similar contemporary arguments and justifications for Israel are to the ones Uris laid out seventy years ago. To start with, the novel insists on the teleological inevitably of the Israeli nation-state. As David Ben-Ami, one of the novel’s many resident historians--Exodus is nothing if not filled with (a very particular version of) Jewish history—puts it in the opening pages of the novel: “I must never stop believing…that I am carrying on a new chapter of a story started four thousand years ago.” The irrational nature of antisemitism, voided of historical or political context, is hammered relentlessly into the reader: “Jew hating is an incurable disease. Under certain democratic conditions it may not flourish well. Under other conditions the germ may even appear to die, but it never does die even in the most ideal climate.” What the novel excels best at, though, is vilifying Arabs, and in particular, Palestinians. Here’s one example out of dozens: “Greed and lust, hatred and cunning, shrewdness and violence, friendliness and warmth were all part of that fantastic brew that made the Arab character such an enormous mystery to an outsider.” As scholar Andrew Furman blithely puts it: “one finds oneself wondering, as the novel unfolds, if Uris will ever exhaust his arsenal of new and derogatory ways to depict Arabs.” Anyone who’s found themselves in the unenviable position of arguing with a Zionist knows that these talking points have not changed in over seventy years. Almost unbelievably, there’s even an entire position paper plunked right into the novel explaining why the Palestinian refugees from the Nakba can’t be allowed to return to their homes that could have been published yesterday in Tablet or The New York Times.

As surely as there’s been Jewish fiction writers working tirelessly to turn the Zionist dream into a Palestinian nightmare-reality, there have been those resisting. One such writer is Aziz S. Sahwell, who, in 1960, published a pamphlet with the New York-based Arab Information Center entitled Exodus: A Distortion of Truth in an attempt to stop, or at least slow, Exodus’s massive ideological appeal. Sahwell cogently argues how Uris uses his novel “to justify the violent establishment of a Jewish state on Arab soil, to glorify Israel’s military ‘valor’ in accomplishing its unlawful purpose, and to slander and discredit all Arab people. His tools for the task are untruths, half-truths, deliberate omissions and distortions of events, all blandly presented with an air of historical integrity.” Untruths, half-truths, deliberate omissions and distortions of events, dressed in historical integrity: exactly the same thing we’ve been witnessing on our television and phone screens for the past two and a half years.

Since Exodus, Jewish diasporic fiction that deigns to explore Zionism, Israel and/or Palestine come in a number of different flavours in novels and short story collections that have grown in number in recent years. Though I’m not interested in doing a full accounting of those texts here, I’ll lay out some of the modes they take, with a couple of examples. There’s liberal Zionist Jewish fiction where Israel is the settled background (Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss). There’s Jewish fiction that tackles one part of Israel/Palestine while leaving the Zionist narrative otherwise intact (in David Bezmozgis’ The Betrayers it’s what the influx of a million Soviet Jews did to the country; in Ayelet Tsabari’s The Best Place on Earth, it’s the positionality of Arab Jews in the state’s racial hierarchy). Then there’s the rarer Jewish novel that takes the core Zionist mythologies to task (this list would include Strangers With the Same Dream by Alison Pick, The Jewish War by Tova Reich, Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar). Finally, there are the novels that are through and through Zionist, that tell Zionist stories, that make Zionist claims (Exodus, of course, as well as Uris’ later, somehow even more racist novel, The Haj; Meyer Levin’s The Settlers and The Harvest; Herman Wouk’s The Hope; Nora Gold’s Fields of Exile). Taken together, Jewish literature and the institutions that support, disseminate, award, and canonize Jewish literature are thoroughly Zionist, and take it as a given that an ethnic nation-state established in horror and blood and maintained through the same is integral to what it means to be Jewish.

There are, of course, exceptions to this narrative. Philip Roth wrote two Israel-centered novels that can be read as challenging the fundamental tenets of Jewish statehood: The Counterlife and Operation Shylock. In the latter, the protagonist, also named Philip Roth, says that if Israel dropped a nuclear bomb, the Israelis would lose their morality: “The Israelis will have saved their state by destroying their people. They will never survive morally after that; and if they don’t, why survive as Jews at all?” A very fair question to ask, not to mention that Israel has dropped enough ordnance as multiple nuclear bombs on Gaza in the past two years. One would be hard-pressed to find anything as biting or as true about Zionism and Israel in any other recent Jewish novel.

A more contemporary example would be Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus, a novel that, in fictionalizing and satirizing Benjamin Netanyahu’s father’s visit to a small liberal arts college in upstate New York for a job interview, his young children and wife in tow, is about how our worst war criminals and fascists were once just children. It’s less the novel that interests me here, but the reaction the novel had in the Jewish literary world. Alan Arkush, writing in the Jewish Review of Books, says the novel “consists of little besides distasteful mockery of the Zionist idea.” Taffy Brodesser-Akner says in the New York Times that “This was a good book to read as my Jewish friends texted me that this would stop if we could just get Bibi out of power, and I wondered what they texted each other in 1935 as the streets in Europe overheated with pogrom energy and there was no Bibi and no Israel to blame.” The outsized reaction this novel had among Zionist readers and critics helps us come to terms with the direness of the situation. Imagine the reactions to a popular Jewish novel that seriously undermined Zionism.

Speaking of Joshua Cohen, let’s return to the abovementioned 2022 discussion between him and Nicole Krauss, held at the Jewish Theological Seminary. In many ways, this is an accurate temperature-taking of Jewish literature and its practitioners on the eve of October 7th. They spend about half of the hour-long video focused on Israel, including what they term the “BDS stuff.” Cohen, who seems to be emulating his late mentor Harold Bloom in his sloppy, ill-fitting attire, compares American Jewish writers to Israeli ones, saying that “Almost every interesting Israeli that I know…left,” before going on a strange tangent about how difficult it is to be an Israeli writer. Krauss says American Jews have lost control of the narrative of Israel (whatever that means), that the Jewish story is now over there (a deeply Zionist and antisemitic position, no different to Bezmozgis’ above), that, as a writer, Israel “fascinates” her and opens up “a world of material.” Later in the discussion, however, Krauss claims that she never writes out of some contemporary event—“never, never”—by which she means she avoids politics. But writing fiction set in Israel, as she has done in numerous short stories and novels, is writing about contemporary events, is deeply political; believing that writing about Israel is not political just reveals Krauss’ typical Zionist worldview that the state of Israel is eternal, its existence undebatable, its structure as an apartheid state settled (more on this can be found in an essay on my Substack, where I compare a short story of Krauss’ and one of Palestinian Canadian author Saeed Teebi). And she is far from alone as a Jewish writer or Jewish person in thinking that. The single time Palestine or Palestinians come up in their hour-long conversation is when Cohen asks rhetorically, after summing up how badly Israeli writers have it, “Would I want to be a Palestinian novelist?” He shakes his head emphatically: “no.” In a very roundabout way, Cohen acknowledges the plight of the Palestinians, and then quickly moves on. One of the few comments posted on the video’s YouTube sums it up nicely: “I think Cohen is a great writer but I would like him to just say it out loud, Israel is an apartheid state.” Watched from the vantage point of the current genocide, the discussion seems incredibly naïve (it was incredibly naïve on October 6th, too), and speaks to the desperate need of a seachange in Jewish fiction, a jolt to the system, a down-to-the-utmost-core unsettling.

The discussion on Jewish literature’s role in confronting Zionism is just beginning to take off. In a recent Vulture article titled “A New Jewish Plotline in the Wake of Gaza,” novelist Andrew Ridker writes that “Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza has laid bare the plot holes” in the Jewish narrative of eternal and powerless victimhood. In rereading twentieth century Jewish fiction that critiques power and wealth, Ridker asks how Jewish fiction should respond to the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Ridker also helpfully points out that a decent share of contemporary Jewish American fiction now seeks “inspiration in Jewish history, folk tales, and mysticism.” These authors, called the “New Yiddishists” by David Sax, don’t write about their own lives or political situations, but look to the Jewish past to find their fictional material. While I hold nothing against these novels and their authors, I do think that Jewish literature in general needs to confront the Zionist bedrock before going off into the Jewish hinterlands. Ridker’s essay has seemingly struck a nerve: in the Canadian Jewish News, Phoebe Maltz Bovy excoriates Ridker, wondering “why American Jewish writers would be under this unique obligation” to write about Gaza, “at a time when America itself is up to all manner of unpleasantness …Why single out American Jewish writers in this way, when if they ought to be handwringing about anything (and I do not believe in making handwringing mandatory), it would be with what it means to be American? Is this not perhaps yet another example of 2010s progressive self-flagellation morphing into 2020s scapegoating of a tiny minority meant to embody all the evils of white supremacy, yet also, curiously, despised by white supremacists?” This is beyond satire: Maltz Bovy basically is stating her belief that American Jewry has no role in Zionist success or Zionist violence, not to mention that a glance at the headlines at Canadian Jewish News quickly reveals how integral Israel is to the North American Jewish world (I was recently the target of Maltz Bovy’s ire as well; the Canadian Jewish News, to their credit, published my response in full on their website). When a people, no matter how small, finds themselves in positions of tremendous power, it is our responsibility as writers to interrogate that power.

4. The Necessity for New Outbursts

If Jewish fiction is going to survive as serious literature and not just be pretty stenography for a state, it’s long past time for a serious reckoning. Zionism and fealty to Israel have dulled/dimmed Jewish literature for too long. Howe couldn’t have been more wrong: Zionism and its hold on the Jewish world is a multi-generational topic that demands its own sustained “outburst of literary consciousness.” And yes, it would be nice if Bezmozgis was correct that fiction concerned with the “dilemma” of Zionism is “short-lived,” but this would require Zionism itself to be short-lived, its violence and damage minor. The truth is that in barely a hundred and twenty years, Zionism has infiltrated and nearly suffocated three thousand years of Jewish tradition, history, ethics, and creativity, all the while mutating Jewish identity into the militaristic, chauvinist, power-hungry, reality-denying monster we see daily on our screens and argue about at our family dinner tables. Interrogating through fiction—our most malleable and consequential narrative art—how the Jewish people came to this juncture, how we have learned to deceive our eyes and ears to hold so vehemently onto a false ideal, a false idol, how we have become so morally compromised, is a subject so inexhaustible that it threatens to outlive us. And we have barely started to scratch the surface. And the bodies pile up.

What would this new antizionist Jewish literary fiction look like? The possibilities are endless. We could start with the dozens of Zionist personalities and worldviews that are ripe for fictional interrogation; Jewish Zionists, are, of course, not one size fits all. There’s the religious Israeli settler who knows exactly what he’s doing when he bombs a library or evicts a Palestinian family from their East Jerusalem home. There’s also the Jewish Canadian who knows that the death and destruction in Gaza are true, and they salivate at the thought of it. But many other—many more?—Jews actually believe that none of it—the oppression, the killing, the apartheid, the genocide—is true, that the state has never been in the wrong, that Hamas incursions are just the latest manifestation of the world’s oppression of the Jews, not an occupied people reacting themselves to hideous, generational violence. How this worldview became a Jewish archetype—through whatever muddled mixture of education, propaganda, psychic wounds, and the innate human ability to hate—is rich enough to fill an entire library.

There’s the daughter that has been ostracized from her family for finding common cause with Palestinians. There’s the mother of five who is aghast at what is happening in Gaza, but feels ill prepared to raise her views with her friends who talk about how the whole world is against the Jews. There’s the Reform rabbi torn between knowing innocent Palestinian children are being murdered and not wanting to upset her congregation. There’s the Instagram warriors who post non-stop about the Israeli hostages, but not a peep about the murdered Gaza children, except to say “war is horrible,” and then, once the hostages are released, no longer care about the situation at all, at least until the next time Jewish lives are on the line. There’s the progressive Jewish thirty-something who has Palestinian friends, who uses words like “occupation” and “apartheid” when talking about Israel, but whose brain was broken by October 7th, for whom vicious Palestinian suffering can be lamented up to and until Jewish lives are put at risk in order to ease that suffering.

Think of all the hundreds of minyans and congregations and institutions and university departments that think you solve the victim equation by simply locating the Jew, always and forever, missing the most important variable: power. All the Jewish day schools, synagogues, rabbinical seminaries, summer camps, book clubs, mah jong and canasta tables, condos, families. At one of those mah jong tables a woman talks with beaming pride about the success of the most recent Toronto March for Israel—the March! The March! A day of horror and shame where 60,000 celebrate a nation-state currently murdering, starving, and oppressing millions of people! Thousands of Israeli flags transmuted into nothing but “Jewish pride”! How will we ever outlive the damage of the March?!—and says about the Palestinian counterprotesters: isn’t it enough already? Think of the sometimes razor-thin distinction between moral and legal culpability, about how to jolt an entire people into admitting that they committed a horrific mistake, a horrific mistake which turned into a murderous soul-crimping genocide? More than enough “compelling and weighty … material for literature,” as Howe put it nearly fifty years ago.

A novel set at a refugee camp in the electric mess of the aftermath of World War II, where Zionist emissaries from the Yishuv fought and cajoled for the minds, souls, and bodies of Jewish survivors who at first wanted nothing to do with a colonial outpost a world away. A novel set during the first Zionist congress, the second, the sixth—when the Territorialists made their break with Herzl (the Territorialist leader, Israel Zangwill, was himself a fiction writer: in a story called “Noah’s Ark,” Zangwill narrates real-life Mordecai Manuel Noah’s attempt to turn Grand Island in the Niagara River into a Jewish city-state). A Jewish antizionist novel that gives the university encampments the radical care and understanding they require. A drone salesman goes on an adventure. A novel about that infamous Toronto mohel, marking tens of thousands of male Jewish babies throughout Toronto, screaming about a Kristallnacht here in Toronto, can you believe it, a Kristallnacht in Toronto! His heart stone, his mind dehumanizing, his soul parched. Novels that explicitly reject Zionism, that through their rejection turn to diaspora, the bund, the commune, revolution. Novels that reclaim narrative trails that had been buried under decades of Israeli propaganda, Israeli debris.

Most importantly, antizionist Jewish fiction must include Palestine. And not just Palestinian characters, Palestinian points-of-view, Palestinian narratives (though that’s a good start). This new fiction has to be honest with what we have done for nearly a century. We have to stand in solidarity with Palestinians. We must rehumanize. We must bolster their resistance in whatever form they choose it to take. We must stand witness. We must stand trial. And, unless I’m misunderstood: my focus on Jewish literature here does not mean I think it’s more important or vital than Palestinian literature, which is exactly the opposite of what I believe. Palestinian literature must be published, read, studied, celebrated (at least in Canada, more Palestinians are publishing novels than ever before). I focus on Jewish literature because as a Jewish antizionist I insist that we don’t just let our entire cultural output be dominated by fascists; because it’s stories that got us here, and it’s stories that will get us out.

Am I saying Jewish writers need to write about these things in their short stories and novels? Not necessarily. What I am saying is that any Jewish author who wants to write about the Jewish collective in serious, honest ways, who wants to, in other words, write literature, cannot shy away from these too-long hidden truths. To do so is an abdication of writerly care. It’s an abandonment of any kind of ethics. The Jewish literature that is needed now is one that detoxifies, that estranges, that challenges, that demonolithizes, to coin a phrase. That takes a subversive attitude towards power. The Jewish narrative needs a reset—away from Zionism, towards diaspora. Away from power, towards solidarity. Our experiences of oppression in Europe do not preclude all possibilities except us becoming oppressors ourselves. Far from it.

We can—we must—imagine alternate forms of Jewish collectivity.

5. Saving the Neighbourhood

The task before us is beyond immense. To go boldly against the established order with everything we’ve got. The sad truth of the matter is that we live in a world where a Jewish novel that makes room for the Palestinian narrative, that treats Palestinians as human, will be ignored by the majority of the Jewish literary world, if not slandered outright as antisemitic. When the dust from the genocide settles—as I write this, a false calm reigns, the elite celebrate, while in Gaza suffering and pain and death escalate—there will be Jewish people who claim they didn’t know, that they were lied to. There will be Jewish people who will never admit anything. We have to understand how it came to this point, how this happened to us, so it truly cannot happen again. Not for us. Not for anybody.

The narrative of the nation-state of Israel as the natural endpoint of Jewish history, as the saviour of eternal Jewish victims, as a bright-eyed scrappy upstart succeeding against impossibly stacked odds, as an innocent national home beset on all sides by people who hate you simply because you are Jewish, only became the dominant narrative engine of Jewish identity through hundreds of thousands of decisions, betrayals, and lies whispered and shouted. The Jewish fiction of Zionism has to be retired; antizionist Jewish literary fiction must play a role.

Fiction doesn’t just explore possibilities; it makes possibilities. We can write truth into existence. We can write towards reconciliation. We can write towards the right of return. We can write towards war crime tribunals. We can write towards a borderless, stateless world. Howe thought Jewish literature, Jewish narrative, was spent. Bezmozgis wanted the last dregs of it for himself before he packs up for Israel. But this essay isn’t an obituary. It’s a call, a hope. To stop letting our aunts and uncles and cousins get away with their poisonous worldview.

What was it about Zionism that made it such a potent reality-distorting ideology? And how do we prevent such ideologies from rising up to take hold of us again? The memory-holing, the excuse-making, the false belief—the deeper we excavate the closer we get to understanding a truth about the human condition, a truth about power, a truth about our society’s failure to meaningfully confront the climate crisis, the devastations and inequities of settler colonialism, of the whole blasted nation-state racist supremacist capitalist edifice. If the Jewish neighbourhood has any chance of righting its wrongs, of playing a part in rebuilding everything it partook in destroying, of remaining welcome in the human city, we have to come to terms with what we have done, as soon and as meaningfully as possible.

Aaron Kreuter is the author of six books, including the poetry collection Shifting Baseline Syndrome, a 2022 finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. His most recent book is the novel Lake Burntshore, set at a Jewish summer camp. He lives in Toronto and teaches literature and creative writing at Trent University. Aaron is currently editing an anthology of antizionist Jewish fiction for Baraka Books.