There’s an old joke, often told and close to my heart, that came to mind the other day. Here’s one way you could tell it:
It’s the early 1920s, and two Jews sit down next to each other on a streetcar in Detroit. One of them opens up a local edition of a Yiddish paper, the Forverts, and the other opens Henry Ford’s viciously antisemitic newspaper, the Dearborn Independent.
The one holding the Forverts turns to the other and says, “Look, I don’t want to bother you, but I have to ask: How can you possibly read Ford’s paper? It’s filled with antisemitic conspiracy theories!”
The Jew holding the Dearborn Independent smiles. “Oh, it’s easy to explain. When I subscribed to the Jewish newspapers, all I read about was pogroms, or Jews suffering from hunger, poverty, and starvation, or Jews bickering among themselves about every topic under the sun. It was all so depressing. When I read Ford’s paper, everything seems so much better: Jews, all over the world, working together, controlling all the banks and the media and the world’s governments! It’s wonderful!”
The joke came to my mind at conference earlier this week, when a colleague, the political scientist Mira Sucharov, pointed out an upcoming protest—planned for May 18, 2024—which brought me to an associated social media account, @zionistsinmusic. I’m by no means a specialist in U.S. or global popular music (Blake knows about a thousand times more than I do on the subject), but even I recognized some of the luminaries listed as Zionists. Rihanna’s a Zionist! Justin Bieber is a Zionist! And Will.i.am and Radiohead and Chaka Khan! The list, like the beat, goes on.
In the spirit of the joke, I imagine Zionists, whether in North America or Israel, must be just delighted to have the support of so many talented celebrities. And knowing that celebrity musicians sometimes get together to jam, I can’t help but wonder which Zionist ideas compel these folks, and whether they might hash out their ideological disagreements, from time to time, in a green room before a concert, snacking on all the colors of M&Ms, except the brown ones. Are some of them Revisionists, perhaps, readers of Jabotinsky? Or maybe fans of Ahad Ha’am’s cultural Zionism? Maybe some are Labor Zionists, committed to Moses Hess’s ideas?
Of course, it’s hard to laugh about such lists right now, no matter how absurd they might be. (Another stomach-turning one making the rounds in my circles categorizes writers, by color, according to whether they support Palestine or Israel.) But I confess that I worry much less about Bad Bunny or M.I.A. losing a little income because some of their fans join the cultural boycott of Israel than I worry about the decidedly non-celebrity college students and professors, many of them Jewish, who have been doxxed by anonymous Zionist activists (who get their funding from the Israeli government and American Jewish foundations), leading to death threats and denied jobs and opportunities, just because they showed up at events, or expressed their support, for Palestinian liberation. And more than even those people, I worry right now about all the musicians, artists, students and children in Gaza who want nothing to do with Hamas, whose schools and cultural institutions have been reduced to rubble, who are currently starving to death, and who have lost dozens of their friends and family members to the Israeli military assault.
If there’s anything meaningful to say about such circulating lists, it’s that nobody deserves to be reduced to a single one of their opinions or commitments. (There’s a bitter tongue-in-cheek element of @zionistsinmusic that suggests that could be the point of that project, though if the May 18th protest happens, we might learn more about the list’s creators and their intentions.) It seems to me that even the people who most loudly and proudly proclaim themselves to be Zionists or anti-Zionists are much more than just that.