Jewish Questions Podcast

Episode 5: Before Zionism — Transcript

*Learn more about the hosts and the series on the Jewish Questions podcast page.*

Laurie: Hi, I’m Laurie Marhoefer, a historian at the University of Washington and the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies.

Noam: I’m Noam Pianko, a professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Washington and a member of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies.

Laurie: And this is Jewish Questions, the Stroum Center’s deep dive podcast on stuff that matters now in Jewish life, politics, history and culture from a scholarly perspective.

Noam: This season on the podcast, we’re talking with scholars from the University of Washington about anti-Semitism: what it is, its long history and how we can push back against it today.

Laurie: Hey, so Noam, this is our last episode in our first season.

Noam: I know, I can’t believe it. It’s really amazing how much we’ve been through both on the podcast and also how much our world has just changed over the last few months.

But I’m really excited that we’re able to finish on such a strong note today. We’re really lucky to have a chance to think a little bit about the relationship between anti-Semitism and the history of Israel and Zionism — obviously a question that raises lots of other questions and a really crucial one for both historians and for observers today.

And we’re just lucky that we have a leading historian of Israel with us, Professor Liora Halperin, our colleague, who we will introduce in a moment. And Liora is going to help us think about a fascinating moment in the late 19th century and particularly how historical experiences of anti-Semitism shaped the world view of European Jews who settled in Ottoman Palestine more than a half century before the founding of the state of Israel.

So, it’s a really rich part of the history of Zionism and Jewish history that takes place in Palestine decades before 1948. And Liora is a specialist in those areas. So we’re just really fortunate to have her here with us today.

Laurie: Liora Halperin is an associate professor of international studies and history. She’s also the Rebecca and Jack Benaroya Chair in Israel Studies in the Jackson School here at the University of Washington. Her first book, which came out from Yale in 2015, is called, “Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine.” It won an award for the best book in Israel Studies from the Association for Israel Studies, the Shapiro Prize.

She also has a new book coming out next summer from Stanford University Press, and she’s going to talk about that research today about early Jewish farming settlements in what was then Ottoman Palestine and what they had to do with anti-Semitism. Liora, thanks so much for doing this.

Liora: Thank you for having me.

Laurie: So, could you start out by telling those of us for whom this isn’t a story that we’re so familiar with about the agricultural colonies and how they related to European anti-Semitism, how they fit into the history of Zionism that some of our listeners may know something about and also what they had to do with anti-Semitism?

Liora: Yes. So I think one thing that’s really remarkable about these groups is that their settlement in Palestine, and specifically rural settlement on agricultural land, preceded the beginning of the Zionist movement. So, Theodore Herzl, who you may have heard of as the father of the Zionist movement, who convened the first Zionist Congress, didn’t do so until 1897. I’m looking at communities that were first founded, one of them as early as 1878, early 1880s and early 1890s.

So, strictly speaking, these communities are not Zionist, per say. But what is true is that into the 20th century, those who did think of themselves as Zionists, look back on these communities as a very important first wave. In fact, first wave, or First Aliyah, is the term that scholars and also Zionist settlers used. They saw them as a very important piece of the history.

So, another important thing to know about these communities, they were not kibbutzim. They were not socialist. These were individuals who had grown up, for the most part, in the Russian empire, the western area of the Empire called the Pale of Settlement.

These were not secular people. These were religious people. For them, the religious significance of the land was really central, right. They wanted to live in the Holy Land, they wanted to be able to practice certain Jewish laws that only applied to cultivating the land in the land of Israel.

Laurie: So the Russian Empire in that period is this time and place when there’s a real wave of anti-Semitic violence and rhetoric. Do they want to get out because of that?

Liora: Yes. So, as you get into the early 1880s, violence against Jews, anti-Semitic violence, is growing in the Russian empire. The Russian Tsar was assassinated in 1881, and there followed after waves of pogroms against Jews, that kind of illiberal wave after a period of greater liberalism and opening.

This was not the kind of, like, intellectualized anti-Semitism that we might be thinking about in Germany or the German lands or in France. These were large-scale episodes of violence by people who really weren’t that educated. A lot of them were peasants, folks living around Jews, who had their own grievances and saw Jews, kind of, as their scapegoat or the most immediate person, maybe a middle-class person, to take out some of those grievances against.

So those who left, for the most part, did not go to Palestine. They went to the United States. Some of them moved within the Pale of Settlement or to elsewhere in Europe,

but this little group that I’m looking at… and when I say “little,” we’re talking about 5,000 people of a total emigration of Jews of about 25,000 people. So really, a tiny, tiny group, who was part of a much bigger wave of outmigration from Eastern and, to some extent, Central Europe.

Laurie: There’s a fair amount of people who left and went to Germany in this period because it was less violent. Can you talk about what happened when they got to Palestine and what they found? And what it was like there?

Liora: So Palestine was under Ottoman rule. It had been under Ottoman rule for coming on 350 years at that point. And it was a place, really, in flux; it was a place opening up to the world economy. There were peasants who were mainly Muslim, illiterate, who had engaged in subsistence agriculture, who were now finding work on plantations owned by wealthier people, most of them Arabs, to export things like oranges to Europe.

It was a time when a lot of European, non-Jewish Christian citizens were coming to the Ottoman Empire and setting up missionary institutions and schools and hospitals and trying to invest their money. Kind of a time where a group of people with some aspirations, some capital to work with, could get a foothold. Not necessarily a strong foothold, but a foothold. So, they were able to purchase land from, usually, large landowners in cities who didn’t live on lands that they were selling.

Noam: Can you just clarify, just because it’s so important, you know, in debates about land and how land was purchased, these are Arab landowners, these are not Jewish landowners?

Liora: They were almost never Jewish landowners, since Jews really didn’t own rural lands. For the most part, they were Arab landowners who lived, many of them in Jaffa, sometimes Haifa, sometimes Beirut or Damascus, who, for complicated reasons I’m not going to go into, kind of were increasingly motivated to sell their land. And it provided an opportunity.

But the important piece here is that even though the owners of those lands were not living on those lands in three quarters or so of the cases, it doesn’t mean that there was nobody living on the land. Those landowners were making their money off the land with the help of workers, peasants, some of them were tenant farmers, who lived on that land, sometimes over multiple generations, right. You think of the CEO of Amazon who doesn’t live anywhere near, like, the Amazon packing facility, but of course he’s getting the profits that are coming in through the work of the people who are living in that community and working in the facility.

Noam: So, you have a group of basically Jewish refugees or, at least, Jews inspired to leave Eastern Europe to pursue an agricultural life somewhere else that happens to be Palestine in their cases. And when they get there, they have funds to buy land, and they’re buying the land from Arab landholders who don’t necessarily live on the land that they’re about to settle and farm.

Liora: That’s right.

Noam: Great. That’s kind of a recipe for possibly a not great situation, or at least some tension.

Liora: That is correct! So, the folks that these Jewish settlers encounter in general aren’t the landowners themselves, but rather these peasant populations, who in some cases are displaced, in other cases have their grazing rights limited, right; they might not be growing anything, but they were grazing their animals on the land and now are told, hey, this is private property.

In other cases, peasants who end up working for these new Jewish owners, as, you know, menial labor. So, you end up with more and more Arab workers who get employment within these new Jewish-owned enterprises under conditions that ranged but were often fairly exploitative.

Laurie: How did the Europeans view the peasants who started working for them?

Liora: So, on the one hand, these Jewish settlers, whether they were middle class and had some means, or came from a lower middle-class background, saw the Arab peasants as, sort of, universally uncivilized: people who were not modern, who were not sophisticated, who would be satisfied with a menial wage and had no, kind of, larger collective aspirations; [they] saw them sometimes in a kind of romantic way as people who were authentic, primitive in a way that was really wholesome, and, most importantly, connected in a very deep way to this land, which the Jewish settlers considered the land of Israel.

So, in a way there’s almost a jealousy, right. Even though there is a sense of superiority. There is a sense that these peasants had a connection to this land that Jews symbolically, religiously felt connected to, but in practice did not know how to farm.

And then there is yet another component, which is that they saw them as violent, as brutal. This will sound familiar to anyone who’s read about European settlement, whether it’s overseas colonies or settler colonies like the United States, kind of the mix of feelings that a person might feel when encountering a population.

Laurie: Yeah, it sounds a lot like other Europeans in other contexts settling beyond Europe.

Liora: I think that’s right.

Noam: I guess one question is these are both Europeans bringing their European ideas of the Orient with them and they’re also Jews who have been the victims themselves of a system that has very clear hierarchies that put Jews at a less civilized level than non-Jews.

So, I could see that either making these settlers different from other colonial settlers, or I could also see it as a way of saying, you know, we really want to get back on that highest level of the hierarchy. And, you know, precisely because they’ve been the victims, they feel a need to express their own European-ness by being even more European.

Liora: Yeah, and this becomes a conversation that basically runs through the entire history of Zionism, I mean, arguably until today, about whether Jews, in coming to the land of Israel or Palestine to settle, were doing so essentially as Europeans who brought some kind of familiarity with a sense of “modernity” and “civilization”— and I’m making air quotes here— and had the capacity to bring benefit to this land that did not have access to those things, or whether they were, in fact, not European or the outsiders within Europe, which they also were, who were expressing a very different relationship to a land than somebody without that experience and without that kind of treatment in Europe would have had. So, it’s really important to say, oh, it’s not one or the other. It’s absolutely both.

Noam: Can you give any really specific examples of a person or a sense of a community and that that shows, kind of, the tensions or both sides of the situation?

Liora: I wanted to bring one story that I write about in my research that exemplifies some of these dynamics of what it means to be a community that has experienced pogroms, essentially anti-Jewish riots, but is also interested in thinking of themselves as a civilized population, one that’s going to bring benefit to the land.

So, one of the moments of encounter that I write about occurred in 1886 in an agricultural colony called Petach Tikvah. You might have heard of it; it’s the fifth largest city in Israel now. People who live in Israel tend to joke that it’s, like, the most boring.It’s like the way Americans joke about New Jersey is the way that Israelis joke about Petach Tikvah.

So, Petach Tikvah is founded in 1878. It had some problems. It was sort of reestablished in 1883. So, here we are in 1886. We’re pretty close to the beginnings. And a group of peasants from a nearby village had sort of ongoing gripes that these new settlers were not allowing them to graze their animals in places where they had been accustomed to doing so for generations.

There was some back and forth here where some Jews tried to confiscate the animals that the Arab peasants had brought to graze. And then a group from this village came and attacked this new agricultural colony.

And so, what interests me here is the way that the Hebrew press at the time and soon after talked about it. What did it mean for a group of peasants from the surrounding area to come attack a Jewish community?

So on the one hand, the frame of reference that was available was the frame of the pogroms, right? There they were, living in usually small cities or market towns and having Russian-, or Polish-, or Ukrainian-speaking peasants from the surrounding area attack.

So, one of the accounts I found uses language that presents Jews just exclusively as victims of this wanton violence.  They don’t use the word anti-Semitism, but they do present the events sort of in terms of a pogrom, like, with glass broken and feathers flying everywhere, which are things that descriptions of pogroms often would put into place. And there, it’s like, oh wow, like, these folks have been— maybe they, or they’ve heard of people— traumatized by pogroms, and, like, they’re just seeing it through that lens.

Laurie: But isn’t it basically the same? Like, these peasants came and attacked the settlement?

Liora: Yeah. And so, it’s not surprising at all that that would be the frame of reference at least some people would turn to. But what I found super interesting is that a bunch of the newspaper accounts really insisted that that was not the correct framework to view what had just happened. Like, we know that that’s maybe the most natural way to view it, but we shouldn’t view it that way.

And the reasons that they gave: one was that— and this, I think, is really important for today’s listeners to understand— is that anti-Semitism is not rampant among Muslims. For Jews at that time, European Jews, they thought of anti-Semitism as being very deeply connected to Christianity.

So many of its tropes about blood libel and Jews having killed Christ, that kind of story, were very, very closely linked to Christians, and also there would often be upticks of anti-Semitic violence around Easter. Of course there were Christians in Palestine, Christian Arabs, but they tended to be urban populations.

So one of the letters that I saw to a Hebrew newspaper called Hamagid was trying to assure readers that the Muslims are not hostile and do not hate us at all, and even suggested that maybe others were trying to exaggerate and overinflate the events.

Noam: If that was the case, then how would they explain the violence against the Jews?

Liora: One way of explaining that I saw was drawing on those tropes of being primitive. That these are people who were undeveloped, undisciplined, but because of that, they were highly susceptible to negotiation and, kind of, personal intervention.

So it’s like, these people don’t have some sophisticated idea against Jews, they just are undeveloped people who get angry, and we can come in and we can negotiate with their leaders, maybe their leaders and our leaders can sit down and we can figure that out.

Another explanation was that it had to do with land policy. So, another letter that I found suggested that Jewish buyers were buying up land with really not understanding the local conditions and economic relations and that they’re inflaming passions. And they really needed to be more conscientious about some of those dynamics and maybe even more conscientious about how and where they purchased land to try to prevent this kind of thing happening.

So there comes some recognition that something about, if not the fact of their settlement, then, kind of, the mode or the location or the timing of their settlement was causing problems, and they needed to look into that to try to prevent it from occurring in the future.

Noam: What’s fascinating to me is how you see a position that this is not about an irrational hatred. This is about an economic or a national land dispute. And that, you know, you need to look at this in the context of what happens when one group displaces another.

Liora: Yeah, I think it’s a big conversation to have about whether any violence, and, of course, anti-Semitic violence is just one subset of all the different sorts of violence, is ever truly irrational, or whether… you know, there’s always some sort of economic conditions or underlying grievances.

Laurie: As somebody who studies Nazi Germany, I’m bumping up on this what seems like just a fundamental irrationality about Nazi anti-Semitism, and I wonder if there’s something particular and special about European anti-Semitism.

I mean, like, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that came out of the Russian Empire seems like maybe an example of this, that it’s just a fantasy world that seems to come out of nowhere and attack people for no reason. And the story that you’ve told about 1886 I really feel like is not an example of this, as it sounds to me, hearing it for the first time.

But some of the recent research on Nazi Germany, about, like, Alon Confino’s book about, like, why are they burning the Torah? Why this fascination with burning the Torah… sometimes you’re like, yeah, that was just… there is just a wacky corner of the human brain that sometimes gets activated.

Liora: Yeah, this is a really interesting question. There’s no doubt that, in the period I’m looking at, there aren’t conspiracy theories to look at the peasants themselves. We don’t have a lot of insight into their thinking, but when we do have insight through different kinds of interventions, sometimes legal interventions they sought with the Ottoman Empire, they were very specific that they had these economic concerns, claims to land, whether or not those claims ended up being substantiated, they frame their demands in terms of these very, like, material things.

That kind of raises the question of the way in which, kind of, mass politics… like, once grievances become expressed by mass politics, really, of any group, where that becomes a really fertile zone for irrationality. Not to say there aren’t still underlying grievances, but the kind of forms that it takes and the kind of, what you called, fantasy world can become more compelling or encompassing.

Laurie: That’s so interesting, yeah. I wonder if there’s something about mass politics.

Noam: Laurie, I thought your point was fantastic about bringing Nazi Germany back into it, because I think the idea that there could be such a large, irrational hatred of Jews in one context can easily be transferred to another context.

So, you know, if you look back even as early as the 1880s and 90s, I mean, you are already beginning to see it arise in these pogroms, which really are irrational violence, one can understand how you could apply that to another context because it is possible that there is this irrational hatred against Jews.

Liora: Yeah. But I think I want to emphasize that they didn’t see them as coming from that kind of world view. There is this sense that it evoked the pogroms, but I never saw a sense that it was motivated by the same kinds of hatreds. In fact, they didn’t think that these contexts were really comparable, which is part of the reason why they thought that settlement in this area would free them from some of these pressures, right. Otherwise, why leave? If you’re just going to encounter another set of peasants who are going to hate you?

Laurie: Is it because they think Christianity is such a foundational part of anti-Semitism that if they’re in this place where the peasants aren’t Christian…?

Liora: Yeah, they associate anti-Semitism with the Christian world, but not just the Christian European world. There had been, like, the Damascus Affair in 1840, where Jews had been accused of murdering a Franciscan friar. And there’s a whole story around how that mobilized the Jewish world with intervention and philanthropy.

But it kind of solidified the idea that even in the Ottoman world, that this was more a Christian phenomenon than a Muslim one. Because, you know, Muslims— and there’s a whole scholarship on this— the way that, kind of, Jews saw Islam, scholars of Judaism in the 19th century, really were thinking about Islam as kind of a parallel religion. A lot of similarities.

Noam: Even the whole idea of Semites, right, these two groups being connected in some way. I mean, I know from my work you have American Jewish leaders like Stephen Wise, who is an American Zionist, who was trying to respond to the Arab attacks on Jews in the 20s and 30s was very forward in saying that, no, there’s no way that Arabs could hate Jews in the same way. They’re all Semites, they’re all part of the same community. So I think that that idea that this is going to be different, right, that somehow Palestine is exceptional precisely because they’re Arabs and not because they’re Christian.

Liora: Right. It just shows how much this race thinking from Germany is really a center— it’s not the only center of this kind of thinking— has pervaded Jewish thought to such an extent that because they had been labeled as Semites within this paradigm, therefore, of course, anybody else labeled as a Semite would totally welcome them as brothers without thinking about these relationships of power and economic hierarchies, which ultimately prove a lot more relevant.

Laurie: Do you have other examples of incidents when you see these Jewish settlers bringing in experiences from Europe into their experiences in Palestine?

Liora: Yes. So the other side of this that I wanted to bring in is the aspiration among this particular group of settlers and, really, ultimately Zionists, not only to escape a setting of anti-Semitism, but in some ways to embody the characteristics of those who had oppressed them.

And now that sounds like a very provocative statement, but there’s some really interesting research that’s been done about the ways that settlers, both in the 19th century and also in the early 20th century, were really inspired by some of the modes that these Ukrainian Cossacks, who became the figurehead of anti-Jewish violence in the 19th century, were distinguished by.

Laurie: So, the Cossacks are this predominantly Orthodox Christian group in the Russian Empire. Are the Cossacks seen as connected to the pogroms?

Liora: They are.

Noam: They’re like the boogey men of Jewish history.

Liora: I know, they’re kind of the boogey men. They become, like, the symbol of both scary violence, but also of strength, rural living, masculinity. So, one great story that I found in one of my sources is this figure I write about named Abraham Shapiro, who was a guardsman in Petach Tikvah, the same place I talked about before, who in his memoirs tells the story of when he first came to Palestine. He actually lived in Jerusalem.

And he remembered sitting in his school in southern Ukraine, where he had his early childhood, and remembering fleeing from Vasiliy and Ivan, which are basically, like, two stereotypically Russian Orthodox names, kind of cowering in the face of these powerful Russian Orthodox men, probably not Cossacks, but in any case.

And then, he says in his memoirs that he felt motivated to learn Arabic and kind of take on this more Semitic, in fact, Arab demeanor in order that he could become like Vasiliy and Ivan and kind of fight them off as an equal. So if you have on the one hand, the Cossack is this figure of violence and masculinity, you also have the Arab, and particularly the rural Arab, the Bedouin, as another more immediate image. And some individuals like Shapiro really tried to take it on.

And it also starts happening where becoming more, quote/unquote, “Arab” in dress, in horseback riding, in certain types of behavior, becomes a way to actually take on the role of this Cossack, who is so frightening, and thus neutralize that danger.

Noam: That idea, the need for power in the face of powerlessness, particularly around Jewish men and masculinity, that ultimately develops as the Israeli soldier. I mean, it happened earlier in Zionism, too, with the new Muscle Jew. I mean, there’s a lot in the way in which Zionism evolves to try and embrace that masculine stereotype.

And it’s interesting to think about it as a way of actually internalizing the anti-Semitism of Europe, acknowledging in a sense that Jews are effeminate and trying to take on a very different image.  Of course that’s very different from the American Jewish experience, where you have, sort of, the Woody Allen figure. You have these, like, two very different images of Jews.

But you can see the way in which the importance of power and masculinity comes in so early in the way in which Jews settling in Palestine begin to shape their own identity. And that’s quite different, actually, from the way in which Jews who came from Europe to the United States started to shape their identity, which was not about taking on positions of power, but instead about accepting some of the stereotypes of Jews.

Liora: Yeah, Noam. I think it’s so interesting what you’re saying. Because undoubtedly the twin goals of Zionism is, on the one hand, the desire to become more fully Jewish, whether that means Semitic or culturally Jewish, and on the other hand the desire to become more fully European.

And so, what’s kind of interesting here is to note that— I already talked a little bit about desire to become more Semitic and take on features of the Arab that seemed to be iconic, but, of course, taking on European-ness. What does that mean? Of course, [in] a positive view, right, they might want it to mean something around scientific method, or developing more efficiency in agriculture, knowledge and education, but insofar as anti-Semitism is also a piece of what it meant to be European, I’m certainly not trying to make that suggestion that they simply became anti-Semites. They don’t.

But of course, in taking on European-ness, in what way is that European-ness so marked by its anti-Semitism that features of it end up percolating into Jewish thinking either about themselves or about Palestinians?

Laurie: In an earlier episode we were talking to Devin Naar, and he made the point that one of the core pillars of European thought is anti-Semitism. That it’s a core part of European-ness.

Noam: Going back also to our conversation with Devin and connecting it here is the way in which in the United States, the pressure upon Jews was actually to become white, and that was so important. And so, it was actually an attempt to downplay the Oriental-ness of Jews. And what’s interesting in Palestine, though, is it doesn’t work out that way. There seems to be kind of almost a celebration of the Oriental. Or, I guess you could argue maybe the Cossack is the ultimate white European?

Liora: You know, I think both of these strains are really powerfully there in the sense of themselves as higher than those who they’re encountering, including, let’s note, the Jews that they encounter in the urban communities of Palestine were both Sephardi and Ashkenazi, and the sense that they are ultimately not European and returning back to their identity.

And I don’t think it’s right to say, oh, whereas in this context they wanted to become white, in that context, they wanted to become fully Semitic or fully Oriental. They didn’t. They absolutely didn’t. And that kind of civilizational hierarchy is very much present.

Noam: It seems like the dilemma that we keep bumping into when we think about anti-Semitism is the way in which anti-Semitism both creates stress and a desire by Jews to resist or to figure out how to respond to it, but also something that Jews are forced to internalize at the same time.

Liora: Yeah, I think that’s really right. To see anti-Semitism as some kind of, like, mysterious external force, as opposed to a piece structuring so many of the institutions of modernity, including institutions that Jews, like, very proudly participate in and want to participate in.

And I think that’s really uncomfortable. It would be much easier if it was just an unwelcome guest on the scene. But it’s actually is so interwoven within these histories that grappling with it requires looking inwards and not just figuring out who the boogey man at the moment happens to be.

Noam: Liora, I’ve got to ask you, are there things that we can learn about our present? Are there ways in which this history can help shed some light on the ways in which Zionism or Israel or anti-Semitism are perceived today?

Liora: Yeah. It certainly needs to be said that a lot of the contemporary discourse about anti-Semitism ends up being conversations about Israel and Zionism. Not only, but certainly in some contexts that’s a huge focus. And I think I would really encourage everybody both to think in a really expansive, long-range way about the history of Israel, Palestine, and Zionism, to be curious about the ways in which multiple facets of Jewish identity and perception intertwine, not to fall into either it was X or it was Y, and X is bad, and Y is good, so it must have been Y.

But actually understand, and, kind of, get comfortable with the discomfort of our both aspirations that we might today think of as really positive, and also aspirations that we shouldn’t think of as positive are intertwining themselves really from early days of Zionist settlements in Palestine and that they unfold over time, and that we just need to engage with these questions with real curiosity and real interest. And I think turning to histories, right, multiple histories with an s, is a very important piece of doing that work.

Noam: So, I think what I’ve learned from going back in time with you, Liora, to your amazing research— and I’m really looking forward to the book coming out— is when we think about anti-Semitism, or we think about how Jews understand violence against them, how the context is so important and different perspectives bring such different context to the conversation.

You know, you have your example of this violence that took place in the late 19th century. The Jews are bringing a whole context that is completely alien to the actual Arab peasants, who are part of that episode. And I think that’s something that really gets lost, particularly today when we’re facing such a polarized moment where we just bring one context to a particular situation in trying to understand it.

And what’s so valuable about your work, and I think history in general, is that it allows us to see both sides. And a lot of the issue is just that they’re bringing totally different perspectives, and in order to really make sense of the past and the present it’s so crucial to appreciate those differences.

So, I’m just really grateful that you brought this specific piece, which, I think, is from the 1880s and 90s, but could relate to how we understand the situation today and shared it with us. So thank you for doing that, Liora.

Laurie: Yeah, thanks, Liora. That was really fascinating.

Liora: Thanks for having me.

Laurie: This has been Jewish Questions, the podcast of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, part of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington.

Noam: This season was supported by an Ignition Grant from the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle and the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies.

Laurie: Jewish Questions was produced, recorded and edited by Kara Schoonmaker.

Noam: That was a wrap on our first season where we looked at anti-Semitism and got a chance to hear from various faculty members at the Stroum Center. We hope to have another season next year, so keep subscribed, and we’ll see you next year.

Find more episodes of the podcast, and learn more about the series, on the Jewish Questions series page.