Host and "Movement Meteorologist" Ejeris Dixon sits down with journalist, scholar, and author of Fascism Today, Shane Burley.
In this urgent and clarifying episode, Ejeris Dixon sits down with Shane Burley—journalist, scholar, author of Fascism Today: What it is and How to End It, and co-author of Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism—to unpack what it means for social justice movements when fascists control the government, and what to expect of their next moves. They also discuss the dangerous manipulation of antisemitism in our current political moment. Together, they explore what the history of anti-fascism can teach us about these times, historical roots of antisemitism, how it's being weaponized to silence dissent—particularly pro-Palestinian voices—and the critical difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. This conversation is essential listening for anyone navigating the intersection of anti-Fascism, Jewish identity, Palestinian solidarity, and anti-war organizing.
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Podcast production by Phil Surkis
Intro Music by Meklit Hadero
The Fascism Barometer Podcast is an Ejerie Labs Project. Thank you for joining the movement.
Ejeris: [00:00:00] I'm so excited to welcome Shane Burley to the Fascism Barometer. Shane is a journalist, author, and filmmaker. He's the author of Why We Fight Essays on Fascism Resistance and Surviving The Apocalypse, and also Fascism Today What it is and how to end it. He's the editor of No Pesan Anti-Fascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis.
His latest book, he's the co-author of Safety Through of Solidarity, A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism. But in addition to his public work, Shane is also an incredibly dedicated, generous, big-hearted activist whose encyclopedic understanding of fascism and the role of the anti-fascist left has been essential to my understanding of fascism.
And so, so many of us. We're so excited to have you on the Fascism Barometer. Thanks for joining us, Shane.
Shane: Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here with you.
Ejeris: So we always start kind of asking people how we talk about [00:01:00] fascism. So let's imagine you're at a coffee shop. Someone sees you reading a book on fascism, and they ask you, what is that even about? How would you describe it?
Shane: Yeah. this is tough too. I think it's tougher this year than it would've been years past when fascism was either something of the deep history or maybe, you know, small movements or stuff that we talk about in other countries. So traditionally, the way I would explain fascism is that it's a far right ideology that has sort of two tent poles.
One is the idea that human beings are fundamentally unequal. So it sort of runs in the face of what we think of as kind of modern liberal democratic politics where people are generally thought to be equal. We create a society where everyone has a say. So, the belief being that people are fundamentally unequal.
And the second piece is that our identities are what I call essentialized, meaning racial, gender, or otherwise. They are chosen for us, not, we don't choose them. And that those sort of [00:02:00] identities, those pre-chosen identities, that determines where we fit in that hierarchy.
And in that it's a revolutionary ideology. It wants to remake all the progress of sort of the post-enlightenment world, the creation of democracies and. Egalitarian ideas. It wants to undo that and create a society that strictly reinforced hierarchies, and it does those through violence and the way that it sort of mobilizes people, because it is an ideology that invites people to participate.
Doesn't just happen from above. It invites our neighbors is by speaking to their discontent. Saying, Hey, the anxiety you feel about losing your house or having, you know, your relationships fall apart. That's actually because of this modern equality and these myths that we have. And so instead, we want you to participate in creating that hierarchy and dispossessing other people.
And so that shows up differently in different societies.
What does Hindu nationalism in India have in common with Nazism or Italian fascism? Well, quite a bit. If we take a [00:03:00] step back and see like how did these societies think about identity and hierarchy and what do they want and how are they manipulating people's fears?
Ejeris: So let me try to break that down. So first, there's this piece around inherit inequality, This fundamental belief as opposed to how so many of us are thinking that we want a world where. No matter what your position or station in life is that you have the ability to get your basic needs.
So fundamentally, inequality is good. Your these identities are fixed. violence is part of the strategy and, a way of revolutionary remaking society. I think I read somewhere and I wish I could remember where, where people were actually saying that. the people who can get recruited into fascism are also the same people sometimes that progressives or the left are trying to organize, but it's a, it's a fundamentally [00:04:00] different worldview or concept, right?
It's, it starts with the same premise around aren't you upset about these things happening in your life and do you want a better life? But then the kind of premise on. Who did it, why? And how we change it is like a fundamentally different, more violent, less hopeful. And the sense of, well, it's because of these people, these marginalized people, they took this from you.
They took your, sometimes God given or this identity, these, these things that you deserve. One of the really critical pieces that I learned from you was this delineation, the separation between fascist movements, you know,
Fascist movements have grown in power. Um, Many people characterize MAGA as either a fascist movement or a coalition between fascists and authoritarians [00:05:00] that have tremendous power over the government and over the federal government.
And I, I know you've been talking about kind of fascist state capture. I've been talking about it with some folks. Um, what does state capture mean? And what does it mean for us?
Shane: Yeah, this is a good question. So sort of like you said. People, they have anxieties in their lives. Fascist movements pick up on that. That is, they're actively recruiting and usually they get a little wonky. They go with a privileged sector of the working class. So maybe they're working people that are absolutely unable to pay mortgages, stuck at their jobs, you know, alienated from community, all those things.
But. They do have white skin privilege, right? There is actually a narrative that can be intervened on, they can point at something. and they do that by mobilizing a false story about the past. You know, you and your people used to be harmonious. Things used to be good, but what's changed since then? Well, immigration, I.
You know, women got the vote, they started speaking, leaving the home, now you're lonely. Put two and two together. [00:06:00] These are the kind of narratives because you need a mass of people to participate in it. fascism only exists in an era which people engage in politics, right? Like that's relatively a new concept in a lot of ways, right?
Like where everyone's participating. So when you have a movement of people, you have to get people involved in. And when we talk about fascism, when I was first writing about fascism, We saw what you might call like an ideal type. These are people who are deeply, deeply ideological, right? They read fascist philosophy.
They cite fascist literature. They have very clear ideas about who human beings are and what they should strive after. And that's different than when someone gets into power. Even when a fascist gets into power and has to build coalitions and they make compromises and. like we know about power, people are corrupted even from their own ideas.
Even if their ideas were sort of corruptible to begin with, they'll even betray those, right? For power, for money, for other resources. So it's different when you see someone like Richard Spencer, who's a very [00:07:00] famous white nationalist in the us, got a lot of press attention for a few years,
He didn't have state power, so he didn't have to compromise his ideas. But then what you have with the, the MAGA movement is some of those people make partnerships with a number of wealthy people and more now than even in the first run with what we think of as traditional conservatives who lean right, but don't go the full distance.
and they built a coalition so that they could win. But most of the time when we're talking about fighting fascism, at least in the American, kind of like global northern context, like you're talking about minority movements where they can maintain their, their ideologies, but they really don't have power in the kind of overarching sense of they control the government.
They can control pieces of it. They can certainly be violent in the street and cause lots of problems and they can push the Overton window. They can push people in power to go further, but they don't necessarily have control over it. Things are different now. I think that requires us to rethink everything that we've done before.
Because those rules are just fundamentally different. [00:08:00] So if you look at Trump taking office on a popular platform, right? Had the majority vote, has a huge coalition, pushed many, many, many more people on the foundations of the capitalist class to the right. So people are opening, supporting him, remade the Republican party to be a deeply ideological party that's basically made up of people that would've been too fringe for the party even 10 years ago.
Then came in and immediately dismantled organs of democracy, things that had been reformed for years. Targeted immigrant folks, cut the lifelines on trans healthcare, exacerbated attacks on abortion rights. These are things at a level that we just don't have a parallel for in the American context, they look more like that.
Interwar, fascism we were talking about. So what does that mean for us to be anti-fascists? To fight back? It's one thing when you build up a kind of community of folks that wanna protect yourselves from attacks, from proud boys or from, you know, when David Duke ran in [00:09:00] Louisiana in the late eighties,
It's different when it's the entire Republican party and they're going to use ice and the police not proud boys and neo-Nazis. And so when we're thinking about state capture, we have to rethink what it means to be anti-fascist. But I don't think that that is.
Something I look upon with a lot of doom because what it means is building the same alliances we've already built, thinking about these things as integrated, and we have to understand that all these issues are suddenly connected in ways that like we may not have dealt with before.
Ejeris: One of the things we've said on the podcast a lot is that fascism is best fought with tremendous amounts of people power. and it's that piece around the time when we could say, oh, I work on this issue, or I'm from this community. And, uh, that doesn't really affect me. like the coalition work.
[00:10:00] The alliance building, the way we show up for each other feels essential, right? It's essential both to the project of surviving fascism, but also for. It's the world we want beyond this, right? For, for liberation. but for some folks that is going to be a shift. Like, to figure out how to, what coalitions will we be and what, what forms of difference can we tolerate?
What conversations are we used to walking away from that we need to now
Shane: Yeah.
Ejeris: have to navigate, you know? And um, I've been calling it in an invitation to a higher level of strategy.
Shane: Mm-hmm.
Ejeris: Um, an increase in our nuance in, in the work that we do together. So I hope we're up for it. Um,
so one of the things I really. Love about the kind of vastness of your knowledge is you've studied fascism a long time. So much though that I think we could try [00:11:00] to even get a little predictive here, you know? So from what you know, from what you've seen, either from history.
Or from, what's happened in other countries and contexts, what should we be expecting from fascist escalation? Like what should particularly targeted communities be thinking about in these times? Because. Capturing state power still means that they will continue to exercise, power, and move kind of this fascist project forward.
So what are you watching out for and what do you think should be on our radar?
Shane: It is sort of interesting because I do think that the reality of this. It teaches us a lot about how power actually works and about where our power actually is. So like, just to take a step back, there's a center of analogy that always comes up in my mind around 2008 when the financial collapse was happening and in Europe there's all these sort of.
What [00:12:00] were thought of as social democratic governments that had like social housing and you know, a lot of public housing, things like that. And, and those were pooled. Austerity came in really hard in places like Spain, Germany, and so on. Right. And people were evicted from their homes. They really cut those things down.
And the parties that did that, those were socialist parties. And the reason was, is that they dearly didn't have the power there, right. Like a capitalist class has the power there. You can come in, you can advocate in their system as much as you want, but in the end your choices are derivative of what's available to you.
Shane: And if we think about fascist state capture, it has to challenge many, many, many of the assumptions we make about how we fight for change. So for example. If you think about the things that are happening, mass deportations, attack on abortion rights, attack on healthcare, attack on housing continuity is about to scale up attack on unions.
What do you do about that when there are no courts that will ever rule on your side? Do we file lawsuits? [00:13:00] Think about the hundred thousands of nonprofits that exist to support people with lawsuits, the ACL U, national Lawyers Guild. What happens when courts aren't viable at all? What happens to a labor union when they rule the National Labor Relations Act, the foundation of the NRB to be illegal?
They just say it's illegal. What happens when Trump refuses to actually listen to courts? What happens then? And so I think we need to think about those sorts of things. There's a lot of foundations of what people think of as progressive politics, universities, obviously lawyers and other things, public intellectuals, things like that.
What happens when those institutions are not viable anymore? And let's take even a step further. What happens when. People completely negate the Democratic Party as an institution. This is something that happened I think a lot over the last few years as you watch the Democratic Party rather enthusiastically fund a genocide, right?
Like people lost lot of faith. So those institutions aren't really dependable to resist these sorts [00:14:00] of things. And I think that was always true, right? Like we always, there was always a sort of foundation to that. Like, you know, the law is not a neutral arbiter of human rights, right? It's like an institution created to maintain property rights and maintain white supremacy.
So we knew that, but we still played that game. But now we can't even play that game. We can't even do that. So instead, I think we need to be ready for those sorts of things. But I think, like you said about people power. I think it's worthwhile to think about what does organizing mean?
what's like it actually mean?
Well, all organizing works the same way. A lot of people get together until they're more powerful than the people with the money. That is how all organizing has always worked, right? That's how a strike works.
That's how riots work. That's how it all works. And so we need to think about ways of like, we're talking about a large mass of people that are gonna be affected here. What happens when we get all them together? You don't even need to get that many together. What happens if you got 10% of Americans together refusing to participate, occupying buildings, picking [00:15:00] those things that would change the entire, not just balance of power, not just their ability to do that, but it would be a revolutionary situation to change the foundations.
You could actually stop this from ever happening again. And so I think that's what we need to think about. And in a, a way. We have the ability to turn that on a dime. 'cause it just depends on us. We're not depending on, a, a judge choosing to hear our case, right? We're not depending on someone's funding to be approved for the grant, right?
We're storming buildings. That's different. And so I think knowing that, Is sort of the optimism about how to handle these sorts of situations. But it's still a lot to overcome because that comes with a great deal of pain. You know what I mean? That comes with people losing their jobs, people not able to get healthcare, people being attacked by the police.
I mean, all of that is very dangerous and very real. but it does open up the reality that our options really are just based on how we can cultivate those relationships. How big can they be? How strong can they be? You know, what kind of actions are they willing to take?
Ejeris: Yeah. And also the work that we do to connect people to [00:16:00] each other, right? Like that piece around, um.
One of the, foundations of this podcast is that for many communities in the US we know what fascism is. We know what that means, that there are foundations of European fascism and Jim Crow and all of these pieces.
So there's wisdom from targeted communities, but there's this piece where for some people, the. Collapse that is happening is so jarring that it can be wait, what? The court he's not listening to. Right. Like, wait, what the police may target me. Me not just, you know, those people, you know, like, so there's this piece around, how do people who have experienced an inherent and structural.
Inequality, uh, in the US unite with people who will be just waking up to it. [00:17:00] And how do we have, functional and healthy ways to move together. And that's, it's a challenging and awesome problem, right? Because it, it does involve, like, I've just been, you know, like I listen to and read.
Media that is progressive. But I also try to kind of like branch out, you know? And so when I've been in more kind of democratic establishment media lately, people have been like, I think we need to rise up and protest. And then there's been, but maybe it's not safe. So it's just, I think there's, there are tremendous relationship building opportunities if we're up for them.
And there are tremendous. Alliance building opportunities if we're up for them. But I think there's gonna have to be a lot of norms that we have to change in some of our spaces to figure out how to be, how to be really welcoming to folks who are newer to this. and how to make space for [00:18:00] people.
And so I'm both, hopeful and scared, but I don't know if you're, are you seeing. Tend of this kind of new organizing that you're speaking to, um, in these moments?
Shane: A Yes to a degree, I've been thinking a lot about how people in other countries have arosen up against far right attacks, and they're usually from moments that seem. kind of bizarre. Like think about the Israeli protests in 2023. There was a big far right take over the government of an already like nearly fascist government, right?
And what mobilized people was a judicial reform. It, it was, it was like really wonky and kind of complicated and didn't make sense on its face. And the country went into the streets, right? Like it, Like, what, what was this? Or like the yellow vest protest was about uh, uh, gas taxes and things like that in France, or like attacks on water rights in other countries.
Or like, a lot of times you don't know what that's actually
Ejeris: What the moment or
Yeah.
Shane: social security or something like that. because it, it steamrolls really [00:19:00] fast for people,
Ejeris: It could be like Medicaid coming or
Shane: Oh, yeah. Uh, and, and, and look, if they attack Medicaid and social security, yeah. I mean that would. That would do it.
Um, but I think also it's about reminding people of like, actually some people already know how to do this. You know, something is really interesting when you read anti-fascist literature, like the classics from the 20th century. You'll read a lot of it. And the real common theme will be something along the lines of, you know, we look to the past and when this happens again, we'll be ready.
And then you read black anti-fascist writing and they say it's happening again, and we're ready. It's a different experience. And so some people actually live in that space already and can actually guide those folks and saying like, Hey, welcome to the reality for everybody else. Um, and I think that's actually really dynamic ' cause I think that feels like surprising or there's like a barrier between people, but that's actually a hopeful relationship, right?
So I think doing that is really important.
But I think also reminding people That doing this is [00:20:00] joyful. This is how you live a good life. there is a problem here in the culture already. People don't know their neighbors.
They're not connected. people don't go to church very often. They don't have unions. They don't go to the Elks Lodge. They don't do the kinds of things that people historically do that really, really cement relationships in their lives. And being in an organizing meeting is a version of that. And when you build up this kind of resistance that doesn't depend on those load structures.
You look around at the end of it and all of a sudden you have a society, built on human relationships with other people, you know, and you're invested in them, right? And so giving people that, I think that optimism, that kind of revolutionary optimism is there. 'cause they're not just saying, okay, we have a fight ahead.
It's like, no, look at what you're inheriting. you're, you already kind of want it to a degree, right? We're just making it bigger and louder and more effective.
Ejeris: And we're building this new world together.
Shane: Yeah, absolutely.
Ejeris: I'm really excited about your latest book, safety Through Solidarity, A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism. It feels so needed [00:21:00] right now, particularly because as it feels like one of the tenets that. MAGA is using right now is this manipulation of antisemitism and it's becoming this way to punish descent.
It's particularly becoming a way to punish, pro-Palestinian organizing. international students. It's, it's, it's this thing. And, and you also see though, you're like, these people care about antisemitism, like Steve Bannon with the Nazi Salute Cares and Elon Musk and so you're like, something's wrong here.
But what you and Ben do in your book is also. Giving some language and some clarity. So I would love in this time of where antisemitism is being weaponized and where the definition is being shifted and changed and incredibly actually confusing, um, to so many people. where we know that antisemitism is wrong, [00:22:00] but we also know that how this word is being used is also wrong.
can you describe what actual antisemitism is and also its manipulation right now?
Shane: Yeah. you know, we talk about the history of this in the book, but it's been a very kind of intentional change in the way this has been discussed since, primarily since 1967. Since the six day war when like the quote unquote formal occupation, obviously all of Palestine's been occupied, began and.
Particularly American Jewish politics, but also just American politics in general. It became more of a kind of like, openly Zionist affiliated kind of system. There's this language about supposed homogenous Jewish flourishing. This is what it means to be safe. This is what it means to be a happy Jewish person.
This is what it means to be successful, and that has always included support for Israel. So then. The definition of anti-Semitism as anything that's a supposed threat to that has started to proliferate, but that is not what antisemitism is. It's not how it's been historically understood. [00:23:00] anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory about Jews and about power, and about how the world itself works.
That has a very particular history. It comes out of Christian Europe, a particular kind of, uh, Christian theology, but also the politics and economics of medieval Europe, um, and how Jews were dispossessed and used as sort of like middle agents for, um, to defend the nobility when they were attacking the peasantry.
And certain conspiracy theories evolved And they developed what we know as today as modern conspiracy theories, a false story about how capitalism and power works. And one of the things that's really important about that is that that doesn't just harm Jews.
It's not just a danger to Jews, though it is. It's a story that undermines everyone's sense of how to fight back against the oppression they're facing by disguising and confusing where that power is coming from and who's responsible and what to do about it, Eventually, Zionist politics filtered into pretty much all discourses on how American deals with any of these, like large scale issues.
And so there you'll [00:24:00] find what times when anti-Zionist politics do take on anti-Semitism, such as if it uses a conspiracy theory or uses a kind of classic demonizing characterization of Jews. Um, but anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel. Itself has nothing categorically to do with antisemitism.
They are not one in the same in any way.
Shane: And instead. There has been longstanding historic Jewish movements against Zionism and in solidarity of Palestinians. And now it's exploding in numbers that are sort of unprecedented. But what's happening and what's happened for a long time is that the right has basically used weaponized accusations of antisemitism, the silence, pretty much any pro-Palestinian voices, disproportionately against Arab American and Palestinian folks.
and now even against Jewish folks speaking up in solidarity with Palestine. This has only gotten so much worse since. We finished the book and, and, and sort of Trump came back where there's this effort to Point to Jewish safety as the [00:25:00] reason to to ramp up these efforts of deportation, the shutting down speech on campuses, cutting funding on campuses.
All of it's under the guise of quote unquote fighting antisemitism and in support of Jewish safety. And again, these are from folks that use anti-Semitic conspiracy theories as their fundamental ideological core. It's how they make their political arguments. It's how they won the election, it's how they're building their coalition, so they're not people that actually care about Jewish lives and Jewish flourishing, but it's.
Dead, just as anti-Semites did in years past. They're using Jews as sort of a token to move political positions to protect themselves when they're making, you know, costly judgements. Um, and it's one that is making Jews demonstrably less safe. If we look at the numbers of anti-Semitic attacks at the same time as it's being used to undermine one of the most important fights we have right now, which is ending the genocide in Palestine.
Ejeris: So one of my questions is like, let's take a little bit of time on like antisemitism versus anti-Zionism, just because it feels like they're being almost [00:26:00] collapsed. Right. so, and in my understanding, right, anti, like The ability to critique the violence or the apartheid that is happening in Israel is being named as anti-Semitic.
So if you could just like break it down for us even more, it'd be really helpful I think, for the listeners.
Shane: Yeah, so anti-Zionism is simply opposition to a sort of, Jewish. Supremacist state or a J enforced Jewish demographic, majority state in historic Palestine. So the way the situation in Israel works right now is that they maintain a demographic, majority of Jews, and that's sort of the foundations of the Zionist project.
The idea being is that Jews were historically unsafe because they didn't have a state like all other peoples did. Of course, not all of the peoples have states, but that's sort of the, the argument. And so to do that. In a land that has an indigenous people already, you have to maintain a system of aggressive apartheid and ethnic cleansing, keeping people out of neighborhoods, ensuring that Jews have the majority of land holdings that Jews get, preference positions, that even when you have [00:27:00] Palestinian citizens of Israel, which are about 20% of Israel, that they have less social rights and things like that, and that.
Politic inside of Israel, that ideology is only radicalized. And so now you have what's often called greater Israel movement or religious inus that want to even expand those borders even further. And as we get occupied IES territories in the West Bank, and then obviously the cja Gaza, and so all of this, basically this.
Anti Zionist politic is an opposition to that. And instead a demand that the area should be just, you know, a country for all the residents. You know, it'd be Jews, it'd be Palestinian folks, it'd be people of all backgrounds, right? including, you know, rights for Jewish folks and equal rights, but that, that's a better solution for the politic.
That is really all we're. Talking about here, the way that the language has been used over the last 40, 50 years, but in particular is that Zionism is built into Judaism and Jewish self-preservation. So any attack on that, any kind of critique of that is a critique on Jewish ability to flourish and defend ourselves.
And so we, we want to do, as we wanna walk back [00:28:00] to like a really coherent definition of antisemitism, which is no o opposition to the Israeli status quo is not. The same as what we've historically understood as being anti-Jewish prejudice. So let's look back, what are the features of that? What does it actually look like?
And when we look at that, we start to see that something could, in theory be both anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic, but so could pro-Israel politics. And actually we see a heavy amount of that in the American, right?
So, for example, the largest component of the Zionist movement in the United States aren't Jews at all. It's actually evangelical Christians, what we would call Christian Zionists, and these are overwhelmingly the biggest financial and political component. For example, Christians United for. Israel is the largest pro-Israel advocacy organization in the United States, and their kind of rabid support for Israel is not outta some deeply held love for Jews or for Judaism.
It's because Jews play a central role in their visions of the end times. What's gonna happen when Jesus returns the [00:29:00] apocalypse that ensues and the future that it. Brings, and in that story, Jews either face a mass genocide or they're forced to convert, and that's simply another way of saying forced to stop being Jewish.
Shane: Um. That is in a lot of ways the foundation of America's pro-Israel politics, and at the same time the US Cs Israel as a strategic asset in the region to control oil flows and just to kind of secure American interests. None of that is about concern for Jews. so when we conflate those two things, we end up having a conversation about.
Politics and about empire except we project Jewish interests. On top of that, instead of talking about actual living Jews and what Jews actually believe, and what Jews need, and what Jewish histories actually look like, which is much, much more diverse than that.
Ejeris: God, it's just still so complex in this way. And then My question is, it feels like there's this part, 'cause I, I have lots of, you know, friends, who are deeply involved in kind of this like [00:30:00] anti-Zionist Jewish organizing. Right. and I see the targeting of international students.
I see the targeting of Muslim organizations, of Palestinian organizations, but there's also targeting of anti-Zionist Jews. So I'm curious, like, There's a role for all of us in fighting this manipulation of antisemitism, but also, within Jewish communities. What is that work looking like as so much harm and violence and manipulation is impacting everyone?
Shane: it's a good question and it's a complicated question. On the one hand, I think Jews have the opportunity to intervene on the discourse in ways other folks don't, because I. American politics centers, Jews on those discourse, right? They project Jewishness onto it. So we say, okay, great.
We'll speak for ourselves on this, and that has the advantage of being able to do that. We also, I think. I feel like have a responsibility to go into communities in which we share their language, Hebrew Jewish tradition and [00:31:00] talk about it. Right. I think increasingly part of it is to actually create alternative Jewish spaces and Jewish.
Community that doesn't actually just rely on that. 'cause part of the defacto quote unquote defacto Zionist politics is more complicated than that. But the, the kind of standard pro-Israel politics in Jewish spaces is just because the legacy institutions have continued that. And even when the rank and file don't necessarily agree.
So we want to bring those voices out and we want to continue Jewish life in ways that affirm people's values and that give someone the opportunity to live a Jewish life without. Compromising on their ideas about Palestine. and I think speaking out as Jews is strategically valuable and things like that.
it's interesting when you look at the really profound growth of Jewish anti-Zionism, I think part of it is also that, that Jews are finding in those spaces a way of affirming themselves and building that community and feeling strong in that way themselves because they are feeling alienated from that.
[00:32:00] Judaism. could be have a profound effect on people's lives. And people don't wanna lose those traditions, but they feel taken from them when they're having splits with their family. They're not welcome at their synagogue and they're not welcome at Jewish federations all these places.
And so being a part of that movement is a way of speaking out on that issue that we now. Felt lied to when we were young or we, we now feel, have a lot of consciousness on, but also able to affirm that different vision of Jewishness. so I think that's become really important for people. And I think also there's just the fact that right now Jewish interests are so outsized in the discourse about what's happening politically, that we're giving another voice to those interests and saying like, look, actually, Jews speak with about different issues. Jews have different opinions. Um, overwhelmingly lean to the left and are dissenting at a higher rate when it comes to Palestine.
So start listening to what we're actually telling you. And I think that's become that, that big battle.
Ejeris: And so it sounds like, for all of us who aren't Jewish, who both oppose antisemitism, [00:33:00] who oppose Islamophobia, who oppose, the ethnic cleansing of, Palestinians, all of these pieces, what do you see as like the work of our movements? in this complex and almost like, changing and churning and, and really heightened, moment
Shane: you know, one of the things that Ben and I talk about in the book, and we've talked about events a lot, is the antisemitism. Dovetails with other forms of oppression really directly. so anti-Semitic narratives are often used in the service of anti-blackness, They're a story about, you know, why if black folks are so quote unquote incapable, why had they bake so many successful struggles in the Civil Rights movement and other movements?
Well, it's 'cause Jews were controlling them. Obviously. It's especially been used to explain, the growth of visibility for queer and trans youth. It's just been especially used to talk about, basically quote unquote non-white immigration. Basically, the point being is that antisemitism is actually a frontline discourse in all these other forms of [00:34:00] oppression.
So if we're talking about fighting antisemitism, we're talking about fighting those things simultaneously. Where does antisemitism show up really prevalently? Well, it's showing up in anti-abortion debates, right? The way that conspiracy theories are used to attack abortion rights is really clean way in which antisemitism is showing up.
So by actually engaging with those issues, we are engaging with antisemitism, right? And then bringing it back and saying like,
Hey, like if folks aren't actually educated on antisemitism and. There's reasons for this. The right has taken over discourse and antisemitism for decades. So we're taking that back and saying, Hey, we're gonna touch folks on this.
We're gonna talk about this when we're talking about fighting the right. We're gonna talk about anti-blackness, antisemitism, anti-immigrant xenophobia. We're gonna talk about this stuff together. I think that's how we start to do it. And to not separate out antisemitism from everything else.
'cause this is a big part of the way that that discourse is used. We talk about antisemitism as if it has to be, um, separated from all other forms of oppression, as if it can only be discussed on its own, and that everything else is a zero sum game. [00:35:00] And we just don't believe that's true, so we need to bring it back into that collective conversation.
I. The talk attacking the US rule in the genocide in Palestine is one of the most complicated, difficult fights. I think there is because it requires such a mass movement and a lot of the institutions, like we talked about earlier, have totally betrayed us on this. Obviously we need to fight for first to cease fire and arms embargo.
We need to think practically about those sorts of things. What happens in Israel depends to a great deal on the US aid, the military aid, and part of why the US is such a a, a kind of. Clean military supporter of Israel is that it's a military Keynesian program, meaning they basically use tax dollars to pay companies in the US weapons manufacturers to send stuff over to Israel, thereby keeping jobs in certain red districts and actually funneling that money back into the us.
So in a lot of ways, where you're talking about is a number of weapons manufacturers making money to basically send weapons over to Israel that are then used to, you know, to [00:36:00] bomb Palestinian civilians. So what we need to do obviously is build obviously a, a mass anti-war movement and to confront those things and push for that because without the US support in that way, Israel would be much, much less able to just run rough shot over those things and the politics would change rather rapidly in that case.
And so I think thinking about our own government and where our leverage there ends up being the most important when, when I'm talking with, when I'm interviewing. Jewish anti-Zionists, they'll talk about being a Jewish anti-Zionist. But the next thing is they'll say, and I'm American Pay American taxes, right?
My tax dollars are being used. And so I'm actually talking there about my tax dollars just as much as I'm talking about me being Jewish and this not speaking for my Jewishness. So I think leveraging it in those points, and it's tough because anti-war movements. Are difficult social movements, it's different than housing.
I can block an eviction, at least in theory, right? You can go on strike at a workplace. It's more complicated when you're talking about the US' funding of a foreign war. And so I think that's gonna require real mass mobilization. But again, the opportunities we [00:37:00] have here is that we already have to have mass mobilizations.
We don't have a choice anymore. And so I think when we think about what happens when we're all together. And how these issues are tied together, and they certainly are tied together. that gives us the opportunity to take on multiple things that we didn't think were possible before.
Ejeris: So it feels like. In, you know, maga, which we'd know to be a fascist movement, but taking on antisemitism, which is so, coded right, because of how, like, when most people think of fascism, they think of, the Nazis, right? it almost feels like it can create this, cover, you know, and this confusion for many people.
Well, maybe, maybe they're not. Fascist
Shane: Mm-hmm.
Ejeris: you know, this, this, that, or the other. and it's, it's strategy on their end to kind of really create, issues that make it hard for our movements to unite both against what's happening in this country and against what our, our, country is against, like these [00:38:00] arms sales against what we're funding in Israel.
I know you're saying we, that these movements go together. How do we thread those lines? Because I know that pretty soon people will start talking about midterms or, you know, we need to choose, we need to focus on addressing the power, um, that MAGA has. And then, the anti-war work can wait.
what do you say to our folks when we are thinking about, how we fight all of these fights.
Shane: there's a, the logic of that kind of argument is intact if we play by the rules of the world. They told us we had. But we don't have that world. We actually don't have those options. things are too severe to be able to think in that way. And instead, I think it's worthwhile to think about.
More dramatic solutions that have more complicated outcomes where things happen interchangeably. Right? A dramatic political shift in the US that might come from a real [00:39:00] mass movement and by mass movement, I mean millions of people, right? Really disrupting the, like the status quo. That would change politics on every front.
It would change foreign policy, it would change economic policy. It would have to, right? Those things would change in in session and, and when we look at. Historically, you know, for like during the Great Depression, uh, during great society programs, those changed actually pretty rapidly together. So I don't, it's not like one or the other.
That doesn't mean that. We don't have the work of sort of making smart choices and figuring out how to balance. Demands and issues and how we talk about them.
one of the things that is a challenge now is that we're talking about pretty radical politics for, for a lot of people in the United States talking about a free Palestine is very radical because the status quo of the Western arrangement includes Israel, right?
As it stands now. Not like the Israel of the Future Collaborative Society. No, of the Israel today. So you're necessarily talking about revolution and people don't. [00:40:00] Naturally just want revolution, right? They want stability, like who wouldn't. so instead, I think what we need to do is find that language of being able to like affirm and move people past that and affirm those fears.
And so often we are driven by anger and frustration and. Boy, do I get it? Like I am just as much frustrated folks. But the reality is that most people actually are pretty good people and are actually struggling to find the right decision. And so bringing them into this coalition and also saying, Hey, we're not all there on all these things.
You know what I mean? And we're gonna affirm the sincerity of your disagreement and that you're, you know, that you're coming in trying to learn and grow. That doesn't mean getting rid of your. Political principles, but it does mean having the flexibility that people can be invited in, that's what's gonna be required at a real mass scale.
And then it's reaching out because like you said at the beginning, some of the, the main recruits of the far right are people that could have been in our ranks in a different world. Right.
For example, I mean like the number one factor here is whether someone's in a [00:41:00] rural county, but a rural county in the US is most likely gonna be the inheritor of even worse economic realities from rightwing politics, right? So like, are we not going in there? Are we abandoning those folks? Are we saying like, Hey, like even if you've been tricked by a conman, like do you, do you wanna do something differently?
you know, I, I live in Portland, Oregon, which frankly is only about 10 miles away from deeply read deeply rural parts of the state. Right? And in those areas, people oftentimes understand mutual aid in a way that city goers just simply don't. Right. They come together and help people's farms, so they're about to lose them.
They help stop foreclosures. They support each other in ways to help people get to the people to the hospital, help deliver medication to folks that can't get around. Like that stuff happens. How do we bridge those divides? I think that's the important question that's gonna have to happen, because again, you're gonna need those people to take back power, um, from what's happening now.
Ejeris: Yeah. Yeah, I think that you just gave us so much to think about around the complexities of the alliances and the [00:42:00] relationships that we need to build now. Making space to bring people in, but also to kind of push people's politics, to educate them, and how we can kind of build both the anti-war movement we need and the anti-fascist movement we need.
So, I'm so grateful. For your time. Shane, thank you so much for joining us on the Fascism Barometer and we're, we're so excited to continue to, look into your work and to, um, support you.
Shane: Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited about the project. I'm really glad to be here.