'If You Want to Understand Ben-Gvir, You Have to Go Back to Brooklyn' - Jewish World - Haaretz.com
Elana Sztokman, right, and Israeli right-wing activists calling for the Jewish resettlement of Gaza near the border, last week.Credit: Jacob Sztokman, Amir Cohen / Reuters
Just a few days after the October 7 Hamas massacre, Elana Sztokman discovered that she had been added to a WhatsApp group of graduates of her yeshiva day school in Brooklyn. Many of them she had not seen or heard from in decades.
It soon became clear to her that while she had moved on ideologically, the rest of them remained pretty much where they had been in high school when it came to thinking about Israel and the Middle East conflict. As far as they were concerned, Israel could do no wrong, the Arabs were all bad, all they want to do was kill Jews, and therefore, they all deserve to die.
As a proud leftist who had left the Orthodox world many years earlier, Sztokman found she had very little in common with her old gang. But that was not the only thing that set her apart: Unlike most of the other members of this new WhatsApp group, Sztokman actually lives in Israel, and like most Israelis, had been personally and deeply affected by the events of October 7: Her two daughters, who lived close to the Gaza border, had been displaced, and were now living with her, and their husbands, along with Sztokman's son, had all been called up for military reserve duty.
- Can an Israeli really understand the American Jewish view of Israel?
- Dozens of Jewish organizations spanning the globe call for immediate cease-fire in Gaza
- A new platform emerges for progressive Zionists in America
Deeply disturbed by some comments being posted in the WhatsApp group, Sztokman reached out privately to the moderator, who happened to be an old friend, and asked her why she was allowing the platform to be used to promote radical religious ideas that justified mass murder.
"Do you have any idea what happened on October 7?" the moderator wrote her back.
Burned houses in kibbutz Nir Oz a year after the October 7 Hamas attack.Credit: Olivier Fitoussi
Sztokman was not sure whether to laugh or cry. "Of course, I know what happened on October 7, I'm living it," she responded. "But I still don't believe that all Palestinians support Hamas or that there are no innocent people on the other side."
Taken aback by this response, the moderator advised Sztokman to seek professional help and suggested she "go back to being a grandmother and leave the thinking to the rest of us."
This exchange opens "In My Jewish State," Sztokman's latest book, scheduled for release later this month by Lioness Books and Media, the publishing company she founded to promote women's voices. It not only underscores how far the author has deviated from her Orthodox, right-wing Zionist roots, but also establishes her credentials as an authority, based on her own lived experience, on the Jewish supremacist ideology that has taken Israel by storm in recent years.
Rabbi Meir Kahane, Jerusalem, 1984.Credit: Harnik Nati/GPO
Sztokman attended the Yeshivah of Flatbush, a Modern Orthodox day school whose graduates include the likes of fashion icon Isaac Mizrahi, retired Israeli Supreme Court Justice Neal Hendel, and former Anti-Defamation League leader Abe Foxman.
It is also the school where two of the most infamous Jewish characters of recent history earned their diplomas: Meir Kahane, the racist rabbi whose party was banned in Israel, but whose protégé Itamar Ben-Gvir, a convicted criminal, serves as the powerful minister of national security in the current government; and Baruch Goldstein, the doctor who, motivated by Kahanist ideology, carried out a massacre against Palestinians at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron 30 years ago, killing 29 Muslim worshippers and injuring another 125.
"I often say to Israelis that if you want to understand Ben-Gvir, you have to go back to Brooklyn," says Sztokman, who lives in Modi'in in central Israel, in a telephone interview with Haaretz. "Ben-Gvir is a direct heir to Meir Kahane. The language he uses comes straight from Avenue J [a main Flatbush thoroughfare]. It's used to play on people's fears, and now this language has been transplanted to Israel, and the radical religious right is turning it into policy."
Itamar Ben-Gvir at a cabinet meeting, Jerusalem, in 2023.Credit: Marc Israel Sellem
Justifying atrocities
An anthropologist by training, Sztokman, 55, is an outspoken feminist and peace activist who has written seven books, including "When Rabbis Abuse" (2022) and "The War on Women in Israel" (2014). She has served as executive director of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, completed a spiritual counseling program run by the Reform movement, and since July has been co-hosting a podcast called "Women Ending War" with her Palestinian friend Eva Dalak.
Sztokman was a young mother when she immigrated to Israel more than 30 years ago, "a hat and long-skirt wearing bright-eyed Jewish educator intent on convincing my fellow Jews to love Israel and dedicate their lives to Judaism."
She raised her children Orthodox and left Orthodoxy when she was in her early forties (her husband is still observant).
"I kept my Shabbat-breaking habits private for a very long time," says Sztokman. "I didn't really leave leave until my kids were out of the house – and even today, I still have one foot in and one foot out."
In her latest book, the author sets out to explain how she got from there to here, not only religiously, but also politically. Of all her books, notes Sztokman, "In My Jewish State" was the most difficult to write. Not only because it is a memoir of sorts, forcing her to look deep into herself and take stock of past mistakes, but also because it focuses on the highly fraught topic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"So many people today are speaking from a place of trauma, and from a place of trauma are justifying atrocities, and so what I'm asking in this book is: Can we please stop doing that?" she says.
"I know people are going to take deep offense at that suggestion, and I understand that, because Jews are still living in the shadow of the Holocaust, and October 7 is still very raw. And yet, I need to say it because a lot of lives are at stake, both here and there. I also think the Jewish state is at stake, the definition of who we are as a people is at stake, and I think our humanity is at stake. We cannot use antisemitism to justify doing whatever we want to the Palestinians – and that's a stance that's hard for most Jews to engage with."
Israeli far-right activists load a mobile house bearing the slogan "Gaza is ours forever" onto a truck near the border between Israel and Gaza last week, as part of a demonstration promoting Jewish settlement of the Strip.Credit: Menahem Kahana / AFP
I'm saying we need to rethink what it means to be a Jewish state, we need to be rethinking the whole concept of a Jewish state, because what we're doing now is not sustainable.
Elana Sztokman
It's often said that there is not an Israeli who hasn't had their beliefs shaken by October 7. Is that true for you as well?
"Yes, but in a different way. They say that most Israelis have taken two steps to the right. I've taken two steps to the left. I'm even more certain about the need to do things differently. My views have evolved to even further places where I'm saying we need to rethink what it means to be a Jewish state, we need to be rethinking the whole concept of a Jewish state, because what we're doing now is not sustainable."
More than 30 years later, do you have regrets about making Aliyah?
"I regret that I didn't realize what a pawn I was, that I didn't realize that I was being sold a very particular agenda, a particular version of Jewishness – I feel I've been used a bit, and it upsets me. I feel I've been lied to my entire life. I wish I would have had more courage to ask questions and have more outlets for questions when I was young. I had nobody to ask, so I made decisions based on not having all the facts. So, I'm sad and angry, and I'm trying to repair things now. Writing this book is part of that repair work."