"I Just Couldn't Accept That That Was Something That Was Being Said": Contemplating Humanity & Inhumanity from "A Weird Place," with Joshua Leifer

I humbly yet insistently invite you to check out the most recent episode of my podcast BAD RABBI, in which I interview journalist and gadfy Josh Leifer about the controversy that erupted around the Dissent piece he published shortly after 10/7, “Toward a Humane Left.” 

This is one of my favorite episodes if I do say so myself. (I do) Josh speaks with so much honesty, vulnerability, and nuance about his own experience of 10/7 and its aftermath—what it felt like to hear friends, colleagues, and comrades cheering on Hamas, and what it felt like to be ridiculed for (in the Dissent piece) making a basic call to empathic humanity, which he understood to form the foundation of left ethics and thought. He reflects on ideological compartmentalization, the conversations he avoided and wishes he hadn’t, and the liberating process of seeking a place to stand in this new, still-shifting political landscape as Israel’s war against Hamas rages on—no longer confined by what he refers to as the strictly orthodox “politics of deference” that’s come to dominate discourse on the left.

"So now I'm in a weird place," Josh shared early in our conversation, and it’s a sentiment many can relate to these days. Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza, following the latter's barbaric 10/7 torture-rape-massacre of 1400 Israelis, and kidnapping of 240 more, has provoked some of the most acute fissures of my generation, with implications that can't be fully predicted except to say we will be living with them for generations more. Leifer experienced what he describes as an acute awakening about the nature of left-politics in the wake of the massacre: "I reacted very personally to people I knew personally from the left-journalism milieu, reacting excitedly, triumphantly -- or just justifying the Hamas attacks…I was surprised by the controversy of the humane left piece, and even more surprised and kind of appalled by the published response to it. These were things that I thought were basically uncontroversial ideas….But it turned out to be the case that this sentiment was pretty widely shared among progressive Jews."

Toward a Humane Left - Dissent Magazine

Inhumane Times | Joshua Leifer | The New York Review of Books (nybooks.com)