NY bookshop said to nix talk by Jewish critic of Zionism for including Zionist rabbi

Author Joshua Leifer says he was expecting flack from synagogues, not a Brooklyn bookstore; progressive rabbi he was set to appear with slams move as ‘Stalinist or Maoist’

By ToI Staff 21 August 2024, 9:13 pm Edit
Rabbi Andy Bachman attends a protest in New York, December 9, 2013. (Andrew Burton / Getty Images via AFP)
Rabbi Andy Bachman attends a protest in New York, December 9, 2013. (Andrew Burton / Getty Images via AFP)

Joshua Leifer, a Jewish American journalist and critic of Zionism, said Wednesday that a Brooklyn bookstore canceled his public conversation with a progressive Zionist rabbi because the store would “not permit a Zionist on the premises.”

Leifer was set to discuss his new book, “Tablets Shattered,” with Brooklyn-area rabbi Andy Bachman at the PowerHouse bookstore on Tuesday night. Less than an hour before, Leifer said, the store told him it was unwilling to host the event due to the moderator.

“I wrote this book to explore debates within American Jewish life, which of course includes many people who identify as Zionists,” Leifer wrote on X. “My biggest worry was about synagogues not wanting to host me. I didn’t think it would be bookstores in Brooklyn that would be closing their doors.”

Leifer posted a picture of a sign at the powerHouse bookstore’s entrance apologizing for the event’s cancelation “due to unforeseen circumstances.”

Bachman, noting his and Leifer’s criticisms of Israel, wrote on Facebook that the bookstore’s decision “is nothing short of Stalinist or Maoist thinking.”

“It’s disgusting, it’s antisemitic and if the owners of powerHouse Books had any courage, they’d fire the dopes who canceled last night’s event,” wrote Bachman.

The bookstore, which has three locations in Brooklyn, could not immediately be reached for comment.

Congressman Daniel Goldman, a Jewish Democrat who represents part of Brooklyn in the US House of Representatives, assailed the bookstore for what he called “unacceptable antisemitism, plain and simple.”

“The term ‘Zionist’ — which simply means someone who believes in a Jewish state — has become an antisemitic slur in extreme left circles,” Goldman wrote on X, praising Bachman as a “friend and a proud progressive Zionist.”

Fellow New York Democrat Representative Ritchie Torres, who is a vocal supporter of Israel, accused the store of “abruptly and arbitrarily” canceling the event with Bachman “simply because he is a pro-Israel Jew.”

“The far left is making ‘Zionists’ (i.e. most Jews) the exception to progressivism’s rule against discrimination,” Torres said on X.

While it is unclear how many American Jews identify as Zionist, a Pew Research poll from 2021 found that roughly eight in 10 Jews in the US feel an affinity to Israel.

Leifer, a contributor to Jewish Currents as well as to The New York Times and the Guardian, has written extensively about his disillusionment with the “dogmatic, bellicose Zionism” in which he was raised.

Bachman is the former rabbi of Beit Elohim, a progressive Reform congregation in Brooklyn. He has reportedly called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition “the most evil and racist Israeli government in the history of the country.”

In December, he was heckled at a panel discussion during a screening of a left-wing Zionist documentary at New York’s City University, where he has taught.

Bachman wrote that he “was lambasted for being a rabbi who dared to dissent from the only line of reasoning that the film and its protagonists had to offer: Israeli and Zionist American Jews are solely responsible for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

The cancelation of Bachman and Leifer’s conversation came amid a string of antisemitic incidents in major US cities linked to protests against Israel over the war in Gaza.

On Tuesday, a mob of anti-Israel protesters that had breached the Democratic National Convention in Chicago chanted anti-Israel slogans as they stormed a room where delegates from a non-Zionist Orthodox Jewish organization were meeting with members of the US Congress to discuss domestic antisemitism.

In June, anti-Zionists vandalized the Brooklyn Museum — the site of several pro-Palestinian protests — and the homes of some of its directors, including one who is Jewish.

Later that month, mask-wearing protesters on the New York subway demanded Zionist passengers identify themselves and leave. The incident led at least one New York county to codify the governor’s recommendation that protesters be barred from wearing masks.

The protesters were leaving Manhattan’s Union Square, where an exhibit was being held about the Hamas-led atrocities at the Nova music festival during the October 7 attack,  in which Palestinian terrorists stormed into southern Israel killed nearly 1,200 people and took 251 hostages, sparking the war in Gaza.

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