Hope written on the walls: Q&A with Sim Kern
Sim Kern talks to S(h)ibboleth about antisemitism
(anti-Jewish hate), Israeli propaganda and what Christians could do more of in the fight for Palestinian freedom.
Interview: Jonty Langley • Illustration: Malky Currie • Photos: Interlink Publishing
Sim Kern is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author and digital creator. Their book, Genocide Bad: Notes on Palestine, Jewish History, and Collective Liberation springs from their experience of growing up Jewish in the United States, and deconstructing the pro-Zionism arguments they have encountered in life and online.
How did you feel when you started talking about Palestine on this kind of public platform?
I felt very scared. It was very intimidating. Like you, on October 7th, I had been in the anti-Zionist place for a while. I had already founded a Jewish Voice for Peace chapter in Houston with some of my friends (JVP is the big anti-Zionist Jewish organisation). I’d been doing the work for a couple of years and I would go to these JVP actions with the Palestinian Youth Movement and when they would ask someone from JVP to speak, it was never me.
I was really intimidated by it. I had Zionist extended family, and I had gotten into it with them before, and it had gone really badly. And when you talk with Zionists it’s like getting a firehose of talking points and their version of history. There’s just so much of it and it can be quite intimidating to take it on.
But I keep saying: courage is a practice. It took so much and it was so scary for me to just make a TikTok saying “you should read Palestinian books, Palestinians are human beings, the media is racist against them.” And I had no idea the level of exposure and backlash that I was in for. But now, doing that isn’t scary at all.
That sense of imposter syndrome in talking about Israel-Palestine, it can be an excuse for celebrities not to use their platform to talk about it, but for ordinary people, do you have any advice?
Well, it’s great you bring that up, because that’s literally the whole point of the book, Genocide Bad. It’s about how you have these conversations.
Zionist commenters on the internet were so helpful to me in doing the research, in that every possible counter-argument got thrown at me. I was making these TikToks that were getting hundreds of thousands of views and I was getting dogpiled by Zionists. Everything that they had to throw at me, I’ve heard a hundred, a thousand times, and I’ve put all my responses in the book.
Each chapter is named for a hasbara [Israeli propaganda] talking point. The title of the first chapter is “Who are you to speak on Israel?”
A huge amount of their strategies and tactics are just to make you feel like you’re not allowed to have an opinion on this issue. The point of the book is to help people gain that confidence and see through the obfuscations, the lies, the bogus history, and find their voice on this issue.
Was there any aspect of hasbara that threw you most?
I was tripped up most before I realised that Israel employs “sock puppet” accounts. Israel spends $150 million on propaganda, and they operate pro-Palestine, seemingly leftist social justice accounts, and they have thousands of them. I’ve gotten really good at spotting them, sometimes it’s really obvious: they’ve got like 10 followers, they started this account yesterday. Sometimes they’ve been at it for a while and they gained huge followings. They put a Palestine flag in the picture window, they name themselves something like ‘Queer Falistini Girly’ or something, and then they cause mayhem.
And you can spot them because all they’re doing is tearing down other people who are speaking out, for some perceived imperfection. They’re trying to scare everybody into shutting up, and they’re pretending to be in the movement.
A really aha moment for me was when I realised that sometimes I was arguing with these accounts and more than one would say “you’re a self-hating Jew”. And I was like, Boom, hello, Shlomo. No Palestinian would ever call me a self-hating Jew. That is an Israeli move!
Governments and corporations are all employing a ton of people to operate sock puppet accounts and try to influence youth culture. If we aren’t aware that that’s the reality, and expecting it and on the watch for it, we will be totally derailed.
What is it like being attacked by all these strangers on the internet?
On October 10th or something, I had this video that got 20 million views and got hundreds of thousands of followers. And one of the reasons was that it was stitched by a MAGA influencer who had, five million followers and was selling “I stand with Israel” t-shirts. He sicked his five million Christian Zionist, MAGA, Trump Country following on me. I got a lot of death threats. And that really freaked me out. I had never experienced that before. I also started getting recognised in public at that point, usually by followers and supporters, but all of a sudden the private and the public just collapsed. For me it was quite difficult to gauge: how safe am I?
It was an intense time. I was on a book tour for my last novel, and I cancelled the Texas leg because we just didn’t have any security plan in place and it was too late to figure all that out. Now, if I’m doing any public events, I always have to insist on some kind of security plan.
Death threats for TikToks is wild. Can you laugh it off?
Yeah, I mean, I laughed off a lot of them, ‘cause a lot of them were ridiculous. But it’s scary, because you never know if they mean it. The scary ones were people who took the time to like find my e-mail address. They did some digging, they didn’t just put it in the comments.
There were thousands, though, that were wishing me death as well. Like “Go to Gaza for your haircut and you’ll get raped to death by the men there.” People publicly fantasising about me being murdered or raped. There was a lot of that in the comments.
It wears on you. But I’ve always been sort of a spiteful person, and so, in a way, it does fuel me, all the hate that I get from Zionists.
When we announced my book, before I’d even finished writing it, I hadn’t even turned in the pages yet, an op-ed writer in the Jerusalem Post said my book was “lies, misrepresentations and insidious insanity”. Sight unseen. And I was just tickled pink by that.
A lot of those people who are wishing really awful things on you will have been Christians. I’m so sorry. What can we do about Christian Zionism?
God, I don’t know. I’ve read the New Testament cover to cover, which I don’t think most Jews have done, and that Jesus Christ sure had a lot of great things to say, didn’t he? But it was just appalling how little it seemed to sink in in the examples of the Christians I interacted with.
I definitely don’t want to say all Christians are like that. I know there are amazing Christians that I have met who really do take the things that Jesus said to heart, which are quite a radical anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist agenda. But it’s not the majority. Not in the United States at least.
I grew up in a very rural area where I was the only Jew. It was completely Christian, very white area, Northern Illinois, out in the cornfields. And I experienced a lot of interpersonal anti-Jewish hate. Like bullying from kids, which I think is very, very important to distinguish from any kind of structural racism like what you have in Israel against Palestinians, or what black people face in the United States. I also ended up going to Catholic school, where weirdly there was like less of that kind of bullying. But at Catholic school I was fetishised for being a Jew. Being a Jew was such a get. The really religious kids wanted to convert me, the naughty Catholic kids wanted to hang out with me because I was edgy and dangerous – because I was Jewish.
I don’t think that Jews face structural racism or structural religious persecution in the US, but as a Jewish kid, I did experience interpersonal kid-to-kid bullying about being Jewish.
So many people have been told for so long that antisemitism and criticism of Israel are pretty much the same thing. How do we chip away at that for people who aren’t already deeply engaged in this issue?
Well, that’s why that’s the longest chapter in my book, because I come at it from a lot of different angles, and my conclusion is: it’s actually the opposite. There’s nothing greater you could do to spread anti-Jewish hate than to conflate Judaism with Israel’s actions. Standing up to anti-Jewish hate necessitates criticising Israel. And criticising genocide.
I actually don’t use the term antisemitism anymore, for a lot of reasons that I go into in the book. I don’t like the word. The word ‘semite’ is a made-up racial category created by these racist 19th century Germans. It’s not a real thing. Biological race isn’t a real thing. But because some 19th century Germans said so, anybody from the Levant is considered a ‘semite’. And so, because of that historical association, Palestinians and Arab people generally feel very erased by the term ‘antisemitic’.
They say: even though it’s a made-up category, we are in this category. How come you never use the word for us? Well, the reason they never use the word for us is because the person who coined the term ‘anti-Semitism’ was Wilhelm Marr, who was a proto-Nazi, before the Nazi Party formed, and he created the political party of “Anti Semites” in Germany, and the political platform of that party was: we are about hating Jews, and we are going to get the Jews out of Germany. Anti-Jewish hate was nothing new in Europe at this time, but they were applying Victorian ‘race science’ to justify their hatred of Jews.
Wilhelm Marr was Hitler’s inspiration. That’s who created the term. It erases Palestinians and Arab people, and Israel has used it so much that I get sick hearing it. It means nothing anymore. If criticising Israel, if criticising genocide is antisemitic, saying kids dying is bad is antisemitic, then I guess that’s what I am. That word means fucking nothing.
I just use the term “anti-Jewish hate” to talk about what I think people generally mean. Because hate is hate, and it can be anti-Jewish, it can be anti-Palestinian, it can be anti-Arab. It’s not this special, unique, protected class.
A lot of people get hated on. And what happened to the Jews is horrific, but it we’re not the only people that’s happened to. It happened to the indigenous people of the Americas, it happened in South Africa. It happened in the Congo. It happened all over the place.
Why is it important for Jewish people to speak out? And is there a danger that goes with it, of either being tokenised or taking up Palestinian space in the movement? It seems like a complicated space to occupy.
It is. I recommend the book Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O Táíwò all the time, because it’s so helpful in recognising the way identity politics gets weaponised against people and against movements. He names the way this happens as Deference Politics. In Deference Politics, you defer to whoever is the most marginalised person in the room, and it’s an uncritical deferral. It’s: “because of my identity, listen to me.” Not because of my ideas. Which is an inherently dehumanising and tokenising platform, but it has become sort of the mainstream approach of online social justice spaces over the last ten, 15 years or so.
Táíwò makes the case that it has completely derailed leftism. And we gotta get back to a constructive politic, which would be about building power and really taking on elites. To do that, we have to evaluate people’s ideas based on the quality of their ideas, not their tokenised marginalisations.
So, for me now, when I show up as a Jew to this movement, I am continually clarifying that “I’m Jewish and here’s what I have to say.” But finding the time to also say: “by the way, it is fucked up that you care more about what I’m saying because I’m Jewish.” It’s important that I keep reiterating that.
A lot of Jews are hiding behind the feeling that “I shouldn’t be centred, so why do I need to speak out?” Well, because this is the real world. In the real world, we’re being told that Israel is burning kids alive for us. And we have a moral obligation to speak out.
And can I say, for you and your audience, I’d really love to see more Christian anti-Zionists show up as their identity. I think that would be really powerful. Because in JVP, we just had a Seder, we do holidays together where we’re just creating space to be anti-Zionist Jews and practise our traditions together with a shared commitment against genocide. And that, in and of itself, is a really radical act when almost every single Jewish synagogue in Texas is Zionist.
Just making space to come together and say that we are anti Zionists together and we can still be Jews, or we can still be Christians. I think that’s really powerful. And I would love to see more like of a united Christian anti-Zionist presence.
The images from Gaza we’re seeing are more and more brutal. The indifference from our leaders continues. How do we maintain hope?
Change takes time. This is small, but I went out to see my friend’s band play in a bar in Houston, and like most bar bathrooms there was Sharpie drawn everywhere. And a whole bunch of people had written “Free Palestine”. In Houston, Texas! And I bet that in every bar that has sharpie on the walls, you’re gonna find Free Palestine.
That was so unthinkable a year ago. The culture has shifted irrevocably. You can’t put that genie back in the bottle. The political processes, the billionaires, the weapons manufacturers, they all are very powerful and they have a very vested interest in keeping this going forever and propping up their colony forever and continuing forever-wars forever. But the people have turned against it in a way that is just undeniable.
I find hope in bar bathroom graffiti and I find hope in the people in Gaza who are still living their lives. They’re starving. The humanitarian aid is not flowing. It’s a terrible situation. But they have survived so much. They’re continuing to survive. And we’re just going to keep going for them. We’re just going to keep going.
TikTok: @simkern
This interview is from Issue 4 of S(h)ibboleth magazine. Buy your copy today!
Instagram: @sim_bookstagrams_badly