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The Thin Veil is a show for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of Palestine—and what Palestine can reveal about the systems shaping our world. Hosted by musician/activist and anti-Zionist Jew Ezra Lipp, who was raised in a Zionist ecosystem and is now, as always, on a continuing journey of learning and unlearning.
Through long-form conversations with historians, journalists, artists, activists, and people with lived experience, the show explores Palestine not in isolation, but as a window into questions of power, history, identity, media, ideology, resistance, and the stories we inherit about the world around us.
[00:00:00] Coming up on The Thin Veil The project of turning Jewish summer camp into a place to instill Zionism was very intentional and designed.
[00:00:09] something like 1,500 Israeli soldiers, were at dozens of summer camps across North America, very clearly for indoctrination purposes.
[00:00:19] Camps would boast about soldiers who literally just came from the killing fields of Gaza, to these summer camps. One article I read, the camp director said, "Spending a week at this summer camp is more healing than a year of therapy for these Israeli soldiers."
[00:00:32] So why Jewish summer camps should be these feel-gooderies for potential war criminals is absolutely beyond me.
[00:00:39]
[00:00:44] Well, hello, and welcome back to The Thin Veil.
[00:00:47] So happy to have you here. I am your host, Ezra Lipp. The Thin Veil is a show that explores what happens when inherited narratives crumble, what happens when the veil lifts, particularly around Palestine and Zionism. If you're listening for the first time, thank you for being here. if you're a returning listener, thank you so much for coming back. And if you're a returning listener, you've probably heard me say that it really helps the show if you leave a rating or review, if you subscribe on YouTube or wherever you're listening to on the podcast platforms, if you hit the notification bell.
[00:01:23] it helps other people find these conversations. It helps me sustain this work. and I'd so appreciate it. So if you haven't done those things, and this is not your first episode yet, maybe just consider now just taking two minutes pausing. I ask every week, and you could do that.
[00:01:38] That would be very meaningful. also, if you'd like to become a monthly sustainer contributor to the show, w- we'd really, uh, love your support, either through Patreon or through a one-time donation tip you can make on the Ko-fi platform. These are all linked in the show notes. Of course, we will be soon, starting to offer some early episode releases, as well as maybe some bonus content with myself and new collaborator, co-host, Esther Azar, Rabbi Esther Azar.
[00:02:13] I'm not promising it yet, but,I think there'll be more content coming down the pipeline, so please, uh, help support the show. It means so much. Also, before you do that, if you have any extra money, I would encourage you to give it to people on the ground in need in Gaza.
[00:02:31] Today we'd like to highlight Gaza Food Relief Project. I will leave a link to that in the show notes. This is a mutual aid project organized by people on the ground in Gaza to help people desperately in need of food in Gaza. So please, if you have, anything to offer, please donate to Gaza Food Relief Project and help support them
[00:02:55] My guest today is a Canadian anti-Zionist Jewish writer. He is a novelist, essayist, and he is trying to do the work of reclaiming Jewish writing and Jewish fiction from Zionism. He has written, fiction such as Babka at the Party, essays such as Jewish Fiction After October 7th, and most recently he has a novel out, a full-length novel called Lake Burntshore, which I had the pleasure of reading, which, I'd highly recommend, and it is a novel that, explores, the phenomenon of Jewish Zionist summer camps in North America and, it deals with themes of anti-Zionism, settler colonialism in Canada, and Israeli nationalism. That is a topic that I am interested in as I attended, for my whole childhood and adolescence, Jewish Zionist summer camp.
[00:03:58] so Aaron and I spoke a few weeks ago. it was a lovely conversation. I have to say, as far as my contributions, particularly to the first half of our conversation, I was just, I don't know how else to say it, but I was, like, brilliant, incredibly articulate. I was, uh, surprising both myself and Aaron with just the level of depth and clarity and, fresh analysis in my thinking,
[00:04:28] Some of my, my, my best work,I killed it. Unfortunately, you will never hear that part of the interview because we had technical errors. So that whole first half of the conversation I was just describing did not actually get recorded, as in my side of the conversation did not get recorded, either audio or video.
[00:04:48] So,this is going to be somewhat of a unique structure for the first half of, this conversation, which I've edited, with help from the great Ali Budner. and the way that it works, is that for the first half of our conversation You will be hearing Aaron's original conversation with me, and at the times that I interjected, I've re-recorded new content, that approximates what I think I might have said from memory and, my best guess based on Aaron's response.
[00:05:24] so it is a little bit of a manufactured conversation for the first half of this conversation as far as my part, but honestly, I think it works, and I think A-Aaron's, analysis and everything he says still rings true. So I apologize about the clunky framing, but h-I-honestly I, I think it's gonna be okay.
[00:05:42] Uh, and then the second half of the conversation is our live exchange, and I indicate when that happens. Anyway, that was a lot of ado. Without further ado, please enjoy this wonderful conversation with the one and only Aaron Kreuter
[00:06:01] I'm an anti-Zionist Jewish writer and academic and activist. I've been pro-Palestinian for almost 20 years now and working on it in one way or another, whether it's through my writing or through my academic work, which is mostly on Jewish fiction, Palestinian fiction. I grew up in, in Thornhill, which is a very Jewish suburb of Toronto, very Jewish, very Zionist.
[00:06:20] Apparently, Thornhill's actually known in Israel as, like, a very safe place for Israelis to go. That's how Zionist it is. Going up there after October 7th, it's entering another world, just the amount of Israeli flags and, uh, you know, the United Jewish Appeals signs, which are, like, from an alternate reality, which we can get into.
[00:06:36] My, my parents were not religious at all, but we joined a Reform synagogue when I was young, mostly for community, and, uh, it was a, you know, it was a big part of my life growing up. I went to a number of different types of Jewish summer camps, more secular camps to Zionist camps, secular apolitical camps that became Zionist camps later on.
[00:06:54] So I was always very involved in the Jewish world. I was never, like, a gung-ho Zionis- Zionist, really, but Israel was sort of there, and I guess I, I believed in it when I was young. But I very quickly saw the hypocrisy around it. That's what really opened my eyes to the whole phenomenon of Zionism and Israel as a settler colonial state.
[00:07:13] Just the hypocrisy in, like, you know, family members and friends and the way sp- people would, would speak about it I went on birthright, which also definitely had the paradoxical effect of pushing me much, much further away. I spent some time in Israel in my very, very early 20s on a kibbutz, and we traveled around, and, uh, you know, that also definitely pushed me further away.
[00:07:33] And basically since my early 20s, I've been, I've been anti-Zionist, pro-Pa- pro-Palestinian. At least until October 7th, I definitely was one state for two people type of mode, but a- after, after the two or three years of genocide, I don't know how feasible that is anymore. Okay, this is, uh, Ezra fabricating my questions, as mentioned earlier.
[00:07:57] My best guess of what I probably asked right at this point, and judging by Aaron's response, is I probably asked him about his thin veil moment when the veil started to lift and when he started to see through Zionism. So Aaron, when did you start to see through all this? This is such an important question, I think, in the Jewish community at least because Zo- as, as Jewish listeners and non-Jewish listeners know, Zionism is just the dominant narrative, or it, it was more so.
[00:08:24] That's obviously starting to fray, fortunately. But it was, you know, it was, it was in the very air we breathe. Like, you know, as a teenager, I don't really remember that much direct indoctrination. That wasn't my personal experience, but it was just always there. A lot of anti-Zionis- Zionist Jews have this moment where something clicked.
[00:08:41] For me, it was almost more of a, a gradual progression. I was always drawn to, you know, the counterculture and radical politics, and my real political awakening was in 2001 when I was 16, marching against the US entering the war in Iraq. But yeah, just the way people spoke about Israel as this unimpeachable, pure state of glorious pioneers who could do no wrong, and the dehumanization of the Palestinians, and sort of that, that, that realization and awakening definitely paralleled in some ways my all, my learning about the Canadian, about the nation-state of Canada, right, and its settler colonial history and present and, and the Indigenous populations here.
[00:09:16] One of the things I try and explore in my work, definitely in, in my novel, Lake Burnshore, is the sort of, that, the, the conjoined settler colonial history of, of Palestine and of Canada, of Tur- of Turtle Island. I've tried to go back and pinpoint it before, but I re- I really do think, as I sort of mentioned earlier, it was really just the way people spoke about Israel as this...
[00:09:36] I very quickly tuned into the fact that the way Jewish institutional leaders and my Zionist friends, et cetera, the way they spoke about Israel, it wasn't about a place that really existed. It was about this magical Jewish utopia that was in Palestine, you know, across the border were these, were these bloodthirsty Arabs who wanted to kill every, every Jew.
[00:09:53] Like, it didn't make sense from the very beginning, but As, as I said, it was once I started looking deeply at it, it was definitely, definitely a pretty fast turn- turnaround for me. I'd like to transition into talking about Jewish sleepaway camp and that phenomenon, which I was also a part of. And we are missing the brilliant things I might have said at this point, but, uh, we'll let Aaron take it from here.
[00:10:18] Jewish sleepover camp is definitely a, a major phenomenon in, in the US and Canada. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish youth, uh, s- att- attend camp every summer. And it's part of the sort of general, the camping movement in general in, in North America, which does have, you know, settler colonial roots, which we could talk about.
[00:10:34] But it also is, it's its own phenomenon. Like, out of all the ethnicities that have camping trend, the Jewish folks at- attend summer camp way, way more. And I loved summer camp when I was a kid. I loved being in the woods. I loved the communal feel of it. I was always drawn to the c- the communal. When I was 16, I was at Camp Biloweeen, which is part of the, which is part of this Young Judea network in Canada, where four or five Camps across Canada go up to age 15, and then when you're 16, you all go to one, one central camp.
[00:11:02] So it was like 110 16-year-olds living in, like, glorified tents, basically. I was 16 when I thought I should really write a novel to try and capture what th- what this experience is, is like. And it wasn't until my mid-30s where I actually sat down and wrote the novel. All of which to say is that, you know, I was very much drawn to it, and I pull this out in the novel as well.
[00:11:21] Just the fact that for four to eight weeks every summer, you can leave your... You can leave, like, your home life. You can leave your parents. You can leave, like, the rhythms of school and the suburbs and the city, and go to live in this much, much more communal, bounded space, much closer to, like, the lakes and forests of Turtle Island.
[00:11:39] You live in a cabin with your friends and enemies. You all eat in a dining hall communally. To me, just that shift is even possible just really shows that we build the way we live, and we can build a dif- a different way. Okay. If I recall, what I most likely brought up in this point in our conversation was that although Aaron did point out it is possible to kind of build this, this communal socialist-ish experience for, for children and adult staff, what is also inherent to a lot of these camps and what he does a great job bringing up in his book is that there's actually a lot of material wealth behind this that makes it possible.
[00:12:23] It's a very privileged activity, obviously. Most of the families that I went to camp with had a lot of material resources. My mother actually worked at my, the summer camp I went to for most of my life, so I had a different experience in that way. But, um, yeah, there's a lot of wealth behind this kind of, uh, communal utopia.
[00:12:46] Yeah, for sure. The fact that Jewish summer camp is such a big part of Jewish life in North America just speaks to our elite and privileged status in, in North America, for sure. But yeah, one thing I wanted to do in the novel is to get across the m- the materiality of, of the camp experience, right? The money behind it, as you mentioned, and also, like, what the day-to-day of running a Jewish summer camp is like.
[00:13:06] Since we're talking about some of the problems of camp at the moment, the fact that Jewish summer camps are on stolen land no matter where they are in North America, the settler aspect of it, the use of indigenous names, e- etc. All of these elements that we're discussing, both sort of the positive and the negative, to me, that- that's what drew me to the, the camp as a geography to really explore and dig down in- into the contemporary Jewish experience, right?
[00:13:29] This, this bounded space with all these elements brewing underneath. I will just say that I had a wonderful time attending these camps.
[00:13:39] I recognize now that the insidiousness of indoctrinating youth into having this loyalty to Israel, for instance, there's all these crazy things of, you know, you're celebrating Israeli Independence Day, and you're doing these sort of, like, coded IDF military training activities, and, uh, eating falafel, and all, all the kind of, Zionist propaganda indoctrination experiences.
[00:14:06] But, um, you're also making really good friends and experiencing this, this communal space, and that's how indoctrination works. It's often masked in these really joyful and true experiences of building these real friendships. Just to respond to all that, you know, very true things you were saying. Yeah, I mean, sleepover camp in general is a crucible.
[00:14:31] Everything is super heightened. A day is like, feels like a week in the city. The connections you make, the desires you feel, the love, the connection to the place, it's really real. And to segue into talking about Zionism, Jewish institutional leaders realized very early that camp was a, a, a prime location for Jewish identity formation.
[00:14:53] Whether that was earlier in the 20th century especially, whether that was like Yiddishkayt diaspora culture, or then especially after 1967, whether that was Zionism.
[00:15:02] The project of turning Jewish summer camp into a place to instill Zionism and an iron core belief in the State of Israel was very intentional and designed.
[00:15:13] Researching the novel, I did quite a bit of reading, and now there's sort of a sub-genre of Jewish studies on Jewish camp studies. It's very much known that camps were decidedly, just as so many Jewish institutions basically gave themselves entirely over to Zionism and Zionist indoctrination, which is one reason so many young folks are leaving those institutions right now, because they feel it doesn't speak to their experiences or their beliefs.
[00:15:36] There's plenty of camps that are, have nothing to do with Zionism or Israel at all. The camp my partner went to and that I was staff at, w- it was one of those camps. Very much like Camp Burnshore at the beginning of the novel had nothing to do with Israel or Palestine or r- Jewish religion, really. It was just 90%-plus of the people who went there were Jewish.
[00:15:55] And so having that sort of first crisis Be, uh, in the first days of the novel, summer of 2013, more staff than usual get kicked out for smoking pot. And so the camp owner's son, who's a big Zionist, he convinces his dad to bring in Israeli soldiers to act as staff. Sort of having that switch from secular apolitical into Zionist indoctrination, and Ruby, the anti-Zionist protagonist, her response to that.
[00:16:18] That seemed like a really interesting tension and movement in the novel. But speaking of Zionist indoctrination, when I tell people who aren't as familiar with Jewish summer camps the plot of the novel, they think it's absolutely insane that there's Jewish, literally Israeli soldiers at camp. But unfortunately, that's not something I made up.
[00:16:36] That's a very real phenomenon. Two summers ago, I wrote an article on Mundoice for this, and something like 1,500 Israeli soldiers, or Israeli soldiers who just finished their service, were at dozens of summer camps across North America, very clearly for indoctrination purposes. And all this was just on the internet.
[00:16:57] These Zionist institutions and summer camps were not hiding it. Camps would boast about soldiers who literally just came from the killing fields of Gaza, th- they wouldn't call it that, to these summer camps. One article I read, the camp director said, "Spending a week at this summer camp is more healing than a year of therapy for these Israeli soldiers."
[00:17:16] So why Jewish summer camps in North America should be these feel-gooderies for potential war criminals is absolutely, absolutely beyond me. And Israel hosts conferences where camp directors come and talk about their plan for bringing soldiers in, and it's a whole huge institutional vehicle for Zionist capture and indoctrination.
[00:17:36] And I've been involved in some organizing in Canada, trying to get some of the Zionist camps that bring Israeli soldiers sort of decertified, but that's very much an, an uphill battle. In r- in response, and I think it's the province, just dedicated millions of dollars to improve security at these Zionist summer camps.
[00:17:54] So these Zionist summer camps are literally turning into fortified battlements. Instead of this deeply needed Jewish reckoning with what we've allowed ourselves to become vis-a-vis Zionism, they're just battening down the hatches. And, you know, to parents of Jewish kids who go to these camps, is this really what you want your child to be brought up believing, that Is- Israel can do no wrong, and the Palestinians brought it on themselves, and there's no victims, they're all potential terrorists, et cetera, et cetera?
[00:18:20] I've been accused of making Jewish kids at summer camp unsafe because I write about this, but is that what makes th- these kids unsafe, or is it that there's literal war criminals a- at the camp? And just to further deepen this, this line of thought, because summer camps are such a, such a heightened place, that crucible, you can only imagine what it's like when these Israeli soldiers come to, and these impressionable youth.
[00:18:45] You know, forget Israeli soldiers, the way kids look up to their staff, sometimes who are, like, two or three years older, as literally, like, the coolest people on the planet, and then, you know, a soldier comes. These tanned Is- Israeli 20-something-year-olds, sometimes they wear their ar- uniforms, and they have their war stories, and they lost friends, and it's a very potent form of, of indoctrination.
[00:19:06] Yeah, I'll just interject here again to say I, I totally second that about looking up to the staff. My summer camp counselors were some of the most influential people on me as a young adolescent, the way they, um, got me into the music that I would end up loving and being a big part of my life.
[00:19:29] We also had Israelis at the camps that I'd attended.
[00:19:34] I went to a camp called Ramah. I'll name it there. The, Israel program I went on was also through Ramah. I've actually been in conversation/debate with some former camp counselors of mine that are just totally indoctrinated when it comes to Zionism.
[00:19:52]
[00:19:52] I don't really think it's stated enough that- Zionist Jews in diaspora, in North America especially, the Israel they believe in and that they think is over there never existed and was never over there. It's a disconnect from reality, right? I think in certain segments of Israeli society, the Nakba is far more acknowledged than, than it is in the, in, like, the Jewish d- diaspora.
[00:20:15] Y- you can't go there without ideological scales on your eyes and not see that it's apartheid. It's apartheid, like, plain and simple. And then some, some folks who sort of believe in the Israel within the green line, like the pre 6- 1967 borders, will say, "Yeah, well, the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza is bad, but Israel proper is, like, a functioning democracy."
[00:20:35] But Palestinians within Israel proper were under, like, military, uh, rule until, like, '65. There was, there was that two-year per- yeah, '66, yeah. Anyways, and that's obviously just gotten so, so much worse since October 7th. Uh, and my la- my most recent essay on this is called Jewish Fiction After October 7th, and it really looks at, there's, like, a double meaning to the title, right?
[00:20:57] Both how, how I see Jewish literature and fiction's role in, in challenging the Zionist narrative and how the Israel that Zionists in North America talk about and believe in is itself a fiction, these dual tensions and ironies. Just to bring it back to the summer camp just for a minute, yeah, I mean, your, the experiences you were just talking about, Ezra, you know, those are widespread at Zionist summer camps.
[00:21:21] I read one book called Hebrew Infusion, an academic book, and it was, like, an academic study of how successful or not successful, like, Hebrew language learning and indoctrination is at camps. And it's just without a hint of irony, right? These are, like, Zionist academic texts. You can see very clearly what's going on in these camps.
[00:21:40] I just wanted to make clear that most of the staff at this camp, and I was at one point on staff at s- one, one of these camps, the whole thing sounds incredibly insidious and has, you know, this element of indoctrination.
[00:21:54] But it's not like As far as I was aware, certainly as a 18-year-old counselor, and I think even this is true for most of the older staff, nobody's trying to give these youth a false sense of history to manipulate them for malevolent political aims. It is just, we all believed in these myths and this falsified history that is so dominant in the Jewish Zionist narrative.
[00:22:28] I think that's definitely true. Though I will say, I do think, especially at the top of these institutions and Zionist movements, there are people who are responsible for sure. There are people that can be held, and should be held responsible, definitely. But what, and we, what you're getting at is that in the Jewish world, as in, like, other parts of the world too, right?
[00:22:45] This ideology, this worldview, it just be- it becomes the norm. It becomes normalized. It's just, it's, it's the air, it's the air we breathe, and we don't realize it's, it's the way things are, and things can't be otherwise. Whereas what I try and do in m- in my work is to just to totally discard that idea, right?
[00:23:02] Israel didn't have to exist. You know, the Jewish people didn't have to give all of their attention and sense of self to, like, a militarized nuclear power oppressing millions of people. It didn't have to be that way at all. And we really see that the cracks, the deep divides happen, uh, in the Jewish world right now.
[00:23:22] Zionism's dominant narrative is holding on for dear life, and it, hopefully it's not gonna, it's not gonna last too much longer. But as the, the majority of the Jewish world was def- profoundly against Zionism, basically until 1948. And then, okay, the state exists, so now I'll support it. But even until '67, that was, Israel was just ov- over there.
[00:23:42] Again, it was, like, decisions that institutional leaders made in the diaspora to, to, to totally lock Jewish identity, which they were worried was disappearing through intermarriage and assimilation, to lock it into, to lock it into Israel. And so p- part of the work that I see myself and other writers of anti-Zionist Jewish fiction and literature doing is, is making that, is making the invisible visible, right?
[00:24:06] Is showing that Zionism is a belief system that can be discarded and, you know, and people should be held to account, and justice must be desired and worked for. But there is another way. The whole Jewish story of we didn't have a land, we didn't have a state, we didn't have governmental power, we didn't have an army, and to come away from that, and, you know, the horrors of the Holocaust, of course.
[00:24:28] To come away from that and to think, "You know what? What we actually need is we need a nation-state. We need to become what oppressed us for so long." To me, that's just unbelievably ma-, a wrong way of thinking about it. To me, what that actually means is that no one should have power over others, right? There, no one should have temporal power over land.
[00:24:48] We shouldn't be beholden to the weapon companies. We've become a people of, like, weapon companies' spokespeople. I say no to that. I very clearly and loudly say no to that. Yeah. how did Zionism become the dominant narrative in the Jewish world?
[00:25:03] I'm not an expert in this. I'm not a historian per se. One thing that, what I do know about and what I can talk about a bit is the role that literature and cultural products play in this indoc- in this indoctrination. In particular, Leon Uris' novel E- Exodus, which came out in the '50s. It can't be stated strongly enough how much of a role Exodus played in, in cementing Zionism as, as the dominant narrative.
[00:25:25] You know, the book sold millions of copies in its first year, and it's a hundreds of pages genre novel about the founding of the state, and the novel is chock, chock-full of Jewish history. There's hundreds of pages take place during the Holocaust and the Warsaw Ghetto. But every single sentence in that novel is fine-tuned to- towards making the argument that Israel is the natural endpoint of the Jewish diaspora.
[00:25:49] And of course, the book is just absolutely rife with Palestinian racism. And one thing that Uris did in that novel was he really sort of Americanized the founding of Israel. He took these sort of Zionist pioneers and made them into the heroic American male individual, right? They made... He turned the Zionist settlement of Palestine into a cowboys and Indians story, which is really fascinating because, you know, in that sense, he wasn't too far off because they both were settler colonial projects.
[00:26:18] Obviously, different settler colonial nation states, the context is different, the history is different, the forms indigenous resistance take are different. But the mechanisms of settler colonialism are the same pretty much across the board, whether we're talking about Palestine, Israel and Palestine, or the US or Canada or South Africa.
[00:26:38] But yeah, Exodus and, and the film of Exodus, which even was sort of more Americanized than the novel, just had a huge impact in cementing Zionism. And some folks, you know, you could be talking about Exodus with Zionists, and they'll say, "Oh, you know, Exodus was from another time. Its arguments are, like, old and outdated."
[00:26:54] But if you actually go back and read Exodus, the arguments haven't changed from a Zionist perspective at all. Exodus is still assigned as Zionist reading, especially, you know, if you're going to do a year course in Israel or anything, Exodus is still an assigned text. So some, you know, liberal Zionists know how poisonous and horrific the ideology espoused in Exodus is, and they try to distance themselves from it, but it is a very clear encapsulation of Zionist thinking and the, and the Zionist project.
[00:27:22] Just disparaging the, the diaspora, as you know, weak, effeminate Jews, and this reborn, muscular Jew founding, founding the state with their hands and their weapons as, as the ultimate expression of Jewish virility and communal success. Just totally ensconced in there Okay, and that concludes our technical error portion of this conversation.
[00:27:46] I hope this format with me responding after the fact wasn't too distracting, but from here on out, the rest of our conversation, we did capture both sides of the audio and video. So from here on out, it is all conversation that happened in real time. Thanks for bearing with my technical errors. Have you experienced your writing or speaking or any kind of advocacy you're doing, do you feel like it's been able to change anyone, move anyone even just a little bit?
[00:28:17] Yeah, I would say so. When I toured around Canada, and I did a few events in the States for Lake Burnshore, I had a lot of, like, progressive or anti-Zionist Jewish readers come up to me and say they were, like, so thrilled and relieved to read a book that mirrors or captures their Jewish experience.
[00:28:32] So there's a very deep, deep hunger in the Jewish world for, for anti-Zionist Jewish stories. Just a tiny aside, it was very important for me in the novel to have Ruby start as an anti-Zionist. I didn't want this to be a story of a Zionist becoming an anti-Zionist. Okay. I think those stories are fine, but for me personally, like, we're way past that moment.
[00:28:53] You know, Ruby sort of deepens her anti-Zionism, and her thinking about settler colonialism in general, but that was really important to me. And I've heard from some folks that the novel and my last collection, Rebel Children, has changed people's thinking. I've had some folks email me through my website and tell me that I, like, totally changed their minds about stuff.
[00:29:12] Hmm. Yeah. Who is your target audience? Is it, like, the already committed anti-Zionists? Is it the liberal Zionists that are having cognitive dissonance? Definitely those two groups. I can say who I'm not writing for. I'm not writing for diehard ideological Zionists. I don't need to speak to them through that.
[00:29:30] I'm definitely happy if they know of my presence and other anti-Zionist presence. Mm-hmm. But I'm definitely not writing just for Jewish folks. I'm writing for anybody who wants to read a, you know, a satiric political novel that's also full of sex, drugs, rock and roll. Yeah. We spoke a little about this before the interview started.
[00:29:47] The amount of detail that you have in the book, making it so realistic to the quintessential Jewish summer camp, generally speaking, whatever that means, at least my experience, is really extraordinary with the way that jam bands, both like- ... Phish and the Grateful Dead, and the fictional jam band Grizzly you create, and the staff's love of those, and the way they make their own music, the excessive pot smoking, the sex.
[00:30:15] Even how the book started, like, I loved... It starts with the maintenance, the two-person maintenance crew, like- Yeah, Jonah and Tim. Yeah, clearing out the camp, and I just, I, right away I was like, "Oh, this is gonna be really good and realistic." Because the camp I went to, we knew the maintenance guys. That was, like, a part of the camp, and the bunk raids, I mean, everything.
[00:30:39] I was just like, you really nailed, um... It was a quite a pleasurable read. There was a lot of nostalgia. I've been reading so much nonfiction, uh, about Palestine, and Israel, and Zionism, and it was a nice way to read something a bit lighter that still dealt with really important themes. So I thank you for writing this.
[00:31:02] It was quite enjoyable. Thanks for saying that, Ezra. It really means a lot. Having the book connect with readers is an unbelievably gratifying and it's almost like sacred feeling. When I was writing the novel, I was definitely very preoccupied with having it work on various levels, right? Like on some levels- Yeah
[00:31:18] it's, it's just about a summer at camp and, like, connections and friendships and loves and betrayals. Then there's the political, there's the relationship with the land. There's the land and the lake as a character. I really see fiction as a vehicle for ideas, right? Like in arguments, music, all that. And I also, I really truly believe in how the particular can get at the universal, right?
[00:31:38] In terms of audience. Yeah. Like the deeper I dig into this very particular bounded Jewish world in the novel, the more universal the experiences become, right? 'Cause at its root it's a novel about friendship and relationships, right? With all the other stuff. There is one central theme that we didn't quite name explicitly I don't believe yet, which is central to the plot of the book, which it also deals with s- settler colonialism in Canada.
[00:32:05] Can you just speak to that a little bit? Yeah, definitely. For sure. So the first crisis in the novel is that Brett, the Zionist camp owner's son, is bringing in these five Israeli soldiers, and Ruby, who, you know, hates all soldiers, but especially hates Israeli soldiers, she's unbelievably pissed and worried.
[00:32:23] She feels that it's gonna totally destroy the camp. But the second major crisis in the novel, which we'll see is interrelated, is that Ruby finds out that Brett is in the process of buying 10,000 acres of adjacent crown land. I guess we call it federal land in the States. You know, it's land that's owned by the provincial or federal government, and in Canada, it technically is owned by, like, the queen or the king, which is horrifying and disgusting.
[00:32:46] But, you know, by right and by tradition, that land belongs to the Black Spruce First Nation, which is the fictional Anishinaabe people who live in a reserve next door to the camp. And there's major Anishinaabe characters in the novel,
[00:32:59] So now Ruby ends up fighting for what she sees as the camp's spirit, I guess, for lack of a better word, uh, on these two fronts, against sort of the Zionist indoctrination and the settler colonial expansion, which Brett very clearly justifies in the language of Jewish safety and Jewish security, sort of satirizing that, that justification.
[00:33:18] In, in that way, the novel really sort of explores three different kinds of relationship to land, right? The settler colonial, which is a dominating, oppressive, dehumanizing one, but focused on the nation state. The Indigenous, which is about reciprocity with the land, living with the land as stewards of the land.
[00:33:35] And then, you know, the diasporic, which, as we already discussed, I see as, you know, living as guests on the land, not having, you know, temporal or, uh, land-based power. And again, having Anishinaabe folks, anti-Zionist Jews, Zionist Jews, Israeli soldiers all at this camp, the mixture of English and Hebrew and Anishinaabemowin and a little bit of Yiddish, a little bit of Arabic.
[00:33:57] It really just makes this bounded summer camp speak to these conjoined settler colonial histories of Canada and Palestine, and the Jewish role in both of them. On the subject of fusing Zionism with Jewish summer camp, I'm not sure if the camps you went to had this, but in mine There was also an Israel summer built in, where the summer between your last summer as a camper and when you come back as a CIT, counselor in training, you go to Israel in the summer program.
[00:34:29] So very much like your kind of camper experience is leading from when you're very young to this glorified summer in Israel, which that's obviously very much tied into Zionism. The camp I went to as a 16-year-old, Camp Bilowim, yeah, the following summer when you're 17 is Bilowim Israel, and it's exactly that, a summer in Israel.
[00:34:49] I was planning on going, but our Bilowim Israel year was canceled in 2002 'cause of the Second Intifada. Mm-hmm. So I mean, who knows how different my life would've been if I ended up going. Maybe I would've swallowed the Zionism- Yeah ... hook, line, and sinker. I sort of doubt it, but you know, I've always- Yeah
[00:35:03] sort of had this outsider look at things, but you never know. But thanks for bringing that up, Ezra, because year courses, summers in Israel, Birthright, which is a free 10-day trip, these are all ideological packages and mechanisms in the same way Zionist summer camp is, right? It's all about building young Jewish identity on Zionism through whatever means possible, right?
[00:35:25] You know, you go on this 10-day free trip, and, uh, you know, they're plying you with alcohol, encouraging you to, to have sex. All just part of this institutional attempt to ideologically capture Jewish youth, youth being very impressionable. Um, I'm reading this book right now called Jabotinsky's Children, which takes place- Hmm
[00:35:44] in Poland in the interwar period, and it, it's such an unbelievably fraught period of Jews across the political spectrum, from the communist Bund to the fascist Zionists, right-wing Zionists, building summer camps and doing training clubs and, and doing, like, war exercises, and all about ideological capture of the youth.
[00:36:05] It was very, very important in Poland in the interwar years. That's obviously still going on, right? Capturing Jewish youth in this ideology. And I should mention, it's very common in these programs, particularly, like, the longer semester programs, like, where they send kids to Gadna, which is a high school training program for the IDF.
[00:36:25] So for instance, I did a semester when I was 15, and I did a week in this actual division of the Israeli army where they take high school kids, or in this case Jewish American kids from all over, and you learn how to shoot a machine gun, and you're in the army for a week. And then they say, "Hey, if you wanna come back in a couple years and be- join for real and terrorize Palestinians, we will facilitate that for you."
[00:36:51] Uh, I mean, the fact that that's normal in our Jewish liberal communities, it just blows my mind to this day. It's absolutely astounding to put together all these various elements of this project of Zionist indoctrination. Like, you know, Zionism wouldn't maintain itself, there wouldn't be the same buy-in if it wasn't for the intense amount of money and effort put into this ideological capture.
[00:37:15] And then when we say something like, "Maybe camps in Canada shouldn't have Israeli soldiers there teaching the youth," then it's, "Oh, you're against all Jews and you're antisemitic." You know, and then, "Oh, you're turning this into a political thing." It's like, no, you turned this into a political thing when you brought over Israeli soldiers to indoctrinate our kids.
[00:37:33] It's just totally, again, totally, totally backwards What can you say about conversations happening in the Jewish community, specifically around Zionism and anti-Zionism, and this divide that we're seeing post October 7th, and maybe how those conversations have shifted or intensified since before October 7th?
[00:37:54] Yeah, uh, they've definitely both shifted and intensified. Before October 7th, sort of the Jewish, you know, mainstream, the Jewish institutional world basically took a stance of just ignoring anti-Zionist Jewish folks and writings, which have always existed and have only grown in number and output, just totally pretending it doesn't exist, explaining away as crackpots or self-hating Jews, et cetera.
[00:38:17] Zionists have continued to try to, to take that stance of just pretending anti-Zionist Jews doesn't exist at all. It's a rounding error. But, um, you know, from, from my point of view, we're becoming harder and harder to ignore. Like, it's basically impossible to ignore our presence anymore. I feel like now a lot of the times with the narrative I see, at least for some people, is kind of explaining it away as they don't understand the history of Zionism.
[00:38:44] They don't understand, like, the reasons for Israel. They don't understand Jewish history and victimhood, when- In my experience and from what I found, as well as how I think of the work I've done, I feel like committed anti-Zionists actually know far more about Zionism, as well as Palestine, than the Zionists that fight against them.
[00:39:07] So there's this irony there where people chalk it up to Soviet propaganda or Hamas propaganda, you know? Yeah, I know. That's just one technique they have in their arsenal, right? But it's super, super easy to defang and declaw those types of arguments, 'cause as you said, yeah, I mean, y- you know how many anti-Zionist Jews I've met who speak Yiddish and Hebrew and Arabic, and know the history very, very deeply?
[00:39:32] Like, you know, me speaking personally, I didn't come to my politics out of thin air. I've read a very large amount about it. Yeah. And, you know, the history is clear, and this comes to what I was mentioning earlier, like the Zionist talking point of, "Oh, anti-Zionist Jews just don't know the history. They don't know why we need Israel."
[00:39:49] They actually have it completely backwards. Mm-hmm. They're the ones whose, especially North America, their history is entirely fabricated. It's impossible to read the history of the Zionist colonization of Palestine and not see the Palestinians as the victim of the settler colonial project that excluded them, ethnically cleansed them, dehumanized them, oppressed them, genocided them.
[00:40:11] And, you know, speaking of weapons companies, Gaza has been, for a long time, like a testing ground for Israeli weapon companies and, you know, surveillance. Yeah. And that's just gotten to extreme extent. That's the sword we're gonna die on. That's what we're gonna give it all to. The fact that a, this 100-year political ideology of Zionism is on the verge of destroying this thousands of year old people and religion and culture, it's absolutely horrifying.
[00:40:37] And you know, I feel it's incumbent upon those of us who have seen through the veil, so to speak, to do all we can to eject Zionism and to work for a free Palestine. I do wanna mention here that Palestinian folks and writers and activists and resistance fighters, they're on the ground waging this battle against their own oppression and genocide against Zionism since '48 and before '48, of course.
[00:40:59] Yeah. And so as anti-Zionist Jews, we definitely have to take their lead and support them. I don't think it's an accident that after October 7th, the most visible people on the streets protesting, doing sit-ins, et cetera, were Palestinians and anti-Zionist Jews, right? I mean, we're at the forefront of the movement, and yes, we're small compared to the Jewish institutional world, and we don't have, you know, institutional power and finances, but we're fighting tooth and nail against our uncles and cousins.
[00:41:27] Yeah. And I'm glad you brought that up too, you know, about Palestinians and how they're literally fighting for their lives and against erasure of their people, their culture. You know, I, I appreciate us having this conversation. I appreciate the work we both do, which in some ways, at points at least, are, are tailored specifically, like internally towards the Jewish world.
[00:41:52] It's definitely not exclusively speaking for myself, but I do feel like there is this risk, this danger that is possible where when we continuously center the conversation around internal Jewish dialogue, which are arguably, like, important conversations to have. As you say, we don't want to see Judaism die on this sort of Zionism.
[00:42:15] But sometimes I feel like it has the adverse effect of obscuring or just delaying conversation about the grotesque reality that is actually happening in Gaza and the West Bank to Palestinians right now. So I just feel like as anti-Zionist Jews, we need to continuously remind ourselves of that and come back to that.
[00:42:38] Like, oh, no, this is our internal dilemma and processing our own feelings, even if they're on the side of with the Palestinians and anti-Zionism. You know, if we do that too much, it could obfuscate doing the more important work of being in solidarity and fighting for Palestinian liberation. 110%. I have a few things I wanna respond to, but I want us to start by saying, you know, as you and I are talking right now, the genocide is very, very much still going on in, in Gaza, as we both volunteer with Connecting Gaza, and we hear the absolute horror stories of the genocide continuing, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza living in tents or less, the lack of food and medicine, the scrounging for just daily survival, the daily murders and death, Israel just pushing the Palestinians closer and closer, erecting cranes that have AI-sensored machine guns on it.
[00:43:32] The fact that there's human beings- Mm ... living that way right now, and the self-reported Jewish state is enacting it, is horrifying, and that has basically become normalized. You know, I definitely think we need to continue looking at what's happening and doing our utmost to make it stop. I have no interest in centering Jewish feelings.
[00:43:52] You know, th- this is happening to the Palestinians. That being said, I have no interest, quite the opposite, of giving up Jewish literature to the Zionists. I don't think it's helping anybody if Jewish literature just becomes this fascist stenography for a state. I wanna try and push back against it, make something new, make something better.
[00:44:12] You know, Jewish North American fiction used to be lauded for its subversion, and, and its, and its satire, and it's, it's speaking back to power, and I wanna bring that back. As I've written elsewhere, Jewish fiction about Zionism, which is an important part about what I see as anti-Zionist Jewish fiction, has a duty and a role to look at how this has happened to the Jewish people.
[00:44:34] I do believe that under the right circumstances, any group of people, especially if there's nationalism involved, can be pushed to, you know, oppress and dehumanize. It seems like dehumanization's this easy thing to fall into, and we as anti-Zionist Jewish writers have a role to, to investigate why that is and to prevent it from happening a- again in any situation.
[00:44:54] And as we've sort of talked around in our conversation, the Israeli oppression and genocide of the Palestinians with the total support of the Western world, especially America, is really just the tip of the spear of our capitalistic, extractive, settler colonial, white supremacist world we live in. If we're going to break that spear and build something new, it's gonna have to start in Palestine, basically.
[00:45:18] But all these issues are intertwined. To me, it seems very clear that the same way Zionist Jews in North America, you know, a majority of them, not all of them, live in an alternate reality, don't see what's actually happening in Palestine. You know, it's the same thing with climate change. It was the same thing with COVID for a vast swath of the population.
[00:45:37] We've built a society from all aspects, media, culture, living paycheck to paycheck, where it's easy just to think that the horrible things that are happening on the planet aren't happening. And, uh, literature, especially fiction, is just one way to sort of make us aware so we can try and do something about it.
[00:45:54] I deeply believe a better world is possible, and I think fiction is one way of not only imagining, but bringing that world into being. Well, I really appreciate the work you're doing with that, and I think we need more of that.
[00:46:09] Aaron Kreuter, thank you so much for coming on The Thin Veil. It was such a pleasure to talk with you. Thanks for having me, Ezra.
[00:46:14] It was really great
[00:46:15] Well, thank you so much for tuning into The Thin Veil again. Thank you, Aaron, for coming on the show. I so appreciate it. It was wonderful to talk to you. Thank you for doing all the work you're doing. Please follow Aaron. He has so much content, uh, books, essays, writings. he's-- does speaking events. Follow him on his website, aaronkroyter.com.
[00:46:37] Link in the show notes. You know what to do. Please leave a rating and review of the show. Follow us, support us on Patreon and Ko-fi. Give to Gaza Food Relief Project. Uh, we so appreciate it. We will come out with the next, episode with myself and Esther Azar this coming Friday. Another episode of, I guess you call it The Thin Veil Unfiltered.
[00:46:59] And, um, I'd love to hear your thoughts on, how this is going.
[00:47:03] Write to thethinveilpod@gmail.com. Find us on Instagram, The Thin Veil Podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you for doing what you're doing. I wish you a very free Palestine, and thank you for being here
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