PART 1: Antisemitism and the American Left | A Discussion with Asheville's Jewish Leaders

In the days after Oct. 7, when Hamas attacked Israel, some of the fiercest criticisms in this country were directed at Israel, from self-identified liberals and progressives. At the same time, I heard nary a whisper of outrage directed toward Hamas for the attack, its treatment of hostages taken that day and their use of civilians in Gaza as shields.

This is the first episode in a two-part conversation with local Jewish leaders: Rabbis Batsheva Meiri of Congregation Beth HaTephila and Mitchell Levine of Congregation Beth Israel, along with Frank Goldsmith, who is on the steering committee of Carolina Jews for Justice; and Sharon Fahrer, who has documented much of Asheville’s Jewish history.

We talk through the antisemitism they’ve observed and experienced here  before and after Oct. 7. We also discuss both the faith-based and cultural nuances of Jewish identity, talk through Israel’s conduct in this war and what these leaders want to see happen once the smoke clears.

Note: Royalty-free music for this episode "Warm Solitude, Cold Loneliness" by Arthur Vyncke.

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Transcript

Matt Peiken: Rabbis, how did you address the Oct. 7 attack with your congregations once you had a chance to sit and have a service? How did you view your roles in that moment?

Rabbi Batsheva Meiri: I don't think we had to make people feel anything. People felt it, almost instinctively. As Jews, it may have happened on the other side of the world, but this is the phenomenon of what it means to be part of a people that when one Jew suffers, no matter where they are, we all feel the sting of it.

And so what our work really was, was to hold people through that awful, terrifying, fearful, grief stricken moment. I think that was our work, much more so than trying to have people relate to it, people immediately related. And we also have to say that at Beth Israel and in other congregations, not so much in ours, although there are a few, we have people who are from Israel who live amongst us, who have family, who are still very much.

Traveling back and forth regularly to Israel. And so it's not a, it's not a foreign land to any of us. It's very much part of our reality and consciousness at all times. 

Matt Peiken: But what is your role with your congregations in these times, let alone that first moment?

Rabbi Mitchell Levine: I think we can distinguish one level between a clergy response and synagogue response. For example, in our synagogue we put together a group in collaboration with Jewish Family Services that's simply designed to give people a safe space and emotional support. But as a rabbi, I guess I have to say, although I share Rabbi Meiri's grief and that of the Jewish people very early on, I think I was concerned given the background of antisemitism and the fact that it seemed clear to me that this would escalate very quickly into a war that would go on for some time. I felt, you know, given the history of Israel suffering accusations of disproportional response in the past, we would see these kinds of challenges again. So it became important to me early on to try to equip my congregants with information from our tradition and how to successfully have some of these challenging conversations with family members, with peers, with people at work, students at school, how do we find a way to explain to our friends and neighbors how we feel about what's going on and how can we put that in the context of Jewish tradition and classical Jewish values?

Rabbi Batsheva Meiri: We did much of the same and are still doing that. One of the additional things that I've been doing. Personally, it's just reaching out to my interfaith clergy partners and trying to engage in conversations and have there be some understanding about how the Jewish community is feeling right now.

Matt Peiken: What responses did you get from your outreach in that regard? 

Rabbi Batsheva Meiri: It's still ongoing. Everybody has been loving and Supportive. And what I'm hoping really for is for some deepening of the conversation so that the impressions from the news cycle feel very condemning to the state of Israel and how it's undertaking its conduct in this war, and What I want to do, what I feel is so important to do, is to tell some other stories. 

Matt Peiken: Frank, Rabbi Levine just mentioned alluded to an anti semitism around the world and you didn't mention but here and I'm just wondering you were born here. You've lived many years here. What has been your experience as a Jew in a largely Christian part of the country? And I'm wondering if the conversation at all has changed since October 7th. 

Frank Goldsmith: Yes, I think it has changed a lot since October 7th. I think it's a fundamental shift in how we feel, and I'm going to speak broadly of the progressive Jewish community because that's part of what I am and that includes Carolina Jews for Justice, but it also includes The Social Action Committee at Beth Israel and the Social Justice Committee at Beth HaTephila and unaffiliated Jews that we have joined with to work in partnership with other organizations, non- Jewish organizations, other people who we feel have been unjustly oppressed because of their race or because of their gender identity or because of their economic status or whatever the case may be. And what most concerns me domestically, apart from what's happening in Israel, is that there is, I perceive a rift in the relationship between Progressive Jews who have done these things, and I can name some of the things we've done, and the reactions that we're getting from people that we held in allyship.

Matt Peiken: Can you clarify a little bit, progressive Jews and what we've done? Yeah. Explain that, what do you mean? 

Frank Goldsmith: Okay, so for example, Carolina Jews for Justice is one of the founding members of the Racial Justice Coalition here in Asheville. I'm on the board of that organization. We have done other things that furthered racial justice.

We've sponsored film screenings, for example, and panel discussions on the civil rights movement, the movie Selma, the movie 13th about mass incarceration of Black people. We formed a Black Jewish alliance some years ago, which I think is an unfortunate name because it tends to remove people who are both Black and Jewish from the equation.

But nonetheless, we've done that. We've marched every year in the Pride Parade, carrying our banners and showing solidarity with LGBTQ people. We've sponsored forums on language for LGBTQ people. When Trump started his Muslim ban, we went en masse, a lot of people, to the mosque to show solidarity with the Muslim people.

When Trump tried to end DACA, we showed up with CIMA, the Latin American, Compañeros Inmigrantes. We showed up with them and marched in the streets and we put on programs against HB2, the so called bathroom bill. And so there are a host of ways in which we have tried to show up for others, expecting that they would also show up for us.

Not doing it because of that, but it's just a natural expectation when you're partners and allies with another group that they will do that for you. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah, you said things have changed since October 7th. Yeah. What was it like before October 7th? 

Frank Goldsmith: We felt that we were in solidarity, with other oppressed groups, that we were all working together, that we viewed oppression as being something that affected all of us.

A lot of it stemmed from the right wing, from white supremacy ideology. And so we view that as a common threat and we would band together to fight that kind of thinking. And we're not giving up on that. I want to be clear about that after October 7th. It is in our DNA to stand with the oppressed people.

We believe that we're all created b'tzelem elohim, in the image of God. We believe we're mandated to pursue justice. We're not going to quit doing that, but there is some healing that has to occur. There is some mending of relationships because some of the people, not so much people as organizations that we felt were our allies, have embraced a pro Palestinian position in a way that does not acknowledge the atrocity of what happened on October 7th in Israel, and that is based on false assumptions about Israel. That it's an apartheid state. That it's a colonist enterprise. It's a white settler enterprise. That it's engaged in genocide. None of those things are true. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah, one of the things that's pretty clear is that there's a conflating of the actions of the Israeli government, Netanyahu and people who are in his administration, and Judaism as a whole. You just talked about how groups, how you thought were allied with Local Jewish organizations that you've sensed or maybe seen that is not necessarily the case. You're talking about these misconceptions. Have you had personal conversations with any of these organizations along these lines, and what have you heard back? 

Frank Goldsmith: Yeah, I have had those conversations, and I think there need to be a lot more of them. And I think it's a process of gradual education, in my opinion. I think some of it comes from a tendency to stand with the underdog, and they believe that the Palestinians are the underdog.

And there's a tendency to create a false equivalency between what happened to the people living in their homes in southern Israel who were brutally treated, brutally murdered, and I won't get into more detail about that, between that and the Israeli response. And I think it's a false equivalency because Hamas targeted civilians.

That's who they went after. That was their strategy, and they knew it would wreak havoc on their own people and they were willing to sacrifice their own people, and so I think there is a tendency to create this idea that the Israeli response has been disproportionate, that it is just as bad as what Hamas did, a tendency to conflate Palestinians with Hamas, which is not at all the case. And so it's a difficult educational process that needs to be gone through. 

Matt Peiken: I'm just wondering how that plays on the ground in Asheville. Sharon, you've done a lot of work in documenting the history of Judaism and Jewish life in Asheville. I was surprised in what little you've told me now about how fertile and active and broad based the Jewish population has been here in terms of academic life, business life.

Sharon Fahrer: First of all, the proportion of Jewish people here has never been large. I think Now it's maybe seven percent, if it's that much. 

Matt Peiken: Seven? I'd be surprised if it's seven percent. 

Rabbi Mitchell Levine: Yeah we can look that up. That would be considerably higher than the national average. Okay, then maybe it's, I don't know. It's more like two or three percent. 

Sharon Fahrer: I'm not sure, but it's been small compared to the general population. Yet the contribution of the Jewish community here has been well beyond the proportion of its numbers.

Jewish businessmen had a different relationship with their Black customers than typically Southern people did. They treated them as customers. They allowed them to try on clothes. They gave them credit. They employed them in their businesses. It's a very different perspective, and I use the example of the Feldmans they had a grocery store on Valley Street. It started in the 1930s, and it went through the 1960s. What did Mr. Feldman do? He Helped people pay their bills, like he would gather the money from them and pay the utility bills. If they couldn't sign their name, he would vouch for their ex. Things like that, and yet, his business was bombed three times and his window was broken in the 60s.

My point is, he was a part of the community, and he was respected as part of the community, and he had a relationship with the community. When the 60s happened, there was a whole different there was a change of attitude. 

Matt Peiken: Talk about that. How did that change of attitude manifest in terms of antisemitism here?

Sharon Fahrer: Well, In some cases it got more violent. The Black community and the Jewish community had a lot of relationships before that. And once that change came in, once the more militant, and I'm not talking about locally necessarily, it could be, you know, it happened nationally, then there was a separation of the two people and they didn't have the same relationship. 

Matt Peiken: The anti Semitism That brought us here today that you were talking about in the wake of October 7th, is that something that Jews in Asheville or in Western North Carolina have faced In an undercurrent. Has there always been to your awareness, observation, research, experience, is there something about life in this region that in particular has borne that out? 

Rabbi Batsheva Meiri: My experience in the 16 years I've been here is that it rises up in the middle schools that I've been called into middle school where kids are bullying kids on particularly anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish tropes, and that has always been In the mix of the experience. In high school it gets to be less brutal, or the kids grow a little bit of thicker skin. But it also expresses itself in less painful ways. There's a lot of holocaust making jokes that are somehow acceptable to say, and I think since 2016, there's been an uptick in that antisemitism that happens at the school.

And you have to think about whether, kids in middle school are not getting that out of the air. It's coming from somewhere.

Matt Peiken: I guess I'm surprised that, at that age, where are they even getting this information? Where are they getting the ideas that are anti semitic? Where are they getting the language of anti semitism and let alone identifying classmates to target? I guess I'm surprised by that. 

Rabbi Batsheva Meiri: I am not. 

Matt Peiken: You have kids. I don't have, I don't have 

Rabbi Batsheva Meiri: kids. 

To me, I think it was something that was a little less socially acceptable before 2016. And then when President Trump said there were good people on both sides, suddenly, There are good people who can say anti-Semitic things or do anti-Semitic things, and that's okay.

Anti-Semitism, by some definitions, is one of the oldest conspiracy theories, which theorizes that Jews are in some way nefarious actors in the world. And that expresses itself in all kinds of different ways.

I think that, what's Interesting, and some of the most interesting thinking that I've heard recently since October 7th is, you know, in the past, Jews have been cast as the vermin and the thing that we need to exterminate from our society. That was an old version of anti-Semitism, and that this new version, which speaks to what Frank was alluding to in the social justice circles, is that now Jews have become the ultimate white people, and because it's not good to be a white person, because white now connotes power, colonialism, oppression, all the things, but it plays on that on this very primal and sometimes subconscious and unconscious bias that a Jew with power is not going to use it well. And that's some of the double standard that is being projected onto what's happening in Israel right now. 

Matt Peiken: You think, you just brought up probably the key component of this is that the success of some Jews, many Jews in this country, whereas I think people look at people of color, other immigrants, and thinking they're all being held down en masse.

Even if you can disregard the Holocaust, I don't know how anybody can, but I don't think people think Jews in this country or around the world have been held down since World War II ended. Do you think I'm wrong in assessing it that way?

That there's this general broad brushstroke that Jews have an advantage somehow? 

Rabbi Batsheva Meiri: Interestingly, I became very friendly when I first moved here with some native Ashevillian dear, dear people who grew up here and spent their whole lives. And one of my dear friends of blessed memory would always talk about how she wasn't allowed to go into Biltmore Forest.

She wasn't allowed to attend parties in there. She wasn't allowed to be part of it because she was Jewish. And at some point the charter of Biltmore Forest changed. Biltmore Forest Country Club has had actually a Jewish President in its midst. But that existed trying to divide the community and separate socially Jews from others.

And that's true almost everywhere in the United States. There have been places where Jews were not allowed to buy homes. And while you're right, it's not the same kind of redlining that was done to the community of color, and there has been an economic and social mobility afforded to Jews, for whatever reasons, there's still always been this lever that could be pulled to cut Jews off at the knees and make them targets. 

Frank Goldsmith: Yeah, I just wanted to also interject, to add to what Rabbi has said is that we have to remember we're living in the Bible Belt and there is a theological component to anti-Semitism.

There has been in the past. I don't think it's prevalent now so much, but certainly historically in that period when Jews were not welcome at country clubs and were prohibited maybe even from living in certain neighborhoods. It was also a time when Jews were viewed as Christ killers and there were sermons in churches that people heard and believed and tended to view Jews in a different light because of that.

I really think, I like to hope, that's true. aNd I don't think it's representative of Christianity as a whole now, but I think there is historically, that goes back into the Middle Ages. There is historically that component to creating anti-Semitic feeling. 

Matt Peiken: You're bringing up something that touches on a larger question I have about whether Judaism is viewed as a faith or as a race. And I'm wondering your thoughts on that. Contemporary Judaism. I call myself, for instance, I call myself a Seinfeldian Jew. 

Rabbi Batsheva Meiri: So explain that. 

Frank Goldsmith: It's one of the larger denominations. 

Matt Peiken: It's the humor, it's the humor, it's the affect, it's the mannerisms, the loudness sometimes.

I have seen, in my direction, because of all of that, being marginalized, not because of faith at all, at least in my perception. It's all by mannerism. It's all by affect. And, if my family had remained in Brooklyn, I probably wouldn't have experienced any of the otherness that I have felt, when I, I was raised in Northern California, when I lived in the Twin Cities in Minnesota, even though there are a lot of Jews there.

Boy, being in the Twin Cities, you are very aware you are the other when you are a Brooklyn Jew. And I guess I just want to ask you, how much of this anti-Semitism, and any of you can answer this, just your own thoughts, how much of this is An otherness that is faith-based versus culturally based and mannerism based.

Rabbi Mitchell Levine: Matt, I have to take this opportunity to affirm that a sense of humor is definitely an essential characteristic to being part of the Jewish community, so you're to be commended on that. I've been thinking along similar lines to what's behind your question as I've been listening to the discussion, and I didn't grow up in Asheville, I grew up in Raleigh and one of my memories is being in a minority of one, which is different than being in a minority.

Sometimes in school, I assume it's still true today, a public school kid in Raleigh, I could find myself as the only Jew in the class or even in the school. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah, I was. There was nobody bar mitzvahed on either side of me until my younger brother, two years later, was bar mitzvahed after I was.

Rabbi Mitchell Levine: So I think that experience very much lends itself to the perception that less than a malicious anti-Semitism, just a sense that Jews really don't fit in. Like, You don't really belong. Like, You get a sense that the Black kids think you're one of the white kids.

Fair enough. But some of the white kids, or at least some of their parents and grandparents, don't think you're that very much white at all. You have a sense of not really fitting in to the extent that's religious or ethnic. I think the fact that you have the question, I think, underlines the fact that we don't fit in.

Even asking the question is asking a round shape to fit in a square hole. I don't know if it's unique to the Jewish experience, but it occurs to me that part of what we're learning here is not anything new at all. It's just a reminder that anti-Semitism doesn't stem from just one side of the political spectrum.

The extremes on both sides can lend themselves to hosting these malicious ideas, and as Rabbi Meiri mentioned, the conspiratorial thinking. It's not the same as the other types of racism. We tend in the South, especially in the South, but I think in the United States in general, we tend to think of these problems as prejudice or bigotry as having to do with racial lines, black and white.

But if you don't fit in to that divide then it can be very confusing and very complicated to figure out. I think Jews stem from a biblical culture in which faith and ethnicity weren't separated the way they are today. So there is no answer to your question, in my view. 

Matt Peiken: They're separated almost categorically in terms of census information. We're forced to choose in that way. 

Rabbi Mitchell Levine: That's in itself, I think, an indication of that, that's implicitly saying Jews don't belong. Because you have a sense of identity that we can't take account of. And at the same time, we can't accommodate. 

Matt Peiken: And there's no demarcation on census forms for being Jewish.

Rabbi Batsheva Meiri: And I'm always uncomfortable with what I Respond because I don't really feel it's a description to say I'm caucasian or like that's really not 

Rabbi Mitchell Levine: right, How do you check? Anglo Saxon or something like that was that even the words don't mean the words don't Resonate the opposite of what we want.

So I think we're in a world in which our sense of who we are isn't even acknowledged or accommodated and that's why we find these challenges on all sides or both sides or from the extremes. But you mentioned an undercurrent and perhaps that's where the undercurrent stems from as well.

Matt Peiken: Sharon, you wanted to say something? 

Sharon Fahrer: I think we're talking as Ashkenazi Jews, we have to remember that there is a diaspora, and there isn't a Jewish color. We're all different colors. Jews lived in the Arab countries. Hundreds of thousands of them were displaced. Jews live in Ethiopia. They're Black. We're giving our view of it, but we're not the ethnic view. 

Matt Peiken: But do you think it would be different if we were a federally recognized minority, if we had a classification like Blacks and Hispanic whites versus non Hispanic whites, you see that on census forms, Asian, Native Americans are recognized, and all of that rightfully so, they've all been oppressed Minorities in this country. 

We've established locally and globally an oppression that Jews have faced for millennia. Does some sort of federal recognition as a minority, would that help?

Is that something so that the people on the far left, and this is something we talked to, just got an allusion to earlier in the conversation about some of the feedback post October 7th. So people on the left, far left, may not see Jews as the oppressors if we were cast in the same light as oppressed minorities as others.

Rabbi Batsheva Meiri: See, I think this is the problem in the discourse, is that we privilege oppression. And that the state of Israel represents the Jewish people's exit from victimhood. And that disturbs the world so much that Jews would transcend their ultimate victimhood and have self-determination.

That is, to me, not criticism of a government, because I have plenty of that, but the very denial that Jews are allowed to exercise self-determination because their experience in every other country was one of oppression and victimhood, and that they wanted to release, liberate themselves from that and have their own place and re indigenize themselves to the only home that's ever been a home for Jews. And that so disturbs the world to me is the denouement of this anti-Semitism that's been with us for millennia. That to me is what is the double arrow in this conflict. We not only were attacked, but now we're attacked for responding to being attacked, when any other sovereign nation in the world would be expected to protect their citizenry. 

Matt Peiken: I think what gets attacked back in the direction of Israel, and as a proxy, Jews at large, Is the fact that so many civilians, so many innocent people not to say, and we all know the thousands of innocent Jews who were killed in the October 7th attack, but I think people look at well, there's a difference between terrorists such as Hamas versus an established government in a tit for tat. The government should know better, should act better in a certain way, that there should be a certain restraint that Israel's government should show that Hamas is not as expected to show because it is not a recognized nation. 

Frank, you mentioned that Israel has showed incredible restraint in the battlefield and that could well be true. But some people would argue that it hasn't, and that's very subjective with restraint, right? There is no line of, oh, here's where you've shown restraint. When you look at the numbers and the videos to show Here's where you have gone too far. There's no universality about that, that that's a movable line. And push back on this if you don't see it this way, but I think a lot of the feeling about Israel in the course of this war is that A nation which has the resources, which should hold itself to not to mention the laws of the United Nations and the Geneva Conventions, but just decency and humanity people don't expect Hamas to hold to the same standards, not that's right or wrong, but Israel as an established nation is held to a higher standard. 

Rabbi Mitchell Levine: I think as Frank already answered, though, that there's a difference in fighting on an open battlefield and taking on an enemy that's using human shields. A lot of tragedy in Gaza.

Could be avoided by allowing civilians to inhabit those tunnels beneath Gaza, which are essentially bomb shelters. Let all the refugees of Gaza go underground to those tunnels while Hamas fighters and Israeli soldiers fight it out on the streets above them. But Hamas, as far as I can tell, isn't inviting anyone into those tunnels of safety.

And they've got something like 300 miles of a network of tunnels available. And yet they're not available to their own people. So I don't know if the pictures you're referring to, Matt, reveal that discrepancy. It seems to me proportionality isn't about a photograph. Proportionality is about what it takes to achieve a justified aims.

If the aim of eliminating Hamas is justified, Then it seems to me proportionality should be measured by what does it take to do that. And Hamas, it seems to me, could have ended all of this long ago at the very beginning by releasing hostages and by surrendering.