An Interview With Sim Kern – Mother Jones

Sim Kern never set out to become a face of anti-Zionist Judaism—the English teacher turned science fiction author and “BookTok”-er was just in the right place at the right time.

Facing, as the October 7 attacks unfolded, a social media feed they described as embodying “two contradictory realities” about Palestine —one in which Palestinians were universally depicted as terrorists, the other as freedom fighters—they posted an Instagram video titled “Books about Palestine to read RIGHT NOW,” highlighting those, like the anthology A Land With a People and the Palestinian American author Hala Alyan’s novel Salt Houses, that had helped them learn more about the region.

The video’s 100,000-plus views in its first day—October 8, 2023—were more than 10 times what Kern was used to. But longtime friends and colleagues were confused by Kern, a Jewish author, recommending only Palestinian books in the immediate aftermath of the attacks and taking of hostages. So they posted a second video, “Jewish Author Speaks…” the following day.

“If you didn’t give a fuck about what’s happening in Palestine until two days ago,” Kern said, “that is because you see Israelis as people, and you do not see Palestinians as people.”

That video has since been watched more than 20 million times across different social media platforms. Kern was launched into prominence, receiving both death threats and praise.

Over the past year and a half, their social media presence has turned into an archive of video shorts breaking down history and misinformation, and covering genocide in Gaza, where Israel’s defense minister recently announced plans to move the remaining population into a closed camp built on the ruins of the city of Rafah. (The United Nations, Amnesty International, and leading Holocaust and genocide scholars have deemed Israel’s war in Gaza genocidal, charges also brought against the country’s government in an ongoing case before the International Court of Justice.)

Hannah Moushabeck, a Palestinian author and editor, described Kern’s work as “propell[ing] this movement for Palestinian liberation in ways we may never quantify.” In May 2023, Moushabeck invited Kern to write Genocide Bad for Palestinian American–owned publishing house Interlink Books. 

The book, which ties scholarship with memoir in Kern’s distinctive TikTok voice, breaks down nine key talking points used to defend or obscure the Israeli government’s actions and how to respond. 

“Perhaps the most fundamental and vital labor, of all liberatory organizing,” Kern writes, “is the act of explaining hard truths. In your own words. To your own people. As clearly and compellingly as possible. Over and over and over and over.”

I spoke with Kern in June.

You entered this space by inviting people to read. Why do you recommend books? What are the merits of reading across cultures?

The short answer: because I’m an English teacher. Those habits die hard.

I do believe that books can change the world and change people’s minds. I know because it’s happened to me. I really just stepped away from Zionism because of one book, which was Palestine by Joe Sacco. From there, I went on to read many more books by Palestinians and deepened my understanding of the history of the region.

Reading builds your empathy. It builds your curiosity. Doing that thought experiment of being able to put yourself in the shoes of someone who would choose to engage in acts that your culture has taught you are abhorrent and terrible, that’s an important thought experiment.

Despite being a New York Times and USA Today bestseller, this book has received very little media attention. Why do you think that is?

Another example is Perfect Victims by Mohammed El-Kurd; his book [also a Times bestseller] also hasn’t gotten any major newspaper reviews, any trade reviews.

I was invited out to an interview over dinner—two hours with an editor at a top book-reviewing outlet. The whole thing was recorded, and then that article was scrapped. Someone killed it. So there’s active suppression.

But given all that, it is pretty amazing that we are a bestseller, right? None of that is through bought ads, none of that is because of trade reviews. It’s all because of grassroots support based on people who are familiar with my work on social media.

The thesis of the book is simple: “genocide bad.” How did you get there?

This is where being Jewish is relevant to me. I just feel like “genocide bad” was so drilled into me from a young age. It was the first historical political lesson that I was ever taught.

My generation of Jewish children were raised on Schindler’s List. It came out when I was seven years old and I was taken to see [it]. Part of laying it on so thick was to make sure we would grow up to support Israel. But I never got the Zionist half of the message. What I got from my nuclear family and my relatives was the “genocide bad” and that these kinds of oppressions, this type of fascism, these are the warning signs you need to look out for, and “never again” means never again for anyone. It is deeply drilled into me.

Since Israel’s founding, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide have been characteristics of its history and its treatment of Palestinians. The best way to cut through all the noise and cut through all the propaganda is to stay grounded in the universality of human rights, the universality of genocide and apartheid and ethnic cleansing being bad.

The structure of the book emphasized refuting the talking points used to justify Israel’s actions. What led you to that structure?

The book ended up being structured this way because I’m simply responding to what Zionists have thrown at me for a year and a half. In a way, I never could have written this book if Zionists hadn’t trolled me so hard for so long with the thousands and thousands of comments that I got.

At first it seems overwhelming, but when you get them at that scale, you start to realize that there’s not that many different categories of arguments. The book evolved very naturally over the course of these endless debates through videos and comment sections on social media.

Your Jewishness is imbued in this book, but you don’t hide the nuances: focusing on your patrilineal Jewishness, your cultural rather than religious practices [in a religious context, Judaism is considered to be passed down on the mother’s side]. That’s a common understanding of what it is to be Jewish, but it’s not seen as “fully Jewish” in some people’s eyes. What compelled you to emphasize it?

There’s so much gatekeeping within Jewishness. No matter how Jewish you are, how deep your roots go, how religious you are or not, or whether all of your grandparents were Jewish, or one of your grandparents were Jews–the most important defining factor of whether or not you get to be Jewish, in Zionist eyes, is whether or not you’re a Zionist. I’m never going to appease them.

I’m very used to being gatekept out of Judaism. I was never fully accepted into the Jewish community by Jewish relatives. We were the least religious. We lived in a rural area.

But at the same time, Jewishness was very much imposed upon me by Christians. Christians in my rural town always made sure that I knew that I was Jewish. To them, this was a racial designation. It had absolutely nothing to do with what I did on my Saturday.

You take time in the book to detail the relationship between what is happening in Palestine and Israel and white supremacy. Could you break that down for me here?

Well, first of all, it’s important to note that it is not me, Sim Kern, coming up with these definitions. I’m drawing on the Black radical tradition, the Black Marxist tradition, as first defined by Cedric Robinson.

A central argument of the book is that Jews were a racialized “other” in Europe during the early modern period and through the Holocaust, but as soon as you have the foundation of Israel, these white Ashkenazi Jews that ended up settling in Israel, they flipped their relationship to power. They became the foot soldiers of white supremacy, and they defined whiteness within Israel as Jewish. Jewishness is an essential component to achieving full whiteness within Israel.

Once a group is determined as white, that group is the only group that is afforded full humanity, full human rights, full civil rights, and it necessitates having a non-white group that is the racialized other that is to be oppressed, exploited, criminalized, and ghettoized. [How] Jews were treated in Europe in the early modern medieval period is very similar, I argue in the book, to how Jews who have now accessed white supremacy in Israel treat Palestinians there today.

This book grappled with how you struggled to speak out against genocide and for Palestinian rights. What was it like to detail that fear in this memoir?

I call myself a coward in my writing very frequently. My novels often have characters grappling with their own cowardice who, by the end of the book, [are] maybe doing something slightly courageous. 

Over the past year and a half, I have become much more courageous as an activist. It was very scary to begin this process. I knew that it would entail losing relationships, losing opportunities. And I feared, even more than that, that I would say the wrong thing or say something  hurtful or harmful or unhelpful to the cause.

Courage is a practice. When [we use] words like “hero,” “they’re so brave”—those can be distancing words. It is important to show transparently our journey towards courage and how we struggle with it.

Any final thoughts?

I would just end with a very serious call to action that somewhere between one and a half and 2 million people who have survived this genocide in Gaza until today are currently being starved to death; the ones who are starving to death first are babies, and the youngest children will die first.

I urge everybody to find a way to do more or be louder. Use your voices to call for an end to genocide. If you need motivation and ideas for how to do that, then I hope you know this book is a resource to help you.