Last week, Scottish author Ben M. Freeman said at the first meeting of the Jewish student association VUJU in the context of Reclaiming the Narrative that anti-Zionist Jews should be excommunicated. American activist Shabbos Kestenbaum took it up a notch at the third and final meeting last Tuesday evening. He compared anti-Zionist Jews to Jews who fought for Nazi Germany in World War II.
“You can’t say: I’m Jewish, so I can’t be anti-Semitic,” says Kestenbaum. “Zionism is the core of our Jewish identity and anti-Zionism is therefore anti-Semitism.”
Kestenbaum (26) is a remarkable young man. He calls himself a liberal Orthodox Jew, “I’ll out-liberal any liberal, even here in Amsterdam,” he says. He claims to be a registered Democrat, but campaigned for Donald Trump and spoke at a number of his election rallies. He also supports Elon Musk’s notorious organization Doge, set up to make the US federal government more efficient, and says he advised it to cut off funding to Harvard University altogether. He is anti-woke, though he seems to see “woke” primarily as a synonym for anti-Israel, since he also refers to the “woke right,” represented by people like Tucker Carlson, the conservative political commentator who recently criticized Israel.
Philosemite
Yet he does not support Trump’s policies, he says. “I am not in favor of deporting Mexican immigrants.” But Trump is a philosemite [someone with a strongly positive attitude toward Jews, ed.] and the Democrats have failed to combat anti-Semitism, which is why he spoke at those campaign rallies. Possibly to preempt critical questions about the rampant anti-Semitism among Trump’s supporters, Kestenbaum says Trump keeps anti-Semites at bay.
Kestenbaum himself became world famous by taking the university where he studied, Harvard, to court, together with other Jewish students. Earlier this month the news broke that the lawsuit has now been settled. Kestenbaum believes that Harvard is doing too little to combat anti-Semitism, which began to spiral out of control, especially after October 7, 2023, the day that Hamas invaded Israel and committed a mass slaughter.
‘Zionism is the core of our Jewish identity and anti-Zionism is therefore anti-Semitism’
But according to Kestenbaum, it was already extreme before October 7. According to him, the curriculum at Harvard testifies to an “obsession with Israel and Palestine” and he describes lectures in which Jews are said to have been described as a powerless people who have internalized the ideology of the Nazis. He claims that when he wanted to enroll in a particular class, people tried to discourage him, saying everything he had learned about Israel would be “unlearned” in that class and that as an Orthodox Jew he would not be able to deal with that. According to Kestenbaum, Harvard students are taught to be anti-Semitic.
Intifada
On October 7, all hell broke loose. Within a day after the massacre, a group of students and teachers had already blamed Israel itself and not even touched upon the atrocities committed by Hamas. Then slogans like “Intifada, intifada” and “From the River to the Sea” resounded across the campus and, to “thunderous applause,” it was declared that Hamas was not a terrorist organization but a resistance movement. Jewish students were attacked and one of the attackers, a Muslim of Indian descent, has recently been awarded with a fellowship from Harvard. In reaction, Trump immediately imposed a second budget cut of $450 million on Harvard. Kestenbaum himself claims to have been intimidated. He was followed, filmed and booed by, among others Jewish students, he recounts.
There is no doubt that anti-Semitism at Harvard and other American universities is bloodcurdling. There are videos on the internet that prove it, and in a recent report Harvard admits having done too little to protect Jewish students. The same goes for black and Muslim students, for whom Harvard also promises to do better.
But there are also students and staff at Harvard, some of whom are Jewish themselves, who think that Kestenbaum is exaggerating. In The Harvard Crimson, the university’s journalism platform, a Jewish professor, Shaul Magid, denies that Harvard is one-sidedly feeding its students with hate towards Israel: There were “protests and counter-protests. In class, they debated complex issues with open minds. My classes were filled with disagreement; students sometimes felt upset at what others were saying, some felt personally attacked. Like most of my colleagues, I sat during office hours with many students who expressed frustration and felt hurt by what transpired in some of those discussions. But every week they returned, and every week we continued to wrestle with themes of Jewish identity and the unfolding crisis on campus. Why? Because that is what universities do.”
Blow themselves up
Things heated up and Kestenbaum didn’t hold back himself. In a photo in the Harvard Crimson, he is seen holding up a protest sign with the slogan: ‘From Harvard Yard To The Plaza Send These Antisemites Off To Gaza’. On Instagram, in a now-deleted comment, he is said to have asked pro-Palestinian activists to blow themselves up, since they love the intifada so much. ‘Kestenbaum has quite literally fought hate with hate.’, writes a Jewish student, Matthew E. Nekritz. Like Kestenbaum, Nekritz criticizes anti-Semitism on campus, but emphasizes that he does not want to be represented by him. “He speaks for no one but himself.”
At the VUJU meeting at the VU, Kestenbaum explicitly refers to Nekritz’s opinion piece, which he calls a “nasty piece”. “I don’t want to speak for people like him at all”, he says.
Ethical
Kestenbaum does not want to hear about criticism of Israel. According to him, the Israeli army is the most ethical and moral in the world and does everything it can to ensure that innocent people are not killed. No other Western country can match that, he says. Israel, he says, also spares no effort to give the Palestinian population everything it desires. In Israel, he spoke to an IDF (Israel Defense Forces) soldier who had mixed feelings about keeping the road clear for the convoy of trucks that would bring food and relief supplies to Gazans, because one of the hostages held by Hamas was her cousin. “And that is the IDF in a nutshell,” Kestenbaum said. “IDF soldiers continue to help people who are killing their own family members and friends.”
If the supplies do not reach Gazans, it is not Israel’s fault, according to Kestenbaum. “It is because Hamas is stealing them.” Israel has now bombed all the hospitals in Gaza to rubble, but Kestenbaum still talks about the first hospital that was wiped off the face of the earth in October 2023, not by Israel, but by a stray Hamas rocket, he claims. According to him, Palestinians are fed with Jew-hatred “almost from the womb”.
According to Kestenbaum, anyone who does not support Israel has flawed morals. “Israel is not the one throwing gays off of buildings and who oppresses women. Israel is already what liberals want Palestine to be.” According to Kestenbaum, being against Israel is the same as being against the West.
Pro-Palestinian protest
There is not a single critical question from the audience, about 30 people, considerably fewer than at the first two meetings. There is only one man who says that the situation in the US cannot be compared to the Netherlands, where people are more hypocritical and hide their anti-Semitism behind anti-Zionism. A student complains that there was another pro-Palestinian demonstration on the VU campus earlier on Tuesday and how hurtful that is. He asks the students present, there are about ten, if they feel the same way and most of them do. He asks if they are considering moving to Israel for that reason, just like him, and that is also the case.
Kestenbaum breaks in and tells them not to flee to Israel because of anti-Semitism but to go and live there because that is their biblical right. He also tells them not to spend their time fighting anti-Semitism, which is a little odd, since fighting anti-Semitism is what he himself became so well-known for. “You shouldn’t fight over a pile of shit,” he says. “If people don’t want you, you should just leave.” He doesn’t mean the Netherlands, but certain places that are not worth fighting for, he explains. “Jews don’t need those universities, those universities need Jews. When all the Jews are gone, they will come begging on their knees for us to come back, even promising to change their policies.”
Kestenbaum is a thorny personality, and therefore controversial. He was supposed to speak at Maastricht University, but that was cancelled because his safety could not be guaranteed. On Twitter, where he has almost 40,000 followers, he calls the university board “cowards”.
But there are many institutions where he is not welcome, including synagogues, which hurts him particularly. “Because they don’t like my political views.” He complains several times that his own mother unfollowed him on Twitter. “She said I had become too political.” It clearly bothers him a lot. He also complains several times that people don’t laugh at his jokes, which he announces all the time and the point of which may have been missed because he speaks so incredibly fast.
But he doesn’t feel alone, he says at the end. “Because I am part of the great Jewish community.”