The other night I went to Hunter College to hear Alice Rothchild read from her new book, On the Brink: Israel and Palestine on the eve of the 2014 Gaza Invasion. The room was jammed with students and faculty, and Rothchild, a doctor and activist, was engaging, lively, warm, and genuine– the most you could ask from someone describing what she’d seen and seeking to change people’s minds back home.

At the bottom I publish Rothchild’s own report from her NY visit. But first, here are two videos in which she responds to her audience at Hunter.

In the first video, Rothchild seeks to explain the differences between Jewish religion, Jewish nationalism, and Jewish community advocacy.

“Love of Israel has become the way to be Jewish in the United States. So if you don’t love Israel right or wrong, then you’re not a good Jew.”

But she sees more and more young people rejecting that equation. Zionism has hijacked Judaism, they say; Rothchild reports that there are a “whole lot” of anti-Zionist rabbis coming out of the Hebrew College in Boston.

In the next video, a professor describes the blowback at Hunter against her starting a CUNY Center on Palestinian studies; Rothchild responds by describing the resistance to her message from Jews. She begins with the liberal Jews who “really don’t want to believe this.”

The way that I try to understand this is, I think of my mother. My mother lived through the Holocaust. She was in the U.S. but her emotions were there. She wrote all about the Holocaust. She was an author. She loved the state of Israel; I mean, this was going to be this fabulous place. So watching her go back and forth and write there, and really be part of that country, and then having a daughter who does what I do. And having her realize that I’m not making this stuff up, that this is actually going on. I watched her heart break. So for many many people, particularly Jews who are very involved in the myth of Israel, coming to terms with this is an emotional heartbreak. They have to give up a dream that they realize they were duped. And so that’s sort of like doing family therapy. I’ve done presentations at temples where people sat around and wept, because they’re confronting the fact that what they had thought was going on wasn’t going on. That’s a kind of response that you can really work on. Because people are listening and they’re open, and they know you’re bearing witness to what you saw, you didn’t make this up. That’s stuff you can work with, you can help people move on, you can address the pain they’re feeling. The kind of pushback that’s really hard to deal with is the people who say you’re lying.

She goes on to the Israel messengers who tell her she’s lying. “I absolutely will not rise to the hysteria.”

There’s a Jewish PTSD stemming from the Holocaust, and it is fastened on Israel:

“I get hit with rage, I get hit with pain, I get hit with fear.”

Then Rothchild says: “Basically I feel like the way the Israeli state functions is really a danger to Jews. Not only to Palestinians but also to Jews. We need to really think about, What does Zionism mean. Was it a good idea? We must look at what happened. That really triggers a lot of people.”

Compare her comments to Rev. Bruce Shipman’s comments on Israel fostering anti-Semitism, which got him ousted at Yale.

Now here is Alice Rothchild’s account of her visit to New York, published with her permission: