Episode 37: The genocidal claim of genocide with Adam Louis-Klein

Ask Haviv Anything

Haviv Rettig Gur

History

4.9 • 640 Ratings

🗓️ 22 August 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Many of our Patreon subscribers have asked us to address the campaign against Israel that accuses it of genocide, colonialism and so on. This episode is the beginning of our deep dive into examining these questions.

What do anti-Zionists argue? What do they want? When is it antisemitic and when legitimate? And how do we know?

We posed these questions and more to anthropologist Adam Louis-Klein, a compelling commentator on academic and elite anti-Israel narratives and ideas. The resulting conversation is a fascinating and helpful dive into these ideas and the problems they pose for Jews in the modern age.

This episode is sponsored by the Frozen Chosen, Haviv’s supportive community in Minnesota, to honor Noi Maudi, 29, a US-Israeli dual citizen from the southern Israeli town of Yated who taught in the community for 5 years and was a beloved teacher and friend. Noi was murdered on October 7 along with other members of his family, including his nephew and brother-in-law, at a music festival near Kibbutz Nirim.

He was an impactful and beloved Hebrew teacher at the Talmud Torah of St Paul Minnesota from 2015 to 2021.

Please join us on Patreon to support this project: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything⁠.

If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [email protected]⁠.

Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Ask Aviv Anything coming to you from the road,
0:10.4	from Bergen, Norway. I'm here with Adam Lewis Klein, who is a scholar, a PhD candidate at McGill
0:18.0	University, did his BA at Yale and philosophy, and has written almost
0:24.3	even just at the social media level, just really fascinating, thoughtful and consistently
0:30.9	fascinating and thoughtful opinions about everything that's happening today that makes a lot of
0:37.4	people I know, especially in
0:39.4	diaspora Jewish communities, very nervous. The rise in anti-Zionism, the rise in all kinds of
0:44.6	new, old, anti-Semitic views, the laundering of it all, the sort of everyone getting used to
0:50.6	the crazy, the idea that elite institutions and elite discourse can be bigoted
0:58.6	against certain groups, can be prejudiced against certain groups, that there's a righteousness
1:02.0	to the idea that we have to go after some people, not others. All of that stuff we're going to
1:10.6	tackle today. And I really appreciate that Adam is here with me.
1:13.6	Before we get into it, I want to tell you that this episode is sponsored by the Jewish community of Minnesota, who asked me to say that this community, they call themselves the Frozen Chosen, because folks, if the joke is
1:30.8	available, you don't leave it on the ground. You pick it up. The Frozen Chosen are this wonderful
1:37.3	sweet community. I give a talk there last year. There's nobody more welcoming than the American
1:42.8	Midwest. The colder it is, the nicer the people.
1:45.8	But they have not just sponsored this episode. They've done something that's become a really
1:50.4	beautiful tradition in this community, basically, that has developed, which is to dedicate
1:57.6	this episode to someone we lost on October 7, and in their case, it's someone
2:01.9	that they know well and love very much.
2:05.0	Noy Maui, Israeli-American dual citizen who taught in the Minnesota Jewish community for five
2:12.8	years, and he was 29 from the southern town of Yatad in Israel.
	...

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