Karen Milner
Being South African and Jewish in 2024
Karen Milner - Being South African and Jewish in 2024
- So thank you, everybody, for tuning in. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are, all over the world and this afternoon in a freezing cold Joburg’s winter afternoon with a little bit of rain. I am delighted to introduce to you all a friend of mine, Professor Karen Milner, who is an associate professor of psychology at Wits University, one of the big universities here in Johannesburg. But she’s also the elected National Chairperson of the South African Board of Jewish Deputies. And why she was the most perfect person, in my view, for this conversation today, not only because she’s in psychology and she works with a lot of young people at the university, and she’s at the Board of Jewish Deputies, but also being a mother in South Africa with a really unique and fascinating story of her own as part of the South African tapestry, I really thought that more than just an academic conversation, more than just the numbers and the statistics, we can have a community conversation about being Jewish in South Africa. Before the freedom that we have, the past 30 years, and as most of you know that are sitting on this podcast today, as you know, South Africa is going through an interesting and tumultuous relationship with its Jewish community at the moment. So welcome, Professor Karen Milner. Thank you for coming and sharing your story with us and your insights. And over to you.
Thank you so much, Phumi. Thank you for inviting me. I really do feel very honoured to be on this very prestigious platform and to see how many people have come out to listen to, you know, a Jew in the southernmost tip of Africa talking about our experiences of the past and of the present. So it’s an absolute pleasure for me. And good evening, morning, good day to everybody here. Thank you so much for coming out and for listening to what I have to say. I have said to Phumi, I’m really quite informal in the way that I engage. So please feel free. She’ll interrupt me if necessary. If there’s nothing, something unclear, she’ll interrupt me if necessary. You’ll interrupt me if necessary. I’m really happy to answer questions as I go along. And , you know, I’m also not sensitive. If I’m going on too long, please feel free to…
We’ve got an hour.
I won’t talk the whole hour. I really, really do want to get onto the questions.
Like a little tea, we’ve got enough. And I’m monitoring the Q and A. The Q and A will be open. Everybody is quite okay with how the chat works. I’m monitoring the chat, so as they put up questions, I will send them through to you or read them out to you.
Brilliant. Okay, so I’m going to start really in answering your question without talking about present day, and I’ll come back to it at the end, but talking about kind of what it feels like to be a Jew at the moment in present day South Africa. And the only word that I can describe for how it feels to be a Jew in present day South Africa is that to a large extent, we are living in a paradox as Jewish South Africans at the moment. And the reason I say that is because we are seeing such a contradiction between what’s happening at a high level, at a government level, and what’s happening in the ground as Jews in South Africa. So despite, and there has been, despite a massive spike in antisemitism that occurred after October 7th, as it occurred around the world globally, despite the spike, what’s really interesting in South Africa is that we still have amongst the lowest levels of antisemitism globally. And I think that that’s really important to keep in mind, although we have had the spike, as I continue to talk because we’re going to see this contradiction as I talk the whole way through between the real love that we feel from fellow South Africans and some of the hostility that we’re experiencing in other areas. And I think the best way, and I love telling stories, so, as you say, I’m not going to talk about this in kind of a statistical way. But I’d like to tell you a little bit of a story that I think really represents the paradox of what it means to be a Jew in South Africa at the moment.
And I’m going to have to take you back. It’s impossible for me to talk about being a Jew in South Africa at the moment without, of course, talking about October 7th. I’m going to take you back to just post October 7th, and the response of communities around the world, governments around the world, to the tragedy that occurred on October 7th. And we saw governments around the world coming out in support of their Jewish communities. Every public place was lit up in solidarity with the Israelis who had been so viciously attacked on October 7th. The horror at the hostage taking seemed to be a very common global response, particularly amongst Western governments. And unfortunately, that wasn’t the response that we as a South African Jewish community experienced as far back as October 7th. We immediately experienced hostility from the government. There was no sympathy expressed. There was certainly no compassion expressed, not only for the broad horror of October 7th but, in fact, for the South African Jewish victims that were both murdered on October 7th and were taken hostage in the aftermath of October 7th. So the South African Jewish community and the South African Jewish Board of Deputies decided to take matters into our own hands. If our government wasn’t going to express the kind of solidarity that we were expecting, we would do it ourselves. And what we decided to do was, and we are talking about very close now to October 7th, to go onto the Nelson Mandela Bridge. And for those of you who aren’t South African, Nelson Mandela Bridge is a really iconic landmark in South Africa. It connects Braamfontein to town.
And it’s a really beautiful both… It’s got a pedestrian part and it’s a bridge that people drive over. And we took posters of the hostages. That was before, of course, any of them had been released or we knew of any of them who had been killed. We took posters of the hostages. And we went very, very early in the morning. I wasn’t with them. The team went very, very early in the morning with these posters and red balloons to put them up, show the solidarity with the intention, we didn’t know what the response would be, with the intention of taking them down and going home after we’d filmed this moment of solidarity. And as the team put up the posters and put up the balloons, what we experienced with the people who were walking to work that morning across the Nelson Mandela Bridge was the most enormous outpouring of sympathy and compassion from the ordinary South Africans on their way to work crossing the Nelson Mandela Bridge that morning. There were people, a cleaner, who stopped and offered to come back in her lunch hour to come and pray with us for the safe return of the hostages. And people stopped and they looked and they were interested. And unlike in so many countries in the world, in fact, we left the posters up and we left the balloons up. And I returned much later that afternoon to see what had happened.
And I drove over the bridge back and forth a few times. And all of those posters were still up. None had been taken down, none had been defaced. And to a large extent, I think that epitomises the paradox that we experience as a South African Jewish community. And I want to end the story on a really quick personal kind of what I think is quite a funny note. Because, as I said, the bridge is between Braamfontein and town and my university, but the university sits really at the start of the bridge. And for many years, on the one side of the university, there’s an informal trader, an old woman who sits there selling cigarettes and sweets, make a bit of living. And I’ve often spoken to her and tried to support her. And on that afternoon, as I’m driving back, the event was really over. The posters were still up, but I see that she is selling a huge bunch of red balloons that she has clearly taken from the bridge. So in addition to the sympathy and empathy, the innovation and creativity and entrepreneurial spirit of South Africa was on full display that afternoon. And I think that to a large extent for me, that says everything about our position in South Africa, the positives that we’ve experienced. But at the same time, we’ve also experienced an enormous amount of hostility. And that’s really the paradox of living as a Jew in South Africa at the moment. I mean, I can carry on a a bit about that, but I think it’s worth saying that I really attribute that to the fact that the kind of hate that we’ve been seeing on the streets, and, unfortunately, it’s been the streets of London, the streets of Europe, to some extent, the campuses in the U.S., the kind of outpouring of real antisemitism, not all of it is but a lot of it is really blatant antisemitism.
That kind of hatred does not find fertile ground in the South African population. It is not a population that hates easily. And I think it’s part of the miracle of South Africa. We are part of the story of South Africa. We’re recognised as part of the story of South Africa. And it’s part of the miracle of South Africa that we are not a country that hates easily. And I think that that is really something that’s worth mentioning as a Jewish experience in South Africa. And if I may just go on and talk a little bit about it. ‘Cause I don’t think that this paradox is unique to this time either. If I look at the history of Jews in South Africa, I think the history of Jewish South Africa has always had a real paradoxical element. So if we look at the history, many Jews came to South Africa at late 1800s, early 1900s. They were fleeing poverty. They were fleeing economic hardships. And they were fleeing oppression and pogroms. And they came to South Africa. And there was immigration until it was kind of stopped just before the Second World War. And to a large extent, they found a safe haven in South Africa. Although just before the transition, the Afrikaner nationalism had a very strong strain of antisemitism and an enormous sympathy with the Nazis. So the South African Jewish community going way back then and to now has always been quite a vulnerable community. It was a vulnerable community historically. And it was a very small community that had, as I said, fled oppression and had fled hardship. Yet if we come to the years during apartheid, one of the paradoxes we see is how so many, a real outsized, disproportionate number of Jews were involved in the anti-apartheid struggle.
I have to say, the majority of Jews in South Africa took the comfort and the safe haven that it offered. But there was this really significant group of people who despite the fact that they had found safety in South Africa, despite the fact that they were, literally, and I think sometimes people forget this because we forget apartheid very quickly, that we had racial classifications that were inbred in our law, and that Jews were provided with a classification as being White. And for those who don’t recall South Africa and who don’t remember the apartheid or don’t know the apartheid history, that conveyed an enormous safety and enormous privilege to the people who were given this designation: the specific racial designation of being White. Yet we see a tremendous resistance amongst the part of White Jewish South Africans against apartheid, where they were able to acknowledge their vulnerability, and many of them put their lives in danger, their lives, their livelihoods and their liberty in danger to fight for post-apartheid South Africa. And I think it’s relevant that of all the White trialists that were with Nelson Mandela on trial at the Rivonia trial, every single of those White trialists were Jewish. And I think that that is quite a remarkable statistic if you think about the population of South Africa. And I think it’s something that we’re really very proud of. I also don’t want to only mention the people who fought apartheid, the kind of big names that we all know, the Rivonia trialists.
A couple of years ago, and I know you’re aware of this, Phumi, we were approached by someone who said a young Black man who had been really assisted during the apartheid years by a Jewish family who took him in when he was on the run from the apartheid police. They didn’t do it out of any kind of ideological positioning. They took him in because it was the right thing to do. And we started to gather these stories. And we put them together in a book called “Mensches in the Trenches.” And those are the stories of the thousands and thousands of ordinary Jewish South Africans who did risk to a large extent, maybe not as much as the big names and the trialists, but who risked to a large extent the safety that they had found in South Africa to do what was right. Many of them were trade unionists. Very many of them were in the field of education. Many of them were in arts and literature. And they stood up for what was right and they rejected the racism inherent and the assumptions inherent in the apartheid regime. And what I think went really clearly through these stories is how their Jewish values and Jewish experiences of history had influenced their determination to do that. And again, I think it’s important to remind people of what it was like. I can talk about what it was like to be a White person growing up in South Africa. Because I think we forget the utter brutality of the South African racial regime as we look back in history. We are very much focused at the moment on the problems that we’re having with our government at the moment. And I’ll come to those. But we forget where we came from and the brutality that we experienced. I remember sitting on a bench that the pettiness of apartheid was something unbelievable.
I remember sitting on a bench with Black children peering through the fence in a park because they couldn’t join the White children in a park in South Africa. The brutality of the South African police is often underestimated or not recalled, perhaps amongst those of us perhaps who were privileged not to experience it, maybe not by everybody. I remember well, I was a child at the time, but the 1976 uprising and the incredible violence that was brought to bear on the students that were involved in that uprising. And you mentioned my story. So I’ll come to it now because it’s relevant. As a student at university, I was a witness to the brutality of the South African police. And I’ll tell you briefly about what happened. But Winnie Mandela was due to speak at Wits University. And at the time, she was banned. And she was coming to speak. And as she entered the university campus, the police came onto the campus. And they had dogs with them. And they released the dogs onto the students.
And as a privileged White South African from a very middle-class comfortable home, I had never seen anything like what I witnessed that day at Wits University campus. As dogs literally tore pieces out of people, police came with sjamboks and tear gas and rubber bullets and brutally, brutally put down what was an absolutely peaceful student event. And at the time, I was not politically active and I make no claims to have been an activist. But at the time, I did see that there was something deeply, deeply wrong with what had happened that day on campus. And the next day, there was a student meeting and they asked for all the clubs and societies to send representatives. And they said, “We need to respond. "We need to send people off campus "and we need to allow them to be arrested. "They will be arrested. "And we need representatives "from every single student organisation so that they know "that this is a broad-based protest. "They will be arrested. "And we need to protest against this brutality "on our campus.” And I sat down and, I don’t know, in a moment of madness or in a moment of courage, when they asked for representatives of students to come forward, I put my hand up and I said that I would join them as a representative of the South African Union of Jewish students. And on a Friday afternooon, we marched into Braamfontein. The march was stopped by the South African police. We were hauled into police vans and taken to Hillbrow Police Station. I’m orthodox at the time. I was more religious than I am now. And it was Friday night.
And I think that this also talks to something about the South African Jewish community. As the word spread that I had been arrested at Wits and was in fact at Hillbrow Police Station, just the outpouring of warmth from the South African Jewish community. People kept arriving. Every five minutes, there was a knock on the door as people would arrive with , with challahs, the Friday night bread. I didn’t get wine, unfortunately, but I did get this amazing Friday night supper in the cells at the Hillbrow Police Station. And I think for me, that really represented something to me about standing up for your values. Again, I don’t want to overemphasise it. In the scheme of things, getting arrested in a student march was not a major issue. But I think it did talk to the importance of standing up for what was right. And it’s something that I learned really as a Jew and as someone with an example of these remarkable Jewish activists who had come before me.
You know, I think 'cause you’re talking about your student activism days, and this is definitely something we’re seeing all over the world on CNN, on all the channels. And Shelly, Shelly Shapiro is asking in the comments about students in South African universities. And now I know you are at Wits, and there is an actual sit-in happening at the moment. Do you want to talk a little bit about the experience of currently the students on the campus and how the different nationalities, as it were, that are there responding to whatever’s happening on campus?
Sure. Again, I’m going to ask you if I can go a little bit back on that.
Sure, sure.
I think what’s important is to still understand the progress of student activism in South Africa certainly didn’t end in 1994. And unfortunately, as a result of student poverty and financial exclusions at universities in South Africa, we’ve seen students who have been excluded as a result of not having enough money to pay for their degrees. Sometimes it’s a couple of thousand rand that has meant that they’re unable to finish their degrees or unable to register for their degrees. Many students in South African universities don’t have basic funding to continue their studies and are hungry. There’s real food insecurity in South African universities. So there’s been an ongoing activism in South African universities, which culminated in what was called the Fees Must Fall protests. And I think that, again, there’s some kind of paradox. This time I was an academic during the Fees Must Fall protests. And there was some kind of paradox between recognising the real concerns and valid, deep, deep validity to the student protests that were were happening at the time and the need for universities to acknowledge that students had a right to go to university regardless of their financial position.
And some of the ways in which those protests took place, which included, for example, burning, trying to burn down libraries. And I think that that kind of activism did present something of a dilemma for me in that I supported the students completely, but some of those methods I didn’t support. We’ll be seeing, although, there’s a small encampment on Wits University. I also have to say there will be another protest I think on Thursday afternoon, which again is protesting student exclusion. What happens at the midterms, students get excluded if they haven’t achieved a certain score. And it’s absolutely heartbreaking. It’s absolutely heartbreaking for these students. And I think that that kind of student activism in a peaceful way. Because we do live in a democracy now. And you can demonstrate peacefully in a democracy. And I think that that kind of student activism which really deals with deep-seated student issues is something that I continue to support. The encampment at Wits to my knowledge right now is really small. And at the moment also, students have not had access because of a fire in Braamfontein. Students haven’t had access to hot water, electricity, hot food for about two weeks. And I think that student activism really needs to try and address some of those really core issues that South African students are still facing 30 years into democracy.
But I think one of the things that definitely we don’t see here on our campuses, whether it’s at Wits or UCT, is we definitely don’t see the hordes of really violent protests as they are, as what we are seeing coming out of the U.S. And there is another question here also about the Muslim community. You know, because South Africa is such a very, very, very diverse community. And we have all types of religions, all types of people here in South Africa, and how the Muslim community has responded. And I think there have been some kind of in Cape Town and maybe because of your Board of Deputies experience, you can talk to us a little bit about that and the experience in Cape Town, which I think is vastly different to the experience that we are having here in Joburg.
I think that the experience in Cape Town is different. And I think it is partly driven by some of the demographic differences between Cape Town and Johannesburg. I think they’re also very driven by certain political agendas. So what we’ve seen in Cape Town, for example, is the People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, which is PAGAD. And the name is a misnomer. And PAGAD is not actually an anti-gangster and drugs organisation. It is, in fact was, a gangster organisation itself which had extremely violenced around 15, 20 years ago. And they seem to be… They have taken on a particularly strong anti-Zionist rhetoric, I think partly as a way to gain political relevance in the Cape. So I think that there has been much harder rhetoric in the Cape than that we’ve seen in Johannesburg. And we’ve definitely seen… Some of the marches that we saw certainly at the beginning were quite… I mean, one of the journalists in South Africa used the term “Jew-baiting” about some of the marches that we saw in South Africa in that sense. So it’s definitely not all rosy. But it’s limited to a relatively small, very strong activist group as opposed to kind of the hordes of the general population joining in in that kind of hateful rhetoric.
I think you make an interesting point just around South African community, South African society not being a society that hates easily. And I think that, you know, besides the big names that we know, the lawyers, the doctors, having grown up in a township in the 80s where the only doctors that you could find in townships were either Jewish doctors or Indian doctors. Because they were the only ones brave enough to come out there or who cared enough to be doctors in those areas. And when I first met you, you were actually hosting the conversation around “Mensches in the Trenches.” And with such a strong political activism, not just within South Africa’s governing party in the ANC, but I think if I think about Benjamin Pogrund with the PAC and with Robert Sobukwe, their really strong ties almost intertwined ties between the Jewish community and our activism community. Do you think that the Jewish community is feeling a sense of betrayal given the posture that our government now takes with regard to Israel and with regards to what is happening in the Middle East?
I think the Jewish community is feeling a strong sense of betrayal. But I really think that sense of betrayal is coming specifically in relation to the Jewish activists. Because I think that was never done as a transactional thing. And I think that’s important. And I would hope that we don’t look back on it in that way. Those activists did what they did because it was the right thing to do, not to place Jewish South Africans in any kind of better position. And we don’t expect any kind of payback, if I can put it that way, for the activism that they pursued. Because they did what they did because it was right. Having said that, I think that we do feel a really strong sense of betrayal from the South African government in that the social fabric of South African society is a very delicate fabric. And we recognise and have no problem with the real intense also loyalty and sympathies that the ANC government have with the Palestinian cause. And for many years, that hasn’t really been a source of major conflict between the South African Jewish community and the government. And we must remember that the ANC and XL trained together with PLO people in the trenches under the Soviets. So there is a deep-seated loyalty there as well. And we recognise that loyalty and in fact absolutely support the South African government support for a Palestinian state. And again, I’m going to quote Mandela 'cause everybody leaves this bit out when they quote Mandela.
So they use the quote, Mandela said, “We are not free until Palestinians are free.” But he also acknowledged the right of Israel to exist within secure borders. And I think that the way the South African government have gone against every single one of their own principles, it’s the principle that created the miracle of what happened in South Africa and our peaceful transition to democracy. And that is, they spoke to all sides. They always say “You make peace with your enemies, "not with your friends.” They dialogued with the people that they were very comfortable to be in dialogue and in conversation, with the people who had been directly oppressing them and who had put them in jail. Yet, when it comes to Israel and it comes to the Middle East, they seem to have abandoned these principles, that the way in which we find peace is not to go to one side, but is to understand each other, to engage in dialogue. And I think, for me, more than anything else, it’s such a tragic missed opportunity. And that’s where the betrayal comes in. We have a remarkable story as South Africans of how we overcame tremendous odds to peacefully transition to democracy. And I think that the way the South African government has engaged on this issue more than anything else is a missed opportunity which could have potentially saved actually thousands of lives if they had stuck to those principles and really engaged in a way that could bring about real peace.
Well there’s an interesting comment I think here from Marian Roberts. Marian Roberts says, “The majority of the Jewish community "kept their heads well below the parapet "and did not identify with those "who were active in the struggle, "including my parents, Jean and Jaime Bernard. "There was a close relationship between the apartheid regime "and the Israeli governments over the decades.” And I think my question following on from that view and that comment is: Today, we’ve seen the Jewish community shrinking to almost a third of what it was in its heyday. I remember it was about 120,000 and I think today it’s about 50,000. Whereas a lot of people in the community would actually rather leave or would rather just be not part of the mess, do you think that the stance of kind of keeping to themselves, keeping within the community has also allowed within South Africa the voice of the community to be a little watered down when it comes to some of these big issues, you know, even in the government?
I think that’s a great question that I want to absolutely acknowledge. And I think I did say it. And if I didn’t, I will say it. I want to absolutely acknowledge that the majority of South African Jewish community did not speak out against apartheid and neither did the body that I’m a representative of when perhaps they should have. And I completely acknowledge that. Having said that though, there still was this outsized contribution that came from a minority of Jews in the community. I think when you talk about the shrinking Jewish community and you say that many Jews want to leave, I’m not sure if many Jews want to leave. I think there’s been a shrinking community and it’s multifactorial. I think it’s a result of farm, service delivery, water, electricity. All of those kind of things has to some extent diluted some of the commitment that some Jewish South Africans have experienced. Having said that, and I am speaking anecdotally, but I am pretty much… I think I’ve got my finger quite well on the pulse of the mainstream Jewish community in South Africa. We are unbelievably proud South Africans in the post-apartheid era. Despite the betrayal of our government, that’s the government. We really feel a real… And I speak for myself and I speak for my family. We want to contribute to building up a South Africa, a real post-apartheid democratic South Africa that can overcome the legacies of apartheid.
I think we are an incredibly traumatised community. Not the Jewish community, the South African community. I don’t think in any way that we have overcome the traumas of apartheid. And I think that those have just been exacerbated by COVID. I think they’ve been exacerbated by the riots that occurred just after COVID. I think they’ve been exacerbated by state capture, and unfortunately by the real lack of any progress in addressing the kind of greed and corruption that occurred over the years of state capture. So within the context of a broad traumatised community, we now get this small and quite vulnerable South African Jewish community feeling doubly betrayed by our government. Having said that, though, I know not a single Jewish person in South Africa who would not absolutely commit to doing everything they can. And we’ve done an enormous amount as a community under COVID. So while some of the things that we’ve done may have been diluted, for example, fundraising over COVID, there were people who ate. And they didn’t eat because of the Jewish community wanting to say, “Oh, the Jewish community are out there.” And I think it’s a really important thing to say. We do this because as South African citizens, these are our fellow citizens. They’re our neighbours. They’re people we know. And we don’t let our fellow citizens starve. And that’s what we did under COVID. And the commitment of the Jewish community at the moment I feel is very strong. I think that how to channel that has become quite difficult and how to find ways…
What do you mean by that?
So how to channel the commitment to assist. How can we assist best? We have an incredible business community. And I think they are actually doing quite a lot where possible. We have young professionals. You spoke about doctors, for example. We’re still seeing a lot of Jewish doctors still in the state service. And we’re seeing Jewish lawyers who are attempting to address some of the issues around state capture. We see students who on Thursday will be protesting with the SRC about exclusions and who spent the whole of last week, for example, they provided meals for the students at Braamfontein who don’t have food and electricity. The commitment I think remains very, very strong. We need to find really effective avenues to make sure that we can build that commitment into something that will bring hope both to ourselves and to broader South Africa. 'Cause I think that’s really missing in South Africa at the moment.
So there’s a question here from Barry Epstein. And I want to bring that back almost to when you first described your experience having come from a protected White middle-class suburb and experience, which is still largely the South African Jewish community’s experience of South Africa. I mean with all the challenges that we have now, people can insulate themselves. You know, if you can get solar, you try and get solar. If you can, you know, you get off the grid or as it’s said. And Barry asks, “Are Jewish White people in South Africa "living in a bubble?” You know, you do enjoy this really great life, high standard of life, but are faced with this government that is anti-Israel. Is it a bubble that they’re living in? And does it feel that the world is piercing into that bubble?
It’s quite a tough question to ask. I think that to a large extent, everybody is living in bubbles at the moment given the circumstances that we’re all living in. Having said that, I would agree that we are still more protected from the ravages of, but not everyone. And I think that there’s a misnomer. I think that people think that… I think that there is a slack trope that South African Jews are wealthy, in relative terms obviously. We are significantly wealthier than the majority of South Africans. But having said that, there are many Jews in South Africa who don’t have solar and who aren’t protected completely from the experience of unemployment. For the first time, we are having to provide food to Jewish families in South Africa because there’s food insecurity in Jews in South Africa. And that’s not the good news, the fact that we are experiencing some of the incredible financial challenges associated with what’s happening in South Africa at the moment. Having said that, though, our lives are infinitely better than so many South Africans who are not experiencing that. And we completely acknowledge that. And I think that the only way to come out of that bubble, and I see it happening at the universities mostly because, of course, geographically, there’s still geographical racial spatial apartheid happening in South Africa. So I think from that extent, yes, we are living in a bubble.
Having said that, I don’t know another community or another group of young people in the world, Black or White, Jewish or not Jewish, who are not intimately aware of what is going on in their country. It’s literally relevant to our survival to understand the context that we’re living in, to be aware of the political context that we are living in. And I’m quite impressed by the, and admittedly I’m only seeing them at a university level, but the university students that I see coming through who are so aware of the challenges of South Africa. They want to stay here. They want to contribute. If the question about the bubble is whether or not there’s a safety issue, and I’m not sure if that was the question. If the question is if, we’re certainly living in a bubble of privilege. And I think that the only way to address that bubble of privilege is to see what we can do to contribute. Because we all recognise that our fates are intertwined, that it’s not sustainable to live in a bubble of privilege. And I think most of our community understand that. I think if the question was whether we are living in a bubble because we are somehow unsafe because of the hostility of the South African government, I have tremendous faith in our South African institutions. And I’m sorry. If I had known that question, I often go to talks. I carry my South African constitution around with me quite a bit. And I’d be waving the South African constitution right now because our South African constitution has stood us in good stead. And I believe it will continue to protect South Africans. So I can sit on this call on this webinar with a global audience and criticise my government, and I have done so. And I’ve personally called out President Ramaphosa in a video, in a “Sunday Times” advert. I personally called out President Ramaphosa for the way that he has betrayed our community. And I don’t feel the same fear that people experienced during apartheid. There will not be
This is an interesting comment and question. “I’m a South African Jew living in the U.S. "and seeing rising antisemitism here. "My grandmother was a member "of the Black Sash movement in Joburg. "And I’m wondering if that movement "was predominantly Jewish.” Do you know?
I don’t. I also know many members of the Black Sash.
I know people.
I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m sorry, I don’t know. I certainly know that there were lots of Jews who were part of the Black Sash. They were a phenomenal organisation. Unfortunately, I don’t know the answer though.
And there is some body here wanting to… Elliot I think, Elliot from Canada. And I’ve never heard those terms before. “Our Canada is also afflicted with Jew Flu, "and especially with the encampments on our campuses. "And many universities with definitely "to harass student Jews and Jews of faculty. "In many cases, the administrations of these universities "are saying, and they consider this to be free speech, "where Jews are not to be in certain locations "of the university grounds. "And courses are cancelled, "to use Zoom to continue teaching.” Wow, that’s amazing. I mean, I think that you spoke about the fact that we are a traumatised nation. I think it’s still fresh for us. I think the trauma of apartheid is still fresh for us. The trauma of that kind of chaos, the hate, the state control, all of that trauma is still quite fresh for us. That’s why it’s still… When you see Fees Must Fall campus riots, when you see Marikana, when you see any of those, July 2021, that’s why we have a visceral response to it and reaction because those things are still fresh for us.
And I don’t know if our kids have the same kind of appetite for that kind of chaos. I do think some of those Western universities, that’s what they yearn for. They’re yearning for that kind of expression, which to us is still very real. There’s a message here from Denise Samuel who wants to support some of what you’re saying. “I worked at 'The Rand Daily Mail’ "at the time of the Rivonia trial. "And I was in the midst of all the buzz that it engineered. "The Jews who supported Mandela, Sisulu, "and others who were the elite of the ANC, "Joe Slovo, whose name was anathema "to the nationalist government, ”‘an avowed communist’ as they described him. “There were many Jews who were banned "and placed under house arrest. "And it was awful. "What Karen says is all too true. "And many Jews began to be viewed "by those who were biassed anyway, antisemitic.” And I want to talk a little bit more about antisemitism and South Africa in particular. Do you think that in the past couple of months there has been a rise in antisemitism? Do you think the South African population even understands what antisemitism is for them to… No, seriously.
I hear you, I hear you.
But seriously, do South Africans actually know and understand what antisemitism is? And is it on the rise in South Africa?
So I’m going to answer the question about do they understand what antisemitism is in two ways. We know in fact… I mean with a community of just over 55,000 or so in South Africa, the vast majority of South Africans and rural South Africans have certainly never met a Jewish person. And so I think that while you do get antisemitism in the absence of Jews, I don’t think that the issue of Jews and antisemitism is in any way kind of a priority or paramount in South African’s lives in the way that we seem to be seeing in other places around the world. And I did make reference to that before. Having said that though, I think that the position that the government has taken in relation to Israel has allowed an outburst of antisemitism that possibly wouldn’t have occurred without the either subtle or not subtle permission that’s been given by our government. So for example, some of the things that have been deeply distressing when it’s come to antisemitism in South Africa has been a boycott of Jewish businesses. And in a country with the kind of levels of unemployment that we are seeing, even if you’re not worried about antisemitism, I would’ve thought that the government would’ve taken a much, much stronger stance against things like boycott of Jewish businesses.
President Ramaphosa has made a statement condemning it. But we haven’t seen anything with real conviction and a solution to say, as I said before, where jobs are at stake that this country can tolerate a boycott of Jewish businesses. I still think though that those are very much amongst people with a very strong, particular strong political agenda. I don’t think that we are seeing antisemitism. We see bits of it. It doesn’t have the kind of deep wells of hate that seem to bubble up around the world, that connect to old histories of European antisemitism. And I can’t talk about American antisemitism. We don’t have that history in South Africa. As I said before, we have an incredibly tolerant history in South Africa. So no, I don’t think that South Africans have an agenda or have a particular animus against Jews. But I think that we have been seeing things that have come out of our government which are deeply disturbing. And that’s that paradox again. So when we complain about the spike in antisemitism, it’s been a 600% spike when we’ve complained about things like boycotts of Jewish businesses, our Minister of Justice Lamola said there’s no antisemitism in South Africa. Now that’s just a complete denial of, firstly, the facts on the ground. We collect antisemitism statistics using a universally acknowledged methodology. When he was challenged on BBC “HARDtalk,” he doubled down on it even though we’d sent the government the antisemitism statistics. So we’re definitely seeing this high level, firstly, of antisemitism denial, which is in and of itself a form of antisemitism, combined with a lack of interpersonal hostility. We’ll see what happens at the universities. It’s bubbling at the moment. I don’t want to make any assumptions. But we are not seeing a deep-seated, broad-based form of antisemitism in South Africa outside of particular political or other agendas, which aren’t minor. They do exist. But it’s not as widespread I think as we’ve seen elsewhere.
That’s such a powerful image that you give about how there are many South Africans who’ve actually never met a Jewish person, especially out in kind of rural areas, far flung areas. Which makes me think about a project that we worked with in our company, South Africa’s Promise. And we did a dipstick research in a rural community in the middle of Keiziden with about 50 young people. And we asked them about Israel. we asked them about Palestine. None of those kids had ever heard of Palestine. Again, because 80% of South Africans are Christian. So the reference points to some of these things, particularly in the Middle East, is what would be in the Bible. So they’ve never heard of the country Palestine, but they have heard about Philistines, right, and the Israelis and the Jews. But what would your advice be to people like us and organisations like ourselves that is really trying to A, build good strong relationships, not just within our communities, with South Africans and Jewish people in our community, but also because we believe that we could benefit from a good relationship with Israel. What would your advice be to an organisation like ours in terms of how do we fight what’s happening with the government and what’s bubbling and really try and turn the tide?
I think that there are a few ways that we can kind of start addressing some of this. And that the starting point, which gives me some hope, is that the government that is taking this position at the moment is not the government of Nelson Mandela and the government of Thabo Mbeki who had a moral, and I know that there are issues with Thabo Mbeki, but who had a real kind of moral standing in the world. And I don’t think it’s coincidental. I don’t think that those governments would’ve taken these positions. Because they did put South Africans first, including these South African Jewish citizens. Firstly, they don’t have the moral standing of the founders of our democracy in the way that Mandela. And I’m sorry to say, but they are so sullied by the corruption and by state capture that I think that it doesn’t feel… When people say, you know, stand up against them, not only am I protected by our constitutional democracy, I’m also protected by the fact that these people have no real moral standing. Because they have allowed this country to fall into a state of disrepair, which is honestly a bit disgraceful. So I think the starting point is to take some hope from the fact that we are seeing a massive pushback. And that’s really important as South Africans as well against the corruption. We are seeing a tremendous reduction. Whether they get 50% or not, I’m sure you’ve got better people to talk about the prospects for a South African election.
[Phumi] Every night. Every night, I get an opportunity. Every night, I get an opportunity to do an an ad about what’s happening tomorrow on our South Africa series. And we are actually talking the politics. We are actually talking the politics, as you were saying, of what’s going to happen, what the patterns look like. So it will be interesting to see. And we will talk about it, if anybody that’s watching today is interested in seeing what lies ahead two weeks before the elections here in South Africa.
There’s a significant opposition in South Africa that doesn’t share… And now it’s significant. You know, a couple of years ago when the ANC had close to 67% of the vote, opposition parties were not significant. So I think that it’s really about educating South Africa. It’s about educating South African communities. And I really do feel strongly that there’s no need to choose one side over the other. Because that’s not the South African way. We can have incredible compassion for the innocents who are dying and been killed in Gaza and the innocents who’ve been killed in Israel. We can support Palestinian nationalism and the desire for a Palestinian national state because we understand the desire for a state of our own. And for me, we really need to approach this in what I always see as the South African Way, which is a way of engagement and dialogue. I don’t think that non-Jewish South Africans have to feel like they have to choose. I think that non-Jewish South Africans can have compassion and sympathy with both sides. That’s all we’re asking. And I think that is a message that those who are trying to work on this should really be be using. You don’t have to choose. We both have valid, valid points. And we can have compassion on both sides. And not only is that an important message, I believe it’s the only way that we’ll truly have peace. Until we can see the humanness of each other, we won’t find peace. And that’s really the message I would suggest.
Mm, on both sides, I think. On both sides, and I agree. You know, if there is one thing that South Africa truly could gift the world, it’s how to find each other through the murkiness of hate and betrayal and dehumanisation, how to find each other and want to build a nation together, which is what we have in South Africa is a genuine desire to build a nation together, all of us. There is a message here from Denise. And I think it’s two minutes to end, two minutes to seven. So we can take two questions or comments.
Q&A and Comments:
And I’ll end with Denise’s because it’s a… “My late father…” This is Serena Kapinsky. “My late father was a commercial traveller "in country districts. "He was fluent in Afrikaans, grew up in Harrismith "and lived in Reitz in the free state. "One day, his client was amazed to learn he was Jewish. "The client says , ”‘You don’t look like a Jew.’ “And my dad responded, ”‘How should a Jewish person look?’“ And that’s the thing is, what do you think?
"Thank you both for a wonderfully informative conversation. "So much appreciated.” I’m glad you enjoyed it. Val Molen.
This is Philip, I’m struggling with this name. Lanzokowski, I think. Sorry if I butchered it. “Although antisemitism is a worldwide problem, "the South African government stands out "as a government apart from some of the Arab countries "that has certainly shown itself "as being openly anti-Israel.” True. And there’s lots of conversation about what that is about.
Carrie Supple: “Thank you, thank you.” From Carrie, “Thank you for the best Lockdown sessions. "Wonderful words and actions of hope.” So wonderful affirmation. Thank you very much. And then this is going to be the last one, I think, if I can find it.
I think so many wonderful messages of grace. They love it, thank you. They loved your presentation. Karen, thank you so much. Thank you so much for taking the time to come and chat with us and share your experience and knowledge with us. And really just a wonderful perspective. And I think to close off, I will say the paradox that you speak of I think is one of the things that a lot of people don’t understand about our country. And also, more importantly, that we don’t live in a binary world. Simply because we have this particular administration that has taken this posture does not mean that this is how all our governments will forever be, and that this is the posture of South Africans and how we feel about each other as South Africans with each other, or also how we feel about our neighbouring countries. And I do think that a lot of South Africans do pray for peace, first and foremost, peace all over the world and I think specifically in the Middle East, and the return of the hostages. And, you know, hopefully in the Middle East, they will find each other too. Last words from you before we say goodbye.
Listen, it seems to be quite an international audience. I’m going to answer a question that I’ve been asked. People say to me often, “Why do you stay? "Why don’t you leave?” So I’m going to answer that question perhaps for myself to end off. And I’m going to answer the question: Because I am a South African, and I’m a proud South African. And I believe in the future of this country, but I believe there will only be a future of this country if we all get stuck in and work for it. So thank you for being such a wonderful interviewer. We have a remarkable Jewish South African community as small and as beleaguered as we are. And we really are pretty much the last Jews on the African continent. And I believe it’s a community worth fighting for. And I really do, really do appreciate also the allyship of people like you who really make the South African story a true one. Thank you.
You are a wonderful friend. Thank you for coming on, Karen. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. I hope we see you again tomorrow night. We’ll be talking about the patterns to look for going into our election at the end of this month. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Hannah, we’re done. Thank you, goodnight.
Thank you.