Robbins, Bruce. Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists.

Literary scholar Bruce Robbins’s work has been wide-ranging and rooted in 19th and 20th century fiction, but the documentary Some of My Best Friends are Zionists reflects his increasing attention, as an activist, academic, and public intellectual, to issues around the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. This film, along with his more recent, shorter film “What Kind of Jew is Schlomo Sand?”, explores tensions between some experiences Jewish identity and alarm at Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

Relatively brief at 46 minutes long, the film consists mostly of interviews of artists and intellectuals like Judith Butler and the playwright Tony Kusher, as well as lesser-known people, but also includes some news and documentary footage, textual explanations, and segments where Robbins himself converses with a behind-the camera interlocutor. We don’t hear the questions interviewees are asked, but in one of the segments in which he is featured, Robbins explains what he asked and why: “The film is about how people have changed their minds. I asked everybody what they grew up thinking about Israel and the Middle East and more or less what they think now and how they got from Point A to Point B” (9:41).

Most interviewees describe how they went from feeling some type of support for Israel, to feeling that they should no longer support the state, and in some cases engage in writing or advocacy against Israeli policies. Common themes that emerge include a sense that support for Israel is expected, and that expressing otherwise is “dangerous…in American circles” (says novelist Gary Shteyngart); and that there is a generational divide with regard to feelings about Israel, with younger generations less unquestioningly supportive of Israel and its government’s actions. Those featured in the film are not direct perpetrators of mistreatment or violence against Palestinians, but rather express that for them Jewish identity, and the ties they feel to Israel, is in some way wrapped up with sentiments of complicity in guilt for Israel’s actions. Some interviewees name those actions, while others are described in textual explanations on screen. 

The film does not explicitly address concepts like victimhood, perpetration, or subject positions outside the victim-perpetrator binary, but many interviewees report feelings we could describe as complicity or implication, or at least of wanting to avoid implication in acts perpetrated by the Israeli government. The film is more explicitly interested in the question of how one changes one’s mind about a political issue related to identity: in this way, however, it is an interesting case study illustrating what seem to be patterns in the arrival at a feeling of complicity for actions one has not directly perpetrated. Memory scholar Michael Rothberg touches on the film in one of his essays on implication, “Trauma Theory, Implicated Subjects, and the Question of Israel/Palestine,” remarking on the film’s illustration of its subjects’ arrival to a sense of implication. Indeed, the film serves as a thoughtful and poignant case study of concepts more thoroughly theorized elsewhere. 

Cited: Rothberg, Michael. “Trauma Theory, Implicated Subjects, and the Question of Israel/Palestine.” Profession 2 (2014). https://profession.mla.org/trauma-theory-implicated-subjects-and-the-question-of-israel-palestine/

Author of this entry: Hannah Jakobsen

Robbins, Bruce. Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists. 2013, www.bestfriendsfilm.com/.