A Bookshop Cancels an Event Over a Rabbi’s Zionism, Prompting Outrage

Shortly before 6 on Tuesday evening, Joshua Leifer was on his way to an event for his new book, “Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life,” when he got a call from his publicist.

In about an hour, he was to be in conversation with Andy Bachman, formerly the head rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, one of the best-known reform synagogues in the country. The talk had been planned a month ago; tickets had been sold and many people eventually showed up, but now there was a big problem.

The staff at Powerhouse, an arty but not aggressively political bookstore on the waterfront in Dumbo, where the discussion was being held, was objecting on the grounds that Rabbi Bachman was “a Zionist.”

He was not a Zionist who remained uncritical of Israel; he was not a zealot of the right. He believes in the Zionism of its literal definition, the animating principle of which is unacceptable to some faction of the pro-Palestinian left. “I mean that Jews have a right to self-determination and a homeland of their own,” he said.

In that call with his publicist, Mr. Leifer learned that she had been given the message that the conversation should avoid “uncomfortable territory,” Mr. Leifer, a doctoral student in history at Yale and a contributor to The New York Review of Books, told me the following morning. “My initial response was ‘Wow, that is a surprising and unsettling thing to hear from the bookstore.’” He presumed that those who had organized the evening had read his book, and he told his publicist to reassure them that the conversation would not deviate materially from it.

This proved in vain. A half-hour later, his publicist called him again to tell him that Powerhouse was “not willing to have Andy do an event at the bookstore.” Mr. Leifer, who describes himself as “an anti-occupation Jew” in favor of a democratic Israel, was welcome to speak on his own, but Rabbi Bachman was not invited to join him onstage. The writer was angry and mystified by this reversal of course — the event was to be a conversation, not a monologue; he was not going to address the audience by himself. Many people had come to hear Rabbi Bachman, a celebrity cleric who remains a beloved figure in Brooklyn even though he moved to Maine last year.