Genocide undebated — how words failed the Jewish Literary Festival in Cape Town

Daily Maverick

04-05-2025

In the face of unrelenting allegations of Israeli atrocities in Gaza, what would constitute an act of Jewish self-betrayal? On Freedom Day 2025, at the Jewish Literary Festival in Cape Town, this question was more important than any other. But it wasn't asked inside the festival venue — it manifested, instead, as verbal and physical assaults on the two Jewish protesters outside.
In search of the collaborators
Pankaj Mishra, in his new book, The World After Gaza: A History, quotes a remarkable line of Primo Levi on the subject of the Kapos, the Jewish collaborators in the Nazi death camps:
'No one is authorised to judge them, not those who lived through the experience of the Lager and even less those who did not.'
Most lovers of Jewish literature, without knowing Mishra or his work, would know that Levi — author of the essential Holocaust memoir If This is a Man — died by suicide in 1987. They would also probably know, as Mishra points out in his book, that Levi emerged from Auschwitz with an unshakable belief in the necessity of a Jewish state, but that he was later deeply troubled by the crimes of the Israeli military, particularly the massacres at Sabra and Shatila in 1982. Levi's self-slaughter, by almost all accounts, was partially prompted by the actions of his fellow Jews.
Still, even if one knew this about Levi, one would need to know something about Mishra to properly appreciate the significance of the focus on the 'blamelessness' of the Kapos.
Destined to become one of the world's leading public intellectuals, Mishra — like Levi — began his writing career in idealistic solidarity with the Jewish state. He had grown up in India 'imbibing the reverential Zionism' of his Hindu nationalist family, and so for many years had viewed Israel as a 'redemptive' project. But while the Holocaust would remain for him 'a universal standard for gauging the political and moral health of societies,' a visit to the West Bank in 2008 would jolt him 'out of a languid view of Zionism as vindication and shield of the eternally persecuted'.
In other words, like Levi, Mishra would conclude that the Holocaust had been weaponised for truly nefarious ends. Well before 7 October 2023, when labels such as 'Nazi' and 'anti-Semite' would begin to be drained of all meaning, he had broken through the veil.
Unlike Levi, however, Mishra did not land on the other side in a heap of his own trauma. He had not been in the death camps, and therefore could not know the anguish of survivor's guilt, nor the even deeper anguish of watching the victims turn into perpetrators.
The most Mishra could attempt, as stated in his introduction to The World After Gaza, was to alleviate his 'perplexity' in the face of 'an extensive moral breakdown'. His main reason for writing the book, he informs us, was to 'invite general readers into a quest for clarifications that feel more pressing in a dark time'.
In the context of Mishra's subject matter as implied by his choice of title — 'the broad human condition after Israel's livestreamed mass-murder spree in the Middle East' — one of those clarifications had to do with blame. And here, the demonisation of the Kapos served for him as an example of how the Jewish state had scrubbed all nuance from the official memory of the Holocaust.
'Levi,' Mishra writes, 'who had become reconciled to the inevitability of human failings in everyone, including himself, did not have much patience with the demand for moral perfection.'
Put simply, given his enduring literary heft and his own lived experience, the significance of Levi's free pass for the Kapos was that it punctured a giant hole in one of Zionism's core myths: real Jews, heroic Jews, did not collaborate with Nazis to save themselves. As Mishra had correctly (and brilliantly) intuited, to be complicit in genocide had become — for a mainstream, pro-Israel Jew — the greatest of all sins.
No wonder, then, that to call a Jew a Kapo had become the greatest of all slurs.
And even less wonder that after the Hamas atrocities of 7 October 2023, Megan Choritz, a Jewish South African author, actor-director and pro-Palestine activist, would be called a Kapo too many times to count.
On 28 April 2025, outside the Jewish Literary Festival at the Holocaust Centre in Cape Town, she would also be told that she was 'not a Jew'.
Please, join us for a chat
'It's the funniest thing,' Choritz said during a telephone interview with Daily Maverick the next day. 'Two months before 7 October, I was literally a celeb for the Zionists. I was all over the Jewish Report, it was like they wanted my opinions on everything.'
When Daily Maverick checked later that morning, her statement turned out to be true.
In mid-September 2023, Choritz's expertise as an actor-director was sought out by the Jewish Report on the question of whether Jews 'should be the only ones' to portray Jewish characters in film. Whatever she thought of the relevance of the question, Choritz had been helpful and polite. 'Acting is pretending,' she said to the journalist. 'An actor's cultural or religious heritage shouldn't play a role in the casting of a character.'
Clearly, given that not all of the interviewees agreed, she was trending on the liberal side of the divide. But back then, before everything changed, such distinctions did not matter as much as why a person deserved to be quoted in the first place — and for Choritz, aside from her theatrical credentials, there was her novel Lost Property, which had been published in June of that year to wide acclaim.
The book had garnered the almost unqualified praise of the South African literary establishment, with leading critic Karabo Kgoleng calling it 'a work of poetic and magical prose' in a review for News24. The Jewish Report, for its part, celebrated the release with a Q&A, in which Choritz was asked to describe herself.
'I'm a 58-year-old rebel, with a big mouth, big opinions, and big energy,' she had said.
More than a year later, well after the 7 October assault, the organisers of the fifth iteration of the Jewish Literary Festival (JLF) appeared unfazed — and perhaps even enthusiastic — about Choritz's 'bigness'. As Vanessa Valkin, the JLF's co-chair, wrote to Melinda Ferguson, Choritz's publisher, on 16 September 2024: 'Thanks! Megan's book is on our list.'
But in October 2024, in a piece authored by self-proclaimed 'firearms activist' Tim Flack, Choritz's name would appear in the Jewish Report for the last time. Accused of 'astounding moral blindness' for speaking at a pro-Palestine event alongside Gift of the Givers founder Imtiaz Sooliman and other 'disturbing' South Africans, Flack declared that Choritz had taken part in a 'hate-fuelled endorsement of terror'.
Daily Maverick was unable to conclusively determine whether it was Flack's article that caused Valkin and her partner, Caryn Gootkin, to backtrack. Either way, on 20 December 2024, just before the country shut down for the holidays, Ferguson sent an email to the JLF co-chairs expressing her dismay at Lost Property's absence from the final list. 'You both seemed so keen,' Ferguson lamented, before offering to send them the book's 'many, many reviews'.
Posed as a question, Ferguson signed off with the following: 'So I am very confused why a book that is so quintessentially Jewish and of such a high standard has been overlooked by you?'
On 14 January 2025, Valkin and Gootkin replied. 'We have put together a programme that does not provide a platform for partisanship or political activism from either extreme of the great divide of opinions surrounding the current conflict in the Middle East,' they stated.
'Unfortunately, we feel that Megan's presence at the Festival would threaten that neutral paradigm. We do hope you understand and look forward to working with you with your other authors.'
On the day of the event, in a two-person protest that included Jared Sacks — a member, like Choritz, of South African Jews for a Free Palestine — the author of Lost Property made her presence felt regardless.
In photographs of the protest that went quickly viral, she was pictured sitting calmly on a chair with a large sign balanced against her knees that read 'Not Zionist enough for the Jewish Literary Festival'. She was wearing her standard Palestinian keffiyeh, an item that she had worn practically every day since 7 October. On the small table to her left, placed between copies of her book, was another sign that read 'Please — Join us for a chat'.
Throughout the day, Choritz endured the verbal abuse of festival attendees. Along with the well-worn 'Kapo' slur, the new insult hurled her way was that she was 'not a Jew'. Many of the attendees requested a security escort to get past her. Police and law enforcement, more than likely responding to the complaints of attendees, returned at regular intervals. But, in the end, it was Sacks who was physically assaulted — his phone was grabbed from his hand, stamped upon and destroyed.
A case was opened at the local police station. Instead of the R10,000 offered for the replacement of his phone, Sacks requested the deposit of the funds into the bank account of Gift of the Givers, specifically for the organisation's relief work in Gaza.
Daily Maverick confirmed, via Sooliman, that the deposit was received on 30 April.
The lords of death
Over in The Hague, at around the same time that Choritz and Sacks were under assault in Cape Town, Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, counsel for the Palestinian state, was addressing the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
'Israel is now seeking to destroy Palestinians as a group,' Ní Ghrálaigh informed the panel of judges, 'including by inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their destruction, by seizing ever more Palestinian territory, and by turning Gaza into an uninhabitable wasteland incapable of sustaining human life.'
For the next 40 minutes, the Irish barrister laid out in detail how and why Israel appeared intent on destroying the framework created to ensure compliance with international law. More than 50 days into Israel's total blockade on the entry of aid into Gaza, the ICJ had set aside five days to hear submissions from dozens of nations and bodies on Israel's humanitarian obligations to Palestinians.
In this context, Ní Ghrálaigh asserted that Israel's attacks and restrictions on the United Nations were 'unprecedented in the history of the organisation'.
And yet, just on this one day, the ICJ was not the only global institution to call Israel to account. On 28 April 2025, the world's largest human rights organisation, Amnesty International, released its annual report — in it, Israel was accused of perpetrating a 'live-streamed genocide' in Gaza, and of committing illegal acts with the 'specific intent' of wiping out Palestinians.
Also, on the very same day, Louis Theroux's BBC documentary The Settlers was burning up the Internet — its focus, was the phenomenon of Jewish settlers in the West Bank; and what it showed, without reservation, was that a former fringe group of supremacists and ultranationalists had won the support of the highest echelons of the Israeli government.
But again, back in South Africa, Choritz's views had been dismissed by the JLF organisers as 'extreme'. To reflect their so-called 'neutral' stance, presumably, one needed to look no further than the festival programme. And to be sure, of the JLF's 25 regular sessions, only three had been focused directly or indirectly on events in the Middle East — there was a morning session titled 'Israel after October 7th: A photographer's perspective'; an afternoon session titled 'Being Jewish after October 7th: Personal reflections'; and a parallel afternoon session titled 'Roots of rage: Unpacking violence and terror'.
The plenary session, scheduled for 4pm in the Gardens Shul, had featured VIP guest David Baddiel, British author of Jews Don't Count, in conversation with Nadia Bilchik 'on antisemitism' and other topics.
Out of 26 sessions, then, four had been focused on Jews as victims. None, quite clearly, had addressed the real and immediate (global) allegations of Jews as perpetrators. And so, to properly understand, Daily Maverick sent a list of questions to Gootkin and Valkin.
Did they concur with Choritz's allegation that the event should more accurately have been called the 'Zionist Literary Festival'? What aspect of Choritz's views did they regard as 'extreme'? Did they believe that Choritz and Sacks had an inherent right to protest outside the festival venue? Did they know who might have called the police and law enforcement? Were they aware of the verbal assaults on Choritz and the physical assault on Sacks?
Only one of the questions was directly answered. 'We were aware of a peaceful protest that took place outside the venue and respected the right to protest,' stated the JLF co-chairs.
Other than that, according to Gootkin and Valkin, the fifth iteration of the JLF was a resounding success. 'We have received truly heartwarming feedback about the programme and the spirit of the day from people across a wide spectrum of beliefs and backgrounds,' Daily Maverick was informed.
Heartwarming?
Far be it, we thought, for Daily Maverick to rain unjustly on anyone's parade — in fact, in the spirit of full disclosure, the author of this article happily took part in the inaugural JLF in 2016 — but the choice of adjective was unfortunate.
Jewish literature, in the final analysis, had always been about a lot more than that. Whether in books by Jews, about Jews or with reference to Jewish issues, the best of the genre had always tackled the fullness of the human condition; the most honest and enduring writers, from Hannah Arendt and Martin Buber to Primo Levi and Jean Améry, had always addressed Jewish crimes and culpabilities alongside Jewish triumphs.
And here, to remind anyone whose heart may have been warmed at the expense of anybody else's, the epigraph of Mishra's The World After Gaza was obligatory medicine.
The writer, needless to say, was Levi:
'We, too, are so dazzled by power and money that we forget the fragility of our existence: we forget that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is fenced in, that outside the fence are the lords of death, and not far away the train is waiting.' DM