Fleeing Jerusalem

Author Avi Steinberg posits a unique and timely interpretation of the Book of Mormon.

Recently, the Utah Monthly had the chance to sit down (virtually) with Avi Steinberg, a lecturer in the University of Chicago’s creative writing program and the author of three books of narrative nonfiction, including the 2014 memoir, The Lost Book of Mormon. In our conversation, we chat about his formative years as a prison librarian, how his work on the Book of Mormon expanded his conception of what it means for a text to be “true,” and how his reading of Lehi’s exodus from Jerusalem influences his take on Zionism. As always, Steinberg’s words are his own and do not necessarily represent the position of the Utah Monthly’s editorial board. 

Could you talk a little bit about your background? Where did you grow up, what did you study in college, and what has your career looked like so far?  

My grandparents, parents, and I were born on different continents. My grandparents were Jewish refugees from Ukraine and Poland. My parents were born and raised in St. Louis. I was born in Jerusalem. We were an academic family and moved around a lot. I grew up mostly in Cleveland and then in the Boston area. My parents’ religious community was Modern Orthodox and so I grew up in the yeshiva school system. 

At Harvard, I studied American history and literature. Shortly after graduating, I decided to be a writer and pursued journalism as a way into the field. I started out as a cub reporter for the metro section of the Boston Globe, which was a great apprenticeship. It was during this period—when I was trying to learn everything I could about my city so that I could write about it—that I came across a job listing for a prison librarian. I was intrigued because the inside of my city’s prison was one place that I, as a writer, could never really see, much less explore. I eventually applied for the job, with the intention of learning about this place and becoming a more savvy writer. 

In my deep naïveté, it actually didn’t occur to me until about a year on the job that I might simply write a book about that place itself. But I did finally register that, and it became my first book, a memoir published in 2010, called Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian. I’ve written two other books of narrative nonfiction since then, each one very different, but, in my mind, linked in unexpected ways, too. I’ve also done a bunch of magazine writing. In the past few years, I’ve taken on new kinds of projects, a biography and a translation, and have taught creative writing in universities, which has been a lot of fun. 

Could you talk about how you came to write The Lost Book of Mormon? 

That was my second book. It started as a desire to write a bible travelogue, in the old nineteenth century (and earlier) mode, of a semi-pilgrim story wherein a traveler goes to Jerusalem, Jericho, the Galilee, following in the path of the biblical story, and writing a chronicle. But that landscape seemed less and less plausible for me, both because I know it too well (I’ve spent years of my life there) and it didn’t feel new or exploratory, which is what makes a travel/pilgrim narrative exciting. It then occurred to me that a travelogue of the Book of Mormon would be very exploratory for me! 

And, as I looked into it, I discovered that it wasn’t just new ground for me, it was still, in a kind of objective sense, a not-totally-discovered path. Even believers aren’t certain where the book’s settings are and so there is a very real kind of mystery that would animate any effort to retread the steps of Nephi and Moroni. I also loved the premise that the book actually starts in Jerusalem but quickly leaves it behind. This allowed me, as an adventurer and storyteller, to begin at a familiar starting point but also to not be confined by it. The overall goal in that project, for me, was partly in discovering something about the Book of Mormon itself, especially about its early readers, but also about the nature of sacred literature generally, especially in the Hebrew tradition that I was raised with. 

Could you talk about what you learned from writing The Lost Book of Mormon? 

What was striking to me were all the ways that a story can be connected to landscape and how a real-life journey into those places can yield a new way of understanding that original text. What I learned from that experience was simply this: there are multiple ways in which a sacred text can be “true,” various ways in which a received text can make a claim on me. It was critical, for this project, to find a way to believe in this book’s claims in order for it to speak to me, to open up its meanings to me. 

This is, I realize, a pretty different way of approaching the text than how a believer reads it, but I also was fascinated in how “believing in” a text can itself take different forms. I wanted to break the (to me, boring and no longer useful) binary approach to this book—believers vs. debunkers—and find a third track to follow through its world. I don’t believe in the book in the way a pious person does, but I also think that people who seek to expose it as a fraud are pretty egregiously missing the point, and also foreclosing this fascinating book for others. 

When you visited BYU in October, you mentioned that for you, the Book of Mormon offers a post-Zionist approach to Judaism—or something to that effect. Could you talk a little bit about that? 

This was something that I was only beginning to really understand myself when I wrote the book back in 2013. It has become far more clear (to me) in the decade since. But it’s there in the book, too, especially in the Jerusalem section. What I meant was this: Zionism, as the modern ideology of Jewish nationalism, particularly in the form of territorial colonization of Palestine, necessarily places the literal territory of the Hebrew Bible at the center of its activities. The Zionists brutally conquered, then brutally settled (and continue to settle) Jerusalem and the West Bank because of an implicit sense that Jerusalem, the literal city of Jerusalem, is Zion, and is therefore the be-all-end-all of their political aims. 

The problem with this idea is that it has led to the ethnic cleansing of these territories of its indigenous inhabitants, the Palestinian people, and has led to what can only be described as a hundred-year crime spree in that land. There are many reasons, legal and moral, why this is wrong. But one need not look beyond the endless carnage, and Israel’s increasingly open desire to erase this population from the earth, to know that this ideology is far from a spiritual revolution. It has been an ethical failure for many decades now, and that reality is getting harder to mask. 

What I liked about the Book of Mormon is that it posits a completely different history and thus charts a different path forward. This history is no less ancient, no less biblical, no less Hebraic. It tells the story of leaving Jerusalem and, unlike the parallel Jewish narrative of desiring to return to that ancient city (and to Zionists, of literally re-taking it), this book says that Zion is elsewhere. It can be in other parts of the world. It can be . . . right where you are right now. In the Zionist communities in which I was raised, that is a really subversive idea. And it is an idea that I feel is more and more necessary to explore. I’m not arguing for the Latter-day Saint concept of Zion, per se. Jews, certainly, are not going to accept Jesus or Joseph Smith, and that is certainly not my mission. But the spatial theory behind the Book of Mormon, its theory of history, that Jerusalem is not a destination for the future but a starting point in the past, and that our goal isn’t to seize some random city in the Levant but to live with a keen spiritual vigilance about place, about where Zion might exist for us, in our own country. . . . That feels radical and necessary today. 

How does your understanding of Zionism influence your understanding of the current war in Gaza? 

I think Zionism has been a catastrophe, and we are now seeing, in the most graphic terms, the result of that catastrophe. First and foremost, it has been a catastrophe for the Palestinian people. They have been dispossessed of their lands, and their lives, and their history for seventy-six years now. They have suffered the most and paid the dearest price for the rise of this movement. If Zionism was meant to solve the issue of European and Christian antisemitism, it should have been Christian Europe that gave Jews a homeland. Why did the Palestinians have to bear the cost of the European and Christian world’s crimes against Jews?

But Zionism has also been a catastrophe for the Jewish people, spiritually, ethically, politically, and, in a more visceral sense, to the simple health and well-being of Jewish communities. You used the phrase “war in Gaza,” but I don’t see this as a war, but rather a genocide and I don’t see it as “in Gaza” as much as against Palestinians everywhere they live (including the West Bank and Jerusalem, and the millions expelled into other countries). I use the word genocide carefully. I lost dozens of family members in the Holocaust. I don’t use the word genocide casually. But that’s what we are witnessing, and that’s what our country—the US—is materially aiding. Scholars of genocide agree with that assessment, and so do the courts of international law. 

For years, I (and others of my political persuasion) have been warning that Israel was waiting for a good pretext to launch this genocide. The reason we felt that way is that they have been pursuing these policies our entire lives. They openly talk about wanting to remove Palestinians, to erase them, to relocate them. They deny that Palestinians exist as a people or as a political or territorial entity. I grew up in Zionist communities, including in Israel, and I’ve heard this my entire life. I’ve seen it first hand many many times. And, outside of the region, they have created an environment where any discussion of Israel’s crimes is inherently antisemitic, which is an absurd position that grows more and more untenable as the pro-Palestine movement itself becomes more and more full of very proud, practicing Jews like me. So, to answer your question succinctly: I believe that the logic of colonial Zionism has always been genocide, and so it was just a question of when and how. Unfortunately, we are now finding out. At the same time, because the mask is off, we have an opportunity to steer in a new direction.

Have you received a lot of pushback from members of the Jewish community as well as from others regarding your approach to Zionism? 

Oh, yes! That is an understatement. But I think it’s important, first, to identify what you mean when you say “members of the Jewish community.” For over fifty years, and really for more than seventy-six years, large strains of the American Jewish community have worked hard to link Zionism and Judaism, and so folks in these communities have been indoctrinated for their entire lives to think that the two are synonymous. But that’s an ahistorical perspective: Zionism was always very contentious within Jewish circles. Especially within the religious establishment: most rabbis, for instance, were very opposed to Zionism in the mid twentieth century. There is nothing inherently Zionist about the Jewish religion. That said, Zionism has become the ideology of choice for much of the organized Jewish community in America and so Jews like me are at odds with the leadership in our communities. I will make two points about this:

1. Modern Judaism, unlike the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has no central leadership structure and so there’s no inherent mechanism for defining who is “in” and who is “out” of the community. A Jewish community can crop up anywhere and build itself up how it pleases and can claim its own authority. That has always been true and is key to Judaism’s staying power, I believe. Now, Zionism is powerful because it is linked to state power, which is why it is so attractive to some people, but there is nothing in Judaism that gives a state actual religious authority. On the contrary, a secular structure like a modern state is regarded as inherently antithetical to religious authority (which is why rabbis opposed it at first). All of which is to say: Zionism holds a lot of power but not a lot of legitimacy and that is why it has to be so repressive. If they really had the hearts and minds of people they wouldn’t be so aggressive about forcing Jews to tow their line.

2. The organized Jewish community in the US is in crisis at the moment because it is having a lot of trouble attracting millennial and younger people into its institutions. There’s a donor class, which funds nice buildings and ambitious programming, but the grass roots are drying up. Those nice buildings are not as full as they are intended to be. Zionism is part of this equation. The institutions of the community are heavily invested in Zionism, but the younger people simply are not. On the contrary, they see it as a barrier. So, again, to answer your question succinctly: there is pushback, yes, but mostly from entrenched powers who currently do have the highest platform but also a fragile and diminishing one. I don’t think that they even believe that they will be able to sustain these commitments in the future. They are worried. I am not. I see young Jews out there on the right side of history, and in big numbers, and I believe our communities have the chance to undo the deadly mistakes of our Zionist parents and grandparents.