ROBERT BOYERS: You’ve had much to say about Israel and Zionism over many years, especially in your book, The Lion’s Den: Zionism & The Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky. More recently, in November of 2023, you published a provocative essay on “The Return of the Progressive Atrocity,” which was a fierce denunciation of the reaction by much of the global Left to the Hamas attacks, a reaction you decried as a kind of moral rot that had been years in the making. The essay has circulated widely. What has been the reaction from readers from whom you’ve heard?

SUSIE LINFIELD: I received more responses to that essay than to anything I’ve ever written. That was hugely gratifying (and any writer who says that she doesn’t care if people do or don’t read her is probably lying). The piece was sort of my “J’Accuse,” written out of desolation, shock, sorrow, and fury. But I also—and I have to credit my partner for this—tried to modify the tone. He’s a philosophy professor at the New School, and he told me, “I want my students to be able to read this.” The original version was more sarcastic; it included phrases like “useful idiots.” I took those out; you can’t influence people by insulting them. Tone is not only an aesthetic question; it’s a political, and even moral, one. Orwell knew that.    The responses have been overwhelmingly positive (though I should add that I am not on, and don’t look at, social media of any kind, so I don’t know what’s going on there. Maybe nothing good!). Clearly there was—there still is— a tremendous feeling of desolation, of betrayal, of isolation among those whom I would define as the humane or universalist Left. And of course I hope that the piece contributed to a sense that we are not alone, even if the “anti-imperialists” and “decolonizers” are a lot noisier at the moment. The emails from shocked, beleaguered Israeli leftists were moving, painfully so. One of the responses that meant the most to me came from an Iranian-American friend. He wrote that he was so, so sorry that I had to write the piece. I am too.

Robert Boyers: A former graduate student of mine wrote to me asking why a writer like you, long associated with publications “on the Left side of the spectrum,” should have chosen to publish her essay in Quillette? Would this not, in effect, announce that you had moved to the political right, and thus that what you wrote would be discounted as an expression of “a reactionary Zionist ideology”? Her words, not mine. Of course I told her that she must read your essay and decide for herself whether or not it was ideologically determined. Now she’s read it and said it changed her mind about many things.

Susie Linfield: Is Quillette on the Right? I didn’t know that, and the reason I don’t know it is that I pay less and less attention to those compartments, those “camps,” these days (although there are some places that I would not publish). Quillette publishes Benny Morris, one of the Israel’s finest “revisionist” historians. It publishes Michael Walzer, a lifelong social democrat. How are they on the Right? One of the points of my piece—and I am certainly not the only one to raise this—is that the whole definition of “the Left” needs to be re-thought...