So you disagree with the direction in which your country is headed. What’s a moral person to do? That’s the question the columnists M. Gessen and Michelle Goldberg recently set out to answer in their reporting in different countries. In this conversation with the editor Ariel Kaminer, they discuss recent tactics by Israeli dissidents, Americans organizing against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other ways to protest unethical policies.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Ariel Kaminer: I’m Ariel Kaminer. I’m an editor at New York Times Opinion. My colleague Masha Gessen, who I have the good fortune to edit, recently published a piece that explored how to be a good citizen when your country is doing things you think are immoral. Masha reported their story in Israel.
Our colleague Michelle Goldberg has been asking similar questions with her reporting here in the United States. Masha and Michelle are here in the studio today. Thank you both for joining me.
Masha Gessen: Hi.
Michelle Goldberg: Hi. Thanks for having us.
Kaminer: The people you both wrote about are not professional activists. They’re just normal people trying to put their values into action at a particularly fraught moment in both countries. I’m interested to know: Where do you think they found the courage to take on their government? Masha, why don’t you answer first?
Gessen: That’s actually the most difficult and important question. The answer right away is: I don’t know. I have some hypotheses, and these hypotheses boil down to, I think there are situations, and there are people who find that the psychic cost of moral compromise is greater than the cost of acting. For them to live in harmony with themselves and with their values, they have to do things that are scary, and they feel like they’re not paying a greater price than they would be if they just sacrificed their values.
Kaminer: There are all kinds of people in Israel resisting their government in all kinds of ways and gradations. What was it about these people that interested you specifically?
Gessen: The four people I ended up including give a range of responses. Maybe the person I’m most interested in is Jonathan Dekel. The first time I ever interviewed him was about six months after Oct. 7. He is a Jewish Israeli who lives in an intentional co-living community. It’s a village called Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom, where half the families are Palestinian citizens of Israel and half the families are Jewish Israelis. The entire project is to create a kind of working model of the future of this co-living — not coexistence but co-living — because of the intentionality and constant conversation. He told me a year and a half ago that he had moved there thinking that he was going to bring up his children to not serve in the military and to live in a different Israel-Palestine from the one he knew.
The morning of Oct. 7, he reported for reserve duty without being called. When I interviewed him six months into the conflict, one of the sentences that I remember him saying was: “Look, I’m OK with this being done in my name. I’m at peace. I am not at peace.” This was just coming out of his mouth in a constant flow. And when I contacted him this time, I just assumed we would have a check-in. And he said, “No, I’m actually living on the Upper West Side of New York. Because that was the only way I could stop serving. I couldn’t say no when they called if I was in Israel. But if I’m 6,000 miles away, then I just can’t get there.”
I so appreciate that frankness but also his willingness to just sit in the mess of it — the sort of “I’m at peace. I’m not at peace” and being able to express it. I think that’s ultimately a much more difficult place to be than a place of total moral clarity. And I hope it speaks to a lot more people.
Kaminer: There was a line, Masha, in your piece that I thought spoke directly to something that Michelle wrote. I’m going to read from the piece. Masha wrote: “It is strikingly easy to shrug off one’s responsibility for the country where one pays taxes, contributes to the public conversation and at least nominally has the right to vote. If that country is the United States, it seems one can just say ‘Not in my name’ and continue to enjoy the wealth and the freedom of movement one’s citizenship confers.”
Michelle, the people you wrote about had that option and chose not to take it. Tell us about how you got interested in their story.
Goldberg: I think about it a little bit differently because I agree with Masha about the moral dimensions. But at the same time, something that I was struck by in Masha’s piece was Michael Sfard saying that he is no longer a part of the opposition because there is no meaningful political opposition in Israel. That’s a place where I think that the United States is quite different from Israel. The United States, in some cases — the political opposition has let us down, but there is a political opposition. The society as a whole is not behind this Trumpian project, so people who are standing up to it don’t necessarily experience themselves as marginal.
A lot of the people that I wrote about, they’re very brave. I’m not trying to minimize that in any way. But in some ways, it’s like they just hadn’t gotten the memo about capitulation. In some ways, to me, what’s been more shocking than the everyday acts of bravery have been the everyday acts of cowardice by people who have very little to lose and are not really threatened in any way but have just decided to go along with the new regime. I think that what you’re seeing is a lot of individual people for whom it would never have even occurred to them to do that. I’m thinking, for example, of Elizabeth Castillo, who was in the piece that I wrote about the protests and the pushback against ICE in Los Angeles.
She wasn’t someone who was particularly political. She didn’t consider herself an activist. She was just furious that ICE was coming into her neighborhood and raiding her building and arresting her neighbors. And so she just started going out on her own and honking her horn and tailing the ICE vehicles and warning people that they were in the neighborhood. When I was asking her, “Weren’t you afraid? How did you decide to do this?” She wasn’t really thinking in those terms. She was just like, “What are they going to do to me?” Actually, they could do a lot to you, but she was so disgusted, and I don’t think it occurred to her not to do what she was doing. And then she met up with other people in the neighborhood. They got more organized, as people are kind of getting more organized all over the country.
And I think what you’re seeing — this is why maybe I’ve sort of veered wildly between hope and despair in the last year — but one of the things that gives me hope is that you do see huge numbers of ordinary people who are not intimidated and who do still have the kind of muscle memory of democratic citizenship that so many of our elites gave up so quickly.
Kaminer: The issues that you’re raising right now are also relevant in Masha’s piece in that I think all of the activity that you guys wrote about was taking place on a very local, very personal level. These weren’t people who were joining a big brand name national movement. In fact, in your piece, Michelle, you described this as “part of a growing shift from symbolic protest to direct action.” Have you guys come to feel that this is a more effective model for resistance than big national marches, at least at this time?
Gessen: No, I find it very depressing. I think that these people are doing incredibly important work. Certainly in Israel, the people that I wrote about are probably doing the only things that are possible for them to do, in terms of resistance. There is no coordinated movement for these people to join. They’re doing what they can. They’re helping one person at a time in one way or another. That’s how you resist autocracy on behalf of your neighbors, but it is not how you overthrow autocracy.
Kaminer: Sounds like you don’t think that No Kings is going to topple the king.
Gessen: During the last No Kings march, I was in a little town in the Catskills where we have a house, and the entire town, which is completely Democratic, was out on the street. Everybody in their inflatable chicken costumes. And I found myself getting so annoyed because I felt like the risk of that sort of brunchtime party was zero. The next day, I called Erica Chenoweth, the political scientist who studies civil resistance, and I was talking to them about these feelings, and they said “yes,” but there were also people who were wearing their inflatable chicken costumes in towns where at the last No Kings march they got beaten up, where there were actual neo-Nazis who were protesting at the same time, counterprotesting.
They were also saying that while it may look ineffectual in the moment, it certainly creates a kind of zeitgeist that people who are in the position to make more consequential decisions may refer to. And then I said, “Well, so, are you feeling kind of more hopeful?” And Erica was like, “Oh, I go through the full cycle every day.” It was total despair to some hope. I feel the same way. I feel like we’re totally in uncharted waters. I’ve been writing about autocracy for most of my life, and yet I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like this.
Kaminer: There’s a message that those big protest marches send to whomever they’re protesting, but there’s also a message that they send to the participants.
Goldberg: Yeah. Maybe I can afford to be a little bit more cheerful because this is my first go-round with all this stuff. I think that those marches were extremely consequential for a couple of reasons, and I don’t think there’s any reason to draw a binary between direct action and protests. I think you need both.
But I think the protests have been really important because they helped to break the narrative that this administration was a steamroller that had not just all the levers of government on its side but also the public on its side. Part of the thing that was so dispiriting when Trump was re-elected is that this time he really did win the popular vote. He really did have — not the kind of overwhelming mandate that they had claimed — but they had said what they were going to do, and the American electorate had assented. And so in a way, they had a right to be — not a right to be breaking the law, not a right to be torturing people, but they had a right to try to enact their agenda. It’s why there was no mass protest the day after the inauguration, the first Trump presidency again, because he came into office without the popular vote and it was this big shock. You had this immediate society-wide immune response that I think was very important in hindering some of their worst impulses the first time around.
This time, you didn’t really have that. You heard a lot of talk about a vibe shift, that all of a sudden now all the young people were interested in this sort of edgy, avant-garde variant of fascism. One of the things that we’ve seen is that the people at the top of industry in Silicon Valley and the American economy are kind of constantly chasing where they believe the zeitgeist to be. So when they saw in the first go-round that the resistance was in the air and they were willing to try to co-opt that as much as they could and to try to fill their stores with pro-L.G.B.T.Q. merchandise and to institute all kinds of D.E.I. programs — and we’ve seen how quickly they swing when they’re trying to chase where they believe society is going.
And so I think that having a very public display of “This is not where society is going.” Being able to say this is one of the biggest demonstrations in American history — and it’s not just in New York and L.A. and Washington, D.C.; it’s all over the country — matters. And people who might have otherwise felt alone in their communities, who might have been like, “Am I the only one who is horrified by this?” see that they’re not. And then that translates into other kinds of activism. You see tons of people going into the political system, running for office. And you see people looking around and saying, “What else can I do?”
I was talking to Pablo Alvarado, who’s a co-founder of a group called the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. He’s doing a lot of talks in churches — their congregations want to learn how to do this kind of community defense work — but he’s also getting calls from Indivisible and No Kings and the 50501 movement, from people who say, “OK, people marched, and now they want to do something else.” And so it’s an entry point.
Kaminer: I think one thing that came through really clearly in both your pieces is that taking this direct action, personal action can be really clarifying, but it can also be isolating, separating yourself possibly from your neighbors or your friends or in some cases — Masha, you wrote about somebody who separated themselves from their family. How did the people that you both reported on manage that?
Gessen: That’s a great question. It’s funny because the person who you just referred to — Ella Keidar Greenberg — she might be the most prominent resister to military service in Israel at the moment. But she found herself and her community in her activism. The way she described it to me — I asked her how she got into it, and she said, “It was Covid. I was stuck at home. And then I read “The Communist Manifesto” —
Kaminer: As one does.
Gessen: — as one does. Which her grandmother had on the shelf. And then she started reading more books. Then she found other young people who were reading books. And then she found people who were actually acting. Then the lockdown ended, and she was able to be with people and act with people. It was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to her.
I think ultimately that’s the secret of all activism. Nobody can act alone. Activism has to be more nurturing than it is costly. That’s the only way that it is sustainable. I think that’s true of people who are going to No Kings protests or participating in Indivisible. Otherwise they can’t do it for very long.
But it’s also true that the people I wrote about are completely on the margins of Israeli society. I think this is also a meaningful distinction from U.S. society. Those margins, really, you feel them all the time. You feel them at Shabbat dinner because there will be somebody in uniform at your family Shabbat dinner. You feel them when you talk to people on your block and in your family. And I think a tragedy of American society is that you can go through life without encountering people with different political views.
Goldberg: I agree with you 100 percent about the social component of activism. The people that I spoke to, they felt like they had a whole new social world. All of a sudden there were people in their neighborhood that they hadn’t known that now felt like their brothers and sisters, were at the center of their lives. And that’s how I think all activism works. There was a study I wrote about — I can’t remember who conducted it, but it was about what made people become anti-abortion activists. And the secret was not the depth of their feelings about abortion; it was whether a friend had brought them along to a protest.
This is a society that is — people are very lonely. They’re very isolated. I think we saw with the Zohran Mamdani campaign that one of the secrets of that was he gave people not just kind of hope for a more decent and affordable New York, but also the Zohran Mamdani campaign became people’s whole social worlds. It became the locus of their relationships. I think that piece of it — it’s also what MAGA has given a lot of people, to much to much darker ends — but the political movement that can capture people’s desire to be part of something bigger has a huge advantage.
Kaminer: We’ve been talking about how to resist a government that you oppose, but there’s also the question of when and whether to stop resisting and just leave. Masha, you’ve written about the experience of seeing a country transform in real time until you no longer recognize it. And for you, writing as a trans person, it no longer recognizes you. You had that experience once before in Russia. Why did you leave? What was it like? What was the breaking point for you?
Gessen: The breaking point for me was very clear, and for years I actually said — and I still think so — I was very lucky. Not lucky that I had to leave my home but lucky in that it was so clear that I had no choice. The state was going to go after my family. They were going to pass a special law to take away my adopted son. And that was in the newspaper. So I called an adoption lawyer. The adoption lawyer said, “The answer to your question is at the airport.”
That put an end to a couple of years of soul searching and questioning — “Is it time to go, and will I betray my people if I leave, or will I regret it if I’m not here? But it’s still possible to live here.” All of that stuff.
The last time I was in Moscow — I have emigrated from Russia twice in my life, and I also continued to go back and report once my family was in the United States, it was safe for me for many years to go back and report — the last time I was in Moscow was the week of the full-scale invasion. That’s when my entire community left. And it’s one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever reported on — looking at my friends, sort of one after another, making that decision without even visibly making a decision, just kind of understanding that they had to leave.
I likened it at the time to people parachuting out of a plane that’s bombing a city. They couldn’t stand to be inside the country that was bombing Kyiv. It was a visceral thing. There were rumors that they might close the borders or go after people. Eventually they did start going after people, but months later. These people were fleeing not a security threat to themselves. They were fleeing that feeling of moral impossibility of being in the place where they were.
Kaminer: How did that experience in Russia and the clarity of that moment — how does that affect the way that you see the decisions that people are making in other countries, in Israel, in the United States and elsewhere?
Gessen: I sometimes joke that — the Carnegie Corporation of New York does this thing every July 4. They make a list of good immigrants or great immigrants —
Kaminer: I think you’re a great immigrant, Masha. Just great.
Gessen: That’s what I say. I am so good at it. I’ve done it so many times. I’ve really perfected the art of emigration. I feel like one of my jobs as a very good immigrant is to reassure people there’s no science to it. There’s no way to know whether it’s the right time.
My parents made the decision to leave the Soviet Union — which, if they had known that it was going to collapse seven or eight years later, they wouldn’t have done it. On the other hand, I know people who have gone back to their country because they thought, “Well, surely it can’t last forever.” And 10 or 20 years later, they had to leave again. We just can’t know. But I did ask this question of the people that I interviewed in Israel on this last reporting trip, and I think the most clear answer I got was: I’m just going to stay here as long as I can do something.
But at the same time, people are asking themselves, “OK, that may be a worthy moral measure, but what does it do to my loved ones? What does it mean to be raising a child in a genocidal society?” And I’m using a term that a person who is struggling with that decision used. What does it mean to raise a child who is marginalized because of their parents’ political work? All of these things are considerations, and there are no right answers.
Kaminer: Michelle, could there be a breaking point for you? What’s your threshold?
Goldberg: I don’t know. I feel like I’m so far away from it. There’s part of me that has thought many times, “Maybe I owe it to my children to give them a start in a healthier society.” But at the same time — I don’t know how you feel, but I feel like we’re further down that road than maybe I could have ever imagined in this country and yet so far away from where the people that you’re talking about in Israel are. It almost feels self-indulgent to say, “I need to flee the country.” There are certain people who are in real danger and whose lives have become impossible, and I absolutely would never begrudge them leaving. And I could imagine a scenario where it gets to that point.
But again, I also just feel like there’s no reason to surrender right now to the idea of these people’s inevitability when we are already seeing that it’s been less than a year — the damage that they have done is substantial. The damage that they can do is even more so. But you’re already seeing a mass pushback, and they’re demoralized. They’re unpopular. They know that they are weakening. I’m curious how you would compare it to places that you live. I think, even in an authoritarian state, you need some level of popular consent.
Gessen: Or resignation. I really do think that we’re in uncharted waters in the sense that there’s a kind of imaginary authoritarian playbook. It’s not like there are that many devices or that many moves that an aspiring autocrat can make. It’s known. What’s not known is what happens when you do it this fast. I don’t think we’ve ever — certainly not in my lifetime — we haven’t seen a democratically elected leader move this fast and break this many things.
Goldberg: So how do you think about it? Like in terms of —
Gessen: How do I think about leaving?
Goldberg: Yeah.
Gessen: I think I’m really tired of being repotted. So I’m putting it off as long as possible. But I’m as cognitively dissonant as everybody else. On the one hand, I’m talking to construction workers about doing renovations on the house and, on the other hand, thinking, “Yeah, but we might be driving to Canada tomorrow.” And those two parts of my brain are not really talking to each other.
Kaminer: We started this conversation talking about direct action. You’re both outspoken critics of this administration. You’re also both columnists at The New York Times, which means that you can’t participate in direct protest action. Certainly your position gives you a giant megaphone and a lot of institutional support to express your views. But is that restriction ever difficult for you guys to navigate or to explain to the people that you are reporting on?
Gessen: Not usually. But I had a funny incident a couple of months ago. I had a talk and people got really mad at me. Somebody asked, “What should we do?” And I said, “Look, I’m not here to be prescriptive. Do something.” Then someone else said, “Why are we just sitting here listening to people talk about their feelings and thoughts?” And I said, “Well, because that’s my job. This is what I do. You want to talk about what to do and how to do activism, maybe go to an organizing meeting.” And then people started screaming at me that —
Kaminer: Really?
Goldberg: Wow.
Gessen: — there’s nothing incompatible between being a writer and being an activist. And I think that’s true. I happen to be much better at one than at the other. So this is what I do, and I think that I make a significant contribution by doing what I do best. But that frustration was kind of instructive. I think certainly at that moment in that town, people were feeling like they needed something different than someone who helps them think through our predicament.
Kaminer: Before we wrap up, I’m curious to know what you’re both watching, specifically now that we’re a year into this administration, in terms of new forms of resistance, old forms of resistance, people pushing back, especially now as political tides might be shifting.
Gessen: We talked a little bit about the No Kings protest, and I think the big question is: Is there going to be meaningful coordination and visible leadership that emerges from these protests? I think that’s what’s missing.
I also think we don’t quite understand how to read them. It used to be that protests, street protests, were always the result of community organizing. So if you saw people demonstrating, you knew that some significant minority of them had been in a room together figuring out what their posters were going to be, whether they were going to do this at lunchtime or in the evening, on the weekend or on a workday in the street or in the park — all of this stuff that doesn’t really happen anymore. Because now it’s enough to post something on social media, and then people either show up or they don’t show up.
I think of this very unscientifically as a kind of collective-action discount. What is the discount that we apply to these numbers to understand what’s actually happening? Was this a one-off where they followed a social media post, went alone or with their friends and returned with no change to their political behavior or social connections? We don’t know that yet.
Goldberg: Our colleague Zeynep Tufekci wrote a whole book about this changing nature of protest and how it no longer is a show of organizational power because they appear very quickly and can evanesce just as quickly.
I will be interested to see what the administration attempts as they become more cornered and desperate to regain the momentum. They won the election, but you’ve already seen — I mean, I think people should have known they were voting for this, and this was 100 percent what some were voting for, but there are people who voted for them who are shocked by this. Or, if not shocked, they just feel like it’s not helping them. I think those people should be welcomed into any kind of anti-Trump, pro-democracy coalition.
What I hope is that resistance is self-fulfilling. First you see the protests, then you see the results of the election, and that should embolden some of these elite actors, even if they’re not making their decisions on an ethical basis. This is something that Leah Greenberg, one of the two founders of Indivisible has said to me, that we want elites to be considering that we might win.
Kaminer: Well, I think that’s a good place to end it. This has been a great conversation, and I want to thank you both for participating.
Goldberg: Thank you so much.
Gessen: Thank you.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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