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Jeffrey Lax, I Wrote the Book. Why Won't You Debate Me?
Special Feature by Avrum Burg
Jeffrey Lax is a very brave man. He is willing to take on Tucker Carlson, one of the most influential media figures in America, accuse him of a catalogue of offenses against the Jewish people, and demand his expulsion from political life. Yet that courage deserts him when it comes to one person: the author of the book at the center of his campaign. Me. I wrote the book. I proposed its title. I stand behind every word. Carlson chose to publish it and wrote the foreword. That is the extent of his involvement. Yet, Lax appeals to the publisher, the distributor, Vice President Vance, and every Jewish and conservative organization that has yet to condemn the book. The one person he has not approached is its author. I am tempted to take offense. But his choice is convenient. It allows him to wage a battle without any intellectual risk, against an adversary he already knows, while avoiding an encounter with ideas he would rather not confront.
The book is called Peace Is the Only Final Solution for Jews. Every word of that title was chosen deliberately. My father fled Nazi Germany in 1939, leaving behind the entire personal, cultural, and spiritual world in which he had grown up. I married the daughter of a hero of the Jewish Resistance in France, and together we built our family in an Israel haunted by the Holocaust. Its memory is part of my life, of my very being. Apparently, that is not enough for Lax. He believes he must instruct me in history, language, and the proper use of Jewish concepts. I appreciate his generosity in volunteering. I must politely decline.
I am not naive. I knew the title would challenge, perhaps even pain. I thought about it long and hard. I chose it not to diminish that pain, but to ask whether the Holocaust has taught us only how to remember death, or also how to choose life. The list of words we are forbidden to use grows longer by the day. That is precisely why I wanted to reclaim their moral force. The Nazis sought a final solution through extermination. I argue that the only final solution for the security and survival of the Jewish people is peace. An end to perpetual war and to our domination of another people. Only blindness or wilful obtuseness could mistake this moral inversion for sympathy with Nazism. It is my Jewish answer to the idea of annihilation.
I assume that Lax, a respected professor in his field, knows how to read. English, at least. So how did the first word of my title, Peace, disappear from his article? Again and again, he invokes the words Final Solution for Jews as though they were the title of the book, removing the very word that reverses their meaning. To attack a book calling for peace, he must first erase peace from its title. The distortion serves his argument far better than the original. He also objects to the word Jews appearing where he thinks Israel should be. That, too, was deliberate. I am a Jew writing about our moral destiny and the future of a people whose existence and significance extend far beyond any single state. A man who accuses others of disguising antisemitism as criticism of Israel ought to welcome a Jew who speaks openly in his own name and that of his people, rather than allowing Israel's conduct to hide behind the automatic accusation of antisemitism.
Had Lax bothered to open the book, he would have discovered that the title is merely the doorway. The book itself offers an argument, a journey, and a proposal. It brings together personal memories, political criticism, and a humanist vision of Jewish life. It examines Jewish fear, the transformation of Holocaust memory into a political instrument, and the militarism that has taken hold of Israeli society. It culminates in a practical proposal for a global humanist coalition committed to confronting hatred wherever it appears, including when its victims are not Jews. Alongside the political arguments stand real people: Abu Shaker and Umm Shaker, who saved my mother and her family in Hebron in 1929; my father, Yosef Burg; and my father in law, Lucien Lazare, who devoted his years to honoring the heroes among the nations who had rescued Jews during the Holocaust. Anyone who settles for the cover only escape the necessity contend with the answer.
The most astonishing feature of Lax's article is his candid admission that he has not read the book. He has examined its cover, the publisher's description, and some things I wrote in the past. On that basis, he concludes that the book is probably abhorrent. He even observes that sometimes a book can be judged by its cover. It is difficult to imagine a more flagrant abandonment of intellectual standards by a university professor. A man who teaches law ought to know something about evidence, the right to be heard, and the difference between suspicion and conviction. Review copies were available to critics months before publication. Anyone who wished to read the book could have done so. Lax preferred to pass judgment on pages he had never read, then demanded that Simon & Schuster stop distributing them. What began as an argument over language has become an attempt to suppress an idea. I find myself wondering whether we belong to the same intellectual tradition. What kind of Judaism seeks to protect itself from a book by preventing people from reading it?
This book began decades before Carlson and I ever met. In The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise from Its Ashes, originally published in Hebrew as Defeating Hitler, I examined the danger of making the Holocaust the permanent center of Jewish identity and Israeli policy. I wrote about the transformation of memory from a source of moral responsibility into an instrument of fear. I argued then, as I do with greater urgency today, that Jewish life defined forever by the existence of an enemy bent on our destruction can never be genuinely free. I have made these arguments in Hebrew, English, and German, in books, articles, and interviews that Lax now retrieves from the archives. Throughout those years, as far as I know, he remained silent. My ideas apparently became a danger to the Jews on the day Tucker Carlson agreed to publish them. Since when does the truth of an argument depend on the identity of its publisher?
Here we come to the most contemptible maneuver in Lax's article. He portrays me as someone Carlson is using, a convenient Jewish instrument in a larger campaign. What extraordinary condescension. My convictions were formed decades before I knew Carlson, through a lifetime within Israeli and Jewish institutions, sustained by a sense of responsibility towards them and a deep disappointment in what they have become. I do my own thinking. Carlson does his without requiring my approval. We come from very different intellectual and political traditions and sometimes disagree profoundly. That is precisely what makes our encounter worthwhile. But in Lax's universe, a Jew who departs from the approved narrative cannot possibly think for himself. Someone else must be pulling the strings. In stripping my arguments of legitimacy, Lax also attempts to strip me of intellectual independence. An odd accusation. Throughout my life, I have been accused of many things, but intellectual obedience has never been among them. My Judaism requires no certificate of kosher approval from Jeffrey Lax or from Israel's self appointed thought police.
There is another irony worth examining. The man now outraged by a phrase associated with the Holocaust appearing in the title of a book advocating peace once declared that he had spent his life urging people never to compare anyone to Hitler. He then proceeded to compare Tucker Carlson to Hitler. Holocaust memory, it seems, is sacred when others invoke it and conveniently available when Lax needs it himself. I listen to Carlson because he is intelligent, challenging, and capable of a genuine conversation. I dislike some of his guests, and I believe there have been occasions when he should have confronted issues far more forcefully. Yet precisely because our perspectives differ, I regard him as one of the most important interlocutors of our time. He is challenging the once automatic identification of American conservatism with unconditional support for Israel. He raises fundamental questions about unnecessary wars, the influence of foreign governments in Washington, and the price Americans pay for policies pursued in their name. I do not agree with all his answers. But the questions will remain long after Lax has finished shouting.
I recently discovered that my interview with Carlson appears in the Anti Defamation League's dossier of evidence against him. Some of the statements presented as evidence of hostility towards Jews were my own words. Carlson's alleged offense was to listen and nod. When the words of a Jewish critic of Israel become evidence of antisemitism, something has gone badly wrong with the distinction between protecting Jews and protecting Israel from Jewish criticism. For too long, the unconditional defense of Israel has sheltered behind accusations of antisemitism, some justified, others manufactured to silence criticism. Lax is another link in that chain.
The moral priorities displayed in his article are revealing. He is horrified by two words on the cover of a book proposing peace, yet Gaza is entirely absent from his discussion. The devastation, the tens of thousands killed, including many children, the mass displacement, and the famine remain outside his field of vision. So do the Israeli leaders who invoke Holocaust memory to justify policies of seemingly unlimited violence, and the brutal expressions of racism that echo language once directed against Jews themselves. Lax appears more disturbed by the language used to describe reality than by the reality it describes. He seeks to protect Holocaust memory from words. I seek to protect its moral meaning from deeds, particularly those committed by Israelis, though by no means exclusively. For him, remembrance demands the protection of sacred expressions. For me, it demands the protection of human life. A memory that cannot impose moral limits upon Jewish power has lost something essential to its purpose. I refuse to surrender the Holocaust to those who invoke its memory to excuse Israel's conduct rather than examine it.
Beneath this controversy lies a fear far greater than Tucker Carlson. For decades, parts of the American Jewish establishment succeeded in turning support for Israel into an almost absolute test of Jewish loyalty. Serious criticism was branded as betrayal and frequently as antisemitism. That edifice is beginning to crumble. Increasing numbers of Jews are asking whether a state that rules over another people can plausibly claim to act in the name of Jewish values. Increasing numbers of Americans are questioning why they should defend policies they find morally indefensible. Jewish support for candidates such as Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El Sayed also suggests that a politician's position on Israel is no longer the overriding test of political loyalty for every Jewish voter. Carlson gives these questions an enormous audience, sometimes an audience larger than his judgment deserves. But the questions arise from political reality, not from Carlson's imagination.
What Lax and others in the Jewish establishment truly fear is that criticism of Israel will no longer remain safely confined to the political left. It is now moving into the heart of American conservatism, reaching devout Christians and younger voters who once took the alliance with Israel for granted. In that new political landscape, the familiar slogans are losing their power. The moment has arrived when those who defend Israel unconditionally must explain why a state that calls itself democratic denies another people its rights, and why so many who profess their devotion to the Jewish people seem capable of imagining its future only as a life lived by the sword.
Mr. Lax, you are welcome to debate me. I have only one request: read the book first. Show me where I have misunderstood history, where my analysis fails, or where my proposals for peace cannot withstand the test of reality. The book proposes replacing a doctrine of security based on unlimited force with a vision of existence grounded in peace and equal rights for every human being between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. It is a difficult argument, one that demands a moral reckoning. Perhaps that is why it is easier to denounce it as Nazism than to engage with it. I understand the attraction of condemning a book before reading it. As long as you argue with the cover, you need not confront its contents. As long as you attack Tucker Carlson, you can avoid me, the Jew who wrote the words and the reality that gave rise to them.
But it is not the title of my book that threatens the future of the Jewish people. The danger lies in the belief that war can continue forever without our eventually paying its price. That is why I wrote the book. And that is why I chose its title.
Peace Is the Only Final Solution for Jews.
Avraham (Avrum) Burg is an Israeli author, intellectual, and former Speaker of the Knesset, who has combined a career in public leadership with writing, teaching, and dialogue across cultures, and is known for his insightful reflections on Israeli society, Judaism, democracy, and global politics, with a consistent emphasis on ethics and peace. Read him on Substack here.