Riane Eisler on Antisemitism, Zionism, and Israel’s Path to Partnership

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/08/27

Riane Tennenhaus Eisler (born July 22, 1931, Vienna) is an Austrian-born American social systems scientist, cultural historian, futurist, attorney, and author. As a child she fled Nazi-occupied Austria with her parents in 1939, lived seven years in Havana’s industrial slums, and later emigrated to the United States; she went on to earn a B.A. (magna cum laude) and J.D. from UCLA. Eisler is best known for The Chalice and the Blade (1987), which introduced her “domination vs. partnership” framework for analyzing social systems; later works include The Real Wealth of Nations(2007) and, with Douglas P. Fry, Nurturing Our Humanity (2019). She founded (in 1987) what is now the Center for Partnership Systems and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies at the University of Minnesota. 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen interviews Riane Eisler on how her Holocaust-era childhood shaped her systemic analysis of antisemitism, Zionism, and today’s conflicts. Eisler recounts fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria, diaspora trauma, and the evolution of Judaism, situating Zionism within centuries of persecution. She argues Israel’s garrison posture stems from out-group hostility and urges a shift from domination to partnership. Drawing on gender, childhood, economics, and story, Eisler highlights Nordic policies that reward caring and refute genetic tribalism. She calls for mutual acceptance, honesty, and public policies valuing people and planet, framing the core struggle as partnership versus domination across cultures, ideologies, and eras.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So today, we are here once again with the distinguished Riane Eisler. We will be discussing a topic that is both personally significant to me and connected to my past research. I will give a brief background.

My Dutch grandfather, who passed away long before I was born, was part of the Dutch resistance for six years. They were later recognized for harbouring at least one Jewish couple for a year or more during World War II. My family eventually moved to Ontario, Canada—in effect, fleeing the Nazi occupation, as far as I know.

During an internship I undertook, one of our projects involved contacting Holocaust remembrance organizations. We worked to locate survivors to help preserve their stories and ensure that this history is not lost. In a sense, I see today’s conversation as a continuation of that work, on a more personal level.

So, about the Holocaust, antisemitism, and Zionism—what is your history?

Riane Eisler: My life and the trajectory it took were profoundly shaped by the Anschluss—the Nazi annexation of Austria in March 1938, which the Austrian government and much of the population welcomed. I have often felt more comfortable travelling to Germany than to Austria, because the Germans, as a nation, formally acknowledged and took responsibility for their role in the Holocaust. At the same time, Austria long promoted the “first victim” narrative. It did not fully confront its complicity until much later. That is a profound difference.

My life, as I have told you before, has been like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle slowly coming together. The first critical piece—one that shaped my systemic, whole-systems analysis of society—was escaping Nazi-occupied Austria with my parents when I was a child.

Overnight, our lives changed. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, we became targets, essentially hunted. A gang of Gestapo agents arrested my father. My mother recognized one of them as a young Austrian Nazi who had once been an errand boy for her family’s business. In an extraordinary act of courage, she demanded my father’s release. She reminded the man of the kindness my father had shown him in the past. Incredibly, he relented, and my father was freed. We were able to flee first to Cuba and later to the United States.

I grew up in Cuba, where Nazi propaganda had fueled antisemitic campaigns. In my work, I have often analyzed in-group versus out-group dynamics, and Jews have historically been, in European and global history, the prototypical out-group, blamed for economic, political, and social problems. For many years, I suppressed the traumas of my childhood.

Eventually, after my divorce from my first husband, I reconnected more strongly with my Jewish identity and began to confront the Holocaust directly. I returned to Austria. I visited Dachau, one of the first Nazi concentration camps in Germany, and a place where I might have been imprisoned and killed had we not escaped. I stayed in Vienna’s Hotel Imperial, where Hitler had once stayed—a symbolic act, my youthful attempt to demonstrate that he had not won.

It was, in some ways, like what Viktor Frankl described in Man’s Search for Meaning. I did things I could not have done earlier: visiting Dachau, studying European history in depth, and tracing the historical roots of Zionism.

It is a sad history, because the Jews, as I have said, were—and in many places still are—the prototypical out-group, the scapegoat for whatever is perceived to be wrong in the world. Zionism emerged from that terrible history.

To understand it, you have to go far back, and I did. Those who know my research—particularly my most famous book, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future—see that I examined our prehistory, long before there was such a thing as an ancient Jewish state.

If you consider the expulsion of the Jews from what is today Israel and Palestine, it took place during a time when there were numerous city-states and kingdoms, each with its religion. When the Jews were expelled, they took their religion with them, and it changed over time. The Judaism I was brought up with bore no resemblance to specific Old Testament passages advocating revenge, such as “an eye for an eye” or “a tooth for a tooth.” It had evolved in the diaspora.

That diaspora, however, was often disastrous. Take Spain, for example. Jews were prominent there, as they were in Morocco and many other regions under Muslim rule. However, at specific points, they became the out-group and the scapegoat once again. In Spain, they were expelled unless they converted to Christianity during the Inquisition.

Historically, in many societies—including medieval Europe—Jews were the only group permitted to lend money at interest. This role was both necessary and dangerous. Nobility across medieval Europe owed large sums to Jewish moneylenders, and one way they “repaid” the debt was by expelling or killing the Jews who had lent them the money. Pogroms and expulsions occurred repeatedly, stretching far back in history.

Zionism arose from this centuries-long pattern of persecution. The idea was: we Jews are a wandering people, like the Roma—another historically persecuted out-group—so we must have a state of our own. The most logical place was where Jewish history began: the land that is today Israel and Palestine.

Theodor Herzl, often considered the father of modern political Zionism, advanced the idea of a Jewish homeland. Over time, Jewish settlers established communities there. Eventually, the land that was essentially desert in many regions was transformed into a modern state.

I was brought up with the idea that Jews must help one another, because no one else would. After World War II, when I was 12 years old, I saw the newsreels of the concentration camps. The God I had been taught to believe in died for me in that moment. I could not understand how a deity could allow such horrors.

Jacobsen: There is a famous phrase—one of the most impactful I have ever read—which says, “If there is a God, you will have to ask my forgiveness.”

Eisler: I have written extensively about prehistory, before what I call the domination system emerged. That system was not invented by the men who wrote the Old Testament; it arose in prehistory with the invasions of Indo-European tribes—the very tribes Hitler so considerably idealized. However, that is another discussion, and we are covering it in our series of interviews on the partnership–domination social scale, for which I am known.

Israel came into existence despite the British. I say “despite” because, when the British left, they turned over many of the so-called police stations to Arab forces and carried their legacy of antisemitism. Antisemitism is ancient, and it is embedded in domination-based, in-group versus out-group thinking. For Europeans, Americans, and much of the world, Jews have been the prototypical out-group.

Finally, in 1948—not 1946—Israel became a state. I know people whom the British interned in Cyprus before independence. They disembarked from the boats, were handed weapons, and told they must fight for survival. The moment Israel was declared, all the neighbouring Arab states—Egypt, Transjordan (now Jordan), Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq—sent their armies to destroy it. Israel won that war, but, as the saying goes, “We live in a neighbourhood where we are not wanted.” That remains true.

Over time, because of its security situation, Israel has become a garrison state. This reality arose from the refusal to accept Israel, driven in part by the same in-group versus out-group antisemitism.

Now we face the present. After the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, Israel sought to eliminate Hamas but has been largely unsuccessful, due in part, I believe, to entrenched antisemitism and in-group/out-group thinking within parts of the Muslim world. I have no simple answers, except to emphasize that there is an alternative: the partnership model. Our choices are not limited to “dominate or be dominated.” The partnership alternative is deeply rooted in the hidden history of our past, which I tell in The Chalice and the Blade.

That was my first book, and I began with gender because gender is a foundational category for equating difference, whether that difference is religious, as with Jews, or racial, as with people of darker skin, with inferiority or superirity. It begins with the two basic human forms: women and men. Of course, there are people in between. Still, they are not recognized in dominant systems, because how could you rank one gender over the other if you acknowledge fluidity? In such systems, rigid gender stereotypes are required; nothing in between is permitted.

Look at the stories of Eve and Pandora: both blame women for no less than all of humanity’s troubles. This is powerful propaganda for domination systems. My first book addressed gender in this context. However, I also want to return to the fact that I am Jewish. I am a secular Jew, obviously, but I am culturally Jewish.

I feel deep sorrow for everyone in Gaza and everyone in Israel. The Israelis know they are hated, and the slogan “From the river to the sea” means precisely what it says—it calls for the elimination of Israel, in effect throwing all the Jews into the sea. I do not have a simple answer, except to say that we must shift from domination to partnership.

My cross-cultural, multidisciplinary, whole-systems research takes into account women, men, children, and families. Remember that the conventional political and cultural categories—right, left, religious, secular, Eastern, Western, Northern, Southern—tend to marginalize nothing less than the majority of humanity: women and children of all genders, including those who are transgender, as we say today.

There is a long tradition of Jews working for social justice. Think of the two Jewish men—Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner—murdered in Mississippi in 1964 while helping to secure civil rights for African Americans. However, there is still antisemitism in some parts of the Black community, and there is propaganda portraying Israelis as colonizers, which is absurd. After the Holocaust, Jews had nowhere else to go. Britain had promised they could return to their historic homeland, so they did—and now they are stuck in a neighbourhood where they are not wanted.

The only way forward is to stop blaming and shaming others for our problems. That is the partnership way, as opposed to the domination way. The fact that so many Jews work for social justice is precisely because we understand oppression firsthand. We have been the targets of antisemitism for centuries.

I have been fortunate in many ways, aside from my early life. Both my parents and I were deeply traumatized by the Holocaust. My parents never spoke about it. They never explained anything to me. That is why I had to do all my research as an adult—they could not face it.

I have no quick fix for these problems, except to say we must move from domination to partnership, and stop equating difference with inferiority. Yes, it begins with gender, but it extends to Jews as the prototypical out-group, and to racism, and all forms of bigotry. All of these “-isms” stem from the idea that you either dominate or are dominated. In domination systems there is no partnership alternative, even though we know there is.

Unfortunately, many people in the Middle East are dominated by their governments—kings, emirs, sheikhs—living under total domination systems. These regimes accept inequality, and so they deflect blame onto Israel. “Everything would be fine if it were not for the Israelis”—that becomes the narrative. I am no fan of Netanyahu, but this is a miserable situation. It is a lose–lose scenario for everyone, rooted in a domination system that always needs an out-group to blame.

That has been the story of my life: trying to find a place where I fit in. In college, I pledged Alpha Epsilon Phi, my Jewish sorority, because I could not join a Christian sorority in the United States at that time. I eventually disaffiliated because I did not want to participate in a system that said, “Because I am an AEPhi, I am better than you are.”

I felt it in my bones. I hope we are at a point now, as a species, where we realize we are threatened not only by climate change but also by nuclear weapons. Suppose an Iranian Ayatollah—someone at the very top—were to acquire and eventually use a nuclear bomb. If he genuinely believes he will be rewarded in heaven with “72 virgins” attending to all his needs, what would hold him back?

I have always wondered: what do women get in that scenario? 

Jacobsen: Christopher Hitchens once joked that women in heaven get their husbands back. Another joke I heard imagines God saying to women, “Good news, ladies—you are in heaven. Weird news—you get your husbands back.”

Eisler: In all seriousness, we must shift to partnership—including partnership with our Mother Earth—instead of continuing extraction and exploitation, which have been ongoing for thousands of years. Our technology has become vastly more powerful, and our population has exploded. That is another topic I address in my work, but it still comes down to the same thing: shifting from domination to partnership.

If we can do that, there can be forgiveness for the centuries and millennia of persecution of Jews, and yes, for the horrors in Gaza. However, that can only come with a change in consciousness.

Do I think antisemitism can be given a single, static textbook definition, or should it be defined in the context of an ongoing conversation? Speaking as a victim, as a Jew, I am not sure what it would mean to lock the definition into a fixed form. For me, it always hinges on this in-group versus out-group dynamic—and on the denial of our shared humanity.

Look at economics. Whether under socialism, which in the Soviet Union became state control—the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat”—or under capitalism, we face domination-based thinking. We may have markets, but they are far from free markets. What we need is government policy—enlightened policy—that rewards caring. Caring is at the crux of all of this.

If I care about the out-group, everything changes. Societies that have shifted toward the partnership model—such as the Nordic nations of Sweden, Finland, and Norway—are less authoritarian, more democratic, and moving toward gender equity. These societies have made caring a cornerstone in both family life and public policy.

They also challenge the claims of certain sociobiologists who insist that we only invest in those to whom we are genetically related. The Nordic countries invest a greater share of their GDP than any other nation in people on the other side of the globe—people to whom they are not genetically related. Of course, we help those closest to us, but in a partnership model, care is extended far beyond that circle.

Who needs science to show that we are interconnected? We know it. However, that is not the point. Everything is still based on the assumption of in-group versus out-group thinking. That assumption is not grounded in reality.

The fact that some physicists won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on quantum entanglement at the subatomic level demonstrates our interconnection. It is a fact of physics. It is a fact of biology, tracing back to our mother or father. It is a fact of history. We are all interconnected.

Today, this reality is made evident not only by technologies of communication and transportation, but also by technologies of destruction—nuclear and bacteriological warfare—and even by industrial production and climate change. We are in the post-industrial era, and we need a whole new economic system. More than anything else, we must value caring for people and the planet.

That it is I, a Jew, who has studied all of this is no coincidence. We study it out of empathy for all out-groups. My hope is grounded in empirical evidence—that for millennia, human societies were oriented more toward partnership than domination. It was only in the last five to ten thousand years—a mere blip in the evolution of our species—that we shifted toward domination.

The real struggle for our future is not between right and left, religious and secular, or East and West. Those categories are still rooted in in-group versus out-group thinking. The struggle is between the tremendous movements toward partnership—such as the women’s movement, the anti-racism movement, the fight against antisemitism, and the environmental movement—and the regression to domination we see today. That regression is, in many ways, a reaction to these partnership-oriented movements.

These movements share a coherent framework: gender, childhood and family, economics, story and language. We should be conscious that we, too, have a framework—the partnership framework.

Jacobsen: Since Israel is often described as a “garrison state,” while still maintaining a legitimate vision for a Zionist state, what could shift it from a garrison state to a partnership model? Or is that very difficult, given the situation on all sides?

Eisler: The killing of so many people complicates the situation tremendously. What we are talking about here is a shift in consciousness and a change in how history is told, because in the surrounding Arab states and territories near tiny Israel, the history is not told. They do not recount that when Israel was formed in 1948, all the neighbouring armies invaded and lost; or that they invaded again and again and lost; or that in these conflicts, everybody loses.

People sometimes talk about “paranoia” on both sides, but I would argue that the fear of Israelis is not paranoia. It is grounded in reality. They have been attacked since the inception of the state. They are not wanted. They are hated. They are the out-group. Unless we can move toward mutual acceptance, the cycle will continue.

The more the out-group is excluded, the more it becomes an in-group defined in opposition, prepared to fight. That is a lose–lose scenario. We must shift our consciousness and start afresh—with partnership and with an understanding of our profound interconnection.

Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Riane.

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