#348 — The Politics of Antisemitism
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Summary
Sam Harris speaks with Rabbi David Wolpe about anti-Semitism and free speech in the wake of Harvard University President Claudine Gay's testimony before Congress on October 7th, and the role of the anti-Zionist "Great Replacement Theory" as a means of delegitimizing the Jewish people, and what it means to be a Jew in the 21st century. David is a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School, a Rabbinic Fellow at the Anti-Defamation League, a Senior Advisor to the Maimonides Fund, and an Emeritus Rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. He was once named "The Most Influential Rabbi in America" by Newsweek, and is considered one of the most influential rabbis in the country. He is also a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Forward, and has been a frequent guest on the radio and television show "The Rachel Maddow Show" on Comedy Central. He is the author of several books, including "The Great Replacement Theory: A Guide to Anti-Semitism in American Life," and is a regular guest host on the show "Yeshivah" on the Chassidus Radio Network, where he also hosts a weekly show called "Rabbi David's Corner" and hosts a podcast called "The Rabbi's Corner," where he talks about Jewish life and culture. He's also a frequent contributor to The Forward and The Forward. and "The Forward." Sam Harris is a writer and host of the podcast "The Making Sense" and the host of "Making Sense" podcast, which he hosts a show on the podcast Making Sense: The Making Sense, a podcast about the intersectionality of ideas, culture, politics, and culture, culture and culture in the culture and history of the modern Jewish experience, and how they intersect across the political and spiritual worlds. He's been a long-term friend of the Jewish community, and a regular visitor to many of the world's most influential Jews. Make sure to check out the Making Sense Podcasts on social media by using the hashtag on Insta-tweet and the . to find out what he's been up to on the latest in the latest trending topics in the world of Jewish culture, and his thoughts on it all things Jewish and Jewish culture and their impact on the culture of today's culture and the culture in general. And be sure to subscribe to his feed in the Apple Podcasts!
Transcript
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David is a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School.
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He is a rabbinic fellow at the Anti-Defamation League, a senior advisor to the Maimonides
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Fund, and the emeritus rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles.
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And because he's at Harvard, he's had a front seat view of the recent controversy around
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I spoke to him before the president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, resigned, in the aftermath of
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Elizabeth McGill, the president of Penn, resigned first, and Claudine Gay resigned last week, though
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She resigned for reasons that were unrelated to her testimony, however.
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It seemed that she had an impressive pattern of academic misconduct, namely plagiarism.
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Many people on the left are alleging that racism is the reason she was forced out.
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I'm sure she was personally subjected to a lot of racist abuse in the aftermath of her testimony
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I don't doubt that, and I'm sure that was awful.
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But as for her being forced to resign from the presidency of Harvard, that was not a racist
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The painful irony is that it was concern about racism and sexism, perhaps, that explains why
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she occupied the position of the presidency of Harvard in the first place.
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As many people have pointed out, it is very difficult to imagine a white man with her academic
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record getting anywhere near the presidency of Harvard.
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Nor would a white man, having been found out for academic misconduct, have been defended
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so fulsomely by the institution, even in the wake of resigning.
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Honestly, the whole episode, the more you look at it, is diagnostic for what is wrong with
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And of course, DEI was largely responsible for the explosion of anti-Semitism.
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We saw on our college campuses, including Harvard, where over 30 student organizations, on October
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8th, before Israel had dropped a single bomb in Gaza, came out in support of Hamas, claiming
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that Israel was, quote, solely responsible for the atrocities of October 7th.
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This derangement of ethical and political thinking was the result of the DEI ideology, this oppressor
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and oppressed narrative that has captured everything on the left.
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We talk about the global response to the atrocities of October 7th.
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We discuss the difference between Israeli and diaspora Jews, the history and logic of anti-Semitism,
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the role of conspiracy theories, so-called great replacement theory, reasons for Jewish success,
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right-wing anti-Semitism, left-wing anti-Semitism, the response of Harvard University to October
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7th, the college president's testimony before Congress, the future of DEI and civil discourse,
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the BDS movement, anti-Semitism versus anti-Zionism, declining Jewish attendance at Ivy League universities,
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the anti-Semitism that is endemic to Islam, foreign funding of U.S. universities, and other topics.
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So, you were once named the most influential rabbi in America by Newsweek, and I noticed
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that this happened after we had our public debate, so apparently none of my atheist rhetorical
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You only rose in stature after I put into challenge your entire worldview, so much for that.
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I used to say, you know, for about six years in the history of the Jewish people, there was a most
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influential rabbi award. And it happened to be when I was like, after I, while I was doing all these
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debates, had it been any other time in Jewish history, I never would have been able to put that
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on my resume. But for that brief time, there were a couple of people who got together and decided to,
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to give this award. So, yeah, I was, I was very lucky. But actually, people still say to me,
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you know, I saw your debate with Sam Harris. Nobody says to me, and you won. So.
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Well, for at least one of them, I had Hitch on my team, too, which was also an advantage.
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And that was, that was fun. Those were, those were fun debates. I've had many encounters that are,
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that are not fun, and it's not fun on stage, and it's not fun in the green room, but it's always
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But we, we've got other topics to touch here, and I don't, maybe we'll find something to disagree
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about, but I don't think there'll be much. You've since been teaching at Harvard, and how's that
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So, yeah, right. I remember I saw you, actually, before I went, and I told you that I was going,
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and my, my aim was to do research and to write and to teach this coming semester, but then October
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7th hit, and everything changed. I mean, for the, for the world, for Israel, certainly for Harvard,
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Yes, I, that's obviously what I want to get into. So for me, as someone who has considered himself a,
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you know, somewhat distant student of, of Jewish history and, and anti-Semitism, I confess that I,
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I always viewed the problem of anti-Semitism more or less in the rearview mirror. I mean, I just,
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I viewed it as a problem of history rather than a, a present concern. I mean, I, obviously, I knew that
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it still existed, and it's existed in various contexts that we'll talk about, but, you know,
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I, I felt fairly blindsided by not October 7th itself, but the response to it that we, that we
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saw the most gallingly in our nation's finest educational institutions, or what purport to be.
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What changed for you after October 7th? I mean, did you, I think you, you're probably a,
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a much closer, or have been a much closer observer of anti-Semitism than I've been being a rabbi.
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How surprised were you in the aftermath of October 7th?
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I think that you and I grew up actually in a strange interregnum in anti-Semitism because
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post the Holocaust, I mean, my father, who was a conservative rabbi most of his life in Philadelphia,
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for him, anti-Semitism was real and a going concern. And I remember when I was ordained in
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afterwards, I thought, okay, anti-Semitism was the concern then, but now not so much. And the truth
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is, for the last, I don't know, I would say starting maybe 20 years ago and back to, I don't
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know, the 60s or the 70s, it was really a minimal concern compared to the way that Jews had been
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obsessed and preoccupied with it for all of Jewish history. So I, like you, was, I had certainly more
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experience with it day to day. A large part of my congregation in Los Angeles was from Iran, and they
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had obviously fled anti-Semitism. But I was surprised at the explosive nature of anti-Semitism
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racism all over America and the world, certainly on college campuses, but not only on college
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campuses. Yeah, it a little bit shocked me and dispirited me because as we can talk about, you
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know, it's not only coming from one political direction, even though on campus, it's almost
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entirely from one direction. Yeah. So we'll focus on the various institutions in a minute. I definitely
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want to talk about the college campus problem in particular, but I just want to get some more of
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your experience here over the years. I mean, how much time have you spent in Israel? How close is
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your connection there? I've spent a lot of time in Israel. I'm usually there at least a couple times
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a year, and I lived there as a student, and I have constant touch with friends and colleagues in
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Israel. And how do you view the relationship between Israeli Jews and diaspora Jews, I mean,
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Jews elsewhere in the world, in particular in America? I mean, I can imagine that, you know,
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post-October 7th, the experience for American Jews and really, you know, all Jews outside of Israel
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is one of a sudden sense of implication in what's happening there that has never, I mean, it's always
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been, it's possible to have felt that long before this moment, but this really was a September 11th
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moment for all the world's Jews in a way. And again, it was not, you know, the atrocities aside,
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it really was in how they were responded to that suddenly everything seemed upside down and in need of
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a hard reset. So how do you think about the relationship between Jews inside of Israel and
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everywhere else? One of the interesting things that happened as a result of October 7th is it
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resolved a long, in some ways, a long debate in Jewish, you know, inner circles, which is how,
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I mean, Israeli Jews, for understandable reasons, sort of felt disconnected from the diaspora.
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They felt as, oh, look, we live in Israel. We're the ones who are living on the front lines of Jewish
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history. We're the ones who are busy building a state. And you guys in Los Angeles or in, you know,
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or in Wichita or Miami or Chicago or Paris or London, you're living nice lives and you're Jewish and
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maybe every now and then you face something. But the truth is you're not in this boat together the
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way we are. And October 7th changed to that. And it changed it for both directions. That is, as you said,
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diaspora Jews finally said, oh my God, all of us have to take a position on this. We're all part of this.
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We're all in this circle, whether we want to be or not. And Jews in Israel all of a sudden realized,
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actually, the Jews of the diaspora are part of our enterprise, even though we don't normally think of
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them that way. And it really matters what they say. And look what's happening on campuses because they're
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Jews and they're supporting us or speaking about us. So in a strange way, you know, Abba Iban once
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said, Jews like their clouds without silver linings. But there are sometimes some silver linings here.
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And one of them is that I think it created a certain solidarity of Jews around the world because
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nobody could be indifferent or almost no one could be indifferent to this, you know, dilemma.
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And how do you think about anti-Semitism historically? I mean, it's just this ever
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protean and perfectly durable hatred. It's been interesting to watch, again, in the aftermath
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of October 7th, people grapple with the concept and try to understand it. I mean, it's just, it's,
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you know, the history, I mean, I think we can trace the history, you know, loosely, you know,
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from Christian theology 2,000 years ago. And I mean, there are a few salient landmarks in the last
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two millennia. I mean, one in particular is the racialized form it took in the 19th century. I
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think the term anti-Semitic first appears in the 1850s. And then we have the contributions of
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Russia with the protocols of the elders of Zion forgery. And in America, we have Henry Ford and,
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you know, the synergy between his mania and the Third Reich. And obviously, all of this takes
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the most painful and consequential form with the Nazis and the Holocaust. But in the aftermath of
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that, we have, at least, to my eye, three strands of anti-Semitism that we have to, we almost have
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to talk about separately. One is the great reservoir of Muslim anti-Semitism, which was given, it has its
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theological roots, obviously, but it was given a fair amount of topspin and inspiration from the Nazis.
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And then we have, especially, you know, in an American context, especially, but it's, you know, I guess
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is true throughout the West at the moment. We have on, you know, both anti-Semitism on the far left and
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on the far right. And they're different. It's a deeply inconvenient fact for Jews that if you go far
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enough in either direction on the political landscape, you meet stark anti-Semitism and for
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opposite reasons. So there really is no winning. I mean, to speak about it loosely, you know, on the far
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left, Jews are considered to have an extra helping of white privilege. And on the far right, Jews are
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considered not to be white and therefore are condemned and hated as non-white, you know, interlopers
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in the otherwise pure society. I mean, that's a very quick gloss of how I've been seeing things,
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I will end up in the same place, although I'll take a couple different stops in the destination to
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get there. First of all, I think it's important to remember that one driver of anti-Semitism,
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and as you said, it is a protean hatred. I mean, people hate Jews for being capitalists,
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for being communists, for being stateless, for being in a state, for wandering, for being in a
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place, for being powerless, for being powerful. There's nothing for which you cannot hate Jews on
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the left, on the right, as you said. But as you said, first of all, the fact that Jews were other
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was really significant all through history because they were the minority in other people's lands
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ever since they were kicked out of their own. And, you know, as I said once or twice in debates,
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actually, you know, if you think that human beings are basically good, you should visit a playground.
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And when you go to a playground, a new kid comes on the playground, they don't say,
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oh, look, a new child, you know, let us share our toys. No, there's something about otherness
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that makes us uncomfortable. That was then given really, as you said, theologic rocket fuel because
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of Jews and Jesus. Because Jesus was Jewish, the Jews did not accept him as the Messiah. And now just
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think about this psychologically. If God walks on earth and you don't, and he's standing right next
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to you, and after all, he's part of the Jewish community, and you don't see him as God, you're
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either foolish or wicked. There are no other choices because it can't be that God's not impressive or that
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God's not God. And so what is really a family quarrel, which is what it was with Jesus, because
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everybody was Jewish, a family quarrel, which are sometimes the most toxic, got enshrined in sacred
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books. And that, here I will make a concession to your side of the debate, that's not a good thing
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because that doesn't change. And so Christian, the roots of Christian antisemitism, Hyman Maccabee,
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the English scholar, had a theory about this that's very interesting. He said, Judaism is one of the few
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hatreds where you're both subhuman and superhuman. Because to kill a God, you have to be a devil.
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You can't just be a bad person. And so from the beginning, hatred of Jews was supercharged. And
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then, by the way, and many people are not aware of this, Muhammad made the same assumption that early
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Christianity did, which was Jews would convert to Islam. And when they refused to convert, you get in
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the Quran as well, not with the same degree of toxicity as the New Testament, but it's still,
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there are some pretty awful verses in the Quran about Jews. And I just want to say, before we get
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too complacent, that Jews are probably lucky that no Canaanites are still around, because, you know,
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the Bible has its moments too, but Jews are still around. And the Amalekites especially, yeah, if you
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want to go to the darkest. But Jews are still around. And so in land after land after land, they were a
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minority with the Christians, a minority with the Muslims, and the other. And the reason that America
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has always been different, I think, is that there were Frenchmen and Jews, there were Germans and Jews,
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there were Russians and Jews, but there aren't Americans and Jews. There are so many different groups that
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Jews were not the identified other. But on the fringes, they're still seen for different reasons as the
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other. And as you said, today, we get those three strands. You get the far right, you get the far left, and the
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Islamists. And all three have different reasons, but form weird alliances in their hostility, which is
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to end up in a place that you did not end up in, which is where you get those strange signs like
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queers for Hamas, which is totally inexplicable unless you understand that they're united by antipathy.
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Yeah. I mean, that's where it all becomes an SNL sketch, which is probably written by a
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disproportionate number of Jews. Let's start with the far right component of this, because I think
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the far left component will take us to college campuses where we should focus. But how do you
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understand the antisemitism of the right? And I guess the American context is the right one to think
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about. And some of this has been in the news in pieces of late, really having nothing to do with
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October 7th. So you have people like Tucker Carlson and Vivek Ramaswamy, you know, flirting with,
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and beyond flirting, actually just fully endorsing so-called great replacement theory. You know,
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many people were bewildered to hear those good Americans in Charlottesville with their tiki torches
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chanting, Jews will not replace us. And I didn't know what that was about. But there's this idea that
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Democrats in general, leftists in general, but really Jews in this insidious backroom way are
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consciously trying to engineer a future electoral victories by just letting the dispossessed people
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of the world flood the country through open borders, as though that were a reliable way of producing,
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you know, democratic victories in elections. We're noticing now that this is, you know,
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there's a fair number of Arabs, yeah, a fair number of Arabs now who are not inclined to vote
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democratic in the aftermath of October 7th. How do you think about the far right problem?
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So for one of the, I almost want to say interesting, if it weren't so tragic, it would be interesting.
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Things about antisemitism, unlike other hatreds, again, is it's almost always a conspiracy theory,
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which is a feature. I mean, look, you and Michael Shermer and others have explored the conspiratorial
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mind. All I can say about it is, for whatever reason, almost always you will find among antisemites
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that Jews are somehow conspiring to do something terrible in the world. And whatever it is they fear,
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it is the Jew that has created that which they fear. And so if you're right-wing white American who
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fears being replaced by minorities, obviously it's engineered by the Jews because things can't happen
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without an explanation. And there's always the Jewish possibility and Jews being such a small
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population. I mean, 2% of America, like 0.02% of the world, their prominence allows conspiracy theories
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to have, you know, life on social media and in people's minds because, as an example, like they
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would point to Paul Wolfowitz and say, ah, you see, you know, the war in Iraq is a Jewish conspiracy,
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regardless of the fact that the president and the vice president and the secretary of state and so on,
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none of them were Jewish, but that's irrelevant because it's always got to be the person who is
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tied to this international conspiracy. And that's what's happening right now with the quote unquote
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great replacement theory. It's engineered by the Jews, which is a bizarre, but very persistent
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feature of antisemitism. You mentioned the protocols, the elders of Zion, that was a Russian forgery about
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Jewish bankers who control the world. And weirdly, I am told, I don't know this firsthand, you can find
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that book in hotel rooms in Jordan, like, you know, the way Gideon Bible was given. And, and so there is
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this, it links all people who want to believe that everything bad in their life is due to someone else
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planning it, that it would be bad. And it's almost always the Jew. I mean, just think of the caricatures
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of the Jew, like as a predator holding the globe and spinning it, you know, to their will.
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Yeah. I remember this is now jumping to the Muslim context for a minute, but I remember our friend,
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali, telling me that when she was in Somalia and, uh, you know, by her account had,
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had never met a person who had ever met a person who had met a Jew, still they knew they hated the
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Jews because of all their, their evil work in the world. Yeah. No, you don't need our presence to hate
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us actually. It's, it's astonishing. Just to take the flip side of this, how do you explain Jewish
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prominence in either high status cultural contexts or powerful positions in governments? I mean, you know,
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obviously the, the point you just made still stands that, you know, even, even if we're overrepresented
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in really any of these contexts, we're still never the majority in those contexts, right? Because
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you're talking in the, in the, in America, if 2% of the population, if we, if we're 20% in any field,
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well then that's a tenfold quote over representation, but you know, we're still not the majority of
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anybody, you know, doing the work anywhere outside of a synagogue, I would imagine.
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Yeah. Let me tell you a funny story about that, that will actually illustrate, I think both how
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we got there and what's happening to that. So I got, I got COVID a couple of years ago,
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maybe a little bit less. And, and I was supposed to do a doctor's daughter's wedding. And I called
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him and I said, listen, I just want you to know this is in Los Angeles. I have COVID. He said,
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I'm getting you to Cedars tomorrow morning and you're going to get monoclonal antibodies.
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So next morning I'm at Cedars because he wanted me to do his kid's wedding, which I did in the end.
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And the nurse is giving me monoclonal antibodies. She goes, how did you get here so quickly? I,
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you know, usually it takes a couple of days. And I said, well, honestly, if you're going to,
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if you're going to get monoclonal antibodies, it is good to be clergy to the Jews. And she said,
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that's true. But in a decade, you're going to want to be clergy to the Indians.
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And I thought, and I thought that's part of the point is, yes, this is a certain moment in history
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where the skills that Jews have happened to be very suited to the kind of skills that are needed
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to succeed in the modern world. But there are a lot of other groups that haven't actually had the
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opportunity that now have the opportunity that are going to, you know, flood the market essentially.
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And that's going to change. But the reason my explanation, at least for why Jews have been
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so successful is their culture trained them to it. It was a portable culture. It was a literate
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culture. It was a culture where scholarship had greater status than anything else. And then you come
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into economies where numeracy and literacy and brain work matter much more than physical labor.
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And it's almost as if we were primed by our tradition to do well.
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Okay. So back to the right and the alt-right and the far-right. I mean, one thing that's so
00:26:22.680
confusing about our current information landscape, and you just look at what's happening in the media
00:26:28.980
and on social media, you have various characters seeming to play well with each other. I mean,
00:26:35.780
they signal boost each other. They are clearly on friendly terms. I'm thinking of people like
00:26:41.680
Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson and Vivek Ramaswamy and Jared Kushner. I mean, these are all people who
00:26:48.420
are either in Trumpistan or Trumpistan adjacent. They're, I think, united in their hatred of so-called
00:26:59.180
elites, all the while being among the elites. These are people that are standing outside our
00:27:05.420
various institutions and condemning them as irretrievably corrupt. And, you know, everyone I
00:27:11.920
just mentioned, with the exception of Jared Kushner, I would be reasonably sure, is someone who has
00:27:19.500
either said, great replacement theory is absolutely real and is just, you overlook it at your peril,
00:27:26.420
or there's been some flirtation with it. Again, none of this is the far-right, you know, white
00:27:34.740
nationalist, quasi-neo-Nazi fringe, but it's also not hostile to that either, right? So all of these
00:27:43.600
people focus, you know, 100% of their energy in decrying what we're about to decry, the moral
00:27:50.860
confusion of the far-left, and they spend exactly none of it worrying about the various monsters at
00:27:57.640
their backs on the right. My view is that we can keep both of these problems in view at the same
00:28:03.260
time. What's your sense of the right-of-center problem in American political life? And, I mean,
00:28:11.660
you take it at any strata of society you want, but I mean, I just, there seems to be a populist
00:28:17.100
moment on the right that is heavily infected by, if not frank anti-Semitism, a disinclination to see
00:28:27.960
the anti-Semitism further to the right. I think that it's even more, I mean, you're being careful
00:28:37.100
in the way you frame it. It's a sort of delight with flirting with that anti-Semitism without
00:28:45.960
pronouncing it yourself, giving openings to it and seeing it sort of rise up, which is
00:28:52.280
kind of amusing and fun. And it's not only in America, of course, you know, I was recently in
00:28:58.160
Hungary. The same game is going on there as here and in other countries as well, where the populist
00:29:09.060
and the energy of populism and, let us be honest, the votes of populism and the engine of fundraising
00:29:16.960
and other things and all of that is in some ways intersecting with anti-Semitism and public figures
00:29:26.680
understand that they don't have to be anti-Semites to get the, I mean, like frank anti-Semites,
00:29:34.660
open anti-Semites, to get the boost from the populist approval because a wink and a nod is
00:29:41.380
sufficient. You only have to say, you know, look, I really think that, you know, I'm not, that
00:29:48.440
intellectual sophisticates are betraying us. And people know that you're saying Jews. People know
00:29:55.500
that cosmopolitans means Jews or that the intellectual elite means Jews. And so you can get tremendous
00:30:03.360
support and encouragement from this. There's a nice Hebrew word, which means kind of strengthening
00:30:10.220
from it without needing to say anything explicitly anti-Semitic. So I think Elon Musk has done this
00:30:18.760
numerous times. And I don't believe for a moment that he doesn't know what he's doing when he says
00:30:26.080
things that encourage anti-Semites to say, go Elon. And he's not alone. So I, look, I mean, even something
00:30:36.500
as contentious and contended as there are fine people on both sides. Well, if you're marching with
00:30:42.940
Nazis, you're probably not a fine person. But if you say that, then, and then you say, but I'm condemning
00:30:50.320
Nazis, you have played that double game of encouraging people that want to understand
00:30:56.600
you're on their side without saying explicitly, I'm on your side. And this game has been played
00:31:03.120
on the right to the Jews' detriment now a lot. And it's, as you said, it's being done by people who
00:31:13.100
have tremendous cultural influence and sway. Let me bend over backwards to defend two people who I'm
00:31:18.380
really not in the habit of defending now. So with Trump, I mean, the fine people on both sides
00:31:24.140
moment, there's no question that there was a clip from a press conference there that was edited to
00:31:29.220
make it seem like he was just, without caveat, endorsing the white supremacists as fine people.
00:31:36.040
Which, yeah, which he wasn't. No, I totally agree with you. He was not doing that.
00:31:39.660
So there's that. But I take your point that he's sloppy enough that you think that there,
00:31:44.400
in the end, there must be some method to his madness where he's
00:31:48.380
unwilling to, in a very straightforward way, disavow people who support him,
00:31:55.000
who really any decent person would just, at every opportunity, disavow. I mean,
00:32:00.180
whether it's anti-Semites, or it's David Duke, or it's white nationalists, or there's the Proud Boys,
00:32:05.440
or it's QAnon. I mean, whenever he's posed a, you know, really an ultimatum, like, tell us exactly
00:32:11.760
what you think about X, he will say something mealy-mouthed of the sort that is invariably,
00:32:19.800
you know, a testament to his own narcissism. I mean, the formulation is usually something like,
00:32:24.260
well, they really seem to like me, so they can't be all bad. Or, I mean, it's like,
00:32:27.700
he just turns it back to himself. Right. If you say to me,
00:32:30.980
is Trump an anti-Semite? I think, no. I don't actually think that that's what's going on.
00:32:36.300
And I don't, I don't, I have no, look, also, I can't look into people's hearts.
00:32:40.240
I don't know what he thinks, or what Elon Musk thinks in their heart. But I don't,
00:32:44.320
I don't see them as being explicitly haters. That's not the issue. The issue is exactly what
00:32:51.360
you said, which is, if I can just wink and get people to buoy me up, then, you know, that's-
00:32:58.980
Let's say, I just don't see, perhaps I'm naive, but I just can't imagine. I mean,
00:33:03.700
in Trump's case, I really don't have a theory of mind. It all just breaks down. It's like,
00:33:08.600
you know, you're getting sucked into a black hole and the normal physics changes. But with Elon,
00:33:15.580
it just seems to me that there's no possible advantage for him to be confusing his fans about
00:33:22.620
what he thinks with respect to Jew hatred. You know, I don't know if you've seen him going after
00:33:28.040
George Soros. I don't know enough about George Soros to know exactly what he's focused on there. But
00:33:33.480
I'm imagining that, you know, George Soros funds lots of left-wing groups and causes. And for that
00:33:40.360
reason, many people right of center view him as fairly culpable for having delivered us the
00:33:46.300
monstrosity of diversity, equity, and inclusion, such as it now exists. And we'll be talking about
00:33:52.140
that. So insofar as that's true, if he is a major funder of district attorneys who won't jail anyone,
00:33:59.640
you know, even if they're, you know, ransacking a CVS near you, provided the color of their skin is
00:34:05.640
the appropriate shade. Well, then it's easy for people to just say, okay, this is an awful
00:34:11.420
degradation of our society being funded by this billionaire. Let's criticize him for that. And
00:34:18.620
it's perhaps unfair to say that is given that he's, this guy is famously maligned by real anti-Semites
00:34:26.420
that now you're party to the anti-Semitism that is casting a shadow over the whole thing.
00:34:31.880
I agree with you. I mean, he's retweeted one or two things and said one or two things that have been
00:34:36.260
more explicit, but I think the same, it's actually not so much a point about Donald Trump or Elon Musk.
00:34:44.720
It is a point about the fact that the anti-Semitism on the right looks for any opening that suggests
00:34:55.340
that there is encouragement of the ideology and it finds it in, I think, lots of places,
00:35:03.320
even if the putative encourager is not themselves, you know, anti-Semitic or trying to goose anti-Semitism,
00:35:12.160
but you can call the rhetoric sloppy. You can call it, you know, conscious winking. I don't know,
00:35:19.340
but it's clearly there and you see it in the responses that people get on social media.
00:35:25.840
And I see it in my own feed where people will write, you know, as Elon Musk said about you people,
00:35:32.600
or as Donald Trump said about you people. So, and I, I look, I try very hard to stay apolitical.
00:35:40.420
I am not telling people they should vote for this person or that person. I obviously have my
00:35:45.780
preferences as I know you certainly have yours, but I really, I never, I try to be like consistently
00:35:54.340
vigilant against anti-Semitic provocations and they clearly exist among the characters we've
00:36:02.580
mentioned, whether by design or inadvertence. Yeah. Well, it's often in what isn't said,
00:36:09.100
right? I mean, so it's, it's the fact that, you know, in Trump's case, when asked about the Proud
00:36:13.760
Boys, he just, all he can say is, you know, stand back and stand by, right? Like, which is just
00:36:18.960
not the, it's not what you would say if you recognize the problem of right-wing militia lunatics
00:36:27.380
in our society, you know, agitating for their own power, right? I mean, you would completely disavow
00:36:34.500
them and you would leave, leave nothing left to the imagination. And so it is with, with Elon.
00:36:39.660
One of the things though, that I have actually seen is that people on the right don't, I mean,
00:36:45.700
people who are clearly not anti-Semites on the right, don't take anti-Semitism on the right
00:36:50.660
that seriously. And people on the left who are not anti-Semites by and large have not, maybe now is
00:36:57.200
changing, taken anti-Semitism on the left that seriously. Right, right. Yeah, it's really, it's
00:37:04.380
the single focus to the other side of the aisle, which I think is so corrupting of one's ethical
00:37:10.860
compass. Yeah. Okay, well, let's go leftward. Right. And get a picture of, of what's happening
00:37:19.180
there. I mean, this is, you know, the difference for me has always been, you know, if you go far
00:37:24.100
enough right, you meet just frank Nazis, right? You literally meet people with swastikas on their
00:37:30.400
foreheads. If you go far enough left, you have met, you know, up until the recent weeks, you have met
00:37:38.840
people who were not at all violently disposed toward Jews. They're just confused people whose
00:37:48.220
social justice hysteria has caused them to view everything in terms of, you know, a very American
00:37:56.320
framework of, you know, oppressor and oppressed dynamics that just really break down along the
00:38:03.320
lines of the African-American experience. Like, everything gets mapped to that. It's what people
00:38:08.720
like Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates have done to our civil rights thinking, where, you know,
00:38:15.160
you can't just not be racist, you have to be anti-racist. And, you know, white guilt is a kind
00:38:22.380
of original sin, which can never be expiated. And everything, you know, including, you know,
00:38:28.300
objective standards in education is a matter of power and oppression and privilege. And you force
00:38:36.060
everything through that filter. And what falls out the other end, if you're a Jew, is, again, the view
00:38:44.340
that you're not only not among the oppressed, you're among the most privileged, and you're a,
00:38:50.060
you know, worse still, you're this model minority against whom African-Americans and other minorities
00:38:57.640
are always subject to invidious comparisons based on the success, you know, the success of the Jews in
00:39:04.000
all walks of life. And so it's just, there's this animus toward Jews, but it never seemed to be the
00:39:11.280
kind of thing that would give us our next Kristallnacht until October 8th, right? Where
00:39:19.180
we then, we feel, okay, now this is now supercharged in its alliance with people who are actually
00:39:25.020
celebrating, explicitly celebrating the murder of Jews.
00:39:29.480
Right. Exactly. So I used to say, and not, not me alone, this, it's hardly original with me that
00:39:37.380
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