00:05:06.840So when the Jews are saying they don't bow to other gods, essentially what they mean is that they don't bow to tyrants.0.93
00:05:11.720And this idea is reinforced throughout Jewish civilization, right?
00:05:14.600The idea of the laws of the Torah, this is sort of an early concept that is in a way similar to what we have in the U.S. Constitution, where you have a set of laws that are not tied to an individual ruler, right?
00:05:26.060It's not like the king is the lawmaker.
00:05:27.580It's not like Hammurabi's code, even though some of those laws might overlap.
00:05:31.680But there's this idea that even the kings have to follow the laws, right?
00:05:34.500These are actually quite radical ideas.
00:05:36.500And so what I think is really interesting is that this is a very, very tiny group. It is conquered by empires over and over again. And these empires have differing attitudes toward, you know, these various groups that they conquer. But often the idea is that the conquering empire has some idea that is universal, supposedly universal, and that everyone who is good and righteous is going to follow along with this idea.
00:06:01.180So that comes with, for example, religious ideas, right?
00:06:04.580And if you think about in the spread of Christianity, where they're spreading Christianity by the
00:06:08.560sword, or by, you know, they're encouraging people to convert, right?0.84
00:06:14.660So when you have a group of people who don't cave to this pressure, it sort of throws the
00:06:19.400surrounding society into a sort of a problem, right?
00:06:23.140Because it's suddenly raising this possibility that there isn't only one way to be, right?
00:06:27.700And that, well, if someone is rejecting my ideas, then it sort of leads you to question your ideas. And the more tyrannical a society is, the less tolerable that is. So when you want to go back to your question about this idea of, oh, are Jews sort of contributing to this by not assimilating into these societies, what's interesting is that through Jewish history, there's been this kind of push and pull between how much Jews are able to assimilate and how much they aren't.
00:06:54.220And what is interesting is that at the time of the emancipation of the Jews in Europe, for instance, which happens in the early 19th century in Western Europe, there's this possibility that Jews are able to become citizens of emerging nation states.
00:07:06.840And there's a thought at that time in the Jewish community that this is the route out of anti-Semitism.
00:07:12.160And, of course, that turns out not to be true at all.
00:07:15.400It doesn't matter if you think about something like the Dreyfus Affair, when there's this captain in the French army who is falsely accused of espionage. This is in the 1890s. And this person who was accused of espionage, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was the most assimilated into French culture as he could possibly be.
00:07:33.400He was not a religious Jew. He was not part of any organized Jewish community. He was had spent his entire career, his entire life devoted to France serving in the French army. None of that mattered. And it wasn't just a false accusation. This were mob violence against Jewish communities in France and in all of their and in French colonies where neighborhoods were burned to the ground.
00:07:53.960I mean, this wasn't just about, you know, one guy losing his job. I mean, this was like a mass movement against the Jews that was stirred up by an anti-Semitic press. And it was precisely in part of that anti-Semitism came from, oh, because he was assimilated.
00:08:06.000So that's what's sort of interesting is that in Jewish history, you see that there was, in a sense, it didn't matter what the Jews' choices were in whether they chose to assimilate or didn't assimilate because it was about the larger role that this group was able to play in the minds of the larger society and basically where they were drawing the limits of what they considered universal.
00:08:24.000Yeah, you have a line in the book, which is a detail I never knew that. I think Dreyfus lived—he was in prison for like four years or so, but then—
00:08:38.660I think five years in solitary confinement on Devil's Island on the coast of South America, manacled to his cot every night for five years, yes.
00:08:45.880But then he lived to 1935, and you said to him, just a few years shy of being able to join his wife, who got deported to Auschwitz.
00:08:55.140So, let's just linger on this question of Jewish difference a little bit, though, because obviously it has theological underpinnings, which I don't think are the main driver of the conversation these days, at least not in mainstream culture.0.56
00:09:08.220But it is unavoidable that Jews, by merely remaining Jews these many thousands of years, have stood in perpetual repudiation of the theology of Christianity and Islam.0.65
00:09:23.560Let me say, you know, Christianity is entirely dependent on you taking seriously the claim that, and actually accepting the claim that Jesus was the Messiah. And the Jews for 2,000 years have been standing around being Jews saying, sorry, guys, we met your Messiah. He actually was one of us and he wasn't our guy. And the same for Islam.0.87
00:09:45.040Islam claims to be the final revelation of the Abrahamic tradition. Muhammad is the final prophet1.00
00:09:52.140delivering that perfect revelation to humanity, never to be superseded by anything we do until
00:09:58.440the end of the world. And the Jews are still here to say, no, sorry, we met your guy. He struck us1.00
00:10:05.680as a schizophrenic warlord, not interested, sorry. And that is, for anyone taking the faith claims0.74
00:10:13.100as really the center of their worldview, that has proven to be perhaps tolerable for decades
00:10:19.800at a stretch or even, you know, a century at a stretch in certain contexts.
00:10:23.840But generally speaking, it's a source code that's always there to be re-invoked and revalued
00:10:30.940as, okay, this is not only intolerable, but this is now a killing offense, and we have0.92
00:10:37.520to deal with these Jews among us who are just, again, merely by maintaining their Jewishness,0.93
00:10:44.340they are disparaging our core beliefs. Yes. Well, I think it, I will, you know,1.00
00:10:51.220you preface this as this is a theological argument. I actually think it's more of a
00:10:55.680universalist belief argument because I don't think it necessarily has to be specifically
00:11:00.320religious because you see something similar with communism, for example. Communism's repudiation
00:11:05.520of Jews as being particularistic and there the objection is that Jews are you know being too
00:11:11.760nationalist right this is you know they in the communist uh communist regime in Soviet Union
00:11:17.060framed their what frankly was you know decades of persecution of Soviet Jews and you know riling up
00:11:23.520of of anti-semitism among among their client states was entirely framed as quote anti-Zionism
00:11:29.400right that we are objecting basically to the particularity of the of a particular form of
00:11:33.500a national movement. So it was this particularity that was supposed, that was the thing that they
00:11:38.660were objecting to. And that's also true even in a pre-Christian setting, when you see something like
00:11:43.860the attacks on the Alexandrian Jewish community in the first century, those are coming from people
00:11:50.040who have been riled up by the idea that the Jews are not loyal to the Roman Empire. So that's the0.58
00:11:55.160sort of the theology, so to speak, or the universalizing idea that like, we're all supposed
00:11:59.580to be Roman citizens, you know, we're all supposed to worship the emperor and these people don't.
00:12:03.020So these are the these are the ideas. To me, this is less about theology as opposed to whatever is considered the, quote, universal idea of the time.
00:12:14.160And I think you can even trace that in something like the racism of the Nazis. That was this that was supposedly grounded in. Oh, well, this is you know, this isn't this primitive religious belief. This is science. Right. This like bogus pseudo race science that Jews are an inferior race.
00:12:31.400So I think that those to me, it's it's the Jews objection to this idea that everyone has to agree and submit to some to have this sort of blind submission to some supposedly universal ideal that is so intolerable to people.0.94
00:12:44.860And I think it's intolerable because, as you say, this is the source code.0.96
00:12:48.580If your belief requires everyone to believe it and then you have a dissenter, that's a challenge to your beliefs in a way that it might not be if your beliefs did not require everyone to agree with you.
00:13:02.500And to me, that's where it becomes this acid test for a pluralistic society.
00:13:07.120Yeah, there are a few other details here which are interesting and make anti-Semitism, which we're going to talk about next, unusual on the list of bigotry.
00:13:20.160So, for instance, anyone who uses the term Islamophobia tends to want to use it as though it were deeply analogous to anti-Semitism.
00:13:28.200Now, I don't have to go into this, but I have my reasons for objecting to the very concept of Islamophobia.
00:13:33.800I just think it's been used to shut down any criticism of the doctrine of Islam as tantamount to bigotry, and that strikes me as increasingly dangerous.
00:13:42.540But leaving that aside, the reason why Islamophobia, even if we were going to grant the term, the scope its users want, the reason why it's not the same as anti-Semitism is that, crucially, Judaism is not a missionary faith, right?
00:13:56.380Islam is an aggressively missionary faith that is acquiring adherence in 100 countries.
00:14:02.840And so there's no implication, no necessary implication of ethnicity or race or anything apart from your believing a certain doctrine.
00:14:13.240I mean, that's what it is to be a Muslim.0.91
00:14:14.940To talk about being an atheist Muslim really is a contradiction.0.71
00:14:19.900You can say you were a Muslim, but now you're an atheist.
00:14:22.320But no one says, you know, I'm a Muslim and Islam is very important to me, but I'm also an atheist.
00:14:31.780Or really, this is true of almost every other religion.
00:14:35.980But among Jews, it's an all-too-common phenomenon to meet atheists who are Jewish, who both see themselves as Jewish.
00:14:43.620But most importantly, from the point of view of every anti-Semite on Earth, they will be seen as Jewish no matter what they believe.
00:14:49.980So it's not analogous to—and this is why religion isn't a great mapping here, because there are atheists, Jews, there are secular Jews, and there are Jews who don't believe a whole hell of a lot, and they're even religious by Jewish lights.
00:15:07.500and you don't see this among Christians and Muslims and Mormons. And I mean, this is just not
00:15:12.940what's happening. It's much more. And the fact that Judaism is not a missionary faith,
00:15:18.880though you can join it, is doing a lot of work that people don't notice here.
00:15:23.880Well, it's more than that. It's not even just that it's, you're correct that it's not a
00:15:26.740missionary faith. There was some proselytization in the ancient world, but very little. And
00:15:30.500certainly it's, you know, for thousands of years has not been a proselytizing,
00:15:33.800I wouldn't even call it a faith of proselytizing culture. But in fact, I think that religion is
00:15:39.700the wrong term, absolutely the wrong term to describe Jewish civilization. And again, this0.97
00:15:46.360is because of the success of empires. Because when Westerners use the word religion, they are
00:15:51.960thinking of something like Christianity or Islam, which are transnational movements where what
00:15:58.620makes you a member of this movement is, as you say, your profession of faith, right? It is the
00:16:04.900profession of faith that makes you a member of this movement. That is not at all the structure
00:16:09.160of Jewish civilization. As I often will say, Jews are not a religion. Jews have a religion,
00:16:15.640which many Jews follow. And as you've pointed out, many Jews don't. But Jews are not a religion.0.57
00:16:20.460Jews are this other category, this pre-modern category, which in Hebrew is called an am,0.70
00:16:24.740right? The best translation of it is maybe a peoplehood or something like that.
00:16:28.620That's a weird word in English that doesn't quite fit either.
00:16:31.420But the idea is that this is, it's never been a movement that is intended to universalize
00:16:39.340The idea of the covenant with God, even if you go to that level of religious belief within0.67
00:16:45.320Judaism, even the covenant of God is between God and the Jewish people.0.75
00:16:49.420It isn't intended to be shared with the entire world.
00:16:52.220People can have different relationships with God.
00:16:54.360There's that understanding that, you know, there's no sense that like, oh, this is better0.60
00:16:58.380or worse than anyone else, this is just the Jews' relationship with God. The way, like, you know,
00:17:02.480I have a relationship with my spouse. I don't expect you to have a relationship with my spouse.
00:17:07.120But, you know, there's sort of this, you know, this is a private relationship in a sense.
00:17:11.980It's what some sociologists of religion sometimes will call a closed practice,
00:17:16.340which is this, you know, idea that, you know, these are traditions that are intended for this
00:17:19.920group. So obviously it is a joinable group. We would think of it as monotheism, but it's actually,
00:17:25.100I think the concept is more appropriately described as henotheism, which is not the assertion that only one God exists, but there's only one God worth worshiping in a context where other gods do exist.
00:17:51.160I mean, this is a—the religion evolves over time.
00:17:54.520I mean, that's another thing is that this is a tradition that's been here for a long, long time, and it evolves. But you're correct that that probably more accurately describes Jewish practice in the ancient world, for sure. That quickly evolves past that, though.
00:18:07.040But overall, what you said, I think, is really accurate, that religion is the wrong category. And the only thing I would add to that is that there's a reason why Americans are particularly confused by this, which is that a few generations ago, American Jews actually spent quite a bit of time, and I talk about this in the book, on investing on sort of reframing Judaism as an American religion.
00:18:28.380And that was sort of a strategic decision that American Jews made after World War II.
00:18:32.580And I think the legacy of those efforts also causes a little bit of misunderstanding and
00:18:36.640confusion in the 21st century as we're living it now.
00:18:46.660But let's talk about, so we've covered what Jews are and aren't and how to think about
00:18:52.480them in this, you know, as occupying space on the religious social landscape.
00:18:58.380how should we think about anti-Semitism? And can you, how would you demarcate it, or would you
00:19:03.980demarcate it from anti-Zionism, which is now the phrase that is doing so much mad work
00:19:11.140in, you know, on both the right and the left? I guess, I mean, I think we've teased this,
00:19:16.820but what I'm hoping you'll explain is how anti-Semitism is not just an ordinary form
00:19:24.440of bigotry and ordinary social prejudice, but it contains more and less information than that.
00:19:30.760Yes. So look, I don't make a claim that bigotry against Jews is unique. And I think that, you
00:19:36.060know, bigotries against different groups in different settings have a lot of, you know,
00:19:38.840there's a variety of histories. What is unusual about the case of bigotry against Jews is just
00:19:45.740that this is a really old group that has survived all of these attacks and persecution. And so
00:19:51.720So because of that, you have a lot of data points that maybe you don't have for, let's say, African Americans, which is a group that's existed for a number of centuries, but not for millennia.
00:20:01.120So there's just a different history there, and it's a much longer history.
00:20:04.120I think it's more illuminating to think about antisemitism less as a bias or a bigotry than as a lie, a lie that people use to gain or maintain power.
00:20:16.200And I think that what's interesting about it, because you have all these data points, because this is such a long history, is that there's an extent to which you can say that that lie is always the same in every setting. The lie is always the same. The lie is Jews are destroying what you value the most. And the thing that changes in different settings, different historical eras, different social circles is what you value the most.
00:20:39.820And to me, this is a very important distinction, because if you think about fighting bigotry,
00:20:45.060the tools you have for fighting bigotry are things like empathy.
00:20:48.440You know, we need to get to know each other better, bring people over for dinner, you
00:20:53.020And all of that is extremely important for fighting any kind of bigotry.
00:20:56.220And I don't claim that that should be neglected.
00:20:58.860But if what you're fighting is less about bigotry and what you're fighting is actually
00:21:03.500a lie, fighting a lie requires a different strategy.
00:21:07.240It requires exposure of the lie. It requires thinking about who benefits from the lie. And also what it means is that the people who are taken up by this lie is they're brought into it not necessarily because they have hate in their hearts or something like that, but because they have been manipulated and someone is benefiting from that manipulation.
00:21:28.460So to me, that is the pattern recognition that I think is important to think about.
00:21:33.320And I think it's also obviously an incredibly important thing to think about, not just in
00:21:36.820the context of anti-Semitism, but in the context of, you know, we are in a new media environment
00:21:41.240where it's very, very easy to manipulate large numbers of people.0.61
00:21:45.020So this offers a key as to why Jews have fared so badly in the DEI moral calculus that was
00:21:53.680meant to protect, you know, embattled minorities of all kinds. Why is it that the DEI social justice
00:22:02.860machinery didn't, not only didn't protect Jews, but really birthed its own strain of anti-Semitism?
00:22:11.620Yes. And I want to talk about your tenure on the Harvard Advisory Council as well. I mean,
00:22:16.900that really sharpens up this point, but let's talk about it generically for the moment.
00:22:21.020Yes. Anti-Semitism has always presented itself as a form of social justice. That's part of the lie. Remember the lie. Jews are destroying what you value the most.
00:22:31.660So if you value equity and anti-colonialism and anti-racism.1.00
00:22:36.380Exactly. Then Jews are destroying what you value the most if that's the thing you value most. I mean, that is a very, very old pattern as well. I mean, as I said, this goes back to ancient times. I think it's so funny that if you believe that there's this massive discrepancies in power structures and we're all stuck in these power structures and your job is to level the playing field and that's the way to do this, I mean, there is merit to that view.1.00
00:23:01.680And I always think it's very funny because sometimes I'm invited to speak at corporations for, you know, some sort of, you know, Jewish American Heritage Month or one of these, you know, they're sort of throwing a bone to this idea of we want to do something about anti-Semitism.
00:23:12.580And I always think it's funny where, you know, I go to speak at one of these large corporations and I'm like, are there people in our society who have too much power and too much privilege?
00:23:24.040Right. So it's like, you know, there's an unwillingness to look in the mirror there.
00:23:26.880But if that is your worldview, then you're going to fall face first into anti-Semitism because the anti-Semitic playbook is always Jews have too much power, Jews have too much privilege and Jews have to be taken down. Right. This is this is part of the structure of this lie. Right. And that is when I say anti-Semitism is always conceived of as a form of social justice.0.73
00:23:45.180That is exactly what it is, because that is the way that this big lie is able to manipulate a population, because people don't feel that they're being hateful bigots.
00:23:54.440They feel that they are standing up for their greatest ideals, and they don't realize how they have been manipulated.
00:23:59.860But it's interesting that it passes through this filter in ways where it really shouldn't.
00:24:04.980So, for instance, even if you were going to grant that Jews are disproportionately privileged, let's say Jews are rich.
00:24:13.220I mean, it's not to say that that's true. It's certainly not true across the board, but let's just grant that it's true. You still wouldn't discount their vulnerability as historically as a victim group because no one says, well, gay men are rich. Therefore, there's no issue with homophobia or gay men are not, you know, rich gay men are not part of our DEI calculus.0.99
00:24:37.580correct or you know indian americans rich blacks or not you know we no longer care that about
00:24:43.520racism in their case of course not right so it's interesting that even if you were going to price0.83
00:24:49.340in the bias you could say the same thing about you know jews are white also right a fraught and
00:24:54.980often false term often a gay white man is not yeah people don't think that you know gay white
00:25:00.780people don't experience bigotry right right exactly so but that's what's so interesting
00:25:06.580about it, right? And that's where it sort of reveals the flaws in this way of understanding
00:25:10.940anti-Semitism, because anti-Semitism is this lie. Jews are destroying what you value the most,0.91
00:25:16.280right? And if what you value the most is, you know, some kind of more equitable world,0.95
00:25:20.680then that Jews have to be placed in this villain box and have to be eliminated.0.99
00:25:24.380It is essential that you get to that point in that kind of ideology. I think there's many1.00
00:25:29.540examples of that. It's remarkable to me how often you see descriptions of something that Jews are
00:25:34.420doing, that if it were presented as being about another group, would be celebrated. But if Jews0.98
00:25:41.060are doing it, would be considered sinister. I'm going to give you just one example of this.1.00
00:25:44.760It was a few years ago, there was a piece, a long piece in the New York Times about
00:25:47.960Hasidic Jewish schools in New York City, about, you know, it was basically making an accusation
00:25:53.280that they were exploiting city funding or something like this. And, you know, it was a
00:25:57.180piece about these schools. There was a lot of, you know, merit to the criticisms that were leveled
00:26:01.120in that piece. But what I thought was so interesting about that piece, there was a couple paragraphs
00:26:03.840where it said that it made the claim that the Jewish communities were the Hasidic Jewish
00:26:08.280communities in New York City were manipulating city politics through block voting. And the way
00:26:13.960the way they illustrated this was they said that in the schools, when after election day,
00:26:19.160the children were encouraged to bring in the sticker that says, you know, when you vote and
00:26:23.060get that sticker says I voted today to bring in their parents stickers saying that their parents
00:26:27.400voted. And any student that brought in those stickers showing that their parents had voted
00:26:31.020was rewarded they i think i think they got to go on a field trip to an amusement park or something
00:26:34.840and the article was saying how you know look how they're manipulating city politics and i just
00:26:39.980thought you know if this were about any other ethnic group in new york city it would be a
00:26:44.160celebratory article about like you know look how haitian americans you know figured out how to you
00:26:49.600know how to solve the problem of voter turnout like do we not want people to vote yeah right
00:26:56.260like it's like what is the argument here right i mean to me that's so that's so revealing because
00:27:00.580what it shows is that there's this need to cast anti-Semitism as a form of social justice because
00:27:07.540that's the only way that you can get away with this because otherwise it's just so obvious what
00:27:11.920you're doing. Okay, so if anti-Semitism is at bottom a conspiracy theory about Jews... Well, I wouldn't
00:27:17.820say conspiracy theory. It's more direct than that. It's a lie. It's a lie about the way the world
00:27:22.240works. Yes, exactly. Exactly. It's a claim in a baffling range of contexts. I mean, it's a claim
00:27:29.380in context that really can't be reconciled, right?
00:27:32.420So it's like, if communism is your thing,0.79
00:27:58.140that is largely hidden and they're working against what you value. And this is why if you
00:28:05.980travel far enough left or far enough right on the political landscape, you meet just as committed0.61
00:28:13.100anti-Semites. I've heard you describe this as this isn't even horseshoe theory on your account. This
00:28:18.140is just the same problem. It's a circle. Yeah. I mean, it's not even a circle. It's like the same
00:28:23.120people. Right. Well, so, I mean, there is this weird marriage of, yes, like, you know, people
00:28:27.840like Tucker Carlson and Hassan Piker, you know, are best friends, apparently. But let's table
00:28:34.340that for a second. There is something distinct about me. It might be the same axis of animus
00:28:39.600here, but there's a kind of a difference of spin here because, so if you go far enough left,
00:28:44.960Jews are thought to be essentially, not only do they have, they have a double dose of white
00:28:50.700privilege. They have all the sins of whiteness, but some extra ones as well. And so if you're0.98
00:28:57.540an anti-colonialist or an anti-imperialist, if third worldism is your new religion, well,0.97
00:29:03.680then the Jews are at the top of the hierarchy of privilege that you want to despise and somehow0.96
00:29:09.620disempower. If you go far enough right, it's a very different story. Jews are not white. They're0.97
00:29:14.820posing as white, they're successfully pretending to be white, and they're undermining Western0.99
00:29:21.100civilization by making common cause with the third world, right? I mean, they're not inimical0.82
00:29:27.260to the interest of the third world. They're bringing in immigrants or something like this.
00:29:29.720Yeah, so this is the Great Replacement Theory, right? So, I mean, the net result is to hate the1.00
00:29:34.320Jews in both cases, but there are very different sets of concerns, and their logic are really
00:29:42.280kind of mirror opposites of one another? I don't think they're as different, as you're saying,
00:29:47.140because in each case, there's this desire to explain away what doesn't fit into your supposedly
00:29:55.040all-encompassing worldview. And because the Jews are defying your all-encompassing worldview,0.81
00:30:01.400and there's this cognitive dissonance that you have to explain away. So for example, I mean,0.99
00:30:06.640we didn't even get to this yet. You asked me about anti-Zionism. There's a lot we can say
00:30:09.820about that, but maybe we'll put that over here for a moment and come back to that in a bit. But
00:30:12.840Zionism is one of the world's most successful anti-colonial movements. It is one of the only0.93
00:30:19.220successful land back movements. It is one of the very few examples of one of the countries
00:30:25.020formed, the majority of the countries in the world formed after World War II,
00:30:29.900where this is not a failed state. This has been an incredibly successful state with challenges
00:30:34.460like every other country on the world. But I mean, when you look at all of its neighbors,
00:30:38.080I mean, there's no comparison in terms of democracy and liberal expression, freedom of expression, all of those kinds of things. It's like if there was somewhere in the world you'd want to live and you have this list of countries. I mean, most people in Western countries, there's no question. This is a successful anti-colonial movement.
00:30:56.800But if your whole, you know, if, as you said, if you have this like third worldist, you know, idea that's sort of become a religion and your idea has to be like, well, colonialism is the cause of all the ills. This ruins your, this ruins your story. This ruins your story. So you have to turn it into something else. You have to say like, well, those people are white people who came from Europe. They're just a continuation of the colonization of the middle.
00:31:20.520It's like you have to make up this ridiculous mythology around it instead of understanding, like, wait a minute, this is actually a successful decolonial movement.0.51
00:31:30.700Just to clarify that, it's anti-colonial because Jews actually are indigenous to the region, right?
00:31:38.880Yes, and also not just in some abstract way.
00:31:43.040I mean, they defeated the British Empire.
00:31:46.200I mean, this was a post-colonial state.
00:31:50.340This was, you know, a state that was, you know, a country that was formed like, frankly, the majority of countries that were formed after World War II through the partitions of empires into nation states.
00:32:00.900I mean, it's actually remarkably similar to the creation of the majority of the countries in the world, most of which are younger than the state of Israel, almost all of which come out of these partitions of empires into nation states.
00:32:13.080In every single case, there's these massive population of violent population upheavals that happen in the creation of these states.0.75
00:32:18.580What's unusual about Israel is that you come out with a successful, successful country. You know, it's a successful democratic state that's been able to build its own economy, that's been able to educate its citizens, that's been able to adjudicate civil rights. I mean, all of these kinds of things that other countries around them have not succeeded in doing. And even though they emerged out of the very same circumstances.
00:32:38.420And so then you have to sort of keep going, you know, keep moving the goalposts, keep no true Scotsman, you know, keep up the no true Scotsman argument, right? Like, oh, well, it's because people migrated. It's like, well, that was true for modern Armenia, too. Most Armenians were, Armenians were majority diaspora before the founding of modern, the modern nation state of Armenia. Guess why? Guess why? You know, I mean, that can't be something that's disqualifying.
00:33:03.380I mean, and then it's like, yeah, the idea that, you know, oh, we have to call them. These are white European colonists. Like the majority of people in Israel are not European descent. Guess why? Guess why? Most of those people were murdered. So, I mean, it's like you have to sort of keep keep changing the goalposts.
00:33:20.100So in the same thing, though, to get to, as you said, the same thing happening on the
00:33:24.240right, it's like, well, how do you explain that you have this sort of, you know, let's
00:33:27.900say this, you know, white working class that has not succeeded.
00:33:31.780It must be because something is, you know, it's too it's almost like it's it's too hard
00:33:48.420I mean, like, you know, there's all these vast problems that are almost, you know, they're very hard to solve. It's much easier to say that your problems are all because, you know, the reason you're not succeeding like someone else is, is because those people had some kind of unfair advantage.
00:33:59.360I think that's same when you see people who are struggling in in the United States who are feel like, you know, they're part of this, like, you know, neglected white working class in cities and towns where industry is dried up. It's like it's too hard to solve the problem of like reshoring manufacturing.
00:34:14.620instead you sort of it's much more it's much easier to believe this kind of scapegoat theory0.82
00:34:19.940of like oh these you know evil jews and there's are manipulating immigration in order to make it0.79
00:34:25.700so that i can't get a job that where i can support myself it's you're absolutely it's true that these0.97
00:34:30.780people don't you know are in these situations and these in these but the idea that it's basically
00:34:36.840it's too hard to it's when it's too hard to solve the real problems people resort to this it's very
00:34:42.540easy. And then people who are manipulating them into believing that this is their problem are the
00:34:46.340real winners in this story. I mean, as with any conspiracy theory, it's inconvenient that there's
00:34:52.200a kernel of truth to many of them. I mean, they're not just perfect lies. They're lies that are
00:34:59.960contaminated by facts that can be spun to seem to substantiate even the craziest claims that are
00:35:08.620attached to the lie. Right. I mean, and that's true for any successful movement that's based
00:35:12.680on a lie. Yeah. Right. Like an election denial from the night from from 2020. Right. I mean,
00:35:17.680it was true that, you know, people were voting by mail because of covid and that made voting
00:35:21.220complicated. OK. Right. I noticed what I mean, this is the first thing that comes to mind. I'm
00:35:27.220sure there's a dozen things we could talk about in this vein. But I noticed what you know, when
00:35:31.920Elon Musk on X got the great replacement theory among the many bees in his bonnet,
00:35:38.620That one entered and he was retweeting some, I think, actual neo-Nazi.
00:35:45.780I mean, somebody who was castigating the Jews for having, you know, like this was in the aftermath of some, you know, Islamist atrocity.
00:35:53.400It might have been the Manchester attack a couple of years ago.
00:35:58.300And this person was gloating, essentially.
00:36:01.520You know, you guys have thrown open the doors of Europe to the barbarians and this is what you've been fighting for all this time.0.99
00:36:06.920And now now you're unhappy that you've imported all these anti-Semites who want to kill you.0.99
00:36:11.520You know, you've made your bed now lying.0.98
00:36:13.300And I mean, there's none of this verbatim, but that was a gist.
00:36:15.340And I think Elon's verbatim retweet was you have spoken the actual truth or something like that.
00:36:20.620You know, he sends it out to a quarter of a billion people.
00:36:22.660But what the problem is, however, that Jews are disproportionately represented in all kinds of places and, you know, Nobel Prizes and, you know, and in places where you'd like to be disproportionately represented.
00:36:36.920But they're also disproportionately represented among people who have these have humanitarian commitments that have led them over the years to think that things like open borders would be a good thing.
00:36:50.920Right. I mean, I mean, obviously, Jews in their in their living, in many cases, living memory, know what it was like to meet closed borders when they were running for their lives from the Nazis.
00:37:00.140So it is true to say that you can see many, you know, disproportionately, you know, liberal, disproportionately Democrat voting Jews in America who are biased toward, you know, there are no bad immigrants on some level.
00:37:14.780And then they find it very difficult to think about Islamist maniacs driving over crowds of people on the sidewalk and leaping out of the car only to knife the people they've not killed with their car.
00:37:30.340And this happens on Yom Kippur in Manchester.0.99
00:37:34.300And I mean, honestly, there's so many, even for this conversation about anti-Semitism, there are so many Jews who are useful idiots, right, that it is gone.1.00
00:37:43.160Well, there's so many people who are useful idiots.0.99
00:37:44.800Yeah, but there are, I mean, there are, I don't know who could do this poll, but I'm sure more than 2% of Americans who have thrown their lot in with, you know, the Islamophobia brigades who think that this is, you know, there is no problem here with Islamism or jihadism, who think that the Council of American Islamic Relations is basically the Muslim, you know, NAACP, and one needs to look no further there.0.99
00:38:12.020I mean, it's more than 2% Jewish, I would bet anything, right? So there's a kernel of truth0.68
00:38:17.580here. And again, it's kind of a predictable consequence of, so many Jews seem to think that0.99
00:38:25.020the end game for their own acceptance into an open society is to imagine that no culture is0.90
00:38:34.540better than any other, right? I mean, so many Jews, so many left of center Jews think that
00:38:40.060the defense of Western civilization in the face of Islamism is morally suspect, right? And so it's0.99
00:38:46.460easy to say, I mean, so the backlash from the right and backlash from the left is different,
00:38:49.960but the backlash from the right that I saw in Elon's tweet was, okay, not only did you
00:38:55.640over-index on Nobel Prizes, you over-indexed on progressive social justice work that has brought0.89
00:39:04.800us this kind of moral idiocy, which where you can't even acknowledge what you're confronting0.68
00:39:10.880here when people are running over your people on a sidewalk in Manchester, right?0.99
00:39:15.060And that's, again, there's not, you know, I just think obviously right of center that,0.92
00:39:20.100you know, none of the noises I've just made will make any sense in the Jewish community0.93
00:43:03.740they're very slow to change but also i think that there was this there was this real belief in
00:43:09.640in the american jewish community in america as this exception to jewish history and that was
00:43:15.900sort of this that's was sort of this grounding assumption in the american jewish community
00:43:20.480understandably so because this is you know one of the most welcoming diasporas that jews have
00:43:26.020ever experienced in a very long history and i think that there was this you know there was this
00:43:30.740belief that that that came from the liberal traditions of this country and that was i mean
00:43:35.680i think that that belief has a lot of merit where i think it falls apart is the idea that that those
00:43:42.060liberal traditions can only be found in you know one part of the political spectrum that i don't
00:43:46.800think i that i think the in a polarized age like the one we're living through where we have this
00:43:53.320sort of you know frankly uh realignment of what these you know like look we're in a bipartisan
00:43:58.820system. We have two parties. What do either of these parties mean? You know, I feel like every
00:44:03.54010 minutes it means something different. And there's an acceleration of extremism in both
00:44:09.260parties. And that's been very bewildering, not just for the Jewish community, but for a lot of
00:44:13.100people. Yeah. And illiberalism on both the left and the right. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So to me,0.52
00:44:18.000it's less about, you know, this like suicide pact. It's more about you need to vote for a party in
00:44:25.260this country you know i mean i have you know there's a lot of people who are now facing you1.00
00:44:30.260know local house and senate races that are you know really pretty crummy choices for the jewish
00:44:37.300community but honestly for everybody yeah um i mean and that's i think that's a that's a larger
00:44:41.740symptom of this you know polarization of the country i think it's interesting that often
00:44:45.920people will say that anti-semitism is sort of a canary in a coal mine where it's a sign that you
00:44:50.920know worse things are going to be happening in your society down the road it's like an early
00:44:54.300warning sign. I actually think it's the opposite. I think it's toward the end of the failures of
00:45:00.140institutions. And what you're seeing is the failures of these larger political parties.
00:45:03.540I mean, and failures of institutions you see in a lot of cases. I mean, in the cases I explore in
00:45:09.200the book, I mean, certainly universities are one of them, you know, new media. I mean, there's many
00:45:14.060different sectors where the institutions that we trusted are no longer serving us.
00:45:20.580Yeah. Well, I want to get to the institutions. I certainly want to talk about Harvard,
00:45:23.400but we haven't even spoken about anti-Zionism yet. So how would you differentiate anti-Semitism
00:45:30.640and anti-Zionism historically? I mean, I think you probably would grant that there was a moment0.98
00:45:36.220in time where one could have been an anti-Zionist without being an anti-Semite, but there's not too
00:45:42.380many people now that can fit into one part of that Venn diagram without landing in the other,
00:45:48.760Or at least if what I see online is any sign of it.
00:45:53.020I mean, so how do you think about anti-Zionism now?
00:45:56.480So I come to this with a longer historical lens than maybe a lot of people do.
00:46:01.300First of all, look, there's been a massive effort online that's been pushed by, obviously, by tyrannical regimes overseas to redefine Zionism.
00:46:10.420And that's been going on for decades and decades.
00:46:12.940Just to be clear to your listeners, Zionism is the support for a Jewish state in the historic homeland of the Jewish people in the land of Israel, and that's it. That's literally it. It has nothing to do with any particular Israeli government. There's nothing about Zionism that precludes Palestinian independence or dignity. That's really it.
00:46:32.220And what that means in reality, in terms of like living in 2026, for most Jews around the world, what it means to be a Zionist is I don't want the state of Israel to be destroyed. That's frankly all it means. And, you know, there to me, this idea of anti-Zionism, you know, comes from a place of enormous privilege because you can sit in dinner party in New York and talk about.
00:46:58.060No, certainly if you're Jewish. Yes, this is a position that comes from enormous privilege, but really for everybody. But certainly if you're Jewish, it comes from a place of enormous privilege because, you know, you can sit in a dinner party in New York and say, you know, I think that, you know, we should Israel should open up its borders and see what happens. You really can't do that if you're sitting in Israel in a bomb shelter and you know exactly what happened when the country's borders are opened on October 7th. And it wasn't a big secret before that either.0.91
00:47:23.040So that's, you know, just to clarify for your listeners, like when most Jews use the term Zionist, what they basically just mean is they do not want the state of Israel to be destroyed. And that's why it's very hard for most Jews to understand how someone claiming to be an anti-Zionist wouldn't be anti-Semitic because it doesn't make you not anti-Semitic if you only want half of the world's Jews to die or if you're only willing to allow for that possibility, which is more than just a possibility since it's the explicit political program of parties like Hamas and Hezbollah.
00:47:53.040on others. So I'm going to put that over here. But the reality is that there's a very, very long
00:47:57.160history to anti-Zionism that actually predates the state of Israel. And you're correct that1.00
00:48:02.740certainly among the Jewish community, yes, anti-Zionism was a fun hypothetical to talk
00:48:06.620about in 1920 when there was no state of Israel. It's not really a hypothetical to talk about
00:48:13.820in 2026 when there is now a state of Israel, which is where half the world's Jews live.
00:48:19.420right i mean it's sort of like let's talk about whether or not we should have a baby
00:48:23.140and then we have a baby that's 70 years old let's kill that baby right like that's really not the
00:48:28.720same conversation so it's and it's very disingenuous for people to pretend that it is so0.94
00:48:32.140that's within the jewish community but what i think it's really important for people to understand is
00:48:35.860the long history of anti-zionism because that's actually the only thing that really distinguishes
00:48:41.000zionism from other national movements of its era number one is its success as i said in creating
00:48:47.600really a successful society, which is unfortunately not true for many of the other countries that were
00:48:51.860formed in exactly the same way after World War II. But the other thing that distinguishes it
00:48:56.200is this long history of anti-Zionism. The earliest anti-Zionist political text is the
00:49:03.920Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This, you know, anti-Semitic screed.
00:49:07.960Yeah, it's a Russian hoax, an anti-Semitic screed created by the Russian secret police.0.74
00:49:11.880It was created in response to the World Zionist Congresses that had been meeting for the previous0.66
00:49:15.680six years. So it really was an objection to the idea of Jews ever having agency over their own
00:49:20.480destinies. You then have, with the rise of the Soviet Union in 1918, the Bolsheviks, who are0.57
00:49:27.560consolidating their power over what's going to become the Soviet Union, they're waging civil war.
00:49:31.860Part of their bid to get the two million Jews in the former Russian Empire on their side
00:49:35.360was this approach where they told this Jewish population, we are not anti-Semitic, we are only
00:49:41.700anti-zionist this is in 1918 it's 30 years before the state of israel is created it's probably not
00:49:49.340about netanyahu so you have this and then of course in the and of course these people are
00:49:54.480like oh we're not anti-semitic we're only anti-zionist of course they're marxist they're0.80
00:49:58.240also anti-religious so what they're saying is we love jews you just can't practice judaism
00:50:03.440or study hebrew or be a zionist and basically what this results in in practicality was the
00:50:09.380destruction of every Jewish institution in the USSR, and then the persecution of Jews in the
00:50:13.700USSR for decades. And then that continues later. The Soviets export this to their client states in
00:50:18.760the developing world. And anti-Zionism as an ideology has the result of emptying the remaining
00:50:26.220countries with Jewish populations of their Jews. Every country that takes on anti-Zionism as its
00:50:33.080official state ideology in the 20th century destroys its Jewish population, whether in the
00:50:40.240way that the Soviet Union did by persecuting its Jews, discriminating against them, oppressing them
00:50:45.180and shutting down anybody who was a dissenter, or the way that all of the countries in the Middle
00:50:50.720East and North Africa that became anti-Zionist. You know, Baghdad was, in 1940, Baghdad was 30%
00:50:57.820jewish yeah it's more than new york yes more than new york absolutely tripoli was 25 jewish new york
00:51:03.840is not 25 jewish today in 1940 tripoli and libya in libya tripoli and libya was was 25 jewish
00:51:10.560aleppo and syria was 20 jewish cairo was 15 jewish how many jews live in those countries and cities
00:51:17.020today how many of those jews have a right of return today who's worrying about that is there
00:51:21.920zero zero refugee committee over the un that's worried about that right that's what's so
00:51:26.340fascinating, right? I mean, and that's also, you've raised another, I mean, there's a whole,
00:51:29.520we have a whole conversation about the UN. But yes, I mean, this is, you know, these were people
00:51:34.520who, these were communities in a lot of cases that even predated Islam. I mean, these were
00:51:38.620ancient Jewish communities that had been there for thousands of years, under a lot of persecution
00:51:42.300during those thousands of years. And these states took on the ideology of anti-Zionism.
00:51:48.440They have all eliminated their Jewish populations, eliminated them. And I think that, I mean,
00:51:53.540the same thing happened in Poland in 1968. There was an anti-Zionist campaign in Poland where the
00:51:58.060government officially announced, we are not anti-Semitic, we are only anti-Zionist. 50,000
00:52:02.500Polish Jews lost their jobs or pushed out of society. I mean, how many Polish Jews were even
00:52:07.720left after the Holocaust, right? I mean, we managed to get rid of whoever was there.1.00
00:53:18.160in almost nothing important to be lost by never using this word Zionism again, right? Why have a
00:53:24.920word for Israel's right to exist? Israel exists. Israel is a country like many other countries.0.90
00:53:31.500It does not have an especially ignominious origin story. I mean, you can compare it to Pakistan.
00:53:38.040It's a very similar point of origin, very similar logic. Many more people died in the partitioning
00:53:44.260of India and Pakistan and then died during the founding of Israel. There's no name for this
00:53:50.280notion that Pakistan has a right to exist. There's no Pakistanism against which people0.97
00:53:57.060could organize if they wanted to. Pakistan exists if it's attacked by genocidal maniacs. No one's0.98
00:54:03.420going to begrudge it defending itself. Israel exists. Israel is surrounded by genocidal maniacs.
00:54:08.900It has to defend itself. We can quibble about how it has defended itself or the extent to0.96
00:54:14.160which has defended itself. We can prosecute war crimes where we find them. And we'll talk about
00:54:19.380the genocide blood libel with respect to the war in Gaza in a minute. But Israel exists. This is0.97
00:54:24.960no longer debatable. It's older. As you pointed out, it's older than more than half of the
00:54:31.220countries, the 190-some-odd countries acknowledged by the UN. You know, fully two-thirds of those
00:54:37.940countries were formed in similar ways by just mapmakers drawing lines on maps without much
00:54:43.400regard for the people who had to live within the boundaries enshrined by those lines.
00:54:48.240There's nothing especially unusual about Israel except for the world's commitment to0.62
00:54:55.240claiming that it is so, apart from a few things.0.84
00:54:59.840And one thing is this collaboration with that weirdness by insisting on using this
00:55:05.120word Zionism, which sounds like it was, you know, first used.0.59
00:55:11.360And I mean, it's just a spooky sounding word, too.
00:55:13.160it sounds like it was first used on, you know, Battlestar Galactica or some, you know, sci-fi
00:55:17.460program. It's just not, it's kind of the worst possible PR at this moment. I just don't see why
00:55:23.360we have to collaborate with the people who hate us by labeling ourselves in this way when all
00:55:29.460we're talking about is the fact that Israel exists. It has a right to exist. It was attacked.
00:55:35.900It has a right to defend itself. And there's this additional backstory, which again, doesn't need a
00:55:41.160name, but should be acknowledged at every point, which is that unlike most other nations on earth,
00:55:46.280Pakistan doesn't have this, nor does any other Muslim country. Unlike basically every other0.95
00:55:52.920country on earth, Israel has a different moral rationale for its existence because of the world's0.99
00:55:59.500aptitude for deciding, you know, on any given Tuesday that it wants to murder all the Jews0.98
00:56:06.680within its borders. Among the people who should have a country where they don't have to let their0.95
00:56:14.200survival be predicated upon the enduring sanity and goodwill of their neighbors, Jews are clearly
00:56:20.520on the first of that list of people who need to think about the end game of their own survival.
00:56:26.680And again, this is not based on something they've done. It's based on century after century,
00:56:31.100their mere survival throwing up this challenge again and again of eliminationist antisemitism
00:56:37.060being birthed anew in new contexts for new reasons, but again, reliably in country after
00:56:43.020country through the centuries. But again, we don't need a name for that moral commitment. We just
00:56:48.400need to remain cognizant of history and of the all too pressing evidence of our senses, which is
00:56:54.940Much of the world at this moment is rallying to a cry that is actually, you know, in many cases, explicitly genocidal.
00:57:03.720Yeah. So why would you give those people ground by ceding your own word that is 3,000 years old?
00:57:08.500Because you just don't need the word. And the word's confusing. Like, you and I have to explain it.
00:57:12.760I agree that. Well, so I agree. Yes, you're correct about that.
00:57:15.960The reason it's confusing is because of this genocidal campaign that has invested enormous resources, billions of dollars, decades of effort.
00:57:24.020But let me just add one more piece, Dara. The Zionism, if it was ever—I'll grant you we needed a word for the aspiration to found a Jewish state for all the reasons Jews might have wanted to do that, their survival as a people being perhaps first among them.
00:57:45.300But now the state exists. It's been here for 80 years. The ism has been accomplished. Why maintain this as a talking point when all we need to talk about is the fact that Israel exists and can fight a just war in its own self-defense?0.87
00:58:01.120So I would buy this argument, and a lot of people have made this argument. I would buy this argument if it weren't arising at exactly the moment when you have this turbocharged genocidal movement that is dumping billions and billions of dollars into this, quote, anti-Zionist campaign. Because you wouldn't have said this to me 15 years ago.
00:58:19.540I think I would have. I mean, it's the same. But you wouldn't have cared. You wouldn't have cared. Well, it's the same logic. I'll just give you one other analogy. So I'm known for having argued to the atheist community as a famous atheist at the time at an atheist conference in D.C. I basically said that or I did, in fact, say that that we shouldn't use the word atheism. Why use the word atheism?
00:58:41.900Because it's a negative. In other words, it's like, yeah, it's a gift to our enemies. It's defined by our enemies. It's trumpeted by our enemies. And all we really need to talk about is reason and science and common sense and evidence and logic. And if you want to repudiate the claims of religious dogmatists, all you need are those strong intellectual virtues. And that's it. You don't have to define yourself in the same way that you wouldn't say, yes, I'm a non-astrologer. Right.
00:59:09.260You wouldn't go to a conference for non-astrologers.1.00
00:59:11.400You would just say, astrology seems like bullshit.0.99
00:59:16.040And you never have to define yourself in opposition to it.
00:59:18.200And so it is with, I mean, it's a similar logic.
00:59:20.400I just think it's, I mean, the image I gave in that talk was that it's almost like in
00:59:25.120the aftermath of a crime scene when the police put down the tape of the dead body, you know,
00:59:29.600outlining the dead body on the sidewalk.
00:59:31.960You know, we walk up, we sort of dutifully walk up to that silhouette of a dead man
00:59:36.960and just lie down in it and conform ourselves to the aspect of our own, you know, destruction
00:59:43.540rhetorically, it seems like a way of losing the debate before you even started.
00:59:47.240So that is one side of it. Here's why I'm pushing back. The Jewish community has been through this
00:59:52.520so many times before, where there's a corruption of the language that we use to describe ourselves.0.87
00:59:58.460And then the Jewish community is like, oh, let's change the word. And I give an example of this0.99
01:00:03.720in the book. I was, I was asked, I tell the story of a book where I'm speaking at a private school
01:00:09.020and in the pre-call before my, before my talk, I was, you know, one of the people of faculty or
01:00:14.740administrators on one of these calls. The Z word. Yeah, said like, oh, when you come to speak to our
01:00:19.000school, you know, please avoid using the Z word because, you know, that might, you know, that
01:00:23.080might offend people. And I said, well, should I also stop and avoid using the J word because I0.97
01:00:27.180don't want to offend people who hate Jews. And then they just sort of look at me. And the reality
01:00:32.480is that that is exactly what happened in the 20th century with the Jewish community in the United
01:00:37.080States. People did not use the word Jews to describe themselves because haters had turned
01:00:41.820it into a slur. And I think it's so interesting to me that a lot of Jewish organizations until
01:00:47.940the early, even the early 21st century in America did not use the word Jews or Judaism to describe
01:00:54.920themselves. My children, when they went to preschool at the JCC, the Jewish Community
01:00:59.140center near me. I personally went to that. I live in the same town where I grew up. I went to that
01:01:03.720JCC for preschool myself. But when I went to it, it was called the YMHA, Young Men's Hebrew
01:01:10.220Association, right? Because people were using this word Hebrew. The reform movement in the
01:01:15.080American, you know, reform Judaism in the United States. I was at the conference in 2002 when they
01:01:20.880changed their name finally after over 100 years from the Union of American Hebrew Congregations
01:01:27.220to Union for Reform Judaism. It wasn't until 2002 they were willing to put that word on a sign.
01:01:34.040And that is because of this raging hate. I mean, the Jewish publications in the 19th and early
01:01:40.44020th century, they didn't have the word Jewish in their name. They would be like the American0.84
01:01:45.260Israelite. Those are the kind of names they were using because haters had taken over the word.
01:01:52.220And I just sort of, to me, I understand everything you're saying, and I agree with it.
01:01:56.740This is a 3,000 year old word, Zion. It's on like every other page of the traditional prayer book, right? This is part of, and so I'm not willing to get rid of this word, is what I will say, because I just, I call BS on the idea that people are getting rid of it suddenly now in 2026, because, oh, we don't need it anymore. Nobody was talking about that in 1980. No one was talking about that in 1970.
01:02:21.800What does it mean to be a Zionist with Israel already existing?
01:02:26.640Now, I'm telling you what it means in practicality is you don't want your friends and family in Israel to be murdered.
01:03:06.880You know, I was out there, you know, making these sorts of noises.
01:03:10.940But I didn't have a word. I didn't have a bespoke philosophy aimed only at Denmark for that. I mean, this was a civilizational clash between the values, the liberal values of an open society and sheer barbarism.
01:04:34.780And, you know, much of the anti-Semitism in the Muslim world, I mean, some of it is endemic there and has a theological basis, but much of it is an import directly from Nazism.
01:04:45.580Maybe we'll get there and talk about the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
01:04:47.960Yes. But there's a sense in the West or in the diaspora that safety for Jews, the shoring up of our civil rights and our ability to just live happy lives in the West depends on our doubling down on our identity and playing the game of identity politics as well as anyone else can play it.0.51
01:05:12.020And, again, I think that's a mistake. I think identity politics, maybe this wasn't always the
01:05:17.460case, maybe it wasn't the case during the civil rights era in America, but I think now identity
01:05:21.460politics really is just poison, right? I just think it's contributing to much of the craziness,
01:05:28.040the populist craziness that's happening right of center, much of Trumpism, I think is ascribable
01:05:32.680to that. I think the wokeness epidemic we had was, you know, kind of the reductio ad absurdum
01:05:38.720of where identity politics takes us.0.95
01:06:07.560You know, the equality before the law, free speech, et cetera, women's rights, I mean, political equality, et cetera, against their enemies, whoever they are, whether they're Islamists or Nazis or, you know, ideologues of whatever flavor.
01:06:20.960And if we do that successfully, well, then by definition, we're protecting Jews in Sydney, you know, and in London and in New York.
01:06:29.500And so the endgame is not for Jews to have some kind of supercharged commitment to their Jewishness and to prosecute the primacy of that identity on the political stage, along with the people who think black and brown people have to be organized around their blackness and brownness until the end of the world.
01:06:49.980No, we actually just need liberal values.
01:06:59.500I agree with it. I think that one example of this would be something like, and this is something, and we still haven't talked about this, but where I was in this committee at Harvard and also where I've seen this in other places, sometimes people will fight for, let's say, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism.
01:07:18.720And I always think that that's a little bit odd because, you know, is there like an official definition of racism? Is there an official definition of homophobia? Like this sort of seems strange to me.
01:07:28.940And I will tell you that when one of my children was subjected to hate crime from one of his peers at a summer program, the way that this was the way that we were able to get the university that sponsored this program to recognize it as a hate crime and act accordingly was not by pointing to some statute about some special definition of anti-Semitism, but pointing out that my son was being harassed due to his membership in protected classes of shared ancestry.
01:07:55.780I mean, that's already part of American law. So that's one example. National origin. If you're firing your Israeli-American DJ because they're a, quote, Zionist, that's against American civil rights legislation to discriminate against someone based on national origin. You don't need a special law for a special case. These laws already exist. They're not always used that way, but those laws already exist.
01:08:20.480So, yes, I agree with you. I think that obviously free expression is extremely important, but also that, you know, civil rights legislation as it exists is already has a lot of tools that I think people are not adequately using. And a part of the reason they're not adequately using it is because we have this legacy of thinking that Jews are a religious group. Right. And so, you know, it's like if you're, you know, if somebody is like, you know, vandalizing your kid's room with free Palestine signs, you know, it's like, well, what does this have to do with religion?
01:08:47.800right it's like well no this is this person's being attacked because of their membership in
01:08:53.800a protected class defined by shared ancestry right and it's even it even says in the statute
01:08:58.260real or perceived shared ancestry yeah right so i mean like you know those it was already exist
01:09:03.420that's just one very very narrow example i do agree with you i think that the place where
01:09:08.020there's room for and why you often will hear leaders within the jewish community talking about
01:09:14.180shoring up Jewish identity is because I think that a lot of people even within the Jewish community
01:09:19.980have been living in this environment for so long that they don't even recognize what is happening
01:09:27.060to them. They don't have the language for understanding it. Because, yeah, if you think
01:09:31.660that being Jewish is a religion and then you discover that your dorm room has been vandalized
01:09:37.080with Free Palestine signs, your first thought is like, oh, is this just a political disagreement?
01:09:42.520You know, your mind doesn't go to the first place of someone vandalized my dorm room. And it wouldn't matter if they vandalized my dorm room with signs that said save the whales. They would still be vandalizing my dorm room. But or and in addition to the fact that my dorm room was just vandalized, it was in fact vandalized based on this idea of shared ancestry. That was why my dorm room was vandalized. And that makes it a hate crime.
01:10:05.120So, you know, people don't have the vocabulary or the knowledge about Jewish identity, quite frankly, by design, to even be able to sort of do that thought process where that becomes obvious.
01:10:15.420So for that reason, I think it is important to understand Jewish identity better, not because you want a seat at the victim table of, you know, everybody's favorite totem pole of persecuted minorities, not for that reason, but for the reason of just even just understanding what anti-Semitism looks like in the 21st century.
01:10:35.280You sort of need to already, and I've noticed this when I'm educating people about this, that people don't understand who Jews are. I mean, I came across this at Harvard all the time, like these people in their, you know, whatever their DEI department was, were like struggling to figure out how to fit Jews into their like drop down menus of persecuted minorities.
01:10:53.420Like they could not process. And, you know, part of that was, you know, you could say it was cynical, but it was part of it was like a genuine confusion about like, you know, I don't even understand who Jews are well enough to put them in this box. And so therefore I'm going to put them in the box that I think they fit in, which, by the way, is something that's dictated by this like large imperial history of how we like to handle these minorities that don't fit our box. And the reason they don't fit their box is because, you know, they're too old.0.69
01:11:15.900Tell me what happened at Harvard and take both sides of it. I'd love to know what happened, just what was happening to students at Harvard and places like Harvard. And what was your experience trying to kind of midwife some institutional sanity there?
01:11:33.620Yes. Not very successfully, I'm sorry to say. Yes. I was asked to participate in this anti-Semitism advisory group to the after October 7th, 2023. So this was all happening in the fall of 2023. I was asked to be part of this anti-Semitism advisory group to the now former president of Harvard, who your listeners may remember, did not take a whole lot of our advice.
01:11:55.400So this preceded the congressional testimony.
01:11:58.520But were you still, your group still existed during that testimony?
01:12:02.120Yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes, we did. Yes, it was quite horrifying.
01:12:05.540That's a great day of television for you and the family.
01:12:07.980It sure was. It sure was. Yes. So this was, you know, we were, I was recruited. I was one of six people who were on this committee. I was actually the only person who wasn't a professor at Harvard. Well, there was one person who was one of the board of overseers, or I don't pretend to understand that.
01:12:50.680Yes, I knew I had a couple sweatshirts. So and really, but they recruited me because I was a national voice on this issue because of my previous book. And at first I was, you know, I was reluctant to participate in this because I thought, like, are they just doing this as lip service? Like they can slap my name on it and make it sound like they're doing something. Oh, boy, it was not lip service. We were meeting with these people for hours and hours every week. And we were meeting with these, you know, top administrators with with, you know, Claudine Gay, who was the president at the time, with the provost at the time, who's now the president, Alan Garber, with a number of other people.
01:13:20.680deans and sub-deans and people like that. We occasionally had meetings where we brought in
01:13:24.920the deans of all the various schools. And from the minute my name became public that I was on
01:13:30.680this committee, I was just inundated with Jewish students asking for help. And what was so
01:13:36.320interesting to me about this was that it was completely different from the picture that
01:13:39.880came through in the media portrayals of this. Because in the media, the portrayal of this was
01:13:47.900all about, you know, student protesters, you know, and when does, you know, when does it go too far
01:13:53.500with free expression? You know, it was like, you know, where do you draw the line and this sort of
01:13:57.040thing? None of the students that were coming to me, the Jewish students, you know, asking for help,
01:14:02.620nobody was complaining about, oh, I don't like the slogan they used at this rally. Instead, what they
01:14:07.560were complaining about was, I don't like people vandalizing my dorm room. I don't like being
01:14:12.200chased through the law school. I don't like being followed around campus with someone holding0.95
01:14:17.820a megaphone yelling at me personally. I don't like having someone spit in my face on the way
01:14:22.360to class. I don't like my professor throwing me out of class for being Israeli. I mean,
01:14:29.140these are the kinds of things. I don't like someone waiting for me outside my dorm room.
01:14:32.600I mean, there was like one person who like I no longer who was like, I no longer eat in the
01:14:35.680dining hall anymore because there's these people who are waiting for me. They wait for me outside
01:14:39.320my room, wait for me to come into the dining room. They just follow me yelling at me. I mean,
01:14:42.800this harassment. Yeah. Right. I mean, this isn't like I mean, harassment, you know,
01:14:46.580stalking, harassment, intimidation. I mean, these are against Massachusetts state law.
01:14:50.440I mean, you know, we don't have to sit here and parse like, oh, is it political expression? Like,
01:14:53.460it's not political expression to stalk someone. It's not political expression to vandalize
01:14:57.220property. You know, it's a Title VI violation to throw somebody out of class based on their
01:15:01.600national origin. So, I mean, you know, these are the kinds of complaints that people were
01:15:06.100sharing with us. And it was just amazing, like, that there were so many of these complaints that,
01:15:11.880and what was astounding was that, you know, they had, as you mentioned, this whole DEI apparatus
01:15:15.840at the school, there are easily 100 people at Harvard in various schools and departments
01:15:21.320and things whose only job was to foster community and belonging or whatever lingo they were
01:15:45.080And it was just, you know, it was so astonishing to me. And our committee were just like bringing this fire hose of complaints to the administrators. And in every case, it was being treated. Each situation was being treated as though it were an isolated situation. And then here's 10 reasons why we can't do anything about this particular situation. And it was like it took a while to figure out that that was what was happening.
01:16:06.440I mean, there was one point where our whole committee threatened to quit. Then they brought in the big guns. They hauled in somebody from the corporation. And then they made fools of themselves on national television. I mean, that was sort of, to me, it was amazing that here were the anti-Semitism advisory group to the president of Harvard. Not once in all these hour-long meetings did she ever ask us for our advice on what to say in Congress on this topic.
01:16:28.060Well, the thing that was so galling about the testimony of those three presidents, wasn't just Claudine Gay, was that the double standard was so obvious. I mean, it was just it was obvious that had this anything like this been happening to trans kids or black kids on campuses, this would be over in 15 minutes. Right. There's no way there'd be this.0.52
01:16:51.420In fact, it exactly had happened. There was a case. Because I remember one instance, there was one particularly egregious instance where a Jewish student was assaulted by these students who were, you know, these anti-Israel protesters. And, you know, we told them, you know, you need to get ahead of this, right? You need to put out a statement, you know, to the whole, you know, not to the world, but like to the university community saying this happened, this is an anti-Semitic attack, this is on, you know, this is unacceptable on our campus.
01:17:14.400And they told us, oh, we can't do that because we can't disclose these people's names. It's a legal issue. It's confidential. And we told them, well, then do it without revealing their names. Oh, people are going to figure out who they are, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, at the time, we just accepted it.
01:17:31.740But then it was a little bit later that I realized there had been a very similar incident, as you say, homophobic incident at the law school the semester before where, you know, somebody had assaulted somebody while yelling an anti-gay slur.
01:17:42.200And this is exactly how they responded to it.
01:17:44.560They put out a statement to the entire law school community that this homophobic incident had happened.
01:17:50.180And they said, you know, this is unacceptable on our campus.
01:17:53.260And they just I mean, it was like transparent, transparently obvious that this is being treated completely differently.
01:17:58.880Yeah. And then the whole scope of it. I mean, just imagine, you know, in the worst massacre of blacks in living memory, if there had been people in support of, you know, protesting in support of that massacre in Harvard Yard the very next day, just how much patience would there be for the free speech rights of these kids doing immense brand damage to the institution?
01:18:19.720you know with with uh you know signs of you know dylan roof you know having massacred uh black
01:18:25.620congregants in a church uh you know he's he's our hero you know with the harvard the harvard
01:18:31.260dylan roof club yeah how long is that going to last at harvard right exactly you know these kids
01:18:35.720are going to get kicked out of the school immediately harvard's going to recognize that
01:18:38.660it has a brand that it has to protect and it doesn't like uh genocidal lunatics among its0.99
01:18:44.400alums uh it doesn't want to be on the cvs of any of these dumb kids uh so these kids are going to0.99
01:18:50.600be expelled right and it's oh quite the opposite not just not only were they not expelled in fact0.97
01:18:54.940the two students who were you know actually ended up being criminally charged for assaulting this
01:18:59.240jewish student one of them was made a speaker at commencement and the other one was given a
01:19:03.38065 000 fellowship oh no i missed it i could not make this up yes yeah but you know it's honestly
01:19:11.500To me, what was so revealing about all of that was something I really realized after they dissolved our committee, because eventually they did dissolve our committee basically because they didn't want our advice.
01:19:19.840They moved to some internal task force.
01:19:22.400What was so interesting to me, though, is that digging into this later, I saw that there was, like you said, wouldn't they have just thrown these people out immediately?
01:19:30.700Wouldn't they want that not to be associated with their brand?
01:19:33.300What you realize when you dig into this topic is that this is their brand.
01:19:39.400To me, the deeper issue was not what anyone, you know, students were yelling at a protest. It's that they're teaching this stuff. And when I say this stuff, I mean, anti-Semitic wise from tyrannical regimes. So, yeah. And when you dig into that, I mean, it was so obvious. I write about this in the book. I wrote about it at the time.
01:19:57.720For example, the Harvard School of Public Health had a partnership program with Beirut Zayt University in Ramallah. Beirut Zayt University in Ramallah is, in fact, a segregated apartheid institution. Israeli Jews are not allowed on the campus.
01:20:12.640And, you know, there was a Jewish student at the at the School of Public Health who at one point said to me, it's not even clear to me that, you know, if there were an Israeli Harvard student who was enrolled in this program, they wouldn't be able to participate in this partnership program, which means that the program itself is discriminatory by American law.
01:20:28.040Right. Like and it wasn't even like it was a Middle Eastern studies program.
01:20:31.180Like it was literally a program of public health.
01:20:33.180Like you could have done this in I mean, are there no public health issues other places in the world?
01:20:37.320Like, why is this program not in Guatemala?
01:20:38.700It was like, really? And then they were teaching a class at the School of Public Health. The title of the class was Settler Colonial Determinants of Health, where the premise of the class is that Israel is a colonial power. Not like, oh, we're going to discuss this. That's the premise of the class. And you just look through every department. They were teaching this material. And as I say in the book, worse things emerged at other universities. I mean, Harvard at least doesn't have a campus in Qatar.
01:21:08.700you know, Cornell does, Georgetown does, you know, Northwestern does. I'm going to get the
01:21:13.020schools wrong and your listeners can correct me, but Texas A&M did. They recently closed it.
01:21:18.740But you can crow about academic freedom, but all of the campuses that are in Qatar,
01:21:24.140the Qatari royal family is censoring the syllabi. You're not allowed to say anything negative about
01:21:29.500the emir. You're not allowed to say anything. You're not allowed to, you know, defame. It's
01:21:32.700like, you know, worse than that, they're a straight up, you know, Muslim Brotherhood1.00
01:21:36.460theological clone you know they're they're also the greatest greatest outside funders of0.97
01:21:43.780american universities yes on planet earth i mean they've got 300 000 citizens uh you know three
01:21:50.500million uh guest foreign workers guest workers yes but um their funding to the tune of uh you
01:21:57.720know it's north of 10 billion dollars i think in recent decades and they're the funders of hamas
01:22:02.980And they're the funders of Hamas. So it's like, you know, you have this joint investment in American, in Ivy League schools and Hamas. So it's like not such a surprise that it's these Ivy League schools where you have the support for Hamas. It's the same funding. It's like more than that.
01:22:16.040Let's talk about just the vitiation of institutions across the board.
01:22:38.440But the way in which an organization like the U.N. has been vitiated by Islamism and for many years backstopped by the Soviet Union and its Arab client states.0.50
01:22:52.300I mean, the net result is that, you know, Israel has had more ultimatums passed against it by the U.N. than all other countries combined.0.64
01:23:07.520But the problem is, it sounds like, we're about to describe this, but what we're describing sounds like a conspiracy theory against the Jews, against Israel. And yet, the net result of all these machinations has been to make it all too easy, in fact, inevitable for the lazy journalist or the lazy thinker to just say, well, the UN has passed a resolution against Israel.
01:23:33.680You know, Israel's just like South Africa. South Africa had the apartheid problem. The world rallied against it, and that was all to the good. Israel's got this, you know, genocide problem and an apartheid problem. And where there's smoke, there's fire, right? You have all these institutions saying there's something wrong here. I mean, some of the institutions aren't even what they seem to be. I mean, I forget what the acronym is, but, you know, it's like the world congregation of genocide scholars where you have to pay $30 to be a member.
01:24:03.680Yes, and I think 20% of the members live in Iraq.
01:24:33.020You have to do so much work to convince yourself that these, what have advertised themselves to us for, you know, as long as anyone has been alive, these authorities on the morally correct governance of humanity.
01:24:49.480I mean, like, well, what is the liberal world order if it doesn't include the UN, right, as a body that can adjudicate, you know, claims among countries?
01:24:57.940As far as I can tell, the UN has been utterly vitiated on this topic.
01:25:03.020I mean, you just got like you not only can't you trust what the U.N. thinks about Israel, they're guaranteed to be lying about what is happening in Israel.
01:25:11.680I mean, it's so far past that. It's so far past that.
01:25:14.340I remember when my daughter was reading this book before it came out.
01:25:18.120My daughter is in college age and she was saying to her younger brothers, she was like, did you guys know that the head of the U.N. was an actual Nazi?
01:25:28.640It's like, yes, like, you know, like people are old enough to remember this.
01:25:31.980You know, Kurt Waldheim was, in fact, a Nazi, not like a Nazi, meaning someone I don't agree with, meaning a Nazi officer in the Balkans who liquidated Jewish communities.
01:26:08.080Yeah. Iran was on the Women's Rights Council. I mean, at one point, you know, Libio was on the Human Rights Council. I mean, it was the head of the Human Rights Council. I mean, it's, I mean, it's tragic.0.82
01:26:16.520So, I mean, we must—what is there to do except declare bankruptcy on that front? I mean, that's just—it's clearly not working. It's not honest. It does not have the moral integrity it pretends to have.
01:26:29.460So what do we do in light of that? I mean, because as far as I can tell, even the New York Times can't keep this stuff straight.
01:26:36.300No. No, they cannot. There was just a study of the New York Times showing, you know, every article that it had published on the war in Gaza over the past three years.
01:26:44.560And it was demonstrated. I think there were almost no articles that presented Hamas as an agent in this war with a military. It was always presented as the Israelis are attacking civilians. It was never presented as... There was never any presentation of Hamas's organization of child soldiers, let's say. They were just not treated as an agent in the war by the vast majority of articles.
01:27:11.860I'm not saying it was never covered at all, but I mean, it was, you know, the level of distortion was just insane.
01:27:16.780No one ever demanded, virtually no one ever demanded that Hamas release the hostages as a mechanism to bring the conflict to an end, right?
01:27:26.740It was just Israel had to stop its operations in Gaza, but it's as though Hamas had nothing they could do.
01:32:43.360You know, maybe the tour of Auschwitz is still considered an apocryphal story, but he definitely met with Himmler and Hitler.
01:32:51.780He trained Muslim soldiers in the Balkans to fight with the Nazis.0.85
01:32:54.500So it's just like, this is, it is no accident that a core rejectionism of the state of Israel is in the kind of founding DNA of Palestinian nationalism. This is not a, it's not an accident that we haven't magically found a two-state solution here.0.68
01:33:10.020It's the foundational, you know, the rejection of, it's beyond the rejection of the state of Israel. Again, to me, this all comes back to this idea that Jewish civilization is an anti-tyrannical movement and the Jews have refused to bow to tyrants. If you think of it now, you know, they're still facing an empire in the Middle East, right?0.75
01:33:28.800I mean, this is an Islamist empire in all but name that is trying to eradicate all minorities from the Middle East.0.76
01:33:33.620I mean, they succeeded in genocide against the Yazidis, for example.0.77
01:33:37.460If you think about how Coptic Christians are treated in Egypt, I mean, there's sort of the bloody edges of this Islamist empire in Africa, where there's in Nigeria, for example, in Sudan.
01:33:48.320So, I mean, this is like a small, a tiny, tiny minority that refuses to bow to tyrants.0.94
01:33:55.620And that was true in the past, and it's still true now.
01:34:48.920I mean, it's just, these memes have spread everywhere.
01:34:52.060Is it just, are we just going to play whack-a-mole until the end of the world with each one?
01:34:56.980I mean, we have some of the biggest podcasters hosting a lie like this.
01:35:01.940The greater Israel lie is harder to track down, but we just have overt Holocaust denial going out to tens of millions of people.
01:35:08.780I mean, you spent a lot of time thinking about Holocaust education and have concluded that it's actually just insufficient to deal with the nature of this problem.
01:35:16.580Yes, thank you for saying insufficient.0.98
01:35:18.020I'm not against college education, but it is insufficient for us to face this.
01:35:22.000So maybe as we get toward closing, just rhetorically, what is the necessary and sufficient message to communicate given enough time and a large enough audience?
01:35:35.740Well, so this for me is not rhetorical because I founded a nonprofit recently to exactly to spread this message starting in 12 schools.
01:35:43.880It's called the Tell Institute, and our mission is to educate the broader public about Jewish civilization and the dynamics of anti-Semitism for well over 2,000 years around this completely different framing, which we talked about at the beginning of our conversation, about Jewish civilization as this anti-tyrannical movement, as this movement, this tiny countercultural minority that refuses to bow to tyrants, and how that idea has triggered dominant societies and people who want to gain or maintain power to rely on this lie that Jews are destroying.0.66
01:36:13.880what you value the most in order to rile up populations against the Jews. So what our program0.92
01:36:20.540does, I should say, it's eight lessons. This is not like a year-long class. It's really a crash
01:36:25.120course. We have been test driving it in public high schools with a lot of success. The biggest
01:36:30.720thing that we are hearing back from students and teachers is, who knew? Like, wow, this is total
01:36:35.560news. People are even shocked. Jews have been around for 3,000 years. What? Even that is shocking
01:36:40.120to people. And, you know, look, our goal in this program is not just about content. It isn't just
01:36:44.820like, oh, here's yet another identity group in your identity alphabet soup. It's about this,
01:36:49.180that this civilization has within it some of the roots of world history, right? I mean,
01:36:55.040you don't have Christianity and Islam without Judaism. You don't have, you know, a lot of the0.97
01:36:59.060ideas of the American founders come from their understanding of the Hebrew Bible. You know,
01:37:02.860it's very hard to understand those trends in our history, a lot of which lead to liberal democracy
01:37:07.800is certainly not the only thing that's leading to liberal democracy. But this is a huge contribution
01:37:12.120to a lot of the things that we now think of as part of our shared civilization. So introducing
01:37:17.960those ideas and also introducing how you might end up being manipulated and how to avoid it.
01:37:24.460That's the skill piece. Because ultimately, and this comes from research that I've seen about
01:37:30.440what researchers will call pre-bunking, right? That it's much easier to pre-bunk
01:37:36.960information instead of to debunk a lie once people have already had the lie to prepare people that
01:37:42.220you're going to be hearing this lie and you should be ready for it. Who might be manipulating you?
01:37:46.960And so those are the questions that we're asking in this curriculum. We teach about
01:37:50.820antisemitism through case studies because the goal is pattern recognition. We literally have
01:37:54.740it as like a chart, like the big lie chart, like who is the liar in this instance? What value in
01:37:59.920this society are they targeting and claiming that Jews are violating? It's like a chart that like a
01:38:05.00013-year-old can understand. And then the last piece of it is, how is new media accelerating
01:38:09.800this lie? Because new media, of course, is the Wild West. You don't yet know who's credible and
01:38:14.100who's not. And the way you're establishing credibility is through exposure, otherwise
01:38:17.540known as popularity contest. And remember, this is a tiny countercultural minority that refuses1.00
01:38:22.580to bow to tyrants. Most people are bowing to tyrants. And we're trying to get people to scale.
01:38:26.880How are you hoping to scale this curriculum? I mean, ultimately, this has to be a digital
01:38:32.180product i imagine yes it's going to have to be yeah so we look we've we've been thinking about
01:38:37.020this we are we started this in public schools also another thing then interesting you know
01:38:41.700maybe less relevant for most of your listeners but we also i discovered very quickly into developing
01:38:46.440this that i also had a lot of people in the jewish community coming to me saying you know our students
01:38:51.060don't know this either can we teach this in our synagogue bar and bat mitzvah program um so i
01:38:55.440developed a version of it and that goes to what you mentioned earlier actually what you said before
01:38:59.460about, oh, I meet all these liberal rabbis who were so surprised that they're allies. Those are
01:39:04.680exactly the people who are now coming to us about this, because they realized in the last few years
01:39:08.620that this was, you know, their frame was, something was off about their frame. But yeah, we're doing
01:39:13.300this in public schools. But you're correct that there's going to have to be a direct-to-consumer
01:39:16.780version of this. And we are thinking about how to do that and how to do that the most effectively.