RadixJournal - September 29, 2023


Aspirationally Jewish


Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

136.9722

Word count

1,463

Sentence count

113

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Alan Dershowitz is a leading voice in the anti-anti-Zionist movement. He's also a friend of the ADL and a professor of law at the University of Toronto. But what does that have to do with Elon Musk? And why does he call himself a Jew?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 So I would actually praise Alan Dershowitz for his commentary.
00:00:09.460 So Dershowitz has dedicated his life to promoting Zionism. 0.70
00:00:17.200 So he obviously has a dog in this fight, no question.
00:00:22.540 But I would praise him first off as just being the most clear and explicit.
00:00:30.460 So all I heard before Alan got on was just a lot of platitudes that had some very strong built-in assumptions, I would say.
00:00:43.120 And there was also some things that were pretty interesting that were revealed by seemingly throwaway comments.
00:00:51.180 Because maybe I'll just go into those just because those are kind of wider.
00:00:56.720 So this notion of being aspirationally Jewish came up.
00:01:02.520 And Elon was talking about this.
00:01:05.380 And he said something to the effect of, well, I'm aware that all anti-Semites say that they have a Jewish friend.
00:01:14.860 But I would say that the majority of my friends are Jewish.
00:01:18.380 So that's whatever.
00:01:20.440 I mean, that might be true for a lot of people.
00:01:23.100 You're in Silicon Valley.
00:01:24.380 You're in the world of finance.
00:01:26.600 Whatever.
00:01:27.260 I don't care about that.
00:01:28.520 But then he offered some interesting things, which he said that Elon is a very common name in Israel.
00:01:37.160 And that is true.
00:01:40.820 And that is pretty interesting, although not definitive.
00:01:45.880 And then he mentioned that his father sent him to Hebrew school when he was growing up in South Africa.
00:01:52.920 So I would ask the question, you know, you don't just casually go to Hebrew school.
00:02:01.640 I mean, maybe you might in some circumstance, like I've heard of plenty of people, including Jews, who, you know, they went to a Catholic school for whatever reason. 0.62
00:02:12.240 And it's better, it's close to their home, the public school sucks, etc.
00:02:16.900 So, I mean, there's some plausible deniability about it.
00:02:20.540 However, it just seems curious to be going to Hebrew school when you're young.
00:02:26.840 He also said that his father took him to Israel when he was 13 and he saw the wall.
00:02:32.360 So I presume he's referring to the Wailing Wall, all this kind of stuff.
00:02:37.480 Now, again, like maybe his father had great dreams for him.
00:02:43.380 He knew that one day he would be a politician who would go and touch the wall with his hand while wearing a yarmulke or something.
00:02:51.060 But it's interesting.
00:02:54.460 Now, Elon's estranged from his father.
00:02:57.040 So I don't quite know what to make of it.
00:03:00.180 There are all these curious suggestions about Elon's background, that he's part Asian.
00:03:07.200 I mean, to be honest, in terms of his physiognomy and even comparing it to his brothers, if you see some of those early childhood photos, there was a lot of these being passed around after the release of the recent book by Walter Isaacson.
00:03:25.860 And if someone said that he is half Asian or a quarter Asian, I would believe them. 1.00
00:03:34.920 There's just something about it.
00:03:36.080 Now, that doesn't kind of mean anything.
00:03:40.000 Maybe his father isn't his father.
00:03:42.100 Might mean that.
00:03:44.040 But it's just there.
00:03:45.340 But there does seem to be a suggestion that Elon's connection with Judaism goes deeper.
00:03:53.200 All of these things are plausibly deniable.
00:03:55.180 But I don't know.
00:03:57.700 Many, many Jews in South Africa got out of there at the end of apartheid time.
00:04:03.320 And it would fit a pre-existing narrative, a kind of personal narrative of a lot of people.
00:04:11.800 You know, you meet many Russians who immigrated to the U.S. or Canada or Europe, you know, in 1992 or 1996.
00:04:21.100 It fits a narrative.
00:04:24.120 So I don't know, just saying it was rather odd.
00:04:30.180 I think it also would throw a lot of cold water on what seemed to be happening about two weeks ago, which was that, you know, there was this notion that Elon is just outright attacking the ADL.
00:04:47.400 And, yeah, I think it throws some cold water on that, or it kind of turns a fastball into a curveball, so to speak.
00:04:56.520 I think it's worth looking into these things.
00:05:01.760 At the very least, just to understand where he's coming from.
00:05:05.160 Because Elon says a lot of different things, and they're contradictory.
00:05:10.300 There's, you know, I'm a free speech absolutist.
00:05:13.480 And then there's also, oh, you have freedom of speech, but not freedom of breach.
00:05:16.940 As Alan Dershowitz correctly pointed out, that is already, like, sliding rather fast, quickly into censorship land.
00:05:27.340 Just saying that, it rhymes, it sounds better, I guess, but you're already kind of, like, surrendering the past before the battle takes place.
00:05:36.700 And I think it's worthwhile just knowing who he is.
00:05:40.300 And I'm not sure Walter Isaacson would be the right person to reveal that, to be honest.
00:05:48.820 But to go back, I'll just jump around a little bit and throw out some of my ideas.
00:05:54.820 You guys can pick up on them, and we can have a conversation.
00:05:58.320 Alan Dershowitz, to his credit, did not engage in platitudes.
00:06:04.580 He did engage in kind of memorable visual metaphors, but I think those are actually really helpful.
00:06:15.700 And he objected to something that I think Elon might have said or someone else on the call when they said, oh, we need to draw a line.
00:06:24.080 And he's like, look, we're not drawing lines, because a line, you're on either side of that.
00:06:32.380 And instead, you should draw a circle, which is legal speech under the U.S. Constitution.
00:06:38.120 And I guess in this case, this is a very American-centric discussion.
00:06:42.140 Obviously, different lands have different laws.
00:06:47.100 But he said, so there's what is legal, of course, and then there's what's permissible in a U.S. country that should, at the very least, be kind of inspired by the ideals of the U.S. Constitution and should reflect them and certainly be coherently connected to them.
00:07:10.100 And so everything is inside, every ism is inside.
00:07:15.560 So Zionism is in there, anti-Zionism, presumably white supremacism is in there, Buddhism, Islam, et cetera, et cetera.
00:07:25.020 It's all in there outside of things that are quite obvious abrogations of law, things that where speech turns into crime, because speech is an absolute, of course.
00:07:40.640 And that is, who knows, sex trafficking, explicit death threats, selling illegal items on a platform, et cetera, et cetera.
00:07:50.900 It's actually kind of easy.
00:07:52.120 But what he said is that because we're all in this one circle, you can't police.
00:07:58.220 If you're going to police someone else, you're going to police yourself.
00:08:00.500 So it's kind of self-reinforcing.
00:08:03.220 And Alan, all of these esteemed Jewish leaders were on the program saying, oh, I'd love to talk with you offline, Elon, about this.
00:08:12.200 You should come visit us.
00:08:13.480 We should all go to Auschwitz. 0.99
00:08:14.900 I know you know about this, but I want you to feel it.
00:08:17.860 You need to feel what this means.
00:08:19.520 All of this stuff, they all wanted to kind of get with Elon.
00:08:23.320 It was kind of embarrassing almost.
00:08:27.000 There were threats, implied threats, probably is more accurate.
00:08:31.380 But there was also a kind of cloying bootlicking going on.
00:08:36.940 It was strange.
00:08:38.560 But anyway, Dershowitz offered something that was actually constructive.
00:08:46.120 And so I would praise him for that.
00:08:48.580 And he offered the only thing that was tangible that could lead to some sort of policy.
00:08:58.040 And I know a lot of people probably don't take him seriously because Dershowitz is as much a Zionist as Jonathan Greenblatt.
00:09:06.580 He's more of a Zionist than most liberals in Congress, et cetera.
00:09:12.380 I mean, he has a dog in the fight, but he said this.
00:09:18.200 And it's a tangible policy that would seem to work.
00:09:21.280 He also noticed that this freedom of speech but not freedom of reach, it is choosing sides.
00:09:27.920 And it kind of reminds me of the famous line by Antonin Scalia.
00:09:33.680 I think he might have written this about the Westboro Baptist Church or he might have written it.
00:09:38.880 I think it might have been St. Paul, that Supreme Court case, which is you can't declare that one side plays boxes according to the Marquis of Queensbury rules and the other side goes freestyle.
00:09:51.380 So you can't, and I think if I'm correct, I mean, perhaps Chris can correct me here, but I think I'm right on this.
00:09:59.220 You can't like, you know, burning a cross in someone's front lawn.
00:10:04.940 You are absolutely harassing them, but you can't create laws that make a differentiation between, say, burning someone's house down and burning a cross in their lawn in the sense that just engaging in arson is obviously criminal, but there's no kind of symbolism to it.
00:10:27.660 You can't create a law prohibiting burning of crosses.
00:10:31.780 Now, it might very well be illegal, but in the words of Scalia, just because it is illegal does not mean that it is invisible to the Constitution.