#496 — The Oldest Lie

Sam Harris speaks with Dara Horn about antisemitism, Jewish identity, and the failure of institutions. They discuss Horn's new book, why Jews predate the categories of religion and nationality, antisemitism as a lie rather than an ordinary form of bigotry, why DEI failed Jewish students, the history of anti-Zionism, whether the word "Zionism" is still useful, Horn's time on Harvard's antisemitism advisory group, Nazi influence in the Arab world, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe http://samharris.org/subscribe.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  I am here with Dara Horn. Dara, thanks for joining me.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  Well, you have written a truly masterful book, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question, A Love Story for the Living. This is your second provocative title that I'm aware of. The last book was People Love Dead Jews. So you have not been shy about your titles. But this book is, I mean, there's no way we will exhaust the points you make in this book. I mean, it's just, it's really a comprehensive look at the problem of the moment, at least for many of us. So thank you for writing it and thank you for doing what you're doing and taking the time to talk to me today.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Well, thank you for having me and for all the work you're doing.

• 1:02Speaker 00

  So let's start where, I guess, the confusion tends to start. How should we think about Jews as a people? I mean, how is it that the variables of nationalism or a religion don't map on to the territory in a way that makes it immediately understandable what we're talking about?

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Well, the reason it doesn't immediately map on to the categories we know is frankly because of the successive empires. What often, when people ask me this question of, you know, are Jews a nationality, are Jews a religion, are Jews a race, are Jews an ethnicity? The answer actually isn't complicated. It's just old. Jews predate all of those categories. Jews predate, obviously, the modern concept of race. Jews predate the concept of nationality. Jews even predate the concept of religion. When Hebrew linguists were reviving Hebrew as a spoken language, they had to dig through the Hebrew Bible to find a word that meant religion, because Hebrew actually didn't have one. So there's actually an answer to who Jews are. Jews are a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and

• 2:08Speaker 01

  culture. And that was a sentence in English. And in Hebrew, it's one word. It's two letters long, "am." So this is who Jews have always been. And the reason that this is so incomprehensible to most people in the modern world is because most groups like this were eliminated by the successive empires. So this is a very familiar kind of category in the ancient world. But if you think about it, you know, Christianity conquered all of Europe and the Americas and beyond. Islam conquered the Middle East and North Africa and Central Asia and beyond. Think about all of the various groups that were living in those places whose cultures and civilizations are basically erased. What's unusual about Jews is that

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Jews are still here. There are very few of these ancient groups. I mean, maybe Zoroastrians. I mean, you could, you know, find some groups like this, but there are very few. And so that's why even the category is unfamiliar to people in the, certainly in the modern West, but really frankly, in a lot of places because of the successive empires. And Jews are unusual, and this is one of the few ancient groups that did not succumb to empires, did not assimilate into empires, and are still here. And that's why it's sort of, to me, this brings us to, you know, the challenge that we face now, which is that this is a group of people who, because of this, have become essentially an acid test for the success or failure of a pluralistic society.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  Well, one point you make in the book is that security for Jews can't be a matter of making the case that they're just like everyone else, because they've spent 3,000 years telling the world that they're not just like everyone else. And their coherence as a people is in many ways predicated on that conception of themselves. And there are theological pieces here, which you don't really emphasize in the book, which perhaps we'll talk about. But this poses a problem, because in some sense, Jews have been collaborating, I mean, in a very real sense, Jews have been collaborating with the people who see them as irretrievably different and hate them on that basis by seeing themselves as irretrievably

• 4:15Speaker 00

  different, right? So see if you, I mean, that's, that sounds like a kind of paradox that is somewhat indigestible in a pluralistic society. But how do you think about the Jewish self-concept and how it's working here?

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Well, the way I think about this, and I describe it this way in the book, is that if you think about the actual content of Jewish civilization, what you ultimately emerge with, and I don't claim this is the only way to understand Jewish civilization, obviously, there are many ways, but one strain of it you find is essentially an anti-tyrannical movement since ancient times. So a lot of the ideas that we now think of as religious or theological, like monotheism, you know, monotheism, we today think of as a spiritual concept. In the ancient context, it's actually a political concept. Because in the ancient context, you have many groups that have lots of gods, and often, one of the gods is the dictator. So when the Jews are saying they don't bow to other gods, essentially what they mean is that they don't bow to tyrants. And this idea is reinforced throughout Jewish

• 5:13Speaker 01

  civilization, right? The idea of the laws of the Torah, this, this is sort of an early concept that is, in a way, similar to what we have in the US Constitution, where you have a set of laws that are not tied to an individual ruler, right? It's not like the king is the lawmaker. It's not like Hammurabi's code, even though some of those laws might overlap. But there's this idea that even the kings have to follow the laws, right? These are actually quite radical ideas. And so when, 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 different, differing attitudes toward, you know, these various groups that they conquer. But often, the idea is that, is that the conquering empire has some idea that is universal, supposedly universal, and that everyone who

• 5:58Speaker 01

  is good and righteous is going to follow along with this idea. So that comes with, for example, religious ideas, right? And, you know, if you think about the spread of Christianity, where they're spreading Christianity by the sword, or by, you know, they're encouraging people to convert, right? This happens with Islam as well. So when you have a group of people who don't cave to this pressure, it sort of throws the surrounding society into a sort of a problem, right? Because it's suddenly raising this possibility that there isn't only one way to be, right? And 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, what, to go back to your question about this idea

• 6:41Speaker 01

  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. And 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. And there's a thought at that time in the Jewish community that this is the route out of antisemitism. And of course, that turns out not to be true at all. It turns out not to be true at all. Like, it 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,

• 7:24Speaker 01

  and this person who was accused of espionage, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was, you know, the most assimilated into French culture as he could possibly be. He 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. I 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 antisemitic press. And it was precisely, and part of that antisemitism came from, oh, because he was assimilated. So that's what's sort of interesting, is that in Jewish history,

• 8:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, you have a line in the book, which is a detail I never knew, that, I think Dreyfus lived, he was, he was imprisoned for like four years or so, but then-

• 8:38Speaker 01

  I think five years in, yes, solitary confinement on Devil's Island off the coast of South America, manacled to his cot every night for five years, yes.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  But then he lived to 1935, and you said just a few years shy of being able to join his wife, who got deported to Auschwitz.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 8:55Speaker 00

  So, well, 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, not in mainstream culture. But 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. I mean, so, Christianity is entirely dependent on you taking seriously the claim that, actually, accepting the claim that Jesus was the Messiah. And the Jews, for 2,000 years, have been standing around

• 9:36Speaker 00

  being Jews, saying, sorry, guys, we met your Messiah. He actually was one of us, and he wasn't, he wasn't our guy. And the same for Islam. I mean, Islam claims to be the final revelation of the Abrahamic tradition. Muhammad is the final prophet, delivering that perfect revelation to humanity, never to be superseded by anything we do until the end of the world. And the Jews are here, you know, still here to say, no, sorry, we met your guy. He struck us as a schizophrenic warlord. Not interested, sorry. And that is, for anyone taking the faith claims as really the center of their worldview, that has proven to be perhaps

• 10:18Speaker 00

  tolerable for decades at a stretch, or even, you know, a century at a stretch in certain contexts. But generally speaking, it's a source code that's always there to be re-invoked and revalued as, okay, this is, this is not only intolerable, but this is now a killing offense. And we have to deal with these Jews among us who are just, again, merely by maintaining their Jewishness, they are disparaging our core beliefs.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Yes, well, I think it, I will, you know, you preface this as this is a theological argument. I actually think it's more of a universalist belief argument. Because I don't think it necessarily has to be specifically religious, because you see something similar with communism, for example. Communism's repudiation of Jews as being particularistic, and there, the objection is that Jews are, you know, being too nationalist. Right? This is, you know, they, in the communist, communist regime in Soviet Union framed their, what frankly was, you know, decades of persecution of Soviet Jews and, you know, riling up of, of antisemitism among their client states was entirely framed as, quote, anti-Zionism, right? That we are objecting basically to the particularity of a particular form of,

• 11:33Speaker 01

  of a national movement. So it was this particularity that was supposed, that was the thing that they were objecting to. And that's also true even in a pre-Christian setting, when you see something like the attacks on the Alexandrian Jewish community in the first century. Those are coming from people who have been riled up by the idea that the Jews are not loyal to the Roman Empire. So that's the sort of, the theology, so to speak, or the universalizing idea that like, we're all supposed to be Roman citizens, you know, we're all supposed to worship the emperor and these people don't. So these are the, these are the, to me, this is less about, you know, theology, as opposed to whatever is considered the, quote, universal idea of the time. And I think you can even trace that in something like the racism of

• 12:17Speaker 01

  the Nazis. That was this, you know, 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. So 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. And I think it's intolerable because, as you say, this is the source code, if your, if your belief requires everyone to believe it, and then you have a dissenter, that challenge, 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.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  And to me, that's where it becomes this acid test for a pluralistic society. Can you tolerate dissent?

• 13:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, there are a few other details here which are, are interesting and make antisemitism, which we're going to talk about next, unusual on the list of bigotries. So for instance, anyone who uses the term Islamophobia tends to want to use it as though it were deeply analogous to antisemitism. Now, I don't have to go into this, but I have my reasons for objecting to the very concept of Islamophobia. I just think it's been used to shut down any criticism of the doctrine of Islam as tantamount to bigotry, and that's, that strikes me as increasingly dangerous. But 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

• 13:51Speaker 00

  same as antisemitism is that crucially, Judaism is not a missionary faith, right? Islam is a, is an aggressively missionary faith that is acquiring adherents in 100 countries. And so there's no implication, no necessary implication of ethnicity, or race, or anything apart from your believing a certain doctrine. I mean, that's what it is to be a Muslim. To talk about being an atheist Muslim really is a contradiction. You can say you were a Muslim, but now you're an atheist, but no one, no one says, my, you know, I'm a Muslim and Islam is very important to me, but I'm also an atheist. That is just not a thing.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Or an atheist Mormon.

• 14:30Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah. Or really, it's true of almost every other religion, but for, among Jews, it's an all-too-common phenomenon to meet atheists who are Jewish, who are, both see themselves as Jewish, but most importantly, from the point of view of every antisemite on earth, they will be seen as Jewish, no matter what they believe, right? So it's not analogous to, and this is why religion isn't a great mapping here, because

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  There are atheist Jews, there are secular Jews, and there are Jews who don't believe a whole hell of a lot, and they're, and they're, they're even religious by Jewish lights. And you don't see this among Christians and Muslims and Mormons. And I mean, this is just not what's happening. It's much more, and, and the, the fact that Judaism is not a missionary faith, though you can join it, is doing a lot of work that people don't notice here.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Well, it's more than that. It's not even just that it's, you're correct, that it's not a missionary faith. There was some proselytization in the ancient world, but very little. And certainly, it's, you know, for thousands of years, it's not been a proselytizing, I wouldn't even call it a faith, a proselytizing culture. But in fact, I think that, you know, religion is the wrong term, absolutely the wrong term to describe Jewish civilization. Because when, and again, this is because of the success of emper, of empires. Because when Westerners use the word religion, they are thinking of something like Christianity or Islam, which are transnational movements that are, where what makes you a member of this movement is, as you say, your profession of faith. Right? That is what, that, it is the profession of faith that makes you a member of this

• 16:06Speaker 01

  movement. That is not at all the structure of Jewish civilization. As I often will say, Jews, Jews are not a religion. Jews have a religion, which many Jews follow, and as you've pointed out, many Jews don't. But Jews are not a religion. Jews are this other category, this pre-modern category, which in Hebrew is called an am, right? The best translation of it is maybe a peoplehood or something like that. That's a weird word in English that doesn't quite fit either. But the idea is that this is, it's never been a movement that is intended to universalize and capture the world. That is not the goal. The idea of the covenant with God, even, even if you go to that level of, you know, religious belief within Judaism, even the covenant of God is between God and the Jewish

• 16:48Speaker 01

  people. It isn't intended to be shared with the entire world. People can have different relationships with God. There's that understanding that, you know, there's no understand, there's no sense that like, oh, this is better or worse than anyone else. This is just the Jews' relationship with God. The way like, you know, I have a relationship with my spouse. I don't expect you to have a relationship with my spouse. But, you know, there's sort of this, you know, I, this is our, this is a private relationship in a sense. It's what some sociologists of religion sometimes will call a closed practice, which is this, you know, idea that, you know, these are traditions that are intended for this group. So obviously, it is a joinable group, but it's a

• 17:22Speaker 00

  You would think of it as monotheism, but it's actually, I think the concept is more appropriately described as heterothism, which is, which is not the assertion that only, only one God exists, but there's only one God worth worshiping in a context where other gods do exist. I mean, if you read the Hebrew Bible, it

• 17:39Speaker 01

  In the ancient context.

• 17:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, it seems

• 17:41Speaker 01

  That's a pretty good argument.

• 17:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, they were not asserting that there were no, no other gods. They were just, these were the, the wrong gods to worship, right?

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Well, they do ultimately assert that. I mean, this is a, the religion evolves over time. I mean, that's another thing, is that this, this is a tradition that's been here for a long, long time, and it's, it evolves. But you're correct, that that, that more, probably more accurately describes Jewish practice in the ancient world, for sure. That quickly evolves past that, though. But 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. And that was sort of a strategic decision that American Jews made after World War II.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  And I think the legacy of those efforts also causes a little bit of misunderstanding and confusion in the 21st century, as we're living it now.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, I want to talk about assimilation and just

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  the condition of Jews in the diaspora and what to do about all that. But let's talk about, so as we've, we've covered what Jews are and aren't, and how to think about them in this, you know, as occupying space on the religious, social landscape, how should we think about antisemitism? And can you, how would you demarcate it, or would you demarcate it from anti-Zionism, which is now the, the phrase that is doing so much mad work in, you know, on both the right and the left? I guess, so I mean, we've, I think we've teased this, but what I'm hoping you'll explain is how antisemitism is not

• 19:22Speaker 00

  just an ordinary form of bigotry, an ordinary social prejudice, but it contains more and less information than that.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Yes. So, look, I don't make a claim that bigotry against Jews is unique, and I think that, you know, bigotries against different groups and different settings have a lot of, you know, there's a variety of histories. What is unusual about the case of bigotry against Jews is just that this is a really old group that has survived all of these attacks and persecution. And so because of that, you have a lot of data points that maybe you don't have for, for, let's say, African-Americans, which is a group that's existed for a number of centuries, but not for millennia. So there's just a different history there, and it's a much longer history. I think it's more illuminating to think about antisemitism less as a bias or a bigotry

• 20:11Speaker 01

  than as a lie, a lie that people use to gain or maintain power. And 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. And to me, this is a very important distinction, because if you think about fighting bigotry, the tools you have for fighting bigotry are things like empathy. You know, we need to get to know each other better, bring people over for dinner, you know, build personal relationships. And all of that is extremely important for fighting any kind of bigotry.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  And I don't claim that that should be neglected. But if what you're fighting is less about bigotry and what you're fighting is actually a lie, fighting a lie requires a different strategy. It 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. So to me, that is what, that is the pattern recognition that I think is important to think about. And I think it's also, obviously, an incredibly important thing to think about, not just in the context of antisemitism, but in the context of, you know, we are in a new media

• 21:40Speaker 01

  environment where it's very, very easy to manipulate large numbers of people.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  Well, so this offers a key as to why Jews have fared so badly in the DEI moral calculus that was meant to protect, you know, embattled minorities of all kinds. Why is it that the DEI social justice machinery didn't, not only didn't protect Jews, but really birthed its own strain of antisemitism?

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:12Speaker 00

  And I want to talk about your tenure on the Harvard Advisory Council as well. I mean, that was, that really sharpens up this point, but let's talk about it generically for the moment.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Yes. Antisemitism 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.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  So if you value equity and anti-colonialism-

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Yes, then Jews are destroying that-

• 22:35Speaker 00

  Anti-racism.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. Then Jews are destroying what you value the most, if the thing, 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 there's this, you know, if you believe that, you know, that there's this, you know, massive discrepancies of power, 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. And 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 antisemitism. And I always think it's funny where, you know, I go to speaks 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?

• 23:21Speaker 01

  I'm like, Google, it might be you.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Right? So it's like, you know, there's an unwillingness to look in the mirror there, but if that is your worldview, then you're going to fall face first into antisemitism, because the antisemitic 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 antisemitism is always conceived of as a form of social justice, that is exactly what it is, because, you know, 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. They feel that they are standing up for their greatest ideals, and they don't realize how they have been manipulated.

• 23:59Speaker 00

  But it's interesting that it passes through this filter in ways where it really shouldn't. So for instance, even if you were going to grant that Jews are disproportionately privileged, right? Let's say, you know, Jews are rich. I 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, I mean, just, no one says, well, gay men are rich, therefore, there's no issue with homophobia, or-

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 24:34Speaker 00

  Gay men are not, you know, rich gay men are not part of our DEI calculus.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  Or, you know-

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Indian Americans, yes.

• 24:40Speaker 00

  Rich blacks are not, we no longer care that, about racism in their case.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Of course not.

• 24:46Speaker 00

  Right. So it's interesting that even if you were going to price in the bias here-

• 24:51Speaker 01

  You could say the same thing about, you know, Jews are white, also.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  A fraught and often false term, often false belief.

• 24:57Speaker 00

  A gay white man does not-

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Right, but gay, it's not, yeah, people don't think that, you know, gay white people don't experience bigotry.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  Right.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. So, but that's what's so interesting about it, right? And that's where it sort of reveals the flaws in this way of understanding antisemitism, because antisemitism is this lie, Jews are destroying what you value the most.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Right? And if what you value the most is, you know, some kind of more equitable world, then that Jews have to be placed in this villain box and have to be eliminated. It is essential that you get to that point in that kind of ideology. I think there's many examples of that. It's remarkable to me how often you see descriptions of something that Jews are doing, that if it were presented as being about another group, would be celebrated, but if Jews are doing it, would be considered sinister. I'm going to give you just one example of this. It was a few years ago, there was a piece, a long piece in the New York Times about Hasidic Jewish schools in New York City, about, you know, it was basically making an accusation that they were exploiting city funding or something like this. And, you know, it was a piece about these schools. There was a lot of, you know, merit to the criticisms that were leveled in that piece.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  What I thought was so interesting about that piece, there was a couple paragraphs where it said that it made the claim that the Jewish communities were, the Hasidic Jewish communities in New York City were manipulating city politics through block voting. And the way, the way they illustrated this was, they said that in the schools, when, after Election Day, the children were encouraged to bring in the sticker that says, you know, when you vote and you get that sticker that says, "I voted today,"

• 26:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  To bring in their parents' stickers, saying that their parents voted, and any student that brought in those stickers showing that their parents had voted was rewarded. They, I think, I think they got to go on a field trip to an amusement park or something. And the article was saying how, you know, look how they're manipulating city politics. And I just thought, you know, if this were about any other ethnic group in New York City, it would be a celebratory article about, like, you know, look how Haitian Americans, you know, figured out how to, you know, how to solve the problem of voter turnout.

• 26:52Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Like, do we not want people to vote?

• 26:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Right? Like, it's like, what is the argument here? Right? I mean, to me, that's so, that's so revealing, because what it shows is that there's this need to cast antisemitism as a form of social justice, because that's the only way that you can get away with this, because otherwise, it's just so obvious what you're doing.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  Okay, so if antisemitism is at bottom a conspiracy theory about Jews-

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Well, I wouldn't say conspiracy theory. It's more direct than that. It's a lie.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  It's a lie about the way the world works.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly, exactly.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  It's a claim in a baffling range of contexts. I mean, it's a claim in, in contexts that really can't be reconciled, right? So it's like, if communism is your thing, well, then Jews are capitalists. If capitalism is your thing, then Jews are communists.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 27:38Speaker 00

  So it literally can, the coin can flip, and it comes up just as, as true.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:44Speaker 00

  But, so it's a, it's a thesis about kind of the ulterior operations of a very small number of people who manage to corrupt or, you know, otherwise game a system that is largely hidden, and it's, they're working against what you value. And this is why, if you travel far enough left or far enough right, you know, on the political landscape, you meet anti, you know, just as committed antisemites.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  I've heard you describe this, this isn't even horseshoe theory on your account, this is just the same problem.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  It's a circle.

• 28:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  I mean, it's not even a circle, it's like, the same people.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  Right. Well, so I mean, there is, there is this weird marriage of, yes, like, you know, people like Tucker Carlson and Hasan Piker, you know, are, you know, best friends apparently, but let's table that for a second. There, there is something distinct about, I mean, it might be the same axis of animus here, but there's a kind of a difference of spin here, because, so if you go far enough left, Jews are thought to be essentially, not only do they have, they have a double dose of white privilege. They have all the sins of whiteness, but some extra ones as well. And so if you're an anti-colonialist or an anti-imperialist, if you're, if third-worldism is your new religion, well, then the Jews are at the top of the hierarchy of privilege

• 29:06Speaker 00

  that you are, that you want to despise and somehow disempower. If you go far enough right, it's a very different story. Jews are not white, they're posing as white, they're successfully pretending to be white, and they're undermining Western civilization by making common cause with, with the Third World, right? I mean, you're, they're not, they're not inimical to the interests of the Third World.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  They're bringing in immigrants or something like this, yes.

• 29:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's the great replacement theory, right?

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:32Speaker 00

  So, I mean, the, the net result is to hate the Jews in both cases, but they're very different sets of concerns, and their, their logic are really, you know, kind of mirror opposites of one another.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  I don't think they're as different as you're saying, because in each case, there's this desire to explain away what doesn't fit into your supposedly all-encompassing worldview. And because the Jews are defying- Your all encompassing worldview and there's this cognitive dissonance that you have to explain away. So for example, I mean, we didn't even get to this yet. You asked me about anti-Zionism. There's a lot we can say about that, but maybe we'll put that over here for a moment and come back to that in a bit. But Zionism is one of the world's most successful anti-colonial movements. It is one of the only successful land back movements. It is one of the very few examples of one of the countries formed, you know, the majority of the countries in the world formed

• 30:28Speaker 01

  after World War II, where this is not a failed state. You know, this has been incredibly successful state, you know, with challenges like every other country on the world. But I mean, and you look at all of its neighbors. I mean, there's it's just no, there's no comparison in terms of democracy and liberal, you know, liberal expression, freedom of expression, all of those kinds of things. It's like if there were somewhere in the world you'd want to live and you have this list of countries. I mean, most people in Western countries, like there's no, there's, there's no question. This is a successful anti-colonial movement. But 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

• 31:06Speaker 01

  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. It'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.

• 31:29Speaker 00

  Just to clarify that, it's, it's anti-colonial because Jews actually are indigenous to the region, right? And it's not-

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Yes. And also not, not just in some abstract way. I mean, they defeated the British Empire. I mean, this was, you know, they, they, this was a post, you know, this was a post-colonial state. This 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, World War II through the partitions of empires into nation states in every, I mean, it's, 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.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Almost all of which come out of these partitions of, of empires into nation states. In every single case, there's these massive population of violent population upheavals that happen in the creation of these states. What's unusual about Israel is that you come out with a successful, successful country. You know, it's a, a, 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. And 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

• 32:49Speaker 01

  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. I mean, and then it's like, yeah, the height 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. So in the same thing though, and to get to, as you said, the same thing happening on the right. It's like, well, how do you explain that you have this sort of, you know, let's say this, you know, white working class that has not succeeded.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  It must be because something is, you know, it's too, it's almost like it's, it's too hard to handle the real problems, right? It's too hard in these developing countries to handle the real problems of state corruption, let's say. You know, I mean, it's not because, you know, or, you know, the seizure of, of oligarchs of natural resources of a country. I mean, like, you know, there's all these vast problems that are almost, you know, they're, 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. I think that's same when you see people who are, you know, struggling in, in the United States, who are feel like, you know, they're part of this, like, you know, neglected, you know, 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

• 34:13Speaker 01

  manufacturing. Instead, you sort of, it's much more, it's much easier to believe this kind of scapegoat theory of like, oh, these, you know, evil Jews that there's are manipulating immigration in order to make it so that I can't get a job that where I can support myself. It's, you're absolutely, it's true that these people don't, you know, are in these situations and these, in these, but the idea that it's basically, it's too hard to, it's, when it's too hard to solve the real problems, people resort to this. It's very easy. And then people who are manipulating them into believing that this is their problem are the real winners in this story.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  I mean, as with any conspiracy theory, it's, it's inconvenient that there's a kernel of truth to many of them. I mean, it's, it's not, they're not just perfect lies. They're lies that are contaminated by facts that can be spun to seem to substantiate even the craziest claims that are attached to the lies.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, and that's true for any successful movement that's based on a lie.

• 35:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Right? Like, I don't know, election denial from the night, from, from 2020, right? I mean, it was true that, you know, people were voting by mail because of COVID and that made voting complicated. Okay.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  Right. So I, I noticed what, I mean, I, this is the first thing that comes to mind. I'm sure there's a dozen things we could talk about in this vein, but I noticed what, you know, when Elon Musk on X got the, the great replacement theory, you know, among the many bees in his bonnet, that one entered and he was retweeting some, I think actual neo-Nazi, I mean, somebody who was Castigay and the Jews for having, you know, like, this was in the aftermath of some, you know, Islamist atrocity, might, might have been the Manchester attack a couple, a couple of years ago. And this person was gloating essentially, like, what did you expect? You know, you, you guys have thrown open the doors of Europe to the barbarians and this is, this is what you've been fighting for all this time. And now,

• 36:07Speaker 00

  now you're unhappy that you've imported all these antisemites who want to kill you. You know, you've made your bed, now lie in it. I mean, there's, none of this is verbatim, but that was a gist. And I think Elon's verbatim retweet was, you have spoken the actual truth or something like that. You know, he sends it out to a quarter of a billion people.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  But what was, the problem is however, that Jews are disproportionately represented in all kinds of places and, you know, Nobel prizes and, you know, and, and places where you'd like to be disproportionately represented. But 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, right? 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.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  So it's, 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. And 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. And this, you know, this happens on Yom Kippur in, in Manchester. And I mean, there's honestly, there's so many, even for this conversation about antisemitism, there are so many Jews who are useful idiots, right? That it is-

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Well, there's so many people who are useful idiots.

• 37:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. But there are, I mean, there are, I, 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, is basically the Muslim, you know, NAACP and one need to look no further there. I mean, there's, it's more than 2% Jewish. I would bet anything, right? So there, there's a kernel of truth here. And again, it's kind of a predictable consequence of, so many Jews

• 38:23Speaker 00

  seem to think that the end game for their own acceptance into an open society is to imagine that no, no culture is better than any other, right? And so that the defense, I mean, so many Jews, so many left of center Jews think that the defense of Western civilization in the face of Islamism is morally suspect, right? And so it's easy to see, I mean, so the backlash from the right and backlash from the left is different, but the backlash from the right that I saw in Elon's tweet was, okay, you, you, not only did you overindex on Nobel prizes, you overindexed on progressive social justice work that has brought us this

• 39:06Speaker 00

  kind of moral idiocy, which where you can't even acknowledge what you're confronting here when people are running over your people on a sidewalk in Manchester, right? And that's, again, there's not, you know, I just think, obviously right of center that, you know, none of the noises I've, I've just made will make any sense in the Jewish community or any other. But as you go left, I mean, I, just to give you a little color to the backstory that's animating me here. I mean, I've spoken to liberal rabbis who in the aftermath of October 7th, were completely bewildered by the, the absence of support they got from the, you know, their, their former allies in the progressive community, right? I mean, the phone did not ring. There were no black and brown friends, you know, calling them

• 39:48Speaker 00

  up to commiserate, right? And they were completely mystified by all of this. They had no theory of mind for any of it. They're still worried about Islamophobia and their brains were just on tilt, right? And as far as I can tell, they're still on tilt. I mean, just you go far enough left, you find deeply, you know, masochistically confused Jews. And what I saw in that tweet from Elon was, you know, this was all too predictable. And until you can figure out how to talk about this, you know, the inconvenient fact is the Nazis are going to be right about something. You're letting, you vacated the space in which, you know, good people are willing to talk about this and I'm just going to signal boost white

• 40:29Speaker 00

  supremacists and Nazis and great, great replacement lunatics. And that's, in some sense, that's where our culture has stuck.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Yes. There's, well, I mean, look, there's a polarization is what you're identifying in part. But, and also I would, I would push back against your claim that like, oh, the Jews brought this upon themselves. I mean, this is a very old, you know, antisemitic idea that this is, you know, because of, you know, that basically the cause of antisemitism is something the Jews are doing.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  Well, no, I would-

• 40:56Speaker 01

  It's like, you know, if only the Jews were that powerful, right? I mean, that doesn't seem to be the case.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  I would just bet that-

• 41:01Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, especially, especially the example you're giving in Britain. I mean, you know, Jews are- Jewish population of Britain is like in the low six figures.

• 41:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it's

• 41:09Speaker 01

  And also, you know, the, the process you're describing of, you know, this sort of tradition that we certainly, you're correct, we do have in the United States among Jews being, you know, perhaps disproportionately aligned with, you know, a progressive movement or something like that. That already had a sea change in Britain in the past 10 years with, uh, Corbynism. So, I mean, and, and again, in Britain is such a small population. Like I said, I think it's in the low six figures. So,

• 41:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  You know, it's making that kind of claim that this is something, you know, that the, you know, huge tides of Muslim immigration to Britain have something to do with something the Jews did is patently absurd. So, I mean, that I do, I mean, you can't make that claim to your, the claim I do think you can support, which is this idea that, you know, yes, there is this large tradition in American Jewish community of, of alliance with progressives or, you know, certainly, obviously Jews tend to vote Democratic. Um, and that's been true for, you know, about a hundred years. And as you say, and I, I've, I've seen exactly what you described as well in corners of the Jewish community where, you know, people who are, you know, leaders in liberal Jewish communities were very blindsided by the lack of, you know, lack of support they had from people who they felt were their allies after October 7th.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  And, you know, as you said, that those people were not making the phone calls. Um, in some cases, it's even much more pronounced than that. Like there were, you know, Muslim Jewish initiatives that the bottom just fell out of them. I'm aware of several of those. I'm also aware of the opposite, which I could talk about too, of, you know, interfaith work that has been more successful in, in recent years. But to speak to that, this is a strategy in the Jewish, in Jewish diaspora communities where, you know, you're a tiny minority. You feel like you need to have, you do, you know, you need to participate in coalition politics. And I mean, that makes sense to me. And this was a coalition that made sense decades ago.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  These, you know, larger institutions are very slow to change. They're very slow to change. But also I think that there was this, there was this real belief in, in the American Jewish community, in America as this exception to Jewish history. And that was sort of this, that's was sort of this grounding assumption in the American Jewish community, understandably so, because this is, you know, one of the most welcoming diasporas that Jews have ever experienced in a very long history. And I think that there was this, you know, there was this belief that that, that came from the liberal traditions of this country. And that was, I mean, I think that that belief has a lot of merit.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Where I think it falls apart is the idea that, that those liberal traditions can only be found in, you know, one part of the political spectrum. That I don't think, I, that I, I think the, in a polarized age, like the one we're living through, where we have this sort of, you know, frankly, a realignment of what these, you know, like, look, we're in a bipartisan system. We have two parties. What do either of these parties mean? You know, I feel like every 10 minutes it means something different from, and it's certainly, it's, there's an acceleration of, of extreme and, of extremism in both parties. And that's been very bewildering. Not just for the Jewish community, but for a lot of people.

• 44:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. And illiberalism on both the left and the right.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly, exactly. So to me, it's less about, you know, the, you know, this like suicide pact. It's more about you need to vote for a party in this country. You know, I mean, I have, you know, there's a lot of people who are now facing, you know, local House and Senate races that are, you know, really pretty crummy choices for the Jewish community, but honestly, for everybody.

• 44:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, and that's, I think that's a, that's a larger symptom of this, you know, polarization of the country. I think it's interesting that often people will say that antisemitism is sort of a canary in a coal mine where it's a sign that, you know, worse things are going to be happening in your society down the road. It's like an early warning sign. I actually think it's the opposite. I think it's, it's, it's toward the end of the failures of institutions. And what you're seeing is the failures of these larger political parties. I mean, and, and failures of institutions you see in a lot of cases. I mean, in the cases I explore in the book, I mean, certainly universities are one of them. You know, new media. I mean, there's many different sectors where we, this, the institutions that we trusted are no longer serving us.

• 45:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, I want to get to the institutions. I certainly want to talk about Harvard, but we haven't even spoken about anti-Zionism yet. So,

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:27Speaker 00

  So how would you differentiate antisemitism and anti-Zionism historically? I mean, I, I think you probably would grant that there was a moment in time where one could have been an anti-Zionism without being an antisemite, but there's not too many people now that can fit into one part of that Venn diagram without landing in the other. At least, uh, if what I see online is any, any sign of it. I mean, so how, how do you think about anti-Zionism now?

• 45:56Speaker 01

  So I come to this with a longer historical lens than maybe a lot of people do. First of all, look, there's been a, a massive effort online that's been pushed by, obviously by tyrannical regimes overseas to redefine Zionism. And that's been going on for, for decades and decades. Just to be clear to your listeners, Zionism is the, you know, 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. Has nothing to do with any particular Israeli government. There's nothing about Zionism that precludes Palestinian independence or dignity. That's really it. And what that means in reality, in terms of like, living in 2026,

• 46:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  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, well,

• 46:57Speaker 00

  You mean if you're Jewish?

• 46:58Speaker 01

  No, 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. Cause 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. So that's, you know, just to clarify for your listeners, like when most Jews are, 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-Zionism wouldn't be antisemitic because it doesn't make you not antisemitic if you only want half of the world's Jews to die.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Or if you're only allow, 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 and others. So I'm going to put that over here, but the reality is that there's a very, very long history to anti-Zionism that actually predates the state of Israel. And you're correct that certainly among the Jewish community, yes, anti-Zionism was a fun hypothetical to talk about in 1920, when there was no state of Israel. It's not really a hypothetical to talk about in 2026, where that, when there is now a state of Israel, which is where half the world's Jews live. Right? I mean, it's sort of like, let's talk about whether or not we should have a baby. And then we have a baby that's 70 years old. Let's kill that baby.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Right? Like, that's really not the same conversation. So it's, and it's very disingenuous for people to pretend that it is. So that's within the Jewish community. But what I think is really important for people to understand is the long history of anti-Zionism, because that's actually the only thing that really distinguishes Zionism from other national movements of its era. Number one is its success. As I said, in, in creating really a successful society, which is unfortunately not true for many of the other countries that were formed in exactly the same way after World War II. But the other thing that distinguishes it is this long history of anti-Zionism. The earliest anti-Zionism political text is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This, you know, antisemitic screed.

• 49:07Speaker 00

  Russian hoax, yeah.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's a Russian hoax, antisemitic screed created by the Russian secret police. It was created in response to the world Zionist congresses that had been meeting for the previous six years. So it really was an objection to the idea of Jews ever having agency over their own destinies. You then have with the rise of the Soviet Union in 1918, the Bolsheviks who are, you know, consolidating their power over what's going to become the Soviet Union, they're waging civil war. Part of their bid to get the 2 million Jews in the former Russian empire on their side was this approach where they told this Jewish population, we are not antisemitic, we are only anti-Zionism. This is in 1918. It's 30 years before the state of Israel is created. It's probably not about Netanyahu.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  So you have this and then, of course, in the, and of course, these people are like, oh, we're not anti-Semitic. We're only anti-Zionism. Of course, they're Marxists. They're also anti-religious. So what they're saying is we love Jews. You just can't practice Judaism or study Hebrew or be a Zionist. And basically what this results in, in practicality, was the destruction of every Jewish institution in the USSR. And then the persecution of Jews in the USSR for decades. And then that continues later. The Soviets export this to their client states in the developing world. And anti-Zionism as an ideology has the result of emptying the remaining countries with Jewish populations of their Jews.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Every country that takes on anti-Zionism as its official state ideology in the 20th century destroys its Jewish population. Whether in the way that the Soviet Union did by persecuting its Jews, you know, discriminating against them, oppressing them and, you know, shutting down anybody who was a dissenter, or the way that all of the countries in the Middle East and North Africa that became anti-Zionism. You know, Baghdad was, in 1940, Baghdad was 30% Jewish.

• 50:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was more than New York.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Yes, more than New York, absolutely. Tripoli was 25% Jewish. New York is not 25% Jewish today. In 1940, Tripoli in Libya, Tripoli in Libya was 25% Jewish. Aleppo in Syria was 20% Jewish. Cairo was 15% Jewish. How many Jews live in those countries and cities today?

• 51:17Speaker 00

  How many of those Jews have a right of return today? Who's worrying about that?

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Zero, zero.

• 51:23Speaker 00

  Refugee committee over the UN that's worried about that?

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Right. That's what's so fascinating, right? I mean, and that's also, you've raised another, I mean, there's a whole, we could have a whole conversation about the UN. But yes, I mean, this is, you know, there's, these were people who, these were communities in a lot of cases that even predated Islam. I mean, these were ancient Jewish communities that had been there for thousands of years, under a lot of persecution during those thousands of years. And these states took on the ideology of anti-Zionism. They have all eliminated their Jewish populations, eliminated them. And I think that, I mean, the same thing happened in Poland in 1968. There was an anti-Zionism campaign in Poland where the government officially announced, we are not anti-Semitic, we are only anti-Zionism. 50,000 Polish Jews lost their jobs or pushed out of society. I mean, you know, I mean, how many Polish Jews were even left after the Holocaust, right?

• 52:09Speaker 01

  I mean, we managed to get rid of whoever was there.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was over 90%.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this is, this is a, anti-Zionism is like most anti-Semitic campaigns. It is something that is taken on by tyrannical regimes to distract their populations from their inability to solve their own problems. And what you, I mean, you see this happening over and over and over again. And I mean, this is the whole history of the 20th century. This is why Jews are, you know, Jewish population is so small, hasn't recovered from the Holocaust.

• 52:41Speaker 00

  That's incredible. There are fewer Jews on Earth still.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Than in 1939.

• 52:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm, I think, I think we're within like a, you know, a million or two of 1939 levels.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Correct, correct. And also that Jews used to live in all these different countries. I mean, now Jews are down to like, you know, there's like five countries on Earth where you can live as a Jew and have a supportive community and be, and, you know, not have to live inside a fortress.

• 53:04Speaker 00

  And it's, that's seeming dicey in a few of those countries we might talk about.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  That is true.

• 53:08Speaker 00

  Well, so I have a very strong recommendation. This is, this is more of an intuition than anything else, but it's, I'd be willing to bet a lot on this, that there's a lot to be gained and almost nothing important to be lost by never using this word Zionism again. Right? Why have a word for Israel's right to exist? Israel exists. Israel is a country like many other countries. It does not have an especially ignominious origin story. I mean, you can compare it to Pakistan. It's a very similar point of origin, very similar logic. Many more people died in the partitioning of India and Pakistan than died during the founding of Israel. There's no name for this, this notion that Pakistan has a right to exist.

• 53:53Speaker 00

  There's no, there's no Pakistanism against which people could organize if they wanted to. Pakistan exists. If it's attacked by genocidal maniacs, no one's going to begrudge it defending itself. Israel exists. Israel is surrounded by genocidal maniacs. It has to defend itself. We can quibble about how it has defended itself or the extent to which it's defended itself. We can prosecute war crimes where we find them and we'll talk about the genocide blood libel with respect to the war in Gaza in a minute. But Israel exists. This is, this is no longer debatable. It's, it's older, as you pointed out, it's older than, more than half of the countries, the 190 some odd countries acknowledged by the UN.

• 54:35Speaker 00

  You know, fully two thirds of those countries were formed in similar ways by just mapmakers drawing lines on maps, without much regard for the people who had to live within the boundaries enshrined by those, those lines. There's nothing especially unusual about Israel, except for the world's commitment to claiming that it is so. Apart from a few things, and one thing is this collaboration with that weirdness by insisting on re, on using this word Zionism, which sounds like it was, you know, first used and, I mean, it's just a spooky sounding word, too. It sounds like it was first used on, you know, Battlestar Galactica or some, you know, sci-fi program.

• 55:17Speaker 00

  It's, it's just not, it's kind of the worst possible PR at this moment. I just don't see why we have to collaborate with the people who hate us by labeling ourselves in this way, when all we're talking about is the fact that Israel exists, it has a right to exist, it was attacked, it has a right to defend itself. And there's this, this additional backstory, which again, doesn't need a name, but should be acknowledged at every point, which is that unlike most other nations on Earth, Pakistan doesn't have this, nor does

• 55:48Speaker 01

  Jordan.

• 55:49Speaker 00

  any other Muslim country. Unlike basically every other country on Earth, Israel has a different moral rationale for its existence because of the world's aptitude for deciding, you know, on any given Tuesday, that it wants to murder all the Jews within its borders. Among the people who should have a country where they don't have to let their survival be predicated upon the, the enduring sanity and goodwill of their neighbors, Jews are clearly on the first of that list of people who, who need a, need to think about the end game of their own survival. And again, this is not based on something they've done. It's based on century after century,

• 56:31Speaker 00

  their mere survival, throwing up this challenge again and again of eliminationist anti-Semitism being birthed anew in new contexts for new reasons. But again, reliably in country after country through the centuries. So, but again, we don't need a name for that moral commitment. We just need to remain cognizant of history and, and of the all too pressing evidence of our senses, which is much of the world at this moment is rallying to a cry that is actually, you know, in many cases explicitly genocidal.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. So why would you give those people ground by seeding your own word that is 3,000 years old?

• 57:08Speaker 00

  Because the word, you just don't need the word and the word's confusing. Like you and I have to explain it.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  I agree that, well, so I agree, yes, you're correct about that. The reason it's confusing is because of these, this genocidal campaign that has invested enormous resources, billions of dollars, decades of effort. And I want, the way, the place where I would put this.

• 57:26Speaker 00

  Okay, but just let me just add one more piece there. The Zionism, if it was ever, I'll grant you, we need, we needed a word for the, the aspiration to found a Jewish state for all the, all the reasons Jews might have, might have wanted to do that. Their survival as a people being perhaps first among them, but now the state exists, has existed, 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?

• 58:01Speaker 01

  So 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-Zionism campaign. Because you wouldn't have said this to me 15 years ago.

• 58:19Speaker 00

  No, I think I would have. I mean, it's the same.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  You might have, but you wouldn't have cared. You wouldn't have cared.

• 58:22Speaker 00

  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 DC. I basically said that, or I did in fact say that, that we shouldn't use the word atheism. I mean, why use the word atheism?

• 58:41Speaker 01

  Right, because it's a negative. In other words, it's like, yeah, I see what you're saying.

• 58:44Speaker 00

  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.

• 59:03Speaker 00

  That's it. You don't have to define yourself in the same way that you wouldn't say,

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:07Speaker 00

  I'm a non astrologer, right? You wouldn't go to a conference for non astrologers. You would just say,

• 59:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:12Speaker 00

  Astrology seems like bullshit. I'm not into it. And here's why. And you never have to define yourself in opposition to it. And so it is with, I mean, it's a similar logic. I just think it's, I mean, the image I gave in that talk was that it's almost like in the aftermath of a crime scene, when the, the police put down the tape of the dead body, you know, outlining the dead body on the sidewalk. You know, we walk up, we sort of dutifully walk up to that silhouette of a dead man, and just lie down in it and conform ourselves to the aspect of our own, you know,

• 59:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:43Speaker 00

  destruction rhetorically. It seems like a way of losing the debate before you even start it.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  So that is one side of it. Here's why I'm pushing back. The Jewish community has been through this so many times before, where there's a corruption of the language that we use to describe ourselves. And then the Jewish community is like, oh, let's change the word. And I give an example of this in the book. I was, I was asked, I tell the story of a book where I'm speaking at a private school and in the pre-call before my, before my talk, I was, you know, one of the people, faculty or administrators on one of these calls.

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  The Z word.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, said like, oh, when you come to speak to our school, you know, please avoid using the Z word because, you know, that might, you know, that might offend people. And I said, well, should I also start and avoid using the J word because I don't want to offend people who hate Jews?

• 1:00:29Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  And then they just sort of look at me. And the reality is that that is exactly what happened in the 20th century with the Jewish community in the United States. People did not use the word Jews to describe themselves because haters had turned it into a slur. And I think it was, it's so interesting to me that, you know, a lot of Jewish organizations, until the early, until even the early 21st century in America, did not use the word Jews or Judaism to describe themselves. My children, when they went to preschool at the JCC, the Jewish Community Center near me, I personally went to that, I live in the same town where I grew up. I went to that JCC for preschool myself, but when I went to it, it was called the Y M H A, Young Men's Hebrew Association, right? Because people were using this word Hebrew.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  The reform movement in the American, you know, reform Judaism in the United States. I was at the conference in 2002, when they changed their name finally, after over 100 years, from the Union of American Hebrew Congregations to Union for Reform Judaism. It wasn't until 2002, they were willing to put that word on a sign. And that is because of this, you know, raging hate, you know, I mean, the, you know, Jewish publications in the 19th and early 20th century, you know, they didn't have the name word Jewish in their name. They would be like, you know, the American Israelite. Those are the kind of names they were using because haters had taken over the word. And I just sort of, you know, to me, I understand everything you're saying, and I agree with it.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  This 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, you know, I'm not, I'm not willing to get rid of this word, is what I will say.

• 1:02:09Speaker 00

  I'm not saying we unlearn.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  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 know, we need it anymore. Nobody was talking about that in 1980. No one was talking about that in 1970.

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  Like, what, what does it mean to be a Zionist with, with Israel already existing?

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  Now, I'm telling you what it means in practicality is you don't want your friends and family in Israel to be murdered. That's honestly what it means.

• 1:02:34Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  That's what it means. It shouldn't be a big lift. You're right. It shouldn't be a big lift.

• 1:02:38Speaker 00

  Being a humanist, you know.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  You would think that. Yes, you would think that. You would think that.

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I feel the same, you know, I don't want the.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  No, I think we're in agreement, but I just, I'm just noticing the.

• 1:02:48Speaker 00

  To be murdered. I don't, I don't have a word for not wanting the people of Denmark to be overrun by jihadists and killed.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  Because guess what? It's not really so much of an issue there. I mean, maybe it will be in the future. Who knows?

• 1:02:57Speaker 00

  But I wouldn't, again, I wouldn't, I would object to it for precisely the same reasons and to the same degree. I feel like when the Danish cartoon controversy was happening.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:06Speaker 00

  You know, I was, I was out there, you know, making these, these sorts of noises, but 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,

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  between the values, the liberal values of an open society and sheer barbarism, right?

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:03:26Speaker 00

  And, and so I just think we're on much firmer ground.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Just saying I'm anti-barbarism?

• 1:03:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, just, we just.

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  I'm anti-terry.

• 1:03:33Speaker 00

  We want to defend liberal values.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  Across the board.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:37Speaker 00

  I mean, actually, this, so this brings me to my next topic, which I think we're also going to disagree about a little bit.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know that we disagreed about this one. I'm just pointing out the background to it. Yeah.

• 1:03:46Speaker 00

  But I think maybe we'll disagree about this more because I think the, certainly for any religious Jew, this has to be true, but also I just think it's true for most Jews by default, which is to feel that, I'm not talking about Israel now. I'm talking about Jews in the diaspora. We feel pretty embattled now. It's for obvious reasons. And I mean, the quality of life, I mean, this, this precedes October 7th, and this is something you talk about in the book. Again, the book gives a ton of history here that we're not going into that, just how long, I mean, you alluded to it a few moments ago, but how long this campaign of demonization

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:22Speaker 00

  has been against Zionism, against Jews, against Israel.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  All the same slogans too. Zionism is genocide. Zionism is racism. Zionism is colonialism. Zionism is apartheid. Absolutely. Yeah.

• 1:04:34Speaker 00

  And, you know, much of the, the antisemitism 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. Maybe we'll get there and talk about the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and.

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:48Speaker 00

  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. And again, I think that's a mistake. I think identity politics, maybe this wasn't always the case. Maybe it wasn't the case during the civil rights era in America, but I think now identity politics really is just poison, right? I just think it's contributing to much of the craziness, the populist craziness that's happening right of center, much of Trumpism, I think is ascribable to that.

• 1:05:33Speaker 00

  I think the wokeness epidemic we had was, you know, they kind of the reductio ad absurdum of where identity politics takes us. So I think, and this is my, my hypothesis that I pitched to you, I think the, you know, the failures of D E I are, should be indelible to us now. And I think the, the safety for Jews or for any other vulnerable minority population in America or any other open society is going to be safeguarded by a true commitment to liberal values, right? We have to protect liberal values, you know, the equality before the law, free speech, et cetera, women's rights, I mean, political equality, et cetera,

• 1:06:13Speaker 00

  against their enemies, whoever they are, whether they're Islamists or Nazis or, you know, ideologues of whatever flavor. And if we do that successfully, well, then by definition, we're protecting Jews in Sydney, you know, and in London and in New York. And so the, the end game is not for Jews to have some kind of supercharged commitment to their Jewishness and to prosecute that, 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. No, we actually just need liberal values.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  So your question for me is.

• 1:06:55Speaker 00

  Well, do you, do you agree with any of that or disagree with all of it or?

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  No, I agree with it. I agree with it. I think that, you know, one example of this would be something like, and this is something, and we still haven't talked about this, about the, where I was in this committee at Harvard and, 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 antisemitism. And I think, 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. And 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

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  recognize it as a hate crime and act accordingly was not by pointing to some statute about some special definition of antisemitism, but pointing out that my son was being harassed due to his membership in protected classes of shared ancestry. I mean, that already is, that's already part of American law. So that's one example. National origin, you know, if you're firing your Israeli American DJ because they're a quote Zionist, that's actually against, 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. Like these laws already exist. They're not always used that way, but those laws already exist. So, yes, I agree with you. I think that obviously free expression is extremely important,

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  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's like, you know, vandalizing your kid's room with free Palestine signs, you know, it's like, whoa, what does this have to do with religion?

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  Right? It's like, well, no, this is, this person's being attacked because of their membership in a protected class defined by shared ancestry.

• 1:08:56Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  And it's even, it even says in the statute, real or perceived shared ancestry.

• 1:09:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  Right? So, I mean, like, you know, those, it was already exist. That's just one very, very narrow example. I do agree with you. I think that the place where there's room for, and why you often will hear leaders within the Jewish community talking about shoring up Jewish identity is because I think that a lot of people even within the Jewish community have been living in this environment for so long that they don't even recognize what is happening to them. They don't have the language for understanding it. Because, yeah, if you think that, you know, being Jewish is a religion, and then, you know, you discover that your dorm room has been vandalized with free Palestine signs. You know, your first thought is like, oh, is this just a political disagreement? You don't, your mind doesn't go to the first place of, someone vandalized my dorm room.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  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. So, 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. So for that reason, I think it is important to understand Jewish identity better. Not because you want a seat at the, you know, victim table of, you know, our, you know, everybody's favorite totem pole of persecuted minorities, not for that reason.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  But for the reason of just, even just understanding what antisemitism looks like in the 21st century, you sort of need to already, and I've noticed this when I'm educating people about this, that people don't, 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 dropdown menus of persecuted minorities. Like, 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 boxes is because,

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  you know, they're too old.

• 1:11:16Speaker 00

  Well, so tell, tell me what happened at Harvard.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 1:11:19Speaker 00

  And take, take both sides of it. I'd love to know what happened, what, 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?

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  Yes, not very successfully, I'm sorry to say. Yes, I was asked to participate in this antisemitism advisory group to the, after October 7th, 2023, so this was all happening in, you know, the fall of 2023. I was asked to be part of this antisemitism advisory group to the now former president of Harvard, who your listeners may remember did not take a whole lot of our advice.

• 1:11:55Speaker 00

  So this preceded the congressional testimony?

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:11:58Speaker 00

  And, but were you, you still, your group still existed during that testimony?

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  Yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes, we did. Yes, it was quite horrifying.

• 1:12:05Speaker 00

  Nice. That's a great day of television for you and the family.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  It 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 a, one of the board of overseers, or I don't pretend to understand that.

• 1:12:22Speaker 00

  What was, Rabbi Wolpe was?

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  Yes, Rabbi Wolpe was, yeah, Rabbi Wolpe, who's a California Rabbi, but he actually was on the faculty at the time. He was, had a year-long visiting professorship, so he was teaching there at the time.

• 1:12:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  I had previously been, I was there really as an alum. My, I'm a college graduate, a PhD graduate from there as well. And also, I had taught as well as a visiting professor about 10 years prior, so.

• 1:12:46Speaker 00

  You have your Harvard bona fides.

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I, I knew my way around campus. Yes, 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 deans and subdeans and people like that. We occasionally had meetings where we brought in, you know, the deans of all the various schools. And from the minute my name became public that I was

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  on this committee, I was just inundated with Jewish students asking for help. And what was so interesting to me about this was that it was completely different from the picture that was, that came through in the media portrayals of this. Because in the media, it was all the picture, the, in the media, the portrayal of this was all about, you know, student protesters, you know, and, and when does, you know, when does it go too far with free expression? You know, it was like, you know, where do you draw the line and this sort of thing. None of the students that were coming to me, the Jewish students, you know, asking for help, nobody was complaining about, oh, I don't like the slogan they used at this rally. Instead, what they were complaining about was, I don't like people vandalizing my dorm room. I don't like being chased through the law school.

• 1:14:14Speaker 01

  I don't like being followed around campus with someone holding a megaphone yelling at me personally. I don't like having someone spit in my face on the way to class. I don't like my professor throwing me out of class for being Israeli. I mean, these are the kinds of things. I don't like someone waiting for me outside my dorm room. I mean, there was like one person who like, I no longer, who was like, I no longer eat in the dining hall anymore because there's these people who are waiting for me. They wait for me outside my room, wait for me to come into the dining room, they just follow me yelling at me. I mean, this harassment.

• 1:14:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  Right? I mean, this isn't like, I mean, harassment's, you know, stalking, harassment, intimidation, I mean, these are against Massachusetts state law. I mean, you know, we don't have to sit here and parse like, oh, is it political expression? Like, it's not political expression to stalk someone. It's not political expression to vandalize property. You know, it's Title VI violation to throw somebody out of class based on their national origin. So, I mean, you know, these are the kinds of complaints that people were, were sharing with us. And it was just amazing, like, that there were, there were so many of these complaints that, and what was astounding was that, you know, they had, as you mentioned, this whole DEI apparatus at the school. There were easily 100 people at Harvard in various schools and, you know, departments and things, whose only job was to, you know, foster community and belonging, or whatever lingo they were using. At the same time, there was a point

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  at which Harvard Hill, which was one of the Jewish student organizations, they actually had to hire somebody just to track the complaints. Like Harvard Hill receives no money from the university, and they had to hire someone on their own dime, just to keep track of like, where is your complaint moving through the system? And the answer is it's going nowhere. And it was just, you know, it was so astonishing to me. And our committee, where we're 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. I mean, there was one point where our whole committee threatened to quit. Then they like brought in the big guns, they, you know,

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  hauled in somebody from the corporation, you know, and then, you know, they made fools, made fools of themselves on national television. I mean, that was sort of, you know, to me, it was amazing that here were the antisemitism 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.

• 1:16:28Speaker 00

  Well, 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-

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  Yes. In 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, that this was an anti-Semitic attack, this is unacceptable on our campus. And they told us, oh, we can't do that because there's, you know, there's, you know, we can't disclose these people's names. It's, you know, 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. But then it was a little bit later that I realized there had been a very similar

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  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. And this is exactly how they responded to it. They put out a statement to the entire law school community that this homophobic incident had happened. They didn't name the person. And they said, you know, this is unacceptable on our campus. And they just, I mean, it was like transparent, transparently obvious that this was being treated completely differently.

• 1:17:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. 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, you know, with, you know, signs of, you know, Dylann Roof, you know, having massacred black congregants in a church, you know, he's our hero, you know, with the Harvard, the Harvard Dylann Roof Club. How long is that going to last at Harvard, right?

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:18:35Speaker 00

  You know, these kids are going to get kicked out of the school immediately. Harvard's going to recognize that it has a brand that it has to protect, and it doesn't like genocidal lunatics among its alums. It doesn't want to be on the CVs of any of these dumb kids. So these kids are going to be expelled, right? And it's-

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  Oh, quite the opposite. Not just, not only were they not expelled, in fact, the two students who were, you know, actually ended up being criminally charged for assaulting this Jewish student, one of them was made a speaker at commencement, and the other one was given a $65,000 fellowship.

• 1:19:05Speaker 00

  Oh, no, I missed it. I missed that.

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  I could not make this up. Yes. Yeah. But, you know, it's honestly, like, to 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. They moved to some internal task force. What was so interesting to me, though, is that digging into this later, I saw that there was, like you said, like, wouldn't they have just thrown these people out immediately? Wouldn't they want that not to be associated with their brand? What you realize when you dig into this topic is that this is their brand. And here's what I mean by that. To me, the deeper issue was not what anyone, you know, students were yelling at a protest. It's that they're teaching

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  this stuff. And when I say this stuff, I mean, antisemiticalized 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. For example, the Harvard School of Public Health had a partnership program with Beir Zayt University in Ramallah. Beir Zayt University in Ramallah is in fact a segregated apartheid institution. Israeli Jews are not allowed on the campus. And, 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, right? Like, and it wasn't even like it was a Middle Eastern Studies

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  program. Like, it was literally a program of public health. Like, you could have done this in, I mean, are there no public health issues other places in the world? Like, why is this program not in Guatemala? It was like, really? And then they, 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 the, you know, not like, oh, we're going to discuss this. That's the premise of the class. And you just look through every department. It was like going on, it was, they were teaching this material. And as I say in the book, you know, worse things emerged at other universities. I mean, Harvard at least doesn't have a campus in Qatar. You know, Cornell does. Georgetown does. You know, Northwestern does. I'm going to get the schools wrong, and your listeners

• 1:21:14Speaker 01

  can correct me. But Texas A&M did. They recently closed it. But you can crow about academic freedom, but all of the campuses that are in Qatar, the Qatari royal family is censoring the syllabi. You're not allowed to say anything negative about the Emir. You're not allowed to say any, you're not allowed to, you know, defame. It's like, you know-

• 1:21:33Speaker 00

  I mean, worse than that, they're a straight up, you know, Muslim Brotherhood theological clone. You know, they're, they're also the greatest, greatest outside funders of American universities on planet Earth. I mean, they've got 300,000 citizens, you know, 3 million foreign workers.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  Guest workers. Guest workers. Yes.

• 1:21:53Speaker 00

  But their funding to the tune of, you know, it's north of $10 billion, I think, in recent decades.

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  And they're the funders of Hamas. And 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, right?

• 1:22:16Speaker 00

  Let's talk about just the vitiation of institutions across the board. So we briefly mentioned the UN. We should bring the UN in here, but it's, it's everything. It's journalistic institutions we could name. This is, the problem here is that this is going to sound like a conspiracy theory, because it has been a kind of century-long conspiracy. But like, the details sound crazy. But the way in which an organization like the UN has been vitiated by Islamism and for many years backstopped by the Soviet Union and its Arab client states, I mean, the net result is that, you know, Israel has had more ultimatums passed against it by the UN than, than all of the countries combined.

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:23:00Speaker 00

  I mean, I think this includes countries like Sudan and North Korea and China and Iran and-

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  Guess why? Guess why?

• 1:23:07Speaker 00

  But the problem is, it sounds like, we're about to describe this, but we're just, 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. You know, Israel's just like South Africa. We, you know, 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 that where there's smoke, there's fire, right? You have all these institutions saying

• 1:23:50Speaker 00

  there's something wrong here. I mean, some of the institutions aren't even what they seem to be. I mean, they like the, I forget what the acronym is, but you know, it's like they, the World Congregation of Genocide Scholars, where you have to pay $30 to be a member.

• 1:24:03Speaker 01

  Yes. And the, I think 20% of the members live in Iraq.

• 1:24:06Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah, exactly. So, but I mean-

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  Bastion of genocide scholarship there.

• 1:24:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. You literally hear people, I mean, I actually think that's, you know, that this aspiring Senate candidate, Abu El-Sayed in Michigan, you know, he's bouncing from podcast to podcast now, talking about how, you know, genocide scholars have all agreed that there's a genocide in Gaza. Hopefully, we'll get to, get to debunking that. But again, it's too easy. You 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. I mean, like, what is the liberal

• 1:24:51Speaker 00

  world order if it doesn't include the UN, right, as a body that can adjudicate, you know, claims among countries? As far as I can tell, the UN has been utterly vitiated on this topic. I mean, you just got like, you, not only can't you trust what the UN thinks about Israel, they're guaranteed to be lying about what is happening in Israel.

• 1:25:11Speaker 01

  I mean, it's so far past that. It's so far past that. I remember when my daughter was reading this book before it came out, my daughter is in college age, and she was saying to her younger brothers, she was like, did you guys know that the, the head of the UN was an actual Nazi?

• 1:25:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  It's like, yes. Like, you know, like, people are old enough to remember this. You 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.

• 1:25:40Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:25:40Speaker 01

  And, you know, he was the Secretary General of the UN when the UN passed its resolution, Zionism is racism in 1975.

• 1:25:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  Gee, gee. I mean, look, the thing about the UN is it's, you know, the majority of countries in the UN are authoritarian regimes.

• 1:25:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. And some of them get appointed to head the, the Human Rights Council.

• 1:26:02Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 1:26:03Speaker 00

  I mean, Iran is-

• 1:26:04Speaker 01

  Oh, God. Yeah. Iran was like women's rights.

• 1:26:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Iran was on the Women's Rights Council. I mean, at one point, Libya 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.

• 1:26:16Speaker 00

  So, 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.

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

  No, it does not.

• 1:26:29Speaker 00

  So what do, what do we do in light of that? I mean, like, because as far as I could tell, even the New York Times can't keep this stuff straight.

• 1:26:36Speaker 01

  No. 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. And it was demonstrated, I think there were, there were almost no articles that presented Hamas as an agent in this war.

• 1:26:52Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:26:52Speaker 01

  Like, with, like, a military.

• 1:26:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  It was always presented as, you know, the Israelis are attacking civilians. It was never presented as, like, there was never any presentation of-

• 1:27:02Speaker 00

  Well, the incredible thing-

• 1:27:02Speaker 01

  Hamas's organization of child soldiers, let's say, or, I mean, or, you know, they were just not treated as an agent in the war.

• 1:27:08Speaker 00

  Or, yeah, on that point-

• 1:27:10Speaker 01

  By the vast majority of articles. I'm not saying it was never covered at all. But I mean, it was, you know, the, the level of distortion was just insane.

• 1:27:16Speaker 00

  No, no one ever demanded, virtually no one ever demanded that Hamas release the hostages as a mechanism to bring the conflict to an end, right? It was just, Israel had to stop its operations in Gaza, but it's as though Hamas had nothing they could do.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  Hamas has no agency at all, right?

• 1:27:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, they started this war. They're holding the hostages. They still haven't surrendered power even now, and as, during more having this conversation, you know, in the fall of 26. So, yeah. I mean, there's also a deep racism in that, right? I mean, there's this assumption that, like, even this whole attitude of, oh, it's just, you know- October 7th is a natural response to oppression.

• 1:27:54Speaker 00

  Of course. Don't, don't draw a cartoon about the prophet Muhammad because of course they're going to helplessly burn our embassies in 12 countries.

• 1:28:00Speaker 01

  It's just this, this assumption of, of, of the lack of agency, right? It's so crazy. I mean, this is some of the wealthiest-

• 1:28:06Speaker 00

  How could you not burn an embassy in, in response to a cartoon?

• 1:28:08Speaker 01

  Who, who among us wouldn't, you know, rape and massacre our neighbors, right? Who among us, you know, it was just this insanity. So, yeah, I mean, so, but your larger question is like, what do you do about these institutions?

• 1:28:18Speaker 00

  Well, I guess I maybe give a little, I mean, I realize I've kept you now nearly two hours, but I'm going to keep you to the, to the final minute.

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  It's okay.

• 1:28:25Speaker 00

  Maybe give a little color on just how weird this history is because, I mean, you go into it in the book in, in great detail and it's actually quite entertaining in a, in a morbid way to read. But, I mean, maybe tell people who Johann von Leers was.

• 1:28:38Speaker 01

  Oh my God, sure. So, yeah. So this is like, when I said it's not horseshoe theory, when it's one person.

• 1:28:44Speaker 00

  Right, yeah.

• 1:28:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, Johann, Johann von Leers was a Nazi ideologue. He joined the Nazi party before it was cool in 1929. And he was obsessed with empires. He was a linguist. He studied languages of basically what are all the great empires, right? So he was fluent in English, French, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Arabic. And even as a young man before, in 1929, he wrote to Hajamine Al-Husseini, who is the Mufti of Jerusalem, who was this Palestinian Arab demagogue who had succeeded by 1929 in inciting massacres of Jews in Hebron and Jaffa in Jerusalem. So this is before, before the state of Israel, these people he was massacring were not, you know,

• 1:29:26Speaker 01

  were, were actually part of these traditional Jewish communities that had lived there for centuries. And he had incited, incited these massacres. And Johann von Leers wrote him fan mail, complimenting him on his success in, in slaughtering the Jews. He, during the, during the Third Reich, he was, he created all the school curriculum for the Third Reich. He published 27 books, very prolific, 27 books about Nazi ideology. And what's clear from his work, from his ideology books is that, and this is as the Holocaust scholar, David Patterson, has put it, he said, "The Nazis were not anti-Semitic because they were racist. They were racist because they were anti-Semitic." Because what Johann von Leers writes in one of his books is that the Jews have tried to convince the world of a great lie, which is that all people are created equal.

• 1:30:11Speaker 01

  He was exactly, the Nazi objection to the Jews, in his mind at least, was exactly because of what we today would call these liberal values, right? I mean, which for the Jews comes from, you know, from this, you know, the statements in the Torah about every person being created in the divine image. All of this would just be, you know, a remarkable career. And I would say Hajamine Al-Husseini then of course came to Berlin, was employed by the Third Reich for years to spread Nazi propaganda to Arabic speaking world over the radio. He ran those programs. This would be an, it would be a sort of uninteresting story, except for what happens to Johann von Leers after the war. He escapes justice, flees to Argentina, where he quickly is employed by the regime of Juan Peron, since he's fluent in Spanish and loves dictators.

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  When Juan Peron is deposed, he gets a job with the Egyptian embassy in, in Argentina, creating their bespoke anti-Semitic campaign against Argentine Jews, which is a weird use of state funds for the Egyptians. He then is recruited to come to Egypt to work for the regime of Gamal Abdul-Nasr, who was the dictator of Egypt and also the head of the Arab League. And he was employed to create anti-Israel propaganda in Arabic for the entire Arab League. And he does that for the rest of his life. In Cairo, creating anti-Israel propaganda for the rest of the Arab League. Some of this material ends up getting translated into Russian, is used by the Soviets in their

• 1:31:35Speaker 01

  anti-Zionism campaigns. And my favorite coda to this story is that in Cairo in the 1950s, he reunites with his hero, Hajamine Al-Husseini, who converts him to Islam.

• 1:31:47Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  And then he renames himself Omar Amin after his hero Hajamine Al-Husseini. I mean, like, yeah, it's not horseshoe theory when it's one guy.

• 1:31:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:31:56Speaker 01

  It's like, you know, like it's turtles all the way down. It's like, wow, it's Nazis all the way down. And he's not the only one. I mean, I could have told many other stories about many other Nazis who wind up in the Middle East supporting, I mean, the, there was a Swiss, a Swiss Nazi banker who ended up funding the PLO. I mean, there's a lot of people like this who, who end up in the Arab world.

• 1:32:12Speaker 00

  Again, I think there are theological justifications for this as well, but there is this layer of just explicit Nazi influence of-

• 1:32:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:32:23Speaker 00

  -the Muslim, the Muslim world. And I mean, Al-Husseini is not a peripheral figure. He is-

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  Oh no.

• 1:32:29Speaker 00

  -the very founding of Palestinian nationalism, again, predating the existence of Israel.

• 1:32:34Speaker 01

  From the 1920s, yes.

• 1:32:36Speaker 00

  And, and, and we're talking about somebody who aspired to create his own death camps in, in the Middle East for Jews.

• 1:32:41Speaker 01

  Oh yes.

• 1:32:42Speaker 00

  I mean, he toured Auschwitz, you know, he, I mean, the tour, maybe the tour of Auschwitz is still considered an apocryphal story, but he definitely met with Himmler and Hitler and-

• 1:32:51Speaker 01

  He trained Muslim soldiers in the Balkans to fight with the Nazis.

• 1:32:54Speaker 00

  So 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, that we haven't magically found a two-state solution here.

• 1:33:10Speaker 01

  It's a 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? I mean, this is an Islamist empire in all but name that is trying to eradicate all minorities from the Middle East. I mean, they succeeded in, you know, genocide against the Yazidis, for example. If you think about how Coptic Christians are treated in Egypt, I mean, there's, you know, there's sort of the bloody edges of this Islamist empire in, in Africa, where there's, in Nigeria, for example, in Sudan. So, I mean, this is, this is like a, a small mi, a tiny, tiny minority

• 1:33:53Speaker 01

  that refuses to bow to tyrants. And that was true in the past and it's still true now. And that pisses off tyrants.

• 1:34:01Speaker 00

  Actually, there's, there's one Nazi lie that I just want to flag that you discuss in the book, but I don't think you mention in the book where it recently resurfaced. Maybe your, your book came out before this conversation, but this notion of a greater Israel-

• 1:34:14Speaker 01

  Oh no, I do talk about that in the book, actually.

• 1:34:15Speaker 00

  You, you talk about that in the book, but, but did you-

• 1:34:17Speaker 01

  Yes, this is a Nazi propaganda lie that the Jews want to create a, quote, "huge Jewish home in the Middle East that stretches, you know, all the way to the Euphrates in what's now Iraq."

• 1:34:25Speaker 00

  But did you notice that it came up in Tucker Carlson's interview of Mike Huckabee?

• 1:34:29Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. So that was, you know, that it didn't make it into the book. But yes, this is, this is, again, an old, old lie from Nazi propaganda that this was, you know, the move, the purpose of the Zionist movement was to take over the Middle East and then the world. I mean, this is just absurd.

• 1:34:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. What should we do about the currency? I mean, it's just, these memes have spread everywhere. Is it just, are we just going to play whack-a-mole until the end of the world with, with each one? I mean, we have some of the biggest podcasters hosting a lie like this. The Greater Israel lie is harder to track down, but we, we just have overt Holocaust denial going out to tens of millions of people. I mean, you spend a lot of time thinking about Holocaust education and have concluded that it's actually just insufficient to deal with the, the nature of this problem.

• 1:35:16Speaker 01

  Yes. Thank you for saying insufficient. I'm not against Holocaust education, but it is insufficient for us to face this, yes.

• 1:35:21Speaker 00

  So maybe, maybe as we get toward closing, just rhetorically, I mean, what, what is the necessary insufficient message to communicate, given enough time and a large enough audience?

• 1:35:35Speaker 01

  Well, so this is, for me, is not rhetorical because I founded a nonprofit recently to, exactly to spread this message, starting in 212 schools. It's called The Tell Institute. And our mission is to educate the broader public about Jewish civilization and the dynamics of antisemitism 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, what you value the most in order to rile up populations against their Jewish, against the Jews.

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  So that is a, what our program does, I should say, this is an, it's eight lessons. This is not like, you know, a year-long class. It's really a crash course. We have been test-driving it in public high schools with a lot of success. The biggest thing that we are hearing back from students and teachers is, who knew? Like, wow, this is total news. Like, people are even shocked, like Jews have been around for 3,000 years? What? Like this, like even that is like shocking to people. And, you know, look, our goal in this program is not just about content. It isn't just like, oh, here's yet another identity group in your identity alphabet soup. It's about this, that this civilization is, has within it some of the roots of world history, right? I mean, you don't have Christianity and Islam without Judaism. You don't have, you know, the whole, a lot of the ideas of the American founders come from their understanding of the Hebrew Bible.

• 1:37:02Speaker 01

  You know, it's very hard to understand those trends in our history, a lot of which lead to liberal democracy, is certainly not the only thing that's leading to liberal democracy. But, you know, this is a huge contribution to, to a lot of the things that we now think of as part of our, our shared civilization. So introducing those ideas and also introducing how you can, how you might end up being manipulated and how to avoid it. That's the skill piece. Because ultimately, and this comes from research that I have seen about what researchers will call pre-bunking, right? That, that it's much more so easy, it's, it's much easier to pre-bunk information instead of to debunk a lie once people have already had the lie, to prepare people that you're going to be hearing this lie and you should be ready for it.

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

  Who might be manipulating you. And so those are the questions that we're asking in this, in this curriculum. We give, we teach about antisemitism through case studies, because the goal is pattern recognition. We literally have it as like a chart, like the big lie chart, like who is the liar in this instance? What value in this society are they targeting and claiming that Jews are violating? It's like a chart that like a 13-year-old can understand. And then we, the last piece of it is how is new media accelerating this lie? Because new media, of course, is the Wild West. You don't yet know who's credible and who's not. And the way you're establishing credibility is through exposure, otherwise known as popularity contest. And remember, this is a tiny countercultural minority that refuses to bow to tyrants. Most people are bowing to tyrants and we're trying to give people the skills.

• 1:38:26Speaker 00

  So how are you, how are you hoping to scale this curriculum? I mean, ultimately, this has to be a digital product. I imagine it's face to face.

• 1:38:33Speaker 01

  Yes, it's going to have to be. Yeah. So we, look, we've, we've been thinking about this. We are, we started this in public schools. Also, another thing then, interesting, you know, maybe less relevant for most of your listeners, but we also, I discovered very quickly into developing this, that I also had a lot of people in the Jewish community coming to me saying, you know, our students don't know this either. Can we teach this in our synagogue bar and bat mitzvah program? So I developed a version of it. And that goes to what you mentioned earlier, actually, what you said before about, oh, I meet all these liberal, liberal rabbis who were so surprised that, you know, they're allies. Those are exactly the people who are now coming to us about this because they realized in the last few years that this was, you know, their, their frame was, something was off about their frame. But yeah, we're doing this in public schools. But you're correct that there's going to have to be a direct-to-consumer version of this.

• 1:39:17Speaker 01

  And we are, we are thinking about how to do that and how to do that the most effectively.

• 1:39:21Speaker 00

  Nice. What, what's the URL for your org?

• 1:39:24Speaker 01

  It's www.theTillInstitute.org. And it's T-E-L-L, I named after an archaeological tell, like the layers of civilization, because we're exploring these layers of civilization, but also tell like we're telling our story. And also the tell that reveals a lie. So it's all of those meanings layered together. Yeah, theTellInstitute.org.

• 1:39:42Speaker 00

  Well, Dara, as I promised, we, we barely skimmed the surface of your beautiful book, which is lacerating to read, so I recommend that people do that. I'm going to support your org. I hope my listeners do as well. Thank you for everything you're doing, Dara.

• 1:39:57Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you for everything you're doing. And I'm just going to say to your listeners, this is winnable.

• 1:40:03Speaker 00

  Nice, nice. Well, I hope you're right. And I hope to live long enough to see it.

• 1:40:07Speaker 01

  Me too.