138: Why antisemitism works, with Prof. Ruth Wisse

[Music] Hi everybody, welcome to a new episode of Ask a Leave Anything. Thank you so much for joining us. I have the honor and privilege of having Professor Ruth Weiss on the podcast, one of my intellectual heroes, someone I've been reading, and learning from, and in more recent years watching her talks on YouTube, for many years a historian, a literature professor. Professor Weiss is the former Martin Perts professor of Yiddish literature and professor of comparative literature at Harvard University, and she is currently the distinguished senior fellow at the Tickva Fund. Her books on literary subjects include the modern Jewish canon, a journey through literature and culture. She's the author to political studies, if I am not for myself, the liberal betrayal of the Jews from 1982, and Jews in power from 2007. Her latest book, No Joke, Making Jewish Humor, is a volume in the Tickva sponsored library of Jewish ideas, and it was published by Princeton University Press. So let's get into it. Before we do, I want to tell you that this episode is sponsored. It's an incredibly relevant sponsor to everything we're going to be talking about. This episode is sponsored by Club Z. I spend a lot of time watching young Jews talking to young Jews on campuses throughout the United States and Canada and Britain and elsewhere, who call themselves anti-zionist, or feel of pressure to talk about themselves as anti-zionist, without being able to actually articulate what the word "zionist" or "anti-zionist" actually means, without knowing the basic history of how Israel came to exist, of who Israeli Jews actually are. That's not their fault. Nobody taught them these things. Nobody taught them their own story. Club Z is one of the organizations closing that gap. Since 2011, they've been teaching Jewish teens their own story, the story of the Jews, identity before advocacy. First, you teach them who they are. First, they get to learn the story of themselves, their communities, their forebears. Then, Zionism becomes not a slogan they inherited or some kind of political conditional, but it becomes something they actually understand. It becomes a history of Jewish suffering and Jewish triumph and Jewish resurrection and Jewish survival. That is far larger and far deeper and far truer, far more real than the kind of narrow sloganering that they will encounter in that ferocious ideological whirlwind that is consumed so much. Of American academic life, at least outside the classroom and often inside the classroom. Club Z runs year-round programs in New York, New Jersey, Boston, LA in the San Francisco Bay Area and there are new cohorts forming right now. You can get more info on that at clubz.org. Here's the thing parents need to hear. You don't control what happens on campus, but you can college proof your kid. That's why I really appreciate that they are partnering with us. You can college proof your kid before they get to that campus. By giving them their history, their confidence, their identity, they will have the answers. This is not about politics. This is not about whether you support a particular policy or government or war or any of that. This is about knowing the story of the Jews so nobody else can write for them their own story. And nobody can talk them out of who they actually are. That's a must and that's what club Z does for your kid. This Liberty Weekend club Z is bringing 100 teens to Central Florida for the rising, which is a national leadership gathering featuring speakers including Colonel Richard Camp, Shobbis, Kestinbaum. There are only about 20 spots left. No teen has turned away for lack of funds. Visit clubz.org. That's CLUBC.org/the-rising. And you can use code Ask Havive 200 ASK H-A-V-I-V 200 for a listener discount. Thanks to club Z for everything that you do and for being a sponsor of this episode. I just love to invite everyone who appreciates what we do to join our Patreon, subscribe to our substack. If you're interested in asking the questions that guide the topics we talk about on this podcast, you can do that at the Patreon at the substack. You also get to take part in monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. Join us at www.patrion.com/asKhambeaveanything or www.chavivgour.substack.com. Those links are in the show notes. Ruth, how are you? I'm very well, Havive. And I'm just so delighted to be here with you the first time on the show, but I'm always one of the listeners. So I feel very much at home. I come from a culture of my parents and Hebrew University where I was a Jewish thought student and it's people who lived in Yashiva, grew up in Yashiva. Not all of them are religious, but they all know that culture of study. And so when you say someone is your teacher, that's the big thing. And you have been one of my teachers and it is truly an honor to have you here. I want to immediately dive in and just get started. You have argued, you have written, I have interviewed you and published articles on this based on those interviews, that anti-Semitism generally. And absolutely the anti-Semitism of this moment, the obsessive focus on Jews, the just explicit anti-Semitism we see in parts of the right and parts of the left in the Muslim world in the West. And that anti-Semitism is not hatred of Jews. Anti-Semitism is something much more interesting and much more useful. It is a strategy of political organization. It's a strategy for acquiring power, for elite competition. It's not a prejudice. Can you describe to us how you understand anti-Semitism and I'm just going to put it out there as the biggest possible of a question, how you understand the moment that Jews are going through right now. Well, one of the reasons that we write is so that we should get it just right. And you understand that the temptation of being in such a podcast is terrific, but it will never come out as clearly as one tries to get it in the pros that one crafts very carefully on the page. So in the long run, I do hope that this leads people also if they're interested to the books themselves where I think these thoughts are much clearer in their formulation. But let me start where I think it might be helpful to start with how I came to this myself. And I think it starts all the way back in my childhood and certainly in my teams, the holiday of Paisach of Passover was taken with ultimate seriousness in my home. Two nights of Passover, the entire Haggadah read, and everyone at the table had come from Europe, either just on the eve of World War II, which we came in 1940. And then in the years that followed many of the people who came to our table, came after the war, people who had lost their families, their children. So you understand that the reading of the Haggadah was a national experience and it was very intense. The most intense point, I suppose early in the Haggadah is the hall door of a door. I read in my father's voice. In every generation they come to destroy us and the holy one blessed be he rescues us from their hands. So the conversation, of course, around the table at that point was just explosive because what did they focus on most of these people on the second part of that? But God did not save us from their hands. Why are we saying this? How are we saying this? How are we to understand this? If God did not save us from their hands? Well, I have to say that at a very early point, I realized that this was not my question. You could say that I'm not very spiritually gifted. But in a way I understood that God somehow was not my domain. You see, I would never know the mind of God. I would never be able to understand that theological thing. But the second part of it was extremely interesting and I thought that it was wrong. Because we were in Canada and in the United States the situation was the same. And look, in every generation they did come to destroy us. This is true. And by the way, was it ever true at that table because it was not only that people had fled Hitler. But we had also fled Stalin who was as great a threat in our household as anyone else. And that very moment in time the Arab League had organized to destroy the state of Israel. So yes, in every generation it's not only one people that was trying to destroy us. Multiple people's enforces were trying to destroy us. But it was not true that everyone was. You see, and I never bought into the fact that all the world hates the Jews and that we are always. No, not at all. When we were growing up, all the world did not hate us. The laws protected us. And by the way, we felt pretty protected. That's why I make that distinction. Sure there was some prejudice. Sure there was discrimination. But look, the discrimination in the United States. States against blacks in the 50s and then the 60s, it was much greater than it was against Jews. And as far as getting into places like Harvard are concerned, well, the discrimination against Catholics was just as great as it was against Jews. You see what I mean? I realize that my problem was to figure out how come some people organize their politics against the Jews and how come others don't. And so from the very beginning, it seemed to me that this was a political question. What was it about the political makeup of the Jewish people that made it so attractive for some people to put them at the center of their ideology, of their negative ideology? Whereas democracies that really believed that all people should be given equal opportunity and felt very comfortable with that, okay, so they would have a minority problem here and there. But they were different. So you see the main thing that I would say that I came to and that I've stayed with all the time is that this is a political issue, a political issue. And so then one of the questions that you asked and that began to fascinate me, so why do Jews, what do they get out of organizing against the Jews? So I started to define antisemitism in some ways, the organization of politics against the Jews. And when you start with where it starts, in 1879, quite specifically in Germany, with Wilhelm Mar writing the book that says, you know, the victory of Judentum over German and tomb, yes, which sold many, many copies and was immediately republished 12 times, I believe. Well, what did he get out of that? Out of founding the league of antisemitism, the antisemitic league, that's what he called it. He formulated that. He said, we are not you know, in that Christian domain, we don't believe in that anti-Judeism. No, no, this is a political issue. The Jews have come to take over Germany. And it was a very powerful idea because it was, Germany was beginning to become more liberal and was moving in the direction of democracy. And it was now the people who had to be one over to an idea. People who wanted power now had to appeal to a very large public and to convince them of something and look at how brilliant this was. You're unemployed? The Rothschilds have your job. It's the Jews who have your job. You feel that other people are running the stores and everything and that it's no longer Germans who are in control of their city. Of course, it's because of the Jews. Wagner came and said Jews are ruining German music. So it was the politics of the pointing finger. We've got a problem, guys. And you know, every country has problems. And Germany at the time had lots of problems. So if you could answer that problem, and if you could answer it not abstractly, like it's the capitalists or even it's the communists, but if you could point to a people that was there in small enough numbers not to be a threat, but in large enough profile and image to be really, you know, much magnified over what they were, it was the perfect organizing target. And then I began to think over the years of its functions. So the politics of the pointing finger organizes, you say, as I say, grievance and blame, grievance, you're a grieved and there are so many grieved groups. Well, all of them can be answered by the fact that the Jews are the ones who are taking advantage of you in these varieties of ways. And then the grievance and blame, but it's also a marvelous thing because look at, if you look at a magician and how the magician uses the pointing finger, he says, watch this, watch this. And he points the finger. And if your eyes follow that finger, guess what? They don't see the hand. They don't see that he's the one coming to power. He is using this to come to power. And he is focusing you so much on those Jews. So it's a deflection of his own will to power. It's a deflection of his own ambitions. So you have all these things, organization, agreement, and blame, deflection. Now, look at what it does to a population. It galvanizes them negatively. And this makes me laugh sometimes because, you know, at this, we're living through a season, when are we not living through a season of, of voting and, you know, electioneering. So everybody comes and says, I'm not going to, I'm not going to do negative campaigning. I was going to do positive. Yeah. Well, I watch the news enough to see that there isn't a single positive ad that I have seen in weeks, right? They're all negative. This anti-semitism became the largest and most effective negative political campaign. The only modern ideology that is exclusively negative. Everything else, socialism promises you something. You know, communism promises you something. Democracy, if you can think of that ideological promises. Anti-semitism, anti-ism, I call it, because it then becomes anti-sionism. It becomes anti-anything, but, you know, anti-ism, the organization of politics against the Jews. It is the largest and effective negative campaign. And here's one of its greatest functions. And this is what Well-Hell-Mar, the founder of the anti-Semitic League, understood. It is the greatest coalition builder. You see, it is the only coalition builder. And if you think of it today in all its forms, you see that that may be its most important function. Because if we skip to, let's say Harvard, let's not go that far, but if we skip from the German context to the Harvard context, you see how come 33 groups on October 7th held Israel responsible for the war against it. And who were these groups? Well, these were 33 different grievance groups. And the grievance movement at Harvard had been generated for decades. I saw it beginning in the late 1990s, the grievance of women, right, who, you know, the radical feminist movement. But even before that, the anti-war movement that started, that did not allow reserve officer training corps on the campus because we were against war. And then all the anti-capitalist movements, and then the anti-colonialist movements, and then occupy Wall Street, you see. All these grievance movements were all just stationed in Harvard, all those years. And then suddenly come the Palestinians. And they say, "Hey, guys, we've got a flag. We've got to costume the Kafea. We're the grievance group number one. Just follow us." And they brought it all together. They brought it all together. If this organization of politics against the Jews plays such an important role in world politics, in the politics of the part of the world that we inhabit, how come political science, how come the study of government, how come all these people who deal with these issues have never studied this phenomenon in this way, as a political tool, as a political instrument, to ask about its variables. You see, this is the great question. Where have all these people been that they haven't been asking these questions? Because they want to think holistically, you see, they want to find something a general principle, some kind of formula that fits, and they don't think that the Jew, they think that the Jew is just a parochial issue. It's not the parochial issue. I mean, to think that the Jews is a parochial issue is to be parochial. This to me is the strange thing. It's prejudice and even organizing against another. You see it in different societies, but the scale of the organizing against the Jews. In the Middle East, I am very used to seeing this kind of anti-Semitism in Arab politics, in Egyptian politics, in Algerian politics, in Jordanian countries where it peace with, and some of the recently countries that are very much adversaries of us. You see this obsessive in say, at the museums in Egypt as part of the Judaism exhibit having the protocols of the elders of Zion. I mean, just normative, ordinary, in the Ramadan television dramas of the Arab world, rabid, insane anti-Semitism with Jews controlling the world and Jews depicted in these old European sort of crooked nose kind of ways. And you see Arab politics organizing against Israel. And this is something I learned from you. But just why should in the 40s and 50s as they're becoming decolonized as the empires are leaving? The Arabs have chosen not what they could have chosen so many paths. They could have chosen so many kinds of politics. And they chose a politics obsessively focused on Israel while building incompetent destitute tyrannies back home. Instead of a politics that focused on the problems back home and build something much bigger and better and more beautiful out of it and didn't obsess about Israel. And I always put-- and I think I intuitively just assume because the experience of anti-Semitism I have in my life has essentially been Middle Eastern. And I always assumed that anti-Semitism was a signal of incompetence. But I always knew that that's not true. But I didn't realize I knew it because, of course, Nazi Germany wasn't in-- the Germany that fell into Nuz it wasn't in incompetent society with broken economy. But now Tucker Carlson is making a big name for himself with millions of viewers and these best friends with vice president JD Vance who himself platforms him and defends him. And he has argued that the Jews invented the pornography industry that is destroying the American family. Now there's a huge problem in crisis of millions of young men who are having this genuine crisis in their education, crisis of literacy, crisis of jobs, crisis and call. There's a real crisis and modernity of literally couples pairing up. The Jews did not invent the American porn industry. The Jews did not come for America's men. That is not a thing that ever happened, blaming problems that are obviously not-- the Jews are obviously not trying to take over Germany. And you're going to demolish Germany if that is how you organize your politics. And here's Tucker Carlson doing it. Why the Jews? Why doesn't this look incompetent to everybody else? Well, I think that-- it's funny the way you put it. The question why is a good one? But you put it in a way that it seems unanswerable. And what I am suggesting is that it is quite answerable to take your first example and perhaps the most serious one that we're dealing with. Why the Jews in 1945 for the Arab world? Well, the Arab world organized in the Arab League, not the anti-Semitic League, but the Arab League organized as an anti-Semitic League in 1945 and Cairo. Right? They got together. The Arab League was in the best place of anything that you could have imagined. Because all the imperialist countries were exhausted by the war. But the Arabs came out of it marvelously whether they were on the wrong side or not. Nobody was bothering them anymore. They had-- really, you could say-- they have the whole world in their hands. They could have-- they had oil. They had oil. They had the land. They have 640 times more land than Israel or something as if land was a problem. They had the people. They had everything. But they'd had nothing to hold them together. Pan-Arapism had nothing to hold them together. And they already had something to fear. Because the Muslim Brotherhood had started up and it was getting very strong. And it had its own Islamist element, which was really-- and the Arab world is very divided. And so how many wars there are among them? What was the one thing? Talk about a coalition builder. What was the one thing that really brought them together and has stayed the only thing that brings them together like an accordion? Oh, some of them will pull apart and make a peace treaty. But then, ooh, it only takes a little thing when they're back in the movement again. This is the one thing that combines-- Shiites and the Sunnis and a young and old, the religious and the secular, the nationalists and the whatever it is from one coast to another. It can get into Pakistan. And it has the Muslim reach is even greater than the Arab reach. So that, if you look at the Arab League and its economic boycott, which they built in right from the beginning, the economic element was built in right away that the boycott of Israel and of all the countries said what have to do with Israel, first of all the destruction of Israel. So all these elements, you see that I'm pointing to, the politics of the pointing finger, the organization of grievance and blame, the coalition builder, all these functions of anti-Semitism. And in the Arab world, even more, a lot of rising dissatisfaction, a lot of rising dissatisfaction with the governments themselves. Think of how useful it is to deflect attention away from the government that you're dissatisfied with as Iran would love to keep doing-- it's not the government. It's Israel. It's Israel. It's the Jews. It's the Jews. So for the Arab world, particularly, this became a godsend, I would say. Now, you know, but what you said implicitly, we should never lose sight of. You see, deflection in the short run is very useful. But in the long run, it's completely destructive. Because if you're deflecting the problem, if you are misdefining the problem because the Jews are never the problem, you see. You can use them for the blame. But they're never to blame. And getting rid of them is never the answer to the contrary, right? So this politics of deflection that gets more and more violent as the domestic problem is growing, become more extreme. That keeps multiplying until it destroys itself from within. Ultimately, it is self-destructive. But ultimately, it can take decades. It can take centuries. Right? Ultimately, it is always self-destructive because it is a deflection of paying attention, as you said. Why don't they put the finger to themselves? Well, this is what we are supposed to do. You see, this is the answer to anti-Semitism, by the way. When somebody says, look at Israel. Look at Israel. You never follow the pointing finger. You never answer to the charge. Never, because it's never that. The question is, why are you pointing there? Point back. So that's why I say to students over the years, never defend. Never defend. What I mean by that is that the problem being articulated is not the real problem. You see, the organization of politics at the UN, the against Israel all these years, that's talking to do with Israel. It was just the organizing. So you're not doing anyone a favor by following the pointing finger. So I would say that answering to the charge, no matter what it is, is already an error. You see, so it's wonderful that all these organizations teach the Jews to be proud. And of course, I'm part of that. And you know, I don't disagree with any of that. You understand that. Of course, we have to know. We can get to why that is so important for Jews and for Americans to know who they are and to have the moral confidence in their country and in its goodness and in its greatness. This is very, very important. But when somebody comes at you and says, what about bebeen etanyahu? And you say, oh, well, you know, I don't agree with bebeen etanyahu. Or of course, I would pull back 10 yards or I would pull back 10 kilometers or I would pull back 50 miles. You understand what Israel is trying. It's never about that. And so if you pretend that it is about that, you want to blame yourself because you want to solve the problem. And if you could only solve the problem this easy way by pulling out of Gaza, oh gee, why don't we just pull out of Gaza that will solve the problem? You know, it's such a temptation because if you think you can solve the problem, then you're in control of the situation. The situation of the Jews is that they can understand the problem. But if they think that they can solve the problem of the organization of politics against them by trying to accommodate it, I mean, that is insanity. And you know, I have to say that the greatest day of my life, maybe we can come to that, was May 14th. My calendar, the creation of the state of Israel, it came one day after my 12th birthday. So I always felt that that was my butmitsvah. Nobody in the world has ever had a butmitsvah gift like I've had, you know, nothing in the world will ever match for me. The astonishing thing of being alive at the creation of, you know, the state of Israel. But to the same degree, a signing of the Oslo court was for me. I thought Israel would never survive this. Because no country in history has ever armed its enemy with the expectation of gaining security. I mean, to take the world's greatest terrorist, who was a terrorist against you and put him in charge of the population of a country that is, you know, that you inhabit. I mean, but you understand that I understand what the impulse was. That was why I was so devastated by it. Of course, Jews thought if only we could get, you know, rubbing thought, "Well, I can't kill those people. I can't keep peace among those people." No, but Arifat's gonna do it for me, you know? They will do it for me. Let's outsource, you know, our defense. Let's outsource our defense to our enemies. What a concept. I have to say, yeah. I'm so old there. I'm not. No, not at all. We go wherever we go. I was a huge fan of the Oslo Accords. I'll say in my defense that I was a teenager. So, you know, but of course, I am. We were ruling them militarily. And that was not right, because democracy, civil rights, et cetera. And I don't, you know, everyone takes their own journey. I apologize for nothing. I mean, I have been right there at the front paying the cost, but also, I'm not disagreeing with you. You know, I needed to find out. And it isn't that the second anti-Fatta that ends the Oslo peace process is like, you know, it failed. It didn't just fail. It failed in 140 suicide bombings created by this massive infrastructure. And we pulled out of the Palestinian cities in what, 98? And the second they finally begins in this fall of 2000. I might be off by a few months, but that's roughly the time. In other words, the second that the Arafat led Piazza and Authority controlled territory, it launched this war. And it was a war targeting kids. And if you can't see that, we're not, you know, we're living on different planets. You can't have a conversation with me. I'm willing to hear what I'm doing wrong from people who understand what Hamas says. How much Hamas is willing to destroy the Palestinians? Never mind the Jews of Israel, which it absolutely is committed to destroy. And by the way, you say to me, you can say to me, it's okay for you to say, you're not the one who has to go to war in or every day in order to fight that enemy. And so here we come to the, I don't, it's not the psychology, but it is the political predicament of the Jews, the inescapable predicament of the Jews. We are the most independent, self-reliant, self-defining people in the world. And I would love to talk about that. I mean, Judaism is politically unbelievably important. You know, we represent the principle of coexistence because we are built for coexistence. You know, we are, Can you explain what you mean by that? Yes, of course I will try. This is a fascinating thing. You know, my husband and I were happy and privileged enough to come to Israel and we took a trip with the, yeah, I wrote, I'm sorry with them. Oh, it's only the, the people who would talk you to the Sinai for a week and a half. We went with the, on a, on two command cars with a group of 30 people, you know, just who paid the price as we did, to tour the Sinai and we climbed Mount Sinai, you know. It was unbelievable. We climbed Mount Sinai. This is before the withdrawal in '82. Yes, of course. So it was in '69, 1969, right? So we, we, we, we were there, we climbed Mount Sinai. You know, I, I mean, all of the description of, you know, Mutantora and Moses and all, it, it seems so real because you can understand that in that expanse, the idea that a people could undertake a contractual agreement with the creator of the world, to be that people, to live by that stringent law, which was necessary to take this rabble and turn it into a civilized people. I mean, you can see the whole thing and you understand what it is to carry the Torah into the world. It is a great, great privilege to be a member of that people. And I would hope that if I were not born into it, I would have chosen to become a member of this people. It is great, but it only occurred to me, sort of more recently that nobody told us that that Sinai, that Sinai, when you're there alone, that you have to do this among the nations. You're not going to be standing there alone with God. You're going to have to be doing that, living by those laws and commandments. You're going to have to be doing that among the nations in the land of Israel to be sure if you've been able to conquer it, but among the nations, you see. Now that combination that we took upon ourselves, to be a perfectable people, and yet to do it among the nations that are not trying to perfect themselves, that do not live by that, they are expansionist. They are living by their laws, by paganism, by conquest. You know, we know, but as you said, by what Islam, prides itself as being a people of conquest. It's a religion of conquest. Okay, one wouldn't want to take anything away from it, but we need coexistence. We cannot live without coexistence, and that is our Achilles heel. Everybody knows that about us. A small people with a hugely inflated image that has no incentive for counteraggression. None. Not only do we not have an incentive for counteraggression, we have every disincentive to attack those who attack us, because we want acceptance from precisely the people who are most against us. You see, you see what that is politically? When you have an enemy like us, that is really self-accountable, wonderful, right, but has no incentive to counteraggress against you unless absolutely forced to do so. That's a vulnerability. That's a permanent built-in. It can be, of course it has been our vulnerability. We want to be the most useful, and that's how we prove ourselves, not to be pornographers, but to bring the best to people. We've tried to bring the best in medicine. We've tried to bring the best in thought, in every respect, because this is how we live. We live by proving ourselves useful to others. You see? When, yeah, there's been debates about what exactly is happening on the progressive left in the USA, crowd, and other parts of progressive left were the succession with Israel, but also often with Jews, and it's driven by the same exact kind of animus and obsessive focus. It is easier today to be opposed to almost any traditional progressive policy and still be in the progressive camp. You cannot support Israel and be in that progressive camp. It is more definitional, the Jewish question, essentially, than any single other progressive policy. And that itself is fascinating, but one of the arguments that are made in that progressive, that are made by analysts looking at that phenomenon is that hating Israel and having this obsession with Jews is cost-free to progressive politics. In other words, Mamdanin has a huge problem right now in New York, and it's not that a lot of the Jews distrust him. It's that he's spending money. New York City doesn't have New York City's budget as tripled or quadrupled or something like that in 20 years, but obsessing about Israel and talking about Israel and talking about Nitenyao and vowing to arrest and putting press releases and press conferences about Israel is cost-free. That doesn't cost what healthcare costs. It doesn't cost what, you know, child care, you know, early childhood education costs. It has no cost. And hating Israel will get your headlines. And hating Israel will organize coalitions. And you'll have a Muslim coalition together with a progressive coalition or they'll feel good because the third world is good and the West is evil and all of that stuff and it's cost-free. And that I think is part of what you're saying. What is a Jew's gonna do to you? What a Jew's gonna do in response? - Well, this is exactly what I'm saying. But it's not, it's cost-free because we do not, you know, I've been trying to get, I mean, trying to, I'm not an organization, you know, I just say this to people, don't go stop talking about anti-Semitism. It's anti-ism. It's trying to bring down the United States as it is. It's trying to really destroy what is best about America, both the socialism and the, whatever else goes into that package of what they think progressiveism is. It's very destructive. And of course, communism always said the worst it is, the better it is. I mean, we've got to destroy before we can rebuild. And so they were really bent on destroying an anti-ism, anti-ism, anti-Semitism is part of that. - Is it fair to say, you come from an American political conservative perspective. You, that's the camp you're from, you are. - Start it, that's not. - Of course not, whoever started there. - A knife? - Yes. - A little bit. to hear though, everyone starts as a liberal. You've done. No, this is, this is no, but, but how do you see, you just touched on it. So let's dive into it. How do you see this, this political moment? Anti-Semitism that I, I by the way, when I talk about anti-Semitism, I talk about it being, you know, a religious idea at the earliest monotheistic, you know, moments in the founding of Christianity, the founding of Islam and the Jew is positioned as the sort of obstacle to, you know, it's this intellectual stuff from St. Augustine and when you, early Muhammad in the Quran is respectful of Jews, late, will come into the Quran is murdering Jews. It's a pro, Luther begins his career, respecting Jews and ends his career hating Jews because they never convert and, and religions that, that draw so much of their ideas from the Jewish story, can't handle that Lecuna of the Jew not accepting the new revelation and the new story. And this embeds, Christianity has come a very long way from there in a way that Islam still hasn't done the work. But that's where I position it, but you insist on anti-Semitism being fundamentally a political act and a political organizing principle and, and the intellectual side is, is not, is not the driver. So how do you see this moment on the American left and the American conversation? And by the way, and the Tucker Carlson right and the Candace Owens is worse and Ik Fuentes is worse and they're, they're normalized. They're mainstreamed now. How do you see this moment and in everything that we've said, though we've talked about? Well, I, I would urge, I would urge it only, it's not that I don't understand the roots of anti-Semitism and how far it comes. And all of that went into the making of the negative image of the Jew, which is harnessed to the new anti-ism that I'm talking about. But I want to concentrate it, particularly the way you say it. I'm looking at modern anti-Semitism. Modern anti-Semitism comes into being in a world which is liberalizing, which is democratizing. It is a movement that is born together with the possibility of democracy because it has to win over the populace. If you have a leader that can, you know, make peace today and make war tomorrow, all right, he still has to have the people on his side, but you know, you know, and I mean it's an authoritarian government and it sort of has that power over the people. If the people have the power, then you have to win them over. And this organizing politics against the Jews, the politics of the pointing finger, they are responsible, making as crazy as the actuization is. And it becomes crazier and crazier by the way, there's never been Jews have never been responsible for what they are charged with. Never. So you say, what, are you telling me Jews are a perfect people? Not at all. Jews know that they're an imperfect people, but the point is not that we perfect ourselves. The point is that other people cannot be allowed to use us as the explanation for their failings. And that every time we allow that to any degree, to the smallest degree like saying, oh yeah, but we know that we're responsible for this and this. Really? I would never make that thing because if you push it far enough back, it's their inability. It's their desire to blame you that is the problem like it or not, you can't solve it by pretending to be part of the problem. You cannot, you have to convince Israelis, even before you convince Jews in America, you have to convince Israelis that they dare not see themselves as the problem. They are the solution and let me get to that. Please let's. Yeah, no, let's get to that. So, so you do, you know, because of my age and the advantage of my age, I will tell you that that moment in 1948, the creation of the state of Israel is a most hopeful moment in civilization. Since the dove came with the olive leaf to know us, Ark. Think about it. Europe had destroyed itself. Europe and especially Germany, which was the crown jewel of Europe, good, shiller, Bach, Beethoven, bronze, Kant, Hegel. German was the language that I had to learn both for a PhD in in English department, in the English department, right? And then when I was in the department of Near Eastern languages and civilizations, you could not graduate without German, German, the great language of civilization. And look to the depths of which it had taken itself and all of Europe and Stalin too, what he did to the ideal of communism. I mean, the world was like, could it ever rise? And there were the Jews literally in the ashes. They were the ashes. And three years after that, they create the state of Israel, which had been, they take the hack, the state of Israel, which had been under foreign domination for 2000 years. I want to say that the word miracle is usually reserved for events which are not to be explained by natural means. This we can explain by natural means you could do it and I could do it, the wonderful history of Zionism and so forth. Nevertheless, in the history of nations, there is nothing remotely comparable to that and I call it the resurrection. The resurrection of Israel, why would I choose that word? I will borrow something from Christianity. Christianity is built on the idea that Jesus is resurrected after three days, while the Jewish people resurrected itself in three years. From that, may derives civilization, it resurrected itself, the state of Israel to the glory that it is. It is such a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful country, wonderful. So this is the story that we ought to have been telling for all these years. This is our story, but why do we not? Because immediately they came and they organized against us. Blame, blame, you are responsible and we take a lot of it on ourselves. Well, maybe we are a little bit. Oh, maybe it's two people over one land and maybe we should give this and maybe it should be this and this. Completely beginning to internalize parts of that war against us, thinking that if only we could give back a little, if only we could do this. We have not told our story and we've sold short. You see, we sell others short. If we cannot be that voice of civilization and say, "Look what a people can do." "Look what a people can do. Can you imagine six million Jews?" Not just murdered, but humiliatingly wiped off the continent. Families, I mean, I can't even go into the horror about it, right? And this same people within three years has reclaimed the land, its own homeland, after 2000 years of foreign donate. Look, you know, I mean. These are people who came out of the DP camps. They came out of the slave labor camps in Germany, they came out of Auschwitz and nobody else on Earth will take them in and they're living in Dachau in 1948 and they come to this land and build. Exactly. I mean, this felt to them like a redemption even if they were secular Marxists. Of course, but you see, we don't have to. You can use the language, but I will claim the word resurrection, you see. So instead of talking about the Holocaust and the destruction that is the German problem, say, that's German history. Jews did not make the Holocaust. The Germans made the Holocaust and they will always live with that. So to go back to what I was saying about Germany being, you know, the center, look at poor Germany, it can never wash the blood from its hands. Like I think of it as the eternal lady Macbeth, you know, and I don't blame today's Germans for the past. That's not what I'm saying. But it destroyed the idea of civilization and I think that in a way the creation of the state of Israel represents the potential for civilization. You have written in the past, even recently, I think I don't remember when I read this, but you have written that Jewish self confidence, the Jewish confidence in the moral story of Israel and the Jews deserving that self determination and deserving it in the historic homeland is undermined by Jews universalist liberalism by the Jewish commitment to liberalism, but because Jews were saved from the 20th century by American liberalism and that combination on the left. of universalist liberalism alongside an identity politics to protect the oppressed, that combination weakens Jewish confidence in their moral story, and it teaches Jews to distrust particularism, it teaches them to distrust power, it teaches them that everything that Israel did to save Jews, and then the last living Jews in the Eastern hemisphere is somehow vaguely not okay. Christianity, you walk into a church and you see Jesus on the cross, and the foundation, the foundational idea of suffering as redemptive, of that suffering for me as my redemption arc, and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington being built on this very Christian idea, not framed in Christian terms, but it's a Christian sort of mental architecture where somehow this suffering is purified, some of this suffering puts the Jews on a moral pedestal as a moral exemplar of some kind, all of these things, all of these threads. To me, it feels as though the liberalism combined with an identity politics that tells them they're on the wrong side of the ledger of the oppressor oppressed, even American Jews, combined with kind of basic ignorance of the actual story of the Jews in the 20th century. They don't know much these college students I need on the campuses. Means that American Jews are caught in the headlights, they're frozen, they're clueless, they're not really capable of strategizing at this moment, they're not really capable of seeing this threat for what it is and organizing around it. There's a professor at Toth's, a sociologist, I'm going to finish this question very soon. There's a Aitan Hirsch at Toth's, a sociologist who studies American Jews and other things, and he has calculated that American Jews spend something like $600 million a year on defense organizations, organizations that defend the Jews fight anti-Semitism and all of that. It's a vast ecosystem and they've almost been missing in the moment of the biggest rise of anti-Semitism that American Jews maybe have ever experienced. How do you understand this loss of confidence? I'm specifically asking about American Jews, why don't they know their story and why don't they rise up and fight? Well, you know, I have to say you're talking a little bit to the wrong person here. I do think about this all the time and as you know, I write about it and try to explain it, but let me say, I find myself in an organization that didn't exist 25 years ago and Ticca is something new on the landscape and this is the most self-confident Jewish organization that I could ever imagine being part of and what it sees by the way is that Jewish self-confidence in America is completely indivisible from American self-confidence and so part of the Jewish problem that you are identifying is the problem of America itself that we are undergoing the same thing we live among other people and we're very much affected by it and I can just tell you that in the universities for example, which is probably the prime example that and the culture and the press and everything but it the universities the collapse of moral self-confidence as if America was not itself the most extraordinary creation in certainly in political history. I mean the Constitution of the United States of America and the Bill of Rights in America, it's unbelievable the world knows that but the teachers stop teaching it. They started apologizing for America. They sank and you see they they and and and part of it is that liberalism does not want to face evil it does not want to fight evil so as long as the world is all loving, dubious, everybody's fine you know in post-war world whether it seemed that it would always be post-war that was a fine period. I'm sorry why why how is this possible I have a very Israeli perspective on this it is so blindingly obvious that the American-led world is the best world there has ever been and there's no data point there's no measure that you can bring that that doesn't true. It is the first large scale democracy that proved that if you get a little bit of institutional wisdom, large scale democracy is possible there would not be large scale democracy if somebody hadn't shown it and they showed it and the genius of how they did it in the institution and American kids don't look at that as one of the great achievements of human history. Yes because because look at because look at something from our own history how did we stay who we are? We stayed who we are because one generation taught another generation taught a third generation. If we stop teaching it, it's calculating it at not only at the lowest level at the trader at the kindergarten level but the highest level our most educated elites have to be the ones who carry it so in the Jewish tradition you always wanted the smartest people to become the rabbis why the rabbis not just as community leaders but because they had to be the intellectual carriers of the law to make the arguments we have to keep reinterpreting it for each new generation well the university elites stop doing that they started to really just say no Marxism is better this is better that playing around with ideas we should be universe we should do this we should do that we should try they were they they didn't want to be Christians anymore they didn't want to speak for the Christian world anymore they didn't want to speak for what parts of it they thought it was more advanced more progressive to be nothing you know certainly not to believe that you are part of a people a nation a nation has to believe in its own national identity as you said but in order to do that they would have had to keep teaching the Constitution telling kids to get up in the morning and to say if not the Lord's prayer then to say the pledge of allegiance you know the pledge of allegiance if you don't say Maudet Anilif Annecha the morning if you don't say something you know then how do you know that you're part of it so you don't understand in a strange way the reason that you don't see this very much because from an Israeli's point of view because of the war against Israel the physical war the largest part of Israeli population understands that it has to fight for its life so through the army I don't mean just to people in it but through the idea that everyone is going to have to go into the army and be part of it you have to know what your identity is it's forced upon you in some way or another it hasn't hasn't been forced on American since the Second World War and they didn't want it forced on them in Korea and in they didn't ever want to go to war again and if you never want to go to war again and if that's your biggest ambition then what you have to do is you have to undermine your own self-confidence you have to say well this country is not really worth fighting for you it's certain we don't want to fight foreign wars nobody's going to really come on our turf anymore you see you get out of the habit of teaching and reinforcing and knowing that you have to first and foremost teach every children at every age and yourself keep reinforcing in yourself why you're there in the world what you represent in the world precisely what you say if you don't do it it's not innate you see the babies are not born with this knowledge it is you're an educational institution and I'm part of the educational institution too this is our job and when one has failed to do it these are the results you see these are the results so this paper we're in here you should you should just know that there are people here who are very much invested in making sure that nobody destroys this country and one of the ways we make sure of it is that the presence of the Jews in this country as a free people and admired people are recognized people people that is given its due and has the same opportunities as everyone else that does not have to guard its synagogues it does not have to defend itself in the streets that can wear a keeper that can wear a muggende of the you know openly that is the proof of American freedom if the Jews are not free in America America is not a free country anymore so it one has to understand that that the war against the Jews is a way of undermining this whole country's security in itself everything that the country stands for and this is the war against the Jews as a war on America it is a war against the civil yes against a more America for sure it is a war against everything that America stands for certainly freedom so you know the the the great lesson everyone on earth can learn from the Jews that all the Jewish societies have organized around all Jewish communities have organized is that what you teach the kids is what the future is that that's it and everyone wrote off what was happening in the universities as if it doesn't matter because that's universities and then they'll all hit the real world they'll go to work at Wall Street and they'll become capitalists again or they'll become a pro-American again and no actually what you teach the kids is what the future is you said it's the I want to ask you about antisanism you've argued that antisanism is a is almost a more malevolent form of an In other words, when the political organizing against the Jews turns from Jews, quad Jews to framing it as about Zionism and about Israel, it becomes more destructive. What did you mean by that? Well, I mean by two things. One, I think it is more destructive because each phase of anti-Jewish organization in history has pulled something in from what came before it. So the negative image of the Jew became bigger and bigger and all these functions of being against the Jew with the pointing finger, they multiplied in time. So when modern anti-Semitism came into being, it really drew from the anti-Christian and the anti-Muslim, you know, the Christian anti-Jewdism and the Muslim anti-Jewdism before. So in some sense, one builds on the other and it becomes strengthened by what came before it. But in the here and now, I would say let's just take the Nazis and the Islamists. Let's just say they say, you know, the October 7th was the worst massacre since the Holocaust. Let's just look at that, you know, in terms of, well, the Nazis, when they exterminated, they decided and they went about the final solution. You see, they built the death camps, either somewhere in Poland or when they built them in Germany, they wanted to make very sure that the rest of the population did not know what was going on and they didn't want the whole world to know what was going on. They were killing these Jews in ways that had never been invented. Even genius had gone into the killing process, right, and perfecting it in some way, right, but they didn't want the world to know about it. Now why didn't they want the world to know about it? Interesting, no. They didn't want the world to know about it because they still felt that they were part of Western civilization. They still felt that they were part of Western civilization and that Western civilization would not make its peace with what Eisenhower discovered when he saw, you know, a dachau, right? You knew they knew that. Take now the Islamists. Take Hamas, take October 7th. Now they did the opposite. They wanted people to know that they were coming into Israel in the same way that they come into African communities. They wanted to be barbaric. They wanted to rip people apart. They wanted to do things to the human body and to the Jews that had never been seen before and then they broadcast it as a pool of recruitment. Now that is new and what was that doing? That is saying that's what we think of Western civilization. We are out to destroy Western civilization, you see. So we're out to destroy the Jews, not just the Jews who are, you know, represent part of Western civilization. So we have to be careful that people don't know what we're really doing because we know that otherwise they would be horrified, right? But no, we want you to know in some way and look at how sick it is that there are whole parts of the Western world that really bought into this and that really were prepared to overlook the methods and to pretend that they are not seeing this, but everybody knows what they know today, right? So this is much worse because this is a war really on Western civilization that advertises itself as such that is proud of that. And what one other thing and here maybe I'm going out on a limb, you know, this business of Mamdani, this combination of socialism and Islamism that is all, you know, a destructive and anti-ism that has come into New York in the name of whatever it says, progressiveness is whatever progress they pretend to. This idea that he says, who asked him that he is going to arrest Netanyahu if he comes to New York, which he knew that it was not within his purview to do so. Why does he say that? Why does he keep making it a point? What is that to do with it? This was to humiliate, to publicly humiliate it. That's what they wanted to do, and that's what they are doing to the Jews in America, but in a sense through the Jews, they are doing it to everything that the Jews represent. We want to humiliate you. We want you scared. We want you running for your lives. This is where we get our jollies, you see, and by getting it Netanyahu, you know, he's not the prime minister of a country. Oh, what country is that? So that's their joy, you see, and it's all about being bigger than by humiliating others. And whom can you humiliate? Cost-free, as you said. The Jews seem remits. So we must not allow it for one minute. I want to ask the last question. Thank you so much for your time. I have gone a little bit over the time, I think that we thought this would take. You saw this coming. You wrote a piece titled, "Is the Writing on the Wall for America's Jews in August 2022?" Long before October 7. And you, in fact, wrote a book, which is subtitled, I think, the liberal betrayal of the Jews. We mentioned it at the beginning. In 1992, there is a cultural shift that you saw coming from a mile. Away. I have met, at this point, thousands of Jews who describe themselves as October ages, Jews who woke up to the shift, to their own changed position, to this new culture of blame and the categorizing and identity policy that put them in the dock. And they're part of the audience of this podcast who understood what was happening on October 8 when it all blew up in their faces. And you saw it much, much earlier. And so my question is twofold. One, what did you see? Two, why didn't they see it? And you know what? I have another question. Your professor of literature and specifically a Jewish literature. American Jews with the institutional freeze that they seem to have in this moment of unbelievable explosion and tension. I'm not all institutions. Goodness knows A-pack has gone fighting. Goodness knows Tickva has just constantly building out new educational initiatives to teach because teaching is the long term solution to every problem. There's so much happening, but there's so much not happening. And there's so many organizations that truly don't know what to do in this moment. You saw what was coming. American Jews by and large did not or caught by surprise. Don't know how to respond to it. And I want to connect it to a kind of collapse. Forgive me. I'm going in a weird place, but a collapse of American culture. You know, Darahorn has been on this podcast. She's coming back because she has a new book out. She started writing American fiction. She started writing books of fiction because there are no Jewish fiction. There's a little bit. There's some. There's here. There's some of it's fascinating, but there's so little of it that's millions of American Jews. So much of a distinctly Jewish culture among American Jews. I walk away from this time. I'm starting to wonder if there isn't a profound cultural weakness, a profound sense that American Jewish community, American Jewish identity isn't strong enough, isn't thick enough, isn't cohesive enough to fight back, to see what's coming, to build out, you know, novels on Jewish themes, literature on Jewish themes, a consciousness of being a powerful Jewish community sailing through history with its own special identity and story. Are you optimistic about the future of American Jews? Well, in that, firstly, I'm very proud to say that Darah was my student for many, many years. And so you did a good job. Well, she's very inspiring and she's doing a lot of work now on the ground, you know, just really invested in doing what she knows has to be done. So these things happen and they are there. Who's going to win out this war within this war of ideas? Life isn't easy. And this war of ideas is just as important as wars that are civil wars that are thought with weaponry, you know, as military campaigns. So we fight very hard in the war of ideas and I'm not sure. I'm certainly not willing to give up or to concede ground. I think that we have the more powerful arguments on our side. I think that what we stand for is necessary and important. And one will continue to do it is imaginatively as one can. Yes, I would say through the arts, but look. The word of the law is supposed to come forth from Jerusalem. So I will a little bit tip my hat to you as well. It's been a great disappointment to me. I love so many of the people in Israel. It used to be friendly with the bully Yoshua and had the greatest admiration for writers. And I always defer to Israelis. You're on the firing line. I'm not. So I feel, you know, I'm not going to give you advice about anything. But boy, if one is going to be disappointed in the intellectual and creative life of a country, being explained to us by its greatest creative artists. Come on. Where are Israelis? Where are the films? Where are you mean for goodness sake, you have talked about the greatest story ever told. So Steven Spielberg has to come and tell us the story about Munich as a story of feeling guilt. I mean, what is that? Yeah, that's what we would like to see. If we had more coming, you know, from Israel telling us of what? I think there's not enough cultural confidence among Israelis. Exactly. If we could see the projection of cultural confidence from Israelis at every level in every field, in every sphere. This would so strengthen American jewelry. It would mean everything to us. Yes, we pull it out of ourselves and we do what we can as well. And we will continue to and we will do it for Israel. So it's like it was really. I think it's really don't realize how much the Asperger Jews are listening into their culture. I've been to large events of American Jews and they'll play songs by Shia L evil or they'll play Israeli music as because it's Jewish music. And it's in Jewish languages and it has that authenticity. And journalists have, by the way, much more of a responsibility than they know, especially those who write in English, tremendous responsibility because everybody's hungry for it. And by the way, the enemies are hungry for anything that they can use as negative information. Of course, they're the first ones to jump on any negative information. So you have two jobs to keep the country as you would want it. If you have every right to try to pull it in the direction that you want, hopefully in a better one, not a worse one. But when it comes to really representing the country in any way that will go abroad, I think that one does need a lot, a lot of just the glory of the real, not invented. Just the facts of the real and not the suffering, but the energy, but the creative righteousness of everybody. I mean, it's really so important. I can't put it otherwise, but it's important from God's point of view. This is really important. Much more to be said, but this is. Now, you threw the ball back in our in our court challenge accepted. I don't know how to create any culture, but, but, but as a teacher here and there challenge accepted, Professor Ruth Weiss, thank you so much for joining me. If people want to learn Jewish literature, Jewish history, you have a tremendous amount of content online and books that are fascinating and deep and rich and interesting and extremely, I don't know how to put this extremely Jewish, you know, American Jews live in a very non Jewish world, and a universal mental architecture that is so foundational that you can't even see it and to draw back into a world of Jewish assumptions and Jewish sensibilities is something that happens in your work that can be just fun and fascinating. And if people also just want to have somebody to argue the American politics with, you're very much out there arguing American politics as well. Thank you so much for joining me.