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- [00:00]
Van Jones
Foreign.
- [00:05]
Host (Ask Khaviv Anything)
Hi everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Khaviv Anything. Thank you so much for joining us. There is a historic alliance between Jewish Americans and black Americans. I've even seen it suggested that the Black Jewish alliance was one of the most powerful coalitions in 20th century America. From civil rights to voting rights, Jewish support at the founding of the NAACP, Brown v. Board of Education, Dr. King's March in Selma, you name it. That alliance was front and center. And it feels like especially in the last three years, but over many decades it has not withstood the test of time. Maybe it's even almost disappeared entirely. Where did it go? What broke it? Can it be rebuilt? To talk about this fascinating and vital topic, Van Jones has joined us on this podcast. I'm really excited to have him. I'm an admirer of his substack of his work and of course Americans will know him for much more than his substack. I'm a nerdy reader. Van Jones is an American media personality, entrepreneur and has a really rare track record of bringing people together to do very hard things. He was a clean energy, a czar in the Obama White House. I think he actually didn't want to be called a czar. I apologize, that was kind of the title thrown around to the media at the time. Has worked for years on criminal justice reform, racial inclusion in the tech sector. In 2007, Vann was the primary champion of the Green Jobs act signed into law by George W. Bush. In 2009, he worked in the Obama White House, as I said, as the special advisor for green jobs. In 2018, he helped pass the First Step act signed into law by Donald Trump about criminal justice reformed. The New York Times called that legislation the most substantial breakthrough in criminal justice in a generation. And in 2021, Van Jones was the first recipient of Jeff Bezos's Courage and Civility Award. He has since founded Dream Machine Innovation Lab, launched Rapport Co. He is a Yale Law School graduate, a CNN host, an Emmy Award winning producer, a three times New York Times best selling author, and the creator, as I said, of the Van Jones substack. I can't tell you how thrilled I am that he's here to help us learn, to help us expand beyond the Jewish conversation into the black American conversation about a lot of the topics and a lot of the trials and tribulations that American society is going through today and especially that the black Jewish relationship is going through. This episode is sponsored by a sponsor who asked to remain anonymous. And this is one of the Episodes that they asked to dedicate very simply to the victims of October 7th. It's recording. We're recording on April 21st, Yom Hazikaron, Israel's Memorial Day for soldiers who fell in Israel's wars and for the victims of terror. So it's particularly poignant to be recording it today and to have that sponsorship today. Thank you for that support. I also would like to invite everyone to join our Patreon community. It helps us keep this project going. We need your support. You also get to take part in our monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. We have a great time. That's at www.patreon.com askhabiv. Anything that link is in the show notes. Van how are you?
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Van Jones
I'm good. I'm good to get a chance to talk with you. I just greatly admire you and your take on everything. I probably share you with my friends more than anybody else on Instagram. So getting a chance to start you is a big honor.
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Host (Ask Khaviv Anything)
Well, that was an unexpectedly excellent start to this. I really appreciate that. Thank you so much. I express an opinion, probably a little too flippantly, about the Jewish experience with DEI and affirmative action. We have polling that says that American Jews are increasingly skeptical about DEI and affirmative action. And you called me out on it, as you were extremely polite. So I'm going to make it less polite. As ignorant as just deeply not understanding what's happening to the black community, what has happened with these issues. And we ended up having a conversation that for me was just mind expanding. And I don't think a lot of American Jews now, I tell people I put it on the table. I'm an outsider. I come in from the outside. But half my childhood was in America. I'm fascinated by the Americans. American Jews are 90% of the Jews who aren't Israeli. I mean, it's just, it's, it's. It is a world that I, that I follow very closely and care about. And I don't think American Jews know this story. And so I want to dive into it. But I want to start with, first of all, tell us about yourself. Tell us your story. And of course, we're going to extend it to what that teaches us about this moment in the black experience.
- [05:10]
Van Jones
Well, I, I do think that this alliance between our two communities is the most important alliance between any two marginalized ethnic groups maybe in world history. If you think about where America was in 1909, as you mentioned, the NAACP in 1909, we did not have a democratic republic. We had Fought a civil war. And we still had only gotten as far as having an apartheid terror state for half of the country where African Americans were being lynched for fun. Picnics were initially, you know, unfortunately, guard your ears here. Pick a nigger was where the picnic idea comes from. They would pick a black person and hang them for fun. So that's where we were in 1909. That's not a democratic republic. And there were signs, you know, throughout the south, no Negroes, no Jews, and no dogs allowed. So Jews also had their backs against the wall. And so. And that's not a democratic republic. And so in 1909, a very small group of Jewish leaders and a very small group of black leaders sat down and said, this is intolerable. We can't live like this. And they decided they were going to do something about it. They decided they were going to take America's constitution. They were going to turn what had been a slave state and had become an apartheid terror regime into. Into a democratic republic. Now, this is kind of an insane thing to do because there's no precedent in human history for two marginalized groups under that kind of terror regime to get together and turn that into an actual democratic republic. They said they're going to do it anyway. And in 1909, they created an organization. They couldn't call it a Negro organization because there were Jews in it. They couldn't call it a Jewish organization because there were black people in it. So they called it the national association for the Advancement of Colored People, the naacp. It starts off as a black Jewish, Jewish alliance. The lest you think if those people were particularly nutty, the next year another group of blacks and another group of Jews sits down, have the same conversation not knowing about the first group, and create the organization we now call the National Urban League, which again, is seen as a black civil rights group today that starts off as a black Jewish alliance. And so starting in 1909 and in 1910, every decade afterwards for the next century plus, disproportionately on the front lines are black activists and Jewish activists working together to advance the cause of civil rights and social progress, labor rights, Pretty much every positive advance, if you look and you're looking for it, you see disproportionately blacks and Jews together. Now, you can overstate this. Some people act as if all black people loved all Jewish people and all Jewish people loved all black people. Well, that never happened. Yet some black people didn't like Jews. You had some Jews who didn't like black people. That's true. Today, everybody's got some terrible uncle or some awful cousins, so you don't have to make it better than it was. But it is in fact the case that the most persistent feature of democratic progress has been this alliance between the best people in both communities who are the most committed to repairing the world or tikkun olam on the Jewish side and the most committed to justice for all on the black side. Those two strands of cultural DNA created this sort of double helix of hope. Repair the world. Justice for all. This double helix of hope for everybody. And I would go so far as to say what you now call American democracy is disproportionately a consequence of the black Jewish alliance. And so the fact that it has now fallen into such disrepairs. And by the way, it doesn't stop in the 50s or the 60s. You can come all the way up through the very recent past. Every black college in America, if you look at who's donating to those colleges, you see Jewish names. Every black cause or not for profit. You look at who's supporting that, you see disproportionately Jewish philanthropists. Every black candidate who's run for office. If you ask them who was the first person who opened their home to you to do a fundraiser outside the black community, 99% of the time it was a Jewish family. Every Black CEO that you talk to, 80% of the time, they'll tell you that there was a Jewish person in the firm or along their path that helped them. So it's not like it just stopped with Dr. King. You got another half century, says Dr. King of incredible partnership between blacks and Jews. Also in music, also in entertainment, also in film, also in theater. It is just an extraordinarily productive partnership. The challenge has been, though, on the black side, we saw in our mind help, support and solidarity with white liberals. We read all that activity as white liberal, white progressive, white philanthropic support. We didn't code it in our culture as Jewish. But the reality is there's not that many, quote, unquote, cool white people helping us. It's mainly just Jews. And so this creates this sort of feeling of unrequited love and appreciation where on the Jewish side, the black civil rights tradition is very important to Jews and by the way, liberal and conservative Jews, because even conservative Jews play a huge role in the charter school movement here in the United States trying to rescue black kids from failing schools. That's disproportionately conservative Jews. So the entire Jewish community, in their own experience, have had a special place in their hearts for the black struggle and have done their part on the black side. We didn't code it that way. We coded it. Coded it as we have some white support, mostly white hostility, and we're doing the best that we can. So that then sets a table for a huge rupture after October 7, which we can get to. I just wanted to set that framework because my story, to your point is a part of this whole thing in that I was born in 1968, which is the year that Dr. King was murdered, year Bobby Kennedy was murdered, the year that the Democratic convention turned bloody against young people who were marching for peace. And I am in the first cohort of black kids who are moving through desegregating public schools in the south. My parents are public school teachers in the south. And it was a very challenging process because we didn't know what to do with each other in the classroom, and the teachers didn't know what to do with us as students. But a couple of things happened. One, my father, who was an assistant principal for one of the schools in our county, was unable to become a principal of a school, the head of a school, because one of the unspoken rules of desegregation was you have these black schools with black principals. You have these white schools with white principals. The courts say you've got to merge them. Okay, we're going to merge them, but the white principal is going to be the principal, and the black principal is going to be the assistant principal. And that's how it's going to be. And so you suddenly have demotion of all these black principles into this subordinate position. So the NAACP sends lawyers down to sue my home county. One of the lawyers is Jewish, so that my father could become a principal. So from the very beginning, this fight to complete the desegregation process is a fight where black and Jewish lawyers are working together to help my dad get his promotion. And then when he gets promotion, he does a fantastic job with the school he was given. But now I've gotta figure out how to go on with my life to go to college. Well, now we get into affirmative action. You had black people had been in the state of Tennessee for I'm a seventh generation American, so, you know, two centuries paying taxes to public schools that we weren't allowed to go to. And so in 1986, when I graduated from high school, that you still have white and black public schools, public universities. Tennessee state university is the black in 86, is the black public university. And the university of Tennessee system are for basically white kids. To fix that, they created minority scholarships to try to get kids like me into the white schools. My twin sister was smarter than me. She got accepted. She got a scholarship. She argued for me to get a scholarship. So I wind up going to college, the University of Tennessee at Martin, on my sister's affirmative action scholarship. That's how my educational career starts. Then you're in the South. There are newsrooms across the south that are all white. Maybe one black reporter to cover black stuff. Gannett News Service, which owns USA Today, bought my hometown newspaper. And they said, this is appalling. And so they created minority internship program to try to drag kids like me into these white newsrooms. And that was how I, you know, you hear me talking today. My initial entry point into journalism was a minority scholarship to University of Tennessee at Martin's communications program and then minority internship programs at Southern newsrooms. Look, I'm not talking about something from 97 years ago. Like I'm still in my 50s. So this is, this is the level of fight. This is very recent. So this is a level of fight in the past few decades to get a kid like me into a place like the University of Tennessee at Martin and into Southern newsrooms. Then I do extremely well in school. My girlfriend was a black student alliance student president at Vanderbilt University during the apartheid fight. She was great. She, we're still good friends. She became a medical doctor. But she was such a good student, it made me be a good student. And so I wind up with incredible grades. I was become an independent publisher in the South. I published four independent newspapers in the south as a college student on different campuses. And then I scored a 96th percentile on LSAT. And I applied then to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, et cetera. Well, the reality is there are 10,000 people applied. They laid out 130 out of 10,000. The fact that I was a black student when they were having a hard time finding black students, a southern student, they were having a hard time finding southern students. And I had gone to a public school, a public university. I didn't go to Harvard undergraduate or whatever or Penn meant that at, at that point in time, they said this kid should come here. Now, did I have 96 percentile is the median for an LSAT score at Yale. My grade point average is I think three seven, three eight. That's about right as well. So it wasn't that I was not qualified, but it's that when you have 10,000 people applying to a school and you have 130 slots, a lot of people are going to meet that criteria. But they. But Yale, looking at its long, sad history and what was going on in the country, said, we have not done well by Southern students. We've not done well by black students, We've not done well by public school students. This Van Jones, kids from UT Martin, we're bringing him here. And so if people think it's good to have someone like me not stuck in, you know, where I probably would have been, I mean, I probably would have been like, nothing wrong with it. I probably would have been a schoolteacher like my dad. Nothing wrong with that noble profession. But I think I've been able to do more good with those opportunities. And had it not been for affirmative action, I want to say this very clearly. Have people not been affirmatively looking? How do we get more black kids into these public schools, public universities in the South? How do we get more black kids into these newsrooms? How do we get more black kids into the Ivy League? I wouldn't be here. And so when I hear people say DEI is only and always a scheme to stigmatize success, to label Jews as oppressors, to let unqualified minorities run victim schemes, it's just a scheme for lawsuits and losers, to sort of get one over on, you know, good, hardworking people who deserve better, it hurts because it just ignores an awful lot of what it's taken to get us here and which we can talk about later. The continuing obstacles to fair treatment that are evident everywhere, if you are a remotely fair observer of American life. And it tends to overstate how well these programs have done in the first place. It's not like these DEI programs have, you know, eliminate the ills of society. They're barely a tiny little shred of hope of opportunity even for extremely well qualified people to at least even be considered. That's how we see it, but we recognize that other people see it differently.
- [18:50]
Host (Ask Khaviv Anything)
I have so many questions. First of all, I don't want to leave that sort of assumed on the side. What are those structural problems today? I mean, it's such a valuable thing for me to understand just how recent it was that it was the law for you not to have opportunity. And then how much, therefore, affirmative action is an attempt to correct something that was so completely lopsided. You think of it as deep history. It's not deep history.
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Van Jones
My mom, dad and me.
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Host (Ask Khaviv Anything)
Yeah. So how much of it? Or maybe it's of different kinds of structural problems today. But what are those structural problems? And where I'll Put it this way, most Americans think affirmative action is now gone by the Supreme Court. Right, so where, what happens now? And, and what happens to minorities? And then I want to ask, after that, I'll ask about sort of the Jewish experience of this, which was a kind of being pushed out as coded white, you know, as you said. And then.
- [19:51]
Van Jones
Right. Look, I just want to say I have a great deal of sympathy for the Jewish world especially I think central left Jews, progressive Jews, because all of a sudden, I think on their side, and you can speak to it more than I can, they've been there sticking up for every cause that they can, from the environment to women. I mean, any cause, you see disproportionately a lot of central left and progressive Jewish people there. And yet when October 7th happens and other things have happened since then, there's no support. And so there's a sense of like, hold on a second, I was helping you. You're not going to help me. That's not fair. We can circle back to that. But just on the black side of the street, there is an empathy gap and an information gap that has opened up between the black world and the Jewish world. And it's pretty big. And I don't think it is because, look, you've always had some, again, some anti Jewish sentiment in the black community. You've always had some anti black sentiment in the Jewish community. So I'm not trying to erase either of those. But I think we have an unnatural now level of disaffection and misunderstanding. And I think that comes from. Our algorithms are now completely separate. What you see on your phone in the morning and what I see on my phone in the morning may not overlap by more than 5 or 10%. So for instance, when the Beavis babies were murdered by Hamas, that story never appeared in my algorithm. I never saw it on my phone. Not, not, not a mention. The only reason I knew something had happened is because I was, you know, relationships with all kinds of people, including Jewish people. I just noticed that a couple days I texted some of my close Jewish friends and they didn't respond. And I thought that was weird. And so I texted one of them and I said, hey, you know, trying to track you down about something. And they responded, with everything that's going on, I need a couple days. I said, with everything that's going on, I need a couple of days.
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Host (Ask Khaviv Anything)
I said, you like checking the news?
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Van Jones
Yeah, I mean, I'm like, like I'm looking at the. I mean, there's a lot going on. What Are you talking about?
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Host (Ask Khaviv Anything)
Yeah.
- [22:06]
Van Jones
And then the person wrote back, what? What I read is By Bass babies said By Bass Babies. What's a By Bass baby? Then I searched Beavis Babies and I was like, holy shit, Hamas has murdered infants. No idea. Okay. So then the Jewish world says, well, nobody's speaking out. Well, some people wouldn't speak out anyway. But you can't speak out if you don't know. Similarly, in the black world, you know, this past year and a half has been a horror show for black America under Donald Trump. It's very simple things that may not land on your phone's algorithm. The Doge cuts, you may remember, in the early days of the Trump administration, Elon Musk comes in, announces Doge. They're going to cut all this stuff. Elon swinging around a chainsaw, whatever. Well, the backbone of the black middle class is college educated black women. That's the backbone of the black middle class. The criminal justice system and other things in very bad schools have pulled black men disproportionately into prisons and into non college status. So the backbone of the middle class, college educated black women, they mostly are not in Silicon Valley starting tech companies. You may have noticed they're disproportionately in the public sector, not the private sector. They work in philanthropy, they work in not for profits, they work for government. Those Doge cuts were a nuclear bomb against that sector. So 300,000 black women lost their jobs instantly. These are the super voters, the churchgoers, the homeowners, the backbone of the community. Those are the aunties. If you lose your house, you're going to sleep on her couch. Well, now those people are going into foreclosure because of this sort of reckless, you know, attacks on all that public infrastructure. Not saying that public infrastructure could not intelligently be reduced, modified, but the way that it was done, I'm not saying that it was done deliberately, but I'm saying that the people who bore the brunt were in the black community. Then the DEI rollbacks were suddenly companies that had made promises and commitments to be supportive, to open doors, to make investments, to have supplier diversity. I've got a big company, I'm going to look for women and minority firms to buy from, to help give them a shot. I'm going to affirmative looking for those kind of. Once Trump comes in, everybody deletes those programs. They take them off the website, they fire all the people who run those programs and they run to, you know, to, you know, off the field to not get in trouble with Trump. Well, then that means in the private sector, there's a huge drop as well. So if you look at unemployment under Trump, it's been mostly flat, except it's up two to three points in the black community. In other words, all the economic pain of the Trump year and a half has been borne by one community, black folks. And we're saying, where are our friends and allies here? Nobody's saying a word about this. And in fact, when we listen, you hear Jewish voices disproportionately calling for the end of dei, saying, we are going to pull this away. This is anti Jewish, it's anti American, it's unfair. And you're thinking to yourself, we've been barely hanging on by a toenail to the American dream. We're at the bottom of every. We're in all the failing schools. We are sucked up by these horrific prisons. We are over policed and underprotected. We are going to more funerals for young people than old people. In some communities, we are barely hanging on by a toenail. And the Jewish community is coming with the toenail clippers. What the hell is this? So you wind up in a situation where people who I know and have a good relationship with, people like Bill Ackman, people like Barry Weiss, who I think are patriotic American, that they're doing the best they can to fight the evils and ills that they see, the way that they've talked and some things they've done have landed very poorly in the black community, as, you know, at best insensitive and possibly, you know, hostile toward the few remaining, you know, opportunity sets that we have. And so that's led to, you know, some real ill will and some real frustration. It's, you know, on the, on the Jewish side, Gaza is sort of like, people talk about the war in Gaza in a way that makes Jewish people feel very unseen and it feels very hypocritical and very dangerous. And I think a lot of black people are surprised that our concern about the Gaza war can land that way. In our mind. We talk about, in our mind, it's not anti Jewish, it's anti war, but it lands in the Jewish world a particular way. I think on the Jewish side, their concern about DEI is not meant to hurt black people. They just think these programs are too woke and often characterize Jews and successful people in ways that are dangerous and they're sick of it. But when you don't have the same information, we have an information gap. You can then have an empathy gap, and then that becomes A problem?
- [27:32]
Host (Ask Khaviv Anything)
Did DEI go nuts? The Jewish experience is a steady, measurable, constant decline in Jewish access to Ivy Leagues. And Jews were coded of all the groups in America coded white oppressor in the progressive power dynamics. I don't know if I'm reflecting a very sort of insulated Jewish discourse when I say that sentence, but of all the minor. Of all the groups in America coded that way, the Jews are by far the smallest and by far the most subject or the only ones subjected to obsessive discourses about them. Where do you think DEI went wrong?
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Van Jones
Well, look, I mean, part of the thing that's so sad is that you're talking about programs that have let down both communities. DEI as a program, not as an idea, but as an actually implemented program, didn't give Jewish people enough protection and didn't give black people enough prosperity. So it's not that the program itself is something that couldn't be completely rethought. Everybody wouldn't get out of our tribal bubbles. Everybody knows a lot of talent is in places that's not likely to wind up being fully realized. Whether you're talking about Appalachia, whether you're talking about the hood, whether you're talking about a lot of places, you have very talented people, very promising kids. But they're not going to get to great opportunities unless somebody does something. They're not going to accidentally wind up on the right path because that path is hard to find from where they are. And I think we all could agree on that. And I think that if people are fair and honest, there is an advantage that comes from having white skin versus black skin. There is an advantage that comes from, you know, if you're male in a lot of places, that these are. Privileged. I don't like that word. But there are certain advantages and disadvantages that, you know, given what cards you have in your hand are more favorable than others, and we need to account for that. Now, how you go about doing it, that's where I think we still haven't solved the problem. Because if what you do is you just say, okay, we're just going to get out the Crayola box and just color. Anything on this side is an oppressor. Anything on. On the brown side is oppressed. And then we're going to make everybody sit through these shitty workshops and have to listen to somebody who's never run anything but her mouth. She's or his mouth, never run a company, never run a city, never run a government, explain to everybody how we all now have to be well, this is just going to breed resentment. It's not going to work. And then you wind up in a situation where the resentment starts to build up. And I think there's a smart way and a dumb way to do anything. I think progressives, and frankly, including progressive Jews, all progressives, have to take responsibility for the fact that for 20 years before October 7th, we ran a thousand of these workshops. Some of them were terrible, some of them were okay. None of them focused on antisemitism. We therefore left the door open for the worst people in the world to come in and grab the progressive movement and use it as a weapon against Jews. That's what happened. For instance, if you don't include antisemitism. And I was. I'm guilty. I was a part of this whole thing. But also, frankly, so were a lot of progressive Jews. If you just run your workshop and it basically says, if you're white, you have privilege, if you're male, you have privilege, if you have money, you have privilege. And you don't ever point out, oh, but by the way, you've had white guys, some of whom had privilege, who were murdered for 3,000 years, who were chased out of every country in the world for 3,000 years, who were put in ovens and murdered in living memory. So it's not just if you're white or if you have money or if you're male. You can be all those things and still be brutally subjugated and almost eradicated. If you don't include that, and we did it, then you are literally setting up the one community that fits that white male, sometimes with money box, but is incredibly vulnerable and has been vulnerable for millennia, to then be just run over, which is happening right now. And so I get that what we did set the Jews up to be incredibly vulnerable right now. And that's one reason I am so loud and so aggressive, because I recognize the error. And I think that those of us who want some version of consideration for people who don't have much, I think we actually be pretty humble and come back to the table and say we left out a whole group that's now being targeted around the world for the biggest hate wave you've ever seen against Jews since, you know, since, you know, the 30s and 40s. And even when we were right, the way we ran these programs and the way that we talked about this stuff left a lot of people feeling uncomfortable, unseen and bitter. And there's a. Probably a better way for us to do it. What I would have loved to have happened was for us to come together as leadership and talk it through. For the frustration in the black world about what's been happening to us, the frustration in the Jewish world. There'd been some opportunity for us to sit down and say, not we're going to get rid of dei, but we're going to replace DEI with a better program that's going to be more fair to everybody and make sure we're creating more opportunity for people who don't have it. But when it just becomes DEI is terrible, anybody who wants DEI is terrible. We're going to get rid of dei. And now you. But you haven't said the next sentence, which is, and for those of you who are still being mistreated in America, who are still being herded into terrible schools with no opportunity, here's what we're going to do for you. Instead of the ei, when you leave out the replacement, then it also sets up my community to then become weaponized against your community. Because now we're saying, well, these people don't care about us at all. In fact, they are siding with Donald Trump and they've now decided they want to be our enemy. And so this is the problem.
- [34:24]
Host (Ask Khaviv Anything)
One of the striking things as you're talking about how DEI failed Jews is, and this is something I learned from you. DEI in its modern iteration, its most recent iteration, it didn't do much good for black Americans. The George Floyd moment, the Black Lives Matter moment, not specifically the organization or each individual incident, but this idea that there's now a great moral reckoning didn't leave black America with serious legislative, serious economic, serious public responses that changed the reality of, of black America. It was a, you know, white progressives got to feel righteous. I, I'm going to throw it out there. This is not in your name. This is my sense of it. Tell me if I'm wrong. White progressives got to feel amazingly righteous and holy about it. For a long time. Black America, the needle didn't actually move. And so we have a, a program, a philosophy, a way of thinking about American life that fails the Jews for the reasons you described didn't move the needle for the communities that allegedly it's literally built to move the needle for if it's such a failure. And affirmative action, the way you described it, the way you experienced it, was this necessary correction and, and success story. What is the alternative? And I just want to add to that, you're somebody who has done a lot of work on alternatives, including, you know, in places like the Obama administration in California and you have a, you, you had a program, I don't know if it's still running, to get, to get minority kids coding in very large numbers. Learning computers is. What is, what is the alternative to dei? What does that look like, that. That actually fixes things without targeting new communities?
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Van Jones
Look, I don't know. And I think we're still in the process of trying to discover and invent, I would say a couple things. Number one, I really think that the George Floyd and post George Floyd moment is a source of real misunderstanding between the Jewish community and the black community. So much so that, you know, often Jewish people say, well, I was there for you during George Floyd. You weren't there for me. This is an ill advised thing to say because it's a real. It pokes at a lot of wounds at the same time. First of all, what did it cost the Jewish community to say that George Floyd shouldn't have been lynched? There's no cost to that. Even the police didn't defend this cop. I mean, like nobody, like the entire world said this was a terrible thing. And by the way, George Floyd wasn't the first person who was unjustly killed by a police officer in America. He wasn't even the first person who was unjustly choked to death on television by a cop in America. That was Eric Garner in 2014. No response from the Jewish community or any other communities of the black community. In fact, Black Lives Matter doesn't start under Trump. Black Lives Matter starts under Obama because they've been killing after killing after killing of black people for the first time caught by these phones. And it was every week I became famous in America largely because I was on television responding every week to another murder of a black man by a white police officer on film for almost a decade before George Floyd. It wasn't until you got to George Floyd that you had a nine minute, uninterrupted perfect video of a man just being lynched in front of the whole community that people finally said, enough. But what did it cost anybody? It cost literally nothing. Also, was it. Did you have to challenge yourself in the Jewish world to stick up, you know, for human life against lynching? Well, no. The Jewish community has been frontlined against black lynching since 1909. So this is costless, completely consistent with your own values. And then in the end, what did it actually get black people? Practically nothing. In fact, a report just came out that showed for only about one year after George Floyd was there an increase in support for black causes is now completely Collapsed. The anti woke backlash. The anti DEI backlash which we just experienced as an anti black backlash has actually collapsed the support for a number of black communities. And they were expecting more help. The help never arrived. These are false promises that were revoked as soon as it was no longer cool. The legislation that was promised, the George Floyd Policing act, did not pass. And so this doesn't. This is not a great thing to throw in our face. It's not a great thing to say because it really was as passionate as people felt about it and thank God they did. Let's not forget Rodney King happened in 1992. We've been fighting for this a long time. Dr. King in 1963 at the I have a Dream speech that everybody cries about. They cry about the last fifth of that speech. They don't look at the first four fifths. In the first four fifths, it's I have a nightmare. And one of the things he says is, when will the Negro be satisfied? The Negro will never be satisfied as long as he is a victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We have been dealing with this for generations. We got public support and attention once. That resulted in no sustainable support and no legislative change. So when that gets thrown in our face, we were there for you, for George Floyd. Why aren't you there for us, for Gaza? It's not a great way to make a friend. And then on the other side for us, Gaza is very tough for us from the Jewish world. It's like, look, this is, you know, we've been surrounded by terrorist organizations firing missiles at our children for 10 or 15 years. No other state in the world would sit up here and let terrorists fire rockets at their babies for 10 days. And so we don't want to hear it from you guys. Like, we are doing what any state would do. That's a Jewish perspective. It's a valid perspective. But on the black side, we haven't supported any war since World War II. Black people went to World War II, fought, were treated like garbage, came home and were lynched at the railway stations in our uniforms, lynched at the bus stop in our uniforms. Because you niggers aren't going to come back over here and think you're better than us. So after World War II, black people said, look, why do we, we always get put on the front lines. We have the biggest casualties. That was Vietnam. We're anti war. So Muhammad Ali did not support the Vietnam War. Dr. King did not support the Vietnam War. We don't support wars as many Black people as died here in New York with 9, 11 when it was time to invade Iraq. George W. Bush says we're going to invade Iraq. 80% of white Americans supported George W. Bush going into Iraq. Look back at the numbers. 80% of black people opposed it. We oppose the Iraq war. 80%. We don't support wars. So when you show us a war, we're going to say, no, we're not for that. We're going to have more empathy for the people who are getting the blunt end of that force than people who are giving it, period, every time.
- [42:21]
Host (Ask Khaviv Anything)
And that's even before we get into any propaganda campaign. The changes, social media reflect actually seeing the victims.
- [42:28]
Van Jones
Yes. Yeah. And so you just have a community of people that are going to be anti war and pro underdog in any situation because of our experience. And when our Jewish friends said us no, of all the wars in the world, this is one you have to support. And if you don't, we're now suspicious that you're doing it because you're anti Jewish or you're holding us to a different standard than other governments. We're like, I don't know, we'll move to the same standard. We haven't supported any war. Now go tell your white friends that who support every war but yours. But we haven't supported any war. So why are you mad at us? And so number one, on Gaza, it's not consistent with our values to support wars. Number two, if we do raise our hand, there is a price to pay on either side. If you get involved in this whole Middle east conflict stuff, on either side, there's a price to pay. There's real contestation. You're gonna have to take a lot of heat one way or the other. And then lastly, it's not clear what difference it would make if we supported, if we didn't support. So you have these two issues, Gaza and dei, that are very sensitive and stack on top of a lot of pain and misunderstanding that make it very difficult. But I do want to say, just to answer your question, you know, taking me a long time to get to it, is what are the barriers if you're black today? The laws have been changed. We've had a black president, there's a black woman on the Supreme Court. We have a couple of black senators. Not just one, I think we have four now. We have a black governor of the state of Maryland. We have black mayors of major cities. Just had a black mayor here in New York, have a black mayor in Chicago, have a black mayor In Los Angeles, these are serious gains in politics. We are a political superpower. Compared to our numbers. There are way more Latins, way more Hispanics in America than there are black people. Way more. But you wouldn't know that looking at politics. So we have made real progress. The problem is that for the vast majority of black people, even those gains have not meant much. Even those gains have not changed the outcomes in the neighborhoods that you and I might care the most about. It's a sticky set of problems that are holding back progress. The way the criminal justice system operates in our community is completely different. I mean, I went to Yale, I saw kids doing drugs. Nobody ever called in, you know, a DEA task force to kick in the doors of dorms, dorm rooms at Yale and put people in prison for 12 years. If anything, they went to rehab. I mean, the way that. The minefield that a black kid has to navigate just to not get killed and not wound up in jail is extraordinary. And so if you look at it from a distance traveled point, as opposed to what's your test score, but if you look at it from what's the average test score and what have you got to overcome? You wouldn't feel sad to give extra opportunity and extra points to kids from the neighborhoods that we care about now, you might say, and try to reinvent it. Well, don't make it be about race explicitly. Make it be about income or zip code or some other thing. I'm open to any kind of new thinking there. But what I won't do and what I can't do and what I should not be asked to do is to pretend that this country is fair to black children. It's not. And everybody knows it's not. And if you woke up in the morning and you went and you saw your child into your child's bedroom and somehow you know she had an allergic reaction to something, her skin was, was black for the rest of her life. You wouldn't see that as an advantage. You would see that as an injury, and you wouldn't want compensation. And so we all know, and we should not pretend that we don't know that it's still a disadvantage to have the skin color that I have in this country for the vast majority of people who are black. And we should keep trying to do something about it now. We should do it smarter. We should do it in much more active collaboration and with other groups that may have, to your point of view, experienced some harms here. The Jewish community in particular. I'm passionate about making sure that Whatever comes out of this catastrophe of the Trump years, et cetera, whatever reemerges, has a real sensitivity and concern for Jewish vulnerability baked into it from the beginning of. Because you see what happens when you don't. But I should not be asked to pretend that the country is feared in my community when it's not. It shouldn't be a requirement of me to, for the first time, ever support a war when we've never done that for two generations. Some of these, I think, expectations and requirements from the Jewish world, from some in the Jewish world, just strike us as unfair.
- [47:28]
Host (Ask Khaviv Anything)
I remember visiting friends at Yale and being startled at the levels, at the disparity, at the gaps between the wealth, the Yale campus and the poverty of New Haven. And so when I read that in your writing about, you come from Tennessee, you come from this place that has to be legally and consciously desegregated, and you show up at the Ivy League in Connecticut, and there you see such a disparity in policing. And you've written about. I forget the details, but about how that kind of conveyed. Clarified for you, just how widespread it is and how deeply embedded it is, far beyond any stereotype of the South. Okay, so we talk past each other. We don't experience each other. We don't know what the other one is seeing. And each is in a real crisis and arguably may be placed there by foolish politics or foolish social engineering that didn't work. Sometimes policies can work. Sometimes policies will fail. And this has so far failed everybody. And that means that America needs to start having an honest conversation and a serious conversation about what to do about any of this. Is that possible at this moment? The American conversation about the Middle East, I think, is terrible. I mean, it's just. It's all domestic politics projected onto the Middle east, and therefore, you know, nobody thinks about what Palestinian politics, Israeli politics, the psychology of any of the actual groups, Iranians. It's all about whether Democrats agree with Republicans or Republicans agree with Democrats. And, you know, why the other side is getting everything wrong. Is that true of every issue? Can you have a conversation in which America moves forward on any of this stuff in a. In a serious way?
- [49:24]
Van Jones
I hope so. It's going to take a lot of work. I mean, I'm a part of something called the Exodus Leadership Forum, trying to get African Americans and Jewish people to at least have these kind of conversations. And it's difficult because people are shocked to hear the perspective of the other person. I mean, they're shocked. And everybody doesn't communicate it as Cleanly or clearly. And so it's difficult. But I do think we're getting used. I do think we're getting tricked to become enemies of each other in a way.
- [50:06]
Host (Ask Khaviv Anything)
What do you mean by who?
- [50:08]
Van Jones
I think we have geopolitical adversaries, Russia, Iran, North Korea, China, that want the west to fail and want. Listen, if you wanted to undermine American democracy, certainly top five ideas would be get blacks and Jews to start fighting. Because these are the groups that have fought the hardest for American democracy over the longest period of time. So if you can get those two groups to not like each other, not trust each other, not respect each other, not appreciate each other, it's not like there's nine other groups that can jump into that void. I mean, you have a very particular ethic in the Jewish world about fairness, about justice, about repairing the world. It's not every group doesn't have that. And you have a very particular tradition in the black world about, you know, getting. Dr. King could have given the speech. It said fuck you, white people were coming to kill you. Look at what you've done just for 400 years. That would have been a valid speech to give.
- [51:15]
Host (Ask Khaviv Anything)
There were other black, black leaders who talked that way. He had to. He debated them, he pushed back on them.
- [51:21]
Van Jones
Absolutely. But, you know, the argument that won the day ultimately was, you know, the sons of former slaves and the fund of slaves, former slave owners, you know, should live together in peace and brotherhood. That's the argument that won the day in our community and in the country. He could have given the other speech. And so that's a moral miracle in the black community. It's a moral miracle that the Jewish community emerges from 3,000 years of horrific oppression with a commitment to build the strongest middle class, I think, in the Western world, arguably the strongest state in the Middle east and the most generous to your point, philanthropic culture probably in the world. This, you know, they could have come out and said fuck everybody too. So we've got like two communities that have a lot of good, not for just for each other, but for the world. And it's worth the fight. It's worth the argument.
- [52:22]
Host (Ask Khaviv Anything)
When I talk to Jews on, on this question, and it's not. They don't at all obsess or focus on the black community being, you know, coming for them. They think this is mainly a progressive thing. What, what's happening. Not all Jews, they're Jew also in that progressive. They're anti Zionist Jews taking part in that progressive thing, thinking it's the Jews fault. Right. There's everything under the sun, okay, as there is in the black community. But when they do look at the black community, there's a real sense of abandonment and bitterness. At the end of the day, race is this fault line through American history and through the American story. When you step out of race and you start taking FBI hate crime statistics on other categories like religion, Jews are at the top. Jewish synagogues have to have security guards outside of every synagogue. I have probably given a talk at a hundred synagogues in the last three years. And by the way, not limited to the United States, you should know it's Canada, it's Britain, it's Australia. There isn't one where an armed guard doesn't meet me at the door. Now, that was not America 10 years ago. 15. It simply wasn't, and it is today. And so Jews are looking at that, and then they're looking over to the black community. And I have to tell you, I complain a lot about Israeli extremist politicians who kind of make the rest of us look bad. I'm joking, of course, because I mean that much, much more fiercely than I just said it. And I talk about it constantly. What Kanye did and the way that Kanye would bring Hitler into it. And okay, you can write that off as mental illness. Except the Nation of Islam. Except so much of this discourse. I suspect that if you're an American Jew, you remember it's one of these selection biases, right? If 100 people tell you something normal and then one says something crazy, you'll remember the crazy. The crazy feels to you like a third of the people. But they hear outright antisemitism from the black community, which is not representative of the majority of the black community, of the black community story. And then they attach that to this DEI stuff. And it does feel under siege. And then you have over in the black community, they have been failed. And when you're failed so consistently, it's got to feel purposeful betrayal. It's got to feel like the system is rigged for the people who already have it made. And failed so miserably. And failed as much by the progressive political world as. I don't know if, as much, but nevertheless also failed by the progressive political world. And so they feel in that sense, and you described it beautifully, under siege. How do they even begin to have a conversation when from where they stand, the other side looks at against them? And it's not even, you know, there are no black pogroms against Jews. And when you have violent protests against Jewish communities outside of synagogues, it's not the black community ever, but they'd feel. But so it's. I don't want to get. I don't want to overstate it, but nevertheless they feel like they're on the other side of the debate. How do you cross that gap?
- [55:27]
Van Jones
Now look, I mean, I think slowly and slowly but surely is the way to do it. I think that both communities now seem fractured. The Jewish world seems to. Here in New York, I mean, 30% of Jews voted for Mamdani. Make of that what you will. And the black world's in a lot of pain too. I'll tell you often, people will raise with me the Nation of Islam. You know, in our community. I'll say two things about that. One, if you have a loved one, a young man who's gotten in trouble, who's gotten lost, who's done a lot of bad things and winds up in prison and word comes back that he's become a Muslim, you rejoice because it means when he comes back home, he's probably going to get a job, he's probably going to try to start a family. He's probably not going back to the gang. Now. The Nation of Islam often is the gateway to Sunni Islam and other forms of Islam. You know, Muhammad Ali went through that pathway. Malcolm X went through that pathway. Started off the Nation of Islam and then says this is not for me, becomes a Sunni Muslim and anti racist. Malcolm X did that. Muhammad Ali did that. So there's a path in our community where we see that as progress, better than, you know, than some of the other options. So we hold it somewhat differently. But I'll also say I have two sons that are. They'll both be adults this year. One's 21 and one will be 18 this year. I'm not sure they know who Louis Farrakhan is. I'm not sure they've ever heard of him.
- [57:13]
Host (Ask Khaviv Anything)
You think more Jews know than black Americans?
- [57:17]
Van Jones
Absolutely. I'm not, I'm not make of it what you will, but I think. I'm not sure they know who he is. I'm sure that they would not be excited to meet him or I mean. So I think that the Nation of Islam does have a role in our community. I think that it's a very small organization and more than anything it wants it usually being a gateway from Christianity or nothing to Sunni Islam. But it doesn't play the role in our community that I think people not in our community think that it does. I'm not saying it plays no role. I'm just saying it plays a much smaller role than people I think assume it's weird. Like I don't. Like I get asked about Louis Farrakhan. 90% of the time when I'm talking to Jewish people, 0% of the time when I talk to black people, his name just does not come up. So I just think it's important for people to know. And then the thing about Kanye, which I think is very interesting, Black sentiment against what Israel is doing probably runs 90% negative, maybe 95. No hip hop artist has issued a song against Israel except for Macklemore, who's white, and Kanye, who's crazy. The silence from the black hip hop world on this conflict is something I think that people should take note of because it does not reflect the sentiment. But there's.
- [58:56]
Host (Ask Khaviv Anything)
What does it mean? Why wouldn't they talk about.
- [58:59]
Van Jones
Because I think there are enough black people in music who have friends who are Jewish. And those friendships and those relationships are deep. And yet the black community's against the Jews because of Kanye. That just strikes me as bizarre. I get it. Trauma will have you read information for threat, look at the world for threat. But if you look at the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus has been the most supportive of Israel, largely because generationally, there are older African Americans who are just, you know, traditionally more supportive. I'm in my 50s. People in their 50s, 60s, 70s are still more supportive of Israel, not the war. But just understand that it's a miracle that the Jews survived. They only have one spot in the world to survive. And so that consciousness means a Congressional Black Caucus has been incredibly supportive of Israel, despite the fact that our base is much less so and the younger you get, the much less so. So when you see a community that, given what. Where sentiment is, all of our politicians and all of our artists could right now be marching down the street on, you know, and doing things that would make Jewish people feel very vulnerable. And none of them are. We feel. You know what, it's easy to be mad at black people, isn't it? It's really easy to be mad at black people. It's like kind of the easy thing to do and it hurts. It's like what we have to. We can't account for everybody in our community more than you can't account for everybody in your community. And so when I just. I just challenge my friends in the black community to really look for the way that we are being anti Jewish, that we are obsessing about this conflict, when China is destroying Tibet, destroying the Uyghurs and you haven't said a word about it. There's horrors happening in Africa. You haven't said a word about it. Haiti is tearing itself apart. You haven't said a word about it. But everybody's reposted something in the past couple of months about what's happening in the Middle East. Is that anti Jewish? I challenge my friends. Is it anti Jewish? Why is it? Oh, it's because America's putting money into it, Is it? If America stopped putting money into it, would you just go on to some other topic you just start talking about, you know, stop littering. Like, is it just because America's supporting Israel? Like, is it? And I challenge my friends on the Jewish side. Isn't it easy to be mad at black people? Like, isn't it easy to go after the one program that alleges it's to help black people? Let me give you the alternative history. What if instead of making DEI the bugaboo and going after these little campus protesters, we'd had a meeting and we had said, the real problem here is Iran. Yes, these students are ridiculous, and yes, these DEI programs can be obnoxious, but these little crappy DEI programs that are barely giving anything to black people are not the source of the main threat to Jewish safety. The sources, Iran. So rather than us spending two and a half years attacking DEI programs in campuses, let's start building up global sentiment that Iran is to blame for, frankly, a lot of the nonsense happening now down through Africa. What's happening to the Jewish people, What's happening to our kids minds, and build a coalition against Iranian attacks on our kids minds and on human beings in the region. And along the way, let's figure out a way to help each other, help Jewish people feel more safety and African Americans feel more hope and prosperity. Hope and prosperity and opportunity. That would have been a black Jewish alliance that could have begun to put real pressure on the social media companies for continuing to let poison come into the minds of our children and built up public understanding that the Islamic Republic of Iran is a threat to everyone. We didn't do that. Instead, it was what we had. I don't think it advanced the interests of either group. I think it actually probably set both groups back quite a bit. And so this is what happens when we don't have the dialogue. The dialogue allows. Maybe I shouldn't say that. Maybe I shouldn't release that song. Maybe I shouldn't. Maybe I shouldn't say all dei. Maybe I should just modify it and say poorly designed DEI or like, is there some way I can append and amend my conversation so that we keep each other at the table? This is the leadership I think that is required going forward. And unfortunately, I think we're going to have a long time to figure it out because I don't think the disinformation campaigns against Israel are going to stop. I don't think the attempt to get black people to be anti Western, anti capitalist, anti American are going to stop. And so I think we're going to have a while to figure it out.
- [64:15]
Host (Ask Khaviv Anything)
So we got to find leaderships and maybe do it quick because there's a new generation coming up that is more susceptible to all of this manipulation to the TikTok and to the information campaigns. Last question. Thank you so much for your time. It has been fascinating and eye opening. Are you optimistic? I want to ask you again, give me the three things we do and then obviously this all solves itself. Obviously we don't have those three things, but nevertheless, I mean, you have a thousand programs you've been involved in and are you, at the end of the day, you know, a young generation is coming up of people who don't even trust the very institutional leaderships that people like you and I would imagine sitting in that room that you're describing having that conversation. Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? The next generation is, you know, less pro Israel, certainly, but maybe it's more able to maybe young black people in America, young Jewish people in America have a more a conversation on TikTok that people who are late comers to TikTok don't. I don't know. Are you optimistic about the future? What does it look like to you in the next generation? Where is this going to go? And maybe you can say something about what we need to do to make it a better future.
- [65:30]
Van Jones
I think the one thing we can do is your phone is not your friend. Your algorithm is exquisitely designed to give you a very narrow view of the world that you experience as the world. But it's not. That's true for black people, Jewish people, Muslim people, all people. Your phone is not your friend. It is not trying to give you information. It's trying to give you endorphins. It's trying to tickle your brain so you stay on the app and it will tell you lies, truth doesn't matter as long as you stay on that app. That's not your friend. No friend is. That way your friend will tell you the truth when you don't want to hear it that's not your phone. So the most important thing is to realize that we're all, all of us, victims of algorithmically induced myopia and bias. So we have to talk to other human beings who think different, who vote different, who pray different, who look different, who love different. You have to aggressively try to find people who you disagree with and be passionate about hearing them out because they have access to information and disinformation that you don't have access to. We need each other, number one. Number two, I am not hopeful. I am not optimistic, and I'm not pessimistic and I'm not hopeless. I'm determined. I'm determined. I'm not an optimist. I'm not a pessimist. I am determined. I am determined that democracy and freedom will have a chance. There's no world in which democracy and freedom have a chance. When blacks and Jews are fighting about dumb things because we don't understand each other at all and because we're being programmed to fight. There's no world where freedom has a chance. So I'm focusing on that. There are other divisions between the Muslim world and the Jewish world, which I have less leverage over. There are other divisions, you know, that I just have less information about. But this particular cleavage I think is particularly dangerous and not necessary. And I'm focused on it and I'm not hopeful about it. I'm not hopeless about it. I'm just determined that we not just stay this stupid and this easily choked against each other for another two and a half years.
- [67:46]
Host (Ask Khaviv Anything)
That made me optimistic. So whatever it was you just did, it worked. Van Jones, thank you so much for joining me. This was fascinating. I really appreciate it.
- [67:56]
Van Jones
Well, thank you. Look, I just admire you. I think you are the only person that is trying to translate what Israelis are feeling, including Israelis who've had a progressive or left leaning background are experiencing right now in terms of what it would be like to live in a country that's under this level of bombardment and misunderstanding, with all of its faults and flaws and failures like every other country. And I think you do such an incredible job of trying to translate that for us who are not in Israel and wouldn't have any other way of understanding except for what you're doing. So I really appreciate it.