Loading summary
Transcript47 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:06]
B
Welcome to Ask Khalid Anything. Thank you for joining us. My guest today is Alana Newhouse, an old friend, a brilliant thinker and writer, and maybe most importantly, one of the few people who have recently succeeded in piecing together a lot of different disparate threads of my own thoughts and feelings about Zionism. Feeling and thinking about Zionism is kind of my day job, so there's a lot of them. And she managed to piece them together in a way that is incredibly useful and explanatory. And we're going to get into it. She is the founder and editor of the excellent Tablet magazine. I'm a subscriber, including in print. And we're going to delve today into her new essay, Zionism for Everyone, that was published in both Tablet and the Free Press, which is about why Zionism might hold the answer to some of the great global crises we face, the deep cultural ones about identity and immigration and economic displacement and class and all the things that are producing some unhealthy political cultures and cultural responses throughout the Western world. It goes way beyond Jews. It goes way beyond Israelis. Before we do, I just want to tell you we have a sponsor, one of our favorite sponsors. There are few, if any, publications out there like sapir, the quarterly journal of Jewish Ideas, edited by Brett Stevens from the New York Times. I am myself a subscriber. You might remember that we've hosted a number of people on the show to talk about topics they've written about for SAPIR over the years, including Coleman Hughes about antisemitism in the black community in the United States, Danielle Haas about the ideological capture or arguably rot in the human rights industry. It is a beautiful publication, not just in content, but physically in the physical appearance. I love reading it. If you live in the United States, you can receive it in print absolutely free. And if you sign up now, you'll actually receive the upcoming issue on the theme of America in honor of this year's semiquincentennial, the 250th birthday of America. Lots of excellent stuff in this issue about the current political crises in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, the decline of education, especially history education, which is something that concerns us a very great deal here, tangible suggestions for America and for the future of America as it turns 250. If you want to start receiving this excellent publication 100% free, go to sapirjournal.orgs a P I R journal.org askhavivanything they won't even ask you for payment information. That's sapirjournal.org askhaviv anything and finally, I'd love to invite you to join us on our Patreon community and to subscribe to our substack, which is newly active. And if you're interested in asking the questions that guide the topics we talk about, you also get to enjoy monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. That's at patreon.com askhalive anything or khalivgur H A V I v g u r.substack.com all those links are going to be in the show. Notes Alana, how are you?
- [03:18]
A
I'm great, thank God.
- [03:21]
B
So great that you agreed to come on. I have been wanting to talk about this essay for a while now. It came out weeks ago and there was some dust up with Iran. I forget what happened exactly, and it got delayed. But this is an essay that deals with fundamental things, and fundamental things are more important than news, in my view. You won't understand the world from the news. You will understand the world from the kinds of essays that you write. For the few listeners of this podcast. This is the in crowd, I think, but there might be a handful who have not yet read your excellent essay. Is there a two minute summary, an elevator pitch? And then we'll dive into a lot of the. A lot of the good stuff in there?
- [04:02]
A
Sure. The two minute elevator pitch is that I set out to figure out why, at a time of massive technological and societal change, the one thing that everyone keeps obsessing about is the juice. And what I tried to explore was the possibility that, particularly in the west, the reason why there is this focus on Zionism and on how the Jews practice nationalism is because the rest of the west has become unmoored from their own national identities. And that in fact the Jews are doing something that they feel they can't do or don't know how to do anymore. And so there's a kind of fascination and a, an envy and maybe even for some people, aspiration that leads to a kind of obsessive conversation. And the point of the piece was for me to put all those things together, both for the people who are doing the obsessing and also for Jews who may not understand why people are talking about us and why they're talking about us in the ways that they're talking about us. And I think it's important for us too, for our own personal communal health and the health of the our discourse to be clearer about why our neighbors and other people are talking about us the way that they are. So that's the short version of the piece.
- [05:50]
B
So just to quote the way you put it, the alterations happening to the shape of human life. And you talk about AI and industrialization and post industrial economies and robots and all of this in industry, the alterations happening to the shape of human life are already dwarfing those brought about by any other transformative age. And you just describe the. The tremendous upheaval happening right now in societies. It's scary and confusing, you write, and every day gets more so at just this wild moment filled with questions so incredible they're effectively spiritual. At this moment, the world suddenly entered a vortex where instead of engaging on these many phenomenally interesting and challenging topics, all anyone can talk about is Zionism. And that's the question, why do they organize their politics around Jews at these moments of crisis? And then you suggest an answer. You gave us a small taste of it. The Jews have something that we, the rest of the west, wish we had but can't have. What is that thing?
- [06:55]
A
So on my way to getting to describing it, I think it's really important, particularly for this conversation, for me to note that the point of this essay wasn't only directed at explaining the behavior or the conversation of people who are angry or skeptical about Zionism. I was also trying to expose and diagnose the reaction of Jews to that obsession. Because there is a reflexive outrage bordering on hysterical that leads to a kind of idea of. It leads to a fatalism about antisemitism. That antisemitism is this natural part of the human condition and people just go there and then they lose their minds. And then. And that's it, and it's over and there's no rational reason behind it.
- [08:06]
B
I feel this. You feel, I told you, I preached this fatalism. I told you to write it off. Do your thing.
- [08:13]
A
Right.
- [08:14]
B
Why are we, why are we wrong? What are we missing?
- [08:16]
A
Well, you're not wrong about some people in this space. What I'm trying to explain is that the conversation now involves too many humans for that to be true of everyone. I actually believe that there are a lot of good people having these questions about Zionism and asking some things that make us feel uncomfortable. And it was important for me to notice that they weren't conspiracy minded freaks. They weren't people whose brains had been bit by that disease. They were people who were legitimately wondering why it was okay for the Jews to have a nation state that they were proud of, A state that actually defended its people, A state that actually spent money on Defense. And I can go through the features of the Zionist technology as I try to explain it in the piece. But before I do that, I want to note that those people, their motive is very, very important to isolate and to understand because they're your neighbors and there are many of them who are very good people. And what they're pointing out is actually the reason for anti SEM, for the, for the explosion in anti Semitism. Their societies are in stress. Antisemitism emerges from societies that are struggling, that are in stress. So what's stressful? What is stressing their society? What is making good? People who normally don't want to think about this stuff actually start to go online and ask whether or not World War II, were we the good guys or not? The answer, I posit is that we've created, I think, a wrong assumption in our conversation. There's a definition of Zionism that's popular in Jewish communal conversation, which is that Zionism is the right for the Jews to have self determination in their ancestral homeland. And that if you don't want that for the Jews, it's. You are a bigot because everybody else has that right. And it's the everybody else has that right that I want everyone to sit with for a minute because everyone else doesn't feel they have that right anymore. And so as a result, what you think is the Jews having a right that everyone else has actually now to many people looks like the Jews having something that no one else has.
- [10:59]
B
So you describe this failure of post nationalism. You describe this turn after World War II against nationalism in Europe and in the Western academy, and therefore the Western elites. And it comes at a time of ever more globalizing capitalism, new technologies that make the world smaller and a kind of flattening of identity. Walk us through that failure. The post nationalist idea, what it has generated and why European societies and Western societies aren't able to respond to it in healthy, constructive, constructive ways.
- [11:32]
A
So the, the history that I try to trace is a history of what, looking back, actually looks like a quite human and in fact not just defensible, but laudatory impulse on the part of Europeans, which was an impulse to ask themselves what could have been central to our condition as Europeans that created the horror of World War II. What was it that we did wrong? And it's important to take a minute and say that that is a, that there is something very, very human about that thought and that reflex to have not thought. The problem is that they went wrong in their diagnosis of what caused the problem. They decided that what caused the problem wasn't something. Wasn't a set of complex economic trends, wasn't something about the human condition, wasn't a whole host of things that you can analyze are what cause wars and even cause gruesome and horrific wars that involve torture and genocide. What they decided the problem was and where they had gone wrong was in nationalism. They decided that. That having countries with identities that then you wanted to articulate and define and defend, when that got. When that got strong, it curdled and it went. It took them into a dark and bad place. I happen to believe they diagnosed the problem wrong.
- [13:42]
B
Why? Why? 50 million people are dead. After World War II, the genocide of the Jews, the genocide of the Roma. Every place in Europe had its collaborators at a massive scale, just about every place. The exceptions are rare and few. Maybe. Maybe nationalism is bad.
- [14:04]
A
Humanity has fought wars throughout recorded history, and we have fought gruesome wars throughout recorded history. I don't know that we fought wars before there were nations. And so to me, if you're asking me to diagnose the problem, which is not what I do in the piece, actually, I don't want to go into diagnosing the problem of World War II or World War I or actually whatever we're in now, what I'm trying to explore is that they decided that the nation was the problem. But what about other nations that didn't go to war? America was a nation and it didn't actually decide to gas all of its Jews. England was a nation. It didn't gas all of its Jews. So I understand the impulse, and I'm. And I get it. I think they were just wrong. And this coincided with the emergence of international organizations, internationalism in academia, in the world of the arts, all of which allowed for the promulgation and circulation of a set of ideas that again, sort of flattened the world and tried to make people aware of and more sensitive to the things that are the same about all people, that people are the same all over. Because there was this idea that if you could make people aware of what was the same about a person in Africa or a person in Asia, that actually their impulse would be never to hurt that person, never to harm them, because they could be like you, like your family. Again, I get it. I understand it. It's just wrong. And in fact, being aware of our differences, being aware of the ways in which somebody is different, very often allows us to create more connection to them. That sort of is where the piece starts to go. And I start to try to explore the ways in which countries, when they have a distinct national caste or distinct national identity, actually create stronger, better healthier humans internally and they function better in an international space as well.
- [16:42]
B
This boundary of this world created a massive blowback. Nationalist, far right, le Pen winning 40% of a French election. Right? All of this tremendous blowback all over the west. And it looks like this doubling down on sort of socialist coded kind of boundarylessness versus far right as it's coded nationalist is becoming the conversation everywhere, including the United States. And you make the case, you make the case that these are not going to solve the problems. They're barely properly diagnosing the problems. Because these are movements built on frustration, on anger, on a sense of displacement. Those are not effective instruments. They're effective instruments to tear things down, I think was how you put it. Yes, but there's nothing to tear down. The demolitions already happened. National identity is something that is on the retreat everywhere in Europe for a couple of generations at least. You need to be building things up. And here is where Zionism comes in. Not just a sense of place, identity, cohesion, solidarity, social capital, but with a kind of forward, but not anchored or pulled back to a kind of nostalgic past, but forward facing. Tell us about that.
- [18:03]
A
So a really good way to start is by saying, well, Lana, wasn't Germany In World War II an expression of what you're asking for? It was a strong national identity, right? Except in my read of Nazi ideology, they were trying to, to revive something from the past. They were looking to revive a kind of pre Christian Volk that they were inspired by. And they wanted to go backwards and revive something that that once was. And I think that that is a fatal flaw. And the world spins forward and our lives move in one direction, at least on this plane or now. And any movement that does not build itself on that trajectory is going to ultimately, I think, fail. What I try to express about Zionism was that, and there's a kind of simple way I put it, it's almost a formula, right? You have ethnic particularity. And by ethnic I don't mean ethnicity, I mean it in this very specific term. It's cultural, cultural particularity, or with a national, a real sense of your nation and what makes it distinct and different from other nations. Plus ruthless pragmatism, enormous hard work, basically willingness to actually wake up every day and build, which is very, very, very hard and forward thinking. Idealism, it's just those three things. But you'd be surprised how rare it is to find all three of those things in the same place or in the same leader. So when I look at someone and I again, these countries are all very different and they are, are changing. And I'm not trying to be prescriptive or trying to issue a summary judgment on any of these people, but when I look at someone like Meloni or Orban or the AfD in Germany, these people feel they, they don't feel like brightness and light. They don't feel like, like I'm signing on for an exciting, thrilling, rich, bright new future. They feel like they are going to potentially in very strong and significant ways, defend me. But then what? So now I'm defended. What kind of life do I have? What kind of life do my children have? What, what kind of opportunities do we have? Is, does this feel like a, like a Germany or an Italy or a Hungary of the future? And to me, when I hear it, it doesn't, it doesn't sound that way to me. And you can especially hear it when you contrast it with someone who does sound that way. And I use the example of Malay in Argentina. Millet is no wallflower. This isn't some like, cheery circus clown. He's a man who's very, very intense about his enemies. He is very, very serious about his threats, both in terms of what he wants to do with the government and society, which, by the way, you can agree with or not agree with. The. The thing that I want to isolate though, is when that man jumps on a stage or when you see him give a speech, you can feel his excitement about what he wants to build in Argentina. You can feel how happy he is, how joyful he is about the vision he imagines and he sees in his mind about what that country can be. These things are not woo, woo. And they're not, they're not, they're not mushy. They're real because people can feel that. And when people can feel that they want to work toward it. And to me, that's what I see as a huge difference between, certainly between the leaders right now, globally on the right.
- [22:31]
B
Let's get sort of specifically into America. The American response to this sort of flattening of identity to the boundaryless world has been doubling down on Christian nationalism, doubling down on a lot of this kind of nostalgia. Look, what they took from us is this repeating meme on social media and on Reddit, et cetera. And what they took from us is a family with like, mom, dad in the 50s, two kids, and a house with a white picket fence. That is nostalgia. That is not forward leaning. There's no clear policy to moving forward to that. They identify enemies but they don't actually know what it is they want to build. Is that the argument? And yes. And is there someone who sells a positive, a, you know, breath of fresh air morning in America, to quote Ronald Reagan, who was very good at selling that kind of, that kind of a sensibility.
- [23:23]
A
I think the American space right now is a little weird and it's a little hard to, to look at because, because of the particular moment we're in. I don't even think that the politicians in America that are doing this very dark dance understand what they're doing. I think they feel they're being, or some of them feel they're being defensive of Americans and defensive of Americans who have had nobody defending them for the last 20 years. I believe that of the left too, I think that there are certain well intentioned people on the left who believe that they are defending a way of life that they think is where Americans want to be and where they, they are. So they talk about immigration, for example, today as though it's immigration in 1907. And they say immigration was so, so important to American identity and to the, to the thriving experience of America in the 20th century. Not understanding that actually we're not talking about the same thing in any, in any way. So I, I understand the, the impulse on both of these parts, but in both part, in both scenarios, both, both groups of people again are looking backwards. Right? People who want to talk about, including
- [24:52]
B
progressives, including Mamdani in New York.
- [24:55]
A
Yes. Socialism and communism. It's literally, it is actually, literally from another century. And what are we actually going to unionize the robots? The whole conversation is insane if you think about it. It's completely backwards looking. It doesn't offer any vision for what is going to be a completely new future. Instead, it is reflexively insecure. It's deeply insecure and it is insecure about human capacity. Because what it basically is telling you is, is we have to go back to a solution from the past because we don't trust ourselves or each other to find something for the future. I don't feel that way. I think so. Look, I trust the people around me to actually ask themselves that question and come up with good answers.
- [25:53]
B
Okay, so obviously this is the fun part. This is when we get into Zionism, you pose for survival tests for a thriving free society. And those are maintaining demographics above replacement level. Having enough kids, in other words, willingness to fight and defend itself, genuine societal happiness, even Amid conflict and the ability to field smart and cohesive teams or companies in an AI driven world. But social capital, the ability to work together cohesively. And you say that these four tests, only Israel alone, among all the free societies of this earth, meets all those tests. Just the first test of maintaining your demographics above replacement, only Israel meets. And a willingness to fight, including among progressive left wing Israelis, happiness, weird levels of happiness. Even in the middle of political crisis and massive war and terrible, terrible adversity and economic struggles. Weird levels of happiness because they're really embedded in social capital rather than they're embedded in trust. They're embedded in all these things that Israelis have that other Westerners don't have. The Israelis have some weird secret sauce and everybody's gone looking for it. I had a whole podcast episode with Micha Gudman, the Israeli philosopher, just trying to figure out what that is. Um, and you think you've figured out what that is? Zionism as a social technology. What is it? Why has that given Israel these strengths in this moment when everybody else feels like they're losing access to those kinds of strengths?
- [27:29]
A
So the, the way to start to answer that question is in a term that I, that I tried or have decided to try to redefine, which is a term the. The ethnostate. If you go on X on any given day, certainly on Reddit, Israel is sneered at. It is, it is a slur to call Israel an ethnostate. And I think that that is a sign of envy. And the reason is because I think that we're actually misunderstanding the term ethnos, which most people today reflexively believe means ethnicity, a state built on the idea of shared bloodline, that people are genetically related to each other. I actually instead look at the root of the word, which is ethnos. And ethnos is a term from anthropology that actually meant people or culture, which does not necessarily mean people who are biologically related to each other or genetically related to each other. And in fact, throughout history, meant group, a group of people who had a shared set of features or characteristics that made them different from those around them. That's it meaning. And the metaphor that I like to use is a metaphor of a mixing board and music, right? The music you make is recognizable by the people in your group and recognizable by others as yours. That's it. It's different. So now when you go inside of it, you start to realize that Western nations developed with very, very different ethnosis, meaning they were using different features at different levels and creating different Music. I'll give you an example. Race, right? Race in Japan is a very important part of the ethnos. That dial is turned all the way up. Race in Israel is not an important part of the ethnos, which is why it confounds people, right? Because you're calling it an ethnostate. And then it turns out that in fact race is not remotely important culturally inside of Israel. These things are choices, and we make these choices. And I want you to. The way that I try to explore this is I try to encourage people to see race, religion, and a lot of other things, your music, your literature as instruments, and to imagine that each country was making different music from those instruments. It's very, very, very important to be able to say, my music is different from other people's music. And if you don't want to, you don't ever have to say it's better. It's just different. And this is what it is. And I can recognize it and other people can recognize it, and I know what it is. That is the first and most important element of Zionism. There was a culture the Jews famously have, a culture that in fact, unlike many, many, many other examples throughout the history of anthropology, the Jews culture is transportable, which is very rare, right? We actually managed to maintain a Jewish culture even when we were divorced from the land, which in the history of human cultures is quite rare, Right? So rare that in fact, it's been studied by the. And used. The Jews were used as a. As a leading example of how to define peoplehood because their culture was so distinct and so clear that it didn't even matter if they were exiled from their land and it didn't matter if they were flung between nations that were very different from one another. That culture, there was a shared culture across it. So clearly there's something very strong about the tethers that made that Jewish music. If you use that as a basis, a clear sense of your ethnos or your culture, and you add to it a vision for the future and an intense ability and an interest in working hard to make that vision a reality. That's Zionism to me. And so if you define it that way, you can have Zionism. Anyone can be a Zionist. Milei, I believe, is doing Zionism for Argentines. Lee Kuan Yew did Zionism for Singaporeans. Modi, I think, is doing Zionism for Indians right now. The failure of it, whether it looks the way you want it to look, it's actually not a value judgment. It's literally just Descriptive of the way that a certain way of thinking works in reality.
- [33:04]
B
So I want to delve into this last point of yours, which is that Zionism can push back all the failures of post nationalism, all this flattening of identity. Zionism can produce these survival skills that Israelis have demonstrably have that you argue other people actually kind of envy and wish they had. How is it transferable? In other words, a technology for national renewal that could conceivably be used by anyone. And you cite Lee Kuan, Yew and Milei. How does a British person today in a country on fire in this debate? I mean, the politics are being reshaped by this debate over immigration, which is a debate over Englishness and Scottishness and Britishness writ large. How did they piece together these social technologies of Zionism, political identitarian technologies and build something new, build a new politics? Maybe England is the best way to talk about this right now because they're literally having a debate over whether they are a nation and to what extent and how much and what that means for immigration.
- [34:09]
A
So I don't believe that it will work for the UK if they. If there is nobody in there who can come up with a definition of what Britain is first, what is your music? What's your song? What does it sound like? Describe it. If you can't do that, it doesn't matter what you add to it. You can add as much idealism as you want. You're adding idealism to, to nothing. It's like you just added salt to a pot of water and you're telling yourself it's soup, there's nothing in it. Right?
- [34:53]
B
I can describe what I think Britishness is, but maybe I'm talking about history. It's the English language, it's Shakespeare, it's Churchill, it's the legendary period ending with Alfred establishing proper kingdoms that they would come to identify with later. It's the crazy back and forth between Parliament and monarchy that produced the 1688 Glorious Revolution that produced earlier than that four century, the Magna Carta. It's a kind of social standoff between all the different layers of society that created the institutions that would give everybody alive today democracy. It's a thousand things that could only have happened in that particular social context, which I can't believe they're not damn proud of. That's what it is to me. And I happen to love English. It's my second language, but I learned it as a kid and I try to teach it to my kids. And if you had English, how could you not be proud. So what, why don't they have. Why is that music hard for them to articulate? What is, what is happening there that they can't build a future on?
- [36:00]
A
So what's really interesting about England in my telling of the story is what did England have to feel guilty about in World War II? And again, every time I say this on an interview, somebody says to me, oh, you know how anti Semitic the British are. Yes, I understand that. The bottom line is, is England did not perpetrate World War II. It did not perpetrate genocide, nor did it participate in it.
- [36:31]
B
What they actually talk about in, in the elites over there is, is, is colonialism and imperialism. As if, as if they are the defining. I watched this unbelievably viral video of Constantine kissing, telling an English audience to booze. We are not the inventors of slavery. We were the first major nation to outlaw slavery and hunt it down and end it.
- [36:54]
A
So, so can I, can I actually bring something up here? Because I really. The, the, the, the real question that I think we want to be exploring is why do people need to feel powerless in this moment? And for me, the answer is because the technologies feel really big and the technologies feel too hard for a human to go up against. Digital technologies have changed the way that every single industry, every part of our lives functions. It changes the way your doctor can perform and read an MRI on you. It changes how your students, education happens, right? It changes how we communicate with. It obviously changes public opinion and the idea of public opinion because now our. We have a shattered mirror in place of what was a kind of broad conversation, particularly in the West. It changes the way that our food gets made. It changes every single part of our society. And it also, in the process of doing all of that, it flattens difference between us and it flattens it for a reason, right? So when Amazon needs to create a technology for one click, why? Because it's better for Amazon if they can get, if make it really, really easy for you to buy stuff. So they have to create a technology that lowers all the barriers for accessibility. In lowering all the barriers for accessibility, it needs to actually create a language that is usable across cultures and across, across countries, right? These technologies, Facebook, first the social media technologies, but now everything AI, every aspect of our lives is filtered through systems designed to make us not have differences between us, not be alive to what makes Americans strange or distinct. Because we're literally daily, from the minute we wake up and pick up that phone, we're using technologies meant to never have us Recall those, those differences, they're not in our heads, right? That I feel is very, very, very powerful. And I think it is. I think it leads people to black pill and leads them to feel like they don't have control over their own lives. And as a result it's better for them to believe that England is responsible for colonialism. Somebody else was responsible because then they don't. They. All they have to do is sit back and let someone else take over the future. Someone else can think about a vision for England, someone else can build it. Because it feels too big subconsciously. And I think that that's the real. I know it feels gauzy and it feels subconscious or it feels deep, but I actually think that that's what's happening. I think whole parts of the west are being demoralized and they're being deactivated from participating in their, in the building of their own future.
- [40:41]
B
Agency can only be particularistic. If, if you are flattened so much that there's no difference between you and anyone else as a group, then the group has no. You met as an individual in a larger world. But the group can't have agency if it can't see itself, if it can't recognize itself as having unique, distinct interests, etc. I, I, I watch Israeli teenagers. You know, my oldest is now a teenager and he's on the phone and, and they're doing the same TikTok dances that they're doing everywhere else in the world. And they're sharing in a culture that's more generational than it is geographic, more generational than it is distinct. I don't know what the heck my kids are talking about, but they, and share whatever they're talking about with kids in Argentina and Canada. And so that flattening is, is done. It's over. Why do the Jews still.
- [41:33]
A
So when your kids go into the army, that's a huge opposing force to the global flattening, because that is a very distinct experience. So at the end of the piece I tried to set out two calls. One to people who are readers, who are citizens. And that call is to see their own volition in their life. And I try to explain that one of the things that happened in the establishment of the state of Israel was that the story ended up being so unlikely and so wild and the success was so such a huge lift from where the people started that it made those around them have to come up with some conspiracy theory for the dark power that must have been behind it all this whole time. Because the success was so extraordinary. And the first thing I want to do to any human being who's alive is to tell them that they have the capacity to have that happen to them. You have the capacity to build a life so extraordinary if you want to, even now, Even if you're 92 years old, you have the capacity to do something in your life right now that is so extraordinary that it makes people come up with conspiracy theories about you. That's the whole point of being a life, is that you have that capacity. The second thing that I say is that I really want to when you do that and when you do that for yourself, it makes you demand and be able to identify that in our leadership. And here I know that it's not en vogue to believe in hierarchy or believe in actually having a leadership class, but I do believe in it. And I do believe that a leadership class, by the way, doesn't have to be an elite. These leaders, as the state of Israel and as the story of Israel actually shows, your leaders can come from anywhere. They just have a clear idea about what they're looking to build and what they believe you would get out of it. That's inspiration. I want us to demand and to look for leaders who can articulate that in our societies. Because I think that once you isolate this idea in yourself, you'll start to see it in others. I think the reason why we're looking to leaders and why we're generating leaders who, who are less than ideal is in part because we don't even know what we're looking for as people anymore and as citizens. And so I think the first thing would be for us to make ourselves bring ourselves closer to this idea of what we want and what we want our nations to be, and then to try to find people who can actually help us make the reality.
- [45:12]
B
How would you replicate Israel's strengths practically? We just published an episode with the Somaliland ambassador. One of the things that most, most the first one ever in Israel, one of the things I'm most impressive about Israel is that they'll take risks. And I'm like, well, you know, wars, etc. No, he's talking about the business people. They will found companies on the drop of a hat and try the damn thing and if it fails, they'll found three others.
- [45:32]
A
Khabiv, this is me. It is actually so central to, I think, what the Internet and digital technologies have done to us. I think that actually, and I, and I, I try to get at this a little bit at the end of the piece, I Think that digital technologies and life on screens has actually de. Risked our lives in ways that are making us inhuman. They're making us very afraid of or, or maybe not even afraid. Literally just completely distant from the things that make up life. These are things that are, they could be drudgery, they could be beautiful. We are going tree blind. Humans have no. The, the, the inability to actually understand that life is not lived simply or only or primarily on screens is itself the whole game, I think. And I think what that Somaliland ambassador noted is something that throws into sharp relief. For example, what a lot of what I see a lot in the US with kids. I'm gonna bring up an example of a, a 16 year old who I was with a group of people at a beach and it was one of these moments where it was like 5:30 or 6:00 clock in the summer and it was totally gorgeous. It was an unbelievably gorgeous moment at the beach. And there was nobody at this beach and the water was placid. And you just think to yourself, I feel alive in this moment. I have to go in, just put my feet in, right? And a bunch of us were there and all the teenagers were like, there are shells there, there are sharp shells. And everybody. I looked at them, I said, what's going to happen? We're in the Hamptons. We're not far from whatever urgent care you need. If it's beyond a band aid, which is in the house, like, what's going to happen? And there was like. And they looked and they were like, oh, okay. And they went in. But that idea of what happens if I engage in the real world, it could get, it could go really wrong, is I think creating a set of kids and a whole generation of kids, at least in the US who are neurotic. I don't know what else to say. They are, they, they, they are afraid of the physical world. And if you are afraid of the physical world, you will never take risks in any world. You will not take risk on risks on the screen, right? And that is essential to the decision to actually build anything. You can't build anything unless you have an appetite for risk. Because it. Central to the act of building is the act of failure. It happens. Hopefully it doesn't happen completely and hopefully the whole project doesn't fail. But you have to be willing to take that chance. And if you can't do that, which I think people can't do at the most local level, they can't do with their bodies right now, I think that we have a cultural and societal problem. And that feels to me to be the kind of the seed of this whole conversation. I think the conversation is really, really personal and individual.
- [49:42]
B
Place yourself in the world. Build out your distinctiveness, your music. As you say, every nation will use different instruments, not just play a different song, but actually one will have bass, one will have drums. Everybody will sound different. Build out that difference. Know that difference. Recognize that difference, so that you can love the world from somewhere in the world. If you don't have particularism, you're not real. You're a ghost. I'm pulling this from the article. It was so beautifully written. Natan Sharansky. I once worked for Nathan Sharansky. He's the famous dissident against the Soviet Union. And he was asked by fellow dissidents, you know, you came out of the Gulag and you immediately went to Israel and you immediately declared yourself a Jewish nationalist, they said, in this sort of disgust. And he wrote a book about that, in Defense of Identity. It's called, I think, where he said, you know, when I was in the Soviet Union, I was willing to go to the Gulag because I was fighting for the right to be what I am, which is a Jew. That particularist anchor gave me the strength to fight the great universalist fight against the oppressor. You want that strength? Do that. Find your church, find your community. Build it. If it doesn't exist. And something that someone once told me, failure is literally every moment up until success.
- [51:01]
A
That's right.
- [51:03]
B
If you can't handle failure, you're. You're not trying to succeed. You're not going to do anything in the world. Alana, any last advice? Any last comment? To me, this was a seminal essay. I'm going to put the link in the show notes. You're not supposed to do that because apparently it's not great for the YouTube algorithm, we're going to do that. Hopefully the YouTube algorithm will take care of itself. This is different. This is a way of thinking about the pain of the world that is respectful. So many Jews feel so besieged that they're writing off everybody who's talking to them. Sometimes when people talk about us, they're not talking about us, they're talking about themselves. And if we can listen in those terms, it's a lot of empathy for somebody screaming at you. But there are also solutions once you can start seeing things for what they are. So I was deeply moved by this. I'll give you the last word. And just to say thank you for this.
- [51:55]
A
Thank you for that I try, I try not to get religious in conversations like this because I am trying to keep the discussion accessible to a wide group of people, including people who don't believe in God. And so take this for what ever it's worth to you. Whether you believe in God or not, the idea that you were born is an unbelievable experience. Like the idea that you're here is bananas. And if you want, you can email me and I will show you a video of your brain cells and you will see what is actually going on inside of your own head and you will understand that you are a phenomenon. The idea that you have no power is a lie that is being told to you by people who want you to believe something that is so incontrovertibly opposed by reality. You have power. You have power to build a family for yourself. You have power to build a career for yourself. You have power to read what you want, to listen to the music you want. You have power to build the community you want. And if you so choose, you have power to help build a country that could ensure a rich and exciting future for yourself and for those around you. You can make a decision not to use that power. That's on you. But you will never ever be able to convince me that you didn't have it. That's the lesson that I hope that people take from the piece. What I really want to see and what I would encourage anyone who wants to produce it to contact me about is I think that a huge contribution to this conversation could happen if people in different countries would start to do that articulation. So I don't want to define for Japan what Japaneseness is. I would like for somebody in Japan to actually write that for me. What is Japanese? What's Japaneseness? What is French? What is British? What is, what is the, what is the. The Britishness of Britain? Because I think that that is the basis from which we can have. We can then add the other ingredients. That's the first and most important ingredient. It's like trying to make meat soup without the meat. This thing, I need that to start with. And it's not for me to define for other countries, but I do think that it would be incredibly inspiring in the same way that it's hugely exciting to learn about classical music and rock if you're learning about music. The most exciting conversation right now would be one in which we all talked about what was distinct about our nations in ways that felt not conflictual or hostile, but actually forward thinking.
- [55:20]
B
I have to say, just growing up Educated on the Zionist bookshelf. Articulating it isn't the beginning, it's the thing itself.
- [55:31]
A
Right. If I, if I could convince you to engage one piece of art in the quest to articulate a national cast or an ethnos, I would suggest that people read or I'm sorry, I would suggest that people watch Saints and strangers and I talk about it a little bit in the piece. The reason why this weird movie about the establishment of America is so good at in this conversation is because it has as its premise a basic idea which is that there were two groups of people that founded this country. There was the saints, people who believe they were founding it because of God, because of a covenant with God. And there were Puritans, in other words, the Puritans. And then there were what was called the strangers who are the people who came here for money. And the point that this gets across, it gets across two points. The first is that in fact conflict between motives difference was built in to the ethnos, to what became the ethnos of America. The that that there were diff people of who had different motives and wanted something else from this country and is central to this country, not to other countries, to this one. It's central to our particular country and our national identity. But the second thing is, is that both of those motivations then become central parts of the ethnos. And in this I try to explain that America basically almost invented two new instruments. It invented this idea which again the notion of a country being blessed by God is not new. But the idea that America was a new Zion was actually new. And the idea that it made America exceptional was new. And it was taken from the Jews actually. But it was new enough and new enough in this context. And the second idea was capital. The idea that a non royal could come to this country and could make a lot of money, could have a completely different material life than they had anywhere else. These two things became very central to the American identity. They became very central to the American identity. And I posit that actually one of the things that's happened to the American conversation about our national identity has been the breaking down of those two ideas. So the emergence of socialism as a, as a viable way to organize the American economy, that breaks down the idea that America is a place where you come to better yourself materially. And the breaking down of the idea of America as exceptional again, which I think I write about in the piece, I think it's been misconstrued by some people on purpose as being. As Being prejudice. Right. That we think we are better than others. Exceptionalism is something else, and operated in a very particular way. But what's fascinating about these two things is they became cultural tethers and they allowed people from countries all over the world and from cultures all over the world to come here and become American. It created a new music. And that should be inspiring to any culture right now or any country right now. Because what it means is, is there's still new music to make. You can make new music. Doesn't only have to be the music that you made in the past. That to me, feels like. It feels endlessly exciting.
- [59:46]
B
That would be what American optimism would look like. Getting back to that sense of exceptional in the sense of city on the hill, right? In the sense of something worth looking up to. But that's also a calling. You have to be worthy of it.
- [59:57]
A
I also want to note something here which is really important, which is that when you create an ethnos, you're creating a majority culture. That does not mean that every citizen actually has to hit every single one of your notes. Right? So, for example, you, America, a Protestant idea of. Of God and God's relationship to human life is central to America. I am not a Protestant Christian. I. That part of the American ethnos is not one that reflects my own personal life. That does not mean I am not an American citizen and that I can't participate and be part of the American ethnos. This thing is. For whatever reason, this idea is very hard for people to understand that not every single person doesn't match every single part of the ethnos exactly. If it helps you, again, you can think that you can like one part of the song or you can be able to sing only one part of the song. It doesn't mean that you don't enjoy the whole song and then it's not yours. Right? So majority culture. And I think this is also the reason why people misunderstand Israel. Right? They misunderstand the role of Israeli Arabs in Israel and the. And. And even more, maybe even more importantly, the potential role of Israeli Arabs in Israeli culture. Because they assume that defining Israel as a Jewish country, this necessarily then excludes everyone who's not Jewish. That's not how ethnos or culture works either historically or in the present, or how it has to work in the future.
- [61:43]
B
And it's not how polling on Arab Israelis looks either. A quarter of them in some polls, 40%. It depends a little bit on whether the news cycle is pressuring us one way or another say Israeli is their main identity, is their identity they identify with most.
- [61:58]
A
And not only that, but I just want to note, and again, I'm not a Bible scholar and I definitely don't want to get into fights with rabbis. I mean, I have enough of that in my life in general.
- [62:05]
B
But you need a little fights with rabbis to know you're alive.
- [62:11]
A
But I do note in the piece that every single one of the Jewish matriarchs was not Jewish by our definitions. The the ideas that we have about culture and about every single person needing to follow every single part of it may be how this whole conversation went off the rails to begin with. Right. You can have a majority culture that people participate in and respect and see as their own, even if they can't hit those every single one of those notes or don't want to. That, to me, is true liberalism. The idea that you can have that mechanism where there is a majority culture, it defines your nation and people swim through it in their own way, is the true vision of liberalism for the future.
- [63:10]
B
Thank you. Ilana Newhouse, thank you so much for joining me. And thank you for writing it.
- [63:16]
A
Thanks for having me, Sam.