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- [00:05]
A
Hi, everybody. Welcome to a very exciting episode of Ask a Anything. I'm excited to have with me my good friend Coleman Hughes. When I swing by New York, we occasionally meet to discuss all the problems of the world. He doesn't hail from the Middle east, so it's a conversation that is on new and original and interesting topics and I learn a very great deal from it and I hope you're going to learn also. Today, Coleman is a journalist, a writer. He recently, a year and a half ago, came out with a book, the End of Race Politics. He has a lot of deep, thoughtful things to say about race relations in America, about American history, about the American future. And he has a podcast, Conversations with Coleman at the Free Press, which just had a three and a half hour back and forth with Dave Smith. Coleman is a gentleman. He doesn't like to talk about winning or losing the these rich, complex, respectable debates, but he knocked it out of the park. You learned it here first. Before we get into it, I want to tell you that we have two co sponsors for this episode. Thank you to Earl and Jordana Lipson of Toronto for sponsoring in appreciation for the thoughtful commentary the show has been providing to those in the diaspora who hunger for understanding during these very unsettling times. Earl and Jordana, you're welcome. Usually the dedication isn't to the podcast itself, so really, really appreciated. They've asked us to dedicate the episod episode to non Jewish allies who have shown strength of character, heartfelt compassion, and a willingness to seek out understanding when so many around them have proven unwilling to do so. Sadly, in a world gone crazy, it takes courage to speak up against the tsunami of blood, libel and hatred being cast upon us. These courageous souls should know that their righteousness is greatly appreciated and is so very important to us. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. That is from Earl in Jordana and it's surprisingly relevant. I didn't plan this. Coleman. You're not Jewish, are you?
- [02:03]
B
Not even 1%.
- [02:05]
A
So it worked. So it worked. It lined up perfectly. And it's co sponsored by Eve and Bobby Lapin, Leslie Gilstrap and Suzanne and John Landa, who are collectively known as Haviv's Houston Herd. Friends. I swear I'm reading that. Thank you, guys. This is embarrassingly adorable. Who wish to dedicate this episode to the courageous soldiers of the IDF and the iaf. That's the the Air Force. And to the families of Israel's fallen soldiers as Diaspora Jews in a climate of increasing antisemitism, we are deeply grateful for the sacrifices all of you have made to protect Israel as a safe haven and homeland. Your fortitude inspires us. Our hearts are with you and with the hostage families each day. Thank you so much to those sponsors and those beautiful dedications. And I would like to invite everyone also to join our Patreon. If you're interested in asking the questions that guide the topics we choose to talk about, join the Patreon. There's great discussion forums there where I and or part of the conversation we talk about general news about the episodes and you get to have you get to take part in the monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. We have a great time. Join us at www.patreon.com askhaviv. Anything the link is in the show Notes Coleman, how are you?
- [03:22]
B
I'm very good. I'm a huge fan of this podcast and it's an honor to be on.
- [03:27]
A
So I was just going to say that about you. It is such an honor and exciting to have you on. I read you all the time. We talk all the time. I learn from you all the time. But also the last time we were on a podcast together, it was you and Noam Dorman from the Comedy Cellar. And I went and watched it to sort of figure out what it is that you and I talked about last time. And I completely railroaded everybody and talked the entire time and didn't give anybody else a chance to talk. And so we are now compensating for my impolite likeness, all those I don't know what year and a half ago. And I want to start in on getting your thoughts. You know, everybody I know in Israel, we scheduled this a while ago. I did not know that Trump was going to pull this rabbit out of the hat, this astonishing, wonderful, beautiful thing where by Monday we're going to get all our hostages back. We're recording on Thursday, October 9th. And and this might be the beginning of the end of the war. In other words, there's a lot to negotiate. There's Hamas is already Trump announced a deal. Israel agreed to the conditions. Hamas agreed to different conditions, but phrased it as agreement. And everybody just decided to move forward. And so we don't yet know if actually Hamas is going to disarm and have its leadership leave Gaza. That is not a thing Hamas has actually agreed to, but everybody's pretending it's so the Israelis because they want those hostages out, and Trump because he thinks he can actually push it through and push the deal forward. And the Qataris and everybody wants the War over. So there are good reasons to think good things are happening, that this is what it looks like. There are reasons to believe, to be skeptical, to be fearful that it might not be as good as we hope it is. But nevertheless, nobody in Israel is talking about anything else. Nobody in Gaza is talking about anything else. This is two years of war. For the very first time, we can imagine the end. And it's to me, amazing because that deal not doesn't just end the fighting. That deal, the Trump 20 points, commits Israel to Gaza's rebuilding, funded and policed and managed by the Arab world, by the Americans, the Europeans and the Israelis, commit not to annex anything, not to settle anything. It's the perfect deal for Gaza. It's the perfect deal for Israel in the sense that the hostages come back and the war ends. Really, the only loser is Hamas and they're going to try and finagle out of it. That's kind of, I think, the general Israeli sense of it. What are you seeing? What are you hearing? What do you think? What do you think Americans think about this?
- [06:05]
B
So the strange thing is not what Americans think, but the general silence in America about this deal. The strange thing is that we're not really talking about it. And the reason that's strange is because, you know, Ceasefire now was a massive movement on the left here. It was on every college campus, it was on every single one of my friends Instagram pages. All eyes on Rafa was just blowing up my phone and blowing up every campus whenever that was. And now we have, we're actually at the 10 yard line, as we would say in America on a ceasefire deal. And suddenly all the same people are just kind of oddly silent. You would think that they would now more than ever be, be applying that little extra pressure required that would be helpful to get this deal across the finish line. The reason that that's interesting to me is because I was always sympathetic to the Ceasefire now folks, for the following reason. I'm on the opposite side of the conflict in terms of who I think the good guys and the bad guys are, as they are. But they would always defend themselves by saying, look, I'm not pro Hamas. I mean, not all of them, but many of them would say I'm not pro Hamas. But when I see pictures of maimed children every day, videos of maimed children in my feed, my heart tells me that this war has to end now and we'll figure out the rest later. And I don't think you have to be crazy or callous or an idiot to have that opinion. But then we get an actual ceasefire deal that, as you say, closes the door on all of the far right. The truly unethical ambitions that the far right has ends the suffering, brings the hostages home, and suddenly all the same people are oddly silent instead of being supportive of it. And so what are the possible reasons for that? I can only see two now. One is a stupid American partisan reason, which is that if Trump did it, it's bad. That is actually the thinking of about half the country. So just the fact that this peace plan has Trump's name on it. I don't think Israelis care so much about whether this peace deal came from Trump or Biden, but Americans will see the exact same peace deal, and if it comes from Trump, half the country will hate it. And the reason that's even more interesting is because former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken came out on a podcast a few days ago and said Trump's peace deal was exactly Biden's peace deal that we never got to propose. So it's actually. There's nothing about it that really reflects Trump's particular signature. It's. It just happens to be that Trump is the president and he's in a position to do it, and Biden didn't, for whatever reason. So partisanship is one reason why the Ceasefire now crowd is not excited. This, the only other reason that could possibly exist is that you're upset that Hamas doesn't stay in power at the end of the deal. And if that's the reason, then you actually are pro Hamas. It exposes the Ceasefire now folks as either so partisan that they care more about their partisanship than about ending the suffering in Gaza, which is a little bit of a strange set of priorities, and sort of gives away what it is that Americans truly care about in the conflict, which is, as always, ourselves. Or it gives away that you actually have been pro Hamas this whole time and have been hiding behind a kind of humanitarian motive.
- [09:56]
A
I tend to lean to the latter because it's the same silence in Britain and the same silence in Holland and the same silence in France. And the Brits have sat it all out and they have come out with exactly the same basic phenomenon, their silence. So, to me, to me, it's astonishing. I have always divided the anti Israel or pro Palestinian or Ceasefire now crowd into two groups, and I generally believe this about all political movements. You have the core activist group that talks and thinks and obsesses and mobilizes and informs and forges the messaging and gets it out there and Then you have decent, honest, happy, good people who really are just activated by these images, these awful images of war. And they come out to the march and when they say, I'm marching for a ceasefire, they mean, I'm marching for a ceasefire. But they don't come out for the march unless they're activated, unless the organization calls for it and organizes it and hands them the placards and sends them the email. And I think that there are a majority of marchers. So I think that, you know, of the hundreds of thousands or millions of people around the world who have marched for Gaza, for a ceasefire, for an end to the war, most of them are just decent, normal people with jobs and lives. And, and, and they do want an end to the war. But what we're discovering in the silence, because the people who would usually speak is that core, and that core is sophisticated enough, knowledgeable enough, and constantly dealing with the issue. Enough. Yeah. To be completely dishonest, to have completely nefarious motives, to have these kinds of layers and complexities and to be lying to us for sure, maybe also to themselves. I think that's all laid bare now. Everything you're saying echoes things that I saw while you were asleep. It is morning in the United States where you are, and afternoon here in Israel. But Konstantin Kiss and several hours ahead of you woke up in London and said similar things. And so we're discovering that it was about Hamas winning, we're discovering that it was about support for Hamas. And to me, because I know something about Hamas and its ideology that means that it was the support for the destruction of Israel, for the removal or erasure of Israel as a Jewish state expressing Jewish self determination. And so there's something bad at the heart of this campaign that mobilized millions of good people. It's astonishing to me, it's a moment of clarity where they themselves can't avoid it. And that, to me is the surprising thing about this moment. It's so easy to speak. You and I could easily imagine what they would actually say. Right. I mean, fantastic that the war is over. A lot of problems here. Thank God the war is over. That's the Muslim war. But, you know, the second phase will actually have to see the idea of withdrawal, or we don't believe it, but first, let's end the war. Right?
- [12:59]
B
Yeah. And they could say something like, look, is Trump the best person to do this? I don't think so. But my God, it's a genocide. Which they've been saying, right? It's a genocide. Who cares who's the president. If he, if he's the one to do it, he's the one that's got to do it and we've got to get behind him. Right. That, that would make sense for a left wing American to say at this moment and to feel a sense of deep relief at what they're thinking. They're seeing a genocide ending. Nothing else should matter. If you think you're seeing a genocide ending, partisanship shouldn't matter. But strangely there you can almost feel maybe this is over interpreting, but there's like almost a sense of disappointment that Trump is the one to like get, get this war. Like, they'd rather not give Trump a win, as it were, than to actually see the war end. And this, obviously, this goes to just a classic pattern to always notice in life when you have one group of people with skin in the game and one group of people without skin in the game. Americans have relatively little skin in the game of the Israel, Gaza conflict relative to both Israelis and Gazans. And so, you know, our opinions on it are virtually consumed by really our own psychology and our own sense of self. And I'm sure we'll get more into that. But this is evidence of that. This is a manifestation of that. Because if we did have skin in the game, we would be talking nonstop about this peace plan.
- [14:36]
A
Like, you guys are right, Like Gazans and Israelis both are at this moment. The actual responses from the streets in Gaza and in Tel Aviv are the same. And that's what's astonishing to hear this silence from the pro Palestinian crowd. I want to ask you about this question of partisanship. Trump just did something truly brilliant. And I deeply apologize to anyone listening who has reasons to be more skeptical of Trump on a thousand other issues. I come from a country with universal healthcare, okay? I respect your domestic politics and divides. I'm not stepping into them. But here's what Trump did. Netanyahu bombed Doha, he bombed Qatar. He tried to take out some Hamas leaders. And it was a terrible bombing. It was a mistake, it was failure. It didn't work. And the ramifications and the blowback was enormous. And the Trump administration actually then went to the Qataris. The Qataris came crying to the US and said, you have to protect us. And then the Trump administration did something marvelous. It went to the Qataris and it said, of course we're going to protect you. You're an ally. You're, I think, the highest level you can be of an ally that's not actually a member of NATO. Biden elevated them to major non NATO allies status. And the Trump administration said to them, possibly President Trump himself, we will protect you, but you got to give us something. You got to give us the hostages. You got to give us the end of the war. You got to bend Hamas, and if you bend Hamas, then we're going to protect you from this crazy guy, Netanyahu, who's bombing everything he sees. And when Trump announced this deal yesterday or the day before yesterday, depending on the time zone, the astonishing thing was how Trump, how Al Jazeera covered it. Al Jazeera is a mouthpiece of Qatar owned by the regime. It carries the Qatari message to the world, to the Arab world. It's its major source of soft power. And Al Jazeera has suddenly gone very gentle on the Gaza war on Israel, calling for the deal to be followed through. And the Qataris pivoted immediately, told Hamas, you have to do this. The Qataris came running to the Americans for help, and the Americans used that as leverage to get this deal. Here's my question. Would a Harris administration have had the competence to do that? Would the Harris administration have been able to step out of moralizing to the kind of pragmatic, actionable discourse that the Trump administration knows how to do? This could only have come from Trump. Is that a fair assessment?
- [17:13]
B
I think that is a fair assessment. I mean, we'll never know what Kamala Harris was capable of because she never managed anything as important as United States foreign policy. The great weakness of her candidacy is that she had literally never even won a single delegate within the Democratic Party primary process. Right. When she ran for president four years prior, she got zero delegates within her own party. And she. It wasn't, wasn't for lack of name recognition. She was absolutely considered a major contender, top three or four contender, and she got zero. So that says everything you need to know about her weakness. Even within the Democratic Party, much less within the country as a whole. I never heard her utter a single sentence on foreign policy that suggested to me that she was highly competent and, and, and deep on U.S. foreign policy. You can't say the same of someone like Hillary Clinton, for instance. I can easily find paragraphs at a time of her talking sense about various foreign policy issues. So, yeah, there's nothing to suggest that Kamala Harris would have been able to pull this off, given her vulnerabilities, her sensitivity to. I mean, she wasn't even able to do simple things that would have helped her win the election, like, go on, Joe Rogan, go on the biggest podcast in the country, she wasn't able to do simple things like say, no, your taxpayer money probably shouldn't be funding convicted criminals that want to change their gender in prison. Right. This is like a 9010 issue in America. And she wasn't able to resist the pressure from the woke fringe enough to say no to things like that. So, yes, there's nothing to suggest that she could have handled this the way Trump has handled it. For all of Trump's flaws, his biggest flaws have been his insane vindictiveness in the domestic context. Like, if you've said anything bad about him, if you release a poll he doesn't like, he'll sue you. Like, it's absolutely insane. If you're a law firm that works for a Democrat or has Democrat clients or was anywhere tangentially involved with Democrats that he doesn't like, he will pass an executive order saying your law firm can't enter federal buildings, which we didn't even know was possible to do. Right? So his to me that the scariest thing about Trump has been his vindictiveness and insane instinct for revenge and scorched earth in the domestic context. His foreign policy, in my view, has never been weak, has never been his weakness, whatever. It's actually been a strength for him, I think, in both of his terms, relative to the Democrats that came right before and after. I know it's just like icky to say to give Trump any win for half of America, but I think that's the truth.
- [20:29]
A
Let me try and make it easier for Democrats. His particular style of governing synchronizes perfectly with the Middle East. Maybe it's that, in other words, don't give him the credit. Just look down on the Middle east and then it all fits. If that's a way to understand his phenomenal successes in the Middle east, where he's gotten tremendous things for America out of the Gulf states. He put together the Abraham Accords at the beginning last term, and he just pulled this off. And it, to me is really. And watching it in real time, in other words, watching the decisions being made and just knowing. Just knowing that a Democratic administration would have been too hobbled by moralizing discourse to be able to pull off the actual end of the actual war, which was not available to Biden because he was too busy navigating all of these moralizing demands rather than actual the pragmatics of policy. So I want to. I want to shift gears to America, to American society, to Jews in America. A lot of people who talk to us turns out One of the sponsors of this episode. A lot of Jews who listen to this podcast are very concerned that one war has ended, but in an important sense there's another war that really has only just begun that they were unaware of. They did not even know that this was percolating, that this was latent. And that is the sense that there is a absolute whirlwind of hatred of them, of demonizing of them, of trying to understand all the evils of the world and all the anxieties of various groups through them. It's coming from the left, it's coming from the right. It is almost a political identity in various places in American politics rather than an actual argument. And the Jews have to live with these. People now have to know that there's this never ending libel campaign against them. And even someone like me who comes from the outside and comments sometimes on the Jewish experience around the world, but also on American Jews. I get this blowback from racists online constantly about Jewish issues. How big? We have Pew polling from 2024, 25. Not just that Jews are experiencing a lot more antisemitism, but that other Americans say that there's a lot more antisemitism. Just a huge spike. We have FBI data on hate crimes by religious groups that tell us that Jews are by far the largest religious group, the religious group most likely to face hate crimes by a huge margin, six fold of the next one. I mean, just enormous. How do you see it? How bad is anti Semitism in America right now, as an American who follows these things fairly closely?
- [23:07]
B
Well, it's hard to know. I think the FBI hate crime stats, Jews have been at the top of the list since long before October 7th. I'm not Jewish. It's hard for me to, you know, understand how the typical person, Jewish person would feel, you know, wearing, wearing a kippah walking around New York City. You know, it's long been known that in certain neighborhoods of the city, especially neighborhoods that are mostly black and ultra Orthodox or Haredi, like Crown Heights and certain other, those have long been hot, hot zones for anti Semitic, anti Semitic violence. You've got two communities that don't, don't talk to each other at all where there's like crime already. And, and you've got, you know, the, from the American side, the black American side, you're seeing people like dressed in a way that just looks crazy to you. And this is like a recipe for pretty one sided violence. And it's been a shame for a long time. And it's been a Real tough issue. So there, you know, there's the strange thing about anti Semitism. Is that it, you know, is it one phenomenon or is it like three or four phenomenons that end up, you know, three like rivers that end up becoming one river and feel like one phenomenon from the Jewish side? If you want to talk about right wing anti Semitism in America, this is more or less a carbon copy of Nazi anti Semitism. This is just whatever it is in the, the European mind that created this obsession with Jews to the point of wanting to exterminate them and expel them from every country. That's essentially the same impulse you get on the far right. And, you know, there's this guy like Daryl, Daryl Cooper, who, you know, is, you know, he's the amateur historian that says Winston Churchill was the greatest villain of World War II. But, but really he was just joking when he said that, but then he actually says it for real on his Twitter threads without any hint of a joke, and he says, well, no, he's not. He's not a Nazi. He just gets all his stuff from David Irving, the famous Holocaust denier, and he's curious and he's multifaceted and you really just don't understand him. And then when Mother Jones finds his old anonymous comments online, they find that he really actually is just a Nazi and he's in fact developed a strategy, says something like, well, look, you don't just go from being a normal American to believing Mein Kampf overnight. You need someone to be the bridge. Now I'm going to be that bridge. So really, he is just a Nazi.
- [25:57]
A
That was amazing.
- [25:58]
B
Yeah, it was all bullshit. And he is a Nazi.
- [26:03]
A
It's amazing that he turned out to be exactly what he looked like.
- [26:06]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [26:07]
A
That to me is amazing.
- [26:08]
B
That doesn't always happen. Yeah, yeah. And now we know that. So. So that's where it comes from. From the Nick Fuentes wing of they really just don't like Jews. They like the white Christian ethnic core of the country, and Jews are a threat to that. And everything is to blame on the Jews. That's how they arrive at antisemitism. It's such an alien mindset to me that I'm afraid I don't do it justice by explaining it any more deeply than that. I am basically a creature of the left in America. Everyone I grew up around is broadly default liberal. And I understand the liberal version of anti Semitism much more deeply. And the reason I say it comes from a different river that maybe ends up linking up with the Fuentes Right is because it actually has a different psychological source, which is for Americans on the left especially. Our deepest story about ourselves is that the country was at its birth marked by racism, stained by slavery. And the glory of the American left is that we have inched ever more towards perfection, especially during the civil rights movement, by canceling out white supremacy legally. And so that's the deepest story that drives the American left. And it's why the left is always looking for causes that resemble that story of perfection, the perfection of America through the ridding of bigotry from America. At the core of that is this deep idea that basically American history is all about whites having oppressed blacks. That's why, you know, the biggest riots you will ever find in American history were about this issue. They were about a white cop with his knee on the neck of a black man. That is the image that most deeply resonates with the American soul. The only reason that Americans care about the Israel Palestine conflict, the only reason we've heard of it, frankly, is because we think it's a case of a white man with his knee on the neck of a brown man, right? We think the Israelis are white and the Arabs are close enough to black. I mean, they're non white, they're brown. And we think it's a case of whiteness oppressing blackness. That's why it affects the left in America so much. So every, you know, the past decade saw a massive upswing in just casual anti white rhetoric in left wing spaces. Like, I went to Columbia between 2016 and 2020 and what you heard, you know, virtually every day was someone just making a casually dismissive, snide remark about white people or white men in particular or straight white men in particular, or whiteness or white culture or that's a white of you. You know, just this, this casual way of talking about white people that if it were any other ethnicity would be fighting words. But for some reason they take it, and I never really understood this because I would never take that abuse as a black person.
- [29:54]
A
They believe it. They believe that white people in America, A, you're privileged and B, are oppressive, right?
- [30:00]
B
And so, and so the way to signal this is to, to really put, put themselves down in a way. And, and for the black kids and Hispanic kids on campus to, you know, to put them down. You know, I never heard an anti Jewish comment from, from these folks. I never heard a casual, oh, that guy's a Jew, oh, you know, whatever, that kind of thing. And this tells you something deep, which is that the Source of antisemitism on the left is not a hatred of Jews qua Jews, it's a hatred of Jews as the paradigmatic example of white privilege, white oppressor. Now, as I said, from the Jewish perspective, it probably just all ends up in the same river. And you're just seeing all these people focus on you for no reason. But this is a psychology I can actually break down at a deeper level.
- [30:52]
A
But these, these models of people, this essentializing of people, white kids on campus today, white liberal kids at the Columbia campus, didn't create slavery and didn't maintain the institutions of white supremacy. I realize I'm treading into a world that isn't mine, and I apologize for that. But it is. The problem with it isn't that there isn't the history, the real, true, profound history, that it's responding to this vision of the world, this way of talking about the world on the American left. The problem with it is that it essentializes real living people today who lose the permission to express what they really think, to think what they really think, and to really grapple with, to be themselves. A white kid on campus isn't a white kid on campus. They're a specific person with specific views and opinions. And there's only so long you can essentialize them before the rebellion comes. And. And so this kind of wokeness on campus, this racialized essentialism, was always going to explode. And I think that the frustration for Jews was they were on the wrong side of whiteness when being white was bad. And now the essentialism, the rebellion has come, but now they're blamed by the anti Semites, by the Candace Owens, for example, for being the drivers of the very wokeness that essentialized them on that side. And so they. Again, somehow the system always ends up with them having to stand in the dock and apologize and be judged. If Jews talk that way. I guess what I'm asking is, do you take it seriously? In other words, are Jews a little too sensitive, or do you share their sense that everyone kind of writes their own story on the Jews?
- [32:37]
B
Yeah. So here's what I would say about that. And I say this, you know, coming from the black community in America, after a couple hundred years of slavery, another hundred years of Jim Crow, we are quite. We are rather sensitive, some would say oversensitive, I would say often oversensitive about racial slights. Right. Like, but that comes out of a specific history. There's a reason for that. It doesn't mean we're not oversensitive. I mean, the entire BLM movement has been an exercise in ignoring facts and prioritizing our own emotional sensitivity to the superficial image of a situation. So we couldn't really handle the facts around the Trayvon Martin case totally honestly. We definitely didn't handle the case of Michael Brown in 2014. That really made the effect be put BLM on the map. We didn't handle that honestly at all. We didn't handle George Floyd honestly. And the reason for that comes that.
- [33:50]
A
I'm sorry, I'm sorry to interrupt. Can you explain, you know in the Talmud the. It says on one foot, right? Tell me the whole Torah on one foot. Can you standing on when there's a time it takes before you fall onto your second foot. Is there some kind of three sentence version on one leg of what it is? How. Why you say that those were dishonestly handled?
- [34:13]
B
Yeah.
- [34:13]
A
For the 40% of the listeners of this podcast who are either Israeli or British or from other places, sure.
- [34:19]
B
So just take the Michael Brown case as representative of most of them, not all of them, But Michael Brown, 2014, he robs a convenience store. 911 is called, the police come. What actually happened is he punches the cop, tries to grab his gun, gets into an altercation with the cop while the cop is still in the car and he has the high ground and he's a big dude. Cop ends up shooting him in self defense. That's what actually happened. Now to this day and the reason we know that is because Barack Obama sent his Attorney General Eric Holder down there to do a very specific investigation. Now this was a black president and a black attorney general. They did the whole investigation. And we now know that this is what happened. What people think happened to this day is that just.
- [35:15]
A
I'm sorry, this is a new story to me. I follow George Floyd. I don't know the Michael Brown story. The President of the United States sent the Attorney General of the United States to what was a local robbery of a store that went.
- [35:31]
B
Yes.
- [35:32]
A
Who went wrong?
- [35:32]
B
It was a massive.
- [35:33]
A
In a country of 350 million people.
- [35:35]
B
Yes, because this was the genesis of the Black Lives Matter movement. I know the world found out about it in 2020. It was huge by 2014. And then it went dormant for a few years from like 2017-19. And then it came back with a vengeance. But this was a huge story. And the narrative that spread around is that this innocent black man was killed by a cop. Kid really was killed by a cop with his hands up. In other words, hands up, don't shoot became the Mantra of the protests known around the country. The idea was that this guy had his hands up and the cops shot him anyway. It was a total fiction. It was a total fiction. And we know that because the people who investigated it were all black Democrats that found this. This was essentially like testimony against interest in a court. Eric Holder said, I'm going down there as a black man to investigate. And there was enormous trust in this investigation. Every witness said, no, he didn't have his hands up. He was charging at the cop, he had been punching the cop, and so on and so forth. This is simply one example in a string. George Floyd being another. And let's not even get into it, because we could do the whole podcast on, on. On that. But we in the black community prioritized our own emotional sensitivity to the issue of police brutality over the facts, as did white liberals. And it's not justified. It's a. It's a big problem because we end up. Than advocating for policies that hurt our own communities. But it comes out of a particular history. All that to say, I would be shocked if Jews were not overly sensitive to antisemitism, given the history of being expelled from every country, the pogroms, the Holocaust, you know, all the way back to the Inquisition, being kicked out of every Arab country. You know, more UN resolutions against Israel than the entire world combined. Yeah, I would be shocked if Jews were not overly sensitive to. To anti Semitism. And so. But that doesn't mean it's not a real problem. It just means that it will show up in your psychology, cranked up, you know, whatever it is in the real world, it'll probably be a little higher in your psychology, and that's understandable, but it's something to keep tabs on as well.
- [38:11]
A
Okay, let's get into. Let's get into black anti Semitism. I want to tell people who are listening to us on audio. Well, there's. I mean, there's. There's no beating around the Bush, Coleman. You're. You're black.
- [38:25]
B
Yes, I am. I'm actually half black, half Puerto Rican, you know, but the way blackness works in America, it's like if you're half black, half white, you're just black. Like, that's how that works. President Obama. Exactly. Don't ask me why we can get into it. It's like stupid, weird historical stuff, but that is the fact socially here. So I'm not half black halfway. I'm half black, half Puerto Rican. I'm. I'm of color on both sides, as it were. And, you know, Puerto Rico is its own thing. My grandfather in Puerto Rico was himself black. So it's like a whole. But yes, in America, I'm black.
- [39:02]
A
Yes, and you're very proud. Puerto Rican.
- [39:05]
B
We all are.
- [39:05]
A
In the Middle east, we would. In the Middle east, we would call you a nationalist, but it's just being Puerto Rican, really. So let's get into it. You published an absolutely fascinating essay, and it's a year ago. I have no justification for bringing it out now, except that you're here. I'm here, and I always wanted to ask you about it. You published a fascinating essay in a magazine called sapir, which is a Jewish magazine in America of ideas and issues, edited by Bret Stephens from the New York Times. Very thoughtful, very serious, very prestigious, and very, very Jewish. And it was an essay on black antisemitism. And one of the things that I found absolutely fascinating and you have said just in our conversation so far, repeatedly, you've touched on this theme, which was that antisemitism is often many things because it serves the needs of the people who are talking about it. Antisemitism is one of the stories that people tell them that pretends like it's about the Jews but is actually about themselves. And you go into, first of all, there is black antisemitism. And actually there's a great deal of antisemitism in radical black politics and radical black nationalism of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, variety. Can you lay out the thesis for us? We're drilling down into black antisemitism. And you write there in ways that are very clear, very precise. I don't want to accuse you of being sympathetic. You're not sympathetic at all. But empathetic. In other words, they're responding to real questions and issues in their world. So what are the multiple sources, the different streams that come together, at least in the Jewish experience, to one thing? What are those in black antisemitism in America?
- [40:53]
B
Yeah. So the first thing I'll say is, remember when I was talking about the sort of liberal college campus anti Semitism and that it's, you know, it's not people making mean comments about Jews, it's people making mean comments about white people. Right. The black anti Semitism problem is both. It's like you do hear comments about Jews in the black community specifically, and. And also whites. And so in my essay, I start with James Baldwin's famous essay. In 1967, he wrote an essay, I think it was the Atlantic or the New Yorker, I can't remember, called Something like Negroes hate Jews because they hate white people. And this is back when negro was the polite, acceptable term and the title was an oversimplified version of what he was saying. But it got at something which is true, which is that again, black people in America, black Americans see Jews as white. In other words, we understand there are different ethnicities of white people. You have Irish, you have Italian, and you have Jews. Right? So, but we see these as all subcategories of white. And we have, because of our own historical experience, pretty big beef with white people on the whole. So any, any beef directed towards white people gets copy pasted against the Jews. But what I say in my essay is that's. That's not everything, right? And, and Baldwin, he explains this by.
- [42:26]
A
Saying.
- [42:28]
B
You know, when he grew up in Harlem in the 1930s and 40s, every time he met a Jew, that Jew was in a position of power over him. Right? He was, it was, you know, he was poor kid, and it was the landlord, it was the butcher, it was the, the groceries. And this created an inevitable friction, as would happen between any two groups of people, where one owns the majority of, or one disproportionately owns stores and the other doesn't. Right? It wasn't about the Jewishness of the Jews. Anyone who had owned those stories would have gotten the same kind of friction. So this is kind of his story for why there's an added resentment of Jews in the black community.
- [43:12]
A
One of the things, Can I just jump in. You point out about that experience of Jewish ownership of the economy of Harlem, so to speak, is that the Jews got there first. Correct? So the Jews had already been there a couple of generations. When the black migration arrives in Harlem.
- [43:26]
B
Black people don't actually know that Harlem was a Jewish and Italian neighborhood before the first black person arrived there. And only in the early 20th century, like with the Great Migration, did it become this sort of symbolic black mecca in America. But what I say in the essay is basically like James Baldwin's thesis cannot possibly explain the deep well of anti Semitism in the black community.
- [43:53]
A
Why?
- [43:53]
B
Because first of all, there weren't really Jews anywhere else in America, in. In most black neighborhoods all across the country. And yet you find anti Semitism everywhere, not just black people that grew up in Harlem. In over a couple decades, Jews no longer own those stores in Harlem. I lived in Harlem a couple years ago. Every single deli owner was Yemeni, Muslim, Arab. And I don't really hear too many. I mean, you do hear some anti Arab comments. To be fair. But the point is, anti Semitism has been a national phenomenon among black people. It has been a long standing phenomenon. So it can't possibly be explained by the temporary relations between blacks and Jews in the 1930s and 40s and 50s. So then I go on in my essay to talk about a major source of black antisemitism, which is the Nation of Islam. The Nation of Islam was this syncretic blend of Islam and black nationalism and a sort of copy paste of the Jewish story, but replacing black Americans with Jews. And if you read Elijah Muhammad's Message to the Black man in America, which is the foundational text of the Nation of Islam, it has a phrase something like a savior is born, but not to save the Jews, to save African Americans. There's this whole thing of like, we were the actually like the 12th Lost Tribe of Israel. And there's this whole kind of placing ourselves at the center of the. The biblical story that happens in Nation of Islam, which became thoroughly anti Semitic by the time that Louis Farrakhan became the leader of it. He would say, you know, Judaism is a gutter religion. Hitler was a great man. He would call the Jews satanic. Just every, you know, check every anti Semitic slur off the source of it.
- [45:59]
A
The source of it was the supersessionism or the replacement. Yeah, what's the source of Farrakhan, for example? I remember, by the way, I went to high school in America and I remember the Million Man March. I think I was in middle school. And I remember watching his speech. And I remember being shocked that all of America seemed to be proud that a million black men were marching on Washington. That was a great redemptive thing. And we little Jews were the only ones who noticed that. He actually hates a lot of people. He actually is deeply hateful to a lot of people. And we're not allowed to feel that because everyone's really inspired by this black mobilization, which if it wasn't for a man who hates everybody, would have been inspiring to the Jews. So where does that come from? What is the source of his anti Semitism?
- [46:40]
B
Yeah, so part of it is again, the copy paste of the anti whiteness. Like the original Nation of Islam texts were far more anti white than anti Jewish. You know, white people were believed to have been invented by an evil scientist named Yakub. And they're like, like, who's like an alien? And like there's this whole mythology around, like, where white people come from and it's profoundly racist, but that's it. It became more Anti Jewish over time. And partly because, yeah, the idea is that we African Americans, we are the real Jews. Like we are the real Jews. So these people constantly claiming to be Jews, like we have to hate them. And then. And also somehow they were behind the slave trade. And also somehow, like there's that whole mythology is a part of it, which is insane given how thoroughly Christian and Arab and Muslim the slave trade in blacks has been throughout history.
- [47:46]
A
You've just guaranteed that in the YouTube comments they're going to be people talking about that one Jewish ship captain carrying slave. I mean, you just guaranteed this that there's not going to be.
- [47:55]
B
Yeah, it's like, it's amazing that you'd have like hundreds of years of slave trade all by Christians, all by Arabs and you be lying to the one Jew. Right. It's very interesting to me.
- [48:06]
A
Yeah.
- [48:07]
B
But yeah, and then there's also the fact that NOI was mostly a north northern, inner city based movement. So you did have a little bit of that Jewish shopkeeper that the black kid knew as a kid. You know, Malcolm X would have grown up to some extent in that reality, for instance. So that's where all that came from. And now the Nation of Islam was never like a majority of black people were into that. It was always a relatively small minority of black Americans that were into noi, but it punched far above its weight because all of the black rappers of a certain generation of, you know, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Jay Z, Jay electronica, all of these rappers that came up in the 90s and early 2000s were deeply steeped in Farrakhan and Nation of Islam and constantly slipping references to it into their songs. And it became a kind of bullhorn to the wider culture of black Americans from this ideology, which was never actually that popular to begin with. So I think that accounts for. Why does someone like Kyrie Irving flirt with Holocaust denial? I think he grew up listening to all these rappers that were all NOI based.
- [49:25]
A
A guy like Kanye west, yay. Or I don't know if that's how you pronounce it, but Kanye west turning full on Nazi and putting out Heil Hitler songs, that would have been the source. Kanye took that from Nation of Islam.
- [49:39]
B
Oh yeah, definitely. Kanye would have been heavily swimming in the waters of Nation of Islam rhetoric when he grew up. Just by default of having been that involved in the hip hop world. He would have been hearing things like Jews were behind the slave trade. He would have been probably hearing anti Semitic comments about the Jewish agents, whether they're Hollywood agents. Or record label agents. And, you know, like, the strange thing is, like, there's always been a lot of contact between Jews and blacks in the music industry, going all the way back to the early days of jazz music in the early 20th century. Both Jewish Americans and African Americans just really punched above both of our weights in terms of how many brilliant musicians there were in. In those genres. And so as a result, there was, like, a lot of contact between that community, which I think created, like, good fraternal aspects, but also friction and resentment. And so Kanye is, like, heavily focused on the fact that, like, it was probably a. A Jewish lawyer that wrote the contract for a black artist 75 years ago when nobody else was paying attention to the black artist, but the Jewish American actually took a chance on that artist. And after that artist became huge. As always happens, you look at the contract that you signed when you weren't huge and you were a risky bet, and it looks to you exploitative, because had you had as much status as you have now, you would have written much better terms for yourself. You would have. Have commanded much better terms. So there's that whole aspect to it as well. But to get back to the essay, so what I. What I conclude is that, like, all of these sources of anti Semitism are kind of on the surface, and they don't get to the deepest reason that black Americans have such a deep well of anti Semitism. I mean, and I start the essay by kind of noting, like, you would think black people and Jewish people in America would get along better than anyone because we've had. We have the exact same historical enemy. We vote for the same party in America, and you've got Martin Luther King. The Jews stood by us much more steadfastly than other Americans during the civil rights movement. With Rabbi Heschel walking next to Martin Luther King, what I argue is that the biggest reason why black Americans arrive at antisemitism via all these intermediaries like Nation of Islam or My Grocer was Jewish. The reason that we arrived there has again, everything to do with our own story. Very little to do with the Jewish story has to do with the role that Jews play in our story of us. The black American story of us is that we were the only Americans that came here not by choice, but in chains. We were enslaved for 200 years, and then Jim Crow for another hundred years, lynched and, you know, forced into menial jobs and all this. And our story of ourselves right now is that the reason we stand at the bottom of virtually every statistic that you can measure with respect to wealth, with respect to income incarceration rates, education rates, test scores, you name it, you name it, we are doing worse than white Americans on it. The reason that we tell ourselves that that is true is because of this deep history of oppression we've had in our country. This is one version of the black story that is very motivating and almost sacred. Now the classic counter to this argument is, well, look at all these other immigrant groups that arrive on American shores. And you know, they've got, you know, we weren't so nice to them either, but they managed within a couple generations to rise through the ranks and live the American dream. And why can't you guys just do that? And this is a very, this is a deep threat to our story of ourselves. And the general retort is like, well, look, their oppression was not as bad as ours. It was not as deep as ours. The Irish Americans, like, yes, there were some, no need, you know, Irish don't need to apply signs and they weren't so nice to the Italians. But that's like we tell ourselves, that's a firefly to the sun compared to 200 years of slavery, lynching and Jim Crow and all that. And so in that way our story is preserved. Then in come the Jews. Now the Jews are a deeper problem, a deeper challenge to that story. Why? Because you can't honestly say that the history of Jewish oppressive oppression hasn't been profound, like it's so well documented and well testified to between the pogroms and the Holocaust and everything that you can't like honestly argue Jews are doing well in America because, well, they weren't oppressed that much anyway. Like, okay, maybe not here, maybe not here, but they were trailing a thousand year history of being kicked out and slaughtered and almost literally erased. And how do you minimize that? I mean, you can't honestly minimize that. And so that becomes a much deeper challenge than the Irish or the Italians or any, any other, you know, you know, Chinese or Japanese Americans. It becomes like the deepest challenge to our story of our current station. And when given a choice between looking deep into our story and seeing whether it's maybe not entirely honest and getting mad at the Jews and denying their story, obviously we choose the latter. And I think Martin Luther King said something about this. You know, as usual, he had the wisest of possible perspectives about this. But what he complained about in his, I think it was his final book, Where Do We Go From Here? He said he was constantly hearing in the black community that when The Jews got to America, they must have had money already, right? And MLK said, this is absolutely not true. There were reasons why Jews went from rags to riches, relatively speaking, in America over a couple of generations. And it had to do with their culture of education, their culture of written word, and all kinds of other cultural values that are worthy of emulation. And looking at it as a case study in how to succeed, how to live the American dream, right? How to work together, this kind of thing. So he saw it as worthy of emulation. But I think it's interesting that he complained about constantly hearing this comment within the black community. What is that comment getting at? That comment is getting at. Well, it breaks my sense of myself to think that Jews came here from Russia and Ukraine and Poland with nothing. We're not treated particularly well, and within a few generations are at the top of many, many of these metrics that we would like to be at the top of. And so, because I can't handle that, I can't handle what that does to my sense of myself and my community, I'm going to invent the lie that they must have come here with money to begin with, because then my story is consistent, my worldview is reconciled, my sense of myself is preserved. So that's what it's really about. And the final thing I'll say is that like I've said throughout this conversation, you've got these different rivers that end up pouring into one river of antisemitism that Jews experience. Why is the world obsessed with us in some way? They all do come from the same source, which is envy, right? Like the politics of envy has been one of the most destructive forces of around the world. And Thomas Sowell, the great writer, has a weirdly titled but very profound essay called Are Jews Generic? What he means by that strange title is actually a not at all strange, but profound point that if you look around the world not just at Jews, but at other groups, at the Lebanese in West Africa and the Indians in East Africa and the Chinese in Malaysia, what you find is like when, when, when a population experiences a minority that does a little bit too well, they often end up getting extremely violent towards that minority and inventing BS reasons why that minority is controlling their society. And the Jews have been the paradigm case of this in Europe and America, where it's like the world's problem with you guys is that you're doing a little bit too well, right? So we invent reasons why you must be pulling all the strings in order to preserve our own sense of Ourself, and it's just based in envy, you know, differently directed, and it's contemptible. And I think that's what it is. I mean, and if societies end up destroying themselves by acting out their envy, unconstrained by reason, unconstrained by principle, unconstrained by humanity. And so that, to me, is the breakdown of where I see anti Semitism coming from in the black community. And where it ends up with is like these highly disturbing statistics. If you ask people about Holocaust denial, the black community scores, like at the top of the list on Holocaust denial. And again, that gets to this point is that we can't let you have your history of oppression and also be doing so well in the world now, because then we have to ask why with our history of oppression, we aren't doing quite as well. And that question is too much for an immature person to handle. And so that's where it comes from. It's just pure envy.
- [60:54]
A
I want to wind down. That was very deep, and it was a deep essay that made waves in my world. Episode two of this podcast is the history of the American Jewish arrival on America's shores. And one of the really interesting things about American Jews is exactly what you were saying, that they did not arrive with money, but to an extreme extent, they were the peasants of the Jews. I mean, there were illiterates among them. They really were the lowest. All the elites of European Jewry stayed in Europe throughout all the pogroms right up until the 30s. And the Jews who actually arrive in New York harbor until the Gates Close in 1921 are people who don't have a dollar's worth of coins to show the immigration officer to get off the boat. And so Jews actually develop charities that go onto the boat, hand them dollar bills so that they can show a dollar bill and come off the boat. The Jews are desperate. The Jews are poor. The Jews have nothing at all. And they do what other desperate poor immigrant communities do. For example, they found a very robust and very violent and very brutal mafia. Jewish organized crime in the 30s was on par with the Italians. And then something very strange happens to the Jews, which is that they almost immediately begin to tell themselves a story that is a total fiction, which is that they're Jews. And we all know what Jews are. Jews are scholars and scientists and musicians and great people of wonderful renown. And they were not. They were the multi generational peasant class of rural, what we would call today Ukrainian countries of the southern Russian empire in their millions. That's what they were. And yet, because the image they had of what a Jew is. So, for example, there was a kind of social stigma to organized crime that meant that the organized crime families among the Jews, the kids went to medical school because the point of having the money was that the kid wouldn't then not be allowed into synagogue because they're, you know, despicable. Organized crime. Right. And so social stigma, social pressure destroyed Jewish organized crime. And. And so that vision of themselves as the Jewish elites of Europe drove a whole different outcome. And maybe there's a lesson there. I hope that's not flippant, because I really am a foreigner coming in. And I want to say that up front. Maybe there's a lesson there in the Jewish experience.
- [63:25]
B
This was Martin Luther King's point. I mean, and it's. You can't actually imagine a leader of the African American community making that point today. But he made it in the mid-60s.
- [63:37]
A
That you quote him in the essay, saying Jews progressed because they possessed a tradition of education combined with social and political action. And then saying that in deep ways.
- [63:47]
B
I mean, he said, and saying that that is a model to emulate. That's what he said, roughly.
- [63:54]
A
Coleman, are you optimistic about the future of black Jewish relations, about anti Semitism in America, about the fallout from this war going away and everybody getting back to their normal lives? I think so.
- [64:04]
B
I think it can be easy to lose sight of how, you know, like, our attention span is short and things do fall back to where they. Once the war ends and Americans are no longer seeing a distorted reality on their phones, I think it is possible that things could thaw out and that this disturbing trend isn't just going to keep getting more disturbing. It can go back.
- [64:36]
A
Thank you so much for joining me.
- [64:37]
B
Thank you for having me on these, Sam.