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Is Antisemitism the Gateway Drug to Socialism? — with Yascha Mounk (Part 1)
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You are listening to an art media podcast.
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People who like capitalism can claim that all the dirtiest socialists are Jews, and people who like socialism can claim that all the dirtiest capitalists are Jews. And of course, in a sense, both are right. The Jews have figured both among prominent capitalists and among prominent socialists. So there's a historical puzzle here. Why is it that when Jews have often historically been suspected of having these socialist sympath, suddenly we're starting to associate socialism with anti Semitism or perhaps anti Zionism in particular?
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It's 8:30am on Sunday, January 18th here in New York City. It is 3:30pm on Sunday, January the 18th in Israel and it is 5:00pm in Tehran where after an extraordinarily murderous crackdown by Iranian security forces, the protests appear to have quelled. In a speech on Saturday, Ayatollah Khamenei said thousands had been killed and blamed the US And Israel for the deaths. He said those linked to Israel and the US Caused massive damage and killed several thousand, khamenei said, quoted by Iranian state media. The massive crackdown on unrest has left at least 3,000 dead, with some estimates claiming more than 10,000 deaths. It has also been reported that more than 22,000 have been arrested. President Trump on Saturday called for regime change in Iran, saying, quote, it's time to look for new leadership in Iran. In his remarks to Politico, Trump denounced Khamenei in Iran, calling him, quote, a sick man who should run his country properly and stop killing people, close quote over the past couple of days, reports have emerged that a group of US Allies in the Middle east, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and then even a country like Oman, seem to have convinced President Trump to step back from launching airstrikes against Iran, fearing retaliatory attacks by Iran and an influx of refugees that could lead to the collapse of the Iranian state. This is a topic we'll be focused on in our episode on Thursday. Also on Friday, the White House announced the formation of an international panel to oversee post war management of Gaza, naming senior officials from Turkey, Qatar, Egypt, the UAE and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair to its executive committee. The inclusion of Qatari and Turkish officials is a move, according to Prime Minister Netanyahu, that quote, was not coordinated with Israel and contradicts its policy, close quote. Former UN Envoy to the Middle East, Nikolai Maldanav, was given the title of High Representative for Gaza and will effectively head the panel and will act as the on the ground link between the Board of Peace and the panel of Palestinian technocrats running daily affairs in the Gaza Strip. Now on to today's episode. Two weeks ago, the workers at the Israeli Run Bread's bakery in New York City made anti Zionism central to to their unionization effort, an effort that attracted very little attention before tapping into the Free Palestine movement. Their demands refusing to cater any Jewish event that is associated with Israel and that some of the bakery's profits go to pro Palestinian causes. This link between socialist causes and anti Israel vitriol has become commonplace. Many chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America, the dsa, the group that launched a number of progressive political careers in recent years, from Alexandria Ocasio Cortez to Mayor Zoran Mamdani, have made anti Zionism a condition for membership and has galvanized thousands and thousands and thousands of voters and activists across New York City. Is antisemitism a gateway drug to socialism or is it the other way around? Has anti Semitism become so politically useful that it could be used to rally support for any cause? Joining me to make sense of the growing role that anti Zionism seems to be playing in left leaning politics is political scientist Yasha Monk. Yasha is the founder and editor in chief of Persuasion, an online journal I highly recommend if you are concerned or engaged in the future of the Center Left. It's the most interesting and innovative publication out there these days and he's also the author of multiple books on the strengths and weaknesses of liberal democracy at an age of identity politics, including most recently the Identity Trap and also the Great Experiment. He is a podcaster himself. He's the host of the Good Fight podcast, which I highly recommend you subscribe to. But before today's conversation, a word from our sponsor. Many of you will know how big a fan I am of sapir, the quarterly journal of Jewish ideas edited by Bret Stephens, who came on this show recently to discuss U.S. foreign policy in Venezuela, the South China Sea, and of course, Iran. Every issue of SAPIR is excellent, but did you know that a print subscription is free? If you haven't signed up for your free print subscription? That's right, completely free. No credit card information needed. Do it today as to not miss their upcoming issue on the theme of aspiration. As I've said in the past, they should be charging for it, but their generosity is your gain. Be sure to sign up for free@sapirjournal.org callmeback that's sapirjournal.org callmeback. Yasha joins us from New York City. Yasha, good to see you.
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Good to see you.
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Good morning so, Yasha, before we get into some of the issues I just previewed in the introduction, I want our listeners to learn a little bit about you and where you come at these issues. You come from Europe. You come from the European left. So can you just tell us where you came of age in terms of your own identity, dare I say, and your own intellectual development?
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Yeah, of course. I'm happy to. I mean, I guess as you laid out the subject, there's two elements of my biography and the biography of my family that are very relevant. The first is that I'm Jewish and that my family has been in the wrong place place at a long time for many generations. My grandparents grew up in shtetls in what today is the territory of Ukraine. Much of their family perished in the Holocaust. My grandparents were actually convinced socialists who stayed on in Poland after World War II and hoped to build a better society, only to experience the red regime turned on them. And in 1968, when the remaining Jews were thrown out of Poland, both my grandparents, who were in the 50s at that time, and my parents, who were in the late teens or early 20s, were thrown out of a country in which they had been born and raised. And I myself was actually born and raised in Germany, a country that treated me well in many ways, but in which the shadow of the recent past was obviously very present. And inflected relations between Jews who are living in Germany and the rest of the society now, politically. I understand in many ways why my grandparents were moved by socialist ideals when they were young. It was an ideology that promised to help them overcome the deep poverty that many Jews, as well as others, suffered at the time. And it was a universalist ideology which claimed that it wouldn't care about what somebody's religious background was, what somebody's ethnic background was. But of course, as the history of my grandparents illustrates, that is a promise that socialism did not in any way keep.
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Okay, and you got involved with a political party in Germany. Talk a little bit about that.
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B
Yeah, sure. So, you know, my grandparents became quite disillusioned with their socialist beliefs, but they remained, in the broad sense, Social democrats. And that's the tradition in which I was raised. And when I was 13 years old, I was always quite political. I went to the youth organization of a German Social Democratic party. I was encouraged to become a member of a party immediately so that I could help provide votes in various internal party squabbles. So I was a member of a German Social Democratic party from the age of 13 until, at this point, about 13 or 14 years ago.
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Okay, so just scene setting here. Before we get into our discussion today, can you just describe the impulse between your founding of persuasion? Because I will say, as I said in the introduction, while I don't agree with a lot of what's in persuasion, there's a part of me that wants persuasion to succeed. It's an important project. I think as a society, we're better off when people within ideological or philosophical oriented movements are having a robust discussion and a heated debate. And I feel like that's what you're trying to do with persuasion. So can you just talk a little bit about persuasion? Because we'll link to it in the show notes.
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So, look, I'm somebody who started to worry a while ago about attacks on our democratic institutions. I like to say that I'm a democracy crisis hipster. I worried about crisis of democracy before was cool. But I also increasingly became very concerned about the forms of illiberalism on the left that were growing stronger in the second half of the 2010s. And that led us into full scale moment of cultural revolution in the summer of 2020, a time in which people were being fired from the jobs for the most absurd and ridiculous supposed infractions. I remember speaking at length to an electrician in San Diego who is of Latino origin himself, as it happens, who had his hand dangling outside of his truck while driving home. And somebody claimed that he had made the okay symbol, which they somehow believed was some secret white supremacist symbol. And he lost what he said was the best job he'd ever had after Twitter mob came after him. This is a completely apolitical person with no connections to the alt right, just full on moral panic. And of course, that atmosphere of ideological conformity and fear of speaking your mind was particularly strong. And universities and the media more broadly. And so persuasion is really designed to stand up for the values of a free society, for the basic rules of a separation of powers, but also for values like free speech and free inquiry against extremes, whether they come from the right or from the left or wherever they may originate.
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A
Okay, so now let's talk about what's happening in New York City. You and I both live in New York City. We've just witnessed the election of a mayor that seemed to have galvanized his supporters around two primary issues. One is socialism and the other is anti Zionism. I may go so far as to say anti Semitism, but let's table that for now. And I obviously think the two are connected, but let's just Say anti Zionism and socialism were the rocket fuel of his extraordinary rise from no name 2% in the polls candidate to the mayor of the most important city in the world. So how do you understand the connection between those two ideas, Anti Zionism and socialism as a political force?
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B
Yeah, look, it's incredibly complex because, of course, for much of history people would have used as an argument against Jews as an antisemitic argument, that the connection runs the other way around, that in fact Jews are more likely to be socialists and socialists are more likely to be Jews. Of course, Jews have been phenomenally successful, influential over the last 150 years. And so people who like capitalism can claim that all the dirtiest socialists are Jews, and people who like socialism can claim it all the dirtiest capitalists are Jews. And of course, in a sense, both are right. The Jews have figured both among prominent capitalists and among prominent socialists. So in a sense, there's a historical puzzle here. Why is it that when some of the most prominent socialists were Jews, when Jews have often historically been suspected of having these socialist sympathies, now suddenly we're starting to associate socialism with anti Semitism or perhaps anti Zionism in particular. And there's a few kind of reasons for that. I mean, one is that of course, the socialist tradition has from the beginning been quite suspicious of people who want to lay a lot of claim to Jewish identity and later to the Zionist movement. You go back to on the Jewish question by Karl Marx, who of course himself was Jewish. And basically what he asks for is everything for Jews as human beings who are willing to give up their identity, but nothing to Jews as Jews. Which to say that the solution to the Jewish question in his mind was, would be to give full civic rights to Jews, but also to dissolve Jewish identity as a thing that stands apart from the rest of the population. I think all of those historical relationships are incredibly complex. I think to understand what's going on today in the United States, you actually need to abstract away from some of that history. In important respects, what we're really talking about here is the politics of the highly educated echelons of a professional managerial class. I think actually to understand what's going on in the United States, you really need to think about the very specific kind of politics that you tend to get among the most affluent and highly educated young Americans. And they, I think, have fused a deep skepticism of a capitalist system with a deep hostility to the state of Israel, and then sometimes a broader antisemitism that flows out of that.
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You mentioned Obviously Marx. And then I want to fast forward to life for Jews in the Soviet Union, which had many features, but one of which, at least early on, was a similarly respect for Jews and religious Jewish life, except they drew this distinction with Zionism and that any connection to Zionism and Zionist ideas had to be purged from Jewish life in the former Soviet Union. You could be a Jew, fine, be a Jew, but we have to disconnect you from Zionist ideas, from Israel. Even in the Jewish textual engagement, any reference to Israel and Zionism in the Jewish homeland had to be again purged. So what was that about?
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So, you know, we're really getting into complexities here. It's interesting that I think the experience in the Soviet Union was quite different from the experience that my parents and grandparents had in Poland, because the nature of those states was actually quite different. Right. The Soviet Union was a multinational state and it embraced a form of sort of diversity and a form of sets of quotas and sort of treating citizens on the basis of the national origin. So you had not just a Soviet passport but a stipulation of a nationality in that passport. And so you might be Russian or you might be Armenian or you might be Jewish. Those were kind of thought of as equivalent nationalities within the Soviet Union. And so there was actually tremendous effort paid to flattering and building up those communities. But then of course there were also subordinate not just to the Soviet state, but to the Russian majority in key ways. And Jews who didn't have a geographic center often suffered the worst of it. So from the beginning it was harder for Jews to access university in the Soviet Union than it was for members of other groups. And then of course, whereas Georgian and Armenian were national categories that were unrelated to a religion, those didn't conflict with the anti clerical nature of communism. In the case of Jews, there was this deep suspicion because of course any form of religiosity was deeply suspicious in the Soviet Union. So all of this came to a head repeatedly, both as a pressure valve politically and as a downstream result of international relations and particularly questions surrounding the state of Israel. There was these show trials and witch hunts of prominent Jewish Communists and other Jewish members of society. And this happened in Czechoslovakia, in the Soviet Union, all over the Eastern bloc in the 50s and so on. And then because Israel came to be allied to the United States, anybody who was suspicious of having any kind of support for Israel became themselves deeply suspect. In Poland, where my parents and grandparents lived also under communist rule, is rather different because Poland was a much more homogeneous state that tried to impose its cultural norms much more strongly. That, of course, meant that there was even less space for Jewish identity within that realm. And what led to my family's expulsion from Poland was a combination of factors. It was the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia. There was also protests of students and some reformers in Poland who wanted to basically emulate what was happening in Czechoslovakia. Some of those were Jewish. And then the aftermath of the Six Days War. The Polish government decided that as a way to quash the student protests, they would go on this huge anti Semitic witch hunt. And any Jew who lived in Poland at the time was accused of being a Zionist, of secretly having a preference for the state of Israel over Poland. And of course, the striking thing is that was untrue for the vast majority of Jews in Poland at the time, because if you were a Zionist, well, you probably left for Israel in 1948 when you could. Right? Who were the people who stayed in Poland? It was the people who believed in socialism and who actually wanted to be part of that society. And so people like my grandparents who hadn't been Zionist, were thrown out of a job, harassed. My mother, who was 20 years old at the time, walked into a music university one day and there was a huge banner, her maiden name is Gottlieb, and it said, weintraubs, Gottlieb's Cohens leave for Israel. And they were forced to sign a declaration that they preferred to live in Israel and were pushed out of a country and to have that citizenship taken away.
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Okay, so I want to bring things back to New York City where we have this experiment going on with a socialist mayor, self described socialist. So let's take these two principles, these two ideas, anti Zionism and socialism. Do you see these as both non negotiable? Because I've heard some friends of mine on the left argue that Mamdani, at least on the socialism part, is actually negotiable. They point right away to the fact that he retained Jessica Tisch as commissioner of the nypd and the fact that she has a very strong position on public safety. And to be something that Mamdani explicitly ran against, by and large, they say that he will be more flexible on many issues, they say to me, than you appreciate. And yet, even if I take them at their word, and even if I say, okay, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, it does not appear to be the case on the anti Zionism part, which he seems to be just completely dug in. So what's your reaction to that? Are either of these Negotiable. Both of them negotiable.
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The first thing to say is that it's very early. Mamdani has had this meteoric political rise. He obviously has a history of very extreme statements. When you look at what he used to write on Twitter and so on, even relatively recently, I think it's quite clear that he's an ambitious man who wants to succeed. And I think part of success in politics often comes from some form of moderation. And how exactly that's going to shake out, I think is still anybody's guess. On the question of socialism, I just don't know what Americans mean when we talk about socialism. I think there's this weird strategic ambiguity when many parts of the American left talk about it. Are we talking about Venezuela, which nobody would celebrate today, but which was widely praised and celebrated in the pages of the Nation and other left wing magazines in the United states in the 2000s?
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And you mean Venezuela under the Maduro and Chavez regimes, under Hugo Chavez and.
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Nationalizing the oil companies and really going after the corporations, et cetera? Or do they mean generous welfare states like in Denmark and Sweden, which have the advantages and the disadvantages. You can like them or dislike them, but which obviously are integrated into a capitalist system, which in fact, in the case of Sweden has created a higher number of billionaires per capita than the United States. Right. You know, when you look at opinion polls and you see that more young Americans now have a positive view of socialism than we do of capitalism, what do those people mean by that? You know, I suspect that they mean something rather softer rather than harder. I suspect that they mean, I think there's too much inequality and I don't like what Mark Zuckerberg is doing on Instagram and wouldn't it be nice to have health insurance? But then, of course, there are also people who really do mean some much deeper commitment to socialist ideals. And I wonder whether Azor Mamdani himself is somewhat confused by that. He's a sophisticated person. He's the child of intellectuals. His father is a professor at Columbia University. But when you push him all the way down the line, does he actually mean that we should abolish the system of free market capitalism and have state ownership of the means of production across most things? I sort of think that probably he doesn't mean that. One of the things I've liked that he's done is to champion the course of small businesses. That doesn't sound like socialism to me. Right. On the other hand, there's these silly ideas like state run Grocery stores which are not going to bankrupt New York. But given that the city has been unable to provide gas to my building for nine months last year, I'm pretty skeptical about whether the grocery stores are going to run well. So I think there's just a confusion of things here. On things like thinking that perhaps allowing people to build more housing is an important part of solving the affordability crisis. On the other hand, he's appointed some people like Sia Weaver to be in charge of relations with renters in New York.
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A
Can you just describe her for a little minute? Because I think she to me was the most jarring case study. That appointment in like, wow, he really does believe all this stuff.
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Yeah, I mean she's somebody who is a housing advocate who's deeply hostile to landlords and real estate developers and who has a history of very extreme statements of saying that homeownership is a tool of white supremacy. And one of the reasons why she wants to undermine homeownership is that it's a way of undermining the power of white people in this country.
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A
Okay, and then on Israel, anti Zionism, antisemitism, how non negotiable is it from by Mamdani and the people who believe in him?
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B
So that I think is equally hard to tell or perhaps even harder to tell at this early stage. I think that clearly Ani feels very strongly about the Palestinian cause. I think it is one of the reasons why he got involved in politics and he will always be committed to that in some way, shape or form. The form that that will take is I think still very much open to evolution. There is a form of uncompromising radicalism on this. I spent a good number of years in England and followed closely Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of a Labour party and Corbyn was just unwilling to take action against members of a Labour Party who are straight up anti Semitic. And we're not talking here about they criticized Israel in ways that betrayed a double standard and so on. They were just straight up anti Semites. And Corbyn out of his weird defensive posture of saying sometimes charges of antisemitism are used against people who fight for Palestinian rights. And therefore I'm going to be completely unwilling to condemn anti Semitism.
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A
But in the case of Corbyn, just to stay on Corbyn, because I followed that very closely, it was because Corbyn believed these things. It wasn't just that he extremist members of his own party, it was that he himself believed it. So if you believe in Something that's legitimate, then why would you try to delegitimize members of your own party who share the views that you have?
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B
No, I agree. And part of that, by the way, I think, is also a lack of cultural fluency with Jews in Judaism. I mean, Britain has more Jews than Germany, where I grew up, but a lot less Jews than the United States. And I think Corbyn just generally doesn't know. A lot of Jews may not be super comfortable with Jews. And so he just has a form of left wing politics that digs in its heel in this fundamentally ideological way. And we've seen that in the last weeks as well, where he went on a press appearance and was unwilling to acknowledge that Nicolas Maduro is a dictator because he opposes Trump's Operation Venezuela. Fair enough. But because he opposes Trump's Operation Venezuela, he doesn't want to give an inch. And the way he doesn't want to give an inch is that if he's been asked, but do you acknowledge that Maduro is a dictator? He says, no, no, no, I'm not going to acknowledge that. Right. So that, to me is the kind of scariest scenario. Now, I think, measured by that scariest scenario, I do see some small ways in which Mamdani is evolving. And those are just early signs and they don't go terribly far, but I think they are important to acknowledge. So when a few days ago there was a protest outside a synagogue and there was chance just straight up supporting Hamas during those protests, it took Mamdani a long time to align on the exact language that he would be comfortable to use. But in the end, he did implicitly call Hamas a terrorist organization, which he had not done before, and he did condemn the protest. That's a small thing. It's a thing that should be obvious for the mayor of New York, shouldn't earn you applause, but it's something that somebody like Jeremy Corbyn would never have done.
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A
Just to be clear, on that one protest, which I think it was in Queens, I would just say one point about that, which I think is fascinating because people seem to want to, like, quickly rush to recognize that Mamdani, while he was slow to respond, he ultimately did respond. But those protests explicitly praised Hamas. It was not just an anti Israel protest, it was solidarity with Hamas. So the question to me would have been, what if that protest had just been a couple clicks shy of that, where not had been solidarity with Hamas, but still strident hatred of Israel? Because with the Par Key synagogue situation in Manhattan, he used language that legitimized the protests. Now, those protests were not expressing solidarity with Hamas, but they were basically saying there is no space in New York City for Jewish organizations that are connected to Israel. That was effectively what that protest was saying. And he said no one, anyone trying to attend a house of worship should not be obstructed. But. And then he does the but he said he had concerns about organizations that, quote, unquote, support Israeli settlement expansion, the west bank, which is not what this organization does. That, to me, was much more revealing than a protest that sings the praises of Hamas is almost a layup for him.
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B
I just think it's too early to know for sure. And I don't think he knows. I think you run this experiment 100 times, it's going to go differently within a range. A bunch of those hundred times. I will just say that perhaps this is just my trauma as a European Jew, but I appreciate when people are able to do the layups because Jeremy Corbyn was not, and Jean Luc Melanchon, the leader of the far left in France, is not. Corbyn said that Hezbollah and Hamas were his friends. And just to go back to one point that I was kind of starting to make, I do think that there is a difference there in terms of the level of comfort with Jews and Jewish people. And in this, Mamdani is just a product of New York, given that New York is New York, a lot of his key political allies and advisors are themselves Jewish. And I just do think that there is a level of comfort with a knowledge about Jews that is very different from what you would get from a political leader with some of the same ideological instincts and leanings in a place like the United Kingdom or certainly France or other parts of the world.
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A
How do you think about the actions Mamdani took on his first day as mayor where he overturned executive orders that had been signed and issued by his predecessor by Mayor Adams on a definition for antisemitism, the ihra, the International Holocaust remembrance definition of anti Semitism, and also the executive order on BDS that basically would seem to greenlighting discrimination against the City of New York and its agencies doing business with Israel or Israeli companies.
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B
Well, first of all, I think it's interesting the way in which he did this. He could have explicitly revoked the executive orders with which he disagreed. What he did was this kind of rather strange move where he said all the executive orders which were passed by Mayor Eric Adams after he was indicted are going to be canceled, and a bunch of them related to questions of anti Semitism in the state of Israel. Those were probably the most important ones. But there were a bunch of other executive orders that were then cancelled in the process. And you can read this two ways. You can say, well, that's treacherous, because clearly a big part of the motivation was to get rid of these executive orders with which he disagreed. And so it's this really sinister way of pretending it's about good governance and when really it was about his ideological agenda. Or you could itself see that as a sign of moderation, that he is saying, all right, this is something we want to do, but we actually don't want to be picking this fight, which, and you can read that positively and say that indicates that he doesn't want to be defined by this issue and he doesn't want that to be all that his mayoralty is about. Or you can see this negatively in saying, oh, he's willing to use these roundabout workarounds in order to advance that agenda. You can make the case either way.
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A
And you have thoughts on the IHRA definition of antisemitism?
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B
Yeah, I have two beliefs and some amount of tension here. The first is that I'm a deep believer in the First Amendment and the importance of free speech. And I worry about the way in which we have seen authorities, whether that's governments in Europe particularly, or institutions like colleges and universities, abuse the language of anti racism, antisexism, but also sometimes antisemitism, to patrol and punish people for their views. At the same time, I'm deeply conscious of the fact that a double standard is often applied to the state of Israel and that people who simply hate Jews substitute the word Zionist for the word Jew, and suddenly they can call for the extermination of Jews or other things and have this kind of figure leaf of saying, I'm only talking about Zionists, which is a kind of political ideology. I think the IHIA definition is complicated in that regard because it formulates a number of intellectual points that I think as a general definition of antisemitism to be used in academic research, are perfectly reasonable, such as the fact that it's of course fine to criticize Israel, but when you criticize Israel for things that you wouldn't criticize any other state for, that at least puts in suspicion of being anti Semitic. So I actually think it's a good definition. I do start to worry that when you use that definition as a standard which in various contexts can legitimize coercive action, that is very, very ripe for abuse in the same way in which Definitions of racism, which on the face of it are perfectly reasonable, have been used as cudgels to limit speech on campus into very, very narrow bounds. I think in general that Jews have an important choice to make, and that choice is, do we want to fight for power or do we want to fight tooth and nail for the universalist principles that will protect us from any government that may be in charge? And I would much rather give bigger leeway to assholes in our society to say offensive things, to which I deeply object, than to empower bureaucrats who have, on the one hand, the IHA definition of antisemitism, and on the other hand, a bunch of vaguely written rules about sexism and racism and every other ill in society. They decide what utterance falls foul to those various definitions. I'd much rather live in a society where we have fundamental protections of free speech, even if that means that sometimes people are going to say really disgusting things.
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A
I'm listening to what you're saying. While the reality of the scenarios I worry about and that are happening rub up against what you're saying, which is that the double standard criticisms of Israel are so extreme right now, and the tolerance for the extremism of them is so off the charts. Israel's a genocidal state. Israel's an apartheid state. Israel is a Nazi state. And, and those claims have become so normalized among so many parts of Western society. And if you have Jewish institutions that have an Israeli flag, if they say a prayer for the state of Israel, if they say a prayer for the idf, that they are suddenly complicit in the quote, unquote, genocide and the Nazism, and then that becomes a basis for. Well, if these people are supporting genocide and apartheid, then we must do everything we can to stop these people. And that, Yasha, is what's happening, that if you look at the violent anti Semitic attacks, not just the protests we've been seeing, but just the number of synagogues that have been severely vandalized since October 7, 2023, around the west, it's a shocking list. All throughout Europe, all throughout Latin America, tragically, as we saw in Mississippi a little over a week ago, in the US they're happening in Canada. And the case that is made, if you look at some of the perpetrators of these acts, it's all tied to a genocide. I can understand what you're saying. And yet it, like, rubs against this reality that we are normalizing and tolerating a way of talking about Israel, that we don't talk about any other country in the world, and therefore that there are so many Jews, at least in the United States and elsewhere in the west, who support Israel. Obviously, most Jews do. So you, Jew, are supporting genocide and apartheidism, and you now are part of the problem that must be confronted violently as much as the idf.
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B
So let me say a few things. The first is just that I want to echo the emotional force of what you just said. When I grew up in Germany, I knew that if I was in some town that I didn't know and I was looking for a Jewish community center, it wouldn't be hard to find because I could spot the two police cars parked outside of it. And one of the amazing things about coming to the United States was to see Jewish institutions which are not guarded. I mean, I remember walking around the streets of New York with my mom. She was saying, oh, this looks like a Jewish school. Do you think that's a Jewish school? And then she said, well, it can't be. There's no security. And that has changed. I've talked a little bit over the course of the last few years about the Europeanization of American Jewry, that American Jews today feel beleaguered and insecure and scared for their safety in the way that European Jewry has since I was a little kid and before, obviously. And that, I think, is a profound transformation that we're still starting to grapple with and mourn as a community. The question is, what is a realistic path out of that? And I don't think that entrusting public authorities that often are not going to be particularly friendly to our interests to make arbitrary distinctions about what you're allowed to say and what you're not allowed to say is going to be the way to do that. I think in a way, the argument you're making about how widespread these attitudes sadly are, are self undermining in terms of justifying the attempt to deal with them with speech restrictions. When something is a view that sadly is shared by many people in the mainstream that has huge support. I just think in purely tactical, strategic terms, trying to outlaw and ban it is not going to work. And doing that then has downstream political consequences. I mean, in Britain, I think it is partially the adoption of the Ihia definition of antisemitism, which then gave people on the different side of that debate the argument to say, now we're about to adopt a hugely overbroad definition of Islamophobia that makes it very difficult to make legitimate criticisms of not just a religion and should be legitimate to criticize any religion, but also of the link between religious fundamentalists and terrorism and all kinds of other things. And so I just think the logic of this is not going to play in our favor.
- [36:03]
A
Okay. It's almost easier to talk about what's happening on the extremes. But as it relates to Israel, Zionism, anti Zionism, the Jewish community, there's something big going on. Also among more moderate Democrats. What I'm seeing is a number of moderate Democrats even who are alarmed by what's happening, what we'll call Mamdaniism, you know, what it represents. And yet they express their alarm in private. They are increasingly uncomfortable with saying how they really feel publicly, which tells you the mood that is going on in a lot of liberal circles. So can you react to that in terms of what's going on?
- [36:38]
B
If you're interested in the long term security of the state of Israel, this is something to take very seriously. In some ways, Israel today seems more safe than it has been in a long time, with a lot of its rivals in the region significantly weakened. And at the same time, I think that the idea of Israel as Sparta, the idea of Israel as this state that can go completely unknown without any international support is very perilous. And for the first time in my lifetime, it is imaginable that the United States may at some point no longer be committed to Israel or perhaps stand on the other side. And you see inklings of that on the left. Mamdani is not a national born citizen, so he's not going to be President of the United States. But another New York member of the dsa, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, maybe. And of course, you also see a change on the right that is partially the anti Semites on the far right, the Gruipus, and all of those big online voices like Nick Fuentes that have huge followings that are just straight up anti Semitic. And it's also members of the Republican Party who I don't think are anti Semitic, but who feel that the United States has been overly supportive of Israel. And they have a growing voice. When you look at the young members of the Trump administration, that is actually quite a significant stream within this as well. So you could come to a moment where all of this flips and you have people in charge of a Democratic Party who have deep ideological hostility to Israel and people in charge of a Republican Party who perhaps don't have that same hostility, but who say, not our circus, not our monkeys, why should we care? And I do think that that is a significant threat to the mid and long term security of the state of Israel.
- [38:20]
A
So I hear you on what's happening on the right and I'm paying close attention to it and I'm increasingly concerned about it. I still think it pales in comparison to what's happening on the left, which is not to excuse it. And it's not to say it's not something that can turn into a version of what's happened on the left. But what I find distinctive between the two parties is that on the right, the Republican Party, the biggest demographic among the primary electorate in the Republican Party is evangelical Christians. And generally speaking, overwhelmingly evangelical Christians are very pro Israel. So it's not surprising that, you know, even with all the griper stuff, you can't find more than two now 1 Republican members of Congress who've toed that line in any way. Whereas I feel like what's happening in the Democratic Party is that criticism of Israel and Zionism is now almost becoming a litmus test. And they use this language, you know, you have to agree to not take any money from aipac or you have to support very aggressive language against the Netanyahu led government. And it's not to say that the Netanyahu government isn't deserving of some criticism, but let's be honest, they're all code words for you need to distance yourself from the Jews. So it feels like there's real energy for that in the base of the party where I don't see that real energy on the right. So do you see my point about the difference in terms of the two sides? And particularly as a student of what's happened on the left, I'm curious what is, if you agree with my observation, what is actually going on that makes what's happening on the left distinctive?
- [39:55]
B
Well, look, I agree that there is a difference where it's imaginable, that the next Democratic administration is just going to be pretty hostile to the state of Israel. It depends on whether the next Democratic president turns out to be AOC or Gavin Newsom or Shapiro. And those are all imaginable futures. And they're going to look very, very different from each other. Now, I think on the Republican side, it's still hard to see somebody who is ideologically opposed to the state of Israel becoming president. I could imagine that you have a constellation in American politics where Republicans are kind of indifferent and Democrats are hostile.
- [40:28]
A
Interesting.
- [40:28]
B
And that would be much, much, much worse for state drizzle on the Democratic side. Yeah, I think that there is a big generational shift. And you see it obviously even among many young Jews. I mean, it's interesting that Mamdani did least well among Jews of different religious groups. But among young Jews, he still won a plurality of vote, not a majority of a vote. But more young Jews voted for Mamdani than for any other candidate in the general election.
- [40:54]
A
Yeah, I gotta say, I think that the. I feel among many young Jews, Mamdani's anti Zionism is not a reason that they voted for him. They had other issues about their quality of life in New York City that make them progressive. And when you raise concerns about Mamdani and Israel and Zionism, they're like, what are you talking about? He's the mayor of New York City. What do I care how he feels about Israel? Some of these people wouldn't vote for AOC or a member of Congress who has influence on US foreign policy. But they're just like, he deals with public transportation, he deals with cost of living. My rent is too goddamn high. I'm not sure that the anti Zionism is a feature for their vote. So I think once you break among young Jews down, there are some for whom Mamdani's anti Zionism is a feature, but I think it's much smaller among the Jews who voted for. Many of them are just like, give me a break. Like, I'm living my life and like, the mayor of New York City is not gonna affect, you know, Jewish life.
- [41:50]
B
Yeah, I don't think that it means that they fully support Oliver Mamdani's beliefs about Israel or anything like that. I do think it means that they have much less of an identification of the state of Israel and that perhaps they view recent actions by Israel more critically than the older generation. Because the attitudes of older Jews in New York is not necessarily that different about those other elements of Mamdani either. They might also like the idea of free buses or think wrongly, I believe that state run grocery stores would be a great thing. But they're not willing to get there for voting for Mamdani because the anti Zionism is a deal breaker for them and for young Jews, it's not the same deal breaker for them. And that's in itself telling and significant.
- [42:33]
A
I want to ask you about the Western left's, what I would say is deafening silence around the brutal crackdown on the protesters in Iran. How do you understand this indifference compared to the campaign against Israel? You wrote about this in Persuasion and it was also picked up in the Free Press. You explain it's not necessarily because many of us tend to think, oh, if it's no Jews, no news. And therefore the Western left just isn't interested in the story of what's happening in Iran. But you point to something else happening. Can you talk about that?
- [43:04]
B
Yeah, I think, look, it is part of that, but obviously there is a particular obsession with the state of Israel and that therefore anything that happens in Israel or Palestinian territories immediately becomes an object of obsession. Whereas from the things happening in Sudan to the things happening in Venezuela to the things happening in Iran, it's just of less interest. But I think there's also a more specific reason here, and that is that there's an old tradition where you kind of invert nationalism and patriotism. And rather than thinking that your country is special because it is especially wonderful, you start to think it is special because it is especially atrocious. It is responsible for all the evils in the world. And that then tempts you to presumptively see any enemy of your own country as a friend. If the United States is the worst thing that has ever existed, and if Israel is the worst thing that has ever existed in part because it's allied with the United States, well, then the enemies of the United States and also the enemies of Israel must be onto something, right? We may be a little bit uncomfortable with a theocratic regime in Iran. It might not look exactly like what we imagine as a great society, but hey, they're on the right side of things because they really hate the United States and they really hate Israel, so they can't be too bad. And you can make the same calculation about Venezuela and all kinds of other places in the world, in some senses, the people who are being most logical, the people who are pushing that logic to its logical end, to embrace outright Iran, to embrace outside the Ayatollahs, to embrace outright Venezuela and the Shavista regime, to say that Maduro is a great brave politician and that the only people protesting in Iran are Zionist agents, and you see that almost extreme kind of far left streamers and so on. But for a bigger part of the sort of far left, of a committed left, they don't go all the way that far right. They're not going to start singing the praises of Maduro today. They may have sung the praises of Chavez 20 years ago. They may not celebrate Ayatollah Khomeini today, for they may have done so in 1979, but they're still a little bit queasy about celebrating the potential demise. There's just enough of that logic to them to think, well, to celebrate when the enemies of our country are down, that would go too far. That would be too much in danger of losing out of focus, that in the end we ourselves, our country is the source of real evil in the world. And I think that explains why mainstream media took much longer than it should have done to pick up on the extraordinary developments in Iran. And the main left wing magazines which I looked at last weekend, from the Nation to the New Republic to Slate to Jacobin to Dissent, had been astonishingly silent about what was going on in Iran.
- [45:49]
A
Okay, we're going to break here, Yasha and for our listeners, please listen to part two of the conversation where Yasha and I are going to get into the whole topic of identity, the identity trap, the topic of his book and Jewish identity. So please listen to part two. That's our show for today. If you value the Call Me Back podcast and you want to support our mission, please subscribe to our weekly members only show, Inside Call Me Back. Inside Call Me Back is where Nadavayal, Amit Segal and I respond to challenging questions from listeners and have the conversations that typically occur after the cameras stop rolling. To subscribe, please follow the link in the show notes or you can go to arkmedia.org that's ark media.org call me back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Ark Media's Executive producer is Adam James Levin Aretti. Our Production manager is Brittany Cohn. Sound and video editing by Liquid Audio Community Management by Gabe Silverstein. Our music was composed by Yuval Semo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.