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- [00:00]
A
If you love epic stories of myth and legend, listen up. Before Camelot and before the crown, the Pendragon cycle Rise of the Merlin tells the origin story of the legend that shaped Britain in a seven episode cinematic epic years in the making. This is not a retelling of the King Arthur story, it's the rise of the world that made Arthur possible. The Pendragon cycle Rise of the Merlin is available now on Daily Wire. Plus. Shot across multiple international locations, this series brings myth to life with serious production value, full scale battles and a sweeping original orchestral score at its core, this is a return to classic epic storytelling where faith, prophecy and sacrifice truly matter. Stream the Pendragon cycle Rise of the Merlin only on Daily Wire welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Rabbi David Wolpe. Rabbi Wolpe is an American conservative rabbi, author and a scholar in residence at the Maimonides Fund. He was named the most influential Rabbi in America by Newsweek and one of the 50 most influential Jews in the World by the Jerusalem Post. In this episode, we talk about Rabbi Wolpe's old debates with Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and the other New Atheists. We talk about why liberal religion is in decline all over the world. We talk about antisemitism in America and in particular, how it's similar to and different from other forms of bigotry. We talk about what the word Zionism means and whether that word is still necessary. We talk about the rabbi's controversial Atlantic article in which he called Donald Trump and Elon Musk pagans. We talk about the relationship between Enlightenment values and Christianity and much more. So, without further ado, Rabbi David Wolpe. Hey, Coleman here. If you're enjoying the show, then you probably care about how political decisions really get made. If that's you, I want to tell you about the new podcast On Notice, produced by the nonpartisan newsroom Notice. Each week, journalist Reece Gorman sits down with lawmakers for candid conversations, not just about the headlines, but about what makes them tick and what brought them to Washington in the first place. On Notice gives you an insider's view of the people shaping policy in the U.S. reese's approachable style has earned him trust on both sides of the aisle, unlocking unguarded conversations that you won't hear in traditional interviews. So tune in to On Notice. That's Notice spelled N O t u s. It's available every Monday wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube. Rabbi David Wolpe, thanks so much for doing my show.
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B
I'm delighted to be here.
- [02:51]
A
So I think, I think we met when I came to Israel years ago, and we've since seen each other. I used to watch your debates with all the new atheists when I was in high school, probably. And, you know, you were one of the few people willing to debate the, the fearsome Christopher Hitchens, who I'm not sure ever lost a debate, even if he was wrong about the issue.
- [03:20]
B
You can't he, you can't lose with that, with that baritone and that wit. But I used to tell him, when, when, when people would ask why I debated him, I would tell them that there's a phrase in the Talmud that if you're going to hang yourself, you should do it from the tallest tree. So I figured, you know, if I was going to lose the debate to Hitchens, that's no shame.
- [03:39]
A
That's right. No one would ever blame you. Okay, There's a lot I want to talk to you about, but first I want you to give my listeners. Many of them will know who you are, but assume for the ones who don't, sure. Who are you? How did you become a rabbi? And what kind of rabbi are you? What does it mean to you to be a rabbi in this day and age?
- [04:03]
B
So the short answer is, my father was a rabbi in Philadelphia, Conservative rabbi, which is a movement poised between Orthodoxy and Reform. It's traditional, but not literalist. And I became through. I didn't intend to when I was a kid, but I won't give you my whole autobiography. But in the end, I became a rabbi in the same vein as my father. I do from the. For the first 10 years of my rabbinate, I was writing and teaching and traveling and speaking a lot and doing debates like that. And then I went to a synagogue in Los Angeles called Sinai Temple, which is a large Conservative synagogue. At the time, it had about 1800 families or 2000 families, so like 5000 people, which for a synagogue is quite large. And it was composed, it had an unusual composition of about 60% Iranian Jews who had fled from Iran in 7,980 after the Shah fell. And I was there for 26 years. When I retired a couple years ago, I went to Harvard to teach for a year, and that happened to be the annus horribilis of October 7th. And now I shuttle between New York and LA, and I teach and I write. I've written a number of books, and I'm writing a book now, and I write articles for a variety of publications about, you know, public life and religion and that sort of thing. And that's a quick epitome of where I've been and what I do.
- [05:42]
A
So I want to get to antisemitism on campus at Harvard. You've, you've talked about that. And, and, but before we get to that, I, I want to go back to your debates with the new atheists. What do you think the new atheists got wrong? What was the most important thing that they got wrong? And what, if anything, did they get right?
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B
They got, I'll start with what they got right. They got right the fact that modernity poses unprecedented challenges to religious faith. Some of them understood better than others that the challenge wasn't mainly natural science. It was much more social science in the sense that most of religion doesn't really make claims about natural science. More corrosive to most people's belief was the recognition that these religions were really profoundly, historically impacted. And so when you discovered, for example, that there were other texts that parallel, parallel the biblical texts that were created at the same time, or you learned that there were other traditions where people were as good and as kind and as thoughtful as people in your own tradition, that was a real blow to people who had up to then been insulated and thought only of themselves. And what I think they got wrong was that to some extent, I think the world divides between materialists and non materialists. And if you believe that the non material is real, you're already on the side of faith, even though what you believe in may be very different. And I think that they thought right. You either believe there's an old man in the sky who doles out punishments and rewards, or you realize religion is ridiculous. And in fact, I still have this debate with some of them. There is a huge area in between those two things. And most sophisticated believers, including most mystics throughout history, have believed neither of those things. Not that there's an old man in the sky and also not that there's nothing. But I understand that if you're arguing against faith, the more literalist your opponent, the easier the argument. So, right.
- [08:16]
A
So that that's what they got, I guess that's what they got right and wrong. So yeah, it does that partly reflect the fact that you're Jewish as opposed to Christian or, or Muslim, because in Judaism it's easy to find people that are very religious, very attached to their Judaism, but don't actually believe in a God that can hear your prayers or any kind of literal God where that kind of believer is harder to find or less representative of the whole faith. In Christianity, Or Islam. And, and I guess my question is why is that? Is that partly because Judaism is not only a religion but also an ethnicity and also kind of a culture. So you can be attached to those latter elements and be a proud Jew without being attached to the belief.
- [09:04]
B
Judaism is a pre Western category. So to call it a religion doesn't fit. Because as you say, there are Jews who don't believe in anything religious but are still fiercely attached to Judaism. To call it a peoplehood doesn't quite get to it because it's animating forces religious. It's kind of like a tribe, but tribe has pejorative associations these days, but it really is a tribe. And as a result it's exactly as you said, which is that there are lots of ways of being Jewish and fidelity to peoplehood is a really important part of being Jewish. Whereas that's not. So let me give you an example that I used to give all the time. Jews and Christians were persecuted in the Soviet Union. But, but there was no worldwide movement among Christians to save the Christians of the Soviet Union because Christians generally don't feel the same familial connection to other Christians in other cultures that Jews do. There was a worldwide movement to save the Jews of the Soviet Union from Jews. So there's an advantage and a disadvantage to that to society.
- [10:20]
A
You said save Jews from Jews, you.
- [10:22]
B
Meant save Jews from Jews from the Soviet Union.
- [10:24]
A
Right.
- [10:27]
B
The disadvantage is Christianity is much more easily spread because you don't have to be part of, you don't so much have to be part of the family, you just have to believe the essential belief. And the same with Islam. The disadvantage is that there are much looser ties which is why Christian persecution can happen without a worldwide Christian response. So they're sort of different ways of being humanly connected and religious.
- [11:02]
A
Right. I mean it's interesting because everything you just said distinguishing Judaism from Christianity has analogs in other religions. And so for instance Ismaili Muslims, the small sect of Shia Islamic very much do look out for each other when Ismailis are persecuted halfway across the globe. That 100% animates an Ismaili living in America and the Ismaili community living in America. And there have been analogous efforts to rescue people and so forth. And that is likewise a non proselytizing sect that is like roughly as small as global Jewry, like 15 million world worldwide. So like there are analogs to like.
- [11:50]
B
And they've reached out to the Jewish community, we've talked to them a great deal in la. And also this, this goes into my favorite religious theory, which I have yet to prove or write up, but I really like the idea and I think it's right. And that is Christianity. Here is the outlier, not Islam or Judaism in the following way, of the monotheistic faiths in Islam and in Judaism, civil law and criminal law and religious law are all the same. They're all traditions of law. That's not true in Christianity. And the reason I believe that so is both Islam and Judaism grew up in the desert. We're creating a society and creating a religious order were the same thing. So you had to have. Being a thief and breaking the Sabbath were in some ways the same order of violation.
- [12:42]
A
Right.
- [12:43]
B
But Christianity grew up in the Roman Empire where civil law was taken care of. Had Jesus come along and said, I want to tell you what the penalty is for my ox growing your ox, they would say, that's ridiculous. You know, we live in a civil society that's not yours. But if he had said, I want to tell you how to feel or how to conduct yourself personally, which is what he did, that made perfect sense because everything else was already taken care of. So Christianity in that sense is a much pure religion. And also Christianity was then poised to give us that great gift which I don't think Judaism or Islam could have given us of separation of church and state.
- [13:24]
A
Is that even controversial? I mean, I think that, like, I've never had that thought before, but it seems like manifestly it has to be true.
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B
I, I've enunciated it many times. I've never written it up so far. Nobody in the scholarly world has taken issue with it, but I haven't seen it, although I'm open really to seeing it expressed somewhere in the literature. I haven't yet, but it makes perfect sense.
- [13:49]
A
So if that's right, and I think it is what accounts for the difference between how Judaism has evolved as a religion and how Islam has evolved as a religion. So for instance, Jews have, you know, despite the anti Semitic tropes of being unassimilable and all the rest, you know, I, I live in New York. I grew up in New Jersey in like a heavily Jewish. For as far as that goes, no place in America is like really heavily Jewish because there's so few, few of you guys. But I grew up around a lot of Jews. You don't see anyone having Jewish. Any problem with church, the separation of church and state. It's, it's a very easy actual, actually assimilation to American culture and American laws and all the rest. Whereas Most Islamic countries are either, you know, if they're not taken over by the Muslim brothers in Sharia law, they're one revolution away from, from being overtaken by, by Sharia law. So what accounts for that difference if they both come from this desert tradition where there's no separation between law and religion?
- [15:00]
B
One difference. I mean, there's a lot of speculation about why Islam, which was once the most enlightened tradition in the Western world. I mean, during the Middle Ages, like when Maimonides in the 12th century wrote his great work of philosophy, he wrote it in Arabic because Arabic was, you should excuse the solecism, the lingua franca, that is the, it was the common language of philosophy at the time. And that declined. And there are a lot of theories about why that declined. Christianity went through a Reformation and a Renaissance, a Renaissance and a Reformation, and Islam never did. And Jews had the historical experience of being in the Christian world as it went through the Renaissance and the Reformation and modernity. And much of the Islamic world did not pass through the modern world the way the Christian world did. And again, these are large questions, and I'm not going to pronounce absolute answers about why. But by and large, the Jews who lived in Islamic lands had to some extent the same kinds of experiences and outlook as Islam as the Islamic country that they were surrounded by. But once Jews were given the opportunity for modernization, which is what happened to the Jews in Iran under the Shah, for example, or the Jews in Western Europe under Germany and so on, they rushed towards it in part, I think, because unlike Islam, they had felt forever that they were not accepted by the majority culture. And the desire to be accepted was very powerful. And also because Judaism, it's almost like it was geared to excel in modernity. It's an information based culture, it's a text based culture. Scholars were the ones who had the highest social status, even more than people who made a lot of money. And so when you came to an information based culture, a trading culture and so on, Jews were very well poised to take care, to take advantage of that and have done so.
- [17:27]
A
So two years ago you wrote an article in the Atlantic arguing that Donald Trump and Elon Musk were sort of pagans in a manner of speaking. And it proved to be very controversial. I didn't know that actually, you know, paganism versus monotheism was still like a live debate. What did you mean by that? And, you know, why is paganism bad? Is it actually bad? I'm not so sure it's bad. If I look at the pagan societies around the world. India?
- [17:57]
B
Yes. No, I, I, well, so, yes, this got me in a lot of trouble, and I think it was, I think a lot of the trouble was a little bit of a bad faith misunderstanding. But, but basically what happened was an editor came back from Mar a Lago and said, with all the gold and all the guilt, there's something sort of pagan about it. And would you write about that? And I said, look, I really do try to stay apolitical. I said, and I'm willing to write about the paganism of the right if I can also write about the paganism of the left. The paganism of the right is this certain worship of wealth and power. And the paganism of the left is elevating environmentalism over humans. That is, you know, people who think that animals matter more than human beings do. And so I wrote this and, and I thought that it was clear that I was talking about the paganism of, that it reflected the paganism, as the Bible saw paganism in biblical times. Not all paganism everywhere in the world, not. But the pagans at Harvard, at HDS in particular, were very upset. And they basically said, you know, you attacked us. Which really.
- [19:10]
A
Were those people, like, what kind of pagans were they? Did they sell?
- [19:13]
B
Well, I met with them. I actually had a lovely meeting. So this was the sequence where someone called me and said, do you want to have a dialogue about. And I said, I really, that was not my intention. I just wanted to point out the difference between that this reflects, you know, pagans, the Bible. And so that that was probably a mistake, because then they got very upset. Not only did he attack us, but he won't talk to us. And I said, look, look, look, that was not my intention. I'm happ with people at hds. But then someone called me and said, I just want you to know that we have now put something on your Wikipedia page that will be there forever about how you don't understand pagans. So I said, okay, fine, look, I can't live or die by my Wikipedia page. And I met with people at Harvard, and basically what they were saying to me was, some of them worshiped Norse gods, some of them worshiped nature gods, but they were at Harvard. At Harvard.
- [20:09]
A
These are like, yes, theologians at Harvard.
- [20:12]
B
Who self identified as pagans, including two instructors there. And they said, we worship peace. And I said, look, I think that's beautiful. I said, you can't really be surprised that a rabbi talking about biblical times says that monotheism is better than paganism I said, this is not shocking or should not be shocking to. But I understand why you felt as though your views were misrepresented. We had a very nice talk and that was it. And, and since then, just every now and then I get, you know, a pagan blast.
- [20:50]
A
Now, if you were an Arab imam and you had written the same article, do you think they would have tried to take you down like that? I don't know. They're not, perhaps they're not pro pagan either.
- [21:01]
B
Perhaps not. But also, I, I, I, but I also do want to say that by and large, with a few exceptions, the polemics were intellectually based and not ugly. You know, by and large. So the paganism, pagans fought fair.
- [21:23]
A
Right? So that kind of dovetails into my next question. You know, the, you spoke about the, the quote, unquote, pagans on the left, and the people I'm imagining are, you know, for instance, the protesters in the Northwest United States in places like Oregon and Washington state who, you know, not only did, it's not that they had reasonable concerns about preserving the forest because that actually I support, like we would all share, right? Absolutely right. But when they get presented with the most watered down proposal, a proposal that plants as many trees as it cuts down, that preserves the ancient forests that doesn't impact any endangered species, are still against it or are even against, like, there's been cases where activists are against allowing loggers to chop down a tree that has just burned in a natural forest fire. In other words, this tree is dead. It's already dead. But if you can harvest the wood in time, you can. First of all, that employs, that employs whole towns in the Northwest, like generations of towns were based on the logging industry. So there are people that even oppose that. They just don't want to see a tree get cut down, whether it's dead or alive, whether it impacts anything at all. And that's when you get into, okay, what is your moral concern there if it's not some kind of implicitly sacred value? Right.
- [22:52]
B
I'm going to violate one of my principles here. In those debates that you talked about before, I used to say to Hitchens until he literally stopped doing it, it's not fair to defend your positions by reason and attack my positions by psychology because he would say, oh, people who are religious, they do it because they're weak and they need a crutch. And I said, that's not a fair argumentation. But I'm going to, I'm going to say something about the psychology of people.
- [23:20]
A
Who.
- [23:23]
B
I think there's something in the psychology of activists, and I've seen it. I don't want to say that it doesn't exist in the Jewish world. It exists in the Jewish world, too. Anybody who has a cause that they care about, there is a certain psychological reluctance to succeed because it takes some of your cause away then. And when you're living for that cause, what you do is you push it further. And so you say, if I got an inch, I got to get the next inch, and the next and the next. And if you actually say, well, maybe Steven Pinker is right, things are getting better, then you have lost an enormous amount of your emotional steam. And so I think that that's part of it is anybody who admits that they won is a traitor. And so you have to always say they're doing a little bit, but it's nothing like what we need.
- [24:20]
A
Right? And, you know, I wouldn't be the first to point out, many people have pointed out that on the left, intersectionality and, and, you know, climate activism is one category we just discussed. But also intersectionality has taken the kind of character of a religion for many people. And the notion of white privilege is psychologically similar to original sin in the sense that you've got this stain that you've inherited from your ancestors, even though you didn't do anything specific to earn it. And you can never really get rid of it, but you can work through it the rest of your life if you sort of attend the right seminars. Right. In some ways, it's like a parallel of original sin. And so it becomes clear to me that the secular liberals of the world are swimming in various new religions that don't actually. They don't have a holy book. They kind of have a series, a whole array of de facto saints, which are like, you know, public intellectuals and influencers and so forth. But, you know, the vacuum of religion does seem to get filled for the most part. There are exceptions to this, right? It does seem to get filled by. By religions that have a political bent. And to me, that seemed, you know, I'm not sure I ever heard the new atheists fully give that. That the kind of do that it is due, for lack of a better way of putting it.
- [26:02]
B
I don't think, by and large they did, because every now and then someone would quote at them, Chesterton, that when a man stops believing, it isn't that he believes nothing, it's that he'll fall for anything. And there is. I mean, there is a. There's a hole in us. I Just wrote an essay that I hope will be coming out soon comparing Emerson and Heschel about like awakening in American religious life. But I start off, part of the beginning of the essay is Emerson saying, you know, that a man is born believing he bears belief as a tree bears apples. And I think that that's true for all of us. You can't help it. The question is what you'll choose to believe in. And here also the intersectionality and the DEI part of it is particularly perilous. We haven't gotten to antisemitism yet, but I'm going to bring it in by the back door. Because if you have the faith that intrinsically every group qua group must come out with the same result, and if it doesn't, there are only two explanations why it couldn't. One is historical discrimination which makes it less able to achieve, or two, that the game is currently rigged. Those are the two. That's structural inequalities. The game is currently rigged. And then you look at the Jews, and the Jews clearly had historical discrimination. So you can't say they've had historical advantages because the opposite is obviously true. And so the only explanation you're left with for why the Jews achieve out of proportion to their numbers is the game is rigged. And who would rig the game for the Jews? Only the Jews. Nobody else is going to rig the game for them. And therefore it almost follows like the night, the day, these conspiracy theories that obviously Jews control and have rigged the game so that they end up on top. And there are a thousand mistakes in reasoning on the way there, but it actually makes. It's very clean and neat when you follow that, that line of thought.
- [28:24]
A
I think that's absolutely right. You know, I've been saying that antisemitism, especially the anti Semitism on the right, is just the right wing version of systemic racism on the left. And what do I mean by that? I mean what systemic racism said was that, well, if white people are earning X percent more money than black people, if, if white people are imprisoned at a lower rate than black people, if white people have more wealth than black people or Hispanics or any other group, the only allowable explanations for that are that white people are dominating society and discriminating against black people. No matter how much research, including from African American scholars, comes out suggesting that there are many things that cause disparities, many innocent explanations for disparities, especially in a multicultural society. The whole idea of a multicultural society is that you actually have different subcultures in the same society. And insofar as they're different in any meaningful way, in any way more meaningful than what you eat for dinner, you would expect them to have different outcomes. You can't have a multicultural society, a diverse society where everyone achieves the same thing. Different groups specialize in different professions, different groups have somewhat different values that lead to all kinds of different specializations and different outcomes. And so as you said, that same exact logic sort of applied within the group. The umbrella term of white people in the west or which Jews are lumped in with leads to the same exact conclusion. Why does the average American Jew have a higher income than the average American Christian? Well, they're going to come to the same conclusion. Jews must be rigging the game. It's equally unsound. But you know, no matter how many books Thomas Sowell writes destroying this premise, a certain kind of person just won't let go of it.
- [30:28]
B
Or Indians who have a higher income, I believe the Jews do in America. So it's, which is due to, to multiple factors. It's, you know, the. I do a podcast with Brett Stevens called the Sapir Podcast, which comes out of the Maimonides Fund. And Sapir is this journal. And the last journal was on Jews and money. And we knew that it was a tricky thing to, I mean, it has some fascinating articles in it, but we knew that it was a tricky thing because the trope is so powerful and so deep and yet it's really important for people to start looking at their cultural assumptions anew. And unfortunately the prevailing social ethos is to just reinforce the cultural assumptions you have not to re examine them.
- [31:27]
A
So why do you think. You know, it seems to me that liberal religion is in decline in the world. Meaning, you know, you have conservative Muslims, conservative Christians, but you also have liberal Christians, you have, you know, tolerant Christians. They don't believe things literally. That seems to be, you know, with each, each passing year a smaller and smaller phenomenon as. Is it that liberal. Is it the kind of strict church paradox where, you know, if you have a relaxed church where you can sort of believe whatever you want and take it a la carte, that actually doesn't keep people coming back because it attracts the kind of people that may not show up to church in the first place and may just bleed into secular culture as a, as a result of not being strict enough.
- [32:16]
B
So I again, I'd like, like a lot of why questions. I think this one is kind of over determined. We know, for example, that a lot of Jews who came to the United States abandoned their religious life the moment they hit the shore. So we know that it's not like if you have an Orthodox life, it will inevitably keep people in Orthodox life. Some of them will flee. And that's why in America, for most of our history and even up to now, reforming conservative were much larger in numbers than than Orthodox was, especially right wing Orthodox. But it is also true that when you're non literalist, and I think that's the easiest way to put it, non literalist movements means that you engage more with the society in general. And the society in general is a very attractive society. And so if you look at other, other ethnic groups who came in the early 1900s, the Irish, the Italians and so on, most of them have essentially disappeared into the larger population. They carry some cultural memories and some tropes, but nothing like it was in the first couple generations when they were really cohesive neighborhoods. Jews have held out somewhat longer. But America is a very, very powerful embrace. And if you send your kid to university, yes, there's going to be a Jewish population there, but there's going to be a much larger non Jewish population. And they will meet many bright, attractive, wonderful, engaging, charming people. And the chances that they won't find someone to marry in that non Jewish population grow smaller and smaller over time as the Jewish population grows smaller. So non literalist movements to keep their integrity in a time when people are generally accepted. And so I don't know what the solution is. No one does. I mean, this is something that all of the movements have struggled with greatly and it may be that this will change. We always extrapolate from what is. And we used to think that literalist movements would die out and now we think non literalist movements will die out. But it is a real challenge for anybody like myself who is not a literalist to try to sustain the enthusiasm and the care and the love of the tradition that I have in generations to follow. I'll just close with this. If you, for example, in a Jewish context, if you want to get somebody to, I don't know, observe the Sabbath, which means that you don't go out, you don't spend money, you don't do a lot of things that people would normally do on a Saturday and somebody says, why shouldn't I? It's a very effective apoditic declaration to say because God said you can't, the creator of the universe told you not to. As soon as you don't believe that literally, then you have to give reasons why it's good for the person not to do it. And giving reasons why it's good is a lot harder and more tenuous and more arguable than God said you can't. And I would think all non literalist faith in every movement struggles with that difference.
- [36:04]
A
I want to talk about antisemitism in general and in particular on college campuses, which I think you have experience with in the past two years. You know, I. I guess one place to start is like, do you have a working definition of antisemitism, and is it different from your definition of bigotry? Racialized or ethnic bigotry in general?
- [36:30]
B
The definition might not be different, but the causes and manifestations are different. That is, if you hate someone because of who they are, not what they've done, that's prejudice. Whether they're Jewish or black or Puerto Rican or Indian or anything or. Or gay or, you know, whatever, it doesn't matter. So if you hate them for what they are instead of for what they've done, that already is bigotry or Mormon or, I mean, or. Or white or anything. But. But antisemitism is different in at least a couple ways from any other racial or ethnic prejudice that I'm aware of. One is, and I'll just identify two ways. I mean, I don't want to go too, too deep in this, although we can if you want to. But the two ways that are really different is one, there is a weird, subhuman, superhuman valence to it. That is Jews are vermin who control the world. That's how the Nazis spoke of them. Now, I know a theory that explains why that's so, but we can leave that aside for now. Nonetheless, I don't think that's true of any other hatred. That in fact, we think of them as less than us, but they actually control us. And the second is that antisemitism always resolves to some kind of conspiracy. And so when you have a conspiracy, it almost, almost inevitably ends up in the Jews, which is just a bizarre phenomenon of history that has been going on now for a very long time.
- [38:19]
C
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- [38:48]
A
So let's then talk about antisemitism on college campuses. Because it seems to me what we're dealing with ever since October 7th is I guess, two separate phenomena that are not clearly delineated and are in principle actually tough to draw a line. So, you know, from my perspective, I'm basically a free speech absolutist insofar as anyone can be a free speech absolutist. Obviously you can't incite violence and all that stuff. But if a college student says, you know, I don't think anyone was raped on October 7, I don't think Hamas committed atrocities. Now my opinion of that person's intellect goes down incalculably if they say something so stupid, right? And so callous, but they're totally allowed to say it. That's actually in the realm of political disagreement. Now sometimes when I read about anti Semitism since October 7, I hear Jewish students claiming that that kind of stuff makes them feel uncomfortable. And I get that it probably does make them feel uncomfortable. But you're supposed to feel uncomfortable, right? If that is actually what we mean when we talk about antisemitism on campus, how do you then deny that, say an Arab student or a Palestinian student can't be made uncomfortable if they have to hear something like, oh, I don't think there's starvation in Gaza. So I've come out and said, I don't think there was starvation. I think there was hunger. I don't think there was starvation. That's going to make a Palestinian student feel uncomfortable. I don't think there is a genocide in Gaza. I think that's a totally made up charge perpetrated by idiotic international rights organizations that have a bias against Israel. But that could very much make an Arab or a Palestinian student or any student feel uncomfortable. That's their problem. That's not, that's not anti, that's not bigotry, that's not harassment. And then on the other, on the other hand, you have actual examples of harassment. You have Jewish students, you know, allegedly followed around and you know, go back to Poland and, and you even have reports of, you know, a student who get, gets spat on because they're wearing a yarmulke and so forth. But there's not, like sometimes there isn't. These two conversations get conflated. So where is the line between anti Semitism on the one hand, and legitimate deep political disagreements where Jewish students are invariably in the minority and feel uncomfortable?
- [41:22]
B
I am with you 100%. First of all, I would not sanction a student for saying Israelis are starving Palestinian kids. I wouldn't sanction them for saying it's a genocide. I don't even think, and I know this is going to get me in trouble. I don't think saying Israel perpetuated the genocide is necessarily an anti Semitic statement. I think a lot of people say that who genuinely think that that is true and that that's not. And they don't say it because even though I think that they're completely wrong, I don't think they say it because they hate Jews. So yes, all those things should be said on campus. It gets much trickier when they're said by professors. That's a different question about what is going over. I mean, academic freedom is a really difficult. Like, does academic freedom allow you to inculcate Nazi beliefs or anti Semitic beliefs or racist beliefs in your class? That's a different question. Should somebody be able to say in class, I don't like white people, I don't like black people? Again, in theory, yes, although in practice, part of the problem of what happened on campus was someone who said I don't like white people would be applauded in class and someone who said I don't like black people would be thrown out. Someone who said I don't like Jews would be okay. Someone who said I don't like Muslims would be thrown out. That was the experience. But as a general principle, in theory, I suppose all those things could be said, although you'll have to suffer from social shunning. But when professors say them, or when, as you say, there is, that's why, I mean, that's why colleges have time, place and manner restrictions. When you follow Jewish students around the campus and say you're baby killers, that's harassment. That's not protected academic speech. So the lines are difficult and they're tricky. And I went up to the demonstrations at Harvard numerous times to talk to them because I really wanted to hear what they had to say, but they wouldn't speak to me. And in fact, in one case I was told that they were instructed not to talk to me and that let me know that this was an organized and this wasn't spontaneous outbursts of indignation. And so I think that there was, then you can be, you can allow that as academic freedom and still recognize that it shows a structural dysfunction in the teaching, administration, staff and conduct of the university.
- [44:24]
A
Yeah. Another one of the flashpoints is around the various slogans that people adopt in the pro Palestinian cause or the anti Israel cause. However you want to frame it You've got Ceasefire now, which is relatively inoffensive slogan that I see how anyone could get behind who's just seeing images of war on their phone and thinks it should stop. Then you've got from the river to the Sea, right, which by itself is an abstract slogan that can in principle mean whatever you individually want it to mean. Right. When Hamas says it, it means we want to kill the Jews. Kill and or expel the Jews between the river and the sea. That is all of Israel. Not just. Not just settlers in the west bank, all of Israel. So it is genocidal when Hamas says it. When the kids I went to school with at Columbia a few years ago say it or post it on Facebook. I honestly think many of them, if not most, don't mean in their minds, kill the Jews of Israel. I think they think it's sort of a liberation, most of them.
- [45:33]
B
What I was going to say was, first of all, the ones who said it in Arabic, when I was at Harvard, I was in a restaurant right off campus, and a bunch of people came in and started chanting it in Arabic. And in Arabic, it is from the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab. It's not will be free. The Arabic version will be Arabic. And that's a pretty clear declaration of there won't be Jews there. But what I would say is, you are right. For a while, you could say for the river to the sea. And I mean, the Wall Street Journal famously did this article asking people what river and what sea. And most of them had no idea you could do that for a month. But after a while, everybody was well aware of how it was being taken, even if that was not how they were intending it originally. So I think at a certain. You have to have a fidelity to the sensitivities of your audience. And if you know that they're hearing that as genocidal, that's something you want to be aware of. And even more, by the way, globalize the intifada, which is hard to see other than as an explicit call for violence, since that's what the intifada was. By universal recognition at the time, the first and second intifada. I mean, I was in Israel during the intifada, and it was a time of blowing up buses. That's what it was. We brought millions of dollars to Israel from my synagogue, and all of it was given to victims of terror and their families, and they were all over Israel because that was what the intifada was. So globalize the intifada is to me an even clearer case. But from the river to the sea. For a while, people may not have known, but, but pretty soon it was clear.
- [47:25]
A
Okay, I think I disagree with this because I, I, I, I think you're overestimating the extent to which people are actually educated. Like it, the people that couldn't name the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. You know, it wasn't just like after a month that they knew sort of that from the river to the sea is something Hamas says and what it means. It's, these are people that don't know. Many of them literally think that both intifadas, the first and the second, were essentially peace. Like they're deeply steeped in misinformation. They don't know that over a thousand Israelis, civilians were killed on buses and in bars and in restaurants and that that's what in the second intifada means. To a historian of the Israel Palestine conflict, I think some of them are so deeply in misinformation circles that they just associate these, these, these slogans with essentially the vibes of decolonization. Right? And, and to me, you know, political slogans, unless they are explicit, like Kill the Jews or down with the Jews, I mean, that's, that, that, that's an explicit slogan. But you know, we had in this, in, in this country, huge debate over what does black lives matter mean? And what does all lives matter mean? Right. To some people, black lives matter meant let's reform the police. To other people it meant, hold on, why, why are you saying black lives matter? But don't all lives matter? And to some people, all lives matter was a white supremacist statement, while to others it literally meant how could you take it that way? I'm literally saying all lives matter. How could you take this as white supremacist? But isn't this the nature of political slogans, that their meaning is contested by, by, by definition?
- [49:16]
B
I, I, I take the point in general. I think that the, I think that it was in the hot house of the, of the college where every single day people were talking about what this slogan meant and people read the, the college newspaper and they heard from their professors and their peers. The best I would concede to you is this. They may have known that others saw it as a genocidal slogan and still said, but that's not how I'm saying it. I suppose that is possible, but I don't think after a month of saying from the river to the Sea and hearing how the Jewish students, and not only the Jewish students reacted to it that they were unaware of the fact that some people saw it as genocidal. But it is a minor point in the pretty slippery highway to Hell.
- [50:18]
A
In defense of what you're saying, I assume you remember the video of Norman Finkelstein trying to convince people on his own side, the students. I mean, say what you want about Norman Finkelstein. This guy really has devoted his whole life to the cause of Gaza. Right? So none of those students have an inch on him in terms of caring about this issue. He wrote the book on it, and I think he's wrong about most of what he says. But he gives this long, impassioned, pretty good speech on why Ceasefire now is a good slogan and from the river to the Sea is a bad slogan. And what does he. It's not two seconds that he leaves the bullhorn, that they get the bullhorn and just start chanting from the river to the sea. The subtext being, fuck you, Boomer. We know what we're doing. Get out of here. With all these arguments about responsibility and yada, yada, yada, we're perfectly comfortable being understood to be violent in some way.
- [51:16]
B
Right. I think that that was part of the strategy, you know.
- [51:20]
A
Yeah. Okay. One other topic I want to hit with you. You know, recently, you know, I've been thinking about the word Zionist, right? This is a word that just gets thrown around all the time. I get called a Zionist on the Internet and I don't know what it means. I literally don't know what it means. And I also have this argument with other people that support Israel's right to defend itself, Israel's right to exist, who self identify as Zionists. And I ask them what it means, and I'm. I'm not really satisfied by their answers either. And so here's what I mean. You know, if you were to talk, you know, nobody. Let me put it this way. The word Zionist meant something very specific. Between 1880 and 1948, it meant somebody who wanted to establish a Jewish state somewhere in historic Palestine. Right. I would have known what you meant if you called yourself a Zionist in 1880 or 1920 or even 1946. Once the state is there, going on 80 years, recognized by the United nations, why does there need to be a word for a person who thinks it should continue existing or have the right to defend itself? Right. If Australia got attacked by terrorists, I would be defending Australia's right to defend itself. Right. But there's no word for that. There doesn't need to be a word for it. In practice, the Word Zionism just allows the enemies of Israel, I think, to portray it as not a real country, in other words, as still a colonial project that's hoping to one day be a country. And then it just basically becomes a Slurpee rather than a meaningful word. So that's why I've never identified with the word Zionist and I don't actually know what it means.
- [53:17]
B
So this is kind of a chicken and egg problem in the sense that do people say that Israel is the one established country in the world that doesn't have a right to exist because people call themselves Zionists, which suggests there's a question, or do people call themselves Zionists because it happens to be the one country that people still debate whether it has the right to exist? I agree with you. Nobody calls themselves a Frenchist because they believe that France has a right to exist. But that's essentially what Zionist means, which is a very. It's a sort of very anodyne, and one would hope one day would be a completely unobjectionable term which just means somebody who believes that Israel has a right to exist like every other nation. And this is why Einat Wilf, for example, says that she really believes that the Arab nations around Israel, some of them are, and all of them should be Zionists because it would be good for them too, to be Zionists, and that one day she hopes the Palestinians will be Zionists and that means that they would live side by side within Israel, that they recognize the same way France lives next to Italy. And nobody ever says, you know, Italy shouldn't exist because it's very bizarre that, you know, Germany started two world wars, but nobody says there shouldn't be a Germany. And nobody says there shouldn't be a China because of the Uyghurs or there shouldn't be a Rwanda because of the Houthis and the Tutsis, and there shouldn't be a Myanmar because of the Rohingya. It's just, it's a real historical anomaly that clearly reflects a large measure of anti Semitism that there's one country in the world that not just shouldn't have a different government or different borders, but should not exist, period. And so I think that Zionist, at least from my understanding, is because that belief exists, there has to be something of a pushback to say, no, I am one of those people who believes it should, and one of those people who believes it should is called a Zionist.
- [55:33]
A
Well, that's interesting. I mean, that's. That's interesting because I think there are a Lot of people that would say Israel does have a right to exist, but would recoil at being called a Zionist. So that means in their mind, those are bad pr.
- [55:47]
B
Then we have bad pr. Maybe we need a different word.
- [55:51]
A
Right, which.
- [55:52]
B
Let's just call such a person a rational human being. I'd be happy with that.
- [55:57]
A
Where are you on enlightenment values? As a rabbi, do you like enlightenment values? Do you believe that enlightenment values are a good foundation on which to build a society? And do you think there's a relationship between enlightenment values and Judeo Christian values, or do you think there's an opposition between them?
- [56:22]
B
To the extent that enlightenment values are based solely on the products of human reason, I think that they are fragile and dangerous because reason breeds monsters, just like the sleep of reason breeds monsters. And I really do believe that an underlying value structure to society is essential and salutary and important, and that I'm certainly not anti enlightenment. I think science and technology and reason have given tremendous boons to the world, but I don't see religion and science as in opposition. They have moments of clash, but generally I think they can live in very harmonious quarters together. So I would say I like living in an Enlightenment society that has a foundation of religious values. And to me, at least, that's what America and that's what Europe has been for a long time, although increasingly is not. And that's what America still is, although there are challenges on both sides to that. But I think that that is kind of the ideal combination. Will Herberg. Many years ago, the theologian talked about cut flower ethics. He said, what happens is if you remove the religious soil, the ethics of a society will stay for a while, just like cut flowers, but eventually they will wither and die. And that's my fear, is that people do not realize how much of what we take for granted as sort of normal e have actually a religious foundation. And without that religious foundation, you get some of the anomie and purposelessness and meaninglessness that I think are creeping and dangerous tendencies in America.
- [58:28]
A
Okay, so final question. Is it true I read that I didn't know this about you, that you battled two brain tumors and. And lymphoma.
- [58:40]
B
One brain tumor. And then I had to have two operations because then the first operation didn't go as well as it should. I had that. And lymphoma, yeah.
- [58:48]
A
Wow. So did the experience of battling those cancers change any of your beliefs about the American medical system? Did it make you more a fan of American doctors and hospitals or les a fan? Did it change Anything there.
- [59:07]
B
I just want to say, first of all, I mean, you know, I'm a fan of yours and have been for a long time, and this is one of the reasons why, because everybody who starts the question with, you've had tumor and lymphoma, they always want to ask, did it make you feel differently about God? You are the first human being that has said, how does it make you feel about the American medical system? Which is great. I had a very fortunate bout because I survived, so I felt very good about. One of the things I learned from it, which I think everybody who goes through enough medical trauma learns is we do not. We just do not value nurses the way we should, because the doctors were great, the nurses make all the difference. And, boy, a good nurse is like an unbelievable blessing. So I think my experience with the medical system was that it was, in extremists, good. But anything a little bit less than extremists was hard to get, hard to navigate. It's just very hard to navigate. And if you're not lucky enough to have people who are really savvy and capable. If I had been by myself, I think it would have been a very hard go. I don't think we make it easy for people, even if the care is available. We just don't make it easy for people to find their way through a very difficult system. But I was very lucky in both cases because I got great medical care, partly because I was in la, partly because I knew a lot of doctors by virtue of being the rabbi in a large synagogue, and partly because I had people in my family and my network who looked out for me. So I had a sort of optimum situation. And it still wasn't easy, and there were still things that fell through the cracks. And I still remember, I tell people now who have brain surgery, apparently after you have brain surgery, your brain starts dumping salt. That doesn't always happen, but it often happens, and no one told me that. So I went home after my brain surgery, and I thought I was going insane. I really did. I've never had a feeling like that in my life. It was like I was withdrawing from heroin. Never been on heroin, but it felt like that. And when we called the doctor, they said, well, don't you have salt tablets at home? And we said, no salt tablets at home. And they said, you got to get to an ER right away because you could have another seizure. Which is how all this started, with a seizure, because your brain is dumping salt. And I thought somebody should have mentioned that.
- [62:14]
A
Small detail.
- [62:17]
B
But that's why, like, yeah, we could be doing better in the things that are not immediately urgent and, oh, this is the best medicine. But, you know, I also have an enormous amount of sympathy for the fact that healthcare gets more expensive and more complicated and more ramified and more specialized. And we have not yet figured out a way to do this well. And especially for people who are less fortunate, we have an enormous amount of work to do to give ourselves a decent healthcare system.
- [62:54]
A
Yeah. Okay. On that note, Rabbi David Wolpe, thank you so much for doing my podcast. Before you go, can you point my listeners in your direction on Twitter, website or your latest book or your upcoming book, whatever you want to plug?
- [63:07]
B
Sure. Rabbi Wolpe on Twitter, davidjwoltby on Instagram, and rabbiwoltpe on Facebook. Those are all my socials. And I have a bunch of books you can find on Amazon on different. My most recent book was a biography of King David, and I'm writing a book now about the religious values that America has lost, but it probably won't be out for at least a year and a half, two years. So I'm still working on it.
- [63:34]
A
All right, thank you, Rabbi.
- [63:36]
B
Thank you, Coleman. Great pleasure.