Unidentified Expert/Commentator (7:51)

You reach a point when you say, well, gee, you know, here's a guy who has gone out of his way to defend Demjanjuk and other accused Nazi war criminals, who's constantly attacked Israel, who's attacked American Jews for supporting Israel unduly, who's implied that American Jews push America into wars in which non Jews die. There really is. And again, I'm not hysterical on the subject, but I do believe that there is a pattern with Pat Buchanan of needling the Jews. Is that anti Semitic? Yeah, I mean, after a while you conclude it is in some sense anti Semitic.

Yehuda Kurtzer (8:27)

So it feels surreal to watch this nearly 20 years on and see that Carlson seems to have gone down exactly the same path. Give us some insight as what happened to Tucker Carlson as a kind of a mainstream conservative pundit to now trafficking in this anti Semitic arena.

Yair Rosenberg (8:46)

It's always a dangerous thing to try to explain what's going on in somebody's head, right? Is it ideological commitment? Is it personal resentment? Is it a mix of the two? Is it one that leads to the other? I've heard all sorts of stories from all sorts of people because Tucker Carlson has been around a really long time and he's had relationships with many, many different people across the media landscape, obviously on the right, but also on the left. And everyone' got their own theories. And I don't know if it's really productive to try to figure it out. It's more like, what are the outcomes of those things? But that clip is very instructive because it is essentially an instruction manual for doing what Tucker Carlson is doing now, which suggests that he knows what he is doing now, right now, for reasons. He's choosing to talk about Jews in this way and to fixate on Jews in this way and to make them the center of all conspiracies and things that are wrong in this way and to promote people who have that worldview and a lot of other adjacent narratives which we might get into. He's doing it consciously. It's not a mistake, it's not an error. It's a worldview. It's a choice. As to why that is, it's hard to say.

Yehuda Kurtzer (9:47)

So instead of diagnosing what happened to Carlson, what changed? I guess the different way of asking that question would be what changed in the incentive structure that this is now perceived as being something that is because ultimately he's A marketer. Right. And he's speaking to 20, 30 million people a week. What changed in the incentive structure and in the American population that is making it more ripe, creating a different appetite for kind of the conspiratorial thinking about Jews. And it's a larger question about the rise of anti Semitism.

Yair Rosenberg (10:16)

That is the question.

Yehuda Kurtzer (10:17)

But in particular in the media landscape.

Yair Rosenberg (10:18)

That is the question. It's much, much bigger than Tucker Carlson. Yeah, right. People like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and other people with millions of followers on social media platforms and podcasts that you've never even heard of are all doing this. It is not just Tucker. They are not in fact creating the anti Semitism so much as they are supply rising to move, meet demand. And we know that the demand for anti Semitic material exists because we now have pretty good survey data that shows in particular that young people are much more anti Semitic than their elders. And this goes against certain stereotypes about how prejudices are the province of the old and they will die off when that generation passes on and are replaced with the flag waving progressives of the youth. Important fact in many cases, not just with anti Semitism. And in many countries, prejudices are the province of the young. One example of this is David Shore. The top pollster for the Kamala Harris campaign, who designed a lot of their messaging, was given a tremendous amount of resources and money during the 2024 election to poll the electorate. And not just on political questions, but generally to get a sense of the opinions and the thoughts and the ideas and the themes roiling the people voting in America. And he asked things like, do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Jews? And unlike your typical poll where they get like 500 people and maybe a thousand if you're lucky, and then you try to scale up and do all sorts of math with it. He polled 130,000 people, because when have the resources of a campaign, you can do that. And so this is pretty good data. And he found that some one quarter of young people with a negligible difference between whether you voted for Trump or Harris said straight out that they had unfavorable opinion of Jewish people. And then as you go up the age curve, that just disappears completely. And hardly anybody is willing to, the older you get to say that kind of thing. So this suggests that there is an audience and enterprising people in an unmediated landscape that social media allows are going to service that demand. And not only that, but as this younger generation ages into positions of more influence in politics, and culture. You would expect politics and culture to begin to reflect their desires and impetus. And thus you're going to get that 25% being expressed in our politics and culture. Then the question becomes, why did that 25% become right? This is your real question. And that could be a whole book and perhaps I'll write it. Let's give the capsule version of a few things. One is really obvious, but I think misunderstood, which is the passing of Holocaust memory. Now, when we talk about that, many people think of it in terms of the Holocaust. Survivors have passed on. Who's going to tell their story? The Jewish experience of the Holocaust is passing. But actually what changed American attitudes towards Jews and what affected how they treated Jews was not the Jewish experience, it was the non Jewish experience of the Holocaust. Which is to say that if you look at Poles before America intervened in World War II, while the Holocaust is going on in Europe, the Nuremberg Laws, Kristallmacht, Americans are not particularly sympathetic. They don't really want to get involved. And you get remarkable polls which show, like Gallup found that, you know, over 60% of Americans thought that the persecution of Jews in Europe was either partly or entirely their own fault. They blamed the Jews for the Holocaust that was descending upon them. That was already after Nuremberg. After Kristallnacht there was like, you know, 70%, you know, don't raise the Jewish refugee caps. There was a bill in Congress to let children, children, more children immigrate from Europe. After Kristallnacht never even got to a vote. FDR knew this. He could read a poll. This is one of the reasons why he didn't raise the caps. It's why he didn't bomb the railway tracks to Auschwitz or Auschwitz itself. There wasn't a desire, appetite. Then you have Pearl Harbor. America enters World War II for American national security, entirely American reasons. And then we send men drafted from across the country, diverse backgrounds, because we have conscription back then and so does Canada, right? And all these places, they all go to Europe and they defeat the Nazis. And by the by, they start liberating some of these concentration camps. And you have these letters from GIs, and they're saying, I was eager to go and liberate the camps because I wanted to see for myself, because I figured it was propaganda and this would set my heart at ease to see that it wasn't as bad as I'd been told. And it turned out it was worse. This is what they write back to their families. Eisenhower famously brings in journalists and congresspeople to see the Camps. And he goes himself to say, lest anyone ever say that this wasn't as bad as they said, I will have been there and I've seen it and testified to it. This dramatically changes American attitudes towards Jews, their relationship to anti Semitism. Because to be American became to defeat the Nazis, to be against anti Semitism, antisemitism became in some ways anti American. Right. This becomes part of this myth of Americanism post World War II. And that redounds to the great benefit of Jews trying to integrate into American society and succeed in American society in ways that they never had in any other non Jewish country.

Yehuda Kurtzer (14:49)

Including the fact that American Jews were among those GIs who return. Exactly. They come back as not just having liberated their own people, but actually having fought on behalf of America against the bad guys.

Yair Rosenberg (14:58)

Yeah. Although I think that what really, you know, you have non Jews go back again because they're drafted from across America. They come back to Kentucky to everywhere you can imagine in the United States, and they tell this story, and we have records of people doing this, and they say it in churches and they write it in papers. It becomes firsthand knowledge and secondhand knowledge by the next generation. And that is what tethers the place of the Jews after World War II and changes this dynamic. Well, you go to the current younger generation, very understandably, they don't have that experience. There's no connection. There's not secondhand. It's just not there. So we're reverting to the people who could say maybe it was their fault. Right. It could be suspicious. Let's keep out of all that stuff. It's not something we want to get involved in.

Yehuda Kurtzer (15:35)

Yeah. And there's a deeper critique that we've covered on the show before, also about antisemitism. And Holocaust education oftentimes universalizes a whole set of concerns that actually doesn't put in any context that hatred of the Jews is actually a driver of the Holocaust. So as opposed to this kind of either of American exceptionalism and intervention across the world, which is kind of what the US Holocaust Museum in Washington is about, it ends with the American GIs liberating the camps or, you know, universal Holocaust education, which talks about man's inhumanity to man. Neither of those. And this has been demonstrated our story about anti Semitism.

Yair Rosenberg (16:10)

Correct.

Yehuda Kurtzer (16:10)

Have any measurable effect in helping people understand the particular precarious position that Jews inhabit in the West.

Yair Rosenberg (16:16)

And of course, Darren Horn and others have written on this, and I have sympathy for it, but I do think I want to emphasize we often look at these problems and say they're problems of education. I think education is important. Both my parents are educators in some sense. What I do is education. So clearly I think it matters. But something that matters just as much or more is experience. And education can't replace experience. And in the case of the Holocaust, we should never want such another experience to educate people. But when you have a generation that Shaloh Yadat Yosef that didn't know, never saw, understandably, they're not impacted. That's just not a frame of reference. So that's one big difference. And you can see if you look at now back to Tucker Carlson and the people that he has on he has had a parade of Hitler apologists on his podcast, people saying that actually Hitler was misunderstood, he wasn't as bad as people said, and maybe Winston Churchill was actually the villain of World War II. All of this stuff. He just recently went off on a tangent about how Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who the Christian sort of saint who was part of a plot to try to kill Hitler and died for it and was formerly a great hero on the American right as part of that story, suggesting that it was not Christian of him to try to do that. And you can make some sort of technical, theological argument about that kind of thing because you're trying to kill somebody, but that's not what he's doing. He's saying that Hitler isn't bad, that Ms. Churchill is bad, that Dietrich Bonhoeffer is actually maybe not a Christian right. Like, you don't have to. It's not even reading between the lines anymore. It is an inversion of this traditional narrative, which has a more receptive audience now in service of a broader inversion of the American story in which Jews are suspect, right? And subversives and other people, also others, other kinds of prejudices are now in play again. And the sort of reorganizing of America's understanding of itself after World War II is reversed. So that's one big answer. Another answer, and this gets to some of the stuff you're talking about, how this is not just a phenomenon on the right. This is something we've seen on both the left and the right. We have seen the rise of populist politics since 2016. I cover with one of my other hats, right, in American politics. I've been to the national political conventions since 2012 and interviewed candidates and been on the trail and all that stuff. And in 2016, we saw a populist revolt against both parties. One of them succeeded. That was Donald Trump. And The Republican Party and a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. One of them was remarkably successful and shifted the direction of the party, but didn't actually capture the nomination. That would have been Bernie Sanders revolt against Hillary Clinton. And these populist revolts against party elites, against American elites were well founded in things that we now recognize as tremendous failures of elite governance in American society. And everyone can sort of point to different ones they want, right? Economic stewardship, foreign entitlements and wars that were disastrous and catastrophic. Some will point to academia and immigration and border control and all of these other things. Lots and lots of people, the media, my industry, right, People feeling that they can't trust what the media is doing. The media fell down on this or that thing or scandals and things like that. All of this comes together to show, create a lot of discontent with the people who have been running American society and seem to have not been doing a good job. And so that results in, as it often does in many countries, in many places, in a populist movement against those elites. And populism is not inherently an ev thing, right? Populism can be a great corrective to elite mismanagement. It can result in corrective reforms and new leadership. But populism is also a narrative about how the innocent masses have been screwed over by mass reform manipulators at the top of the food chain, a shadowy cabal of people who are responsible for all your society's problems. And that rhymes with anti Semitism, because all you have to do is say that those people are the Jews. And then there's centuries of propaganda and Google searches backing you up. And it becomes very easy to graft anti Semitism archivists and in fact divert what are originally populist movements with genuine grievances into chases against for Jewish culprits, right? Hunts for Jewish culprits. And so as our politics has gotten more populist, right. It is inevitably going to get more anti Semitic. It's very hard not to. To stop it, you need leaders who might gatekeep it out. And we can get to other points about social media and communication. It's much harder to gatekeep anything out. And so these are just two examples of like this sort of thing. And of course, Tucker and his many, you know, extended universe people, they are riding that wave. But it's also the case that we see it on the left, right? And that sort of stuff in populist left discourse where you see anti Semitic ideas, it is often just grafting this narrative of the sinister conspiratorial group on the top, these elites, and saying that those elites are Jews or saying it's Zionists, but literally there's no difference.

Yehuda Kurtzer (20:32)

Right. It's interesting even in your depiction of that narrative, which is very compelling. You even made a rhetorical move at some point where you said, you know, the global elites, the cabal is the Jews. But actually there's a preliminary step which isn't the Jews, it's just Jews. Because that's actually easy to prove. You can be like, oh, look, there's George Soros if you're on one side of the aisle, or there's Sheldon Adelson on the other side of the aisle. And here's, you know, we'll throw Jeffrey Epstein into the mix. You do actually have Jews who are human beings who happen to be Jewish, who are sometimes easy to depict as the caricature of a cabal. And then once you do Jews, it's very easy to jump to the Jews. Right. Because there's not that many of us. And because it becomes easy to kind of re aggregate the Jews under one umbrella. So it's kind of one of these things where anytime you have a conspiracy theory, you have just enough data to be able to fuel something bigger. And that enables you to kind of transpose that from an observation. Oh, there are actually rich Jews who have a lot of influence and turn that into. The Jews are a controlled cabal that's actually trying to orchestrate the society.

Yair Rosenberg (21:36)

That's always the case with these kinds of things where you take individual members of minority community and then you recast them as mendacious monolith where everybody is all in cahoots with each other and they're out to get you. And people will do that with more and less success with other groups too. You know, so, like, all the Muslims are conspiring to impose Sharia law. Right. That kind of conspiracy is not very distinct from this kind of thing, just not as prevalent throughout history. Right. But we've seen it with some power in different times in the United States history. There were certain conspiracy theories about Mormons trying to take over America, which people think is crazy now. But that was absolutely something. And it got stirred up, actually when Mitt Romney ran for president. There were times when people evoked this sort of thing. But there's just been centuries upon centuries, centuries of versions of this, and certainly most recent in the last century or two of this kind of narrative which animated the Soviet Union and animated Nazi Germany, which were opposed in every possible way in so Many other respects. But the thing about a conspiracy theory that says that there's a secret, shadowy group that's behind all of your problems is that whatever your problems are, you can pit in on those people. So you might have totally different diagnoses of what the problems are, but you can agree on what the enemy is. And that makes anti Semitism really potent and able to. And unite extremely unlikely allies. So for the Soviet Union, right, all of the capitalist superstructure, the exploiters of the workers, end up being Jews. Right. For many people on the left, the socialist left, the sorts of people who ended up thronging into the Labor Party under Jeremy Corbyn, there was a large group of those sorts of people. But then on the right in Nazi Germany and the like, and just the nationalist rights elsewhere, the Jews are the Bolsheviks, right? They're the communists and the cosmopolitans. The people have no place, right. Who are undermining society from within. And as you say, you can always point to Jews who are doing this and you can even point to sometimes where they're disproportionate. Right. Nobody's ever very interested in when Jews are disproportionately. Not somewhere like, I would like to know why we're discriminated against in the NBA. Yay, Right. It's always in one direction. It's very motivated reasoning. The jump from Jews to the Jews is something that people just don't do with. Let's put it this way, the people who do that will never do that with white people, which I think is correct. You should never say that. This young white man shot up a shopping mall. What will white people do about this? This is sort of a gag that some people on the left started doing that sometimes on social media in the 2000s. It's a very bad one, right? It's a bad way to talk about people. But it's not the general thing. It's certainly the sorts of anti Semitic rhetoric we hear where people essentialize Jews into a monolith. They'll never do it to their own community, right? What we're all just saying is treat everyone with the same sort of heuristic. And so that is the, you know, you have the jump from Jew to Jews, right? And then you have this very selective definition of what is disproportionate, which only goes in one direction and only indicts.

Yehuda Kurtzer (24:06)

One group rather than helps. Bret Stephens, in the piece I alluded to before, adds another layer to this, which I found kind of a provocative move, where he said one other piece that's gone wrong has been what he calls like the forced merger of conservatism and Christianity. And he argues that conservatism, at least in what he would consider kind of the heyday of conservatism in the 80s and 90s, the period that he is formed in, actually had something more of an embedded respect for religious tolerance as a kind of constitutional principle of what it meant to be conservative. And he sees the merger of Christianity with conservatism, a kind of takeover, as therefore importing some of Christianity's historical antipathy for Jews and its incapacity to be tolerant as part of a kind of a conservative worldview and creating that kind of oppression. I wonder what you think about that theory.

Yair Rosenberg (24:57)

It's hard for me to make such straight lines because I think in general, every partisan of every ideology that ever covered always says that if people were truly conservative, if they were truly progressive. I saw this on Twitter.

Yehuda Kurtzer (25:09)

No true Scotsman.

Yair Rosenberg (25:09)

If they were truly post liberal, I saw that this past week. Right. They would not be anti Semitic. It's definitionally impossible.

Yehuda Kurtzer (25:16)

Civil.

Yair Rosenberg (25:16)

And yet historically, in actuality, that is not what happens. Because the truth is every ideology is subject to hypocrisy. Every ideology is subject to creating carve outs and rules for disfavored communities. I'm sorry, but like Zionism does this in spades currently in Israel. Right. If you pay attention to who is calling the shots and who is pressuring Netanyahu and making a lot of decisions. And everyone always says, but yeah, but true. This the true version. Right. And it's totally fine to advocate for a better version of something that doesn't have these things, but. But you're not going to make much of a dent in it until you recognize that there are these natural propensities. And I think that same is true of Christianity. There is a Christianity that is tremendously, you know, can be tremendously oppressive to Jews throughout history. And then there's, you know, Christianity of different stripes that has been tremendously welcoming. Right. And that was also part of the American philo Semitic experiment. Right. In post World War II and deserves credit. So it's hard for me to draw this natural like alliance and say that these things all go together. I think it's just about whether there are good versions of these ideologies or bad. And then what are the fundamental forces that lead them to go along certain tracks rather than others.

Yehuda Kurtzer (26:14)

Yeah. It's interesting though to me to consider the ways that evangelicals play into the story. Because one of the things that I've watched pro Israel Jews say for about maybe 20 years now is we're going to be fine because America is becoming evangelical. And evangelicals have a special place in the hearts of the Jews because they support Zionism, the state of Israel. And they tend to kind of make light of the theological implications of why evangelicals might support the state of Israel. Make light of the fact that like some of that implies that evangelicals would like Jews to leave here and be in the state of Israel and forget about the theological kind of apocalyptic vision of the future in which Jews are meant to play a role, which is its own type of antisemitism. Like that Jews fit into a paradigm for the transformation of the world based on a Christian idea. But what's so fascinating is that that has so visibly backfired in that next generation of evangelicals are becoming isolationist around Israel. And it almost feels, and you could tell me if I'm wrong on this analysis, it almost feels like you have one generation left of Republican leadership which is embracing some of those isolationist ideas, but still has a kind of carved out exception for Israel. And it's going to become gradually incoherent down the line. So maybe you could give us some insight into what you think is taking place on the Christian right as it relates to these issues.

Yair Rosenberg (27:34)

So I don't know if I'm any expert on the Christian right, but I can tell you what I have seen in my writing and reporting. I think that it's like every younger cohort in America. Again, their narrative about Jews and their narrative about Israel is very different. And this notion that American evangelicals would be immune to any of that right was a folly. Setting aside the moral considerations that be sort of centering American support for Israel in what a certain group of non Jews wanted, rather than perhaps listening to the American Jewish community more, which he didn't have any real interest in doing. But I don't think, for example, that there's a huge groundswell of evangelicals who want to ditch Israel. I think that there is a significant number of younger people who want to have a more normalized dialogue and conversation about Israel, which is to say this recent trend, which is really post George W. Bush of the Republican Party, not just being supportive of Israel relationship with Israel, but basically just enabling the most right wing version of Israel and the wish list of whoever is the most right wing person on Israel, both in the evangelical community and in the Israeli community. That does not actually make sense. It is not something that George W. Bush felt compelled to do it is not something that any previous Republican president, despite they having evangelicals in their base, felt compelled to. Not Ronald Reagan, none of these people. It's very unique. It happened under Trump, under very unusual circumstances. And when you do it to one extreme, you often have a backlash. Right? You have people questioning that. And so that's one of those things. I don't think that all of these people are just immediately saying, let's sever Israel. That being said, when people respond to their critiques by saying that's entirely out of balance, that's anti Semitic, you can't have that conversation. Well, what do you think is going to happen? They're not going to drop those questions. They're going to say, why don't you want to have that conversation? Especially in a very sort of distrust authority, distrust the system, distrust the elites kind of environment. And so you have a fair amount of that just going on, which is a very normal foreign policy debate that some people are sort of seeing as something that's beyond that. So different Republican politicians are trying to navigate that and trying to come up with ways to, to bridge these sorts of divides both generationally and in the base. Someone like Tucker Carlson is not interested in that. He's not interested in trying to come up with a rational way to discuss Israel, which is something I would support. As someone who's much to the left of the American right on Israel, it's kind of funny to see the Steve Banz of Tucker Carson pretending to be critical of Israel. But you know that they have no actual interest in Palestinians. They have no actual interest in good outcomes in Israel. They just don't like people who are different. Right? And particularly they have an issue with Jews and they see them as subversives and problems. They also seem to see, let me say, they seem to see these things. That's how they act. And they also seem to see anti Semitism as a useful tool politically for uniting people behind their movement. And that's not a bad short term bet. Historically, you can use antisemitism to glue anti establishment populace together like we discussed, and gain a certain level of political power that transcends normal political divides. That's really handy. That's really useful. It tends to blow up in your face. It tends to destroy the movements that embrace it because they can no longer rationally solve problems because they're chasing phantom Jewish culprits instead of rationally addressing their society, society's issues. All that long term is disastrous for society and anyone who's involved in it. Not to mention the Jews who are targeted by it. But in the short term, it can become some good rocket fuel for a movement. And it does seem like some people are doing that, and they're pushing these people who have these sorts of questions into the most extreme versions of these questions. But I don't think it's inherently. These sorts of political debates are inherently dangerous. I think what's sort of dangerous is what people are purposely pushing them, what direction. Just like I don't think populism inherently has to be dangerous. Right. It's how you use these things and where people decide to use it.

Yehuda Kurtzer (31:01)

Yeah. This is something I hear from a lot of our audiences traveling around. Part of what's taking place also is a kind of psychic overload by American Jews of how much of this antisemitism they're seeing and hearing all the time, and the inability to kind of classify it, order it, make sense of it. I think there tend to be kind of two responses. One is the overwhelm response, which actually doesn't help you. It doesn't help you think about how your politics should be different. Doesn't help you to think about how you should organize around it. But I think that actually characterizes much of the American Jewish institutional response to antisemitism. And one of the ways they respond to it is just by amplifying all of it. That's antisemitism. That's anti Semitism. That's it. I'm like, okay, but what do we do about it? The second response seems to be like, oh, let me decide. This one is kind of okay, and I'll respond to this. I'll kind of put them in order. I'll give you, like, my favorite example was for all of the conversation about antisemitism in the recent New York City mayoral election with respect to the mayor elect, Mamdani. You know, Cuomo has, like, a famous line for when he was governor during COVID about Orthodox Jews trying to celebrate Sukkot. And I don't know if you know this one. This is a great line where he was like, as said to have said to his staff, these people in their fucking tree houses, which is funny and also kind of anti Semitic. So I saw people on the left kind of wheeling that out to be like, look, this isn't a choice between an anti Semite and a Filo Semite. It's a choice between these two antisemites. Or I think Cuomo is worse. And I find these, like, neither of those strategies seem right. And I wonder how you think about the kind of this overload phenomena of all of this arrival of this data and what it's doing to our capacity to actually talk intelligently about this and even strategize around it, both as a Jewish community but also as Americans.

Yair Rosenberg (32:50)

Yeah, there's a tremendous lack of strategic thinking on this stuff. There's a lot of reactivity that's always these characterized, I think, the Jewish response to anti Semitism, I would say in the defense of all the Jewish organizations, some of which I have more sympathy for in their particular approach and some less. Anti Semitism fundamentally isn't about what Jews say or do about it. And this is the real problem. The Jewish organizations could have the pitch perfect, perfectly designed, incredibly executed strategy for countering anti Semitism. And unlike the anti Semites who believe that the 0.2% of the world population I.e. jewish controls the fate of the other 99.8%, in reality the 99.8% of the world that's not Jewish is going to determine the fate of the 0.2% that is. And it doesn't matter if that 0.2% does the perfect strategy. Say they managed to figure out how to punch 100 times above their weight, well then they would be punching at 20%. It still wouldn't work. And that's not what's happening. And that can't happen. And that's not how the real world works. So it's similar to when people say, people often say I am really mad about how this right wing person is running interference for right wing antisemitism or this left wing person is running interference for what I perceive to be anti Semitism disguised as anti Zionism. And it's true, I might agree with you on this or that critique. But if they didn't exist, if those people weren't running cover, if all the self hating Jews as they're so called described didn't exist, you'd still have all the anti Semitic power structure, all the anti Semitism would still be there. Because the concept of Jews sort of trying to fit into an anti Semitic power structure or running interference for it is an epiphenomenon of the power structure. It didn't create it. Jews didn't create the anti Semitic superstructure, the double standards, right. The conspiracy theories, all of that kind of stuff. Right? Jews are subject to it and then they act within it and they try to respond to it and they do that in less good.

Yehuda Kurtzer (34:32)

And they can't make it worse.

Yair Rosenberg (34:34)

Right? They can make it worse and they can make it a little better. And this is all mostly at the margins. Right. And this is, you know, not something that people really want to hear. It's going to be what they need to do. In the end. It is a non Jewish concern. And it is something that non Jews decide whether or not this is something that they want in their societies and this is something they want to govern their societies. And you're seeing that playing out right now very strongly, obviously on the American right, where there's this pitched war now over what has a place in the conservative movement. And fundamentally it's not going to be decided by the Jews. And if Jews somehow tried to decide it, that would end up being construed as anti Semitic.

Yehuda Kurtzer (35:05)

Right.

Yair Rosenberg (35:06)

Look at the Jews acting to try to control this debate. I think it's a little scary. I think Jews look at that and they say, wait, we don't have the ability to influence this so much. Much. That's probably true, and that's not incredibly encouraging. But also the fact is, is that there are plenty of people out there in the world who do care about Jews. And America was a better place for Jews before the Holocaust. Even as we just talked about how there was a lot of anti Semitism that sort of fell away after World War II. There's a reason so many thousands upon thousands of American Jews came here from Europe. It was so much better. Right. And there's lots and lots of good things and resources that America has and Americans have and all of those things. Things. But in the end, it's gonna come down a lot to Americans who are not Jewish.

Yehuda Kurtzer (35:43)

It's such a strange powerlessness story in so many ways.

Yair Rosenberg (35:46)

I think people want to tell a really agentic, powerful story about the Jews rising above their circumstances and constantly changing fate and bending the arc of history. And I don't know. I don't really see it.

Yehuda Kurtzer (35:58)

Right.

Yair Rosenberg (35:58)

I think that's a very powerful both national and theological narrative. And I think that some people absolutely, reasonably can believe those sorts of things about different moments in history. But like. Like if you were just looking at the distribution of power and who decides what terms, what groups are talked about in. Well, Jews are not the adult. We don't get to set the terms of discourse about which we're discussed.

Yehuda Kurtzer (36:19)

That's true. Although here's the counterpoint, which would be that one of the things that American Jews did in the first half of the 20th century is American Jews helped architect not a special treat us well strategy that they then imported to others, but they helped architect a better Angels strategy, a narrative about America that would help Americans tell a better story of America that ultimately redound with goodness for Jews. Yeah, that's the Brandeis story. It's the Callan story. That's the Lazarus story.

Yair Rosenberg (36:49)

That's the American liberalism story.

Yehuda Kurtzer (36:51)

That's the American liberalism for sure. So I understand that what you don't want to have is. And let's use the Ted Cruz example, the recent one is a good one. That's your good story. Right. A leading American conservative politician stands up to repudiate the anti Semitism that's taking place within his own party. To his credit, he wasn't like, yeah, this is anti Semitism, but what's happening over there on the left is worse.

Yair Rosenberg (37:13)

He did not use that.

Yehuda Kurtzer (37:13)

He did not do that. He went after the Heritage Foundation. It's a hard thing for conservatives to go after. Just did it. Exactly right. And the way you're describing it is in order for that to work, that just has to be a natural occurrence as opposed to. It can't be like, he did that because AIPAC called him. Because that will be like the worst expression of this of like, oh, the Jews are leveraging this.

Yair Rosenberg (37:35)

And I'm not saying the Jews can't be involved in these things. I think that there's a very strong American Jewish liberal story of it that says we will create alliances with all sorts of groups for all, but not.

Yehuda Kurtzer (37:44)

For our own interests.

Yair Rosenberg (37:45)

Right. But not just for us forever. And I think that's totally correct. And I think on the moral sort of, again, and just in general, I think people should do those things if they think they're right. I push back on the notion that we are the deciders. Right. And I sometimes think Jews fall into that sort of. I think it's a little solipsistic. And I think anti Semites believe it all the time. Right. They really believe that Jews are deciders of this story. But really everyone has agency. And then there's a lot of people in this world.

Yehuda Kurtzer (38:08)

World.

Yair Rosenberg (38:08)

So, like, I think Jews in the end. Right. Can be part of different stories that America tells about itself. And they should say which of those stories I think is better for everyone. Right. Not just better for Jews. Right. But better for us too. Right. And then work on those. And there's very strong disagreements about what that story is.

Yehuda Kurtzer (38:22)

Yeah.

Yair Rosenberg (38:23)

But yeah, I just don't think that Jews are ultimately not going to be.

Yehuda Kurtzer (38:26)

The ones who decide.

Yair Rosenberg (38:26)

I don't think we're most of the time. So once in a while, someone might be in the right place at the right time. Right.

Yehuda Kurtzer (38:30)

And I fear about that version of a story that it creates a kind of American Jewish fatalism about this. Of like, well, well, I guess we'll wait around to see whether America likes us or not. Which.

Yair Rosenberg (38:39)

Well, I think that there are other things you can do other than saying we're going to solve all this problem on ourselves. There's also things that you do that are just protective. Right. That's the sort of thing where you say, like, we're not going to be able to like solve these giant societal wide issues on our own. Right. But we can do certain things that are just sort of protective of our community. Right. That can be involving just basic things like security, that can be involved with Jewish life and learning and like, you know, resilience and so many other things that you can do. Right. Without saying we have to conquer this all ourselves. Because you're talking about overwhelm. That's how you started this conversation. It's because people are correcting perceived an overwhelming situation. And if that is the thing that you start trying to do, you're going to accomplish almost nothing. And you might actually do a lot of counterproductive stuff. Right. And so to scale back a little bit and then to like, you know, take stock. Right. I think it is valuable.

Yehuda Kurtzer (39:24)

So. But I would say for us, and I say this personally, but it's also my hope institutionally, I would like to bring back that agenda of American Jews being part of, together in coalitions, other Americans who are arguing for a narrative and a set of ideas and values about America that is ultimately to our collective benefit and to reduce the amount of dissonance between how right wing Americans might tell a narrative story about America and how left wing Americans would tell that narrative story. Not because I don't ultimately vote on one side of the aisle and not because there's some altar of centrism that I sacrifice on. On, but because ultimately that is a means of creating the best possible framework for the safety and security not just of Jews, but other fellow Americans. And I'll ask you a question that may just be a rhetorical question, but I actually think you may have opinions on it also. Why doesn't the freaking American Jewish community do this? What happened to this agenda as the normative agenda of American Jewish life, which I genuinely think prevailed in the middle of the 20th century and led to a period of, of relative safety and security for Jews in America?

Yair Rosenberg (40:35)

Yes, I'm actually the worst expert to ask about the American Jewish organizational landscape because I report on American US politics, Israeli politics, international stuff, these big picture trends that. And I do not, I almost never write about any of these organizations. I have very little insights.

Yehuda Kurtzer (40:49)

It's a good way to stay safe, right?

Yair Rosenberg (40:51)

I have very little. No, but I have just very little insight into them. I will go and speak on a panel here and there and things like that, but it's just not the landscape that I cover. And I do think frankly the fact that I can do what I do and not do that suggests something of what you're saying, which is that if they mattered my more right on some of these issues than I would be right. It would force its way into what I do. But very often it doesn't.

Yehuda Kurtzer (41:09)

Yeah.

Yair Rosenberg (41:10)

So that's what I would say I want to do. Want to circle back because you said I want to push back against the fatalism thing. Because I do want to say that's not what I'm trying to say. I am trying to give people a realistic appraisal of what the problems are and figure out how can we smartly address them. I also think that there are a bunch of things that people can get together on matters of common concern that don't seem like they're specifically Jewish coded, but in fact matter for. And that may be a much more healthy way into it than just talking about this anti Semitism and that, like you said. So think in terms of these big picture trends that we're talking about that are leading people to be more open to say conspiratorial anti Semitism than they were a generation ago. It's the passing of the Holocaust generation. It's the rise of populist politics in America. We didn't discuss this, but it's underneath everything and perhaps the most important, which is the change in how we communicate and understand each other through social media, which is a sort of mechanism that is designed to proliferate advantage conspiracy theories and disadvantaged minorities. To break that down really simply, if there's like a company of people talking on social media to break through, you have to say something that other people are not saying. And that's unique. You could be prettier than other people. Your cat could be cuter, you could be funnier. Or if you're a news organization, maybe you have some information that other people don't have. That takes a lot of work, but it doesn't take that much work if you just make it up. Right. And that is why you see so much conspiratorial theorizing and fabrication and scams on Social media is the easiest form of vital content to produce. So we've advantages. Conspiracy theories and anti Semitism is one the of of those. Social media decides what you see based on an algorithm which determines what people click on, pay attention to, and that's based on shares and likes. When you have a globalized conversation, it's going to reflect the globalized pathologies. A tremendous number of people around the world, many, many more millions don't like Jews. Maybe they've never met one, but they don't like Jews and they have negative notions about them, then are Jewish or like Jews and are willing to step up and stand in the way of people who are saying no. Right. We hate Jews and we want to. And it's one thing if your conversation is localized, right, in your community where people know each other and they know Jews and other people, and you can handle all these kinds of prejudices in that way. In theory, once you globalize it, you can solve a local problem and then it becomes. But then in your pocket, the conversation and the algorithm is deciding based on global trends and global votes. And you've let a tremendous number of people into that conversation and who's actually getting most of their information and having that conversation, it's young people. Right. And so. So social media, huge thing, huge driver. So thinking about how social media acts in society and whether or not we want social media, which has so many other downstream negative consequences like study after study in so many different ways, how much influence do we want it to have on our lives and the lives of our children and our families and our communities? That doesn't sound like a Jewish issue, but it is a Jewish issue. Yeah, of course, Right. Populist energy and grievances in American politics, how you address those, maybe it's that populism is too dangerous and it too easily turns into conspiracy theorizing and press prejudice. And so you're going to try to find someone who will be a consensus broker and come up with a new form of politics. Right. That will address those grievances in a way that isn't populous. Or you say, I need to find responsible populist politicians who will police their coalitions and they have the power and the charisma to do that. Right. Sort of what certain people on the right sort of have given up on Trump ever being or doing, which is. Trump would have to say, like, this is not good and I won't do it. Of course, he never does that. If you agree with him, right, he will accept you into his movement no matter what other views you have have. That's part of how we got here. But in theory, somebody could exist who doesn't have that. So I'm not telling people which direction to go. But once you see these big picture trends that don't look like Jewish issues per se, but they in fact are, you then have agency and have the ability to work with other allies and all these other people on those issues in ways that if you address those concerns, you will address these things that are feeding into the anti Semitism.

Yehuda Kurtzer (44:36)

Yes. And you know, closer to home for us educational and pedagogic strategies. You wrote about this in tablet in 2021 around why Marjorie Taylor Greene became a nationally known name in part for all of the reason you described populist use of social media. You know, you didn't say this specifically, but like I know this just from a person with a modest social media platform among certain kinds of Jews.

Yair Rosenberg (44:58)

Yeah.

Yehuda Kurtzer (44:58)

The more inflammatory I write something, the more boost that I get.

Yair Rosenberg (45:01)

Yes.

Yehuda Kurtzer (45:02)

And I regret it every time I do it.

Yair Rosenberg (45:03)

And we have lots of studies that show that negative material towards the out group goes much farther than saying nice things about your own group on social media.

Yehuda Kurtzer (45:11)

So you wrote in 2021, like here's the reasons and many of the things we covered around conspiracy theories that people are drawn to this kind of anti Semitic rhetoric. And your argument ultimately, which was for politics, a weak argument for education, a powerful argument is we need to build societies that actually teach complexity and that would make people resilient and capable of repudiating the ways that conspiracy theories take complicated things and try to produce simple answers. Yeah. One way, it's very hard to do that at scale. Yeah.

Yair Rosenberg (45:40)

Well, one way I would say that one can do that in a more simple way is sort of recognizing that conspiracy theories are usually bad answers to good questions. Why did the stock market crash? It's a great question. Very important question to ask. Who did 9 11? Right. Really important question to be able to answer. Now if you're Tucker Carlson and Cadiz Owens and saying, well, Jews are behind 9 11, specifically Israel had some sort of foreknowledge and let it all happen or something like that, well, that's not good. Right. If you're the anti Semites who think that the Jews crashed the stock market and replayed the currencies, whatever the that is, you will never stop the next calamity because you don't actually understand what's going on. But people are right to ask the question and we would be right to validate the grievance and to validate the question and the concern. But then to say this is a bad answer that will lead you into bad places will not solve your problems. And then what you have to do is get people better answers, and better answers have the value of actually playing out of the real world and solving those problems. And then people realize, well, this person has more predictive value. This person helped me more. Right. This person's way of explaining the world empowered me rather than disempowered me. The sad tragedy of, like, conspiratorial actors in the world, like, say, a Candace Owens or Tucker or whatever, is they are fundamentally disempowering their followers. Right. They're taking people who feel often adrift and ensuring they stay that way. And it's so incredibly cruel and irresponsible. Right. We talk about this in this narrow context of what they're doing to targets of, like, people like Jews, but everyone who listens to them is a victim.

Yehuda Kurtzer (46:57)

In this way until they make them feel powerful by activating them, like on January 6th. Yes.

Yair Rosenberg (47:01)

And then some of those people will then victimize other people.

Yehuda Kurtzer (47:03)

Correct?

Yair Rosenberg (47:04)

Right. But, you know, and the wake of January 6, the people who are both the perpetrators going into the capitol, but they were victims. Right. These are the people who are going to get thrown in jail, their lives are going to be ruined. The people who actually incited them into this and lied to them, often knowing better. Right. Those people very rarely get held to account. And so I think that in that way, some small way, what I'm doing in journalism is trying to say, these are good questions. Let me try to give you the real answer. And over time, you can build people who say, okay, yeah, that was more trustworthy. That explains something to me that I couldn't otherwise understand that the conspiracy theory theory didn't do. And if we just say, oh, that's conspiracy theory, we label and we lecture. Right. That's not helpful. Similarly, if you just say that's anti Semitic, that doesn't solve anything. You have to. When I report on antisemitism, I try to explain in some detail why someone might come to this conclusion and then why it's wrong and then, you know, pull out the word or the label if I choose to do that. Right. A lot of people think that reporting on, you know, we're talking about anti Semitism just means saying it and labeling it and that you did something there, but you didn't. Right. You have to assume the average person needs more than. But I understand that's not for Everybody. Right. In fact, it can be exhausting. It is, but that is a much more effective thing. And I think that our organizational responses often sometimes fall short in that respect. But this is much bigger than Jews. Right. This is generally about any sort of populist or conspiratorial grievance, is figuring out the way to address that as best you can. And then there are some of these things that are just toxic or they've curdled into something so toxic that you can't do with it, and then it just needs to be quarantined. But you need to be able to distinguish between those two.

Yehuda Kurtzer (48:31)

Right?

Yair Rosenberg (48:31)

Right. If you just treat everything as the curdled version before. Right. You will end up creating more of it.

Yehuda Kurtzer (48:37)

Let me ask you one last question, which is, as someone who likes to think about history and memory, there's always an. I find. Always an appeal to, like, where have I seen this before? What's a historical analogy to this? And kind of the most obvious one is Father coughlin in the 1930s, you know, a parish priest who ultimately, somebody is like, hey, you're pretty good at this. Puts him in front of a radio mic and becomes, in the 1930s, enormously influential in advancing anti Semitic ideas, which you can see a direct correlation to. Exactly. We were talking about before the rise of anti Semitic ideas in America, the resistance to entering the Second World War, certainly to intervening on behalf of Jews. That happens. And then afterwards, people are like, well, that was bad. And he winds up returning to spend the rest of his life basically anonymously, living as a parish priest in some parish somewhere else. Does the Father Coughlin story help us in any ways, thinking about Tucker, both about, like, how these things come to pass and how they might ultimately turn out in the end, you know, is it a story of, like, some version of a brief period of collective psychosis because of all these various economic and other reasons that drive people into these positions? And we can be optimistic that someday we'll get on the other end. Or is this a story of almost the inevitability of these media figures leading a country into such significant ruin that their ultimate ending doesn't really matter? I wonder how that history actually helps us in a moment like this. Or if it doesn't, maybe it doesn't.

Yair Rosenberg (50:06)

Well, since we're on a podcast, I want to bring readers attention to the fact that there is a podcast called Radioactive, that a journalist, Andrew Lapin, did, which is excellent. Which is a short series podcast that you can go listen to partnership, I think, between tablet Studios and public radio. And it does a great job of recapping the Father Godlin thing and then in the end, just interspersing the things he was saying with the things that someone like Tucker was saying. And this is made years ago, which is an example of all these trends. They're not new. And all these things that are suddenly shocking people. It is shocking, but it has been building for quite some time. And I can't predict the future. That's really something I steer clear from. I have all my little cliches. I report on the present, not the future, all that kind of stuff. I think you laid out two very plausible scenarios, which is that these sorts of things can burn themselves out. And you could even argue that in the Internet age and social media, everything moves so fast that we go through these phases way quicker. Right. And so something can really come to a boil and can seem like the wave of the future, and then it's gone within a year or two. And then on the other hand, something's gonna be transformational and they can stick. It's very hard to know. I do think, though, what that story does tell us is that Father Coughlin is not a sort of one guy who drops out of the sky. He's feeding off of major social unrest and trends, and as some of those get resolved, some of his appeal goes away. And so that brings us to some of these sorts of big picture questions about what is fundamentally driving American anti Semitism and what you can do about it, and reacting not to individual symptoms, but saying what are these fundamental forces? That to me is not fatalistic. That is sort of an optimistic approach. It's saying that once you actually recognize a problem for real and the real sources of it, you have the ability to grapple with it and to try to ameliorate those trends and to challenge them. But, yeah, but I don't know. I think Father Coughlin is very instructive. I think people should pay attention to that parallel and recognize that our history does recur. And some comfort comes from that in the sense that we have faced these questions before and we have gotten through it. And so my hope is that we will get.

Yehuda Kurtzer (52:02)

Thanks. That's great. Thanks for doing it.

Podcast Announcer (52:06)

Here are some other things that are happening at the Shalom Hartman Institute. This week we're proud to celebrate the 100 anniversary of Jewish Book Month with a conversation with Rabbi Joanna Samuels, CEO of the Marlene Meyerson JCC in Manhattan, and author and Hartman research fellow Tomer Persico, about his new book on a fundamental Jewish that all people were created in the image of God. Join us in our New York office on December 9th. Learn more and register at the link in the Show Notes. If your high school age child or student is looking for a gap year experience in Jerusalem that will propel them into lifelong engagement with the most pressing questions facing the Jewish people, check out Chavruta. Watch the recording of our recent virtual open house with Chavruta director Shira Ben Simon Schonfeld and current Chavruta participants. Find the recording and so much more at the link in the Show Notes.

Tess Zitter (52:55)

Thanks for listening to our show and special thanks to our guest, Yair Rosenberg. Identity Crisis is produced by me, Tess Zitter and our executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode was produced with assistance from Annie Beyer Chaffetz, researched by Gabrielle Feinstone and edited by Seth Stein with music provided by so called transcripts of our show are now available on our website. Typically a week after an episode airs, we're always looking for ideas for what we should cover in future episodes. So if you have a topic you'd like to hear about or if you have comments about this episode, please write to us at identitycrisis at shalomhartman. Org for more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute about what's unfolding right now. Sign up for our newsletter in the show notes and subscribe to this podcast everywhere podcasts are available. See you next time and thanks for listening.