Loading summary
Transcript90 lines
- [00:00]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Rabbi.
- [00:02]
Bari Weiss
I'm Rabbi Ami Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York, and you're listening to in these Times. Last month at our synagogue spring benefit, we honored Bari Weiss and Nellie Bowles with our Light of Freedom Award. Barry and Nellie, who founded the Free Press, have made prodigious contributions to journalism and to a free and hopefully open exchange of ideas in this country. During the program, I sat down with Barry and Nelly to interview them about the Free Press, their Jewish journey, and several of the central challenges facing the American Jewish community.
- [00:48]
Nellie Bowles
Well, this is really a fantastic honor. It's little intimate conversation with some of our closest friends here in the synagogue. What you've done is amazing. I want to ask you first about the media empire that you have or are about to establish or are establishing the Free Press. I hope everybody has a chance to read the Free Press. You should be. You should be receiving it.
- [01:14]
Unnamed Speaker
I love this room. This is.
- [01:16]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
We're turning this into a subscription drive.
- [01:18]
Nellie Bowles
It's a fabulous contribution, of course, to Jewish discourse, but to American society as well. Both of you left the New York Times. I don't think you originally thought that you would establish something as immense as the Free Press. But can you tell us about the circumstances of your leaving the New York Times and how that led you to establishing the Free Press?
- [01:44]
Unnamed Speaker
One thing I should say from the start is that we never would have met had it not been for the New York Times. So for that, I will always be grateful to AG Sulzberger and his family for introducing me to my wife and I would say, like the greatest addition to the Jewish people since Ruth herself.
- [02:00]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
But also the New York Times refusing to cover all of the interesting stories in the most interesting time really created a market opportunity.
- [02:09]
Unnamed Speaker
Exactly.
- [02:10]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
So we owe them, really, a debt.
- [02:11]
Nellie Bowles
Nellie was already at the New York Times when you arrived, right?
- [02:15]
Unnamed Speaker
Nellie was at the New York. Okay. So for those of you who have no idea who we are, the tldr, as the kids say, is I was working on the opinion desk of the New York Times. Nelly was, I think it's very fair to say, like the golden girl, beloved by everyone at the newspaper San Francisco Lesbian. And with the politics that go along with that. And I was already hated from day one. Why it took me a long time to realize this, but it was Israel, like, pretty plain and simple. And to make a very long, complicated, but in a way not complicated story short, because it's really one of the major stories of our epoch is that the mission that the New York Times claimed to be pursuing was not at all the mission that it was pursuing at the time that we were there. In other words, the idea of pursuing the truth, holding up a mirror to the world as it actually is, and trying to reflect it back to people so they can make practical decisions about where to live and who they should pay taxes to and who they should vote for and where they should send their kids to school, that had been sort of quietly, subtly, insidiously replaced with a different mission. And that mission was about ushering readers to the correct political conclusion. We each encountered this ideology in our own ways. Perhaps Nellie will tell stories about the kinds of reporting she was doing that ended up sort of not seeing the light of day. We each had our own moments, but the upshot of it was we both had gotten into journalism because we are chutzpadic people that like to pursue our curiosity. And the idea that you can get paid to go and talk to strangers and then report back to the public what you find is like an unbelievable thing. The idea that we could get paid for that, I think still astonishes us to this day. And, you know, I ended up leaving in the summer of 2020, in the aftermath of, you know, a very hot summer politically, and in the aftermath of this decision to publish an op ed by Senator Tom Cotton. And again, to make a long story short, I was sort of bumping into walls, drinking at 4pm telling Nellie that anything short of becoming the next Rupert Murdoch was not going to be enough for me and I needed to extract my vengeance.
- [04:32]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
And I thought, you should become a rabbi. I was suggesting that at that time, go study.
- [04:37]
Nellie Bowles
But they did hire you and they knew your background, they knew your views, they knew it was to the right of many of the journalists and the.
- [04:47]
Unnamed Speaker
I was the most right wing person at the New York Times, which is to say I'm like a Scoop Jackson Democrat.
- [04:52]
Nellie Bowles
So why did they hire you in the first place if they had a very specific agenda that they wanted to push?
- [04:58]
Unnamed Speaker
Because after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and everyone in this room will remember the needle that night. Everyone remembers the needle. You're all triggered when I say that word that told us that Hillary Clinton was going to win by 99.8% certainty, there was a brief moment of reflection, even at the New York Times, of how did we get this so wrong? How did we, the paper that's supposed to be the most important newspaper in the country, get the biggest political story of the 21st century so far, so unbelievably wrong? And I'll Be blunt. I was a diversity hire. I mean, I might not look like it, but I was intentionally brought in to bring in sort of heterodox, independent and gasp, conservative views to an opinion page that would not otherwise know where to look for those stories. And I did a damn good job of it. So the problem wasn't the pieces I was bringing in. And frankly, the problem wasn't even really at the top of the paper. There was cowardice at the top of the paper ultimately, but they wanted what I was doing. The problem were the colleagues around us. And that was very much. And I think this is a great place for Nelly to come in. Like, just tell the story, if you would, just about Kenosha. What happened when you went and reported on that story as a business journalist? Because I think it kind of summarizes the whole everything.
- [06:18]
Nellie Bowles
I just say, Nellie, you were a star reporter for the New York Times. You were like this kind of debutante that came from San Francisco.
- [06:28]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
It was going great. And then I met Bari Weiss.
- [06:32]
Unnamed Speaker
And I will say, when we got together, I said, this is going to be so bad for your career. And she looked at me, she was like, what are you talking about? Like nothing bad had ever happened to her. And then everything happened exactly as I said.
- [06:43]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Roast. No. Basically, in 2020, the realm of things that you could report on was starting to get tighter and tighter and kind of the rules around what was considered kosher to be curious about were getting tighter and tighter. And so when the riots were happening, I was a business reporter and I wanted to go to Kenosha to see the businesses that had been burned down and kind of report on the build back. And when I went there, what I realized was that actually the wealthy white neighborhood had not been burned down at all. Those businesses were fine. They had a business association that boarded everything up. And it was the poor minority business district that had a bunch of like cell phone shops and stuff that had been burned down. So I reported the story out and they were all totally underinsured and so couldn't really be rebuilt. And we were at the time being told that basically these, these riots were victimless, that everyone had insurance that that property destruction is not violence and, and shouldn't be thought of as such. And that was being promoted by one of the top reporters at the time. And anyways, when I came back with that story, I basically hit a wall with it where I was told it wouldn't be able to run until after the election. It was all of a sudden kind of this verboten topic to talk about. All of my stories before had sailed through. And then all of a sudden anything I wrote that was critical of the moment or that was documenting that moment, it became impossible. And then people were just being jerks about it and leaking my story list to New York magazine and making fun of me. And it was just, it was like a crazy like Stasi time. In all of media, the New York Times and our experience is not at all specific. It was the entire media ecosystem of New York went absolutely mad for a couple years.
- [08:17]
Unnamed Speaker
And I don't even think it's the story of the media. I think it's the story of just so many elite institutions in American life. It was like Harvard, you know, it was all of these places that we assumed hewed to a certain set of values, betrayed them and in some cases very publicly and in other cases more subtly. The reason I think that story is important though is I think a lot of Jews, especially that read the New York Times and see its bias against Israel and its blind spots to our community and our concerns. Imagine that there's at least my dad imagines this, that there's some like secret cabal meeting where they talk about these sorts of topics. But really a huge aspect to the way the bias itself plays out is just the things you're not allowed to be curious about. And a lot of times those are the things that are politically inconvenient.
- [09:06]
Nellie Bowles
So there, it's like if you want to control the narrative, I guess there are two main ways of doing that. One is to present stories in a certain specific ideological way. And the second is not to report on stories at all.
- [09:20]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Exactly. That's the key. It's that the facts that you read are probably accurate, but the things that reporters are allowed to be curious about and what is uncovered, that's where the kind of the bias comes in. And also when it comes to Israel and Jewish issues, the facts probably aren't even accurate in the story you're reading.
- [09:36]
Nellie Bowles
So would you say that, Would both of you say, is it fair to say that you felt canceled at the New York Times?
- [09:43]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I didn't feel it. And I think basically you self deported.
- [09:47]
Unnamed Speaker
You wrote your I self cancelled, very self cancelled, which is a really good way to go.
- [09:51]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
And then you started the substack and you started writing and it started getting subscribers. And so, and I was still at the Times thinking I'm going to white knuckle through this. This moment will pass. My bosses were really great and they were saying, we're so sorry this is happening. We don't know what to do, but we're going to figure it out. And the substack started growing and it was making salary, and then it was making twice your salary. And I was kind of like, this seems like fun. And so part of this is a story of like the institution was getting toxic and the moment was toxic, but also all of a sudden we had these tools to build something new that was exciting and positive and fun and like the future.
- [10:33]
Unnamed Speaker
And I think that's one of the great stories of this moment. Like if one of the tragedies, and I think one maybe that a lot of people in our community are understandably still mourning, which is the loss of all of these institutions and frankly, just more generally like cultural mores that we took for granted. That the positive story and the one that we try and really focus on, we never even think about the New York Times anymore. The positive story is the fact that this is a moment for builders. This is a moment for. And I think people in the Jewish community are incredibly adept at building because we've had to do it for our entire history. This is a moment for that. And neither of us are entrepreneurs. Neither of us imagined that we would do anything like this. And now we have a company and we have 55 people working for us, having never managed either of us, anyone in our entire lives. And I. I emphasize that only because. I emphasize that only because you, in your own ways, especially maybe the younger people, may not think of yourselves as being capable of starting something new. And like, we are middle aged moms that have a nine month old and a two and a half year old, and we did it knowing nothing about how to do it. And I really like to emphasize that because I think it's an important thing to be clear about with people that like, there's a sense of, like, who am I to do something? We'll just keep our head down. We'll just go along with this thing that we kind of know is bad, because could we start a new school? Could we start a new synagogue, could we start a new art museum? Could we start a new nonprofit? Could we start a new publishing house?
- [12:12]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
And.
- [12:12]
Unnamed Speaker
And the answer is yes to all of those things. We're just doing it in the area that we know how to do it in. But I think the broader message in American Jewish life right now is that we need all of those things to be built. And maybe some of the people that are gonna start those things are in this room right now.
- [12:31]
Nellie Bowles
Just before we move on to just if you could just tell us what is distinctive about the Free Press? What idea is it dedicated to and how is it distinctive? How does it differ from other media outlets?
- [12:45]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I think I'm going to butcher our slogan, but it's something like the fearlessness of the new world paired with the standards of the old world. So our first hire was a fact checker. It's the idea that we're going to report on things that the legacy media ignores or downplays, but we're going to bring still the legacy standards and the quality you would expect. Whereas I think in a lot of the wild world of Substack and various blogs, you won't find that pairing. So that's what we try to do.
- [13:18]
Unnamed Speaker
I think the other part of what makes us distinctive is we are unapologetic in our values. We believe in the American Project and the goodness of America and the goodness of the West. And everyone that works at the Free Press signs onto that as one of our values. And we think that that is non controversial and in fact, essential, because without a belief in the American Project and a sense of duty to defend it, there wouldn't be a free press at all. There wouldn't be a business at all. None of our lives would be possible. And I think that the fact that that feels maybe radical to certain people in this moment says so much more about the state of the rest of the press than it says about us. I would say the other thing that makes us really unique is the makeup of our newsroom. We took a straw poll two weeks before the election, and this is, I guarantee you, it is the only newsroom in the country like this. A third of people voted for Kamala, a third of people voted for Trump, and a third of people didn't vote. What does that mean? It means that a newsroom that is trying to reflect the world as it actually is reflects the country as it actually is. And we're incredibly proud of that. And I would say in a moment where everyone's getting more and more balkanized and in like these tiny little narrow niches where everyone agrees with them, we're trying to do something that didn't used to be radical in this country, which is showing that you can disagree with people and still like them, showing that you can actually hear the strongest perspective from someone you don't agree with, but come away more educated because you heard the strongest version of the argument.
- [14:53]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I was terrified when we did that poll. I thought it was going to be entirely RFK write ins. I was like, these freaks it's going to be. This is Maha. This is a Maha scene.
- [15:06]
Nellie Bowles
I want to ask you about turning to Nelly. When we spoke last week, I told you that I personally, as a rabbi, I never mentioned to people who have converted to Judaism that they converted to Judaism because that's the insistence of Jewish tradition that you never remind somebody that they weren't born Jewish. But you said, well, I write about it all the time and I have something to add. So I said, you know, the only distinction that a convert can't do, that a born Jew can do, is be a high priest or a king, neither of which you really want to do.
- [15:45]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
When I found out about the Kohanes, I was.
- [15:48]
Unnamed Speaker
She was disgusted that she married just a normal Israelite. When she said.
- [15:52]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I said, bear, do you have any of these? Any, you know, whatever? And Bear was like, no, I'm an Israelite.
- [15:58]
Nellie Bowles
I was like, anyway, Nellie, so since you insisted that I ask you about your conversion, you actually have written about it very eloquently. So could you just share a little bit of that story?
- [16:09]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Yeah. I kept a blog, chosen by Choice during my conversion journey. I think I wanted you to bring it up only because I think. I think it's really cool. Like, I am really proud of having converted, and I'm really. Thank you. And there's sort of a way in which it's like, I know it's out of respect to not bring it up and all that, but in American Jewish life, in non Orthodox American Jewish life, something like 80% of people marry non Jews. So if there is a desire for continuity, then there needs to be a conversation about conversion and about opening up Judaism to these families. And it's not even to argue that it should be an easier process or anything like that, or that it should be somehow very fast or anything. And I actually think having it be slow and hard is good. It's just that it should be talked about and, like, celebrate it as a conversation that it's an okay conversation to bring up. And then it should maybe be a little more transparent about how to do it and how it works. But anyways, I just always think it's really interesting to talk about and bring up. It kind of makes people a little uncomfortable, too, which I try at dinners to say things like, have you thought about converting your wife? And people look at me like I just said something really inappropriate, which is, I like to keep bringing it up.
- [17:31]
Unnamed Speaker
Nelly's business after the free press, if there ever will be one, she told me, is to become, like, an evangelical Jew. And I actually think it's a very good business idea. I mean, I will say, like, our entire orientation as parents is toward that. Like, everything we do is about. And they're very, very young, but everything is about how do we give them a positive experience of what it is to be a Jew. How do we make them proud to be Jews? How do we, you know, end the day with Shema? Begin it with mode. Like, in everything we do, we're thinking about it. And like, Judaism is not an easy thing to transfer. Like, the transmission of Judaism is very intentional and requires a lot of investment, like, of time, of money. I mean, that's a whole nother thing. We could talk about the. No, really, the idea.
- [18:26]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Special tuition. Yeah.
- [18:27]
Unnamed Speaker
The idea that Jewish day school costs. What it does in a community like. Like ours, where there's so much capital, I do believe is like one of the great scandals.
- [18:35]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Tuition.
- [18:37]
Unnamed Speaker
But I think that, wow, the moms.
- [18:40]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Here know the mom guys. It's out of control.
- [18:43]
Unnamed Speaker
But I think that, like, it's not a guarantee that your children are going to. Just like Judaism, it's not like oxygen. It's countercultural in very profound ways, and not just because we. We live in a world that is increasingly hostile toward us.
- [19:00]
Nellie Bowles
What do you mean? Give us a couple of examples of what?
- [19:02]
Unnamed Speaker
If you choose Judaism, you're not going to choose something that's hard on its own.
- [19:07]
Nellie Bowles
Give us one or two examples of what you mean by countercultural.
- [19:12]
Unnamed Speaker
Judaism resists, I would say, political extremes. At its best, Judaism is based on a kind of like, dialectical, ongoing questioning and conversation. In that way, I think it is very countercultural in this moment. I think Judaism is based. I mean, a belief in chosenness feels very countercultural, whatever that means. A belief both in the supreme importance and dignity of the individual, but also in a kind of communitarianism is very countercultural. The idea that you don't need to be born a Jew, that Judaism is not a race or an ethnicity, it is a peoplehood that is a category that in its very essence is countercultural in this moment. And I think at its best, Judaism resists a lot of the idolatry, if I can say that, of worshiping, whether it's prestige or money or any other thing that is very normalized in this moment. And I think that a lot of that's lost. You know, people think that Judaism is kind of like whatever they want it to be. Like, it's Judaism is just tikkun olam or it's just social justice. Those things are great, but that's just one piece of what Judaism is. And I do think that if looked at in a whole way, Judaism can really offer the most effective, wise, profound tools for how to be in a moment where, you know, all of those other things are happening.
- [20:50]
Nellie Bowles
So are we doing a good job in transmitting that to younger generations? And what should we be doing that we're not doing?
- [20:58]
Unnamed Speaker
This is just me. And maybe this is just a, you know, I'm 41. This might just be the way what was happening in college, et cetera, when I was growing up. But I think that there was an attempt, a sincere and well intentioned attempt on the part of a lot of Jewish leaders to make Judaism just progressive politics with a little bit of Hebrew slapped onto it, or to make Judaism just like, easy for people. As if that was the thing that was going to work and attract young people. And it's like, why would I choose a sin? Like, if I can go to Burning man and it's like, amazing and this spiritual experience, why would I choose, like Judaism over that? Or if I can go to a.
- [21:41]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Climate change Bear has never been to.
- [21:43]
Unnamed Speaker
Burning man, but she has and I know she loved it. I'm like the straightest person, though. I've never done a drug. But my point is only like, there's better versions of that. There's better versions of environmental justice, there's better versions of pro choice, there's better versions of Burning Man. There's better versions of all of that stuff. And if Judaism is just a watered down version of a thing that already exists in the world, why is that ever going to attract people? How do we attract people? It's very counterintuitive. It's to be more authentically Jewish. That's actually, to me, the secret. Because that is like, that's the thing that has lasted for thousands of years. And I find, and this is like one of the like green shoots of this moment, that when people encounter that thing, young people, they are profoundly drawn to it. And we know more and more people that are coming back to Jewish life right now and they're coming back to.
- [22:46]
Nellie Bowles
As a result of Jewish life.
- [22:49]
Unnamed Speaker
Nell, do you think it's because of October 7th or a bigger thing than that?
- [22:53]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I think it's both. I think October 7th for sure. But I think also you see it in the, like, the appeal of Catholicism right now to the young people. There's a, there's a return to religion as a practice, not like spiritual. Like, I think the era of like, spirituality and like, I'm I'm spiritual, but not religious. Now more and more young people are religious, less spiritual. But. But I think October 7th is what tip for a lot of our friends.
- [23:20]
Unnamed Speaker
Yeah, for a lot of our friends. But I think also having kids and like my dad always says this, he's like, we've got a great program. Like Judaism is a great way to mark time and to have a meaning in your family and to structure your family life. And, you know, I just find that that is very, very, very true. And the deeper we get into Judaism and Jewish community, the more into it I would say that we are.
- [23:53]
Nellie Bowles
I want to ask you about some of the challenges in the American Jewish community. Barry, you grew up in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, and I heard you speak very eloquently about the pain that you experienced. And both of you and Nellie, you're a graduate of Columbia University, and Barry also, so kind of you have these two focal points over the last, call it seven years or so that really affected the American Jewish community and our relationship with non Jewish community. What's happening with respect to American society and American Jews. The challenges that the American Jewish is facing now are, I think, unprecedented, at least since the end of World War II. Do you think it's more dramatic, it's more intense? That anti Jewish animosities are deeper than they were, say 10, 20 years ago? Or is it just our sensitivity to it?
- [24:51]
Unnamed Speaker
I think the fact that we feel that it's unprecedented tells us that we were living in a bubble. The post war sort of holiday from history moment. That holiday is over. It was over before October 7th, but anyone that still believed that it wasn't over has now been disabused of that reality. And I think what's happening is that we are returning to the mean of Jewish history in a way. And we are having to have the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest taste of what our ancestors took as normal. There's some comfort in that, in that when you look at the sweep of Jewish history, what we're experiencing isn't so bad. I think we literally have a Jewish kids book that gets called It Could Always be Worse. And I think when Nellie opened that, she was like, what have I gotten myself into?
- [25:40]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I was reading it and I was like, oh, wow. It's just about how it could always be worse, right?
- [25:44]
Unnamed Speaker
It's like the guy has a coat and then it becomes a vest. And then in the end it's like a single button and then he loses the button. And that's the end of the book.
- [25:51]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
And then the book is over.
- [25:52]
Unnamed Speaker
It's a very Jewish story. I say that only because it's always important to laugh about the terrible state of things, but also because it could always be worse. I think what's also happening, and this is something that has been, I would say, much, much more painful for my parents generation than for me, although it's been very painful for me too, was I was truly raised with this idea that America was. And I still believe this, okay, but like immune to anti Semitism. And when things happened, even tree of life, by the way. But when like, you know, kids told me, like pick up pennies or where's your, you know, like things that happen to kids. My. The reaction of my parents was like, they should be so embarrassed. Do they not know what country this is? Like, that is antithetical to what it is to be American. And I grew up in that myth like it was almost like a two faith household in the sense that it was completely Jewish and completely American. And it was like a belief in Americanism and a belief in, you know, the. We grew up with all of it like that Benjamin Franklin wanted the image on the Great Seal to be Moses crossing the sea and the letter from George Washington to the congregation in Newport. And like that was all as much of a part of our family's ethos as like the Haggadah and the parsha of the week. And I think that one of the adjustments of this moment is to understand that America's only exceptional if our leaders and if our culture continues to believe in those ideals. And that any culture, any country, any administration is only human beings making a choice. And I think that there has been a profound sense of frankly loss of like we used to take that for granted. We can no longer take that for granted. Okay, that's our new reality. And what are we going to do to claw it back? What are we going to do to rebuild those guardrails? How can we each do it in our own way? And I think that's. I'll speak for me and Nellie, that that's a thing that we are talking about constantly in our life, in our professional life and in our personal life.
- [28:11]
Nellie Bowles
When you were at Columbia, and I say Columbia because it's a mile from the synagogue and it's in New York City. It could be symbolic or representative of a lot of elite higher educational institutions. October 7, in a sense, didn't necessarily create this kind of new hostility. It uncovered. It gave license to this hostility. When you were there, did you see any of that did you sense any of that? Did you consider that to be a barometer of the health of the United States?
- [28:45]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
It's funny because I was, I think, in the water of it, but kind of blind to it. So I know I didn't see it. But Bear was also there and had a really different experience. So I know it was there. I'm not going to pretend it wasn't. But I wasn't so involved in politics, to be honest. Bear says this the most eloquently. I cannot add anything that's as good as what, how she'll know. The only thing I'd add is that I find it sometimes frustrating. The conversation, whenever it comes to anti Semitism, right now becomes kind of a debate between whether it's worse on the right or worse on the left. Like, the conversation gets bogged down into that dichotomy, just like, which is it this or is it this? Is it this or this? And it's sort of like it doesn't matter. Like it's. The point is it's bad on both sides right now. Bad things are happening certainly on the right, certainly on Twitter, but also the left wing. Anti Semitism matters enormously. And like your kid is probably more likely to encounter it when they're trying to get a job at a gallery, which is more likely than they're trying to move to Louisiana and work in evangelical Christian spaces. And yeah, I think the conversation, it's frustrating that that's where it goes instead of just like a more productive place sometimes.
- [29:59]
Nellie Bowles
I want to just expand on what you just mentioned, both of you, about antisemitism and anti Zionism. What in your view is the nexus between the two? Is anti Zionism almost always or always by definition antisemitism? And where is it all coming from? It does seem much more intense as a result of October 7th. This is a thing that I keep thinking about all the time. You know, the worst day in the history of the Jewish people since the Holocaust. The most people murdered on one day and within 48 hours there were protests around the world against the Jews. Where did that come from? Was that pre existing? Is this animosity against Israel really, does it harbor and betray an animosity towards Jews, part of that age old, centuries old hostility against our people? Or is there something new here?
- [30:58]
Unnamed Speaker
It came, well, this new version of it, the anti Zionism came from the Soviet. It was like the Soviets won a posthumous victory. People don't think of it that way, but when a young 19 year old at Columbia right now and There are many of them, I'm sure, shouts that Zionism is racism. Does she know that she is shouting the slogan of the evil empire that was destroyed long ago? Of course not, but that's what happened. And I write about this in my book. But to make a very long story short, a set of ideas that insisted that truth was relative, that morality was relative, that you couldn't make a judgment and say that one culture was better than another culture, and that to do so was racist, that you couldn't really know truth at all, and that everything was sort of based on your lived experience. This set of viewpoints, whether you call it post colonialism, post structuralism, post nationalism, there's a lot of posts that stew of ideas that at one time, in the late 1960s, let's say, I think we could trace it all the way back to then, seem like it was just a feature of a few weird outposts at places like Columbia and Harvard and Yale. It's like in the way that the coronavirus escaped the lab in Wuhan, those extraordinarily toxic, extraordinarily lethal ideas not just came to subsume the entire university structure, pretty much. It came to subsume the culture. And everything is sort of downstream of that. And so when you go and you ask the average young person that's screaming with a keffiyeh, they don't think they're doing it because they hate Jews. If they're shouting from the river to the sea, they have no idea which river and what sea they are doing it because it has become successfully a plank of a kind of politically progressive worldview in which there's any number of points of the orthodoxy. And being opposed to Israel is just one of those things. So, like, I want to be very clear about how successful this has become when people try and make a distinction between anti Zionism and anti Semitism. Okay, for like the 10 anarchists that want to get rid of nation states that live in Brooklyn, fine. That's your exception to the rule. And if so, I would ask you, like, why are you starting with Israel? Like, maybe start with China, India, Pakistan. It's never okay, but fine. That would be like your one intellectually honest out. But I would say that any sense that there was a distinction between those two things I think is absolutely foolish. I think any Jews that spend any time trying to make Talmudic distinctions between those two things have their heads up their ass. Bluntly, we're not in the synagogue itself, so I can say that. But I would just say, like, wake up when people Say, no Zionists allowed. They mean Jews. They mean Jews. They just mean Jews that are honorable and proud enough to say what pretty much every Jew believes, which is, of course, we believe in the right to our political sovereignty, like we believe in that for every other people, period. End of story. And I mean, we've heard, we've. Nelly and I have been at all kinds of dinner party conversations where people have all these different strategies, right? We were at one where someone suggested we should just get rid of the word Zionist. Like, that'll do it, you know, because we gotta get rid of the word because Israel exists. And Zionism was the desire to return to the land of Israel, and it exists so we can let go of it. It's like they're gonna come up with another word. They're gonna come up with another word. And I just feel that the most fundamental and important thing to do in this moment is to be absolutely unashamed and proud about who we are, about our Judaism, about our Zionism, and make absolutely no apology for either of those things. And anyone that wants to suggest that that means that we agree with everything the Netanyahu government does, or it's as absurd as saying, I'm proud to be an American, that means I agree with everything the Trump administration does. Are you insane? So I just feel that it needs to be without caveat, just pride, courage, modeling that for each other, modeling that for our kids. Like, to me, that is the absolute table stakes for any attempt at trying to not just roll back the anti Semitism that's here, but transmission. Like, if the answer of, like, why be Jewish is, you know, to fight the people that hate us, or if the answer to why be Jewish is, you know, any of these sort of defensive answers in the negative, that's not going to work. It's got to come from a much more positive and a place of pride. And I know, ami, that that's what you're doing all of the time. All the time at Stephen Wise.
- [36:08]
Nellie Bowles
All the time. I heard you, Nelly. I think you mentioned you were worried about the glorification of violence that has increased in American society. And these slogans, globalize the Intifada and glory to our martyrs.
- [36:27]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Oh, God. Yeah. Who isn't worried about that?
- [36:30]
Nellie Bowles
Could you elaborate on that? What exactly you mean by that?
- [36:33]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Yeah, I mean, I think we're all seeing it. You have students at American universities chanting, glory to our martyrs. It's shocking. Like, it's beyond imagination. I have friends who are basically defending the United Healthcare assassination. Not just basically. I Mean, I think I definitely have a friend who's a fan of it. There has just been such a shift in the Overton window with what's acceptable. And for me, I feel like there's an air of possibility now, and I mean possibility of danger that I've never felt before. And I definitely feel it now. I mean, like, we moved into a doorman building because we were getting a little scared. Being in a cottage on the street in la, and that felt weird and not good. But then I realized, like, wow, if someone did something like, you look at the response to United Healthcare killing, and it's like, oh, that would be the response.
- [37:34]
Nellie Bowles
Where do you think that's coming from? What is it?
- [37:38]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Because humans are animals. Like, I don't know, our base instincts are bad and they have to be beaten into some.
- [37:43]
Nellie Bowles
But is that new? I mean, we always had those base instincts.
- [37:49]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I think the guardrails are cracking. I was really excited about Elon Musk buying Twitter. And there was a lot in the old regime that I really, really didn't like. A lot of censoriousness that really scared me, too. But I think I was a little bit wrong about being excited about that. Because seeing now the death threats, the threats of violence, the way in which that's now allowed to explode, it is really scary. And I think it is new. And I think that, yeah, these have always been part of human nature, but the ability to distribute those threats and distribute the glee, let's say, in the United Healthcare killing, the ability to distribute that glee is new and really scary. And I think we don't know what that's going to look like as it gets bigger. We don't know what that's going to look like as you layer on AI and you all of a sudden have it in more and more of your life.
- [38:46]
Unnamed Speaker
But this is always why identity politics, whether it came from the right or the left, was so dangerous. Because any politics, any worldview that says some people are more deserving fundamentally of privilege but or of life than other people is a politics that will end in violence against certain groups. And that is a politics that is antithetical to what America at its best is all about. And I think you see that taking hold in so many places. Why is violence against Jews on college campuses basically kind of permissible where it would never be against any other group? It's very simple. It's because in classrooms and in the culture on campus, there is a view that Jews are just white people that believe and support a white colonialist, violent outpost in the Middle East? Ergo, why should they. Why should we even think of them in the same category as black people or Hispanic people or gay people? That's literally the logic. And so if you just expand that outward, it becomes somehow permissible or even heroic to go and murder someone that's the CEO of a healthcare company. And I think that we really cannot overstate how significant. I mean, the positive way of spinning this is that ideas really matter, and the ideas that you encounter at those most formative years of your life truly make a difference. Right now, we're seeing that in the negative way, and it's up to us over the course of the rest of our lives to make sure that it comes out in the positive direction.
- [40:26]
Nellie Bowles
So my last question to both of you, to finish on a more positive note, what do we have to look forward to in America in the next five and 10 years and in the Jewish community, what optimistic thoughts do you have for us?
- [40:43]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I think actually American Jewish life is going to get amazing in this because I think that there's going to be a lot of people who are sending their kids now to. Sorry, I'm thinking in terms of kids in schools, but there's going to be a lot of people who are sending their kids now to Dalton who start to rethink that. And people.
- [41:01]
Unnamed Speaker
No offense to anyone that goes to.
- [41:02]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
That school in this room, offense to every Dalton.
- [41:05]
Nellie Bowles
We have a lot of those kind of people.
- [41:07]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I'm looking at each other idea what.
- [41:08]
Unnamed Speaker
Dalton is, and neither do I. Just know it's a fancy one.
- [41:11]
Nellie Bowles
They're new. They came from California. What do they know?
- [41:14]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I've seen Gossip Girl, but. But no, and it's. It's the positivity of. Of our friends getting more into Jewish life. And it's the.
- [41:25]
Unnamed Speaker
I mean, positive things. There's so many. How can you be a Jew in 2025 and not be an optimist? I mean, for real, we are alive during the third Jewish Commonwealth. We are alive during the Jewish return to political sovereignty in the land of Israel. We can get on a plane right now, Houthis aside, and go to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv right now. That's unbelievable. That's in our lives. So I think, like, that is, like, baseline. We should be optimistic. The second thing is that we are a people that has, like, by every law of history, should have been completely erased from the world probably, like, 1900 years ago. And yet we are here. I view that as something like a miracle, if not a miracle. And so that is when that is your frame for things, so many other things feel possible. And I would just encourage everyone, maybe just take a day and think that way a little bit, because there's so many things to feel negative about. And when you get into that headspace, the idea of. To go back to the beginning of this conversation, ami, of starting new things, of building new worlds, of, you know, bringing lots of Jewish kids into this world right now, which a lot of people we know are nervous about, that all of those things just become much more possible. America's celebrating its 250th next year, as I'm sure everyone here knows. And we're thinking a lot about coverage for that. And also just the youngness of both America and Israel. There's so many things to be built. I feel very worried about many things happening in this administration, but I feel like the possibility of normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia could happen in the next few months of our lives. That's incredible that that could be happening. And I think that's another thing to be excited for. I feel maybe more optimistic than I realized I did. I don't know if that's the answer you were looking for.
- [43:25]
Nellie Bowles
That's a good way to end. The Light of Freedom Award. Barry Weiss, Nellie Bowles, welcome to New York. Welcome to the synagogue.