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- [00:06]
A
Hey everybody. Happy Summer. This is just a reminder that like most summers, this show's gonna move to one episode a week for much of July, a little bit of August, so do not go anywhere. This feed will be just as active, or maybe even more active I bet than many podcasts this time of year. We'll have new episodes every Tuesday with the occasional Friday summer episode. We will see you and listen with you quite a bit over the next few weeks. Thank you. Something is happening in the Democratic Party and before we look at what it means, I want to understand what it is over the past few weeks, candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, the dsa, have won a series of primary elections that, taken together, represent something much more significant than a fluke. In late June, three candidates endorsed by New York City Democratic Socialist Mayor Zoran Mamdani were won congressional primaries in deep blue House districts. Claire Valdez, a DSA aligned state assemblymember, won an open seat in the 7th district. Brad Lander, the progressive City Comptroller, defeated incumbent Dan Goldman in the 10th. And in the biggest upset, Darieliza Avila Chevalier, a 32 year old community organizer who supports abolishing prisons, police and deportations, unseated a four term congressman who was also the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. One week later, 29 year old Mehlat Quiros, another DSA backed candidate, won a primary against a 30 year congressional veteran. Those are just the House races. The DSA also prevailed in the Washington D.C. mayoral primary along with the Democratic Socialist advancing to the runoff in Los Angeles. What is driving this? As I see it, there's a few big forces at work. The first is deep anti establishment energy. Every one of these candidates ran against the Democratic leadership as much as they ran against their individual opponents. The second major factor, as I see it, is economic frustration and a leftward pull on economic issues. Positive views of capitalism or markets among Democrats have plunged in the last few years and half of the party now says they view socialism as favorably. Polls suggest that when voters say they like socialism, what they mean is not so much Stalinism and more universal health care and an antagonistic relationship to corporations, but the third force. And the one that might be the most revealing, the most combustible, and in some cases the most difficult to talk about is Israel and Gaza. In race after race, a candidate's position on Israel's military campaign in Gaza has become a major litmus test in the Lander Goldman race. Both candidates are Jewish, but Lander blasted Goldman for voting against legislation to block military aid to Israel and for taking money from pro Israel lobby groups. Goldman refused to call Israel's campaign a genocide. Lander did, and Goldman lost. Chevalier attacked her opponent for refusing to say the word genocide as well. And in Colorado, Quiros made opposition to the war a centerpiece of her campaign. One new pro Palestinian super pac, American Priorities, has backed eight winning primary candidates this cycle, all of whom have condemned the war in Gaza. The question of Israel and Gaza is not staying put inside the primary process. It is unfortunately spilling over into American life. In New York, swastikas have been spray painted on synagogues, Jewish community centers and homes. When the Heim sisters, three Jewish musicians, sat courtside with Taylor Swift at Game 4 of the NBA Finals, they faced a surge of anti Semitic Semitic hate online. In San Francisco last week, California State Senator Scott Wiener, who is gay and Jewish and currently running to replace Nancy Pelosi in Congress, was surrounded and verbally attacked at the city's Trans March for his views on Israel, despite the fact that he has called the events in Gaza a genocide. Now, it would be absurd to suggest that any opposition to the Israeli government's military campaign in Gaza is the equivalent of antisemitism. I am definitely not saying that. Like the majority of Democratic voters, I am outraged by the scale of civilian death and suffering in Gaza. But it would also be oblivious to ignore the fact that opposition to Israel's government is rising alongside antisemitism on the right and on the left. Now, I've just put a lot on the table here. Number one, the rise of the DSA and the progressive left in some key elections. Number two, the centrality of Gaza to those elections and number three, a coincident rise in antisemitism. To guide us through all this, I've asked Peter Beinart back onto the show. Peter is the author of several books, including Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza. He's also the author of the Beinart Notebook on Substack and a professor at the City University of New York. He's someone who has long argued that the American Jewish establishment's unwillingness to criticize Israel has been a moral failure. Today we talk about how the genocide question has become a defining litmus test in Democratic primaries, what the left owes to the distinction between anti Zionism and and antisemitism, and whether the Democratic Party can hold two truths at once. Number one, that the war in Gaza has become a moral catastrophe and number two, that something ugly is growing in some of the spaces where this catastrophe is being discussed. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. This episode is brought to you by SAP Waiting. It's one thing mid sized businesses cannot afford to do. When your biggest ideas are ready to launch, you need technology that's ready too. SAP Grow comes preconfigured to your industry standards. With AI embedded at its core, you can hit the ground running. Bring it with SAP Grow aicloud ERP for any size business. Peter Beinart, welcome back to the show.
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B
Thanks.
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A
My first question for you is pretty straightforward but also quite weighty. How would you describe the role that Gaza has played in the Democratic primary elections in the last few weeks?
- [07:06]
B
I think Gaza has played a quite significant role. It was one of the striking things about the candidates who have won. The candidates kind of running from the left, many of them associated with the DSA in, in New York, in Philadelphia, in Colorado. These are all House races. But I also think in the Michigan Senate race is that the candidates who are running on the left have a very, very deep concern about Gaza. It's something they talk about a lot, it's something they care about a lot. And I think it's part of what is defining them in voters minds as people who are authentic and people who have courage and, and people who kind of have a moral vision that's appealing to progressive Democrats.
- [07:59]
A
And why, going a little bit deeper, do you think Gaza has come to play such a significant role in the self identity of this generation of the new left?
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B
So I think the first thing that one should start with is just how utterly horrifying what Israel and America have done in Gaza has been. I think there's a tendency sometimes to kind of skip that over. I mean what Israel has done in Gaza may be the great, you know, has been now described as the genocide by the world's leading human rights organizations, by Israel's leading human rights organizations, by the United nations. In the 1990s, the United States considered very seriously intervening militarily. We did intervene militarily to prevent, try to fight against the genocide in Yugoslavia. We are sending weapons to the Ukrainians to respond to something that Russia is doing that probably doesn't even meet that threshold or genocide. Here we have spent $20 billion to arm a genocide. So this is something that I think before one gets into the larger kind of questions of why Israel has a particular status, simply the fact that the United states has spent $20 billion to basically fund something that is widely understood, the International association of Genocide Scholars has called it a genocide is something that I think on its face is astonishing and deeply horrifying and should be right. And so I think we kind of need to start there, especially because social media has meant that this particular genocide compared much more than, let's say, Bosnia or Rwanda or Cambodia, let alone the Nazi Holocaust, is much more available to people. We see it right. So I think that's part of it. The second thing I would say is that I think Gaza has become kind of a manifestation of the way progressives see of two things. Progressives see first is that we are entering a world of. We are entering a world of extraordinary brutality and profound racism of a kind of really crude sort on the right and in the kind of Democratic Party establishment. What you see is an unwillingness to actually really resist that it was a Democratic president who enabled this genocide to take place. And I think the fact that the Biden administration, for all its protestations about international law, basically armed this genocide is representative of a larger sense that the Democratic Party and its leaders are not actually willing to fight seriously hard enough against the kind of racism and brutality of this moment.
- [10:39]
A
Peter, do you see a connection between the issue of Gaza and the other issues that populate the identity of the new left? It's one thing to say, as I think you have said, that there's a moral shock looking at the death counts coming out of Gaza and the images coming out of Gaza. It's another thing for that event in Israel to act as in many cases a kind of litmus test, as it has in many of the Democratic primaries. And so I wonder where you see and how you see the war in Gaza sort of clicking into the rest of the progressive left's identity. It's their case against corporate power, their case which in many cases I take as one about power and powerlessness. So maybe just talk a little bit about the role that you think it plays within that sort of that portfolio of issues that the left talks about. Hardly.
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B
I think what progressives have noticed is that politicians who support Israel unconditionally and take money from aipac, even if they are kind of conventionally described as liberals, tend to not be people who actually really fight hard against the kind of American political and economic system. You know, one of the things you notice in a lot of these campaigns is that when AIPAC or other pro Israel organizations go in against a progressive candidate, other corporate interests, whether it's crypto or others, basically go in as well, because people who. There tends to be an overlap between one's view about Israel and how radical one's critique of the American kind of economic system is. And So I think that's one of the things that people have noticed that basically this serves to some degree as a kind of proxy for how much you're kind of going to be a kind of go along, get along Democrat, or whether you going to be someone more like AOC and Zoran Mamdani, who basically has a very serious structural critique of the way in which business is done in Washington and the way in which American capitalism works. So I think that's part of the reason that the issue matters so much, but it also intersects. And I think the analogy here that's interesting to think about would be the role of the anti apartheid movement in the 1980s in American politics, where for a period of time it was a significant force, but it didn't meet the same kind of resistance that this movement for Palestinian freedom did. And that debate in some ways about South Africa in the 80s was during the Reagan era, 20 years after the voting and civil rights acts, a kind of proxy for debates about race in America in the 1980s. And I think coming in the wake of The George Floyd 1619 moment, this debate about Israel and its settler colonial project, and that's a controversial word to use kind of in American politics, but it's not really a controversial word to use among academics who study Israel, Palestine. Question of how you think about that settler colonial project and what it says about how you think about America's settler colonial project, I think is also a kind of connection that people make. One of the things that Dariela Chevalier, who just won the congressional seat, the Democratic nomination in a district in northern Manhattan, mentioned was that she went and spent two months in the west bank and she reflected on the way in which she saw parallels between the use and abuse of state power and the way it was racialized there and what she had seen in New York.
- [14:09]
A
Yeah. To pull back the curtain a little bit on my own thought process about doing episodes on Gaza and Israel, I find it, I think, that the audience of this podcast to me, seems to be, I don't know if moderate is the right word, but somewhat down the middle on this issue. I'll interview Israelis who are critical of Hamas, and I'll be accused of apologizing for the Israeli genocide. I will interview people who are critical of Israel's military effort and am accused of apologizing for the folks in Hamas. And so I want to make sure that I represent a range of opinions in my questions to you. And I think there is a debate right now about what words to use. And there's Also a debate about what policies to pass. And those two discussions are related but distinct. And I want your thoughts on both the words that we should use and the policies that those words should lead us toward. So let's start with this word, genocide. I want you to imagine that you are talking to a liberal Jewish who holds the following opinions. October 7th was a vile crime and the beginning of a new kind of war between Israel and Hamas. Israel has killed an egregious number of civilians and children in its counterattacks, but this is a war. And the United States killed an egregious number of Japanese civilians in its firebombing of Tokyo. And the Allies killed an unreasonable number of civilians in its firebombing of Dresden. And I cannot, in being this person, this person cannot think of it quite as a genocide like the Holocaust or even Ukraine war, because there was a clear act of aggression on the part of the state of Gaza. And so what we're describing here is happening in the context of a war which distinguishes it from something like the Holocaust where the Jews did not themselves elect a state that attacked Berlin. To someone who has those sort of, I guess you would call them liberal Zionist opinions. Why is this a genocide and why is it important that we use that word?
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B
So I'd say a couple things. The first is that genocides usually take place in the case of war
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A
and
- [16:26]
B
oftentimes they take place against one side in that war. So in Rwanda, for instance. Right. The genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda was taking place at the very time that the Tutsi led Rwandan Patriotic Front was leading a rebellion against this, against the government and in fact ultimately won and is the government now? So there's nothing about, in fact, you know, in the form of Yugoslavia, there was a genocide against Bosniaks at the very time that the Bosniaks were waging a war of independence against the Serb led Yugoslav federation. So that would not be unusual on the question of genocide. I would simply say to that person. And again, these are the conversations I have constantly because these are many of the people around with whom I live. I would say if someone told you that there was something going on in Paraguay and Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the United nations, the International association of Genocide Scholars and the Human Rights Organization in Paraguay had all said it was a genocide, would you think? And the government of Paraguay and its supporters around the world vehemently said it was not, who would you be likely to believe, Right. Under any other circumstances? I think with this weight of scholarly and human rights consensus, I think People would accept that it was a genocide. On the question of the analogy between Japan or Germany, I think the critical thing to remember is that Gaza is not a state. It is not the equivalent of the United States being attacked by Mexico. Gaza is the territory of. Under Israeli occupation, Israel occupied Gaza starting in 1967. Although it removed its settlers and soldiers in 2005, it never ended the occupation. It controlled Gaza by air, land, and sea. It controlled the population registry. It's like saying you remove the prison guards from a prison, but you have people around the perimeter determining everything, who and what can go in and out. And Gaza is also a territory composed overwhelmingly of refugees, the families of refugees expelled from Israel in 1948. So to me, the much better analogy would be, imagine it's the 19th century in the United States. You have Native Americans pushed off their land into smaller and smaller enclaves that are basically, essentially like concentration camps. Not death camps, but concentration camps. And they break out and they commit a terrible massacre. And this did happen throughout the 19th century United States. Right? And then you respond to that by essentially doubling down with even more catastrophic force and taking even more of the land and forcing them even into an even smaller area, which is what Israel's done, because Israel's now basically taken 60% of Gaza and basically, basically not allowing virtually any Palestinians to live there in the area that was already overwhelmingly crowded because of its refugee population. I think that is the. That puts the question even before we get to the question of proportionality and whether under international law, you have the right to destroy apartment buildings because you think there's fighters there, even before you get to any of that. I think it suggests that the entire moral and legal prison that we should look at, this is very different than the one we would apply if you were attacked by a sovereign state.
- [19:38]
A
And what is the policy that you think this moral argument leads to? What should the United States do? What laws should its Congress pass?
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B
Well, in some ways, the good news is the US doesn't actually have to pass many new laws. We have a law called the Leahy Law, which has been in place for quite a long time, but never applied to Israel, which says that we are not allowed to sell weapons to units of foreign militaries that have committed grave human rights abuses. We just need to implement the Levy Law as it relates to Israel. And I think it would make it virtually impossible for us to either give military aid or to sell weapons to Israel. I also think that we should follow. Follow on our stated commitment, or at least the Biden administration stated commitment to the belief in international law. We supported the International Criminal Court when it tried, when it prosecuted Vladimir Putin over Ukraine. We support the prosecutions that it is, that it is, that it is brought in the case of Israel and also of Hamas leaders. And we shouldn't give Israel international impunity under international law. I think those would be the policies that I would promote.
- [20:43]
A
We're talking about a moral case to motivate certain policy changes. And it's interesting because the war in Gaza and the war in Iran, as I see it, are fracturing both parties ahead of the midterms. On top of everything that we've said about the Democratic Party, you have the Republican Party, where isolationists like J.D. vance are trying to negotiate an exit from the war. There are hawks who are fiercely critical of Trump's memorandum. Prices are rising. The president's approval rating has hit a record low. The war in Gaza clearly is being directed by Netanyahu. But the individual most responsible for persuading Trump to enter the war against Iran is also, without question, objectively, Benjamin Netanyahu. And so I think that alongside a moral argument that Israel has crossed a line in Gaza, there also seems to me to be an emerging practical argument against tethering our foreign policy to Israel's interests. And I wonder if you thought about that, because most of this conversation, and indeed the conversation that, that we've had so far, has been contained to the moral sphere, but there also is this practical, almost amoral case for distancing ourselves from Israel at the moment. Do you see that as, well, playing a role either within the. Well, specifically, I should say, within the Democratic Party?
- [22:01]
B
Yeah. I mean, I think this is part of the reason that the politics of Israel are changing so dramatically, because the, the argument that the critics of Israel are making is not only a moral argument. It's also an argument that in some ways is very appealing to people who voted for Donald Trump. Right. It also has elements of an America first argument. I mean, if you look, if you listen to Abdul El Sayad, who's running for the Democratic nomination in Michigan, what he says again and again and again is, why are we sending our money there to kill kids when we should be investing in kids in Michigan. Right. That's a message that Tucker Carlson would be, you know, would be shaking his head and agreeing with. And it's, it's, it's a view that has actually really widespread support. I mean, and so in a way, I think the reason this issue has bipartisan appeal, even though the worldviews of progressives and conservatives may be quite different is precisely because actually there. There's not a lot of support on the right for foreign aid of any sort. Right. And so it's pretty easy to say. And people on the right also see what's being done to people in Gaza. And so it's pretty easy to make the case to them. This is not a good use of US Money that you should either give the money back to Americans to put in their pockets, or you should invest it on roads and healthcare and housing
- [23:21]
A
and all that we've talked about. Where we can see this, the beginning of a shift against Israel. It exists at the level of voters. It exists at the level of politicians. But I've seen you point out that the Democratic Party has this historical tendency sometimes of electing doves who surround themselves with hawks. So I think the examples that you use from the last 50 to 60 years of American history were Jimmy Carter runs as a dove and he makes his. I think it was national Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, was it NSA? Yeah. And then you have Barack Obama 2008 in the primaries. In many cases, you can say that one of the things that most distinguish him from Hillary Clinton was his position against the Iraq war that she had voted for. He becomes president, who becomes his secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. And one could argue that the foreign policy class around Barack Obama was more hawkish than the rhetoric that he used during the primaries. And so it raises this important question of, okay, well, let's say that you have the voters and the politicians, the Democratic Party, maybe also the Republican Party, beginning to move against Israel, shift against Israel in the ways that you've described. But if the foreign policy class does not shift, then policies might not shift. And so I wonder what you see in terms of the foreign policy class's evolution on Israel. Is there an evolution, or are they sort of hanging on a little bit more, just sort of a antebellum anti, you know, October 7th frame of mind than the rest of the country.
- [24:54]
B
No, there is some shift in the foreign policy class. So, for instance, Jake Sullivan, right, who was Biden's national security adviser, who basically was a critical person as Biden gave Israel essentially unconditional military support during. During Israel's assault on Gaza, has now said that he thinks military aid should be conditioned. I mean, one might say, well, you know, it's a little late, but. But it's striking that he has now moved towards that view. I think there's. If a Democrat gets elected, there will be a really fascinating struggle over whether the kinds of people who were in the Clinton, Obama and Biden administration who generally came of age in an environment in which unconditional US Support for Israel was kind of uncontested, whether those people return to these key jobs or whether you have people who are more kind of outsiders who instead get them. And one of the things that's been interesting, Chris Van Hollen himself, who could be very likely, I think a candidate to be secretary of state who's been one of the most critical senators on Israel, actually wrote in a column in the New York Times, basically said the people who were intimately involved in Gaza policy should not actually get jobs in the next administration. The last time we kind of had this kind of thing play out, I think was after Vietnam, where you had a series of Democratic foreign policy luminaries like McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow and Robert McNair who kind of became outcasts in the party. And I think we are that's possible. It could happen again.
- [26:31]
A
This episode is brought to you by Lincoln Too many summer plans end in maybe next year. The Lincoln Summer sales event is on now, making this the time to go watch the sunrise through the available panoramic Vista roof in the Lincoln Navigator picnic from the available Lincoln Split gate, then go somewhere new guided by the available 48 inch panoramic display guide. Visit your Lincoln retailer today or learn more@lincoln.com I want to turn the page to the second chapter of this conversation, which is about the coinciding rise of not just anti Israel politics, but what I think I would objectively call antisemitism. I have traditionally associated anti Semitism with the right. Most Jews I have known most Jews, I think by census and poll fact, are liberal Democrats. But the rise of anti Israel sentiment has coincided with, and I want to be clear, has coincided with not been caused by necessarily, but coincided with a surge of anti Semitism. And I wonder if you think there is a part of the new left, the new young left, that has an incipient strain of antisemitism within it.
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B
So I would start by saying that I think this traditional Jewish intuition that antisemitism is more a feature of the right remains the case. And the reason it was true then and it's true now is that bigotry is often travel together, right? So what you see in the kind of MAGA movement, right is basically a vision of saying America was a lot better when we had clear hierarchies based on race, sexual orientation, gender, et Cetera. And that perspective is much more conducive to antisemitism than a more equality based perspective. And I think that there was. And what you see particularly clearly now with people like Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes and to some degree, Tucker Carlson, is basically that they're taking a lot of the same kinds of tropes that they used about Muslims, about, you know, everyone used to talk about was in the Quran. Now if you look at Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes, they're talking about things they've discovered in the Talmud, right? If you look, one of the things that Tucker Carlson and these guys have had been focusing on in the past was this idea that Somalis and Haitians were leeching off the American welfare system. If you notice now they're increasingly saying that about Orthodox Jews. So I think that because bigotries tend to travel together, the Pittsburgh shooter in 2018 at free of Life didn't start out focusing on Jews. He started focusing. He got radicalized by Fox News about this migrant caravan from Central America and then decided that the Jews were behind it because there was a group called Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society that was associated with a local synagogue that basically helped refugees. So that, I think, is the largest antisemitism problem we have. I think what you see on the left is a bit different. First of all, some of that stuff does bleed into the left, right? Because people are not in purely ideological camps. And the second thing you find is some tendency to blame Jews for what Israel does, right? And I think this is something. This is an area in which a certain kind of antisemitism is rising. People basically take out their anger against Israel at Jews, which is just as wrong as it was during COVID to take out your anger against Chinese Americans because your anger against. Angry at the government of Beijing because of their role in Covid, right? The particular challenge I think we face in fighting against that kind of antisemitism which blames Jews or Judaism or Jewishness for the actions of the state of Israel, is that you need to disaggregate these two things, right? You have to say, Jews in America are not responsible for what Israel does. Israel is a state. Jews are a group of people who can have whatever set of opinions about Israel they want. But the American Jewish establishment itself, itself actually rejects that disaggregation. If you listen to people like Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti Defamation League, what they say again and again, essentially is that to be Jewish is to be a Zionist. Inherent in being Jewish is supporting the State of Israel and that you have synagogues all over America that have big signs outside saying we stand with Israel. Right? Imagine if the Chinese churches all had big signs saying we stand with the People's Republic of China. This, to me, is a big problem we have in fighting against that version of anti Semitism.
- [31:14]
A
There's two pieces of that answer that I want to respond to, and I appreciate it. The first response is about the left in anti Semitism, and the second is on the modern Jewish identity. One more cut at antisemitism on the left. Here's just a range of facts. Hasan Piker has said that the government of Israel is a thousand times worse than Hamas. Hamas, which is clearly an anti liberal, anti democratic organization that has in its charter a kind of genocidal intent in terms of its aims of wiping out the state of Israel. Which is not to say that Hamas itself is guilty of currently conducting a genocide, but that it certainly has expressed murderous intent. Darielisa Avila Chevalier participated in a pro Palestinian march on October 8, the day after the egregious Hamas attacks. I think a lot of the messaging in the days and weeks after October 7th about globalizing the intifada was not necessarily anti Semitic, but I do think that the idea of globalizing an intifada certainly walks up to the precipice of calling for violence against Jewish populations around the world. And then finally, I don't want to put too much weight on the cross tabs of any one poll. There's a thousand polls out there, and maybe you've got one or some listeners got one that can invalidate what I'm about to say. But there was a Harvard study for Harvard center for American Studies Harris poll in December 2023 that found that 2/3 of voters between the ages of 18 and 24 agreed with the statement that, quote, Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors. And more than half, 51%, again between 18 and 24, said Israel should be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians. Cross tabs can be janky. It's just one poll, but I consider both of those statements to be pretty heinous. Putting all of that together and adding to it any number of anecdotes about the treatment of the Heim sisters or swastikas burning in New York. Does it not make you a little bit afraid that maybe this moral effort to change the way that Americans see the ethics of the Israeli government is carrying alongside of it a genuinely hateful category of people who might Be as anti Semitic as parts of the far right. Is any part of you afraid that what you see is a largely moral movement has this sort of attending sidecar attached to it? That's going to become more of a problem in the next few years.
- [34:08]
B
So I think that there's a lot in what you said, I would say, on the question of people who say that Jews are an oppressor class, which is essentially another version of conflating, let's say, Israel and Jews. Right. If you look, I think the best work we have on the relationship between ideology and antisemitism is by a tough political scientist named Eitan Hersh. He's also worked with a person at Harvard named Laura Roden. What they find, and they've done a number of these studies, is that there's much, much more of a conflation between Israel and Jews on the right than there is on the left. That people who on the right who are anti Israel are much, much more likely to say, for instance, that Jewish stores should be boycotted than people on the left. The people on the left actually are better at making these distinctions. And I just think it's worth just noting that in the anti Palestinian solidarity movement, Jews often are very well represented. I mean, in many of the encampments on college campuses, Jews were a higher percentage of the student activists on those encampments than they were of the student body as a whole. Many of the students who were expelled or suspended or beaten up by the police were Jewish themselves. Right. Which I think suggests that there is some capacity to make that conflation, I think, more on the left than on the right. I think the examples you give need to be looked at individually. And I think it's important to say that people can have views that I think are morally wrong, that I fundamentally disagree with without necessarily being anti Semitic. So let's take Piker's claim that Hamas is a thousand times worse, by the way. It just is worth noting. Again, I have lots and lots of criticisms of Hamas. Hamas bombed a bus where a friend of mine was on the bus and killed him. Hamas is an organization who's ideologically, fundamentally, fundamentally disagree with. But if we're going to mention that Hamas had an anti Semitic charter in 1987, its first charter, and undoubtedly was anti Semitic. It is also important to mention that it issued a new charter in 2017 which is not anti Semitic. Again, Hamas is still Islamist. It still attacks and targets civilians, which I think are war crimes. Absolutely. But its 2017 charter makes a clear distinction between Jews And Zionism. On the question of Hamas being a thousand times worse, it's certainly not language I would use. I think, again, I think I would like to see the leaders of Hamas be tried before the International Criminal Court. But I think that the point that Piker is getting at is that Israel has a thousand times more power than Hamas. Right. The number of children that Israel has killed in Gaza. Israel's killed tens of thousands of children in Gaza. Right. Hamas killed 1200 people, including children, on October 7th. So again, I did a whole conversation with Hassan Baikhar, pushed him a lot on some of his views because I disagree with him. But I don't see that view. That statement is anti Semitic. The march on October 8th, I would certainly never have gone to that March on October 8th. And I think there were speakers at the march who supported violence against civilians. I oppose violence against civilians, period. I think it's a war crime to target violence against civilians for whatever purpose. Right. But even supporting violence against civilians, again, let's say you're a supporter of Ukraine and you think Ukraine has the right to kill Russian civilians. I think that's an immoral view. I don't think it makes you an anti Russian bigot. I just think you don't respect the rules of war. Right. So again, I think it's important to distinguish the fact that we can think positions are immoral without necessarily think they were bigoted. What Avila Chevalier has said about her decision to go to that march was that she had witnessed that Israel's response 2014 assault on Gaza and she feared, rightly, that what Israel was going to do in response to October 7th was going to be even worse and she wanted to protest against that. Again, I would not have gone to a march on October 8, but I certainly would have supported a ceasefire. And so again, I think it's important to distinguish the fact that there are elements, there are things that we can disagree with strategically and disagree with things morally, and that doesn't necessarily make them anti Semitic. There are things that are clearly anti Semitic as well, but I don't see those two things in and of themselves as anti Semitic.
- [38:19]
A
The second issue, which is sort of shifting Jewish identities. There's a column in the New York Times today by Nicholas Lemon that, you know, really, for me, as a 40 year old reformed Jew with currently sometimes tenuous relationship with the faith itself, that really captured, I think, where I am. Here's two quotes from this essay. Politically, most American Jews were liberal Democrats and still are. Most were ardently Zionist and they considered that to be a liberal stance. To them it meant supporting a fragile social democratic nation established as a home for refugees, which had wrested its independence from the British Empire and immediately had to defend itself against the hostile armies of the surrounding countries. But with jarring suddenness, it now seems no longer possible to be at once comfortably Jewish and also Zionist and also liberal and also fully accepted outside the Jewish world. End quote. I think that nails my identity to a T, except for the fact that I rarely use the word Zionist to describe my political opinions. Otherwise, that's more or less how I felt. And I've sort of watched my own feelings about the relationship between my Jewishness and Israel change since the war in Gaza started. I remember, I think it was this Passover where we were reading all of those passages about the Jews being slaves in Egypt. And those passages for Passover are about power, about Jews having a relationship with power in which we were slaves and therefore the powerless. And there's a lot in Aran Pesach about Jews emerging from powerlessness and about confronting a world of aggressors. And of course I think that Jewish powerlessness is a theme of Jewish history. It was just so uncomfortable to read those passages while recognizing what's happening in Gaza where the imbalance of power. Despite my absolute uncomplicated hatred of everything that Hamas stands for, the extraordinary imbalance of power that exists in Gaza lives uncomfortably alongside the readings of my absolute, no question, favorite holiday to celebrate all year. And it raises this question of generations. I don't know how old Nicholas Lemon is. I assume he's a couple decades. Maybe he's in his 60s or something. I'm 40 years old. But the quotes that I was reading you from the Harvard Harris study of teenagers and 20 somethings, they are 15 to almost 20 years younger than I am. I wonder to what extent you see the evolving, the shifting Jewish identity. How much of it do you think is generational, where the young Jews that you know feel one way and the Jews who are, I don't know, your neighbors in the Upper east side feel a different way? And how much of it is what sort of sociologists would call like a period effect where even the, you know, 40, 50, 60 year old Jews that you know living in Manhattan think differently about the relationship between their faith and Israel than they do did three years ago because within the generation their attitudes are changing. So long winded question. But like how much of what we're seeing in terms of the Jewish identity is about differences between generations versus ways that people within one generation are feeling that they have to work up a new definition or relationship between their Jewishness and their relationship to Israel.
- [41:56]
B
What I would say is I think there was always a deep moral contradiction between the illiberalism that most American Jews wanted in the United States States and their support of Israel. Because what most American Jews want in the United States is equality under the law, is a state that treats everybody equally, regardless of whether you're Christian or Jewish or black or white, et cetera. Israel is based on a very. On a completely different principle. Israel is based on the idea of Jewish. And this is a word that will land harshly on some people's ear, but it's the word that B'tselem, Israel's own human rights organization, it's based on Jewish supremacy. It's based on the state has as that Jews have legal privileges that Palestinians don't have. That's true most egregiously in the west bank, but it's true inside Israel proper too. If you look at the way the state actually functions, it has special obligations to Jews that it doesn't have, even to the minority of Palestinians who have citizenship. And it could only have been created through an act of Palestinian mass expulsion because a Jewish state had to have a large Jewish majority, and it could only get a large Jewish majority by expelling large numbers of Palestinians. And so what's striking in Nicholas Kristoff, in Nick Lemon's kind of description of that liberalism, is the word Palestinian doesn't appear right. And it's only when Palestinians don't really appear that you can pretend that these two principles are consistent. What I think has happened is that Palestinians, because of social media, have gotten what Edward Said called permission to narrate, to talk about their own experience of Israel and Zionism. And it is made for younger American Jews. It has made them more aware of the contradiction between the political principles they were raised to believe in the United States and the ones that exist in Israel. What the American Jewish establishment has historically done is a kind of translation effort where they take Israel's political system and try to translate it into American political terms. Right. Even though, again, I think in some ways the principles that we want here and the principles that they operate there are contradictory. But Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben GVIR and the destruction of Gaza have made that translation project very, very difficult. So on the generational question, we've known for, I would say, 15 years or so, that there's quite a large generational divide among American Jews, but also among Americans as A whole. I think what's happened is that younger Americans have moved and new generations, younger Americans have moved even more dramatically in that direction as they've gotten older and as younger people have come up. But what we've seen among Democrats is the older Democrats have also moved, essentially are kind of following younger Democrats in their evolution of views on Israel, and younger Republicans are also now moving against Israel. So the one quadrant that remains strongly supportive of Israel is basically Republicans over the age of 50.
- [44:53]
A
Yeah. It's interesting because listening to you, I think in the days and months after October 7, I was very frustrated by arguments on the left where I thought a lot of critics were. A lot of critics of Israel were presenting a falsely idealized image of Hamas. And as the years have gone by, while I haven't changed my mind on that, I do think that a lot of Jews falsely idealize Israel and have defended the idea of. Of a liberal state of Israel. I'm talking here about the government, the state of Israel that doesn't exist. Because what exists, I think, just has to be objectively described as a far right enterprise in consistent violation of international law. And I think that's a. I think it's a painful change of identity and change of opinion. And so I think you're right that, that you have some jews, maybe under 50, that are moving toward the opinion of younger Jews. But what makes it all the more difficult, I think, and I don't even know if there's a question at the end of this confession, it's just that I see the group sometimes that I'm moving toward also contain within it ideas about Israel or Jews that I also consider to be abhorrent, not to say anti Semitic sometimes, yes, anti Semitic, but often just abhorrent. And so for a certain progressive Jew in the middle, it's like you're leaving one camp that you believed was deluded and you're moving toward another camp that you think is populated in some cases by viewpoints that are just abhorrent. And so it's a little bit of an ideological diaspora to move from one home to another and not feel comfortable in. In either. Not sure there's a question there, but I think it just speaks to the weirdness of this moment to be a liberal Jew without a clear home.
- [47:02]
B
Yeah, I mean, I guess I think there's a lot there. I would say. The first thing I would say is that I think the idea that there was a liberal Israel and now we have a far right Israel in some ways is too easy. Right. I mean, between 1948 and 1966, when the labor socialist non religious government was basically in complete control, Israel held its Palestinian citizens under military law. Right? Palestinians, literally citizens of Israel, those who had not been expelled needed permission to go to leave their villages overnight. And I think we have a. I understand why people focus on Hamas, but it's just worth remembering that virtually everything that people say about Hamas now they said about the PLO in the 1970s and 1980s. Because in fact, in fact the vast majority of armed resistance against Israel in the 1960s, 70s and 80s was not done by Islamists. It was done by leftist and leftist and nationalist factions. Right. And one of the reasons Israel supported Hamas in the late 1980s as it was coming out of the Muslim Brotherhood is because Israel couldn't imagine anything worse than the plo. And when you talk to Palestinians, what I think Palestinians stress is the continuity of Palestinian resistance to Zionism, even though there are these internal Palestinian divisions about, about Islamism, leftism and nationalism. And the last point I would make, and this may be take us in a different direction. I think part of the crisis that American Jews are going through is based on the fact that Israel has been put at the center of our identity. Right. So then once your relationship to Israel shifts and it no longer seems like a stable and positive thing, the question was, well, what's left? And to me this is part of the tragedy of American Jewish life is that I just don't think that, that I don't think that a relationship with a foreign country that was created in 1948 is actually the right way to think about why. Right way to answer the question, why be Jewish in assimilation, a society where you don't have to be. I think that the thing that has endured as a relation, as the reason historically most Jews have been Jewish is because they have found in Jewish religion religious texts, answers to life's a structure for living and answers to the questions that face them. And I think the American Jewish community has under invested in giving American Jews the literacy they would need to engage with those texts and the ability to actually see those texts as ones that could be meaningful to them.
- [49:30]
A
Well, I mean, one reaction that I have is right, Israel is the home to half the Jewish population of the world and the Israeli government is the, at least from a Jewish standpoint, democratically elected representation of that Jewish identity. And so I do think there is something difficult about being Jewish and feeling such a moral chasm between my sense of liberal ethics and the government that represents more than half of just More than half of the Jewish population. It almost demands that an American liberal Jewish develop a relationship with their faith that requires a divorce from a majority of the planet's Jews, which essentially is like a kind of post Luther schism. Right. It almost demands an identity apart. And we're now reaching sort of the far outermost extremes of the cosmos of my thinking about Judaism. And so I don't know how much further I can go, but that's just where it becomes. It becomes most thorny and difficult for me.
- [50:39]
B
Yeah, I mean, I guess I would distinguish a relationship between the Jews who live in Israel and the state. I do believe that not all Jews
- [50:48]
A
at all times, I should be clear, and I do. It's just so painful to see their government, which is not a Stalinist tyranny imposed on them.
- [51:01]
B
No.
- [51:01]
A
But a government elected by them. Yes, disproportionately by the crazy far right settlers. But it's nonetheless painful to watch this representation of the faith.
- [51:11]
B
Yes, I agree. I mean, again, I think that we should, in my view, I think Jews in American Jews should care very deeply about the safety and welfare of Jews in Israel and Jews around the world. I mean, it says famously, you know, in the Talmud, you know, Kol Yisrael, Aravim Zebazeh, all Jews are responsible for one another. There is a metaphor, a family that runs through Jewish texts and Jewish identity, that we are a kind of quasi imagined family. And I believe that. But I think the pain you're talking about is that the answer to the modern Jewish condition that American Jews have generally gravitated towards here and other diaspora Jews too. Australia, Canada, is basically secular governments based on the principle of equality under the law. And the answer that Zionism in Israel has given is, is I think much more like the answer that white South Africans gave and Protestants in Northern Ireland gave, which is that our safety is bound up with a system or whites under Jim Crow. Our safety is bound up with a system of legal supremacy. And so I think that what's painful, and I agree, I find it very painful too, is to believe that is to morally, deeply oppose that answer to what keeps Jews safe while still trying to maintain a sense of affinity and connection and care for people who you believe have embraced a political system that I believe is a system of apartheid.
- [52:32]
A
Yeah. And there's a way in which my feelings about Israel are an adjunct of my feelings about the United States Today, days after July 4th, which is to say I'm a proud patriot who's embarrassed by the government in Israel. I am just unbelievably impressed by the achievements of and identity of and in many cases courage of the people, while at the same time just feeling such shame about the behavior of the government. I want to end with, with a bit of a coda because we started with the relationship that Gaza is playing in the self conception of the new Left and especially the DSA Democratic Socialists of America affiliated left. And I want to return to that subject because there's really been especially, it must be said in deep blue areas, an earthquake in terms of DSA's success in the last few weeks. And I wonder, returning that subject to what you would credit the rise of DSA and DSA affiliated progressives in the party beyond the issue of Gaza that we spent the last 51 minutes discussing.
- [53:33]
B
So I think first of all, it's the sense that capitalism is not working, especially for younger people. Right. That the whole economic system, which is supposed to allow people if they work hard. What did Bill Flint say? Work hard and play by the rules. Right, Right. I think a lot of people feel like they work hard, employed by the rules and basically for their generation, it's really, really hard to basically actually buy, to become a believer in the system because the system isn't working for you very well. Right. And people connect that to the mass increase in, you know, in the economic disparity between very rich and everybody else. I also think it's the corruption of America's political system has made people alienated. The fact that our government had had so many catastrophic failures, whether it's wars, the financial crisis, refusal to respond to climate change, I think these have all been radicalizing things for folks. And then you add on top of that Donald Trump and the fact that it was like for the even if you could forgive the Democrats and everything else, you would say what the Democratic Party said is the one thing we're going to do, and this is especially Biden, the one thing we're going to do is keep this fascist lunatic out of power. And they fail in that. And so I think all of that has led. I'm not sure I can ever remember a time in my adult lifetime where so many grassroots Democrats hated the Democratic Party establishment as much that's especially strong on the left, but not only even among lefty Democrats. And I think that's part of what creates the conditions for these populist insurgents that we're seeing in various places.
- [55:04]
A
I wonder how you think about putting the DSA's success in what one might call, quote unquote, the proper Context, because there's an argument that goes directly against the way that I even framed this issue for you a question ago. So I'm not even blaming your answer for this. Right. That says, look, the DSA success is dramatically overrated. It's disproportionately concentrated to deep blue areas in New York and maybe Chicago, Seattle, in which Republicans have absolutely no chance of winning. And if you look at the parts of America that are purple, that are up for grabs, where Democrats actually do have to win in order to get back power in Congress and the Senate, we'll look at, look at Pennsylvania where Josh Shapiro is running. I think someone said Assad numbers against his opponent there. And so I wonder how you think about putting the DSA success in the proper context and looking at keeping everything that you just said on the table about how it represents national trends, national frustration with capitalism, national frustration with the Democratic establishment, a national frustration or motivation to overturn a kind of establishment order. And then on the other hand, you look at the places where the most important elections are being held and like Roy Cooper and Josh Shapiro are not running as like secret socialists. It's not remotely a part of their platform. How do you think about those two things living alongside each other?
- [56:30]
B
I think it's worth distinguishing the DSA from a kind of larger category of kind of left populist. So I think you're right. It's not likely that we're going to see DSA candidates who, you know, winning in outside of bright blue districts. But we do have the cases of Graham Platner in Maine and Abdul El Sayed in Michigan and even James Talarico in Texas who, I mean it's quite, you know, Texas Paddarico is not a moderate. I mean, really is running as a pretty progressive guy right in Texas and Sayed is running a and flat are running pretty far left campaigns. So the, the claim of not just DSA but a broader category of people, I would say is that, you know, these are people coming out of the Bernie kind of movement basically that if you have a hard then economic populist message can allow candidates to win without them having to kind of compromise on cultural issues where, you know, Republicans have had success deaths like immigration or trans stuff. And I think we don't know the answer to that. It may be that it turns out that they're wrong and that Platner loses, El Sayed loses and Cooper and Shapiro wins, which strengthens, I think the argument that says actually no, you have to be more in the center. But in A way, I think the fact that Donald Trump won even though he violated so many of the normal rules of politics and that he beat very somewhat conventional Democratic candidates in Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris, who are only really different in their identity. But it's politics, I think, has given some oxygen to this idea now. But I don't know. We will see. We'll see. I think 2026 will be a really interesting test case of whether this theory proves to be correct.
- [58:18]
A
What does economic populism mean to you?
- [58:24]
B
Well, I think what I see these candidates talking about, first of all, is simply their unwillingness to take money from corporations. And I think in a way that becomes a kind of stand in for a lot of other things. It's kind of like I'm not going to be beholden to these folks then on policies you see. I mean, I think these people support Medicare for all, for instance. Right. That's one position. They obviously support higher taxation. And rhetorically, they're more willing to talk in just kind of oppositional terms than I think someone like Josh Shapiro, Roy Cooper. I don't, I don't know which formula will be better politically. And I think that if my guess would be that the most successful Democrat in 2028 would probably not fall neatly into either of those camps. In a way, one of the things that Obama was able to do was on the one hand, he was someone who was to the left of where the Bill Clinton kind of Clinton was, but he created a particular narrative that actually also had some crossover appeal. And so what I think would be my, what I think is most likely is that someone in 2028 will come up with a version of this which is not clearly in either of those camps. But I can't claim to know which one I think will be more politically effective. It may well be that it's the Josh Shapiro and Roy Cooper position. It's one of the dangers for people. All political commentators, but me in particular, is to be willing to distinguish from the policies that I might say support morally and the ones that are most likely to get you elected.
- [59:57]
A
Yeah, we're out of time. And I want to go so much deeper into this issue because I'm so interested in the appeal of populism right now, which I think is without question. I think that left populist groups, maybe more than a lot of establishment Democrats or center left Democrats, have a very clear message on power. And like many populists, they found a good way to associate what ills America with a very particular group. In many cases, billionaires, even Talarico, who I consider, you know, more moderate maybe than Platner, still loves to say it's not left versus right, it's, it's top versus bottom or up versus down right, which is a way of reorienting the way that we think about politics. Not about disagreements among classes, but disagreements between class, which then gets us right back to this, this issue of assigning the problems of America with the Oligar, with corporate Democrats or corporate money. I think there's ways in which the clear popularity of this message is worth interrogating a bit in terms of where it cashes out in terms of policy. Because it's one thing to say I think the Trump corporate tax plan was wrong. And it's like, well, I think the Trump corporate tax plan was wrong too, and I'd be fine getting rid of that. It's another thing to say, how do we solve America's housing crisis in certain cities? And it's not clear to me there that saying billionaires are bad leads you directly to a really good solution to increasing, say, housing supply in a certain district. So I don't want to go too far in this soapbox. It's probably another episode, but I'm interested in where the rhetoric hits the road in terms of policy.
- [61:36]
B
I mean, I think it's a super interesting question. And it's also, I think one of the interesting questions is how important is it for Democrats to have clear policies that actually, you know, Bernie, Elizabeth Sanders was, you know, Elizabeth Warren was a real policy wonk. Bernie Sanders is not a policy wonk in the same way. Right. But maybe one lesson that Democrats will learn from Donald Trump is actually that being wonky in that way, although it might be actually valuable in terms of policy conversations, isn't actually the best political strategy. I don't know. It does seem that Graham Totner is not doing well among working class voters in Maine. So I would say that's one indicator we have early indicator that perhaps this strategy that isn't working as well as the left populist would hope.
- [62:20]
A
Well, Peter, I really appreciate both the coda on the progressive left, but also the conversation about Judaism and Gaza. This is an issue that's really vexed me and I've been holding and holding and holding off to have this conversation, but I got a lot out of this, so I appreciate it. Peter Beiner, thanks for having me.
- [62:36]
B
I appreciate it.
- [62:39]
A
Sam.