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- [00:01]
John Podhoretz
This episode is brought to you by White Claw Surge. Nice choice hitting up this podcast. No surprises.
- [00:07]
Jon Pothorts
You're all about diving into tastes everyone in the room can enjoy.
- [00:10]
John Podhoretz
Just like White Claw Surge. It's for celebrating those moments when connections.
- [00:14]
Jon Pothorts
Have been made and the night's just begun. With bold flavors and 8% alcohol by volume, unleash the night. Unleash White Claw Surge.
- [00:23]
John Podhoretz
Please drink responsibly. Hard seltzer with flavors, 8% alcohol by volume. White cloth seltzer works Chicago, Illinois.
- [00:34]
Christine Rosen
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:40]
Jon Pothorts
Some preach and pain Some die of thirst no way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect.
- [00:51]
Abe Greenwald
The worst for the best.
- [00:55]
Jon Pothorts
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Thursday, November 20, 2025. I'm Jon Pothorts, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [01:07]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [01:08]
Jon Pothorts
Washington, Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.
- [01:12]
Christine Rosen
Hi, John.
- [01:13]
Jon Pothorts
And rejoining us today, Commentaries social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [01:20]
John Podhoretz
Hi, John.
- [01:21]
Jon Pothorts
So, interesting contrast last night, or not a contrast at all, really. Park East Synagogue on the Upper east side of Manhattan, where my nephew and his wife were married 12 years ago. The site of a vicious protest, masked intifada, Globalize the intifada. Screaming monsters yelling about scaring Jews, basically trying to provoke a fight between either the cops and them or the or the counter protesters, Jews in, you know, in the streets that had come out to yell back at them as an event was taking place inside the synagogue on how to make aliyah to Israel, which actually echoes a protest that happened in New Jersey across the river four or five months ago, where there was a kind of violent protest either in Teaneck or in Englewood. I can't remember where in New Jersey at precisely the same sort of circumstance in which a meeting was being gathered to provide information to Jewish congregants on how they might emigrate to Israel. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Manhattan's luxury precincts was the awarding of the National Book Awards, one of the two major literary prizes given in in the United States. And the winners of that award were over. Let me just find the site here. New York Times says books that examine the past and present of the Middle east take National Book Awards. So Omar El Akkad's One Day Everyone will Always have been against this, a brief, searing indictment of American and European responses to the devastation in Gaza, took home the National Book Award in nonfiction Wednesday night, one of three prizes awarded to writers of Middle Eastern origin who addressed their traumatic past and present in their books. And in their remarks, El Akkad, an author and journalist born in Egypt, grew up in gutter in Canada and now is in the United States, said in accepting the prize, it is very difficult to think in celebratory terms about a book that was written in response to, to a genocide. It's difficult to think in celebratory terms when I spend two years seeing what shrapnel does to a child's body. Yeah, it's pretty terrible thinking about what shrapnel does to a child's body or what happens when a child is being raped by a marauding resident of Gaza on October 7 repeatedly or being set on fire or being shot in the back, or being taken captive in Gaza and then murdered in Gaza along with his four year old brother. It's pretty bad to have to look at that. I think probably worse than anything that, that, that our awardee had to witness on his, on his television in a population in Gaza that as we now inclusive, you know, increasingly are aware, was not starved, did not go through, you know, massive depredations of the sort of there was a war, a war started by their side. Israel had to defend itself. And of course this is just the latest in a string of cultural awards being granted at Khan, at the Oscars, at the Toronto Film Festival, all over the place to out and out prizes. The Pulitzer Prizes out and at right for the, for, for new, the New Yorkers, obscene coverage of the fake genocide that basically now this year what you do to virtue signal with your artistic awards is to give them to false, reckless, slanderous, libelous and anti Semitic accounts of the true events that happened in Gaza over the last two years. So these two are not unconnected.
- [05:45]
Abe Greenwald
Can I just say, John, the other half of what you do, if you're one of these arts institutions that gives out awards or, or puts on exhibitions or festivals, whatever, the other half is, you exclude Jews and Israelis from competing or showing their works at all or publishing them or whatever the medium may dictate.
- [06:14]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, I have a note beyond that, that's true. But you also there's the overt exclusion of Jews and Israelis which the Toronto Film Festival tried to do. And then there's the tacit exclusion of conservative, you know, expression or conservative participants in these where you conservatives know that any kind of conservative reporting will not be awarded a Pulitzer Prize or any conservative leaning novelist will not win the prize. And so I do think it goes beyond that and it has downstream effects where people like me who have worked in reporting for 20 years. The Pulitzer Prize doesn't mean anything anymore. Shrug. These things are totally irrelevant now, right?
- [07:19]
John Podhoretz
Well, I mean, could I just add that there also used to be, and we saw this after the George Floyd summer, a similar thing happened. Every single award, every single grant was given to anything that had to do with race. And you know, there used to be this period of time where you would have a kind of diversity equity, inclusion fever for a year or two and it would be reflected in these awards. It'd be reflected in the, I mean the MacArthur genius grants are always, have always been like this pretty steadily. But, but there would then be some sanity A couple of years where the nonfiction book was, you know, something interesting or a work of decent history would win the Pulitzer Prize. And now it does seem like the moments of clarity and sanity have shrunk almost entirely. So that these awards have become an expression of hollowed out cultural institutions that insist on politicizing or only recognizing the work of those who've politicized their own so called art. And I want to point out that one of the other books that the book that is the True, True Story of Raja the Gullible and His Mother, which won the fiction prize, is described as a comic novel about a 63 year old Beirut high school teacher and quote, neighborhood homosexual who lives with and spars with his mother. Okay, maybe it's great. I haven't read it, so I can't judge it on its merits. But everything about that sentence is what's wrong with some of our award granting institutions?
- [08:43]
Jon Pothorts
Well, let's talk about the cultural, you know, arbiters. So we don't, we don' just have obviously these panels that give out these awards that theoretically read 100 or 150 different books that are submitted and then decide which is the best one and amazingly come to weird consensus that while it may not be the same book, a book of the same theme might win the National Book Award and a different book will win the Pulitzer and a different book will win the National Book Critics Circle Award. But they're all about the evil in Gaza. They just spread the wealth out a little bit. And as you say, maybe the idea was that giving awards for political reasons is a craze and then things settle down into a kind of stasis in which you try to find actually a good book to give an award to. But I think that's long since over. I don't think that anything, everything is political. And I'm going to give you an example of what I mean from a review Today in the New York Times by Vinola Dargis of Wicked for Good, the sequel to Wicked the First. It's the second act of the Broadway show Wicked, made into its own movie as the first act, was the first Wicked movie. Now, Wicked is a political musical in the sense that it takes the wizard of Oz story and it flips it on its head. The Wicked Witch is the good guy, the wizard is the bad guy. He's kind of the novel.
- [10:16]
Abe Greenwald
The novel is very political.
- [10:18]
Jon Pothorts
Yeah, the novel is very political. So it is political. And it's all about how the animals are being, you know, the animals are being, you know, discriminated against. And I don't want to go into the politics of it because it's preposterous. But. And to be fair, L. Frank Baum, who wrote the wizard of Oz, was a. Was a crazy socialist lunatic. And there's a lot of that in the Oz books as well. But in Manola Dargis's review, she basically complains that Wicked for Good isn't political enough. And I'm trying to find the quote that fascism has come to odds in Wicked for Good, and there's no wishing it away. That is one of the truths in the less frenetic, more downbeat second half of this screen adaptation of the Broadway musical Wicked. Okay, so she already sets it out that it's basically a portrait of America under Trump. Fascism has arrived, and the quote here, that is okay. These invocations of the horrors of fascism were startling in the first half, and while they're more pronounced in Part two, they're embedded in a movie that does everything it can to accentuate the positive. As the tale evolves, alliances are formed, ties severed routinely, time musical numbers that oscillate between shouty group set pieces and quieter, intimate interludes. And Deb Glinda begins to understand the truth about Oz and her own complicity in its oppressiveness, a transformation that Ariana Grande, who plays Glinda, puts across with gestural delicacy and touching vulnerability. So despite its unsettling political resonance, Wicked is finally a story of an intense, soulfully nurturing female friendship. In other words, it really could have gone all the way into being a propagandistic portrait of the evils of 2025America. Whereas the original musical is kind of about a rock, honestly, but, you know, it chickens out. So basically, we're now supposed to watch Wicked, which is going to be the most successful movie of the year, according to the New York Times, entirely through a political lens, like that's how we're supposed to judge it? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it fun? Is the music good? Are the dance numbers good? How are the performances? What is it? Is it fascist? Is it anti fascist enough? Is it anti Trump enough? And that is the way in which our cultural arbiters are now judging everything. And I came up over the last 40 years as one of the few conservative culture critics in the United States. And whenever I said anything about anything's politics, I would get emails and letters and attacks by Richard Corliss and Time magazine and others about how I was politicizing the arts by pointing out things where, say, you know, Avatar had basically an anti American tinge, which it does and it did. And you know, Steven zychik at the LA Times wrote a 2000 word attack on me for politicizing Avatar. I didn't politicize Avatar. James Cameron politicized Avatar. And I was making fun of it. I wasn't attacking it. I was teasing the whole notion that this idiot story about unimp tanium and, you know, blue creatures flying around on planets with mountains that float in the sky had a political valence.
- [14:02]
John Podhoretz
But this, but, but I think that maybe they're upping that sort of criticism. Like the Dargis review. Honestly, I think she wants to focus on fascism to distract everyone from the completely creepy turn that the Female friendship has taken on the publicity tour between the two main actresses of this show. I don't understand it. Friends send it to. I'm like, why? Why are they constantly touching each other and like picking things out of each other's hair? Anyway, that. But there is a sense in which they now have active competition from independent cultural critics, from anyone who writes on substack, from anyone on social media. And so in a way, they have to. Maybe they're doubling down on the political angle because it is the one thing that they have historically claimed for themselves as, as critics. They. There's much as much more competition now. You don't have to read the New York Times review. You can look at, you know, there are dozens of independent cultural critics now who do excellent work. And I think that's, that's a good thing. I think it makes the resonance of the criticism of places like the New York Times less impactful. Now, whether that impacts the people creating these shows and more importantly funding them, I don't know.
- [15:10]
Jon Pothorts
Look, if we look at, if we try to take, say, box office or cultural footprint or cultural imprint as a guide to where we are in America at any given moment, I look at the fact that the two most brilliant American movies of 2025, and I have problems with both of them, but they're very brilliant. One of them is Eddington, and the other is One Battle After Another. These portraits of Eddington is about COVID and about what happened during the COVID madness of the spring of 2020. And one battle After Another is about a former weatherman 16 years later as the government starts pursuing him and his daughter again. And they're politically very complicated. And I don't. And they are particularly One Battle After Another is both a salute to kind of political radicalism and a complete vicious satire of it. And I don't really approve of it, but I think it's kind of a remarkable piece of work. That's my critical judgment of Eddington, is a genuinely brilliant piece of work. Nobody really wanted to see either of them. Nobody in America wants to be visited by sort of the. And I don't think Eddington like the Message of Eddie. People didn't see it, so they don't know what the messages are, but they see the trailers and stuff, and they're like, I'm not going anywhere near that. Leave me alone. You people like all you want to do.
- [16:56]
John Podhoretz
Demon hunters. I mean, it's.
- [16:58]
Jon Pothorts
You know, all you want to do is, like, shove contemporary politics down my throat. And I get it on the news. I get it everywhere. Leave me the hell alone. You know, just leave me alone. I'll go to streaming and I'll watch Claire Danes in a murder mystery. I'll watch a science fiction show. I'll do whatever. Just leave me alone. Stop already. And these. And these cultural arbiters are shoving it even more readily down here. There's no aesthetic left. It's not like we're here to tell you what's good and true and beautiful. It's like, does this comport with the message we think, you know, these yahoos in America and across the world need to hear or not? And that's what we're here to do, is say, salute this and attack that based on what message it provides. That is of sucker and health and makes people like me who sitting around wondering when the stormtroopers are going to come march through my door and arrest me and take me to Dachau, make me feel good and people, you know, and so, yeah, why. Why would you ever buy a book that wins the National Book Award? You think readers aren't onto this already? That once something is. Is sort of anointed in this way that there's probably an alternate reason why even liberal readers understand that they're being sold a bill of goods. In my most. Most fiction readers, for example, I assume, being primarily liberal or, you know, literary.
- [18:30]
Christine Rosen
Fiction readers, I think that that's a really important point. And I just want to make a point about two other related institutions. One is the Pulitzer Prizes, which this year, the Pulitzer Prize in commentary went to this Palestinian poet, Mossab Abu Toha, for his quote, unquote poetry on, you know, leaving Gaza. But, you know, five seconds after the award was bestowed, his tweets lambasting the mainstream media for showing excessive sympathy to the hostages taken by Hamas were revealed and the. So the words bestowed to him. Then, you know, the Beacon goes to the Pulitzer Prize board and asks them, were you aware of his social media history? And they refused to answer any questions about this? But it goes beyond the Pulitzer board because, of course, Abu Toha wrote these pieces for the New Yorker, and the New Yorker had to nominate him for the award. And I would note, I think the New Yorker used to be a great magazine. You know, 20 years ago, I was a subscriber and I would read every issue and there were really interesting articles about in there. Every issue there was one or two. There were one or two pieces that were really interesting. And that is just not the case anymore, which is the point that you're making about these Hollywood films. And there's a corollary to the Rhodes Scholarships, where increasingly over the past 25 years, these scholarships have gone to. As the elite schools are admitting insane political activism activists, the scholarships have gone to the most insane of the activists they admit, starting with when I was in college, Chesa Boudin, who was raised by Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn, the Weathermen terrorists, because his own parents, who were Weathermen terrorists, David Gilbert and Kathy Budin, were in prison. And so he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and after doing some consulting for Hugo Chavez, went on to Yale Law School and became the District Attorney of San Francisco and was recalled when he turned the city into a dump. Even the good people of San Francisco didn't like his decarceration policies. But again, like with the Pulitzer Prizes, these schools have to give their imprimatur for the students to be Rhodes recipients. And this year there is a recipient from Harvard who celebrated October 7th. But we've seen this year after year after year, and I would note, I think in the past 20 years, the scholarships have gotten more irrelevant. You just don't hear about them as much. Like, compared to when I was in school, I think the recipients are less impressive and the things they go on to do are less impressive. And I think Boudin is an example of that. I don't think anybody would point to his career and by the way, he's now teaching law school at University of California, Berkeley. But I don't think anybody could point to him and say, wow, that's a really impressive guy. Really making his mark on society. The guy was recalled and is now, you know, teaching law school, one of the most left wing law schools in the country.
- [22:21]
Jon Pothorts
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- [25:16]
John Podhoretz
They also. Those awards also used to be a path out of lower middle and middle class anonymity for people who actually were seen as being necessary to a future elite. That was the story of Bill Clinton. Yeah, yeah.
- [25:31]
Jon Pothorts
Robert Reich and Bill Clinton meet on board ship as Rhodes Scholars on their way to Oxford. Yeah.
- [25:37]
John Podhoretz
And that, that also has disappeared a lot. If you look at the, the sort of socioeconomic and educational background of the parents of some of these children selected for these awards, they're already in that elite. So as a selection across class in the United States, that's also disappeared in favor of radicalism.
- [25:54]
Abe Greenwald
I mean, Eliana says that these scholarships and awards mean less generally than they used to. And I agree. But to those doing the awarding and the receiving, that's still their whole world. Like, they mean everything. You know, that's. They're still in that bubble.
- [26:19]
Christine Rosen
Yeah. By the way, I meant to note that the Pulitzers, you know, they went to Abu Toha this year. This is on the heels of them going to all the Russia collusion reporting.
- [26:30]
Jon Pothorts
Right.
- [26:31]
Christine Rosen
For which there's been no accounting. And John, to your point about Hollywood, it is indicative of the disconnect from reality and from the rest of the country.
- [26:42]
Jon Pothorts
I mean, again, I don't, I don't. I. I think the country. Yeah. The disconnect is. Leave me alone. Like, okay, this is One Battle After Another is a funny, lively chase thriller with the biggest star in the world, Leonardo DiCaprio, that could barely make it to $70 million at the domestic box office, where you might expect that he could have a movie with him as good as this in its own way could have gotten to 150 million. The rejection is the rejection of this overall cultural hunger to stuff politics that half the country rejects down the throat of the rest of the country. And I know when you talk about the Rhodes Scholarship, for example, and it's scholarships, the literal term scholarship is about giving people who cannot afford to go to a school the resources to go to a school. That's what a scholarship is. Right? You have proved your mettle as a scholar, meaning you were intellectually curious. You have. You want to improve your mind and grow your understanding and contribute to the knowledge of the world, but you just, you probably have to go to work rather than go to school because you don't have the resources to depart from the workforce or you need to help your family or whatever. So we're going to pay for you to do this. So my father, son of a milkman, gets the Kellett, gets a scholarship to go to Columbia and gets the Kellett Fellowship to go to Cambridge University. He is a poor kid from Brooklyn who didn't cross the Hudson until he was 19 years old. Like, that's what scholarships are supposed to be for when they turn into just yet another elite prize for an elite that is trained to get to these places from the time. And I, I don't, you know, I'm part of this myself, but, I mean, you go to the right nursery school to go to the right private school to go to the right boarding school to go to the right college to get the right graduate fellowship, the German Marshall Fund, or the roads or this or that. It's all part of the ladder of the elite. Ladder. It is not, as Christine says, a way of introducing new voices, new perspectives, new socioeconomic people into the world of the elite to better the elites, to broaden the elites, to make them aware of things that they would not otherwise be aware of.
- [29:52]
John Podhoretz
And conservatism racket at this point for the elite.
- [29:55]
Jon Pothorts
Exactly. So conservatism is actually a very good analogy to this, which is half of these things should go to conservatives, because the whole purpose of this is to make sure that the American elite is responsive to what is going on elsewhere in America and that it should be flavored and multivarious, not uniform. And, you know, and choking off all forms of conversation. I want to bring up one other thing that is ancillary, but, but you'll be able to see the connection, a story again in the New York Times about cultural arts institutions that are really struggling now because, you know, the, the Trump administration announced that grants from.
- [30:52]
Abe Greenwald
The.
- [30:53]
Jon Pothorts
Arts endowment in particular, would no longer go to institutions that were. That were putting DEI issues at the forefront of what it was that they did. So this is a story about all these arts institutions that, faced with either giving up on DEI or giving up on federal grant money, have given up on federal grant money. So the Arts Council in Las Vegas, Nevada, released a statement that its board had unanimously voted to decline a $4,701 grant, fearing that events like an annual Pride Month exhibit would violate the executive orders and jeopardize its federal nonprofit status. The Denver Philharmonic Orchestra declined an $8,000 grant, citing concerns about diluting its DEI work. The Portland Opera in Oregon said it would not apply for future federal if current restrictions remain in place. Hey, this is interesting. So basically, they don't like strings being attached to federal grant giving. Hmm. Where have I heard that before? Hillsdale College? Grove City College? Welcome to the world in which when you decide you are going to take federal largesse, you may find that the federal government's demands on you impinge on your freedom of speech or your freedom to run your organization or your arts institution or whatever your nonprofit as you see fit. This is why if you are a big liberal, you're now learning an interesting lesson, which is that nothing is free. Nothing comes for free.
- [32:45]
Abe Greenwald
Or permanent.
- [32:46]
Jon Pothorts
Or permanent. But you know, Hillsdale had to decide 40 or 45 years ago that it was going to forswear all federal grant money so that it was not subject to the regulations of the Department of Education as they got increasingly more onerous on reporting requirements. And what were they doing to do X, Y and Z? And then of course, by 2010, the famous Dear Colleague letter that, that threatened to put their federal grant money at risk if they did not pursue blatantly unconstitutional efforts to find accused sexual harassers guilty until proven innocent. You know, so I'm enjoying this. I think this is great. Let them, let them, let them experience. Let them have to make this choice.
- [33:35]
Abe Greenwald
Let them.
- [33:35]
Jon Pothorts
And that's why there should be no federal support for arts institutions or even educational institutions. It's too corrupting. It's too politicizing.
- [33:46]
Abe Greenwald
A couple months ago, Matt made this great point on the podcast where he said Trump is the first president to use all the architecture that liberals put in place to fund and structure the culture, use that same architecture to shape the culture to other ends, to non modern liberal ends. And we've seen it over and over. We've seen it with the universities, we've seen it with the federal grants to arts and parks institutions. And every time something happens to the liberals, that's been happening to conservatives for half a century, they act as if this is the first time that funds are tied to ideology or politics. This is the first time that anyone in the government is having any say about what is being produced.
- [34:52]
John Podhoretz
Well, and it's interesting because it's going to force them to do what conservatives have had to do for more than half a century, which is you got to throw yourself out there on the marketplace of ideas, the marketplace of the public and what they like and dislike, these orchestras and these, you know, museums and these other cultural institutions that put up these exhibits. And I'm sure we've all seen many of them, and not just in New York, even at the local level, all over the country that are so highly politicized and they would not exist if they were forced to actually support themselves by the public's demand for these things. So you're going to. I think you're going to see a lot of these orchestras not doing any more, fewer indigenous composer concerts and more nutcrackers in the coming holiday season to support themselves because these, I mean, look, I work for a nonprofit institution at aei. We don't. We also don't take federal money. There's a lot of it out there if you want to find it, but for the same reason. That way we're not beholden to who's in charge in the government. We can be free and fair about who we criticize. And it's important. But it does mean the people in our development office. And I'm sure the same is true at Commentary. And you have to hustle more and you've got to prove that your work is actually meaningful and necessary. And I think that will be a very good lesson for these cultural arbiters on the left who have become quite dependent on the largesse of a few billionaires and a lot of government federal funds.
- [36:09]
Jon Pothorts
I think these are all very salient and fair points. I think most of all, it is the hoisting on their own. We both have the example of them being hoist on their own petard of their own virtue signaling, but remaining in a sufficiently powerful position that they, they do still command the heights of culture. They. If you. If what matters is who wins prizes, then, you know, the Oscars giving a prize to a blatantly propagandistic documentary called no other land. 50 years after, you know, after the Vanessa Redgrave was booed off the stage for talking about Zionist hoodlums At the Oscars, 50 years later, an anti Zionist piece of garbage wins a prize. A year, you know, a year after a Jewish anti Zionist speech is made from the stage of the Oscars by the director of Zone of Interest or the screenwriter of Zone of Interest or whatever. Like, this is. This is where things have moved and we live in a different world from the world that we used to live in. And just as you can't trust a New York voter not to elect Zoran Mamdani, you can't expect cultural institutions that continue to be kind of, you know, have disproportionately, let's just say Jewish, Jewish creators or represent whatever, not giving in to whatever the fashion of the day is and showing that they're as enlightened as everybody else by trashing their own people. And it's worth, you know, it's worth, worth making note of that to talk a little about the park east demonstration last night. We had a little bit of a tussle here. Abe was on Twitter last night, absolutely going nuts about this, as a lot of people were. And what I saw in the footage was obviously people who I wish the earth would, you know, like, like the Korach rebellion. The earth would open up and swallow them whole and then cover the ground up and that would be the end of them screaming anti Semitic, anti Israel and genocidal things at Jews standing on the other side of the cop line. Unfortunately, I just, I don't know what you do about that. Like, it's a. There's freedom of assembly in the United States. As long as they don't perform acts of violence on others, they can, you know, they can do what they want in that way. I don't know what the New York City Police Department was supposed to do to the demonstrators who were screaming the way they were streaming. Again, part of the point of screaming and behaving the way that they were behaving is to trigger the police into acting with preventative violence. They want that footage. They want to show the cops abusing them. That's half of what goes on here is an effort to get that iPhone footage of abuse at the hands of cops. That, that, that can turn them into martyrs. So, Abe, what, what would you, what.
- [39:44]
Abe Greenwald
Would you have them do, John, to use a, a liberal term? We can, we can find common ground between your, your position and my fulminations.
- [39:55]
John Podhoretz
On what's happening in this podcast.
- [39:57]
Christine Rosen
Yeah.
- [39:58]
Abe Greenwald
On Twitter last night. Because my main point on Twitter was that Jews shouldn't look for the city or really anyone to protect them. That we have to protect ourselves. And that in fact, it is easy. Well, I don't know if want to get into this. It is easier to get a concealed carry license in New York than it used to be. You can't, you can't take. You can't carry it to as many places, but you can carry it to shul. And I was Pointing that out to people because they were seeing what was going on. My. What we were fighting about before the podcast started is I have. I'm. I'm confused about why it is legal to stand outside of a synagogue, scream at Jews, we chant at Jews. We need to make them scared. We need to make them scared. That's one of the chants from New York City to Gaza. Globalize the intifada. That's a call for terrorism. Take out another settler. Resistance, make us proud. Take out another settler. I don't understand. To me, this is harassment. This is incitement to terrorism. I get that you have a right to free speech. I get you that you have a right to protest. I don't know who makes the call when, excuse me, in such a situation and says, okay, cuff this guy, cuff them and see what happens. From there.
- [41:37]
John Podhoretz
Doesn't the problem. Actually, the problem begins earlier, which is when they get the permit to be on a public street within a certain number of feet of a house of worship. And we, I mean, I brought up the federal laws about, you know, the zones, the safety zones around abortion clinics. The laws are still on the books, although after Dobbs, they. It's a matter of state enforcement of. I think it's called face the federal abortion clinic access, whatever. But there's no reason why in an environment of increasing anti Semitism, you couldn't have a very ecumenical law about who's allowed how many feet from a house, any house of worship, a mosque, a synagogue, a church, that you're allowed to stage any sort of protest. That could be an ordinance that the city Council passes. That could be something a New York State assembly passes. So I think there are questions about whether or not these are clearly targeting Jews because they're Jews, because if it was targeting the state of Israel, there's a consulate in New York. They could gather outside the consulate and protest there. They are trying to threaten and intimidate Jews. Yes, they have a right to say these hateful things. But the question of whether they're allowed to gather and threaten and intimidate so close to the entrance of a house of worship is a question for policymakers to consider going forward.
- [42:46]
Jon Pothorts
Okay, but that's going forward. So. So according to New York City law, as long as you are not amplifying sound, you can march on a public sidewalk. So the sidewalk in front of the synagogue is public property. The. Once the, the step up onto, onto the, onto the park, East Chul is presumably private property, but the sidewalk in front is public property. And you can March there. As long as you don't use a megaphone without amplified sound. You do not need a permit to march on a public sidewalk without amplified sound. It is not clear to me that they ever. That they had a permit or. Or that they needed a permit. You need a permit to organize a march in a street that requires blocking traffic or street closure, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, to rally in a public park or to use amplified sound. So as. So they were screaming, but they didn't have.
- [43:48]
John Podhoretz
They were blocking the sidewalk, though, by gathering. You can't. You can'. Actually can't impede movement on the public.
- [43:54]
Jon Pothorts
Well, there's no evidence that they were impeded, by which, I mean, there were cops and there were counter protesters. But let's say you and I were walking down the block. Were they. Were they saying, you can't walk here, that you can arrest somebody for? That's. That's. That's actual. I mean, that's a. That's a criminal offense. The protest itself, from what I can tell, followed New York City law, and maybe New York City law should be changed. And I would have absolutely no problem with that. This city is wildly tilted in a wrong balance on all kinds of weird speech issues that mean that as long you.
- [44:36]
Abe Greenwald
You.
- [44:37]
Jon Pothorts
You can block half a sidewalk with a blanket, with paperback books because of a. Either a memorandum of understanding or some court decision that said that book selling is a First Amendment right, and therefore you can do it anywhere, including, like on a sidewalk and, you know, blocking a store and that kind of thing. So there are all kinds of weird rules in New York that allow for things that other municipalities would not. Would not allow. I think the question that is raised by this protest is, is there. Is there will be. Is the. Will there be a new emboldening of this kind of behavior with the coming on January 1st of the mayoralty of Zoran Mamdani? And what will he do if there is an explosion of this kind of protest? Because, of course, he's all. He's all that. This is the world that he emerges from, like a, you know, like a sloth out of the mud.
- [45:41]
John Podhoretz
You know, he participated in these in post October 7th.
- [45:46]
Jon Pothorts
This is all his political life was until he got into the assembly anyway, was being part of mobs and things like that.
- [45:52]
John Podhoretz
Tish on. He's kept Tish on as police commissioner. She agreed to stay on for his administration. That's actually a. That's a positive sign for New York City. It'll be a probably negative experience for mandani when he has to talk to his democratic socialists about why he made that choice. But that's at least one hopeful signal.
- [46:12]
Jon Pothorts
I look at it the other way.
- [46:14]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, I have a few thoughts on that.
- [46:16]
John Podhoretz
Go ahead.
- [46:16]
Jon Pothorts
Well, no, you go, you go.
- [46:19]
Abe Greenwald
One is that we'll see where it goes, we'll see how long she stays. The other is that I think he would have had an immediate police revolt on his hands if he, if he had done otherwise. And the last is that I expect Mamdani to do many performative philo Semitic things while doing many policy anti Semitic moves at the same time. I think he will embrace every purple haired trans quote rabbi he can find in the city and go to every anti Zionist shul he can find to show his that he has Jewish friends and supporters while he carries out his insidious agenda.
- [47:15]
Christine Rosen
I was just gonna say, I mean, you're reminding me, Abe, of the ad that he released with four quote unquote rabbis. And one of the rabbis in the ad was a trans something or other. Who, when we looked into who is this person, he. She was booted from a Biden White House event for disrupting the event for a pro Palestine protest. So these are the Jews for Mamdani.
- [47:54]
Jon Pothorts
Yeah.
- [47:55]
Christine Rosen
You know what struck me about the park east protests were the chance that we need to make them scared. We need to make them scared. We need to make them scared. So the intent of the protest was to instill fear and intimidation among synagogue going Jews. And I wonder to the point of Tish, whether this, whether these sorts of things don't put Tish and Mamdani on a collision course as you suggested, Abe.
- [48:33]
Jon Pothorts
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- [48:58]
Abe Greenwald
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- [49:00]
Jon Pothorts
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- [49:04]
John Podhoretz
Welcome to Walgreens.
- [49:06]
Christine Rosen
Looking for a holiday gift?
- [49:07]
Jon Pothorts
Sort of. My cousin Freddie showed up to surprise us.
- [49:11]
John Podhoretz
Oh, sounds like a real nice surprise.
- [49:13]
Jon Pothorts
Exactly. So now I have to get him a gift, but I haven't gotten my bonus yet. So if we can make it something really nice but also not break the bank. That'd be perfect.
- [49:21]
Christine Rosen
How about a keurig for 50% off.
- [49:24]
Jon Pothorts
Bingo savings all season? The holiday road is long. We're with you all the way. Walgreens offer valid November 26th through December 27th. Exclusions apply. Well, that's the. See there. There are two ways to look at Mamdani supporters and where they're going to go with this. If they are maga, if they are the leftist version of maga, they will do everything in their power to make his path easy. Like, the thing to do, if you have a leader that you think is like, singular and gonna blah, blah, blah, is not to say, okay, deliver on my. Give me everything I want right now, and I'm gonna put your feet to the fire and test you. You're going to say, my God, we met it, we did it, we got, you know, we got into Gracie Mansion, we're here. It's so exciting. You know, we're gonna. We're gonna take it to the. We're gonna take it to the people we don't like and, And, And. And do do things that we like and take it to people we don't like. The other way of doing it is we got you here. We're gonna start protesting in front of every synagogue in New York City and see how you respond. Because what we want you to do. Oh, it's worse.
- [50:43]
John Podhoretz
I'm sorry to interrupt, but it's worse than that. I mean, socialism. The reason the. The hilarious joke that real socialism has never been tried is a joke is that they are not just going to say, we're going to do what we want. They are going to say, you must now be the avatar of our pure agenda of socialism. And everything you do that is against that is a compromise. And we are not people who compromise. And they've already started with that.
- [51:06]
Jon Pothorts
Right. So, as I say, I don't know.
- [51:10]
Christine Rosen
Another one of the Jews for Mamdani, Rabbi Emily Cohen, said in her official biography that her professional experience includes baking challah and developing curricula for adult education classes on Judaism and social justice. And the trans rabbi also participated in an interfaith dialogue with the Iranian president.
- [51:36]
Jon Pothorts
Right, so just to put these together, you're saying they will say, it is time for the purity of our socialist approach to be put into practice by you. And we, you know, we. We expect you to deliver from day one. But as I say, the other thing is we need to let him succeed. So the last thing he needs is for us to be giving him crap. So we'll Keep quiet for a while and like let him appoint us to jobs and we'll do this and we'll do that and we're not gonna, we're not going to challenge him and challenge his mayoralty and create for example, the kind of moment where Jessica Tisch, the police commissioner will have to decide whether she stays or whether she goes by creating some kind of a massive disturbance relating to anti Semitism that she, according to her lights, has to put down and that he, as mayor of New York City is in the position of telling her to stand down and let it continue. That kind of thing. That could happen on January 3rd or it could happen on September 15th. It could happen at any point. At some point it will happen. Of that I have no doubt there will be the effort to say it's either her or us to Mamdani about Jessica Tisch because of course, what they hate more than anything and where all this starts is defund the police. That's the, that's, that's the, that was the opening gambit five years ago. He is a defund the police guy. He tweeted out about defunding the police and all this. Now he has this kind of hard, tough on crime police commissioner he's going to work with. How long can that last really? It can, but it's all going to be dependent on his people leave understanding that they have a stake in his success as measured by polls and how people say, you know what, it's not so bad.
- [53:48]
John Podhoretz
But we were worried about it.
- [53:50]
Christine Rosen
But that would be very practical minded of them, John. That would be very pragmatic and, and I don't know this. Those aren't just aren't words I really associate with the Democratic socialists of America.
- [54:03]
John Podhoretz
We should add, I mean they are the true believers described by Eric Hoffer in his book the True Believer. And there we should add there's a third data point here in terms of why this is a broader cultural issue if you're a Jew in New York, the City College of New York just tried to host an interfaith meeting among like rabbis and ministers and imams. And it turn to the imam calling basically for everyone to walk out because he would not be in the same room as a Zionist. The whole thing was a disaster. A lot of people left and the other people there for interfaith dialogue looked around and were like, what is happening? There is a radicalism. And Mamdani comes exactly out of that line. He's just endorsed someone for. What is it? A New York state assembly. I Think the New York State assembly candidate, Aber Kawas, Abra Kawas, is like a super fan of, you know, guy who has pled guilty to plotting to bomb a synagogue in New York City. So his entire world, not just his parents, but his entire milieu, is full of these people. And they are not politicians and they do not compromise when it comes to their views about the Jews.
- [55:07]
Abe Greenwald
Can I say something? You know, we were talking before Mamdani was elected, but very, very only a few days before election day, and I said that we were talking about what it means for Jews in New York. And I said whatever policy, whatever horrible anti Semitic, anti Zionist policies he's going to enact, what will happen immediately is a change in the culture, is a license among these types to run wild. And I think that's what we saw last night. Excuse me already. So in some sense, you know, I know John, you said like people are acting like he's the mayor already and not doing something about it. But I think this is connected to his winning and I think we could expect so much more of it. I also want to say when he and Tish part ways, perhaps that will be the first day of her campaign for mayor.
- [56:11]
Jon Pothorts
Fair enough. I, I all of this is, you know, this, these moments, the CUNY moment that you mentioned. I should mention that the lead article in the December issue of Commentary is about Hillel the, the largest, probably the largest Jewish organization in America in the sense that it, it is, it is the collegiate network, it's of Jewish organizations on campus often having separate buildings that provide, you know, sort of a way to live as a Jew on a college campus. And Josh Toll in our article, which is called if Hillel Is not for Jews, who Will Be former education director at Hillel, at Ohio State and other places, writes about his disappointment with Hillel as a, as an advocate for Zionism and Jewish causes on campus, particularly when things get hairy and dangerous. And that Hillel privileges and is much more focused on making sure that the Hillel directors at various colleges don't come under attack for being insufficiently supportive of Israel, as many of them have been very defensive about this. Do not, you know, have been, were very disappointing in the wake of October 7th in using the Israelis whom they import to work at the Hillels and provide a sense of what life is like in Israel to undergraduate students at these colleges, that they were not allowed to do what they were really hired to do, which is, which is do that in the way, in the midst of a war. And I bring this up Only because the Hillel, the person who was abused at this CUNY interfaith meeting, was the Hillel rabbi at cuny. And it's very important to point out, having published this critical piece about Hillel, that our issue with Hillel and Commentary's issue with Hillel is that it did not do enough to protect Jewish students, to advocate for Jewish students to fight on their behalf while their rights were being trampled and violated at places, and to internally promote Zionism, which is the dominating fact of Jewish life in the 20th and 21st centuries, and to allow a multiplicity of voices, which means people like the Jews from Mamdani seeming to have some kind of not relatively equal weight, but weight at these places, so that they're as inclusive as possible. And there are some things that you cannot be inclusive about as a Jewish organization, and one of them is anti Zionism. But that does not mean that the Hill rabbis in places who are going through the kind of treatment that this guy went through and others elsewhere do not require condemnation. They deserve our support. They deserve our advocacy. And I just hope very much that though the Hillel hires up, are extremely angry at me and at Commentary for this piece, that I'm just going to call on them to make sure that they show as much support, enthusiasm, security concerns, and all of that for the CUNY Hillel rabbi who underwent this horror as they did toward the egregious Jessica Lott, who was the Northwestern Hillel Rabbi, who was fundamentally an anti Zionist and whom they have defended stoutly against the evil imprecations of people like me and others who were disgusted by her behavior. So fine, if they want to defend her, they can defend her. We published an 11,000 word article about what's wrong with them. But it is now, it is now their obligation and their responsibility to focus their efforts on making sure that the Hillel at cuny and that the rabbi at cuny, that this does not go away, that they. That they take action to ensure his safety, the safety of Jewish kids at the City University of New York and their own standing as an organization with any moral frame whatsoever. So.
- [61:03]
John Podhoretz
Well, it's a clarifying moment then, that the imams are no longer pretending that they have any interest in interfaith dialogue. They are saying, if you're a Zionist, you are beyond the pale and we won't even be in the same room with you. And we're going to encourage every student who agrees with us to walk out. What do you think? Those are the same students who were likely protesting with Keffiyehs all over the college campuses blocking Jewish students entrance to the library. So they have made their. Their red line is totally out in the open now. So you're right that it's up to the leaders in the Hillel and the leaders of these universities to make sure that Jewish students are safe on campus. And obviously now having an executive in Trump who has deputized the administration to make sure that those civil rights laws are properly enforced is a good thing, but it is a constant. It's going to be a constant battle every. On every campus.
- [61:50]
Jon Pothorts
And there's going to be. Sorry, go ahead.
- [61:52]
Abe Greenwald
Maybe, John, that's what you were going to say, the meeting between Trump and Mamdani.
- [61:56]
Jon Pothorts
No, no. Oh, I was going to. I was going to mention one other thing. Then we can go to the meeting between Trump and Mamdani. There is a gubernatorial election in New York in 2026 between Kathy Hochul, the sitting governor, and Elise Stefanik. Elise Stefanik, of course, really making her national reputation. Not that we didn't all know who she was before. Congressman from New York with her astounding, what would you call it, cross examination of the college presidents, university presidents, at the hearing on Capitol Hill that took out, you know, three of them, three of the, four of them long gone. As a result, in part of Stefanik's absolutely amazing and bruising effort to get them to acknowledge that what is anti Semitic and what is not anti Semitic and how this is not a matter of context and all of that. She's a very strong candidate. She's got a hard road to hoe in a state that is overwhelmingly, not overwhelmingly Democratic, but it's mostly Democratic. And in a year that looks like it's going to be, you know, basically you're going to be swimming up river against the tide. Is that right? Do you swim against tough.
- [63:09]
John Podhoretz
She is tough. I recently heard her speak live and she was given a bunch of tough questions and she just. Every single question. Yeah, just absolutely nailed. And not with the kind of campaign stump speak that you're used to candidates hearing. I mean, she is going to be a very tough opponent.
- [63:24]
Jon Pothorts
She's a very tough opponent. And Kathy Hochul is a disaster. Kathy Hochul is a third rate sort of, you know, literally kind of. We were talking about Death by Lightning the other day. I mean, she's, she's not, she's not like a corruption, you know, she's not like a corrupt charlatan like Chester Allen Arthur was, as we see in Death by Lightning, but she was chosen by Andrew Cuomo to be his running mate because she provided absolutely no challenge or threat to him whatsoever. And then he had to resign and she ends up becoming governor.
- [63:57]
John Podhoretz
She always just looks sort of surprised when she wakes up every day, surprised she's a governor.
- [64:02]
Jon Pothorts
Yeah. But I'm bringing this up only to say that what will happen and what will be without question, because. Because Stefanik will be looking to exploit it and she will be looking to soft pedal it is how the antisemitism issue is going to rear its head in New York State in 2026. Because it's not just that the Jewish population of New York City is 12%, 40% of the Jewish community in the United States lives in New York State or lives in the New York metropolitan area, some of them in New Jersey, but most in New York, Nassau County, Suffolk county, and Westchester and Rockland counties. And they're a potent bloc. And Stefanik is going to be reminding them that Mamdani is there sitting in the city, doing whatever he's doing, and that Hochul is there. And this is going to be a major topic during 2026 in the gubernatorial race. And that will also provide moments for Mamdani and Tish's potential battles to come out in the open. So that's something to watch for. Okay, Abe, Mamdani and Trump.
- [65:16]
Christine Rosen
Just one, one more point on that. You know what Elise did, and I think the issue goes beyond anti Semitism. What she did in those hearings was extremely important and showed political instinct in that. Yes, the immediate issue was anti Semitism that she was pressing the college presidents about. But it was also the insane double standards of these academics that all Americans knew were at work where they refused to say that anti Semitic speech was beyond the pale on their campuses, when everybody knew that students had been hauled in for, you know, fat shaming or using the wrong pronouns and this, that and the other. So was there was the. There was the dub. There was the double standard issue. And the second issue was the chaos on college campuses, which may very well come back to New York. You know, we saw some of it last night in the protests outside the synagogue that Americans saw images of and did not like. And Stefanik succeeded in showing that that could be real political currency in the Republican Party. And Trump, in turn, took that up on the campaign trail and campaigned on that. And that will be, you know, the climate of college campuses is. Will now be a permanent campaign issue in the Republican Party because of what she did in those hearings.
- [67:02]
Jon Pothorts
Right.
- [67:03]
Christine Rosen
And it was not just the anti Semitism. Thing it was all of these issues bundled together. And if she can do that in a forward looking way, in a current way, because the protests are no longer live on the campuses because of what she did. Yeah, they're not an issue anymore. She'll have real success on the campaign trail.
- [67:27]
Jon Pothorts
Right. Okay. Abe Mamdani and Trump are meeting at the White House tomorrow.
- [67:32]
Abe Greenwald
I'm worried about it. Trump announced that he's meeting with Mamdani on Truth Social in a post that calls Mamdani a communist.
- [67:47]
Jon Pothorts
I know Communist Communists. What does it say? It says communist Zoran quote Kwame, unquote. Mamdani. I don't know why he put the quotes around his middle name.
- [67:59]
Abe Greenwald
Trumpian punctuation is a, is an art. My fear is that Trump is going to be joking around with him because he jokes around with everyone. You know, he wants to. He likes to create this sort of like buddy, buddy atmosphere and strip them with cologne. Yeah. And, yeah. And Trump is also now trying to show that he's on top of the affordability message, which is obviously Mamdani's campaign mantra had been his campaign mantra. And I think, I fear Trump may want to come out of this looking more friendly than he should.
- [68:51]
Jon Pothorts
I kind of doubt that. But I mean, and I don't know, there's no point in speculating, but it seems to me like he's like, come be my chew toy for half an hour. That would be great. You think what I did to Zelensky was unpleasant? Wait till you see what I do to you. If you, you're the one want. You want to have a meeting with me? Come on in. Come on in, little boy. Let's see how you let, let, let, let's see how you tussle. And he's got a very nice smile, but he shows absolutely no sign of having a light touch. I mean, all the light touch is curated. It was like TikTok curated. So that means it could have been filmed 14 times before he struck the right tone. Democratic socialists, not known for being fun. What was it that Trotsky said? Trotsky famously said, damn all communists. They suck the joy out of life. And this is when he was a communist.
- [69:54]
John Podhoretz
Chick in his brain. Yes.
- [69:55]
Jon Pothorts
Yeah, well, that was, that was 30 years later. Yeah, but he was sort of like, you know, communists are terrible. Like, you can't even have even have remotely have a good time with them. And Mamdani sure seems like that to me. So, you know, Trump, Trump will want to joke around and he'll be like, Mr. President, you've committed genocide. He's like, oh, really? You want to go there, piggy? You know, I don't know. Well, we'll see. We may not even hear much about it. I mean, it's kind of a weird thing that he's having this meeting anyway. Like, how many mayors does he meet with individually? Granted, it's New York and he's from New York and all of that, but it's not like I see him meeting with Brand Johnson or Karen Bass or.
- [70:39]
John Podhoretz
He'S probably just going to make some Trump specific request about Trump Tower, and that's the whole reason for the meeting. And there'll be no political discussion at all.
- [70:48]
Jon Pothorts
Or. Or he'll announce that he's sending ICE into. Into. You know, into Mamdani's former congregation. Former assembly district is making a special dispensation for ICE to go right into Queens in the Bronze. Okay, we've gone on long enough. We'll be back tomorrow. For Abe, Eliana, and Christine, I'm John Podhoritz. Keep the camel burning.