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This is TLV1. This episode may contain explicit language. Welcome to the Promise podcast brought to you on TLV1, the voice of the city that this week crated up and shipped out from the Kirya IDF headquarters campus over across from the Art museum, a five ton stone block that had been brought to the army headquarters campus in 1969 from the area of the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem and to it was affixed by the Antiquities Authority, a surprisingly technical sign in Hebrew and English that started quote the use of monumental stones was typical of Herodian architecture At the end of the Second Temple period, the soldiers of the Roman army that invaded Jerusalem in 70 CE battled Herod's temple structure in the time of her the support of the stones was achieved with a sophisticated lifting system made of high and low levers permitting a type of light and shade. Most of the stones were removed from nearby quarries at the point of the city. They vary from two to dozens of tons and can weigh even more than that. And it goes on in this fashion. The decision to take some of the huge stone blocks that sat strewn and scattered at the foot of the wall where they were found when IDF soldiers took control of the Old City on June 17, 1967 was taken back in the day, apparently in hopes of allowing more people from more parts of the country to experience seeing and touching a part of the retaining wall of the Old City. And the uplift and inspiration that such contact might bring, it was hoped would make the lives of people around the country better, including the soldiers who went to army headquarters. At the curia, a five ton stone was laboriously transferred to the Curia, as I said, and one was also transferred to the garden of the President's residence to the Knesset grounds, one to the Israel Museum. Some years later, one of the stones was brought to Ben Gurion Airport as well. In the event at the time, President Professor Zalman Shahzar, who learned about the stone only after it was placed in his garden, insisted that it be returned to its original location, piqued that he had not been consulted and also perhaps persuaded that the stones had best not be moved at all. And maybe he was wary also of using religious artifacts or with such great symbolic power to spur national pride. For whatever reason, the stone went into the storehouses of the Antiquities Department. But the other stones, including the stone that came all the way to Tel Aviv to IDF headquarters, remained. Last year, though, the Chief Rabbinical Council of Israel met to discuss the fate of the diasporic stones of the Western Wall and it was decided to investigate the possibility of returning all of the stones to Jerusalem. Minister of Defense Yisrael Katz expressed his support for the move, which was qu to return the stone to its natural place with all the other stones of the wall in the Old City in Jerusalem. The stones of the wall belong to the wall. The stones of the wall are part of the place holiest to the Jewish people, the place that is the root of our identity and of our beliefs. The Temple Mount. The place where God told Abraham, take your son, your only one whom you love, Isaac, and go forth to the land of Moriah and offer him up as a burnt offering. End quote. After that there was a bit of bureaucracy and a bit of logistics, but finally this week the stone was returned to the wall complex, where it, with other repatriated stones, will be buried in a specially designed geniza for the stones of the wall. The Rabbi of the Wall, Rav Shmuel Rabinovitch, said, quote, the stones of the Western Wall are not merely stones. They bear the soul of the Jewish people the pain of exile and the joy of return, even when there was a desire to bring some of this sanctity to the very heart of. Of decision making its natural places here in its original home. The return of the stones today is not only a physical restoration, but a renewed connection to the deep foundations that sustain the nation. End quote. All of which is very much in the spirit of the Great 1967 Naomi Shemer song Jerusalem of Gold, with the verse that goes, the trees and stones softly slumber A dream unfolds them all. So solitary lies the city and in its heart a. A wall, a wall, of course, being the Western Wall here in Tel Aviv, of course, the absence of the stone produced no expressions of regret. Indeed, I scoured the press and asked politicians to find any sign of regret that the five ton piece of the Second Temple's retaining wall that had been here for 57 years was now gone. And I found nothing. Nothing, I tell you, nada. Nothing. And when I asked the deputy mayor in the hallway why he thought this was, he said, well, you know, Tel Aviv does not really do holiness and arguably nothing. The there ain't nothing the matter with matter vibe of this city we love so El Tel Viafo, a city that revels in the terrestrial, the human, the this worldly, in sun and sand and food and drink and sex and sports, mostly believing that such sanctity as we need and as we can find, we are capable of producing ourselves with our hands and our hearts better than no one having too many feelings at all about the sudden leave taken of a temple wall stone. Because at the heart of this city there is no wall, no stones, just of beating hearts, lapping waves and pounding music. With us as we return this week after our long wartime hiatus in the great underground vault that is the Serenity studio here at number 12 lesser horry street, is a woman whose lovely prose, not unlike a perfectly hewn five ton stone from the retaining wall of the Second Temple, improbably combines momentous weight with a sort of delicate grace, smooth and cool, often seeming to have been quarried from the deepest seams of human consciousness and at best reaching a sort of beauty that seems surely sanctified. Obviously, the author of such prose could only be Alison Kaplan Sommer. Alison it's written for Politico, the New Republic, Foreign Policy, the Jerusalem Post, the jta, the Forward, and many other of your very best papers and magazines. She is a columnist with Haaretz. You have seen her on i24 television and Al Jazeera TV, and you have heard her on NPR, PRI and the BBC, and of course on the Haaretz podcast that she hosts very often, two times a week. People Alison Jose b' Naibrith World Center Award for Journalism recognizing excellence in Diaspora reportage and a Simon Rockauer Award for Excellence in Covering Zionism, Aliyah and Israel. Alison, how are you doing?
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I was waiting for you to say Jerusalemites care about stones and Tel Avivians care about getting stoned.
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There is truth to that. You speak the truth. That's very deep, what you just said, and yes, and true. Now, as for me, my name is Noah Ephraim and I do not mean to boast, but I got an Airbnb this past Shabbat for us to go away and celebrate Susan's birthday. And when I got home, I wrote my very enthusiastic review of the yurt we stayed in. It was it is an excellent yurt. And I pressed upload. And then I found myself shockingly impatient to get back the review that Ruti, the owner of the yurt, wrote about us. You know how it works. The quote unquote host and the quote unquote visitor each write a review of the other and they send it in. But the Airbnb people only publish them when both sides have written so that the one doesn't influence the other. And I wrote mine that night as soon as we got home, and while I returned the rental car and then walked the dog, I kept refreshing the app to see if Ruti had sent her review in Of Us. And it was like that time in set at the Hebrew Academy when Jay Roden passed a note to Anne Saxer saying, Noah likes you. Or I think it might have said Noah likes like you, do you like or like like Noah? And it had two check boxes underneath, one yes and one no. And I watched as the note went from hand to hand and I watched as Anne thought about it and took a pen out of her desk and I watched until the note came back hand over hand and it was just like that. But this time it was Ruti, my host at the Green Yurt. And when I woke up the next day and checked first thing, I kept refreshing and refreshing to see, well, does Ruthie like me? Which box did she check? And please believe me when I say that I am not bragging. God knows that that is not how my folks raised me. But I think that I've retained a certain youthfulness to me that many of my friends seem to have lost when they stopped being cripplingly insecure. Also, I read at past a ninth grade level, that's true. I should add that joining us for our second discussion and hopefully will persuade him to stay on and share a what a country will be one of my oldest and dearest friends, Professor Gordon Leifer, who I will introduce more fully when he is here to be introduced. Today we got two topics of such grave importance that we worried about how we would ever get a security clearance for this podcast episode. But first, we have this matter in memoriam. Last Friday, hundreds of people came to Beita' Almin Minuchot Olam, the Eternal Rest Cemetery in Netanyah, a cooperative cemetery with an ideology, the ideology being that it is not run by rabbis and that it is dedicated to enabling every human being to bid farewell to loved ones in the manner he chooses and believes, exercising their right to a dignified and respectful burial. The people came to laid arrest Yair Garbuz, an artist, writer, teacher, political activist of sorts and public intellectual who himself had no love for rabbis. Many of the people who came are famous, some of them extravagantly so, like former president Ruvi Rivlin, actor Rivka Mikhaili, writer Chaim Be', Er, playwright Ephraim Tzidon, illustrator Dani Kerman, comedian Shlomo Nizan, singer Nurit Galron, all of them very accomplished, all of them in their 70s or 80s or 90s, all people who starting 50 years ago in the 1970s you would see at the lefty demonstrations in Tel Aviv, Peace Now, Yeshvul, what have you you would clock them either just a bit over from you in the crowd, or often enough you would see them on the stage speaking to the crowd. Yair Garbuz himself came from an accomplished family, tightly bound in the warp and woof of Israel's leftist establishment. His older brother, Aharon Harel, was a Labor MK for most of the 1980s, and he served as the head of the Israel Broadcast Authority and high up in the Histadroot labor union. His son and Yair Garbus nephew, Asaf Harel, was, until not that long ago, deputy mayor of Tel Aviv and Yair Garbuz's younger brother, Alon Garbuz was head of Tel Aviv's cinematheque for 40 years, building the place into what it is today, becoming, as he did, a legendary character in the cities and the country's cultural establishment. Now people of this same ilk, celebrities and mandarins, movers and shakers, were here, hundreds of them, under the great awning at the entrance to the green lawns of the cemetery, consoling one another. Chaim Be' er read passages from essays Yair Garbuz wrote about his life in art. Dani Kerman said, quote, they once asked Yair, why aren't you like everyone else? And Yair answered, I want to be like everyone else, but everyone else refuses to change. End quote. Margalit Garbuz, who was married to Yair Garbus for 60 years and whom, as Dani Karman said, was the only person Yair Garbuz truly revered, Beard told this story. Today is Friday, I taught Yair to bring me flowers. Every Friday he would go into the store. Sometimes he would take a ready made bouquet, but sometimes he would pick each flower from the buckets in the store and he would make a bouquet out of them. The saleswoman, he told me, said to him, but they do not go together. So he said to her, so they will learn to go together. Yair Garbuz had his first Solo Gallery show 59 years ago, in 1967 at the Masada Gallery at Diesenghaf, 164, two floors over the old Masada Bookstore. Since then he has made thousands of works of art shown in 52 solo shows in galleries and museums around the country and around the world. And there were group shows too, of course, and he taught art at the Art Teachers Seminary at Bateborough College and at the Avni Institute for Art in Tel Aviv, where Yair Garbuz did his own training, and he was the editor of the best satire publication the country ever had the Varacher. He won Israel's top journalism prize for that. And he was the host of a classic TV satire show, Ein im Mila Daber There is no One to Talk with, it was called. And he wrote nine books of essays and he won prize after prize and got countless honors. He did all this and still what he is most known for and what he will surely be remembered for, there's no question about that, are 8 minutes and 17 seconds. On the evening of March 7, 2015, at a demonstration at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, 10 days before an angrily contested election, polls showed to be a dead heat, during which 8 minutes and 17 seconds, Yair Garbuz stood in front of more than 100,000 left leaning voters and said this. Ashinui. Good evening. Good evening to all who long for a change. They told us and want us to believe that the despicable man who murdered the Prime Minister came from a tiny fringe of delusional people. They told us he had been influenced by out of touch rabbis and that he belonged to the lunatic fringe. They told us that the yellow shirted and black emblemed followers of Kahane was right. Those shouting Death to Arabs are only a fringe, merely a tiny fringe. The wicked perpetrators of price tag attacks are surely just a fringe too. A mere handful. The Temple Mount faithful, the would be rebuilders of the Temple, the entire inciters of hatred, just a fringe. Violence, they said, was only a marginal phenomenon. Again and again they repeated and drilled into us that the racists who threatened and cursed us do not represent Israeli society at all. They are only a fringe. And then they had the gall to tell us that the thieves and bribe takers are also only a fringe. The corrupt and the swinish hedonists, no more than a fringe. The destroyers of democracy. A fringe. Those who think democracy means the tyranny of the majority, a fringe. The kissers of amulets, the idol worshipers, those who bow and prostrate themselves at the graves of holy men, merely a fringe. Even the sexual harassers and rapists are a fringe. And the corrupt policemen and liars who lie, they told us, are not representative of the whole. But if all of these are only a fringe, then how is it that the fringe rules over us? How is it that without anyone noticing and without anyone stopping it, the fringe has become a majority? How did it happen that being so destructive a fringe turned out to be so contagious? How is it that the fringe became so fat, so aggressive, so crude? And how is it, digging beneath us, that Most dangerous of tunnels, the Tunnel of Ignorance. How is it that by their hands they're snakes beneath us? The Tunnel of Hate. I went to Shuka Carmel, the Carmel market, two days after Yair Garbuz's speech, just to buy stuff we needed. And I was confused to find there and maybe every other basta or stand. There was a picture of Yair Garbuz pinned up. I asked one of the guys I buy from, he remembers me because of my accent and he's friendly to me, poking fun in a warm way. I said, I know you enough to know that you had to. I hate what Garbuz said on Moze Shabbat. Why do you have his picture hanging? And he said, my parents came here from Morocco with nothing and they lived in a tin hut in a transit camp for seven years and no one official ever helped them. All they got from the clerks and self important party hacks who came was condescension. And everything they got, they got on their own or because of their friends and family. Nothing ever came from the government or from your people, the Ashkenazim. And they built a life for themselves and for their kids. And I owe all that I am to them. And this picture of Garbus, I put it here to remind me of what they went through, of every clerk and hack who treated them like they were worthless, who looked at them and saw only primitive amulet kissers who throw themselves on the graves of great rabbis. I want to see Yair Garbuz every minute of every day to remember the pain of my parents, what they had to suffer in order for me to get where I got. The fruit and fish guys in the Shuk were not the only ones to take Yair Garbuz's speech the way they took Yair Garbuz's speech the next day. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, I heard someone yesterday talk about mezuzah kissers with contempt. Kissers of mezuzo. When did it become a crime to kiss a mezuzah? We know where we came from, we know what country we came back to, we know what we are preserving. We know about our traditions and our heritage, which is the foundation of our future kissers of mezuzot. And of course, the Prime Minister, who has a talent for amplifying and exploiting insult, he swapped Yair Garbuz's criticism of people who kiss amulets for people who kiss the mezuzah on the frame of every door, which is more of a mainstream custom that many more people were raised to follow I know I was than were raised to kiss kabbalistic mystical magical amulets. But Benjamin Netanyahu's exaggeration worked because say what you will in spirit, it was right. It was not an over interpretation to hear in Yair Garbuz's words his anger and antipathy for religious sorts and most of all probably Sephardi or Mizrahi religious sorts for whom visiting the graves of righteous rabbi, rabbis and consulting healers and such is probably more common than it is among the Jews whose ancestors sojourned through Europe. A few days after his speech at Rabin Square, Yair Garbuz found himself on a talk show with then recently replaced head of the Labour Party, Shelley Yakimovic, arguing that this was not at all what he meant. He had nothing against Svaradim, he detested all primitive sorts equally. But Shelly Yakimovic was not buying it and neither really was anyone else. Naftali Bennett, running at the head of the Jewish Home National Religious Party, said, I will tell you, Mr. Garbooz, who that fringe is. That fringe is people from development towns, people who live in Kiryat Shmona, Shlomi, Nitivot, Sderot, who get up at six in the morning to pray the morning prayers and put on tefillin. That is the fringe you are talking about. And in this fringe are people who for a generation you ran over because of our culture. And I am proud to stand at the head of this fringe. The Sephardi Ultra Orthodox Shas Party, by the day after the demonstration in Rabin Square, already had billboards up all over the country with Yair Garbuz's picture on them alongside the picture of the head of the party, Aryeh Derry, with the tagline who are you to condescend to us? Yair Garbuz always insisted, ever since that night, that he was not talking about Sephardim in particular. He was talking about everyone who had benighted attitudes. And God knows, he said, there are enough Ashkenazim who believe the primitive things they get from their primitive religion that cause them to do primitive things. Terrible, violent and racist primitive things. Almost a year ago, in a lovely long valedictory interview given after he learned he was sick and that it was bad, Yair Garbuz said that recent history had only proven that what he said 10 years before in Rabin Square was right. He said, It is hard for me. I don't like sentences that mean I knew I was right, I told you so. I don't like them. But there were people who warned. And there were people who talked. And I was one of those who talked, and they manipulated my words in the most unbelievable way possible. And the first time we went to Hasid Square, my wife says to me, there is a mother here sitting with a sign, go over and talk to her. Talk to her. And I say to her, what will I say? And she says, go, she will say. So I went. And she says, is it you? And I say to her, yes. And she says, the first warning, it came from you, because you said, the fringe is taking us over. You didn't say this about Mizrahim. They invented that, that true blood libel. But you said, the fringe is taking us over. And the fringe did take us over, end quote. In what seems to be the last interview that Yair Garbuz ever gave, he was asked, would you give the same speech about the fringe all over again? And he answered, quote, I would absolutely give the same speech again. In the elections that took place the Following Tuesday on March 17, the right wing under Benjamin Netanyahu won by the smallest of majorities and ended up forming a coalition of 61 with an opposition of 59. Then and ever since, political scientists have argued about whether Yair Garbuz's speech shifted enough angry votes away from the centrist Zionist Union and away from the centrist Yeshatid Party, both headed by famously Ashkenazi men Buji Herzog and Yair Lapid, to the right to Shas and the Likud and the Kulanu Party, headed by Moshe Kahlon, the very successful kid of a construction worker from Tripoli, who was the surprise success of the election, winning 10 seats, which 10 seats Moshe Kahlon straight away took to Benjamin Netanyahu's government, keeping Netanyahu in office. There are many people who believe to this day that were it not for the 8 minutes and 17 seconds that yer Garbu spoke at Rabin Square, Benjamin and Netanyahu would have been swept from public life in 2015, and everything now would be different than it is. But a person's life, especially the life of a man like Yair Garbuz, who did so much for so long, a person's life can never be reduced to 8 minutes and 17 seconds, no matter how important those minutes and seconds are. And I, who for 11 years have held a great simmering resentment towards Yair Garbuz, whom I always lazily, it must be said, held to account for reminding voters and all the rest of us right before an election that there is still an old elite what Political science professor Asher Cohen calls Ahusli an anagram for Ashkenazi secular, established socialist nationalists who still look at everyone else as somehow less than they are, and who, with a microphone in their hand and a crowd at their feet, are capable of a sort of cluelessness and condescension that are so great that they cannot easily be ignored or forgotten or forgiven, which I think is true. But then, as this week, I read tribute after tribute and memory after memory of the man I came to see that while it is true that this cluelessness and condescension are part of Yair Garbuz's life and legacy, this is not the whole truth. Another thing that Yair Garbuz was, of course, was a painter. In grade school, at the Boruchov School in Givatayim, he studied with Avraham Naton, a Serbian immigrant and painter of renown who showed in galleries and won the prestigious Diesenghaf Prize, all while working in an elementary school. Yair Garbuz was already a painter of recognized promise when at 16, he left home to live and work on Kibbutz Mishmar Hasharon, though a year later, at 17, he started his studies with the man who would have the greatest influence on Yair Garbuz, Rafi Lavi, at the Avni Institute Art Academy in Tel Aviv, which studies Yair Garbuz somehow continued while he went through the army in the Nahl Brigade. Though Rafi Lavi was only seven years older than Yair Garbuz, he was of a different generation, and Rafi Lavi was of a revolutionary character. He was all about new and all about rebellion from the start, challenging what he took to be the insufferable lyricism of the art that had found its way into the galleries of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem ever since the 1930s. Yair Garbuz was still in his teens when Rafi Lavi recruited him to a group of like minded, or at least game young artists who became the Ten plus, who starting in 1965, put on a series of shows of a sort that no one had ever before seen in Israel, based on a manifesto they wrote together on a Drunken Night in August 1965 in Rafi Lavi's apartment. The manifesto saying, among other things, that, quote, it is decided to hold unconventional shows, like shows of just large works, shows of just miniatures, collages, illustrations, slides, shows organized by topics such as nudes, portraits and so on. End quote. The first 10 plus show was held in Tel Aviv, in Masquit, the boutique of invented Indigenous fashion run by Ruth Dayan, Moshe Dayan's brilliant wife, wherein the paintings were all painted on fabric, the same fabric used to make the fashion sold in the store. And after that there was a show of just nudes and a show of flowers and red paintings and round paintings and so on. The ten plus artists paid great attention to materials. It was part of their manifesto that they would make a virtue of the vice of the cheap stuff that was so in Israel in the 1960s, the Rough Paper and rough fabric and yellowing, magazine clippings and thin tin constructions and such. Yair Garbuz was drawn to collage, a form he went back to over and over again throughout his career. His collages and then later his paintings were mostly crowded, jammed with images. In 1999, Yair Garbuz remembered his first visits to Rafi Lavi's apartment. Quote, I dared to look around me and peek into the different rooms and behind the partitions and cabinets that created still more space. It seemed to me that I knew this crowdedness and this clutter. His home struck me as a visualization of my own psychoanalysis. The principle of multiplicity feeds upon itself and always demands more. If there is a bottle of water on the table, and not far from that there is a faucet, then both require backup. That is to say, there must be a reserve bottle of water and a reserve faucet, and naturally there must be the business card of a plan plumber and the business card of a backup plumber, and empty bottles waiting to be filled. In this way, an endless list comes into being, lengthening at every moment. A list of arrangements and tasks that are extraordinarily urgent and utterly non interchangeable. Rafi La Vie carries such lists around with him, and so do I. Every line crossed off the list gives rise to two or more new ones added at the end. That is the secret of the multiplicity of my paintings and end quote. It is, by the way, a source of great pleasure to me that Rafi Lavi's only son is Aviv Lavi, Israel's best environmental reporter and a man of rare gentility and humor. And if not quite a friend, well, at least someone whom I love and admire. In any case, for Yair Garbuz, multiplicity. Different materials, different media, different sorts of images, different sources. Comics, movies, books crowd together on a canvas or board or piece of paper or oak tag. And this crowding of all different sorts together, it is the heart of his art. The catalog of a show Yair Garbus held at the Gordon Gallery here in Tel Aviv during the Corona starts with this. This exhibition overflows its banks. It spills beyond its edge, beyond its banks, it goes outside the lines. Paintings alone are not enough for this exhibition. It invades texts, songs, essays. Language, too, is too cramped to contain it. And so it cracks fissures within it. It shifts trains of familiar words off their tracks. This exhibition is noisy. It seethes, it stammers, it rattles, it coughs, it clears its throat, it sputters to life. It coughs again. It chokes, it vomits, it spits. It bursts into loud laughter and immediately turns grave again. For all this manic noise, after all, cannot conceal its depressive roots. End quote. The reference to language and text, it is not captured. Yair Garbuz's art is full of words, words, words describing why Yair Garbuz said he grew up in a religious home with a religious father and a religious, much older brother, and there was no art on the walls at all. But they had books, plenty of books, and they had books about art. And this is why, when he was in need of inspiration throughout his life, it was to bookstores and libraries that he would go. And there is something he said that is Jewish about this, about the inseparability of images from words, of anything from wor, and of the real world from its representations. Which is why he said, the very good, very Jewish old Yiddish joke has one man visiting another man's house and saying, what a fine, beautiful young woman your daughter has grown into. And the first man says back, ah, if you think she is beautiful in person, wait until you see her in a photograph. And watching Yair Garbuz telling this joke to explain his art, its obsessiveness, its Bruegelian saturation, its fascination with words, I get all at once just how Jewish an artist Yair Garbuz is, how much he really accepted the challenge of the Zionism of his immigrant parents from Poland, which was to give their kids the tools and the energy they would need to take the Judaism of their parents and to transform it into something altogether different for their grandchildren. This was Yair Garbuz's life's work. And when you see that this was his life's work, work, you get why. What he took to be the old kind of Judaism that he saw rising again around him was such an affront to the man I once interviewed, Tomi Lapid, Yair Lapid's father. He was Minister of Justice and the head of a big party committed to getting ultra Orthodox Jews out of yeshivas and into the army in the workforce. He was a remarkable man. I've never met anyone with his charisma. And after he sat me down at the table in his office and had his secretary bring me a glass of water, he. He said, I know you're going to make me look bad in your book, like a man with an irrational and unfair hatred of haredim. But what I really am is a maskil. By which he meant one of those 18th and 19th century advocates of Jewish enlightenment, of adopting Western ways and Western science and believing in progress and that rights are a universal thing, and that before we are Jews, we are human beings. Tomi Lapid said, I am a Maskir, and a Maskiel is a sort of Jew. A Maskiel is a real Jew. The fight I am leading against the haredim and against religious narishkite in general, amulets and magical rabbis and all the rest, it is a fight that has been going on for more than 200 years. And this is my fight, but also this is our fight, because where else are we going to fight it than in a Jewish state? And this was the moment when I realized that all along I'd been exactly wrong, when I thought that Tomilapid was somehow against Judaism or against Judaism in the public square square. Tomi Lapid was fighting for Judaism, including Judaism, in the public square. Just a particular sort of muskilic, enlightened judaism. More than 20 years have passed since I spoke with Tomi Lapid, now of blessed memory. And it took until this week for me to realize that the same thing is true of Yair Garbus. He was a man who devoted his life to making art and to making satire and to making politics that would allow us to be good Jews, the way he understood what it is to be a good Jew. And I do not agree with Yair Garbuz or with Tomilapid about kissers of amulets and people who visit the graves of the righteous, who find meaning in what their parents did and what their parents parents did, all of which to me seems just beautiful. But what Yair Garbuz and Tomilapid thought, this Jewish state that we all live in is for keeping going this argument that started more than 200 years ago. Not only do I think that they're right about that, I think too that this is why I wanted to live here in the first place and why I want to live here now, so that Yair Garbus can say what he said in Rabin Square, and so that the guy that I buy my avocados from can hang his picture in his stand as a homage to his parents from theft. My hope is that all of them, Yair Garbuz and tomilapid, my avocado guy, the people who go to Uman each Rosh Hashanah to start the New Year at the grave of Rabbi Nachman. My hope is that all of these people who like the flowers really don't go together, may someday somehow learn still to go together in the place, the whole purpose of which is to make them somehow go together together. May Yair Garbuz's memory be for a blessing. Today. Two Discussions Discussion one Strange High IQ bedfellows playing three dimensional chess as Iran this week attacks with vigor and some success the Fujairah oil industry zone as well as Emirate tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, and as Israel transfers its newest, most advanced laser based missile defense system to the United Arab Emirates, and as the UAE lately withdrew after decades from the OPEC oil cartel, and as the Emirates have this week lobbied hard for the US and Israel to renew their out and out war against Iran, we will smack our foreheads with the butt of our palms and say, my God, should we have been paying much more attention to the UAE all along? Are they our beshert? Our brother from another mother? Should we be more hobnobby with Abu Dhabi? You know what I'm talking about. And discussion College days. That's daze spelled D A Z E. What as it's graduation season, people, and we will turn our days back to campus and especially to some recent Brew Ha Ha's Gordon Lafer's University of Oregon, where a talk by beauty queen goodwill ambassador Noah Kochba was canceled for fear that Noah might be harmed, which is uncool, man. And the University of Michigan, where a professor giving a charge presented pro Palestinian activists on campus as moral role models act at graduation. And back on the east coast at jts, where students petitioned their chancellor to cancel Israeli President Yitzhak Herzog's planned commencement address on the grounds that he is divisive and maybe genocidal. All of which maybe pales in comparison to a shallow dive that I took into very recent social science quote unquote research about Israel, Palestine, Zionism and colonialism. It'll be back to college for the three of us. And then for our most unreasonably generous Patreon supporters in our extra special special extra discussion, the link to which you can find in our show notes on your podcast app or@patreon.com promised podcast on the World Wide Web. We will make the most of having Gordon with us. When we have him with us, hopefully he will agree and ask, is there a place and future for quote unquote, liberal Zionism and liberal Zionists outside of Israel? Or is liberal Zionist identity, which describes most everyone I know and love back in America, basically impossible to inhabit these days if it's not impossible to occupy? What does liberal Zionism look like today and what might it look like tomorrow? We will ask. But before we get to any of that, listen to this. That song is Yamim Levanim. The words are by Leah Goldberg, the music is by Shlomo Yidov and it is here sung by Mor La Vie. I've never liked him more new music for these days of the sort we will listen to over the course of the show. And now it is time for our first discussion. So, Alice, using the podcast's very extensive network of high level contacts in the world of Middle east diplomacy, we managed to get our hands on this authentic bit of audio of Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed or mbz speaking with Prime Minister Netanyahu. I love that you get cold when it's 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich.
- [40:31]
C
I love that you get a little
- [40:32]
A
crinkle above your nose when you look at at me like I'm nuts. I love that after I spend a day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I want to talk to
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C
before I go to sleep at night.
- [40:43]
A
I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. So, Alison, has the war with Iran shifted our relations with the United Arab Emirates? Perhaps in ways that we did not fully notice until this week.
- [40:58]
B
Can I just say that these names MBZ for the head of the UAE as opposed to MbS from Saudi Arabia Arabia. Don't they sound like rapper names?
- [41:08]
A
It's. It's cool. Yes, they sound. They have a certain hypnos to them.
- [41:11]
B
Absolutely, absolutely. Bringing. Bringing hypnosis to Middle east politics. So we learned this week that Israel has sent its newest, most advanced laser based missile defense system to the UAE, to MBZ's country, the United Arab Emirates. This system used to be called Iron Beam and then it was called Laser Dome. And most recently it's taken the name name O Eitan, a pun of sort, which means Eitan's light after Captain Eitan Oster, an infantry captain killed in Lebanon, and his father, Dov Oster, was an engineer who helped develop that technology. It also comes from a popular Hanukkah song and means a strong light. As someone who named her son Eitan, I strongly endorse that choice. The or Eitan system first became operational in Israel only a few months ago at the end of December, and it is extraordinary for Israel to have shared shared such new cutting edge technology and all the more so to have shared it with a Muslim country that until fewer than six years ago did not recognize Israel. Last week the Wall Street Journal had a long and significant article about the UAE and how it is hearkening in quote, a new Middle east order. The proximate reason for the article was the Emirates decision last week to pull out of OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, a 66 year old consortium of mostly Arab countries tasked with coordinating production, shipping and sales in a way intended to keep the price of the crucial resource high and the power of oil producing countries great. The UAE announced it was leaving OPEC in order to avoid the production constraints the cartel imposed on it, allowing it to sell more oil at prices that they set to best meet its own needs. Reports are that the uae, newly unbound by OPEC quotas, plans to raise its oil production by more than 60% in the next year, which was a source of distress among OPEC nations first and foremost, foremost Saudi Arabia. According to the journal, the UAE's exit from OPEC quote rang the opening bell for the new geopolitical order that the war with Iran is ushering in across the Middle East. The war with Iran has been tougher on the Emirates than many people realize. Iran has launched more than 2, 800 missiles and drones at the UAE, more than at any other place, including Israel. The Emirates are much closer to Iran than Israel, with fewer advanced missile defense systems. So the damage Iran has caused caused in the UAE is greater than the damage that it has caused anywhere else. As the Journal reports, the Emirates have been dismayed by the reticence of other Arab countries to challenge Iran and as a result its leaders and most of all Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, or so cool mbz, are considering downgrading their country's relationships with the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. This disappointment with their traditional allies has also spurred the UAE to double down on its strategic alliance with Israel that has developed for years and was formalized in the Abraham Accords five years ago and lately reached its fullest expression ever as The Journal reports quote, flight tracking websites show military transports have shuttled between the Israeli base of Nevatim and the UAE throughout the recent conflict with Iran. At the very start of the war, Israel sent the Emirates Iron Dome defense systems. Israeli generals were seen frequently in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the US uae. Partly as a result of all this, the UAE under MBZ may be as eager as Israel under Bibi to return to active fighting with Iran. There are unconfirmed reports that MBZ this week lobbied US President Donald Trump to renew bombings. Relatedly, over the past days, Iran has repeatedly attacked the UAE in an effort to disturb its oil production at export and damage its economy economy. So all this, the newly very close relations between Israel and the UAE cemented by arms trade, the growing tension between the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the UAE lobbying of the Americans to take a tougher line against Iran and more is no doubt seen in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office as developments that would make Israel stronger and maybe as the very positive results of efforts to reshape the Middle east in a way that might allow Israel a long term place, at least among some of the nations. In fact, the Prime Minister and his people have uncharacteristically not boasted all that much about this, a fact that when we asked friend of the podcast and maybe the smartest person we know in all things Gulfish, maybe Jonathan Furziger, the managing editor of the Circuit, which covers daily business news from the Gulf and who in the past was a fellow at the Atlantic Council and a big wig at Bloomberg and is also married to a very smart woman. Jonathan Furziger said, how do you know that he didn't leak all this stuff to the Wall Street Journal, which is a good point. That's kind of boasting, but boasting without taking credit for boasting. So it's possible Benjamin Netanyahu just decided that, hey, no one likes a guy who boasts we know how modest he can be and it's better not to sing your own praises and just let other people do that for you. Noah, I'm asking you, is this new geopolitical order that MBZ seems to be guiding his country towards seem to be likely one in which Israel can really thrive? And and do you think that moving towards that new geopolitical order has all along been one of Prime Minister Netanyahu's three dimensional chess goals? That is assuming that you think he's playing three dimensional chess and not just winging it?
- [46:53]
A
Yes, I do. I think that this in when the History is Written will be one of Benjamin Netanyahu's biggest successes. In a list of successes that is not really very short, though it remains dwarfed, I think, by his list of important failures, or maybe dwarfs in importance by his list of failures. I think that this is exactly what Netanyahu has been talking about obliquely for years, how he has it in his power and it is his plan to reshape the Middle East. Obviously we saw this reach some form of fruition or first fruition in the Abraham Accords, which the UAE was very central to from the very beginning. Without the uae, those probably would not have taken shape in any of the other places that ultimately signed on. I think that this is what he sees as being his principal legacy and I think that this is in fact a huge success. Because while you cannot say that this is going to lead the Middle east to be a place in which Israel will thrive or even survive, it clearly makes the Middle East a place with opportunities for Israel to be become part that are greater than what existed beforehand. That said, I mean, I'll just add that I think that the Prime Minister sees this as part of a grand strategy wherein the Palestinian problem can be sidestepped. The Palestinian problem where in the fact that there are millions of Palestinians who are living without rights and who are living immiserated lives, and we live in a situation where we have recently, over the past three years, seen the death of 70,000 Palestinians, all of that. I think that the Prime Minister believes that his new Middle east is a Middle east in which one of the things that binds Israel with, with its allies in the Arab world, UAE first among them, and he's hoping certainly for the Saudis to join strongly, is their joint willingness to ignore the Palestinians, the needs of the Palestinians, the pain of the Palestinians. And I think that he is wrong about that. I think he's wrong about that in that ultimately these Arab countries will not forever ignore that. But I think that he's wrong in a whole different fashion because I think that all of our lives here between the river and the sea will be endangered, violent, immiserated, sad, conflictual, until somehow the Palestinian problem is solved. So then to the degree that he sees this as a way of just putting that problem on ice or pretending it doesn't exist or minimizing it to the point where it need not be dealt with in an active way, I think that he's making a mistake that jeopardizes Israel's future. But. But I do think that this is as huge and as meaningful as, as anyone in the Prime Minister's office might be saying quietly yeah, my PhD in
- [50:19]
B
Gulf country studies and Middle east studies is still, you know, up in the air. So it isn't fully developed.
- [50:26]
A
I thought journalists had to know everything.
- [50:28]
B
Well, we act like we know everything. I don't know if we're talking three dimensional chess here. If we remember one of the reasons bandied about for what happened on October 7th or at least it was planned for a long time or the timing of October 7th was the prospect of full diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia that the other mb that was about to recognize Israel and that was, you know, one of the reasons to, to pull the trigger on, on Oct. Oct. 7. And you know, since during the war, after the war again it's been clear that that's Netanyahu's holy grail would be, you know, fully getting recognized and having a relationship with Saudi Arabia without as you say, resolving the Palestinian question. And that is eluding him because the Saudis have made it clear that that's not going to happen, that there's not going to be any kind of, you know, advancement, full recognition, diplomatic relations, evading the, the Palestinian question for whatever reason because it's smaller and weaker. The UAE is, you know, putting that aside and is just thinking about self interest and so it is doubling down on its relationship with Israel. Bibi is taking the opportunity and doubling down on a close relationship with the UAE which now is feeling even smaller and weaker now that it's having conflicts with, with Saudi Arabia and it's not in line there. And you know, they say the, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Certainly they've got that in Iran but now they've got similar fears I think in what's happening or what not happening in terms of the war in Iran. And I think both Israel and the UAE are sort of afraid of Trump saying okay, I've had enough of this and just kind of walking away from it and you're on your own. And I think both Israel and UAE feel very vulnerable of this on your ownness. And so that's one of the reasons that they're, you know, clinging together and, and, and, and strengthening their alliance. You know, there's more about that in my non existent dissertation on the relationship between Israel and the in the Gulf states.
- [52:35]
A
Well, it's obviously neither of us are speaking as experts about, about this. We'll afterwards hear what, what Jonathan Ferziger has to say about it but, and other experts as well.
- [52:45]
B
But wouldn't it be nice to have an expert,
- [52:50]
A
yes. Wouldn't it be nice to know something about something? We can dream. But it seems to me as though the relationship between the UAE and Israel, from all sorts of much smaller and on the face of it, completely into significant cues and signs that we've gotten over the past several years or since the Abraham Accords, that the relationship is one more of greater simpatico and really a greater sense of something like cultural similarity or affinity between these places, which of course is absurd on the face of it. But I think that the strong belief of both places is that their future, both their economic success and just their security, depends largely on technology. And they're both super committed and proud purveyors of the newest technology. I think that that's a little bit of a deep connection. And I think that I have had 100 conversations with Israelis who have come back from the UAE, all of whom. Whom talk about just the interest and affection they meet on the street. And I don't know exactly what that is and where that comes from, but to me it seems as though it goes beyond the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And that there's something, that there's something there. Does that ring true to you at all?
- [54:18]
B
Yeah, but like I said, I also think there's something about feeling like you're rather small and vulnerable. Although we know on paper Israel militarily is not vulnerable. Vulnerable presence in the, in the Middle east and that a need to, to have a strong ally and they complement each other. Right. Israel has this great military abilities and, and capabilities that it can give the uae, and the UAE gives Israel cred, right, because it's a Muslim country, it's a real Middle Eastern country. And so it's a, a true ally that I guess, you know, the, the contrast in what you talking about, people coming back from Israel, I guess they're much more used to the cold peace that they've experienced if they visited Egypt or Jordan. So I think, you know, they're talking about a contrast in feeling with that, that they're not, you know, sort of held at arms length or shunned or, you know, qualified as with our other quote, unquote, peace partners in the Middle east, that it really feels when you go to the uae, when you go to Dubai. Have you gone, Noah?
- [55:18]
A
I have not. I want to.
- [55:19]
B
I have.
- [55:20]
A
And did you feel that?
- [55:21]
B
I did feel that. But it's also like a mega weird place. I mean, you don't see a lot of Emiratis, you know, wandering around, except actually, if you go to the mall, into the most expensive luxury stores. That's where you see them. I mean, it's really. I don't want to say Vegas, but, you know, it just feels like everyone there is from somewhere else. So, you know, maybe that's one of the reasons why it's so easy for Israelis to fit in or feel at home, because it's not like it's. You're one, you're wandering the streets and it's 100% emirates, and you're this, you know, Israeli kind of wandering around there. It's just such a big salad bowl of people from all over the world working there.
- [55:58]
A
Well, I think that that's another kind of culturally shared thing between the two places. Our shared love of Faberge eggs, I think, is something to build on. Now, listen, That song is by Roni Bar Hadass, who is right now, these days, working on her first record after some years of playing together beautifully with Yoni Bloch. And now it is time for our second discussion, which we are calling College Days, and for which we will be joined by my very, very, very, very dear old Swarthmore chum, Gordon Lafer. What's that you say you want to hear the Swarthmore Alma Mater? That's very irregular, but okay.
- [58:20]
B
Staunch and gray Thou stands Before us
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A
on the camp is fair Thy high
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B
spirit guarding o' er us who thy blessing share
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A
Thee we praise with songs of gladness Name thy glory song hail to thee. Wow, it really brings you. We used to sing that song every morning, as I remember, and every night before we went to sleep. And you probably noticed Gordon's voice in mine there in the back. Anyway, like Swarthmore College itself, Gordon Lafer, too, stands staunch, though not at all gray, which is a funny thing. He is a political economist and a co director of the Labor Education and Research center at the University of Oregon. In his colorful and impressive past, he has been a senior labor policy advisor for the US House of Representatives, Representative People, their Education and Labor Committee, and he's been a leader of union campaigns across America, including in Hawaii, which is sort of across and then beyond in America. He is the author of the acclaimed books the 1% solution and the Job Training Charade or Charade. He is on the board of Directors of the Shalom Hartman Institute, and he and his family put the lafer in the Lafer center for Women and Gender Studies at the Hebrew University. He played drums for White House Function and for a time, Life in a Blender. In my. You are most likely to first set Eyes on him when he is pogoing to the Buzzcocks. Presumably that is how Congressman George Miller first met him. Gordon, welcome. How great that you are here. How are you doing?
- [60:08]
C
I'm doing great. And it's a pleasure and honor to be here. And I didn't realize until now that the Swarthmore song is the same tune as the Kellerman's Song from Dirty Dancing.
- [60:20]
A
Exactly.
- [60:20]
B
It was so familiar. I wanted to. I couldn't figure out where I'd heard that song before.
- [60:25]
A
Good. To Cornell and also every other college or university in America. Yes, that is sort of a universal, though the words are different in each place, including, you know, including its.
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B
I've seen dirty dancing like 10 times. So therefore it was ingrained in my brain. And when I heard the tune, it was so familiar to me.
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A
That is one of my favorite music.
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B
You can replace it. Yeah.
- [60:43]
A
Yes, yes. It is excellent. Yes. And that's why I think that those. Most of the people went from there to Swarthmore. There's a whole Jewish Catskill story. Yes, yes, yes. You can't put baby in a seminar room, is what we always used to say there. Anyway, we are all here now to speak about something that we are calling college days. And here is why. It is graduation season, as I already mentioned, and no time could be better for pondering the present state and standing of Israel and Zionism on campuses around the world, and especially in places where you are likely to find, if you look, Jews among the students and the faculty, faculty, which is to say mostly the United States and England and France. A few other places this week saw a few big commencement related brouhaha's, or if you prefer kerfuffles, hoo ha's to dos, dust ups, flare ups or blow ups, if we're going to be pedantically grammatical. Could be dusts up or flares up or blows up. Ruckuses or ruck eye rows, firestorms, teacup tempests, or if you want to get fancy about it, contretemps. One of these happened at Michigan Stadium, or the Big House, as they call it, where the Wolverines marched to a 94 record, 7 and 2 in the Big Ten before losing to the Texas Longhorns in the Citrus Bowl. And if you ask me, it's because JJ McCarthy, the QB, was inconsistent in his passing efficiency. But I digress. Michigan Stadium, where months earlier the Wolverines eviscerated The Central Michigan Chippewas 63 3, was where this week at commencement, historian Derek Peterson, most recently of A popular history of IDI Amin's Uganda, about which one of the two Amazon reviews said, quote, too much space is given to side stories and trivial details about which I say there is never a justification for losing focus on the main story that you are trying to convey. But I digress. Professor Derek Peterson said to the more than 10,000 Michigan graduates in the Big House that when they sing the University of Michigan fight song Hail to the Victors Valiant, they should sing it not just to their athletes, but also also sing for the students who have dedicated themselves to the pursuit of social justice over the course of centuries. Sing for Moritz Levy, the first Jewish professor at the University of Michigan. He was to open the doors of this great university to generations of Jewish students who found in Ann Arbor a safe haven from the antisemitism of Eastf universal universities. Sing for the students of the Black Action Movement whose members demanded a curriculum that would reflect the experience and identity of black people in this country. Sing for the pro Palestinian student activists. Who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel's war in Gaza. There were those in the audience who complained that Professor Peterson had injected divisive politics into a day better suited for common denominator unity. A second of the brouhaha's took place on New York City's Upper west side at the Jewish Theological Seminary jts where a letter signed by six graduating seniors and a few dozen other students and recent alumni called on the seminary to rescind its invitation to Israel's President Yitzhak Herzog to speak at their graduation. Herzog, they said, incited violence against Gazans and was a figure with and about whom, quote, many students and community members so vehemently disagree. End quote. A third of the to dos happened at the University of Oregon where 27 year old former Ms. Israel Noah Kochba, who has been touring campuses as a sort of goodwill ambassador for Israel, seeking to give solace to students with affection for the Jewish state and seeking Charlie Kirkishly to debate students who have no affection whatsoever for the Jewish state. She was forced to cancel her appearances after the police told her that they could not ensure her safety in the face of threats by pro Palestinian anti Israeli activists on campus. To these very recent, very public and much discussed things, I would add something about Israel and academia that roiled my own world. This week I was at a seminar on how to use Zotero, that open source reference manager that you gotta use if you're doing research, and the woman leading the seminar told us as an exercise to go to Google Scholar and type in any search term. And I typed in idly Zionism. Then I tried Colonialism Zionism, limiting the search to articles published just in 2026, so very recent. And when I pressed return, what I got seemed to me to be a nearly endless list of articles that all seemed to me to take as axiomatic the analysis that Israel is an illegitimate, alien Western act of colonialist thievery that was like their starting point, unargued assumption, their axiom. Articles like one in a journal called Settler Colonial Studies that was called, quote, the Dialectics of Reconstruction in Gaza, Settler Colonialism and the Impossibility of Rebuilding Gaza, and one in a journal called Politics in Society called Colonialism by Purchase, Coercion and Replacement in Rural Palestine. And one in the journal of Genocide Research called Mainstreaming a Genocidal Imagination in Israeli Settler Colonialism, Settler Anxiety and Biblical Cues. And one in a journal called Middle East Critique entitled Espionage as a Settler Colonial Practice. And another about Israeli environmentalism called Greening the Occupation, Colonial Landscape, Regulation in Palestine, Israel. And there are literally more than 1500 other articles with names just like these. And it made me wonder whether the story that matters most going on in campuses these days isn't the story of what's going on in stadiums and in protests on the quad and in open letters. But maybe the story that sense makes matters most is the one going on in the seminar rooms where the people who wrote these articles are teaching those articles to the next generation. Not just of people who will write these articles in a few years, but also the people who are running the NGOs and the people who will be in charge of social services in the city and the manager of your bank and the people you buy your car from and the folks on the pta. So, Gordon, you are literally a professor on the campus where Noah Kochba had to cancel her lecture over fears she'd be hurt or worse. And you are, and this is true, one of my favorite professors. What do you think we ought to to make of the place of Israel and Zionism in the lives and imaginations of kids on, say, American campuses and in the lives and imaginations of their professors three academic years after October 7th?
- [67:50]
C
Well, first, I think we have to take it in context and not exaggerate. Like to to shut down somebody who wants to sit on a table on a sidewalk takes about 30 or 40 yelling accidents, activists in a college of 25,000 people. And it's still true that the vast majority of people are not thinking about Israel and Palestine and are not thinking anything radical. But I think if you shrink down and say let's just look at liberal to left activist students in social sciences and humanities, that it's a lot more true both about who the students are and as you said, about what faculty are thinking. And it's increasingly and dramatically over the last three years gotten worse. And I think, you know, obviously part of it is responding to real things that in my opinion there are like horrible things that have been done in Gaza and we can't just say, oh, people are psychotic and making everything up. But I think when you think like why is this so uniform and so heartfelt and so popular as opposed to, I don't know what's happening in Syria or Sudan or something else, is partly that it's a mirror for American bourgeois or economically secure leftists own situation in America that they can be moral heroes about. I mean, to take the simplest thing, everybody who I know who's on the left in this kind of thing also thinks the United States obviously was a settler colonial project that committed genocide, that commits war crimes. Nobody's calling for a boycott of themselves. Nobody's getting up and leaving. And there's a way that this issue allows people to be moral heroes, even moral extreme extremists in a way that things that are tragic in other parts of the world but that can't map onto a white oppressor person of color victim in the way that this is imagined does.
- [69:41]
B
I've heard similar things from people in Canada and Australia about that kind of projection and mapping, which are two countries where the it's been a very severe in on academic campuses and elsewhere reaction to what's happened in Gaza.
- [69:54]
C
You know, I know a lot of these kids. I've worked really closely with the Undergraduate Student Workers Union at University of Oregon and there's a big overlap between them and the Palestinian encampment. And they're mostly really good people. They're people who you'd want, you know, your kid to be. I think they're massively uninformed and mistaken on this issue. But some of that comes from like at the base of, I think both liberal left America and Jewish liberal America is like a morality that essentially is just always side with the underdog, always side with people who are weak. And I think particularly in countries that are culturally Christian, it's like the highest moral thing you can do is to sacrifice your own self interest for somebody else. I mean, with Jesus on the cross being the ultimate example. But okay, Jews could have benefited from Racism, but sided with the civil rights movement, like, this is the glorious thing to do. And the truth is people who, students or faculty who say, yeah, I want to sacrifice my self interest and promote universalist values in general are much lovelier than the people who say, I don't give a shit about anybody but myself. I'm here to make money and have power over other people. But it's really, really limiting in all kinds of ways because as soon as somebody who's a victim succeeds in getting any amount of power, then power is dirty and is complicated. And there's like a whole hole in the moral thinking of saying, how can we think about a place like Israel says, yes, it's important to have power, it's important to have an army. It's going to be messy, but it, but that doesn't make you, there's a way to see that as a moral thing, even though it's not the pure powerless victim.
- [71:35]
B
But what about the academic piece that Noah mentioned? Because there, you're not talking about young undergraduate students, you're talking about people writing these articles who are presumably well educated,
- [71:46]
C
well informed academics you may be overestimating.
- [71:53]
A
Yeah, I, I, I, who have, as said many times on this podcast, and that I have given up on outrage. And I, it's, it's one of the, one of the, the, the few promises that I've made to myself that I've actually more or less lived up to. And I, I don't, I don't, I don't get outraged much anymore. I got as close to outrage as I have in a long time reading these articles one after another, you know, skimming through these really, the praises, the abstracts of these articles one after another. And part of the near outrage that I could not entirely tamp down was less about explicitly about Israel, though obviously that was the force of the emotion behind it. But it was more about academia. It was like, this is like such, this is so far from being anything like scholarship. Because the most important and the most interesting part was axiomatic. There was no questioning of the analysis. And the analysis starts with these very stark terms that basically, obviously Palestine was stuck, stolen from Palestinians by the Europeans in a way that's similar to the way that North America was stolen from the indigenous North Americans by the Europeans as well, and Australia by the Europeans as well. That you start from that and then everything thereafter. These articles were extremely, extremely formulaic. I was saying to Gordon earlier that once I read usually just the title of this article, I was pretty confident that I could more or less have written the article like, I had it blocked out in my mind, and then I would scroll through, and the article that I was reading was the article that I had, like, fully formed in my mind because there was no new intellectual input into this. There was no thought, okay? So saying that, like, academics who need to publish way too much in order to get promoted write bullshit articles that are the same thing over and over again, that's not new. And that in itself is not so interesting. But the reason why it feels important to me is because this particular set of axioms is so ultimately unproductive, unproductive intellectually and also unproductive politically, because the only conclusion that it leads to is, is that every Jew in Israel needs to leave somehow. Which, of course, it's hard to imagine how anyone thinks that could possibly happen. So basically, it leads you to nowhere. It leads you to nowhere politically except condemning these people. And anyone who's been on social media at all, which is everyone knows that every third post you see has a comment in it about Israel and Palestine, has a comment in it that says the only acceptable solution is for them all to pack their bags talking about Israelis and like, okay, pack our bags and then do what? Exactly. So then all of a sudden, I saw, in the few cases I, like, went and checked who these people are. And a lot of them are, in fact, like you'd expect young academics who need to publish a lot in their late 20s and early 30s. And these are the people that are teaching. These are the people that the students are gonna see in the seminar room. And it just made me cringe to think about what these courses must be like. Like, not just because they're so, like, heartless and cruel in their inability to allow any room for Israel to. To even exist, much less any room for. For what is really a, you know, a quite remarkable and beautiful inspiring story of Israel. Obviously, there's no room for that, but that. That basically, they. They like, closed the. I think that they're designed to, not designed to. I think that what they do is they close the mind of everyone who reads it. You have this very simple story, very easy to apply, that leads nowhere except to screaming. You know, screaming, Israel needs to be dismantled. And it's so depressing to think that the smart students and the ones who want to continue, this is what they're learning. To get a good mark, you have to reproduce this. You have to write papers like this, or have the AI write for you papers like this. And then you're gonna go to graduate School produce dissertations like this, and then the next generation. And we know academia just completely is built to just recapitulate itself. And so I just found that so frightening. Much, much more than, like, I listened to that thing at the University of Michigan, the Derek Peterson speech, and I frankly agreed with him. It's like, who's not inspired by lots of students seeing an injustice around the world and saying, we're gonna do something, even if it means moving out of our dorm room, and even if it means us fearing that we're gonna be thrown out of school. Probably most of you won't be thrown out of school. But of course, that's inspiring. And him putting it in the lineage of the people that he put it in. There were the women who were fighting for women to get in. There were Jews that were fighting for Jews. And now these people are fighting for people halfway across, across the world. Like, yes, that feels to me to be no threat. I think that all those students should have a better analysis, could have a better analysis. I also think maybe we'll have a better analysis in the future, but I have no problem with that. But then when I thought about what was going on in the seminar room, I just felt deflated and hopeless. It's like, what can you do? Do I have to say the university is gone? Like, for the next 50 years. The university. University is gone. I don't know. What do you think?
- [77:55]
C
One thing I think is that we can't win this or approach this just on structural things, like saying we need to have free speech or we need to have all views considered or it's too narrow, or something like that. Because there are things that I think certainly that I think that I think most of us think should not be subjects for discussion and should be kind of ruled out like this. Right. Like you could have. And it's protected by free speech. Somebody who comes into a classroom and say is like, well, maybe there really are different races of people who are biologically smarter and dumber than they are. I'm not saying for sure there are, but let's really go deeply and consider that and consider the evidence. Right. Which you probably could have heard in a classroom in the 30s or 40s. And now we say, like, there's something offensive about having that discussion. We don't want to have that discussion. And I think about the analogy to South Africa, which I don't think works as an analogy to what's happening here on campuses.
- [78:48]
B
I think it works as an analogy because I remember my colleague college years, like, it was just subsumed by South Africa and people. There were encampments and people getting arrested. And you know, I went to things and I just, you know, now I look back and I know that we were not extremely informed about the nuances of the situation.
- [79:05]
A
But we were called, we were more or less right.
- [79:07]
B
Yeah, well, but we weren't calling for South Africa to not exist or be dismantled.
- [79:13]
C
That, that's true. But a. I certainly, I was as uninformed about like, I didn't know anything about South Africa. And like, so people say, oh, you don't know anything about Israel and Palestine. Okay, but people have a model of how the world works and then they act on that. But also, the South African boycott was uncompromising, where we said, no, Paul Simon should not go and play music there. And if somebody would say, oh, you should really go to South Africa and engage with the liberals who are trying to change things from within. No, we didn't use the word normalization, but essentially that's what we were saying. And if somebody would said, well, why don't we invite an Afrikaner here to explain why they think it makes sense for white people to rul. And just hear both sides, we would say no. That is an amoral kind of balance to call for. Which means, I think, and the hard thing and the challenge is like, we need to take on directly why this is not like that, as opposed to try to say categorically we object to not having balance.
- [80:14]
A
I agree with that and I don't have an immediate answer. And it makes it interesting to me because I would like to work that through and still not to harp. I feel like ultimately if what's going on in the seminar rooms and in the meetings between the directed readings and the meetings in a faculty's office, faculty member's office, between a professor and a student is just this very, very simple paradigm in 98% of the cases. Then I just don't see how, even if we work this out, even if we work out, even if we work out an accessible, thoughtful, open hearted explanation that is also true or true enough to be a foundation for discussion. I just don't see how it's gonna happen on campuses. I mean, I think it needs to happen beyond campuses too. But I mean, so the question that I'm asking myself and the question that I'm asking you, and you know, I have a. My girl is. Have finished. Is doing her PhD with the idea that she's not committed to going on in academia, but with the idea that she Might go on in academia. Of course, it will probably be in Israel, and that's a completely different thing. But it's like, I sort of feel like, oh, do I need to say academia is. For someone like me, academia is just over. Like, there's just. It's just. I just have to say I met someone who I'm sort of friendly with, someone who for a couple of years, was responsible for doing sort of Jewish outreach on British campuses. And he said his name is Robin Moss. He's wonderful.
- [81:57]
B
I love Robin Moss.
- [81:58]
A
We all love Robin Moss. He's one of my favorite people in the world. And he, over coffee one time, said, you know, I came to the conclusion that, like, it's lost. Like, campus debate in England, it's just lost. There's. There's no way to expect to hope that it's gonna be. It's just not. And I said, oh, my God, that is so depressing. And he said, yeah, it's sort of bad. But then on the other hand, like, when have you ever met someone five years out of college who still takes seriously what they believed five years before? You don't. So the fight just moves to a different realm. And I'm wondering whether this is what I need to say about university life. That it just. And it would be. It would be before political reasons, because I just can't live with their attitude towards Israel. But it's also, like a little bit of a deeper depression that has flowered over the course of my career of. A lot of this is bullshit, man. Like, a lot of it. Like, in social sciences and humanities, there's, like, fascinating, amazing stuff. There's always new books to read that ought to be read that I just think are amazing, that opened my world. But 90% of this stuff is like, crap. I mean, it's just like, crap and evil in the sense that it pretends to be serious. And there's that book by Maurice Sendak where the goblins steal the real baby and replace them with a baby of ice. I feel like academia, the real baby has been replaced by a baby of ice in 90% of the time. And, like, almost 100% of the articles written in 2026 about Zionism, colonialism, blah, blah, blah, and I don't know what. Like, I don't know how to live with that.
- [83:40]
B
Sounds like an existential crisis to me.
- [83:43]
A
So you're suggesting suicide, I take it?
- [83:45]
B
No, but I'm just, you know, to see someone amazing, lifelong academic, say these things. I'm sitting here kind of, you know, a Little. A little shocked. I mean I think of much more mundane things. For example, in the news really over the past few days, I forgot. Forgot which campus, but some significant university calling for the elimination of. Of Hillel. Kicking the Hillel off campus.
- [84:10]
A
Nyu.
- [84:10]
B
Nyu, exactly. I'm also concerned about the, the spillover and again I just did a, a podcast about anti Semitism in Canada about the spillover from this kind of attitude and hostility about and oversimplifying about Israel, the bleed of anti Israel to anti Zionist to anti Jewish. Because you know, Jewish students are often personally so tied up in, in Israel. The Jewish religion is so tied up in Israel. So when this anti normalization, anything that has to do with Israel is, you know, Persona non grata. What this does to, to Jewish students, students who you know, want to go and study and open their minds and be open to the marketplace of ideas, knowing that something so fundamental to their identity is, is, you know, being ostracized and them personally being ostracized. This may be a little bit of a tangent off of the pure academics, but it's part of the whole campus atmosphere that I, I'm concerned about, you know, not as a career academic having a existential crisis, but as a parent who has and will probably in the future have children on this, these campuses.
- [85:29]
C
I think we can't walk away from it like, you know, like you're attempted to do above all for the reason that you said Allison. Because what's happening on campus is part of a broader thing that that means young liberal to left Jews growing up like this is the common sense, this is the taken for granted. And I do think we have to. I don't know exactly what the answer is, but I think we have to approach it strategically. Part of that means that senior faculty, faculty need to create space to make it safe for junior faculty and students to say things like, right, if you're a junior faculty member in a progressive discipline, to publish something that is pro Zionist or even waffles on it is a self death sentence, right? A, you'll get like a zillion people attacking you on social media and then you probably won't get promoted. So we have to think strategically about how to create space to make it safe for that kind of voice to be heard.
- [86:23]
A
Now listen to this. That song is Zelazebe by Yoni Rechter and Eviatar Banai in memory of Shai Pizzam of blessed memory who died in Lebanon. More odd music of these strange times. You can find all the music you heard today in all the usual places. And now it's time for our other country segment. This is a part of the show in which each of us describes something that may be surprised or amused, delighted or enchanted and source hold or possibly even fluged us as we wended our way through our worlds over the last little while. Gordon, I'm so glad that you stayed to do this. What is your what a country.
- [88:32]
C
You know, I'm here just for a week now, mostly for a friend's kid's wedding, but I'm also spending time looking at apartments to possibly end up spending.
- [88:41]
A
You're here.
- [88:41]
B
Welcome.
- [88:42]
C
Thank you. Thank you. And one of the things that struck me that in the in this week that's not particular to Israel entirely, but it's very different from the US is just how small the country is and especially how small Tel Aviv is, which means the ability to have like in person communication and friendships and connections is here in a way that it's not at home. Yesterday I spent a few hours at Cafe Schneor, lovely Bauhaus Cafe, and I met a former student and former labor organizer who's writing a PhD about Israeli housing policy in the 50s. And we talked about that for two hours and then he left and an organizer for Standing Together came and we talked about about their strategy. And then I get to see you, Noah. This morning I had coffee with the social sciences dean from Hebrew University. So obviously it's different to be someplace on vacation when you don't have to work every day. But at home I know lots of great people, good friends and interesting people, and I see them once a year. And you get sick and tired of zoom discussions. And so it just feels like the ability to have all of this in person connection makes for a possibility of a really rich, rich life here.
- [90:01]
A
Yeah, here, here it does. Allison, what's your what a country.
- [90:05]
B
So I sort of wince when I try to do what a country's about music, Israeli music, or any kind of music. Because Noah is such a freaking encyclopedia. I feel like I need to run a fact check afterwards. I can't resist this time because this past week I had a close encounter with such a pillar of Israeli music, David Broza. So I am going to openly invite Noah to correct, interject, or add anything I have to for those of you who are not intimate with Israeli culture. And I picked this up from his own biography, so I would be factually correct, hopefully. David Broza was born in Haifa, Israel, 70 years ago. He's celebrating his 70th birthday, which is one of the reasons I decided to to have him on as a guest on the other podcast on my Haaretz podcast. He grew up in England and in Spain, in Madrid where he here he went to college. His grandfather was named Wellesley, Aron Wellesley, a first name of Wellesley, famously co founded the Arab Israeli peace settlement in E Shalom and the Habonim youth movement. So those are big credentials. And Broza is a internationally renowned singer, songwriter. He's really known for the guitar. He's at one with his guitar. He's influenced by Spanish flamenco, American folk music, rock and roll, and a great deal by poetry. He, he really loves his poetry. Sort of his brand is social justice and peace advocacy. And his premiere song is called Yetov from 1977. It's kind of the anthem of Israeli peaceniks. After the Yom Kippur War broke out, he left Spain and he came to Israel. He started his musical career at a relatively advanced age of 22, where he attributes his emergence and success to Yonah. Jonathan Geffen, who's a famous writer and musical and author creator, unfortunately passed away a few years ago, made him really an icon as part of the legendary project keva Sashasa, the 16th sheep. So Broza has lived in the US for the past 16 years, but he parachutes in very frequently. He's very connected to the Rimmon School of Music where my daughter studied. And for the past three years I find this funny because it's a concert celebrating 40 years of his famous Spanish album, Haisha shaiti. So for three years he's been celebrating the 40th anniversary. So yeah, after so many podcasts over the past number of months about war, politics, politics, war, war, politics, I decided to celebrate the 500th episode of the Haaretz podcast to treat myself. So I invited Rosa to come in last Thursday and we had an amazing long conversation. Don't come go looking for it. It's not published yet. What I found amazing mostly about him is just sort of what a dedicated artist. He is 70 years old at this long, long career. He practices Noah seven to eight hours a day. Seven. Oh my God, seven days a week. He doesn't even take. He told me he doesn't even take a Shabbos seven to eight days of guitar. So that's how we know he is
- [93:29]
A
an astonishing guitar player.
- [93:31]
B
Yeah, so now we know why, you know, I mean, it's both talent and, and dedication. Anyway, I was by a conversation. It was really so much fun. I felt like I had got to see him in concert now I made him bring his guitar into the studio and he ended the show with playing. But I wanted to see the whole concert, so I got tickets the next day to an Isha Shiiti concert at the Droma Sharon, the Southern Sharon kind of cultural center. I felt so young in that audience, really. Yeah, Well, A, David Brosa is 70 years old, and B, it's just an area of sort of wealthy moshav, big homes, whatever. So it was a very elder skewed audience. So highlights of the concert included his most popular adaptation, I think, again, correct me if I'm wrong, Noah, of a Spanish song called Sigaliot. And it was really a beautiful experience hearing the audience sing along with it. And then, of course, the peace anthem yet. That I asked him to play live on the podcast, but was much, much better and beautiful to.
- [95:05]
A
You did play it live on the podcast that I have not yet been able to hear.
- [95:08]
B
Exactly. Exactly.
- [95:09]
A
Oh, wow.
- [95:09]
B
You have something to look forward to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Yetov, in my opinion, is the epitome of an Israeli anthem in a trouble filled country in which people are still unreasonably happy, which we've discussed on the podcast that ranks high in happiness surveys. The lyrics talk about the situation here being a mess in great detail as of the 1970s, but you listen to the lyrics, you're like, that could have been written yesterday. So the chorus goes. I may get sad and have the occasional breakdown, but still it's a beautiful night. I've got my love next to me and I believe that everything will be good in the end.
- [96:07]
A
Oh, I'm with you, Allison. That's. That's wonderful. Yeah, he. He really is something. And he. When. When he does enthusiasm, he's really enthusiastic.
- [96:14]
B
Oh, he's super enthusiastic. Even more than you, Noah.
- [96:17]
A
Yeah.
- [96:18]
B
And that's saying a lot.
- [96:19]
A
How wonderful. So I already said how we spent Shabbat at a yurt celebrating Susan's birthday with Miriam and Jennifer. Jonathan and I got to the Green Yurt, that's its name, in the way one does through Airbnb. I was looking for somewhere special in a somewhat Susanish way. And the place is in Moshav Beit Nehemia, which is nearby. It's not far from the airport, and it is springtime here, which is a very, very short season usually. And the Shephelah, the lowlands southeast of Tel Aviv, they're not too hot to still enjoy yet, as they will be soon. And I got the place and I wrote back and forth with Roni. She's the proprietor of the place. And I asked if Lucy, the dog, could come with. And usually the green yurt is a no dogs allowed operation. And Roni asked me a little bit about Lucy, and I answered as truthfully as I could. And we went back and forth and back and forth. And in the end, Roni said, okay, we'll give it a try. And Roni sent directions about how to find the place, which involved going through one gate, continuing on, and punching in a code into the keypad at a second gate, which automatically drew open and then closed after you went through. Once we were in, and then we were in kind of a compound on a dirt road in a kind of small forest or a big stand of trees. And we continued on for a bit, and there on the right was our yurt. The yurt across the way belongs to Roni and her partner, Shachar Ohevtzion is his name. And their little girl and two dogs and some number of cats. I never figured out exactly how, but it's like we were in. We were inside a fence, inside a fence. And inside our fence was this, like, forest, trees. Everything was covered with trees. The yurt is big, and it's gorgeous, with a big bed over on one side and kind of a satellite room behind a curtain with another big bed. And it's got this, like, lovely kitchen and a big dining room table and a big sofa, and there's a hanging chair kind of near the middle of the room, just sort of hanging by a chain from the roof. It is a very deluxe yurt. And we were exploring the place when there was a knock at the door. And Roni introduced herself, and she asked if I wanted a tour, which, of course, I did. And we tramped through the brush and the trees to the hot tub deck, and then through more brush and trees to the barbecue deck. And there's this outside breakfast nook. And we got to talking, and she said, how her Shachar, he built the yurts, and lately he just finished building two houses. Did I want to see them? Which, of course I did. And so as we started walking up the path, Roni and Shahar, little girl came from nowhere and suddenly pounced into Roni's arms. And she said to Roni, ask that man, what's his name? And I said, my name. And she turned to me and she said, I just had a birthday. Do you know how old I am? And I looked her up and down, And I said, 16. And she said, no, I am four. And I said, you're not four. You're probably 12. And she said, no, I am four. And as we walked, Roni said, shachar built something called timber frame and houses. And I told her how Susan's sister Andrea is a timber frame architect, that's what she does. And how she was the head of the Timber Framers Guild in America for a time. And she, she said, I never met anyone who knew just off the bat about timber frame houses. And I said, well, now you have. And by now we were at Shahar's very big workshop and Roni was explaining how Shahar could always do anything, he could make anything. And then he fell in love with timber frames. So they moved to British Collection Colombia for a time. And Shakar learned timber framing at the College of the Rockies. And when he came back, he set up the Timber Frame Israel Organization and he set up a timber frame course, kind of a timber frame university. There's one course and then another. And he's been building up the field and training colleagues and compatriots while building one thing or another all the time. And by now we were outside the house and there was Shachar. And the girl ran and leapt into his arm thing from the ground up, you know, five feet, boom. And Roni said, chachar, this is Noach. His sister in law is a Tibber framer, she's in the guild. And Chachar said, I probably know her. And he told me how he'd fallen in love with the thing and how it had become his life, or a big part of his life anyway. And we were standing in front of a big pond with big fish. And Roni said, the house that Chachar grew up in used to be on this spot, but he knocked down that house and he made it into this pond. And then he built those two houses behind us. And we went into one of the houses and people, it was so beautiful, so perfect. It was modest, but it still had something that you can only call kind of grandeur. And the girl said, what is that man's name again? And Roni said, noach. And we went back through the workshop with its planers and routers and beam drills and beam saws. And there was a chain mortiser, I think, and there were shelves and shelves of wood beams of various dimensions. And it was all so gorgeous and it smelled like wood. And it is a thing that you run into here often of a person who falls in love with a thing, because as they say in Hebrew, they become mad for the thing. And that person sometimes will move to British Columbia to learn how to do it. And then he'll come back and he'll set up an organization back home and he'll start a guild and he'll set up a school. And then this thing that was never here at all, all of a sudden it is here. And the girl said, you said I was 16, but I am 4. And that brings us to the end of our show. Thanks to Itay Shellam, our station manager, without whom we would have none of this. Thanks to Achi Bolim, my favorite band from Kibbutz Geva. They give us some music at the start and the end of our show. Thank you, Allison. Thank you Natalie. Thank you, Gordon. It was great to have you. And we'd like to thank all of our Patreon supporters for your generosity. It keeps the show going, it keeps the station going and it keeps us moved and grateful and much in your debt. And we'd like to thank all of you out there for taking the time to listen and ask you to like us on Facebook and drop us a line. We are eventually going to answer. After you do that, go to Apple Podcasts and give us a five star review. Maybe one that starts with this, the promised podcast. Now that cronyism is in the mix, it's bound to get better. Finish that any way you want. But before you do that, remember that today, as we record on May 7, we celebrate world Password Password Day, so stipulated to occur each year on the first Thursday in May, way back in 2013 by the Intel Corporation, the world's third largest manufacturer of semiconductor chips, flash memory, graphic processing units and such, who just want the world to know that passwords are really important. Especially since there is a bunch of scholarly literature about how lousy we are at picking passwords. Literature like machine learning, Michelle Mazurek, et al. Quote measuring password guessability for an entire university, the university's Carnegie Mellon, by the way, or Joseph Bono's the Science of Guessing, analyzing an animized corpus of 70 million passwords. And there are more articles like that. And they find that people's passwords are usually their nicknames, romantic partners, names or nicknames, pets, sports teams, religion or keyboard walks like qwerty, where you go from one key to the other. Reading this right away, I changed all of my passwords to Jew, obviously. The HIPAA Journal, the leading provider of HIPAA training news, regulatory updates and independent compliance advice. In a SACCO article called World Password Day 2026, Password Tips and Best Practices, reports that while the first, first modern password based systems were invented at MIT in 1961 the practice of using passwords has roots with the Romans, who employed a system of watchwords among sentries. They also include a fascinating table indicating how long it will take hackers to bypass different sorts of passwords, finding that an eight digit numbers only password can be hacked instantly. But an 18 character password comprising numbers, upper and lowercase letters, n and symbols will take 4630-000000-00000, years to hack. This so long as you avoid dictionary words and obviously I love World Password Day. It is probably my favorite day of the entire year on account of how it pricks the imagination to ponder all the possible permutations of passwords. Or the fact that there are 1.85 times 10 to the 35th or 185 undisturbed unique 18 character passwords with uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols. Which is a lot. Especially when you consider that There are only 7.5 times 10 to the 18th or 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on earth. Which means that there are 2.46 times 10 to the 16th possible 18 character passwords for every grain of sand on earth. Which is a lot. It makes you think thoughts still, even though World Password Day is not yet halfway over already I can feel it going away like those four character passwords that with modern software can be hacked in literally a fraction of a second. And who knows what will happen when new AI hacking tools become regularly available? Our passwords will be gone and with them our Internet privacy not to return for a long, long time. Not so the Promise podcast. We will be back next week and most every week, reminding you that while in some contexts lots of random shit strung together can give you security, in other contexts lots of random shit strung together just makes you feel like you wasted your time listening to stuff that doesn't make no sense when you think about it. On this the Promise podcast, Sam.