American Jews on the Left, post-October 7th
Today's guest is Ruby Namdar, who was born and raised in Jerusalem to a family of Iranian-Jewish heritage. His first book, "Haviv" (2000), won the Israeli Ministry of Culture's Award for Best First Publication. His novel "The Ruined House", has won the Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious literary award. He currently lives in New York City with his wife, he has two daughters, and teaches Jewish literature, focusing on Biblical and Talmudic narrative.
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
[00:00:00] For American Jewry, the formative trauma was arriving in America as a refugee with severe PTSD from pogroms. And then there was the trauma of coming here and starting from the bottom of the social rung. And then there was a consolidated effort to rebuild this Jewishness as a modern American entity.
What happened is Liberalism to build themselves as people who have sovereignty of their life over their body, over their destiny, who can actually be mobile. So liberalism is an inseparable part from their Jewish identity. As people became less religious and there was less religious content, the liberal element became stronger and stronger and stronger.
Replacing Jewish identity, and then the radical left [00:01:00] turns on them and becomes anti semitic. Now, where are these kids gonna go?
It is 10 p. m. on Tuesday, November 7th, here in New York City. In Israel, it is Wednesday, November 8th, as Israelis get ready to start their day at 5 a. m. Since October 7th, or rather, October 8th, I've had a series of conversations with friends and colleagues. Thought partners both here in the United States and in Israel many of which have been very clarifying But there are three in particular over the last few days that have been especially clarifying moments The first was on Saturday night There was a gathering of Israeli Americans Israelis who live here in New York City to [00:02:00] hear my friend Lior Raz give a talk.
Lior Raz is the co creator and the star of the television show Fauda and some other productions And he's a character in my new book. And Lior was in town to speak to these Israelis here about some very important relief efforts and work being done in Israel to help with the recovery and help put the country back together post October 7th.
I actually was one of the only non Israeli Americans at this event. And a number of the Israelis came up to me and I would express to them how horrified I was by what had happened on October 7th, and I was trying to see how they were doing, and I was trying to console them. And after a while, more than one of them said to me, Hey, we'll be okay.
It's gonna be tough. We've gone through the most brutal experience any of us could have ever imagined in our lifetimes. But we Israelis will be okay. They kept saying that, or a version of that. And then they would say, [00:03:00] but what about you Americans? We're worried about what's happening here. What's happening in the United States?
They looked at what was going on with college campuses and debates in the press and these protests in major cities with a sense of, like, it was also perplexing. And that the whole situation in the United States was not what they thought the United States was, or at least for Jews. They thought there was some kind of derangement going on.
That was one exchange. The second one was with Ruby Namdar, who's an Israeli American author who lives here in New York City. who has been very active in liberal circles for most of his adult career and has been shocked by what he's experienced since the Hamas massacre on Jews. He's been shocked by what he has seen.
He's been shocked by the sense of abandonment, by people and [00:04:00] movements that he thought he had been closely intertwined with and allied with. forever. Ruby, more than most, really expresses what so many in the Jewish diaspora are experiencing today. And so we recorded that conversation, which we will play momentarily.
And then the third clarifying moment was moments ago. When I read a column by Brett Stevens, who is a frequent guest on this podcast, minutes ago, he posted his new column in the New York Times. I'm not going to read the whole column here, although I highly recommend that you do. I'll post it in the show notes.
Basically, Brett sets up for that we Jews should start living every day like it's October 8th. And to set up the piece, he reminisces that after September 11th, there was a sign somewhere at Langley, the CIA, that read, every day is September 12th. Meaning, as [00:05:00] Brett explains, National security community in the United States had to start thinking in every way they operated around the world to protect America's national security, as though they felt the same way they did, that same level of vulnerability on September 12th, 2001.
And so then Brett uses that as a device to argue that Jews in the diaspora should start leading their lives every day. as though every day is the way we felt on October 8th, 2023. So I'll just read here a few paragraphs from the piece. Brett writes, and I quote, There ought to be a similar sign, meaning every day is September 12th, the CIA sign.
There ought to be a similar sign in every Jewish organization, synagogue, and day school, and on the desks of anyone, Jewish or not, for whom the security and well being of the Jews is a sacred calling. Every day. October 8th. What was October 8th? Brett asks. It wasn't just the [00:06:00] day after the single greatest atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust, an atrocity whose details were impossible to miss because the perpetrators made sure to film them.
It was the day when the atrocity was celebrated. Not just in places like Tehran, but also in the streets of Manhattan, and on too many college campuses. And it was the day in which, instead of it being universally denounced by institutional leaders, we began to see it often ignored, or addressed, in belated and carefully parsed statements of regret.
On October 8th, Jews woke up to discover who our friends are not, and then Brett goes on to describe all the friends that are not actually the friends of the Jews, or at least not anymore. And he writes, Our friends are not those who, until recently, never mentioned that Gazan casualty figures come from a health ministry run by Hamas, [00:07:00] a mistake they would never make if, say, They were relaying figures produced by the Russian government, or who described the people murdered on October 7th as quote Jewish settlers.
Nevermind that they were living in towns in Kibbutzing that are part of Sovereign Israel, or who speak of people who murder babies and kidnap elderly women as quote fighters or militants. And then this paragraph, which I think will resonate with many friends of mine who I've been having conversations with, whose.
Children are currently in colleges at some of these elite colleges that have become hotbeds for anti semitism, and in some cases anti semitic violence, or friends of mine whose children are thinking about applying to college, or friends of mine whose children are applying to college soon. Brett writes, Our friends are not at universities where every third building seems to be named for a Jewish benefactor, meaning Jewish donors building out much of the physical infrastructure of these universities.
He writes, Schools like [00:08:00] Stanford, which now defends the right of students to chant from the river to the sea on free speech grounds, are often the same places that only recently barred a student from campus for Quote, racist social media posts. Free speech is fine as a standard, not as a double standard.
The list could be longer, and in fact it is. He goes on to cite a bunch of different places and people that we should all know now are not our friends. But he says, knowing who our friends aren't, Isn't pleasant, particularly after so many Jews have sought to be personal friends and political allies to people and movements that, as we grieved, turn their backs on us.
But it's also clarifying. More than 3, 800 years of Jewish history keeps yielding the same bracing lesson. In the long run, We're alone. In the long run. I just want to say it again. In the long run, we're alone. That is exactly [00:09:00] how I have felt these last 30 plus days. And as I mentioned, my friend Ruby Namdar captured for me this newfound loneliness more than most.
I think he's feeling it. More than I am, because of the community he's been more prominent in than I have been, and the sense of abandonment he feels. I'll let him explain it, rather than trying to explain it for him, just a little bit on Ruby's background. Ruby Namdar was born and raised in Jerusalem. To a family of Iranian Jewish heritage, in fact, he has written quite eloquently and has talked to me about his experience on October Yom Kippur, 1973, as a nine year old boy, seeing on television Golda Meir announcing that Israel was under siege and the trauma.
that he experienced then and the similar trauma he's been experiencing since October 7th. Ruby's first book is called Haviv, which came out in 2000, and it won the ministry, Israeli Ministry of Culture's award for best first publication. His novel, The Ruined House, which [00:10:00] I highly recommend, has won the Sapir Prize, Israel's most prestigious literary award.
Ruby, as I mentioned, currently lives in New York City with his wife, he has two daughters, and he teaches Jewish literature, focusing on Biblical and Talmudic narrative. Before we get to our conversation with Ruby, just one housekeeping note. Today is what they call in the publishing industry, pub date. Yes, today is the date.
that my and Saul Singer's new book, The Genius of Israel, The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World, is being published. It's now actually available at your favorite bookstores at barnesandnoble. com, at amazon. com, wherever you order your books. It's a book about Israeli resilience.
We put a lot of work into it, and I think we are about to see some of the very resilience, in fact we are seeing it, that we write about and the building blocks of this very resilient [00:11:00] society express itself, uh, in Israel in this post October 7th world. There's a lot in there about Israel, for Israelis, and there's a lot in there about Israel and Israeli resilience that I think the West could desperately learn from.
As I said, it's the same resilience we're seeing across Israeli society, to include Haredi Jews trying to enlist for the IDF, we're seeing it from secular Jews who were on October 6th, deeply oppositional to the Israeli government, and today are locking arms with the Israeli government, not on political policy, but just on working with them to help support the effort to defeat Hamas and secure Israel.
the country's borders, Jews from the East, Jews from the West, really all across society, even those who get less attention is the Israeli Arab community. We write about them quite a bit in our book, and I think there's some very powerful stories happening right now in Israel to get a taste, actually. We have a piece right now up in the Free Press that just posted [00:12:00] tonight, which is Barry Weiss's news platform.
I'll include that piece in the show notes, but some really inspiring stories if you're looking for a dollop of hope and optimism. We have it. And, um, and it, like I said, it affects all these different communities in Israel. We hope you will purchase the book this week. It would mean a lot to us. I'm sending the proceeds to an organization in Israel working on the rebuild, working to help the hundreds of thousands of evacuees from the south and also the north that will have to begin anew.
Now on to Ruby Namdar on American Jews on the left post October 7th. This is Call Me Back.
And I'm pleased to welcome to this podcast, for the first time, Ruby Namdar, who is, uh, as I mentioned in the introduction, is a, an Israeli, and a New Yorker, and an [00:13:00] author, and a very deep thinker, generally, but especially during this time. Traumatic time. Ruby, thanks for being here. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Um, I want to start by apologizing in advance for practicing some pretty harsh, some pretty tough less identity politics in my very first question. All right? So I just want to get this straight. All right? Mm hmm. You're a New Yorker. You're Jewish. Mm hmm. You're a liberal. You're an award winning author, so by any lights, you're just another Upper West Sider, based on that criteria.
Yeah. But you're also an ex pat Israeli who moved here from Israel 25 years ago. So this national trauma that Israel has been experiencing has been, I think, pulling on all corners of your identity. And being the introspective individual that you are. How did you personally experience October 7th and the ensuing weeks?
Oh, [00:14:00] to say that I was activated is a understatement of the year. I was a rattled to my core and I, I don't, it's one of those moments where, you know, you will never forget as they're happening. I woke up in the morning and it was a holiday and I was like. Maybe I'll go to shul this week, we'll see. I picked up the phone and I saw, and listen to this, I saw the number, 40 dead.
War in the south, 40 dead. And this number, 40, which now seems to us to be like, oh, I wish it was only 40, was so shocking to me. It was so wounding, jarring, to see this kind of number on one morning, on a Bokyoshel Chag, on a morning of a holiday. And, you know, my mind went immediately [00:15:00] to one of my early childhood memories.
The Yom Kippur war when I was nine. I really relived that moment in a strange, visceral way. Sometimes I write about this stuff in, in my fiction, but then I fictionalize it. This time I was my own literary character. I really was shot back to the afternoon of Yom Kippur, October, 1973. When I was nine, it was even more than that jarring sound of the siren tore into the quiet and you know, the quiet, the out of worldly quiet of Yom Kippur, where everything stands still, then suddenly.
into this tore a, uh, horrific sound of a siren. And as an Israeli, you know, when it's a siren, we're supposed to stand and remember the dead. And you know, when it's a siren where you're supposed to hide, so you're not one of the dead. But the most important then, it was the [00:16:00] evening of that time where I saw on TV, Golda Meir's famous speech with a quivering voice.
She looked like an old defeated woman. And I looked around me. I was nine years old. And I was never the same because I saw my grownups, the family, looking completely lost, not sure that we will survive. And I have to say that I have not had this feeling until the morning of this October 7th of 2023, when I picked up the phone.
And I had a sinking feeling that this is actually an existential crisis, not in the psychological. way, but actually that we may not survive. I want to stay on that for one sec. Because between 1973 and 2023, there were a lot of shocks. Nothing like that. Okay. But you had the first Lebanon war. Mm hmm. You had the second Lebanon war.
Mm hmm. You had the, you had the, the. Second Intifada in the early 2000s, where an [00:17:00] enormous number of Israelis were killed over a sustained period of time, suicide bombings, you know, the Delvenarium in Tel Aviv, you know, where these kids, teenagers, were getting slaughtered, blown up. There was the Passover bombing in Netanya in the Second Intifada.
There were these events that were mini traumas. I agree, it wasn't a trauma on this scale. But there was a sustained campaign of traumas. So, by the way, I feel the way you feel, okay? So, I, I, I, I'm not disagreeing with it. I'm actually, in talking to you, I'm trying to understand why this felt different than all the others.
Manishtana, what, why is this one different than all the others? And we all feel that. First of all, the scale does matter. But my shock and my response was before the scale was revealed. Mind you, I only saw the number 40. And I had this sinking feeling and I was taken back in time to 73 because this like [00:18:00] 1973 and I was present for all the traumas you describe and I was served in three years in Lebanon in the first Lebanon war.
I was one of the last soldiers to come out of Lebanon. Trucks were blowing up right and left around me. I mean, I've seen shock. I mean, I'm a who shot me to all the explosions. I was there. The difference is that this was an invasion, they broke through the border, and they basically, and I'm going to say it, they conquered the south of Israel for about 12 hours before we even got it together to understand what happened.
This was a conquest. This is our worst nightmare as Israelis. It is not only the women and children that were violated sexually and otherwise. The whole country was violated by Hamas in a way that is, I'm just going to say it, [00:19:00] akin of a rape. A violation of the very body of the country, and that is the trauma.
We are used to burying our dead. It's a terrible habit that we got into and when they're young, but this is a different thing. Well, I would, I would argue. The other difference is, other than the suicide campaign, suicide bombing campaigns, other wars that Israel has experienced, the two Lebanon wars, even the Yom Kippur War, was, they were conventional, I hate to say it, they were conventional wars.
They were soldiers fighting soldiers. You know, in the Yom Kippur War, as terrible as it was, and as many casualties as there were, there was not a sense that civilian areas were going to experience mass slaughter. Not to mention rape and torture and live burnings. And there was something about the vulnerability of [00:20:00] just.
Like, these civilian communities, these peace loving, peace loving civilian communities, these are communities where the people who live there have done more, have done, you couldn't find people who have done more for reconciliation and coexistence with the Palestinians, and then just watching these civilians get slaughtered en masse.
In their homes, in their bedroom. One of the great traumas of diaspora Jewry was the fact that pogroms did not happen on battlefields. It wasn't a war, not even in the street. That the murders were in the domestic sphere while other members of the family are watching. It is every parent's, every loving person's nightmare is that the home.
is going to be violated, and your [00:21:00] loved ones are going to be violated, tortured, murdered. They put a baby in the oven, for God's sake, and baked the baby while the mother was being raped, and the father was shot already. So, we are talking about pogrom thinking in the way, it's, it is a genocidal practice.
They want to enter your nightmares and they did think of yourself, Dan, and I'm sure that like myself and like every Jewish parent here, you are full of anxiety about the kids because you know, every normal right now, think of somebody coming and planning this so that they can tug on every one of your nerves.
of your instinct to protect the cubs, instinct to protect your children. This is what they did. We have basically experienced a limited genocide on October 7th. And this is exactly then, way before the first Israeli bomb fell on Gaza, [00:22:00] that the global left and Much to their shame, some of the Jewish left started shouting, Israel is committing genocide.
Israel is committing genocide. This word did not appear in the, from thin air. There was a genocide. in October 7th, but it was a genocide in the Jewish settlements around Gaza. Okay, I want to, I want to come back to that before I do, just to your point about how, um, how cleverly sinister the, the, the nature of the attacks were, the ways you're describing.
And I think about this at least once a day and usually many times a day. And I will tell you about the one I saw this morning was a photo of a of a baby, of an infant named Kfir B'bas. I hope I'm pronouncing the, the child's last name correctly. Kfir was kidnapped to Gaza, this beautiful little baby, who was kidnapped to Gaza by Hamas, is always referred to, according to this post, is always referred to as the nine month old [00:23:00] baby.
Well, because we're at the one month anniversary of the war starting, he's already 10 months old now. 28 nights in hell. And the immediate thing I thought of, Ruby, when I read that, Was, I remember when my children were infants and even a little older, you remember every month matters in terms of they change, they change.
They have a, this, a new smile, they start moving a little differently, they roll over, they start experimenting with crawling and walking and, and they, every month matters. First words, first words. First words, first words, they develop new tricks, you know. I used to say to my wife, Cam, I used to say, what, any new tricks?
Week to week, new tricks. Not to mention month to month. Every month at that age is a long time. And when I thought to myself, this nine month old infant has been taken by these monsters now and held by them for a month, the month in the life of an infant. [00:24:00] It's like a year in the life of us. Yes. And so to your point, that's what's so.
It's crazy. And I'll tell you, and I want to add to this. Most of American Jewry, numerically, are from the shtetl areas between Russia, Poland, Ukraine. Truma Moshaf, the place where the Jews were all pressed, pushed together in these places, not allowed to live anywhere else in East Europe, most of them. Most of the people, the Jewish people that live here today, I would say 90%, are descendants, and we're talking three or four generations.
of people who experienced this type of trauma on a large, large scale and had to leave East Europe with deep PTSD, usually penniless, and came to this country as haggard refugees, [00:25:00] but like deeply traumatized, deeply wounded. Many of them themselves suffered, and others just suffered collectively. It took a very short time for American Jews to like move from a traumatized, when I say short time, three generations, move from a traumatized, completely marginal place to feeling privileged.
We can talk later about this whole privileged and white and. Which plays a very big role in the equation of what's happening now in the college that actually would like us to discuss this whole whiteness business. We'll get into this whiteness business. But under this, there is deep memory. And I think that this was not just an attack on Israelis.
This was an attack on all Jews. By the way, my ancestors in Iran had gone through a pogrom like this and a forced conversion to Islam in the city of Mashhad in the early 19th century. Others in [00:26:00] Iraq went through similar pogroms. People came into the houses and murdered people with kitchen knives, neighbors.
People in Egypt, people in Morocco. All this story about the love and peace that happened between Jews and Arabs in the Arab countries was partially good. true and partially completely a made up fantasy. So we all as a collective, we carry this trauma under our skin and it's not that deep under the skin.
Three generations, your conscious mind then can do a lot of tricks in three generations. To fantasize you that you are safe and different, but your unconscious mind stores trauma in a way that your conscious mind does not. And I feel that they activated all of that trauma to for all of us. So I wanna drill down on that.
So, because I think unlike in previous wars in Israel, this one has a direct [00:27:00] impact, not just on Israelis, but on Jews all around the world in ways that you're alluding to now. Never in my lifetime. Really, Never in My Lifetime has the feeling of a shared destiny of all Jews has been made so visceral. Yes.
And so I ask you, I guess, being both an Israeli and a Diaspora Jew, because you embody both. Yeah, I'm betwixt, I'm between. You have both identities, yeah. How do you experience that? Like, what is your observation of what diaspora Jews are going through these days? I think that the same way that the body of Israel, the territory as in body, was violated, I feel that the global Jewish body was violated.
And all the responses, the heightened responses of Jews all over the world. And they're not just responses of support for Israel. We're going to talk about that. Are shock, shock responses of a violated body. [00:28:00] This was not yet another terror attack in Tel Aviv on one club. This was a very well orchestrated pogrom.
They came with body cameras. This was, I'm going to say something horrific now. This was a diabolic art installation. They made an installation of murder. They made a art exhibit of terror and murder because they wanted all of us, everyone, every Jew in the world, to feel unsafe and to feel that We were violated, and they succeeded in that.
Why are we so activated? Because it tugs on your unconscious trauma that your father told you and your grandfather, and you said, oh, I know enough already. Enough with these stories about pogroms. Enough of these stories about how old the Goyim hate us. I have friends who are WASP. I have friends who are Catholic.
I dated this girl. I dated that boy. [00:29:00] I know them. It's not the same. And this attack undid. All of this for all of us as an Israeli, and you mentioned that I'm a liberal. I am definitely, you know, in Israel, I'm considered part of the, what you would call the peace camp. And, and as an American Jew, I also am more on the liberal, I mean, side of the map.
Not, not again very much, but yes. So I didn't change my opinions, but this attack, and I think it did it for all of us, pulled the rug from under our feet, ideologically, identity wise. Now, some of us are more able to be in this wounded, chaotic place and reassess. I'm trying. I'm very traumatized. I'm obsessed.
I think about it all the time. For others? [00:30:00] The cognitive dissonance is too big, because if you really believed in one reality, and then came this attack, and it was meant It was brilliant. It was meant to create a deep, unbridgeable cognitive dissonance between our sense of safety, sobriety, sovereignty, and between a reality that is chaotic, diabolic, demonic.
Many people here in the diaspora are still unable. So they stick with old narrative because there is no new narrative for them that could So, Ruby, since the founding of the State of Israel, different periods during the 70 plus years, has become a central part of diaspora, specifically American Jewish life.
It's been a, it's been a, Zionism has been a way to express your Judaism. Even, even for [00:31:00] those Jews in the, in the U. S. who don't. who don't lead particularly religiously observant lives. Uh, there's been, there's been no problem reconciling their quasi secularization and assimilation with, with the Zionism and strong support for Zionism.
And, and it's gone in different periods, obviously 48 to 67 was not as strong as post 67 post following the six day war, uh, and now. And now, and then it went, in recent years, particularly the last couple decades, it's, it's been a lot more tenuous, it's been a lot, it's, you know, there have been some parts of the organized Jewish community in the United States that have been strongly Zionist, some less so, some have had a, have felt burdened by their relationship with Israel, some, some have actually been openly hostile, so it feels to me, And I, I'm seeing this play out in real time, so I don't know how lasting it's going to be.
It feels to me like October 7th is changing everything, including that. That's a good [00:32:00] question. Let's go back maybe in time a little bit before we start prophesying, and of course we will not know what's going to happen. Okay, bring it. For American Jewelry, the formative trauma Was arriving in America as a refugee with severe PTSD from pogroms.
And then there was the trauma of coming here and starting from a very different place like the bottom of the social rung. In crime infested and, and extreme poverty, many of the Jews lived in slums that you know were just the Lower East Side that isn't so hip now and you go to Yoneshimel and you eat a Ian, whatever.
These were, uh, terrible places. Uh, poverty, prostitution, uh, uh, violence, uh, gangs, everything that has to do with poverty, culture, the falling apart of the family institutes, the falling off of the [00:33:00] religious and cultural wagon, everything. And then there was a consolidated effort, very impressive to rebuild this Jewishness as a modern American entity.
What happened is liberalism that was part of what, in America, what they did not have in Europe. This liberalism, no matter how fraught it was, but still better than what they were used to, has become a key element in American Jewish culture. Because this was their hook on which they could hold on to. to build themselves as people who have sovereignty over their life, over their body, over their destiny, who can actually be mobile.
So, liberalism is an inseparable part from their Jewish identity. It is a core value. As people became less religious, And [00:34:00] there was less religious content, the liberal element became stronger and stronger and stronger, until it became in some place really the only thing. So we have to understand that there was a certain clinging to the liberal ethos, in a way replacing the thick, multidimensional Jewish identity of Jews before that.
And it's all of us. It's you. It's me. It's everybody who's in this conversation has internalized these values. You like them. You don't like them. That's a different story. We internalize them and we feel that these are Jewish values. The support for Israel was also another hook on which American Jews could exactly, as you say, hang their identity without being religious and without being committed religiously to anything.
You could eat your treif and you could like play golf on Shabbat instead of go to shul, and if you married a sheikh, so what? And as I support Israel, I support Israel. I [00:35:00] planted a tree, I gave, you know, all these cliches. Some of this, by the way, was to compensate for a deep survivor's guilt. Survivor's guilt from, from the Holocaust, from the Shoah.
Pogroms and then Shoah. Those who left for America left Jews behind. Then came the Shoah. And during the Holocaust, American Jewry was not strong or empowered enough, there's a debate, to actually do something about it. And we all know the story about Roosevelt, who was kind of like the Jewish Messiah. And Philip Roth writes about him, how his father cried, cried like a baby when Roosevelt died.
But the truth is that Roosevelt was a very complex person, and he enabled the Jews to integrate, and at the same time, he didn't really like Jews so much, so he never bombed the trains to Auschwitz. So, a lot more Jews could have been saved had Roosevelt made it a priority. Jews did not have that sense of agency or the actual agency then.
A generation [00:36:00] later, they did have it when the State of Israel was, was declared with Truman. And then they went all in. And in my opinion, it was a way to compensate for that deep sense of guilt and negligence that they had for not being able to do anything for what happened in Europe in the Shoah. They were not yet strong enough, they were not yet established enough, either weren't or didn't feel it.
So we have a double hook on which you can hang your secular Jewish diasporic identity. One is the support of Israel, and one is liberalism, universalism, tikkun olam. You do these two, you don't have to, in their mind, you don't have to be Jewish. This is how you're Jewish. The problem is that this guilt and these feelings traveled for a generation or two.
The automatic support for Israel, in my opinion, was about one and a half generations deep. The [00:37:00] second generation, definitely the third, is already not feeling the guilt, the survivor's guilt, and is very, very steeped in liberal, which has now become progressive culture. And then the ability to empathize.
With other Jews and empathize with Israel. The Jewish homeland is diminishing. Of course it's diminishing. It would be weird, it would be absurd if the progressive secular Jews today, many of whom are product of a mixed marriage already, whose Jewish education amounts to almost nothing, and what the little that they got was only universalist and humanistic values with the Jewish title put on them.
Why would they support Israel? What, what, what would compel them to do that? It makes total sense that they would feel alienated and not, not connected. [00:38:00] I've heard you say, or heard you describe young Jewish students today on college campuses, and I guess to some degree at non Jewish schools. High schools.
Yes. You've described them as hostages of woke culture. What do you mean by that? It's, it's a harsh term and provocative. I'm aware. I use it provocatively. I, I just found the horrific comparison between the hostages that we actually have, the Israeli hostages that are at the hands of the Hamas. And that it made me realize that a large part, not all of, not all of Jewish youth, by the way, but a very large part of Jewish American youth is held hostage in a different way.
Of course, I don't want this analogy to make the horror of what's happening in Gaza seem, you know, I don't want to, I don't want [00:39:00] to, to really compare, but it, it made me think about that because what happens is the following. Many of us, or you, or whoever it is, many of American Jews, sent their kids to non Jewish schools.
The fancy public schools, and of course the fancy private schools. We're getting more and more progressive, and when I say progressive, I mean woke. I mean it started with progressive, but then there's this new strand of progressiveness. Which is wokeism is different than the progressive education that, you know, people got at Brown University 20 years ago, 30 years ago, or, and it is not liberalism.
They actually hate. And despise liberalism, and it's not even progressive thinking as people of our age used to think about it is a very, in my opinion, a very toxic, divisive, anti American, anti [00:40:00] whiteness, a lot of very divisive ideas, conflated together, intersectionality, this is a very important element.
Cultural phenomenon that happened on our watch, and for some reason we did not fight it when these people came to our schools. When a Jewish teacher, mind you was proud that she got Homer's Iliad or the Odyssey out of the curriculum because it promoted white supremacy, the id Homer, the big white guy, we allowed this to happen.
People were busy with their careers. People trusted the principals. People trusted the administration of the university. People trusted professors. Because we projected on them our liberal sense of social responsibility. And that is not the case. The new strands of progressive thinking are nihilistic.
Explain that. Why are they nihilistic? [00:41:00] Nihilistic in the way that they don't believe in, in the core values of society. You and I believe in, I assume you believe in him, Dan, although I wouldn't put anything past you. Such as free speech, such as a balance reporting, such as things that we think are the core.
of civil society. They view them as counter revolutionary, as things that help the racist, oppressive system. And this takes us back to the early days of communism. This is basically all this thinking is an offshoot of Marxist thinking and in which everything that doesn't promote a revolution becomes counter revolutionary and therefore must be annihilated.
Now we allow this to happen on our watch. This is our generation. It's our fault. And now what we see. Is a lot of our own [00:42:00] Jewish youth and they feel that they are allies and that they are part of this movement that for them they took that slogan of tikkun olam again a noble cause and they took it very seriously and there were no antidotes to anything else that's all they got and now they're there in the universities alone surrounded by people who thought they were their friends or they still think that they're their friends With immense pressure on them to say that Israel is genocidal and Israel is the worst culprit of Everything bad in the world a while ago a Jewish Student at Wesleyan University a few years ago Wrote something in the Wesleyan paper where she said that the university should drop everything else and focus on the two Most dire problems that humanity faces today.
Dan, you're a wise man. What do you [00:43:00] think these two problems are? Systematic racism. You're getting close, but let me help you. Climate change and Palestine. These are the two greatest crises that humanity has to face today. So not systemic racism. Oh, no, no, that's so two years ago. Come on. It's, no, but like we're laughing at the absurdity of it, but it is not absurd for them.
And they are held hostage. And let me explain why. Because they built their lives as adults, separating. from liberal culture, which they see as a culture that basically serves capitalism, serves only white people. They're very disappointed by liberal culture, so they separated themselves from liberal culture by becoming radical leftists.
And then the radical left turns on them and becomes [00:44:00] anti semitic. Now where are these kids gonna go? One of the things that were the biggest shocks for me On the days after the attack on October 7th was a certain silence on social media, almost all the progressive Jewish side of the map. Us, the liberal Jews, the conservative Jews, the Jewish Jews, the older Jews, basically, we were frantic.
On the left side of the Jewish social media, there was a still silence. The sounds of silence. Nobody could say a word. Why? One, a great dissonance in their minds. They've been told that there's an oppressor and there's an oppressed the Zionists are white and oppressors and colonialists The Palestinians are brown Colonized and oppressed it couldn't be that the [00:45:00] oppressed is going to do these atrocities It doesn't work in their mind when a person a normal healthy person is, is faced with a cognitive dissonance.
And this is like Freud, Freud 101. The first thing to do is to deny the brain, the mind protects itself. The brain cannot live with cognitive dissonance. It's very few people. that are able to stand in this raw place and and see everything they believed in torn apart and still stand there and try to see a new reality.
Most people are going to run back to try to live in the old reality. So if you see the pictures of the kidnap on the wall in campus, You must tear it. But also, if you said one word in social media about the rape, murder, brutal, [00:46:00] terrible atrocities that happened to Jews in October 7th, your friends in the left are going to call you, they're going to use the Z word on you.
They're going to say you're a Zionist and you are so screwed once you were labeled a Zionist. It's worse than any other curse in their world. So they are held hostage. They're held hostage by their own set of beliefs and also by the milieu that they were associated with until a month ago. The worst happens in the art world.
I hear. Terrible stories in the art world. The art world apparently has released all the demons and I speak with Israeli artists, Jewish artists. I have a lot because I teach at an artist residency. So I have a lot of friends younger than I. And what's happening there is truly monstrous. There's not only Ignoring what happened.
There's open gloating. They say we had it [00:47:00] coming. They make memes. There's a Palestinian, apparently, I've never heard of her, but she's apparently very famous artist called Emily Jaseer, Emilia Jaseer. And this artist, Jaseer, had posted a meme making fun of an old woman that was kidnapped, saying she looks happy.
She maybe she thinks they're gonna feed her a delicious Palestinian dish now. There's a woman, an artist. I, by the way, wrote to the gallery of this woman. And I said, are you standing behind this? I, they did not return to me and, you know, that was, they ignored it. This is a, a famous woman that is well known all over the world.
She thought that this was funny. It's like someone posted a journalist, a mainstream journalist who has an affiliation, I think, with the New York Times posted, there was a, there was a photo of a, of a baby putting, uh, [00:48:00] being put in an oven, a live baby being put in an oven. And one of these people would see him, and the person posted, Oh, did they include baking powder?
So this is beyond the silence of the progressive Jews. By the way, they woke up two days later when it was beginning to be clear that Israel is, of course, going to retaliate. Then they could run back to their comfort zone. and started posting pro Palestinian posts and also warning the world against the Jews committing genocide.
Now, this was fascinating that because October 7th was actually a genocidal moment, and these were genocidal practices, the word genocide popped into the discourse and became central to it before the first Israeli bomb. fell on Gaza. Progressive Jews, and I believe they were parroting [00:49:00] a Palestinian propaganda, started posting photos of like, stop Jews against genocide in Palestine.
So the word genocide in itself, the fact that it appeared so quickly in the discourse, I think it's very telling. It's again that dissonance. They knew that this was genocidal and they had to transfer it to Israel. Uh, Ruby, unlike American Jews, many if not most Israelis Have never had to practice a deeply observant religious life in order to feel Jewish.
It was baked into their Israel identity. They all speak Hebrew. They live on a Hebrew Jewish calendar. So they live according to a religious calendar. They, we write a lot about this in our book, in our next book, The Genius of Israel, how we say that Israelis have a Thanksgiving every, every week. We call it, we have a chapter called Thanksgiving Every Week, that over 70 percent of Israelis [00:50:00] have Shabbat dinner every Friday night.
Now, that doesn't mean they're all sitting there doing everything to the T according to, to, you know, Orthodox religious observance, but they are with family together, often multi generational. So they, so they live this, it's like baked into Israeli life and Israeli society that the religious religion becomes part of the civil and civic religions.
But American Jews don't have that luxury. They don't have that privilege. What do you think are some ways in which American Jews, especially young American Jews today, who do not practice Jewish life in a meaningful or religious way in the Diaspora will, you know, change, strengthen, explore their Jewish identity?
As a result of October 7th. You know, it could go many ways. And first of all, there is no such thing as Jewish America. There are a few Jewish [00:51:00] Americas. And the responses are going to be different. Um, there is I still use the old numbers. Used to be 10 percent Orthodox. I think it's more now. And then there's a lot of others who have been already two, three generations.
Away from this world and are deeply secularized and the the synagogues that they may or may not go to once or twice a year has very little connection to the kind of synagogue that I don't know if you go to synagogue with the kind of synagogue I go to or the people that go in Israel and there's no Hebrew and the prayers are different and a lot of the emphasis is on Again, tikkun olam and progressive thinking.
These are the people who are going to go through the biggest crisis. Some of it is grieving. I think we are all in, in [00:52:00] shloshim now. We are grieving. We are in, in, in a state of grief and that as if somebody close to us died and their, their main Support system is the liberal, progressive, non Jewish world.
It could be that the more orthodox, conservative, affiliated Jewishness, Jews, Judaism's, are going to become more tight, more close to Israel. Stronger, identity wise, and my suspicion is that the other parts might have such a strong crisis because of this cognitive dissonance, that it's going to push them further from Jewishness.
That scares me. It scares me too, a lot, but we can't fool ourselves, because you know, You know what, Ruby, I got to say something, this is, I'm glad you said this, because I've been thinking about this and I haven't really said it out loud, publicly. [00:53:00] Shame on us. Yes, because we have sent a message to many Diaspora Jews that it is okay to raise your children without any serious Jewish education, without any serious formation of Jewish identity in a deep way, without any real connection to Israel, without any development of any Jewish identity.
Jewish literacy, and that they could basically hang on to their Jewish, a light Jewish identity, but lead a, an assimilated American or Canadian or British life, or wherever it may be, and then there's an existential crisis for Israel and the Jewish people, like October 7th, and many Jews are upset that these children they've raised Yeah, just basically keep their head down.
Yeah, because and we say how can you keep your head down? What what what? How are you not so unnerved? [00:54:00] How are you not so jostled? How do you not have your your your your show a moment? How do you not have that and their reaction I think is Why should I feel so strongly about this? Now you tell me it's important?
You, you, you, in the midst of the horror you tell me it's important? But when it was about developing and learning and, and embracing the joys and the burdens and the challenges and the commitments of Jewish life and the obligations of Jewish life, you told me it wasn't important. An assimilated secular life was more important.
But now, Jewish assimilated kid in their, on college campus or in their twenties, now they're supposed to suddenly decide they're a Jew? I don't think they will. I honestly, Dan, I'm with you. I think shame on us. Shame on all of us. Shame on the parents and shame on us that because we were privileged enough to have a Jewish knowledge.
And it seems like we also were asleep at the helm. I mean, I think, Truva, you have to first, it's very easy to, to gloat [00:55:00] at the fall of the other. But like, where were we? You and me? I mean, and we tried and we're still trying, but I. Look, there is an instinct, there is a Jewish instinct for people who are like us, who are like traditional Jews, in a way, even if we're not religious.
That, you know, we will come together, there's going to be something that's going to bring everyone back, all the sheep are going to return to the herd. So, we can think that, but in order to think for them to do that, they need a minimal cultural base to know this instinct, and they don't have that. So, I think that the very large part.
Of fine young Jewish people who could have been a great asset to themselves, the Jewish people and to the world as committed Jews are actually not going to be able to face the cognitive dissonance and are going to completely fall off the [00:56:00] wagon. However, And because, as Jews, we always end every terrible prophecy in the Bible, there's always a nechama that ends it.
You never end with a terrible prophecy. Nechama means a comforting prophecy by the same prophet. However, there is a certain percent of these progressive secularized kids who are held hostage by this woke culture who may still have that point. And I know some of them. And they are in desperate need of us now, and they could actually come home.
And when I say come home, it doesn't mean let's go become right wing fanatics, everybody become Republican, let's forsake all liberal values. Not at all. But to return home to this deep feeling of Jewishness and meaningful. and ability to carry some burden and some commitment, even if it's not huge, something [00:57:00] there are, I don't want to, I don't know the percentages.
Maybe I would say some off the cuff that maybe we're going to lose 70%. of the woke, young Jewish community, but 30 percent of them are still there to be reached out to. I think what we should do now is leave everything, support Israel with one hand, and reach out to this 30 percent on the other. Save what there is.
Look, the good news is there are those who are Jewishly committed, and I think their commitments are already deepening. Maybe it's 30%. I don't know what the percentage. And then we're seeing some Jews who were in the category described, who whose families and parents are saying, huh, maybe my child should have a Jewish day school education.
Maybe I should give them more experiences when they're growing up to tie them to their, to Jewish communal life and tie them to Israel. And suddenly Many of those families are reaching out to Jewish institutions saying I made a mistake. It's not too late. I want to raise Jewish children. [00:58:00] We have to capture those kids.
We have to give them a home. We have to give them a refuge. And you know something? One of us is to speak to the wealthy American Jews who are committed and to fund A lot of Jewish day schools that are very good that are not that are like Heschel and to to give stipends because for many people it is not possible to send their kid to a good Jewish day school.
It's either some in darkened Orthodox yeshiva who wants that or. a public school where they're going to be wokey sized and then you will not recognize your own child. So that's it. This is a place for Jewish philanthropy. Maybe all the money, all the money that we were pulling from the universities should completely at one, the same amount should be sent to creating a very impressive, very competitive Jewish day school that will, will be just like Heschel, liberal.
And, but, but [00:59:00] with a healthy core and affordable and available to the middle class. It could be, it could be a renaissance in Jewish day school education. I completely agree with you. My final question for you, Ruby, well, I just have to ask you this question. Please do. Many people define the 50 years between 23 as an era, a chapter that just closed.
We're in a new chapter now, a new era. October 7th can also be seen as a bookend to the 30 year era that began in 1993 when the Oslo Accords were signed. Now, I, I became, I think I became a skeptic of the promise of the Oslo process and all its iterations, including the subsequent. processes, the Y process, the Camp David process, the, you know, I, I, I became probably skeptical before you did, uh, but still, as someone who's seen himself as part of what is known in Israel [01:00:00] as the peace camp, um, do you think October 7th has, has impacted or your faith in that vision?
I grew up in Israel, in Jerusalem. My first memories were formed in 1967 when I saw my mother bring us and some blankets to the Miklat while the Jordanians were bombing us. And, and I, I lived through many, many I was formed in deep conflict with the Israeli Arab conflict. So I am not naive. And this is something that I think your listeners should know.
We, the people who believe that continuing to occupy the Palestinians forever is the worst idea and the end of Zionists. Yes, some of us are naive. Some of us are. Most of us are not naive. We're not stupid. [01:01:00] We have grown there. We know the nature of the neighbors, we have met them, our memories are formed by their aggression, cruelty.
However, the separation of the nations that I believe is the only chance of Zionism to ever survive, is not done just because of its immoral to govern, to rule over another nation. It's also because this is destroying Zionism. Look at how much of a pariah Israel became right now in the world. This is not just because of antisemitism.
I know Dan that it's easy to say, Oh, they always hated us. And now they have, um, uh, but this occupation has given them. The fuel. It is going to destroy Zionism eventually. If I told you now that Israel must pick up all our soldiers, uproot the settlements and leave the West Bank and [01:02:00] move back to the 67 borders, I would be a fool.
I should be like committed. It's, you have to be really stupid or out of your mind to actually believe that. On the other hand, does it mean that we need to keep building settlements? Fortifying them, making it absolutely impossible to separate the nation sometimes in the next 50 years. Try so hard to weaken the Palestinian Authority that, mind you, Dan, has been keeping the Palestinians in check during this terrible time.
We don't have problems with the Palestinian West Bank. The only problems we have is we have a few schmucks. And I'm gonna You, I could use worse words, eh, I'm just trying to stay It's a very, it's a very technical term. Yeah. Yeah. Schmuck is a very technical term. Muck, Jewish mucks from the settlements who are trying to provoke the Palestinian population.
So let's not, let's not be easy to dis the idea of Oslo. We have to refine [01:03:00] it. We, it has to be an international project. We have to bring the new allies. I, I, I have great hopes from like Saudi Arabia. There could be a key. To some solution in Gaza. I feel that it, I not only didn't this make me want to keep conquering millions of Palestinians for the rest of history, this made it more urgent for me to think of creative, but same but realistic adult solutions to how do we separate from the Palestinians?
But it is a very refined adult. It may take 50 years. It has to be, it has to be an ongoing effort to eventually separate the two nations. I believe that the two state solution is the only way in which Israel will survive and Zionism will survive. [01:04:00] It's just not going to be as simple as we imagined it to be.
Or anytime soon. Or anytime soon. It could be a 50 or 100 year project, but the work has to begin now and the goodwill needs to begin yesterday. Not the ill will, and I must tell you the right wing governments of Israel have been practicing a lot of very ill will vis a vis the Palestinians. I agree with most of what you've said on this podcast I just want to draw a sharp line here because even if you think there has been stupidity of You know advanced by certain Israeli politicians which there have been if not outright Malevolence.
There's also a beautiful combination of both, you know, they can be Okay, but but I just want to be clear that What we saw unleashed, the barbarism we saw unleashed on October [01:05:00] 7th, has nothing to do nor is it a response to that stupidity and malevolence. This is a whole other level of genocidal ambition that it's not about.
Yes, and this is an important point and I actually would like to agree with you and say it. I definitely support In the long term solution that will create the two state solution. I do and I'm firm in this belief at the same time. What happened in October 7th is not connected to the liberation of the Palestinian people for a variety of reasons.
One is that Gaza has not been occupied by Israel. For many, many years now, which is a very, it's a fact that is strangely omitted from the conversation. We are not conquering Gaza. Gaza is not occupied. Gaza has been governed by Hamas. For many years now, there's no Israeli soldiers there. So this is not [01:06:00] about the occupation because there is no occupation in Gaza.
Number two, Iran. Iran is behind this. Everybody knows it. This level of execution is not Hamas level. This is the Revolutionary Guard level because they are very sophisticated. This is a deep Salafi Islamic belief that as long as an infidel holds rule over the mosques and over any Muslim, the Muslim movement has to Eliminate that rule.
It was it. They did it with the Crusaders and now they do it with the new Jewish Crusaders If occupation means that there's gonna be any Jewish sovereignty at all in the Middle East then yeah, it's an occupation. But given the fact that we have no intention of giving up on our Jewish sovereignty in the [01:07:00] Middle East, if only for the mere fact that there's nowhere else for us to go, then this is not about the occupation.
And this distinction needs to be made. And I don't feel it's been made enough. I, so we could talk about this forever, I, I think there may be some of that, but I think it's, what we're seeing reveal itself is, is the oldest hatred, anti Semitism, and whether Israel's in Gaza, whether Israel's out of Gaza. The moment the Jews are under siege, I, sadly, throughout history, like in every century, there's this incredible pylon, and I didn't think we'd see the pylon this way.
I didn't, I really didn't. Yeah. We thought it ended. And I didn't think we'd see it in such, with such a lack of subtlety. I thought it would be an effort to be more nuanced. I, I know that sounds crazy. It's not, there's nothing subtle about it. No, no, it's, it's, that's what's, so that's what makes me, honestly, Ruby, it makes me as a Jew feel so vulnerable is the lack of subtlety [01:08:00] because it's like, there's no, there's no cost there, there, they're just, it's in your face.
Yeah. And they, and they could because they think they can get away with it. They can get away with it. But in some ways, I'll tell you what, it could be, it could strengthen you because okay, now you know where you're standing. This, the ambiguity is what weakens us. And now you know where you stand, and we're, we are survivors.
We are survivors. We're tough. I'm gonna just say it, okay? We're tough motherfuckers, the Jews. Yeah, we are survivors. But when we know, when there's clarity, when there is clarity, now we gained a certain clarity. Let's become the tough motherfuckers, you know what I mean? I, I, I, you know, it's like I tell my friends who've been giving all this money to all these elite American colleges, and, and they're shocked by what's going on on these campuses.
Jews, I said, it's like, paraphrase that movie, you know, they're, they're just not that into you. Like, now you've learned. Like they, you know what I mean? They're just not that into you. Like, they never really cared about you. They're happy to take your money. [01:09:00] They're happy to, for you to send your kids to their schools.
They're not gonna, they don't have your back when it matters. No. All right. Well, look, I'm glad we were able to end this conversation, uh, with a shed of darkness. God forbid we should have any lightness. hope, whether we introduce, you know. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Ruby, I hope you'll come back. I hope to come back.
Well, I think we just only begun. I mean, there's so much. We could have done another, we could have done another few hours. Thank you for doing this. Thank you. Shabbat Shalom. This was wonderful.
That's our show for today. I highly recommend everything Ruby Namdar writes, but I'm going to post in the show notes, a link to the ruined house and also a piece he wrote on October 8th, actually for the Atlantic. And then just one last reminder to please this week. Go out and purchase The Genius of Israel.
I think it will give you something to be hopeful about, and I think there's a lot of [01:10:00] lessons in there for us here in the United States to learn from Israel. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.