What starts with the Jews, rarely ends with just the Jews - with Yuval Levin
On previous episodes of this podcast we’ve discussed the origins and history of antisemitism. But what does this antisemitic moment tell us about society more generally? If you look back throughout history, the persecution of Jews has often coincided with an even bigger crack-up in society.
Is this antisemitic moment the first sign of something bigger going on – is it a vessel for broader and deepers trends? This is what we will discuss with Yuvan Levin. Yuval currently wears three hats: At the American Enterprise Institute think tank, he’s the Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies. He’s the editor-in-chief of National Affairs, a quarterly journal of essays about domestic policy, political economy, and political thought. He’s also authored numerous books. “The Fractured Republic” is especially relevant to today’s conversation.
Yuval served as a member of the White House domestic policy staff under President George W. Bush. He earned his masters and PhD from the University of Chicago.
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
[00:00:00] You know, the Jews have always found themselves on the wrong side of these kinds of distinctions. You look at 19th century antisemitism, and what it basically consists of is people who hate capitalism accuse the Jews of being capitalists, and people who hate communism accuse the Jews of being communists at the same time.
And so there's just a way in which Jews come to represent what ideological extremists hate. I think we're seeing that here. The left identifies Jews as the oppressors. The right, to the extent that we also see right wing anti Semitism, and that exists too, of course, identifies Jews as kind of outsiders, you know, the Jews will not replace us.
Those crowds in Charlottesville were yelling. These are obviously contradictory ways of understanding what the Jews are. And ultimately, they're not really trying to understand what the Jews are. These are expressions of dangerous and violent ideological extremism. And they have to be fought on their own terms, even as we work to [00:01:00] specifically protect Jewish Americans from the particular threats that we face.
It's 6 p. m. in New York City on Friday, December 15th, as we get ready for Shabbat. It's 1 a. m. On Saturday, December 16th in Israel. Today is day 70 of the Hamas Israel war. Here are a few updates. A few hours ago, the IDF spokesman reported that three Israeli hostages were tragically killed, accidentally, by IDF soldiers during a battle with Hamas terrorists.
Of the 240 hostages, 113 are still in Gaza. 110 were released from captivity during a week long pause in fighting in late November. The bodies of eight hostages [00:02:00] have been recovered and the IDF has confirmed the deaths of 20 of those still held by Hamas, citing new intelligence and findings obtained by troops operating in Gaza.
There appears to be growing tension between the families of the hostages and the Israeli government. We will be following this as the growing movement of families of the hostages seems to be increasing pressure on the Israeli government. Meanwhile, in Gaza, an IDF experiment of flooding the Hamas tunnels with seawater has proven successful.
But, according to a Hamas spokesman. Osama Hamdan, the tunnels were constructed in a way that can block their flooding by water. So that is another development we will be monitoring. Meanwhile, in the broader region, a top shipping company has suspended its Red Sea route after two more Houthi strikes on these ships from Yemen.[00:03:00]
And finally, IDF intelligence chief, Major General Aharon Haleva, has said that Israel quote, must continue to pressure the enemy, continue to destroy the enemy. The campaign, he said, has multiple theaters and has many more months to go. Now that's interesting. Many more months to go. Longer than the timeline being discussed between the Biden administration and Israel's war council.
And also the idea that it has multiple theaters. Which points to the possibility of a post Munich style operation that could last years. The issue of what is going on between the Biden administration and Israel's war council is a topic we'll get into with Haviv Retikur on Sunday. There have been a lot of statements made and a lot of reporting and a lot of mixed signals and a lot of confused signals.
And we'll try to reconcile them and explain what is actually happening. In our next episode, but as for today's episode much has been written And said about the testimony [00:04:00] before the u. s congress of the presidents of harvard penn and mit No matter how many times you hear about that testimony or watch it.
It is still quite Shocking, but getting to the bottom of what has happened to elite colleges in the United States is important But it's only part of the story a story that actually began before October 7th According to everyone from the ADL and the FBI to the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies across the United States Anti semitic hate crimes have been on the rise for some time for the past few years But since October 7th something else is going on It's a mass wave of incitement of violence, sometimes outright violence, harassment, and intimidation with language of genocide being used in the most casual of ways, sure, but also quite deliberately and quite methodically.
It all seems to be at times very well organized [00:05:00] and perhaps the most chilling part of all this for Jews. Is the tolerance for those using this genocidal language and the tolerance for those disrupting the lives of Jews. Tolerance by government leaders, tolerance by leaders in universities, and tolerance by leaders in other civic institutions.
On previous episodes of this podcast, we've discussed the origins and the history of anti Semitism. There was our conversation with Yossi Klein Halevi from Jerusalem, and our conversation with Richie Torres and Michal Kotler Wunsk. And it's a topic we'll return to from time to time, but what does this anti Semitic moment tell us about American society more generally, and Western society?
If you look back throughout history, just look at different periods of waves of anti Semitism, whether Grassroots anti semitism or top down government organized anti semitism. Think about the Spanish Inquisition, the Russian pogroms, or the Nazi era. [00:06:00] In each of these eras, and just about every other era that preceded them, the persecution of Jews has often coincided with an even bigger crackup in society.
It rarely winds up being Just about the Jews. So is this anti semitic moment that we are living in the first sign of something bigger going on? Is it a catalyst for broader and deeper trends? Or a vessel of those trends? The Jews always seem to be among the first targets, or the first victims. of world events.
And so today, the attacks on Jews may be the clearest sign or illustration of the moral crisis of the West. This is what we will discuss with Yuval Levin. Yuval currently wears three hats at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, D. C. He's the Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies.
He's the Editor in Chief of National Affairs, a quarterly journal of essays about domestic policy, political [00:07:00] economy, and Political thought. I highly recommend subscribing. I'm a. Happy subscriber, and he is the author of numerous books including The Fractured Republic, which is especially relevant actually to today's conversation, and he served as a member of the White House Domestic Policy Staff under President George W.
Bush. Yuval earned his master's and PhD from the University of Chicago. Yuval Levin. On what starts with the Jews, rarely ends with just the Jews. This is Call Me Back.
And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast my longtime friend and regular guest of the Call Me Back podcast, Yuval Levin. Yuval, thanks for being here. Thanks very much for having me, Dan. I gotta say, the podcast has really been an incredible blessing to all of us who care about what's going on in Israel over these couple of months, so thank you for it.
Thank you. It's been sort of counterintuitively cathartic to be [00:08:00] having these conversations, but if they can, uh, be helpful to you and others, it's definitely, uh, doubly worthwhile. I've thought about you as this seeming complete crack up in our society has, uh, or how we, how, how society seems to devolve into a total crack up.
Because When you've been on our podcast in the past, and given what else you've written, I've wondered, what does Yuval think? Does Yuval think what we are watching right now, is he surprised by it? Does he think it's, it's an extension of what he had been writing about for some time and thinking about for some time?
Or have we reached a new level? Or is it a catalyst of what he'd been predicting was going to be happening. So when I say what this moment is, I summarize it that after October 7th, I, and I sometimes think I naively, but I thought that the outrage around the world from, you know, among elites in Western cities [00:09:00] to elite college campuses to international organizations to the media that in all these corners the Outrage would have been directed at those who committed the massacre Against the Jews on October 7th.
And what I have been stunned by is the outrage seems to be directed at Jews for objecting to being slaughtered. And that's what we've seen since October 7th. And then, and each day seems to get worse and worse and worse with these complete, like these crack ups, as I'm saying, in all these different institutions, in all these places, from protests that use rhetoric, that is literal incitement of genocide, to violent intimidation, bullying, actual violence.
Against Jews, a vandalism of Jewish owned properties and Jewish owned businesses and Jewish institutions, and I, I use the word Jewish here because what is [00:10:00] striking and kind of depressing is we used to have this very academic debate about the difference between anti Semitism and anti Zionism and is there a difference and how can you have legitimate criticism of Israel, but not cross the line into anti Semitism, and whereas now the mask is off.
So, so much of the hate and the outrage and the violence is just, is simply directed at Jews, whether they have a formal connection to Israel or not. So I do, I will want to get into all of that, but I guess my first question for you is. Were you surprised? You know, after October 7th, what did you think was going to happen?
Yeah, I, I was surprised. I mean, look, I, I always tell myself, like I think a lot of us do, that the, the next damn thing won't surprise me. Um, and then it does. So there is a way of thinking about what we're seeing here as a kind of extension of the breakdown, the crack up, that, uh, that I and others have been thinking and writing about for a long time.
But I was surprised that the first reaction, and really it was the first reaction [00:11:00] before Israel went into Gaza, before it even began to respond, that the first reaction of so many people in the West and in the United States, To a brutal pogrom was essentially to join in, to vilify not the attackers, but the attacked.
Uh, really was pretty shocking. I mean, I, you know, just a couple of days after October 7th, I was on the campus of George Washington University for an event, walking back to my car after dark, and there was just, you know, cast on the side of the library. This became famous the next day. There were these slogans, you know, glory to our martyrs, there was a depiction of a guy dropping down in a kind of parachute to kill Jews.
That was the image of the, um, the Hamas gliders. Of the gliders, yeah, exactly. The Hamas gliders who were part of the invasion, part of the air invasion into Israel and anti Israel and really anti Semitic critics of Israel used the image of almost solidarity. [00:12:00] Yeah. With the gliders, as though we're with those invading Israel and committing the massacre.
And, you know, it's hard not to be shocked by that, and I certainly was shocked by it and, and surprised by it, but I do think, nonetheless, that what we're seeing is, in a sense, an extension of the kind of breakdown and polarization that we've been living through for some time, so that everything that happens in the world is immediately fit into some set of pre existing categories rather than understood in its own terms.
And in this case, the categories of a lot of the left work in such a way that they put the world into basically two possible, uh, classifications. The, the oppressor and the oppressed. This is how the progressive wing of the left thinks about everything. And, you know, Israel and the Jews fit into the oppressor category and not the oppressed category.
And what you find is that all of the institutions that have been advancing that ideology, and living under it, and especially [00:13:00] the universities, but of course it's not just universities, the immediate reaction to this event was an anti Jewish reaction. Um, it's obviously profoundly troubling, but I don't think that it began or came out of nowhere on October 7th.
It is an extension of what we've been living through for much of the 21st century. So to frame the discussion, if you look back at history, the persecution of Jews has often been about or has, has coincided with larger societal And, and political trends, and, and the phrase, you know, the phrase I use, crack ups, they, they don't happen in a vacuum.
In other words, what, what starts with the Jews never really ends with the Jews. And so, the, so the way I want to focus the conversation is try to understand If that is, if that is a moment that we're in right now, what starts with the Jews won't end with the Jews. And then the broader, where's it telling us we're going.
And so before we get to that, can you just spend a moment? Cause maybe it's, you know, you haven't been on in a while, maybe just summarize your [00:14:00] thesis about what was happening in society with regard to institutions, with regard to our politics before. Yeah, I do think it's important to understand this in that context to some degree.
I mean, I think that we have for some time, and in some ways this has been going on since the beginning of the 21st century, in some ways you might say that it's, uh, it began in the 2010s, um, we've been living in a moment of a breakdown of trust and confidence that is rooted in a kind of polarization of American life.
Um, that has spread well beyond politics. It's not traditional polarization of your party and my party and we have an election and one of us wins and one of us loses. Um, it's spread into what we think of as a very broad based culture war where left and right are at each other's throats everywhere in every part of American life.
And it's very hard for anybody to stay out of it, for, for corporations, for, uh, [00:15:00] anybody in the press, for anybody in the culture, for anybody in the media and the, and, and the academy. Um, it's all overtaken by this kind of partisan culture war. And in a way, I think one way to think about the two parties to that war is a traditional left right division.
And I would put it this way. That the left in, in this, uh, in, in this way of thinking looks at the world in terms of oppressor and oppressed. And the right looks at the world in terms of order and chaos. Um, and those are very old categories. In some ways they go back to the, even the 18th century. I, I wrote a book about these categories called The Great Debate.
It was published, uh, about a little more than 10 years ago. Uh, that tried to think about the ways in which left and right have divided along these lines for a very long time, and it presents itself in different ways in different moments. But in, in our time in particular, we're living in a period in American life when the two sides to this debate are fundamentally defined by [00:16:00] opposition to each other.
The left is obsessed with the right, and is all about not being the right. The right is obsessed with the left, and is all about not being the left. And everything that happens A global pandemic or a war somewhere else is immediately fit into these categories of which side which party do you fall into?
And becomes another facet of the culture war that we're engaged in everywhere all the time. Um, and part of what that means is that we look at things that happen in the outside world as extensions of the party we opposed, we're opposed to here in the United States. I think that's a, as a general picture, that's one way to describe the dysfunction that American politics has been, uh, living through.
It's affected both parties. It's sort of broken them both apart and made them much less capable of being functional political parties that try to build broad coalitions. Neither of them is very good at doing that anymore. Each of them is absolutely obsessed with the other or with its own, [00:17:00] with its caricature of what the other is.
Um, and the whole world ends up fitting into that. Now, October 7th happens, and in a way, you know, it's an event that's perfectly suited Before you get to October 7th, I want to ask you just one other question about this period. The way you're thinking about things before October 7th. Because I remember you once, in describing what you just described To me is, um, you, the role the conspiracy theories play for both sides in that context and the, and, and, and the simplest and, and most, and, and most stark example was the, the lie in the conspiracy theory that each.
party told itself about how the other party won the election, right? In 2016, it had to be the Russian, you know, manipulation of the election. It had to be Putin that won it for Trump. There was no way that Trump could have won legitimacy. There was no way that tens of millions of Americans had the agency to, you know, make the decision to vote against the Clintons or vote for Trump.
And then in [00:18:00] 2020, obviously, there was no way those supporters of Donald Trump could believe that the Democrats won fair and square and that the election was stolen. And so can you talk a little bit about the role of Yeah. Conspiracy and, and just falsehood. Yeah, I mean, look, in some ways, both, both parties at this point are, are subject to, to radical movements, uh, of their own side.
And there is a distinction to draw between the way in which the right has radicalized and the way in which the left has. And I, I think one way to do that is to, alongside the left right axis that we're used to, and that I think remains very relevant, there's another axis in our politics. There always is.
which I would describe as the insider outsider axis. Do you think your party properly owns this society and its institutions and that they're being invaded by outsiders? Or do you think that you're the outsider and you're pushing against the establishment? In an interesting way, the left and right have switched places on the [00:19:00] insider outsider axis in the course of the 21st century.
Um, so that the left now, implicitly, and it's not comfortable with this position, but the left is more and more the inside party in American politics. It's the party of the elite, of the educated class, of the people who run things. And the right is more and more, and it is comfortable in this place, uh, the outsider party.
The party that's banging on the windows and, uh, demanding to disrupt. This is a change. So that, I think, this is one way in which the example of conspiracies around elections can be helpful. A party that loses a very close election in a democracy often is inclined to look for conspiratorial explanations of what happened.
But the inside party might say something like, The Russians stole the election. That's what the right would have said for most of my lifetime. The left would say it now. Um, the inside party says, The Russians stole the election, this outside force came in and manipulated things. The outside party would say something like the [00:20:00] elites who run the government and the elites who run the corporations conspired against the people to steal the election.
That's a kind of Noam Chomsky argument for my youth and for most of the later half of the 20th century it would have been the left that said that kind of thing. Today it's the right. And I think one way to understand our politics now is to recognize that we're looking at a party that is, that's composed of outsiders on the right, And insiders on the left and the way in which they fight each other is very much defined both by their being right and left and by their being insider and outsider.
And it's rendered the politics of 21st century America very confusing and disorienting. Um, it, it's, neither party is entirely comfortable with the place it's landed in. They're both kind of trying to get a handle on who their voters are now. And our politics is just very confusing and confused in this period.
Everything that's happened that sort of fed into it, as I say, whether that's the pandemic, whether it's these very close [00:21:00] elections, uh, whether it's events in the world, has been processed through that kind of filter. Um, and the result is a, a, a deformed political experience that I think is one way to understand.
The explosion of anti Semitism that we've, uh, been living through. Okay, and then before we get to October 7th, just spend a moment on where our elite academic institutions have fit into this breakdown or this dichotomy that you're describing that was going on in our national politics. So look, our elite academic institutions are dominated by the left.
That's not new. Um, but as the left has changed, what it means for them to be dominated by the left has changed too. And here, I think over the past, really, 15 years by now, um, we've witnessed the campus culture become overtaken by a certain kind of progressive ideology, um, an ideology that, as [00:22:00] I say, divides the world into oppressors and oppressed, defines justice as the liberation of the oppressors from the oppressed.
And, you know, the deliberation of the oppressed by any means, by whatever that means. And so that says that power is all that matters, and that groups that are perceived to be oppressors in the world can be excluded, can be fought, can be denounced, can be attacked, can be openly hated and reviled in any way and every way.
Um, it's a view that rejects both principled and procedural constraints on attacking people if they are in the oppressor groups. Whether that's white America, whether that's corporate America, whether that, as we've been discovering, Uh, is, is the Jews in Israel. In a sense, part of the problem here with contemporary campus anti Semitism is a function of the fact that Jews and Israel are considered among the oppressor groups in this view.
And so [00:23:00] they're, uh, they're being treated in a way that allows them to be openly reviled, openly rejected, openly attacked. And I, I would say this. I, I think it's important to see that the problem with that is not that the Jews are in the wrong category. The problem with that is that this ideology is how the culture of the university works now.
And that, that's the problem ultimately to be addressed, uh, to be confronted. When I speak to, particularly, friends of ours in the Jewish community, there's a tendency to try to argue that you're misunderstanding Jews when, when you When, in terms of where we fit into the, the powerful and powerless structure, or the white privilege, they say, oh, you know, Jews are, are, are part of the white privilege, and, you know, you spend enough time walking the streets of, You know, Israel, and any city in Israel, and you soon realize that the majority of Jews living in Israel, and it's representative, it's represented in [00:24:00] most parts of the Diaspora, too, are not white.
They originate from all, they're Persian, they're Yemenite, they're Moroccan, they're, in Israel there's a lot of Ethiopian Jews, there's, you know, so the idea that they're clearly white is, across the board, is just factually wrong. And Jews want to argue that point, and I think what you're saying is, it's the wrong way to think about it.
Absolutely. I, I, I, it's a perfectly understandable response and inclination. And I find myself arguing this point, too. Someone will say that Israel is a, is a colonial state. And I say, look, if you, if your worries about colonialism Israel is the greatest success story in the history of the human race. Here is an indigenous people who was kicked out of its land by the epitome of Western colonialism, by the Roman Empire, that lived dispersed for 2, 000 years and was able to return with its language and religion intact and rebuild its society, uh, in its indigenous land.
I mean, what a story. You know, it's as if the Cherokee were to return to North Carolina and create a state. and have it be the most [00:25:00] liberal and open and accepting and prosperous, uh, state in, in the region. Imagine if that happened, what a success that would be for people worried about colonialism. Nobody wants to hear that, and I think ultimately, as attractive as that kind of response and argument is, it isn't really going to work.
I mean, the, the problem is the underlying ideology that views the world this way to begin with. And more than that. The problem is that this ideology is destructive to the academic ethos, so that as a way of, uh, of, of organizing and governing a university, it's absolutely destructive to what higher education ought to be.
That's the deeper problem here. Now, it's a long term problem. I think it's important to respond to anti Semitism on its own terms, to make sure that Jewish students are protected and that, and that Jews in general are protected in America. But in the bigger picture, I think we're not going to win the fight that says, No, actually Jews belong in the oppressed category, not in the oppressor category.
The problem really is [00:26:00] categorizing the world this way to begin with makes it impossible to have a free society. And if we're not going to have a free society, then Jews are not going to be protected. And in some ways, that won't even be our biggest problem. So, if we're fighting for what it takes to have a society that can be protective of, of religious minorities, um, we're gonna have to do a lot more than try to move ourselves from one category to another in the world view of the radical left.
We're gonna have to answer that view, and address it, uh, where it's dominant. When you say no one's interested in hearing those arguments about the Jews were dispersed around the world, uh, after the, the Romans pushed them out, and they were scattered all over, literally all over the world, and they came back, and it's the ultimate post colonial or anti colonial project, when you say no one's interested in hearing that, why do you think that is?
Well, I I think it complicates the story that, um, defines the kind of political narrative that they want to live in. I [00:27:00] mean, if this was really about just getting the facts right, then a lot of the left's identification with Hamas in the last couple of months would make no sense whatsoever. I mean, Hamas is an oppressive, radical theocracy.
Um, they, they have, they make no room for minorities of any kind. Um, you know. If you're a movement that cares for oppressed people, or a movement that cares for gay rights, or for women, obviously it makes no sense whatsoever to align yourself. With Hamas that's nuts and against a society where these groups have more rights than anywhere else in the in the Middle East and really almost anywhere else in the world, but that's not really what's going on here.
I mean, I think ultimately the the way in which this comes to be expressed as anti Semitism. is a function of a much deeper, uh, kind of ideological extremism. And, you know, the Jews have [00:28:00] always found themselves on the wrong side of these kinds of distinctions. You look at the 19th century antisemitism, and what it basically consists of is people who hate capitalism accuse the Jews of being capitalists, and people who hate communism accuse the Jews of being communists, at the same time.
And so, there's just a way in which Jews come to represent. Uh, what ideological extremists hate. I think we're seeing that here. It's happening in America too. The left identifies Jews as the oppressors. The right, to the extent that we also see right wing anti Semitism, and that exists too, of course, identifies Jews as kind of outsiders, uh, you know, the Jews will not replace us.
Those crowds in Charlottesville were yelling. These are obviously contradictory ways of understanding what the Jews are. And ultimately, they're not really trying to understand what the Jews are. These are expressions of dangerous and violent ideological extremism. And they have to be [00:29:00] fought on their own terms, even as we work to specifically protect Jewish Americans from the particular threats that we face.
For what it's worth, I think part of the reason that the, the Jews are the ultimate case study in an anti colonial project is because what has resulted in the modern state of Israel is a exceptionally successful nationalist experiment, or nationalist project. There are huge swaths of American society, political, cultural elites today that do not want to celebrate or marvel successful nationalist projects.
Yeah. I, I think there's some truth to that. Uh, you know, Israel's also capitalist. Israel's also, uh Meritocratic. Yeah, meritocratic. It's an interesting That's another principle that no one, that elites here don't want to hear about today, is meritocracy. So, the attack on Israel is an attack on a successful nationalist project.
The attack on Israel is an attack on meritocracy. The attack on Jews in America today is an attack [00:30:00] on meritocracy. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, there's an interesting story there, because Israel, in the first, uh, twenty years or so of its existence Really was held up as a model by people fighting colonialism in Africa, um, and in South America.
was understood to be an example of how this could work and by a lot of the, uh, of the left was understood to be an example of how this could work. In some ways after the Six Day War, but especially when the Soviet Union came to see Israel as its enemy and began to develop this notion that Zionism is racism, which really was a, a kind of Soviet, uh, information operation.
This began to change, and the argument now that, uh, that Israel is the world's greatest example of, uh, of anti colonialism It's just so far from the way that a lot of the folks who deploy the language of anti colonialism think, that, uh, I, I, I do think it's a distance that can't really be traveled by argument.
They're not open to it. [00:31:00] To what extent is what we're seeing on campuses now, and then I want to get back to the broader trends, but, uh, to what extent is what we're watching today a recycled version? of what will happen on American college campuses in the 1960s. And are the students of that era, you know, sort of in charge in this era?
The odd thing about what's happening in the universities now is that the students are pushing on an open door. The university administration is effectively on their side. And although they still deploy the methods, uh, in, in a, a kind of almost, uh, blind recreation of, uh, 1960s protests. They occupy administration buildings and, and so on.
Um, you know, the administration is essentially on their side. In part because they immediately recognize that what's happening here is happening in the language of the kind of, uh, protest movements that, um, that they take to be legitimate and important. They want to create a lot of [00:32:00] space for them. And they're protective of them in ways that they are not otherwise protective of speech on campus.
It's part of the hypocrisy that's made so many people upset over the past few weeks. Suddenly all these university administrators have decided they actually love free speech and that it should all there should be happening all the time. But where were they for the past ten years? So that in a funny way today's left really is the establishment and they the language of anti establishment is still the only language they have.
But as we saw not long ago the the president of Harvard is with them. Um, and is looking for ways to enable and protect what they're doing so that, I think the institutions are in much worse shape now than they were in the 1960s. Even if the protests are not, in some important ways, as violent, as dangerous, they're not because, you know, the door is open.
So they don't need, uh, they don't need armed resistance. There's, I, I want to just Put a spotlight on something you alluded to, the deep contradiction [00:33:00] between Hamas and liberal values as we understand them. There's one funny comment I read, that quote unquote, queers for Palestine, which was one of these college campus groups that emerged.
Queers for Palestine after October 7th makes as much sense as chickens for KFC. Yeah. Right. There's a television show in Israel that it's like the Sound Night Live of, of Israel that did this fantastic sketch. Mm-Hmm. , which you may have seen. Yeah. Mocking these Columbia University students who are identifying with Hamas.
And actually seven years ago Sound, the Sound Night Live in the United States did a sketch about, uh, a parent dropping a kid off at college and the kid getting swept up in, in the pro ISIS Pro, meaning supportive of isis. Yeah. Movement on campus and that like it was it was weirdly prophetic. I mean it was that how on target this was But I guess my question is were these progressive groups on campuses and elsewhere never Truly liberal or have they become over time more [00:34:00] radicalized for reasons?
We we didn't Well, I think it's a mix, and it depends on what we mean by liberal, too. Um, I, I do think that, um, the, these groups are not becoming Islamists. They're not, you know, and, and they see Hamas as an ally in the sense that it is an ally against the kind of oppressive West. Um, they see Hamas as another left wing group because Hamas is opposed to the to all the same kinds of power centers and, uh, and, and ideas that they oppose.
And so they are willfully blind to Hamas's own oppression of people like themselves. I think this is something that we've seen in the culture of left wing protests for a long time. It was evident throughout the Cold War. A kind of willingness to build coalitions with people who are not committed to the same kinds of ideals, to the same kind of [00:35:00] world, because they have the same enemies.
I think at least implicitly, there's a sense here that there's a coalition that is opposed to the West. And for a long time, this is not new. Various Palestinian groups, including Islamist groups, that are very anti liberal and very much opposed to the other things these American leftists believe in. have been part of that coalition.
So, I guess I'd say there's almost a kind of, a little bit of good news in that, which is that some of what we're seeing expressed is not, at its core, anti Semitism. It is a kind of allyship with groups who are perceived to have similar enemies. I don't think we're seeing the American campus left becoming radicalized in an Islamist direction.
I mean, that's not what's happening here. But they are willfully blind to the obvious contradiction between what they're supposedly advancing in America and what Hamas plainly stands for. In previous eras, like you mentioned the [00:36:00] Cold War Where you've seen a versions of this, which is interesting, I hadn't thought of that, that, that analogy.
Actually, can you, can you spend a moment just explaining that? What we saw in the Cold War, Cold War, where the left was making alliances that were self contradictory? You know, I, I, I think that, um, in essence, anyone who was an enemy of the United States was a friend to the radical left for much of the Cold War.
And if you actually think about what, you know, the Maoist movement in China stood for, it didn't really have that much in common with radical campus activists in the 1960s in the United States. But it did have some enemies in common, and it did have a kind of anti capitalist, anti Western worldview in common.
And I think for a long time, this has been behind the alliance between, uh, the global left and various Palestinian movements. These are resistance movements. Look, Hamas is a resistance movement. I mean, Hamas is an acronym for Islamist resistance [00:37:00] movement. And in a sense, it is modeled, uh, on, on the global left in some respects as a resistance movement.
That language is not native to, to Islam. It's native to the western left. And in return, I mean, I think there is a kind of sense on, on, in parts of the left, in radical parts of the left, that sees these sorts of movements anywhere in the world. as inherently allied with and friendly to the cause that they're engaged in so that The interest in, you know, the kind of terrorist chic that you could find in, uh, in parts of left wing culture in San Francisco and New York in the 1970s.
Yeah, the way these teenagers would wear, like, Che Guevara t shirts, right? Exactly. And you say, well, what did Che Guevara think about gay rights? Well, he didn't think what you think about it. Uh, I think it's very much the same kind of, uh, phenomenon. And when you try to present, as I do, to people on the left today, Just how factually wrong they are in their [00:38:00] assumptions.
They're making both About Hamas and about Israel. That's probably always been the case during waves of, I'm sure if we went back to the Spanish Inquisition certainly that was the case in Nazi Germany and anti Semitism in former Soviet Union and the Pogrom eras. Yeah, look, I think anti Semitism has never been a, a reasoned fact based, uh, set of objections to the role of the Jews in the world.
It's always been, A way of attributing to some outside group everything that's wrong with what you think is wrong. And this is also the sense in which we can find simultaneously a kind of right wing and left wing and semitism that are just utterly contradictory with each other. And yet both exist at the same time.
It's because neither of them is all that well connected to the realities of what Jews are, what Israel is. They're both much more about what the people involved oppose than, uh, what Jews are. The trouble is, it doesn't really [00:39:00] matter. If you're a, if, if you're a Jewish person on the street in New York and you're attacked That's the problem, right?
And the inclination that we all have, and as I say, I find myself doing this too, to just say, Well, that's not true. That's the You should look at this or, you know, read that. That's just not very likely to have much of an effect in the situation we're in in this moment. There's a poll conducted a few weeks ago that revealed that one fifth of Americans, I mean, According to the respondents, one fifth of Americans represented in the poll aged 18 to 29 believe the Holocaust was, quote, a myth.
And then, of those sampled that are, were over the age of 65, 0 percent agreed with that statement. So. You know, that's an interesting poll, and I, I, I, it led me in a couple of different directions. I, I think, on the one hand, there's clearly a generational issue here just because the Holocaust. Uh, happened before the lifetimes of most people now living, and uh, even in the [00:40:00] Jewish world, I would say, I, I've, I've had a conversation like this with my children's teachers who say, talking to them about the Holocaust now, to, to Jewish students, you know, it's not that different from talking to them about the exodus.
Um, it, it's just something that happened a long time ago, and they're trying to learn lessons from it, but it doesn't have for them the immediacy that it did even for me, just living in a world with a lot of Holocaust survivors in it. And having a sense that this happened to these people and that in that way, it's just profoundly real.
I think we really don't live in that world anymore, and that's important to see. But the other thing it raised for me is that there's a generational divide in how people respond to polls in general now. And younger people, even a lot of middle aged people in the United States, tend to respond to polling questions as if the question is, Which side are you on?
Are you on the left or the right? Whatever the question is. And sort of searching for, what's the right answer for my side of the [00:41:00] fence? And I'm going to give you that answer. So that when you ask people A question like, do you think the Holocaust really happened, um, which is a strange question to ask in a poll.
I think there is some percentage of younger people who are just looking to sort of say, well, the, the answer that you ought to get from, you know, people who are, uh, on my side of the aisle is no. And I, it's become very, very difficult to really learn about what people in America think, and especially younger people from traditional public opinion surveys.
And I think that's become a problem that you find in a lot of polling. It's part of what's going on here, I suspect. My next question for you, Yuval, is where Joe Biden fits into all of this. Because, to set that up, I mean, do you think that there's a breaking away of the progressive wing? from establishment liberals like Biden that's accelerating and he's, he's got this finger in the, you know, he's, he's holding up the dam for now, but it's just a matter of time that the [00:42:00] democratic establishment is in a race against time.
And it's somewhat analogous per your, the first part of a conversation to what, what has been happening with the far right, the populist right, I guess, and the Republican establishment, the conservative establishment. You know, I think there is some analogy, but not entirely. So a big part of the difference is that the radical, the, the populist left is driving the Democratic Party away from the center of the electorate.
And even from the core of its own electoral coalition, Democratic voters tend to be more like Joe Biden than like, uh, the, the more radical left that in some ways he's resisting now, in some ways he's not. He is the kind of more old fashioned liberal that they actually need in order to win elections. And that suggests that that sort of liberal isn't simply going to go away.
Uh, a more radical left tends to be very unpopular in the United States. The Democrats learned that in the 1970s. [00:43:00] They've been learning it again. On the right, the populist movement on the right has actually tended to drag the Republican Party toward the center of the electorate. There are a lot of things about it I don't like.
Um, most things about it I don't like. But the fact is that they've been a kind of corrective, um, to the tendency of more elite Republicans. to move into a quadrant of political views where there aren't a lot of voters. Um, and so, I think politically it's actually quite different. I think the right is going to be more transformed by populism than the left because the transformation will be beneficial electorally to the right in a way that it won't be for the left.
Populism for the left is pretty harmful electorally. And I think Democrats Uh, can only keep getting burned by that for so long before they, they look for more liberals. This, you know, that book by Henry Olson that, that I [00:44:00] think came out right around actually when Trump was elected called The Working Class Republican.
Uh, the subtitle was Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue Collar Conservatism. Which is, it's a terrific book by the way. And it, it made, made that. I mean, it actually showed that this strand of populist conservatives, or what many of us would think are extreme, were actually bringing the Republican Party more into the center of the mainstream.
Yeah, I mean, Donald Trump personally is not, is not a very popular figure and is not helpful to the party electorally, but a move in a more populist direction, frankly, is helpful to the party electorally. Yeah. I want to ask you about this, because I just It's important. I want to spend a minute on this question of the distinction between legitimate criticism of Israel Mm hmm, and and then where it crosses a line into anti semitism and you wrote about this in this very worthwhile piece in National Review You basically say in this piece that much of the anti [00:45:00] semitism we see today when when pushed back against is defended by saying it's criticism of a foreign government.
That's all it is. We're criticizing the policies, policies of a foreign government, not your fellow Americans who are Jewish. And then you write, and I quote here, Yet their criticism is not a policy argument, but a denial of Israel's right to exist on the basis of its Jewish character. And they themselves plainly behave as though the That message should have implications for Jews in America.
If you were to say that every nation in the world is legitimate, except the one that's full of Armenians, you would obviously be saying something about Armenians in America too. And if you were to direct that argument aggressively toward Armenian Americans going about their lives or were to use that argument to single out Armenians for exclusion or intimidation where they live or work.
Let alone as a reason to kill them where they congregate. We would have to say that you are just holding out their connection to Armenia as a reason to terrorize them. [00:46:00] In this respect, anti Zionism is not about geopolitics. It is about Jews. It is generally easy to distinguish from criticism of the particular actions of any Israeli government.
And all the more so when it is attached to the intimidation of particular Americans on the basis of their Jewish identity. Yeah, I mean, look, I, I I think that this notion that all that's being talked about here is just a sort of geopolitical argument, we're just criticizing the Israeli government, just doesn't hold up.
Because what you find is criticism of a sort that is not made against any other nation with whose policies Americans might disagree. The notion that Israel simply has no right to exist, no right to defend itself, is an idea that you only find applied to Israel. Um, and that suggests that there's something unique, distinct about Israel, and there is.
And what's unique and distinct about it is that it is a Jewish state. Um, so, I, I, [00:47:00] I find it impossible. to accept the notion that all that's being said here is that Israel's policy toward the Palestinians is wrong. Ultimately, the arguments here, and they very quickly fall into this line of argument explicitly, are that Israel should not exist.
That its existence is the problem. Um, and that's simply not something that's said about anybody else in the world. Um, I think it's impossible to avoid the conclusion that that's because this is a statement about Jews and not about foreign policy. It is amazing to me. I mean, even if you get into the colonial, anti colonial debate, think of how many countries were created after the UN was founded that you could apply this colonial argument to.
No one questions their quote unquote right to exist. No one, no one, there's no, there's no debate about, you know, even when people fiercely criticize policies of a particular government, no one questions the right to exist. And look, [00:48:00] it's also the case that these arguments are made in the direction of American Jews.
Um, you know, that, that the banging on the window at Cooper Union against a random group of people. Um, and so it's just impossible to deny. I think that this is a form of Or attacking Jewish owned businesses, uh, for Jews who have not made a statement at all about the current war. Right. You know, it's just, the Judaism is the point.
You, in that same piece, you laid out a prescription for, at a minimum, How laws that deal with hate crimes need to be amended or addressed in order to deal with the uniqueness of Judaism, Jewish life, Jewish communal life, the quote unquote Jewish category, if you will, uh, in, in America. Could you spend a moment on that?
Yeah, I think it's important to see, I mean, in some sense it's, it's important to distinguish this from some of what we've been talking about. I, I do think that there's, That [00:49:00] some of the anti Semitism we're seeing expressed here is a function of deeper problems in our political culture that have to be thought about in their own terms.
The fact that this is ultimately taking the form of, of anti Jewish intimidation also means that there is a role for the law, for legislation and law enforcement, um, in just protecting American Jews, and there are ways to do that better. Then our laws do now. I think those start with a clear definition of anti Semitism, which is not an easy matter And I would I would really direct people to the definition worked out by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance the IHRA which is a very sophisticated and interesting definition of that includes a set of examples that I think are very useful.
And it's intended to be incorporated into law. And so it has now been incorporated into state law, um, in, in a large number of jurisdictions, just in the last few years, um, in a way that I think has been very constructive. [00:50:00] Uh, the state of Virginia has been a leader in this area, but there are now more than 20 states that have adapted, uh, this definition into law.
And that, that definition does allow for Uh, modes of intimidation that present themselves as anti Zionist to be understood as anti Semitic when they are modes of intimidation. I think it really describes that distinction and that, and that difference in a very helpful way. Having that definition be part of, of both state and federal law, and having that matter so that it applies, uh, it's used by law enforcement, and it applies to various definitions of discrimination, and applies to what happens on campus.
Um, would be very helpful, and there are ways that both state and federal lawmakers could help that to happen. Again, I think the model of Virginia is excellent here, although New York State's done pretty well too, and there are a few others. Um, and then I think separately, it's also important to look at the, at the instances when what's [00:51:00] going on on campus and off campus is more than just student activism.
When there are student groups that are actively supported and funded. Um, by, uh, by, by foreign money from the Middle East that is directed to the, the, the purpose of enabling anti Semitism to happen in the United States. And there are student groups like SJP, the Students for Justice in Palestine, um, and also outside of campus, groups like AMP, the American Muslims for Palestine, um, which are groups that ultimately are supported by Qatari money and Gulf money in a variety of ways that violate existing American laws.
Um, or at the very least that, uh, walk awfully close to those lines in ways that ought to be looked at. A number of state attorneys general have started to do this work and to see if there are violations of existing law and what's going on with these groups. Um, and, you know, I, I, I, I think it's important obviously to respect people's free speech rights and to the [00:52:00] extent that what's happening is just speech, that's a distinction that really does have to be, uh, recognized and enforced.
But an awful lot of what's happening is not speech. It already, uh, would count as intimidation under existing law. Some of those laws are not being enforced, and they really ought to be. I mean, some of this has to be thought about as a fundamental threat to the safety of Americans. Um, and that, that does create a responsibility for government action.
Completely different question, but related. You, you are an astute observer of the human condition. Anybody I've spoken to who's watched the 45, approximate 45 minute video that compiles the footage, most of the footage captured by, by the perpetrators of October 7th, because they've They were documenting everything on their GoPro cameras and on their phones.
Mostly journalists I've spoken to who've watched it. They're completely leave aside the, the, the, the virulent, [00:53:00] deranged anti semitism, you know, that is fueling this, this massacre. They're just so blown away that human beings, you know, could do this. That, that, and they even say it seems worse to them than What the Nazis did during the Holocaust, not to say that, obviously, I'm not taking anything away from what the Nazis did in the Holocaust or diluting it, but I know, and certainly you can't compare the scale of, of the industrial scale of, of the genocide or attempted genocide against the Jews during the Nazi era.
But there was something about the Nazi era that allowed at least, obviously, the, the Einsatzgruppen and the, Einsatzgruppen and the, and the, and the, and You know, they were shooting people and burying them in mass graves and, you know, so there's some, some of it was very barbaric, but some of it was also very clinical and this, there was nothing clinical about what happened on October 7th.
And so so many of the people I speak to who've watched the video say, I just. They just couldn't believe that human [00:54:00] beings, no matter how deranged, could be reveling in, in the burning of babies alive in ovens, the mutilation, the rape, torture, and mutilation, the, the, I mean, I don't need to go over all of it again, but you know what I'm talking about.
So, are you shocked by that? Does that surprise you? Are we, are we naive to think that this sort of Hobbesian, complete, downward spiral in, in certain parts of the world is not actually that surprising? Well, I do think it's shocking, and I, I think that it's a kind of dehumanization that actually takes work.
Um, that it's not the natural way that human beings approach, uh, women and children. But it takes work that's been done by Hamas, but also, frankly, by the Palestinian Authority and others who, for two generations now, have been deforming. Their own children's perception of the humanity [00:55:00] of their Jewish neighbors and you know the way in which Palestinian children have been educated to think about Jews in particular not educated in general, but on this particular question I think has been actively and intentionally dehumanizing.
And that does have consequences. This, frankly, I think is part of why there's resistance in Israel to the notion that what should follow Hamas rule of Gaza is the Palestinian Authority. Because, in some ways, the Palestinian Authority is actually a worse offender on this front. Um, in terms of creating so called educational materials that teach their own children to dehumanize Jews and Israelis.
Um, and, you know, I think what we saw on that day was, in part, a consequence of that kind of dehumanization. Uh, these were young men who had grown up in that culture and whose, therefore, whose perception of the people they were dealing with was utterly dehumanized, and that has [00:56:00] consequences. There's no way around it.
Without civilization, there is barbarism, and here it is. Final question for you, Yuval. To the extent we are in a moment where the persecution of Jews is, is a sign of a broader societal threat or breakdown, how would you define that threat? The, like, next level of what you had been? Predicting the trend lines that we were on that evolved threat that new threat.
How would you define it? Yeah, it's a hard question. I mean look I I think to the extent that this is an extension of what we've been seeing I think what it's an extension of is a kind of radical polarization that makes it impossible for us to see the world in its own terms And that lets us see things only in terms of the intense partisan divide that shapes our own politics.
I think that's part of the story here. It's not the whole story. It's part of the American story in particular, because I think anti Semitism in Europe [00:57:00] Uh, is different, and is much more rooted in a kind of Muslim anti Judaism, which is a different story, a related story, but different. Um, in the United States, it's a kind of partisan anti Semitism.
And I do think that in that respect, it has to do with some of the broader deformation of our political culture. And that the response to it, therefore, has to involve a kind of reformation of our political culture and of our capacity, uh, to find ways to act together as citizens, even across lines of disagreement.
That's what a lot of our institutions in American political life are for, but those institutions have been weakened, uh, and undermined for a long time now. And it's worth our while to work toward their regeneration because in their absence, this is what things look like. Um, liberalism, liberal society is not natural.
Um, it's, it's, it's artificial. It takes work and it takes constant tending to. [00:58:00] I think we have, uh, neglected that work now for a generation or so. And that if we continue to do that, things will get worse in this direction. So that to the extent that we don't want that, Part of what we have to do, part of the work that's required now, um, is that we tend to the renewal of our political institutions, those that are intended, uh, to allow us to live with each other despite differences.
Um, those institutions are very good at that if we strengthen them and use them properly, and that's part of what we have to remember to do. Recently I had a bunch of friends over for Shabbat dinner, an Israeli was in town, an Israeli journalist was in town. We had this debate and people were kicking around ideas of what to do.
in this moment and how to react and how to fight back and how to flourish despite the hate directed at Jews. And at one point someone said, and we're, I think at this point we were talking about universities and what's going on on the college campuses. And someone said, yeah, but there are no quick [00:59:00] fixes.
It's, you got to think of it as a 30 year war. And so it's one thing to advocate for changes. at the leadership of certain universities. But these are institutions that have been around for hundreds of years. They are so much bureaucracy and institutional rot, depending on how you look at it. built in there.
Are you in the 30 year war camp? Yes, but I think that there are things that we can do in the near term too when it comes to the universities. You know, I think it's important that we understand that that work as a fight for the universities and not just against them. So that in, in, in a sense, we're working to create models of what academic life ought to be.
Some of those will look like creating institutions Uh, just outside the university that gives some students options, that doesn't have to take 30 years. Things like what Robbie George is doing at Princeton and what many others are doing elsewhere. And some are somewhere in the middle. I'm very encouraged, for example, by the creation of these new schools of, uh, of [01:00:00] civic thought at the University of Florida and at the University of Texas and Ohio and Tennessee and North Carolina.
These are all Republican states where Republican legislators have decided that the, the state universities, uh, should be better than they are and they're looking for ways to do that. I don't think that's going to take 30 years. I think some of that is going to happen more quickly. Uh, obviously a real transformation of the, of the larger campus will take a lot longer.
But just creating spaces, creating pockets, creating opportunities. For students to get the most out of college, but also to be formed in the right way, which is part of what a university ought to be in the business of doing. I think it makes sense to think of that as a long term project, but also that along the way there's a lot of good to be done, and some of it's already being done.
So, I have some hope, um, you know, it's, it's a, it's a silver lining in what is a very dark cloud when you look at American universities at this point. But there is work to do today. It's not just a matter of hoping our grandkids can have, uh, more of a [01:01:00] chance to be educated. All right, Yuval, we will leave it there.
Thank you, as always, for being with us. Thank you. It, uh, it, um, helps us take a step back and kind of think about where we fit into this bigger moment, whether we're the catalyst or the vessel for the moment. Thank you very much, Dan. I really appreciate it. All right. All right. Talk soon. Thanks.
That's our show for today. To keep up with Yuval Levin's work, you can Find it at the American Enterprise Institute at their website, and then also at National Affairs. You can just search the internet for both. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.