Ask Haviv Anything - 123: Batya Ungar-Sargon on why the left turned on the Jews

Episode Date: June 14, 2026

To support our work, please consider joining our Patreon community (https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything), Substack (https://havivgur.substack.com/), or Buy Me a Coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur).And be sure to check us out on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/haviv.rettig.gur/) and TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@haviv.rettig.gur).—In this episode, Batya Ungar-Sargon joins the show to discuss her provocative new book, "The Jews and the Left." We dive deep into the unique history of Jews in America -- a history that looks nothing like the conditional emancipation of European Jewry. Batya argues that American Jews were never an oppressed minority, but rather founding partners in the American project whose rights were viewed as God-given from the start, and why Jews don't know that history. We unpack why the Jewish community historically aligned with the Democratic party, the impact of Foucault and "woke" ideas on elite institutions, the strategic failure of Jewish institutions to understand the problem and push back, and why it is time for American Jews to stop bowing to ideologues who despise them. Batya argues this is a moment for reclaiming history, rejecting victimhood, and standing up with agency.--This week’s episode is sponsored by Cyril Khazan from Woodmere, NY, who asked to dedicate the episode "to my wife Masha, love of my life, who keeps reminding me that the best things in life ain't things. And thanks to her for pointing me at your great podcasts!"Thank you, Cyril.--If you like what we do here, please consider joining our Patreon community at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything or our Substack at https://havivgur.substack.com/. You can also Buy Me a Coffee at https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur. It helps us keep the lights on. Patreon and Substack are also the platforms where you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Haviv Anything. Very excited for today's episode. Batya Angar Sargon is a political commentator, the host of Batya on News Nation, where she is also a weekend anchor. She's a frequent contributor to the New York Post, a colonist for the free press,

and the author of a new book. It's titled The Jews and the Left. There is a tremendous amount of history in there. There is some fascinating polemic. I want to get into it. We're going to talk about it today about the unique history. of Jews in America, about their role in America from its founding days, not even as an American

nation, but even as the colonies. And whether the haven, the Jews have always found in America, whether that haven might be a little bit destabilizing in ways that some Jews are very anxious about because they're seeing patterns around them that are becoming hard to ignore. What is the meaning of it? Where is it coming from? What's it all about? That's what we're going to discuss today. I want to tell you, before we get into all of that, this week's episode is sponsored by Cyril Hazan from Woodmere, New York, who asked to dedicate the episode to my wife, Masha, love of my life, who keeps reminding me that the best things in life ain't things. And thanks to her for pointing me at your great podcasts. Cyril, thank you for your sponsorship. I'd also like to

invite everyone to join our Patreon, subscribe to our substack. If you want to ask the questions that guide the topics we choose to talk about, the book recommendations, the people you recommend we talk to, the topics and the questions you want answered. Join us on Patreon and Substack. That's where you ask those questions, and you get to take part of monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. That's at patreon.com slash ask Javiv Anything or Javivgur.com. Those links are in the show notes. Banya, how are you?

Thank God. I'm good. I'm very, very excited to be here. I feel that this is long overdue, and I want to tell you why. there are maybe four or five journalists out there who I have just a relentless kinat suffraim toward, which is a Talmudic term for the rage one feels when someone is better at what you do than you are. It's considered a very elevated emotion in the Talmud. But you are the person who the most frequently, when I will post something, people will jump

in my comments and be like, have you seen what Javiv Reti Gour has said about this? And then I will go see it and tear my hair out because it's so much better than what I wrote. And I think you use the word profound in the introduction, but you are a profound human on many levels. It's both your intellect, but also

you bring a spiritual profundity to these very difficult times and very difficult topics. Well, damn it. Where am I supposed to go from there? So I really, really appreciate that. I want to get into this book.

Now, I want to say you are very much a political pugilist. So let me start us off with the question where basically I would like you to lay the historical groundwork. Take as long as you want. Tell us that story. You make an argument that European Jewish emancipation, the emancipation that failed. The European Jewelry was wiped out. But European Jewish emancipation was basically a secular left project, a French Revolution. revolutionary emancipatory project against religion, against a resistant religious right.

Whereas America, from the very beginning, from the first Jews to arrive, it's freeing of its Jews. It never needed to free its Jews. It never had ghetto laws. But its ability to give its Jews equality and openness stemmed from conservative religiosity rather than anti-religious secular sort of cultural revolution. Yeah, the book is a history of American Jews. It's about why Jews became Democrats and then why the left turned on them.

But it is also a polemic because in addition to the massive betrayal of the Jewish community by the left, there has been a massive betrayal of the United States by the American Jewish community. Because a big part of why they became Democrats is most American Jews see themselves as an oppressed minority in a country that never ever treated them that way. It was easier to be a Jew than a Catholic or a Mormon for the vast majority of American Jewish history for the simple reason that from the minute the first Jews stepped foot on American soil in 1654, they were treated as founding partners in the creation of this great nation. And this is a history that we have lost as Jews. And we have to reclaim it. We have to reclaim it. Not just because it's true.

but because America is going to rise and fall with our ability to remember that history. To answer your question, Jews were given this kind of conditional emancipation in Europe based on their identity as individuals in the nation state that they existed in. But it was conditional on them abandoning their Jewishness. So they were to be given everything as French citizens and nothing as Jews. Their Jewishness was seen as an impediment to their Jewishness. citizenship because their citizenship was seen as, you know, a gift given to them by the government and their neighbors. That's how rights were perceived in Europe. And when the founding fathers came here and started to think about what is the civilization they're going to build here, they saw it in a very different way.

They saw our rights as being imbued in us by our creator, by God and inalienable. And they saw the source material for that in the Torah. And when they started to meet Jews, They saw us as the living, walking, breathing embodiment of the source material, the protectors of these precious ideas that they wanted to build an entire new world based on. And they just loved them for it. From the minute Jews set foot on American soil, it was like the soil itself rejected Jew hate. So every time they weren't, you know, somebody tried to do something anti-Semitic to them, there was a mass revolt. against it. Every anti-Semitic moment in American history is ensconced in a massive, rabid opposition to it. Leo Frank, the clan in the South, Henry Ford, these icons of American anti-Semitism, each one of them utterly defeated by the community in which they occurred

and took place. And there is historical evidence of this that we have just simply lost or erased. When the clan came for the Jews, the South turned on the clan. Leo Frank's judge got a hundred thousand letters from across the nation begging for clemency. And Henry Ford had to stop writing his anti-Semitic newspaper when he wanted to run for president, because even then, you could not go full anti-Semite in America and maintain a public appeal. And this has been true from 1654. And it goes beyond just the Torah and the source material for the civilization. All of the stereotypes that had dogs, Jews in Europe, that they were good with money, that they were upwardly mobile, that they were capitalists, that they didn't believe in rank and hierarchy

and were always kind of messing with those class categories. Every single one of these things was considered a massive boon in the United States. So you would have the founding fathers writing to each other and being like, I can't believe these people. You give them a penny. You come back tomorrow and there's two pennies. Where do we get more of them? You know, like they would write about how, you know,

the Jews would lend them money and never ask for anything in return. And so they were loath. There's a letter from Henry Madison. He was loathe to ask Chaim Solomon for money because Chaim Solomon would always refuse any recompense. Chaim Solomon was the financier of the revolution. And he died penniless because he was never paid back.

There were towns in the South that when the Jews would move to another town, they would freak out because the economy was suddenly in free fall and they would write editorials in the newspaper. Please come back. Jews. We're starting to look like Ireland. It's just amazing the richness of the love of the Jews in the United States. We did become Democrats in the 20th century. I'm sure we'll get into why. But the Jews really built the left. So there is this insane massive betrayal. that the left decided now in the 21st century to make Zionism the only litmus test and Jews, the only people have to denounce other Jews in order to belong. But like I said, to me, there's an even deeper betrayal, and it was the loss of this early history.

And that's really what I hope the Jewish community takes away from this book. American conservative religious movements, especially evangelicals, follow a very long arc, a very long tradition. in that sense. In being pro-Jewish, pro-Israel, in ways that European Christian conservatism never was. You get into the book a little bit about the reasons.

What are the reasons? Is it theology? And then I would like to then update that to today because there are now right-wing major podcasters and figures who are starting to talk about Jews in ways that you would expect to hear in Europe. Yeah, American Christians are the first Christians in human history to organize their religion around the protection of Jews rather than the persecution of Jews.

You're asking me why. I mean, I would say because Hashem wanted it to be that way. You know, this is the promised land. And so, you know, we have a covenant. And to me, it's a very religious and spiritual answer. But I know that that won't be satisfying to history buffs. Probably some of the answer has to do with the fact that they were Puritans, and the Puritans believed that you had to get really close to the Word of God,

and they learned Hebrew. And they were persecuted in Europe for being, you know, Jew adjacent when they came here. The persecution, religious persecution that so many of the early colonists faced at home made them feel that religious liberty was central to being religious. And if you truly believe, as they did, that our rights are imbued in us by God, and one of those rights is to worship him in the way that you see fit, you're going to be very protective of other religions because they're the proof of concept that you really believe it. If you really believe that God gave them the right to worship him, not you, not your tolerance of them,

you have to protect that because that's a mandate from your creation. to protect the rights he gave them. And they just really believed this, Haviv. They really believed it. And Protestants and evangelicals continue to really believe it. They feel so close to Jews. And it is so horrifying that so many Jews talk about them in the way that it is very normal for liberals to talk about MAGA, conservatives, working class, Republicans with a kind of disdain or to cast their attachment to us as Jews as some sort of

apocalyptic anti-Semitism, which is very common to hear among left-wing Jewish circles. Why not? I've heard that a great deal. I have met some evangelical pastors. We've become friends. Their intellectual world is big and it's complicated and they don't understand it well enough to make these judgment calls. But I have heard from Jews, not often, but on occasion, oh, well, evangelicals love Israel, but what they really love about Israel is that end of day's eschatology. It's about us accepting Christ ultimately at the end. It's not really about us. There's a distrust of that love of Israel. I don't know if it's all Jews. I don't know if it's most Jews, but it's some Jews. What are they getting wrong? Is that common among Israelis? It's not.

right? They don't worry about the eschatology. They just say thank you for the support. No? Israelis have no idea what's going on. They have no understanding. They truly don't. You know, Biden was leading Trump in polls of Israelis while Biden felt like he was very close to us. And Biden felt to ordinary Israel, to the cow drivers. Yeah. Yeah. Like he was limiting us and turned on us. Trump suddenly soared in the polls in Israel. You know, now it looked like the Democrats were anti-Israel, so Israelis were more Republican, but now there's some noises among the Republicans of this. Israelis amongst themselves speak Hebrew, they're not following Fox News and Tucker Carlson and Mamdani and Potsay of America and I don't know, all the different names, right, on all the different

sides. So Israelis have no idea what evangelicals want with them. It's very strange to Israelis that anyone but a Jew would love Israel. Israelis are all the grandchildren of refugees from a world that didn't love Jews, so they don't really understand America. Right. So you're going to have to enlighten the Israelis as well. I don't know. I just find it to be ridiculous. I'm a religious Jew. We have some pretty uncomfortable stuff in our, you know, predictions about what's to come. And so I just don't think any of that matters. Like, it's so esoteric and divorced from politics. And when it comes to politics, they have our backs and they love us so deeply. And the other side hates us. And in order

a curry favor with sociopaths who hate us. Jews get on their knees and denounce their fellow Jews and denounce the political side that is willing to pay a political cost to have our backs. What do I mean by that? You brought up Tucker Carlson, podcasters on the right who are religious and Catholic, who are coming out against the Jews and against Israel now. If you're on Twitter and that's where you get your news, or if you live outside the United States, it looks like the right has been infected by anti-Semitism. It looks like these people are taking over the right because they get so much traction. They get millions of views. They are tanking in the polls in the American public opinion. Donald Trump has kicked them out of the party. On my show on News Nation, I have had Republican

senators, congresspeople, members of the cabinet. journalists, influencers, to a person say, these people have no place in our party anymore. So much so I've been saying for a year now, Tucker Carlson will not be at the next RNC. The day he had on Daryl Cooper, the first Holocaust denier that he had on, this podcaster who says that Hitler was not the real villain of World War II, you know, Tucker's favorite historian, I said it's over for him. And the kakhaya, this is exactly what has happened. they have been utterly, utterly marginalized.

And this is an insane thing to have happened. Insane. Like, I would not have predicted it. When I submitted my book as a manuscript to my editor, this was just starting to take off on the right. And I said to him, I'm going to be a national laughing stock. Because I wrote a book about anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment, anti-Zionism on the left, how the left turn on the Jews.

And the most famous anti-Semite in America right now is on the right. And lo and behold, since then, they have been just basically completely kicked out of the right. A line has been drawn in the sand and at potential political cost, right? But the young people in the polls, they're on the left, they're radicalizing more. On the left, there's more anti-Semitism in the polls among young Americans. But it's rising on the right among young people. And, you know, after Charlie Kirk died. Where's the evidence that it's rising on the right?

JD Vance, as Vice President decides to do a podcast episode or I'm sorry, one of the TPP USA sessions where he answers questions or, you know, a conversation with Tucker. Is, I see a real fear. J.D. Vance goes on TV and says, go to Theo Vaughn is a great podcast that young people should listen to. Now, I am exactly the person you just said. I get my news from the homepages of news sites and Twitter. and I'm far away. And when I come in to give a talk in America, mostly, not always, but often usually Jewish audiences,

those are audiences will come to hear me talk. So there are certain self-selecting groups. I absolutely am open to the possibility that I'm only seeing a very narrow kind of field of vision. But there are these signals that is J.D. Van, I don't suspect J.D. Vance of personally being an anti-Semite. Is he not willing to ride politically the anti-Semitic? group to get that corner of the Republican Party on his side in a primary race against Marco Rubio, for

example? Definitely the jury is out on J.D. Vance, but he is the lone exception. Now, of course, he's the vice president of the United States. So you might say it's a pretty big exception, right? The extent to which he cannot distance himself from these people is the extent to which he will not be competitive in 2028. This is 100% obvious to me. Now, your audiences are probably liberal Jews. They also get their news about conservatives from MSNs and. NBC and CNN who insist on calling Tucker Carlson and Megan Kelly, you know, MAGA voices every single day when Trump has very clearly excised them from the party. And the only thing I hear about Megan Kelly and Tucker Carlson these days from average conservatives and Republicans is what happened

to them. I don't listen to them anymore. And in fact, Megan herself said that Tucker's whole new audience is Muslims, which makes a lot of sense, right? There's what, two billion Muslims worldwide who are desperate for highly produced anti-Israel content, they're driving up the numbers. It's just not here. At Charlie Kirk's last Student Action Summit, he did a focus group on Israel with young people. It's fascinating.

Everyone should watch it. 75% of the 5,000 young people there are still totally pro-Israel. I would wager even more of them are Zionists in that they obviously want Israel to continue existing. Even the ones who are not sympathetic to Israel wanted it to win against Hamas. And obviously, nearly all of them would rather that the Christian holy sites be under the auspices of Jews than Muslims. Like, this is obvious.

So Israel's not like very sympathetic right now. That's true. It's objectively, you know, not sympathetic, I would say. That doesn't mean people are anti-Zionists. It doesn't mean that they don't want Israel to exist as a Jewish state. That is only on the left. Yeah, there are young people who are sort of constantly online, obsessed with the USS Liberty, you know, as somebody. very funnily posted, the only instance of friendly fire in human history, right?

Like, obviously this exists. But what I would say to you, Javiv, is they're probably leftists. Like, young people overwhelmingly are on the left. Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly, are now basically caucusing with the left. Thomas Massey, who made his entire agenda about being anti-Israel, is now, in my view, a leftist. That is who is going to welcome. him and talk to him and wants to make common cause with him, a young person at a university who's asking a question that's anti-Israel is probably a leftist. They're just getting coded as being on the right because it's a university in Oklahoma or because they have a southern accent. So to me, it's just like none of the evidence is really backing this up. I know a lot of young

orthodox men who listen to Nick Fuentes because they think he's funny. Like, they don't agree with him about the Jews. There's no real political movement on the right that is embracing this stuff at all. Like, it's so marginal. Whereas on the left, you've got people like Mamdani and Hassan Piker and Abdul al-Sayed, who don't believe Israel has a right to exist, all the way to Pikr's actual admiration for Hamas, who have been elevated as celebrities. And this is just a massive distinction that the majority of Jews are either in denial about or just totally ignorant about. Colman Hughes has said that there is this anti-Semitism on parts of the right, but it's not programmatic.

It's a kind of rhetorical sort of social media-driven chatterbox kind of a thing, Nick Fuentes, for example, but there's nothing they want to actually do. They're not rounding up Jews. They're not going to somehow, you know, expel the Jews from. America or anything like that. And so it's just this kind of bubble of rhetoric because they're rebelling against everything and they want to prove that can rebel. And so you see it in those terms. On the left, do you think there is a programmatic meaning to it all? Let's, you know what? Let's dive into it. Let's get into the left. You can I just give you anything? I want to just

say something about what Coleman said. It's so true. I saw a video of the day. It was going viral on Twitter the way a lot of like videos of black people behaving badly go viral on Elon Musk's Twitter. If you go into your like for you tab, everybody talks about it's just there's people promoting this stuff. The video was of a black woman on a plane. It was in the back and the plane and landed and she was sort of trying to get to the front before everybody else. So she was sort of saying, excuse me to the guy in front of her to try to like, you know, and the guy behind her was filming her. Like, obviously, that's kind of a dushy thing to do what she was trying to do. He was so enraged and the commentary on the video was like, why do you think you're better than

everybody? Why do you think you can get away with it? Why did, and you could see that within him was bubbling up this feeling of like, she's part of an untouchable class that I'm not allowed to criticize and I'm done with it. And I am going to say the thing everybody's thinking that we've been silenced from saying. Okay, that's the video, okay? Like, definitely there's people who, thanks to the ADL, feel that way about Jews. That there's been this sort of like, that Jews are part of the kind of, because the ADL's response to October 7th, they had the absolute worst possible response. So when the left turned on the Jews and said, you know, sorry, we're siding with Hamas because they are the oppressed here and you're the oppressors.

the ADL's response was to say, you put us on the wrong side of the oppressed or oppressed category. You miscategorized us. Don't you know we're also oppressed? Which is like just in my view the absolute worst possible thing they could have done. But because of that, because so much of the Jewish institutional life in the name of like fighting anti-Semitism insisted on this, you know, the Jews as oppressed narrative and that's why you should support Israel against Hamas, that feeling that that man making that video on. that plane had towards that woman, there is that feeling among some people. And it does bleed out into, well, you're not allowed to say anything about Israel, the one nation you're not allowed to criticize on planet Earth, right? I'm not saying that doesn't exist, right? But it is so marginal. Just like the man making that video does not have a political movement in America, both the right

and the left want to be seen as deeply supportive of the black community. Can you tell us a little bit of more detail that story of the ADL, not just specific to the ADL, but what do you exactly mean? You have the oppressor, oppressed category of the left that determines everything, as Sam Harris puts it, you have a violent attack on a subway, and a lot of people in America, especially coded to the left of center, will wait until they find out the race of the people involved before deciding what they feel about it. there is a profound sense that this sense of categories of race and categories of oppression has overtaken simple human judgment and simple just treating people like themselves and not like representatives of much larger categories. The Jews, certain kinds of Jewish left wing politics are about coding the Jews as oppressed and that's never going to work because they were never oppressed in America. is the argument. Right. Yeah. We were gifted white privilege here.

And it's funny because if you say Jews are white, like, you'll have a fight on your hands, right? Like, one of the reactions I've gotten from a lot of people who agree with me about a lot of things, they'll text me and say, but why do you refer to Jews as if they're white? And it's because, well, they were treated that way from the day they got here. They were never treated as other. They were treated as having another faith. But they do have this history of a practice. Right.

Right. Everywhere outside of America. Yes. Everywhere outside of America. Everywhere. Everywhere. Everywhere. I'm going to get an email from an angry Canadian or Australian, but basically everywhere outside of America.

Yeah. Yeah. Why does that not count for the Jews as, as oppression? Many, by the way, of the Jews, you know, there were Jews here in the case before. I'm speaking only about American Jews. But most of American Jews, but most of American Jews are refugees from Europe. most of the great-great-grandchildren, but still, most of American Jews in their family long, just demographically, there were thousands up to tens of thousands at most.

The millions are from the 1820s fleeing Central Europe and then fleeing Eastern Europe. Those Jews did experience European oppression, you know, eight generations ago, four generations ago, if they're older, and come from certain parts of Europe. You don't think Jews have that in their cultural. DNA in their sense of self and their sense of the world? I think it's a betrayal of American history for American Jews to claim that history rather than the history that we got here for the simple fact that as soon as those refugees stepped foot on American soil, they knew that they were home and they knew it was over.

And in fact, there's a wonderful story in the book of, you know, where the Jewish labor movement came from. We built the labor movement. There's a five-day work week because of Jews. and but it took a while right like they came here by the millions in the you know at the turn of the century they're fleeing pogroms fleeing the may laws and when they first got here it was very very difficult they were you know exploited horrifically the working conditions and the needle trains and the lower east side were horrendous mostly exploited by other Jews who had gotten here you know five 10 years before them and then they would go on five or 10 years later they would amassed some capital and open their own sweatshop and so but at some point they managed to get enough sort of self-esteem together to start organizing and creating labor movements and fighting back. The first moment that that self-esteem appeared, it's an amazing story. I'd never heard it before. So there's never been a chief rabbi in America. They tried it once and it went really poorly. A lot of American Jews were Jews when they got here. As you know, Orthodox Judaism is a heavy lift. and they would get here and get really intoxicated by the freedom.

And so one of the first things most American Jews did was kind of slough off the burden of the law. And they brought over this very charismatic Lithuanian rabbi, Rabbi Iacob Yosef, what I think his name was. And it was like an utter failure. He was like a huge celebrity in Europe. And he got here and just basically died penniless. Like they didn't want to hear it. His one big endeavor was people would. would pass off trafe meat as if it was kosher.

And he was like, tried really hard to put a stop to it. And they didn't want to hear it. Nobody wanted to hear it. So anyway, when he died, people felt, I think, really guilty. And so they all turned out for his funeral and for a funeral procession through the streets of the Lower East Side, like by the tens of thousands. And they're marching through the streets of the Lower East Side,

you know, all these from Jews and their hats and their Shaitals. And they passed by a publishing house. a big factory. And the guys in the publishing house on the first and second and third floor start jeering at them and throwing things at them. And the Jews just went crazy. They destroyed so every single window in the first two floors. And then they stampeded the factory and started beating up the people who worked there. And you heard people screaming in like a very thick accent. What is this? Russia? And when the cops came, they arrested some of the Jews. And when they went to court, they were so angry and said, are you kidding? Like, we were the victims here.

We were the ones who were aggrieved. We were the aggrieved parties. And the chief of police had to issue a public apology to the Jewish community over how they treated it, that they did not understand that the Jews were the grieved party here. This was in 1912. This was the birth of the Jewish labor movement because it was the first moment they realized that they weren't refugees from Europe. They were American Jews and they would not be treated this way here. And that consciousness, that that is how quickly that consciousness took over from these refugees who you correctly say we're fleeing anti-Semitism, but by the time they got here, they knew that it was different. And why are we claiming the history that was left behind rather than the beautiful

history that was granted to us here? That kind of, what is this? Russia? And in my view, it's because on the left, that more oppressed narrative is how you get currency. I don't think this is conscious, but I'll give you another example. Most American Jews think that the reason that Jews were so wildly overrepresented in the civil rights movement was because, you know, this intersectional narrative, well, white supremacy comes for us all, right?

The same people who hate blacks hate the Jews, so we should stand by them as an act of self-preservation. No one at the time thought that. The Jews at the time thought, why were we granted equal status and you weren't? We're going to fight for you because

that's our job as Jews. And it was just, if you think about it, The Edmund Pettus Bridge, when Dr. King marched with Rabbi Heschel crossed that bridge holding safer Torah. This was just 20 years after the liberation of Auschwitz. Like to Jews, they were like, this could have been us and it wasn't. But yet today in 2026, the Jewish narrative is, well, we were oppressed here too. And we were not. And it is a betrayal to suggest that we were. I remember reading a letter written by the head of the New York State Immigration Authority in 1910 after probably a million and a half Jews had come and before another million were to land over the next decade in New York Harbor.

People very, very concerned about how there was just too many coming in and they were very, very poor people, desperate fleeing with nothing but the shirts on their backs. And William Williams was the guy's name. And he wrote this letter in 1810 saying it's time to start looking out for our own. We have to start sealing these borders. And I remember reading similar things written by the immigration authorities of South Africa and Argentina and other places not wanting Jews. The difference is about an order of magnitude. For America taking in these Jews, they were willing to take in millions before that anti-immigrant sentiment kicked in. The anti-immigrant sentiment kicked in eventually, in 1921 America.

closes doors, but it kicked in two roughly, two and a half million Jews after every other country on Earth. But, Khabit, the anti-immigrant sentiment was about labor. And it was Samuel Gompers, who was the guy who founded

the AFL, right? The father of the labor movement. He was Jewish. And he was the top voice opposing immigration. Because he said, look, it's a labor issue. In fact, Jews who came in 1910, made a lot more money than Jews who came in 1920, right?

They were, their own wages were being reduced by the next generation and the next generation and the next generation of immigrants. So it was about wages and labor. I mean, even in when they opposed taking Jewish refugees in the beginning of the war, I mean, there's a whole chapter about this. It got more complicated. There was a lot of anti-Semitism from the State Department. But at one point, one of the opponents said in Congress,

I oppose this in the name of the 11 million unemployed. And that was how Jewish leftists and the labor unions talked about immigration for a very long time. It had very little to do with, had nothing to do with the fact that they were Jewish. They were passing laws at the time against Chinese immigration and Japanese immigration as well. Maybe the Jews come to America, they experienced this radical new place, this integration that had never existed in any time in Jewish history. No one even knows what to call it. No one knows how to think about it. Herzl was asked about the Americans and the English and the Americans.

The closest he can come is to say, yeah, sure, we don't see what, you know, the catastrophe, the looming nationalism, the hatred. We don't see it now, but eventually it'll happen. Why will it happen? They simply don't have enough Jews yet. Wait until they have millions of Jews and then they're going to turn on them. That was the expectation because he couldn't imagine anything else. He didn't really have any serious grasp of cultural differences in America and in the English-speaking world generally. But it never came.

Is it possible when you look at Jews who are much more anxious about their position? I have met a lot of frightened Jews in the last three years in the United States. And the Jews I've met in the United States are more frightened than the Jews in Israel who face kinetic war and have members of their family in the battlefields. And my sense of that has been, and you're describing my own views. And so you're describing them as completely mistaken. So I want to just dig into this. My sense of that has been that

Israeli Jews have agency. Yes, they have problems, challenges, enemies. Iran is out to get them for 30 years, but they have so many tools that they've built out to handle these situations, these problems. And they have each other and having a sense of deep solidarity

and tools to deal with a challenge is enough, is enough to be a happy person in life. You don't actually need to not have obstacles and challenges. American Jews don't have that many tools. They're deeply dependent on society around them accepting them. America has been the absolute exception, which is an extraordinary thing and a great compliment to America. The greatest compliment imaginable to any nation in the history of the world is the Jewish experience of America. And yet, the fact that it's an exception both makes it very special and very cool and very beautiful

and also fragile. We're going through history for the first time. Nobody has any idea what's about to happen. How do we know America's not going to turn on the Jews? American Jews don't have inherent innate power of their own. They have powers citizens of the American Republic. That's the only power they have. If America mobilizes and around them as a political act, right, right now we're seeing on the left that you've said this, everyone, I have said this, everyone with eyes in their head has said this. The litmus test for legitimacy on the progressive left today is more about Zionism than about working class people and their needs. It's more about Zionism than health care, it's more about Zionism than almost any other. The moral superstructure is the

question of Zionism and matters that Mamdani thinks, talks about how the IDF lace the boots of the NYPD when the NYPD goes up to abuse, you know, American minorities in New York City. That matters because the NYP did not learn to abuse minorities from the Israelis, from Israel, from the Jewish state. That is not where that happened. And then to look at Tucker Carlson talking about how the Jews are the engine behind pornography that is destroying America's young men and by extension America's young women.

The Jews, you actually go through the history of the founding of the American porn industry, you have to get to number 14 to reach the first Jew involved in a serious way in founding it. So he says, yeah, but one is owned by a hedge fund that is run by a...

Really? So the Jews invented pornography. I mean, that's the... And of course, they did it on purpose and it's all run through Israeli intelligence. It's so stupid. It's so stupid. I'm stupid.

You know, I saw it on a podcast of his on YouTube with 600,000 views. Yes, but, but Haviv, who are those 600,000? I'm telling you, he has no constituency in America. Those 600,000 of those views are nervous Jews, or are they, are they not his followers? Why shouldn't they be Muslims? Like, why should they be Americans? Where's the evidence? They're Americans.

He's underwater with Republican voters. They did, they literally did a poll a few weeks ago. They said, how do you feel about Trump? How do you feel about Tucker Carlson? Trump plus 74 in approval. Tucker Carlson, among Republicans. Minus seven. He has no constituency. He does not exist. He does not matter. Muslims love him. Who freaking cares? The answer to your question lies in a word you used. You said the amazing tolerance of the American people. How do we know that won't run out? Because our freedom here as American Jews, our equality as American Jews, literally, George Washington said, it is not because of the tolerance of your neighbors. It is because of the liberty imbued and you by your creator. America turning on the Jews would be the same as America turning on the First

Amendment. It's literally in our bones, in our blood, in the soil. It is what makes us America. That is the whole thing. And it's so crazy that people think that there's like, we are so othered in this nation that refused to do that. And I totally agree with you with the left. The reason Jews feel so embattled is because they have made their home. in the only milieu that has turned on us, which is the elites on the left, right? The Jews cannot stand that they lost Harvard. Why was it okay for Harvard to turn on white Americans? Why was it okay for Harvard to turn on Republicans and treat them like they were dirt?

Why was it okay for Harvard to turn on the working class and on MAGA and on people who voted for Trump because they thought he would give their kids a better future? Wait, slow down. Back up. You have written on this extensively. Tell us what you mean. Because a lot of people will be hearing this and saying Harvard turned on the working class, Harvard turned on the white America. What do you actually arguing? The treatment that Jews are getting now in the elite spaces that they have made their homes is the exact treatment that those same institutions have been giving to conservatives, to Republicans for decades. For decades, they've been shouting them down and marching against them and talking about them.

We have polls of academia. I want to lay this out convincingly to that Jew, that Harvard professor who looks around and says, whoa, this isn't the Harvard I joined 25 years ago. But to give a sense of what, there are polls of academics and Ivy League schools, which tell us that only 2% will call themselves conservative. They have been wiped out.

There is a, in the humanities, in the social sciences, and monoculture, a complete monoculture of left-wing elites. This is measurable. And if somebody doesn't believe it, go and do the poll, and you will find the same finding that every other poll is found. Is that what you're talking about? That either conservatives can't move, can't get promoted. Not even just that they can't get jobs.

It's that they get shouted down and attacked physically when they try to talk on college campuses. Their views are treated as hate speech. They get fired for, like, everything that has happened to Jews in the last two and a half, three years. since October 7th has been happening to conservatives for decades before that. Try to be a person who supports Donald Trump on a college campus. You think a person on a left wing, on walking through Columbia University wearing a red MAGA hat

would be treated any better than a person carrying an Israeli flag? They wouldn't. They have put us in the bucket of white Americans, the oppressor, Republicans, conservatives. and I just find it staggering that the lesson from that is not actually it wasn't okay to treat them that way either and it's instead don't you know we're supposed to be getting the same treatment as blacks and trans like I think that that is wild to me but so much of your argument I think stems from that like saying that American Jews don't have agency we have agency as every other American in fact we probably have a little more because we are so precious to

our neighbors. But we have the same agency of every other citizen here, which is to organize politically as we do, you know, like as Zionists are doing and fighting back. And in fact, in 2028, the Democrat is going to be a moderate because people understand that this is just totally toxic. It makes no sense for a country where only 4% of people vote on foreign policy. And of those 4% most of them are Republicans, to create an entire agenda around being opposed to a nation state that the majority of Americans still see as our greatest ally. Like, it just makes no sense. And they're going to get over it.

When and how did this happen? In the book you talk about in 1967 as a key pivot, walk us through that story of, well, two stories, the Jews joining the left in that way. You talk about them at the sort of core founding of the American labor movement. and that obviously precedes the 1960s, and then the pivot in the 60s, that's very profound. Walk us through that history. Something happened to the Jews, the left, the joining of the left,

a sense of betrayal by the left. Let's go there. All right. So we talked about the labor movement. We talked about how, you know, the Jewish proletariat turned out to be a very short-lived affair. Jews would very quickly amass a little bit of capital and become themselves, become capitalists. So they were very drawn.

to FDR because the New Deal, which, by the way, was mostly written by Jews, it had both a respect for labor and a respect for capitalism, which very much reflected how Jews saw themselves. All right, you fast forward to the civil rights movement. We talked about that. White Jews were so attracted to that and felt that very deep in their Kishkas. And there's a lot in the book about the way that Southern rabbis handle the civil rights movement that I had never seen talked about before.

It was a very different approach. but it was equally, if not more noble. Just beautiful stories from rabbis at the time. Wait, such as. Well, the majority of the Jews were against segregation, but they understood their neighbors very well. And they felt that integration was a foregone conclusion and had already started to happen,

especially after Brown v. Board of Education. They did feel that the activists who would come down and March were creating a resistance in their neighbors that was making integration harder. And there's this great interview with a reform rabbi. He said he hated when these rabbis would come from the north and come down in March. He said when they would talk to him, he could already see them writing the op-eds in their head about how like, I went down and I saved the South and I marched for the civil rights. A lot of the activists were Jews.

These rabbis would talk about how they would go to visit with the activists who had been arrested during the freedom rides and they would be shocked to find jails full of Jews. A lot of them young Jews sort of fleeing the, you know, banal suburban utopia that their parents had created for them and trying to be a part of this vanguard that meant so much to them. All right, Dr. King gets assassinated. And with him sort of dies this view of integration. Of course, he believes that we should be judged based on the content of our character, not the color of our skin.

he thought a colorblind society was, you know, achievable. He felt that America was going to make good on its promise to its black citizens. This was rejected by the next iteration of the movement, the Black Power Movement. They didn't see themselves as, you know, neighbors and, you know, members of the same nation as white Americans. They found common cause in this international post-colonial movement at the time. They felt that they were like the African, nations trying to slough off white colonists. And that's how they started to see their white neighbors in America. And they believed in separatism. They didn't believe in integration.

And one of the ways that you showed that you were part of like the cool, edgy vanguard, rather than, you know, Dr. King's lame view that we were all going to become part of this utopia was an anti-white lexicon started to develop. And you would sort of say anti-white things to show that you were with like the cool kids. And of course, because the only white people they knew were Jews, that language quickly became anti-Semitic. So you had that on the activist front. And then meanwhile, on the university front, you had the introduction of postmodernism, post-structuralism, the French philosophers. Foucault spread like wildfire in the American university. And of course, his central thesis being that there's, you know, no right versus wrong. There's no fact versus

fiction. There's only power, right? Power is. the thing that exists between two people. You're either the powerful or the powerless, the oppressor, or the oppressed. And of course, in the American context, because we are obsessed with race, this immediately got racialized. So you're either like darker-skinned and powerless and oppressed or white-skinned and powerful and the oppressor. And crucial to this worldview, which met the activists, right, the combination of this intellectual rubric. And then the activist mindset was that white people were inherently evil. They had no access to virtue.

Virtue was of the oppressed. Abjection itself is virtue. And people with darker skin and less power have no moral responsibilities. And of course, you could see how this is how you end up siding with Hamas. They owe the world nothing, including they don't owe anybody not to rape them because Israel has more power. and the only way white people in this mindset can get powers by proxy. And because oppression became the currency, you have this oppression envy among the elites.

By the way, Jewish elites as well. Like everyone in America who's an elite, especially a white elite, white progressive, they have this. And the only way to achieve virtue, you cannot just act virtuously. So how do you satisfy that moral urge, the human need for moral authority,

you side with the oppressed who owe society nothing, right? This is the woke mindset. Now, it's my view, because I'm a little bit of a materialist, that this would have stayed in the hallowed hallways of the university, but for the economy that was being developed in America, starting with Reagan and then through Clinton and Obama, which basically said that in order to achieve the American dream, you have to have a college degree.

We shipped millions and millions of good working class jobs overseas to build up China and Mexico's middle class. There was mass migration, specifically of working class people, of people from, you know, third world countries, developing countries to compete with working class jobs here. And so you had this sort of upward funnel of wealth from the working class into the pockets of the very people who had had the most exposure to Foucault. And that's how you end up with this kind of very dissolute but very obvious elite in America, college educated elite 20%, top 20%, who control over 60% of the GDP. And the more exposure you have had to the woke mind virus in university, the wealthier you will be, the more access you will have, the more influence you will have. Certainly over symbolic areas like the humanity,

but also the entire journalism, this was my first book, like journalists today are woke, not because they're leftists, but because they're college educated. There's been a status revolution among journalists. Journalism used to be a working class trade, and now most journalists in America have two degrees. So they've been exposed to Foucault for twice as long, right?

And that's how you end up in this situation where the left has turned on the Jews, because of course this ideology is on a collision course with Jews. It hates success. It hates power. It hates strength. And that is what Jews are. We are powerful. Not just in Israel, thank God, but here as well.

And this is, again, something that American Jews would rather not deal with. And so they instead pretend or insist or truly believe that we are an oppressed minority. And that's what they keep saying to the left. Keep us, keep us. We're oppressed. But we're not. So there is this irony of obsession of the oppressed as a way to secure elite position. And the Jews, this is in your sense of things. I want this explained.

Why do they kowtow before it? Why do they fall so miserably before it? I've watched some of the conversations around Peter Beinart. He came to Tel Aviv to give a talk. The talk he gave in Tel Aviv was, you Israelis are terrible and awful and doing everything bad. And then he has to apologize publicly before the Twitter storm of anti-Israel people saying,

how dare you go? What is that tormented soul that lives in the game? gaze of these people who want millions of Jews dead and yet cannot. Now, he's an extreme case, I think, but a lot of liberal Jews in these spaces are tormented or quiet. One of the amazing things for me has been there's this war on Jewish history. There's this war on what the actual lived history of the Jews who made Israel actually, what that history actually was without sugarcoating any of it.

All of it's missing. You cannot, the Middle East Department in American University today, literally cannot learn where the Jews came from and what happened to them. in the Middle East, how they got to the Middle East. You'd think that would be a middle. And because no one can even expect Middle East departments to deal with this rationally or objectively or historically, analytically, self-critically, you don't believe in objectivity.

Fine, self-critically. You can't even expect it. Universities went and founded Israel Studies programs outside of Middle East departments. And now those Israel Studies programs are having a hard time actually teaching and telling the story because there's the pipeline of academics coming in only things. one thought and only tells one version

of a complicated history that erases huge amounts of history. So what the hell happened to these Jews? Why do they not know their story? Why are they unwilling to stand up? Why do they bow before these elite ideologies? Haviv,

wokeness is a mind virus. It is a mind virus. I was woke. And so I remember what it felt like to have... It's completely irrational? To have the grammar of my brain be constructed out of a binary that had thrown right versus wrong, true versus false out,

and implemented it instead with oppressor versus oppressed, white versus person of color, powerful versus powerless. It is a mind virus. It is the building blocks of the way that they think, and this is totally correlated with having university degree, which 60% of American Jews have. So they've spent a lot of time being taught that this is the way you are moral. And they want to be moral because they are human beings and that is something God put in us, that desire. And to them being moral is getting on their knees and, excuse my language, philating the people and the ideology that wants them to have less power, right?

That is what wokeness says has to be. That is the woke mandate to the powerful. You must have less power, right? You must cede that to the oppressed. That is the logic that is taught in humanities departments across the nation. And they are stuck in it. They are stuck in it. It is horrifying to watch.

I mean, that Bynard scene, there were a lot of people on the right, a lot of Jews kind of like mocking it, but it sent like a real chill down my spine because it felt like a scene from the 19th century, from Europe, you know? Like the self-abnegation, this is horrifying for an American to get on their knees like that. In fact, after the Jewish Revolution, one of the things that Jews stopped doing in their synagogues was, they stopped standing for the prayer for the government because it seemed to them an insult to the sovereignty that they had been granted as citizens. I'm sorry, back up. I know the prayer you're talking about. I don't know that all of our listeners will. Tell us that story specifically.

They were so proud of the freedom. There is in the prayer book. There isn't the prayer book. There isn't the traditional prayer book. A prayer for the well-being of the government. Yes. Which you also say about the Tsar of Russia. Right.

And the Jews used to stand while praying it. And after the American Revolution, they sat for that prayer as a sign of the strength and the power and the sovereignty of the American citizen vis-a-vis his limited government. They're no longer beggars. They're owners of their government. They are shareholders, stakeholders, citizens. Yeah. It's theirs. You describe American Jews erasing that history, the 1654 to the 1880s, basically, history, and recasting themselves as an immigrant community. Most of them, demographically, were those immigrants. But nevertheless, there was a Jewish politics.

Can I, you keep saying they were those immigrants, but they weren't. And the reason they weren't is because of the Holocaust. One of the reasons American Jews as a group are so well off, right, are so successful is because other immigrant groups, they had a continuous supply of immigrants, right? Up until today, but, you know, even like the Irish, right, the Italians, they kept coming through the 60s, the 70s, the 80s. The Jewish supply ended in 1942, right? Like, all of the potential immigrants were murdered. So the last Jew, not the last, obviously we had Syrian immigrants, right? We had big Sephardic immigration, but like some Holocaust survivors.

Some Holocaust survivors. But like as a big mass wave of immigration, that ended in our grandparents' generation, right? Like, this is very significant. Like, the American Jewish community today are not the children of immigrants. They are most of them not even, some are grandchildren of immigrants. A lot of Orthodox are grandchildren of immigrants, but many are third, fourth generation immigrants to America. They have a longer lineage than they act like. Like they fundamentally see themselves in a way that is at odds with the actual historical record.

Okay. They belong as much as anyone can be said to belong. They are heritage American. There's not that many members of the daughters of the American Revolution. and yet other people who are not members of the daughters of the American Revolution don't have to justify that they are Americans or ask if they really are Americans. So what did Jews do now? The post-67 left, that shift from that universalism of King,

or I guess we would be in the American context post-68, King's assassination, to an identity politics lens to the oppressor-oppressed framework, was always going to come for Jews. You write something vaguely like that. I think that's a quote. Yeah. What do the Jews do? First of all, why?

And second of all, what do they do now about it? It was always going to come for us because Jews are powerful. 1967 was the moment that America decided as a country that we wanted Israel as an ally. Obviously, your listeners know this, but America did not back Israel in 1948. That was the Russians through the checks. We didn't send any weapons. although big section in the book, the Jewish mob did. But it smuggled, but it smuggled.

Well, basically they owned Panama. So like they were able to use that. But, you know, so just as Israel started to become a strategic ally to America, the left started to turn on it. You know, before that, Israel had been like the home of the concentration camp survivors and then the kibbutzniks, right, the socialists. After 1967, it was a military super. superpower that America wanted to use in the fight against the Russians. And the left, of course,

siding with the Russians turned on Israel, started to at that time, little by little. What's so amazing is that it was Nixon, an unrepentant anti-Semite, who was the first to say, we need to start giving Israel a number, an amount of aid that will stagger our enemies. So until then, until 1972, we were giving Israel about $350 million a year in aid. And Nixon said, we got to get in current numbers. Higher. Yeah. We need to get it to. And apparently Kissinger sort of pulled the number $2 billion, just, you know, out of that because he was like, we needed to show the Russians, this is our outpost because, of course, the Russians had sided with the Arabs. Like, it was purely for strategic reasons. Anyway, so you said, where do we go from here?

I mean, to me, I didn't write this book so that Jews would become Republicans. I don't want that necessarily. What I wrote the book for is so that Jews would join the side we're on, which is the side of America. Like, we owe our loyalty to this nation rather than to any political party. And my book is an effort to get those Jews off their knees and insist on their heritage and on their birthright, which they seem to have seated in order to join a side that just doesn't want them. And that's the psychological thing I'm trying to address. I'm a foreigner with good English.

Imagine I'm a Democrat and I'm nervous and I'm anxious. But, you know, siding with Israel is also hard. Benjamin Netanyahu is the opposite of everything I think I am. And all of this discourse is happening to me and I also live in Manhattan. What do you want from me? I want you to be very proud. I want you to realize that you're not unsafe and your children are not unsafe just because their sociopathic peers at their elite university don't like Israel and probably don't like them if they do like Israel. That's not a lack of safety.

That's a good thing. It's good to be hated by sociopaths. I want them to stop thinking of themselves as oppressed because we aren't and we never were here. And I want them to fight for this country and stop saying, oh no, am I going to love? leave, oh no, is this going to, could it come for us? Is it happening here? This language is just anathema to the greatest gift Jews have ever been given on this planet, in my view. There's now a tension at the heart of most American Jews, two-thirds are Democrats. Their liberalism is very important to them spiritually. It's a huge part of their Jewish identity, is their

liberalism, and so is their Zionism. And those are now in conflict with each other. So you have two options, right? You can switch sides or you can fight for your side. But they seem to be picking, too many seem to be picking a third option, which is accepting the terms laid out by the anti-Semites. Like, for example, that Israel's committing a genocide. Give me a break. The only reason they chose the word genocide is because that was the crime done to the Jews. But they're trying to paint us as Nazis. That's the whole thing. Stand up for yourself and stand up for what you believe in. And if that's liberalism, do that. I love that. You know, I was talking to somebody the other day and she said, I feel politically homeless. I accept all your critiques of the left, but I could never join the right

because I don't want anybody to be offended. I don't want anyone to be hurt. I don't want hear anything negative, including about immigrants and about trans. You know, I think probably a lot of Jews are in that category where they're like, the left is lost, but I cannot join the right. because of these other issues essential to my identity as a liberal. I totally respect that. I totally respect that. What I would ask is for them to find out what the other side actually believes about those things. Because when I started my political journey, I was very wrong about that.

I had accepted a caricature of the other side, which was granted to me by the left, which was trying to make it seem like I don't have a choice. But I did have a choice. We do have choices. We do have agency. In fact, we are citizens of the most powerful nation to ever exist in the history of humanity. We are one of the 350 million most powerful people on the planet, and I think we should start acting like it. I love the fact that you come from an American place to say something that to my ears sounds very Israeli.

Get the hell up, stand up, fight. Half the Jews of this world are Americans. in America is what made them. The unbelievable diaspora has never in the history of Jews, been a diaspora, this strong, this big, this loud, this powerful, this fascinating, this created, this culturally creative. This is a unique thing and you belong to it. You are a Jewish people different from the Israelis,

but no less extraordinary. And what the hell are you doing afraid? And that message, you know, people are going to write me in, how dare she be MAGA? Fine. You guys should be fighting. that fight. That's not my fight. I'm not going to step into it. That message every June needs. Thank you so much for joining me. God bless and protect you, Chabee. Thank you so much for having me.

This was a real honor and a real pleasure.