Ask Haviv Anything - 139: Dara Horn’s final solution to the Jewish question

Episode Date: August 19, 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).--Dr. Dara Horn didn't want to write this book. She wanted to write more acclaimed novels. But after she published her bestselling essay collection People Love Dead Jews, readers kept cornering her with their own horror stories of antisemitism and one unfair question: can you help? She became the antisemitism Lorax.So she wrote the answer, and gave it the humdrum, unprovocative title: The Final Solution to the Jewish Question. It’s out September 1.Dara joins the podcast to talk about why antisemitism isn't a bigotry but a lie told by people who want power ("Jews are destroying what you value the most"); how a 1940s American Jewish strategy to be seen as a religion rather than a people left today's Jews defenseless; why American Holocaust education "eliminates pattern recognition" and outsources everything else people should learn about Jews -- about living Jews, not just dead ones -- to TikTok; and why "Zionism is genocide" is a KGB slogan older than most of the people chanting it.Plus: Harvard, Durban, data-poisoning the AI, Muslim allies with the Hebrew הנני tattooed on their forearms, and why Dara thinks this is the Jewish people's Queen Esther moment.--This episode is sponsored by SAPIR, the quarterly journal of ideas for a thriving Jewish future, edited by New York Times columnist Bret Stephens. One of the most astonishing things about SAPIR, beyond the fabulous essays -- more than a few written by guests who’ve come on this podcast, including Reihan Salam and today’s guest Dara Horn -- is that it is free if you live in the United States!The print publication is beautiful and enriching. Every issue is devoted to a specific theme. If you sign up today your free annual subscription will begin with the forthcoming issue on the timely theme of Influence.Subscribe today at http://sapirjournal.org/Haviv – completely free of charge; they won’t even ask you for credit card information. That’s http://sapirjournal.org/Haviv, or click the link in the episode show notes.--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. Thank you for joining me. Today we have the privilege of welcoming back Dara Horn. Dr. Dara Horn was on last time for a deep and maddening discussion on the roots of anti-Semitism that was based to some significant extent in her last book. People love dead Jews. That was a runaway bestseller. the irony, the power of that headline, and the fact that so many people are so invested in dead Jews and that story that they build on dead Jews for their own moral systems, and then when they encounter living Jews, that all gets a little bit scrambled. It's a fascinating book. That episode is a favorite of mine.

You know, go see it. Today, we are getting together again because Dera has written another book. You know those people who could just write books? Yes, we all hate them. So that is what she did. And this book is titled The Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Dara is the author of seven books, including the essay collection that I mentioned. People Love Dead Jews and wonderful novels, The World to Come, and Eternal Life. She's the recipient of three National Jewish Book Awards. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, many other publications. She received her doctorate in Hebrew and Yiddish literature from Harvard University. She's taught Jewish literature at Sarah Lawrence, Yeshiva University, Harvard.

So it's really a pleasure to have Dara here and for us to learn more from her today. Before we jump in, I want to tell you that today's episode is sponsored by one of my favorite magazines, Sapir, the quarterly journal of ideas for a thriving Jewish future. It's edited by New York Times columnist Brett Stevens. One of the most astonishing things about Sapir, besides the, incredible essays, more than a few of them written by guests on this show, including recently Rehan Salam, for example, and of course today's guest, Darrahorn, along with many others, is that Sapir is free if you live in the United States. If you live in the U.S.

but have only been reading Sapir online, you're missing out on just a beautiful print magazine. Of course, any observant Jew or just a Jew doesn't want to look at a screen for 25 hours a week over the course of Shabbat, Sapir is a breathtaking, a wonderful way to spend, to really sanctify, to focus your mind, to think, to remember how to read at length on Shabbat. So I tremendously recommend it. Every issue is devoted to a specific theme. The current theme is about America at America's semi-Quincentennial, the problems, the challenges, the tremendous boon that America is and has been and about fixing what isn't working in America.

Many people hold on to these issues. They keep it on their bookshelves. They have a full set of them. I do that for several magazines, including Sapir. If you sign up today, your free annual subscription will begin with the forthcoming issue on the theme of influence. If you subscribe, please do it at the link, Sapir Journal, S-A-P-I-R-Journal.org

slash Chaviv, H-A-V-V-I-V. It's completely free of charge. They're not even going to ask you for your credit card information. That's Sapirjournal.org slash Chaviv, or click the link in the episode's show notes. I'd also love to invite everyone who finds our content useful to join our Patreon, subscribe to our substack. If you want to ask the questions that guide what we talk about, you can do that at the Patreon or at the substack. And you get to take part in monthly live streams where I answer your questions live, even if it takes three hours, which is roughly how long. it usually takes and you have a great time. That's at patreon.com slash ask chaviv-anything

or chavivgore.com. Those links are in the show notes. Dara, how are you? How are we all? I'm delighted to be here. Thanks for having me. How are you? Very Jewish answer.

First of all, you end with the question. Second of all, you know, given the condition of things, could be worse. Akharat-hat-tov. Yes. Let's get into this book. book. It's not out yet. When does it come out? September 1st. Okay. So we have an advanced copy and you start the book by describing all these talks that you give and that you gave hundreds of talks to often, mostly Jewish audiences before October 7 and people would come up to you. And what would they tell you after the talks that you gave?

So, as you mentioned, my previous book was, you know, had the, you know, super normal title, people love dead Jews. The premise of that book was essentially that non-Jewish societies only find off or often only find Jews acceptable if Jews have no power, whether that means they're politically impotent or dead. And it was an exploration mostly looking at this question through things like, you know, Holocaust commemoration, Jewish historical sites. I thought of it as really just an intellectual exploration, but as you say, that's not how my readers saw it. And when that book came out, it was like a floodgate opened. And as you say, I was speaking in many different places around the United States. And it always would happen when I would speak to Jewish audiences or even in non-Jewish settings where Jewish readers would come up to me and tell me their horror stories. And this was, to be clear, before October 7th.

And just tell me their personal horror stories regarding experiences they'd have with anti-Semitism. And often their stories would end with, can you help? And as I put it in the book, one of my sisters, I told her about this. And she said, Darry, you've become the anti-Semitism Lorax. The Lorax from this sort of classic children's story by Dr. Seuss about this little angry man who pops out of a tree stump and yells, like, I speak for the trees while this industrialist is mowing the forest down. And I'm like, wow, I'm about as useful as the lauraxes. I was not prepared for this. For one thing, I do not myself appreciate how pervasive this problem was.

How much people had really been keeping it to themselves. And it was, I mean, emotionally difficult because suddenly I'm like the receptacle of like an entire community's, you know, angst and fear and urgency. And also I was being asked to do something about it. Like people were like asking me for help. And I, you know, at that point I had nothing to give them. I didn't know what to do. I was absolutely blindsiding experience. And then, of course, after October 7th, this became worse and then became essentially

institutionalized. And I can say more about that. Yeah. Well, let's say more about that. It's an experience that I've had, I think, much, much less than you. I speak to American Jews less than you do. But I have gone. You're also a more acts now.

I'm a little bit, a little bit, maybe more on Israel than on the American Jewish experience or anti-Semitism. But people would come up to me and they would say, okay, so what do we do now? Right. Or I would give a talk or I would say, this is Jewish history. Our generation faces these challenges. We're surprised by it because it's been so good. But, hey, we're the toughest Jews, safest Jews, strongest Jews, most capable of setting our, you know, deciding our future, deciding our life. We have the most agency of any generation Jews there's ever been.

We don't get to despair, right? So let's, you know, stand up and go meet the challenge. And then people would come up to me after the talk and do something completely unfair, which is say, how, what, what, what specifically? Like, what do I do tomorrow morning? This book is your attempt to answer that question. Yes. Yes, exactly. So what do you mean by institutionalized, meaning American Jews are stuck at a much bigger level

and I'm trying to figure out what to do. People complain about certain institutions, certain organizations. It's not so set. It's most synagogues, most Jews, most communities, most youth movements, most of everybody is struggling to figure out

what the heck is going on and how you respond to it in an effective and good and useful way. So tell us about, I guess, you're feeling about why American Jews or how American Jews aren't understanding what's happening, that sense of

of perplexity in the sense of mevuhah, the guide to the perplexed of immonities, where I just literally wondering, not knowing what's happening, and then, you know, answer the question. What should we do? What should we do? So, yeah, I mean, look, that's why I titled this book, the final solution to the Jewish question, because, yeah, I made this sort of silly mistake when I published people of dead Jews.

It was my first nonfiction book. And I didn't appreciate that, yeah, when you publish a nonfiction book about a problem, people expect you to solve the problem. at the end of the book and, you know, everybody was asking me, like they ask you, right? What, what is your solution to this? And that was my obnoxious reply. You know, do you want me to give you the final solution to the Jewish question? That turned out to be my task in doing this. This book explains how we got here and how we get out of it. That is the purpose of this book.

And when I say it became institutionalized after October 7th, I suddenly found that I had this front receipt to this problem in an institutional level that started with right after After October 7th, I was recruited to be on this committee at Harvard, advising their anti-Semitism advisory group to their now former president who didn't, yeah, didn't take our advice. I'm sorry, Harvard didn't take your advice? Yes, shocking, right? Yeah. In fact, it went so well that I ended up as a witness in the congressional investigation. And so then I got to see how Congress was trying to deal with these things. And, you know, so when I say institutional, what happened was people were coming to me with their, like the horror story. as they were coming to me with, we're no longer just like, here's a personal thing that happened to me. It was like, people who work in the tech world coming to me saying, we have uncovered a plot

that we can trace back to Hamas of how, of a group of people who are data poisoning future sources of artificial intelligence on topics related to Jews and Israel. You know, because they're looking to me, can you help? But I'm like, I don't know. Can I? That's very hard to imagine that I can. And so, yes, that plot about Wikipedia, which I know you've talked about and reported on before as well. It was also Reddit. And people think who cares about Reddit. And the answer is everyone should because they're essentially a vetter of information for AI. So this goes to these larger questions.

And so, you know, this was institutional. Everybody was like, you know, what do we do? And so in the book, I walk readers through how we got here, how American Jews and and to larger extent to ask for Jews in general, have been sort of socialized to respond to this, not even socialized strategies, I should say, communal strategies that Jews have done in the past to respond to this, and then walk people through what we need to be doing instead.

This is not the theoretical questions. Those we covered in people of the Jews episode. You know, what is anti-Semitism? But I want to cover the theoretical for five minutes. and then because how you understand what anti-Semitism is profoundly affects the answers you give. What is anti-Semitism? Again, we touched on this last time when we talked about your new book. It's not just a bigotry.

It's a persistent lie. It's a particular belief about Jews. Explain that to us. What I realized in trying to parse this myself is that the history of anti-Semitism is very intimately connected to the groundbreaking ideas of Jewish civilization. ultimately, the way I am, the way I now understand Jewish civilization, and I don't claim this is the only way to understand it, the way I now find it valuable to understand Jewish civilization is that this is a 3,000-year-old anti-terranical movement. This is a 3,000-year-old anti-terranical movement. Monotheism is, you know, when you say we don't bow to other gods, well, in the ancient world, who are the other gods? The Pharaoh, the Roman emperor, right? I mean, these are the other gods. And so, you know, this is ultimately, when you say we don't bow to other gods you're saying we don't bat the tyrants. That's by the way in the Bible.

I mean, the whole debate between the king and the prophet and the king being under the law. Right. I mean that they were not even supposed to have kings, right? The prophet Samuel says, you know, kings are going to exploit you and take advantage of you and destroy your lives and they say we want king anyway. Even the way that kings are portrayed in the Tanakh in the Hebrew Bible is,

I mean, no one's going to mistake these people for gods. Right. And also they're all paired with a prophet who's, giving them God's message because the king is not expected to be the conveyor of God's message. And, you know, the prophet's usually telling them how they have failed to meet God's standards and generally they're doomed. Okay. So this is, I mean, this is very radical in the ancient world. It's very radical today. Most countries around the world today are autocracies where, you know, disagreeing with the regime is going to land you in prison. That's probably most countries in the world. I mean, this is still a radical country. concept. You know, and it's not just, you know, monotheism and it's the laws of the Torah,

the idea that these laws do not come from a human ruler, that human rulers are subjected to them. And it's not just the Tanakh either, the rabbinic tradition, the idea that Mahoka Hashan Shaman, debate, you know, the argument for the sake of heaven, the primacy and importance of debate and dissent and civil discourse, as we now say. This is perceived as threatening by I mean, when you have an antitranical movement, it's, you know, it's, tyrants don't like that, right? I mean, and also, when you have a movement based on debate and dissent, any society that can't tolerate dissent is not going to like this.

You know, this is ultimately Judaism is this countercultural movement that weaves this way through history. It also inspires a lot of, you know, broader civilization. You don't have Christianity in Islam without Judaism. And what is striking about this is not just these ideas. from the ancient period, but the way that Jews have carried them through thousands of years, you know, the reason that there aren't a lot of ancient groups that still exist today in any form is because most of these groups succumb to empires, right? I mean, you know, Islam took over

Middle East and North Africa and Central Asia and beyond Christianity took over, you know, Europe and the Americas. You know, there's, there aren't, you know, those, all of those, think about all of those cultures that those empires essentially destroyed, not always necessarily by force, sometimes by persuasion, sometimes. I mean, that's just the default when you're facing an empire or a dominant society

is that you assimilate into it, whether you're forced or not. The fact that the Jews are still here is this challenge to these dominant societies. It's a challenge, and it's a challenge on a human level to anyone who can't tolerate, you know, pluralism. And so this takes me,

to the definition, my definition of anti-Semitism, is that anti-Semitism is directly spurred by this challenge. Because I don't regard anti-Semitism primarily as a bigotry or bias. I regard it as a lie that is told by people who want to gain

or maintain power. And the lie is always the same. Jews are destroying what you value the most. And the only thing that varies in different contexts in different settings is what you value the most. And that lie is a permission structure for, you know, ordinary people to feel like they are supporting their own ideals by attacking Jews. So it turns anti-Semitism is into a righteous cause. In other words, people do not think they're doing something, you know, you know, ha-ha-ha, this is my diabolical plan.

They think they are supporting their most, you know, their most treasured ideals. and that Jews are destroying those most treasured ideals. And the only thing that changes in different settings is what you value the most. And so I think once you understand that, you understand that ultimately this is a plot. Right? This isn't an organic movement that's a grassroots thing that, you know, just it's not force majeure. I think often Jews historically will regard this as like the weather or something that you just have to contend with. This is not forced majeure.

This is not, you know, coming from organically springing up from everyone around you. This is a plot by leaders who need to maintain or gain power. And when I say people who are leaders or people who want to gain or maintain power, that can be everyone from, you know, the Ayatollah Varan to, you know, the kid in the middle school who wants to be, you know, the Queen Bee or something like that. I mean, this is something that people do who want to gain or maintain power. And I can say more about that. But I mean, when I say this is a plot, because I had this front row seat for the last two years, I have the receipts from how carefully planned this is, how all the dynamics of how you're able to manipulate a population.

And also I have, and again, I can go into the history of this of how Jews have traditionally and typically and in more recent years in the United States responded to this, why those responses. have failed to disrupt this structure and how he could be responding instead. Yeah, so let's do that. You cite David Nirenberg, the great scholar at the University of Chicago. David Nirenberg's book, Anti-Judaism, is mandatory reading.

Anybody who's interested in anything we cover here who wants to understand it in all the contexts, in the Christian world and Islam, and how that whole story of the Jew is the opposite of whatever the good is, and the Jew is taking away from you, the thing you, right? He created the magisterial historical record that shows this exact thing from ancient Egypt,

pre-Roman, pre-Christian, through all of these different civilizations and why it's so useful and how the Jew really does sociologically. The Jew in Islam refuses to become Muslim. The Jew in Christianity refuses to become Christian. That is that role you're talking about, where they hold out.

And so the Jew becomes position. in the moral imagination, in the political imagination, and the identity imagination of, I think in academia you're supposed to say imaginary, in the identity imaginary, I could do academia, of the West.

He argues that once you see it, you see it everywhere. The Christian civilization and the Islamic civilization early on in the Arab context and at least in the European context come to define themselves by projecting onto the Jew,

the opposite of themselves, It's a way to talk. And so it's foundational to the history of these civilizations. This idea of the Jew is that other against which they define themselves. And this kind of anti-Semitism, I want to suggest, never existed in America. There was, you know, the anti-Semitism that American Jews faced was not that different from the prejudice that the Irish faced, far less than the bigotry that black Americans faced. It's coming to America. Mamdani, thinking that the Israel police

laced the boots of racist cops in New York, which is something he argued for a decade, is an insane projection of fault onto the only Jewish state in the world, totally by coincidence. Tucker Carlson, thinking that the Jews invented pornography to destroy the young American male who is addicted to pornography and stuck off on the edge of society

and unable to build a family, that's an insane, true thing, but it's a projection of all the bad onto the Jew, and the opposite is me. So American Jews, is it possible they're facing it for the very first time that they've never actually seen it before? And that's why they don't know what to do about it. Can you walk us through the responses? What is it? And why are American Jews failing at this moment? Yeah. So I can, I go into this in depth in the book, the history of this. And I also go into the in-depth the history of, for example, anti-Zionism, which is a concept that predates this.

state of Israel by like at least 40 years. And again, is or is originates into in, in, um, tyrannical regimes. All of these ideas originate in one form and another in this tyrannical regimes. And, you know, leaders who are, you know, leaders and influencers who are, you know, have a reason to benefit from this lie. So again, I feel like it's so important to trace this back to the leaders and influencers who, who benefits, who benefits, right, is so important. But to go to your question, this is not just, you know, oh, Americans never experienced this before how has this? No. This, I, there's something very specific happening in the American Jewish community. There's certain compromises and decisions, decisions, decisions that American Jewish organizations and leaders made in the post-war,

in the post-war era to create what is, you know, there's sort of this idea that's often spoken about. Franklin Flora wrote a piece in the Atlantic a couple of years ago called the American Jewish Golden Age is ending. And it's actually really. interesting and well-supported piece, and the only part of it that I am challenging in my book is he suggests that, you know, there was, and so it's not true, Javiv, what you say about, you know, there was no anti-Semitism in America, absolutely false. What's amazing to me is that that idea is, that idea is very important to American Jews, that there is no, there was no anti-Semitism in America. It's so important that until I started researching this topic, like, you know, I, even my own

mother would, you know, told me about how, you know, places that she went to stay in when she was a child and, you know, there was nowhere they could stay because there was no hotel that would take Jews. And I'm like, you know, I know my mother, my whole life. We've had conversations about this, you know, for many, many years. And this is the first time you mentioned this. This is just like the reality. I mean, and, you know, when I mean, you know, and the historian Rachel Gordon, who I cite many times in the book, she's at University of Florida. She's sort of, you know, her expertise is in this post-war era. you know, she says, today we talk about anti-Semitic incidents.

In the 1940s in the United States, it wasn't about incidents. It was about you couldn't get a job, right? You couldn't rent an apartment. You couldn't stay in a hotel, right? I mean, these are life-limiting things. But as you say, is this different from, you know, what Irish Americans went through? I mean, certainly, you know, we have a much, you know, legalized system of discrimination against black Americans. I mean, in that context, I mean, yes, this is lovely.

And also compared to, you know, what just went through in any other societies, it's, I mean, I mean, you know, it's the best you can get. But here's the piece that I think is really interesting. In Franklin Ford's article, I think the thing that he got wrong is that he makes this assumption, and he literally says that, you know, after World War II, because of people were unaware, you know, when people found out about the horrors of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism receded. You know, this was like, you know, non-Jews felt guilty about this. And it receded.

This is false. There are sociological studies. of Americans in the 1940s that, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, that demonstrate that the Holocaust had zero effect on people's attitudes for Jews in the United States. It did not make them more sympathetic to Jews. It did not make them, you know, nicer to Jews. If anything, it intensified whatever biases they already had because they were like, well, you know, if there's smoke, there's fire.

You know, why did people want to kill all them? You know, there must be some reason. No. What changed the situation of American Jews after World War II was activism. on the part of American Jews. Activism on the part of American Jews. There was, I mean, you know, it tells me to think that you can just say this magically happened when people were like, you know, spending every waking woman of their lives trying to change this situation and succeeded. These were American Jewish organizations that, you know, they were, it was lawfare, it was policy change, it was lobbying, it was cultural activity like writing these movies and books that were trying to convince the public to, you know, to get.

get rid of these biases and prejudices. And it was largely successful. To me, the issue is the compromise that was built into that approach. So, you know, Jews were changing their names to avoid anti-Semitism, right? To, you know, change their name to make it, you know, because employers were routinely discarding job applicants, you know, job applications that had a Jewish sounding name. And so Jews would then go to court, change their name to avoid this discrimination. employers clotted up with this and then would have job,

these were like standardized job applications that were used like blue collar and white collar sectors, where the questions on the application would say, you know, irrelevant questions, you know, what are your parents' names? What are your grandparents' names? Where are your grandparents from? Did you or your father ever legally changed your name? Explain fully. What's your pastor's name?

And one of the tactics that American Jewish leaders and organizations took at that time was to make those questions illegal. And, you know, this was part of the, you know, this sort of part of a, you know, at America at the time they called a colorblind approach to civil rights, you know, making discrimination illegal. Zero complaints about that. Wonderful tactic completely worked in this way. I mean, maybe not completely, but really was successful. But look at the compromise that went in. The goal, victory in that context, was to let American Jews pass, right? The victory was that you did not have to be Jewish in public.

right it was sort of the opposite of what the gay rights movement leader did in terms of pride right i mean it's like the whole point is that you should be able to bring your same-sex partner to your company so what that means is they kept intact they never challenged the underlying assumption that jews are you know that the jews are disgusting they didn't challenge that right and so that's one piece of it the other piece of it and this is what my um that this historian rachel gordon has written extensively about is a strategy on the part of American Jewish leaders after World War II to rebrand themselves as a religion. And, you know, this was a decision that was made by American Jewish leaders. And it was taken to, you know, to counter what the Nazis had proposed that the Jews were a race. And also, you know, this was at a period of, you know, one of America's periodic religious revivals.

This was when America is fighting the gobblous Soviets. So, I mean, this was sort of a rebrand. in a sense, where, you know, rabbis, you know, weeding rabbis were writing big articles for Life magazine for tens of millions of readers about, you know, Judaism as a living faith. And so they've rebranded this as a religion, yeah, which, you know, wasn't that different from their neighbor's religion. The problem with this is that you now have, you know, 80 years of American Jews who've grown up in this environment thinking that Judaism is a religion. Judaism has a religion, but that's not what Jewish civilization is.

Jews are people. So two points emerge from what you're saying. One is the specific sort of drilling down question. There was anti-Semitism. There was, you know, dislike of Jews. There was marginalization of Jews. There were many institutions born out of it. But as you say, comparable to minorities, yes.

Was it the thing? In other words, was it the projection onto Jews of the opposite? If America is this one good thing, the Jews are the opposite of that good thing. That move that we find in anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism, as is happening on the populist right in America today, as is happening in the progressive, even academics, profoundly in academic spaces today. There's something about Jewish particularism that is the antithesis of the great and the good and the true and the redemptive. And Mayor Mamdani talks about that all the time. He just puts in the word Israel and he's and he's kosher. Had that existed before or is that also new in America? What I think is really, you know, thankfully unique about not, maybe not unique, but really makes America unusual in Jewish history is that there's sort of a couple of circumstances that have made it possible for that, that not to be sort of in this sort of basic DNA of the country.

One piece of it is, frankly, purely coincidental, which is that the strain of Christianity, and I don't pretend to be the expert in this, but the very, the types of. of Christianity that a lot of the founding, the American founders were inspired by, happens to be a version of Christianity that deeply values the Hebrew Bible. And, you know, really goes back to the Hebrew Bible, doesn't really, you know, emphasize this, you know, kind of supersessionism or replacement theology or something like that. You know, the Hebrew Bible roots are so important to the particular brand of Christianity that inspires so many of the founding fathers. And so that's why you see in their writings, you know, so much material from what they would call the Old Testament.

You know, there's a lot of emphasis on, you know, like speak, you know, language that's about God rather than about Jesus. I mean, there's that kind of, you know, that's very much in the, in the sort of structural elements of how the Republic is founded. And, you know, that's unusual. That's unusual compared to, you know, other, you know, older, you know, older societies and older governments in in Europe and in other places. So there isn't that kind of structural element that Nirenberg is talking about. And, you know, and partly because there's this devotion to these ideas of, you know, these enlightenment ideals that they're applying in a particular way. You know, frankly, parts of it are about, you know, there's not a huge Jewish population in the United States until the mass migration in the 1880s. You know, the minority stories in America are very focused around, you know, I mean, you have this, you know,

enslaved population of black Americans. I mean, that's a gigantic, I mean, it's a minority, but that's a huge population in the United States. I mean, that's like it's 15 percent or something in the United States. You just have like, you know, the first, you know, 100 years, they're, you know, they're fighting wars with Native American nations. I mean, there's, yeah, this is like the Jewish piece of this is just so small compared to other societies where Jews like were the minority. So it's just, it's just a different history. It's a really different history. The ideals are really different.

The language is really different. And so it's not as conducive to those things. When I say that American Jews were not prepared for what's happening now, you know, there was this, as I said, this decision after World War II to rebrand as a religion in the United States because, you know, for many regions. And it actually was, it made a lot of sense at that time. That rebranding, so to speak, is no longer serving the American Jewish community well because what American Jews are currently,

facing is an attack on Jewish peoplehood, an attack on the idea of Jewish peoplehood. And the problem is if you think being Jewish is a religion, you have severed yourself from most of what Jewish civilization is. Because American, you know, Jews are not a religion. Jews have a religion, which many Jews follow. Some Jews don't. But Jewish civilization is not a religion. It's not, I mean, like many Americans, Jewish or not, like, could not even define for you who are Jews. Like, what is this group? And there's an answer to who Jews are. Jews are a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture.

And that was a sentence in English. In Hebrew, it's one word. It's one letter long. It's two letters long. Jews are Am Israel, the people of Israel. And so the issue is that with, you know, the kind of rhetoric you're hearing from somebody like Mam Dani. And I can say more, I mean, I think there's a lot more to unpack. in terms of anti-Zionism.

But this is ultimately this attack which goes back, you know, to the Enlightenment and even earlier, which is like, we love Jews. We just will not let you be part of a Jewish collective. Right? We will not let you be part of an arm. Like, I love Jews as a religion.

It's an extraordinary thing. Yes. But to your point, Jews. But this is, you know, this is not a Jewish society dictating how you are allowed to be Jewish. Right, but Jews are doing. Yes. And this is blindsided American Jews because they had already, we're coming from this internal culture where there was never an effort to sort of disrupt that, as I said, this,

contempt, right? The idea was to pass. You know, even in public displays of, oh, look, there's all these Jews who are popular culture, you know, Mel Brooks or whoever. I mean, it's like, you know, this was like, you know, Jews could be like popular color, right? I mean, this is sort of, again, powerless, right, is the whole piece here. And powerless, not organized, not a collective organization. And because ultimately that is the thing that's the challenge, that's the acid test of a poor holistic society, is if you can accept this non-conforming group as part that that does not doubt at tyrants, that will not agree to all of your parameters of you, that will not accept being defined by this larger society and wants

to define themselves. That's the piece that's unacceptable. Why, I'm resisting the desire to dive into a million different things so that we stay on point and get to a point. But this is, you know, I have complained that Mamdani wouldn't march in the Israel parade. Never mind, he doesn't have to march in the Israel parade, but he made a point of declaring that he wouldn't. And then he explained that he doesn't believe that nation states should be organized around a religion or something like that. And then he participates in Pakistani Independence Day, which is an official Muslim state, right? And one of like 57 Muslim states. Yeah.

And he sees no, he sees. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He sees no inconsistency. His supporters don't care. And when you actually try and drill down, how could this be a coherent view? It's because he believes he must believe. I haven't asked him. He must believe.

And some of his defenders were saying things like this on Twitter that Pakistan, yes, has an official religion, but there's a people there. The Jews are a state organized around a religion. There's no people there. And therefore, Israel is something illegitimate. because they should only be organized for a people. Now, this non-belief that the Jews are a people, Mamdani didn't, he learned it in his third worldism. Jews are one of the oldest surviving peoples on earth.

But he's hearing it for the Jews around him. He's hearing it from this compromise you're describing. These Jews. The gentleman's agreements. This is like American. They don't believe. They don't even know that they're, it's like you're swimming in water. How is that possible?

How can a Jew, for example, who is a Marxist who doesn't believe in God and yet is a self-proclaimed proud Jew. Never mind that they're only a Jew and they have to criticize Israel. That's fine. Whatever. Whatever your Jewishness is, go for, enjoy it. But how can you declare yourself a Jew while declaring yourself not believing in the Jewish religion while believing that the Jews are a religion? What's a non-believing Catholic who declares themselves a Catholic and that they don't believe in Catholicism?

What is that? That's not a thing. That can't be a thing. That's a contradiction. So this lie of anti-semitism, the lie that Jews through straying what you value most has almost always required Jews to participate in it. And it stops working when no Jews, you know, I mean, that- Meaning what? Blood libel is invented by Jews, which is something we've seen throughout Jewish history?

Or what do you mean by that, the Jews are participating afterward? So I mean that these, you know, that, you know, tyrannical regimes that adopt this sort of need to have Jews who can act as their agents. You know, some examples of this from historical examples are, you know, in Hellenistic times when you had the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the Hanukest story, right? The cell you said that it's this Hellenistic regime that takes over ancient Judea and criminalizes Judaism. You know, they outlaw Shabbat. They outlaws circumcision. They outlaw, you know, studying Torah. Yeah. Yeah. So they, there were Jews who went along with this, right? And who were, you know, promoting this. And so because there was some way, you know, maybe they had some affiliation. with the regime. Maybe there's other benefits to them. Maybe they genuinely thought, oh, yeah, circumcision is barbaric and, you know, Shabbat is ridiculous and makes people lazy or whatever, right? I mean, sometimes, you know, it can come from lots of sources, but the regime needs those people. The regime needs those people. So another example is during the Spanish Inquisition, the Spanish Inquisition would use converted Jews, you know, people who had, you know, were raised Jewish,

had this profound Torah knowledge to be the Inquisitors who would be in, you know, you know, these public disputes with rabbis, you know, proving the illegitimacy of Judaism, right? Because they were come and they could come and say, you know, as a former Jew, you know, I know all these sources and I know how corrupt and horrible they are, right? The Soviet Union did this. So the Soviet Union, you know, in 1918, you know, the Bolsheviks, the, you know, the beginnings of the communist, you know, communist regime and so what became the Soviet Union, they created in 1918 what are called the Evesexe, a Jewish, of the Communist Party, whose purpose was exactly, as you say, to, well, their purpose was to spread, you know, this ideology, Marxist propaganda among the Jews of the former Russian Empire. But their slogan in 1918 was, we're not anti-Semitic, we're just anti-Zionist. This is in 1918. It's 30 years before the creation of the state of Israel. It's probably not about Netanyahu. And, you know, of course, and as you say, they're, in this case, they were Marxists. So, are also anti-religion. So ultimately, what the regime is saying is, you know, we love Jews. We love Jews. Look at these people we've employed who are, you know, they're like our court Jews. And we love Jews. We just, you know, you just can't, you know, practice Judaism or, you know, in that case. Or you can't, you can't practice Judaism. You can't study Hebrew. You can't be a Zionist. But otherwise we love Jews. Of course, this was, you know, they, this was the beginning of the Soviet Union, you know, persecuting, you know, shutting down every Jewish organization and Soviet Union, um, persecuted. torturing and murdering and imprisoning thousands of Jews. And of course, the people who were in this effort ultimately end up in the gulag themselves. It happens again. It happens even in the 1980s in the Soviet Union. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union created what they called the public anti-Zionist committee, which was a group of regime vetted Jews whose job was exactly this to put out propaganda saying, you know, as a Jew, I denounce the genocidal, you know, Israeli state and this sort of thing. So, and, and, And yeah, there's a much longer history and more detailed history to the anti-Zionism piece that I can tell you about.

But it's ultimately this, as I said, it's a lie that is told by people who want to gain or maintain power. That's what anti-Semitism is. And this is an effort by tyrannical regimes to manipulate the public. And I tell you understand that that's a lie. Until you understand who's benefiting from that lie, you can't disrupt it because you think that it's true. And then you're sitting here arguing on the merits of the lie as opposed to asking the, correct question, which is who is benefiting from spreading this BS? In 2001, the UN held this amazing, you know, gigantic conference. Those called the World Conference Against Racism,

xenophobia and related intolerance. The Iranian regime took over the Asia sector of that international conference. Bared Israelis from even attending their pre-conference in Tehran at the conference at their Jew-free conference in Tehran. They drafted these, you know, they put these draft resolutions out, and which ultimately, you know, you see coming out of the UN conference in Durbin in 2001, which are that Israel is the world's worst violator of human rights. And then when all of these NGOs, you know, 3,600 NGOs and then, of course, all these country representatives get to this conference in Durbin, the World Conference Against Racism, it's a world conference in favor of anti-Semitism.

There's the whole place is like wallpapered with like posters that say Hitler was They're handing out protocols of the elders of Zion at all the concession stands. You know, there's, you know, it's like a wall-to-wall festival of anti, you know, of hate of Jews. Because it had been captured by the Iranian regime. Well, why would it be in the interest of the Iranian regime? There's only one country that's mentioned as a violator of human rights. Why would all these other dictatorships want to sign on to that? Right.

And then, and that same dynamic as that every UN forum. It's why they're more. General Assembly resolutions against Israel, than against all the wars and all the tyrannies in the world combined for decades. Of course, because, I mean, it's a big look over there. And then suddenly, you know, every dictatorship is going to be delighted to sign on that dotted line of saying, you know, there's only one country that's a world's worst violator of human rights. And it's not, you know, these countries that are, you know, execute 30,000 dissidents in two weeks.

So let me set this up and then and then we'll hand into the punchline. So you have this, this mechanism buried, embedded deep in Western civilization. Muslim civilization. There is a vast history that people can access and read. It's magisterial. It's immense. It's deep. It's old.

This is foundational to these civilizations. This way that, not real Jews, this way that they have turned the Jews into a caricature, that they need to talk about themselves. And now you have this appearing again, again, to serve elite competition. The particular kinds of progressives elites who want to take power on the American left

are more obsessed about Israel than about any actual topic related to, for example, socialist agendas about health care or working class or taxes or anything like that. You can you can be a renegate on any issue and still be on the progressive end of the Democratic Party. You cannot be a renegade on the Israel issue and be welcomed in those spaces. This is the defining thing that decide, you know, this is the cancelable thing. So you have this idea. But there's a reason for that. And this is actually, it is a pressure can. campaign by extremely well-funded tyrannical regimes.

And I bring the receipts in this book of like the pressure campaign that's put against anybody who's, you know, deviates from the party wine. I mean, and that's how you know that it isn't an organic grassroots movement. That's how you know also, by the way, that it's not about, you know, anything real. Because, you know, they're the way that like, for example, I was, I was just speaking in a city I won't name, but it's in a very red state. But there was a pride parade there. And they had an Israeli DJ who was performing or participating in this pride parade.

And suddenly the leaders of this pride parade started getting pressure from such and such community group to excise this Israeli DJ from their pride parade. And what did this look like? I mean, just pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure. Like, you know, endless emails. And, you know, it got to the point of like death threats, going to your employer. you know, you know, spewing, you know, spewing, you know, spuing hate online about you, you know, oh, you're genocidal, all this kind of nonsense, which, by the way, the whole Zionism is genocide. Israel's committing genocide. This is a KGBY that goes back. The KGB was putting out this slogan in the 19,

since the 1970s. You know, that's how you, I mean, this is like how old these slogans are. Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, harass, harass, harass. And when people don't know that this is like an organized hate campaign, they actually, like, sit here and think on the merits that are like, oh, you know, is this maybe a contentious political issue where I need to be? It's like, you know, they sit here and think like, oh, you know, maybe it makes sense to discriminate against someone based on their national origin, which, by the way, is against federal law in the United States. And we're just like, they cave. They cave. It is so hard to not cave. I mean, and same thing with, you know, teenagers who are like seeing

this, you know, TikTok is telling them over and over again, you know, they're, you know, Zionism is genocide. Zionism is genocide. Zionism is genocide. And it's like, They're in my, in my, in, in, in, at the Tell Institute, in my, you know, my nonprofit, which is, you know, has, you know, created these lessons. One of the things we teach about is the, the illusory truth effect. This is a concept in psychology where if you hear a lie repeated enough times, you start to accept it because you're like, you know, I hear this so much. There must be something to it. And, you know, none of it has to do with anything real. you know, it's like there is a real conversation we could be having,

and you have them on your podcast all the time about, you know, actual issues in Israel and in the Middle East. That has nothing to do with any of this. This is a pressure campaign by tyrannical regimes. Extremely well-funded. You know, and these teenagers and, you know, people who are like getting all their information from their phone, you know, they don't realize, you know, I don't pay for TikTok. I don't pay for Instagram. If I'm not paying for it, who's benefiting from this? Like, that means that you're the product, right?

And this manipulation, it's like people don't, you know, so that's why I think that goes to the modern piece. That isn't just about what Nirenberg's argument is, that this is this large piece of Western civilization, blah, blah, blah. This is a very explicit, you know, almost comically transparent effort by tyrannical regimes and, you know, and people who want to gain and maintain power to do exactly that. And I mean, this is this is how it's done.

And until you understand that this is a lie, you know, if you think this is a prejudice, if you think this is just like, oh, we all should get along, we have to have more empathy for each other. If you don't understand, like, this is a manipulation campaign, this is a pressure campaign, this is, you know, stalking of harassment, vandalism,

all these things that American Jews are enduring. You know, another misconduct. I think the other wrong attempt that people have done to try to push back against this in the Jewish community is, and it's very natural. When you're confronted with all these lies, you know, people think that the next answer is to try to refute them, right? Like, here's 10 reasons why Israel is not committing genocide. Here's 10 reasons why Israel is not a cornyal, sub or whatever state, right? You know, but that is like, you know, that's like you accept your position in the defendant's dock and you're like, here I'm going to go. defend myself. But like, what that does is it means that, first of all, then you've accepted the premise, right, that you deserve to be in this dock of the accused, right? You accept that you, you are assuming that this, you know, accusation is based on evidence, which it is not. And then also, you know, that what that means that you are then on the defensive, that means that you are incapable of actively exposing the lie. So to me, the response to this is not, you know, here's

10 reasons why Israel is not committing genocide or whatever, you know, the accusation of the day is, the correct response is who is benefiting from manipulating the public with obvious lies? And ultimately, this does come down to this longer history of why people cannot tolerate this tiny, tiny group of people that has refused to bow to tyrants. That was a long answer to the question. No, so the idea, no, it's fantastic. So the idea is back in a powerful way because it is useful, if it ever went away. The Jews have been trained by themselves, by their own attempt to integrate into America, that they are categorically not a people, but in fact a religious group of Americans,

in some, you know, cute little religious cult of some kind of the various cult of America and the little churches and the little cult is not the word I meant. You know what I mean? I meant that anthropologically. that they're just a religion among all the religions of America. And therefore, the Jews understand the anti-Semitism far less than the anti-Semite understands the anti-Semitism in America and are having trouble figuring out the response. And as you say, when they are coming at you with the point of the genocide accusation isn't,

we have a lot of videos about whether it's a genocide. Yes, I was going to say, I know that, yes. The point of the genocide accusation, it's not. And in fact, reports by, for example, Amnesty International and many, many others, to argue it's a genocide, they have to have a long discussion about what the word means and how the word should be understood to actually mean what's happening in Gaza. In other words, it's not exactly what the word means, right? And, but the word has to be made to me. By the way, it doesn't mean you have to love the war. There could be so many crimes. Never mind just immoralities, being

committed without it being literally that extermination of a people crime, but it has to be the worst crime. And the point is to say it and then say it again and then say it again. And when you come and say, but it's not a genocide. It doesn't matter that you said, but it's not a. What matters is you've repeated the word genocide and the association of genocide and Israel and genocide and the Jews and the removal of the Jews as that moral, you know, core of the, of the Western moral story, which Holocaust education has produced, the removal of the Jews off that pedestal, as you write, and the replacement by Third World, the brown person, the Muslim in these political discourses is achieved. It's achieved because they have, they accuse and then you have

to convince them you're not beating your wife, right? But they've already won by tyrannical reasons that have to, that can benefit from this, right? And so that's the piece that I think is missing. You mentioned help us education. In the book I have a long sort of a long, so walk us through, first of all, how were, America is essentially disarmed from its ability to tackle this thing, because in part, and some of Holocaust education is fantastic, but in part because of how Holocaust education has been framed and generally how tolerance education is framed, walk us through that.

And then my last question will be, okay, so now that we've done all that homework, what do we actually do? Yes. So look, and I think your listeners, I spoke about this in our previous conversation. It's something I've written about before and I write about it at length in the book.

I spent over a year researching, Holocaust education in America. I don't just mean walking through museums. Like, you know, I attended teacher conferences where teachers are being trained. I met with people who write curricula. I met with state legislators who passed mandates. I mean, half of it didn't even make it into the book. But what I discovered was this like bizarre situation in America where this was often the only thing that Americans were taught about Jews and schools.

Was that Jews are people who were murdered in Europe between 1933 and 1945. And I want to be really queer. It's, you know, that's mandated in like something like, you know, 28 states. I want to be clear. It should be 50 states. I'm not arguing against Holocaust education, especially in this era of Holocaust denial reviving again and, you know, this, you know, loss of understanding of history.

What I realized was that when that's the only thing you're teaching, that means that everything else about Jews has been outsourced to TikTok. And we're living with the results. And what that means is that what I realized, so for example, you know, when TikTok tells you that Jews are European colonizers who have no business in the Middle East, it's like, well, that's the only thing I knew about Jews was that they were murdered in Europe. So like that doesn't contradict what I know, right? I mean, you know nothing about this like 3,000-year history of the Jewish people. So that's one piece of it. But to me, the larger piece of it was that this was intended to help inoculate people against anti-Semitism. But when you teach the Holocaust in isolation from Jewish history, it eliminates pattern recognition. It eliminates pattern recognition because, first of all, you know, suddenly you've set the bar at anti-Semitism is murdering six million Jews, which, I mean, yeah, high bar. But you also, there's this deeper issue, which is that you've eliminated any kind of pattern recognition.

Shaul Kalner, who's a sociologist at Vanderbilt, who's written a lot about history of anti-Zionism, you know, he's made the point where he's made the point where he's, He says, if they're, you know, we devoted all this effort and resources to training people to recognize sort of what was this Nazi form of anti-Semitism, which, you know, was based on this like 19th century view of, you know, pseudoscience about race and whatever. And that was, you know, this like demonization and subhuman and this kind of thing. He says, imagine if we had spent five minutes of that time teaching people about the history of Soviet anti-Zionism. So, for example, the effort of the KGB, the incredibly successful effort of the KGB, the Soviet secret police and propaganda in the 1960s and 70s, where they created this vast anti-Zionist propaganda campaign, which was, you know, I mean, like thousands of books and articles and broadcasts and TV shows and documentaries and everything. not only in Russian, but in Arabic and in Spanish and in English, you know, to all of their audiences around the world. And that campaign, it's all the same slogans that you hear today.

Zionism is genocide. That goes back to the 70s, right? Zionism is racism. Goes back to the 60s. Zionism is apartheid. Zionism is colonialism. Right? These are KGB slogans that, you know, were created by the Soviet Union.

which was, you know, one of the most tyrannical regimes ever to have, you know, graced the planet. And, you know, was sort of controlling the lives of, you know, probably an eighth of the people who lived on Earth at the time. You know, they succeeded in passing this Zionism as racism resolution in the UN in 1975 that stayed on the books until the Soviet Union fell in 1991. You know, if people saw those slogans and how those slogans were used to persecute Soviet Jews, how those slogans were used to empty the remaining Jewish communities of the Arab world, you know, how every society that took on this sort of official position of anti-Zionism ultimately purges all of its Jews, right? If we spent like five minutes teaching people about this, this tactic of this totalitarian regime, which then is adopted by subsequent totalitarian regimes, we have a lot less effort to put into

what we're facing today because we'd be like, you know, it's like when people see a swastika. Most people understand like, yeah, that's a bad thing. It's about murdering Jews. If somebody saw, you know, Zionism is racism, Zionism is genocide, Zionism is Nazism is Nazism, and they're like, oh, yeah, I remember this schick. Oh, yeah, I remember this schick. There are millions of Jews in America. That means that there are hundreds of millions of interactions with Jews happening in America. There's some small subset of that, but they're memorable subsets, right? That is a negative interaction having to do with them being Jewish. Every synagogue has guards outside. Now, that was not true 15 years ago. There is a change. There is a

organizing around Jews on the left, organizing around Jews on the right. It is happening. You can't pretend like it's not happening. And there is no way to escape the obsessive focus, the way the focus is disconnected from any objective kind of, and it's happening and it's there. And the Jews can, they're starting to smell it but don't know what it means. They're terrified and nervous and anxious, but don't know where huge numbers of Jews are joining. I don't mean Jews who vote round down to because they're socialist. That is the oldest Jewish tradition. That is the most Jewish thing you could be doing in New York is voting for the socialist candidate. I mean the Jews participating in the demonizing of Israel beyond hating the Gaza war, beyond disagreeing with Netanyo, but obsessively participating

this idea that somehow the other half of the Jews of the world who literally had nowhere else to go somehow should never have existed. Those Jews, the The Jews around Mandani, the Jews who don't accept, they have accepted an idea about Jews that has nothing to do with Jewishness. They've accepted all the, and so the Jews either don't know enough or are actively in their minority, but nevertheless, actively joining these forces. And the answer you give is, so learn the story. Is that right? The answer is a little bigger than that. So, yes, it is learn the story.

And not just learn the story. this is the way we need to be telling this story to everyone, to ourselves and to the broader American public, which is that this is the story of this 3,000-year-old anti-terranical movement that still today refuses to bow to tyrants.

Don't be fooled. Don't be fooled. So there is a way to disrupt this. There is. It's not just, oh, we need to warn our story. It's much bigger than that. by knowing this story, you can disrupt it. You know, you don't have to fall for this BS when you can identify what it actually is and who is benefiting from it and how.

So ultimately, you know, what the curriculum I created is about this who Jews are, these groundbreaking ideas of Jewish civilization, how they've impacted world history, how Jewish communities have, you know, adapted and, you know, sustained. into those ideas through millennia, through overwhelming pressure to erase themselves, we're still facing that pressure today, right? We're still facing that pressure today. You know, in physical terms, in psychological terms, we are still facing that pressure. Every Jew alive today is the descendant or is themselves, someone who made a decision to make that countercultural choice, not to assimilate, not to bow down to tyrants, not to disappear. We are all descendants of people who made that high cost, high cost countercultural choice. We are still being asked to rise up and make that high choice, high cost countercultural choice. I think that

there is absolutely an opportunity, especially in the United States, to change this completely. Be as specific as you can. Yes, I will be as specific. You know, Anton Hirsch said $600 million are spent on defense organizations by American Jews every year, every single year. You have hundreds of thousands of kids in day schools and in Hebrew schools and and vast institutions and federations and communal charities and educational networks, online educational networks. What do we do? What is the Jewish people in America today? This million strong. The biggest diaspora community has ever been facing this anti-Semitism.

What does it get up and do? There's a lot we can do. There's a lot we can be doing. The key is to disrupt the lie. That is the key. to disrupt the lie. Now, you can't disrupt the lie unless you know this story

of how long this lie has been going on. Who is benefiting from this lie? Also, why this lie is targeting the Jewish people, which it has for millennia, because this is the acid test

of a pluralistic society. This is the acid test of can your society tolerate debate and dissent, right? Does your society require people to bow to tyrants? Does your society

require group think? You know, your society needs to pass that test. I will tell you, most Americans are not interested in bowing to tyrannical regimes. Most Americans are not into, you know, supporting an eliminationist hate movement. There is so much more ignorance than malice. And that is an enormous opportunity.

In the United States, most of our non-Jewish neighbors, they don't know what we are going through every day. You know, they don't know that, like, you know, if you post Shabbat Shalom on TikTok, you're going to be like inundated with death threats instantaneously. Right? They don't know that like people like you and me like need a security detail

to like go about our day. Right? They don't know that, right? I mean, I just met with the, the Jewish mayor of a city and a red state who survived an assassination attempt. And it's, you know, constantly being, you know, inundated with demonization and hate.

This, again, this is an organized hate movement. This is an organization. organized eliminationist movement. It is funded and backed by tyrannical regimes. People don't know that this is happening, right? People don't know this is happening. People do not understand that they're being manipulated. People don't like being manipulated. You know, people don't like discovering they've been duped. And once you expose this, when you stop arguing on the merits and pretending that this is a real conversation, And instead, point out the lie. That changes everything. That changes everything. Because people don't like to be fooled. Most people don't are, like I said, most people are ignorant.

They're not malicious. You know, we are so fortunate in this country. We have so many neighbors who are on our side, truly on our side. You know, our neighbors don't want to be part of, you know, some sort of, you know, crazy hate movement. They don't. They don't. They don't know how easy it is to fall into this. They don't know. We need to tell them. We need to tell them. And what this means is that people do have to stand up and not bow to tyrants. And as you say, we are the most fortunate Jewish generation in thousands of years, right? I mean, you know, it's amazing to me that people will say like, oh, I I don't want to say anything because then, you know, people will be mean to me on Instagram.

Let me tell you a story of courage. I was very fortunate. I don't know if you've ever interviewed on your podcast, a superhero woman named Anila Ali. No. No, but I'll take the recommendation. I can recommend her to you. But so I spoke at a conference recently for her organization. It's called Amwak.

It's American Muslim multi-faith women's empowerment council. These are American Muslim. and they take American Muslim leaders on trips to Israel. This isn't like, you know, in partnership with some Jewish group or something. This is just American Muslim leaders. And they were telling me about the pressure they are under. Again, from this organized, you know, this is, you know, from this organized pressure to bow to tyranny. And here's the extent to which you have these Jewish, I'm sorry, these Muslim American leaders,

they go on these trips to Israel. And they recently published a little book of like testimonials of people who had been on these trips. And I want to be clear, like they go to Ramallah. I mean, they go to, you know, they're speaking with, you know, communities, you know, Muslim communities in the West Bank. They're speaking with Muslim communities in Israel, you know, in Israel behind the, you know, on both sides of the green line, you know, whatever your audience wants to call these places. You know, they're, they're seeing quite a full picture. And they still, like, they are like, I cannot believe I've been lied to my whole life. and they come back from these trips, you know, just being stunned.

And because, you know, not because Israel's this perfect magical fairy land, but because the country of Pakistan on its passports has printed on the passport, this passport is valid for every country on earth except for Israel. I was talking to one Pakistani American journalist who had been on one of these trips. He's like, I saw this on my passport since I was a child and it made me very curious. what is it they don't want me to see? You know, what they don't want you to see is of expression. And so, but when I say about, you know, people don't want to, like, oh, I don't want to, you know, put my head out.

I don't want to stick my neck out. You know, I'm going to get pilloried on Instagram. This book that these, this group published, you know, of testimonies of these Muslim leaders who had been to Israel, it was dedicated in memory of one of these Muslim American leaders who had been on their trip. who was murdered in Pakistan because he had been on the trip. Wow. I met people in this group, Kaviv, Muslim men who had tattooed on their forearm, the Hebrew word Humani. Here I am.

Because they said, we are your allies. Because it's part of who we are, we are also children of Abraham. That's a word used in the Bible when God calls just for people who don't know what God calls out to Abraham. And Abraham says, Here I am. And it's taken in the Jewish tradition as this statement of, I am witnessing, I am hearing, I am present, here I am. So that's a heck of a message to put that word on your arm. But this is what we're called to do, right? This is what we're called to do. And you can't not do it because it's hard. Right? I mean, you can. And then you're no longer part of this story. You have to learn this story. Every one of us as Jews is a descendant. of someone who made that choice who said he neenay.

You have to learn the story, and then you have to tell the story to your kids. If your co-workers want to talk about Israel and Jews, you have to tell them the story after you've learned the story. And if you pay a cost for doing so, this is, I feel bad saying it because I will pay no cost because I live among Israeli Jews. And so I truly, I'm- But I'm just channeling you saying it, which is why it's legitimate for me to say it.

If you pay a cost for it, wear it proudly because your life has a little bit more meaning than the job, than the social circle. That is basically your argument. That is my sense of things. Dear American Jews, what do you got to lose? Stand up. Be loud. Tell your story because you've learned your story. What a beautiful thing to do to your life.

You know, when you speak out about this, and I know this, like I know this fear. I understand this. I mean, you know, people like you and me are attacked all the time. And, you know, and it is terrifying, right? But what you then realize also is the amazing, you know, sort of, you don't just realize sort of your own power. You also understand there's all these thousands of people who are waiting for somebody to say something. Yeah. Most people are waiting for somebody to say something. I mean, this is like, you know, waiting for somebody to say the emperor has no clothes and we no longer have to all go bow down to this naked person. and then this ridiculous ritual. Right? It's like some, everyone's waiting for somebody

to say something. And you, you know, I mean, and what that's what leadership is is you look around, you know, and I mean, look,

I didn't want to be doing this. I wanted to be writing novels. But, you know, leadership is when you look around and you're like, somebody ought to do blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you look around,

you're like, nobody's doing that. And that's the universe telling you that means it has to be you. I enjoy it. I like when they come for me. And we have a loud, angry debate on some campus. I have fun.

I come away from it. You know, my heart's pumping. My Apple Watch tells me I have 22 exercise minutes from standing there and yelling at each other. This is not my personality at all. I do it. I do it because this is what I'm called to do. I mean, it's like I call this in the book, the Queen Esther moment, right? Because this is in the book of Esther in the in the Tanakh in the Hebrew Bible and the McGilla.

You know, we're told, you know, Queen Esther is told that, you know, she hears about this decree to the, to. you know, for the genocide of the Jews of the Persian Empire and, you know, her cousin Mordecai, who doesn't bow to tyrants, right? He's the one person who doesn't bow before this genocidal vizier. And he's targeted for it. And he tells her, you know, you need to go to the king and defend your people. And she says, you know, if I go to the king uninvited, I could be killed or canceled or doxed or made fun of on Instagram. Right? I mean, she says, I could be killed.

And he says, well, this is the reason you became killed. Right. Maybe this is the reason you became queen. You live this life to make these hard choices, right? Yes. Yes. So I feel like all of us in certainly the American Jewish community, but around the world, the Jewish people, we have reached this Queen Esther moment. Dara. It's time to rise to the occasion. Challenges exist in this world to give us something great and meaningful to do. What is the point of a life that slots perfectly and seamlessly into all the grooves prepared for it ahead of time? What is the point of a life that doesn't trailblaze anything, that doesn't break anything, that doesn't declare itself and define itself? It's time for American Jews to wake up from this belief that everything is seamless and everything is perfect.

The enemy is at the gates. That enemy has nothing to do with criticism of Israeli policy, which must be. Most American Jews share with the enemy. Psalm C. Criticism. That's got nothing to do with what's happening. That is the excuse they are using to do the old thing. And it is such a beautiful opportunity. When the enemy comes, you learn a lot about who you are.

That is a gift that the enemy gives you. So this could be a moment where we sit in despair and sackcloth and ashes and mourn. Or this is the awakening. Why the hell not? Why shouldn't we make this the great awakening where so many, many Jews who for four generations, five generations, forgot to teach themselves and their kids who they are, what their basic stories, what their history is, what their culture is. Now they have to.

Well, that's a gift. We owe flowers to the anti-Semites if that's what comes out of all of this. Well, I wish this had happened in a different way. I'm not happy that it's happened this way. The obstacle is the only way it ever happens. I'm learning that from my kids. Every time I protect them from something, they get scared of the thing I'm protecting them from.

And when I stop protecting them from that thing, they discover they can handle it. Maybe it's time for American Jews in that sense, forgive me, to grow up and face these challenges as if they are a generation of Jews. Look at Jewish history and know what a generation of Jews can do. This is a moment that calls for courage. Dara, thank you so much for writing this book. Thank you for coming on this podcast. Thank you for every single thing that you do. I run around saying to Bebo, learn your history.

here's my little lecture online. You actually produce curricula. You take it to major institutions. You talk to serious people. You're pushing this forward in so many ways. If we didn't have you as the Jewish people, we need to invent you. Thank God you exist. And thanks for coming on. Thank you so much for having me.